 |
| Abstract Women 015 |
"Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful." - Maya Angelou, Paris Review 1990
A lot of rich memoirs have been published over the decades, and from a variety of categories within the genre - autobiographies, travel memoirs, culinary memoirs - and by a range of African women writers including Buchi Emecheta and Nawal El Saadawi. Indeed, Folasade Hunsu writes that the:
‘Autobiography occupies a central space in African women’s writing as the primal genre through which African women have participated in the representation of African experience and the shaping of African literature.’
I am trying to do better with reading more memoirs, and because I am intentional in my reading of women writers, I have started to put together a reading list of some memoirs I know of - a few I've read, including Reflecting Rogue by Pumla Dineo Gqola and The Settler's Cookbook by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and others I would like to read. Here, I am most interested in the nonfiction
autobiographies written by African women, as there are also fictional stories, in which African women have drawn on elements of their life histories, such as Buchi Emecheta's Second-class Citizen. I’ve included a mix
of older and newer titles - all in English - and I would love any other recommendations to add to this list.
*Since posting this list, I've received some recommendations via Twitter - thanks! So, the list has been updated to include them.**
*Since posting this list, I've received some recommendations via Twitter - thanks! So, the list has been updated to include them.**
Leila Abouzeid's, childhood memoir brings to life the interlocking dramas of family ties and
political conflict. Against a background of Morocco's
struggle for independence from French colonial rule, Leila Abouzeid charts the
development of personal relationships, between generations as well as between
husbands and wives. Abouzeid's father is a central figure; as a strong advocate
of Moroccan nationalism, he was frequently imprisoned by the French and his
family forced to flee the capital. Si Hmed was a public hero, but the young
daughter's memories of her famous father and of the family's plight because of
his political activities are not so idyllic.
Leila Ahmed movingly recounts her
Egyptian childhood growing up in a rich tradition of Islamic women and
describes how she eventually came to terms with her identity as a feminist
living in America. As a young woman in Cairo in the forties and fifties, Ahmed
witnessed some of the major transformations of this century—the end of British
colonialism, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the breakdown of Egypt's once
multireligious society. As today's Egypt continues to undergo revolutionary
change, Ahmed's inspirational story remains as poignant and relevant as ever.
The Settler's Cookbook: Tales of Love, Migration and Food by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Through the personal story of Yasmin’s
family, food, and recipes they’ve shared together, The Settler’s
Cookbook tells the history of Indian migration to the UK via East
Africa. Her family was part of the mass exodus from India to East Africa during
the height of British imperial expansion, fleeing famine and lured by the
prospect of prosperity under the empire. In 1972, expelled from Uganda by Idi
Amin, they moved to the UK, where Yasmin has made her home with an Englishman.
The food she cooks now combines the traditions and tastes of her family’s
hybrid history. Here you’ll discover how shepherd’s pie is much enhanced by
sprinkling in some chilli, Victoria sponge can be enlivened by saffron and
lime, and the addition of ketchup to a curry can be life–changing.
First published in Arabic over thirty years ago, a young Radwa Ashour charts her years as a student
in the US of the 1970s, where she would become the first PhD student to
graduate from the newly founded W.E.B Du Bois department of Afro-American Studies
and the English Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975.
The
Journey narrates the years which Ashour spent in the US and captures so vividly
the spirit and ethos of the time it chronicles - the early 1970s. Anti-colonial
movements, a commitment to popular struggles and peoples liberation, as well as
linking scholarship and work on the ground, are all alive and real in her
memoir. Just emerging from the devastation of the Six Day War in 1967, Ashour
talks about the pain of what we call the sixties generation in the Arab world
and intermeshes the pressing questions and issues of the time within a
quotidian story, as well as the life of an Egyptian woman within a deeply
divided US society at war both with itself and abroad.
Abandoned by her mother and sent to live
with relatives in Dakar, the author tells of being educated in the French
colonial school system, where she comes gradually to feel alienated from her
family and Muslim upbringing, growing enamoured with the West. Academic success
gives her the opportunity to study in Belgium, which she looks upon as a
"promised land." There she is objectified as an exotic creature,
however, and she descends into promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and,
eventually, prostitution. (It was out of concern on her editor’s part about her
candor that the author used the pseudonym Ken Bugul, the Wolof phrase for
"the person no one wants.") Her return to Senegal, which concludes
the book, presents her with a past she cannot reenter, a painful but necessary
realisation as she begins to create a new life there.
