HERE ARE YOUR FAVOURITE BOOKS ABOUT AFRICA, THAT EVERYONE SHOULD READ.
Books are so important, it can inform you, help you learn from history and give you insight into another person, country or continent’s perspective.
Here we want to list just some of the books we think are worth ready related to our beautiful continent.
Most Iconic
A Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography credited to South African President Nelson Mandela
One of the most famous Africans: Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 in South Africa and died in 2013. He led the struggle against apartheid and became the first president of democratic South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was a political activist who fought for equal rights. He was imprisoned for 27 years, but he never lost hope.
He was released from prison in 1990 and became president of South Africa four years later.
Nelson Mandela is one of the most important people of the 20th century because he led a successful struggle against apartheid, which had been going on for more than 40 years.
Long Walk to Freedom
In the first part of the autobiography, Mandela describes his upbringing as a child and adolescent in South Africa and being connected to the royal Thembu dynasty. His Xhosa birth name was Rolihlahla, which is loosely translated as “pulling the branch of a tree”, or a euphemism for “troublemaker”
The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, A LONG WALK TO FREEDOM brilliantly re-creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela’s destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, A LONG WALK TO FREEDOM is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader. ‘Burns with the luminosity of faith in the invincible nature of human hope and dignity …Unforgettable’ Andre Brink ‘Enthralling …Mandela emulates the few great political leaders such as Lincoln and Gandhi, who go beyond mere consensus and move out ahead of their followers to break new ground’ Donald Woods in the SUNDAY TIMES
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today.
This paper is an excerpt from Walter Rodney’s best-selling book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It was originally published in 1972 and has since been translated into over a dozen languages and reprinted many times.
The book is a classic of African history that provides a comprehensive account of the development of European capitalism in Africa from the late fifteenth century to the present day. It also examines how this process led to the underdevelopment of Africa and its people.
Walter Rodney was born in Guyana, South America on March 23, 1942. He studied at Queen’s College, Guyana and then went on to earn his BA from Howard University in Washington D.C., USA in 1963 and his PhD from Oxford University in Great Britain in 1968. He became an expert on African history and economic development
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
As an “African” novel, 2018’s Freshwater is innovative and irreverent in the way it marries African religious and cultural beliefs with “Western” geography, religious iconography and cultural symbols, ultimately defying literary categorisation, just as its protagonist repudiates predetermined categories of identity. (The novel is set in Nigeria and the US, and it deliberately presents Ada as a hybrid, transnational character.)
A book that could be worthy of consideration is Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man (2014), a novel that examines the devastating effects of poverty in the rural areas of South Africa.
When Father Gumede, known as Priest, loses his job as a farmhand, he realises he can’t afford to love his neighbour as he does himself. Despondent and enraged, Priest cuts off all ties to the church and politics, determined to make a living – at whatever cost. It will take a strange story written by his son Sandile – a comical, terrifying and prophetic tale in which the downtrodden rise up to march on the wealth of a neighbouring suburb – to show Priest the hope and humanity inherent in the human spirit. Beautifully poetic, funny and highly relevant, Nkosinathi Sithole’s debut novel highlights the ongoing plight of many rural South Africans and the power of a community working together to bring about change.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history.
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?
Final Word:
We need to change the world’s thinking of Africa. We are not the savages, or the people the other continents must rescue from poverty, lack, or the dark ages.
We are a strong continent representing many colors, nations and ethicists. We have a strong history of art and culture even before the West started documenting their world.
Even today, as we deliver digital services world wide. We too get people from so-called first-world countries assuming that they should either pay us as (Africa’s) far less or nothing at all – than compared to the value of the same services from their own fellow country man… As if our work is of less value to us and them because we are from Africa!
