Chielo Zona Eze praises Doreen Baingana's 'Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe', describing Baingana as a 'clever wizard who conjures a world of possibilities in the reader’s mind'.

Petina Gappah isn’t betraying her roots by objecting to ‘being labelled the voice of Zimbabwe’, Chielo Zona Eze writes in this week’s Pambazuka News, she just doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed into the ‘transcendental role of saving the African, by telling his or her story’.

Responding to intellectuals' efforts to repair the downtrodden image of African people, Chielo Zona Eze urges us to recognise that we have 'moved beyond the world shaped by the 19th century ideas of the African'. Stressing that he sees little probability of Nigeria's difficulties coming to an end anytime soon, the author asks us to consider a 'change of heart that begins with a radical rejection of the thought that the West is only interested in grubbing in the African compost'.

I thought this was a very good essay on ; it is very encouraging to note that the African electorate gets the opportunity to consider the characters of the candidates for elected offices and that money and advertisements play far lesser roles. Thanks for this essay. I have already created a link to the essay in my blog: http://chielozona.blogspot.com/