Book 7 of 54: "I Speak to the Silent" by Mtutuzeli Nyoka

About the author

Mtutuzeli Nyoka was born in 1960 to a black medical doctor father (a rarity in Apartheid South Africa) and nursing sister mother. He grew up in Port Elizabeth and was an excellent athlete. He played cricket, rugby and soccer.

Nyoka went on to study medicine and in 1993 became the first black otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat) surgeon in South Africa. 

I Speak to the Silent is Nyoka's first novel. He started writing it in 1998 as a way to deal with the atrocities he had witnessed and experienced in Apartheid South Africa in the 70's and 80's. Snippets of his life are contained in his second book, Deliberate Concealment: An Insider's Account of Cricket South Africa and the IPL Bonus Saga, which deals about his time as a cricket administrator and his fight against corruption in Cricket SA and the sport in general.


I Speak to the Silent (South Africa):

I finished this book about two months ago but I have been struggling to write about it. I think it is because it is a book about South Africa: her past, her present, her future and how they are all so interconnected. This book touches on so many experiences (most of which are very painful) I have lived personally and through others and so it has been difficult to sit down and reflect on these.

I Speak to the Silent tells the truly tragic story of Walter Hambile Kondile, a self-described "simple man, a Xhosa and an African, whose life is of no significance to the world." Kondile was born and raised in Apartheid South Africa to be a "good native" and to believe that "it was God's design for the white man to rule over" him.

He is an obedient servant to his English master and tries his very best to teach his daughter, Sindiswa, to be subservient and to know her place. He fails at this: his daughter becomes a committed struggle activist who joins the armed struggle.

Kondile's life gets turned on its head when his daughter flees the police because she has become a vocal leader who is good at organising the masses. The events of the book unfold so that Kondile goes looking for Sindiswa in exile and discovers that his daughter's dreams and aspirations for freedom have been betrayed in unimaginable ways.

I found out about this book from Prof Pumla Dineo Gqola's seminal work Rape: A South African Nightmare in a chapter where she discusses violent displays of masculinity and how they cultivate the conditions for rape culture in South Africa. Gqola notes that  one of the things that this novel shows us is that to undermine and undo rape culture, men have to "break ranks with patriarchy" and challenge its conventions and police the patriarchal privilege that we as men enjoy.

Perhaps one of the reasons rape  is so prevalent in South Africa is because of our violent past and our inability as a society to deal with "rape histories, entanglements and violent masculinities." I Speak to the Silent is one of very few works that attempts to do this.

In October this year, an article appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper about women freedom fighters telling their experiences of sexual abuse in training camps like that of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). The men that committed these acts of violence never accounted for their crimes and went on to become some of the most powerful men in democratic South Africa.

When I was watching the announcement of the new leadership of the ANC recently, I could not help but think back to the crimes that the outgoing and incoming ANC presidents committed before they were elected in a democratic South Africa. Neither one of them have accounted for these crimes and both became the most important political figure in South Africa. This saddens me deeply.

In Nyoka's novel, Kondile reminds us that "it is a truism that the suppression of the truth, or of dissenting views, does not mean that they cease to exist. Their suppression merely creates a facade of compliance, a false sense of calm, which will from time to time be violently disrupted as the indestructible desire for liberty asserts itself."

Book 6 of 54: "Ghana Must Go" by Taiye Selasi

About the Author


Born in London to a Nigerian mother and a Ghanaian father, Taiye Selasi has spent a lot of time challenging the idea of what it means to be 'from somewhere'. In her 2014 TED Talk titled "Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local", she tells the story of how, during her international book tour to promote "Ghana Must Go" she cringed every time she was introduced: 'Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria,' or 'Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States.' This was a lie, she says. Yes, she was born in England and grew up in the United States of America. Her mother was born in England and raised in Nigeria and currently lives in Ghana. Her father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony at the time, raised in what then became Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in Saudi Arabia. As a result, her introducers also viewed her as 'multi-national', a term Selasi does not like because it immediately makes one think of international corporations.

