Africa Book Club

The World Book Club is one of my favorite BBC programs. Or should I write programmes?

Harriett Gilbert: A third-generation writer who does her research!

Its entire two decades of episodes are now available as a podcast, and I find myself listening frequently. Because I am prone to fumbling my podcast app, I often hear an episode several times, and I do not mind at all. I have read only a small fraction of the books under discussion, but I find that presenter Harriett Gilbert leads an entertaining and profoundly educational discussion with every participating author. I will enjoy an episode even if I have heard it recently.

The World Book Club is appropriately named. Each month a book is selected and announced so that readers have a chance to read the book and send in questions. The author then meets with the presenter and invited guests in person, usually at BBC's Bush House in London. The author is then introduced, always taking note of awards won and the number of languages into which their work has been translated. 

Gilbert and her team then curate questions from the live audience, from emailed questions, and from phone calls, along with her own questions that arise from her expert reading of the work. I use the term "curate" because the questions tend to follow a very helpful pattern, with general questions that might be asked of any writer near the beginning, followed by increasingly detailed and sophisticated questions that would arise only from a careful reading.

Gilbert graciously acknowledges each question, sometimes adding an expert edit as she repeats it, and always acknowledging mentioning where the caller or writer is from. And because she is a BBC journalist, she always pronounces names of both people and places correctly! In any given discussion,  it is likely that people from at least three continents will have participated. 

The list below is from all of the episodes for which I could readily connect the author to the African continent. Most of these are novels set somewhere in Africa and written by African authors. I have listed only one country as a kind of shorthand -- listen to the episodes to learn that many of these authors call several countries home and that many of the books are set in multiple places -- or in some cases fictional countries. Moreover, as is often the case, these episodes have a focus on one book, but with some authors a broader body of work enters th conversation.

Each entry below includes a link to a BBC page and/or a Spotify page as available. I also include dates of each author's life and each novel's publication.

February 2002 - Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Hove (1956 - 2015) Ancestors (1997)
(Spotify)
This is just the third episode of World Book Club -- the interest in Africa comes early in this series. It is just a conversation between the author and the host -- there were no questions from audience yet.

December 2002 - Nigeria

Ben Okri (1959 - ) The Famished Road (1991)

(Spotify)

July 2004 - South Africa

Gillian Slovo (1952 - ) Red Dust (2000)

(Spotify)

August 2005 - South Africa

Andre Brink (1935-2015) A Dry White Season (1979) 

(Spotify) Film adaptation in 1989: IMDb

This is an episode I will share in my Africa course -- it includes a bit of a meta converstation that connects to my own work as an educator and to my spouse's academic expertise as a librarian.

December 2006 - Ghana

William Boyd (1952 - ) Brazzaville Beach (1990)

(Spotify)

May 2007 - Nigeria 

Wole Soyinka (1934 - ) Ake: The Years of Childhood (1989)

Most books on this programme are novels, but this is the author's memoir. 

(Spotify) 

July 2008 - Nigeria

Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013) Things Fall Apart (1958)

(Spotify)

June 2009 - Nigeria

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977 - ) Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

(Spotify)

I have read two of Adichie's novels, and have sometimes assigned Half of a Yellow Sun in my Africa survey course. Her TED Talk is an important part of my teaching and has had over 14 million views on YouTube. I recommend her novel Americanah as well.

November 2009 - Egypt

Alaa Al Aswany (1957 - ) The Yacoubian Building (2009)

(Spotify)

April 2010 - Western Sahara/Mauritius

J.M.G. Le Clezio (1957 - ) Desert (2012)

(Spotify)

December 2010 - South Africa

Damon Galgut (1963 - ) The Good Doctor (2003)

(Spotify)

September 2011 - Libya

Hisham Matar (1970 - ) In The Country Of Men (2006)

(Spotify)

December 2015 - Sudan

Leila Aboulela (1964 - ) Minaret (2005)

(Spotify)

April 2016 - Somalia

Nuruddin Farah (1945 - ) Maps (1986)

(Spotify)

March 2019 - Kenya

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938 - 2025) A Grain of Wheat (1967)

This episode was actually recorded in a Nairobi bookshop.

