Who doesn’t love a good story about the rise and fall of empires, blended with a spicy bit of romance and the gothic intensity of a mad king?
Chaka, by Lesotho writer Thomas Mofolo, is that kind of novel – a weird and gripping tale about one of the most enigmatic figures in African history.
“I do not believe,” Mofolo writes, “that there was ever a human being whose life was as full of mystery as that of Chaka.” An attempt to capture this mystery led Mofolo to write Chaka in 1910. But his missionary publishers were so freaked out by the novel that they refused to publish it until 1925.
Chaka is the guy who grew up knowing that everyone, except his mother, wanted him dead. Tough luck for a kid born near perfect. Tall, handsome, brave, hardworking, and self-sacrificing, Chaka could not understand why everyone hated him. Like any oppressed soul, Chaka believed that things would change since right and justice was on his side. That illusion faded away when he heard his father order his death even as he stared Chaka in the eye.
Chaka is on the run from assassins when he meets one of the most ruthless witchdoctors that ever graced the pages of an African novel. Isanusi is the guy who makes things happen. He is the magician, the sorcerer, the therapist, the priest, the conman, the strategist, the visionary, the confidante, the doctor, the hit-man, the fixer—the everything man – that every great empire-builder in history has had by his side. The novel is worth reading just to see Isanusi at work.
He’s the one who “inoculates” Chaka with the “medicine of blood.” “If you do not spill blood,” Isanusi explains to Chaka, “it will turn against you and kill you instead. Your sole purpose should be to kill without mercy, and thus clear the path that leads to the glory of your kingship.”
Isanusi turns Chaka into a killing machine. A man who had been hunted all his life had returned to bring the world to its knees.
Mofolo’s novel is a dark, mysterious, and poetic critique of the principle of violence that defines all empires.
By living up to this mandate to kill or be killed, Chaka instituted a political order never before imagined in his part of the world. But the blood on which his beautiful empire is built does not stay still forever. Chaka is eventually consumed by the violence that made him king and lives out the rest of his days in what Wole Soyinka has described as schizophrenia. The story of great emperors gone mad is old and familiar, but Mofolo tells it with all the dark, romantic flair of an African storyteller – sorcery, the supernatural, graphic violence, and tragic love.
No story about war and empire is complete without a special someone. The love of Chaka’s life is the “amazingly beautiful” Noliwa—the girl with the “light brown complexion like a cannabis seed.” How Chaka screwed things up with such a goddess of a woman is a depressing and perplexing story. It is easily one of the most sublime moments in the history of modern African tragedy.
If Achebe had not happened, Mofolo’s Chaka would have been theThings Fall Apartof our generation. There are novelists in Africa – a multitude of novelists. But there’s only a handful of storytellers. Achebe was one. Mofolo was another.
Anyone who loves a damn good story should partake of Mofolo’s dark and quirky love song to a king who inspired a continent and paid the ultimate price.
Buy Chaka by Thomas Mofolo trans. by Daniel Kunene here.
Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.
Nigerian novelist Chibundu Onuzo reviews Half of a Yellow Sun, which premiered in Nigeria on August 1.
I went to two screenings of Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. The first screening was in an obscure Vue theatre, with a largely Nigerian audience, that whooped and called out throughout the movie. The second was in the Bafta building, with a sedate crowd that venomously shhhed me when I whispered a comment to my sister. The first time, I zoomed in on what I believed were the movies fatal flaws: Thandie Newton’s unplaceable accent when speaking English, Thandie Newton’s unplaceable accent when speaking Igbo and the lack of the epic in a movie that is set during the Biafran War, one of the most brutal conflicts of the 20th century. The second time, I approached with a more open mind, ready to accept the movie for what it is rather than what I wanted it to be and I discovered that the director, Biyi Bandele, has made his own film, his own triumph. This is a subtle movie of a large war, intimate and revealing of the personal tragedies that took place from July 1967 to January 1970.
