Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people. But stories can repair that broken dignity.
With the New Year upon us, we thought we would start with a list of African books to read for the year 2022. Initially, we had wanted to start this year with the 52 books a year challenge, but that would be a tall order for most. So we started with 17 books to read by the end of the year.
This list contains the best of both worlds, both fiction and non fiction. We hope that by reading the following books, you will be entertained, inspired or empowered.
Unfuck Yourself, Unfuck the world by Kagiso Msimango
This is the perfect book to start 2022 with. We have to get rid of the mess that the last two years threw us with.
We need to unfuck ourselves to move forward into the new year.
Crippled by burnout, in a state of near-collapse, bestselling author and corporate leader, Kagiso Msimango embarks on a powerful journey of unf*cking herself. What she discovers, after getting little relief from mainstream healing methods, (while maxing out her medical aid in the process), is a simple and revolutionary truth: the more we unf*ck ourselves, the more we unf*ck our world. A book filled with unique revelations to save your life.
Happiness is a Four-Letter Word
This is classic case of which is better, the book or the movie.
The book follows four friends, Nandi, Zaza, Tumi and Princess, living life in the fast and fabulous lanes of Joburg. Suddenly, no amount of cocktails can cure the stress that simultaneously unsettles their lives.
Nandi’s final wedding arrangements are nearly in place so why is she feeling on edge?
Zaza, the “trophy wife”, waits for the day her affair comes to light and her husband gives her a one-way ticket back to the township.
Tumi has only one wish to complete her perfect life – a child. But when her wish is granted, it’s not exactly how she pictured it.
And Princess? For the first time ever, she has fallen in love – with Leo, a painter who seems to press all the right buttons. But soon she discovers – like her friends already have – that life is not a bed of roses, and happiness never comes with a manual.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Nervous Conditions is another African literary classic which was the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English. and was voted in the Top Ten Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century.
Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. A timeless coming-of-age tale, and a powerful exploration of cultural imperialism, Nervous Conditions charts Tambu’s journey to personhood in a nation that is also emerging.
The book Every Business Owner Must Read by 48 Authors
The time, for different, is now.
Tap into the insights of our leading business minds and thought leaders and equip your business for a successful new way of doing business.
The world of business is tough, especially today. We know that now is the time for exponential acceleration, adaptability, agility and adjusting; a time for resilience, perseverance and courage; where the frames of reference that so many of us have held onto for so long are simply no longer relevant. But you may be stuck. You may be frozen and fearful, and feeling panicked. You may be worried, and feel weary. Your vision may be blurred, and you may feel unsure of yourself, yet you have a business to run, and staff to look after.
If you are feeling some, or perhaps all of these things, take a deep breath – help is at hand. With over forty chapters of wisdom, insights, experience, suggestions and advice from some of South Africa’s leading business minds and thought leaders, you will find pure gems of information, ideas and solutions on each page of The Book Every Business Owner Must Read.
This is book is a great starting point for anyone looking to either start or are thinking of starting your own businesses.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.
In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Jewish firm in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s.
He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Invest your way to wealth by Thobelani Maphumulo
This is the perfect book to start 2022 with. We have to get rid of the mess that the last two years threw us with.
We need to unfuck ourselves to move forward into the new year.
Crippled by burnout, in a state of near-collapse, bestselling author and corporate leader, Kagiso Msimango embarks on a powerful journey of unf*cking herself. What she discovers, after getting little relief from mainstream healing methods, (while maxing out her medical aid in the process), is a simple and revolutionary truth: the more we unf*ck ourselves, the more we unf*ck our world. A book filled with unique revelations to save your life.
Africa Writes back by James Currey
17 June 2008 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series (AWS) in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the Editorial Adviser.
The African Writers Series almost single-handedly jump-started the rapid surge in African literary creativity by putting into print more than 300 works in less than twenty years. Almost all this writing was new and it came from nearly every corner of the continent. The availability of these books throughout the world made it possible for universities and secondary schools to begin to teach courses on African literature; in Africa itself this led to a profound transformation of the curriculum in English. A whole new discipline of literary studies quickly emerged. None of this would have happened so rapidly and so successfully had it not been for the pioneering role played by AWS.
The Gilded ones by Namina Forna
Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village. Already different from everyone else because of her unnatural intuition, Deka prays for red blood so she can finally feel like she belongs.
But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs gold, the color of impurity–and Deka knows she will face a consequence worse than death.