(Spotify)

UPDATE: The author died in May 2025. Please see the BBC obituary Giant of African literature to learn more about his contribution to post-colonial literature, the price he and his family paid for his writing, his connections to other writers mentioned on this post, and allegations about his own domestic behavior.

August 2019 - Nigeria

Chigozie Obioma (1986 - ) The Fishermen (2015)

(Spotify)

February 2020 - Zimbabwe

Petina Gappah (1971 - ) The Book of Memory (2015)

(Spotify)

December 2020 - Ghana

Yaa Gyasi (1989 - ) Homegoing (2016)

(Spotify)

March 2021 - Zimbabwe

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959 - ) Nervous Conditions (1988)

(Spotify)

October 2021 - Nigeria

Wole Soyinka (1934 - ) Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021)

This interview celebrates the author's third novel -- written 50 years after his second.

(Spotify)

April 2022 - Zimbabwe

NoViolet Bulawayo (1981 - ) We Need New Names (2013)

(Spotify)

May 2025 - Tanzania

Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948 - ) Paradise (1994)

(Spotify)

This list includes an average of about one episode per year with an African author. I could not help but do a bit of geographic math. If the continents were represented according to population, there would be about two per year from Africa. Authors of Asia and Latin America appear with similar frequency. This being a British production in English, the United States and United Kingdom probably account for half of the episodes.

I am reminded of Ann Morgan's 2015 book The World Between Two Covers, which my librarian spouse and I read together in 2019. Morgan describes a year spent reading one book published in English in each of the world's countries. It was more complicated than she anticipated, and helps to explain why some countries are much better represented than others on the list above.

Reflections of Richard Leakey

It seems that the past several weeks have featured more than the usual number of notable deaths, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, E.O. Wilson, and Betty White. Just after the passing of these nonagenarians came news of the death at age 77 of a slightly younger fellow whose work I knew less well.

Word Art from the Ngaren Museum 

My favorite librarian and I both recall hearing anthropologist Richard Leakey in a lecture hall when we were students, though we cannot recall for certain when or where this was. I remember only that he was part of a noted family of anthropologists and that he had rather a cantankerous personality. As with many notables, I seem to have learned more about him after his death than I did when he was alive.

Vivienne Nunis interviewed Leakey for the BBC program Business Daily, in the context of a career changer. In just 18 minutes, they discuss several very different phases of his professional life, which really began when he was a child tagging along on archeological digs with his parents, anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. He lived his entire life in the English colonial territory that would become the country of Kenya.

In the first phase of his adult life, he reached into the distant past, literally uncovering the lives of humans who had lived in the Rift Valley 1.6 million years ago. He then became a noted conservationist whose audacious protests led to protection of elephants through restrictions on the trade in ivory (this benefited whales as well). His work as a conservationist was linked in complicated ways to his political life and other government service.

The most important part of the interview is the discussion of the work of what has turned out to be his sunset years. His understanding of humans across eons led him to fervent work on the problem of climate change. He sees the arc of human experience from deep prehistory to a precarious future from his lifetime in the Rift Valley, where we began and where our fate is clearly undecided. He and his colleagues have been working to capture that entire arc in the Ngaren Museum, where ground will be breaking soon on a project animated by this view of time.

Leakey was also profiled in a 2010 issue of Sierra, the magazine of the U.S.-based environmental organization. In Elephant Man, journalist Susan Zakin begins the story at the Peponi Hotel on the island of Lamu, where they were supposed to meet. His refusal to come ashore at the hotel becomes a metaphor for his uneasy status with fellow colonials. The profile she writes provides important details about the first two phases of the life Leakey discussed with Nunis last month, especially his work in environmental policy. 

Note: Their meeting took place at a time when many tourists were avoiding Kenya because of violence surrounding national elections. This coincided with my owned planned visit to the country. I had plane tickets and plans to meet a student and her family near Mount Kenya -- where both tea and coffee are produced. Just before the trip, she completely disappeared. I was never certain whether something had happened directly to her and her family or if she cut off contact to protect me.

Lagniappe 

Leakey's transition from renowned anthropologist to avid climate-change activist reminds me of a similar transition on the part of Jane Goodall, a protegée of Louis Leakey who thankfully is still with us. I point to some of her work in my 2020 post Jane Goodall: Climate, Community, Coffee. I have updated that post to include her January 2022 BBC interview, which pairs nicely with the Leakey interview above.