Circumspecte

Today was a blog waiting to happen. Only, it’s not going to be about the Ghanaian and African Embassies in the West as I’d intended – don’t worry, it will have its time too – but rather about contemporary books, libraries and reading in major African cities like Accra, Lusaka, Jo-burg, Lagos, Dakar. It features some   great insights from people on Facebook   and Twitter on   Africa’s reading culture   and access to contemporary books. Yesterday I participated in a very fruitful Virtual Americanah Book Club meeting with two of my friends – one in Accra, Ghana and the other in Maputo, Mozambique – and we had a swell time reflecting on Chimamanda Adichie’s latest, how it resonates with us, the different themes and so on. I posted some of my thoughts and a tweep asked where they could get the book. I have gotten this question so many times this year – especially after   my “summer reads” blog   - and so I automatically responded “Amazon” and sent a link. T...

I woke up this morning to news that Nigeria's prolific author Chinua Achebe had passed. I'm sad, but I'm also grateful - for his life, his work and more importantly, his influence. Prior to attending Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast, I had virtually no idea about what "African literature" was. If you meant the stories submitted by readers to The Mirror , a Saturday weekly in Ghana, then maybe. But if you meant stories that capture the sometimes mundane details of daily life in an African country, complete with the kola nuts, local proverbs, and complexities of traditional and contemporary African life,  then not really. Then came Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Efua Sutherland's The Marriage of Anansewa - and a whole new world was opened up to me. I can't recount the number of times I read Things Fall Apart , it was just that good. Achebe's descriptions of Okonkwo, Unoka and Obierika - some of the main characters - were al...