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Harare Review of Books
@hararereview.com
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✍🏾 Jacqueline Nyathi, librocubicularist, friendly neighbourhood "You *Must* Read This" person.

https://hararereview.com

📝📚 @thecontinent.org, @strangehorizons.bsky.social etc

(Incidentally, also @shonatiger.hararereview.com
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Dawn, earlier
A gold-and-grey dawn, with lots of green foliage in the foreground
January 1, 2026 at 12:17 PM
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Well.
Screenshot of SFF Reviews shows Skywatch Blue's labelled it for suspected inauthentic behaviour
December 29, 2025 at 6:23 PM
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What's happening @unclekins.bsky.social @mamebougouma.bsky.social
Sequential fart posts
December 28, 2025 at 12:41 PM
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Bookish Christmas gifts from @ooeygooey.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️😍
A dark green Clarke's Bookshop tote, Amy Sall's The African Gaze, Speaking in Tongues by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, and a zine, The Time Machine, by Mandy J. Watson
December 26, 2025 at 10:25 AM
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Oh and I saw your zines @mandyjwatson.bsky.social !
A tiny tiny zine, The Time Machine by Mandy J. Watson.
December 23, 2025 at 4:33 PM
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'Haul'
3 books: Ben Okri's African Stories, Granta 128: American Wild, and Blessing Miles-Tendi's The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe
December 23, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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Finally made it to Clarke's Bookshop in Cape Town! 🎉
A picture of me—an African woman with big hair—in a red tee, standing in the sun just outside Clarke's. Their sign is above my head, and a street sign above and to the right says VENKEN LANE. You can see a bit of Long Street in the background, and a very blue sky.
December 23, 2025 at 12:28 PM
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Listen.
A photo I took in Cape Town at the weekend. Santa is caught in Spiderman's web between two buildings. Spidey's perched nearby.
December 22, 2025 at 11:47 PM
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🏔️
A photo of the visitor centre at Table Mountain with the mountain rising in the background
December 20, 2025 at 9:54 AM
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That also means.... I got to pick my top 5 African reads of the year 👏🏾

Books from Goretti Kyomuhendo, @willthisbeaproblem.bsky.social, @wordsweaver.bsky.social, @hofrench.bsky.social, and Oyinkan Braithwaite are on the list!
Text from screenshot reads: The Continent 13 DECEMBER 2025 | ISSUE 224 THE YEAR IN BOOKS As chosen by Jacqueline Nyathi, founder of Harare Review of Books and The Continent's book reviewer. 5. Promises by Goretti Kyomuhendo The dream of a settled middle-class life through the power of the almighty pound drives young people in former British colonies to the United Kingdom. The couple in this story may be fictitious, but their trajectory - from hope to despair, and then picking up the pieces again - is all too real. 4. Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology: Issue V, edited by Olivia Kidula and Somto Ihezue This spectacular collection features speculative fiction from Kenya, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, South Africa, Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. In it you'll find shifty markets, njuzu, tech, cosmic battles, alt-history, anti-capitalist rebellion and maybe even the reason why donkeys have 44 teeth. 3 Everything is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe Another book about African lives, which are so often a dance between the rural and urban. This great novel shows both these aspects. It's a heartwarming coming-of-age story of two Ugandan sisters, with themes exploring queerness and the tensions of family - whether that's one's family of origin, or chosen family. 2 The Second Emancipation by Howard W French French's biography of Kwame Nkrumah evaluates the impact of Ghana's first post-independence leader on Africa and the world and his claim to pan-Africanism. It demonstrates links from Africa to the diaspora and illuminates how events on the continent shaped and were shaped by world affairs. Keep reading us next year for a more substantive review. 1 Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite A late-year surprise, Braithwaite's wonderful tale of generations of women getting into trouble with men is a balance of the lighthearted and the serious. It's a well-executed exploration of desire, love, loss, desperation, and the apparent power of self-fulfilling prophecies. A glorious work.
December 14, 2025 at 3:19 AM
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It’s the end of the year, so @thecontinent.org’s Africans of the year edition for 2025 is here! 🎉

