Round-Up 9

Red Dust Road

Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road has been the book of the week (19-23 July) on the BBC Radio 4. You can listen to all five episodes for the next seven days - use this link Jackie Kay reading Red Dust Road

  

Boabab

Economist has set up a new blog on all things African. It can be found at http://economist.com/blogs/baobab   Check out the beautifully written piece on why they have named the blog Baobab – the African tree of life.
Image: Copyright South African Tourism

Highly Recommended

Derica Shields (a 22-year-old London teacher) was the subject of The Observer’s ‘My Cultural Life’ feature. In addition to references to her favourite music (Erikah Badu) and a visit to the BP Portrait Award, she also says ‘I recently finished two incredible novels that passed me by as a teenager despite being important texts for black women: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. I would highly recommend both.’  Too right – I recommend them both too!

The Kaiser’s Holocaust

In the Sunday Times (18 July), the military historian and journalist Max Hastings reviews The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. It is an examination of Germany’s late arrival on the colonialist scene in south west Africa (now Namibia) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  The reviewer says that the authors, an Anglo-Nigerian BBC producer and a Dane with extensive experience of Africa, ‘seek to show that the Kaiser’s Germany displayed an enthusiasm for  “social Darwinism” and "the imposition of white racial superiority long before Hitler got to work.” It seems a good review, with Hastings taking the authors to task on missing the context of the times, for example that white superiority was the stance of all European nations states operating in Africa at the time, not just the Germans. However he fails to mention that it was the British who started concentration camps in South Africa long before the Germans arrived or to generally note the cruelties of the British throughout Africa alongside the Belgians, French and Germans.

Image: NamibiaVacations.com

The Go-Away Bird

The Go-Away Bird by Warren Fitzgerald is this week’s Amazon rising star. Set in London and Rwanda it tells the story of a friendship between a middle-aged loner who teaches singing, but also self-harms and a 10-year old Rwandan who has seen the atrocities of her country. There are some really moving reviews about it on the Amazon website and the Cape Times thinks that Fitzgerald is going to do for Rwanda what Mcall-Smith has done for Rwanda.  Here is a link to a video of Warren talking about his book: Warren Fitzgerald

Ian Thomson

Following his win of the Ondaajte Royal Society Literature Prize earlier this year, Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica has also won the Dolman Travel Book Award. He had a short piece in the Guardian’s Travel section about a visit to a sugar plantation and its aged owner - read it here. Ian was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s travel show Excess Baggage, with journalist Lindsay Johns discussing Jamaica as a holiday destination: listen to Excess Baggage.

Bitter Leaf

Bitter Leaf, Chioma Okereke’s debut novel was reviewed in The Financial Times: read it here. It is the story of love, secrets, rivalries and dreams in an African village. It is a modern-day morality tale. The author is Nigerian (from Benin City) but the country in the book is not named. Based on the African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child, the reviewer picks out that Okereke is exploring ‘the collapse of the boundary between public and private space.’