Discover our African Writers

Africa

1 May

Written By Spinifex Press

Looking to explore new worlds and writers? Here we highlight books written by African authors.

NOW AVAILABLE

Featured

Chinongwa

A$29.95

Lucy Mushita

My only dream that’s ever come true, and one I relish with a vengeance, is being able to whistle like a man. I was told a woman fit to be married should not whistle. I don’t want to be married so the more they point at me, the louder I whistle. My load is still heavy on my head, but my heart is light, for I know, like the sun, that I shall rise every morning. Be it cloudy, cold or wet, I shall not fail to rise. And I shall whistle as loudly as I like. To me, it is the sound of freedom.

In the village where Chinongwa lives, her family, displaced from their lands, are very poor. One desperate solution to hunger is to trade young daughters into marriage. At first, to their shame, her father’s and aunt’s attempts to marry off their youngest child fail. No one is interested in this small, thin girl. Eventually, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, offers Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband who is old enough to be the girl’s grandfather. Chinongwa is forced to grow up very fast and rely on her survival instincts. She does her best to do what is expected of her and become a good wife and mother, but being very young, very alone, and a girl, the odds are stacked against her. Eventually, after spending her whole life doing the bidding of others, all Chinongwa wants is her independence. But how can one gain such a thing as a woman? Will she ever truly be free?

JULY 2023 | ISBN 9781925950816 | Paperback | 152 x 228 mm| 248 pages

Read more about Lucy Mushita

BOTSWANA

Featured

The Heavens May Fall

A$24.95

Unity Dow

The Heavens May Fall takes up the story of a fiery up-and-coming lawyer at the Bana-Bantle Children’s Agency in Mochudi, Botswana. Naledi Chaba’s caseload is bulging with stories of rape and abuse. So when she takes on the case of a 15-year-old girl who has been raped by the lodger, she’s on a familiar battleground, involving her own peers. And it’s not only J.J., her silk-shirt-wearing, cigar-smoking legal opponent, who’s happy to avoid taking moral responsibility. Justice Mmung, the High Court Judge hearing the case, has secrets in his past. It’s yet another example of hypocrisy in high places, and she’s tired of it. Naledi is giving the Junior Bar address at the Law Society Annual Dinner: is this the place to publicly expose him? But digging into the past holds surprises. Their generation was shaped by the Botswana of no tar roads, cattle posts and customary law … and what will she find at the end of a three-hour trip down dusty dirt roads into the desert?

Unity Dow’s latest novel is a fascinating and uncompromising exposé of the ways in which the law can fail the weakest. Yet it’s also a witty homage to the everyday texture of life in Botswana, permeated by the smell of bogobe and tripe, home-cooked in a three-legged pot by a loving father. The Heavens May Fall continues Unity Dow’s examination of an African culture dealing with the pressures of colonisation and globalisation by looking at the effect of global issues on individual women’s and men’s lives. The Heavens May Fall takes the microscope to the legal profession, the lives of victim and judge, counsel and plaintiff. Unity has a background as an advocate and legal activist and knows the Botswana legal system in the same way that John Grisham knows his courts. Her court drama is gripping and as one reviewer noted "as tight as a hawser" and "a nail-gnawing read to the end".

2007 | ISBN 9781876756482 | Paperback | 212 x 136 mm | 191 pp

Juggling Truths

A$24.95

Unity Dow

Unity Dow’s third novel, Juggling Truths portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka in the Botswanan village of Mochudi in Africa. Go to the past with me, so you can take the past to the future, asks her Nkoko. Nei takes us on an extraordinary journey through the many truths that shape her life; the truths of the colonisers and their churches and of her own people. We travel with her through dreams and share the wisdom of her grandmother as she lets the never-ending stories weave their own reality in face of a universe of conflicting truths. Unity Dow recreates with telling insight and gentle humour a world where the truths of the missionaries and the witchdoctors jostle with those of the generations of women.

