New Caine Anthology

Congratulations to Jude Dibia whose short story, A Life in Full, written at the Caine workshop in March, provides the title for the 2010 Caine Anthology, published July 1.

The anthology also contains this year's 5 shortlisted stories, available to read online now.

Here's an excerpt from shortlisted writer Namwali Serpell's short story, Muzungu - about an expatriate child's sudden jolt into an awareness of racial difference...

Ba Simon was singing softly under his breath. He’d probably picked up some nasty song from the shabeen, Isa thought emphatically, repeating in her head a condemnation that she’d heard a thousand times from Ba Gertrude, the maid. There are three kinds of people in the world: people who unconsciously sing along when they hear someone else singing, people who remain respectfully or irritably silent, and people who start to sing something else. Isa began singing the Zambian national anthem. Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free. Land of work and joy and unity. Ba Simon gave up on his quiet song, smiling down at Isa and shaking his head while he flipped steaks he wouldn’t get to eat. Ashes from the brai drifted and spun like the children playing in the garden.

• Read Muzungu

The other shortlisted stories

• The Life of Worm by Ken Barris (South Africa)
• How Shall We Kill The Bishop? by Lily Mabura (Kenya)
• Soulmates by Alex Smith (South Africa)
• Stickfighting Days by Olufemi Terry (Sierra Leone)

Namwali Serpell is Zambian. Winner of the 2010 Caine Prize will be announced in Oxford on July 5.

New Reads

Two new reads for you - two stories by two writers whose protagonists have rhyming names: Paito and Kaito. It's like E.C Osondu and Unoma Azuah planned it, though I'm sure they didn't.

2009 Caine winner E.C. Osondu's new story is in Atlantic Fiction 2010, and reminds me of old favourites by this writer, like his Caine shortlisted 'Jimmy Carter's Eyes'. The story this time is titled 'A Simple Case'.

It was simple enough. Paito is waiting for his prostitute girlfriend, Sweet, to service a punter when the police raids the Jolly Hotel. He finds himself in a police station and ultimately in the dreaded Area F. Interestingly enough, I had occasion to pay a couple of visits to a real Area F police post in Ikeja last year (not to worry, there was nothing 'Jolly' about my reason for going there); and I pass by Alade Market off Allen Avenue all the time. Osondu's character, Paito, is a second hand trader at Alade Market, so the landscape of this story's not so alien to the average Lagos dweller, though not everyone gets roped into trumped up allegations of robbery, as happens in this very believable story of suffering, which still allows the reader lots of smiles. Paito ends up in an Area F cell, a Jungle Republic presided over by Presido. Paito must sweet talk his way out of this sticky situation, in a story that reads nicely to its 'Jolly' end.

Excerpt
The man who had spoken to Paiko was the first to speak. He cleared his throat and launched forth boastfully.

“My name is Robert, but I am popularly known as Bob Risky. In the daytime, I am a motor-park tout at Iddo, but at night I am a robber. I have been robbing and killing since I was expelled from Mushin Grammar School in form two, for smoking and selling marijuana. No operation is too risky for me to undertake. That is how I earned my nickname, Risky. I have been detained in almost all the police stations in Lagos, including Isokoko, Panti, Alagbon, Bar-Beach, and even the old station on Malu Road. I was drinking in my girlfriend’s beer parlor when the police raided the place and arrested me. They found a locally made pistol in my pocket and some wraps of marijuana. When they are tired, they will release me. I have no other profession than armed robbery, and, as we say, once a robber, always a robber.” Bob Risky finished his introduction, to loud applause. Even the Presido appeared to be impressed.

• Read A Simple Case

In Unoma Azuah's story, Sirens, Kaito is a new arrival in the US. From the airport he begins he search for the only two people he knows in America, two 'brothers' from his village who preceded him in the search for the American dream. During his search he encounters two women who know the men, the 'sirens' of the story.

Excerpt Kaito sat in the well-furnished lobby. A movie was playing on the giant screen TV, but he was uninterested. What if Kamalu never turned up? He thought. A few minutes later, the lady at the desk joined him with an extra cup of coffee. Her red lip stick was smeared at the edge of the white mug. Her face powder didn’t quite hide the light wrinkles on her face.
“What’s your name again?”
“My name is Kaito.”
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
“It might help calm your traveling nerves.”
“You are right, thank you. What is your name?”
“Beth.”
“So you believe that Kamalu is out of town?”
“Well, I haven’t seen him in quite a few days. Are you related to him?”
“He’s my brother….from my village.”
“He didn’t know that you were coming to visit?”
“I sent him an e-mail and left messages on his phone, and while I hadn’t heard from him, I purchased a ticket anyway because my travel visa had kicked in.”
Beth’s eyes settled on his muscles. “You look quite fit. Are you an athlete?”
“No.”
“You and Kamalu are from where again?”
“Nigeria.”
“And the name of your village?”
“My village is called Iwu. I’ll show you pictures.” Kaito retrieved some pictures from his bag.
“The lake in the photo of you fishing is beautiful.”
They spent some time going over the pictures until a little after midnight. Beth’s shift had ended, but there was no sign of Kamalu. She sat with Kaito while he waited.

