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Kahiudi C. Mabana

Congolese writer and chemist, was born on 14 July 1941 to a Congolese father and a central African mother. He was nineteen when Congo-Brazzaville achieved independence, which allowed him to refine his views on history and the surrounding world.

After secondary school in the Congo, Dongala embarked for the United States, where he obtained a BA in chemistry at Oberlin College and an MA at Rutgers University. He completed a doctorate in organic chemistry in France. Returning to his country, he worked as a chemistry professor at the Université Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville, where he passed a large part of his life. But he spent most of his time on literature and theater. For years he ran the Théâtre de l’Éclair in Brazzaville, until the political troubles that arose in the Congo forced him into exile in 1998 First he went to France where to the surprise of all involved ...

Article

Mohamed Kamara

full-time writer and biochemist by training, was born in Porédaka, in the Mamou region of central Guinea on 1 July 1947. He is from the nomadic and cattle-loving Fulbe people. Monénembo’s parents divorced when he was only five. His father was an “African doctor” in Bobo-Dioulasso, in the then French Upper Volta, today Burkina Faso. His mother moved to Sierra Leone to live with her new husband. Tierno Monénembo was thus left to be raised by his grandmother, among uncles and other relatives.

Born Thierno Saïdou Diallo, he received his pen name probably by combining the Fulbe word for grandmother, nenembo, with that for grandson, moné. After his primary school education, Monénembo left his village for middle school in N’Zérékoré and Kankan. From there, he went to Kindia and Conakry to attend high school. In 1969 he earned his baccalaureate with a concentration in biology The ...

Article

Kenyan writer and physicist, was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Indian parents, but grew up in Tanzania. When he was nineteen, he left the University of Nairobi on a scholarship to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. He graduated with a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1978 he settled in Toronto, Canada, where he still lives with his Tanzanian-born wife, Nurjehan, and his two sons, Anil and Kabir. From 1978 to 1980 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Atomic Energy of Canada, and from 1980 to 1989 he worked as a researcher at the University of Toronto.

While at the University of Toronto Vassanji started to write short stories and began working on his first novel He also developed a keen interest in medieval Indian history and literature and together with his wife cofounded the multicultural literary ...