Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara

by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

In 2014, UNESCO's World Book Capital is Port Harcourt, Nigeria-the first city in Africa to receive the designation by public bid.

This makes it a special year for the Port Harcourt Book Festival, which will be in its seventh year, and bigger than ever. They are joining forces with the internationally renowned Hay Festival, which will bring to Port Harcourt its 39 Project-a competition to identify the thirty-nine most promising young talents under the age of forty in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. It follows the success of Bogotá 39 in 2007 and Beirut 39 in 2010. Both recognized a number of authors who now have international profiles: in Bogotá, Adriana Lisboa, Alejandro Zambra, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Daniel Alarcón, and Junot Díaz; in Beirut, Randa Jarrar, Joumana Haddad, Abdellah Taia, Samar Yazbek, and Faiza Guene. In Nigeria this year, the esteemed judges include leading-edge publisher Margaret Busby; novelist and playwright Elechi Amadi,writer and scholar Osonye Tess Onwueme, and Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina.

For the second time, Bloomsbury is honored to be a part of the festivities, publishing worldwide Africa39-a collection of brand new work from these talented thirty-nine.

With an introduction by Wole Soyinka, Africa39 is a must-read for anyone curious about Africa today and Africa tomorrow, as envisioned through the eyes of its brightest literary stars.

Genres: Africa, Short Stories, Fiction, African Literature, Anthologies, Literature, Nigeria

362 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 2014

Reviews

[2TReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading these 39 stories that were distinct in style, tone, and voice was an absolute treat. Now of course as with any anthology, some stories will leave a passing impression, while others will leave a reverberating imprint, and I truly appreciate the authors that wasted no time in setting the narrative of their stories.

I love anthologies for the diverse canvas of stories that they hold and the potential of of discovering new and soon to be favourite authors and writers. And with Africa 39, I definitely did.

There were a lot of faves here that truly stretched and stressed my imagination, themes that were familiar and not, but crafted in descriptive, lean, and sometimes poetic prose, that it was hard not to get caught up in the character(s), landscape and atmosphere.

Top Favourites were:

Mama's Future- the metaphor and allegory for the rape and pillaging of Africa and the resulting repercussions for the people was just fantastic.

The Tiger of the Mangroves- revealing the inherent capitalistic nature of the colonizers and the disregard for the people and land was a familiar song and dance

Hope's Hunter- using magical realism as a means of showing the interconnectivity of life and nature

Harlot- how societal expectations and titles are in no way defining a self-assured and fully autonomous woman.

[Chaitra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt this was a wasted effort. An anthology of 39 authors, it tried to cram too much into its pages. So many of the stories were excerpts, taken from novels published, or worse, still in progress. They were all given about 8-10 pages, and as a result, it seemed like some stories were rushed, and some others ran on beyond the logical stopping point. None of the stories I read made an impression on me, enough to check out the author, except for Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go excerpt. This included writers I already am familiar with: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu and Lola Shoneyin.

An example of what I felt off: I have Mengestu's excerpt is from All Our Names. I felt that this piece began very well, except it went on too long into the novel itself. I have read this book, and while I understand the whole thing in context, I have no idea why it had to be included. Not to mention that someone coming at it with fresh eyes would have absolutely no idea. This is true for almost every novel excerpt, except the aforementioned Ghana Must Go, and there were too many of those. This is not the writers' fault, I don't think, as I saw some merit in almost every piece. It really needed to have less writers and more pages to showcase their writing in.

[Meghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The compendiums. I often shy away from such collections because, to be blunt, I don't like them very much. I love reading short story collections, but when I do, I like reading them all from one author, like a big chunk of chocolate rather than an assortment of tiny bits of candy that mixed anthologies always end up feeling to me. But the blurb for Africa39: stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who I've been reading since Purple Hibiscus came out) and Dinaw Mengestu (who writes about Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Diaspora, so you know I love), so I read it and these are my random thoughts regarding that decision:

The first story is Adichie's and I'm thinking okay, this can work. I can overlook an introduction that makes liberal use of etc. etc. (it's a pre-release; maybe the intro is still getting polished) and talks about dialectical materialism like I should know what that means more than my vague sense it has something to do with Karl Marx. So we have our amazing first story: heart rendering and true feeling and what you want a short story to be. And the second story is by an author unknown to me, Monica Arac de Nyeko and it's also amazing, capturing class and religion and childhood and wrapping it all up in a banana leaf like a tamale.

And then the quality becomes variable and I ended up slogging through most of the other thirty-seven stories. It's just everything I dislike about compendiums like this. The quality of the stories is variable. The style is variable. My mind gets all turned upside down as I go from stories with lazy storytelling:

...check my reflection in the glass door. [this is followed by five lines of what she looks like in the mirrored doors]

Number 9, Nadifa Mohammed

(Don't have a character look in the mirror and tell me what they look like. I'm pretty sure that's on page one of Writing Fiction);

to stories of rhythmic, melodic lists ending in tea:

It's a prison of files arranged alphabetically -- Assorted toiletries, Baby Foods, Body Building, Body care, Bulk Items, Confectionary and so on until Teas.

Day and Night, Mehul Gohil;

to descriptions so spot on that I'm angry I didn't think of them myself:

He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light, she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her.

Sometime Before Maulidi, Ndinda Kioko;

to scenes I want to steal:

'Bury me in the evening, under glittering stars from above and a sea of lit candles from among yourselves.' ... how we in our pyjamas fobbed moths which somehow understood the gravity of our collective mourning.

Rusty Bell, Nthikeng Mohlele;

and sentences I'm going to use myself somewhere, someday:

I used to like my brother's girlfriend, until ...

Echoes of Mirth, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

and then back to overwritten strained metaphors:

...it seemed that the countryside was quietly hysterical.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Mary Watson

until I'm so confused that I have no idea if

They all had penises the size of semicolons ... After a while they all had to leave his loft and find another place for their semicolon parade.

No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimmy Hendrix is Playing, Clifton Gachagua

is good writing or not. Is it clever? Is it overdone. I have no idea. I'm so lost.

Then, too, these aren't all short stories. Some are, but some are excerpts from novels or, far worse, novels in progress. So I read a fully enclosed story, followed by open ended scenes that need the rest of the novel there, that introduce characters I should have already met, and hint at situations that haven't been resolved, and thus I feel cheated. Add to this that some of these excerpts are stream-of-consciousness and I have nothing to situate myself in, nothing at all. I am adrift.

I once took a music CD out of the library about music in Africa. It was sixty or so songs, from all over the continent, in many different languages and pretty much all styles: rap, reggae, country, rock and roll, instrumental, traditional, techno, and mash-ups of any of those and more (best song on that album Barra Barra by Rachid Taha). It seemed very much like the music company was saying Look, African music isn't all Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba (although both were on the CD). This collection should likely be viewed as a wordy-sampler offering the same thing. Look Africa can do crime novels! Mystery! Literary! Stream of Consciousness! Didactic fables! But, at the end, after what felt like a slog, I don't know if I needed to be convinced of all that. But it was a diversion to have a book of Africa with minimal Europeans and no lions and a cover without a picture of an acacia tree with the setting sun in the background.

So, should you read this book: Yes? No? It jumps all over the place that I can't tell you. If you are interested in works by POC, maybe? How do you rank, or recommend, or anti-recommend, a collection of stories where some were worth it and others just made you want to [insert your least favourite chore to do here, like I really hate scrubbing the bathtub or dusting] rather than read another page? I'm new to this reviewing business so I don't know. You spin the wheel, you take your chances, as my mother says. You're going to have to make up your own mind.

Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey goes on sale October 28, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Anetq]

1) “The Shivering”, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - From The Thing Around Your Neck (which I had already read).
2) “The Banana Eater”, by Monica Arac de Nyeko
- Chasing out loitering vendors from the back yard & losing a friend...
3) Excerpt from "The Tiger of the Mangroves", by Rotimi Babatunde-
- Chief Koko meets the Consul (who meets the merchants).
4) “Two Fragments of Love”, by Eileen Almedia Barbosa
- The artists' muse and shipwrecked
5) “Why Radio DJs are Superstars in Lagos”, by A. Igoni Barrett
Excerpt from BlackAss - (I gave up on the book a few years ago)
6) Excerpt from Our Time of Sorrow, by Jackee Budesta Batanda- the christian cult.
7) “Alu”, by Recaredo Silebo Boturu - and his mother's story.
8) “Mama’s Future”, by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond - Mama Africa (who's had a rough century) is on the deathbed and calling her children home to advise them on the future.
9) “The Occupant”, by Shadreck Chikoti - Sci-fi: A watcher develops an interest in an occupant.
10) “The Professor”, by Edwige-Renée Dro - a story of love and literature.
11) Excerpt from New Mom, by Tope Folarin - would you want a new mom, if the old one went crazy?
12) “No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimi Hendrix is Playing”, by Clifton Gachagua
13) “Talking Money”, by Stanley Gazemba
14) “Day and Night”, by Mehul Gohil
15) Excerpt from The Score, by Hawa Jande Golakai
16) “The Pink Oysters”, by Shafinaaz Hassim
17) “Echoes of Mirth”, by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
18) “The Old Man and the Pub”, by Stanley Onjezani Kenani
19) “Sometime Before Maulidi”, by Ndinda Kioko
20) Excerpt from All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu
21) “Number 9”, by Nadifa Mohamed
22) Excerpt from Rusty Bell, by Nthikeng Mohlele
23) “Cinema Demons”, by Linda Musita
24) Excerpt from Ebamba, Kinshasa-Makambo, by Richard Ali A Mutu
25) “By the Tracks”, by Sifiso Mzobe
26) “My New Home”, by Glaydah Namukasa
27) “I’m Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen”, by Ondjaki
28) “Rag Doll”, by Okwiri Oduor
29) “The Is How I Remember It”, by Ukamaka Olisakwe
30) Excerpt from The Wayfarers, by Chibundu Onuzo
31) Hope's Hunter Mohamed Yunus Rafiq
32) Excerpt from Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi
33) “The Sack”, by Namwali Serpell
34) Excerpt from Harlot, by Lola Shoneyin
35) “Amoz Azucarado”, by Nii Ayikwei Parkes
36) Ex from work in progress Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
37) Soham's Mulatto from Mood Indigo Chika Unigwe
38) Migrant Labour Zukiswa Wanner
39) Hiding in plain sight Mary Watson

[Sookie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wole Soyinka's introduction lays down a path for some of the finest African writers. With mostly unknown names, this collection could have been a wonderful "get-to-know-new-author" anthology but unfortunately didn't deliver on its intent.

While some of the stories are near perfect narration, many ended up being handful of chapter from their own respective long form of writing/novels. This was stifling in experience as there was no definitive end for some of the "stories". [Stories is a strong word because they are essentially first one or two chapters from a novel.]

Story reviews soon.

[Diandra Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad to have received an Advance Reading Copy of this book through the FirstReads program, because this is one of the better writing anthologies I've read in a while. The selections in Africa 39 represent sixteen sub-Saharan countries and a variety of genres and experiences. After a very strident introduction by Wole Soyinka (in which I'm not sure I understood all the context for his comments,) the stories begin with solid entries from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ("The Shivering"), Monica Arac de Nyeko ("The Banana Eater"). My favorite piece was Eileen Almeida Barbosa's mellifluous and passionate "Two Fragments of Love," and I hope more of her work is translated into English. Also striking were the simmering anger of Ondjaki's "I'm Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen," the intellectual romance of Edwige-Renée Dro's "The Professor," and the coming-out heartbreak of Ukamaka Olisakwe's "This is How I Remember It."

