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"400 pages of verbal pyrotechnics and animal magic" — The Times

"Bulawayo leans into exaggeration and irony to tell hard truths. *Glory* is jam-packed with comedy and farce, poking fun at an autocratic regime while illustrating the absurdity and surreal nature of a police state." — The Guardian

The cruelty and savagery of Zimbabwe’s (and Africa’s in general) "powerful animals"

Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has written a novel that illustrates better than any documentary the complexity of colonial legacy. In doing so, she revisits George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Her novel *Glory* is a political satire about Zimbabwe—and it’s brimming with humor.

For thirty years, Zimbabwe has been stagnating under Robert Mugabe’s presidency. Human rights violations, corruption, and international sanctions have kept the population mired in poverty and oppression, while the regime exploits the meager earnings of the economy. As the 2017 elections approach, a power struggle erupts over the succession of the very elderly Father of the Nation (Mugabe). On the streets, people hope for long-awaited reforms; the people feel their moment has come.

And indeed, the army ousts Mugabe and his wife—"with her Gucci heels" (p.32)—who was positioning herself for the presidency. Hopes are dashed, however. The generals install former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa in power; the regime merely changes faces, but the problems remain the same.

In the novel, the country is called "Jidada, with a -da and another -da" (p.1); there’s no mistaking that this fictional state is Zimbabwe.

For *Glory*, her second novel, NoViolet Bulawayo invents a whole series of codes whose strength lies precisely in how easy they are to decipher. Like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the characters populating Bulawayo’s universe aren’t humans but horses, goats, or crocodiles with all-too-human traits. Mugabe and Mnangagwa are horses, the spiritual leader is a pig, the soldiers are all bloodthirsty dogs, while the populace consists of goats, chickens, donkeys, and cats. The shift to the animal world serves only to better grasp the laws of despotism—and to ridicule real-life models. On one hand, the animals are humanized: they tweet, torture, travel in private jets. On the other, their greed, stupidity, and brutality stem from their animal nature.

It’s the old trick of fable: dressing men in animal disguises to make them easier to recognize. That’s how Orwell, in Animal Farm, traced how the promise of liberation from the Russian Revolution turned into Stalinist terror. In his 1945 fable, George Orwell describes how the animals of a farm drive out their farmer to organize the exploitation themselves, collectively. For a time, they truly taste freedom, but a clique of pigs ends up taking control. The central figures of the Soviet story—Stalin, Trotsky, Molotov—were easily recognizable.

Yet Bulawayo departs sharply from Orwell. She’s less concerned with precision and the force of argument than with satirical exaggeration. The deposed president is a senile old man who believes he can control even the sun’s course. The new stallion in power is a greedy debaucher. His soldiers sniff respectfully at his tail and backside.

In Bulawayo’s *Glory*, things are more complicated, but her novel also tells of a failed, incomplete liberation. In the author’s Animal Farm, Jidada, the colonial exploiters are followed by new forms of oppression. Because the former liberators become tyrants themselves. And because global power dynamics persist in neocolonial structures.

Wouldn’t that be enough to fuel a deeply depressing narrative? No—Bulawayo turns it into a blazing satire, full of wit and uncompromising criticism of power, a thread running through contemporary (not just) Zimbabwean history. The old warhorses in NoViolet Bulawayo’s Jidada, who continue to act as pack leaders, are easily recognizable as caricatures of the longtime dictator Robert Mugabe and his successor, current president Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The plot kicks off in high gear with independence day festivities. From the crack of dawn, everyone waits on Jidada Square for the Old Horse, the Father of the Nation and former liberator, whose reign "was nearing all of—not one, not two, not three, but four solid decades" (p.1). Everywhere, the colors of the Jidada Party shine; everywhere, true supporters cheer. Even the scorching sun plays its part: "At this point the sun, upon seeing arrive the leader who was decreed by God himself to rule and rule and keep ruling, a leader who'd in turn decreed the very sun to head his cheerleading squad, took a deep, deep breath and thoroughly blazed to impress" (p.2).

Finally, the Old Horse’s luxury carriage approaches "with the slowness of a hearse" (p.2), and "hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary Father of the Nation," which causes "the animals fell over themselves like intoxicated frogs" (p.2). The sovereign’s speech is delayed a moment longer: "what I really want is a nap," groans the Old Horse as he takes his seat with such care "like his backside was made of expensive porcelain" (p.6).

