Africa is a country rich ethnically and culturally and with a brilliant heritage.
That does not come as a surprise that Africa has great literature.
It deals with a range of social and cultural issues like women’s rights, feminism, post-war and post-colonial identity.
And these stories have been told by these amazing writers.
Chinua Achebe
He is a Nigerian Novelist born on 16th November 1930. Achebe is the world’s most recognized and accoladed writer.
He became famous after writing his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958.
Its a story that depicts the clash of traditional values and effects of colonial rule and the bridge between masculinity and femininity in a highly patriarchal society.
Achebe was also a known literary critic.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
He is a Kenyan-born writer and Africa’s most important and influential writer.
When he began his writing career, Thiong’o wrote in English.
His primary topic was postcolonial themes of the individual and the community in Africa versus the colonial powers and cultures.
The government arrested him for staging a politically controversial play.
After his release, he committed himself to be writing his works in his native language, Gikuyu and Kiswahili.
Aminata Forna
She was born in Glasgow in 1964 but was raised in sierra Leon.
Aminata became famous after writing The memoir The Devil That Danced on Water in 2003.
It is about a fearless and personal account of her family and experiences living in a wartorn Sierra Leon and her father’s tragic fate as a political dissident.
She has a brilliant list of novels to her name, but her work, The Memory Of Love in 2010, sprung her to the limelight.
Its personal stories of love and loss within the wider context of the devastation of the sierra Leon civil war. It was nominated for the Orange prize of fiction.
Chimamanda Adichie
Adichie was born on 15th September 1977 in Nigeria. She is part of the new generation of African writers and is taking the literary world far.
Her form of writing centers on character and interweaving the background of her native Nigeria both socially and politically into a narrative.
Purple Hibiscus [2003], her first work of art, depicts the life experiences of Kammbili and her family during a military coup.
Americanah [2013] book is an insightful book portraying Nigerian immigrants’ race relations in America and the western world.
She has won numerous awards, Orange Prizes, and Book Prize.
Nardine Gordimer
Nardin is known as one of the apartheid era’s most prolific writers.
Her work majorly focuses on social, moral, and racial issues in South Africa under apartheid rue.
She has won herself a Nobel Prize in Literature for her amazing skill of portraying a society plagued with racial tensions.
Her most famous work, The Burgers Daughter, was banned from South Africa for speaking about the oppression of the government at that time.
It’s renowned because nelson Mandela read the book while in detention at Robben Island as it follows the struggles of groups of anti-apartheid activists.
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Nuruddin Farah
Farah was born in Somalia in 1948. He has written a lot of plays, novels, and short stories and mainly about his experiences in his native country.
His most notable work of art was From A Crooked Rib [1970], a Somalian proverb [God created man from a crooked rib and anyone who trieth to Strengthen it breaketh it.
It talks about the sufferings of Somalian women in society, and it’s a narrative told by a young Somalian woman trapped in an unhappy marriage.