There are also many novel excerpts, which range in quality. Often, they tend to feel more like promotional previews than self-contained works, but quite a few stand on their own, like Rotimi Babatunde's rendering of a meeting during European colonization, Tope Folarin's engaging family drama, Glaydah Namuka's portrait of a child continually forced from one home to another, and Lola Shoyenin's unapologetic narration for a woman deemed Harlot. Shadreck Chikoti's intriguing sci-fi situation convinced me to look forward to the publication of the full novel of Azotus, the Kingdom. However, I wasn't engaged by the basic police procedural vibe of the excerpt from Hawa Jande Golaki's The Score. A better portrayal of crime comes from Sifiso Mzobe's chapter "By the Tracks," in which a guard for an affluent neighborhood is led to the scene of a ghastly murder. The strongest excerpt, however, is the diptych created by the selection from Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names, starting with a legend about a city kept alive in dreams, and ending with a beguiling fragment about specific characters living in fear.

Many of the stories are straightforward yet satisfying, like "The Old Man and the Pub," by Stanley Onjezani Kenani, and "Number 9" by Nadifa Mohamed. There's a lingering contemplative mood in "Sometime Before Maulidi" by Ndinda Kioko. Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond renders a capable continent and diaspora allegory in "Mama's Future," while Okwiri Oduor pulls off a surprising perspective flip in "Rag Doll."


Clifton Gachagua writes a psychedelic torrent of words for a story, "No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimi Hendrix is Playing," that is sometimes baffling but ultimately intriguing. Stanley Gazemba's prose in "Talking Money" is somewhat stilted as he attempts to convey a folk storytelling tone for his fable. The weaker selections tend to be too abrupt, even short stories like Zukiswa Wanner's "Migrant Labour." However, "Hope's Hunter" by Mohamed Yunus Rafiq is an imaginative and graceful conclusion for the volume.

[Lisa Reads & Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, a tidbit from Wiki:

Africa39 is a collaborative project initiated by the Hay Festival in partnership with Rainbow Book Club,celebrating Port Harcourt: UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 by identifying 39 of the most promising writers under the age of 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in the development of literature from Sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. Africa39 follows the success of two previous Hay Festival initiatives linked to World Book Capital cities, Bogotá39 (2007) and Beirut39 (2009).

I admit that I love the motivation behind this project, so I was predisposed to love the story collection. Each night I sat down with great anticipation, a mining of gems--those voices from a distant land that would provide insight to the variety of human thought and experience. With 39 stories, the voices are varied enough to touch a broad audience. I was both pleased to see how similar people think and behave, yet I noticed details that are quite foreign to my personal experience. By sharing the product of their imagination, these young writers can add to our understanding of one another, and perhaps make the world a better place.

** I received this book from Netgalley

[Alicen · Rating 1 out of 5]

2.5
Some short stories I really enjoyed (Hiding in Plain Sight - Mary Watson and I’m Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen - Ondjaki being two of them) but the majority were a bit eh. A lot of them were extracts from larger novels so I found they didn’t translate well to a shorter form.

It took me so long to read this and the only reason I pushed to finish it is because it’s the end of the year and I figured I may as well.

[Dana Berglund · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll admit that I didn't actually read every single story in this book, but there was quite a variety of styles and countries represented. Some of them were excerpts from forthcoming novels, and sometimes they didn't have the same closure (and punch) that the true short stories did. But I enjoyed enough of them to make it worth the read. (No Kissing the Dolls..... was perhaps the most confusing story I've read in a long time. Murakami on acid, maybe. With too much caffeine.)

[Richard]

Just realized short stories compilation of "incomplete" stories is not my thing.....

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The editor and judges of Africa 39 have pulled together 39 works of fiction by writers under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa. It's a fairly eclectic mix -- contemporary, historical, fantastical; some are standalone pieces and others parts of longer works. Many take place somewhere in Africa -- in the author's home country or elsewhere -- but a few take place in Europe or the United States. Some are stronger than others, but by and large they are tied together simply by being excellent, tightly woven stories.

