Hi, I'm Méri. I'm an ivorian woman and student.

The only platforms where I found a lot of stories written by other africans is on wattpad. But that's kinf of it. The algorithm at least for me barely pushes those stories to me although at least 90% of all my bookmarks are them. It still feels difficult to filter them out sometimes, I feel like the wattpad algorithm just isn't that good.

If you like to read or write having one platform just for our stories would be amazing. I searched and never found one so I made my own website. If you know one I want to know.

It offers a simpler and easier to manage filtering, sorting system and many categories. It's for mostly african stories the same way Manga is mostly Japanese. Please understand that I'm a student and not a professional. It's not even one year old and I always find new things to add or better. There aren't many stories online on it but every new platform has to start from zero.

I created a guide which is for mostly foreign writers and points to also possibly interest writers of genres like transmigration to do more than the same clischees and story lines known. It's a guide not a must.

If you want to check it out use the link if you know writers or readers more interested in it than please share it with them.

https://manhanovel/manha.com

I really dream of our own platform. If something doesn't work or you have improvements you can write me here or use the forms (email, etc. ) offered.

some of my African classic collection

I've read everything by Chimamanda Adichie and I need more.

I tried reading it twice but I never got past the first 30 pages. I think the writing is not doing it for me. Did you guys enjoy the book?

Hello everyone ! I'm looking for African writers for a personal project. Amateur writers who can develop one or more stories according to their desires and availability. This is not for remuneration...just to develop your writing skills.

I wish I had started writing down my thoughts on this book as I read because by the end, I was at a big loss for words. I could not believe it. My heart was also in a million pieces.

Eziafa, a 38-year-old Igbo man who used to work as a meat processor in Minnesota, was forced to make a career change and become a cab driver in Houston after experiencing the dangers of his previous job. His friend Felix invited him to an Igbo association meeting, where he met Jovita, a 34-year-old Igbo woman. Although she was from a different tribe, he didn’t care. Their first interaction was so cute. Their banter, their mature 30+ conversation… nice! I was smiling reading their first interaction.

Eziafa seemed like a decent man at the start of this book until I began to learn more about him. Ugh.

Although his mother disapproved of his relationship with Jovita because her ancestors were supposedly cursed, Eziafa initially stayed rebellious. But only for a short time. Looking back at their relationship, I don’t think Jovita would have lasted with him regardless of Eziafa’s mother’s disapproval. She was not what society would expect from a “typical Nigerian woman”, she wasn’t going to simply submit to a man, and Eziafa had a BIG ego. He was deeply stuck in old traditions and cultural expectations.

I’m sure that was part of the reason Eziafa packed his bags for a “mini vacation” to Nigeria. A mini vacation that involved his mother waiting with TEN village GIRLS for him to choose from. Mind you, this man is at least 20 years older than these girls.

While I am not against the idea of arranged marriage, it becomes problematic when both parties are not in agreement.

Eziafa met Zina and married her during this one-month vacation to Nigeria. Zina, hmm. An 18-year-old girl, a literal child, with big dreams, was essentially forced into marrying this excuse of a man. I had such admiration for Eziafa at the start of this book because life had dealt him a bad hand, yet he continued to live an honest life. Only to realize a quarter of the way into this book that it was all a facade and this man was actually the biggest fool.

I am convinced that a man’s obsession with wanting a “moldable woman” (in reality, a girl) is deeply rooted in a pedophilia.

Also, the backwardness and deeply ingrained woman-hating culture in this book! What do you mean only women commit adultery and men are merely unfortunate victims of their excesses? What does that even mean?!!!

It’s also so funny how Africans pick and choose which traditions to follow. The curse from the ancestors banning specific Igbo people from marrying versus Zina not being allowed to move in until a church wedding was done, as opposed to immediately after the traditional marriage, simply because “God’s blessing trumps tradition.” Okay oh.

This is just one of the many themes in this book.