Meanwhile, Bulawayo parades his entourage: the president’s wife (who earns her doctorate at Jidada University faster than "you could say diss, for dissertation. Tholukuthi it was as easy as ordering from a KFC drive-through, or perhaps even easier being that it was cheaper than KFC; it in fact cost her nothing and the degree actually came with a zero-calorie Diet Coke and a purple straw" (p.41), and she’s now known as Dr Sweet Mother. The cabinet includes "the Minister of the Revolution, the Minister of Corruption, the Minister of Order, the Minister of Things, the Minister of Nothing, the Minister of Propaganda, the Minister of Homophobic Affairs, the Minister of Disinformation and the Minister of Looting" (p.9). And of course the vice-president, who will soon become interim president when the Old Horse finally kicks the bucket—and then settle in as the new long-term president, who in the novel is called Tuvius Delight Shasha, or "Tuvy" for short (p.253), none other than Emmerson Mnangagwa. It’s him Bulawayo reserves her most merciless character description for.

"New Dispensation" (p.109) is Tuvy’s slogan for Jidada, and he loves repeating it so much he even named his parrot after it ("So inspired was Tuvy by the realisation that he rechristened his new pet parrot with the name New Dispensation—tholukuthi the bird having been acquired explicitly for the purposes of tweeting eulogies and accordingly glorifying the Saviour throughout the airs and skies of the nation. Tuvy then went on to hire a lecturer in English from the University of Jidada to teach New Dispensation to say the phrase 'New Dispensation'" p.110). But Tuvy’s Zimbabwe remains a nation without free, fair, and credible elections ("#freefairncredibleelection" p.161), and the promised equal treatment applies only insofar as Zimbabweans now queue up without discrimination in endless lines—and everyone is as poor as the next in the "queuenation" (p.283). Except for the powerful. They can "yes, tholukuthi, her immeasurable riches theirs to take. And take they did—

just take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take—take" (p.249-250).

In short: Bulawayo brilliantly depicts how former independence fighters become exploiters themselves. And how the country threatens to suffocate under the weight of corruption and repression. But she also literally stages the polyphony with which the people oppose imposed obedience to the official line.

Controversial online discussions keep interrupting the narrative—dialogues and social threads (see photo below) that Bulawayo masterfully integrates. From a literary standpoint, it’s a brilliant idea. And it shows, above all, that the author’s sympathy—so likeable—goes to all those who refuse to let their dream of true freedom be stolen, not even by the corrupt elites of their own country.

In the book’s acknowledgments, the first tribute goes to "The Jidadas of the world, clamouring for freedom on many fronts—A luta continua." (p.401) This reflects the realization that, not only in Jidada-Zimbabwe but in many other corners of the world, the end of colonial domination is still far from meaning the freedom hoped for by the vast majority of people. But it also means, more broadly, that this freedom must be won "on many fronts" (see above), both domestically and geopolitically.

That’s precisely what *Glory* so vividly highlights: how complex the project behind the term "postcolonialism" really is. With *Glory*, Bulawayo also delivers a scathing critique of the persistence of colonial mindsets in the West.

In the novel, the murder of George Floyd, racist police violence, and white-supremacist ideology in Trump’s United States perfectly illustrate the persistence of racism. It’s especially in the final chapters that Bulawayo lets Jidada’s inhabitants explicitly and unflinchingly criticize a neocolonial world order:

"It was not lost on us how the West, which loved to 'save' Africa and announce every action to the whole world, did so with one limb while manipulating, looting and fleecing us with the rest of its limbs so that more money in fact poured out of the continent than trickled in." (p.376)

"It was no mistake that multinational corporations yearly reaped and shipped colossal profits from Africa back to their countries as had been the case during colonial times. Even the sticks and stones would tell you that the African earth at any given time howled and shook and heaved from the extraction of its precious minerals that rarely benefited its own miserable children." (p.376)

"(...) we vowed to wage yet another war for Africa's second Liberation from neocolonial oppression. From exploitation. From plunder. From Western dominion. From indignity. From Abuse. We wanted real freedom. We wanted greedy, thieving paws off our wealth. We wanted Justice. We wanted a new world; we wanted a brand-new world so much we didn't sleep a wink that night." (p.377)

The Jidadas of this world must fight two enemies: Western neocolonialism and the autocratic instrumentalization of that argument; the persistence of Western racism and the populist appropriation of that humiliation by tyrants from their own ranks. Neither of these obstacles to freedom diminishes the historical and current guilt of the other. But the path to postcolonial liberation must overcome all these forms of oppression. After all, the colonizers didn’t bequeath democracies to formerly dominated nations, but instability and the principles of oppression and exploitation—which the so-called liberators have also internalized. Yet the fact that a satirical novel can capture the complexity of historical relationships while remaining, despite all the darkness of the subject, hilarious—well, that’s truly astonishing.

