“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
Karen Blixen, from her memoir Out of Africa, first published in 1937
Karen Blixen was a wealthy Danish woman who lived and wrote in colonial Africa. Although she used multiple pen names, the best known is probably Isak Dinesen. Dinesen was her maiden name and many female authors, both historically and currently, have adopted male and gender neutral names in order to gain wider readership. Her most famous novel, Out of Africa is a memoir of her life on a family farm in Kenya and was adapted for film in 1985 starring Meryl Streep. Although Africa has a rich history of excellent literature, it is the writing of white, colonial-era author’s like Blixen who were best known by the general public internationally, thus building a fairly narrow world image of the continent.
Recent history, however, has ushered a surge of diverse and highly talented modern African authors. Popular author Chimamanda Adichie gave a TedTalk several years ago about the “dangers of a single story.” The limited and predominantly white colonialist story exemplified in past popular African literature is a perfect illustration of this danger. The new voices out of Africa that have become popular during the past decade or so paint a picture of Africa that is wide-ranging, vibrant and evolving, rich in language and culture and infinitely more comprehensive. These stories sometimes give voice to the desperate struggles of war and conflict but there are so many more voices including a core of African women writing about the struggle for rights and equality.
The myriad of voices has diversified even further with expanded Internet connectivity and access. In addition to the growth of formally published authors, semi-professional and novice writers have added their voices through self-published blogs and websites. While this new flood of writing from Africa certainly raises some new issues in regard to fact-checking and credibility of authors, those issues are counter-balanced by the far more detailed, interesting, and comprehensive images of this massive continent we are all afforded.
African Women Authors
African Literature List on Goodreads
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