http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/achebe.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe
Excerpts: Chinua Achebe (born November 16, 1930) is a Nigerian novelist and poet, an esteemed and controversial literary critic, and one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. His treatise of literary criticism, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, has become one of the most influential, controversial, widely studied and debated essays of its kind in classrooms around the world. Decrying Joseph Conrad as a thoroughgoing racist
, Achebe asserts that Conrad's famous novel dehumanizes Africans, rendering Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.
Achebe is primarily interested in African politics, the depiction of Africa and Africans in the West, and the intricacies of pre-colonial African culture and civilization, as well as the effects of colonialization on African societies. His satire and his keen ear for spoken language have made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English. He was once recalled by Nelson Mandela as a writer in whose company the prison walls fell down.
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them
(from Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975)
Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart considers the effects of colonialization on Igbo society, and has been translated into over 50 languages. His novel Arrow of God (1964) shows the contrast between the European and African world; his characters carefully portrayed to depict the goodness of pre-colonial African society. In 1967 Achebe cofounded a publishing company at Enugu with the poet Christopher Okigbo. From 1971 he has edited Okike, the leading journal of Nigerian new writing. Later he was appointed research fellow at the University of Nigeria, After serving as professor of English, he retired in 1981. Since 1985, Achebe has been a professor emeritus. The founding editor of Heinemann Publisher's African Writers Series, a body of work that has emerged as a cornerstone of postcolonial literature, Achebe was instrumental in introducing the world to new writing from Africa. In June 2007, Achebe was announced as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize in honour of his literary career.
Badiru Kazeem Adedotun was born in 1978 in Ibadan, Nigeria. He learned the art of adire making from his grandmother. He grew up watching his grandmother create her textile and art designs at the Nike Center for Art and Culture, In Oshogbo, Nigeria. After graduating from university he decided to pursue his passion for textile art. He specializes in the unique batik †and moreso Adire Eleko (traditional hand-painted) indigo textile designs.
Badiru Adedotun has participated in exhibitions and has conducted workshops for students from the German School, the British International School, BBC Network, Africa, the U.S. Embassy and the German Embassy. His studio is located in Oshogbo, Osun State, Nigeria
Ayi Kwei Armah, was born in 1939 in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. In 1959 he left Ghana to attend the Groton School on Groton, MA. Later, he attended Harvard. He is best known for his novels, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968,) Fragments (1971) and Two Thousand Seasons.
He lives in Senegal, where he founded a publishing house: Per Ankh: The African Publication Collective, a publishing house and retreat for African writers. Much of his work deals with corruption and materialism in post-colonial Ghana.
Excerpt: My favourite African authors include Ayi Kwei Amah whose book The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born I find most fascinating. A statement from the book reads; ‘Those who are blessed with the power and the soaring swiftness of the eagles and have flown before, let them go, I would travel slowly and I too would arrive’. This is highly philosophical but naturally, human beings need a lot of things to progress in their lives, and each time I remember the quote, I feel happy because it tells me that we are not equally blessed and our blessings would not come at the same time. There is need for us to be patient. When we approach things slowly, we would still get there.
Ama Ata Aidoo, author and playwright, born in 1942, in Ghana. She studied literature at the University of Ghana. In 1982, she was appointed Ghanaís Minister of Education. Later, she moved to Zimbabwe to become a full-time writer. Her play Anowa, deals with the tragic consequences when an African couple exchange their African values for European and lose their identity, and ultimately, on loses her sanity and the other his life. In 1992, she won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Africa) for Changes
Bio by George Mason University Center for History and New Media
From Books for Women [UK]
Excerpts: Fadhma Amrouche was a singer and a poet, a woman who embodied in her life and her person that confrontation between colonist and colonised, Christian and Muslim, Berber and Arab that is the inheritance of her present-day North Africa.
She was born in Kabylia, a mountainous region far from the colonised coast, the illegitimate
daughter of a widow. The code of honor
among the men of her Berber village was often violently enforced, so the young mother walked six days to entrust her daughter to the care of French nuns.
Fadhma married at 16, and moved first to Tunis and eventually to Paris, where she settles with her two surviving children. There she was to become famous as a singer of the wild and plaintive songs of her beloved Kabylia. Her autobiography, My Life Story, was completed in 1962 when the author was eighty years old. It is recognised as a classic in its original French, and is now translated into English for the first time by Dorothy Blair.
Kofi Awoonor biography at Ghana web
Excerpt: Kofi Awoonor (formerly George Awoonor-Williams) was born in Wheta, Ghana to Ewe parents. His grandmother was a dirge-singer, and much of his early work is modeled on this type of Ewe oral poetry. According to critic Derek Wright, the poetry both drew on a personal family heirloom and opened up a channel into a broader African heritage.