• Read Sirens

New Read

An array of spices and condiments make for a mouth-watering culinary exploration of culture in a globalised world, in Mukoma wa Ngugi's new short story, Walking the Wok - published in African Writing.

Chan's girlfriend leaves him because he's been washing his wok with soap, a no-no, something that threatens her shaky hold on Chinese authenticity. The Chinese students of his culinary college in Limuru are angry with him for messing with the wok, and the Kenyans say he's messing with their culture, thanks to his wild experimentations with local cuisine. What to do? How to cook - or live - in a way that's free of the shackles of the past? Walking the Wok invites second and third readings.

Excerpt
Mpishi Msanii College (aptly translating into The Artist Chef) rested in the outskirts of Limuru, on land donated to the colonial government in the 1940’s by Lord Baring, and inherited by the African government in the 1960’s. Lord Baring carved the 10 acres from his 2000 acre ranch, declaring that Africa needed Africans with practical minds and practical skills, like cooking.

So started the Lord Baring Native Cooking School, where graduating from the three month course in British etiquette and cuisine assured students of work in country clubs and the homes of various wealthy colonials.

With the wave of nationalization and renaming that came with independence, or still-in-dependence as the witty amongst the natives called it, Mpishi Msanii College was born. The three month course in cooking pancakes, fried sausages, eggs and chips and broiled rabbit grew wings, becoming an intensive two year program that produced not cooks, but cosmopolitan chefs well-versed in local and global cuisines.

• Read the story here.
  

New Read

Chika Unigwe's short story, Waiting, is in the current issue of Per Contra. This was one story of Unigwe's that I'd somehow never read before now, although I'm sure I've read about it someplace. Oge is heading home from a shopping trip, after buying a few things that her son Jordi may not actually need. Her husband Gunter thinks she spoils the boy. Gunter has changed somewhat. Why? Waiting has a neat surprise at the end.

Excerpt
She should have made a list. She is always forgetting things and Gunter used to find it endearing. My little forgetful wife, he used to say, laughing. My little forgetful wife. One day you’d forget your head. And then where would we all be? And she had laughed with him too. Now, when he laughs it is because there is something funny on TV. She never watches TV with him, especially not when there is a comedy on because they do not find the same things funny. She finds his humour dry. It had never mattered before: this difference but now, like all the other ways in which they are different, it bothers her and she wonders why she ever married him in the first place.

Unigwe is the author of the novel, Black Sisters' Street.
Read Waiting here.

Miriam N Kotzin, one of Per Contra's editors, has been very good at showcasing new fiction by African women writers over the last few years. She has an interview with Chika Unigwe in this edition.

New Reads

Nubian Princes of Bel Air. Recently published in the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat's tale of gangsters and brotherhood in Baz Benin - the Baghdad of Haiti - titled Ghosts.

Excerpt

Pascal’s father had been a pigeon breeder since he was a boy in Léogâne. He’d stopped briefly in the early eighties, when some soldiers came and collected his birds because it was rumored that he was breeding carriers to send messages to armed invaders in the Dominican Republic. But when the dictatorship finally collapsed—without any help from his pigeons—he started again. Then most of his customers were nervous young men who wanted to perform a ritual before their first sexual encounter: they’d slit the pigeon’s throat and let it bleed into a mixture of Carnation condensed milk and a carbonated malt beverage called Malta. Sometimes their fathers would come with them, and, after the sons had held their noses and forced down the drink, the fathers would laugh and say, as the pigeon’s headless body was still gyrating on the ground, “I pity that girl.”

• Read "Ghosts" online

* * *

Sambi Lazarus Musa has a short-short, "The Full Moon", in the current issue of Serendipity

Excerpt

I had fainted before he completed his speech, and eventually jolted back to consciousness by the screams of a white man whose children were to go to the Pygmies in Congo, right in the heart of black Africa. The white man and I were both sent back to earth next morning. Our way back we saw millions of babies of all nationalities flying across the sky on their little wings. They all seemed happy, singing and shaking hands as they headed for their various destinations.

• Read "The Full Moon".

* * *

African Writing is back, and among the fiction fare this time, is "Night Calls" by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim.

Excerpt

Two months later, she invited him to Zaria so they could meet face-to-face. He had been looking forward to seeing her, so, he went, on a weekend, when the sun rose with a smile as if blessing the union forged over the GSM interface. He got to Zaria and took an okada. She guided him on the phone to the threshold of her heart, her home. She was waiting for him at the door when he arrived and he realised that she was even more beautiful than in the picture. He kept thinking about that clear spring each time she smiled. She asked him in, served him food and mineral and sat by him. They were overwhelmed and just kept looking at each other, smiling, sighing contently, happy to abide in the fragrant presence of a promising love.

• Read "Night Calls"

New Read

To make up some for the silence here of late, how about a new read from me? "Smoking Bamboo", a tale of love and loss and lots more besides, is published in Serendipity, the online journal of magical realist fiction.

