பாவ்பாப் Magazine

FOB/Book Choice
BAOBOB: Growing the Branches of African New Writing
By Femi Morgan
BAOBAB, a 94 page South African literary Journal for creative writers and readers published its 5th issue titled Unfinished Letters. Unfinished Letters was published at beginning of the just concluded 2010 FIFA World Cup. Amidst the fact that the journal is aimed at stimulating and promoting the South African creative writing spirit, it tries to give room to creative writers from other African countries. The 20rand BAOBAB journal with its website as www.baobabjournal.co.za is an independent project of the South African Book Development Council. It gets published thrice a year. It is also funded by the South African Government’s Department of Arts and Culture. Its Founding Editor is Andries Walter Oliphant.

With the focus of the cover being an educative and fecund interview with Zaka Mda in Mda’s Black Diamond. Zaka Mda who is a South African author of The Heart of Redness, The Whale Collar, Cion, Ways of Dying and Black Diamond has exhibited a Magical Realist flair. Mda joins with the league of novelists like Sello Duiker, Garcia Maquez, Isabella Allende, Angela Carter, to mention but a few who have used the magical realist style. Mda, who focused on the Post-Aparthied period, is described as interestingly creative by the BAOBAB. BOABAB Editorial describes Mda style ‘as an elegant rendering of history as the reading of the past and the present through the imaginative form’.
Nigeria still plays a major role in the scheme of things in creative writing, the journal therefore introduces a bold interview of Uwem Akpan, a priest and winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa region. His novel, Say You’re One of Them also got shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2OO7. In the interview titled Uwen Akpan and the Promise of Prose, Akpan vents his thoughts and unapologetic assertions on the resilience of the African Child and the problem of colonialist perceptions. Nigeria’s novelist Seffi Atta, Author of the novel, Everything Good Will Come, is also interviewed in SEFFI ATTA & NEWS FROM HER NIGERIAN HOME where she discloses her experiences growing up in Nigeria, the reason behind her leaving the shores of Nigeria and how these incidences have shaped her stories. Atta who is also the Winner of the Noma Award 2009 contributes a short story titled Hailstones from Zamfara on page 52 of the Journal. Noami Nkealah’s poem In whose Eyes also made the journal’s poetry pages.
The interesting read gives the creative reader a ready ocean of information to glide in. The journal’s creative, simple, witty and beautiful language will endear the journal to its readers. With no disgrace, the journal takes a look at the creative genius of literary greats J. M Coetzee, Philip Roth and Anthon Chekov. The Journal also comes as an advisory towards making not only a good work in terms of short stories and poems but also hints on the important steps to publishing in Some Aspects of Publishing in the Uk Today, an interview of Shelia Lamboe, a publishing Expert. Also, Rose Francis gives An African Perspective in another interview, where she discloses that publishing is ultimately about selling books.
A feature of one of South-Africa’s and Africa’s most influential poets is a thing of note in the journal. With a showcase of some of his popular poems, the literary and even those who had passed through the walls of the subject of literature will feel the nostalgia of Dennis Brutus’s poetic sacrifice during the Apartheid Period in DENNIS BRUTUS, STUBBORN To THE END. There are no bounds to what the BAOBAB Journal offers the creative, it can most probably become a religious book but to the less literary it may be nothing but a carp of boring and longish notes pieced with bold, black and white pictures.
Nevertheless, Twitter Tweedle may catch the fancy of both the literary and the less literary, as it talks about how Twitter is giving Facebook a run for its money and how writers are maximizing Social networking sites in writing minimalist stories with a generally less traditional audience. My Passion also talks about the internal conflicts of the Times’s Fred Khumalo, writer, a journalist and Jazz Critic. Khumalo talks about the possibilities of new art form springing up from music and writing. For him, Journalism is an art of not only finding meaning to life but also finding rhythm to sounds.