Collier African American Library | ||
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![]() | ![]() | Abrahams, Peter. A Wreath For Udomo. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Stanlake J. T. Samkange. 348 pages. paperback. 04806.
DESCRIPTION - AFRICA IS BURNING - The black revolutionaries are waiting in London for the summons to Africa that will mean the beginning of a new regime and the realization of a life-long dream. For on that day they will leave their white mistresses and return to their embattled country as victors, determined to unite and rebuild a free and independent nation. Their leader is Udomo, a man born to command and destined to play the major role in this tragic drama that will bring him fame as a great ruler - and ultimate sacrifice to the darkest menace of primitive Africa: tribalism. Brilliantly, subtly, Peter Abrahams tells a story of love, betrayal and death among these strong, ruthless patriots who have conquered colonialism only to be divided by an even fiercer enemy. This unforgettable novel of modern Africa in turmoil is as relevant, yet timeless, as it is irresistibly compelling.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919), is a South African One of South Africa's most prominent black writers, his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism, most prolific of South Africa's black prose writers, whose early novel MINE BOY (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks. |
![]() | ![]() | Abrahams, Peter. Mine Boy. New York. 1976. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Charles Larson. Collier African American Library. 191 pages. paperback. 04805.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Must a man run who has done nothing?' Young, strong, proud, and black, Xuma came from a Stone Age tribe o the Johannesburg ghetto, innocently seeking work in the gold mines and a new life in the big city. Too soon he discovered that the price of civilization was dehumanization and the cost of living, despair. He learned that running was a way of life; that justice was reserved for whites only, and that a man was no better than the color of his skin. Deep in brawling, boot-legging Malay Town he found a new kind of kinship and love - and a new kind of fear and hatred called apartheid, with its passes, beatings, and the servile compromises that often meant the difference between life and death. And deep in the rich, cruel South African mines he discovered red-haired, white-skinned Paddy who said that a man must be a man before he is a color, for this is his only hope. MINE BOY is Peter Abrahams' brilliant and moving story of a black man's struggle for life in South Africa. Told with compassion, insight, and rare understanding, it traces the violent coming-of-age of a simple up-country native in his strange and hostile land.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919), is a South African One of South Africa's most prominent black writers, his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism, most prolific of South Africa's black prose writers, whose early novel MINE BOY (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks. |
![]() | ![]() | Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Wilfred Cartey. Collier African American Library. 304 pages. paperback. 04803.
DESCRIPTION - On one never-to-be-forgotten day when he was very young, Peter Abrahams was beaten into the violent realization that he was black. Moving with Johannesburg's roving street gangs, he saw his people driven to crime and into jail. Yet because the sordid realities of his young life were softened by moments of beauty and poignancy, he was finally able to make a dramatic escape to England. TELL FREEDOM is an autobiographical tale that is more than one man's story. ‘Beautifully written, moving, revealing,' (THE NATION) it is a mirror of life in a tragic land. ‘Beside Richard Wright's name as a Negro novelist, set that of Peter Abrahams. Or beside that of Alan Paton as a South African novelist, set that of Peter Abrahams. For this young man, born in the black slums of Johannesburg, has rare talent.' - Lewis Gannett. ‘There are some writers whose passion on earth is to affirm our common humanity. To read Abrahams is to be haunted by the feeling that he is writing about our own problems. His art is powerful enough to bridge the gap of oceans and cultures, and make you feel and think.' - Richard Wright. PETER ABRAHAMS is also the author of A WREATH FOR UDOMO, MINE BOY, A NIGHT OF THEIR OWN, and THIS ISLAND NOW. He has lived in England for the past twenty years.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919), is a South African One of South Africa's most prominent black writers, his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism, most prolific of South Africa's black prose writers, whose early novel MINE BOY (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks. |
![]() | ![]() | Abrahams, Peter. This Island, Now. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Austin C. Clarke. Collier African American Library. 285 pages. paperback. 04804.
DESCRIPTION - The President is dead and already the guard has changed. His successor is Albert Josiah - cold, calculating, charismatic, armed with the power of the masses and a ruthless determination to force the dissidents into line - or eliminate them. Power, passion and greed clash as the embattled island is divided by a man who seeks to conquer the rich, intimidate the brown upper classes and create a nation of, by and for the blacks. Is he patriot or demagogue, hero or villain? To the black masses, Albert Josiah is their chosen liberator; to the brown elite, he is a man who commands respect, however uneasy; and to the rich whites he is an enemy to be reckoned with in the coin of their realm: foreign influence. Peter Abrahams has written a bold and arresting novel about racial and political strife in the Caribbean - a novel which exposes harsh truths seldom expressed, about freedom, progress and the men who call the shots in underdeveloped nations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919), is a South African One of South Africa's most prominent black writers, his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism, most prolific of South Africa's black prose writers, whose early novel MINE BOY (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks. |
![]() | ![]() | Aidoo, Christina Ama Ata. The Dilemma of a Ghost. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Karen C. Chapman. Collier African.American Library. 93 pages. paperback. 01202.
DESCRIPTION - Ato Yawson, a young Ghanaian educated in the United States, returns home with his strong-willed Harlem-born wife, Eulalie, whom he married without telling his tradition-conscious family. Ato, in his ambivalence between twentieth-century black America and his African heritage, attempts to bridge the two worlds. Eulalie, bringing with her dreams of "belonging" to a heroic, hallowed land, painfully discovers that Africa is not all colorful birds and peaceful rhythms of deep, mysterious rivers. In these immediate clashes between the tribe and the individual, the primitive and the modern, Ato and Eulalie confront barriers and obstacles which time, custom, and culture have made nearly insurmountable. The Dilemma of a Ghost is a play classic in its dramatic construction, heeding all the principles of tragedy while going beyond the rise and fall of a single tragic hero to include the tragedy of community and culture unable to change or to understand.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, nee Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1940, Saltpond) is a Ghanaian author, playwright and academic. Born in Saltpond in Ghana's Central Region, she grew up in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. Aidoo was sent by her father to Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast from 1961 to 1964. The headmistress of Wesley Girls' bought her her first typewriter. After leaving high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana in Legon and received her Bachelor of Arts in English as well as writing her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. She worked in the United States of America where she held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. She also served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, and as a Lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, eventually rising there to the position of Professor. Aside from her literary career, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months. She has also spent a great deal of time teaching and living abroad for months at a time. She has lived in America, Britain, Germany, and Zimbabwe. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. Aidoo's works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. Many of Aidoo's protagonists are women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time. Her novel Changes, won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet, and has written several children's books. |
![]() | ![]() | Armah, Ayi Kwei. Fragments. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. 286 pages. paperback. 04826.
DESCRIPTION - Agony and madness in "emerging " Africa Baako, a writer, returns to his native Ghana from five years of study and travel abroad. He, a "been-to," is invested by his family with the potency of the returned one, the savior. The been-to, intermediary with the world of departed ancestors, is the bringer of good things from beyond - the car, liquor, the prestige of position and ownership. Pressured by the weight of his own needs as a creative artist and the others' need of him as social lever, Baako is driven toward madness. Only two women understand his suffering - Juana, a Puerto Rican psychiatrist whose love for him is as sensual as it is spiritual; and Naana, his blind grandmother who dreams of a better, less materialistic African community. The vision these three share - of the purification of the poisoned environment in which they live - inevitably collides with the needs and demands of a people "emerging" into a "modern" culture and is shattered. And the books ends as it began, with a mystic, poetic invocation by Naana to her departed ancestors.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - AYI KWEI ARMAH was educated at Achimota, Ghana, then at Groton and Harvard. After three years at home he left Ghana late in 1967 to work for the magazine Jeune Afrique in Paris. In addition to short fiction published in Harper's and The Atlantic, he is the author of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, available in the Collier Books African/American Library series. |
![]() | ![]() | Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. New York. 1979. Collier/Macmillan. 0020482507. Introduction by Christina Ama Ata Aidoo. Collier African American Library. 180 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Lust for Power, Money and Prestige. has infected the decadent ruling clique of a new West African nation, and a young man of profound human integrity fights a desperate battle to keep the faith and uphold the ideals of the revolution. Humiliated, disillusioned, embittered by his experiences, he is forced to surrender at last to the tired hope that the ‘beautyful' ones are not yet born. ‘This brilliant novel takes the small, smouldering resentments of West Africa's perennially short-changed people and explodes them into a crackling protest against the whole of human suffering. Novelist Armah, an artist right to his sizzling nerve ends, states his dilemmas so passionately that they come to carry the force of a parable.' - Time magazine. ‘Raw, cynical. with exquisite moments of poetry, magnificent descriptions and evocative glimpses of urban life in Ghana.' - The Book of the Month Club News.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939) is a notable Ghanaian writer. Born to Fante-speaking parents, and descending on his father's side from a royal family in the Ga nation, Armah was born in the port city of Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana. Having attended Achimota School, he left Ghana in 1959 to attend Groton School in Groton, MA. After graduating he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine REvolution Africaine. In 1964, Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navrongo School. Between 1967 and 1968, he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. From 1968-1970, Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his MFA in creative writing. In the 1970s, he worked as a teacher in East Africa, at the College of National Education, Chang'ombe, Tanzania, and at the National University of Lesotho. He lived in Dakar, Senegal, in the 1980s and taught at Amherst and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In Fragments (1971), the protagonist, Baako, is a ‘been-to' - a man who has been to the United States and received his education there. Back in Ghana he is regarded with superstitious awe as a link to the Western life style. Baako's grandmother Naana, a blind-seer, stands in living contact with the ancestors. Under the strain of the unfulfilled expectations Baako finally breaks. As in his first novel, Armah contrasts the two worlds of materialism and moral values, corruption and dreams, two worlds of integrity and social pressure. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was set largely in an American University, and focused on a student, Modin Dofu, who has dropped out of Harvard. Disillusioned Modin is torn between independence and Western values. He meets a Portuguese black African named Solo, who has already suffered a mental breakdown, and a white American girl, AimEe Reitsch. Solo, the rejected writer, keeps a diary, which is the substance of the novel. AimEe's frigidity and devotion to the revolution leads finally to destruction, when Modin is killed in the desert by O.A.S. revolutionaries. Trans Atlantic and African slave trades are the subject of Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973) in which a pluralized communal voice speaks through the history of Africa, its wet and dry seasons, from a period of one thousand years. Arab and European oppressors are portrayed as ‘predators,' ‘destroyers,' and ‘zombies'. The novel is written in allegorical tone, and shifts from autobiographical and realistic details to philosophical pondering, prophesying a new age. The Healers (1979) mixed fact and fiction about the fall of the celebrated Ashanti Empire. The healers in question are traditional medicine practitioners who see fragmentation as the lethal disease of Africa. Armah remained silent as a novelist for a long period until 1995 when he published Osiris Rising, depicting a radical educational reform group which reinstates ancient Egypt at the center of its curriculum. As an essayist Armah has dealt with the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the creation of a pan-African agency that will embrace all the diverse cultures and languages of the continent. Armah has called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language. |
![]() | ![]() | Attaway, William. Blood On the Forge. New York. 1970. Collier/MacMillan. Introduction by Edward Margolies. Collier African American Library. 237 pages. paperback. 04828.
