Sozaboy powerfully describes the fate of a young, naive soldier thrown into the frontline of a civil war, from his first proud days of recruitment to the disillusionment and horrors that follow. Mene yearns for manhood. He dreams of gaining the glory that the ex-soldier in his village brags about, with his stories of hunting 'Hitla'. So when war breaks out and soldiers appear in Mene's isolated village, he sees his chance to finally wear a uniform. Too soon, however, Mene's innocence turns to terror. While witnessing the unfathomable, Mene must learn to evade the carnage of warfare if he wants to make it home alive... Writing in Nigerian Pidgin English, Ken Saro-Wiwa creates a unique window into the dark consequences of meaningless war. 'Haunting.' Guardian 'Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a great anti-war novel, among the very best the twentieth century has produced.' William Boyd

"The authors examine Saro-Wiwa's literary output both in terms of literary criticism and within a political framework. They give equal attention to his more public roles, including public reaction within Nigeria to his work."--BOOK JACKET.

"Plant one bamboo shoot-cut bamboo for the rest of your life." William Boyd's prolific, fruitful career is a testament to this old Chinese saying. Boyd penned his first book review in 1978-the proverbial bamboo shoot-and we've been reaping the rewards ever since. Beginning with the Whitbread Award-winning A Good Man in Africa, William Boyd has written consistently artful, intelligent fiction and firmly established himself as an international man of letters. He has done nearly thirty years of research and writing for projects as diverse as a novel about an ecologist studying chimpanzees (Brazzaville Beach), an adapted screenplay about the emotional lives of soldiers (The Trench, which he also directed), and a fictional biography of an American painter (Nat Tate). All the while, Boyd has been accruing facts and wisdom-and publishing it in the form of articles, essays, and reviews. Now available for the first time in the United States, Bamboo gathers together Boyd's writing on literature, art, the movie business, television, and autobiographical reflections on his African childhood, his years at boarding school, and the writing life. From Kurt Vonnegut to the Cannes Film Festival, from Charles Dickens to Catherine Deneuve, from mini-cabs to Cecil Rhodes, this collection is a fascinating and surprisingly revealing companion to the work of one of Britain's leading novelists.

This collection of essays examines various aspects of leadership from several disciplinary perspectives.

This is an extensive study of Kenule Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni Minority and Human Rights activist who was judicially murdered in 1995. Questions of nationhood, ethnic minority and power politics in Nigeria are discussed in a collection of essays that examine the corpus of his literary and political ideas, pointing out the direction of his thought and the enduring contribution that Sara-Wiwa made to Nigeria's literary and political arenas.

Places African literature--novels of the colonial and postcolonial periods, written in both French and English--in their proper context within the field of postcolonial studies and illustrates how historical narration not only "answers back" to Europe's colonialist legacy, but also serves as a complex form of dissent among Africans themselves.

Province of South Africa

This Third Edition of Approaches to the African Novel is a child of necessity. Because of the unfortunate death of the publisher of Saros International who issued the First Edition and high demand this third, enlarged edition has become imperative. Three new essays (all previously published) are added, two expectedly on Achebe (the father of the African novel) and one on Mongp Betiís Mission to Kala which was partially anthologised in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Volume 27, 1984). Achebeís Things Fall Apart as an Igbo national epic has evoked a spate of reactions from critics of African literature especially the troika Chinweizu et al. in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. It was also anthologised in Modern Black Literature edited by S. Okechukwu Menu (1971). The essay on Arrow of God whose structure and meaning has been largely avoided by other critics is included here for further airing. For gender balance, as the previous volume contained no essays on women writers, an essay on Flora Nwapa has been added. Since the novels discussed in this volume exclusively are on the African literature south of the Sahara, the last essay on Peter Abrahams comes in to round out this collection of essays with a study of a south African writer, for geographical balance.