Abdellah Taïa in Tangier, Morocco, in 2010.
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His books bring north Africa into conversation with sub-Saharan Africa about lived queer experiences.
Famed director Ousmane Sembène (centre, with trademark pipe) and a group of extras on set.
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Born 100 years ago this year, Africa’s most legendary filmmaker - and a prolific novelist -remains relevant through his beautifully crafted political works.
Noviolet Bulawayo, Zimbabwean writer.
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Playing out in an animal kingdom, Glory is a devastating political commentary on Zimbabwe today.
Toyin Falola
Photo courtesy Boydell & Brewer
Indigenous knowledge, African languages, queer rights and Afrofuturism are some of the issues discussed in the new book.
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Banned 45 years ago, and its author detained, the Gikuyu language play Ngaahika Ndeenda profoundly shaped the literary legend.
Detail of a photo of Can Themba at Drum magazine.
Photo Jürgen Schadeberg courtesy Wits University Press
Abundantly talented and flawed, apartheid-era writer Can Themba wasn’t afraid to put his body on the line for a story.
Ama Ata Aidoo.
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Ama Ata Aidoo recognises the differences between humans and the existence of a history in which some humans are dehumanised.
Academic and author Pumla Dineo Gqola in 2010.
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Female Fear Factory by Pumla Dineo Gqola sees gender violence as a sophisticated ecosystem kept alive by socially manufactured fear.
Portrait of a Lesotho shepherd, Ntoaesele Mashongoane.
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Set in the music wars of Lesotho, the new novel by the South African author tells of a wandering minstrel whose hit song leads to his downfall.
Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist Wole Soyinka in 2018.
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Tanzania might be in the news for producing East Africa’s first Nobel laureate for literature, but there are other compelling authors that also merit attention.
A masked herdsman in Lesotho.
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Lesotho’s famo music is known for the use of accordions - and gang violence. In Wayfarers’ Hymns, Zakes Mda explores this tradition.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr on a TV show after winning the Prix Goncourt.
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He is the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to lift the Prix Goncourt, one of the book world’s most important prizes. And his win matters.
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For parents, skin colour is often a difficult subject and dealing with it through storytelling can be a useful aid.
Nigerian writter Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2019 interview.
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The public politics of African writers has been in the spotlight again due to the bitter disagreement between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Akwaeke Emezi over transgender issues.
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There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.
Detail from the cover of the book Surfacing.
Wits University Press
Undocumented for decades, black South African feminists are increasingly visible. The essays in Surfacing present 22 leading thinkers.
Nawal El Saadawi protesting at Tahrir Square, Egypt, 2011.
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She believed that writing is an act of speaking the truth, an act of courage, that must serve the people and not those in power.
El Saadawi protesting on her 80th birthday.
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To understand her contribution to public debate, it’s important to see her in the context of the historical moment that made her work possible, necessary and provocative.
Nawal El Saadawi at home in 2015.
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A firebrand activist for women’s rights, her novels espoused truths that made her hugely unpopular with the government.
Sindiwe Magona at home.
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A literary icon, her autobiographies offer a way of understanding the country’s brutal past in order to heal and move forward.