Finally, *Glory* ties into a major trauma in Zimbabwe’s post-independence history: the so-called Gukurahundi massacres. Between 1983 and 1987, tens of thousands of civilians were murdered by Mugabe’s bloody henchmen, most of them Ndebele. The State Security Minister and head of secret services at the time? You guessed it—Emmerson Mnangagwa.

When *Glory* turns to the massacres, the novel’s tone shifts completely. The story is now told through the narrative of the goat called Destiny, who, like NoViolet Bulawayo herself, left her home country at 18 for the United States and only returned after 13 years. In the book, the city of Bulawayo becomes a village where Destiny retraces her family’s history—and learns that part of it was also brutally murdered during the massacres.

The abuse of power and life under a dictatorship, dispossession, and a fiercely proud awareness of the psychological wounds and emotional vulnerability of a uprooted and disenfranchised people who had to forge a new language—a new set of names—to express their lived experiences are at the heart of this wonderful Zimbabwean author’s literary work, NoViolet Bulawayo. Shortly after her studies, she was already writing short stories about postcolonial power dynamics in Africa. But her playful, masterful, and often unconventional approach to language also plays a key role in her work. With virtuosity, she shifts from cynical images of power-obsessed elites to compassionate descriptions of the people’s suffering, ending with a hopeful sermon on courage—the courage to break free from fear and thus gain the strength for change ("And every one of them understood that whatever they heard within those hearts was the new national anthem, tholukuthi an anthem that spoke of the kind of glory that burns eternal and glows with living light." p.400). This novel is a genuine pleasure to read. And it’s exceptional. Good, African...

Book info (original English and German translation):

NoViolet Bulawayo. Glory. Chatto & Windus, 2022. NoViolet Bulawayo. Glory. Suhrkamp, 2023.

Hery

The books (in English, in German)

Author NoViolet Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Threads (p.164-165)

“When the Whites came to Africa, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed: when we opened them, the Whites had the land and we had the Bible.” Jomo Kenyatta (p.7)

The Maggi cube, an unchallenged hegemony, and so much more

“The hopeless continent,” headlined The Economist, a British magazine, in July 2000 about Africa. Eleven years later, the same magazine headlined “Africa rising” instead. Images of Africa in the prosperous North constantly oscillate between apocalyptic scenarios and enthusiastic projections. A key issue with such images lies in the generalization they entail. If you look at the continent, considerable contrasts emerge depending on space and time. It’s no surprise that a region of the world encompassing such diverse ecological zones, maintaining such varied ties with other continents, comprising nearly fifty nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and characterized by a great diversity of languages, belief systems, and historical paths, doesn’t share a single destiny.

And yet, for many people outside Africa, as well as for many Africans, the continent constitutes a single entity, defined by criteria such as skin color, a colonial past, poverty, and the art of survival. Until now, these perspectives were generally accompanied by the idea that Africa had to—or should have—followed a single path together, sometimes called development, sometimes modernization, sometimes liberation, then a market economy. None of these paths delivered on their promises.

The two writers Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman Waberi—one from Congo, the other raised in Djibouti, both long settled in France and now professors at renowned North American universities (Los Angeles, Washington)—have had enough of pessimistic scenarios: “We are aware that Africa is in the world and the world is in Africa. The same goes for all other continents, as our destinies are inextricably linked for better or worse. We refuse to see Africa as a reservoir of misfortunes or a continent cursed by atavistic misfortune and characterized by ethnic conflicts. [...] It’s this passionate flame we wanted to capture in a book [...] a kind of stroll through African cultures, without any demands, each letter of the alphabet leading us to a notion, a practice, a concept, a moment in history, literature, painting, politics, economics, cuisine, etc.” (p.10-11). Africa, they write, is on the verge of “imposing a signature, a style, a way of being in the world and in relation to the rest of the world.” (p.11) To put words to the continent’s diversity and dynamism, the two authors created a “rambling ABC,” a kind of portrait—or more precisely, a mythography—that lets you see and feel the pulse of a vast continent whose cultural power is unfolding before our eyes. Once marginalized or even mocked, the voice and importance of the Continent in global affairs are now undeniable” (p.11), containing over a hundred entries, mostly concise, written in a relaxed and casual style. The optimistic, even exuberant tone is set from the brief introduction. The duo of authors wants to “sing a love song to the cultures of our continent, to its inhabitants past and present, to its exceptional resources and its spectacular globalization despite a certain pollution that still clouds our skies due to the unmatched duration of dictatorships in some of our regions.” (p.12) In doing so, they don’t want to be too distracted by today’s Afewerki-Biya-Bongo-Déby & Co. ...

