Writing paths

Hervé Sanson is a specialist in Maghreb literature. It tells of the conditions for the emergence of French-speaking Algerian literature in the 1950s when the country plunged into a brutal war of liberation. The first generation of Algerian novelists and poets paved the way between the militant and the aesthetic imperative and founded a modern and inventive literature in its form and close to the misery and aspirations of their people in…

Antjie Krog is known all over the world for his emotional reports aimed at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and is above all a poet. She is the author of fifteen collections of poems whose themes range from critiques of apartheid to feminism, including the aging body, the cause of the marginalized but also the landscape as a metaphor and ecology. The issue of ecology…

The second part of the Chronicle of Writing Paths that RFI dedicates to the Congolese from the Congo, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe. Author of novels, poetry collections and theoretical essays on Africa, Mudimbe is recognized as one of the leading African intellectuals and philosophers. This year's publication in French of his famous essay The Invention of Africa is an opportunity to discover the essential inspiration of the essential author.…

It was by publishing in 1971, 50 years ago, his first fiction, Tribaliques, that the Congolese Henri Lopes made himself known. Awarded the following year the main literary prize in Black Africa, this collection of short stories enabled the author to establish his reputation as an attentive witness to the wealth and misfortune of independent Africa. Lopes leads a dual political and literary career and has established himself as an essential writer, author of an important work, located between social criticism and…

Since the publication in 2006 of his first novel And the sky forgot to rain, the Mauritanian author Beyrouk has established himself as one of the greatest voices in African literature in French. Author today of six novels and a collection of short stories, he tells story by story the breaking lines of his society torn between tradition and modernity. The desert so close, its majestic and disturbing enormity form the background of his…

Whereas in the course of the apartheid period in South Africa, we witnessed the triumph of English-language writers, essentially the most well-known of whom are Nadine Gordimer, AndreBrink or John Michael Coetzee, however after the apartheid period, a wide range of abilities emerged, the seen and progressive of that are African audio system. Literature within the African language has an extended custom. François Smith, whose first novel,…

The thirty Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a new star in African American letters. With his first book, Friday Black, a short story that has just been published in French, this author who was born to parents of Ghanaian origin establishes himself as a powerful and innovative voice. The twelve short stories in this collection combine dystopia, satire and magical realism and show a clear and disturbing portrait of American society, a society…

The forerunner of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the negritude movement, the American WEB Du Bois has dedicated his life to the fight against racism and to the defense of black culture. Her monumental work, which consists of sociological and historical essays, but also of fictions and autobiographical narratives close to prose poetry, strikes the astonishing modernity in the analyzes of the balance of power between races in the United…

Tsitsi Dangaermbga is the great lady in Zimbabwean letters. She became famous by publishing in 1988 her first novel "Nervous conditions". "The book we have been waiting for so long and which we should all read," said Doris Lessing about this first novel by the Zimbabwean novelist. Tsitsi Dangarembga is also a filmmaker and feminist and political activist.…

After a career in satirical journalism, the Senegalese Pape Samba Kane returned to his first literary and artistic love. With two collections of poems and a novel published over a decade, the 60-year-old has established himself as one of the greatest voices in African literature. "I am the fruit of you / Of your laughter that makes me eat / You guava my nostalgia /…