The Hundred Wells of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Attah

The Hundred Wells of Salaga, by Ayesha Harruna Attah, is a short novel of two young women in Ghana during the pre-colonial era, as slave-raiders and Europeans jockey for power with traditional chiefs and their kingdoms confronting new weapons and forms of social organisation. A bit too sexually explicit for younger readers (and probably that includes Ghanian secondary school?). I didn’t find anything super special about the novel. It is definitely a challenge to get the interior voice of young women in 1890 with low literacy (one of the women is a princess of a small zone, and is literate in Arabic)… what we have here is not Baba of Karo.

About mkevane

Economist at Santa Clara University and Director of Friends of African Village Libraries.
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