Of course, you’ll find tributes to great precursors like Frantz Fanon (“[...] it was a love story and admiration that wasn’t dimmed by the four decades separating his birth from ours. Let’s add that we were born while the native of Fort-de-France had left the world’s stage four years earlier, in the prime of life” p.141), Mongo Beti (“You must read and reread Mongo Beti, a genius who used his fame to support often just causes in Africa, like defending oppressed groups. His place is already in History. His oppressors, like the dictators Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya, can’t compete in the same category” p.64), the Malian Amadou Hampâté Bâ

(“Posterity remembers him mainly as an tireless defender of African cultures. His plea for the collection and preservation of traditional African knowledge remains a major event for all men and women of good will. One day in 1960, at the UNESCO podium, the native of Bandiagara sounded the alarm: ‘[...] Since we’ve admitted that the humanity of each people is the heritage of all humanity, if African traditions aren’t collected in time and written down, they’ll one day be missing from the universal archives of humanity.’” p.51),

Kwame Nkrumah, “one of the founders of Pan-Africanism, father of Ghana’s independence” (p.239), as well as the historian Cheikh Anta Diop, the writer, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire, and the economist and thinker Samir Amin, but also very warm tributes to certain contemporary African intellectuals like Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Achille Mbembe

(“A few years ago, in dominant economic circles, a rumor often resurfaced, usually disguised as a cold and scientifically proven analysis: Africa is useless. It’s a burden for the rest of the human community. With its 2% share in world trade, it would disappear from stock market radars without anyone noticing. So? Maybe it’ll be pulled up by other continents. Wanting to surpass itself is a crazy bet for Africans, they concluded. Arrogant or clueless, President Nicolas Sarkozy declared before an audience of students and teachers at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar: ‘The African man hasn’t entered history enough [...] He only knows the eternal repetition of time marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and words.’ That was in 2007. For decades, armed only with reason, an intellectual often steps up to debunk prejudices, lazy readings, and dishonest frameworks used as false fronts by those who, like Nicolas Sarkozy or former journalist Stephen Smith, out of ignorance, contempt, or condescension, distort African reality. This intellectual is none other than the historian and political scientist Achille Mbembe. This heir of Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Jean-Marc Ela, and Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga was born in 1957 in Cameroon, in the Bassa region. Marked early by the upheavals of a fratricidal war, Achille Mbembe became the guardian of the memory of martyrs. After brilliant studies in Paris, he went on to teach at the best American universities, but the call of the Continent was stronger than anything else. In Dakar, he once directed CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) before joining the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Even though the author of *Critique of Black Reason* (Éditions La Découverte, 2015) spends a few months at Duke University in North Carolina, his observation post remains South Africa. From Johannesburg, Achille Mbembe scrutinizes Africa and the whole world. A lucid observer with an elegant and generous pen, Achille Mbembe knows how to blend big and small history: ‘I was born one day in July, as the month was drawing to a close. It was 1957, in that part of Africa recently named ‘Cameroon,’ a memory of the wonder that seized Portuguese sailors in the 15th century when, sailing up the river near Douala, they couldn’t help but note the presence of a multitude of crustaceans, and named it *Rio dos Camarões*, meaning ‘River of Shrimp.’ I grew up in the shadow of this nameless land, since, in a way, the name it bears is only the product of someone else’s astonishment: a lexical mistake, if you will.’ From this mistake or wound, he made leaven, a springboard to compose a rich work, recognized worldwide. To denounce barriers and barbarians too. But that’s not enough. Among his peers in circles of thought and action, Achille Mbembe passionately and consistently defends human dignity and the beauty of the world. In doing so, he fulfills the mission Frantz Fanon entrusted to him.” (p.227-229),

as well as entries dedicated to lesser-known artists and intellectuals, like the French journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo, daughter of Senegalese and Gambian parents, or the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, who has long lived in the United States. Other names from politics, sports, music, art, and literature: Kofi Annan, p.36; Barack Obama, p.243; Thomas Sankara, p.277; Ousmane Sow, p.285; Yambo Ouologuem, p.250; Léopold Sédar Senghor, p.282; Muhammad Ali, p.30; Nuruddin Farah, p.146; Salif Keita, p.203; Ahmadou Kourouma, p.206; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, p.236; Winnie Mandela, p.224; Kylian Mbappé, p.226 ...

