Black Pioneers of Literature
Successful African-American, Black British and African Writers
Sep 4, 2009
Since the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois gained notoriety in the early 20th Century, few Black authors have gained mainstream success. However, the following giants of literature prevailed and published novels that received widespread acclaim.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Since bursting unto the scene in 2003 , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been hailed as "a fresh new voice out of Africa" after stunning readers with three seminal novels. Born in Nigeria in 1977, Adichie moved to America at 19 and in five years published her debut Purple Hibiscus, about 15 year-old Kambili living in fear and adoration of her religiously oppressive father. It won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and is now on the reading syllabus in Ireland.
Purple Hibiscus' success was surpassed by Adichie's 2007 follow-up Half of a Yellow Sun about inter-racial love and the Nigerian middle-class during the country's civil war in the 60s. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, was listed in the New York Times' list of 100 Notable Books of the Year and praised as "a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing." (The Telegraph)
The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), a harrowing collection of short stories focusing on Nigerians at home and abroad was described as a "resounding confirmation of Adichie's prodigious storytelling powers." (Waterstones.com)
Toni Morrison
Born in Ohio in 1931, Toni Morrison is the most celebrated African-American female writer ever. Her first book The Bluest Eye (1970) about a Black girl desperate for blue eyes was a moderate success along with her second Sula (1973), but Song of Solomon (1977) brought her international acclaim and was recently chosen for talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey's book club and is a favourite of President Obama. It also won the National Books Critics Award.
1987's Beloved would prove to be Morrison's most famous novel. Based on a true story about an escaped slave who killed her two-year old daughter rather than see her return to slavery, it was voted by the New York Times as the best fiction of the last 25 years and was among Time magazine's All Time 100 Novels, who described it as "rich with historical, political and above all personal resonances, written in prose that melts and runs with the heat of the emotion it carries, Beloved is a deeply American, urgently important novel..."
Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction making Morrison the first Black woman to win the coveted award. The book was also turned into a 1998 film starring Oprah Winfrey and is now on the American college curriculum.
Zadie Smith
Born to an English father and Jamaican mother in London in 1975, Zadie Smith's literary career started on a high with the publication of her first novel White Teeth in 2000.
Smith had gained early attention when, aged 21 and still studying at Cambridge University, her publishers gave her a six-figure advance for the book before it was completed. Their gamble paid off and White Teeth, about two immigrant families from Bangladesh and Jamaica adapting to English neighbours in London, received widespread praise and The Daily Telegraph stated "[Smith]'s novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters... the dialogue is pitch-perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed." It won a host of 'First Book' awards including the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize and was turned into a TV film in 2002.
Smith's second novel The Autograph Man (2002) about a Jewish-Chinese man obsessed with celebrities, and her third On Beauty (2005) about an American mixed-race family which won the Orange Prize for Fiction both continued the multi-cultural themes of her first novel.
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most famous book by an African writer. The much-praised classic has been translated into over 50 languages, is included in school syllabuses across the world and was a favourite read for Nelson Mandela in prison. Achebe also inspired Chimamanda Adichie, who has been called his '21st Century daughter' due to their shared Igbo ancestry and literary excellence.
Born in 1930 in Nigeria, Achebe's own family struggled with the same choice between the 'white man's Christianity' and their native beliefs that his lead character Okonkwo faced in Things Fall Apart. The novel also explored the traditions, religion and complexities of Igbo families and the impact the arrival of British colonialists had on the proud Okonkwo and his village.
The book, which also incorporated Igbo words and proverbs became an international success with one reviewer describing it as "full of universal figures, themes and lessons... I'm really surprised that Achebe has not won a Nobel Prize [for literature]. What greater contribution can a novelist make than to help preserve the best of his own culture and convey it to the world, while at the same time showing his own people what they can learn from other cultures?" ("Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century", brothersjudd.com, July 27, 2000)
Things Fall Apart was turned into a successful mini-series in Nigeria in 1987 and the 50th anniversay of its publication was celebrated with various events and conferences around the world. Achebe wrote many more novels, short stories and children's books and, now dubbed the 'Father of African Literature', he eventually won the Man Booker Prize and the Nigerian National Order of Merit, his country's highest academic award.
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