Reviews

African Love Stories
Edited by Ama Ata Aidoo

ISBN: 978-0-9547023-9-7

Extent: 440 pages

Publication Date: December 2006

Love Stories from Africa – Independent publishing feature
The Bookseller 21 September 2007
Reviewed in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine
Jan – March 2007 Edition
Dreams and Jambulas – Brief extracts published in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine
PERCY ZVOMUYA in the South African Mail & Guardian – December 2006

Love stories from Africa

FEATURE: INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING

The Bookseller 21 September 2007

Becky Clarke

After Heinemann stopped publishing new titles in its African Writers Series, commissioning editor Becky Ayebia Clarke took the chance to go it alone.

Tom Tivnan reports on her award-winning success

“ In the news about Africa, all you really hear about is the wars, the famines, the child soldiers. I’m not saying this doesn’t exist, but despite all the trouble, people still lead happy, full lives. And they do normal things like fall in love” Becky Ayebia Clarke, Ayebia Clarke Publishing

In July, Banbury-based Ayebia Clarke Publishing made the pages of the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s biggest-selling newspaper, with the arresting headline: “Ghanaian Publisher Publishes Book on Lesbianism that Wins Major Award”. The paper related how the Caine Prize for African Writing, often called the “African Booker”, had been won by Monica Arac de Nyeko for “Jambula Tree”, a short story about a relationship between two girls that appeared in Ayebia’s African Love Stories: An Anthology.

Becky Ayebia Clarke, a Ghanaian ex-pat and the publisher of Ayebia, shakes her head ruefully at the angle of the story. She says: “Same-sex relationships are still taboo in Africa. But perhaps we are moving to where we can have a grown-up debate about it when a story like ‘Jambula Tree’ wins a major award”.

Whatever the controversy in Ghana, the Caine Prize provided the independent publisher with some welcome publicity. The book, first published in 2006, went into its second reprint, and the publisher says sales worldwide of African Love Stories are nearing the 12,000 mark.

Space to fill

A former commissioning editor for Heinemann’s African Writers Series, Clarke founded her own company in 2003 with her husband David, and the first titles appeared in 2004. Ayebia has thus far released 10 books, consisting of African and Caribbean fiction and essays, and biographies of notable Africans. A further 10 titles are in the pipeline, including a series of critical essays on African writers and a biography of the Chelsea and Ghana footballer Michael Essien.

Clarke joined Heinemann—whose seminal African Writers list introduced such authors as Chinua Achebe to the UK—in 1991 as an editorial assistant, quickly rising to be series commissioning editor. She was made redundant in 2002, when Heinemann, in the series’ 40 th anniversary year, decided not to commission any more new titles. “My world fell apart”, she says. “I came home and stayed in bed for three days”.

She recovered when an agent friend, unaware that Heinemann had decided to drop new work from the list, offered Clarke The Cry of Winnie Mandela, a novel by Njabulo S. Ndebele, the current Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town. “I thought: ‘I want to publish this book,’” she says. “I didn’t know if I had the means, but I was sure I was going to do it. I felt a sure of strength and confidence.

She and David, a retired university lecturer, got together about £35,000 from savings, her own redundancy package and Arts Council England funds to start the company. The two remain its only employees (although they work with a list of freelance editors and a designer). “David does the figures and I do the creative side”, Clarke says.

The Caine Prize win came amid increased recognition of African writers in the UK. In April, the Orange Broadband Prize was awarded to Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. In the same month, Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize for his great work Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958.

While careful not to overly criticise Heinemann—“I had 12 very, very happy years there”—Clarke feels vindicated by the recent awards: “It seems odd to continue with a backlist when you are not commissioning new work. You need to be able to find new voices. But, it is good for me, because I am trying to position myself in the space vacated by Heinemann”.

Another Africa

Before the Caine Prize, Ayebia’s biggest boost was from the astute acquisition of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions from the Women’s Press. An African classic, it has sold over 22,000 copies in the UK and South Africa for Ayebia.

Given the make-up of Ayebia’s list, African and Caribbean studies courses are the company’s bread and butter. Ayebia is actively courting the US market too, recently signing a distribution deal with Lynne Rienner Publishers. Africa is also a potentially huge market, albeit a problematic one, says Clarke. “Most of our sales to Africa are to ministries of education. The retail infrastructure isn’t there and, sadly, there is not the great reading culture that there is in the West”.

In the UK, white middle-class women are Ayebia’s target audience. Part of the reason for publishing African Love Stories was to appeal to this demographic. Clarke says: “In the news about Africa, all you really hear about is the wars, the famines, the child soldiers. I’m not saying that this doesn’t exist, but despite all the trouble, people still lead happy, full lives. And they do normal things like fall in love.

Ultimately, what drives Clarke is finding new talent. She is part of Crossing Borders, a collaboration between the British Council, Lancaster University and African partners, which mentors new African writers. The programme, now drawing to a close, has paid dividends, with Caine winner de Nyeko one of its graduates.