Journalist Helene Cooper - a descendant of two
Liberian dynasties - grew up at Sugar Beach, a
twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants,
flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an
African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup, heartmen
and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child—a common
custom among the Liberian elite. Eunice, a Bassa girl, suddenly became known as
“Mrs. Cooper’s daughter.” For years the Cooper daughters blissfully enjoyed the trappings of wealth and
advantage. But Liberia was like an unwatched pot of water left boiling on the
stove. And on April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers staged a coup d'état,
assassinating President William Tolbert and executing his cabinet. The Coopers
and the entire Congo class were now the hunted, being imprisoned, shot,
tortured, and raped. After a brutal daylight attack by a ragtag crew of
soldiers, Helene, Marlene, and their mother fled Sugar Beach, and then Liberia,
for America. They left Eunice behind.
Michaela DePrince was known
as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and
tormented as a “devil child” for a skin condition that makes her skin appear
spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find a picture of a
beautiful ballerina en pointe that would help change the course of her life. At the age of four, Michaela was adopted by an
American family, who encouraged her love of dancing and enrolled her in
classes. She went on to study at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the
American Ballet Theatre and became the youngest principal dancer with the Dance
Theatre of Harlem.
A Daughter of Isis is the autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi . In it she paints a sensuously textured portrait of the childhood that produced the freedom fighter. We see how she moulded her own creative power into a weapon - how, from an early age, the use of words became an act of rebellion against injustice.
Head Above Water by Buchi Emecheta
"As for my survival for the past
twenty years in England, from when I was a little over twenty, dragging four
cold and dripping babies with me and pregnant with the fifth one - that is a
miracle. And if for any reason you do not believe in miracles, please start
believing, because keeping my head above water in this indifferent society...is
a miracle." Buchi Emecheta's autobiography beginning with her childhood in Nigeria to her life in North London as an internationally
acclaimed writer.
117 Days presents the harrowing chronicle of
journalist Ruth First's isolation and abuse at the hands of South African
interrogators after her arrest in 1963. Upon her arrest, she was detained in
solitary confinement under South Africa's notorious ninety-day detention law.
This is the story of the war of nerves that ensued between First and her
Special Branch captors-a work that remains a classic portrait of oppression and
the dignity of the human spirit.
Aminatta Forna’s intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account
of an idyllic childhood which became the stuff of nightmare. Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable
integrity and enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a
fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who
had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. He
stole the heart of Aminatta’s mother to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents
and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But as Aminatta Forna shows with
compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by new ways of western
parliamentary democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption
of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed Forna
languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and worse to follow.
Aminatta’s search for the truth that shaped both
her childhood and the nation’s destiny began among the country’s elite and took
her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding
her father’s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the
highest reaches of government and forced the nation’s politicians and judiciary
to confront their guilt.
Reflecting Rogue is the much anticipated and brilliant collection of
experimental autobiographical essays on power, pleasure and South African
culture by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. In her most personal book to date,
written from classic Gqola anti-racist, feminist perspectives, Reflecting
Rogue delivers 20 essays of deliciously incisive brain food, all
extremely accessible to a general critical readership, without sacrificing
intellectual rigor. These include essays on ‘Disappearing Women’, where Gqola
spends time exploring what it means to live in a country where women can simply
disappear – from a secure Centurion estate in one case, to being a cop in
another, and being taken by men who know them.
A Woman Alone is a collection of autobiographical writings, sketches,
and essays that covers the entire span of Bessie Head's creative life, up to
her death in 1986. It reveals a woman of great sensitivity and
vitality, inspired through her knowledge of suffering with "a reverence
for ordinary people'' and finding some healing for her own anguish in a quiet
corner of Africa.
A shockingly naked chronicle of how her depression almost robbed her of
her shine, this unflinchingly honest book recounts Bonnie's intricate
journey living in constant fear of darkness. After she unsuccessfully
tried to pursue her acting career in Hollywood, she was diagnosed with
clinical depression. Thanks to this diagnosis, Bonnie began the painful climb
back to a life of health and mental stability. This is the candid account of
her new life trek.
Born Karoline King in 1980 in Johannesburg
South Africa, Sara-Jayne (as she will later be called by her adoptive parents)
is the result of an affair, illegal under apartheid’s Immorality Act, between a
white British woman and her black South African employee. Her story reveals the shocking lie created to
cover up the forbidden relationship, and the hurried overseas adoption of the
illegitimate baby, born during one of history’s most inhumane and destructive
regimes. Killing Karoline follows the journey of the baby girl
(categorised as ‘white’ under South Africa’s race classification system) who is
raised in a leafy, middle-class corner of the South of England by a white
couple. It takes the reader through the formative years, a difficult
adolescence and into adulthood, as Sara-Jayne (Karoline) seeks to discover who
she is and where she came from. Plagued by questions surrounding her own
identity and unable to ‘fit in’ Sara-Jayne (Karoline) begins to turn on
herself, before eventually coming full circle and returning to South Africa
after 26 years to face her demons.
