Aminatta Forna

Prelude to Empire

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels, whether set in German East Africa or the United Kingdom, never cease to demonstrate how the minutiae of people’s lives have been affected by European colonialism.

A Document of Losses

Véronique Tadjo’s chronicle of the West African Ebola outbreak illuminates the link between disease and environmental destruction.

Obama and Africa’s Renaissance Generation

It came to be a core belief held by the American public and media that Barack Obama was a self-creation who had stepped out of nowhere. But for me, Obama’s story is remarkably familiar and concrete. Our fathers both belonged to the postwar wave of Africans educated in the West who saw themselves as the architects of decolonization. Wole Soyinka called them the “Renaissance Generation.”

A Memoir's Afterlife

At one minute past midnight on July 19, 1975, my father was hanged. For twenty-seven years, I told no one about it. Then I published a memoir. I have lived with the aftermath of that decision ever since.