The movie opens with the sisters Olanna and Kainene played by Thandie Newton and Anika Noni Rose. They are beautiful, rich and fashionable in the stylised chic way of the sixties. The period is evoked with footage from the era as well as a beautifully researched set. Olanna and Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are soon introduced as lovers. Kainene and the English, somewhat spineless Richard (Joseph Mawle), also become lovers. Through these two relationships, the vibrancy of pre-war Nigeria is explored: the highlife music, the Lagos high society, the heated intellectual discussions at the University of Nsukka where Olanna and Odenigbo are both lecturers. And then the war comes.
The Nigerian Civil War was global news and personal tragedy. I know this from my father and my uncles who lived through the war and speak not of genocide and federalism but of exams left midway, school terms disrupted and clothes destroyed. Bandele captures this movingly in the scene where the war arrives on the doorstep of Olanna and Odenigbo’s carefully built citadel of books and philosophers and good wine. They must hastily compress their life into a few suitcases, flung into the back of a car. What to choose? What to take before they must run? Olanna is cooking. She carries the pot with her as they flee.
In my first viewing, I was annoyed by the fact that the Biafran War seemed reduced to the love triangles and squares of these four main characters. General Emeka Ojukwu, leader of Biafra, is seen only in black and white footage. There is no character cast to flesh out this charismatic leader of the Biafrans. General Jack Gowon, leader of the Nigerian army is never mentioned. The grand actors are mostly silent. In my second viewing, I was drawn into the intimacy of these four lives. The brief clips of original news footage; the short radio bursts of famous speeches: this was how those living through the war would have experienced the events now neatly highlighted by History as grand. People lived through the epic in very mundane ways. They got married like Odenigbo and Olanna. Brides fussed over the fit of their wedding dresses and sometimes, wedding feasts were interrupted by bombs. The next day, life went on.
(Pic: halfofayellowsunmovie.com)
It is Chiwetel Ejiofor’s first feature since Twelve Years a Slave and this role is sufficiently different for one to be excited to see what he will do next. I did Thandie Newton a disservice in my first assessment. She may not correctly pronounce ‘kedu,’ a common Igbo greeting, but she is utterly compelling as Odenigbo’s long suffering and contradictory lover, who will not marry him in peace time but will do so in the middle of a war. Anika Noni-Rose and Joseph Mawle also give strong performances, with Noni Rose capturing the hauteur and vulnerability of Kainene with great skill. Yet the standout performance for me, was given by Onyeka Onwenu who played Mama: the mother-in-law from hell.
Onwenu or ‘the elegant stallion’, is better known as a singer. Yet she was perfect for this role of eye-rolling, abuse spitting venom. Eavesdropping on conversations after the Bafta screening, I heard the noun ‘caricature’ thrown around a few times. “Such people exist!” I wanted to say, but I had already been shushed once that evening. In the Vue screening, surrounded by Nigerians, there was only adulation for Onwenu. We all knew women like Mama, who tried to control their families with manipulation and tradition. There was no talk of caricatures there.
The movie is not a facsimile of Chimamanda’s much beloved novel. Most strikingly, in the novel Ugwu, the houseboy, is the main narrator. Yet in the film, the sisters, Olanna and Kainene take centre stage. Biyi Bandele, explaining this choice at a pre-screening, said that too often the African domestic had been given the foreground in films made of the continent. It was time for new stories to emerge. Stories of women like Olanna and Kainene; stories of sophistication and accusations of witchcraft because Africa is not one thing. There will be time for other epics on the war; for gun battles and air raids, for army commanders and young Generals. For now, let us celebrate Bandele’s movie for what it is: a triumph.
Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.
Every once in a while, stories come along that surprise critics and readers who claim to know African literature. Jalada’s recent compilation about sex strikes me as that kind of work.
Jalada Africa is a literary collective committed to reshaping the way writing is published and circulated within the continent.
Their recent collection titled Sext Me Poems and Stories proves their open and risk-taking approach to literary projects. I spent the last few days browsing through the collection, floored by how delightfully raw and honest most of the pieces are.
The project is also a small but bold step towards filling a gaping hole in African literary culture. To the annoyance of readers like myself, African authors are not always keen on what their characters do in the bedroom. Under pressure to write about things of world historical importance like colonialism and poverty, African writers have always made short shrift of sex. Sex is perceived as indulgent.
But a projects such as Jalada’s Sext Me Poems and Stories tells us why sex is not superfluous in narrative.