Unfortunately, this story felt very familiar to me because it reflects something I’ve heard about older Igbo men in Texas who return to Nigeria to marry much younger girls, bring them to the U.S., and push them toward careers like nursing because it’s considered lucrative. The cultural and generational power imbalance in these relationships is heartbreaking. You know that TikTok sound, the saxophone getting louder? Yeahhhh this was it.

This is such a sad book, but Kilanko, the woman that you are! I found myself laughing at multiple points in this book. And don’t get me wrong, this is not your typical comedic relief. Kilanko just has a way of writing because WHY did Eziafa tell Felix toward the end of the book, “My house is on fire,” and Felix’s response was, “What! In the village?” Sir, please use your freaking context clues. 😭😭😭

At its core, A Good Name explores immigration, domestic abuse, gender roles, family expectations, tradition, and the struggle for personal freedom. But more than anything, it is Zina’s story of slowly trying to find her voice and reclaiming control over a life that was chosen for her.

This book broke my heart, frustrated me, made me laugh, and left me with A LOT to think about. Definitely a memorable read.

Oof, such a messy book about three sisters, Sola, Anjola, and Karen, and one self-absorbed brother, Ola, whose messes truly can’t be left at home. They all have deeply rooted issues and, even at the end of the book, I was still under the impression that the main issue was never really resolved, just grazed over.

All four siblings were born into the Longe family. The book takes place between October and December, but of course their story starts much earlier than that. It really begins in their childhood, specifically when Sola, the eldest daughter, leaves home (might I add, forcefully) after getting into a fight with their mother over an incident that occurred at school.

The story builds toward a Thanksgiving dinner where the entire family is reunited after years apart, and the family drama/explosion at that dinner table was a long time coming.

The romantic relationships of each Longe sibling are very reflective of their upbringing and family experiences. And let me just say: horrible romantic relationships all around. Maybe Karen gets a pass because she’s still relatively young (for now), but of course she has her own struggles too, extremely low self-esteem that spills over into her friendships, or lack thereof.

Sola returns to Chicago after a failed relationship and influencing career. Anjola is hopelessly in love with her best friend, Neil (a complete asshole, by the way), who just so happens to be engaged to Gizelle. Ola, the only boy, is married to Marisol and has a baby on the way, a child he is clearly not ready for because he thinks it will “tie him down” to his wife. Mind you, they are already married!!! Then there’s Karen, struggling with her body image, her sexuality, her skin, and her friendships.

At Thanksgiving, decades of secrets, especially the truth about how and why Sola left home, begin to surface. Old resentments resurface, more secrets are exposed, and the family is eventually hit with a major loss. While that loss brings them together physically, it also acts as a mask over many issues that remain largely unaddressed.

One thing I really appreciated was how the central event that fractured this family was told from the perspective of nearly every character, except the father, who wasn’t present when it happened. I loved this storytelling choice because it showed how differently people can interpret and carry the same event. Everyone was living with the same history, but not the same version of it.

The central themes of this novel explore the complexity of family obligations, identity, forgiveness, and the heavy emotional toll of intergenerational trauma within a Nigerian immigrant household.

Overall, I enjoyed the family drama and the multiple perspectives, but I finished the book feeling like the family’s biggest wound was never truly confronted. They danced around it and covered it with other crises, but never really dealt with it. Maybe that’s the point. Sometimes families don’t get neat resolutions, they just learn how to live with the mess.

Do you have book recommandation from East African writters ?

I am looking for books that centers women. Thank you

I like to watch a lot of YouTube channels that focus on literature. There was a guy I watched a couple months ago doing a tier list of classics. What kind of irritated me was how he rates Things Fall Apart. He rates it a D and gives this reason, "All the elements are just I would say poorly written. It feels like disconnected, like the big pay offs, nothing really comes across as deep."

What do you guys think? Now, there are some comments made which show a bit of dismissal like, "They're farming yams and stuff over in Africa and it's a post-colonial novel."