Nationality, she says, is a human invention based on arbitrary borders that are not as absolute as we like to think. Countries are not fixed points in time and geography; countries are born, develop and some die; and borders and territories expand and contract continuously. The idea of using nationality as a basis for identity, Selasi says, is one that does not make sense to her.

Before the publication of her debut novel, Selasi was perhaps most famous for writing an essay in 2005 seeking to define an identity for Africans whose parents are of different nationalities and cultures and who live and work across the globe titled "Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)". In the essay, Selasi attempts to 'privilege culture over country', fussing different experiences across the world where one can feel a sense of belonging based on shared rituals and not necessarily on perceived shared geographies.


Ghana Must Go: Ghana

"Ghana Must Go" tells the story of the Sais: a Nigerian-Ghanaian family of six living in America. The parents, Kweku and Fola, leave the African continent 'in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad'. Kweku becomes a world-class surgeon, the best in his field, and Fola gives up an opportunity to study law at an ivy-league university to raise their four children: first born son Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo and 'the baby' Sadie.

Then one day tragedy befalls the family in the form of a grave injustice to Kweku. Ashamed, he abandons his family and returns to Ghana leaving the family to fragment and spiral out to different parts of the world: New York, New England, London and Ghana.

The book opens with Kweku's death, which forces everyone back together to try and heal the wounds of the past.

The title of the book refers to the Nigerian phrase directed at incoming Ghanaian refugees during political unrest in the 1980s. It speaks of xenophobia and it speaks of immigration: both forced and chosen. It speaks of leaving a home you have established with assets and rituals and giving it all up to start afresh elsewhere.

Kweku and Fola have a 'conversation' towards the end of the book which relates back to the title and how it fits into the narrative. Kweku asks himself why he left his family.

"I also left you," Fola says to him. "We did what we knew. It was what we knew. Leaving...We were immigrants. Immigrants leave."

 The narrative comes full circle back to Ghana, to Africa, form where Kweku and Fola left many years ago, where each of the Sais must learn how to 'do their work' in order to heal, so that they can come together again as a family.

My favourite thing about this book is Selasi's command of language. The language of the book is poetic not only in its use of figures of speech but also in the rhythm that it employs.

Consider the following passage from the third part of the novel:

'The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray, with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. The weather in December is like this in Ghana: an in-taken breath held until the world spins, trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.'

If you have not already noticed the rhythm that Selasi establishes, then read the passage again in a different format below:


'The day has dawned coolish, deceptively clement, 
sun covered by clouds, a thick coat of pale gray, 
with bright whiteness behind it, a threat or a promise, 
breeze running its fingers through leaves, not yet noon. 
In thirty or so minutes the clouds will start parting, 
the leaves will stop moving, the air will stand still; 
the sun will stop playing demure and come forward; 
the day will turn muggy, unbearably hot. 
The weather in December is like this in Ghana: 
an in-taken breath held until the world spins, 
trail of tears to the New Year through sopping humidity, 
the worst of the heat, then the respite of rain.'

The fact that the entire book is written like this is a remarkable achievement. Granted, there are parts of the book where the poetic rhythm fails, but one has to conclude that Selasi did this on purpose, as is evident in a reading she did from the book on the tour promote it.

"Ghana Must Go" is a meditation on the ideas of identity that go beyond nationality, something I myself have never considered. I look forward to reading it again and encourage you all to get a copy.

A Black Power Solution to a Bluest Eye problem

"Think about it. Barring Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that's who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye  problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in the rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman's privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. . ." excerpt from 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi

I think the politics black hair have not been written enough about. Hair means different things to different people.

To some it matters not whether their hair is long or short, kinky or straight, coarse or soft: hair is just one of those things we all have for practical purposes, like hands or a nose. To others, hair is very political, and to them, how you choose to wear it is a reflection of your beliefs about beauty standards and the oppression of black people.

