Tag-Archive for ◊ african countries ◊

Author:
• Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Francesca Marciano was born and grew up in Rome, Italy in 1955. Her grandfather was a well-known Italian writer and winner of literary awards. Since her childhood Francesca was dreaming of becoming a writer like her grandfather but she gave up her university studies and went to New York to have a six-month film course and ended up staying six years.

She worked as a producer/director for documentaries for the Italian television before she found out that her real vocation was film-making. She also acted in some films and became a writer.

Her first holiday trip to Zanzibar made her fall in love with Africa. Since then, she spends her time between Rome and Kenya, where she has a residence.

Francesca Marciano has written three novels to date :
The End Of Manners in 2009
Casa Rossa in 2003
Rules Of The Wild in 1998

The beautiful young Italian, Esme, is the main character and the passionate, self-observing narrator of Rules Of The Wild. The story is set in modern Kenya and relates the every day life of western expatriates who live a superficial, decadent, purposeless existence in a closed circle community. They get drunk, consume drugs and are devoid of morals. They live in Kenya and yet are completely cut off from the native culture of the place they call home but don’t seem to care. They don’t want to leave because they are captured by the picturesque beauty of the country and because of all the privileges and freedom they have. They don’t contribute to the Kenyan life, they don’t even make African friends, they only have cheap African labourers. The colonial attitude still prevails among the white society in Africa.

The expatriates are aware without being deterred, that they will never belong to Kenya nor be part of it despite falling in love with it. Just like Esme who surmounts her torn feelings towards her two lovers, Adam and Hunter, knowing well that she will never “belong” to either of them.

Esme is first attracted to Adam, the gentle, handsomely rugged, safari leader, a second generation Scot, who is captivated by the fascinating landscape and wild nature and would like to transmit this passion to Esme.

While living with Adam she is charmed by the conceited British war correspondent, Hunter, who after reporting the Somalian and Rwandan genocides becomes cynical about the harshness and injustice in these breathtaking, unspoilt East African countries and transmits the horror of what he has witnessed to Esme, through his copious accounts.

After much wavering between her two very dissimilar lovers, after much suffering and introspection, Esme discovers that her passion lies elsewhere. It lies in the miracle generated everyday by the swooping of birds over the still water, the movement of the clouds, the pink and purple sunrise and the stunningly dramatic orange sunset. Every day this magnificent, heavenly display looks as if perceived for the first time by the observer.

Esme discovers that she feels reborn and free by living so close to such enthralling virgin landscape which is a constant wonder, because she senses that she is part of it. She realises that she is in love with Africa more than anything or anybody. At last, after her wearying quest, she attains her flawless, “elsewhere” and extirpates herself from the past in order to live in harmony and self-abnegation with her surroundings.

Unfortunately, this striking paradisaical setting is heavily obscured by the sad crude reality of how the white Westerners still sustain the colonialist mentality in the African countries and by the rape, pillages and blood baths taking place in the neighbouring Rwanda and Somalia. A dark side of human nature juxtaposed to the beautiful images of an untamed luxuriant African panorama.

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Author:
• Monday, September 28th, 2009

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977 from Igbo parents. She is the fifth of six siblings. Her father worked as first professor of statistics, then became a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka where her mother also worked as a first woman registrar.

After successfully completing her secondary education, Adichie briefly studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria. She obtained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel in Philadelphia for two years. Afterward she moved to Eastern Connecticut State University, to be near her sister who lived there and continued studying communication and political science.

She obtained a degree in 2001, which was complemented by a master degree in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She also obtained an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008. Adichie lives between Nigeria and the U.S.A. where she teaches creative writing.

Adichie has to date written three novels:
Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003 was short-listed for the 2004 Orange Fiction prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Half of a Yellow Sun was published in 2006 and was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007.
The Thing Around Your Neck was published in June 2009.

She also participated with a short story in “One World: A global anthology…” which was published in May 2009.

The title of Half of a Yellow Sun refers to the Biafran flag emblem, a sun halfway through rising. The story is set in the 1960s in southeastern Nigeria. It is a fictitious story based on fact, before, during and briefly after the three-year Nigerian-Biafran war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, between the Muslim Hausa-Fulani tribe from the north and the Christian Igbo tribe from the south east and also the Yoruba tribe: An armed conflict that was triggered due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions and due to the fragile balance and enmity between the different tribes.

The novel is divided into four parts, relating the events between the early and late sixties switching, in alternation, back and forth in time.

Olanna and Kainene, the Igbo privileged twin sisters, who come from a wealthy and powerful family, are obliged to survive through hardship and starvation. Although twins and well educated, they are very different in every way, not only in looks but also in mentality and in their life expectations. Olanna is an intellectual, while Kainene is a businesswoman, who successfully runs the family affairs.

The third main character, is Ugwu, the thirteen-year-old hard working, ambitious and highly intelligent houseboy, inspired in part by Mellitus, who was working as a houseboy for Adichie’s parents during the war. The other part was inspired by Fide, who was the houseboy when Adichie was growing up.

There is also the passionate, ideological professor Odenigbo, the maths lecturer at the university of Nsukka and Olanna’s partner, who becomes her husband later in the story. He is politically and radically minded, he holds an intellectual salon in his house with his colleagues, where they debate about the day to day problems Nigeria is facing and the post-colonial steps that should be taken.

The fifth character is the English expatriate writer, Richard Churchill who is Kainene’s lover. Richard loves the country, the culture and has the feeling of belonging to the Igbo tribe.

The story evolves around these five lively, interwoven, Igbo characters who are resilient to their fate and don’t convey any self pity.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a deeply moving novel with many themes : The African culture, the Biafran war with its violence, harshness, famine and oppression. It also depicts dignity, love, hatred, tribal loyalty and ethnic allegiance, but also human failure and hope among family members.

Through her innate gift as a storyteller, her compassion and her four-year effort of searching and writing the book that she always wanted to write, Adichie succeeds in producing Half of a Yellow Sun in memory of her grand-parents, whom she never saw and who died during the war, before she was born.

In her novel, Adichie takes her readers to an emotionally haunting, heartfelt and profound scenes of the sixties in a complex Nigeria, which had to suffer a brutal and savage civil war, like many other African countries are suffering even today. Adichie says in one of her interviews that : “many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved today”.

The novel ends on a very poignant and sad note, the title of Ugwu’s written book about the Nigerian-Biafran war : “The World was Silent When We Died”.