100 books like Muriel at Metropolitan

This anthology of African women writers has been my personal lodestar in writing about Regina Twala, a forgotten African writer.

Busby (a pioneering editor and publisher of Ghanaian heritage) was one of the first to recognize that the canon of African writers was much bigger than famous men like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Her work taught me about a longstanding rich female literary tradition on the African continent – some of her earliest examples of women writers date to Ancient Egypt!

Busby recognizes that we can’t always look to the written page for evidence of this, given that many women writers were denied opportunities to publish their work.

So she broadens the focus of her anthology by paying attention to both “words and writing,” thinking about female writers of novels, poetry, plays, non-fiction, and journalism.

A must read. 

This study of West African writers who used pseudonyms has prompted me to think about the importance of anonymity for female writers throughout the ages.

Newell looks at Ghanaian authors of the early twentieth century who used a range of pseudonyms, often for quite playful and experimental reasons.

Some of these writers were, of course, women, and they found that a pseudonym gave them increased respectability. But the pseudonym could be a double-edged sword.

A pen name was a useful cloak of anonymity allowing a woman to write.

But it also means that the true identities of these female writers are hard to discern. In other words, women writers’ frequent use of the pseudonym has rendered them both visible and invisible. 

Editor-in-chief of VICE magazine, Tsjeng is also editor of the “Forgotten Women” series (other titles include “The Scientists”, “The Leaders”, and “The Artists”).

I like this one because I’ve actually struggled to find books that explicitly focus on unknown female writers. I suspect this is partly because these writers are often unknown because they didn’t physically publish much if any work (though not through lack of trying).

It’s hard to document women writers who left little paper trail behind them. I find Tsjeng’s decision to profile “forgotten women” across a range of fields inspiring and provocative.

Although I wish she would have included more African women in her collections, including The Writers. Maybe Regina Twala will make it into a subsequent edition! 

I love the way in which this fascinating group biography of the female partners of renowned male writers brings these usually ignored figures into the limelight.

Ciuraru argues that behind the careers of many acclaimed literary figures stand the important contributions of their wives. These women offered intellectual as well as practical support. 

Many of these literary wives shelved their own creative aspirations to tend to the careers of their husbands.

But after their husbands’ deaths, some of these women found they finally had space for their own literary lives to start blossoming. 

OK this book is not about the United States but Rebecca Ginsburg’s incredibly nuanced investigation of the domestic landscape in apartheid South Africa should be required reading for anyone thinking about embodied experience and architecture. Houses built in the twentieth century for White families in suburban Johannesburg featured small rectangular rooms in the back yard for Black domestic workers. Using interviews, site visits, and compassionate storytelling, Ginsburg pieces together the daily rhythms for women who woke up outside, “came in the dark,” and learned the “tempo of kitchen life,” to borrow two of her provocative chapter titles. When people possessing such drastically different levels of social power share spaces built to remind them of their status at almost every turn, the visceral capacity of architecture becomes painfully clear.

I studied this great work of literature in the 1960s in Secondary School in Mombasa and the injustice of humanity in this tragic story is still indelibly etched in my heart. The story is set in Ndotsheni, a poor, agricultural village in South Africa but with a strong sense of community and in the city of Johannesburg a corrupt, big city where it's every man for himself. It is about a Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, who receives a letter that his sister in Johannesburg has fallen sick. Kumalo undertakes the difficult journey travelling from his village to the city in the hopes of aiding his sister and of finding his son, Absalom, who left to go to the city and never returned. What really moved me is the estranged relationship of two fathers and their sons that evoke anguish in the fathers. Upon reading this book the message that resonated… show more.

As an indie author myself, I am committed to supporting other independent authors and Mark Fine is one of the best. Fine has created an epic love story set against the backdrop of South Africa’s apartheid in the 1970s. When a beautiful white model falls in love with a black man, they become prey in a deadly manhunt that stretches from the golden city of Johannesburg to the dangerous wilds of the African bushveld. The author’s compelling characters and vivid descriptions shine a light on the effects of tribalism and social injustice during a dark period in this nation’s history. This story will keep you riveted until the last page is turned.

This book by South Africa’s most eminent historian, Charles van Onselen, tells the story of the night trains which brought poverty-stricken Mozambican men from Rossania Garcia on the Mozambique border to work as migrant labourers on the gold mines in Johannesburg between 1902 and 1955.

The men travelled in appalling conditions and were preyed on by petty criminals, con men, and corrupt officials. The night trains were a transport system run in partnership between the mining houses and the railways and designed to maximise profit at the expense of the health, well-being, and even the lives of the men it conveyed. 

At the end of their time in the mines, the trains sent the men back to Mozambique, often ill and broken and even insane after their experiences in the mines and in the trains. The story reflects South Africa’s evolving system of segregation and apartheid and the brutal logic… show more.

I enjoyed the local setting, the intensity of the novel, and its unflinching exploration of South Africa’s violent crime problems and how crime ties into cultural beliefs.

The novel goes to some dark places, in terms of events and character arcs, and the pacing and well-written scenes keep the reader nailed to the story – you’ll see a side of South Africa which is very real, but perhaps largely unknown to the rest of the world.

This book described not just a heinous crime that was committed near Johannesburg, South Africa, but the effects it had on a man falsely accused and imprisoned for that crime. Instead of focusing on a single perspective, the author chose to focus on several perspectives, some of which were totally unreliable. As a result, I was shown the messy mind states of all those people associated with the crime, 2 decades after it was committed.

I was in a constant state of curiosity with every page, and as soon as I finished the book, I wanted to learn more, not just about the case itself, but the culture and society from which it took place.