East, Southern and North African Literature
The modern literary canons of eastern, southern and northern Africa: Kenya's novelists of independence, the fiction of apartheid-era Southern Africa, the Arabic writers of Cairo and the Nile, and the novel of the Somali Horn. These works turned colonial rupture, nationhood and exile into the region's defining prose.
A Grain of Wheat
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Four days before Uhuru, a village guards a secret betrayal.
Read why it mattered →Petals of Blood
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
A murder in Ilmorog exposes the theft of a revolution.
Read why it mattered →A Question of Power
Bessie Head
In exile, a woman's mind becomes a battlefield of good and evil.
Read why it mattered →Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
A disgraced professor, his daughter's farm, and a violence that reorders everything.
Read why it mattered →July's People
Nadine Gordimer
When revolution comes, the servant shelters his masters.
Read why it mattered →Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
A country pastor searches Johannesburg for a son who has killed.
Read why it mattered →Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
A girl bargains for an education against poverty and patriarchy.
Read why it mattered →Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz
A Cairo patriarch rules his family as a nation stirs against empire.
Read why it mattered →Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
A stranger returns to the Nile carrying a violent London past.
Read why it mattered →Maps
Nuruddin Farah
An orphan of the Ogaden war cannot fix the borders of himself.
Read why it mattered →The House of Hunger
Dambudzo Marechera
A young mind choking on the violence of the township.
Read why it mattered →A Walk in the Night
Alex La Guma
One night in District Six, a sacking ends in blood.
Read why it mattered →More from the library