African Books - Page 2

A Far-Off Place

Laurens van der Post

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An endearing story 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I remembered watching this movie a long time ago as a kid, which is why I decided to buy it, so many years later.

Long story short, the movie is just as good as I remembered it to be. While the story is cliche at times, and simplistic in some ways, the character interactions is what makes this film shine.

It also gives you a glimpse of a young Reese Whiterspoon, and you can clearly see her developing talent.

Read the books instead 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This film is interesting and somewhat effective as a piece of cinema. That said, its story is so far removed from van der Post's indiosyncratic novels (upon which the film is ostensibly based) as to be almost unrecognizable. Only one connection to the two novels remains: both the film and the books are set in Africa. Beyond that, just about every other element of the books' narratives has been changed, usually so that the film follows some shallow Hollywood plotline, but at the expense of van der Post's encyclopedic knowledge and love of Bushman life and culture. As a result, the film is watchable, but its destruction of the novels is almost as complete as the razing of Hunters Drift by poachers in the film version.

Editorial Review:

The story of a long, perilous journey undertaken by four survivors of a massacre: a teenage boy of European descent, a young white girl, and two Bushmen. The basis for a major film release from Walt Disney Pictures.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Clive James

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.

Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," the renowned critic Clive James presents here his life's work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, "If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive." Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost. 110 photographs.

The River Between (AWS African Writers Series)

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Powerful Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"The River Between" tells the story of a young boy, Waiyaki, who is told by his father that he will be the savior of his village. Waiyaki's village is under the threat of integration by the white missionaries who are slowly entruding on their village. Waiyaki is to go to the mission and learn the teachings of the white man and use those teachings to help save his people. Waiyaki accepts his role as savior and feels that education is the only way to save his people.

This novel deals with complex issues, including finding a balance between accepted, traditional norms and new world education. The struggle to find a balance is the motivating factor in this novel and drives the story forward. Ngugi crafted this novel masterfully and receives tremendous praise for this work. I highly recommend this book to any who desire to read it.

Editorial Review:

Christian missionaries attempt to outlaw the female circumcision ritual and in the process create a terrible rift between the two Kikuyu communities on either side of the river.

July's People

Nadine Gordimer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not an Easy Read 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I bought a copy of Nadine Gordimer's "July's People" shortly before my husband and I made our first trip to South Africa. I must confess I found the first chapter quite difficult to comprehend. I decided to put the book aside and read it after I had been in the country for a while, hoping I would find it easier to understand. And I did.
Though written during the apartheid period the book is valuable today not only as an historical document but also because sadly, in my opinion, things haven't changed much in South Africa since apartheid ended 12 years ago. Though the current government is black we found that descendants of Dutch and English settlers remain in the first world, while blacks are mainly living a third world life and working in subservient positions. True equality will take a few generations and education will play an important role in giving the majority population the skills they need for a comfortable life.
Now a bit about the book itself. July is a black servant until recently employed in a white household in Johannesburg. When rising conflict begins to threaten the lives of the family he serves, the Smales, July takes them to his home in the bush. The book concerns the adjustments that necessitates. It must be said that the elder Smales have always prided themselves in their treatment of July and their liberal politics. How to the Smales adapt to living in an insect infested hut? How do they relate to their former servant and their new neighbors, their subsistence diet and new levels of hygiene their relative status as male and female? The answers depend on which member of the Smales family you are talking about - male or female, parent or child? How does July react as the former servant, who is now above them in the social scale due to a mere change of location? What are the new relations between savior and saved?
Highly recommended to those who are more familiar with the history of South Africa than I intially was and to those with an abiding interest in the establishment of equal and harmonious conditions in the modern South Africa.

Editorial Review:

When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed.

No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

No Longer At Ease 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

After writing "Things Fall Apart", Achebe again comes to us with a masterpiece sequel tiled "No Longer At Ease". This book depicts Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of the Okonkwo in the former. He is an honorable character who comes to a tragic end because of the corruption going on around him, this book also depicts the assimilation that the Nigerians go through and their identity shaken with waves and waves of European influence. A book more concerned over the social issues that the Nigerians at the time felt for their time. This is also shown in Africa today, where corruption run rampant and those in power care nothing about those without power. A powerful novel indeed.

The Trouble with Nigeria 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Although considered a sequel to "Things Fall Apart," "No Longer at Ease" stands on its own and does not require that you read Achebe's more famous work (assuming you've somehow made it through school and managed to escape its ubiquity). It's probably more accurate to say that "No Longer at Ease" is a retelling set in modern Nigeria, and it is as great as--perhaps better than--his earlier work.

Obi Okonkwo is the grandson of Okonkwo, the central character in "Things Fall Apart" (and, other than thematic similarities, this is the only direct link between the two books). With the assistance of fellow villagers who had "made it" in the larger world, Obi leaves home for schooling in England and returns to a civil service job in the colonial administration of Nigeria. Because he is one of the select representatives of his village to receive such treatment, expectations are high: he is to live like a member of his class, entertain like a prince, and pay back his educational expenses. He also finds out quickly that his position on the Scholarship Board, recommending prospective students, is a magnet for bribery.