The authors, who resolutely commit to a “mythography” (p.11) of Africa, also pay special attention to local social movements, cultural events, and aspects of daily life. *Y’en a marre*, “which also meant ‘we’re fed up with sitting on our hands’” (p.320-321), emerged about a decade ago in Senegal as a citizen movement of peaceful resistance and symbolizes, the authors emphasize, the fact that African youth are increasingly fed up “with the political circus deployed in Africa since independence, as our parents would say, ‘since the White man left’...” (p.321). A full entry is dedicated to the Maggi bouillon cube, which has flooded African markets for about forty years and enjoys immense popularity (“It’s everywhere in Africa, from Dakar to Djibouti, and from Tangier to Cape Town. It’s in every pot, every stew. Little hands put it in every sauce, every local or adapted dish. An unchallenged hegemony! You’ll find it in diasporas too. The culinary strolls in Paris, in the [...] neighborhood” p.90). Critics blame it not only for impoverishing the aromatic diversity of local dishes but also for being harmful to health. And yet, “he poorest Africans, those who eat only once a day, a few spoonfuls of white beans and a ball of *foufou*, for example, are the most fervent users of the magic cube.” (p.92-93)

For *fonio*, “the new trendy cereal. [...] From the millet family, fonio is probably the oldest cereal cultivated in West Africa, and mainly in its sub-Saharan part, for millennia. [...] Easy to grow, water-efficient, fonio grows everywhere except on clay soils. Long neglected because it was considered the poor man’s crop, fonio is now a source of pride for the farmers who cultivate it and cherish it like the apple of their eye” (p.156-157), the authors immediately offer a detailed recipe, letting the reader know that “e can’t resist sharing this fonio with chicken recipe from Mali with you:

Ingredients: 1 chicken 3 large ripe red tomatoes 4 tbsp tomato paste 4 large onions 1 garlic clove 1/2 cup oil 2 Maggi cubes or salt 2 large carrots 1 turnip 1 large cabbage 2 large potatoes 1 celery stalk 1 packet pre-cooked fonio 4 okra (or okra powder) salt, pepper

Preparation: 1. Prepare the sauce: wash and cut the chicken. Peel the onions, garlic, and vegetables. 2. In a pot, fry the chicken pieces. 3. Dice the onions, tomatoes, carrots, and turnip very small and add them to the pot. 4. Add the tomato paste, salt, and pepper. 5. Simmer for 15 min, then add 2 L of water and the cooked chicken pieces. 6. Simmer for 30 min, then add the crushed garlic and celery, plus the cabbage cut into 4 and the potatoes cut in half. 7. Prepare the fonio: cover it with warm water, let it rest for 15 min, and cook it over low heat. 8. In a small pot, boil the okra and crush them. 9. Mix the crushed okra with the cooked fonio, then salt. Serve hot.” (p.158-159)

The comedy *Black Mic Mac*, released in French theaters in 1986 and addressing France’s increasingly restrictive immigration policy at the time, also gets an entry, as do *Tintin in the Congo*, the popular comic, and *Jip’s Café* (“[...] a little Africa in the heart of Paris, with passersby stopping to admire the ‘ambianceurs’ on the dance floor or attend the cultural events offered by the place” (p.194), an African establishment in Paris that Alain Mabanckou already immortalized in one of his novels.

The duo of authors also tackles thorny subjects like jihadism (p.119), the Rwandan genocide (p.272), the CFA franc (p.82), and dictatorship (p.110). While the two strike the right tone here, many entries leave a slightly bitter taste. Two examples: why doesn’t the text on Barack Obama mention the great disappointment of many people in Africa, who expected more from the African policy of the first U.S. president with African roots than just occasional warm words? Why do the comments on Winnie Mandela gloss over the fact that she was a highly controversial icon of the anti-apartheid movement due to her involvement in kidnappings, acts of torture, and murders of alleged apartheid collaborators? Instead, there’s a compassion that brings tears to the eyes: “She was often reduced to a secondary role, the wife of a great man” or “When victory came, she didn’t taste its fruits. Divorced, isolated. She would never be a ‘first lady’ in an evening gown, posing before a bed of chrysanthemums. They’d keep her far from the circles of power” (p.224-225). At this point, I would’ve liked the authors to take a slightly more critical stance...

