Detail from the cover of the children’s book Kayo’s House by Ugandan author Barbara Kimenye.
Macmillan/Mactracks Series
At independence, adults were reading decolonial classics - but children were reading Enid Blyton. A generation of unsung women writers changed that.
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Banned 45 years ago, and its author detained, the Gikuyu language play Ngaahika Ndeenda profoundly shaped the literary legend.
Charles Njonjo, then Kenya’s Attorney General, hosts Helen Suzman of the Progressive Party in the South African parliament in Nairobi in 1971.
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The Kenya that Njonjo sought to create was the ‘greatest living example of democracy, justice and peace’ – but there was no space for the poor.
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Makeba, who would have turned 90 on 4 March 2022, was a hugely influential artist and an icon of African liberation and identity.
A copy of “Afterlives” (2021) by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.
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Gurnah’s novels delve deeply into family separation, endless betrayals of core familial relations, and the inexorable pull of the lost past.
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There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.
Rafiki was banned from cinemas by the Kenya Film Classification Board for promoting same-sex relationships.
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A Kenyan film director sued her country’s film board and won. Local artists should follow suit and fight censorship.
Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o shows his newly released book “Wizard of the Crow” during launch at a Nairobi bookshop.
Antony Njuguna/Reuters
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is still regarded as one of Africa’s greatest living writers in spite of missing out so far on a literature Nobel.