Books like The Dark Child by Camara Laye

Camara Laye’s memoir follows his youth in Koroussa, French Guinea, where he witnesses his mother’s mystical healing, his father’s craft as a goldsmith, and his own coming of age amid enduring African traditions.

"At the beginning of this book, a masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked and stranded on the coast of Africa. Brimful of self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape in the company of a beggar and two roguish boys, Clarence is slowly stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold as a slave to the royal harem. But in the end Clarence's bewildering journey is the occasion of a revelation, as he discovers the image, both shameful and beautiful, of his own strange humanity in the alien figure of the king."--BOOK JACKET.

Wie wird aus einem jungen Schweizeer ein afrikanisc her Stammeshäuptling? Wie wird er dann noch finnischer Generalkonsul? Was treibt einen jungen Mann aus seiner sichern und stabilen Heimat dazu, in afrikanischen Stammesfehden und politisc hen Wirren verwickelt zu werden? Die Autobiografie von Hans Rudolf Roth nach einer über 60 jährigen Tätigkeit in Ghana (Westafrika).

Aya has captured the hearts of North American readers of all ages for the rare portrait it paints of a vibrant, happy, bourgeois Ivory Coast in the 1970s, based upon Marguerite Abouet's youth in Yop City. Not only is Aya complemented with Clement Oubrerie's gorgeous artwork, but the volumes also offer a slice of life peek into African culture: complete with recipes, glossaries, and wardrobe instructions for turning one's pagne (brightly colored fabric) into a skirt, head wrap, or baby carrier.

Two immigrant brothers discover the truth about their German father's past in this masterly investigation of evil, resistance and guilt, billed as "the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust." Narrator Malrich, the younger son of a German father and an Algerian mother, lives with relatives in a gritty, mostly Arab housing estate outside Paris. Malrich is an indifferent hoodlum while his older brother, Rachel, has a university degree and a glamorous job at "a multinational." The plot hinges on Malrich's reading of Rachel's diary after Rachel commits suicide. After their parents were murdered in Algeria in 1994, Rachel discovered that their father was a Waffen SS officer posted to the death camps. In alternating chapters, the story is perfectly rendered in Malrich's wonderfully adolescent voice and Rachel's increasingly agonized diary entries. All this plays out against Malrich's perceptive likening of Hitler's Germany to the rise of fundamentalist Islamism on his housing estate ...