Novels About Colonialism in Africa are typically presented in the global North as inspiring and somber realist stories of resistance. From the continent, literary invention and creativity have long overshadowed this view. I asked literary academics from South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda to identify and discuss a favorite Novels About Colonialism in Africa. The finger-on-the-pulse list showcases contemporary and older African literature. Isabel Hofmeyr
Goretti Kyomuhendo awaits
MU’s Susan Kiguli
Alinda, a teenager, and her family must flee soldiers. The Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian soldiers who will liberate them are awaited with apprehension and hope. This short tale cleverly handles the Lendu woman, the Indians, and the Tanzanian soldiers with distrust and optimism for the unknown and mystery provided by strangers.
CUNY Feminist Press
War creates uncertainty for civilians, which the story explores. Lying in the route of fleeing soldiers and liberators causes violence, victims, and loss. The town near Lake Albert borders the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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This novel depicts post-independence internal and cross-border violence. The coronavirus has made me realize how important it is to be prepared for all of the different ways war can happen.
Tade Thompson Wormwood Trilogy
Nadine Moonsamy, Pretoria University
The Wormwood Trilogy (Rosewater, The Rosewater Insurrection, The Rosewater Redemption) by Tade Thompson is well-received. The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Series nominated it.The Homans invade Nigeria in these near-future tales.
All three works strike a balance between contemplating what science fiction means to us—who, as the protagonists often remind out, have been historically invaded by aliens—and enjoying well-written, fast-paced genre fiction.
Orbit
Wormwood is an extraterrestrial biodome in Nigeria. Wormwood heals sick people with its tentacles, drawing people to Rosewood.
In Rosewood, you’ll find they have stable power and toleration of homosexuality. The trilogy’s central question is whether humans and aliens can coexist peacefully.
The compelling and entertaining characters are what makes Thompson’s trilogy succeed. It’s not often you find great worldbuilding in a humorous fantasy book. Thompson’s immersive storytelling skillfully blends African streetscapes, organic extra-terrestrial landscapes, and imagined human technologies to create a seamless African biopunk environment that excites our curiosity about the future.
Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s Oblivion General Theory
Grace A. Musila, Witwatersrand University
Portuguese expatriate Ludovica Fernandes Mano isolates herself in her Luanda penthouse on the eve of Angola’s 1975 independence out of fear of the future. She bricks off her flat and lives with her dog and terrace garden, which feeds her. Her radio is her lone link to a 27-year civil war.
A General Theory of Oblivion by Angolan novelist Jose Eduardo Agualusa is a captivating mix of history, detective fiction, and poetic interludes with heartbreaking phrases and straight-faced follies. Ludo’s self-isolation is packed with humorous escapades, including a trained messenger pigeon who keeps two young loves in touch. A hunter named Ludo catches birds with a diamond-spiked trap.
Ludo writes her thoughts in journals and on her apartment walls using charcoal. Her philosophical musings are excerpted in the Novels About Colonialism in Africa.
Secker
A young burglar accidentally discovers the pretty isolated elderly lady, and from there begins their journey to help her.
The Novels About Colonialism in Africa are short stories. They weave lives together using Ludo’s poetic observations and short, thriller-style segments. Read this book to be startled and inspired.
Warm, sometimes ridiculous humor makes wartime cliches like torture, executions, and profiteering palatable. The novel’s oddball characters, such as the self-proclaimed “collector of disappearances” who tracks planes off airspace, and more mundane disappearances, like the journalist who vanished right in front of everyone, add to its attractiveness.
This 2015 novel is a compassionate and creative depiction of the Angolan civil war’s damage and regular people’s lives.
Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
Rhodes’ Sam Naidu
Freshwater is a gripping tale of border-crossing and multi-location under stringent travel restrictions. Nigerian-Malaysian Bildungsroman Ada leads Emezi.
All of Ada’s life, she has been between different cultures and lifestyles. Dedication
We with one foot on the other side, economic sense to those who have several affiliations.
Faber&Faber
Freshwater, a 2018 “African” novel, defies literary categorization by combining African religious and cultural ideas with “Western” location, religious imagery, and cultural symbols.
Its sensuous, brute physicality and spirituality are unusual. Ada crosses even the human-spirit line to become “as liminal as is possible — spirit and human, both and neither” towards the end. This era-spanning story examines the emotional and physical effects of living with porous borders Freshwater bravely explores terrifying places under lockdown.
Namwali Serpell’s Old Drift
Witwatersrand’s Sarah Nuttall
Namwali Serpell’s 2019 Zambian masterpiece The Old Drift is recommended. This 563-page novel by an imaginative writer will capture you. Three-generation postcolonial saga. It’s about the Zambezi River’s caprice, wrath, and retaliation against human dominance.
Penguin Books
Serpell traces Zambian modernity through the development of the Kariba Dam, the world’s largest man-made dam at the time, and Edward Nkoloso’s Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy and his attempts to send the first Afronauts to the moon. The novel combines historical accuracy with speculative elements. It ends in 2023 with a clever technological twist. A mosquito swarm—a “bare disastrous choir, a chorus of gossipy mites”—narrates the story.
This book needs your time, and you have it. Read.
Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats Man
Manosa Nthunya, Pretoria University
Fiction may be hard to appreciate in this difficult historical time.Future-calming fiction? Reading shows the world’s immensity.
Penguin-Random House
Hunger Eats a Man (2014) by Nkosinathi Sithole explores rural South African poverty.
South African literature frequently focuses on metropolitan life and ignores rural life.
Ada has always had a fascination with different cultures and people, having grown up in and traveled to many different countries.
Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass
Tom Odhiambo, Nairobi University
Anglophone Africa is translating Alain Mabanckou’s works. At times like these, Mabanckou’s 2005 bar-set Broken Glass, Credit Gone West, is easy to read yet complex enough to portray African modernity. It will recreate bar sounds, scents, and pictures for those who can’t go.
The narrator, Broken Glass, who appears “self-quarantined” in the bar, tells various accounts about society’s personalities, whose terrible lives he mimics. Dark humor, satire, numerous allusions, and lack of punctuation create a dystopic novel. Broken Glass’s odd plot will make you want to read more of Mabanckou’s books.
JM Coetzee’s Michael K.
Rhodes University’s
1983’s oldest. Life and Times of Michael K, a JM Coetzee, Novels About Colonialism in Africa, creates a dismal sense of subjective frailty and existential nothingness.
Michael K’s vacuous itinerancy reveals something pitifully hopeful about the existential trip and hilariously predictive about the will to persist. Michael K is a depressing read.