In Rediscovery (1964) and Petals of Blood (1971), Awoonor uses the common dirge motif of the thwarted or painful return
to describe the experience of the Western-educated African looking back at his indigenous culture. His most famous poem from the first collection is The Weaverbird. In it he uses the weaverbird, a notorious colonizer who destroys its host tree, as a metaphor for Western imperialism in Africa. He describes the bird's droppings as defiling the sacred places and homesteads. He also blames the Africans for indulging the creature.
Excerpts: Ba's text is, in fact, a very short novel employing the epistolary form to convey the thoughts and feelings of a recently widowed woman in Senegal, Ramatoulaye, to her longtime friend, Aissatou, who lives in the United States after experiencing many of the same marital and societal problems as the letter writer. Published in 1980 by a woman who had encountered many situations resembling those of her fictional counterpart, the novel is especially striking in that it depicts the lives of educated upper-class urban people in contrast to the more familiar tales from Africa delineating village life.
Edris Makward declares that Ba is the first African writer [of either sex apparently] to stress unequivocally the strong desire of a new generation of Africans to break away from the age-old marriage customs and adopt a decidedly more modern approach based on free mutual choice and the equality of the two partners
Abayomi Barber works at Hourglass Gallery
Abayomi Barber profile at Hourglass Gallery
Abayomi Barber, one of the most influential artists of his generation, has made his mark as a painter, sculptor, and perhaps most importantly, a teacher. Starting at an early age, inspired by Ife figurines, Barber experimented with a variety of mediums and expanded his talent and vision, quickly outgrowing his home and moving to Lagos to broaden his exposure. Several years later, he went to London to further his training. There, he worked mainly in sculpture, creating impressive works which include the bust of Winston Churchill displayed in the House of Commons, but also began his experimental style of landscape painting; one which blends invention and realism to reveal a deeper story, similar to the dreamlike canvases of Dalí. On returning to Nigeria, he joined the University of Lagos and assisted in the establishment of the creative studio, where his influence would be felt in his mentorship of some of the nation's most interesting and prominent artists.
Though Barber is still widely recognized for his accomplished work in sculpture, his landscapes are better known in his home of Nigeria. At the surface, they are beautiful images captured by a man with a love of nature and reverence for creation which seduce the viewer to join him in his glorious world. Looking more deeply, one discovers hidden meanings and subtexts of the underlying story within a realm of possibility where nothing is precisely as it seems.
The Abayomi Barber School
, started in 1973, may be, arguably, Barber's greatest legacy to the arts. Its emphasis is not upon formal curriculum, in the traditional sense, or specific requirements. Rather, it is an informal school with a focus on the most critical aspects of formal school training, the importance of drawing as the basis of artworks and the need to observe keenly, as well as, see and measure accurately. Those who have learned from Abayomi Barber include such respected artists as Muri Adejimi, Olu Spencer, Busari Agbolade, Toyin Alade, Kent Ideh, Bunmi Lasaki, and Bayo Akinwole.
Souleymane Cissè entry at Wikipedia
Souleymane Cissè (born April 21, 1940 in Bamako) was a passionate cinephile from childhood. His film career began as an assistant projectionist for a documentary on the arrest of Patrice Lumumba. In 1972, he produced his first medium-length film, Cinq Jours d´une Vie (Five Days in a Life), which tells the story of a young man who drops out of a Qur´anic school and becomes a petty thief living on the street. Cinq Jours premiered at the Carthage Film Festival.
In 1974, he produced his first full-length film in the Bambara language, Den Muso (The Girl), the story of a young mute girl who has been raped. The girl becomes pregnant, and is rejected both by her family and by the child's father. Den Muso was banned by the Malian Minister of Culture, and Cissè was arrested and jailed for having accepted French funding. In 1978, Cissè produced Baara (Work), which received the Yenenga's Talon prize at FESPACO in 1979. In 1982, he produced Finyè (Wind), which tells the story of dissatisfied Malian youth rising up against the establishment. This earned him his second Yenenga's Talon, at 1983's FESPACO. Between 1984 and 1987, he produced em>Yeelen (Light)
, a coming-of-age film which won the 1987 Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1995, he produced Waati (Time).Cissè is president of UCECAO, the Union of Creators and Entrepreneurs of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts of Western Africa.
Mbella Sonne Dipoko, novelist, poet, born in 1936 in Cameroon, specializes in writing about women. His novel A Few Nights and Days, depicts the complications in male/female relationships, particularly, arising out of racism, and the difference between reality and experience. Other works include Black and White in Love (poem), written in 1972 and Because of Woman.
Cyprian Ekwensi entry at Wikipedia
Cyprian Ekwensi biography at Bookrags
Excerpts: Cyprian Ekwensi (born September 26, 1921) is a Nigerian, short-story writer, and children's books author. He has written hundreds of short stories, radio and television scripts, several dozen novels, including children's books.