So many great Africans.
The cover of The Continent’s Africans of the Year edition, with illustrations of African newsmakers. Illustrations by Nzilani Simu.
December 14, 2025 at 3:15 AM
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(If you're curious about what the US seems to be attempting again in Venezuela)
The Global North, its middle class, its infrastructures and its economic system rely on the colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the Global South. Western democracies are based on the extraction of oil and gas that comes in its majority from the Middle East.5 Iraq is a space at the heart of global economic and political dynamics. The country, which had the most advanced infrastructure, institutions and services such as health and education in the entire region, has been ravaged by imperialist interventions. First of all, there was the repression of the revolutionary left in the 1960s and the Western support for the Ba’athist dictatorship until the 1980s, the military and economic offensives in the 1990s, and the invasion and occupation by US-led forces in 2003. For over 50 years, the everyday lives of Iraqi men and women have been defined by war and an unprecedented economic and political brutalisation.
December 12, 2025 at 5:51 AM
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Anyway, you should absolutely read Lola Olufemi's essay in this book from @plutopress.bsky.social
The colourful concert, mostly text on pink-orange, black, white, red and yellow blocks, of Feminism for the World by Françoise Vergès, Lola Olufemi, Verónica Gago, Sayak Valencia, Zahra Ali, Djamila Ribeiro, Rama Salla Dieng and Silvia Federici.
December 9, 2025 at 4:49 AM
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For The Sunday Long Read yesterday: The Relegation Reader by Will Mountain Cox.

Thank you for the review copy, @laurencerand.com ! 💛
The Relegation Reader By Will Mountain Cox Two of the best things about a collection such as this are: you discover authors new to you; and you find pieces with especial appeal. My favorite example of the latter here is Gabriel Smith’s “doggerland,” in which we learn what a woman wrote to the narrator from her travels. Many recollections mark world events (like the earthquake and tsunami in Hokkaido in 2011), and tell stories of people (a Napoletan restaurateur during the pandemic) and place (a church in Argentina). But just as many are non sequiturs (“[D]id you know that there are pelicans in St. James’s Park?” and “[T]he problem with the calendar was that it was full of days”) or are thoughts drawn from literature or culture (Milton’s angels, and Hitchcock’s birds). A wonderful piece. Another that moved me, to my surprise, is Louise Chennevière’s unsettling essay on Britney (“Old Men and Little Girls Want Irreconcilably Different Things”). I find celebrity mostly stultifying; Chennevière made me care. This is on looking up to Britney, growing up; her global superstardom, and what that meant for young girls in a world of boy bands; and what our collective response to her abuse tells us about the place of women in the world. The collection includes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from the UK, US and Europe (mainly France). It's very much, of course, a showcase of Will Mountain Cox’s own particular taste—but it is very fine, and well worth reading.
December 8, 2025 at 3:10 AM
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The problem is not so much that AI has no intent, no feelings to communicate (to fall short of articulating), but that we have built a world in which language is depersonalised and so often uncoupled from meaning as to erode our expectation that the two exist in a relationship of symbiosis. We do not expect all the language we encounter to carry meaning. Most language is not poetry or a conversation with a friend, it is advertising.
December 7, 2025 at 6:18 AM
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With alt
"Translation in (post)colonial context" A conversation with Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne 4 - 5.30pm, Tuesday 25 November B.H05, Arts Complex, 7 Woodland Road We are delighted to welcome Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor Emeritus of French and Philosophy at Columbia University (and currently Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge). He will be in conversation with colleagues from the Centre for Black Humanities, the French department and the Perivoli Africa Research Centre around his latest book, From Language to Language. The Hospitality of Translation (Other Press, 2025; published in French in 2024). This book explores translation as an ethical encounter and a way of imagining shared humanity across difference. It follows on from Professor Diagne's world-renowned work in African and Islamic philosophy, as well as his personal experience moving between Wolof, French and English. The event will be of particular interest to students and staff working in translation, French, comparative literatures and cultures, and Black humanities. It is free and open to all (no need to sign up). For any questions, please contact cbh-publicity@bristol.ac.uk.
December 5, 2025 at 11:40 AM
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Also recently: More reasons I love Jamaica Kincaid, for the Sunday Long Read (sundaylongread.com)

💙📚
Screenshot from The Sunday Long Read. Text reads: Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974- By Jamaica Kincaid It's always interesting to read a writer over time--their collected works over a period of their life-to see the changes in their thinking and what stays the same, to see their obsessions. In Kincaid's work, that obsession, as I'm sure she'd admit too, is gardens. But it's fascinating to observe as well, in this collection, Kincaid's development as an essayist, from her early musings on living alone in New York for the first time to her later pieces, a mother pondering her relationship with her own mother, a daughter losing her father, her mother. I've always admired Kincaid's incredible facility with language, how she plays with words --not in the form of puns, but in sentence construction, in the construction of her essays. There is much to learn here. You can see, too, that this facility with words and structure was there from the very beginning, that she has only honed it over time. But back to gardens. Kincaid teaches me that you can write about the same thing over and over, finding new ways to inquire into your preoccupation--just as an artist before a canvas does. She teaches me that words are brushstrokes, that practice doesn't make perfect so much as it is in routine that one continuously finds new ways to explore and express, as one turns one's eye within and without; that words are a tool, like a paintbrush and a box of paints, for the examined life. Jacqueline Nyathi has loved books for as long as she can remember, and writes about them for The Sunday Long Read, The Continent, Strange Horizons, and others.
December 5, 2025 at 12:37 AM
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Recently for @thecontinent.org : On Oyinkan Braithwaite's excellent Cursed Daughters.

