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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

Bennett, Louise  

Peter Hudson

Article

Publication History:

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

While Louise Bennett was not the first writer to use Jamaican dialect, the facility with which she reproduces it in her writing and performances has marked her as a pioneer. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Bennett was the daughter of baker Augustus Cornelius Bennett, who died when she was seven years old, and dressmaker Kerene Robinson. Bennett, known as Miss Lou, studied social work and Jamaican folklore at Friends' College, Highgate, Jamaica. In 1945 she received a British Council Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, England.

Bennett began writing in dialect in the late 1930s, inspired by the language she heard spoken by Jamaicans on the streets of Kingston. Soon after she began writing, she staged public performances of her poems. In 1942 her first collection of poetry, Dialect Verses, was published. Starting in 1943 Bennett contributed a weekly column to ...

Article

Cabrera, Lydia  

Roanne Edwards

Article

Publication History:

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

Lydia Cabrera, along with Fernando Ortiz, is widely considered one of the two most important twentieth century researchers and writers on Afro-Cuban culture. She wrote more than a dozen volumes of investigative work on the subject, including her pioneering El monte (1954), subtitled “Notes on the Religion, the Magic, the Superstitions and the Folklore of Creole Negroes and the Cuban People,” and Reglas de congo (1980), a book on Bantu (known as congo in Cuba) rituals. According to Ana María Simo, author of Lydia Cabrera: An Intimate Portrait, Cabrera's “is the most important and complete body of work on Afro-Cuban religions” of its time. Cabrera also wrote four volumes of short stories inspired by Afro-Cuban legends and beliefs. Her fiction is rich in metaphor and symbolism and has been compared stylistically with the writings of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca ...

Article

Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka  

Elsie A. Okobi

Article

Publication History:

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

Ibo novelist, was born on 26 September 1921 in Minna, northern Nigeria (Niger State), to Ogbuefi David Anadumaka Ekwensi and Agnes Uso Ekwensi, who were from Nkwelle in eastern Nigeria (Anambra State). Ekwensi’s father was an elephant hunter and a great storyteller; from him, Ekwenski learned the Ibo folklore that would later enrich his stories. Ekwensi grew up among Fulani children, learning to speak Hausa, in addition to Ibo, which was spoken at home. He was known to have married at least twice: Eunice Anyiwa in 1952, with whom he had five children, and Maria in 1969.

Ekwensi was sent to Government College in Ibadan in Yorubaland where he absorbed the Yoruba culture and language He continued his studies at Achimota College Ghana then at Yaba High College Lagos and he studied forestry at the School of Forestry Ibadan He worked in the forestry department at Ibadan from ...

Article

Juma Bhalo Sayyani, Ahmad Nassir  

Ann Biersteker

Article

Publication History:

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

Kenyan poet and healer, was born in Mombasa, Kenya. He is the older brother of Abdilatif Abdalla and a cousin of the famous taarab singer Juma Bhalo, who recorded song versions of many of Ahmad Nassir’s poems. Nassir’s earliest poems were published in the newspaper Sauti ya Pwani. His poems next were anthologized by Lyndon Harries in Poems from Kenya (1966) . Nassir’s second anthology, Malenga wa Mvita: Diwani wa Ustadh Bhalo (1971) , was awarded the Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Kenya’s major literary award, in 1972. Nassir’s poetry is deeply religious and philosophical. While both of the anthologies of his poems contain poems on religious topics, his religious and philosophical concerns are most fully explored in his 457-verse narrative poem on moral virtue, Utenzi wa Mtu ni Utu (1979) . This work has been analyzed in detail by Kai Kresse who ...

Article

Lima, Jorge Mateus Vicente  

Nicola Cooney

Article

Publication History:

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

Jorge de Lima was the son of José Mateus de Lima, a wealthy businessman, and Delmira Simões Lima. He studied humanities at Maceió, the seaport capital city of Alagoas State, Brazil, and earned a degree in medicine, which he practiced in Maceió and Rio de Janeiro. He went on to become a university professor and local politician in Rio de Janeiro.

Lima's talent for writing emerged at an early age. He published his first poems, including “O Acendedor dos Lampiões” (The Street Lamp Lighters, 1907 in a small literary paper he produced while still in secondary school He spent his childhood living either at the stately house of a sugar plantation or the family s second home in the city These experiences inspired much of his literary work Both his father and his maternal grandfather were white abolitionists who refused to accept slave labor on ...