Sex is the true story of the body told from a place of pleasure, pain, and radical uncertainty. Sex is about putting the body in a place where traditional ideas about gender, shame, violence, and loss are interrogated.
Besides, this collection is not just about sex. It’s about how Africans do sex.
Scrolling through the collection is like walking through a sex-toy shop, dazed by the sheer inventiveness put into assembling a world built on pushing the limits of sexual pleasure.
Akati Khasiani’s Coming Down and Aisha Ali’s The First Time are vignettes sketching out a scene of female masturbation. Both stories put the female body up on display, but as something capable of generating the most profound experience of pleasure, entirely on its own.
The language in both pieces is as raw as it is lyrical. Sex in these two stories is not about conquest or consuming bodies but about exploration and discovery. Ali’s character speaks of the vagina as “that small wet place” that the “fingers” go “searching, exploring, looking for answers.” Pretty intense and exciting stuff.
The first of two parts closes off with Orem Ochiel’s Miss Fucking You. Odd, but the title does not prepare you for the obscene goodness of the story. It’s framed as a man asking a woman, pleading more like, to have another go with him. To make his case, he recounts all the impassioned and kinky sexual encounters they’ve had without sparing the dirty details. Every other word in the story is “fuck” or “fucking.” Don’t click on the story while you’re in church!
The Oink in Doinker by Tuelo Gabonewe is a comical tale about a “half-widow,” Haroldette, who encounters a penis cut off from its owner. She takes it in, bathes its, feeds it, and names it Phineas McPhallus. Unlike many of the other stories in the collection, this one is not strictly an erotica. It is something you’d imagine Gogol or Kafka would write. In fact, I couldn’t help noting the striking resemblance between Gabonewe’s story and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Runaway Fingers.
Sext Me by Aleya and Dorothy Kigen’s Inbox (1) are fun at the level of form. Aleya’s piece is entirely a dialogue that takes place via text messaging. A man and a woman set the stage for their sexual encounter by expressing what they imagine the encounter would be like – a textual foreplay as it were. People complain that it’s hard to convey complex emotional states via emails. Not so for Kigen’s character who details her illicit sexual experiences in an email message.
Sext Me Poems and Stories is titillating storytelling. Read the collection here.
Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.
Fourteen years ago, Sudanese author Leila Aboulela made history when she won the inaugural edition of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
She’s gone on to publish a short story collection titled Coloured Lights (2001), in addition to two critically acclaimed novels – Minaret(2005) and Lyrics Alley (2011), which won the Scottish Book Awards.
In this exclusive interview, she takes us back to the first Caine Prize ceremony and tells us what it was like inaugurating what would become one of Africa’s most prestigious literary prizes. She also comments on contemporary African fiction and leaves the five authors shortlisted for the 2014 edition of the prize with sound advice.
Can you tell us what the inaugural edition of the Caine Prize was like? What was the general feeling about this new prize breaking into the global literary scene and being hailed as the “African Booker?”
In some ways the inaugural prize was low-keyed; hardly any attention, for example, was paid to the announcement of the short-list. It was only when the short-listed writers arrived in London, for the week’s events culminating in the award dinner at Oxford, that the excitement really started. All the major UK newspapers reported the announcement of the winner and there was coverage from the BBC World Service. With few exceptions, African literature was marginalised in those years, perceived to be of niche or academic interest and not attractive to the general reader. The expectation was that the prize would break through these assumptions in order to widen readership and this was very much welcomed. A few days after the prize dinner in Oxford, we all flew to Harare to take part in the Zimbabwe Book Fair and there was large, official award ceremony and dinner hosted by the Caine Prize.
What was it like arriving in Zimbabwe to participate in this brand new initiative for African writing?
It was hugely exciting. My husband and daughter came with me and she actually turned two the day after our arrival. Harare reminded me of Khartoum and I enjoyed my time there. The first person I met in the lobby of the Monomotapa Hotel as we were checking in, was Yvonne Vera. She had edited Open Spaces, the anthology which contained my winning story, and she was warm and encouraging. She gave me excellent advice which I still hang on to today. She said, “As a writer, you lead and your readers will follow.” There was a lot of excitement at the book fair about the new prize and it was especially apt and meaningful to be awarded the prize in Africa, during such a significant literary event as the Zimbabwe Book Fair.
