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Article

Abbe, Gubegna  

Baye Yimam

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Ethiopian intellectual, novelist, playwright, and poet, was born on 1 July 1933 in Gojjam Province, Ethiopia. He was one of the prominent literary figures in modern Ethiopian literature, the author of some twenty-three books between 1956 and 1977; two are in English and the rest in Amharic, his native language. The works comprise eight novels, five plays, three poetry collections, and another five on various subjects, including translation of biographies and works on land tenure.

His mother Yirgedu Belay died young leaving him to be raised by his father Gubegna Ambaye It was her expressed wish that Abbe should go to school which Ambaye fulfilled by sending him to a church school as was usual He attended different schools in Gojjam and Begemeder for twelve years and attained a high level of excellence in the traditional curriculum which included Geez poetry hymnody and liturgical dance all rooted in the ...

Article

Abdulla, Muhammed Said  

Elena Bertoncini Zúbková

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Swahili novelist, was born in Makunduchi village in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1918. Even though he was a Muslim, he was educated in a missionary school. After completing his secondary education in 1938, he worked for the Civil Health Department and edited the Swahili Bulletin in the Department of Agriculture on his island. His complete biography remains obscure. He lost all his family in January 1964 during the bloody revolution that overthrew the sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government but took a heavy toll of victims among the population as well.

Abdulla’s first novelette, Mzimu wa watu wa kale (Graveyard of the Ancestors, 1960), aroused lively interest among the critics for its innovations: the abandonment of the folktale tradition, omnipresent in Swahili fiction of those days, and the concern for literary style. It won first prize in the East African Literary Competition of 1957 ...

Article

Achebe, Chinua  

Mpalive Msiska

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Nigerian novelist, was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on 15 November 1930 at Saint Simon’s Church, Nneobi, near Ogidi, in British colonial Nigeria. His father, Isaiah Okafo Achebe, was a teacher and evangelist and his mother, Janet Anaenechi Iloeghunam, was from the Awka area of eastern Nigeria. Until the age of five, Achebe was brought up at a church school, where his father taught. When his father went into semiretirement in 1935 in Ogidi, Achebe became a child of two worlds, the modern world and the world of indigenous tradition. He began primary school at Saint Philip’s Central School at Akpakaogwe, Ogidi, moving on to Nekede Central School near Owerri in 1942. Achebe developed into a studious young man, passing entrance examinations for two prestigious secondary schools.

It was at Government College Umuahia which had a good library and extremely able and dedicated teachers that Achebe cultivated his love of ...

Article

Achebe, Chinua  

Marian Aguiar

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Chinua Achebe once described his writing as an attempt to set the historical record straight by showing “that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.” Achebe's works portray Nigeria's communities as they pass through the trauma of colonization into a troubled nationhood. In bringing together the political and the literary, he neither romanticizes the culture of the indigenous nor apologizes for the colonial.

Achebe's own upbringing spanned the indigenous and colonial worlds. Born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe to an Igbo family active in the Christian church, he grew up in the rural village of Ogidi, in eastern Nigeria At a young age he received a coveted scholarship to Government College in Umuahia where he studied alongside ...

Article

Afrax, Maxamed Dahir  

Lidwien Kapteijns

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Somali novelist, short story writer, critic, journalist, and founder of cultural and literary journals and institutions, was born in Jarriiban, Mudug region, Somalia, in 1952. His name is also given as Mohamed Dahir Afrah and Maxamed Daahir Afrax. He graduated from high school in Mogadishu in 1973. When the Siad Barre government introduced the first official orthography for the Somali language in 1972, Afrax founded the first bilingual Somali-Arabic monthly magazine using the new script, Codka Jubba (“The Voice of Jubba,” 1972–1975). In 1976, Afrax’s story “Guur-ku-sheeg” (“Pseudo-marriage”) was serialized in the Somali national newspaper Xiddigta Oktoobar (“The October Star”), laying the basis for a lasting literary tradition of serialized fiction.

In this same serialized form he also first published his popular novel Maanafaay, the story of the girl Maanafaay, who, in the Mogadishu of the 1970s, strives to be modern and modest ...

