From JM Coetzee to Nelson Mandela, the author chooses her favourite
'performances of courage and honesty' that have come out of the
continent
Alexandra Fuller
Thursday October 27 2011
guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/26/alexandra-fuller-top-10-african-memoirs
Alexandra Fuller was born in England but moved to Africa with her
family when she was two. She left Africa in 1994 with her husband to
move to Wyoming. Her debut book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight:
An African Childhood, was a finalist for the Guardian's first book
award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Her
2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier won the
Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. Her latest book, Cocktail Hour
Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, continues her memoirs to focus on the
life of her eccentric and charismatic mother.
"The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly
beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are
all performances of courage and honesty. Far from the tell-all
confessionals more usual in western memoirs, the African memoir lays
bare the bones of what it is to be a child, survivor, or perpetrator
of oppression and conflict.
"What is often shocking, but very effective, is the humour evident in
so many of these works, laughter being an essential survival technique
for so many Africans (and of her writers). The act of writing is also
a defiant way of asserting, "I was born. I am here. I will remain."
In places of chronic instability, the memoir is an anchor of words to
an experience and place and a way to bear witness; to expose and
perhaps even explain the atrocities of war, racism, tribalism and
cronyism. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Cocktail Hour Under
the Tree of Forgetfulness, my own memoirs of Africa, are written from
a white African point of view, but explore the ways in which the land
possesses all of us who love it ? regardless of ethnicity ? and the
ways in which laughter can make palatable life's unendurable losses."
1. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter by Albie Sachs [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/politics/9780285640207/the-soft-vengeance-of-a-freedom-fighter"
title="]
Not everyone can be a Jewish-born, anti-apartheid, South African
lawyer and self-proclaimed freedom fighter But that was Albie Sachs
in the 1980s. And that in itself would be enough. But to be, in
addition, a writer of gorgeous, uplifting sentences seems to be
something heaven-sent. Sachs's remarkable memoir transcends its time
and even its place with its universality and ultimately (and this
sounds odd in the context of a man who was blown up by pro-apartheid
forces in 1988 and lost an arm and an eye) its message is hopeful. A
"re-membering" rather than a "dis-membering" is what Sachs would say,
both about the act of violence which threatened to kill him and his
life thereafter.
2. One Day I will Write About this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9781847080219/one-
day-i-will-write-about-this-place" title="]
This wonderful memoir about Wainaina's journey from book-devouring
east African boy to African Caine prize-winning author is brimming
with virtuoso insouciance and it is utterly resolved. Wainaina has
done all the soul-searching of a young-man-in-flux for us, and we are
left in awe of his jazzy, fresh use of language and his gentle
guidance. Wainaina's Africa is not all glamorous poverty and backlit
giraffes. It's an Africa in which the lost are perpetually leading
the blind, and yet still somehow find their way home.
3. The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9781847080219/one-day-i-will-write-about-this-place"
title="]
One of the most memorable memoirs of childhood written in the last
decade. Honest, informative and very restrained, this is the story of
one woman's journey from a child of Liberia's elite ruling class, to
refugee from the war that saw her mother horribly attacked, her cousin
(a member of the pre-coup government) shot, and her family torn
apart. I read this book in one greedy helping and have held it up as
an absolute must-read ever since.
4. This Child Will Be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9780061353482/this-child-will-be-great-memoir-of-a-remarkable-life-by-africas-first-woman-president"
title="]
A true story of Sirleaf's ascent from ordinary Liberian child to
leader that reads as much like an awful whodunnit on a
catastrophically awesome scale, as it does like the memoirs of an
ambitious and brave woman. This autobiography from the woman who is
Africa's first (and, at present count, only) female head of state, is
as inspiring as it is page-turning.
5. The Devil that Danced on Water by Aminatta Forna [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9780006531265/the-devil-that-danced-on-the-water-a-daughters-memoir"
title="]
This memoir manages to be at once one of the least sentimental books
ever written about an African childhood (in this case, Sierra Leone)
and yet so utterly moving that one finds oneself almost constantly
welling up, not just with shock or sadness, but with awe at Forna's
courageous telling of an incredibly difficult story. This is a story
of war, loss and ultimately redemption, written with formidable grace
and poise.
6. Boyhood by JM Coetzee [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/
unclassified/9780099268277/boyhood-a-memoir" title="]
Here was a refreshing splash-in-the-face recounting of a white
southern African childhood shorn utterly of any romance or excess
emotion. Refreshingly cured of any diseased nostalgia for the good
old days, Coetzee's memoir sears with an almost dry-iced precision.
7. Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9780230749016/conversations-with-myself"
title="]
This is a book you will find yourself going back to and thumbing
through, not just for the historical perspective that this collection
of essays, speeches and conversations that this memoir provides, but
for the shot-to-the-heart wisdom of one of the greatest and most
inspiring leaders of our time.
8. A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt by Toyin Falola [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9780472031320/a-mouth-sweeter-than-salt-an-african-memoir"
title="]
This Nigerian coming-of-age memoir is irreverent, poetic and filled
with the kind of ordinary information that makes Nigeria feel oddly
familiar, even in its loud, exuberant foreignness. It's easy to see
the influences of both Chinua Achebe and Wole Solinkya in these pages,
and yet Falola has a voice all his own too. Something modern and
jazzy and shoulder-shrugging and altogether itself.
9. What Is the What by Dave Eggers [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/
data/book/literary-fiction/9780141015743/what-is-the-what" title="]
Eggers' biographical novel of Valentino Achak Dang's nightmarish
flight from his country's civil war in the 1980s and 1990s, to refugee
camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and eventually (but far from safe-and-
soundly) to America reads like a Victorian epic. Dang's courage and
humanity shine through these pages in first-person brilliance and
Eggers is nothing if not the master of language. It's a spine-
straightening read, and ultimately something that lends a very human
face, and a very human need for hope, to one of the most brutalised
corners of our modern world.
10. Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda [http://www.guardian.co.uk/
books/data/book/unclassified/9780143527442/sometimes-there-is-a-void-
memoirs-of-an-outsider" title="]
Mda's electric honesty is a live current through his remarkably
gorgeous, urgent, poetic, matter-of-fact memoir. But don't get lulled
into thinking this is the book of one bravely truthful man's journey
into self-expression. Mda has shaken off calcification, identity, ego
and walked us all into sovereignty and selfhood. Read this, and be
prepared to examine your own soul as never before
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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