Looking back, do you think winning the prize made an impact on your writing career?
It certainly did. It gave me greater confidence in myself and it gave my work more exposure. From a practical point of view, it speeded up the publication of my short story collection Coloured Lights which included my Caine winning story. It also enabled me to get a deal with a London publisher for the publication of my second novel. Before winning the prize, I was published by a small university press. Also after winning the prize, the Heinemann African Writers Series published an imprint of my first novel The Translator for sale in Africa.
Generally speaking, what do you think is the significance of prizes in a writer’s life and work? There is a ‘stamp of approval’ effect, for the public there is a highlighting of a particular writer or a particular work from among others and (so important nowadays for widening readership) there is greater publicity. The significance of prizes can’t be overestimated. They can make or break a career. Unless you are a best-seller, you are judged by the prizes you won or were short-listed for.
Your winning story is The Museum. Ben Okri, who was one of the judges, describes the story as “moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully written.” Do you ever go back to that story? Does is occupy a special place in your body of writing?
It meant a great deal to me that Ben Okri, of all people, was the chair of the judges and I very much appreciated his comments. The Museum has been more anthologised and read than any other of my stories. Ironically, it never was my favorite story. I never particularly liked the characters and I felt distanced from them. My favorite story at the time was The Ostrich, but it didn’t meet with the same success. I suspect that The Museum was artistically better developed and more mature.
Back in 2000, Okri could say to the Guardian readership: “I recommend a general interest in African writing to widen taste and see how other people live, dream, and overcome.” It appears to me that today African writing is so ubiquitous that it is hardly necessary to make such an exhortation. What do you think?
I wish I could fully agree. Within literary and academic circles, perhaps, but for the average reader in the West, an African novel can still means one written by Wilbur Smith or Alexander McCall Smith. Just a couple of months ago, The Telegraph newspaper listed the Ten Best Novels About Africa with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible making the list at the expense of anything by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or Nuruddin Farah.
Which contemporary African novelists inspire you most?
I have always been inspired by Ahdaf Soueif. Her breakthrough novel In the Eye of the Sun is The Golden Notebook of the Arab woman. Soueif brought the North African novel firmly from the village into the elegant city apartments of the chattering classes and that was a breath of fresh air and a dazzling step forward. In completely different ways, Hisham Matar and NoViolet Bulawayo are exciting, excellent writers. I am also a huge fan of Sefi Atta, her work is always distinctive and unforgettable. The Sudanese writer Amir Taj Elsir writes in Arabic but he is a worthy successor to Amos Tutuola. His bizarre and delightful novel The Grub Hunter has recently been translated into English and published by the AWS.
More recently, there has been a lot debate about what constitutes an African writer. There are those who don’t want to be called African writers because, they claim, it is a reductive term. There are those who complain that certain individuals called African writers are not African enough – case in point: Tope Folarin, the Nigerian-American, who won the Caine Prize last year. What’s your thought on this age-old issue of the African writer’s ambivalence toward national identity?
We need to ask ourselves why is it that being an American writer, a European writer or an Arab writer is not reductive but being an African writer is perceived to be so. If the market or the literary establishment is ghettoising or infantilising African literature then that is what needs to change rather than how African writers describe themselves. As for being not African enough, I suspect that when people make this accusation they are trying to say something else, more subjective, as in not ‘my kind of African’. This is a denial that there are an infinite number of ways of being African, it is not a monolith and one of the exciting things about literature is just how much it challenges our assumptions of national identity by zooming in on cultures within cultures and exposing fluid boundaries.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie caused quite a bit of a controversy last year when she said: “I suppose [the Caine Prize] is a good thing, but for me it’s not the arbiter of the best fiction in Africa. It’s never been.” What do you think of such a statement? If the Caine Prize is not “the arbiter of good writing in Africa,” what is it then? Do you care to comment on what you think is the role of the Caine Prize, or any prize for that matter, in the contemporary African literature scene?
