I’m not what you’d call an avid reader. However, last year in November, I decided that I needed to read more African stories, preferably told by Africans. So I started on a journey that took me to nearby Uganda, not so near Rwanda, and distant Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Reading the stories, I felt drawn to those countries. I understood the people, the lifestyles, the landscapes. I found myself nodding and thinking, ‘true, that’s how it is’. I didn’t understand the violent conflicts though. I could not identify with that. Thinking back now, I may have been preparing myself for the unknown.  I must have been worried about my own country, as were many Kenyans, and wanted to understand something I was yet to grasp. Am hoping to find a happy African story soon, but I’d recommend these books to anyone who wants to better understand how individuals elsewhere in Africa have survived conflicts.

Hanna Jansen’s Over a Thousand Hills I Walk with You follows a young girl, Jeanne, through the days before and journey after the Rwandan genocide of 1994 – one of the greatest horrors the world has seen. Nearly 1 million people were killed in 100 days, solely because of their Tutsi ethnicity. With tremendous courage, wits and luck, Jeanne managed to survive, but lost her entire family to the genocide.

Author Hanna Jansen wrote this poignant book based on the true experiences of her adopted daughter Jeanne. Hanna, her husband and Jeanne currently live in Siegburg, Germany with the Jansen’s nine other children, most of whom are war orphans.

Hauntingly unforgattable, the story presents a true tribute to the human spirit and ist amazing capacity to heal. (lifted from http://www.hannajansen.de/book-hills.htm)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s  Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and they must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. (http://www.halfofayellowsun.com)

Christina Lamb’s House of Stone (‘dzimba dza mabwe’ or ‘Zimbabwe’ in Shona words) is based on a remarkable series of interviews with a white farmer and black nanny. Through them, she tells the story of the last of Britain’s colonies in Africa to become independent and the descent into madness of one of Africa’s most respected nationalist leaders.Born in the same year, their experience in growing up in a land blessed with sunshine and rich land yet plagued by divisive politics and bloodshed, could not have been more different. While Nigel played cricket for his country and piloted his own plane under Victoria Falls Bridge, Aqui grew up in a mud-and-pole hut sleeping on the floor where the food was cooked with her four brothers and sisters. “They had air conditioners and cars and went shopping in South Africa. We didn’t have food and had to walk an hour each way to fetch water”, she remembers.

http://www.christinalamb.net/pages/houseofstone.html)

Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles tells a riveting story of twentieth-century Africa that is passionate in vision and breathtaking in scope.

At the center of this unforgettable tale is Mugezi, a young man who manages to make it through the hellish reign of Idi Amin and experiences firsthand the most crushing aspects of Ugandan society: he withstands his distant father’s oppression and his mother’s cruelty in the name of Catholic zeal, endures the ravages of war, rape, poverty, and AIDS, and yet he is able to keep a hopeful and even occasionally amusing outlook on life. Mugezi’s hard-won observations form a cri de coeur for a people shaped by untold losses.(http://www.powells.com/)