The African Writers’ Series
In 1958, Heinemann, a London publisher, published Achebe's debut novel, Things Fall Apart, to critical acclaim. But when Alan Hill, head of the educational department of Heinemann, visited West Africa in 1959, he found that Achebe was relatively unknown in Nigeria due to the high cost of the novel and small print run in the country.
This led to the establishment of Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) as a separate company in Africa. Van Milne was recruited by Alan Hill, and became HEB’s overseas director.
The African Writers’ Series was Van Milne’s idea. His plan was to reissue expensive hardback books by African authors as paperbacks. These paperbacks would be designed attractively and sold at a far cheaper rate.
In 1962, Alan Hill and Van Milne launched the African Writers’ Series with the publication of the paperback edition of Things Fall Apart. This was followed by Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass and Kenneth Kaunda’s memoir, Zambia Shall Be Free. In addition, Achebe became the editorial advisor, a position he held up until 1972 when his short story collection, Girls at War, was published, making it the hundredth book in the series.
In 2003, after 41 years of publication and 359 books, Heinemann announced that no new titles would be added to the series.
The AWS set out to provide a platform for emerging voices in Africa and increase accessibility for readers, and these goals were duly accomplished.
Some popular titles in the series include Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams, Efuru by Flora Nwapa, The Concubine by Elechi Amadi, Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah, America: Their America by J.P. Clark, The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka, Maru by Bessie Head, Toads of War by Eddie Iroh, and The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta.
📝: Abah Onoja
This fascinating short story by Gaius Inofe Dan, written with care and compassion, is about a blind boy who lives with his father, and later joined by a relative, during the upheavals that led to the Biafra War. But what happens to his rainbow?
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Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera's bildungsroman essay is a writer's effort to locate a childhood memory about coming to the awareness of comprehending words, and how this opened a different, fascinating world to him.
"I remember reading the words 'They were going to see their grandmother.' I may not recall the sentence verbatim, but I recall recognising how the alphabets combined to form the word, “grandmother.” And it was at that moment I realised I had learnt how to read. I stopped in my tracks, surprised at what had just happened. At this, Mr. Sule asked Rose and Chioma to their seats. And to me, he said, 'Michael, go and read for us.' I stepped in front, standing before the class, and read the passage.
"It was as though a ray of light had shone in my mind and illuminated in it all the secrets of the art of reading which previously lay hidden like objects in a dark room. Each time I have remembered that moment, I always see myself sitting in that classroom, a stream of light pouring on my head from the ceiling, and a force propelling me to take a new look at my English reader, after which I saw the alphabets combine to form words. Now looking back, I find that it was the moment in my childhood where the door opened and let the future in.
"From the previous school year, we had begun using Queen Primers and English readers with the popular characters, Ali and Simbi. These books had the activities of characters described in simple words and short sentences and were supposed to teach us to read. I recall throughout the three years in my nursery school, that I was very good at memorising poems. I also remember reciting, with the rest of my classmates, “I go up, we go up” after our teacher, who wrote the words out on the blackboard. But I was a child lost in my imagination, more intrigued by words, as I heard them, and the images on the pages of my colourful reader—of Ali cutting grasses and Simbi skipping—than the combination of alphabets to form words..."--Chukwudera
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In this raw, uncut essay is Ubong Johnson's distaste for the redpill community which almost misguided his friend.
"These hypemen in our nightclubs, these songs, these posts which glorify wealth and sex, they all have to be stopped somehow. And women, too, who think men pluck money from trees and would do naught but squander this money trying to get laid. Maybe even older men need to be stopped, too. Young men have to be taught to live life for themselves, to earn money because they want to and not because they must earn money or risk being considered lesser men."
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Latest on our website. A review of Leila Aboulela's latest novel River Spirit.
"Through Akuany’s life this novel teaches us that we are actors in the game of time. That history chooses whom it favours, and what can be taken away from victims it doesn’t favour. It teaches us that history has always been a conflict of ideas: whose is more superior? That in fighting for this supremacy we give ideas more importance over our humanity. And that sometimes ideas take root not in the best places or time, be it a religious visionary leading a revolt or an invasive foreign culture, forever upending the flow of certain river spirits, like Akuany, who can be any of us. Thus, we cannot allow ourselves to be enslaved by ideas; that the constant thing is to seek freedom," writes Carl Terver.
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Latest on our website is a review of Richard Ali's poetry collection The Anguish and Vigilance of Things.
Carl Terver writes, that Ali's language is a "mixture of Derek Walcott, like clear water, and Wole Soyinka, with the aura of corrugated zinc roofs."
