Our Summer in Africa series is back. A series we started last year with the aim of highlighting some of the most interesting and best experiences in Africa. So as many of our customers are getting ready to ride the trolley to travel and roam anyone two, or more of the 54 countries in the continent, join us as we explore and uncover some of the best experiences Africa has to offer. The African continent teems with unique landscapes, ancient history, diverse cultures and traditions, geographical wonders, and of course wildlife and countless active adventures. So are the stories and tales and fables about legends and most importantly the writers and authors bringing into light these stories. It pays to embark on journeys that fundamentally reorient our senses on our travels. Because part of growing, and learning to travel well, means daring to take our own interests a bit more seriously. Rather than following the hype we strive to help our customers become more aware and find a bit more meaning in their journeys. All of us have equivalents – things we care about that aren’t mentioned anywhere. So, what is the traveler’s mindset? Receptivity, appreciation, and gratitude might be their chief characteristics.
As you embark on your journeys we thought to remind you of a few great books and stories written by African authors, about the continent and the African American experience. Perhaps they can give us a fresh new perspective or better yet add to our travels some exciting and interesting new characters. Reading is one of those muscles that constantly needs to be nourished — the more you do it, the stronger you get. So what better way to keep our reading muscles swole, than challenging ourselves a bit more and exploring stories that can expand our imagination and our perspective?
We began our summer reading at the beginning of May and we have now posted in our blog the books in our collection. Every two weeks we will be choosing a book from the collection and we will read and finish the book from May till the rest of the summer and if you like continue till the end of the year. Follow us on Instagram and on Facebook as we embark on this wonderful exploration of our minds and stimulate our mental faculties.
Here is a beautiful excerpt from, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, the father of African Literature Chinua Achebe made this observation; “Imaginative identification is the opposite of indifference; it is human connectedness at its most intimate. It is one step better than the golden rule: Do unto others … Our sense of that link is the great social cement that really holds, and it will manifest itself in fellow feeling, justice, and fair play. My theory of the uses of fiction is that beneficent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social, and human reality. One thing that worries one above all else in the frenetic materialism that pervades our contemporary life is that as a species we may be losing the Open Sesame to the mundo of fiction—that ability to say “Let us pretend” like grace before our act; and to say “Our revels now are ended” like a benediction when we have finished—and yet to draw from this insubstantial pageant essential insights and wisdoms for making our way in the real world. The supple articulation of our imagination seems, alas, to be hardening rapidly into the sclerotic rigidity of literal-mindedness and material concerns.”
Here are the books in our collection:
Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe’s keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.
The first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to the African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
FictionThe Nobel Prize winner’s most recent novel is a sweeping origin story of modern Tanzania and a love story between two young runaways. Their search for a place in the world unfolds against the monumental absurdities of empire, focussing on the East African campaign of 1914-18 and the societies it violently remade. Afiya is an orphan, whose brother leaves her with abusive caregivers to fight for Germany’s Schutztruppe. Hamza, an escaped servant, also joins troops serving the German Empire, entering a brutal brawl for the continent at a time when “every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, África Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.” The book interrogates the costs and rewards of the war’s circumstantial solidarities. For everyone, longing for closeness is bedeviled by old waves of shame and secrets.
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. “I propose to analyse neo-colonialism, first, by examining the state of the African continent and showing how neo-colonialism at the moment keeps it artificially poor. Next, I propose to show how in practice African Unity, which in itself can only be established by the defeat of neo-colonialism, could immensely raise African living standards. From this beginning, I propose to examine neo-colonialism generally, first historically and then by a consideration of the great international monopolies whose continued stranglehold on the neo-colonial sectors of the world ensures the continuation of the system”–From the introduction, page.
Fiction
Set in South Africa in 1927, this powerful novel chronicles the unraveling of a biracial family in the wake of the Immorality Act, which outlawed sexual relations between white and Black people. A winemaker of Dutch and English heritage; his wife, who was born to formerly enslaved parents in Jamaica; and their two daughters are “tumbled into chaos” by the new law. In despair, the mother makes a decision that costs two family members their lives; the surviving pair flees the country. Manenzhe situates this tragic tale within the broader context of the displacement and abuse of Africans caused by colonialism and the slave trade, but her achievement is to humanize the victims of that legacy, in a story that feels like an act of restoration.