DESCRIPTION - From down south to up south - They came north with the Great Black Migration during World War I, literally shanghaied by boxcar-load, with empty promises of wealth, hope and a new life. But the three Moss brothers, as countless black men before and since, discovered only squalor, depravity, madness and death. Big Mat, Melody and Chinatown Moss fled a dying farm in the Kentucky hills for the promised land of the steel mills in Pennsylvania. They plunged into their new, backbreaking work in the white-hot furnaces that made steel and destroyed men. The money they earned bought them corn likker, women and forgetfulness until the day that cold, gray town with its blazing furnaces swallowed the last of their illusions in an orgy of violence, revenge and ultimate despair.
Introduction by Edward Margolies, author of Native Sons, A Critical Study.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South. Attaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers' Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with Blood on the Forge (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North. Attaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O),' which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte. A resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life. He died in Los Angeles while working on a script. |
![]() | ![]() | Beti, Mongo. King Lazarus. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by Peter Green. Introduction by O. R. Dathorne. Collier African American Library. 190 pages. paperback. 04860.
DESCRIPTION - THE MAGIC CHRISTIANS VS. MUMBO-JUNGLE: A BELLIGERENT BLACK COMEDY. All was well in Essazam Village until that fateful day in 1948 when Chief Essomba Mendouga was stricken by a seemingly terminal case of satyriasis. For years the Bantu chief had enjoyed unfailing health and unflagging appetites, dutifully satisfied by his twenty-three wives. But now fear shook the native street, and panic ravaged the French colonial establishment, unwilling to part with its staunch, if polygamous, prop. Complications abound when the chief suddenly recovers and is converted to Christianity by the local Roman Catholic missionary. Temporarily insane and freshly baptized, the newly risen Lazarus piously chooses monogamy with his youngest and loveliest wife as tribal hell breaks loose and twenty-two wifely rejects, their assorted relatives, and outraged tribesmen stage a comic-opera revolt - in real blood. Mongo Beti strikes out with pungent, slashing wit at a conniving, sanctimonious Catholic church, obsolete trivial customs, and neanderthal French colonialism in the lustiest, and most deadly accurate satire ever to come out of Africa.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country. As one critic wrote after his death, ‘The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African people.'The son of Oscar Awala and REgine Alomo, Alexandre was born in 1932 at AkomEtan, a small village 10 km from Mbalmayo, itself 45 km away from YaoundE, capital of Cameroon. (The village's name comes from Akom ‘rock' and Etam ‘source': in old maps of the region, the name is written in two parts). From an early age, Beti was influenced by the currents of rebellion sweeping Africa in the wake of World War II. His father drowned when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his mother and extended family. Beti recalls arguing with his mother about religion and colonialism; he also recalls early exposure to the opinions and analysis of independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, both in the villages and at Nyobe's private residence. He carried these views into the classroom, and was eventually expelled from the missionary school in Mbalmayo for his outspokenness. In 1945 he entered the lycEe Leclerc in YaoundE. Graduating in 1951, he came to France to continue his higher education in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence, then at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the early 1950s, Beti had turned to writing as a vehicle of protest. He wrote regularly for the journal PrEsence Africaine; among his pieces was a review of Camara Laye's Black Child that criticized Laye for what Beti saw as pandering to European tastes. He began his career in fiction with the short story Sans haine et sans amour (‘Without hatred or love'), published in the periodical PrEsence Africaine, edited by Alioune Diop, in 1953. Beti's first novel Ville cruelle (‘Cruel City'), under the pseudonym Eza Boto, followed in 1954, published in several editions of PrEsence Africaine. It was, however, in 1956 that he gained a widespread reputation; the publication of the novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (‘The poor Christ of Bomba') created a scandal because of its satirical and biting description of the missionary and colonial world. Under pressure from the religious hierarchy, the colonial administrator in Cameroon banned the novel in the colony. This was followed by Mission terminEe, 1957 (winner of the Prix Sainte Beuve 1958), and Le Roi miraculE, 1958. He also worked during this time for the review Preuves, for which he reported from Africa. He worked also as a substitute teacher at the lycEe of Rambouillet. In 1959, he was named certified professor at the lycEe Henri Avril in Lamballe. He took the AgrEgation de Lettres classiques in 1966 and taught at the LycEe Pierre Corneille in Rouen. from this date until 1994. Following Nyobe's assassination by French forces in 1958, however, Beti fell silent as a writer for more than a decade, remaining in exile from his homeland. After his death,Odile Tobner noted that exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.In 1972 he re-entered the world of literature with a bang. His book Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une dEcolonisation ('Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization') was censored upon its publication by the French Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono. The essay, a critical history of recent Cameroon, asserted that Cameroon and other colonies remained under French control in all but name, and that the post-independence political elites had actively fostered this continued dependence. Beti was inspired to write in part by the execution of Ernest Ouandie by the government of Cameroon. In 1974 he published PerpEtue and Remember Ruben; the latter was the first in a trilogy exploring the life and impact of Nyobe. After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor Francois MaspEro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse. Beti returned to critical and political writing at the same time that he returned to fiction. In 1978 he and his wife Odile Tobner launched the bimonthly review Peuples Noirs. Peuples africains ('Black People. African People'), which was published until 1991. This review chronicled and denounced tirelessly the evils brought to Africa by neo-colonial regimes. During this period were published the novels La ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama futur camionneur (1983), La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama (1984), also Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la deuxième mort de Ruben Um NyobE (1984) and Dictionnaire de la negritude (1989, with Odile Tobner). Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works. In exile, Beti remained vitally connected to the struggle in Cameroon. Throughout the seventies and eighties, acquaintance with Beti or his work could spell trouble for a citizen of Cameroon; on numerous occasions, Beti used his connections in France to rescue one of his young readers, many of whom knew him from his periodical and his polemical essays. Ambroise Kom, arrested merely for subscribing to Peuples noirs, was saved from incarceration by Beti's actions in France on his behalf. In 1991 Mongo Beti returned to Cameroon, after 32 years of self-imposed exile. In 1993 he published La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun; this book chronicles his visits to his homeland. After retiring from teaching in 1994, he returned to Cameroon permanently. Various business endeavors in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in YaoundE the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organized agricultural activities in his village of Akometam. The goal of the bookshop was to encourage engaged literacy in the capital, and also to provide an outlet for critical texts and authors. During this period, Beti also supported John Fru Ndi, an anglophone opposition leader. He created associations for the defence of citizens and gave to the press numerous articles of protest. The government attempted to hinder his activities. On his first return to Cameroon, police prevented him from speaking at a scheduled conference; Beti instead addressed a crowd outside the locked conference room. He was subjected in January 1996, in the streets of YaoundE, to police aggression. He was challenged at a demonstration in October 1997. In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) et Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished. He was hospitalized in YaoundE on October 1, 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis. Transported to the hospital at Douala on October 6, he died there on October 8, 2001. Some critics noted the similarity of his death to that of his heroine Perpetua, who also died while awaiting treatment in one of the country's overburdened hospitals. From beginning to end, Beti's work was informed by two principles. In terms of style, he was a realist. In a critical statement published in 1955, he asserted that ‘Given the modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, given at the very least these essential conceptions, if a work is realistic it has many chances of being good; if not, supposing even that it has formal qualities, it risks lacking resonance, profundity, that of which all literature has the greatest need -- the human; from which it follows that it has much less chance of being good -- if only it had some -- than a realistic work.' Beti's fiction remains true to this credo. Thematically, Beti's work is unified by an unwavering commitment to combatting colonialism, both overt and covert. Beti's aim always, even in his harsh criticism of Cameroon's independence government, was to strengthen African autonomy and prosperity. ‘Sans haine et sans amour', 1953, is a short story and Beti's first significant work. |
![]() | ![]() | Beti, Mongo. Mission to Kala. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by Peter Green. Introduction by Bernth Lindfors. Collier African American Library. 215 pages. paperback. 04861.