Here, Achebe forsakes the quasi-mythical storytelling tone of "Things Fall Apart" in favor of a more realist style--and this novel, I think, is both stronger and more accessible as a result. In both works, though, Achebe examines how native culture and tradition come into conflict with Western conventions and materialism. Not only is Obi is torn between the often contradictory demands of success and politesse, but he must also face the patronizing racism of his white superiors and the "backward" conventions of his own people. He falls in love with a woman, only to find her spurned by his people because she is "osu"--an outcast. "It was scandalous," Obi thinks, " that in the middle of the twentieth century a man could be barred from marrying a girl simply because her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been dedicated to serve a god, thereby setting himself apart and turning his descendents into a forbidden caste to the end of the Time."

Unable to satisfy either his family and friends or his British overlords, Obi is headed for the nearly preordained downfall that opens the book. It's a tragedy that underscores all of Achebe's works, which critically examine both Western attitudes toward Africa and the corruption in his native homeland. (The title of this review, in fact, is appropriated from one of Achebe's nonfiction works.) It is not modernization per se to which Achebe objects (after all, he now lives in the United States), but the racism and marginalization that accompanied and have superseded imperialism and that created unreasonable expectations for Nigerians. Through the prism of fiction, "Things Fall Apart" represents powerfully the paradoxes of African life in a Western world.

Editorial Review:

The sequel to the classic, Things Fall Apart, tells of a troubled young African whose formal education separates him from his roots and makes him part of a corrupt ruling elite he despises. Reprint.

Age of Iron

J. M. Coetzee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A taut and gripping book 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

In this novel first published in 1990, Mr Coetzee gives the grim account of both a human being facing imminent death and a country - South Africa - still immersed in the tragedy of the apartheid regime. Mrs Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, has just received the fatal news from her doctor, Dr Syfert, that she suffers from an incurable form of cancer. Part of the narrative consists in an imaginary letter Mrs Curren will never write to her daughter who left for America in 1976. Indeed she does not consider it to be just to share her burden with her daughter but, as she puts it, "to resist the craving to share my death", "to take my leave without bitterness" and "to embrace death as my own, mine alone." But since it is nearly impossible for her to approach death without the support of another human being, she ends up sharing her thoughts and life with Mr Vercueil, a tramp she finds one morning sleeping in the garden of her house.
Death is omnipresent in Mr Coetzee's work, not only Mrs Curren's but in the townships of Cape Town where the lives of the coloureds are worth next to nothing and therefore death is as common as life for the people obliged to live there. A powerful, sad and unforgettable tale whose characters and events cut to the bone.

Editorial Review:

In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep.

Brilliantly crafted and resonant with metaphor, Age of Iron is "a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone." (The New York Times Book Review)

Death and the king's horseman

Wole Soyinka

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

One Great Writer 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 17 people found this review helpful.

At a university seminar in the US recently, Prof. Soyinka was asked to respond to charges by certain critics that his writing wasn't 'African' enough. He responded, saying "The people who say these things, I refer to as neo-Tarzanists, people whose Africa is the Africa of Tarzan, swinging from tree to tree. That's not my Africa", he said, to a standing, thunderous ovation. It is difficult to imagine a writer in English today with a wider grasp of the language. Some of his work is unbelievable - metaphor, irony, the supernatural, interwoven with tragedy, lyricism, and language. Top-draw.

Editorial Review:

A Nobel Prize-winning playwright's classic tale of tragic decisions in a traditional African culture. Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka's powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer. The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin's son arrives home.

Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Bitterness of Motherhood 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Buchi Emecheta, writes with piercing teeth and gouging fingers: irony, sarcasm, and anger are her appendages: orphan, arranged marriage object, immigrant to England, five children by 22, marriage terminator, single mother acquiring degree in sociology, messaged writer.

The setting for "The Joys of Motherhood" is in Lagos, Nigeria, between the 1930's and the 1960's. Lagos, the capital of the British colony of Nigeria, is primarily Yoruba; the main characters are Igbo.

Change from chiefdoms to the city: "Men here [in Lagos] are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them. The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money"

Community versus individual: The scene is an attempted suicide in Lagos. "You are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community not just to him or her. So a person has no right to take it while another member of the community looks on. He must interfere, he must stop it happening."

Religion: "Her new Christian religion taught her to bear her cross with fortitude. If hers was to support her family, she would do so, until her husband found a new job."

War: The context is the forced draft of Nigerians into the army during World War II: "For me to be married to a soldier, a plunderer and killer of children.... I don't know how I would feel if I was asked to kill people who had never offended me."

Men and Women: "God when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage?"

Motherhood: "When the children were good they belonged to the father; when they were bad, they belonged to the mother. Every woman knew this."

Editorial Review:

This story of a young mother's struggles in 1950s Lagos is a powerful commentary on polygamy, patriarchy, and women's changing roles in urban Nigeria.