That said, these “weaknesses” (if you can call them that) shouldn’t overshadow the book as a whole. It remains an informative, sometimes very entertaining, and often even original work in its own way.

Book information (the original French and the German translation):

Alain Mabanckou/Abdourahman Waberi. Dictionnaire enjoué des cultures africaines. Fayard, 2019. Alain Mabanckou/Abdourahman Waberi. Der Puls Afrikas. Eine Liebeserklärung von A bis Z. Reclam, 2022.

Hery

"I created the African Languages Universe for a proud, playful, and accessible reclaiming of our languages in homes and imaginations, from ages 7 to 77" (Diaddou Cissé, founder of Univers des Langues Africaines)

A bridge between generations, continents, and languages

Since its beginnings, Univers des Langues Africaines, an independent publishing house, has had a simple yet powerful dream: to bring African languages to life in homes, schools, games, and everyday conversations. This dream grows with every word passed on, every language rediscovered, every child who speaks their first words in Soninke, Lingala, Bambara, Wolof, Pulaar...

Today, Univers des Langues Africaines has become:

an educational, accessible, and multilingual publishing house,

a brand committed to intergenerational transmission,

a lively, playful, and reality-connected learning space.

Children of the African diaspora, regardless of their level in Soninke, Wolof, Bambara, Lingala..., all face the same issue: the lack of books in their heritage languages tailored to them. Univers des Langues Africaines was born to fill this gap by offering simple and fun books and supporting them in learning African languages. Whether you're a minor, an adult beginner, a parent wanting to pass on their language to their child, or an African language enthusiast, Univers des Langues Africaines has a program suited to your needs!

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« Ali is not dead; he continues to inspire many talented musicians. There’s a new generation of artists who have their own style, but they’ve all listened to Ali Farka Touré. » (Ms. Kuypers-Touré, widow of Ali Farka Touré)

Ali Farka Touré (1939-2006)

Recognized worldwide as one of the most important musicians from Africa, his guitar playing earned him the nickname “the African John Lee Hooker.” But Ali Farka Touré preferred to flip the script and highlight the roots of Southern U.S. music in the Sahel region: « I have the roots and the trunk; they only have the leaves and branches. » In other words, what John Lee Hooker played was an echo of a distant African past. Ali Farka Touré was the guardian of traditions, and even though his sound resembled the blues, it remained deeply tied to the land of his ancestors—in Africa, in Mali. A farmer at heart, the famous Malian singer and guitarist continued to cultivate the land until his hospitalization for cancer, from which he passed away on March 7, 2006, in Bamako at the age of 66.

The son of a soldier who fell in combat while serving in the French army, he was born in 1939 in Kanau, near Timbuktu, then part of French Sudan (a subdivision of French West Africa, now Mali). He was raised by an uncle with harsh teaching methods and a grandmother who was “strong in voodoo,” communicating with spirits. At ten years old, he had a revelation for the single-string lute djurkel, “the instrument of the spirits,” and for the fiddle njarka. Seven years later, while training as a driver at a clinic, he fell in love with a colleague’s guitar. It wasn’t until 1968, when he was to represent Mali in Bulgaria, that he finally had the chance to acquire his first six-string guitar. International acclaim came later, following numerous concerts in the UK in the mid-1980s, at the invitation of World Circuit, the independent English label to which he remained loyal his entire life.

Several times, Ali Farka Touré announced his plan to stop making music. « It’s time for me to focus on my own. I don’t want Europe to tear me away from Africa. [...] Me, I love cultivating the land. In my life, if I’m not in the fields, I’m fishing or in the garden! »

Yet, Ali Farka Touré regularly returned to perform in Europe and the U.S. In 1995, he won his first Grammy Award for the album Talking Timbuktu, recorded in 1993 with bassist John Patitucci, percussionist Jim Keltner, the great Californian guitarist Ry Cooder, and the venerable guitarist Clarence Gatemouth Brown. His last three years were extraordinarily productive. Back to back, he recorded his best albums: In the Heart of the Moon (2004), Ali & Toumani (released in 2010), both duets with kora player Toumani Diabaté, and Savane (2005), dedicated to the traditional Peul and Songhai repertoires. At the same time, he tirelessly devoted himself to his agricultural work and his duties as mayor, a role he had held since 2004.

