There are good things galore despite the adversity in Africa

All the Good Things Around Us: An Anthology of African Short Stories. The anthology samples and celebrates some of the great things that spice our otherwise miserable lives daily. It draws attention to the gems that often go unnoticed, unappreciated in our perpetual pursuit of money, power and grandeur. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • There is no shortage to life’s goodness and nature’s beauty wherever one lives or looks everyday. Nigerian writer Ogochukwu Promise, in one of the stories, Tunnels and Hidden Passes, observes as much; “There are many beautiful things out there. So many we hardly see even in our homes. So many still we are yet to be thankful for.”
  • Edited by Ghanaian writer and scholar, Ivor Agyeman-Duah and published last year by London-based Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., the anthology offers a rich menu of riveting stories from across the continent and abroad.
  • Prominent among them is the 1986 Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who gives the Foreword and poet and critic, Ben Okri with the prologues with a poem; As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads.

“The wild landscape of Chalbi Desert in northern Kenya, untouched and barren, was raw in its beauty.” This statement from Nadya Somoe Ngumi’s short story, One Good Turn, bears an oxymoron; attributing beauty to an otherwise bleak phenomenon that is wild, desert and barren.

Yet even in its vast drought and desolation, a desert can still be beautiful. It can offer solace to a miserable soul. As the author says about the wasteland, you get to experience and understand what it means to be alone as you immerse yourself in the silence of the wilderness.

The story is about a robbery incident involving a research scientist. Stephanie is tracking a rare insect variety in the dessert not far from Lake Turkana. Then two armed robbers riding on a motorcycle break the dryland serenity of her academic bliss. Mercifully, the ordeal ends with a good twist in what could have been tragic.

Can there be a good thing in time of ubiquitous adversity? Well, maybe even the proverbial streak of silver in a dark cloud.

One Good Turn is one of the 28 short stories carried in a new book, All the Good Things Around Us: An Anthology of African Short Stories. The anthology samples and celebrates some of the great things that spice our otherwise miserable lives daily. It draws attention to the gems that often go unnoticed, unappreciated in our perpetual pursuit of money, power and grandeur.

CELEBRITY CONTRIBUTORS

There is no shortage to life’s goodness and nature’s beauty wherever one lives or looks everyday. Nigerian writer Ogochukwu Promise, in one of the stories, Tunnels and Hidden Passes, observes as much; “There are many beautiful things out there. So many we hardly see even in our homes. So many still we are yet to be thankful for.”

Such good things could be the tiny, tender and beautiful fingers of a newborn baby that the joyous mother smothers with kisses or the effusive kindness and elegance of good neighbourliness. It could also be the sheer anxiety of returning home after many years of absence due to civil war even if you are not sure who is dead and who still lives… as happens in Monica Arac de Nyeko’s Back Home.

Edited by Ghanaian writer and scholar, Ivor Agyeman-Duah and published last year by London-based Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., the anthology offers a rich menu of riveting stories from across the continent and abroad.

From East to West Africa and from Southern to North Africa, including the Seychelles All the Good Things Around Us assembles a formidable array of veteran and promising writers with crisp craftsmanship. The editor describes the contributors, all of them winners of various literary awards, as Africa’s most promising authors and “futuristic literati” (and, dare I say, litrerati?).

They include Kenyan writer and 2015 winner of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who contributed These Fragments.

Prominent among them is the 1986 Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who gives the Foreword and poet and critic, Ben Okri with the prologues with a poem; As Clouds Pass Above Our Heads.

Renowned short story writer, novelist, essayist and editor, Ama Ata Aidoo, contributes two stories with characteristically sizzling turn of phrase; Rebellion and Feely-Feely. The former celebrates motherhood as the latter castigates corruption in university admission.

RENEWED HOPES

Some of the noteworthy contributors in the book include Transition to Glory and New Mom by Nigerians Chimamanda Ngosi  Adichie and Tope Folarin, respectively. Others are The Brick by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Exchanging the Crown Someday for Exile by Faustin Kagame (Rwanda) and In Astove of the Seychelles Island by Wendy Day Veevers-Carter (Seychelles).

The book tackles many other issues facing African citizens both at home and abroad. 

In Dead Leaves on the Beautiful River, Agyeman-Duah revisits the excitement that greeted Barack Obama’s presidential victory in the USA in 2008 and its historical and literary significance across the land. His phenomenal rise from obscurity to the most powerful position in the world renewed the fading hopes of realising the African-Americans dreams of an equal society.

Back Home by Arac de Nyeko recaptures the long-running civil strife in northern Uganda. It oozes with gripping Acoli imagery that reminds one of legendary poet Okot p’Bitek.

The language, style and literary substance of the book make it one of the greatest anthologies of African stories in the recent past.

The book is available at the Book Stop Shop in Yahya Centre.