I know black women who find themselves and others ugly with their natural hair unrelaxed with harmful chemicals. For some of them its not about ugliness as much as it is about having to wake up every morning to do battle with a curly afro: it's just easier to have smoothe, relaxed hair that can be managed easily at the start of the day.

I had a friend once who always got braids a week before exams because she found examination periods such a stressful time. The only way to help relieve the stress of waking up after a long night of studying was the assurance that she got to tie her hair in a ponytail and was ready to go.

I know other black women and girls who see their hair as battle grounds where the ideals of black identity are fiercely debated.

Only last year, we saw girls at a number of former model-C (read: former white) schools in South Africa protesting the rules that governed how they could and could not wear their hair. These young women (and many across the country who had and had not gone through similar experiences) felt that the way these rules were written and enforced targeted anyone who did not have silky, smoothe and straight white-girl hair. These rules were seen as oppressive an unaccommodating of black people in a country where close to 80 % of the population is black.

This was a polarising issue, with some people feeling that as school learners, these young women had to abide by the school rules and their protest was seen as them wanting to do as they pleased in a school environment.

No matter your stance on the hair of black people, this much is clear: we still have a long way to go in terms of the identity politics of hair.

"Ghana Must Go": A jewel of literary achievement

I'm currently reading "Ghana Must Go" by the incomparable Taiye Selasi.

"He wants her to be satisfied." Selasi writes. " He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.     She is like no woman he's known.

Or like no woman he's loved.
     He isn't sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he's loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having forgotten what they wanted promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He'd never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
     They were dreamer-women
     Very dangerous women.
     Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, 'brutal, senseless,' etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become."

This short passage makes me wonder about what it means to find happiness with someone in a relationship when you are a dreamer. How do you take care of  someone who isn't a dreamer? Do you fight with them to become better than they are? Is that worth all that energy? What if they are happy being with who they are and where they are in their life? Will you only ever be happy with another dreamer? Even then, dreaming with someone else can be exhausting!

Before my current relationship, I was single for the longest time (six or seven years) and was never with anyone for more than a week or so. I always accredited it to my knowing exactly what I wanted in a partner (or more accurately, what I did not want) and all potential partners just not making the cut.

After reading this passage in Selasi's book, I identify a little with what she says.

I self-identify as a dreamer, as defined above: I see the world as it should be and work very hard in an effort to make this vision a reality. I stand so firm in my belief of how things should be that I tend to be too hasty in my dismissal of people who disagree. In the past this has included friends, mentors, family members and potential partners.

Book 5 of 54: "Queen Pokou" by Véronique Tadjo

About the Author:

Véronique Tadjo is the daughter of a French painter and sculptor and an Ivorian civil servant. She was born in Paris and raised in Abidjan (the economic capital of Ivory Coast and the most populous French-speaking city in Africa).

A Fulbright scholar, Tadjo has a BA from the University of Abidjan and a doctorate from the University of Paris. She has lived and worked in many African countries and travelled all over the world. She sees herself as a pan-Africanist and much of these travels come out in the subject matter and imagery in her work.


Queen Pokou: Ivory Coast

Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist, essayist and an artist. What she tends to do in her writing is fuse different genres and styles to challenge the borders between different literary forms. She refers to her literary works as 'texts' or, more correctly, in French 'récits', which are pieces of writing whose genre is not defined.

This is no different in "Queen Pokou", which cannot be classified as a novel.

The book starts off with a prelude in which Tadjo tells of how the story of Queen Pokou kept coming up at different times in her life, essentially haunting her until she wrote it.

Pokou was a princess of the powerful Ashanti nation, who saved her people by sacrificing her baby. She threw him into a river so that her people could cross safely. After crossing the river she is said to have repeated the word 'baouli', 'the child is dead' and the people she saved decided to call themselves the Baouli in honour of her sacrifice.

