100 Books Like The Power to Name

This anthology of African women writers has been my personal lodestar in writing about Regina Twala, a forgotten African writer.

Busby (a pioneering editor and publisher of Ghanaian heritage) was one of the first to recognize that the canon of African writers was much bigger than famous men like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Her work taught me about a longstanding rich female literary tradition on the African continent – some of her earliest examples of women writers date to Ancient Egypt!

Busby recognizes that we can’t always look to the written page for evidence of this, given that many women writers were denied opportunities to publish their work.

So she broadens the focus of her anthology by paying attention to both “words and writing,” thinking about female writers of novels, poetry, plays, non-fiction, and journalism.

A must read. 

I find the notion of the “unknown” writer quite problematic.

Most of the time, at least somebody has, in fact, heard of the writer. So by whom is this writer unknown, and for what reasons has their reputation been erased?

The South African writer Miriam Tlali – the first South African woman writer to publish a book in English - is a case in point.

Tlali’s novel Muriel at Metropolitan (about an office worker in apartheid Johannesburg) was banned when it was published in 1975 for its critical portrayal of white South Africans.

Tlali was subsequently ignored by her literary (almost entirely male) peers, dismissed as offering “reportage” rather than “art”. Yet since 2017, Tlali’s work has been celebrated.

The question of whether a writer is “known” or “unknown” is complex with many layers to consider, including the prejudices of racism and sexism. 

Editor-in-chief of VICE magazine, Tsjeng is also editor of the “Forgotten Women” series (other titles include “The Scientists”, “The Leaders”, and “The Artists”).

I like this one because I’ve actually struggled to find books that explicitly focus on unknown female writers. I suspect this is partly because these writers are often unknown because they didn’t physically publish much if any work (though not through lack of trying).

It’s hard to document women writers who left little paper trail behind them. I find Tsjeng’s decision to profile “forgotten women” across a range of fields inspiring and provocative.

Although I wish she would have included more African women in her collections, including The Writers. Maybe Regina Twala will make it into a subsequent edition! 

I love the way in which this fascinating group biography of the female partners of renowned male writers brings these usually ignored figures into the limelight.

Ciuraru argues that behind the careers of many acclaimed literary figures stand the important contributions of their wives. These women offered intellectual as well as practical support. 

Many of these literary wives shelved their own creative aspirations to tend to the careers of their husbands.

But after their husbands’ deaths, some of these women found they finally had space for their own literary lives to start blossoming. 

In these times of Black Lives Matter, emboldened white-supremicists, and with European dominance descendant, Born into Blackness is a revelatory and blunt dose of historical reality. I was not fully aware of the centrality of the slave economy in Europe’s rise to global dominance. Most importantly, I was ignorant of the level of cultural, political, and economic sophistication of the African nations when the Portuguese first explored the west coast of Africa. I had some understanding of the Haitian revolution and its manifestation of the enlightenment ideals, but this book opened my eyes to the historical ripples of the revolution: the Louisiana purchase, ceding much of present-day Southern US from Napoleon’s France; the sale and forced-march of thousands of slaves into the cotton-growing south, fueling an economic take-off that made the US an imperial power.

Anansi the Spider is one of the classic African stories that inspired me to go into storytelling as a career. Reading this book, and watching its animated counterpart as a child, totally enthralled me. The combination of the bright, bold colours and graphical aesthetic, with the mystique of the folklore felt just like magic to me. The fable told here comes off as profound yet funny and quirky. This book is a must for anyone interested in fables and African folklore in particular.

Toby Green’s book is a magisterial history of West Africa and West Central Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

Exploring a large array of sources from three continents the book tells the history of African societies such as the kingdoms of Kongo and Dahomey, by showing how Africa was connected to the rest of the world earlier before Europeans reached the Atlantic coasts of the continent.

With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade Africa exported currencies such as gold, whose great value persisted over time, but kept importing cloth, cowries, iron, and copper, whose value decreased over time.

The book helps us to understand the roots of the inequalities among Africa and the Global North and shows us that these unbalanced economic and diplomatic exchanges were tied to cultural, religious, and artistic dimensions, in which material culture also played a central role.

Even among this indomitable breed of women, Mary stands out for her daring. She came to Africa almost a century after Anne Barnard with a keen interest in natural history and the eye of an early anthropologist while traveling in places synonymous with dangerous disease – from Sierra Leone to Angola, Congo, and Niger.

She was barely less bold as a standard bearer for African culture, challenging perceptions about the colonial mission before dying as nobly as she had lived, nursing Boer prisoners of war at the Cape in 1900.

Mungo Park’s journeys into West Africa at the end of the 18th century were probably the toughest undertaken by any of the Europeans who explored the continent.

The trials he underwent, from disease to hunger to attacks by local leaders make modern-day travellers like myself look pampered.

As I recount in my book, I was eventually worn down by travelling in West Africa and succumbed to what was known by the region’s French colonisers as “soudanité”, so I could relate to the depressions Park suffered in much more gruelling circumstances. His account of his travels manages to be both epic and full of humility at the same time.

In these seventeen essays we meet the Yoruba river goddess Òsun, the mighty shapeshifter whose name means source, as in “the source of a river, a people, or of children...that which runs, seeps, flows, moves as water does.”

Here is the role model I’ve been hungering for! Not only a river and fertility goddess, Òsun is a holder and conveyor of political, economic, divinatory, maternal, natural, and therapeutic power; a larger-than-life Mother who is both spiritual and material, sweet and strong; a multi-faceted role model who shifts shape with every turn of her river. Immersed in her stories, I find myself leaning into those places where I, too, am fluid, my identity too vast to fit into any one shape or box.