Howling Frog Books

 Co-Wives, Co-Widows, by Adrienne Yabouza This short novel, originally written in French with some Sango, is the first from the Central African Republic to be translated into English.  It's set in Bangui, the capital and largest city of the CAR. Lidou is doing pretty well for himself.  At 49, his building business is going well, he's got two lovely wives and several children, he is respected -- life is good.  He's a little worried about his vitality, though, so he gets some stuff from his cousin Zouaboua. A few days later, Lidou is dead.  His wives, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, are stricken, but there's no time to mourn; Zouaboua has accused them of witchcraft and murder.  The neighborhood is with them, but bribes are all Zouaboua needs to get the law on his side.  In their mutual trouble, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou draw closer together and find that their sisterhood is their best help.  As they support each other and refuse to betray each other,...

It's not a boat.  She Would Be King, by Wayétu Moore This was such an intriguing novel!  It takes a little while to figure out the overall structure, but since each individual story is also compelling, that is not a drawback at all.  Taken together, the various pieces form a mosaic imagining the establishment of Liberia in the first half of the 19th century -- and how it could have gone better. There are three protagonists: Gbessa (pronounced Bessa), a native African woman whose village pronounced her cursed at birth; June Dey, who escaped slavery and ended up on a ship to Liberia by accident; and Norman Aragon, a Maroon of Jamaica whose enslaved mother had just one dream -- to get to Freetown in Africa.  Their stories are narrated by a ghost.  Each of the three has a special gift, and each of them eventually uses the gift to help the helpless, communicate between the native Africans and the African-American settlers, and help to make Liberia a place where all ...

 Suns of Independence, by Ahmadou Kourouma  Ahmadou Kourouma was an Ivorian novelist who wrote in French, so this first novel was published in 1968 but not translated into English until 1981.  Kourouma has gotten lots of awards -- this novel won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire -- but hasn't attracted much attention in English.  He was the son of a highly-regarded Malinke family, and that Malinke heritage (descendants of the Mali Empire, also known as Mandinka) forms a large element of his writing.  Kourouma's main focus, however, was disappointment in the newly independent West African governments, which he saw betraying African ideals and descending into corruption.  He was therefore imprisoned a time or two, but consistently stood against nationalism, wars, and corruption. 'Suns of Independence' is a literal translation of the Malinke phrase that we would say as 'days of independence.'  Fama, the last descendant of the princely Dumbuya fami...

 Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter, by J. Nozipo Maraire Here's another one that came from the donation table.  It's Maraire's only novel, published in 1996 (a 25th anniversary edition has just come out).  Although it's short for a novel, it's very long for a letter, which is the form that it takes. This letter is addressed to Zenzele, a driven young woman who is about to leave for the United States and an education at Harvard.   Shiri, her mother, wants to share her thoughts with her daughter, and gives them to her in this form.  Shiri claims to be a traditional woman who has always focused on her home and family, and has watched Zenzele grow up to be a politically-involved, ambitious young woman who takes after her father in many ways -- but this turns out not to be quite true.  As the letter unfolds, Shiri is revealed to be part of an impressive family.  Her sister and cousin fought in the war for colonial Rhodesia to become independent Zimbabw...

The Heart of the Hunter: Customs and Myths of the African Bushman, by Laurens van der Post Here's a book I picked up from the donation table because it looked interesting, and because I wanted a Botswana book for my Reading All Around the World project.  Laurens van der Post seems to have had the most amazingly varied and interesting life, to the point that I'm going to have to make a list. Born 1906 in Orange River Colony (South Africa) 1926: wrote a satirical, anti-colonialism magazine  Argued against apartheid and openly said that the future would be mixed-race Hung out with the Bloomsbury circle and published a novel WWII, went as an officer with a force to restore the throne of Haile Selassie Taken prisoner by the Japanese, organized a 'camp university' Hung out with Carl Jung Spent a whole lot of time publicizing the plight of the San, then known pretty much only as the Bushmen.  Made films, collected folklore, argued for their protection, since they were being s...