As I would expect for an anthology, some of the stories worked better for me than others. A few I particularly enjoyed:

Mama's Future (Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond), in which Mama [Africa] is on her deathbed, trying to impart some last wisdom to her children, who have returned from the corners of the globe to attend to her. I wanted more out of this story, but conceptually I loved it.

The Professor (Edwige-Renée Dro), in which a woman must mourn the loss of a former professor with whom she had a not-quite relationship, but who also introduced her to a new way of looking at literature. Sweet and sad and delightfully understated.

This Is How I Remember It (Ukamaka Olisakwe), a story of an ill-fated love. Again left me wanting more, but in a way that makes me think it actually ended in the right place -- there's still a lot of story left at the end of it, but there are so many directions in which it could go.

The anthology is, though, very heavy on novel excerpts. Of 39 stories, 17 (if you go by the stories; 15 if you go by the table of contents. My copy is an ARC, though, and I assume this was corrected before publication) are parts of longer works. That's more than 40 percent, which seems far too high. This is not a criticism the writing itself, and in a number of cases I'd quite like to read the full novel (notably: Ebabma, Kinshasa-Makombo by Richard Ali Mutu; My New Home by Glayda Namukasa; Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi)...but, without question, I would have preferred a significantly higher proportion of standalone stories.

Definitely some writers to watch in here, though.

I received a free copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories and excerpts from novels, representing 39 up-and-coming writers from sub-Saharan Africa. While 16 countries are represented, a little over half of the writers come from three: Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.

As you'd expect, it's a real grab-bag of different styles and genres. There are stories about love and loss, family ties, violence and conflict, coming-of-age stories, social issues; historical fiction, crime, mystery, science fiction, magical realism. Don't expect them all to deal with stereotypical African subjects, or even to be all set in Africa. The diversity seems to bother some reviewers, who seem to want a bit more cohesion in an anthology; but it shouldn't.

It's guaranteed that you'll encounter some works that you don't like at all; some that you do; and some which you like well enough to make you want to track down books by those authors. And that's what a good anthology should do; introduce you to a wide array, so you can select your own direction for further reading.

My least favorite story in this collection: "Mama's Future", an awkward and overstrained allegory by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. A few of the ones I liked best:

-a selection from "Azotus, the Kingdom", a dystopian sci-fi novel by Shadreck Chikoti
-"Day and Night", Mehul Gohil
-a selection from "The Score", a mystery novel by Hawa Jande Golakai
-"Echoes of Mirth", Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
-a selection from "Rusty Bell", Nthikeng Mohlele
-"I'm Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen", Ondjaki
-"This Is How I Remember It", Ukamaka Olisakwe

[Muyiwa Gbenga-Oluwatoye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tope Folarin’s shorty story, Genesis, tackles the subject of mental health in a poignant but yet sensitive way.  Narrating a possibly autobiographical account, Folarin narrates the story of two brothers from an immigrant family in the US struggling to cope with the anguish and confusion that comes with their mother’s slow descent into mental illness. It’s a deeply moving account of how two young brothers born to immigrant parents from West Africa, and already faced with the challenge of finding their place in a predominantly white community, try to understand the changes in their mother’s behavior and the unravelling of their parents’ marriage. Told from the perspective of the older brother, it effectively portrays a child’s mixed and conflicted feelings of fear and familiar acceptance; love and resigned alienation. It’s a well –written story on an important and widely-misunderstood subject that deserves its nomination for the 2016 Caine Prize.

[Rosemary · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard to review this book of short stories and essays written by different new African voices. You can see it took me a year to read it. It was on my nightstand and I would read one story and think on it for a spell before I read another. Some of the stories were funny. Some of the stories seemed to just stop abruptly. Some were the first chapter of yet-to-be-released novels. There were stories about zombies, war, families. Some of them I enjoyed and some I didn't understand. I am glad I read this book. It is part of my quest to better understand Africa, it's people and history.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

This rating is primarily not a reflection of the actual writing published in this book, but rather of the failure of this collection as a publication:
I think this is a clear example of a collection where less would have been more.