Excerpt

The notion of babies from the sky was drummed into us by the mothers, to explain how we came about. I had long concluded that this could not be true. No babies had arrived since the men of the gorge went to the never-ending war in the place below. Still, I had the fanciful idea that morning and I was determined to hold on to it.

But Amugbo had heard me. He sauntered down the steps of his stilt-house, movements unsteady. I did not remember a time when he did not walk like this.

'Foolish children,' he slurred. 'Women get babies from men, not birds.' He ignored our collective intake of breath, scratching his head. I wondered if his hair had ever met a comb. A nest woven by an inattentive bird, the hair was knotted, and bits of leaves peeked from the locks. 'Well, you can't be expected to know any better, living as you do in this unnatural environment.

''Unnatural? Babies from men?' Simisola, indignant, scrambled onto her feet. 'Let me go and ask my mother.'

'And what have I said to you all about hanging around my place? Go and disturb your mothers. Leave me alone.' Amugbo hit the air with a kick thrown in our direction, falling on his backside. We knew he meant none of it. We put up with his interruptions in our play because his was the one place we could converge without being driven elsewhere. He tolerated us and we tolerated him.

And for me, Amugbo's place was a refuge, somewhere I could play with my friends, away from the creeping spectre of death at home.

• Read Smoking Bamboo...

New Read

The adventures of a 419 chancer chasing scamming dreams on the internet, is the subject of a new story by A Igoni Barrett, Dream Chaser, published in Eclectica.

Excerpt
It was twenty minutes past eight in the morning, and the cybercafé was already three-quarters full. Samu'ila chose an unoccupied system at the far end of the room. Approaching it, he walked into a blast of air so cold he could feel the skin of his armpits break out in goose-pimples; the spot he had picked was in the path of the draft from one of the air conditioners. Despite this, Samu'ila pulled out the chair and sat down. He cracked his knuckles with anticipation and then drew out the sliding panel on which the keyboard lay and carefully punched in the password on his ticket. The monitor screen burst into life. With a happy smile on his face, Samu'ila bent his head over the keyboard and tip-tapped his way into the phantasmagoric realm of the worldwide web.

Read about Samu'ila the 'Yahooze' guy in Dream Chaser.

New Reads - Caine Special

.

.

.

.

.

One of the niggly things about the Caine Prize season at times is that shortlisted stories aren't always widely available. So you'll be at a reading by the writers who read excerpts and engage in discussions around stories which half the audience havent read, which must be somewhat frustrating for both writers and readers alike. Especially when the story in question is not available online. Not so this year.

.

Thanks to New Internationalist, publishers of the Caine anthologies, you can read of all 5 stories online (downloadable in pdf format).

One of these stories will win the Caine Prize tonight...

• Read Mallam Sile by Mohammed Naseehu-Ali (Ghana).
• Read For Honour by Stanley Onjezani Kenani (Malawi).
• Read Poison by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa).
• Read The Day of the Surgical Colloquium by Gill Schierhout (South Africa).
• Read Cemetery of Life by Uzor Maxim Uzoatu (Nigeria).

New Reads

Emmanuel Sigauke has a story in the SNReview. Mopane Whips looks at the side-effects of war on the damaged psyche of young men in the community. One such man, Mukoma, has a rather disturbing fondness for beating and chasing his younger 'brother' all over town.
.
Excerpt
Instead of fetching a Mopane whip, I went to a Mubondo tree. I thought Mubondo whips were more painful—they looked so—than the Mopane. But boy was I wrong when I returned to Mukoma with the fairly long and fat whip, which I knew was ready to greet my bottom. Mukoma didn’t have to say anything in response. One look on his face told me to go back to the usual Mopane. Mopane whips were just killers, so painful you often wondered whether they had just been created to be weapons of pain. And indeed, Chari, whose father, another man who had not joined the war but told everyone he was a comrade, beat him often as well, had confirmed that Mopane was just for the purpose of straightening bad boys like me. He told me he was not bad; his father whipped him to put Mopane trees to use. But I did not agree with him. We also used Mopani for other things, especially firewood. I liked Mopane wood fire, but hated the burn of the whip on my bottom.

I returned, whip in hand, approaching Mukoma slowly. He was waiting, smoking some tobacco wrapped in a piece of newspaper. The cigarette packs he had brought from South Africa were gone by now, and he had taken to smoking this tobacco that made him twist his body with each pull, then bulged his lips excessively. I walked, slower, but determined to hand him the whip; soon this—the beating itself—would be over, and I would put salted water on my wound and then go to collect the goats and enclose them in their pen. But something in me told me not to keep walking, so I stopped.

