From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization
Gurnah’s novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. —Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee […]
The role of the University in Tanzania
Ask someone ‘what is education?, and you are likely to get an image of a school building. Ask ‘what is quality education?’ and you may get descriptions of clean buildings, orderly desks, sturdy books and disciplined pupils. All these thing are important. But Mwalimu Nyerere challenges us to think beyond. Because, for him, education is […]
Education and development in Africa
Nyerere now seems to have abandoned the combative approach, exhorting Africans to use education as tool for liberation and national development, Rather he is opologetic to failure in giving quality education because of poverty. “The basic educational problems of Africa states since 1980 has been that the resources available to African governments have declined […]
The Intellectual needs society
The traditional thinking is that societies need the intellectuals in order to modernize and develop. This leads to arrogance and a sense of indispensability. Nyerere says this is all wrong. It is other way around. Without the society to be served, intellectualism is meaningless and hallow. Intellectuals should put service first and self-second, and […]
Wole Soyinka: Land of the Happiest people on Earth
The distinguished Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has just published his first novel in almost a half century, Chronicles from the Land of the happiest People on Earth-a scorching satire on contemporary Nigerian society that teems with life, rather like one of the big books by Charles Dicken(Bleak House) or William Thackeray(Vanity Fair) or even, […]
What is Feminism?
Bem(1993), in her ground breaking theoretical work, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality deplores the essentialist definition of gender that treats the differences between men and women as almost in born, if not divine. She is one of the many feminists who advance a call for action against such mystifying notion […]
Gurnah masterfully interweaves Yusuf’s story with the larger historical forces transforming the continent, all in a lush, seductive language that revels in its powers of storytelling
Paradise is a historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, First published in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton in London. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. The book follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in […]