 Minutes of Glory and Other Stories, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o  I've wanted to read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o for a long time, but when I tried A Grain of Wheat , I just couldn't get into it.  I ran into this short story collection and thought that would be a great way to try him out. This is a selected collection of short stories, originally published in 1975 but now put into a second edition with some new stories added.  So most of them are from much earlier in Ngũgĩ's career.  I really liked those early stories; the first three are grouped together as being about 'mothers and children,' so of course I liked those.    Some of the middle group ('fighters and martyrs') were up my alley too, though not all of them.  One, "The Martyr," reminded me of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa -- if you told it from the other side.  (It's not that the stories are at all similar, and in fact I haven't read Out of Africa since 1994, so I don't remember m...

 Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih Here's my Spin title!  This novel was chosen as "the most important Arab novel of the 20th century."  I....am not entirely sure why, as it didn't blow me away, but it did have a lot of subtle things to say about colonialism. Our narrator, who is nameless, is a Sudanese man who has spent years studying in Europe.  Now he is back in a newly-independent Sudan, ready to work hard in Khartoum for the advancement of his people.  He visits his home village on the Nile,* where he meets all the people he has known all his life -- an a newcomer, Mustafa Sa'eed, who lives as an ordinary resident of the village with a wife and two sons. Sa'eed, however, is not an ordinary villager at all, and tells our narrator (who has heard of him) his story.  He lived in London for many years, and was a prominent economist.  He was semi-adopted by an English couple, married an Englishwoman, and had endless clandestine affairs wi...

 Beyond the Rice Fields, by Naivo I have all these books here to post about, but the time flies by and I still haven't written!  Well, here's one, anyway.  The first novel from Madagascar, written in Malagasy, to be translated into English.  Naivo is a pen name for Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa, and this is his first novel -- and it's historical fiction. The story is set in the early 19th century.  Tsito is a little boy whose village was attacked, and he's been sold into slavery.  He's fortunate to be bought by a trader who is kind to him, teaches him a lot, and then leaves him in the village of Sahasoa with his former girlfriend, Bao, and their daughter Fara.  Fara and Tsito grow up together as close companions.  At the same time, Europeans are just barely beginning to arrive in Madagascar, which has a destabilizing effect on society, even though not many people convert. As Tsito grows up, his fortunes rise and he's able to gain a good educat...

Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga, by D. O. Fagunwa, trans. Wole Soyinka This is a pretty amazing book and I feel so lucky to have found it.  To sum up, this is the first novel written in Yoruba -- one of the first in any African language -- published in Nigeria in 1939.  It's a major and influential classic in Nigerian literature which draws on Yoruba folk traditions.  Having read the two novels by Amos Tutuola last summer, I can now recognize something of the relationship between the two writers; Tutuola was clearly very influenced by Fagunwa.  Wole Soyinka translated Forest of a Thousand Daemons into English in the mid-1960s, and there is a wonderful note about his translation process, in which he comments, "Fagunwa's beings are not only the natural inhabitants of their creator's haunting-ground; in Yoruba, they sound right in relation to their individual natures, and the most frustrating quality of Fagunwa for a translator is the right sound of h...

Jazz and Palm Wine, by Emmanuel Dongala Emmanuel Dongala was born in the Congo (then a French colony) in 1941.  He studied in US universities during the 1960s, returned to an independent Congo as a professor in the 70s, moved back to the US during the time of civil war in the 90s.  He has written novels, poetry, and short stories -- as far as I can tell, in French.  This collection of short stories was first published in 1982, in France, but they had been written at different times before that, not all in the early 80s.  Dongala's life split between Congo and the US has given him a dual lens -- and a great love of jazz music. The short stories all show a piece of ordinary life for ordinary people caught up in the changing world of post-colonial Congo, and the frustrations thereof.  Having shed the French colonial power, they look for a bright future of freedom, and find instead bureaucratic paralysis, Marxist rhetoric that fails to disguise the same old oppr...

