Gods and Soldiers (52 page)

Take Mrs. King. And talking about Mrs. King,
Mr.
King is a total misnomer, of course. I must point it out to Reddy. The Revd. King, yes, and Dr. King, yes, and possibly even the Revd. Dr. King. But Mr. King? No ways.

It seems unfair, but Charmaine's bench has the edge on that old museum piece in Room 27. Occasionally I look up from my workbench, and see a white man sitting there, a history teacher say. While the schoolchildren he has brought here on an outing hunt in the grass for lucky beans, he sits down on our bench to rest his back. And after a while he pulls up his long socks, crosses one pink leg over the other, laces his fingers behind his head and closes his eyes.

Then again, I'll look up to see a black woman shuffling resolutely past, casting a resentful eye on the bench and muttering a protest under her breath, while the flame-red blossoms of the kaffirboom detonate beneath her aching feet.

At age eighteen
Chris Abani
was arrested in Nigeria as the mastermind of an alleged coup based on the “evidence” of his first novel. He was imprisoned two more times, tortured, and escaped assassination. Abani has published four volumes of poetry and four novels, including
Grace-land
and
Virgin in Flames
. His numerous awards include the PEN USA Freedom to Write, PEN Hemingway, and PEN Beyond Margins awards. He currently teaches at the University of California-Riverside. More information on Abani can be found at
Chrisabani.com
.

 

Leila Aboulela
was born in Cairo in 1964 and grew up in Khartoum, Sudan. After receiving a master's degree from the London School of Economics (where she studied statistics), she moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, and currently resides in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of the novels
Minaret
and
The Translator,
as well as the short story collection
Colored Lights.
Her story “The Museum” won the 2000 Caine Prize for African Writing (often referred to as the African Booker).

 

In 1957, at the age of twenty-seven,
Chinua Achebe
sent the only copy of his handwritten manuscript of
Things Fall Apart
to a typing service in London, where it languished for months until it was retrieved by a colleague traveling on business. Luckily the British publisher Heinemann took a chance on Achebe, and today, after dozens of books of fiction, poetry, and essays, he is the most widely read African writer in the world. Achebe has been actively involved in Nigerian politics as well as engaged in taking on Western perceptions of Africans in writing. Since the early 1990s, he has been a professor of languages and literature at Bard College.

 

Perhaps the fastest rising star on the African literary scene,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. Adichie not only grew up in the same university town (Nsukka) as Achebe but in the very house he once lived in. Her debut novel,
Purple Hibiscus,
won the 2005 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, and her follow-up,
Half of a Yellow Sun,
won the Orange Prize. She was named a MacArthur fellow in 2008.

 

José Eduardo Agualusa
was born in Huambo, Angola, and works as a writer and journalist in Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. Of his numerous books, three novels—
Creole, The Book of Chameleons,
and
My Father's Wives
—have been translated into English.

 

Writer and musician
Mohammed Naseehu Ali
is the son of an emir in Ghana. Ali chose to be educated in the United States, studying at the Interlochen Arts Academy and Bennington College. He has published one story collection,
The Prophet of Zongo Street,
and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Doreen Baingana
is the author of
Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe,
which won the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a law degree from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. After working for several years in Washington, D.C., for the Voice of America, Baingana moved to Kampala and teaches there.

 

Aziz Chouaki
was born in Algiers in 1951. His mother bought him a guitar at the age of ten and he learned to play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix—music that was forbidden by the repressive Algerian regime. Playing in nightclubs and studying literature soon became his focus. When Islamic terrorism appeared in Algeria in the 1990s, he began to receive death threats and moved to France.
The Star of Algiers
is the first of his three novels written in French to be translated into English. He currently lives in Paris.

 

Nobel laureate
J. M. Coetzee
is the idiosyncratic and reclusive author of twelve works of fiction, five nonfiction collections, and two volumes of memoirs. The novels
The Life and Times of Michael K
and
Disgrace
each won the Booker Prize (the commonwealth's most prestigious literary award), though Coetzee did not attend the award ceremonies. He did, however, attend the Nobel award ceremonies, where he gave an acceptance speech about the nature of duck calls. Coetzee received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas, but he was denied permanent residence in the United States because of his anti-Vietnam War protests. Although he is considered one of South Africa's greatest living writers, since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide and in 2006 became a citizen of Australia.

 

Mia (António Emílio Leite) Couto,
Mozambique's foremost novelist, was active in his country's mid-1970s revolution against colonial Portugal, and has gone on to become a literary hero of his liberated country. Couto's most celebrated novel,
Under the Frangipani,
draws readers into the world of the dead to find spirits old and new wrestling over the soul of Mozambique. Formerly the director of the news agency AIM, Couto was also editor in chief of the newspapers
Tiempo
and
Notícias de Maputo.
In 1985 he resigned from these posts to study biology; he currently works as an environmental biologist at Limpopo Transfrontier Park.

 

Fatou Diome
was born on the Senegalese island Niodior, where she was raised by her grandmother. She attended college in Dakar, supporting herself by working as a housekeeper. Diome moved to France in 1990 and has published two novels and a short story collection. She lives in Strasbourg, where she is completing a PhD.

 

Born in Dakar in 1951,
Boubacar Boris Diop
is a prolific author of novels, plays, screenplays, and political works. He founded the independent Senegalese newspaper
Sol
. After twelve works written in French, Diop wrote his latest novel in Wolof, the dominant language of Senegal.