2003 | ISBN 9781876756383 | Paperback | 216 x 140 mm | 173 pp

The Screaming of the Innocent

A$24.95

Unity Dow

We are looking for a man with a hard heart; a heart of stone; a heart of a real man. One afternoon, a twelve-year-old girl goes missing near her village. The local police tell her mother and the villagers she has been taken by a wild animal. Five years later, a young government employee Amantle Bokaa finds a box bearing the label ‘Neo Kakang; CRB 45/94’. It contains evidence of human involvement in the affair. So begins an illegal and undercover struggle for justice and retribution. A powerful story of corruption, The Screaming of the Innocent challenges the romantic representations of Africa. Botswana High Court judge Unity Dow continues the fight she began with Far and Beyon’, to give her country a strong voice in the bookshelves of the world.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756208 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 215 pp

Far and Beyon'

A$34.95

Unity Dow

For Mara, mother of four, and sole provider for her family, life has never been easy. In her community women carry a heavy burden as the world changes around them. In Botswana the tensions are growing as young people attempt to resolve the magicks of tradition with the technologies of now.

2001 | ISBN 9781876756079 | Paperback | 217 x 138 mm | 199 pp

EGYPT

Featured

Walking Through Fire

A$27.95

Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi, internationally known for her novels, short stories and writings on women, now writes about her life, about the reactions in the Arab world to her writings on sex; about her imprisonment under Sadat and her struggles against oppression and discrimination. Beginning her working life as a rural doctor, she goes on to set up women’s organisations and publish magazines later banned or endangered by fundamentalist threats. After her name goes on a death list, Nawal El Saadawi flees into exile.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756314 | Paperback | 235 x 160 mm | 251 pp

A Daughter of Isis

A$37.95

Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppressions imposed on women by sex and class. For her, writing and action have been inseparable and this is reflected in some of the most evocative and disturbing novels ever written by or about Arab women. Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, Nawal el Saadawi went on to train as a medical doctor. With the publication of Women and Sex in 1969 and other activist writings she has courted danger ever since. She is a writer who has used words as an act of rebellion against injustice.

2000 | ISBN 9781875559923 | Paperback | 235 x 155 mm | 294 pp

NIGERIA

Featured

A Bit of Difference

A$24.95

Sefi Atta

At thirty-nine, Deola Bello, a Nigerian expatriate in London, is dissatisfied with being single and working overseas. Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity. When her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father’s five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward. In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities. Deola’s journey is as much about evading others’ expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life.

2012 | ISBN 9781876756994 | Paperback | 205 x 135 mm | 222 pp

Everything Good Will Come

A$26.95

Sefi Atta

An international prize-winning novel by Nigerian-born Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come is a powerful and eloquent story of a young woman’s coming of age. It is 1971, and Nigeria is under military rule and eleven-year-old Enitan Taiwo is tired of waiting for school to start. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan’s brother, allow her to be friends with the new girl next door, Sheri Bakare? The two girls’ paths traverse this novel, one manipulates the traditional system, the other attempts to defy it.

2008 | ISBN 9781876756666 | Paperback | 202 x 134 mm | 336 pp

KENYA

Featured

The Great Climate Robbery: how the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it

A$27.95

GRAIN

The Great Climate Robbery provides valuable information about how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it, and what can be done to turn things around. The various chapters in this collection document the ill effects of this industrial food system such as the growing hunger, the destruction of rural peoples’ livelihoods, the loss of biodiversity and cultures, the exploitation of labour and a range of health calamities.

This timely anthology by the international NGO Grain shows how food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution to climate change. With governments, particularly those from the main polluting countries, abdicating their responsibility to deal with the problem, it has become ever more critical for people to take action into their own hands. Changing the food system is perhaps the most important and effective place to start.