The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy, by Camara Laye I'm happy I found this memoir, because it's a really lovely and heartfelt story.  Camara Laye was born in Guinea (at the time French Guinea) in 1928, and wrote this, his first book, in 1953 while he was studying in France.  It won the Prix Charles Veillon.*  He wrote three more novels** during his lifetime.  After his French studies, he went back to Africa, though not immediately to Guinea.  He worked for the new independent government of Guinea, but had to leave in 1965 due to politics, and spent the rest of his life in Senegal, where he died in 1980. The memoir tells of Laye's childhood in the town of Kouroussa in upper Guinea, where his father worked as a black- and goldsmith.  His parents were very respected, and had spiritual powers -- Laye describes these in a very interesting way, because he's a modern educated man who doesn't believe in powers....except that he does, because he ...

The Ultimate Tragedy , by Abdulai Sila This novel is from the West African country of Guinea Bissau.  Written in Portuguese, it's the first to be translated into English from that country.   Guinea Bissau used to be known as Portuguese Guinea until its independence in 1973, and this novel is set during that colonial period, but I'm not sure exactly when.  I was imagining sometime in the 1950s or 60s. Ndani needs to leave her village; the djambakus (a religious leader) decided that she has an evil fate hanging over her, and she is blamed for anything that goes wrong.  So her beloved stepmother advises her to go look for work as a housemaid in the city, so she can get away.  Ndani spends a few years working for Dona Linda, who eventually develops ambitions to be a leader in local religious affairs.  Her husband, however, has different ideas. Ndani leaves and ends up in a nearby village, where the chief plans to make her his sixth wife.  Inst...

Radiance of Tomorrow, by Ishmael Beah Well folks, I'm back!  Six weeks off has been very good for me, and we'll see where it goes from here.  My main trouble is the same as ever and is a universal: so many things to say, so little time.  And for my first post-break post, I've got a novel set in Sierra Leone.  Ishmael Beah is a well-known author now, and he started off with a memoir of being a child soldier, which I gather attracted some controversy, but I haven't read it. The blurb on the cover calls this novel a parable, and I can see why.  It's mostly , almost entirely, a realistic novel, but the edges have been smoothed a bit so that things happen at the right time.  I noticed this mainly at the start; I think the story gets more real as it goes along. In the countryside of Sierra Leone, people are starting to recover from the devastating civil war that slaughtered so many, and in which children were often forced to become soldiers.  The villa...

 The Bride Price, by Buchi Emecheta Happy Halloween, folks, and happy Spin Day too!  I was very excited about this title, since I love Emecheta's writing.  I found out that she considered it her best novel, but it also had tragedy attached to it; she based the story loosely on her own life, but when her husband found and read the manuscript, he was angered that his fictional counterpart was a descendant of slaves.  He burned the manuscript, which was the only copy.  Emecheta re-wrote her novel, but changed the ending from hopeful to tragic, reflecting her changed feelings and her failing marriage. Aku-nna is a young teen when her doting father dies, leaving her and her mother and brother almost destitute.  The little family travels back to Ma Blackie's home village (Ma Blackie is much admired for her beautiful, extremely dark skin).  Ma Blackie becomes a plural wife to Okonkwo, a relative of her husband's, and Aku-nna and Nna-nndo go to school....

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola Woohoo, I have done it!  I honestly did not think I would be able to finish 20 of the books on my list.  I added some extras, especially when I went off to Illinois and suddenly had access to new stuff, but I was hoping to get 20 from my actual list.  I finished on August 27, so about 6 days before the deadline.  Woot!  Well, on to our novel... Amos Tutuola was born in 1920 in Nigeria; according to his account, he was a good student and had a great interest in his Yoruban culture's folktales.  He became a good storyteller in school, and so years later when he saw magazine ads for books of African tales, he realized he could do that too.  He wrote his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, in a short span of time in 1946, but then wasn't sure what to do with it.  After seeing a magazine ad for a publisher that solicited manu...