In the rest of the book, Tadjo writes what could have happened if things had gone differently. What if she had refused to sacrifice her son, she and her people had been sold as slaves and shipped across the Atlantic to the cotton fields of America? What if the baby's father had protested to his son being thrown in the river? What if they had not crossed the river, but seeked refuge in a village nearby?

All these 're-imaginings' make the reader question this history/legend that Tadjo and her people grew up taking for granted. It also makes one as a reader question the oral stories/legends/histories that one grew up with as well.

The poetic language of the book makes one think of epic poems and and oral story telling traditions that formed a big part of some of our upbringing. With the continuous re-telling of this well-established legend in Ivory Coast, Tadjo re-appropriates this story and insist that open-ended stories can teach us a great deal about our own damaged and imperfect humanity.

Book 4 of 54: "The Screaming of the Innocent" by Unity Dow

About the Author

Unity Dow was Botswana's first female High Court Judge and has been a prominent human-rights activist in that country. With law degrees from the University of Botswana, the University of Swaziland and the University of Edinburgh, Dow has had an illustrious career in the legal fraternity.

In 1992 she won a landmark case in Botswana that allowed the children of women by foreign nationals born in Botswana to be considered citizens of Botswana. Before this, nationality only descended from the father. She was one of three judges who ruled on the now internationally acclaimed Kgalagadi court decision, concerning the rights of the San to return to their ancestral lands (you can read "Maru" by Bessie Head as a great intro into the racial discrimination and marginalization of the San people in Botswana).

Dow has also done work in other African countries: in 2005, she was a member of a UN mission to Sierra Leone to review domestic application of international women's human rights norms; in 2007 she was a member of a special mission at the invitation of the Rwandan Government and UN special court for Rwanda (the purpose of this mission was  to review the Rwandan Judiciaries preparedness to take over the hearing of the 1994 genocide cases); Dow was also sworn in as Justice of the Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court of Kenya by the Kenyan President to serve in implementing the new constitution in Kenya.

Dow has been a visiting professor of law at Columbia University in New York, Washington and Lee University in Lexington and Cincinnati University in Ohio. She has also been awarded numerous awards for her human-rights activism including the Légion d'honneur de France by then French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the William Brennan Human Rights Award by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the Vanguard Women Leadership Award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world.

She is currently serving as Botswana's Minister of Education and Skills Development.

I don't know how she finds the time, but she has published five books already, each of which deals with the struggle between Western and traditional life as well as issues of gender and poverty in Botswana.

The Screaming of the Innocent (Botswana):

There is a television interview that Toni Morrison once gave where she was asked whether she could/would ever write a novel that was not centered around race. In her response, she mentions that Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Émile Zola wrote about race all the time and how a question about the centrality of race in their works would never be seen as a legitimate literary question. And yet, there she was being faced with that very question.

I saw this video clip a number of years ago, but part of her response that has stayed with me is the following:

"I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books. And the people who helped me most arrive at that type of language were African writers: Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head. Those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans. They didn't explain anything to white people. Those questions were incomprehensible to them. Those questions that I would have as an minority living in an all white country like the United States."

The idea that African writers don't "explain anything to white people" in their writing has never resonated more with me than when I read this book. Set in 1999 in Botswana, "The Screaming of the Innocent" is about the cold case of a ritual murder that took place back in 1994 in a small village in the Okavango Delta. A young woman, Amatle, who has been deployed to the local clinic finds crucial evidence stowed away in the clinic storeroom. This evidence disappeared out of police custody five years before and its resurfacing leads the local villagers to force the police to reopen the case.

I live in South Africa and Botswana is one of our neighbouring countries. The people of Botswana are called Batswana and they speak Setswana. This happens to be my home language and it forms a big part of my cultural identity, and as such, Tswana people in South Africa also call ourselves Batswana. My upbringing, the values with which I was raised and the beliefs of my people have never felt more validated than they did while reading this book. I think this is because the Botswana and the Tswana culture and customs that Dow describes, while in a different country and so far removed from my own lived experience, they are so familiar and I knew exactly what she was talking about: she didn't have to explain anything to me.

