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They came dancing on the streets as news of Al Harun’s coup broke over the dazed City. They trouped to welcome with open arms the man who would soon be their killer. Hundreds had perished within the early hours of the coup that was not yet a day old. This crowd knew. Because they could see with their own eyes, the many corpses that littered the city.

Having a growth spurt at seven years old meant I was the tallest in my age group, taller than all the girls and all the boys who had to stand on chairs so they could be level with me in class photos. Starting puberty at age eight, meant the rest of my body soon looked different from those of the girls around me. 

In the age of Amazon.com, and other online book service, the book market is wide open. With money to spare one can sample as never before the book offerings of the world. I have been indulging my pleasure and doing just that. And I ran across this this amazing new novel, Burden of Failure, by a Ugandan author.

Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s largest and richest country, is caught up in the aftermath of its election, the first proper election since independence in 1960. Towards the end of last, after years of non-stop wars and massive carnage, the country was 90% free of fighting.

How come a super power government got shut down? Over something as banal as a border-wall? A brief look at history may explain the vulgarity. It may also help explain the consternation the rest of the world feels at the American shutdown.

A classroom in the northern city of Zaria in colonial Nigeria. Outside the union jack flutters in a bitterly cold wind. A group of students begin to sketch and experiment using African motifs. This was new and this was strange. It was the kind of thing their teachers scorned.

The main character is a young man who goes by the name Peter Otim. When we first meet him Otim has just sat for a major national school examination. In this land of titles and certificates, the result of this single examination could spell his doom. 

We had grown up under the awful Emergency of the 1950s, reading colonial pamphlets printed in red ink, showing rows of Mau Mau fighters being publicly hanged on high posts. The Lari massacre and the subsequent government reprisals took place within walking distance from our village

How can Saudi Arabia be brought low? If the King won’t remove from power his 33 old son, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, there may be no alternative but to do battle with its regime. In a nonviolent manner for sure..

Reading Burden of Failure, the new novel by Okot Nyormoi, I found myself remembering old friends and old arguments we use to indulge in. We were a group of young lecturers on a northern Nigerian campus. We were bothered by the lack of progress in Africa since independence.  We were searching for a way out of the morass...