Granta 92 (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing) by Ian Jack

Granta 92 (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing) Reviews

• 
  Friederike Knabe

  GRANTA deserves applause for bringing us this collection of current African thinking, writing and dreaming. John Ryle, in his introduction "The Many Voices of Africa", reflects on the richness of language and cultural diversity. His final comment that Africa is part of everybody's life - whether we know it or not - is worth remembering when we are discussing the challenges and opportunities that face this continent.
  
  The book contains new fiction or chapters of forthcoming books, memoirs, photo essays and much more. There is the story of young Ugwu, whose Master is more like a teacher, giving the "houseboy" a chance in life (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). The daily dangers in rural Uganda are captured in The War of the Ears (Moses Isegawa). Here, Mother and son are both teachers trying to keep the school running despite threats from `child soldiers' to destroy it all. Passport Control (Kwame Dawes) reflects the difficulties in being of dual nationalities. Home is an elusive concept. Adewale Maja-Pearce takes up a similar aspect in his personal account.
  
  Binyavanga Wainaina challenges how prejudice influences what people write about Africa and how they describe Africans, taking a highly mocking tone. Daniel Bergner records the work of Mark Kroeker, UN police commissioner in Liberia. He follows Kroeker on some of his dangerous missions trying to instil in his local police recruits the moral and ethics of policing despite the lawlessness around them. Finally, and not least Geert van Kesteren captures the life of the Ogiek people, eking out a living in the Mau forest in Kenya, in a brief photo essay.
  
  All pieces in this collection are worth reading with care and attention to detail. They represent some of the many voices in Africa who combine the intimacy of place and time with the bigger issues of survival, identity, past, present and future.
  
  This is a review I wrote in 2006, still relevant.
• 
  Dorothee Lang

  Parallel to reading a book about Sudan ("Tears of the Desert), I ordered this collection that shares a wider and more diverse view of Africa. The collection includes writers that i knew from previous reads: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, i still remember reading her powerful novel "Half of a Yellow Sun" (blog note), or Nadine Gordimer, but many of the author names are new to me. Looking forward to exploring those new-to-me voices from a continent that has many sides, as the introduction notes: "Africa is too large and diverse for generalizations. It has fifty-four nations, five time zones, at least seven climates, more than 800 million people ... South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan. And yet people do generalize ... This issue of Granta contains fresh voices from Africa, in all their differences."
  
  (this is from a longer blog post on world books, here's more:
  http://virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2013... )
• 
  YZ

  My copy of Granta 92 does NOT have J.M. Coetzee or any other names listed in GoodRead's description. Instead I have Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Segun Afolabi, Adewale Maja-Pearce etc.
  
  Posted on discussion for clarification.
• 
  Eric Piotrowski

  This is an excellent collection, filled with powerful pieces from excellent writers. The stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Moses Isegawa are appropriately superb for their first- and second-place positions. (I need to get a copy of the Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun, from which her piece is excerpted. I had hoped Isegawa's story was also part of a larger work, since it provides none of the narrative or character elongation I was hoping for. Alas, it appears to be a standalone.
  
  The fiction (some of which feels autobiographical) is well-balanced with nonfiction and two collections of photographs. I was especially intrigued by the piece toward the end by Lindsey Hilsum, examining the power and pitfalls of Chinese investment (sans the moralistic hand-wringing so common to the West) in Africa.
  
  As
  a review in The Guardian points out, many of these pieces are linked to Nigeria specifically, and I wonder if so much writing from palefaces really provides the most comprehensive "View from Africa" we are promised on the tin. Additionally, the final piece about New Orleans has some obvious linkages to Africa, but it feels stuck in: "Hey, this is timely, and it's kinda Africa-ish."
  
  I also wonder if the "Policeman to the World" needs a bit more self-awareness of its situated knowledge. It has its tongue in cheek when linking Kroeker's missionary past to his mission, and spends time on the question of the White Saviour itself. But it still seems to present its hero as the only possible antidote to a violent abyss of hopelessness. To wit, toward the end: "He has talked of nascent changes, small signs, of establishing a foundation of morality." However terrible and frightening the images of mob rule described here are (and they're plenty of both), they're not amoral. Perhaps I'm splitting hairs, but the violence of mob rule and revenge killing are not without morality; they are instead circumscribed by a different morality. It's a disgusting morality, but to paraphrase Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, it is nevertheless an ethos.
  
  Still and all, this is an excellent collection that has languished for far too long on my shelf. I'm glad I finally took the time to read it, and I encourage others to do the same.
• 
  Michael

  From my 2006 book diary:
  
  Have a look at this at once funny, sad and altogether irony-fuelled extract: "How to write about Africa":
  https://granta.com/how-to-write-about... by
  Binyavanga Wainaina
  
  It sets the tone perfectly, because this is exactly the grain that this issue of Granta goes against. In other words, an collection of excellent writings on Africa that broaden the horizon on this vast continent.