A multi-instrumentalist, he was a self-taught musician with an impressive musical culture. His discography includes around fifteen albums and several timeless hits used in films or as TV program themes. A universal symbol of West African sound heritage, his presence and his role in spreading a centuries-old legacy are undeniable. His son, also a musician, Vieux Farka Touré, now bears the heavy responsibility of carrying on his illustrious father’s message and legacy. His album Les Racines, released in 2002, is his contribution to preserving an instantly recognizable sound.

Meanwhile, his country, Mali, has paid tribute to him: for several years now, a square and a street in Bamako, the capital of Mali, have borne his name (both located in the Lafiabougou district).

In 2023, World Circuit released a new posthumous album, Voyageur, the first to feature previously unreleased tracks since 2010. It includes pieces composed and recorded spontaneously over the last 15 years, whether during his many tours or in the studio. These tracks once again showcase Touré’s passion for the musical traditions of his homeland and for the creativity and cultural diversity of West Africa. Below, an excerpt from this album: the beautiful song Chérie (with a very young Oumou Sangaré)—magnificent!!!

hgb

Ali Farka Touré feat. Oumou Sangaré: Chérie

Between composition and improvisation: Anthony Braxton

For over half a century, the American Anthony Braxton—a composer, multi-instrumentalist, music theorist, university professor, mentor, and visionary—has been one of the key figures in avant-garde contemporary music. Braxton himself describes his music as "creative music," drawing inspiration from jazz, European New Music (Schönberg, Stockhausen, and Xenakis are among the composers who influenced him), and music from various world cultures. In other words, his work uniquely oscillates between composition and improvisation. His body of work includes around 700 compositions, over 200 albums, and a dozen theoretical books.

Anthony Braxton is one of the most striking and brilliant figures in contemporary jazz. As a member of the Creative Construction Company (with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Leo Smith) and the quartet Circle (with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Barry Altschul—whose double album Circle. Paris Concert is a landmark of contemporary jazz), with his groundbreaking solo alto saxophone album For Alto (1968), his duo with drummer Max Roach, Birth and Rebirth (1978), and especially his own ensembles and large formations, he set out to "redefine the space of music" (Braxton). In doing so, he gave decisive impetus to the development of jazz, making him a star of the avant-garde in the 1970s, with a recording contract from a major label.

Born in 1945 in the South Side, an African-American neighborhood of Chicago, Braxton was always a bit of an outsider, not doing what everyone else did. While the boys in his neighborhood hung out and goofed around, he stayed home pondering chess games or practicing the saxophone. Later, he became a leading figure in the Chicago musicians' organization AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a mutual aid network for many African-American musicians in Chicago's new jazz scene. He then led his own formations for years, including musicians like George Lewis, John Lindberg, Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul, Mark Dresser, Ray Anderson, and Mark Helias. In the mid-1980s, Braxton settled down a bit by accepting a teaching position at Mills College at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a tenured professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, for many years. From his "school" emerged musicians of the younger generation, such as Taylor Ho Bynum (trumpet), Aaron Siegel (percussion), Jay Rozen (tuba), Jessica Pavone (violin, viola, flute), and Mary Halvorson (guitar).

I’ve seen Anthony Braxton in concert many times: the first time at the Moers Jazz Festival (1976) in a duo with George Lewis (trombone)—I still remember it vividly—the last time in November 2021 in Ulm with his Diamond Curtain Wall Trio (with the incredible Portuguese trumpeter Susanna Santos Silva; see the photos).

Just a few days ago, on June 4, this exceptional figure celebrated his 80th birthday. Congratulations!

hgb

(A belated tribute on this forum)

Abdulrazak Gurnah, an author with a unique journey and identity (Tanzania)

Big surprise in Stockholm: the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. The Tanzanian author, who writes in English, is best known for his novels Paradise (1994) and By the Sea (2001). He was recognized for his "uncompromising and compassionate portrayal of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents", according to the Nobel Committee.His work moves away from "stereotypical descriptions and opens our eyes to a culturally diverse East Africa that is little known in many parts of the world".

Gurnah is the first African author since 2003 to win the prestigious prize, and the fifth from the African continent overall—following Wole Soyinka (1986), Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), and J.M. Coetzee (2003). Once again, the prize passed over Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has long been among the favorites for the award.

