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An African Childhood
by Patrice Nganang
Book Reviewed by:An extraordinary chronicle of youth that evokes the paradoxes of modern Africa―complex, contradictory, and full of conflict, tragedy, and joy.
Patrice Nganang, the acclaimed author of Dog Days, Mount Pleasant, and, most recently, A Trail of Crab Tracks, which was a 2022 New Yorker Book of the Year, writes about his vibrant, animated youth in Cameroon, a period of upheaval and change in the country's history and in his life.
Scale Boy is a memoir that brings great brightness and joy to the tumultuous years of discovering oneself and one's community; though there are moments of danger and confusion in his story, Nganang aims to present a new vision of a young Black African man's coming-of-age.
A Quick Geographical and Historical Background
In the beginning was Guinea. That is, from 1441. It was a land of fantasies and coasts and rivers and waters, which we know today as West and Central Africa.
It was involved in inter-European, trans-African commerce and competition. Its boundaries split many West and Central African states between south and north, charting the oldest and most enduring African frontier. The German foothold on the Gulf of Guinea, Kamerunstadt, Cameroontown, became Douala, and then burgeoned into a country, Cameroon, that is still reeling from those conflicting competitions.
Yaoundé is Cameroon's third capital—the first was Douala, then Buea. It became the capital in 1921, when the northern and southern parts of Cameroon were under French colonial rule—the western part was under British rule. Yaoundé functions even today as the seat of government.
The city is made of neighborhoods, we call them quartiers, that are themselves divided into ...
Of his experiences as a scale boy, Nganang writes with a novelist's perceptive eye for both the absurd and the awful... Nganang has an ear for the spoken word, and his many dialogue scenes are infused with tribal languages, such as Medumba... In addition to Medumba, German and French are used throughout the book, as well as arcane English words (e.g., "axanthic," "phagocytosis," and "allogenous"). Some readers may stumble over these linguistic complexities, but a slow, close reading pays dividends...continued
Full Review
(642 words)
(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Scale Boy is much more than a portrait of an African childhood. It portrays the cultural and linguistic complexity of the nation with wit and humor. Nganang's account of colonial machinations and oppressions is appropriately stern and unsparing.In Scale Boy, author Patrice Nganang relates his colorful childhood in the evolving post-colonial world of Cameroon and his love of books, reading, and writing. Nganang left Cameroon to pursue a Ph.D. in Germany and now teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University in New York. His most renowned novels are the Cameroon trilogy, spotlighting a transformative period in Cameroon's history through the eyes of diverse fictional characters:
Mount Pleasant (2016)
A tale of colonialism and transformation, Mount Pleasant begins in 1931 with Sara, a nine-year-old girl taken from her home to become the 681st wife of Sultan Njoya. A slave named Bertha responsible for "training" the Sultan's wives sees a spark of her dead son in the ...
If you liked Scale Boy, try these:
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by Shugri Said Salh
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"I am the last nomad. My ancestors traveled the East African desert in search of grazing land for their livestock, and the most precious resource of all - water. When they exhausted the land and the clouds disappeared from the horizon, their accumulated ancestral knowledge told them where to move next to find greener pastures. They loaded their ...
by Patrice Nganang
Published 2020
The second volume in a magisterial trilogy, the story of Cameroon caught between empires during World War II.
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