When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the
heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed
when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned
by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born,
determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence
and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood—one marked by death
and the misguided love of their mother. In her signature spare and incisive prose,
Sheila Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led. Flashing back to their
storybook childhood at the family estate, Crossways, Kohler tells of the death
of her father when she and Maxine were girls, which led to the family
abandoning their house and the girls being raised by their mother, at turns
distant and suffocating. We follow them to the cloistered Anglican
boarding school where they first learn of separation and later their studies in
Rome and Paris where they plan grand lives for themselves—lives that are
interrupted when both marry young and discover they have made poor choices.
Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes
but never breaks, even after death.
Since the he Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in 1995, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha's extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey. Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work. The narrative is often traumatic, vivid, and provocative. Krog's powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions, and secret themes. This compelling tale is Antjie Krog's profound literary account of the mending of a country that was in colossal need of change.
As the first complete autobiography of
Miriam Makeba, this book celebrates the life of this remarkable talent and
global icon of music, style, and history. It chronicles Makeba's entire life,
from her early days growing up on the Rand and performing with the Manhattan
Brothers, to her departure from South Africa. It also details Miriam's life in
America and friendship with Harry Belafonte, her performance for President John
F. Kennedy alongside Marilyn Monroe, her marriage to Stokely Carmichael, and
her life in Conakry, Guinea.
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari
Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to
the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she
began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment
of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the
Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous
occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to
restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique
luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and
the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come.
As a child in a small rural village in
Sierra Leone, Mariatu Kamara lived peacefully surrounded by family and friends.
Rumours of rebel attacks were no more than a distant worry. But when 12-year-old
Mariatu set out for a neighbouring village, she never arrived. Heavily armed
rebel soldiers, many no older than children themselves, attacked and tortured
Mariatu. As told to her by Mariatu, journalist Susan
McClelland has written the heartbreaking true story of the brutal attack, its
aftermath and Mariatu’s eventual arrival in Toronto where she began to pull
together the pieces of her broken life with courage, astonishing resilience and
hope.
This diary written by an anti-apartheid
activist during her incarceration in the Old Fort in Johannesburg in 1976
begins with her arrest and ends after her release and arrival back in Durban.
Details about living conditions, treatment by female guards, and visits with
her daughters are provided. Her 113 days in captivity are recounted, including
how she the practiced her Muslim faith and read the Koran.
Malika Mokeddem’s memoir of the men
in her life presents a mosaic of relationships defining what it is to be a
woman, an immigrant, a doctor, and a citizen of an uncertain world. From her
childhood days in French colonial Algeria to her later years as a doctor in
Paris and a writer in Montpellier, Mokeddem traces the path of a brilliant girl
in a world of men. Anorexia, insomnia, financial independence, escapism in
books, atheism, self-imposed exile, painting, and the poetics of free love—such
are the various ways in which she has responded to discrimination. Mokeddem
hauntingly describes how her literary and medical careers blossomed along with
her sexuality and her desire to escape the gender bias that shackled Algerian
tradition.
In Always Another Country,
Sisonke Msimang writes about her exile childhood in Zambia, Kenya and Canada,
her college years in the USA, and returning to South Africa in the 1990s. She
reflects candidly on present-day South Africa, but this is a book about family,
romance and motherhood; of childhood jealousies and adult passions, and what it
means to be born into a life scored by history. Her memoir is a chronicle of a
coming of age, for both a woman and a young democracy.
‘I hated being pregnant with you. I used to
cry the whole day. I hated carrying you in my stomach.’
Thuli Nhlapo grew up constantly hearing these
words from her mother. She was seven years old when she realised that no one
called her by name. Known as "Yellow”, she was bullied at home and at
school. Fearing that she had a terrible disease, she withdrew into herself. Years later, Thuli is still haunted by her
childhood experiences. She confronts her mother about her real father and real
surname. Getting no answers, Thuli embarks on years of searching for the truth.
In the process, she uncovers unsettling family secrets that irrevocably change
all their lives.
"I am telling my stories in English for many months now, and it is a time for me to see my whole life. I see that things are always changing. I was born in 1930, so I remember many things which were happening in the old days in Lesotho and which happen no more. I lived in Benoni Location for more than ten years, and I saw the Boer policemen taking black people and beating them like dogs. They even took me once, and kept me in one of their jails for a while." Described as a compelling and unique autobiography.
This autobiography of an African princess
royal (her father was the king of Toro) and its comments on modern Ugandan
history is a revised edition of African Princess which was published in Nigeria
and then in Great Britain in 1983. Additions include accounts of the filming of
her book, her marriage and the death of her husband, and her service as Ugandan
ambassador to the United States under President Museveni. This very personal
view of historical events from a woman who was educated at elite schools and
became a lawyer, a high-fashion model, the foreign minister of Uganda under Idi
Amin, and, most recently, ambassador to the United States, gives a different
perspective from the standard historical accounts of Ugandan history and
politics.