“When you open a manuscript that comes from Africa, often you can literally smell the wood smoke”, Clarke says. “These people are so committed that they have been writing in a home without electricity, by the light of kerosene lamps. It does break my heart if I have to turn them away, but that kind of passion is inspiring”.

Love Stories

African women are thriving as writers of romance.

Penny Dale spoke with some of them

“We too love, we fall in love and love quite deeply, just like people in the West do, but do we ever really hear about that?” asks Ghanaian publisher Becky Ayebia Clarke.

Very rarely, she contends. And that’s why she has gathered a collection of short stories on love, from established and emerging writers from all over Africa.

Clarke has dreamt of this love anthology, African Love Stories, for a long time – infact, throughout her 12 years as editor of the highly regarded Heinemann African Writers Series. But one thing has always got in the way – most notably, other people’s reluctance to venture into what they have wrongly, according to Clarke, dismissed as frivolous, sentimental and unnecessary.

It is not that African writers cannot write about love, says fellow Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, who edited Clarke’s new anthology. She reels off a list of moving, deeply emotional love stories: Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between, her own Changes and Grace Ogot’s The Rain Came, a version of the classical love story motif from African oral traditions.

But, argues Aidoo, African writers have been reluctant to write about love, mainly because they have felt compelled to deal with so-called weightier issues such as poverty, corruption and incompetent leadership.

Having set up her own publishing house three years ago, Clarke has finally fulfilled her dream of publishing a book about love, what she passionately believes is a serious subject.

She has broken new ground. Have a trawl through any of Africa’s market stalls selling books and you will be hard-pressed to find anything but second-hand romance books of the saccharine-sweet type, set in Europe or the United States, without any African characters.

All the stories in the anthology are written by women. And none of the stories are either sentimental, inconsequential or riddled with clichés that more often than not are totally alien to most people’s experience of love.

So why was it important for Clarke to include only the stories of women writers?

“I wanted our women, the backbone of our societies, to talk about their feelings because it is not done often,” she says. “ Even in our traditional communities, it would probably be the men who would be encouraged to talk about their love for the woman. But for us women, we are encouraged not to air our feelings – it is just not done. But now it is time.”

Kenyan Wangui wa Goro, author of the short story Deep Sea Fishing, which is about two people who fall in love even though they have not spoken to each other, agrees: “I think there is a myth, an idea that people in Africa don’t enjoy love, don’t enjoy sex, that it’s not physical and that it’s not emotional and we don’t have the same feelings as everyone else in the world.

“This anthology gives us women’s voices talking about their desires, for the very first time as far as I am aware, and doing so in a unique way,” she says.

These stories are very different to what people may expect and, as Clarke challenges, “prepare to be surprised”.

“The stories are very African and very modern and are full of complexities and intrigues”

They are very African and very modern and are full of complexities and intrigues – including an unexpected and brave twist in Goro’s Deep Sea Fishing when she introduces a taboo subject into an otherwise seemingly conventional love story: as a man and woman start making love he discovers that her vulva has been stitched together. Despite her infibulation, he does not recoil. He still loves her and still wants to marry her.

Some stories in the anthology tackle young, requited love and rivalry, while some cross continents and racial boundaries.

In Marriage and Other Impediments by Nigerian Tomi Adeaga, a Nigerian woman falls in love with a white German man, much to the alarm of both families. She stands fast, refusing to bow to the pressure not to pursue the affair – but she does seek their blessing for the marriage, bowing before her father in the traditional way.

Other stories in the 21-story anthology focus on arranged marriage and one even tackles the subject of same-sex love.

In a continent where homosexuality is widely condemned, The Jambula Tree by Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko is a bold story about a childhood friendship between two girls that evolves into something more. What is interesting and courageous about the way she writes is that at no stage is either girl ashamed of their love, even though their families react harshly, sending one of the girls to live in London, and their communities ridicule and despise them.

At the root of all these stories is the question of desire – and desire from the point of view of women. All stories defy what we consider to be normal. The characters have to battle with supposed norms, in terms of what they think, what they feel and what they want. To hear so loudly what women want for themselves is refreshing.

Yaba Badoe is Ghanaian-British. Her story, The Rival, centres on the disruption to a happy marriage by the arrival into the household of the husband’s niece, who starts to make all sorts of demands as she vies for her uncle’s attention. She desires her uncle for the material possessions he can give her, an experience which many families in Africa go through as women, dependent on men for everything, compete with each other for scarce resources.

“Each of these stories reflects a norm, which is very diverse, because we come from a very complex continent with many different traditions,” says Badoe. “And we are actually making ourselves the subject of that story in a new way. That’s what I find really exiting about this anthology.”

Penny Dale is a BBC African Service producer

Dreams and Jambulas

Brief extracts from two of the stories featured in the African Love Stories Anthology

The Rival
By Yaba Badoe

The night Mrs Mensah dreamt of fruit bats in her garden, she knew that she was in trouble. Forcing herself awake, she whispered a prayer for guidance, for protection from the evils of the world, the machinations of her enemies. ‘Thy will be done, O Lord,’ she murmured in affirmation, folding her body against the frame of her husband, ‘Let thy will be done, Amen.’