The Book of Chameleons, by Jose Eduardo Agualusa This is an Angolan novel, originally written in Portuguese.  I was intrigued by the premise, and also I like chameleons, but there are no actual chameleons in this story.  There's a gecko though, and I also like geckos. Félix Ventura sells genealogy.  If you have some money, but no family background, Ventura will fix up a nice respectable -- even illustrious -- family history for you.  His story is narrated by the gecko who lives on his walls (who is also the reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges).  Ventura has sold quite a few new histories, and a couple of them are going to meet in interesting new ways to illuminate a murder mystery gone cold, while the gecko gains the name of Eulalio and has visionary dreams. I liked this novel pretty well, though I won't claim to have understood the whole thing.  It seemed very dreamlike to me, even the parts that were not dreams.  It's also very short.  I ...

Baho! by Roland Rugero If you're trying to read around the world, some countries have abundant literature available in English (Nigeria, for example) and others, not so much.  Since I'm late to this project, I'm benefiting from a minor but noticeable trend to make global literature more available in English.  I'm seeing more books published from countries that haven't previously been available -- my TBR pile includes the first novels from Madagascar, Guinea Bissau, and other places.  (I also got to read the first literature to come out of North Korea, but that's more a function of smuggling than of publishers taking notice.)  And this is the first Burundian novel available in English.  It was written in French, but also contains a good deal of Kirundi, which is left in and a translation added. Nyamurgari, a mute teenage boy, is out working and tries to ask a girl where he can go to relieve himself.  Frightened, the girl thinks he is trying to rape he...

I feel like it's been a really long time since I wrote any posts, but I guess it hasn't been all that long really.  A lot has happened, is all.  I went on a trip!  I visited one of my best friends, who now lives in Utah, and we went to a women's conference at BYU.  I spent a leisurely hour touring the BYU main library, and now I need to live there.  Otherwise, I've mostly been working a lot -- just a week and a bit left to go! -- hanging out with the family, and trying to get sort of caught up with the house in spare moments (a bootless effort, I fear).  Two very busy weekends in a row have meant no time for Howling Frog and now I have a large pile of books!  One of which is... Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah You've probably seen this book everywhere; I know I have.  I know who Trevor Noah is, but I've seen almost nothing of what he's done, since I hardly watch any TV.  That does not matter, though, ...

My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite Ayoola summons me with these words -- Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again. Korede is the older, plain sister who works hard at her job as a nurse.  Ayoola is the younger and stunningly beautiful younger sister who always gets what she wants and has men falling at her feet.  Ayoola also has a worrying habit; every so often she needs Korede to help her clean up and hide the body of a boyfriend.  The first couple of times, it was easy to believe it was self-defense, but it's getting harder for Korede to believe in Ayoola's innocence.  And now Tade, the kind doctor Korede daydreams about, is interested in Ayoola. This is a gripping story!  It's a pretty fast read, but it's not a simple story at all.  In the end, it's pretty disturbing.  A good, suspenseful novel.

Essential Encounters, by Therese Kuoh-Moukoury I have read hardly anything for my Around the World project lately, even though I have something like 15 books sitting here waiting to be read.  (I am thinking of making my 20 Books of Summer list completely out of African novels, doesn't that sound good?  I absolutely could, but in that case I'd have to put that one I just chose back on the pile, which doesn't seem like that great a plan....hm.)  So I picked this one up to get me back in the groove.  This is a Cameroonian novel, written in 1959 but not published until 10 years later, and it is "the first novel by a woman of sub-Saharan francophone Africa."  In fact it was pretty influential so I thought it would make a good selection. Flo tells her life story entirely in the present tense, so that everything is happening right now.  As a young woman, she enters a cosmopolitan social circle that includes both black and white, and becomes best friends with D...