The Caine Prize focuses on the short story rather than the novel and, over time, it has developed a very effective process of discovering and nurturing new talent. At the moment there is no prize that is awarded to the best African novel of the year regardless of whether the writer is established or a first-time novelist. It would be a welcome thing if such a prize was set up. The Man Asian Prize, for example, shortlists writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Amitav Ghosh, sadly we don’t have an African equivalent. Most of the newly established prizes such as the Etisalat, the Kwani? Manuscript and the Commonwealth are dedicated to new writers. For unpublished, unknown writers this is excellent and African literature will benefit from all this energy and dedication by moving further into the mainstream.
Any words of encouragement to the five authors shortlisted for the 15th edition of the Caine Prize?
If you win, remember there will be another winner next year taking the limelight. So make the most of this year in terms of connections and publication possibilities. Push with all your might.
If you don’t win, go online and see how well previous Caine Prize short-listed authors have done. In many cases, they have had greater success that the winners.
The winner of the £10 000 Caine Prize will be announced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on Monday 14 July.
Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.
Wale had already decided what he would do when he landed on the moon.
“He wouldn’t hit golf balls like the American astronauts” did. Instead, he would play the talking drum, “squeezing out” its rhythms “into the blackness between the stars”.
“He would bind the stars with the drums. There would be dancing.”
Wale’s dream of heading a Nigerian lunar program is the heart of Deji Olukotun’s debut novel Nigerians in Space(2014, Unnamed Press). Wale is a brilliant lunar geologist. For some reason, his rise through Nasa’s bureaucratic hierarchy is stuck at a mid-level research position. This bureaucratic injustice has left him a jaded and bitter man.
But here is Mr Nurudeen Bello – the mysterious mastermind of the Nigerian lunar mission called Project Brain Gain – offering him the chance to walk on the moon.
He has never met Bello in person. He knows Bello only through hushed conversations on pay phones. Bello was a man who existed only in the sound of his voice and the strange power of his words to charm his listeners.
Despite his strong misgivings about the whole enterprise, Wale steals a piece of moon rock from his lab in Nasa, as instructed by Bello, and skips town, taking his wife Tinuke and their little son, Dayo. The plan is that he will meet Bello in Washington DC and officially begin the heroic odyssey to space.
What Wale cannot foresee, however, is that he is about to feature in a classic noir fiction. He will not meet Bello and what follows will be a sky-high pile up of disasters taking place at break-neck speed.
Nigerians in Space is so much a novel of our time that it helps us track how far we’ve come from mid-century African novels. We’ve come a long way from novels like Things Fall Apart, novels that presents life as it takes place in a single locality.
Olukotun’s novel is set in Houston, Stockholm, Basel, Paris Abuja, Bulawayo, Lagos, Cape Town and Johannesburg. These days, African novels are built on the life of the global African nomad.
From Teju Cole’s Julius to Chris Abani’s Sunil, contemporary African fiction is defined by characters for whom mobility is life. They traverse global spaces and force us to think of Lagos and Abuja in the context of Basel and Bulawayo.
Some novels hand the reader one unbroken spool of narrative thread to unravel. The thread may twist and turn as the plot requires, but it is never broken. Nigerians in Space holds the reader’s attention, somewhat counterintuitively, through the stupefying incoherence of the plot.
When Wale’s meeting with Bello fails, his increasing paranoia and desperate attempt to unravel the mystery around Bello and the botched space mission take him through a dizzying array of spaces – from Houston to Stockholm, to Basel, to Cape Town. The first chapter ends, and the reader, who is as confused and breathless as Wale is, turns the page hoping to take comfort in some explanation or a plot movement that takes the story forward.
Instead the reader is transported 21 years to the present day with a sentence that reads: “Thursday Malaysius had worked at Abalone Silver for two years.” No explanation of how Thursday is tied to Wale, Bello, or Project Brain Gain. But then no sooner you fall in love with Thursday, you’re introduced to Melissa, and Mrs. Niyangabo and so on.
These sharp, unpredictable turns in a plot moving at lightning speed is exhilarating and will leave you delightfully lightheaded. I let myself freefall down this zigzagging tunnel of stories. I suggest you do the same. It’s a literary trip of sheer delight. The fragmented portraits and incidents do come together in a stunning collage.
Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work, and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly.