Download this issue (221) here: www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2...

💙📚
A screenshot from The Continent. Text reads: Womanhood, in all its glory and shade A spectacular novel of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters - and the legacies they bequeath. A WOMAN sees a man when he comes to her village and she has to have him - so she does. Her father belatedly protects her virtue (or colludes with her) by forcing the man to marry her. Unfortunately, the man is already married and his wife puts a blood curse on the woman - and all her future female descendants. Generations later, does the curse still hold? The characters in Oyinkan Braithwaite's Cursed Daughters are vividly drawn, bold women. They are sometimes stubborn and wrongheaded (is that the curse again, or just how they are?), but relatable in their longing for love. These women are confused, unwise, bereaved, and passionate. Mostly, they're just doing their best. If they sometimes turn to the spiritual world in desperation (most of the novel's dark humour comes through the seemingly unhinged mamalawo), it's because events in their lives are sufficiently spooky. Where else can a mere human turn? If this all sounds like some light fun, there's more to it. There's a dark thread running through the novel, as one character takes her own life. Braithwaite plumbs the depths of this character's thoughts during her depressive episodes in a way that feels very real. Reading these passages requires care: please be warned if you struggle with your own mental health. Braithwaite's debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, was impressive. The writing was eloquent and her work original, but in the end I found the story just... good enough. Cursed Daughters, however, is glorious - a contender for my African novel of the year.
December 5, 2025 at 12:33 AM
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Fun!
A stack of totes that say "I'd rather be reading! Harare Review of Books"
December 2, 2025 at 5:10 AM
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This is really good! And it's out tomorrow from EastOver Press
The cover of An Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, 2025, edited by Deesha Philyaw. The background image is a series of elongated yellow oval shapes on a blue background, and the title text is in black on a wider oval.
December 1, 2025 at 5:47 PM
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This Mobuto 🥹

bsky.app/profile/shon...
"Mobutu’s ancestral home in the far north of his country, Gbadolité, was mocked as Versailles in the Jungle for its exaggerated opulence, which included an extra-long runway built to accommodate Concorde supersonic jets that were used for shopping trips to Paris." (Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide)
November 30, 2025 at 4:00 AM
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Get you a man who looks at you like KK at Thatcher
A photo of Margaret Thatcher in a white gown with a gauzy cape dancing with Kenneth Kaunda, who might be in a white dinner jacket (?) and black trousers. They're both smiling; he's grinning maybe nervously or suspiciously.
November 30, 2025 at 3:47 AM
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More from @hofrench.bsky.social's The Second Emancipation:
In 1944, the dean of Penn’s philosophy program wrote to Nkrumah to propose that he take another stab at the thesis he had submitted, but Nkrumah spurned the invitation. Years later, after he had become president of the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence, the University of Pennsylvania reportedly sought to confer an honorary doctorate on Nkrumah in the midst of a tour of the United States. “Nkrumah refused it, saying why should he accept gratis that which they would not allow him to earn.”
November 24, 2025 at 5:38 AM
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Alted
Alt: A black-and-white photo of Imani Perry on a blue starry background. Text reads (with breaks as below): ANNOUNCEMENT IMANI PERRY NEW BOARD MEMBER Dark Lab welcomes esteemed Writer and Harvard Professor Imani Perry to the advisory boàrd. Professor Perry received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2022, for her critically acclaimed book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Her writing and Scholarship primarily focus on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after mọments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained
November 17, 2025 at 12:33 PM
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"As Lou Cornum wrote in a piece in The New Inquiry entitled ‘White Magic’, accusations of witchcraft were part of settler colonialism’s tactics to decimate Indigenous and Black bodies in the Ameri-cas, as well as settler bodies deemed unruly. ‘Actual witch hunts of the past such as the Salem witch trials followed from a fear of Indian women and their role in forms of governance alternative to those of the foundling country,’ Cornum writes." (Khairani Barokka, Annah, Infinite)
November 11, 2025 at 1:39 PM