Recommended books

Achebe gives Igbo society its full dignity before the colonial storm arrives, then shows how quickly a world can be unmade. It is the foundation stone of modern African literature and a lesson in who gets to tell a people's story.

A sharp, tender novel about leaving home, being renamed by another country, and the long ache of return. It speaks honestly to anyone who has lived between two worlds and learned what belonging costs.

Set during the Biafran war, it follows ordinary lives caught in the collapse of a young nation's hopes. It reminds us that independence was never the end of the struggle, and that memory is its own form of resistance.

Fanon dissects the psychology of colonisation and the hard road to true liberation. Its questions about dignity, violence and the mind of the freed remain urgent for every nation still defining its sovereignty.

Rodney shows that Africa's poverty was not an accident of nature but the result of history and exploitation. Reading it changes how you see trade, aid and the unfinished work of economic sovereignty.

A memoir of growing up mixed-race under apartheid, told with humour that never hides the cruelty of the system. It shows how language, love and a fiercely brave mother can open doors that law tried to close.

Beah recounts his childhood as a soldier in Sierra Leone and the slow, fragile road back to humanity. It is a hard, necessary witness to what war takes from the young and what survival demands.

Two families, one Cameroonian immigrant and one Wall Street, are bound together as the American dream shows its cracks. It captures the hope, fear and quiet dignity of those who build a new life far from home.

Taken from Rwanda as a child, Wamariya crosses seven countries as a refugee and learns to carry the unspeakable. It is a luminous meditation on exile, memory and the stories we must tell to stay whole.

Armah's unnamed railway clerk resists the corruption that followed Ghana's independence. A bitter, poetic novel about betrayed ideals and the lonely courage of staying honest.