Ekwensi began his writing career as a pamphleteer, and this perhaps explains the episodic nature of his novels. This tendency is well illustrated by People of the City (1954), in which he gave a vibrant portrait of life in a West African city. It was the first major novel to be published by a Nigerian. Two novellas for children appeared in 1960; both The Drummer Boy and The Passport of Mallam Ilia were exercises in blending traditional themes with undisguised romanticism. Ekwensi's most widely read novel, Jagua Nana, appeared in 1961. It was a return to the locale of People of the City but boasted a much more cohesive plot centered on the character of Jagua, a courtesan whose life personalized the conflict between the old traditional and modern urban Africa. Ekwensi published a sequel in 1987 titled Jagua Nana's Daughter.
Ekwensi also published a number of works for children. Under the name C. O. D. Ekwensi, he released Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales (1947) and The Leopard's Claw (1950). In the 1960s, he wrote An African Night's Entertainment (1962), The Great Elephant-Bird (1965), and Trouble in Form Six (1966). Ekwensi's later works for children include Coal Camp Boy (1971), Samankwe in the Strange Forest (1973), Samankwe and the Highway Robbers (1975), Masquerade Time! (1992), and King Forever! (1992). In recognition of his skills as a writer, Ekwensi was awarded the Dag Hammarskjold International Prize for Literary Merit in 1969.
Buchi Emecheta entry at Wikipedia
Buchi Emecheta profile at Contemporary Writers
Just
an Igbo Woman - Interview by Julie Holmes in The Voice July 9, 1996 with extensive background information
Excerpts: Buchi Emecheta (born July 21, 1944) was born in Lagos, the daughter of a railway worker. At a young age she was orphaned, and spent her early childhood being educated at a missionary school (she won a scholarship to the Methodist Girls School when she was ten years old). At seventeen she was married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was eleven. Her husband went to London to study and she went with him in 1962. At the age of twenty-two she left her husband and took a BSc degree in sociology at London University, while supporting her five children and writing.
Much of her fiction has focused on sexual politics and racial prejudice, and is based on her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in Britain. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical In the Ditch, was published in 1972. It first appeared in a series of articles published in the New Statesman magazine, and, together with its sequel, Second Class Citizen (1974), provides a fictionalised portrait of a poor young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up her children in London. She began to write about the role of women in Nigerian society in The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977), winner of the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award; and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), an account of women's experiences bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Ibo society. Buchi Emecheta is also the author of several novels for children, including Nowhere to Play (1980) and The Moonlight Bride (1980). She published a volume of autobiography, Head Above Water, in 1986. Her television play, A Kind of Marriage, was first screened by the BBC in 1976.
In 1983 she was selected as one of twenty ‘Best of Young British Writers’ by the Book Marketing Council. She lectured in the United States throughout 1979 as Visiting Professor at a number of universities and returned to Nigeria in 1980 as Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Calabar. She runs the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company with her son. It has branches in London, where she lives, and in Ibuza. Since 1979 she has been a member of the Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race. She was a member of the Arts Council from 1982 to 1983, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.
Athol Fugard, playwright, actor and director, was born in the remote village of Middelburg in South Africa, in 1932. White, English, with Afrikaner parents, he grew up in Port Elizabeth, with all the advantages afforded to his race by the Apartheid system. Yet, Fugard has dedicated his life to exposing and defying the policy of Apartheid through such works as Master Harold and the Boys, Fragments, Sizwe Banzi is Dead and, Blood Knot, for which his passport was revoked. His plays have been regularly produced in theatres in South Africa, and London and New York. He often works with actor Zakes Mokae. Since the dismantling of Apartheid, Fugard has concentrated on more personal works.
Nadine Gordimer Born in 1923 in Springs, South Africa, to Jewish immigrant parents. Her first book, The Lying Days (1953), highlights the response to the system of Apartheid as she explores the place of the European in Africa, a repeated theme in many of her novels.
Known for her controlled style of writing, her novels, such as The Conservationist (1974), for which she won the Booker Prize and Burger's Daughter (1979), Godimerís novels feature characters that are well-drawn, and evocative mise en scene that draws the reader into the world of tension and isolation social, portraying without sentimentality the devastating effects of an unjust system. Gordimer leaves no doubt as to her position on Apartheid. Politics is character in South Africa,
she once said. Her other works include The Lying Days, A Soldier's Embrace, Get a Life; as well as short stories and essays.
Although she has been criticized for ignoring the feminist cause and focusing more on race issues and for sometimes, in her writings, giving supporters of Apartheid more forum for their warped expressions than they deserve, deeper analysis reveals that this is a ploy to expose precisely the flaws of such irrational arguments. Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature and in 2007 she was awarded the French Legion of Honour.
