In 2011, I ran an alumni reading group that focused on memoirs from and about Africa. I privileged readability and discussability, as well as availability, so the books were generally very presentist.
A mention of Simon Kambalu’s The Jive Talker from a colleague on social media made me think again about the subject. I began to think a bit about it as a course rather than a book club, about a way to engage African history and experience over a wider range of time.
One of the issues I’d run into right away if I were to work this up as a class is that it absolutely would need some amount of literary criticism and critical theory to frame memoir and autobiography as a genre, as well as some work by historians talking about the methodological and interpretative problems that diaries, memoirs and other similar texts present for us.
Among those issues: what we mean by these texts in genre terms is not the same at different periods. (That’s a general problem with diaries, which don’t start being introspective or personal until quite recently in general.) In the field of African history, a more potent problem by far is that some autobiographical testimonies or texts were created under the authority of colonial rulers or by authors in other states of duress. I’d have to think a lot also about whether to assign some fiction that has an autobiographical feel or mood to it.
There’s also a tension here about the fact that there’s a huge number of memoirs from Africa by white authors. I find a lot of these just kind of boring as literary readings and not very historically illuminating for the most part. But I’d leave some room for the small number that I think are both great reads and raise some distinctive issues that I could work with in supplementary readings.
This is the original memoir list from the book club.
Simon Kambalu, The Jive Talker: An Artist's Genesis. Free Press 2008.
Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach. Simon and Schuster 2009.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother. Farer, Strauss and Giroux, 2008.
Dave Eggers, What is the What. Penguin Books, 2008.
Wole Soyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood. Vintage 1989.
Shailja Patel, Migritude. Kaya Press 2010.
Antje Krog, Country of My Skull, Broadway, 2000.
George Packer, Village of Waiting, 2001.
Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. Random House, 2003.
Robert Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir. Scribner, 2002.
I’d have to think a lot about what to add, but some obvious texts:
Ibn Battuta’s Travels, just the Africa-related section.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (yes, even given the controversy about his childhood)
The Diary of Antera Duke
Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Camara Laye, The Dark Child
Wangari Maathai, Unbowed
Aminatta Forna, The Devil That Danced on the Water
Zakes Mda, Sometimes There Is a Void
Binyavanga Wainaina, Someday I Will Write About This Place
Fatima Massaquoi, The Autobiography of an African Princess
Sol Plaatje, The Boer War Diary of Sol Plaatje
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great
Toyin Falola, A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt
Adam Ashforth, Madumo
The hard thing is to get more material like the Antera Duke diary in there—I think I could manage some more colonial-era autobiographies and memoirs, even if some are short testimonies rather than full-fledged texts.