Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has probably embarked on his African yatra without these books. Why blame him? We’re taking this opportunity to lament our staggering, so-monumentally-callous-that-it-borders-on-criminal, neglect of African literatures.
Consigned to a course or two in English literature programmes in a few universities (which automatically excludes the huge volumes of non-Anglophonic African writing), and represented in bookstores only by the biggest names – five or six if we are lucky – the splendid range and depth of African fiction, in a dizzying array of languages and forms, is almost a foreign continent to a large mass of Indian readers, especially because even the most famous books remain untranslated and unavailable in many Indian languages.
As the Prime Minister travels through Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and finally, Kenya, let us attempt to correct this throbbing lacuna in our reading, one book at a time. We have listed here one book we loved from each of the countries the PM is visiting.
Mozambique: Let’s Read Neighbours (1995) by Lília Momplé
The author begins the novel with the following note:
Oppression can take many forms. Neighbours was written out of my horror at the way countries can abuse other’s sovereignty for their own ends and with impunity. Like many Mozambicans, I lived through decades when South Africa did as it pleased in Mozambique in order to protect the interests of the apartheid regime. During this period many Mozambicans were killed or had their lives destroyed. It is to them that I dedicate this book.
— Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Bartlett and Isaura de Oliveira
After more than a decade of armed struggle against imperialism, the Mozambique Liberation Front, or FRELIMO, had presided over the nation’s independence from Portugal in 1975, a year after the historic Carnation Revolution restored democracy to Portugal and brought to an end the unpopular colonial wars. Barely two years later, an insurgency, the Mozambique Resistance Movement, or RENAMO, was funded with the support of the white minorities of Rhodesia and South Africa, which soon became a full blown civil war meant to disrupt the functioning of the new nationalist government in Mozambique. (A similar civil war was used to destabilize Angola, too, since the independence of Mozambique and Angola posed a challenge to the long exploitation of southern Africa by a powerful white minority.) By conservative estimates, one million people died in the civil war, five million were displaced, and hundreds of thousands were maimed.
It is against the backdrop of this civil war that Lília Momplé sets her powerful book Neighbours: The Story of a Murder. It is the night before Eid. The moon has not been sighted in Mozambique yet, but the moulanas report it has risen in South Africa. In the space of the next few hours, the fate of five families (you only discover later who the perpetrators are and who, the victims) – and a country at large – is to be affected.
A remarkable political novel, Neighbours will both horrify you and stun you with its craft; it will also make you reflect on our times and the havoc wreaked by the geopolitical machinations of powerful countries – and, increasingly, transnational corporations with intelligence budgets akin to the GDPs of small countries – in the day and age of push-button drone strikes.
South Africa: Let’s Read The Rights of Desire (2000) by André Brink
The first Afrikaans writer to have a book banned by the government, André Brink chose to write both in Afrikaans (reclaiming the language to say what had never been uttered in it before: a chronicle of the horrors of racial segregation under Apartheid) and in English, and was a man of radical politics. The novel in question, Kennis van die Aand, was published in 1973 – he later translated it himself, as Looking on Darkness – and told of a passionate love affair between a white woman and a mixed-race man.
Consequently, Brink was marked out as a traitor to his own people for good – and over the years, as he fought Apartheid in South Africa from his position of both privilege and disadvantage, he had to deal with constant stalking by the secret service, even as he was nurtured by remarkable encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu, and of course, Nelson Mandela. Three-times winner of South Africa’s most coveted literary prize, Brink is best known for his novel A Dry White Season.
Here, however, we choose to read a very different book from his vast and dazzling oeuvre. The title of The Rights of Desire, a comparatively recent book, is drawn from JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (“I rest my case on the rights of desire…on the god who makes even small birds quiver.”)
A nuanced account in limpid prose, it tells the story of the prematurely retired librarian Ruben Oliver (“Dead wood had to make way for the previously disadvantaged – the new catchphrase”), a widower who lives with his sometime-cranky housekeeper Magrieta in an old house haunted by a young slave-girl’s ghost. Oliver’s sons have chosen the cleaner climes of Australia and Canada over the racially charged politically turbulent South Africa, and they attempt to persuade him to join them. Instead, he places an advertisement in the local newspaper to take in a lodger.
Subsequently, the 29-year old Tessa Butler appears at his doorstep on a rainy evening. The rights of desire give rise to a chain of incidents that soon engulf the interiority of Oliver’s measured life – and create, in the process, a memorable book.
Tanzania: Let’s Read The Book of Secrets (1994) by MG Vassanji
A member of that enterprising community, East African Indians, Vassanji was born in Kenya, grew up in Tanzania, and eventually migrated to Canada, after studying nuclear physics at MIT. In his books, however, he returns again and again to the melting pot of Tanzania where the cultures of Africans, Indians, Arabs, and the West come together to create a fresh-minted identity – and, better still, an original literary voice that is both lyrical and muscular. The Book of Secrets is almost an elaborate trope for this melting pot: part oral history, part post-colonial remembering, part love story, part post-modern reflection on the ends of the text and the beginnings of life.
In the Dar es Salaam of 1980, an out of work schoolteacher, Pius Fernandes, is given an old diary by one of his former students. It belonged to Alfred Corbin, then a young clerk (later he would become the governor of Uganda) and a hundred secrets leak out of its old faded pages to bring colour to Fernandes’s life:
This is how I have come to picture him: seventy-five years ago, in 1913, the only white man in an African village, sits at a rough, crooked wooden table in his rough wooden house. Above him, from a beam, hangs a pressure lamp. Outside, pitch darkness interspersed by the light of a few lamps and candles. The man at the table puts down the glass he’s sipped from, picks up his fountain pen, and writes in his diary. By this writing he begins to weave the thread that will connect to me.
Filled with a memorable cast of characters, this book will return to haunt you in your dreams.
Kenya: Let’s Read Dust (2014) by Yvonne Adhiambo Owur
From Ngũgĩ wa’ Thiong’o to Binyawanga Wainaina, Kenya has produced some of the most disruptive voices in English literature. The country holds particular resonance for us Indians owing to the shared experiences of our complicated, mostly oral pre-colonial histories, the violence of our colonial encounter, and the subsequent battles with corruption and inequalities in our civil societies.
Winner of Kenya’s prestigious Jomo Kenyatta Literary Prize in 2015, Yvonne Adhiambo Owur’s Dust is an ambitious novel that attempts to recreate a momentous portrait of Kenya, violent contemporary history and all, through the microcosm of a single family and their varied network of karma. In a fiercely experimental, full-bodied narrative, Owur works with shards and jagged edges of a broken story to piece together the sort of dissonant yet beautiful whole that, bearing its glued-together pieces bravely, is a moving history of wounded worlds.
They were chance offspring of northern-Kenya drylands. Growing up, Odidi and Ajany had been hemmed in by arid land geographies and essences. Freed from history, and the interference of Nairobi’s government, they had marvelled at Anam Ka’alakol, the desert lake that swallowed three rivers – the Omo, Turkwel, and Kerio. They learned the memories of another river – the Ewaso Nyiro – four moody winds, the secret things of parents’ fears, throbbing shades of pasts, met assorted transient souls, and painted their existence on a massive canvas of glowing, rocky, heated earth upon which anything could and did happen.
If there is only one book you will pick out from this list, we would recommend this one.
Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels, one doctoral dissertation and most recently, of The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat with Saurav Jha.