William Kentridge entry at Wikipedia
William Kentridge (born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955) created his first animation work, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, in the series Drawings for Projection. In this he used a technique that became a feature of his work: successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. In this way Kentridge's videos and films keep the traces of the previous drawings. His animations deal with political and social issues from a personal and at times autobiographical point of view, since the author includes his self-portrait in some of his works.
The political content and the unique techniques of Kentridge's work have propelled him into being one of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing South Africa. He does not portray it as the very militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, but he doesn't emphasize the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed during Apartheid either. Instead, he presents a city in which the duality of man is exposed.
In all his animated works the concept of time and change is a major theme expressed through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cell animation whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This is implemented by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, then re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. In this way he is able to create as many frames as he wants, based on the original key frame, by simply erasing small section of it. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer, and as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed by William Kentridge's technique, which grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten, but can be easily felt.
After a few detours, KUKU, the singer, songwriter from Nigeria, has found his true calling. It's a long way from Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria, to Washington DC — with stops along the way as fast food worker, warehouse laborer, bouncer at a night club and soldier in the U.S. Army — but this soulful singer never stopped dreaming. His debut CD (EP) Love Sessions received rave underground reviews and his full-length project Unexpected Pleasures is being received with enthusiasm. He has performed at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, New York's SOB's, Los Angeles' Temple Bar, Philadelphia's Five Spot, and DC's legendary Bohemian Caverns.
KUKU intends to educate the world about the infectious culture of his homeland. At live performances, songs such as Ife Love)
have captivated audiences. In Asia, it is fast becoming a favorite wedding dance request song. Unexpected Pleasures is an album that requires no fast-forwarding — every track holds its own. The man can sing. He can write a song that will make the devil repent in 10 different religious denominations, and he can deliver a song in optimum quality both live and in the studio.
Spreading his brand of soul the six-foot-four Guitar man, with the five-octave vocal range, is redefining what soul music, the singer-songwriter style, and world music, is all about.
Fela Kuti, singer-composer, bandleader, saxophonist, keyboardist, political activist, was born in Abeokuta in 1938. Originally named Fela Ransome Kuti, he changed his name to Fela Anikulapo Kuti to signify his return to his African roots. Anikulapo means one with death in his pocket
. Later he would be known simply at Fela
.
He was raised in a strict household with deeply religious parents, who regularly kicked his ass
; yet, Fela credited his parents with forging his character. His mother was a poltical activist, a Nationalist and took Fela to political rallies, once introducing him to Kwame Nkrumah. He left Nigeria in 1958 to study classical music at Trinity College of Music in England.
Fela returned to Nigeria during the turbulent 1960s following independence and spoke out against the various corrupt and oppressive governments. He set up a music haven in a non descript neighborhood in Lagos and named it The Shrine. This was his musical retreat, as well as his home where he lived with his band, and his family (blood relatives and those he had taken in). The Shrine also was to become for Fela the scene of triumphs and personal tragedies. In 1977 the compound was attacked by soldiers who committed acts of violence from which Fela never fully recovered. His 78-year-old mother was thrown out a second floor window (and died months later from her injuries) and Fela suffered a cracked skull among other injuries. The Shrine was burned down but its spirit remained. Fela never stopped criticizing the Nigerian government — in fact, political leaders anywhere — for social, economic oppression of its citizens.
Even when he gained worldwide fame, Fela shunned ostentatious displays of wealth, preferring instead to live simply and play his music wherever the masses were gathered. He often played for free at universities in Nigeria, and passers-by and neighbors often delighted in the music coming from practice and jam sessions and impromptu concerts at the Shrine. Fela's works include Jeun Kíoku (Eat and Die), Unknown Soldier, Sorrow, Tears and Blood.
Fela died on August 2, 1997 at the age of 58, of complications from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
In an interview with biographer, Carlos Moore, he said, Death doesn't worry me man. When my mother died it was because she finished her time on earth. I know that when I die I'll see her again, so how can I fear death? ... So what is this motherfucking world about? ... I believe there is a plan ... I believe there is no accident in our lives. What I am experiencing today completely vindicates the African religions ... I will do my part ... then I'll just go, man ... Just go!
Alex La Guma, writer and political activist, was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1925. As a colored
mixed-race man in South Africa, his writings offered another perspective of the phenomenon of Apartheid. While in South Africa, he was imprisoned several times, notably as a defendant in the South African Treason Trial. In 1966 he left South Africa where he had been under house arrest, to live in exile in London. His works include A Walk in the Night and The Stone Country. He died in 1985 in Havana, Cuba.
Djibril Diop Mambèty entry at Wikipedia
Djibril Diop Mambèty (January 1945 - July 23, 1998) was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet. Though he made only a small number of films, they received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style.