Article

Aidoo, Ama Ata  

Kathleen Sheldon

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Ghanaian poet, playwright, and short-story writer, was born Christina Ama Aidoo in a village in central Ghana, in either 1940 or 1942 (sources differ). Her father, Yaw Fama, was a local ruler and an educator who opened the first local school and encouraged his daughter to attend. By the time she was a teenager, she was writing poems and short stories, and she has said that she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. Her first story, “To Us a Child Is Born,” was published in 1958, when it won a prize sponsored by The Daily Graphic, a leading Ghanaian newspaper. She attended Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast and the University of Ghana at Legon. In 1962 she attended the African Writers Workshop at Nigeria s University of Ibadan the result of a contest to which she had submitted No ...

Article

Aidoo, Ama Ata  

Marian Aguiar

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Christina Ama Ata Aidoo was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor, Ghana, into a Fante family she once characterized as “a long line of fighters.” Encouraged by her liberal-minded father, Aidoo pursued an English degree at the University of Ghana in Legon. As a student, she won a short-story prize, but her interests centered on drama as a means of bringing to life the rich oral traditions of the Fante. She worked closely with leading Ghanaian dramatist Efua Sutherland and became familiar with a Fante dramatic style that blossomed in the 1930s.

Aidoo's first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was staged in 1964 by the Student s Theatre at the University of Ghana With this play Aidoo earned her lasting reputation as a writer who examines the traditional African roles of wife and mother The play like many of her later works also demonstrated her willingness to grapple ...

Article

Alexis, Jacques Stéphen  

Richard Watts

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Alexis was born into one of Haiti's literary families. His father, Stéphen Alexis, was the author of Le Nègre masqué (1933) and wrote a work on the history of Haiti. After finishing his studies at the Saint-Louis de Gonzague Institute, Jacques Alexis studied medicine in both Port-au-Prince and Paris, France. Returning to Haiti after receiving his degree, he participated in the revolt of 1946. Alexis soon fled Haiti for fear of political persecution. From that point forward, he spent most of his time traveling, visiting the countries of the Middle East, Russia, and China, before settling in Cuba. But the lure of his native Haiti was strong, and he returned clandestinely to the northwest part of the island in 1961, in spite of reservations regarding the corrupt regime of François Duvalier Alexis was arrested and is believed to have died in captivity ...

Article

Alkali, Zaynab Amina  

Novian Whitsitt

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Nigerian creative writer and educator, was born in the Tura-Wazila community of Borno State, Nigeria. She completed her graduate education at Bayero University, Kano, receiving a doctorate in African literature. Professionally, she has served as principal of Shekara Girls’ Boarding School, Kano, an assistant lecturer at Bayero University, and senior lecturer in English and coordinator of English and general studies at Modibbo Adama College, University of Maiduguri. Following twenty-two years of university work, Alkali took a three-year break and worked for the National Primary Health Care Development Agency in Abuja. In 2009 she was named dean of the Faculty of Arts at Nasarawa State University, where she teaches creative writing and African literature in English. During her childhood, Alkali’s father converted to Christianity, but she became a Muslim in the 1960s. She asserts that both Christianity and Islam have influenced her own spirituality. In 1971 she married Dr Mohammed ...

Article

Almeida, Germano de  

Terza Silva Lima-Neves

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

lawyer and author, was born on 31 July 1945 on Boa Vista Island in the Republic of Cape Verde Germano de Almeida was one of ten children of Anacleto Dias Almeida and Eugenia da Cruz Almeida His father was a carpenter and his mother was a stay at home mother who took care of the children It was very difficult for his parents to support ten children Cape Verde was a small and poor country under Portuguese rule There were not many jobs available When Germano was sixteen years old his father passed away after being sick for many years Germano started working as a carpenter to help his family He was very smart really enjoyed school and because of this Germano was chosen to be his teacher s assistant He wanted to continue with school and be successful even if he did not receive support from his parents ...

