Modern African Stories
Modern African Stories
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AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2002
Copyright@ 1994, 2002 by Nadezda Obradovic Foreword copyright © 1994 by Chinua Achebe
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Previously published, in slightly different form, as African Rhapsody: Short Stories from the Contemporary African Experience,
in 1994 by Anchor Books.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
These stories ate works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Anchor book of modern African stories / edited by Nadezda Obradovic ; with a
foreword by Chinua Achebe. p. cm.
ISBN 0-385-72240-0 (pbk.) 1. Short stories, African (English) 2. Short stories, African—Translations into English.
3. Africa—Social life and customs—Fiction. 1. Title: Modern African stories. II. Obradovic, Nadezda.
PR9348 .A53 2002 823′.0108896—dc21
2002074441
Book design by Oksana Kushnir
www.anchorbooks.com
SEMBÈNE OUSMANE
Sembène Ousmane was born in 1923 in Senegal. He left school at the age of fifteen after only three years of formal education.
He joined the French Army in 1939, and accompanied them to liberated France in 1944. After the war Ousmane became a
longshoreman in Marseilles, drawing on his experiences for his
first novel, Le Docker Noir (The Black Docker), published in
1956. Believing that film had the potential to reach a wider audi-
ence than the written word, he enrolled at the Gorki Studio in Moscow in 1961. He returned to Senegal two years later, and since then has produced a number of feature and short subject films. In 1966 he directed La Noire de. . . . The first feature ever produced by an African filmmaker, it won a prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Beginning with Mandabi (The Money Order), Ousmane has been producing films in the Wolof lan- guage, taking his work on tours throughout Senegal. His subse- quent films have often been temporarily banned or censored for their political commentary. Among his books are God’s Bits of Wood, The Last of the Empire, Niiwam and Taaw.