In one of the chapters in the book, one of the villagers suggests that they kill the two hostages that they have taken to get the police and the government to co-operate with them. "Your conscious will not allow you to sleep," another villager cautions. This reminded me of something my mother once said. She was telling me about something that someone did to her (I cannot remember what exactly) and I jokingly mentioned killing this person and she turned to me and said the same thing: "Do you not want me to sleep at night?"

Life and its distractions

So... I've been silent for a while now.

As the title of the post suggests, life has been happening to me a lot lately: teaching four grades full time, studying full time, maintaining relationships, drama with my parents, organisinng events for my school, and...and...and...and...

Unfortunately, after finishing my third book, I chose a book that I'm finding very difficult to read: Ben Okri's "The Famished Road". So as life happened around me, I found more and more excuses to 'take a break' from continuing the reading.

Once I put Okri's novel aside, I picked up two very delightful books: "Queen Pokou" by Veronique Tadjo and "The Screaming of the Innocent" by Unity Dow. I finished books today and reviews of both will follow soon.

Book 3 of 54: "The Real Life of Domingos Javier" by José Luandino Vieira

About the aurthor:

Born in Portugal in 1935, José Luandino Vieira's parents immigrated to Angola in 1938. Vieira grew up immersed in the language and the culture of the black quarters of Luanda, Angola's capital. He was so influenced by these experiences that later in life he wrote in a language unique to the black quarters: a fusion of Kimbundu (one of Angola's native languages) and Portuguese.

Vieira devoted himself to Angolan independence from Portugal. In 1961, he revealed a secret list of deserters from the Portuguese army to the BBC and was arrested and imprisoned for eleven years. It's sad to think that so many Angolans gave their lives for the realization of Angola's independence in 1975 (which is what the book is about), only to have the country enter a civil war that only recently ended in 2002.


The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (Angola):


This was quite an interesting book. It was about a land so far away that I have not been to yet. A land I knew very little about (until recently); a land I never thought about before. But the connection I made to Angola through this book went deeper than I expected. The similarities to South Africa's history are so uncanny.

"The Real Life of Domingos Xavier" is an ode to all the freedom fighters who made the ultimate sacrifice for Angola's independence. Domingos Xavier represents freedom fighters who were detained by the authorities, tortured, violated and eventually killed. The colonial police come to Domingos Xavier's house and arrest him in the dead of night. The book lays bare Domingos Xavier's torture by the white Portuguese colonial police and the cipaios (Africans recruited to serve in subordinate roles in the colonial police). He is beaten to the point where his eyes become so swollen he is unable to see through them. His wife Maria is sent around by the authorities from one office to the next, each official claiming to have no knowledge of her husband's arrest. These portrayals of Domingos and Maria's torture are inter-spaced by the underground freedom fighters outside jail trying to identify the prisoner that was paraded in the township by the police to curb political dissident.

Vieira succeeded in making me feel a lot of suspense. I found myself telling the characters not to speak to loudly about what they were planning because you never know who is listening. In fact, on two or three occasions I found myself going back on a page to make sure no one was near the characters who might report them to the police. When a scene included the characters of Mussanda, Chico, Grandad Patelo and Young Zito, I would be on edge the entire time, fearing an arrest was imminent.

There is an incident in Domingos Xavier's torture where the white colonial police officer offers him a sandwich and a beer having subjected him to beatings on previous days. This incident made me thing back to a book I read last year: Jacob Dlamini's "Askari". This book was about (among other things) an examination of the circumstances that lead some freedom fighters during Apartheid in South Africa to betray and continue to betray many of their comrades.