Article

Amadi, Elechi  

Terri Ochiagha

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

, Nigerian author, educator, army officer, and administrator, was born in Mbodo-Aluu, today in the Ikwerre Local Government Area of Rivers State, on 12 May 1934 to Daniel Wonuchuku Wogbara Amadi, a farmer and haberdasher, and Enwene Wogazior. One of Amadi’s relatives, Gabriel Ohabiko, was a “famous Aluu story teller and historian from whose lips he must have garnered a vast store of oral tradition” (Alagoa in Feuser and Eko, 1994). His primary education was at Saint Peter’s School, Isiokpo. He went on to Government College, Umuahia, where he developed a keen interest in literature and began writing short stories and poems. After graduating from Umuahia, he spent a year at Survey School Oyo and earned a Land Survey certificate, before going on to study for a degree in physics and mathematics at the University College, Ibadan in 1955 At university Amadi replaced his Europeanized name Emmanuel Elechi Daniel ...

Article

Amadi, Elechi  

Kate Tuttle

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

A member of the Igbo ethnic group, Elechi Amadi was born in a small southeastern Nigerian village near Port Harcourt. In 1959 he graduated with a degree in physics and mathematics from the University College of Ibadan, a prestigious college attended by other well-known Nigerian writers, such as Chinua Achebe, John Pepper Clark, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka. After working as a land surveyor, Amadi taught science for three years at missionary schools in Ahoada and Oba. In 1963 he joined the Nigerian Army; he taught the Ikwerri dialect of Igbo at a military school in Zaria.

His first book, The Concubine, blended acute psychological detail and precise observation to tell the story of a young village woman's battle with spiritual forces. The book's publication in 1966 coincided with the proclamation of an independent state—Biafra—in Igbo-dominated southeastern Nigeria Amadi s allegiance to the Federal ...

Article

Amado, Jorge  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Jorge Amado, who wrote more than thirty novels during his career, played a significant role in representing African culture in Brazilian literature. Among his subjects are the blacks of Salvador, in Amado's home state of Bahia, and the African religious rituals that sustain them. Although Amado's approach to Afro-Brazilian traditions is sympathetic and exceptionally detailed, his Bahian novels have met with much controversy. A younger generation of Brazilian and non-Brazilian critics have accused Amado of creating overly exotic portraits of black culture and creating simplistic, class-bound character types.

Amado the son of a plantation owner in Bahia attended a Jesuit college at age 12 However after just one year he rebelled against the strict lifestyle at the school and left to live with his grandfather During the 1930s Amado joined the Brazilian Communist Party and his writings from this period reflect his ideological commitment to communism These works such ...

Article

Amini, Johari  

Margaret Ann Reid

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

Johari Amini, born Jewel Christine McLawler to William and Alma (Bazel) McLawler on 13 January 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, changed her name after her consciousness-raising by Haki R. Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee), whom she met as a thirty-two-year-old freshman at Wilson Junior College. Johari is Swahili for “Jewel,” and Amini is Swahili for “honesty and fidelity.” Amini believes that the meaning of a name becomes an inherent part of the person carrying that name, and she wanted names that would reflect her personality and her values of honesty and fidelity—values that she lived by and that she wanted her writings to convey.

Amini's meeting Madhubuti was the beginning of a long literary and political association which is demonstrated in her poetic style as well as in her social criticism She was a staff member of the Institute of Positive Education and she was assistant then associate editor ...

Article

Amrouche, Marguerite Taos  

Evan Mwangi

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Algerian writer and singer who brought Kabyle folk music of the rural Berber community to international audiences and one of the earliest modern Algerian female novelists, was born Marie-Louise Amrouche in Tunisia to a family of Roman Catholic converts who had fled Algeria to escape persecution. Her mother, Fadhma Amrouche, also a writer and musician, was an early influence. Amrouche adopted the nom de plume Marguerite Taos to underscore the influence of her mother; Marguerite was her mother’s Christian name, which the latter was not allowed to use by the Catholic Church, ostensibly because she had not been baptized properly.

Despite her exile, the family returned to Algeria on prolonged visits, from which Amrouche and her brother Jean Amrouche, a poet, got acquainted with the oral literature of their native Kabyle Berber people. Amrouche obtained her brevet supérieur in Tunis in 1934 and went to France the following year ...