Article

Mittelhölzer, Edgar Austin  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

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

Edgar Mittelhölzer has been called the father of the novel in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was the first Caribbean author to make a living entirely by his writing, and he remains the most prolific Caribbean novelist to date, even though his career was cut short by his suicide at age fifty-five.

Mittelhölzer was born into a mixed-race middle-class family in Guyana and had Swiss, German, French, English, and African heritage—although his father's resentment of their black blood shaped his childhood. He attended the well-known Barbice High School, and by the time he was nineteen his love for movies, detective fiction, and the Buffalo Bill stories had convinced him that he “had to be a writer.”

For his first decade as a writer he received mainly rejection slips, but he supported himself by menial jobs and continued writing until his first novel, Corentyne Thunder, was published in 1941 Shortly ...

Article

Nsue Angüe, María  

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

Article

Publication History:

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

writer and storyteller of traditional oral narratives from Equatorial Guinea (the only Spanish-speaking nation state in Africa), was born in jail in the city of Bata, where both her parents had been confined for resisting the authority of the colonial regime. Belonging to the Fang ethnic group, she is the only daughter of José Nsue Angüe, an anticolonial and proindependence leader (known by locals as “John Wayne”), who—after the coming of the country’s independence (on 12 October 1968)—would be appointed minister of education, then minister of agriculture, and later ambassador to Ethiopia, in the government of Francisco Macías Nguema.

Nsue Angüe s family came from Bidjabidján a frontier town in the northeast corner of the continental region of Río Muni bordering Cameroon on the north and Gabon on the east She lived there until the age of eight and was then entrusted to a Protestant missionary family temporarily stationed in ...

Article

P’Bitek, Okot  

Article

Publication History:

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

Born in Gulu, in northern Uganda, Okot p’Bitek received his early education locally and went on to the prestigious King’s College Budo in Uganda. At age twenty-two he wrote his first book, Lak tar miyo kinyero wi lobo (1953; translated as White Teeth, 1989). This Acholi-language novel reflected his strong interests in music, song, literature, and traditional culture—concerns that surfaced in all his subsequent writing.

In the mid 1950s p Bitek went to Great Britain as a member of Uganda s national Soccer team and stayed on to continue his education He attended Bristol University where he earned a diploma in education and then the University of Oxford where he earned a B Litt bachelor of letters degree in social anthropology Returning to Uganda he taught at Makerere University in the mid 1960s then in the late 1960s at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and ...

Article

Ribas, Óscar Bento  

Orquídea Ribeiro

Article

Publication History:

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

Angolan writer, poet, essayist, journalist, and folklorist, was born in Luanda, Angola, on 17 August 1909. He was the son of a Portuguese father, Arnaldo Gonçalves Ribas, and an Angolan mother, Maria da Conceição Bento Faria, a prototype of African ladies of the time, who kept the original sources of her culture alive. He attended primary and secondary school in Luanda, the Lyceum-Seminar of Luanda, and the Luanda Salvador Correia High School. After a short stay in Portugal to study commercial arithmetic, Ribas returned to Angola to work in the Directorate of Finance and Accounting. He resided in various cities of Angola, namely Novo Redondo (Sumbe), and Benguela, Bie, and Ndalatando.

Ribas gradually went blind during his early twenties but remained an indefatigable researcher and writer publishing books and articles on the culture of Angola from oral tradition to religious rites and culinary arts At the age of thirty ...

Article

Saldaña, Excilia  

Flora González

Article

Publication History:

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

Born into a middle-class Cuban family, Excilia Saldaña responded with fervor to the social and political changes that occurred in Cuba after the triumph of the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. During her college years, she became fully acquainted with Afro-Cuban culture through the ethnographic work of Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz.

Saldaña, like her poetic mentor and Cuba's poet laureate Nicolás Guillén, celebrates her African ancestry by populating her poems with the gods and goddesses and flora and fauna symbolically drawn from the Afro-Cuban religion. Saldaña is indebted to Guillén for his integration of African and Hispanic cultural traditions in poetry, but she brings to the forefront the force of the feminine heritage in the Caribbean.

Saldaña's lengthy elegy, My Name (A Family Anti-Elegy), published in 1991 by Ediciones Unión, bears a dedication to both Guillén and her grandmother, Ana Excilia Bregante While ...

