The Enemy Within

In A Cowrie ofHope Binwell Sinyangwe captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value. ..

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. ..

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..