Like many of his contemporaries, Djibril Diop Mambèty used the cinematic medium to comment on political and social conditions in Africa. As critiques of neocolonialism, like those of Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissè, Mambèty's films can similarly be understood in the context of Third Cinema. Yet, his often unconventional, surrealist, fast-paced, non-linear style distinguishes Mambèty from other prominent filmmakers of Francophone African Cinema. Montage sequences in his films that are overflowing with symbols and sounds of traditional and modern Africa, as well as contemporary European culture, depict hybridity. In addition, his own editing and narrative style are a confluence of the ancient griotic tradition of tribal storytelling and modern avant-garde techniques. Mambèty was interested in transforming conflicting, mixed elements into a usable African culture, and in his words, reinvent[ing] cinema
.
Other common thematic concerns in Mambèty's films are power, wealth and delusion. Offering a cynical view of humanity in his last feature-length film, Hyènes, Mambèty implicates Africans themselves for a continuing dependency on the West. Through the film and in many interviews, the director suggests that Africans are short-sighted in looking to the colonial past for their future, and are misled by their unrestrained desires for material goods that ensure Africa's dependency on foreign aid. Ultimately, however, Mambèty transmitted a message of hopefulness in his final films, which elevate the little people
, as the bearers of a positive and new Africa. [They are] The only truly consistent, unaffected people in the world,
Mambèty once said of the marginalized, for whom every morning brings the same question: how to preserve what is essential to themselves.
A brief biography and links regarding Mugoshi and his work at Poetry International Web
Excerpt: Born into a farming family in 1947, Charles Mungoshi was raised in the Chivhu area of Zimbabwe. After leaving school, he worked with the Forestry Commission before joining Textbook Sales. From 1975 to 1981 he worked at the Literature Bureau as an editor, and at Zimbabwe Publishing House for the next five years. From 1985-87 he was Writer in Residence at the University of Zimbabwe, and since then he has worked as a free-lance writer, script writer and editor.
Charles Mungoshi has written novels and short stories in both Shona and English, as well as two collections of children's stories, Stories from a Shona Childhood and One Day Long Ago (Baobab Books, 1989 and 1991); the former won him the Noma Award. He has also continued to write poetry and has one published collection: The Milkman Doesn't Only Deliver Milk (Baobab Books, 1998). He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) twice, in 1988 and 1998, for two collections of short stories: The Setting Sun and the Rolling World (Heinemann, 1987) and Walking Still (Baobab Books, 1997). Two of his novels: Waiting for the Rain (Heinemann 1975) and Ndiko Kupindana Kwa Mazuva (Mambo Press, 1975) received International PEN awards.
Ngugi Wa Thiongío , novelist, essayist and playwright was born in Kamiriithu, Kenya in 1938, the fifth child of his father's third wife. In 1976, he changed his name from James Ngugi to Ngugi Wa Thiongío, in honor of his Gikuyu heritage. He received a bachelor of Arts in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda and later, left to pursue graduate studies at Leeds University in England. He lectured at University College in Nairobi, Makerere University and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (USA). Kenyan authorities considered his writings dangerous commentaries on political events and often censored his works. He was frequently harassed by government authorities and was imprisoned for being involved with a communal theatre in his village.
Ngugi writes mostly in his native language, arguing that African writers who wrote in English were not really writing African literature, but Afro-European literature
. He said that African writers should express themselves in indigenous languages in order to reach the African masses.
Ngugi has taught at New York University, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Yale, Smith and Amherst. His works include the novels Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Wizard of the Crow, Caitaani Muthara-Ini (Devil on the Cross), Matigari, his prison diary Detained, and a book of essays, Homecoming.
In the Author's Notes, in Homecoming, Ngugi writes:
There is no area of our lives which has not been affected by the social, political and expansionist needs of European capitalism: from that of the reluctant African, driven by whips and gunpowder to work on the cotton plantations of America, the rubber plantations in the Congo, the gold and diamond mines in southern Africa, to that of the modern African worker spending his meager hard-earned income on imported cars and other goods (razor blades and Coca Cola even), to bolster the same Western industries that got off the ground on the backs of his peasant ancestors and on the plunder of continent.
Izu Ojukwu entry at IMDB
Izu Ojukwu entry at Wikipedia
Excerpt: Izu Ojukwu is a Nigerian film director once touted as the Steven Spielberg of Nigeria
. Working predominantly on action films, this technically driven director is known for his unorthodox camera work and visuals. He frequently collaborates with Emeka Hill Umeasor. Izu was a featured part of the documentary Welcome to Nollywood (2007), as it followed him making his 2006 film, La Viva.
An extensive biography of Christopher Okigbo
Excerpts: A Nigerian poet who wrote in English. Okigbo died in the civil war in Nigeria, fighting for the independence of Biafra. His difficult but suggestive and prophetic poems show the influence of modernist European and American poetry, African tribal mythology, and Nigerian music and rhythms. Prophetic, menacing, terrorist, violent, protesting — his poetry was all of these,
S.O. Anozie wrote in Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (1972).