DESCRIPTION - A scholar in spite of himself - Wit, satire and ribaldry triumph as Jean-Marie Medza, fresh from the University and failed exams, is sent on a mission to an up-country Cameroonian tribe to retrieve the wayward wife of a local villager. Medza has been delivered from his father's wrath - temporarily only to meet a more questionable fate at the hands of his relatives in Kala who capitalize on their newly discovered treasure - a city boy - and a scholar as well! Soon distracted from his mission. Medza finds himself the center of the action - lionized by the uneducated villagers, exploited by his cunning uncle and terrorized by adoring females of all ages whose determination spells disaster to the only aspect of Medza's person which has escaped public notice: his virginity. 'Over and above its intrinsic merit as a piece of creative writing, this first novel by a French West African Negro is notable for its mere existence. What impresses about Beti's genuinely indigenous African novel is his tone of carefree gaiety, his adeptness in pouring new narrative wine into an old literary bottle, and his sympathetic contrast between two generations divided by a yawning gulf.' - The New York Times Book Review. ‘Very entertaining indeed an original talent.' - The Times Literary Supplement, London.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country. As one critic wrote after his death, ‘The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African people.'The son of Oscar Awala and REgine Alomo, Alexandre was born in 1932 at AkomEtan, a small village 10 km from Mbalmayo, itself 45 km away from YaoundE, capital of Cameroon. (The village's name comes from Akom ‘rock' and Etam ‘source': in old maps of the region, the name is written in two parts). From an early age, Beti was influenced by the currents of rebellion sweeping Africa in the wake of World War II. His father drowned when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his mother and extended family. Beti recalls arguing with his mother about religion and colonialism; he also recalls early exposure to the opinions and analysis of independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, both in the villages and at Nyobe's private residence. He carried these views into the classroom, and was eventually expelled from the missionary school in Mbalmayo for his outspokenness. In 1945 he entered the lycEe Leclerc in YaoundE. Graduating in 1951, he came to France to continue his higher education in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence, then at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the early 1950s, Beti had turned to writing as a vehicle of protest. He wrote regularly for the journal PrEsence Africaine; among his pieces was a review of Camara Laye's Black Child that criticized Laye for what Beti saw as pandering to European tastes. He began his career in fiction with the short story Sans haine et sans amour (‘Without hatred or love'), published in the periodical PrEsence Africaine, edited by Alioune Diop, in 1953. Beti's first novel Ville cruelle (‘Cruel City'), under the pseudonym Eza Boto, followed in 1954, published in several editions of PrEsence Africaine. It was, however, in 1956 that he gained a widespread reputation; the publication of the novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (‘The poor Christ of Bomba') created a scandal because of its satirical and biting description of the missionary and colonial world. Under pressure from the religious hierarchy, the colonial administrator in Cameroon banned the novel in the colony. This was followed by Mission terminEe, 1957 (winner of the Prix Sainte Beuve 1958), and Le Roi miraculE, 1958. He also worked during this time for the review Preuves, for which he reported from Africa. He worked also as a substitute teacher at the lycEe of Rambouillet. In 1959, he was named certified professor at the lycEe Henri Avril in Lamballe. He took the AgrEgation de Lettres classiques in 1966 and taught at the LycEe Pierre Corneille in Rouen. from this date until 1994. Following Nyobe's assassination by French forces in 1958, however, Beti fell silent as a writer for more than a decade, remaining in exile from his homeland. After his death,Odile Tobner noted that exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.In 1972 he re-entered the world of literature with a bang. His book Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une dEcolonisation ('Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization') was censored upon its publication by the French Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono. The essay, a critical history of recent Cameroon, asserted that Cameroon and other colonies remained under French control in all but name, and that the post-independence political elites had actively fostered this continued dependence. Beti was inspired to write in part by the execution of Ernest Ouandie by the government of Cameroon. In 1974 he published PerpEtue and Remember Ruben; the latter was the first in a trilogy exploring the life and impact of Nyobe. After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor Francois MaspEro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse. Beti returned to critical and political writing at the same time that he returned to fiction. In 1978 he and his wife Odile Tobner launched the bimonthly review Peuples Noirs. Peuples africains ('Black People. African People'), which was published until 1991. This review chronicled and denounced tirelessly the evils brought to Africa by neo-colonial regimes. During this period were published the novels La ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama futur camionneur (1983), La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama (1984), also Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la deuxième mort de Ruben Um NyobE (1984) and Dictionnaire de la negritude (1989, with Odile Tobner). Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works. In exile, Beti remained vitally connected to the struggle in Cameroon. Throughout the seventies and eighties, acquaintance with Beti or his work could spell trouble for a citizen of Cameroon; on numerous occasions, Beti used his connections in France to rescue one of his young readers, many of whom knew him from his periodical and his polemical essays. Ambroise Kom, arrested merely for subscribing to Peuples noirs, was saved from incarceration by Beti's actions in France on his behalf. In 1991 Mongo Beti returned to Cameroon, after 32 years of self-imposed exile. In 1993 he published La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun; this book chronicles his visits to his homeland. After retiring from teaching in 1994, he returned to Cameroon permanently. Various business endeavors in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in YaoundE the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organized agricultural activities in his village of Akometam. The goal of the bookshop was to encourage engaged literacy in the capital, and also to provide an outlet for critical texts and authors. During this period, Beti also supported John Fru Ndi, an anglophone opposition leader. He created associations for the defence of citizens and gave to the press numerous articles of protest. The government attempted to hinder his activities. On his first return to Cameroon, police prevented him from speaking at a scheduled conference; Beti instead addressed a crowd outside the locked conference room. He was subjected in January 1996, in the streets of YaoundE, to police aggression. He was challenged at a demonstration in October 1997. In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) et Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished. He was hospitalized in YaoundE on October 1, 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis. Transported to the hospital at Douala on October 6, he died there on October 8, 2001. Some critics noted the similarity of his death to that of his heroine Perpetua, who also died while awaiting treatment in one of the country's overburdened hospitals. From beginning to end, Beti's work was informed by two principles. In terms of style, he was a realist. In a critical statement published in 1955, he asserted that ‘Given the modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, given at the very least these essential conceptions, if a work is realistic it has many chances of being good; if not, supposing even that it has formal qualities, it risks lacking resonance, profundity, that of which all literature has the greatest need -- the human; from which it follows that it has much less chance of being good -- if only it had some -- than a realistic work.' Beti's fiction remains true to this credo. Thematically, Beti's work is unified by an unwavering commitment to combatting colonialism, both overt and covert. Beti's aim always, even in his harsh criticism of Cameroon's independence government, was to strengthen African autonomy and prosperity. ‘Sans haine et sans amour', 1953, is a short story and Beti's first significant work. |
![]() | ![]() | Brown, William Wells. Clotel, or the President’s Daughter. New York. 1975. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Arthur Davis. Collier African American Library. 202 pages. paperback. 04913.
DESCRIPTION - A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC - CLOTEL, OR THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER, first published in London in 1853, is brought to the American reading public for the first time in a completely unexpurgated edition. Based on fact and the author's personal experience, it surpasses UNCLE TOM'S CABIN as a tale of truth and tragedy. To this day it stands as the classic Negro American novel, marking the birth of the black writer in this country. Clotel is the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his housekeeper-mistress, a slave. Long after Jefferson has passed from their lives, she and her mother, are sold at an auction, where families are mercilessly separated and peddled by their blood relatives. CLOTEL exposes the flesh trade throughout the south in all its venality and horror: slave pens, auction blocks, bloodhounds, monstrous ‘nigger drives', seductions, suicides, murders and burnings. The yellow fever epidemic of 1831 and Nat Turner's insurrection are both described. Although Jefferson never enters the story, his utterances on slavery are skillfully woven throughout the commentary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Wells Brown (circa 1814 - November 6, 1884) was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near the town of Mount Sterling, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, where he resided at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Brown was lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US; he stayed overseas for several years to avoid the risk of capture and re-enslavement. After his freedom was purchased in 1854 by a British couple, he and his two daughters returned to the US. He rejoined the abolitionist lecture circuit. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Wells Brown was overshadowed by the charismatic orator and the two feuded publicly. |
![]() | ![]() | Chesnutt, Charles W. The House Behind the Cedars. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Darwin Turner. Collier African American Library. 265 pages. paperback. 04938.
DESCRIPTION - CHARLES W. CHESNUTT was the first important Negro novelist to look, and look honestly, at the interracial and intraracial conflicts festering in the white society of the post-Civil War South. In The House Behind: the Cedars, his detached and compassionate presentation of individuals on different sides of the color line brings into sharp focus the race-consciousness and snobbery that existed among both blacks and whites in a schizophrenic and turbulent era. The novel tells of Rena Walden's withdrawal to the house behind the cedars, a flight from love in a world which could at any moment uncover the secret her family had so carefully tried to hide. And it explores the drastically changing views of the white man who loves her. In the development of Negro literature in America, THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS holds a place of great social and historical importance. It demands to be read. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT, school principal, lawyer, businessman, lecturer, and political activist, was one of the first black writers to make money from his writing. Many of his early short stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press. DARWIN T. TURNER is Dean at North Carolina A and T State University in Greensboro.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 - November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income. |
![]() | ![]() | Drachler, Jacob. African Heritage. New York. 1969. Collier.Macmillan. 286 pages. paperback. 05052.
DESCRIPTION - Intimate views of the great heritage of Black Africans and Black Americans. AFRICAN HERITAGE, an anthology of writings by and about Africans, provides a new and deep insight into the Black African, reflects the profusion of lifestyles to be found on the African continent, and conveys a vivid portrait of a rich and varied cultural tradition. In Part One, ‘A.frican Voices,' the people reveal themselves through their traditional oral literature, tales, proverbs and songs, and through the works of the new African thinkers, writers and poets, among them Jomo Kenyatta, Birago Diop, Camara Laye, Ezekiel Mphahele and Albert Luthuli. Part Two, ‘Afro-American Responses,' presents reflections on their heritage by distinguished artists of African descent, among them Rene Maran, Pearl Primus and St. Clair Drake. In Part Three, ‘Through the Eyes of Others,' the African land and its people are movingly depicted by non-Africans - scholars and writers who have lived and worked there for many years and who offer acute and realistic observations on an Africa they know and love, among them Melville J. Herskovits, Joyce Cary, Thomas L. Hodgkin and Elspeth Huxley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacob Drachler, a teacher and artist, and a member of the African Studies Association, has pursued an active interest in African life and literature for many years. . |
![]() | ![]() | Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. New York. 1970. Collier.Macmillan. 0451527550. Introduction by Charles Nilon, University of Colorado. Collier African American Library. 189 pages. paperback. 05053. Cover art by Stephen Perry. Signet Classic original.
DESCRIPTION - The Classic Black Protest Novel - Writing at the turn of the century, Paul Laurence Dunbar produced the first major protest novel by an American Negro the slashing, bitterly ironic Sport of the Gods. In his portrayal of the disintegration of a respectable southern black family forced to move to the North, Dunbar was the first to expose the quality of life in Harlem, with its manic desperation, grinding poverty and the self-contempt that drove men to madness, degradation and murder. A false accusation of thievery has already imprisoned their husband and father when the family of Berry Hamilton is driven out of their southern home by black and white alike, forced to find a new life amidst the gaudy squalor of Harlem. Naive and bewildered, they confront violence, brutality and raw survival in an urban slum, only to learn that innocence has no place among the oppressed and that vulnerability means death. Above all looms Harlem - Harlem of yesterday and today - a bleached, hostile canvas for the black rage and frustration of America's latter-day slaves. PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872-1906) was a prolific and successful author of four novels, several volumes of poetry and drama and a half-dozen collections of short stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was born to two former slaves. While working as an elevator operator, he published his first poetry collection. His second collection in 1895 thrust him into the national spotlight and garnered praise from the white and black elite. He ultimately produced twelve books of poetry, several stories and plays, and five novels. |
![]() | ![]() | Hughes, Langston. Not Without Laughter. New York. 1974. Collier.Macmillam. Introduction by Arna Bontemps. Collier African American Library. 304 pages. paperback. 04802.
DESCRIPTION - ‘We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. It they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful.' - Langston Hughes, 1926. This revolutionary manifesto preceded by four years Langston Hughes's long-awaited first novel, his poignant story of a black boy growing to manhood in a small Kansas town in the 1930s. Not Without Laughter is neither the melodrama of Harems cabarets nor the sentimentality of southern cotton fields, but sensitive perception of simple people meeting as best they can the problems of a complex and destructive environment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.' ARNA BONTEMPS, the distinguished writer and critic, is curator and lecturer at Yale University. |
![]() | ![]() | Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. New York. 1971. Collier.Macmillan. Introduction by Wilfred Cartey. Collier African American Library. 166 pages. paperback. 05241.
DESCRIPTION - The Grand Prix-winning novel of a black revolutionary's dilemma. A modern African political revolutionary discovers that he is neither black nor white, African nor French, but a cultural hybrid who does not even recognize himself. Samba Diallo, a simple revolutionary, attempts to win political freedom for his country by ridding it of a foreign despotism. Along the way he discovers that his integrity - and that of Africa - is threatened by the very attractiveness of the alien culture which he seeks to overcome. AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE is a novel which holds up the pure culture of Africa to the light of the Afro-European culture to discover the flaws as well as the virtues of this diffusion. It attempts to find a middle ground where the best of the European and the best of the African can combine to fit the needs of the new African nations. CHEIKH HAMIDOU KANE has been director of the Cabinet within the Senegalese Ministry of Development and Planning, governor of the region of Thies, and commissioner of planning in the Dia government. AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE won the Grand Prix for French-speaking Black Africa in 1962. Wilfred Cartey, author of WHISPERS FROM A CONTINENT: THE LITERATURE OF CONTEMPORARY BLACK AFRICA, is associate in African literature at Columbia University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cheikh Hamidou Kane (born 3 April 1928 in Matam) is a Senegalese writer best known for his prize-winning novel L'Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), about the interactions of western and African cultures. Its hero is a Fulani boy who goes to study in France. There, he loses touch with his Islamic faith and his Senegalese roots. |
![]() | ![]() | Kayira, Legson. The Looming Shadow. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Harold Collins. Collier African American Library. 158 pages. paperback. 03401.
