This volume lists the work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1997 and 1999. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the highly acclaimed earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 10,000 entries, some of which are annotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources.

A member of the African elite groping his way out of the background of slavery and colonialism, Baako sees his education as preparation for the lifework of a socially innovative artist. His family, more pragmatic, expects an elite resume to convert into power and wealth in the real world here and now. Unable to harmonize contervailing needs with wider social aspirations, both family and individual drift toward confrontation and inexorable loss. -- From back cover.

Existentialism is a philosophy that flourishes in extreme situations. Identified with the period of the French Resistance when Frenchmen were held as political prisoners by the Germans, existentialism, with its call for an uncompromised allegiance to a leftist system of values, served to boost the sagging morale of French political prisoners who had witnessed during the Occupation the subversion of their nation's democratic principles by German totalitarianism. The author finds in post-independence Ghana another example of an extreme situation which has given rise to the existentialist patterns in the novels of the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah. The identification of a crisis situation in post-independence Ghana, comparable to that created by the German occupation of France during World War II, serves largely as the basis for the examination of the recurrent existentialist patterns. This book explores the existential angst of the artist hero and the necessity of revolt to combat the despair which comes from recognition of his superfluousness. Works by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, as well as by the French authors Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, are the focus of study.

A beginners' guide to the fundamentals of the Dru meditation technique, a method for soothing the mind and relaxing the emotions. The programme includes six short guided meditations designed to instill a sense of profound stillness, quieten and calm a stressed mind and reconnect with the important aspects of life. Each nine-minute meditations is based on one of the elements: Earth, Water, Light, Air and Sky.

African pasts examines African literatures in English since the end of colonialism, investigating how they represents African history through the twin matrices of memory and trauma. Inextricably tied up with the historical conditions of Africa’s colonisation, charting the emergence of its independence, and scrutinising Africa’s contemporary neo-colonial and postcolonial states as a legacy of the colonial past, African literatures are continually preoccupied with exploring modes of representation to ‘work through’ their different traumatic colonial pasts. Among other issues, this book deals with literature in the era of apartheid, the post-apartheid aftermath, metafictional experiments in African fiction, gender representation in reaction to the trauma of colonialism and ‘imprisonment narratives’. African pasts covers a wide range of African literatures and a cross-section of genres – fiction, poetry, prison-narratives, postcolonial theory – and embraces such well-known writers as Soyinka, Coetzee, Ngugi and Achebe, and more recent writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Achmat Dangor, Etienne van Heerden, Zakes Mda, Gillian Slovo and Calixthe Beyala.

"Contending that Armah makes a significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing "outside the prison-house of conventional English," Ogede situates Armah's writing within its cultural, historical and political contexts and examines Armah's ability to create new literary forms based on his masterful manipulation of African oral traditons.