Article

Santa Cruz, Nicomedes  

Marveta Ryan

Article

Publication History:

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

Nicomedes Santa Cruz is the author of three major collections of poetry: Décimas (first edition, 1960; second edition, 1969); Cumanana (1964); and Canto a mi Perú (Song to My Peru, 1966). Two anthologies of his work appeared in 1971: Ritmos negros de Perú (Black Rhythms of Peru) and Décimas y poemas: Antología (Décimas and poems: An Anthology). He also wrote a book of literary history and criticism entitled La décima en el Perú (The Décima in Peru, 1982). Santa Cruz recited and sang his poetry and shared his knowledge of Peruvian folklore on television and radio, as well as in live performances. He also made three sound recordings: Canto negro (Black Song, 1968), Cumanana, Antología Afroperuana (Cumanana: Afro-Peruvian Anthology, 1970), and Socabón (1975). An English translation of his works is yet to be published.

Although he employed various poetic ...

Article

Sousa, Noémia de  

Article

Publication History:

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

Sousa was the first woman of color to publish poetry in her home country, and possibly the first published woman of color poet in southern Africa. Noémia de Sousa was born in Catembe, Mozambique, the youngest of six children born of mixed-race parents. She was given the name Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares, but she is better known as Noémia de Sousa. By the time Sousa was sixteen and living in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the repressive racial hierarchies of the Portuguese colonial government had begun to awaken her social consciousness.

In 1945 at the urging of a friend she published her first poem titled O Irmão Negro The Black Brother in a minor school newspaper At nineteen years old the young poet was too shy to reveal her identity so she signed that poem and some later poems with the initials N S E or used ...

Article

Suʾda  

Allen J. Fromherz

Article

Publication History:

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

semi-historical Berber princess, was a main character in the Sira al Hilaliyya, the epic saga of the great Arab migration into North Africa in the eleventh century. Coming from the drought-stricken Arabian Peninsula and known for their warrior prowess on camelback, these Hilali Arabs were sent to Tunisia as a punishment for the Berbers breaking away from the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. One of the great classics of the Sira al Hilaliyya is a poignant portrait of the clash of two cultures, Berber and Arab, even as it insists on moments of reconciliation and the possibilities of peace through the theme of love transcending duty to one’s family, tribe, and people. At times Berber characters, especially women such as Suʾda were portrayed as even more noble than the Arab heroes themselves. Most closely analogous to the Dido character in the Roman epic The Aeneid Suʾda was the ...

Article

Trindade, Solano  

Nicola Cooney

Article

Publication History:

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

Solano Trindade was born in 1908 in Recife, a town in northeastern Brazil, the son of a mulatto cobbler and a mestizo (of indigenous and European descent) woman. His interest in folklore and popular arts was instilled at an early age, as he would routinely accompany his father to local folk dances and read aloud to his illiterate mother.

After some advanced schooling, Trindade became a Presbyterian deacon and began to write poetry. His early works were mystical writings, and his black poetry would evolve soon thereafter. In 1936 Trindade published his first book, Poemas Negros, and founded the Frente Negra Pernambucana (Black Front of Pernambuco) and the Centro Cultural Afro-Brasileiro (Afro-Brazilian Cultural Center). These groups united a group of contemporary black writers with a view to collecting and disseminating the work of fellow Afro-Brazilian poets and painters. In 1959 Trindade founded the Teatro Popular Brasileiro Brazilian ...

Article

Tutuola, Amos  

Article

Publication History:

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

The son of a Yoruba cocoa farmer, Amos Tutuola built his literary career retelling and expanding the stories he heard as a child, listening to elders in the evenings. His ten books, all drawing on Yoruba folklore, have since become classics of African literature.

Tutuola, whose family struggled financially, entered the Salvation Army School in Abeokuta, Nigeria, at the age of ten, his tuition paid by an uncle. Two years later, financial need led Tutuola to seek work as houseboy for F. O. Mornu, a local civil servant. In 1934 Tutuola, by then a promising student, moved to Lagos with his employer and enrolled in Lagos High School. But Tutuola suffered hunger and abuse while living in Lagos with Mornu, and he returned to Abeokuta in 1936. His father’s death in 1939 effectively ended his formal education.

After a failed attempt at farming Tutuola learned blacksmithing and plied his ...