THE RISE OF THE AFRICAN NOVEL, politics of language, identity, and ownership

228pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Pietermaritzburg, 2019

First published in the USA in 2018.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi situates South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonisation of the 1950s through the 1980s and the contemporary generation of continental and diaspora African writers.

"A lucid history of the African novel, emphasising the need to consider works originally written in African languages prior to the 1950s. Mukoma Wa Ngugi brings to the foreground texts that are rarely discussed, demonstrating that the history of the African novel goes well beyond well-known works in the African super-canon. His archive is wide ranging, and he reads both old and new materials with rare clarity." Evan Mwangi, Northwestern University

Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University. His books include Logotherapy, a collection of poems, and the novels Killing Sahara and Mrs Shaw: a novel.