This Voice in My Heart: A Runner's Memoir of Genocide, Faith, and Forgiveness
10 best books like This Voice in My Heart: A Runner's Memoir of Genocide, Faith, and Forgiveness (Gilbert Tuhabonye): Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa, Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman, The Fortunes of Wangrin, The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America, Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood, First Comes Love, then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life, Travels in West Africa, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin, Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa
| Author | Paul R. Linde |
| ISBN | 0071407995 |
"This is a wonderful book. It gives a warm and loving picture of an isolated African country regularly castigated in the US press. It reiterates eloquently lessons lost by our medical establishment and our populace, which need to be regained." --Journal of the American Medical Association.
An...
Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
| Author | Mpho M'Atsepo Nthunya |
A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's voice is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world...
The Fortunes of Wangrin
Amadou Hampâté Bâ
Translated by Aina Pavolini Taylor with an Introduction by F. Abiola Irele
Winner of the Grand Prix Litteraire de l'Afrique Noire
"I think this is perhaps the best African novel on colonialism and it draws very richly on various...
The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo
| Author | Germano Almeida |
| ISBN | 0811215652 |
New Directions is proud to introduce the masterwork of Cape Verde's greatest living writer, Germano Almeida: an ironic and original tragic-comedy from a new voice in African literature. Everyone in Cape Verde knows Señor da Silva. Successful entrepreneur, owner of the island's first automobile,...
Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America
| Author | Francis Bok |
| ISBN | 0312306245 |
Winner of the Books for a Better Life/Suze Orman First Book Award
May 1986: Seven-year-old Francis Bok was selling his mother's eggs and peanuts near his village in southern Sudan when Arab raiders on horseback burst into the quiet marketplace, murdering men and gathering the women and young...
| Author | Nega Mezlekia |
| ISBN | 0312289146 |
Winner of the Governor General's Award
A Library Journal Best Book of 2001
Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the 1970s and '80s, an era of civil war, widespread famine, and mass...
| Author | Eve Brown-Waite |
| ISBN | 0767929357 |
In this laugh-out-loud funny memoir, a pampered city girl falls head over little black heels in love with a Peace Corps poster boy and follows him —literally–to the ends of the earth.
Eve Brown always thought she would join the Peace Corps someday, although she secretly worried about life without...
| Author | Mary Henrietta Kingsley |
| ISBN | 0792266382 |
In 1893, defying every convention of Victorian womanhood, Mary Kingsley set off alone for West Africa to collect botanical specimens. Unaccompanied except for native guides, she plunged boldly into forbidding jungles, often the first European--and almost always the first white woman--ever to...
The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin
| Author | Mukhamet Shayakhmetov |
| ISBN | 1585679550 |
This is a first-hand account of the genocide of the Kazakh nomads in the 1920s and 30s. Nominally Muslim, the Kazakhs and their culture owed as much to shamanism and paganism as they did to Islam. Their ancient traditions and economy depended on the breeding and herding of stock across the vast steppes...
| Author | Robert Klitgaard |
| ISBN | 0465087604 |
I'm not really sure why I enjoyed this book so much; the author talked a lot about economic restructuring/ governmental organization/ etc (snore). But, every time it threatened to get bogged down, he redirected his focus to the people, culture, and natural beauty of the country. He came away from his...
| Author | George Packer |
| ISBN | 0374527806 |
Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, this book is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
| Author | Bjarne Reuter |
| ISBN | 0525471464 |
From one of Denmark's foremost writers, here is his most impressive book to date-a roguishly fantastic adventure story of piracy, slave owners, witch burning, shipwrecks, desert islands, and larger-than-life characters-the largest of which is fourteen-year-old Tom O'Connor, a poor, adventurous,...
| Author | Peter Eichstaedt |
| ISBN | 1556527993 |
“Richard Opio has neither the look of a cold-blooded killer nor the heart of one. Yet as his mother and father lay on the ground with their hands tied, Richard used the blunt end of an ax to crush their skulls. He was ordered to do this by a unit commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that...
| Author | Dayo Forster |
| ISBN | 0743295714 |
Ayodele has just turned eighteen and has decided, having now reached womanhood, that the time is right to lose her virginity. She's drawn up a shortlist: Reuben, the fail safe; a long-admired school friend; abd Frederick Adams, the 42-year-old, soon-to-be-pot-bellied father of her best friend....
Little Boys Come from the Stars
| Author | Emmanuel Dongala |
| ISBN | 0385721226 |
Sardonic, subtle, and sweetly scathing, Little Boys Come from the Stars is satire at its best.
Set in an unnamed country in equatorial Africa, it tells the story of Michel, a precocious teen dubbed Matapari (“trouble”) because of his extraordinary birth. Though his father is a reclusive...
The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest
| Author | Aminatta Forna |
| ISBN | 0802140483 |
Praised as “a shining example of what autobiography can be: harrowing, illuminating and thoughtful” (USA Today), Aminatta Forna’s intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an idyllic childhood which became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals...
When Invisible Children Sing
| Author | Chi Cheng Huang |
| ISBN | 1414306164 |
Expecting to treat some mildly ill children from the streets of Bolivia on a quick “service trip,” an idealistic young medical student gets more than he bargained for when he takes a year off from Harvard Medical School to work at an orphanage in La Paz. As he comes to know the children, and sees how...
Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral
| Author | Amilcar Cabral |
| ISBN | 0853453470 |
Amilcar Cabral, who was the Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), was assassinated by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973. Under his leadership, the PAIGC liberated three-quarters of the countryside of Guinea in less than ten...
Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote
| Author | Ahmadou Kourouma |
| ISBN | 0099283824 |
Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora - storyteller and king's fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical...
| Author | Camara Laye |
| ISBN | 0940322587 |
At the beginning of this masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Flush with self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape...
| Author | Pepetela |
| ISBN | 0435905953 |
Angola em plena guerra da independência.
A base do Comandante Sem Medo fica no Mayombe, região de densa floresta tropical. Luta-se, com o estômago quase sempre vazio, por um objetivo bem definido. No entanto, a estratégia é sempre muito vaga. Este pequeno grupo de guerrilheiros do MPLA encerra...
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
| Author | Noo Saro-Wiwa |
| ISBN | 1847080308 |
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. Then her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there, and she didn't...
Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future
| Author | George B.N. Ayittey |
| ISBN | 1403973865 |
Why haven't the poorest Africans been able to prosper in the twenty-first century? Celebrated economist George Ayittey thinks the answer is obvious: economic freedom was denied to them, first by foreign colonial powers and now by indigenous leaders with similarly oppressive practices. As war and...
The award-winning oral history of Elvia Alvarado, a courageous campesina (peasant) activist in Honduras, the poorest country in Central America. Trained by the Catholic Church to organize women's groups to combat malnutrition, Alvarado began to question why campesinos were malnourished to begin...
