Quite a fascinating angle of storytelling with an unique style providing an insight into two Colonial East African countries and its select inhabitants. The story centers on settlements around the Mount Kilimanzaro of the British East Africa (Kenya) and the German East Africa (Tanganyika). Pius...
A collection of stories set in the Asian community of Dar es Salaam, depicting the changes in Uhuru Street from the sheltered innocence of colonial rule in the 1950s to the shattered world of the 1980s. The author received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novel The Gunny Sack.
"My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years. I head my country's List of Shame..." Th...
This was one of the most readable university books I ever came across. I really enjoyed the different episodes of the different times in the lives of this particular family and their involvement in all the political circumstances they have lived under. The progression from one kind of power to va...
“My father lost my mother one evening in a final round of gambling at the poker table,” writes the narrator of “When She Was Queen,” the title story of a new collection by bestselling novelist and two-time winner of the Giller Prize, M.G. Vassanji. That fateful evening in Kenya becomes “the obses...
Amriika is a novel of betrayal, disillusionment, and discovery set in America during three highly charged decades in the nation’s history. In the late sixties, Ramji, a student from Dar es Salaam, East Africa, arrives in an America far different from the one he dreamed about, one caught up in ant...
On the back cover of my edition, there's a blurb from The Globe and Mail that calls the book "timeless." That is the most accurate single-word evaluation of The Assassin's Song.Once you've plunged into the book and read a couple of chapters, you immediately get that sense of timelessness. M. G....
This was another book I had to read for one of my courses. As an immigration narrative it came very close to home; the issues discussed, the neighbourhood described, the duality of identity experienced by the main character all seem very familiar to me.The plot is of course centred on the struggl...
I sit here and evoke you, why I cannot explain. Forgive me if I misrepresent you in this alternative reality that I create—speculate?—for you. And for me. I could not imagine you dead and eaten, that there was not some humanity in those people there jostling against the brutality. How can we beli...
Gaam Strikes Back: The Leaning Tower and Other Recent Developments ONE AFTERNOON NOT LONG AGO after a meeting in New Haven I took a taxi for the intercity bus terminal, from where I would head off to the airport. The driver, a man in his thirties, was yammering away on his cell phone, had barely ...
The noisy racket of Delhi’s people I will hear as one who listens to music. Jamun, shahtut, phirni, chat-pakodi, bedmi kachori, rabri khurchan. Ahh! Ghantewala’s pista-lauj. KRISHNA SOBTI, The Heart Has its Reasons MANY OF THE DELHIITES I have met are Punjabi, having come as children with their r...