DESCRIPTION - Witchhunters of Nyasaland: Native Justice vs. ‘White Law Once upon a time Musyani was a respected member of his Nyasaland tribe, but now he is charged with witchcraft and accused of deliberately inducing his brother-in-law's death. All have turned against him as'he awaits judgment by the village headman in a bizarre ritual trial. But the harsh justice of native tradition is a thing of the past, and word of the ‘illegal' trial soon reaches the white District Commissioner who unleashes the impersonal arm of foreign law to penetrate the jungle with swift, brutal, callous detachment. With poetic simplicity, Legson Kayira recounts his unique yet ages-old story - the clash of ancient and new customs, the imposition of foreign and meaningless law, and the slow dying of tribal rites which, in all their cruelty and seeming arbitrariness, still offer logical rule and human justice. THE LOOMING SHADOW is an authentic African novel which powerfully evokes the love, hate, passion, revenge, and retribution of a tribal culture encountering its last and greatest threat - European civilization. LEGSON KAYIRA, born in Nyasaland's bush country, trekked 2,500 miles across Africa to the U.S. Consulate in Khartoum determined to receive an education in America. A graduate of the University of Washington, he won a scholarship to Cambridge in England, where he now lives. He is the prize-winning author of I WILL TRY, his remarkable autobiography.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Legson Didimu Kayira (c.?1942 - 14 October 2012) was a Malawian novelist. Kayira, an ethnic Tumbuka, received an education at Skagit Valley College, University of Washington and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His early works focused on Malawi's rural life, while his later writings satirised the Hastings Banda regime. Kayira was born in Mpale, a village in Nyasaland (now Malawi); the precise date was not recorded. Soon after his birth, his mother threw him into the Didimu River as she could not afford to feed him. He was rescued and acquired the name "Didimu". He himself added the English-sounding name "Legson" when he was in school. At the age of sixteen, he decided that the only away to achieve a college degree was to go to the US, and he set out on foot to do so. When he reached Kampala in Uganda he saw the name of Skagit Valley College, Washington State, in a US Information service directory, so he applied and was awarded a place and a scholarship. Kayira then embarked on a journey of over 3000 kilometres and walked to Khartoum, where he obtained a visa, and people from Skagit Valley raised the money to bring him over to Washington. He arrived at Skagit Valley two years after setting out. He went on to become a graduate student at Cambridge University, and subsequently a probation officer and the author of several novels. His autobiography, I Will Try, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 16 weeks after its publication in 1965. He made his home in England, and died in London on 14 October 2012. In October, 2014, an American charitable organization called "Youth of Malawi" built a primary school in the rural Malawian village of Chimphamba and named it after Legson Kayira. The Legson Kayira Primary School and Community Center is solar-powered, rainwater harvesting, and boasts an outdoor movie projecter. |
![]() | ![]() | Kelley, William Melvin. dem. New York. 1969. Collier Books. Introduction by Willie Abraham, University of Ghana. Collier African /American Library. 141 pages. paperback. 05243. Jacket art by L & D Dillon.
DESCRIPTION - ‘LEMME TELLYA HOW DEM FOLKS LIVE. .' dem is white folks. And how they really live is the focus of black novelist William Melvin Kelley's jolting put-on of Whitey and his ways. Mrs. Mitchell Pierce, bored with her philandering husband, takes a black lover. When she bears twins, one black, one white, the outraged Pierce takes off for Harlem to track down his ‘co-genitor' and rack up a little white justice. The result is not only ‘one of the outstanding comic novels of the decade' (The Boston Globe), but also ‘a frightening story of white Americans utterly controlled and deluded by fantasies - and Negroes quietly watching, laughing, and hating' (Choice).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Melvin Kelley (born November 1, 1937) is a prominent African-American novelist and short-story writer. He is known for the novel A Different Drummer. He has won, among other things, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 for Lifetime Achievement. Kelley has been a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and has taught at the New School for Social Research. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Kelley was born in New York City and was educated at the Fieldston School in New York and later attended Harvard University (class of 1960), where he won the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. According to Robert E. Fleming, "From the beginning of his career in 1962, William Melvin Kelley has employed his distinctive form of Black comedy to examine the absurdities surrounding American racial attitudes." |
![]() | ![]() | Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Richard Wright. Collier African /American Library. 341 pages. paperback. 05270.
DESCRIPTION - ‘We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions, its naive illusions about the world outside. The people speak an English vernacular in which the book is written. The result is something strange, emotional and compassionate, something between garrulous realism and popular poetry, and it is quite delightful. One is back again in the pages of Huckleberry Finn - the fundamental book of a civilization - and Mr. Lamming's book reminds one delightfully, indeed poignantly of it in many episodes. As in Huckleberry Finn there is the feeling for landscape, for times of day and night and there is nothing rhetorical, studied or conventional about his descriptions. Mr. Lamming catches the myth-making and myth-dissolving mind of boyhood, the sudden stupors and astonishments. He has caught the endless jawing of boys as they grow up into a life which is very different from the one they imagine. This ability to get the groping mind is Mr. Lamming's gift and it is very valuable and very civilised. His book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly.' - V. S. PRITCHETT (New Statesman and Nation).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. |
![]() | ![]() | Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Hoyt Fuller of BLACK WORLD. 189 pages. paperback. 05268.
DESCRIPTION - THE SKIN GAME. Clare Kendry is a beautiful, sophisticated white society matron. She is also an alien black soul; a light-skinned mulatto who opted for the great white way only to discover - too late - that she yearned for the black experience, and that to recapture it, she was willing to go to any lengths, regardless of the danger involved. And so she played the game, straddling both sides of the racial line, courting exposure, humiliation and ruin in this extraordinary novel of love and hate. Unflinchingly honest, Nella Larsen exposes the fatal deceptions practiced by black and white elite in this provocative spellbinder of social tragedy and violent, meaningless death. Passing and Quicksand are the first attempts by a black writer to examine the, plight of the upper-class black woman, trapped in society's most rigid caste.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891, Chicago, IL - March 30, 1964, Brooklyn, New York City, NY) is the author of Quicksand, also available in Collier Books. She died in relative obscurity in 1963. |
![]() | ![]() | Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Adelaide Cromwell Hill. Collier African /American Library. 222 pages. paperback. 05269. Cover illustration by E. Stephen Perry.
DESCRIPTION - Taut and terrifying, this personal odyssey of an upper-class mulatto woman unveils the tortured search for identity among the racially disinherited. Helga Crane is beautiful, bright and desperate. Drifting from one society to another, she seeks a place to call her own. But it always seems just beyond her grasp. One step beyond. First came Harlem with its high life, brilliant hues, jangling memories; then, Copenhagen, home of her blond, blue-eyed, ambitious relatives who welcomed her as an exotic ornament on their upward climb into gilt-edged society. They gave her everything. But for Helga Crane, too much would never be enough. Unwilling to accept her blackness, unable to adapt to whiteness, she returned to America to discover her ironic destiny in spiritual oblivion amidst a sect of fundamentalist Alabama sharecroppers. Nella Larsen's milestone novel was the first to dramatize the plight of the cultured black woman, trapped between two worlds and alien to both. Nella Larsen is the author of one other novel, PASSING, also available in Collier Books. She died in relative obscurity in 1963.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen, born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 - March 30, 1964), was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels - Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) - and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late twentieth century, when issues of racial and sexual identity and identification have been studied. |
![]() | ![]() | Larson, Charles R. (editor and introduction). African Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary African Writing. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Charles R. Larson. 210 pages. paperback. 05271.
DESCRIPTION - AFRICA UNVEILED. This extraordinary anthology offers a panorama of contemporary Africa in all its humor, vitality, wit, and tragedy. Its ten contributors include Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alex La Guma and James Matthews from South Africa; Amos Tutuola, West Nigeria; Nuwa Sentongo and Barbara Kimenye, Uganda; James Ngugi, Kenya; Cameron Duodu, Ghana; Sylvain Bemba, the Congo; and Abioseh Nicol, Sierra Leone. Seven of these stories receive their first American publication in this volume. A tour-de-force of modern African literature, African Short Stories ranges from folk tales masterfully retold to sophisticated and caustic stories of protest and culture clash. Amos Tutuola's "The Complete Gentleman" is the surreal legend of a lady's love for an irresistible dandy - who has rented all the parts of his body. Sylvain Bemba's 'The Dark Room" offers a grotesque Jekyll - Hyde encounter between a brilliant black madman and an alien Paris. Ezekiel Mphahlele's "Mrs. Plum" evokes the education of a young black servant in a "liberal" white home. Story by story, this dazzling spectrum reveals the mind and spirit of that
endlessly fascinating, infinitely varied Dark Continent, Africa.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CHARLES R. LARSON is General Editor of the Collier Books African/ American library. |
![]() | ![]() | Laye, Camara. A Dream of Africa. London. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Collier African/American Library. Translated from the French by James Kirkup. Introduction by Emile Snyder. 190 pages. paperback. 05274.
DESCRIPTION - A DREAM BETRAYED - After six years in Paris, Fatoman returns to his beloved Guinea which is now distorted by revolution, exploitation, fear and a hedonistic, neo-Colonial black bourgeoisie. A stranger to this new Africa, he observes with horror the erosion of his native land its religion, magic and ancient skills, which have yielded to naïve political violence and progress. In a bizarre and prophetic nightmare, Fatoman sees Guinea as a wasteland: a Kafkaesque future revealed with a poetic intensity that is as immediate, terrifying and unavoidable as fate itself. Strongly autobiographical in tone, this courageous and uncompromising novel unveils the political and cultural plight of Africa and her peoples today. A tragic, ugly independence is frozen in all its spiritual bankruptcy and waste by one of Africa's most sensitive and gifted writers. CAMARA LAYE was born into the magic of French Guinea. Both his parents were believed to possess supernatural powers. He is the author of The Radiance of the King, published by Collier Books. He now lives in exile in Senegal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Camara Laye (January 1, 1928 - February 4, 1980) was an African writer from Guinea. He was the author of The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood, and The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi). Both novels are among the earliest major works in Francophone African literature. Camara Laye later worked for the government of newly independent Guinea, but went into voluntary exile over political issues. Camara Laye was born in Kouroussa, a town in what was then the colony of French Guinea. His family were Malinke (a MandE speaking ethnicity), and he was born into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fifteen he went to Conakry, the colonial capital, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studying mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalaurEat. Camara Laye published his first novel in 1953, the autobiographical L'Enfant noir (The African Child, also published under the title The Dark Child). It follows his own journey from childhood in Kouroussa, his education in Conakry, and eventual departure for France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed the next year by Le Regard du roi (The Radiance of the King). The Radiance of the King was described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as 'one of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial period.' In 1956 Camara Laye returned to Africa, first to Dahomey, then the Gold Coast, and finally to newly independent Guinea, where he held several government posts. He left Guinea for Senegal in 1965 because of political issues, never returning to his home country. In 1966 Camara Laye's third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word), was published. The novel was based on a Malian epic told by the griot Babou CondE about Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. Camara Laye's authorship of Le Regard du roi was questioned by literary scholar Adele King in her book Rereading Camara Laye.She claimed that he had considerable help in writing L'Enfant noir and did not write any part of Le Regard du roi. Scholar F. Abiola Irele, in an article called In Search of Camara Laye asserts that the claims are not 'sufficiently grounded' to adequately justify that Laye did not author the mentioned work. |
![]() | ![]() | Laye, Camara. The Radiance of the King. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by James Kirkup. Introduction by Albert S. Gerard. Collier African /American Library. 253 pages. paperback. 05273. Cover art by Jack Wolf.