I think this idea of betraying your people still happens today. Where you have political leaders choosing the lavish lifestyle that money and other benefits will afford them as a result of bribes and other corrupt actions. This can further be extended to ordinary Africans choosing to participate in a systems and institutions that continue to oppress us today, naively believing that if we work hard enough, we can carve a seat for ourselves at the table, not realizing that for every one of us that makes it in the corporate world (for example) there are millions of us that continue to live under these oppressive institutions that were never created for the improvement of our lives as black people.

Domingos Xavier still refuses to betray his people even after he is promised the sandwich and beer and his "freedom". How many of us continue to accept the sandwich and beer and a false sense of freedom just so we can live a more lavish lifestyle than the next person, while betraying our sisters and brothers in the process?

Book 2 of 54: "Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue

About the author: Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue was born in a small village just outside of the town of Limbe in Cameroon. She spent much of her childhood in Limbe and after finishing high school, moved to the United States of America to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey. Like the immigrant characters in her book, the only images and perceptions Mbue had about America were the things she saw on television and (also like her characters), she says she was not prepared for what she found once she arrived.
After completing her bachelors degree, she worked a myriad of different jobs: as a dental-office receptionist, a bank teller, a preschool secretary, a dishwasher, she was a lingerie saleswoman at an American department store and also sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. She managed to put herself through graduate school and obtained a masters degree in education and psychology at Columbia University.

After completing her masters degree, she got a job for a media house doing market research. She has said that she always wanted to do a doctorate degree, but when she got into a PhD programme in California, she turned it down to stay in her job in New York. She subsequently lost that job after the financial crisis of 2008 and remained unemployed for two years. In those two years, she started writing "Behold the Dreamers" (originally titled "The Longings of Jende Jonga") and a number of years later received a seven figure deal with Random House--the biggest book deal for an unpublished African author in history!

Before it was even published, the book's film rights were optioned by Tristar, a division of Sony Pictures. Mbue's literary Cinderella story is just as intriguing as her novel.

Behold the Dreamers (Cameroon)

I finished this book three days ago, but I have found it very difficult to write about it because it made me feel so many things.


Beginning in 2007, the book is about Jende Jonga and his family, who immigrate to America from Cameroon in search of a better future. They are trying to escape a life where they have to be content with the limited opportunities that come with being born poor in Cameroon and go after a life where there is an illusion of equal opportunity. They go to a country that has sold us the dream that we can all make it if we work hard enough, showing us only the success stories while hiding the many faces of failure for every one that made it.

Jende started out as a dishwasher and managed to get himself a drivers license. This provided him the step-up in life that he needed. He used the license to get a job driving those famous yellow taxi cabs of New York City and as a result could afford to bring his wife and son to join him in America.

When the book begins, Jende gets a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers banker. We then see the inevitable build up to the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath through the eyes of the immigrant characters.

The part of the book that has stayed with me is when Jende is reflecting about the financial crash and its aftermath. He compares it to a financial crisis they had in Cameroon in the eighties; he talks about the"money doublers" of Cameroon who promise people that they will double their money and how no one has seen this happen, but because of their desperation, people always go to them to lose large sums of money; and he thinks about all the people that have lost everything and how lucky he is to still have a job.

Then he thinks about all the dreams that people lost: dreams of sending children to college, dream weddings, dream vacations, dreams of retirement. "In many ways, it would be an unprecedented plague," he reflects, " a calamity like the one that had befallen the Egyptians in the Old Testament. The only difference between the Egyptians then and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshiping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing."

It is easy to dismiss Jende's naivety because of his idolization of America. His belief in "the American dream" blinds him to the wickedness of the financial tycoons of Wall Street. His employment by one of these tycoons blinds him to the fact that the bankers on Wall Street do the exact same thing as the "money doublers" in Cameroon, just on a much bigger scale. But when everything comes crashing down on him, Jende is able to see the lie that he has been sold and has the courage to escape a life that was slowly eating away at his humanity.