Thundering drums and cannons
in palm grove:
the spirit is in ascent.
from Sacrifice
Bright
with the armpit dazzle of a lioness,
she answers,
wearing white light about her;
and the waves escort her,
my lioness,
crowned with moonlight.
from Water Maid
Okigbo published his first poems in the student literary journal Horn, which was edited by J.P. Clark. As a poet Okigbo made his breakthrough in 1962, when his works appeared in the literary magazine Black Orpheus. In the same year he also published a pamphlet, entitled Heavensgate, and a long poem in the Ugandan cultural magazine Transition, which was published in Kampala. Okigbo's early poems reflected the divided cultural heritage of his country, although first influences from Virgil, Ovid, Eliot, and Pound seem to be stronger than the oral literature of the Igbo. Heavensgate marked his return to the African part of his heritage and self-renewal through the goddess of the earth:
Before you, Mother Idoto, naked I stand
before your watery presence a prodigal
leaning on an oilbean
lost in your legend...
from Heavensgate
The 1960s was a period of great political upheavals in Nigeria. The country became an independent republic in 1963 and four years later the eastern Ibo tribal region attempted to secede as the independent nation of Biafra. Although Okigbo followed keenly the social and political events in his country, his early poems moved on a personal and mythical level. Path of Thunder (1968) showed a new direction - its attack on bloodthirsty politicians and neocolonial exploitation was also in tune with the rise of radical movements in the late 1960s. In 1966 Okigbo won the poetry prize at the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, but he refused the prize because he believed that art should not be judged on racial basis.
In 1967 Okigbo joined the Biafran army as a major, refusing more secure posts behind the lines. He was killed one month later in one of the first battles of the civil war near Nsukka. He was posthumously decorated with the Biafran National Order of Merit. The poems Okigbo wished to preserve were published posthumously by Heinemann as Labyrinths in 1971, with Path of Thunder, added. According to some sources, Okigbo was working on a novel before his death, but the manuscript has not been found.
An extensive biography of Ben Okri
Ben Okri entry at Wikipedia
The Ben Okri Bibliography edited by Daria Tunca
We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of earth.
from An African Elegy
Excerpt: Ben Okri (born March 15, 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Since publishing his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's greatest writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize. His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works. He writes about both the mundane and the metaphysical, the individual and the collective, drawing the reader into a world with vivid descriptions.
Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre for the International PEN, an association of writers with 130 branches in over 100 countries. He is also a member of the United Kingdom's Royal National Theatre.
Awards:
1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) - Incidents at the Shrine
1987 Paris Review/Aga Khan Prize for Fiction - Incidents at the Shrine
1988 The Guardian Fiction Prize - Stars of the New Curfew (shortlisted)
1991 Booker Prize for Fiction - The Famished Road
1993 Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize - The Famished Road
1994 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) - The Famished Road
1995 Crystal Award (World Economic Forum)
2000 Premio Palmi (Italy) - Dangerous Love
Ola's Music
Ola's MySpace page
Release from Dorothy Howe Press & Publicity:
THE DEVOURED MAN - SEPTEMBER 17, 2007 (RUGGED RAM RECORDS)
... a master of his instrument, a superb storyteller, a gracious human-being
Robert Papaleoni, Co-Executive Producer OLA ONABULE IN CONCERT
WCNY TV (PBS) Syracuse, NY, USA
September 2007 will see the welcomed release of The Devoured Man, the latest album from Ola Onabule, one of the finest soul/jazz singer-songwriters of his generation and, above all, one of UK's most compelling contemporary performers.
The Devoured Man is a collection of 12 powerfully emotive and introspective songs that weave incisive lyrics around captivating melodies. The title song deals with the corruptibility of men who come to power with ideals and dreams for their people, and their apparent moral collapse once power has been seized, and what happens to leaders and people in power who compromise those around them for individual gain and profit.
From July through December 2007, Ola Onabule will undertake an international tour, which will take in dates in the US, plus four major festivals in Germany and Switzerland, as well as a whole raft of UK dates.
Ola's following in the US continues to rise, with several visits under his belt including, most recently, an appearance at the prestigious Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington D.C., the Blue Note in New York, and a filmed concert at the Homer Center for the Performing Arts, New York State, which was broadcast on US television on 23rd and 27th May.
Ola Onabule has carved a unique career for himself via his powerful live performances and consistently fine albums. His performances are truly spellbinding, with his immense vocal range, but above all, through his communication with his audience. Nigerian in origin, Ola's music is influenced by the soul, jazz and African music of his childhood. He has opened and been guest performer for many great artists, including Roberta Flack, Natalie Cole, Roy Hargrove, Gladys Knight, Diane Reeves, Al Jarreau, Joe Zawinul and Patti LaBelle.