DESCRIPTION - A black writer penetrates the heart of a white man in this brilliant tragicomic parable of two Africas - a literary and symbolic masterpiece exposes as never before the mind and spirit of a white pilgrim and his black counterparts. One glimpse of the magnificent black King of Kings, and the white man Clarence realizes that only in his service will he ever find peace. Down and out but arrogant, he assumes that his color will automatically gain him an audience. But his appeal is denied, and he becomes obsessed with the desire to confront the King at any cost. And so begins Clarence's odyssey. Fleeing from gambling debts, corrupt justice, and the contempt of his fellow whites, he begins a grueling trek to the savage South, accompanied by a roguish beggar and two boys. The overwhelming jungle and its many false trails finally give way to the South, ‘provocative and cruel, lascivious and unmentionable,' where Clarence comes to the end of a bizarre hallucinatory quest for ‘soul' and redemption in THE RADIANCE OF KING.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Camara Laye (January 1, 1928 - February 4, 1980) was an African writer from Guinea. He was the author of The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood, and The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi). Both novels are among the earliest major works in Francophone African literature. Camara Laye later worked for the government of newly independent Guinea, but went into voluntary exile over political issues. Camara Laye was born in Kouroussa, a town in what was then the colony of French Guinea. His family were Malinke (a MandE speaking ethnicity), and he was born into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fifteen he went to Conakry, the colonial capital, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studying mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalaurEat. Camara Laye published his first novel in 1953, the autobiographical L'Enfant noir (The African Child, also published under the title The Dark Child). It follows his own journey from childhood in Kouroussa, his education in Conakry, and eventual departure for France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed the next year by Le Regard du roi (The Radiance of the King). The Radiance of the King was described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as 'one of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial period.' In 1956 Camara Laye returned to Africa, first to Dahomey, then the Gold Coast, and finally to newly independent Guinea, where he held several government posts. He left Guinea for Senegal in 1965 because of political issues, never returning to his home country. In 1966 Camara Laye's third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word), was published. The novel was based on a Malian epic told by the griot Babou CondE about Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. Camara Laye's authorship of Le Regard du roi was questioned by literary scholar Adele King in her book Rereading Camara Laye.She claimed that he had considerable help in writing L'Enfant noir and did not write any part of Le Regard du roi. Scholar F. Abiola Irele, in an article called In Search of Camara Laye asserts that the claims are not 'sufficiently grounded' to adequately justify that Laye did not author the mentioned work. |
![]() | ![]() | Ngugi, James. Weep Not, Child. New York. 1969. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Martin Tucker. Collier African /American Library. 184 pages. paperback. 05308.
DESCRIPTION - Njoroge's only true brother was Mwangi who had died in the white man's big war in Burma, Boro, Kori, and Kamau were all sons of his father's eldest wife, but they all behaved as if they were of one mother and home was a particularly happy place. Above everything else, Njoroge, the youngest, wanted to get education and become like the eldest son of the rich farmer, Jacobo, who had finished all the learning in Kenya and would now go to England. His father, Ngotho, was employed by Mr. Howlands who had come from England to farm the land. Together the two men would go from place to place, examining a new shoot or pulling out a weed, Ngotho felt responsible for the land because he owed it to the dead, the living and the unborn of his line to guard over it until the prophecy came true; Mr. Howlands walked through the shamba with a sense of victory because he had tamed this unoccupied wilderness. At school, Njoroge was good at reading. Education was the key to the future: when Jomo was arrested and a state of emergency declared, it made very little difference at first - everyone knew that Jomo would win, But, one day, Ngotho was arrested and tortured, Boro left to join the freedom fighters in the forest, Jacobo was killed and Mwihaki, his daughter, would not see Njoroge, Gradually all the family was drawn into the struggle and the war became a day-to-day tragedy. This first novel by a young Kikuyu is a moving study of the fight for freedom and the rich red earth of Kenya.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system', by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. Ngugi's project sought to ‘demystify' the theatrical process, and to avoid the ‘process of alienation [which] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers' which, according to Ngugi, encourages passivity in ‘ordinary people'. Although Ngaahika Ndeenda was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. Ngugi was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His son is the author Mukoma wa Ngugi. Ngugi was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamriithu homeguard post. He received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, THE BLACK HERMIT, was produced in Kampala in 1962. He published his first novel, WEEP NOT, CHILD, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be published by an East African. His second novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. THE RIVER BETWEEN is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. His novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I WILL MARRY WHEN I WANT) provoked then Vice President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, he wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (DEVIL ON THE CROSS), on prison-issued toilet paper. After his release, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return. His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), DECOLONISING THE MIND: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native languages, rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and MATIGARI (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folktale. In 1992 he became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. On August 8, 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On August 11, robbers broke into his apartment: they assaulted both the Professor and his wife, and stole money and a computer. Since then, Ngugi has returned to America, and in the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, WIZARD OF THE CROW, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author. On November 10, 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngugi was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered the Kenyan community in the San Francisco Bay area and abroad, prompting an apology by the hotel. |
![]() | ![]() | Oyono, Ferdinand. Boy!. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by John Reed. Introduction by Edris Makward. Collier African /American Library. 144 pages. paperback. 05320.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Brother, what are we? What are we blackmen who are called French?' They call him BOY! but his name is Toundi. He has died, leaving only a diary and eight last words, ‘You see brother, I'm finished. They've got me.' Not so long ago, when he was very young, very innocent and totally awed by the white world, Toundi decided to educate and advance himself as a house-boy, first to a Mission priest, and then to the local Commandant and his beautiful wife. Eager and ambitious, he looked at his world too closely and saw too much - the lying, the infidelities, the weakness and depravity of his white masters and the degradation of their black servants. His awakening was his death, for Toundi unveiled the false gods, and they could not afford to let him live. ‘. Both very funny and inexpressibly sad. [Mr. Oyono's] sophisticated wit stings like a mosquito and he underwrites his story with real craftsmanship.' - Punch. ‘. finely pointed.' - Sunday Times, London ‘. a book of moving and confident mastery.' - Sunday Telegraph, London. FERDINAND OYONO, author of The Old Man and The Medal, is a French-educated writer-actor-diplomat.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ferdinand LEopold Oyono (14 September 1929 - 10 June 2010) was an author from Cameroon whose work is recognised for a sense of irony that reveals how easily people can be fooled. Writing in French in the 1950s, Oyono had only a brief literary career, but his anti-colonialist novels are considered classics of 20th century African literature; his first novel, Une vie de boy - published in 1956 and later translated as Houseboy - is considered particularly important. Beginning in the 1960s, Oyono had a long career of service as a diplomat and as a minister in the government of Cameroon. As one of President Paul Biya's top associates, he ultimately served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 1997 and then as Minister of State for Culture from 1997 to 2007. Oyono was born near Ebolowa in the South Province of Cameroon. After obtaining his secondary education in YaoundE, Oyono studied in Paris. Following Cameroon's independence, Oyono was a member of the Cameroonian delegation to the United Nations in 1960, when the country was admitted to the UN. Oyono subsequently served as Cameroon's ambassador to various countries from 1965 to 1974. He was briefly the Ambassador to Liberia in 1965, then served as ambassador to the Benelux countries and the European Communities from 1965 to 1968 and as ambassador to France, with additional accreditation for Spain, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, from 1969 to 1974. From 1974 to 1982 he was Cameroon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations; he acted as President of the United Nations Security Council in place of the United Kingdom's Ivor Richard at the 1,866th meeting of the Security Council on 16 December 1975. From 1982 to 1985 he again served as ambassador to various countries: first as ambassador to Algeria and Libya, then as ambassador to the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries. In 1985, President Paul Biya recalled Oyono from London and appointed him as Secretary-General of the Presidency of Cameroon. Oyono remained in the post for about a year before Biya instead appointed him as Minister of Town Planning and Housing in 1986. The post of Secretary-General of the Presidency was historically very powerful, but Oyono's stint in the office was associated with a weakening of it under President Biya; significantly, Oyono was moved from the Secretariat-General to an ordinary ministry - effectively a demotion. Although Oyono was dismissed from the government in 1990, he was subsequently appointed as Minister of Foreign Relations on 27 November 1992, serving in that position until he was instead named Minister of State for Culture on 8 December 1997. Oyono was a member of the National Commission for the co-ordination of President Biya's re-election campaign in the October 2004 presidential election and was the president of the campaign's support and follow-up committee in the South Province. After nearly ten years as Minister of State for Culture, Oyono was dismissed from the government on 7 September 2007. Oyono was thought to be a close friend of Paul Biya, and observers attributed his departure from the government to his advanced age and poor health. He had been criticised for reportedly not working at his ministry for months at a time. After leaving the government, Oyono was thought to retain a great deal of influence as ‘an unofficial adviser' to Biya. Biya appointed him as a roving ambassador on 30 June 2009. As the representative of President Biya, Oyono attended a play commemorating Cameroon's independence struggle and the country's subsequent reunification on 14 May 2010; the play was part of festivities marking Cameroon's 50th year of independence from France. During a visit to Cameroon by Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the 80-year-old Oyono died suddenly in YaoundE on 10 June 2010. Reportedly Oyono fell ill at the presidential palace after a reception for the Secretary-General; he received immediate medical attention and an ambulance was called, but he quickly died. Later in the day, President Biya released a statement expressing sadness regarding Oyono's death, although the statement gave no details. Secretary-General Ban, meanwhile, expressed sadness during a speech to the National Assembly of Cameroon. An official funeral was held for Oyono with a series of events beginning on 24 June 2010 and concluding with his burial at Ngoazip, near Ebolowa, on 26 June. |
![]() | ![]() | Oyono, Ferdinand. The Old Man and the Medal. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by John Reed. Introduction by John Pepper Clark. Collier African /American Library. 191 pages. paperback. 05319.