Then a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. They are called alaki–near-immortals with rare gifts. And they are the only ones who can stop the empire’s greatest threat.
Knowing the dangers that lie ahead yet yearning for acceptance, Deka decides to leave the only life she’s ever known. But as she journeys to the capital to train for the biggest battle of her life, she will discover that the great walled city holds many surprises. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem to be–not even Deka herself.
Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela
A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela’s personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons during his twenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the post-apartheid transition; private recorded conversations; speeches and correspondence written during his presidency–a historic collection of documents archived at the Nelson Mandela Foundation is brought together into a sweeping narrative of great immediacy and stunning power. An intimate journey from Mandela’s first stirrings of political consciousness to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself illuminates a heroic life forged on the front lines of the struggle for freedom and justice.
While other books have recounted Mandela’s life from the vantage of the present, Conversations with Myself allows, for the first time, unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
The New Apartheid by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh
“Apartheid did not die, it was privatised.”
South Africa’s story is often presented as a triumph of new over old, but while formal apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist.
Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh explores the edifice of systemic racial oppression — the new apartheid — that continues to thrive, despite or even because of our democratic system.
Rape: A South African Nightmare by Pumla Dineo Gqola
South Africa has been called the ‘rape capital’. Is this label accurate? What do South Africans think they know about rape? South Africa has a complex relationship with rape. Pumla Dineo Gqola unpacks this relationship by paying attention to patterns and trends of rape, asking what we can learn from famous cases and why South Africa is losing the battle against rape.
Gqola looks at the 2006 rape trial of Jacob Zuma and what transpired in the trial itself, as well as trying to make sense of public responses to it. She interrogates feminist responses to the Anene Booysen case, amongst other high profile cases of gender-based violence. Rape: A South African Nightmare is a necessary book for various reasons.
Home Going by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization.
The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
A great diasporic novel highlighting the journey that Africans took to the Americas.
Black Consciousness: A love story by Hlumelo Biko
In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.
In this deeply personal book, Hlumelo Biko, who was born of Steve and Mamphela’s union, movingly recounts his parents’ love story and how the BCM’s message of black self-love and self-reliance helped to change the course of South African history.
Based on interviews with some of the BCM’s founding members, Black Consciousness describes the early years of the movement in vivid detail and sets out its guiding principles around a positive black identity, black theology and the practice of Ubuntu through community-based programmes.
In spiritual conversation with his father, Hlumelo re-examines what it takes to live a Black Consciousness life in today’s South Africa. He also explains why he believes his father – who was brutally murdered by the apartheid police in 1977 – would have supported true radical economic transformation if he were alive today.
A black girl’s guide to corporate South Africa by Lindelwa Skenjana
This timely memoir-cum-guide includes the insights of black women at various stages of their career as they navigate the pitfalls of the corporate world.
A performance review of the working world introduced to the young women reveals issues such as racism, sexism, ethnic chauvinism, ageism, and sexual harassment that many encounter with naivety.
When technical expertise and hard work are not the issue, how do black women make the most of their efforts and support each other to success?
Masters of Money by KC Rottok Chesaina
Masters of Money takes us behind the scenes and provides an opportunity for finance professionals, entrepreneurs, managers, and anyone interested in the world of finance to learn from the best.
Chartered accountant and financial consultant KC Rottok Chesaina interviews 30 chief financial officers from South Africa’s top JSE-listed companies to uncover their strategies for success. These CFOs share valuable lessons learnt over many years in finance, including the key elements of an effective strategy, the power of good communication, how to lead teams to high performance, why values are important in the workplace, and how to remain calm in dealing with crises like the Covid-19 pandemic or the company IT system being hacked.
Their stories show the human face behind the number cruncher and help to explain the x factor required to rise to the top.
This book is scheduled to be released in March 2022.
Nine Hours by Lukhanyo Sikwebu
Naomi Mandisa Nel leads a secret life as a vigilante assassin, making sure justice is served where the system has failed to bring criminals to book. Now she has been recruited to join a team of operatives on a dangerous mission to save schoolgirls who have been kidnapped by terrorists in northern Mozambique. They have a window period of only nine hours to infiltrate the enemy camp deep in the Doente Forest and extract the girls before they are moved and sold into slavery, forever.
If you’ve read any of these books before, let us know what you thought of them in the comments below. Also, if you would like to know more about upcoming books, stay abreast of all our latest news, events, etc, join our book club and follow us on social media.
If you have a specific request for African literature, contact us and we will try and get it for you.