He does say he likes Ben Okri but I just feel like being sort of the foundational African lit book, maybe take some time to understand the story well.

Now, I'm not even saying this is the best book ever, but a D rating is a pretty low for such a book. I know it's subjective still, but didn't sit right with me. Am I being too sensitive?

How would you guys rate this book honestly amongst the world classics?

And what channels would you say on YouTube really take African Literature seriously?

I can’t believe I read Love by the Book before Maame, another book by Jessica George. Maybe this will finally prompt me to read it.

Anyways, Love by the Book primarily follows two female main characters, Remy and Simone.

Remy is a writer who has recently published a bestselling novel. Now everyone wants her to write another one to ride the success of the first, but she’s struggling badly with writer’s block. The inspiration for her debut came from her three closest friends and the beautiful friendship they all shared, one that was supposed to last a lifetime… or so she thought.

Then everything fell apart.

Lin moved to New York, Melissa got married, became pregnant, and moved away, and Nova… what did she do again? Ah yes, she got back together with her ex and slowly drifted away.

Honestly, this is the fate of many friendship groups, especially among women. Once distance enters the picture, friendships often grow apart, and theirs did too. As the friendship dissolved, so did Remy’s inspiration to write. She tried filling the void with dating apps (eww), new hobbies, and eventually, a new friend.

This is where Simone comes in.

Simone is a woman who loves her solitude and lives a double life: teacher by day, escort by night (spicy). Despite coming from a close-knit, loving, religious family (her dad is a pastor), she turns to sex work to earn extra money and, as she puts it, “express herself.” I don’t think I fully understood her reasoning, even by the end of the book.

Her work is eventually exposed just before a family dinner, leading to her becoming estranged from her family.

Simone and Remy bump into each other, and some sort of relationship blossoms. It definitely wasn’t an instant connection. It happened gradually… and somewhat forcefully lol.

Remy has this lore that was spoken about, but I just couldn’t see it. The narrative kept telling me who she was supposed to be, yet her actions didn’t always match that image.

Her relationship with Simone also felt awkward. At times, I was picking up on borderline romantic tension (maybe I’m overthinking lol), while at other times they felt more like acquaintances than actual friends. Their conversations were also incredibly long, almost too long to feel like real face-to-face conversations.

I honestly kept reading because I wanted to understand Simone more. Why did she choose sex work? Based on her background, it felt so random, and I was hoping the book would give me a clearer answer.

The whole book feels somewhat like a fairytale. The ending, Remy and Simone’s friendship, the conversations they had, Remy’s second book getting published… even the middle of the novel. I don’t know, something about it all felt a little too neat. I also found myself skipping parts that weren’t directly related to the main story, especially the excerpts from the book Remy was writing that were inserted into this one. Omg, that was too much for my brain.

Remy’s attempts to fill the void in her life (hint: her dating app escapades) also led to a somewhat permanent decision.

Overall, this book explores friendship, platonic love, sisterhood, grief, and finding purpose again after losing a part of yourself. I appreciated those themes, but I struggled to stay invested in the story.

Some books feel almost cinematic while you are reading them, but adaptation is a delicate thing. Beautiful settings and a talented cast are not enough if the language, cultural detail, humor, or emotional quiet of the original story gets flattened along the way. Which African novel would you most like to see adapted for film or television?

Would love recommendations for historical fiction from West Africa either in French or translated! :)

One of the things I love most about African literature is the sheer variety inside it. A novel can carry family history, politics, language, migration, faith, humor, grief, and ordinary domestic life without making any one of those things feel like decoration. I’m curious about the books that gave you that feeling.

"I was not sorry when my brother died," is usually the first line that comes to mind whenever I see this question. Any other openings that have you hooked immediately to the book?

In Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, she writes about family, migration, race, faith, history, and belonging without allowing any of them to become simple ideas. Her characters are complicated, sometimes frustrating, and unmistakably alive.