2016 | ISBN 9781742199917 | Paperback | 246 pp

SOUTH AFRICA

Featured

The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma

A$29.95

Mmatshilo Motsei

Inspired by rare strength and courage, this gripping narrative tells the story of a young woman —known variously as “Khwezi” and “the complainant” — who made a principled decision to lay a charge of rape against Jacob Zuma, a man who was a father-figure, a family friend, a comrade — and the Deputy President of South Africa. She took on the fight against considerable odds, Zuma being one of the most popular and powerful political leaders of his time. Enduring prolonged public attacks, she listened to Zuma supporters chant “Burn the Bitch” outside the courtroom during her trial. Her accusers and the judge concurred that having worn a kanga that evening, the complainant had, like so many other women, “asked for it.” Crushed and conquered by the mechanics of power, she was forced to flee into exile. By using the trial of Jacob Zuma as a mirror, this account reveals the hidden yet public forms of violence against women in their homes, marriages, and churches. Caught in the crossfire of the nation’s political succession battle, this young woman refused to back down. Her story outlines the particular ways in which women can be subjugated by power, and by speaking out, she amplified the muffled screams of the countless victims of those who parade their authority in parliament, government, and religion.

2007 | ISBN 9781876756642 | Paperback | 234 x 135 mm | 208 pp

Featured

Long Life: Positive HIV Stories

A$34.95

Jonathan Morgan

Bambanani Women's Group

South Africa is in the throes of a new struggle brought on by the AIDS pandemic. Long Life shines a light behind the grim statistics to illuminate the human face of HIV/AIDS in Cape Town's largest township, Khayelitsha. Long Life tells the stories of thirteen remarkable women who are all HIV positive. These women, all part of the Memory Box Project, relate their stories through the use of body maps that reflect their life histories. Through personal stories, photographs and paintings they share their insights with humour and frankness. Woven between are the daily struggles of health-care workers and campaigners.

2003 | ISBN 9781876756420 | Paperback | 282 x 210 mm | 176 pp

Featured

Another Year in Africa

A$19.95

Rose Zwi

They came from the stetl to a new land, to a new life. Another year in Africa, they said, another year in exile. Old bonds break as they adjust from the old world of pogroms to their new life in Africa. Six-year-old Ruth is haunted by memories of tragedy and persecution that are not even hers. Award-winning author, Rose Zwi, evokes with tenderness the 1930s and 40s with a tale of loss of innocence alongside the stirrings of Apartheid.

1995 | ISBN 9781875559428 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 172 pp

Featured

Safe Houses

A$21.95

Rose Zwi

Set against the escalating violence of the last years of the Apartheid regime, Safe Houses tells the story of three families – the Sibiyas, the Singers, the Sterns – who are inextricably bound by love and hate, hope and betrayal. Ruth and Lola are drawn into the struggle against Apartheid, but feel marginal: it is difficult to find solutions when one is part of the problem. Can love and hope survive an evil political system that indiscriminately devours both the guilty and the innocent? Against all odds, a friendship develops between Lola’s uncle Zalman, a resident of a home for the aged, and Mr Sibiya, a black cleaner. Both understand the true complexity of the situation. Two of Mr Sibiya’s children have left the country to become freedom fighters; the two who remain are faced with the problem of fighting oppression from within the system, or taking up arms against it. Zalman, with his Eastern European history, knows that no amount of privilege can insulate the whites against the world outside their high walls.

1993 | ISBN 9781875559213 | Paperback | 198 x 130 mm | 200 pp

Featured

Speak the Truth, Laughing

A$21.95

Rose Zwi

Rose Zwi’s stories embrace people from different countries and cultures drawn together by a common humanity. Her characters range from a political activist who is house-arrested, to the child of immigrant parents caught between two cultures; from a city-educated woman returning to the arid homeland of her tribal grandfather, to a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shtetl; from a solitary dingo in a small Australian town, pursued to its inevitable end to a farmer obsessed with returning his land to its natural state.

Rose Zwi enchants the reader in her struggle to arrive at the truth of a situation. With a delicate but ironic touch, leavened with gentle humour, the award-winning author of Another Year in Africa, Safe Houses and Last Walk in Naryshkin Park opens our eyes to the world around us and captures our hearts.

The title comes from Horace's Satires:
"Furthermore, that I may not run over this matter with a laugh in the manner of those who rattle off jokes – and yet what is to prevent one from telling the truth with laughter, as coaxing teachers sometimes give their pupils cookies to make them willing to learn their ABCs."

2002 | ISBN 9781876756215 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 197 pp

Spinifex Press

Discover our African Writers

Vale Maria Mies (1931-2023)

Vale Suzanne Bellamy