I can't help but think about the inter-connectedness of everything. The Wall Street banker's son says to Jende's wife later in the book: "I have to find a way...to stomach...all the bullshit the masses are blind to...so much mindlessness. People sit on their couches and watch garbage interrupted by messages to buy more garbage which will create a desire for more garbage. They go to their computers and order from incredibly horrible corporations that are enslaving their fellow humans and pretty much destroying any chance of children growing up in a world where they can truly be free. But hey, we have our material comforts and we're saving money and corporations are creating sixty-hour-a-week jobs with sick leave so what does it matter  if we're complicit? Let's just carry on with our lives while our country continues to commit atrocities all over the world."

Book 1 of 54: "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Bâ

About the author: Mariama Bâ

This is a deeply felt novel that mirrors some of the events of the author's own life. Born on 17 April 1929, Bâ was raised a Muslin in Dakar, Senegal. She was raised by her grandparents, who did not believe that girl children should be educated. As a result, she really had to struggle to get an education. She eventually qualified as a teacher, taught for twelve years, and became a school inspector as a result of issues with her health. Bâ was married to a member of Senegal's national assembly; they divorced and she was left to care for their nine children alone.

Bâ started writing quite critically about the shortcomings of African traditional society. She burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, "So Long A Letter", in 1980. Unfortunately, she died a year later, before the publication of her second novel. One can only imagine what great works she could have given us had she lived longer.

So Long A Letter (Senegal)



"So Long A Letter" tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher and the events before and after the death of her husband. It is written as a letter to her childhood friend Aissatou, who immigrated to America after her husband allowed himself to be blackmailed by his mother into taking a second wife. Aissatou completely rejects what her culture says she ought to do in this situation and decides to leave her husband.

Ramatoulaye goes through something similar. Before his death, her husband marries a second wife in an unexpected twist. He does not have the courage to talk to her about it, instead he keeps this courtship a secret and only after he has married the second wife does he send his brother and their Iman to tell Ramatoulaye what he has done.

He leaves Ramatoulaye to raise their twelve children by herself and spends all his money and time on his second wife. Slowly Ramatoulaye starts to realise that the patriachal society she lives in is not going to help her with this predicament. She slowly starts to realise that, Like Aissatou, she too cannot look to her culture and that she needs to reject it.
 
Bâ shows us how much responsibility African women take on and how African society would collapse without them. And yet, we do not value them as much as we should. She uses African men's lack of accountability and sexual instinct to demonstrate our irresponsibility and our pathology for hurting African women.

I am a male, and as such, my views of the lived experience of females is very very very limited (to say the least). I can only draw on the second hand experience of all the women that have been mothers, sisters and friends to me.

Bâ's novel was published in Senegal (on the other side of the continent from me) in 1980 (when I wasn't even an idea to my parents), and yet her views on the treatment of women in society in general still ring true today.

I see it in the way we emphasize to young girls to be neat and clean little ladies and how we don't do the same for young boys. Whether it is my school's deputy principal telling the girls at our school off at an assembly about their short skirts and untidy hair or my own mother telling my female cousins how they should dress and behave if they want to be married one day.

I see it in the way we police the bad behaviour of women and we don't do it to men: my uncle's wife was told she should accept that her husband had a girlfriend on the side because he married her and so he would always come back to her; my grandmother told me about her own father's philandering and simply told me "that's the way men are"; and yet when a woman I know had one sexual encounter with another man after her husband spent years cheating on her, she was demonized for being unable to keep her legs crossed.

I see it in the phrasing of the language we use. Whether it is a male colleague of mine insulting the boys in his class by saying "there are only girls in this class" (and the female students laughing the loudest) and seeing nothing wrong with that! Or the songs we sing at weddings that tell women what they should and should not do in marriage (and yet there are no such songs directed at men) and being told that I know nothing about life when I point this out.

It still astonishes me how much our society is built around protecting male privilege (across race, culture and even sexuality). Both men and women do whatever is necessary to protect the status quo. Bâ teaches us that women are just as important (if not more so) as men and for us to build successful societies, we need to take this lesson more seriously than we have in the past.

