As the water evaporates in their overheated world, crop farmers and livestock herders in Chad are spilling blood instead.

400 pp. April 22, 2025, Cassava Republic Press. Non-fiction. So many stories of suffering in Africa (and most of the Global South) are told by others; so few by the people living them. Here’s a collection of testimonies collected by Chitra Nagarajan over five years, an oral history from people affected by the conflict with Boko Haram: forty-seven interviews in total, with “women, soldiers, farmers, and fishermen,” many displaced; some who were insiders, and many who experienced the violence directly, but others indirectly.

African publishing needs a new language — and infrastructure — to turn its own “locals” onto the global stage.