A Cowrie Of Hope

Opening with the puzzled and innocent view of a boy looking in on the adult world from outside, this collection follows the transition from childhood to adult life. Youthful desires for prosperity, love and a purpose in life are undermined by experiences of humiliation, compromise and a failure to communicate, in a process that reflects a wider disillusionment and decline in post-independence Zimb..

Adah, a woman from the Ibo tribe, moves to England to live with her Nigerian student husband. She soon discovers that life for a   young Nigerian woman living in London in the 1960s is grim. Rejected by British society and thwarted by her husband, who expects her to be subservient to him, she is forced to face up to life as a second-class citizen. ..

Tales of Tenderness and Power draws on writings which have roots in the author's own experience in Botswana. It reflects her fascination with the country's people and their history and her identification with individuals and their conflicting emotions. 'She enjoyed observing, smiling, forgiving or raging and then recording.' These tales reveal her affinity with human goodness and tenderness and he..

Gabriel Bukari is an out-of-work taxi driver living from hand to mouth in a poor suburb of Accra: honest, kind-hearted, and faithful to his wife. When he meets Mystique Mysterious, the `big man' who can get him a job, he is exposed to temptations he has never faced before. In this lively portrait of relations between rich and poor in urban Ghana, Benjamin Kwakye explores the seductive power of cor..

Drawing on the rich oral tradition of Southern Africa, Bessie Head uses the language and imagery of the story-telling tradition. The collection is carefully sequenced, focusing on village people from Botswana, and the status and position of women in Africa. ..

A black man, brutalised by apartheid, murders his wife. His fate is in the hands of a young Jewish lawyer, Jeremy Spielman. As Jeremy prepares to defend his client, he discovers uncomfortable facts about his own life: the racism of his girlfriend, the injustice of the legal system and his own weakness in the face of his country's enemies. ..

The Lovers collects together her short fiction of the 1960s and 70s, written mainly in Serowe, Botswana, and depicting the lives and loves of African village people pre- and post-independence. An earlier selection called Tales of Tenderness and Power was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1990, while this replacement volume adds many previously unavailable stories collected here ..

In the heart of rural Botswana, the poverty-stricken village of Golema Mmidi is a haven to exiles from far and wide. A South African political refugee and an Englishman join forces to revolutionise the villagers'traditional farming methods, but their task is fraught with hazards as the pressures of tradition, opposition from the local chief and the unrelenting climate threaten to divide and devast..

An illicit love affair that turns sour is the starting point in this lyrical and moving exploration of the human heart. Veronique Tadjo weaves together a rich tapestry of voices to tell stories of parting and return, suffering, healing and desire. Like a bird in flight, the reader travels across a borderless landscape composed of tales of everyday existence, news reports, allegories and ancestral ..

African women are seldom given the space to express their concerns, their ideas and their reflections about the societies in which they live. In situations where a good woman is expected to remain silent, literature can provide an important medium for the expression of deeply-felt and sometimes shocking views. in this anthology the award-winning author Yvonne Vera brings together the stories of ma..

`Convent morality's dead and gone. We're now living under a market economy'. In this way Carmina Evangelista, a member of Angola's ruling elite, justifies abandoning the socialist principles of her youth in favour of rampant capitalism. While the war-torn former colony collapses under the pressures of corruption and rivalry, buildings in Kinaxixi Square in the city of Luanda baffle the country's e..