Nonfiction
Bénédicte Savoy’s revelatory new book charts the course of an all-but-forgotten movement to reclaim African art expropriated under colonial rule. For twenty years, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, Africa’s decade of independence, battles over the restitution of stolen cultural property raged at conferences and exhibitions. In the quiet offices of Europe’s ethnographic collections, museum professionals mounted a white-gloved resistance, centered on West Germany, where Savoy unearths a coördinated effort to block restitution claims. The bureaucratic counter-revolution extended to sabotaging international committees, ostracizing dissenters, and denigrating African claimants as unfit to conserve their heritage. The most essential tactic was secrecy, particularly the concealment of inventories and provenance information. Savoy’s investigation yields a riveting scholarly whodunnit that doubles as a timely warning, in her words, that “museums also lie.”
Fiction
Set in postwar Cardiff, in the multiethnic docklands of Tiger Bay, this novel retells the life of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who was executed in 1952, for a murder he did not commit. Arriving in Wales from British Somaliland, he encounters an “army of workers pulled in from all over the world”; he marries, starts an interracial family, and becomes disillusioned as he experiences white men “treating you like you’re the final insult.” The novel poignantly imagines Mattan’s trial and his time in jail, as his hopes of freedom dwindle. Mohamed underscores Mattan’s confidence in his good character—his belief that “the truth kills the lie”—while also showing how, “as each witness takes the stand, his previous estimation of his own power diminishes.”
Sogolon Djata, son of Sogolon, Nare Maghan Djata, son of Nar Maghan, Sogo Sogo Simbon Salaba, hero of many names.
I am going to tell you of Sundiata, he whose exploits will astonish men for a long time yet. He was great among kings, he
was peerless among men; he was beloved of God because he was the last of the great conquerors.
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka offers a keen, thought-provoking analysis of Africa’s current crises and points the way to cultural and political renewal. A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed the promise of independence and lived through postcolonial failure. He deeply comprehends the pressing problems of Africa, and, an irrepressible essayist and a staunch critic of the oppressive boot, he unhesitatingly speaks out.
In this magnificent work, Soyinka offers a wide-ranging inquiry into Africa’s culture, religion, history, imagination, and identity. He seeks to understand how the continent’s history is entwined with the histories of others while exploring Africa’s truest assets: “its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment–both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual).”
Fully grasping the extent of Africa’s most challenging issues, Soyinka nevertheless refuses defeatism. With eloquence, he analyzes problems ranging from the meaning of the past to the threat of theocracy. He asks hard questions about racial attitudes, inter-ethnic and religious violence, the viability of nations whose boundaries were laid out by outsiders, African identity on the continent and among displaced Africans, and more. Soyinka’s exploration of Africa relocates the continent in the reader’s imagination and maps a course toward an African future of peace and affirmation.
To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading — to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to craft deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched evidence — both historical and contemporary — in harmonious structures of language and form. What is caste? According to Wilkerson, “caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, the benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.” Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that “what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system.”
From the activist who coined the term comes a primer on intersectional environmentalism for the next generation of activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive, and sustainable change. The Intersectional Environmentalist examines the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and promotes awareness of the fundamental truth that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Written by Leah Thomas, a prominent voice in the field and the activist who coined the term “Intersectional Environmentalism,” this book is simultaneously a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all, and a pledge to work towards the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet.
Thomas shows how not only are Black, Indigenous, and people of color unequally and unfairly impacted by environmental injustices, but she argues that the fight for the planet lies in tandem to the fight for civil rights; and in fact, that one cannot exist without the other. An essential read, this book addresses the most pressing issues that the people and our planet face examines and dismantles privilege, and looks to the future as the voice of a movement that will define a generation.
