MEMOIR (KENYA)
Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu, 2020
R240 from The Book Lounge
Nadia Owusu blends memoir with cultural history as she explores her own complex identity. Her story is structured around the different stages of an earthquake, and swings back and forth in time and between the places she has lived – Tanzania, England, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda and New York, where she becomes so depressed she barely moves from a blue rocking chair she had pulled off the street and hauled up to her Manhattan apartment. Owusu writes about multiple identities with insight as she pieces together who she is and where she belongs. GB
LEGACY FICTION (SOUTH AFRICA)
Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali, 1975
R450 from Clarke’s Bookshop
Miriam Tlali’s short first novel – banned on its first publication in South Africa in 1975 – is a slice-of-life story about Muriel, a young black woman who works as a typist and bookkeeper in a bustling hire-purchase business in downtown Johannesburg in the late 1960s. Peopled by a motley crew of characters, all of whom are indelibly marked by the appalling racial politics of the time, this book is by turns angry, elegiac and at times, darkly funny. RA
PHOTOGRAPHY (CONTINENT-WIDE)
Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame edited by Aimée Bessire and Erin Hyde Nolan, 2021
R1180 from Jonathan Ball
This book will fascinate students of documentary photography as well as anyone interested in the changing ways that Africa has been presented to the rest of the world. Images of eight countries including modern-day Togo, Ghana, Zambia and Tanzania were taken over a five-month period in 1958 by US photographer Todd Webb, having been commissioned by the United Nations as part of a project intended to optimistically showcase industry and technology across the continent. Todd Webb in Africa goes well beyond simply reproducing the photographs in question, however, by including a series of thought-provoking essays that explore the various “strengths, intentions, and inevitable biases” that they represent. RA
Harare North by Brian Chikwava, 2010 (ZIMBABWE)
R215, Clarke’s Bookshop
The lives of several very different people fleeing Zimbabwe’s disintegration.
“[I]f you don’t spin them smooth jazz numbers then immigration people is never going to give you chance to even sniff first step into Queen’s land” – Brian Chikwava, Harare North
A Question of Power by Bessie Head, 1986 (SOUTH AFRICA)
R304, Clarke’s Bookshop
A woman disintegrates in exile from South Africa.
“Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute” – Bessie Head, A Question of Power
