Sokari Ekine

This time last week, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’o was odds on favourite to receive this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Unfortunately it went to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I have never read any of his work so I can’t really comment.

Until quite recently the mystery story was not well known to African writings, but this is changing rapidly. Yaba Badoe joins authors like fellow Ghanaian Kwei Quartey, author of ‘Wife of the Gods’, and Kenyan Mukoma we Ngugi, who wrote, ‘Nairobi Heat’,in bringing us this new genre.

In preparing to write this short piece I went back to the beginning of Pambazuka and found that the first online edition was ‘Kabissa-Fahamu Newsletter No. 14’ published on 19 March 2001.

2010 marks 50 years of independence for 27 African countries. I see that the majority of countries were French colonies, which makes me wonder if there was any particularly reason for this.

It seems appropriate to be writing this review on the eve of Nigeria’s 50th anniversary of independence. The country is on the verge of its fourth post-military election and has just survived, if we are to believe the rumours, at least one attempted military coup in the past six months.

’Saraba’ is an online literary magazine created and published by Emmanuel Iduma and Damilola Ajayi, two students from the University of Ife, in Nigeria. Saraba has just published its sixth edition in just 18 months and has gone from strength to strength.

For seven days last week and reaching a climax on Friday 10 September, the US and other western media frenzied around a tiny church in Gainesville Florida which had promised to burn copies of the Qu’ran on the anniversary of 9/11.

The two big news stories in Africa this week are the Kenyan constitution vote and the announcement by Haitian musician, Wyclef Jean that he will run for president in the November elections.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/492/july28_01_tsmaluleke.gifTinyiko Sam Maluleke write

I started this week by thinking there was no single theme but now I see that this week's review is about challenging the 'single story' story of Africa.