In 1974 Hannah Pool was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea
and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to
imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until
one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing
what to do with the letter, Hannah hid it away. But she was unable to forget
it, and ten years later she finally decided to track down her surviving
Eritrean family and embarked upon a journey that would take her far from the
comfort zone of her metropolitan lifestyle to confront the poverty and
oppression of a life that could so easily have been her own.
Cancer: A Love Story is the intimately searing memoir of a
four-time cancer survivor. The book magnificently tracks Lauren’s journey to
come to terms with the untold challenges of facing the dreaded disease. Forced
to face her needle phobia, the author leads the reader into her crumbling world
as she confronts the terrors of treatment – from debilitating chemo to nuking
radiation. Death is her uninvited companion. But in the midst of her lonely horror, in a quest for deeper meaning, Lauren
discovers the unexpected gift of awareness of unanticipated opportunities that
cancer presents – to confront her unmasked humanity – her fears, strengths and
weaknesses.
This book is the story of the life of Nisa,
a member of the !Kung tribe of hunter-gatherers from southern Africa’s Kalahari
desert told in her own words to Marjorie
Shostak.
In January 2006, after the Republic
of Liberia had been racked by fourteen years of brutal civil conflict, Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in as president, an event
that marked a tremendous turning point in the history of the West African
nation. In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf shares the story of her
rise to power, including her early childhood; her experiences with abuse,
imprisonment, and exile; and her fight for democracy and social justice. She
reveals her determination to succeed in multiple worlds, from her studies in
the United States to her work as an international bank executive, to
campaigning in some of Liberia's most desperate and war-torn villages and
neighbourhoods. It is the tale of an outspoken political and social reformer who
fought the oppression of dictators and championed change. By telling her story,
Sirleaf encourages women everywhere to pursue leadership roles at the highest
levels of power, and gives us all hope that we can change the world.
Memoirs of a Born Free is a journey back through the life of Malaika Wa
Azania as she recounts the experience of growing up through the end of
apartheid and South Africa’s transition into a democratic nation. She was not
born during the times of constitutionalised apartheid but is still a product of
an epoch of systematic individualised apartheid. Her story is not a reflection
of freedom; it is an epitome of the on-going struggle for liberation and
emancipation from mental slavery.
Zukiswa Wanner sets off on an
adventure-filled road trip with her partner and son. Travelling through six
borders, on busses and on the backs of trucks, Wanner celebrates the 10 years
since her debut novel, The Madams, was published by having a reading in as many
countries as possible. Between protests against bond notes in Zimbabwe and
celebrating her birthday, Wanner reconnects with good friends and gets the
opportunity to give her son an African education that he’ll cherish for years
to come.
Bonus: because, why not? These includes previously unpublished letters from three women who contributed to the southern African struggle, and two that draw on stories from women and men.
What Is Africa to Me? tells
for the first time the story of Maryse Conde's early adult years in Africa - years formative
not only for her, but also for African colonies appealing for their own
independence. What Is Africa to Me? traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling
Condé’s life in Sékou Touré’s Guinea to her time in Kwame N’Krumah’s Ghana,
where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, and
Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Condé’s deportation
from Ghana. Settling down in Sénégal, Condé ended her African years with close
friends in Dakar, including filmmakers, activists, and Haitian exiles, before
putting down more permanent roots in Paris. Condé’s story is more than one of political upheaval,
however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles
steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a
young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer.
Everyday Matters brings together the
previously unpublished letters of three women, Lilian Ngoyi, Bessie Head and
Dora Taylor - who each made vital and
perhaps under-appreciated contributions to the southern African struggle. Each woman writes to one trusted friend or relative. These
letters record their ordinary, domestic lives as well as touching on the
socio-political struggles which they conducted from within their homes. These letters also record all three writers’ joys and sorrows as they struggled to live principled lives in adversity. As well as giving access to the thoughts of three remarkable women letter-writers, this timely book presents letters as literary artefacts, not just sources of information and opinion. It invites readers to taste the intriguing and sometimes disturbing pleasures of reading personal letters.
This unique anthology probes deeply
into the diverse experiences of French and native Algerian, male and female,
rich and poor, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian people who, through their writing,
congregate here to recount personal tales of growing up in this region in North
Africa, experiences that bind them as humans. Through literature, Sebbar deftly
cultivates an imaginary landscape that does not yet exist within Algeria: a
public ground based upon reconciliation and respect for differences. These
sixteen stories, wrought with youthful exuberance and a passion for place,
reflect how ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds greatly shape
lifelong values and perceptions.
Walter & Albertina Sisulu by Elinor Sisulu
For more than five decades Walter and
Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As
secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with
Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989.
While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial
role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of
the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter
struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and
enduring love.
** Book
recommendations via Twitter.