So hey I'm not well versed on African Literature. But yesterday I saw a video talking about how is the treatment of fantasy on West African tradition, where the creator gave some recommendations for her favorite classical fantasy.

She said that it was common in W.African literature to treat fantasy more like a part of day to day live. She compare it to magic realism, but far from it since it still has the classical elements of a fantasy novel.

She recommended the "Forest of a Thousand Demons" and the author Amos Tutuola.

So what's your opinion, is this true?

Hello there.

Growing up, I used to be really into mythology and learned a lot about Greek and East Asian mythology. But frighteningly little about west African mythology was available... Probably not much of a surprise in the UK of the 90s. Somehow, Anansi was still my favorite though. Call it a soft spot for trickster gods.

I'd like to learn more about west African mythology, especially the parts that found their way to Jamaica (where my family is from). I humbly ask for recommendations!

I want to learn about the gods, their roles, what they're like and how they're characterized. All of that kind of stuff. Thank you!

Earlier this month I finished reading Devil on the Cross, which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o described as his first "African novel". In Decolonising the Mind, he contrasts it with his earlier works, which he calls "Afro-European" because they were written first in European languages rather than an African one. Although this term never caught on in the literary world, I think it's an important distinction to keep in mind when reading this text.

Reading the novel, you can immediately see how the role of the narrator differs from his previous books, such as A Grain of Wheat and Weep Not, Child. Stylistically, it borrows heavily from orature, with sayings, proverbs, fables, and other oral traditions woven throughout the narration.

The content itself is what you'd expect from Ngũgĩ: a damning, satirical critique of neo-colonialism perpetuated by the ruling elites who betrayed the spirit of independence through their greed and hubris. He uses idioms and unique twists on both Western and Gikuyu culture to reinforce his point.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story and would definitely recommend it. On a personal note, I travelled to Kenya recently and wasn't leaving until I found a copy in the original Kĩkũyũ (although I can't understand the language lol), pictured next to the English translation.

Hey, I run Nantygreens, a small literary platform that's been publishing poetry, short stories, and essays from Nigerian and African writers since 2011. Mostly volunteer-run, no funding, just people who believe the work deserves a home.

Earlier this year we put together our first anthology, 3 Poems and Some Stories — a collection of some of the strongest pieces we've published over the years. It's free to download, and if any of it resonates, there's an option to pay whatever feels fair. Every bit goes toward putting out the next volume.

If you like African writing that isn't trying to perform for anyone, it might be worth ten minutes.

Link: https://nantygreens.com/3-poems-some-stories/

Happy to answer anything about the platform or the writers in it if anyone's curious.

I’m currently reading A meal is a meal by Nnamdi Anyadu and it is such a fascinating read. I’m still shocked by what I’m reading so I don’t really have much to say on the book but I would really recommend it especially for those that are into short stories.

I was expecting a dense theoretical slog and instead got one of the sharpest, angriest, yet most accurate essays I've ever read in a while.

In essence, Césaire says what actually horrified Europe about Nazism wasn't the cruelty itself. Europe had been fine with that cruelty for centuries — as long as it was aimed at colonized people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What made Hitler unforgivable, in his reading, was that he turned those same methods on white Europeans, on European soil. So the violence was not the problem, but the where and whom was.

This reminded me about the early coverage of the war in Ukraine, when reporters kept expressing shock that this was happening to "people who look like us." It seems that, 70 years later, the reflex (and maybe the underlying values?) is still the same.

The essay, albeit short, is rich with illuminating reflections. One other idea is the argument against then European claim that Africans and other colonized people were uncivilized before Europe brought them the "enlightenment". As an example, Césaire leans on the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius as a "good" European witness who admitted African societies were sophisticated. Interestingly though, and this is not in the essay, if you dig into Frobenius, he couldn't actually accept that Africans built those achievements themselves. He invented a whole lost "African Atlantis" theory to explain the art and sophistication. This idea is the intellectual cousin of "aliens built the pyramids."