The book collects 39 wildly different pieces of writing that as a collection mostly feel unfocused and incoherent. The aim was certainly to present the breadth of literary work done in Africa to new audiences (seeing that African writing is still not that widely read in Europe and North America), but I don‘t think this succeeds — for one, Africa is a whole huge and diverse continent, and trying to stuff writing into a collection purely based on all the authors having African roots does not make for anything coherent by itself.

Then there‘s the fact that a large proportion of the stories in this collection are not short stories, but rather fragments of novels, some not yet complete. I actually found a handful of these fragments pretty compelling and want to look for the completed novels, but a chapter from a novel does not work as a short story! Mashed together in such large number together with far less compelling pieces of writing just leaves the reader dissatisfied when the fragment ends, breaking off the narrative before it has really begun.

This leaves the collection with a feeling of the editors just having collated 39 random pieces of writing with little thought as to which to include and why.
Also, collecting parts of novels does not have to be a bad thing, but mixing them up with self-contained short stories is likely to find the reader in the wrong state of mind and leave them dissatisfied.

I think this collection would have been far better, and its contents have far more of an impact, if the editors had whittled down the contributions to, say, the best 15 — or, 15 based on a particular theme.

Lastly, I think it would have really helped if every story had been prefaced by a brief paragraph about the author and the context they’re writing from, rather than just collect author biographies at the end.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Actual rating: 3.5 stars)

This collection of short stories and excerpts from novels (or works in progress) is puzzling. I quite enjoyed the first half of the collection, but I struggled through most of the second half. Some of the short stories were really, really great (notably Adichie's “The Shivering”, Edwige Renee Dro’s “The Professor”, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s “Echoes of Mirth”, as well as the excerpts of “Harlot”, “Why radio DJs are Superstars in Lagos”, “The tiger of the Mangroves”, “New mom”, “Our time of sorrow”, “Soham’s mulatto”), but some of the other stories were confusing or downright terrible (I even skipped a few!). I found it difficult to constantly need to adapt to a new pace or writing style, and some of the excerpts were hard to understand, having no additional context.
That's probably to be expected when putting together the works of 39 authors, with no real thread connecting their work other than a continent; with each new story and writer comes a context and style switch, so it's not surprising I didn't love this collection. In some cases, it was clear that some of the texts were complete works in progress, that probably needed polishing or altering and perhaps having them in a collection of short stories didn't do them justice.
I would, however, still recommend it to people who are interested in discovering new voices from different countries in Africa.
From this list, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was the only writer I knew, and I’ve definitely discovered some gems I'm looking forward to reading more of in the future.

[Dorothy Himberc · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my notes: I enjoyed, for example, Rotimi Babatunde's striking "The Tiger of the Mangroves," Recaredo Silebo Boturu's beautiful views on nature in "Alú," "Echoes of Mirth" by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, "The Old Man and the Pub" by Stanley Onjezani Kenani, Nii Ayikwei Parkes's "Arroz Azucarado," and "I'm Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen," translated from the original by Ondjaki.

To give one quotation: Mohamed Yunus Rafiq's prose in "Hope's Hunter" is especially lyrical – "Every day the clouds and the land seem to put up a fight against the departure of the sun, an occurrence they cannot stop and every morning they welcome the sun even before men and women begin to stir."

Individually a few of the texts were so fine that I am giving 5 stars instead of averaging all the stories out to 4 stars.