Article

Andrews, Raymond  

Freda R. Beaty

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

and winner of first James *Baldwin Prize. Raymond Andrews was born near Madison, Georgia, in Morgan County, the fourth of ten children born to sharecropping parents George and Viola Andrews. He helped with the farm work and absorbed the ambience of rural living that was to color his later writings. Andrews left home at fifteen and worked at a variety of jobs while beginning to write. He eventually took a position in New York City with an airline, a job that enabled him to travel extensively in the United States and Europe.

Raymond Andrews's first published piece was an article on baseball, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1975. In 1976, Ataraxia, a small journal edited by Phillip Lee Williams and Linda Williams, excerpted a section from the novel Appalachee Red, which was published in its entirety by Dial Press (1978). Appalachee ...

Article

Ansa, Tina McElroy  

Jonathan Silverman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

Tina McElroy Ansa was born in Macon, Georgia, and educated at Mount DeSales, a Catholic school in Macon, and at Spelman College in Atlanta. Early in her career, she worked primarily as a journalist. She freelanced and worked for the Atlanta Constitution and for the Charlotte Observer (N.C.). She has also conducted writing workshops in Georgia at Brunswick College, Emory University, and Spelman College.

Ansa s best known work is her fiction She may be considered a southern writer for her fiction clearly draws on the physical landscape specifically the middle Georgia setting and the mores and folkways that shape the psyche of the American South Unlike much of southern fiction however her tales are devoid of the subtextual exploration of the undercurrent of dysfunction and perversion that exists in the South That is not to say that her fictive worlds are without dysfunction or moral conflict Her fiction however ...

Article

Ansa, Tina McElroy  

Kameelah L. Martin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

novelist, journalist, and educator, was born in Macon, Georgia, the youngest child of Walter J. McElroy, an entrepreneur and business owner, and Nellie Lee McElroy, a teaching assistant. Ansa grew up surrounded by storytellers. Her grandfather was one, and the patrons of her father's neighborhood juke joint often shared the tales of their seedy lives.

This love of storytelling remained with Ansa as she pursued a BA in English at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta. There, Ansa was introduced to the writing of Zora Neale Hurston by her professor Gloria Wade‐Gayles, an introduction that continued to shape Ansa's appreciation for the art of storytelling and folk tradition in the African American community, and one that would influence her own writing style tremendously. After completing her degree in 1971 Ansa became the first African American woman hired to work for the Atlanta Constitution (later the Atlanta ...

Article

Armah, Ayi Kwei  

Evan Mwangi

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Ghanaian novelist, translator, poet, and essayist, was born to an interethnic Fante-speaking couple in the twin harbor city of Sekondi-Takoradi on the coast of western Ghana in 1939. His mother, Esi Bosoma Inse, was Akan, while his father was from the Ewe ethnic group. His name is also given as George Aryee Quaye Armah. His parents, both teachers, divorced after his father, under pressure from his family and clan, decided to take a second wife. Too small to join his father as required by traditions, the young Armah lived with his mother for about two years, accompanying her to the school where she taught and quietly sitting beside her in class. At age five, he was separated from his mother and sent to live with his father in Asankrangwa, a tiny rural town. When his father died in 1947 in a traffic accident Armah s defiant mother took ...

Article

Armah, Ayi Kwei  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Ayi Kwei Armah has pursued his career as writer and teacher on three continents. In a 1985 article Armah described himself as not simply a member of the Ewe people, a Ghanian, and a West African, but “most significantly as an African.” His writings explore the meaning of Africa's past in the lives of its present-day people.

Born in the western region of Ghana, Armah attended local schools and Achimota College near Accra. In 1959 he went to the United States, where he attended Harvard University, from which he received a degree in sociology. Shortly afterward, he moved to Algiers, where he worked as a translator for the weekly paper Révolution Africaine (African Revolution). After a period in his home country, teaching English and writing for Ghana Television, Armah enrolled in 1967 in the Graduate Writing Program at New York City s Columbia University Later he joined ...