• Read Mopane Whips

.
Things Fall Apart Reloaded
In the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new short story, The Headstrong Historian, which reimagines the arrival of white colonialists' in Igbo society from a woman-centred perspective.
.
Excerpt
The day the white men visited her clan, Nwamgba left the pot she was about to put in her oven, took Anikwenwa and her girl apprentices, and hurried to the square. She was at first disappointed by the ordinariness of the two white men; they were harmless-looking, the color of albinos, with frail and slender limbs. Their companions were normal men, but there was something foreign about them, too: only one spoke Igbo, and with a strange accent. He said that he was from Elele, the other normal men were from Sierra Leone, and the white men from France, far across the sea. They were all of the Holy Ghost Congregation, had arrived in Onicha in 1885, and were building their school and church there. Nwamgba was the first to ask a question: Had they brought their guns, by any chance, the ones used to destroy the people of Agueke, and could she see one? The man said unhappily that it was the soldiers of the British government and the merchants of the Royal Niger Company who destroyed villages; they, instead, brought good news. He spoke about their god, who had come to the world to die, and who had a son but no wife, and who was three but also one. Many of the people around Nwamgba laughed loudly. Some walked away, because they had imagined that the white man was full of wisdom. Others stayed and offered cool bowls of water.

Weeks later, Ayaju brought another story: the white men had set up a courthouse in Onicha where they judged disputes. They had indeed come to stay. For the first time, Nwamgba doubted her friend. Surely the people of Onicha had their own courts. The clan next to Nwamgba’s, for example, held its courts only during the new yam festival, so that people’s rancor grew while they awaited justice. A stupid system, Nwamgba thought, but surely everyone had one. Ayaju laughed and told Nwamgba again that people ruled others when they had better guns. Her son was already learning about these foreign ways, and perhaps Anikwenwa should, too. Nwamgba refused. It was unthinkable that her only son, her single eye, should be given to the white men, never mind the superiority of their guns.

• Read The Headstrong Historian

New Read

Victor Ehikhamenor's story, Riding Monkey With Pako, is published in the new summer issue of Per Contra.

Deboy is a village boy who begins to yearn for the city after the arrival of the headmaster's son, nicknamed Fedra Gorment. The no-nonsence Pako, Deboy's best friend, is unimpressed by Fedra Gorment's tales of the city. In Pako's company, Deboy takes part in all manners of exciting activities. All goes well, until they decide to ride 'monkey'.

Excerpt
We became suspicious of Fedra Gorment’s city tales when one day he started telling us stories from his books without pictures. Every storybook we had came with pictures. Primary Two Reader had David and Mr. Dauda driving a lorry from Ibadan to Lagos. Primary Three Reader had Mr. Giwa the trader standing in front of his store, and our own Primary Six Reader had the dubious Mr. Ali selling ashes instead of sugar to strangers. So where did Fedra Gorment get his two small books called Eze Goes To School and Chike And The River?

Fedra Gorment spun story after story from the books, claiming that his elder brother in St. John Bosco College, where white men and Indians were teachers, told him these stories. Though we did not believe him, the tales were interesting. That was until the day the albino stepped on a sore by narrating to us the story of a boy whose father was killed by a leopard in a thick forest. The story sounded similar to how a snake killed Pako’s father. From then on, Pako warned me to avoid the headmaster’s son for good.

“Very soon he will tell us he eats rice everyday and plays football with white children,” Pako grabbed my hand and dragged me away from Fedra Gorment’s court.

• Read Riding Monkey With Pako

New Read 2

Here's another new/ish read. Newly published in Farafina volume 13 guest-edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A version of Victor Ehikhamenor's story, 'Passport to Heaven' is available online as earlier published by Eclectica.

~

Excerpt

"You greet everyone with a toothy, cauliflower smile. Even your shylock landlord gets a good greeting from you. Your co-tenants in the Face-Me-I-Face-You house know your expression has lightened. They are suspicious. Something is fishy. Christopher is a tight-ass-son-of-a-bitch who does not laugh. Christopher is a yam head who wears the Nigeria misery look of no-petrol or food on his face. Christopher is spokesperson of the downtrodden masses of the earth who curses the Obasanjo administration at any given time. "Maybe he has a new girlfriend," they whisper to each other. You keep smiling. You cannot risk telling them the source of your joy. Someone might come calling in the night with a machine gun, demanding your passport to heaven. You have to keep your secret like an un-hatched egg. Even Fatima, your off-today and on-tomorrow girlfriend, cannot hear this. You will tell her a day before your departure, or maybe not at all. Femi has sworn an oath of silence, and except for the mechanic and panel beater who will contribute to the ticket fund, no one else will know.
The days go by slowly. You call Pius, your friend in Washington, D.C., to tell him the good news. He will be your host till you find your feet in an unknown land. He is happy for you and at the same time cursing the consular officer in Kaduna for the extra burden added to his already debilitating American load. But he will not tell you that. You will see for yourself.

~

Read Passport to Heaven. And subscribe to Farafina.

• Farafina magazine is available by subscription for direct delivery all over the world for $79.99 for 6 issues a year. Email Farafina (subscriptions@farafinamagazine.com) for more information.

