Bound to Violence
by Yambo Ouologuem
Seven centuries of slavery, empire, and betrayal.
you want African literature that refuses to be noble or comforting about what Africans did to each other as well as what was done to them
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Ouologuem's 1968 novel — the first sub-Saharan African novel to win the Prix Renaudot — traces a fictional dynasty's participation in the slave trade, their collaboration with colonial powers, their self-perpetuating violence. It is deliberately provocative: an African writer refusing the narrative of pure African victimhood and insisting on the full complexity of African history. Controversial, complicated, essential. A dispatch that made everyone uncomfortable, which is exactly what it intended.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Mali • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Malian author
- Themes
- True Cost of Empire
