Olujide Agboola was born in Onipe, a village in the Oluyole local council of Oyo State, Nigeria, in the early sixties. he attended Prospect High School, Abanla in the same local council He later trained as a graphic artist at The Polytechnic, Ibadan. He did his NYSC programme in the old Bendel State. Worked as graphic artist and later as cartoonist and rose to the level of an assistant editor. He holds GND and PGD (Mass Comm.) certificates From The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Oyo State. He lives ...

The acclaimed author of Dark Star Safari journeys across western Africa in this "thoroughly engrossing [and] at times tragic" travelogue ( Washington Post).Paul Theroux's best-selling Dark Star Safari chronicled his epic overland voyage from Cairo to Cape Town, providing an insider's look at modern Africa. Now, with The Last Train to Zona Verde, he returns to discover how both he and Africa have changed in the ensuing years. Trav...

A young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence. Ahead lies the difficult journey back to the family house and all its memories; meetings with childhood friends and above all, facing up to the paradox of Nigeria, whose present is as burdened by the past as it is facing a new future.Along the way, our narrator encounters life in Lagos. He is captivated by a woman reading on a danfo; attempts to check his email are frustrated by Yahoo boys; he is charmingly duped buying f...

"[An] elegantly written mix of complex history, riveting memoir and damning exposé," from this award-winning Sierra Leonean author ( Publishers Weekly).As a child, Aminatta Forna was witness to the political upheaval and social unrest of post-colonial Africa. Forced to flee her home for exile in Britain, she was subject to the consequences of her dissident father's actions.After war had abated in Sierra Leone, Aminatta's father, Mohamed, returned t...

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle right around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries. In Around Africa on my Bicycle, Manser tells the story of this epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occassional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and...

A “remarkable chronicle” of a journey back to this West African nation after years of exile (The New York Times Book Review).Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to visit her father in Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was killed there, she didn’t return for several years. Then she ...

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends...

Shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award 2018Five runaways ride the bus from Bayelsa to a better life in a megacity.They are unlikely allies -- a private, a housewife, an officer, a militant and a young girl. They share a need for escape and a dream for the future.Soon, they will also share a burden none of them expected, but for now, the five sit quietly with their hopes, as the billboards fly past and shout: W...

Celebrating ten years of the leading literary prize for African fiction (dubbed "The African Booker"), 10 Years of the Caine Prize brings together the ten winning stories along with a story each from the four African winners of the Booker Prize: Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Ben Okri.The ten winners:Leila Aboulela for The MuseumHelon Habila for Love PoemsBinyavanga Wainaina for Discovering HomeYvon...

MY FIRST COUP D'ETAT is a literary nonfiction account that charts the coming of age of John Dramani Mahama in Ghana during the dismal post-independence "lost decades" of Africa. He was seven years old when rumors of that first coup reached his boarding school in Accra. His father was suddenly missing. "It is sometimes incorrectly referred to in texts as a bloodless coup, yet it was anything but," Mahama writes. "They tried, as best they could, with smiles and toffee, to shield me from thei...

Between April and July 1994, the tiny Central African state of Rwanda experienced unprecedented carnage as more than three-quarters of a million people, mostly minority Tutsi, were killed in a carefully planned genocide. In January 1997 Dervla Murphy travelled to Rwanda, intending to trek alone through the beautiful mountains she had first gazed on while holidaying with her family in Eastern Zaire the year before. She found Rwanda still racked by violent post-genocide convulsions and seemi...

Part diary and part reportage, The Soccer War is a remarkable chronicle of war in the late twentieth century. Between 1958 and 1980, working primarily for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Here, with characteristic cogency and emotional immediacy, he recounts the stories behind his official press dispatches—searing firsthand accounts of the frightening, grotesque, and comically absurd aspe...