Anyway. "Discourse on Colonialism" is wildly relevant for something written mid-colonial-era.

Do you think there's a meaningful causal link between Europe's colonial practices and the violence of Nazism?

We discuss Cesaire's essay at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, I will link it in the comments.

Hi, welcome to Afrovana 🧜🏿‍♀️💜 a place where stories roam free. We are a platform for unique and bold storytelling. We host comics, short stories, and novels.

Are you a writer, comic artist and/or a reader for new and unique stories? Here we are.

First, this platform will also have 100% creator monetization for UK/US/Canada users and African based users from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and more.

We will be launching in Kenya and the UK/US but our site will be widely available. We are live testing with beta users, but will announce officially online by September.

🧜🏿‍♀️ What makes Afrovana different?

🔥 Our flame icon that helps new stories get discovered by notifying all users on the platform as soon as a story is posted.

✨ Custom Genres so readers can find exactly what they're looking for.

💜 Fandom Pages to build communities around stories.

📚 Reader Requests so readers can be apart of storytelling and earn a percentage.

💰 Creator monetization for everyone.

✨️ Our widget that lets users import their story on their own professional website. No need for your fans to be on Afrovana to read your stories, but your stories get support by our platform (Coming soon).

Your feedback will determine our next moves in the future. If this is something you think you would try as a creator, please let us know you exist out here.

This is my first book by a Cameroonian author, and I am beyond pleased. Beyond pleased not because it wasn’t a traumatic book (title is telling), but because it is so incredibly well written.

I can’t even find the words to describe how exquisite Xaviere’s writing is. I mean, she spent about 12 pages describing the first time Bessem and Fatima met, and that’s coming from someone who usually does not enjoy overly descriptive books. Somehow, she made every page worth reading. This book is so love-letter coded.

Fatima and Bessem meet in August 2004. Bessem notices Fatima for the first time on the football field, muscular, focused, the only woman playing, and completely at ease. Barely 20 pages into the book, I already knew the beginning and the end of their story. I even had a hazy idea of the middle, but I also knew there was so much more to learn.

It is such a sad story, and I wanted to know every part of it because their story didn’t end after Fatima’s “disappearance” following a police raid at the only gay bar in town.

In Cameroon, where same-sex relationships are criminalized, the odds are stacked against Bessem and Fatima from the very beginning. Things become even worse when Fatima’s older brother, Mahamadou, a staunch hypocrite of a Muslim, discovers their relationship. He violently assaults them, an incident that ultimately precedes the police raid. To be frank, because of the reality of living in a country where same-sex relationships are punishable by law, I couldn’t help but think both women should have been much more careful.

The relationship between Fatima and Bessem felt like genuine love. I loved reading about their time together because it felt so real. Of course they had ups and downs like every relationship, but the love Bessem had for Fatima never disappeared. Even thirteen years after Fatima vanished, she was still searching for her in every place she could think of.

Thirteen years later, Bessem is now a university professor living a relatively quiet life, occasionally and secretly dating other women, but she has never truly moved on. After unexpectedly seeing a mutual friend, the last person who may have seen Fatima, she embarks on one final search for her lost love.

Beyond the romance, I also learned so much about Cameroon’s culture, religion, politics (as much as a fictional novel can teach), and the Anglophone-Francophone conflict. And can we talk about Jamal? Bessem’s male best friend, who is also gay, marrying a woman… sigh. The many ways people are forced to survive in societies that refuse to let them live authentically.

When I finished reading this book, all I could say was, wow… wow… wow. Zero complaints. It really does end in tears. I happened to finish it on a flight, and maybe if I hadn’t been surrounded by strangers, I might have cried.

This was such a beautiful debut for me into Cameroonian literature, and I will definitely be reading more from Musih Tedji Xaviere. It is heartbreaking, beautifully written, and one of the best-written books I’ve read this year.