New Read 1

I last bought Harper's Bazaar (or was it Harpers & Queen?) when Salman Rushdie wed Padma Lakshmi in New York and the pictures (featuring writer-wedding goers including Zadie Smith & Kathy Lette) were splashed on the pages of the magazine. Golden couple now blissfully divorced... I bought the magazine again this month, the June issue, after I read on Petina Gappah's blog about a story in there contributed by Orange Prize winner -
~
(talking of the Orange, how the prize went totally drain-ward this year, with the wholly misguided choice of that embarrassment of a celebrity who's always falling drunk out of clubs, changing clothes on the streets and being pictured with strange stuff seemingly up her nose - as a judge! I'm talking of Lily Allen, who people actually thought was cool. Once. The choice of Allen as judge raised not a few eyebrows - including Maggie Gee's - and apologists used up all their choice words defending the selection. Lily Allen left the Orange with peels only, when she 'dropped out' of the judging panel. Soon after, we learned she'd actually been dropped by the organisation after failing to turn up at judges' panel meetings. She helped 'select' the longlist, apparently - by phone. She more than proved the point some made all along, that she had no place on a literary award judging panel. Ms Allen has gone even more erratic since, only a few shades better than Amy Winehouse. Pity. It shouldn't happen to an Orange Prize judge. Or, it shouldn't have happened to the Orange Prize).
~
- anyhow, about what we were speaking... I read on Petina Gappah's blog that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new short story in the current issue of Harper's Bazaar, so I went and got me a copy. Amarachi is the story, about a young Nigerian woman who comes back home from America for her wedding, all changed (to her mother Mrs Njoku's consternation), and with a Kenyan fiance in tow.

Since 'Amarachi' is all of one page, I don't suppose Harper's will thank me for reproducing the page visually here, but here's an excerpt we typed up earlier:
~
"They were on their second cups when Sochienne said she wanted to have her wedding at Amarachi, the village house where she had spent her childhood holidays; she preferred a venue of emotional significance to an overpriced gilded hall. Mrs Njoku choked on her tea. The hall was already paid for but, more important, Amarachi was old, the grounds sloped, this was the rainy season and the mud would ruin women's shoes and nobody would take a wedding seriously if it was held in that backwater. Indeed, nobody would come."
~
Not quite what Mrs Njoku planned for her daughter's wedding. The short-short story is illustrated with images posed by the author herself. It seems she channelled the mother in one image, and the daughter in another. Wordsbody's preferred image is reproduced here. Those wanting to read what happens with the wedding at Amarachi, are to seek out Harper's Bazaar.

New Read/s

Lots of essays, interviews, reviews - in the new, 4th edition of African Writing - and plenty of short stories. Among the contributors is Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond whose attitude laden story, Bush Girl, follows a young Ghanaian woman bent on making it as a model in New York.

Excerpt

When I had overstayed my visa seven summers ago, my plan was to cash in on all the “You are so striking!”s I had heard on my many long vacs to London and New York. The Plan was to be discovered. The bit of fashion that had trickled down to me in Ghana through magazines and MNET (when cable had finally hit Ghana), had convinced me through Iman and Roshumba and Naomi that the world was ready to celebrate my kind of beauty.

The summer I had come to visit Auntie Freda, the summer before I was to start my first year at the University of Legon, I knew I wasn’t going back to Ghana until I was international. I didn’t know what I would tell Daddy or how I would get around the strictures of my three-month student visa, but that was before 9/11 and back then I knew God, so I prayed.

I couldn’t go back to Ghana. Sure, Daddy had a lucrative business. A big house. A driver. A Land Rover for the unfinished roads. A Benz for evening outings and afternoon luncheons. But I wasn’t a business or science student. I wouldn’t be snapped up by Mobil or Shell or some other multinational, be paid in dollars, meet and marry a boy whose father owned a home on Switchback Road. Besides I didn’t want any of that. I wanted the big house, the luxury cars, the dollars and sterling on my own terms. And I had a plan to get them. I was going to be a supermodel.

When Daddy called to tell me the recurring teachers’ strike had resumed, I felt convinced of God’s endorsement. That very night I prayed a promise to God that I would serve him forever if he made me the international supermodel I knew I was born to be. I practically fell to my knees with thanksgiving right in the middle of the shop when Selima, then the manager at Alain et Riette, asked me in her raspy Moroccan accent if I’d be willing to work off the books. Thank you, Jesus! Thank you Lord, for loving me!

Back then I got it, but I didn’t get it. I had read in Allure Magazine that Paulina Models, then newly-opened in SoHo, was looking for girls with a “different look”. In my 19 year old mind I didn’t realize that just meant they were looking for the latest industry obsession, girls from behind the Iron Curtain.

On my first day on the job I went to four agencies on my lunch break. They all turned me down. At one agency a woman emerged from a glass office and asked me, “How tall are you?”
I answered with the truth, “Five-seven.” After all, what? Carolyn Murphy was 5’7” in flats. Kate Moss was shorter. They had both come into Alain et Riette to try on shoes. Another divine endorsement, I thought back then.

.

This reminds me of a story of mine in which a Nigerian girl dreams of becoming a model in London, complete with a similar line noting Kate Moss' non-model-standard height. And Ms Brew-Hammond's story has given me a new catchphrase, "After all, what?"