DESCRIPTION - A model Christian (black) prepares to meet his Maker (white) The news has spread and old Meka is an instant celebrity. After years of devoted adherence to the white colonial government and its authorized religion, he is about to receive a medal from its Most Distinguished Official, in a ceremony that promises to be the biggest social event of the season. The village is bursting with excitement. At last, the great day is here! But as he proudly waits in line for his medal, a lifetime of sacrifice passes before his eyes - the loss of his lands, his sons and. his heritage. For what? For whom? For this beefy red-faced bureaucrat who is about to pin a tin badge on Meka's second-class chest? What happens to Meka and his medal after the ceremony is an appallingly funny look at the subtleties of polite society and its initiation rites: not only do all blacks look alike to colonial eyes, but, with or without medals, some look even more alike than others. Ferdinand Oyono's brilliant satire is first-class entertainment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FERDINAND OYONO was born in the Cameroons and educated in France. An actor, diplomat and writer, he is the author of Boy! published by Collier Books.Ferdinand LEopold Oyono (14 September 1929 - 10 June 2010) was an author from Cameroon whose work is recognised for a sense of irony that reveals how easily people can be fooled. Writing in French in the 1950s, Oyono had only a brief literary career, but his anti-colonialist novels are considered classics of 20th century African literature; his first novel, Une vie de boy - published in 1956 and later translated as Houseboy - is considered particularly important. Beginning in the 1960s, Oyono had a long career of service as a diplomat and as a minister in the government of Cameroon. As one of President Paul Biya's top associates, he ultimately served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 1997 and then as Minister of State for Culture from 1997 to 2007. Oyono was born near Ebolowa in the South Province of Cameroon. After obtaining his secondary education in YaoundE, Oyono studied in Paris. Following Cameroon's independence, Oyono was a member of the Cameroonian delegation to the United Nations in 1960, when the country was admitted to the UN. Oyono subsequently served as Cameroon's ambassador to various countries from 1965 to 1974. He was briefly the Ambassador to Liberia in 1965, then served as ambassador to the Benelux countries and the European Communities from 1965 to 1968 and as ambassador to France, with additional accreditation for Spain, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, from 1969 to 1974. From 1974 to 1982 he was Cameroon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations; he acted as President of the United Nations Security Council in place of the United Kingdom's Ivor Richard at the 1,866th meeting of the Security Council on 16 December 1975. From 1982 to 1985 he again served as ambassador to various countries: first as ambassador to Algeria and Libya, then as ambassador to the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries. In 1985, President Paul Biya recalled Oyono from London and appointed him as Secretary-General of the Presidency of Cameroon. Oyono remained in the post for about a year before Biya instead appointed him as Minister of Town Planning and Housing in 1986. The post of Secretary-General of the Presidency was historically very powerful, but Oyono's stint in the office was associated with a weakening of it under President Biya; significantly, Oyono was moved from the Secretariat-General to an ordinary ministry - effectively a demotion. Although Oyono was dismissed from the government in 1990, he was subsequently appointed as Minister of Foreign Relations on 27 November 1992, serving in that position until he was instead named Minister of State for Culture on 8 December 1997. Oyono was a member of the National Commission for the co-ordination of President Biya's re-election campaign in the October 2004 presidential election and was the president of the campaign's support and follow-up committee in the South Province. After nearly ten years as Minister of State for Culture, Oyono was dismissed from the government on 7 September 2007. Oyono was thought to be a close friend of Paul Biya, and observers attributed his departure from the government to his advanced age and poor health. He had been criticised for reportedly not working at his ministry for months at a time. After leaving the government, Oyono was thought to retain a great deal of influence as ‘an unofficial adviser' to Biya. Biya appointed him as a roving ambassador on 30 June 2009. As the representative of President Biya, Oyono attended a play commemorating Cameroon's independence struggle and the country's subsequent reunification on 14 May 2010; the play was part of festivities marking Cameroon's 50th year of independence from France. During a visit to Cameroon by Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the 80-year-old Oyono died suddenly in YaoundE on 10 June 2010. Reportedly Oyono fell ill at the presidential palace after a reception for the Secretary-General; he received immediate medical attention and an ambulance was called, but he quickly died. Later in the day, President Biya released a statement expressing sadness regarding Oyono's death, although the statement gave no details. Secretary-General Ban, meanwhile, expressed sadness during a speech to the National Assembly of Cameroon. An official funeral was held for Oyono with a series of events beginning on 24 June 2010 and concluding with his burial at Ngoazip, near Ebolowa, on 26 June. |
![]() | ![]() | Reid, Victor Stafford. The Leopard. New York. 1971. Collier. Introduction by Gregory Rigsby. Collier African /American Library. 157 pages. paperback. 5336.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Beneath its animism and naked emotion, this book speaks eloquently of the ways of men to one another.' - New York Herald Tribune Book Review. In Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion a black warrior, Nebu, sets out to track down and kill a white man, Bwana Gibson. Gibson's wife had been Nebu's mistress. When she admitted bearing a crippled half-breed son, her husband killed her and fled, half-mad, into the African jungle. In pursuing his master and oppressor, Nebu, with a mortal wound in his side, finds himself pursued - by the leopard, waiting to pounce at the first opportunity. From these elements of brutality and terror the author, with a blend of singing lyricism and earthy realism, has evoked a haunting vision of a man confronting evil at its dangerous level - in the depths of his own soul. VICTOR STAFFORD REID, a native of Jamaica, was a correspondent for the London Daily Express. For his first novel, New Day, he received the Musgrave Silver Medal as an outstanding Jamaican in the arts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 - 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver and gold Musgrave Medals (1955–1978), the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - ‘the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form' - and The Leopard. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic Edward Baugh has stated, ‘[Reid's] writing showed a fondness for the rebel with a cause… he wanted people to learn about their heritage through his writing.' Reid was one of a handful of writers to emerge from the new literary and nationalist movement that seized Jamaican sentiment in the period of the late 1930s. From this ‘new art' surfaced many of Reid's literary contemporaries, including Roger Mais, George Campbell, M. G. Smith, and H. D. Carberry. A common objective among this new generation of writers was an inclination to ‘break away from Victorianism and to associate with the Jamaican independence movement.' Reid's emphasis on resistance and struggle is reaffirmed in a 1978 lecture he delivered at the Institute of Jamaica on the topic of cultural revolution in Jamaica post-1938. In the address, Reid contended that the collective discontent of the working class majority was the public assertion of a ‘new brand of loyalty' that situated itself not only beyond, but more importantly, in direct resistance to imperial rule. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Victor Reid was the son of Alexander Reid, a businessman who worked in the shipping industry in the United States and married Margaret Reid. Along with his two brothers and one sister, Victor grew up and attended school in Jamaica, graduating from Kingston Technical High school in 1929. He called himself a ‘city bred' person because of his urban background. He was initially involved in advertising, journalism, farming and the book trade, before becoming a writer. Because of success in literature, his early life was prosperous. In 1935, he married his wife Monica and they had four children. He held several posts in the Jamaican government, including Chairman of the Jamaica National Trust Commission, and was a Trustee of the Historic Foundation Research Centre in Kingston. Reid was also well traveled, journeying to Great Britain, East Africa and West Africa, Canada and the United States during his lifetime. His first novel, New Day (1949), chronicles the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of events that led to the establishment of the new Jamaican constitution in 1944. He found it was difficult to get it published, as his manuscript was written in a different type of language, Creole; Reid had decided to introduce patois in order to familiarize young Jamaicans with black history as well as to instil pride in their heritage. Luckily, a piece of his work in the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper caught the attention of some magazine people that were visiting the island. This led to his first publication and gave him exposure to the literary world. He was soon editing and writing for Spotlight News Magazine and The Toronto Star. Just after New Day, Reid published a novel he had written for young people entitled Sixty-Five, which also portrays the Morant Bay Rebellion, but ‘in an easier gentler sort of way.' In the wake of the later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, Reid was inspired to write a novel about the African situation in an attempt to relate that situation to the Jamaican uprising presented in New Day. His representation of this Kenyan rebellion is evidence that he found literary inspiration in these black uprisings. During the time that he was writing The Leopard, he was simultaneously working as an editor of a weekly newspaper called Public Opinion. Once the book was finished, it was ‘snapped up by an American and English publisher and was published.' Reid's reviews on his new novel were well received by its first audience. After publishing his first few novels, he decided to shift from literary works on specific events to focus on educating the younger generation in Jamaica. According to Reid, it was more difficult for him to write children's novels than adult novels, because he ‘had never written down to children.' Along with his Sixty-Five, Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967), which deals with runaway slaves (known as maroons). He also wrote Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971), which dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. His next novel, The Jamaicans, was written in 1976. It commemorates the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid's last published novel and portrays Jamaica's original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English. Reid's final work was a biography of the Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, entitled The Horses of the Morning (1985). Although novels comprised the bulk of Reid's literary body of work, he was also the author of several stories, collected in Fourteen Jamaican Short Stories (1950), and a play entitled Waterford Bar (1959). Furthermore, edited transcripts of lectures delivered by Reid, such as ‘The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1938' (1978) and ‘The Writer & His Work: V. S. Reid' (1986), have been reprinted posthumously in texts such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and the Journal of West Indian Literature, respectively. Reid's novels focus on the freedom of black culture and describe the struggles of black people. His works tend to focus primarily on the history, hopes, and powers of the Jamaican people. Through his writing, Reid wanted to break apart the ‘distortions of history' portrayed by the foreign press, which described Jamaican radicals as criminals. He wrote to prove the innocence of people who were rendered to be the opposite. Reid held that ‘[he] must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be.' In a way, he was telling the untold stories of the times. Another important aspect of Reid's writing included his desire to contribute to the education system. Previously, schools were solely taught from an English perspective and through a colonial lens. Reid, however, wanted people in school to learn about their own heritage through his writing; he wanted people to recognize that blacks, not only Europeans, participated in history. Therefore, Reid wrote novels to be used in Jamaican schools that provided a historical context of their country and heritage. Reid was also constantly reinventing language through his writing. In his first novel, New Day, he created a newly modified language that combines both the elements of Standard English and the native Creole language. Later, in works such as The Leopard, he integrates a singing prose style of writing. |
![]() | ![]() | Rive, Richard. Emergency. New York. 1970. Macmillan. Introduction by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Collier African American Library. 233 pages. paperback. 05340. Cover: Wide World Photos.