In terms of themes (religion, war, the appreciation of nature, colonialism, migration, personal relationships), geographical location, and styles from intellectual abstraction to the practically descriptive, I felt the collection was highly diverse. If countries like Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt seemed left out, it seems to be because Bloomsbury also published Beirut39, a collection of short stories from Arabic-speaking countries.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven’t read all of the 39 stories in this anthology – just the ones from countries that I hadn’t encountered before…

Africa 39, New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara was commissioned as a Hay Festival Project – there’s a similar collection called Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World. The 39 writers who are included had to be under 40, and to come from the region or diaspora. The collection includes well-known authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus; Half of a Yellow Sun; and Americanah) and Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go) but most of them are writers I’ve never heard of although many of them have published prize-winning novels and short stories. I did read Adichie’s story ‘The Shivering’ (because it was first in the collection) but my criteria for choosing which ones to read was the countries of origin, and the authors I chose came from Malawi; Ivory Coast (Cote D’Ivoire); Liberia, Angola, Uganda and Zambia.

To see my thoughts about these half dozen stories, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/04/a...

[Chola Mukanga · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst book I have read for a long time. I was really looking forward to it. Not least because of Zambia’s Namwali Serpell. But it turns to be a wasted effort. First of the language used in the book should have had a healthy warning. Very poor, unnecessary and often unrealistic. The other thing is that this book is clearly compiled with the agenda to foster what is largely a secular western agenda of liberal sexuality. The writers themselves do not come across as indigenously authentic.

That said, I enjoyed four stories from each that just about qualified the book for 1 star: The Banana Eater; Mama’s Future; the Occupant and, the Talking Money.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

“He wonders though, where is the mid-point between positive and negative. Maybe it is not necessary since the cycle always repeats itself.”


I read this to gain an overview of different African writings and themes. These short stories offered perspectives into futuristic societies, everyday life in various cultures, the pressures of the economies, the pressures of communism, reactions to government and war, a few early society stories.
Most of the stories had a thread of sadness. Going forward I am going to see if I can books that have a different focus in mind.

[Lukáš Zorád · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book to have at home. Foreword by the Nobel Laureate and human right activist, Nigerian writer and intellectual Wole Soyinka, selection by amazing Kenyan writer and activist Binyavanga Wainaina, stories by great talents and profound writers and storrytellers from subsaharian Africa. If you are trying to understand the continent a bit, this will help you to get few pieces of the huge puzzle right.

[Tessie Lulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am struggling to read this book to finish; it doesn't evoke that longing to dive into the pages. Most of the excerpts specifically are quite annoying; hard to flow through and comprehend. Some beginnings feel like being randomly picked up at a station then randomly dropped off, so you can't point out what just happened in between.
For an African anthology, the tid bits from unfinished or finished novels weren't skillfully picked to make them sound like a stand-alone story.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sheer amount and broad variety of the short stories in this book naturally come with different approaches and styles of writing. While there was a handful, that I could not get into at all and at some points had to force myself to read through it, the majority of the stories are an interesting read and cover various intersting topics, such as gender roles and colonialism, both leading to existing and ongoing inequalities.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to admit I was really disappointed by this book. There were a few stories I liked however a majority I really didn't. I wish there would have been more short stories vs. first chapters of forth coming books...... I was really hoping to find some new authors from Africa but unfortunately I didn't.

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful! Lots to read and enjoy, and many, many excerpts from wonderful books (some of which I've read and enjoyed before), so also a great way to get a taste of African literature. There were only a few pieces I didn't read because they weren't my kind of thing, but that didn't spoil the anthology for me at all.

[Salem Lorot · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is encouraging to read a collection of short stories written by a young generation of African novelists. Africa39 exudes talent and a promising future for African writing.

I found some stories quite interesting and some a wee-bit strained in their flow.

Hail Africa!

[J Thayre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review here: https://aroundtheworldonefemalenoveli...

[yenni m · Rating 5 out of 5]

I forget the beauty of short stories and the power of capturing a character in so few words.

[BinaGee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many short stories in this collection have captured my heart, and each have a jarring moment that captures you between the beauty and the tragedy you exist in.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful as an introduction to current writers from Africa but suffers from choice to excerpt most works. A fewer number of writers with more complete pieces would have been more satisfying.