Master Harold . . . And The Boys (Penguin Plays)

Athol Fugard

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a gripping look at racism's multiple victims 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Athol Fugard, 'Master Harold' ... and the boys. New York: Penguin. 1984. Originally produced in 1982 by the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Hally does not know who he is. The single white character on stage in South African-born playright Athol Fugard's one-scene work is the friend of his mother's two black employees when they tend to St George's Park Tearoom in her absence. But he is also their 'Master Harold'-reluctantly but inevitably-when the stress of his crippled, alcoholic father's homecoming impels him into an emotional space that one simply does not share with black folks. Perhaps is it the burden of dealing with human beings on the multiple levels that racism forces upon those who resent but ultimately accede to their required roles that embitters Hally beyond redemption.

Hally doesn't know several things. He is ignorant of the nobility with which Sam and Willie have battled for his dignity over the years of service to his family. He doesn't understand that even this virtue has its limits, beyond which dignity weighs more than the possibility of continuing friendship.

Hally doesn't understand that a night of dancing at the Eastern Province Open Dancing Championships is a thing of beauty rather than of entertainment, nor the hope that is nurtured in a space where for one night people never bump into each other.

'Master Harold', the title upon which he insists at the cost of everything that matters, will never know because he cannot learn. He is a million times more the victim of the 1950's racism in the land of Fugard's birth than any black man whom, when pushed beyond his modest emotional means, he shoves around. They, at least, leave this dark, sad drama with something.

Editorial Review:

One of theatre's most acclaimed playrights finds humor and heartbreak in the friendship of Harold, a 17 - year old white boy in 1950's South Africa, and the two middle aged black servents who raised him. Racism unexpectedly shatters Harold's chilhood and friendships in this absorbing, affecting coming of age play. Readers: Leon Anddison Brown, Keith David, Bobby Steggart

Foe (Essential Penguin)

J.M. Coetzee

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

At the Coalface of Postmodernism 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Foe "establishes itself as a prior, more original text" (Krupat 1992:9) to Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. The primary difference is that, in Coetzee's "prior" text, a young woman, Susan Barton, is washed ashore on Crusoe's island following a mutiny. She becomes the real narrator of the story -- and the story she tells is radically different to that which the original Robinson Crusoe narrates. Not only that, but her man of Letters, Foe, finally takes her story and writes her out of it, giving it shape as the present Robinson Crusoe. I shall offer my own, original interpretation of the book.

The first section may be autobiographical -- perhaps charting the author's inner journey from modernism to postmodernism. It describes the island, windswept and desolate -- unlike Defoe's original rich setting. Barton is a "livewire" who is concerned that Cruso has "narrowed his horizon". She is concerned about his "indifference to salvation". However, Cruso is quite content to lose himself "in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky" -- rather than constructing doubtful meanings for the past, present, or future.

The second section enters into many of the problems of narrative and history. It takes place after Barton's rescue and return to England. Cruso, unable to bear the loss of his island, dies on the return journey. Barton seeks a publisher for her story (Foe), and corresponds with him. But Barton's mind is beset with problems as to how, or even whether, her story should be told. Is the story important after all? Whose story should be told? Is she distorting its content? What should she do with Friday, who is unable to speak? In fact, even when she gets into his clothes, she is unable to understand him.

The third section apparently contemplates theories of truth. Bearing in mind J.M. Coetzee's training as a computer scientist and linguist, I shall draw on the structure of computer languages. "The trick I have learned," says Foe, "is to plant a sign or marker in the ground" (this might refer to the main program). "I shall have something to return to" (one returns to the main program after a subroutine). "The more often I come back to the mark . . . the more I am heartened." The implication is, perhaps, that a life ultimately becomes its own meaning.

The fourth and final part of the novel is a short one, and may represent an attempt to paint reality beyond words and reason. There is a confusion of dream-like imagery. Barton says that God "wrote a Word so long that we have yet to come to the end of it." That is, it would seem impossible to confine truth to words or narrative, or to any enclosed system of meaning. In the closing scene, "a slow stream" comes from the mute Friday. "It runs northward and southward, to the ends of the earth" -- perhaps implying that the inflence of truth is inevitable, regardless of what narration may do to it.

The novel has been described as "an archetypal postmodern novel". In fact it takes one to the "coalface" of postmodernism. It leads one carefully through each of the many deconstructing questions about meaning. This is no textbook on postmodernism, nor even a representation of the same. This is to observe a postmodernist at work, and this makes the book unique.

Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature, 1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Editorial Review:

Susan Barton finds herself marooned on an island in the Atlantic with an Englishman named Robinson Cruso and his mute slave Friday. Rescued after a year of Cruso's company, back in England with Friday in tow, she approaches the author Daniel Foe, offering him the story of the island if he will make her rich and famous. But Foe is less interested in the history of Robinson Cruso than in the story of Susan Barton. How did she earn a living in Brazil? Who were the mutineers who marooned her? Where is the daughter for whom she claims to have been searching the ends of the earth? And how did Friday lose his tongue?