DESCRIPTION - WHY DID ANDREW RUN? He ran for his life-from Cape Town's slums to almost-white Walmer Estate, from the university to politics, to teaching-to Ruth. And now Andrew Dreyer is running again; this time from Cape Town's Special Branch where he is wanted for political insurgency and for violation of the Immorality Act. Because he dared to love a white woman. But Andrew Dreyer's real crime is that he chose to be a man in the country of his birth. EMERGENCY is played out against the taut backdrop of the Sharpesviile Massacre of March, 1960 - during the three terrible days between the Sharpesville shootings and the declaration of a state-of- emergency in South Africa. What began as a non- violent African protest against the racist Pass Laws soon escalated into bloody war 4 the hands of the South African gestapo. Richard Rive has powerfully rekindled the horror of these three days of infamy that the world chose to forget. RICHARD RIVE, born and educated in Cape Town, South Africa, is the award-winning author of AFRICAN SONGS, and a distinguished anthologist of African and South African prose.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Moore Rive (Cape Town, 1 March 1931 - 4 June 1989) was a South African writer. Rive was born on 1 March 1931 in Caledon Street in the working-class coloured District Six of Cape Town. His father was African, and his mother was coloured. Rive was given the latter classification under apartheid. Rive went to St Mark's Primary School and Trafalgar High School, both in District Six, and then to Hewat College of Education in Athlone, where he qualified as a teacher. Later he acquired a BA degree from the University of Cape Town, followed by an MA degree from Columbia University in the United States, and a Doctorate from Oxford University. He was for many years the Head of the English Department at Hewat College. Rive was a visiting professor at several overseas universities, including Harvard University in 1987. He also delivered guest lectures at more than fifty universities on four continents. He was a prominent sportsman (a South African hurdles champion while a student) and a school sports administrator. In 1963 he was given a scholarship organised by the editor of Drum magazine, Es'kia Mphahlele. In 1965 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Olive Schreiner which was published posthumously, in 1996. Rive was a firm believer in anti-racism and decided to stay in his country in the hope of influencing its development there. Rive initially published his stories in collections or in South African magazines like Drum and Fighting Talk. He edited anthologies for Heinemann's African Writers Series: the short story anthology Quartet (1963) - containing stories by Alex La Guma, James Matthews, Alf Wannenburgh and Rive himself - and the prose anthology Modern African Prose (1964). His short story 'The Bench', for which he won a prize, is still anthologised. 'The Bench' takes the well known story of Rosa Parks and sets it in South Africa. He also wrote three novels. Emergency (1964) was set against the Sharpeville massacre. Buckingham Palace District Six, was published in 1986 and turned into a musical by a theatre in Cape Town. He also published an autobiography entitled Writing Black in 1981. His last novel, Emergency Continued, was published posthumously. Rive was shot to death at his home in Cape Town in 1989. On August 23, 2013, Rive and two other esteemed South African authors Ronnie Govender and Don Mattera were honoured for their contributions to the fight against apartheid through literature at the Aziz Hassim Literary Awards held in Durban. The authors all reflected on non-racial enclaves in South Africa during that era: Rive focused on District Six, Govender on Cato Manor, and Mattera on Sophiatown. |
![]() | ![]() | Rollins, Bryant. Danger Song. New York. 1971. Collier. 317 pages. paperback. 05350.
DESCRIPTION - Originally published in 1967, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Danger Song is the story of a young African American who attempts to reach beyond his surroundings, which have always been the black community in Boston. His efforts bring him briefly, poignantly, in touch with the seeminly gentler white world and into contact with a new and more threatening danger than the danger he faced on the streets and in the alleys of the tough neighborhood where he grew up. In the end he discovers that he can only be who he is. Here, unforgettably, are the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the explosive emotions that even today continue to shape black communities in all our cities. It is a story you will long remember."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bryant is a former Editor with The New York Times, and was a reporter and political columnist with The Boston Globe, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was Executive Editor with The New York Amsterdam News. Bryant has more than 30 years experience as a consultant on diversity, management and organizational effectiveness with Fortune 500 companies, colleges and universities, Federal, state, and local government and community-based organizations. He is widely published, bringing skills in analytical and narrative writing to his work. Bryant worked with the Ford Foundation, administering a program for minority journalists at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He began consulting, training and writing on issues of race relations and diversity during the Civil Rights Movement in Boston, New York and Mississippi. He holds a BA in Journalism from Northeastern University in Boston, MA. He is the author of the novel, Danger Song, co-author of entertainer Cab Calloway's autobiography, Minnie the Moocher and Me, Within, a self-published book of poetry, and his most recent novel, Vera Pilgrim and the Ritual of the Dolphins. In 1968 he co-scripted RIOT!, which won a OBIE award as the best off-Broadway play of the year. He is also author of numerous articles on race relations and human differences. He and Shirley Stetson, his wife and business partner, have worked in domestic and international business environments as consultants for 30 years. |
![]() | ![]() | Roumain, Jacques. Masters of the Dew. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Translated from the French by Langston Hughes & Mercer Cook. Introduction by Mercer Cook. Collier African /American Library. 192 pages. paperback. 03555.
DESCRIPTION - The genre of the peasant novel in Haiti reaches back to the nineteenth century and this is one of the outstanding examples. Manuel returns to his native village after working on a sugar plantation in Cuba only to discover that it is stricken by a drought and divided by a family feud. He attacks the resignation endemic among his people by preaching the kind of political awareness and solidarity he has learned in Cuba. He goes on to illustrate his ideas in a tangible way by finding water and bringing it to the fields through the collective labor of the villagers. In this political fable, Roumain is careful to create an authentic environment and credible characters. Readers will be emotionally moved as well as ideologically persuaded. Jacques Roumain, the son of a wealthy Haitian family, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He started Le Revue Indigène and published various books including La Montagne EnsorcelEe (1931). He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, traveled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941 when he established the Bureau d'Ethnologie in an effort to legitimise the study of Haiti's peasantry. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la RosEe a few months before his sudden death in 1944.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 - August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la RosEe (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature. Although his life was short, Roumain managed to touch many aspects of Haitian life and culture. Roumain was born on June 4, 1907, in Port-au-Prince to wealthy parents. His grandfather, Tancrède Auguste, served as the President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. He was educated in Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince, and, later, in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. At twenty years old, he returned to Haiti and formed La Revue Indigene: Les Arts et La Vie (The Indigenous Review: Arts and Life), along with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Carl Brouard, and Antonio Vieux. He was active in the struggle against the United States' occupation of Haiti. In 1934 he founded the Haitian Communist Party. Because of some of his political activities, his participation in the resistance movement against the United States' occupation, and most notably, his creation of the Haitian Communist Party, he was often arrested and finally exiled by then President StEnio Vincent. During his years in exile, Roumain worked with and befriended many prominent pan-African writers and poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. During this time he was also affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, where he conducted ethnographical research. With a change in government in Haiti, Roumain was allowed to return to his native country. Upon returning, he founded the Office of Ethnology. In 1943, President Elie Lescot appointed him chargE d'affaires in Mexico, where his newly found creative freedom permitted him to complete two of his most influential books, the poetry collection Bois D'Ebène (Ebony Wood) and the novel, Gouverneurs de la RosEe (Masters of the Dew). Much of Roumain's work expresses the frustration and rage of people who have been downtrodden for centuries. He included the mass of the people in his writing and called on the poor union to move against privation. On August 18, 1944, Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti's most respected and complex writers, died of still unknown causes at age 37. Roumain created some of the most colorful, dynamic, and moving poetry of his generation. His writings continue to influence and shape Haitian culture and the pan-African world of today. By the time of his death, Roumain had become an acclaimed writer in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. His great novel, Gouverneurs de la RosEe, has achieved a permanent place among great Caribbean and Latin American literature. It is a novel that is still studied at universities, read by new generations, and acted out by theatrical groups. |
![]() | ![]() | Schuyler, George S. Black No More. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Charles R. Larson. 222 pages. paperback. 05365.
DESCRIPTION - Meet Max Fisher (Formerly Disher), Whiter-Than-White (Formerly Black), Wily (But No Longer Woolly), Savior of Oppressed White Society. There is panic in the streets of Harlem; fear is in the air, but tenuous hope rides high as the unbelievable news is heard: Dr. Junius Crookman, brown and brilliant, has discovered a process to turn black skin white - forever? Enterprising rascal Max Disher is among the first to join the new wave, emerging with pork-colored skin, blond hair, a new name and grand designs for the future. Heading South in search of the woman of his dreams, the daughter of the Founder of the klannish Knights of Nordica, Max quickly rises to the top as the power behind the Knights. (Almost) nothing can stop him now as he wages cunning war against "those damn white niggers" in the funniest no-holds-barred turnabout since the new whiter-than-white Negro made black look beautiful to the cream of Caucasian society. Black No More is coruscating satire with a Voltairean touch - and the kind of double-edged irony from which no one emerges unscathed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GEORGE S. SCHUYLER was a book review editor for the Manchester Union Leader. A lifetime journalist, he is the author of Slaves Today, a novel. Mr. Schuyler lived in Harlem. |
![]() | ![]() | Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Collier African /American Library. 276 pages. paperback. 5390.
DESCRIPTION - THEY ARE THE INTERPRETERS - savage, satirical, poetic - caught for an instant on the canvas of time. They are the now-generation artists, lawyers, professors, journalists who speak for and of West Africa and her people and the land that was divided before it was Nigeria/Biafra. Drawn together by their color, nation, dissatisfactions, hopes, loves, hates, and the daily lives and deaths around them, four young Nigerian intellectuals evoke and interpret West Africa today. From their wild drinking bouts at the Club Cabana to their individual pursuits of personal and professional integrity, they are the lost and the found generation - simultaneously seekers and prophets as they attempt to define their identity in a world where primitive past and sophisticated present are brought into violent conflict. THE INTERPRETERS combines the uniquely sensitive observations of gifted Wole Soyinka with the kind of mad comedy seen in the works of Donleavy and Pynchon. Here is a book that speaks for modern Africa with universal relevance and irresistible appeal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US. |
![]() | ![]() | Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. 0020547501. Introduction by Therman B. O'Daniel. Collier African /American Library. 231 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - BLACK IS. DAMNED. Emma Lou is very black indeed. Too black for her own comfort. Victimized by her social-climbing family, she runs to Los Angeles and then to Harlem of the 1920s, seeking her identity and discovering her destiny - rejection by her own race. Forced to accept menial labor and loveless liaisons, Emma Lou is defenseless against the haunting chimera of intra-racial prejudice. She must face her darkest self in order to survive - for black is truth if not beauty - and it is her only hope. THE BLACKER THE BERRY, first published in 1929, is a lost classic in the annals of Black American literature. A fictional work of raw and penetrating insight, it vividly exemplifies the Black self-hate documented by Grier and Cobbs in their contemporary sociological masterpiece, BLACK RAGE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902 - December 26, 1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued. Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license. Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school. Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree. While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP. In 1925 Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior. Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives. As Singh and Scott wrote, "Thurman's Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval." During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content. In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had no children together. Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism. Langston Hughes described Thurman as ". .a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read." Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members. Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored. Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man. |
![]() | ![]() | Tolson, Melvin B. Harlem Gallery: Book I, the Curator. New York. 1969. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Karl Shapiro. Collier African /American Library. 155 pages. paperback. 7091.
