synopsis of the beautyful ones are not yet born

The first being Archibald Campbell Mzolisa Jordan’s Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors), 1940, then Benedict Wallet Vilakazi’s Amal’ezulu (1945). Soon after, you encounter one of two books by South African’s written in a local language before the National Party won the elections in 1948. Second is Sol Plaatjie’s Mhudi, which is said to be the first African novel published in English. The first book on the list is Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, which he wrote in Sesotho. This made sense, since the listings are from a period just after the scramble for Africa.

Many of the books on the list are in colonial languages and a handful in local languages.

Our first challenge came as soon as we went beyond the Top 12 on the list.

Compiled by fellows at the Leiden African Studies Center, the 2002 list provided a steady stool to stand on. So we decided on Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th Century. But considering the fact that we grew up on Roald Dahl and JK Rowling, there was not much to go about. So where do we begin? With books we’ve read, we thought. Such a map would answer some of the questions we’ve been trying to answer. Mapping African fiction using the author’s location of birth.

We had (what we thought then was) a brilliant idea. But how do we do that without having to cram each author’s biographical details?Īfter we used google mapping to locate a number of book clubs on the continent. Having read two books from West Africa, we would like to avoid that region going forward. We have, in our book club, so far read a book from Ghana, one from Nigeria, one from Somalia, and one by a Jamaican national. If your goal was to read books from all over the African continent, how would you keep track of the books you’ve read? How do you avoid reading books from the same country or region? These are some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves over the months while trying to spread our reading across as much of the continent as possible.

Synopsis of the beautyful ones are not yet born