Monday, 07 June 2010 05:38
Africa
By Nnorom Azuonye
In the past month or so I have noted several references to Adichie’s ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. I have received e-mails from admirers of the Orange Prize for Women’s Writing winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointing me to a video of the Nigerian writer talking about her riveting ‘new’ idea. Facebook friends have posted the video on my wall. Others have twitted it, and some have referenced it in responding to book reviews elsewhere. One e-mailer suggested that I MUST get in touch with Chimamanda Adichie to get the text of her presentation and publish it in Sentinel Literary Quarterly because, in his opinion, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ was “so illuminating that it would change the West’s view of Africa forever.” Intrigued, I dropped everything I was doing and went over to Ted.com to see the video for myself.
Last Updated on Monday, 07 June 2010 06:13
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Sunday, 13 April 2008 14:35
Africa
"What can one say of this political cowardice? We expect our leaders to lead, and lead with moral courage. When they fail to do so they leave all of us morally impoverished. Where they funk the difficult issues they make themselves irrelevant. Why should we listen to the mighty when the mighty are deaf to the cries of the afflicted? Millions of Africans and Europeans would expect Zimbabwe and Darfur to be at the very top of the agenda. It is not too late.
Last Updated on Sunday, 27 July 2008 23:30
Thursday, 30 August 2007 20:21
Africa
And it was not just the ownership of the story that was revolutionary - the language was too. Achebe's novels are part standard English, part pidgin, part language of folklore and proverb. His writing crackles with vivid, universal and yet deeply African images. "Living fire begets cold, impotent ash"; "If you want to get at the root of murder ... look for the blacksmith who made the matchet". "Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly," he writes in Things Fall Apart, "and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."
Last Updated on Tuesday, 05 August 2008 18:30
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 21:01
Africa
There are clear allusions to the onset of the slave trade, but the tale's origins lie, Okri says, in the myth of an ancestor who is captured or disappears, which he likens to the Pied Piper of European lore. "There's a lot about the past that we can't know except by stories," he says. "If these are not passed on, how can we understand who we are, and what we can become?" For him, the book is a mythic attempt to reconfigure a disrupted past, not least through its art. "It is not loss that defines us, but recovery. One has to read the clues of what seems to be lost, in art, artefacts, intuitions, dreams. The artist is a conduit through which lost things are recovered." While on the most obvious level his subject is Africa, its resonance is larger, he insists. "Loss is an inextricable part of what it is to be human."
Last Updated on Tuesday, 05 August 2008 18:30
Tuesday, 24 July 2007 13:22
Africa
On Wednesday her epic novel about the Biafra war won Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the Orange prize. In her first interview since, she tells Stephen Moss that she wants to show how the west doesn't get Africa. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book [Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003] because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 05 August 2008 18:27
Tuesday, 24 July 2007 10:20
Africa
For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for 18 months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African literature as a category within the curriculum.
Last Updated on Sunday, 27 July 2008 23:32
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