In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
15.07.2011 | by Binyavanga Wainaina
Communities are above any kind of suspicion; they are incorruptible and have an unfailing vision for the future of humanity. At least that is how some missionaries for the new religion called ‘development’ think. The trope of civil associations serves to illustrate this sanctified sanctifying concept. This pure thing does not exist. Thankfully. What there are human things, with the faults and virtues of all human things.
04.07.2011 | by Mia Couto
What to do with his secret? He was the first to wake up in the Village, and the only one who would know that the fire was dead. Was the circle broken? Would he be haunted by the spirits of the elders for his negligence of loving nature? And had there been such negligence?
01.06.2011 | by Ondja ki
The air erodes
Its shadow quivers
My land is lost sand
My skin a black target
A rough weave of laments
How could anyone believe that a mother
is anything but love?
16.03.2011 | by Céléstin Monga
The Bar-Stool Edible Worm
I’m against everything
Against war and those against
War. Against whatever diminishes
Th’ individual’s blind impulse.
14.01.2011 | by Dambudzo Marechera
I hate the idea that African life is simple bare life - the life of an empty stomach and a naked body waiting to be fed, clothed, healed or housed. It is a conception that is embedded in "development" ideology and practice. It radically goes against people's own daily experience with the immaterial world of the spirit, especially as it manifests itself under conditions of extreme precariousness and radical uncertainty. This kind of metaphysical and ontological violence has long been a fundamental aspect of the fiction of development the West seeks to impose on those it has colonized. We must oppose it and resist such surreptitious forms of dehumanization.
09.06.2010 | by Achille Mbembe
In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order fully to contest foreign domination.
02.06.2010 | by Amílcar Cabral
Lily goes to church and prays a lot, but she is always wondering when this “f…” Jesus will come and finally knock on her door, toc, toc, toc…
12.04.2010 | by Barthélémy Toguo