 

Somali novelist
Nuruddin Farah
has said, “I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way.” Farah has lived in exile since 1976, when the Somalian government pronounced his second novel,
The Naked Needle,
treasonable. The author of more than a dozen works, including the novels
Maps, Knots,
and
From a Crooked Rib,
Farah currently resides in South Africa.

 

Nadine Gordimer
was a founding member of the banned African National Congress and has been called “the conscience of South Africa.” For nearly half a century her epic novels and short stories have articulated the real-life ramifications of apartheid on the lives of ordinary men and women. She is the author of nineteen story collections, as well as numerous novels, essay collections, and memoirs, winning many awards, including the Booker Prize. Despite her international fame, the South African government still banned her novels
Burger's Daughter
and
July's People.
When Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in 1991, Nelson Mandela still did not have the right to vote.

 

Helon Habila
credits E. M. Forster's
Aspects of the Novel
for spurring him back to school and writing. In 2001 Habila won the Caine Prize for African Writing for a selection from his first novel,
Waiting for an Angel,
as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Due to a lack of publishing venues in Nigeria at the time, Habila, like many other authors, had to self-publish his novel. Since then he has achieved international success and published a second novel,
Measuring Time.
He currently teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

 

Laila Lalami
was born and raised in Morocco. She earned her BA in English from Université Mohammed V in Rabat; her MA from University College, London; and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her highly acclaimed debut story collection,
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,
was published in 2005, and her first novel,
Secret Son,
was published in early 2009. She currently teaches at the University of California-Riverside.

 

Alain Mabanckou
's 2003 novel
African Psycho,
a comical and macabre take on a would-be Congolese serial killer, was the first of his seven novels to be translated into English (from his native French). Winner of the Prix Renaudot, France's equal to the National Book Award, Mabanckou currently teaches Francophone literature at the University of California-Los Angeles.

 

Algerian
Mohamed Magani
is at the epicenter of the Maghrebian literary landscape, which is made up of North African nations and includes Morocco and Tunisia. In 1987 Magani won the prestigious Grand Prix Littéraire International de la Ville d'Alger for his novel
La Faille du Ciel.
While it is nearly impossible to get your hands on hard copies of his and other Maghreb authors, excellent translations can be accessed online, courtesy of the heroic efforts of Words Without Borders (
www.wordswithoutborders.org
).

 

Zakes Mda
is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mdais. The author of numerous plays and five novels, including
The Whale Caller
and
The Madonna of Excelsior,
Mda has a PhD from the University of Cape Town and teaches at the University of Ohio.

 

Niq Mhlongo
was born Murhandziwa Nicholas Mhlongo in Midway-Chiawelo Soweto, South Africa, in 1973, the eighth of ten children. His parents sent him to the Limpopo Province to escape violence and get an education. Despite the chaos and school closings surrounding Nelson Mandela's release from prison, Mhlongo managed to graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
After Tears
is his follow-up novel to the cult classic
Dog Eat Dog.
Mhlongo now works as a writer and journalist in Soweto.

 

Patrice Nganang
was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1970, and holds a PhD from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Poet, novelist, and scholar, he is regarded as one of the most promising young Francophone writers, and has won several French awards, including the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire. His novel
Dog Days
has been translated into English. Nganang is a resident of Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

 

Considered one of the leading contemporary Afrikaans writers,
Marlene van Niekerk
was born in 1954, on the farm Tygerhoek near Caledon in the Western Cape, South Africa. A poet, playwright, and fiction writer, she is best known for
Triomf,
her graphic and controversial novel about a poor Afrikaner family in post-apartheid Johannesburg. She is a professor at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, Stellenbosch University, in South Africa.

 

Ondjaki
was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977, and attended university in Lisbon. He has exhibited as a painter, has worked as an actor, and has published five novels, two story collections, and a volume of poetry. His novels
The Whistler
and
Good Morning Comrades
have recently been translated into English.

 

E. C. Osondu
worked in advertising in Lagos before receiving his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University in 2007. He teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island and is completing a story collection and novel.

 

Nawal El Saadawi
is an Egyptian writer and psychiatrist. The author of more than two dozen award-winning novels, plays, and memoirs, she has been at the forefront of Arabic women's rights. Her work has been banned, and she was sent into exile (for five years), arrested by the Anwar Sadat government, and included on various assassination lists of terrorist organizations. She has also served as Secretary General of the Egyptian Medical Association, and ran for president in 2004. Saadawi lives in Cairo.

 

Never one to cast a blind eye at government corruption, the prolific Kenyan writer
Ngūgī wa Thiong'o
's 1977 play
I Will Marry When I Want
earned him a prison cell, in which he penned an entire novel,
Devil on the Cross,
on toilet paper, and also stopped writing in English, switching to the Niger-Congo language Kikuyu, or Gīkūyū. As much a novelist and an intellectual as a social activist, Thiong'o is also a playwright, journalist, editor, and academic. The recipient of seven honorary doctorates, Thiong'o is currently the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California-Irvine.

 

Zimbabwean
Yvonne Vera
was part of the vanguard of writers addressing the varied and complex roles of women in contemporary African society. From former Southern Rhodesia, she received a PhD from York University in Toronto before moving back to her hometown to become the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. The author of the short story collection
Why Don't You Carve Other Animals
and five novels, including
Butterfly Burning,
Vera sadly succumbed to AIDS in 2005 at the age of forty. “I am against silence. The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades.”