• Read Bush Girl
  
• African Writing issue 4

New Read

In Lauri Kubuitsile's story, God's Command, white Adele has run over a young black girl named Mphoentle. Adele will discover that she shares more in common with the dead child's poor mother than can be expressed. Meanwhile, a young priest has his own interesting ideas about God's role in the whole sorry business.

Excerpt
The policeman snatches her passport from her hand. “You’ll not be going anywhere anytime soon,” he snarls at her. She tells him a story that puts her in the best light, no searching for lip balm in hand bags, but still he’s not happy.
“So you say you were going 40?” he asks, one side of his lip rose in disgust. She was a Boer, same as all of them. He hates her just as she expects him to.
She doesn’t hear him at first; she is watching another police officer lift the tiny body, now covered with a sheet onto the back of the bakkie. Only her small feet hang out. She wears the clunky black school shoes and white ankle socks of all of the school girls. Her mind drifts to her own daughter safely at school wearing the same shoes, the same socks. But then she thinks- even this girl’s mother believes that her daughter is safely at school. She has faith that all is well. A faith that will mock her with her ignorance when she finds out the truth in the matter.
Her husband, Johanne, comes up. “So are we done then, Boss?” his booming voice tampers down the policeman’s authority.
“Yes, she can go. But I’m keeping the passport. Don’t go anywhere.” He is not happy; the game is over too soon for his appetite.
They climb into the vehicle and they turn towards home. “Bloody Kaffir!” her husband spits. “Stupid picaninny jumps in the road and they want to blame you! Who the hell does he think he is? Just shows what idiots they are.” He looks at his wife staring blankly out the window and he becomes quiet. “Are you okay? “ He rubs her thigh with his big, red hand.

• Read God's Command

New Reads

Lily Mabura's story, How Shall We Kill the Bishop? - a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction contest - is published in Wasafiri Issue 53. Mabura, a Kenyan, has done well in Fish Publishing contests in the past...

.

Keeping things Kenyan, Muthoni Garland has a new story up on Kwani?. Here's how The Remaining begins...

.

Alfonse disappeared one Saturday, after a half-day’s work, after a generous helping of rice and meat stew at the late lunch at which he’d told off his son for a D grade (‘in English,’ he’d sneered), after giving his daughter money for a movie, and after - what now seemed to his wife - an unusually vigorous bout of sex with her. Alfonse had walked off into a cool Nairobi evening, and not come back.

.

• Read The Remaining

.

In Parselelo Kantai's The Cock Thief, Corporal Naiguran takes off for the Ugandan border with a golden cock. He rides through a Kenya from which everyone's leaving, and lying about it.

.

Excerpt

There was something strange about her. It was as if she was there and not, existing in constituent parts but not as a whole. For one, she looked very different from her voice, a rough, rousing roar of four in the morning in those dark little hovels by the roadside, the ones run by fat round women called Rhoda and Francisca who serve cheap lethal brews to broken men in oversized jackets. Now she spat a gob of miraa suddenly into a polythene bag magically extracted from somewhere in the complicated folds of her clothes. Miraa. He hated it. It was undisciplined. Leave the leaves to the goats. And then she was unwrapping half of a Big G, chewing it, making rude, rhythmic clicks. She seemed to appreciate the sound more than the flavour. She stared at him the whole time, her large liquid eyes shining out of the khanga that covered her head and framed her face; the rest of it disappeared inside a fur-lined jacket, unzipped half-way down to reveal a T-shirt tucked tight into a pair of worn jeans. Limuru, he knew, got very cold. He wondered what she would do with her jacket in the heat of Kampala. But it was the sound of her walk that convinced him this was a malaya, a prostitute going west to seek new flesh markets. She had come down the aisle towards the seat, swaying slightly, her boots clicking loudly against the floor of the bus. There was something of an advertisement about the sound of her walk. There was nothing left in Kenya. Everybody was leaving, and lying about it.

.

• Read The Cock Thief

New Read

In Anietie Isong's Playing Games (published by Gowanus), a woman fears her young son may have joined a group of militants, but she may have more to fear from the gossip mongers in the Ibok Women's Progressive Association.

Excerpt

Nene, my cousin, called the gossip session the real meeting. I watched her closely as she mingled with the other women. I noticed for the first time how bony her hand was, how all the veins that ought to have been covered with healthy flesh stood out like the drawing of a school child. But Nene was not an old woman. It was too much hard work that had aged her. As the bread winner, she supported her family with sales of akara and other petty goods. As in my own case, her husband had left her for the world beyond.

“Are you all right?” I asked Nene after she had disentangled herself from the other women and we were making our way home.

“I am all right,” she said, laughing.

But there was something in the sound, something hidden, which troubled me. Near the village square Nene let it out: “I think Nsima has joined the Ibok Youth Movement.”

She said it quickly, as though the words scalded her tongue, spat the words out as one would spit out hot yam. And she did not look at me.

• Read Playing Games.

