The Archive

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561 works of pan-African thought. 11 matching current filters.

African Psycho
2003
Alain Mabanckou

A dark satire told from the perspective of Gregoire Nakobomayo, a would-be serial killer in Congo, referencing American Psycho while exploring post-colonial violence.

Central AfricaFiction
Broken Glass (Verre cassé)
2005
Alain Mabanckou

A comic novel centered on a Congolese former teacher who now frequents a bar, recording the stories of its patrons in stream-of-consciousness prose.

Central AfricaFiction
The Return of the Water Spirit
1995
Pepetela

A multigenerational saga spanning from pre-colonial Angola through independence, following a family haunted by Kianda, the water spirit of Luanda's lagoon, as the lagoon is drained to build a market, an allegory for what was sacrificed in the name of progress.

Central AfricaFiction
Good Morning Comrades
2001
Ondjaki

A coming-of-age novel set in Luanda in the 1990s, narrated by a young boy growing up amid Cuban teachers, food shortages, and civil war, a tender, funny portrait of childhood under socialism and the slow unraveling of revolutionary ideals.

Central AfricaFiction
Life and a Half
1979
Sony Labou Tansi

A dictator slaughters a resistance leader, but the man refuses to die properly, his body multiplies and is inherited by his daughter Martial, who becomes a guerrilla. A ferocious, hallucinatory political fable about African dictatorship and the indestructibility of resistance.

Central AfricaFiction
Blue White Red
1998
Alain Mabanckou

Massala-Massala follows his idol to Paris only to find undocumented survival, exploitation, and disillusionment in the promised land of France. A mordant comedy about African immigration and the mythology of Europe.

Central AfricaFiction
The Invention of Africa
1988
V.Y. Mudimbe

A philosophical inquiry into how Africa was invented by colonial discourse through missionary accounts, anthropology, and philosophy. Mudimbe shows how the colonial library created a distorted knowledge of Africa that Africans themselves have often had to inhabit.

Central AfricaNon-fiction
Remember Ruben
1974
Mongo Beti

A sweeping political novel set in colonial Cameroon, following generations united by the memory of the assassinated independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, as they resist the collusion between France and the new African elite.

Central AfricaFiction
Your Name Shall Be Tanga
1988
Calixthe Beyala

Two women share a prison cell in Cameroon — Tanga, a teenage prostitute dying of AIDS, and Anna-Claude, a French woman of Algerian origin. As Tanga tells her story, Anna-Claude assumes her identity.

Central AfricaFiction
On the Postcolony
2001
Achille Mbembe

Mbembe's landmark philosophical work examining postcolonial African politics — the aesthetics of power, the grotesque performance of authority, and the relationship between the state and its subjects.

Central AfricaPhilosophy
Critique of Black Reason
2013
Achille Mbembe

A historical and philosophical analysis of race — how 'Blackness' was constructed as the lowest category of humanity, what this does to the people categorized, and what a 'universal subject' beyond race might look like.

Central AfricaPhilosophy