Recently Ola was commissioned to write two arias for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He has performed on film and television, including the film Second Hand Lions, featuring Robert Duvall and Michael Caine.
For CDs/further information/interviews, contact Dorothy Howe
Tel: 020 8995 3920
Email: press@dorothyhowe.co.uk
Yambo Ouologuem was born in Mali in 1940. He was educated in Bamako and Paris and spoke several African languages, as well as English, French and Spanish. His first novel Bound to Violence (1971), published in French in 1968 as Le Devoir de Violence, brought him much media attention, as well as the prestigious Prix Renaudot in France. It depicted the participation of Africans in the enslavement of their own people. It was hailed as the first truly African novel
drawing on the history of Mali, combining oral tradition, legend and realism into a stunning canvas depicting human nature.
In an interview Chinua Achebe said of Bound to Violence: I object to Bound to Violence because of this image of Africa as “bound to violence,” which I don't accept. Yet as a strategy for reinterpreting African history it is two thousand times more successful than Ayi Kwei Armah's [Two Thousand Seasons].You can see that Ouologuem's book moves; it has an epic scope and movement.
(from Conversations With Chinua Achebe, ed. by Bernth Lindofors, 1997).
An extensive biography of Sembène Ousmane
Sembène Ousmane entry at Wikipedia
Excerpt: A Senegalese writer and film director, a modern griot, storyteller and chronicler, best-known for his historical-political works with strong social comment, Sembène Ousmane often turned his short stories and novels into films. Considered one of the founders of the African realist tradition and often called the Father of African film
, Sembène's image of sub-Saharan Africa was more self-critical, less romanticized than Leopold Sedar Senghor's, who more or less glorified the past.
Months later, the slave-hunters returned to the village; they captured Iome but let her go again. She was worth nothing, because of the blemishes on her body.
The news spread for leagues around. People came from remotest villages to consult the grandmother. And over the years and the centuries a diversity of scars appeared on the bodies of our ancestors.
And this is how our ancestors came to have tribal scars. They refused to be slaves.
from Tribal Scars or the Voltaique
As an author so concerned with social change, one of Sembène's goals had always been to touch the widest possible audience. After his 1960 return to Senegal, however, he realized that his written works would only be read by a small cultural elite in his native land. Therefore, he decided, at age 40, to become a filmmaker, in order to reach wider African audiences.
In 1966, Sembène produced his first feature, La Noire de..., based on one of his own short stories. It was the first feature film ever released by a sub-Saharan African director. Though only 60 minutes long, the French-language film won the Prix Jean Vigo, bringing immediate international attention to both African film generally and Sembène specifically. Sembène followed this success with the 1968 Mandabi, achieving his dream of producing a film in his native Wolof. Later Wolof-language films include Xala (1975, based on his own novel), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1987), and Guelwaar (1992). The Senegalese release of Ceddo was heavily censored, ostensibly for a problem with Sembène's paperwork, but more probably for its anti-Muslim themes. However, Sembène distributed fliers at theaters describing the censored scenes and released it uncut for the international market. In 1971, Sembène also made a film in the Diola language and French entitled Emitai.
Recurrent themes of Sembène's films are the history of colonialism, the failings of religion, the critique of the new African bourgeoisie, and the strength of African women. His final film, the 2004 feature Moolaadè, won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the FESPACO Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The film, set in a small African village in Burkina Faso, explored the controversial subject of female genital mutilation.
Guillaume Oyono-Mbia, playwright, was born in Cameroon in 1939. He attended Colle ge Evangelique de Libamba, where he later taught English, French and German. He also attended University of Keele, Staffordshire, England. His play, Three Suitors: One Husband, was the first modern Cameroonian play to be staged in Yaounde, in 1961. Until Further Notice, originally written as a radio play, won the first prize in the 1967 BBC African Service drama competition. Both plays are variations on the same theme: what happens when Western values clash with African beliefs and traditions.
Tribute to Ola Rotimi at Nigeria Exchange
Excerpt: The author of the popular play The Gods Are Not to Blame was born on April 13, 1939 in Sapele. Ola Rotimi was well known throughout Nigeria and abroad. His other plays and books include the very popular The Gods are Not to Blame, with over half a dozen other plays. Some of these include: Kurunmi (1969); Ovoramwen Nogbaisi (1971); if... (1979); Cast the first stone (1966); Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (1977); Holding Talks (1970); Hopes of the Living Dead (1985); When the Criminals Become Judges (1995); and Man Talk, Woman Talk.
Ola Rotimi a patriot, who shunned the attraction of the West and Europe and returned home to contribute his own quota to nation building, was a rare breed. Diminutive in size but a giant in drama in Africa, he was one of the best things that could have happened to the literary community.
