The West African Novel
West Africa, and Nigeria above all, gave the modern African novel its founding texts, turning oral tradition, the colonial encounter, and city life into a literature read worldwide. From Achebe's Igbo villages to the philosophical fiction of Francophone Senegal, these books set the terms for how the continent wrote itself.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The novel that answered colonial fiction from the inside.
Read why it mattered →Arrow of God
Chinua Achebe
A priest, a god, and the machinery of indirect rule.
Read why it mattered →The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Amos Tutuola
A quest through the land of the dead, told in improvised English.
Read why it mattered →Jagua Nana
Cyprian Ekwensi
Lagos nightlife through the eyes of an aging good-time woman.
Read why it mattered →Death and the King's Horseman
Wole Soyinka
A colonial officer stops a ritual suicide, and a world unravels.
Read why it mattered →The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
Corruption rendered as literal filth in post-Nkrumah Ghana.
Read why it mattered →So Long a Letter
Mariama Ba
A Senegalese widow writes her way through grief and betrayal.
Read why it mattered →Ambiguous Adventure
Cheikh Hamidou Kane
A boy caught between the Quran and Descartes.
Read why it mattered →The African Child (L'Enfant noir)
Camara Laye
An affectionate recollection of a Guinean boyhood.
Read why it mattered →God's Bits of Wood
Ousmane Sembene
A railway strike becomes a collective epic.
Read why it mattered →The Famished Road
Ben Okri
A spirit-child narrates a slum on the edge of independence.
Read why it mattered →The Joys of Motherhood
Buchi Emecheta
A title turned bitterly ironic.
Read why it mattered →More from the library