Born in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1948, Abdulrazak Gurnah grew up in an Arab family originally from Yemen. He sought refuge in the UK in the late 1960s, a few years after independence, at a time when the Muslim minority there was being persecuted. He wasn’t able to return to Zanzibar until 1984.

Since 1987, he has published around ten novels and several short stories in English (his native language is Swahili). None have become bestsellers, but his body of work as a whole offers a different perspective on issues like immigration and cultural diversity. His work sheds light on the effects of colonialism, exile, and the plight of refugees, "speaking" of his love for Africa and his fight against neocolonialism. Though Gurnah’s stories aren’t explicitly autobiographical, they’re inspired by his life as an immigrant in the UK.

Gurnah was also a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury until his recent retirement.

Does this award bring more attention to African literature? Who knows? At the very least, it might give it a boost. If African literature is less visible in the West, it’s partly because it isn’t widely accessible: Gurnah is rarely translated into French or German, and not at all into Arabic.

In Tanzania and its Zanzibar archipelago, he’s being celebrated with joy. "This means a lot for Zanzibar’s struggle for self-determination," says Ismail Jussa, a literary critic from Zanzibar. "It helps put Zanzibar back on the map." The Swedish Committee acknowledged that his work has helped understand "the divisions caused by colonialists, but also the heartbreak of being torn between the homeland one comes from and the life of exile one is forced into."

By the Sea. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001 (Fr.: Près de la Mer. Galaade Éd., 2006)

Paradise. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1994/2004 (Fr.: Paradis. Motifs, 1999)

Desertion. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005 (Fr.: Adieu Zanzibar. Galaade Éd., 2009)

Afterlives. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 (Fr.: Les vies d’après. Denoël, 2023)

Hery

Chansons douces pour Petits (et Grands)

« So quiet » - le titre de l’album en dit long : lorsque tout est bruyant et agité autour de soi, il vaut mieux s‘enfermer et se rendre dans un cadre familier. « So quiet » (2019) est une telle retraite musicale à laquelle la chanteuse-danseuse Serena Fisseau et son mari, l’accordéoniste Vincent Peirani, aussi parents de deux enfants ensemble, nous invitent. Un album tout simplement délicieux...

Par cet album, ces deux artistes nous invitent, pour ainsi dire, dans le cercle de leur petite famille, et représentent des chansons qu’ils jouent et chantent chez eux, notamment à leurs enfants (garçons de 3 et 9 ans), ainsi qu’à leurs proches, lorsqu’ils referment la porte du monde extérieur. Cela crée une ambiance confortable et intime, et avec laquelle on peut décrocher et se détendre : s’il s’agit d‘une chanson de Serge Gainsbourg (« La Javanaise »), de Burt Bacharach (« Close to you ») ou des Beatles (« And I love her »), si ce sont des pièces inspirées de la musique folklorique indonésienne ou brésilienne (Caetano Veloso, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Freire Júnior), si elles sont chantées en bahasa, français, anglais ou portugais, ou jouées à l’accordéon, à l’accordina, au Wurlitzer e-piano, aux body percussions ou même au piano – elle affectionnent la simplicité et enthousiasment. Ma pièce favorie, d’ailleurs, c’est « 3 petites notes de musique » (George Delerue/Henri Colpi) : d’une beauté simple (difficile à mettre en mots !)...

Serena Fisseau et Vincent Peirani font ressortir l’essence de ces chefs-d’œuvres intemporels, de la manière la plus naturelle possible. Seulement avec une voix soyeuse, rassurante et sans toutes fioritures, un instrument toujours distant et beaucoup de silence. Un silence – cette denrée précieuse, aujourd’hui peut-être plus que jamais – qui devient audible dans la musique de Serena Fisseau et Vincent Peirani. Dans les espaces entre les tons, qui sont sur cet album presque plus importants que les tons eux-mêmes. Une musique irrésistiblement légère, souvent joyeuse et claire, qui tire son intimité avant tout du fait que les deux musiciens ne sont pas seulement un couple d’artistes, mais aussi dans la « vraie» vie. Les deux ont fait cet album pour leurs enfants. Et pour tous les autres enfants. Et pour tous les adultes qui ont à nouveau envie de se rêver par des vibrations (très près de l’oreille) d’une voix femelle et d’un accordéon dans une légèreté enfantine pendant la durée d’un album...

Serena Fisseau : voix, body percussions Vincent Peirani : accordéon, accordina, Wurlitzer, piano, plastic bags, music box, voix

Hery