DESCRIPTION - MEET - Hideho Heights, the Redskin bard of Lenox Avenue; Doctor Nkomo, the Bantu expatriate and Africanist; Black Orchid, the blues-singing striptease mistress of Mr. Guy Delaporte III; Snakehips Briskie, forefather of the Twisters; John Laugart, the half-blind artist from the Harlem catacombs; Martial Kilroy, president of Afroamerican Freedom, Inc. Black Diamond, the kingpin of Harlem's policy racket and a host of other unforgettable characters from M. B. Tolson's great comic poem, HARLEM GALLERY, ‘a narrative work so fantastically stylized that the mind balks at comparisons. The milieu is Harlem, from the Twenties on. The dramatis personae comprise every symbolic character, from the black bourgeois Babbitt and the Lenox Avenue poet to the alienated Negro professor and sage who sits in the bar and elaborates, along with The Curator and others, a Platonic dialogue. ‘Harlem Gallery is funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, crude, bitter, and hilarious. as if improvised by one of the great architects of modern poetry. It may be that this work, like other works of its quality in the past, will turn out to be not only an end in itself but the door to poetry that everyone has been looking for.' - Karl Shapiro. M. B. TOLSON, whose reputation as a poet has only begun to emerge in the years since his death in 1966, was director of the Dust Bowl Theater and professor of creative literature at Langston University, and author of Rendezvous With America, Libretto to the Republic of Liberia, and many other works.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MELVIN B. TOLSON (February 6, 1898 - August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson is the protagonist of the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters. The film, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is based on his work with students at predominantly-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and their debate with University of Southern California(USC). Tolson is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film. Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was one of four children of Reverend Alonzo Tolson, a Methodist minister, and Lera (Hurt) Tolson, a seamstress of African-Creek ancestry. Alonzo Tolson was also of mixed race, the son of an enslaved woman and her white master. He served at various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until settling longer in Kansas City. Reverend Tolson studied throughout his life to add to the limited education he had first received, even taking Latin, Greek and Hebrew by correspondence courses. Both parents emphasized education for their children. Melvin Tolson graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919. He enrolled at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania the next year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924. In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University. Their first child was Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Jr., who, as an adult, became a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was followed by Arthur Lincoln, who as an adult became a professor at Southern University; Wiley Wilson; and Ruth Marie Tolson. All children were born by 1928. In 1930-31 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching to study for a Master's degree at Columbia University. His thesis project, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers", was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was strongly influenced by his time in New York. He completed his work and was awarded the master's degree in 1940. After graduation, Tolson and his wife moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English at Wiley College (1924–1947). The small, historically black Methodist Episcopal college had a high reputation among blacks in the South and Tolson became one of its stars. In addition to teaching English, Tolson used his high energies in several directions at Wiley. He built an award-winning debate team, the Wiley Forensic Society. During their tour in 1935, they broke through the color barrier and competed against the University of Southern California, which they defeated. There he also co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and directed the theater club. In addition, he coached the junior varsity football team. Tolson mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Heman Sweatt, who later became civil rights activists. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but also to stand up for their rights. This was a controversial position in the segregated U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century. In 1947 Tolson began teaching at Langston University, a historically black college in Langston, Oklahoma, where he worked for the next 17 years. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at the university. One of his students at Langston was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer who became the founding publisher of the journal The Black Scholar. In 1947 Liberia appointed Tolson its Poet Laureate. In 1953 he completed a major epic poem in honor of the nation's centennial, the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. Tolson entered local politics and served three terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. In 1947, Tolson was accused of having been active in organizing farm laborers and tenant farmers during the late 1930s (though the nature of his activities is unclear) and of having radical leftist associations. The film, The Great Debaters, portrays him as having been a possible Communist. In the film, Tolson's arrest for union organizing galvanizes the black community of the town of Marshall, Texas. Tolson was a man of impressive intellect who created poetry that was funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious, as reviewer Karl Shapiro described the Harlem Gallery. In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. He died after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma. From 1930 on, Tolson began writing poetry. He also wrote two plays by 1937, although he did not continue to work in this genre. In 1941, he published his poem "Dark Symphony" in Atlantic Monthly. Some critics believe it is his greatest work, in which he compared and contrasted African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. He was especially interested in historic events which had fallen into obscurity. In the late 1940s, after he left his teaching position at Wiley, The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, which he called "Cabbage and Caviar". Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem in an eight-part, rhapsodic sequence. It is considered a major modernist work. Tolson's final work to appear in his lifetime, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published in 1965. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African-American life. It was a striking change from his first works, and was composed in a jazz style with quick changes and intellectually dense, rich allusions. In 1979 a collection of Tolson's poetry was published posthumously, entitled A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. These were poems written during his year in New York. They represented a mixture of various styles, including short narratives in free verse. This collection was influenced by the loose form of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. An urban, racially diverse and culturally rich community is presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. With increasing interest in Tolson and his literary period, in 1999 the University of Virginia published a collection of his poetry entitled Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Raymond Nelson. |
![]() | ![]() | Tolson, Melvin B. Libretto For the Republic of Liberia. New York. 1970. Collier Books/Macmillan. Collier African /American Library. 80 pages. paperback. 07090.
DESCRIPTION - Two hundred years after the Mayflower anchored off Plymouth Rock, the black Pilgrim Fathers sailed aboard the Elizabeth from America to West Africa in search of freedom. In this epic masterpiece Melvin Tolson celebrates the founding of the Republic of Liberia by expatriate American blacks in 1847. Although Tolson's dramatic brilliance has invited comparison with Hart Crane's classic, The Bridge, his Libretto stands alone as a work of depth, power, vision and originality: a major poetic statement of the ordeal and inspiration that drove the black Pilgrims back to Africa to create Liberia, ‘Black Lazarus risen from the white man's grave.' ‘. there is a great gift for language. a profound historical sense and a first-rate intelligence at work in this poem from first to last. For the first time, it seems to me, a Negro poet has assimilated completely the full poetic language of his time and, by implication, the language of the Anglo-American poetic tradition. In the end I found that I was reading Libretto for the Republic of Liberia not because the poem has a Negro subject but because it is about the world of all men. And this subject is not merely asserted; it is embodied in a rich and complex language. and realized in terms of poetic imagination.' - From the Preface by Allen Tate. ‘. Tolson has established a new dimension for American poetry.' - John Ciardi. ‘. reaches extraordinary rhetorical heights.' - San Francisco Chronicle.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MELVIN B. TOLSON (February 6, 1898 - August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson is the protagonist of the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters. The film, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is based on his work with students at predominantly-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and their debate with University of Southern California(USC). Tolson is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film. Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was one of four children of Reverend Alonzo Tolson, a Methodist minister, and Lera (Hurt) Tolson, a seamstress of African-Creek ancestry. Alonzo Tolson was also of mixed race, the son of an enslaved woman and her white master. He served at various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until settling longer in Kansas City. Reverend Tolson studied throughout his life to add to the limited education he had first received, even taking Latin, Greek and Hebrew by correspondence courses. Both parents emphasized education for their children. Melvin Tolson graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919. He enrolled at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania the next year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924. In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University. Their first child was Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Jr., who, as an adult, became a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was followed by Arthur Lincoln, who as an adult became a professor at Southern University; Wiley Wilson; and Ruth Marie Tolson. All children were born by 1928. In 1930-31 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching to study for a Master's degree at Columbia University. His thesis project, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers", was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was strongly influenced by his time in New York. He completed his work and was awarded the master's degree in 1940. After graduation, Tolson and his wife moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English at Wiley College (1924–1947). The small, historically black Methodist Episcopal college had a high reputation among blacks in the South and Tolson became one of its stars. In addition to teaching English, Tolson used his high energies in several directions at Wiley. He built an award-winning debate team, the Wiley Forensic Society. During their tour in 1935, they broke through the color barrier and competed against the University of Southern California, which they defeated. There he also co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and directed the theater club. In addition, he coached the junior varsity football team. Tolson mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Heman Sweatt, who later became civil rights activists. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but also to stand up for their rights. This was a controversial position in the segregated U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century. In 1947 Tolson began teaching at Langston University, a historically black college in Langston, Oklahoma, where he worked for the next 17 years. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at the university. One of his students at Langston was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer who became the founding publisher of the journal The Black Scholar. In 1947 Liberia appointed Tolson its Poet Laureate. In 1953 he completed a major epic poem in honor of the nation's centennial, the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. Tolson entered local politics and served three terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. In 1947, Tolson was accused of having been active in organizing farm laborers and tenant farmers during the late 1930s (though the nature of his activities is unclear) and of having radical leftist associations. The film, The Great Debaters, portrays him as having been a possible Communist. In the film, Tolson's arrest for union organizing galvanizes the black community of the town of Marshall, Texas. Tolson was a man of impressive intellect who created poetry that was funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious, as reviewer Karl Shapiro described the Harlem Gallery. In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. He died after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma. From 1930 on, Tolson began writing poetry. He also wrote two plays by 1937, although he did not continue to work in this genre. In 1941, he published his poem "Dark Symphony" in Atlantic Monthly. Some critics believe it is his greatest work, in which he compared and contrasted African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. He was especially interested in historic events which had fallen into obscurity. In the late 1940s, after he left his teaching position at Wiley, The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, which he called "Cabbage and Caviar". Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem in an eight-part, rhapsodic sequence. It is considered a major modernist work. Tolson's final work to appear in his lifetime, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published in 1965. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African-American life. It was a striking change from his first works, and was composed in a jazz style with quick changes and intellectually dense, rich allusions. In 1979 a collection of Tolson's poetry was published posthumously, entitled A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. These were poems written during his year in New York. They represented a mixture of various styles, including short narratives in free verse. This collection was influenced by the loose form of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. An urban, racially diverse and culturally rich community is presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. With increasing interest in Tolson and his literary period, in 1999 the University of Virginia published a collection of his poetry entitled Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Raymond Nelson. |
![]() | ![]() | Walrond, Eric. Tropic Death. New York. 1972. Collier/Macmillan. Collier African/American Library. 192 pages. paperback. 5525.
DESCRIPTION - THE CRUEL, SENSUAL WORLD OF TROPIC DEATH - From a lonely cabin in Guinea to the sizzling deck of a Honduras freighter, from the West Indies slums in Panama to the marl-diggers' shacks in Barbados, Eric Walrond brilliantly etches a world in which tropic death is a way of life. Ten stark, realistic stories cut across the West Indies to Panama and the Isthmus Islands to recreate the black Caribbean experience, a transplanted African heritage flowering amidst an exotic new world of buckra johnnies, British whites, upstage blacks, Spanish senoritas, wordy West Indians, American Marines and Latin seamen. Tropic Death uniquely reflects the rhythm, religion, speech and manners of a world of droughts, malnutrition, exploitation, race hatred, folk myths, black magic and leprosy that destroy even as they create the tragic-hallucinatory tropic scenario. ERIC WALROND was born in Jamaica and came to this country in the twenties. He was a contemporary and friend of Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance group writing at that time. He died in 1967.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents' marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen's Boys' School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.' Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,' ‘Miss Kenny's Marriage,' ‘The Stone Rebounds,' and ‘The Stone Rebounds.' Walrond's stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,' which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black' (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,' ‘Miss Kenny's Marriage,' ‘The Stone Rebounds,' ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,' ‘The New Negro Faces America,' ‘The Negro Exodus from the South' (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,' ‘The Black City' (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,' ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?' (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love' (1927). |