New Reads

You can't get away from Barack Obama in this American election season. Asked for her favourite writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga (author of 'Nervous Conditions' & 'The Book of Not) lists Obama among. Read her interview in the new issue of Per Contra. Among the fiction fare in the edition is 'Through the Looking Glass', taken from Dangarembga's forthcoming novel, Bira. High jinks on the bus queue...

Excerpt
"But women!" Now it was a young man chuckling. “What is it with these women! Some of them just walk just like that! With everything in the open!" Some age mates of his standing nearby grinned. They slitted their eyes in speculation and let their observation, like a single gaze, meander over the young women. "Ah, they want to inflame us!" The speaker sighed, and continued with amused indignation. "Now, isn’t it known that when it’s like that it can’t be stopped! So what if we don't want to begin and be inflamed! And get a gaol sentence? We don't want! Now these hussies want to put us in gaol! People, isn’t that why! Isn't that what makes people stone them!

• Read Through the Looking Glass
  

Also in the fiction is something from a forthcoming novel by another favourite writer of Dangarembga's, Sefi Atta. In Grief Mongers (from the novel 'Swallow', soon to be published by Farafina), a young woman comes to her overcrowded building and finds a drama of grieving unfolding. A young boy may have drowned in the septic tank...

Excerpt

The day my father’s body was found, I came home from school. A group of women were holding my mother down in her room. They were the women of her former esusu group. They saved money together and my mother had for a while been in charge of taking and keeping their contributions. "Your father is gone," one of them said, before I had a chance to walk into my mother’s room. She was my uncle’s wife called Sister Kunbi. I could tell she expected me to be sad and instead she made me furious. "I know," I said to her. "He has gone to Lagos." She seemed offended that I wasn’t crying. She reached for my shoulder. "This world is a marketplace," she said. "The other is home. Your father has gone home." "This is my father’s home," I said.

• Read Grief Mongers

And don't miss Silver Leaves for Judah Jones by Vanessa Gebbie - newly unveiled winner of the Per Contra Annual Fiction Prize. Her collection of short stories, Words from a Glass Bubble, has just been published.

~

Per Contra's non fiction this time round focuses on the theme of 'Chaos, Terror and the Rise of the Police State' - and there are two pieces on the recent turmoil in Kenya.

• What is his name, the child whose death you spoke about, Kiraithe? by Ayo Bole; and
• Rigging is Just Rigging (Or, A Nation Held Hostage) by Muthoni Garland.

New Read

Salman Rushdie is in fine form in this enthralling short story published in the New Yorker, The Shelter of the World.

Akbar, whose name means great, but whose same name must accentuate the 'greatness' twice over, such that he is known as 'Akbar the Great'. Whose wives pleasure themselves in ways unspeakable in the tale, when he loves only an imaginary wife he dreamed into being - and who naturally loves him back. Akbar has been made by the accident of history a Mongol when he fact he feels Hindustani. On his way back from wars he stops to dispatch a handsome feudal ruler who speaks of Freedom, but who will learn the hard way that "it is futile to argue with Death." Akbar is a poet with a barbarian's history.

As with all great Rushdie characters, Akbar is teeming with plurality, and seeks to wrestle himself from the royal "we" - with all the plurality it encompasses - for some progress. Progress relates to the singular "I" he strives for, especially to enchant his beloved, the imaginary one who waits for him in Sikri, his "victory city." Best to just lose yourself in this one.

Excerpt

At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.

Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the women’s quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, Jodha’s influence and power grew. The great musician Tansen wrote songs for her, and Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the Emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. “You have captured her, to the life,” he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped feeling as if his head were too loosely attached to his neck; and, after this visionary work by the master of the Emperor’s atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers, the Navratna, or Nine Jewels, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age.

• Read The Shelter of the World...

New Reads

In Unoma Azuah's short story, Season of Scorch (a finalist in the 2nd Glass Woman Prize), a young girl is forcibly married off into the polygamous household of an elderly man.

Excerpt
Tekula was a seventy-four year old farmer and trader whom Tor had met at a yam market two years go. The harvest had been good. I t was one of the days when Tor came with too many yams to sell. He had hopes that he would sell them all. He did not want to take them back to the barn and watch his year long labor rot. The market was closing for the day and he still had half of the yams he came with. He stood beside his pile of yams, calling out, “Yams! Yams! Sweet yams! Buy good yams!” But few of the men, women and lorry drivers who bought yams in tons stopped to buy from him. He arched his hand over his eyes to shade the sun from his face to see how high the sun was. Then he called out louder, “Buy yams! Big good yams!” A scrawny dog trotted into his stall, with its tongue hanging out. It stopped at one of the wooden poles supporting Tor’s stall, lifted it hind leg and pissed. Tor yelled at it, “Shaiii! Go away!” But the dog eyed him and continued pissing. The swarm of flies perched on the dog’s sour ears buzzed as Tor waved his hands at him, so he left him alone.

The sun bore down like an angry god. Then the old man Tekula walked out of a stall, his gold-rimmed walking stick raising dust as it cut into the hot sand. He puffed out a thick smoke from his charred lips and asked with half closed mouth.