Closing her eyes, Mrs Mensah tried to retrieve her dream. She relaxed her body, allowing her mind to drift once again. This time she was in control, her hand on a rudder she steered towards sleep. She believed that if she could return to what she had seen, she could undo it, repelling the bats from her trees, protecting herself and her husband.

For the rest of the night she tossed and turned, assailed by dark-winged moths. These she struck with a broom. But when she hit them, the moths became crows circling her garden. So Mrs Mensah flung stones at them and once again they became bats. Bats with sharp teeth that devoured everything as they rampaged through the garden: mangoes, sour-sop, guava, ripening avocado. They ravaged Mrs Mensah’s trees until there was no fruit left. Defeated, in tears, the woman awoke.

‘Well, at least I’ve been warned,’ she said valiantly, preparing herself for the day.

She chose her clothes carefully, putting on a faded bou-bou in pale blue and grey; colours selected to dispel envy, to show the world that, although still attractive at fifty-five, her appearance was not uppermost in her mind. Her attention was on higher things. Sitting on the veranda, a well-thumbed Bible on her lap, Mrs Mensah spent the day preparing for her dream to take human form.

“It did not occur to either of us that these were boundaries that we should not cross nor think of crossing”

The Jambula Tree
By Monica Arac de Nyeko

We were seated under the Jambula tree. It had grown so tall. The tree had been there for ages with its unreachable fruit. They said it was there even before the Estate houses were constructed. In April the tree carried small purple jambula fruit which tasted both sweet and tangy and turned our tongues purple. Every April morning, when the fruits started to fall, the ground became a blanket of purple.

When you came back during that holiday, your cheeks were bulging like you had hidden oranges inside them. Your eyes had grown small and sat like two short slits on your face. And your breasts, the two things you had watched and persuaded to grow during all your years at Nakawa Katale Primary School, were like two large jambulas on your chest. And that feeling that I had, the one that you had, that we had – never said, never spoken – swelled up inside us like fresh mandazies. I listened to your voice rise and fall. I envied you. I hated you. I could not wait for the next holidays when I could see you again. When I could dare place my itchy hand on your two jambulas.

That time would be a night, two holidays later. You were not shocked. Not repelled. It did not occur to either of us, to you or me that these were boundaries we should not cross nor think of crossing. Your jambulas and mine. Two plus two jambulas equals four jambulas – even numbers should stand for luck. Was this luck pulling us together? You pulled me to yourself, and we rolled on the brown earth that stuck to our hair in all its redness and dustiness. There in front of Mama Atim’s house. She shone a torch at us. She had been watching. Steadily like a dog waiting for a bone it knew it would get; it just was just a matter of time.

Sanyu, I went for confession the next day, right after Mass. I made the sign of the cross and smelt the fresh burning incense in St Jude’s church. I had this sense of floating on air, confused, weak and exhausted. I told the priest, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned. It had been two months since my last confession.’ And there in my head, two plus two jambulas equals four jambulas…

African Love Stories

PERCY ZVOMUYA in the South African Mail & Guardian – December 2006

Ama Ata Aidoo clearly sets out in the introduction the difficulty of an anthology of love stories. "One clear problem … is that the moment you describe anything as such, readers and audiences begin to look for the frivolous and the sentimental."

So begins this collection of short stories edited by Aidoo and written by female writers who live or have lived on, or have a link to, the continent. As one reads one encounters the varied experiences of love conveyed by recognisable names such as Wangui wa Goro (who translated Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari), Purple Hibiscus’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Antjie Krog, Molara Ogundipe and Helen Oyeyemi.

These tales are varied, necessarily so, and what comes out is the richness and diversity of African love experiences – if ever such a concept could be pigeon-holed in a specific locale. The stories range from the mountainous landscapes and old country near the southern tip of the African continent of Sindiwe Magona’s ‘Modi’s Bride’, right up to Germany, in the heart of Europe. Where they are set in Europe, such as ‘Marriage and other impediments’ by Tomi Adeaga, what emerges is the reality of exile, how the protagonists deal with race and the negotiation and forging of new identities.

One such is ‘Something Old, Something New’ by Leila Aboulela, a moving tale of a Sudanese Muslim girl who is getting married to a Scottish convert to Islam. It tells how he negotiates his rites of passage through sheer patience and US dollar bills paid to a crooked brother-in-law to smooth the rugged road.

But it is ‘Transition to Glory’ by Adichie that stands out. This is as much a story of female rivalry as it is a paean to enduring love. Emotionally controlled, it is written in spare prose and easily achieves what it sets out to do: celebrate love.

In sum, this is an often-beautiful anthology of what one may describe as a comprehensive collection of the nebulous concepts that make up love. It tackles, with some success, varied themes like unrequited love, familial love, same-sex love, love across the colour line, religion, and age and sexual love...