7 Books That Can Help You Question the World Around You

Books

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Nigerian journalist and historian, Tayo Agunbiade, opens her book, Untold Stories of Nigerian Women, with this statement: ‘Nigeria’s historiography mostly comprises male-authored narratives which pay little or no recognition to the accomplishments and biographies of women. This one-sided approach to the preservation of history has left an imbalance in global knowledge.’ Her book presents a comprehensive approach to learning about the contributions of women in shaping the past and modern Nigerian society. Importantly, the book asks us to question why the contributions of Nigerian women have been underrepresented. Here lies the power of books and reading. In a world riddled with challenges and evidence of change and development, the quest for deeper understanding and critical thinking is more important than ever. Thankfully, books can expand our horizons, inspire us to see the world from new perspectives, and challenge our beliefs.

In our latest book recommendation, we have compiled a list of seven books that can help you question the world around you. These books offer thought-provoking narratives and ideas that encourage readers to question the world around them. From Vanessa Nakate’s writing about the critical intersection of climate activism and social justice to Petina Gappah’s fictional but realistic reflections on memory and identity in Zimbabwe, these books traverse a wide range of themes and geographies. Through their powerful storytelling and analysis, these books invite us to question the status quo and hope for a more inclusive Africa.

Read our recommendations below.

UNTOLD HISTORIES OF NIGERIAN WOMEN BY TAYO AGUNBIADE
UNTOLD HISTORIES OF NIGERIAN WOMEN
AUTHOR: TAYO AGUNBIADE
GENRE: NON-FICTION

This book is a curation of insightful and engaging narrations aimed at freeing women from the margins of Nigeria’s history. It chronicles their protest movements against colonial administrations, including petitions on taxation and food price controls. It details a string of remarkable political landmarks which highlight women’s historical credentials as nationalists, as well as their voice in early male-dominated legislative institutions. It also narrates more contemporary episodes in women’s resistance against oil exploitation, environmental pollution and anger over the mass abduction of school girls. This timely preservation of the voice and agency of Nigerian women from a wide variety of colonial and contemporary documents will benefit readers interested in African history and gender and women’s studies.

AFRICA IS NOT A COUNTRY BY DIPO FALOYIN
AFRICA IS NOT A COUNTRY
AUTHOR: DIPO FALOYIN
GENRE: NON-FICTION

Africa Is Not A Country is a bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife. In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective. He examines each country’s colonial heritage, and explores a wide range of subjects, from chronicling urban life in Lagos and the lively West African rivalry over who makes the best Jollof rice, to the story of democracy in seven dictatorships and the dangers of stereotypes in popular culture. Africa Is Not A Country brings the story of the continent towards reality, celebrating the energy and fabric of its different cultures and communities in a way that has never been done before.

THE BOOK OF MEMORY BY PETINA GAPPAH

THE BOOK OF MEMORY

Author: PETINA GAPPAH
Genre: FICTION

Memory is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?

In The Book of Memory, Petina Gappah has created a uniquely slippery narrator: forthright, acerbically funny, and with a complicated relationship to the truth. Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

Cassava Republic Press is proud to announce the launch of their inaugural $20,000 Global Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize dedicated to exceptional works by Black women. Deadline: 30th June 2024. Learn more here

A BIGGER PICTURE BY VANESSA NAKATE

A BIGGER PICTURE

AUTHOR: VANESSA NAKATE

GENRE: NON-FICTION

In A Bigger Picture, leading climate justice activist, Vanessa Nakate, shares her story as a young Ugandan woman who sees that her community bears disproportionate consequences to the climate crisis. At the same time, she sees that activists from African nations and the global south are not being heard in the same way as activists from white nations are heard. Inspired by Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, in 2019 Nakate became Uganda’s first Fridays for Future protestor, awakening to her personal power and summoning within herself a commanding political voice.

Nakate’s presence has revealed rampant inequalities within the climate justice movement. In January 2020, while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as one of five international delegates, Nakate’s image was cropped out of a photo by the Associated Press. The photo featured the four other activists, who were all white. It highlighted the call Nakate has been making for both environmental and social justice on behalf of those who have been omitted from the climate discussion and who are now demanding to be heard.

From a shy little girl in Kampala to a leader on the world stage, A Bigger Picture is part rousing manifesto and part poignant memoir, and it presents a new vision for the climate movement based on resilience, sustainability, and genuine equity. 

THE FAMISHED ROAD BY BEN OKRI

THE FAMISHED ROAD

AUTHOR: BEN OKRI
GENRE: FICTION

The narrator in Ben Okri’s cl;assic, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro’s loving parents are made destitute. This Booker Prize winning novel reveals the tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits.

THE INVENTION OF WOMEN BY OYERONKE OYEWUMI
THE INVENTION OF WOMEN
AUTHOR: OYERONKE OYEWUMI
GENRE: NON-FICTION

In this book, Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories—the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of ‘woman’, central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles.

Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.

QUEER AFRICA BY KAREN MARTIN AND MAKHOSAZANA XABA
QUEER AFRICA
EDITORS: KAREN MARTIN AND MAKHOSAZANA XABA
GENRE: ANTHOLOGY

Queer Africa is a collection of charged, tangled, tender, unapologetic, funny, bruising and brilliant stories about the many ways in which we love one another on the continent. The collection includes exquisitely written work by some of the great African writers such as K. Sello Duiker, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Beatrice Lamwaka and Richard de Nooy. It also features new voices that map out a haunting, intricate, complex Africa. In these unafraid stories of intimacy, sweat, betrayal and restless confidences, we accompany characters into cafes, tattoo salons, the barest of bedrooms, the coldly glinting spaces into which the rich withdraw, unlit streets, and their own deepest interiors. We learn much in these gloriously achieved stories about love and sex, but perhaps more about why we hurt and need one another.