Day 2 of 365: Mariama Bâ and Imbolo Mbue

Yesterday was the first day of my "Readings from the Motherland."

I started two of the books: an old classic of African literature, "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Bâ, and a modern African classic, "Behold The Dreamers."

 I'm only about a quarter of the way with each book because of a slight illness. My pace should pick up soon and I hope to finish at least one of them by next week.

Each book is interesting in its own way.

"Behold The Dreamers" is a story about an immigrant family from Cameroon that moves to America. The father of this family starts working as a chauffeur for a Wall Street banker who works at Lehman Brothers just before the financial crash of 2008. The journey of these characters is made more interesting by the recent controversial travel ban instituted by the new American president.

"So Long A Letter" tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher after the death of her husband. It is written as a letter to her childhood friend Aissatou. Bâ's writing is quite beautiful, written as a sequence of reminiscences, it's almost like watching a sequence of flashbacks in a film.

On Egyptian Literature

The story of Egyptian literature is nothing short of incredible! The kind of stuff we should be taught in school as part of the decolonization of education project.

The ancient Egyptians are considered to be the first culture to develop modern literature as we know it today. Texts from this period of African history were divided into two broad categories: religious texts like hymns, mythological texts, magical texts and mortuary texts; and areligious texts like instructive literature (known as "wisdom texts"), poems, what we might consider scientific treatises (like mathematical and medical texts), historical as well as biographical texts.

It's clear that the culture of reading and writing was well established (for the educated elite, anyway) much earlier than the era of the famous library of Alexandria. In fact, many of the texts that ended up in the great library were originally written during the Old and Middle Kingdom (2134 - 1668 BC).

With the rise of Christianity, many of these texts were destroyed as they were seen to teach and promote heresy. However, some important ancient texts were preserved in Egypt by some scholars.

After Egypt was conquered by Arab Muslims, the literature (and libraries) of Egypt thrived and saw a shift almost entirely to Arabic. The concept of a "blurb" dates back to this time and was known as a "taqriz" in medieval Arabic literature.

In fact, literary devices like similes, metaphors and alliteration can be traced back to ancient Egyptian literature.

Modern Egyptian literature is quite expansive and has seen a lot of development over the years. Recently, the shift as been towards writings about the expanding and ever changing Arab culture with a focus on the individual dealing with poverty as a result of rural-urban migration.

I have found three books from Egypt that I would like to read and I need some help deciding which to choose.

1. "Brooklyn Heights" by Miral al-Tahawy

This book tells the story of Hend and her eight-year-old son. They move to Brooklyn in New York City to escape a failed marriage and her family's restrictiveness.

While trying to build a new life for herself and her son, Hend has to deal with poverty, a job she does not like, relationships with men and following her dream of becoming an artist.

1. "Palace Walk" by Egypt's first Nobel laureate in literature, Naguib Mahfouz

This book is the first of Mahfouz's celebrated Cairo Trilogy. These three novels tell the story of a Cairo patriarch and his family over three generation. It represents three eras of socio-political life in Cairo.

Mahfouz examines issues of religion, education, women empowerment and plays a lot with the theme of "social progress being the inevitable result of the evolutionary spirit of humankind."

3. "Zeina" by Nawal el Saadawi

I was drawn to this book because of the beliefs and politics of the author, eighty-three-year-old feminist, activist, physician and psychiatrist Nawal el Saadawi. She has written numerous books on women in Islam, is a life-long activist for gender equality in Islam and has been critical of the Egyptian government as well the effect that American foreign policies and wars have on the rest of the world.

Zeina is her most recent novel. Published in 2011, it tells the story of a distinguished literary critic in Cairo who abandoned her illegitimate daughter, Zeina, when she was a university student. Zeina grows up to be one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers, while her biological mother is stuck in a loveless marriage and plagued with guilt.