“How much for all? They look good.” He said and picked up a large yam.

“Cheap!” Tor told him, “Take all for 500 naira.”

“No, 250.” Tekula said, removing the pipe from his mouth.“350 last.” Tor said and lifted two yams. “See, they’re fleshy and good, no rotting spots.

Tekula held up one of the yams and smiled. “They are quite fleshy and no rot at all…isn’t this what we all look for in everything…fleshy and good, be it money, children, wives, houses, stocks…just name it.”

Tor’s face spread with a wide grin and he shook his head and said, “You’re very right…very right.” They both laughed. Then Tekula bought up the rest of the yams. Their business relationship matured into a friendship. It was on one of their market days that Tekula mentioned to Tor that he was interested in marrying a fourth wife. Tor immediately recommended his daughter, Doshima. But Doshima was hoping to marry her childhood friend, Hembafan. He was tall like an Iroko tree. Long-faced, very dark and handsome. Her father had turned down Hembafan’s proposal to marry her with the reason that he was not financially secure enough to take care of her. Hembafan left the village in frustration for Zaki Ibiam, a town more than two hundred miles away.

“Papa, he’s old” Doshima said. “Please, let me marry Hembafan.”

“No, I’ll not let Hembafan marry you, he’s only a boy. You need a man, a full blown man, not a baby like Hembafan who is still eating off his mother’s pot,” he said.“Papa, please,” Doshima whined.

“Tekula’s age has nothing to do with him as a man. Do you know your mother’s age when I married her?” Doshima’s mother must have heard them. She tapped a spoon on the edge of her boiling pot of soup and poked hard at the dying embers of fire.

“Look,” her father lowered his voice and spoke softly. “I have invested money in my farm and I cannot afford to pay it back, so if you misbehave, I will thrash you like the child you are,” he scowled and stormed out.

• Read Season of Scorch...

New Reads

E.C. Osondu's story, 'Voice of America' is published in Vice Magazine. Onwordi exchanges correspondence with his American pen pal, Laura. He and his friends think it's love, but Onwordi and his 'girl' may be talking at cross purposes.
~

Excerpt
Onwordi began to read from the letter to us. The girl’s name was Laura Williams. She had recently moved with her parents to a farm in Iowa from a much larger city. She had one more year before finishing high school. She was going to take a class on “Africa: Its People and Culture” in the fall and was curious to know more about African culture. She wanted to know whether Onwordi lived in the city or in a village. She also wanted to know if he lived close to lots of wild animals like giraffes, lions, and chimpanzees. And what kinds of food did he generally eat, were they spicy? And how were they prepared? She also wanted to know if he came from a large family. She ended the letter with the phrase “Yours, Laura.”

“Oh my God,” Lucky said, “this is a love letter. The American lady is searching for an African husband."

~

- Read Voice of America (and don't forget Part 2).

~

I was attracted to Chielozona Eze's story, 'Mallam Illia's Meat Shop' - published in Eclectica - for its many literary references, some quite obvious to any reader of Nigerian writing; and a few others recognisable only to literary insiders. But as I read on I wondered a bit about the very pointed ethnic labelling in the story. From the off, the protagonist, Chinelo, is described as "an Igbo woman". Why can't she just be a woman, I thought, especially as her ethnicity is restated in innumerable other ways later in the story (everyone wears their ethnicity in this piece: the Yorubas, the Hausa and the Igbo). But I suppose it comes with the territory, in a story about ethnic cleansing and the intermittent murder of the Igbos in the largely Muslim/Hausa Northern Nigeria. And it is Chinelo's relationship with a Hausa meat seller in her native Igboland that gives heart to this story, set during the killings sparked by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in faraway Denmark.

Excerpt
In the dining hall were many people, half of them evidently Igbo from snippets of their conversations—patches of English and Igbo phrases, most of which were boastful in nature. "I did it!" "I made it!" "I showed them!" It was usual with many Igbo traders They loved to boast about where they had been and the profit they made in their daring business ventures. About two tables to her left were also some of the conference attendees. She had exchanged greetings with some of them the day before. They spoke Igbo with Owerri dialect. She put two teaspoonful of coffee in the cup, poured hot water, and as she was stirring, readying her taste buds for the first sip, a middle aged, plump woman with cornrow hair braids sped into the dining hall, crying in Igbo, her gaze directed to one of the tables on the left. "Ha emekwa ya ozo"—they've done it again. "Ndi Awusa!—the Hausa people. My broda! My broda. Killed."

Lightning lashed through Chinelo's heart. Three words that should never be mentioned in a breath ­ Moslems! Awusa! Killed—conspired to paralyze her. Hadn't she been warned by her mother? She did her best to shrug it off as there was no panic yet in the dining hall. People weren't yet running to safety. Chinelo was able to gather from the few exchanges between the woman and the people that her sister in-law was living somewhere in the North and had called her by phone to relay the information.

- Read Mallam Illia's Meat Shop.

*