On the book's general thematic concerns, he writes, "More than halfway into the collection, we get the theme, or point: most especially, that the poems in the second part bear the weight of anguish. In “The Hourglass of the World,” R.A. writes “men shall always be here, but with each cycle, less of them”—a scary observation of how the world itself depletes in its originality of things, of thinking and ideas, its moral scope, and how humanity probably loses in the end. In “Insha Allah,” which references the tension between the British colonial government and the Sokoto Caliphate in the late 1890s that led to a series of military clashes, a son cries for his father: “Their moment came and my father rode out / With a fire in his eyes that never said to me / Insha Allah, I shall return.” This, of course, points to the beginning of the decline of the once great Caliphate."
"Richard Ali is the last of his kind and more like a cameo in Nigerian poetry today. Or one may say, having been invisible for a long time, even before the publication of Anguish, he’s that hermit poet who calls from the wild, a Thoreau of sorts, sending us Walden love letters of poetry once from the blues. His poetry in The Anguish… elevates itself to the place of an extreme highbrow readership; few readers will have the patience to go beyond the first pages. His voice, however, is important: it provides diversity in a wholesale assessment of serious, contemporary Nigerian poetry," Terver concludes.
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"Now, you wonder what would have happened if on your way back home you had not turned back to the river to fetch your tray. You wonder if by now, you would have still been with Yasin and Salim, Khalif and Gambo. Because it was the last time you ever saw them. The last anyone ever saw them.
"Dauda, the farmer with the largest stretch of land in Ruga Juli, which is at the edge of the village and trails down to the river path, said he saw trucks filled with young boys and men with guns pass sometime just before the day went dark.
"You wonder if they are still alive, or if they are with Sani. And like Sani, you are still unsure of their afterlife. None of you smoked wee-wee except Yasin. But you all had done haram things: the swimming without permission and the lies to cover it up; the mangoes which were not yours to pluck; the hands of girls you all held the day you wanted to show them just how high you could climb those trees by the river. You pray: Allah would know, at least for yourself, what was in the heart that day. You just wanted Ummi to see that you were better than the other boys at something, at climbing trees. Allah would know that the main reason you reached for her hand was that the path was filled with uneven rocks and you did not want her to fall as you did on your first time. Allah knows the intentions of the heart, and even though that was not the only reason you held her hands, He knows that was the main reason. He knows you had no plans for iskanchi. You do not think anyone had those plans. Nothing happened that day. He knows. And that’s what truly matters."
--Jonathan Durunguma
In Durunguma's fiction "One Does Simply Explain," he explores the devastation on a people's mental health when a community has suffered incessant carnage and waste of human life in lucid and poetic prose. Visit the link in our bio to read the complete story.
Latest on our website. Prosper C. Ifeanyi writes about moving to a new city, Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau, and other musings:
"It’s the fourth month, and I must confess, I have written nothing. I have felt nothing in the process of writing. Writing to me is feeling. I have been to NYSC camp, seen girls, watched the sun turn its back on us to welcome the moon, eaten stale boiled cassava, but I cannot say I have felt something. Maybe that’s why I am reading Komunyakaa. The first thing I did was to look for the translation of the words “Dien Cai Dau,” and when I discovered it meant “crazy” in Vietnamese, I wasn’t too appalled. I was, in fact, disappointed.
"We go to poems to seek refuge, but when refuge becomes a somewhat unfamiliar place, what does one do? Or when the rock we run to refuses to shelter us, what becomes the next course of action? I imagine myself as Komunyakaa describes the soldiers of the Vietnam War in his poem “Camouflaging the Chimera.” Branches tied to my helmet, face painted, rifle sullied with mud from a riverbank. It’s intense because even the memory of how I got to the point where my life is a battle scene is lost within the story itself. The need to interrogate the very struggle we find ourselves in and how to find freedom is important, I have noticed. Sometimes, it’s more about what it actually is than what it looks like.
"Have you ever felt like the world and everyone in it was moving on without you, I asked M one time during lunch. Her quizzical expression told me she simply would love to have one meal without my existentialisms. But isn’t the world designed this way, for us to worry?"
--Prosper C. Ifeanyi
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How Can I Do More By Working Less As a Freelancer?
Our capitalist system ensures that we are always busy, like bees, even when sometimes a lot of what we do is drudgery and not actual work.
The demands of life can be so overwhelming that we fail to complete tasks we gave ourselves deadlines to accomplish.
And there’s you, freelancer, without a 9-to-5, always squandering time and becoming a fire brigadier at the deadline minute. That’s a sure path to mediocrity and avoidable burnout. Here are 6 habits to incorporate into your system to be a good time manager.
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