Poet, novelist, playwright, born in 1930 in Malawi. He studied at Makerere University, Uganda, and later, at Kingís College, Cambridge. His poem Stanley Meets Mutesa, depicts the fatal encounter between Africa and Europe, while his novel No Bride Price, written in 1966, showed his dissatisfaction with Post-independence period Africa where the new leaders have sold out their people's anti-colonial struggle to bask in the ease and comfort of western, middle-class materialism.
Al-Tayyib (Tayeb) Salih was born in Sudan in 1929. He studied at the University of Khartoum and the University of London, England. He is considered one of the best short story writers working in Arabic today, weaving aspects of western and Arabic cultures into his writings.
His works deal mainly with political themes such as colonization and gender. His Season of Migration to the North, first published in Beirut in the late 1960s, was declared the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century
by the Syrian-based Arab Literary Academy in Damascus. In 1970 Salih's novella The Wedding of Zein was made into a film by Kuwaiti filmmaker Khalid Siddiq which went on to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Paula Bolanle Sofowora studied English and Literature at the University of Ife, Nigeria and received her law degree from the University of London, England. She was called to the bar in 1993 and currently works as an in-house lawyer.
Her books, primarily written for children, are based on African folklore and involve tales of the cunning and wit of the ubiquitous ijapa (tortoise), whose shenanigans always lead to an unfortunate, but didactic, end. In the books Why the Tortoise is Bald and How the Tortoise Broke his Back, Sofowora recounts the tales with a guilelessness that belies the serious moral message.
Currently, she resides in the UK where she regularly holds storytelling workshops. Her stories, it has been said, give children a wonderful insight into African life. Not poor or poverty stricken — but a vibrant, exciting, colourful culture of sights and sounds.
WoleSoyinka)
An extensive biography of Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka entry at Wikipedia
Interview with Democracy Now! Audio & transcripts
Interview with Democracy Now! (Part 2) Audio & transcripts
Interview with Mother Jones magazine - "Running to Stand Still" by Dave Gilson
Interview at UC Berkeley - Conversations with History
Series
Biography and information page on UC Berkeley site
The Climate of Fear
- Reith Lectures on BBC
Excerpts: Akinwande Oluwole Wole
Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. Some consider him Africa's most distinguished playwright, as he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African since Albert Camus so honored.
Soyinka's literary career began in the experimental theater of the 1950s in England. In 1960 he was commissioned by the Nigerian government to write a play celebrating Nigerian independence. His play, A Dance of the Forests, has been called a lyrical blend of Western experimentalism and African folk tradition, reflecting a highly original approach to drama.
(Professor Paul Brians, Washington State Unversity Department of English) Early plays include The Lion and the Jewel (1963), The Trials of Brother Jero (1964), and Madmen and Specialists (1970). Other well-known works include his memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981); novels, including The Interpreters (1965), which was written in English; collections of poems, including Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988), and works of analysis and commentary such as Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976) and The Open Sores of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Continent (1996).
Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring parties. While in prison he wrote poetry which was published in a collection titled Poems from Prison. He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book The Man Died: Prison Notes.
He has been an outspoken critic of many Nigerian administrations, and of political tyrannies worldwide, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. A great deal of his writing has been concerned with the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it
. This activism has often exposed him to great personal risk, most notable during the government of the Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha (1993-1998). During Abacha's dictatorship, Soyinka left the country on voluntary exile and has since been living abroad (mainly in the United States where he was a professor at Emory University in Atlanta). When civilian rule returned in 1999, Soyinka accepted an emeritus post at Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) on the condition that the university bar all former military officers from the position of chancellor. Soyinka is currently the Elias Ghanem Professor of Creative Writing at the English department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In 2005, he became one of the spearheads of an alternative National conference - PRONACO.
An extensive biography of Amos Tutuola
Amos Tutuola entry at Wikipedia
Excerpt: Amos Tutuola (June 20, 1920 - June 8, 1997) was a Nigerian writer famous for his books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales. His brief education was limited to six years (from 1934 to 1939). Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His most famous novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, was written in 1946, published in 1952 in London by Faber and Faber, and translated and published in Paris as l'Ivrogne dans la brousse by Raymond Queneau in 1953. The noted poet Dylan Thomas brought it to wide attention, calling it brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching
. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was followed up by My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1954 and then several other books in which Tutuola continued to explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts later became an inspiration for the experimental musician Brian Eno, and led to his recording My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981.
Tutuola became one of the founders of Mbari Club, the writers' and publishers' organization. In 1979, he held a visiting research fellowship at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) at Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and in 1983 was an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In retirement he divided his time between residences at Ibadan and Ago-Odo. Tutuola died at age 77 on June 8, 1997 from hypertension and diabetes. Many of Tutuola's papers, letters, and holographic manuscripts have been collected at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.