The following coming-of-age novels by African women authors are shaped by an understanding of the deep and complex relationships between women. In these works, the individual path of the traditional bildungsroman narrator is transformed into a dual path involving two (or more) young women at the cusp of self-realization. Kinship and sisterhood mean something bigger than just finding comfort in the other; it means that the difficulties of life are faced not by one individual alone, but rather by the collective.
In these books, Black girls experience the struggle and heartbreak of nations. It is the Black girl who worries about where to hunt for guavas with her friends, and how the chaos that surrounds her and her family will come to an end. The Black girls in these stories understand the ways large families endure hardship in order to preserve the absolute power of the family patriarch. The Black girl’s grief is not for one person’s death—an older brother, a grandmother—but for a whole country that is falling apart. In my novella Judith Namala, the narrator paints a picture of the labor of the young Black women who carry the burden of both the home and the garden. One young woman’s sacrifices in the garden and home—including abandoning her own child—allow another woman to have a middle-class life. Through it all, like in these novels, a complicated need for each other sustains these women.
Waiting by Goretti Kyomuhendo
Alinda is a Black girl living in rural Western Uganda during the 1970s. Hers is a humdrum life, with her immediate and extended family. Kyomuhendo develops a quiet, mid-tempo novel whose central theme is reflected in Alinda’s name, which means “waiting” in Runyankore. Because it’s set during the administration of Idi Amin, the book doubles as a historical novel. Kyomuhendo’s attention to war comes through in the minute psychological details. Alinda reveals how war disrupts the mundane. This approach diverges significantly from the action-packed movies that depicted Uganda in the 1970s, like Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland. Instead, Alinda waits for the inevitable war as it slowly encroaches on their peaceful existence, disintegrating the very fabric of their lives.
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
Wambugu’s main protagonist is Ruth, a young Black woman from New England who pursues a visual arts degree at Bard College. Later, Ruth is working at a restaurant in New York City, when her childhood friend Maria walks in. The shock of Maria’s reentry into her life reverberates throughout the novel. Outside of her parents, it is her most difficult relationship. The rivalry and romance between the two is part Ruth’s envy for Maria’s success in the art world and part desire. It felt, to this reader, like a portrait of the precarious lives of young emerging artists. Ruth must not only prove her parents wrong by gaining success as a professional painter, but she must prove Maria wrong too. Wambugu’s writing style is full of surprises, revelations, and melodrama, which makes the plot thrilling and tragic.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Dangarembga’s Black girl protagonist, Tambudzai, is living in rural 1960s colonial-era Southern Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe. The novel chronicles the struggle between modernity and tradition, and the colonial ruptures within African rural life. Village life is organized around women’s labor, as women cultivate crops, harvest, and prepare food, whereas the men who might have also worked hard in the fields a few decades earlier join white-collar jobs and participate in the civic life of the modern colonial state. The book’s larger existential themes emerge around how Black women are neglected, overworked, and made invisible in their own community, whereas Black men are given priority through access to colonial systems of power. Similar to the earlier novels of Chinua Achebe—which also dramatized the tension between modernity and tradition—Dangarembga’s novel shows how the family unit is splintered by the ravages of patriarchal values and colonial education.
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
We Need New Names follows Darling, a teenage Black girl who loves raiding guava trees with her friends. The book is funniest when following the antics of the friend group, and in its attempts to describe the American accent. Darling is growing up in a country under Black rule, but her home has been razed to the ground, and she lives in a shantytown. She undergoes a difficult political education, coming to see the “Black man’s country” as flawed. Her departure to Detroit to live with family offers some relief, but she comes to witness the scars that the “Black man’s country” has wrought on her Aunt Fostalina. She comes to understand that her aunt’s version of “home” is one populated by many ghosts.
A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Kirabo Namiiro—whose name means “gift” —is destined to become a storyteller. Oral storytelling has defined East African cultural identity for centuries, such as the Swahili poetry tradition that dates back a millennium. Following her breakthrough debut Kintu, Makumbi takes on the challenge of placing oral traditions at the core of the text. As her work has demonstrated over the years, the oral traditions of Buganda are extremely potent and continue to be essential in shaping that particular culture. The scribal traditions introduced during colonialism have not displaced the importance of praise poetry, naming traditions, song, and storytelling. Kirabo has a best friend, another Black girl named Giibwa. Another major theme of the novel is sisterhood, and how one girl’s life can be transformed by a girl friend. While her family’s love is abiding, Giibwa’s love is attentive, reminding Kirabo of who she is, and cheering her on when no one else is looking.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
This novel begins with the death of Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the discovery of Victoria Falls. Originally called Mosi-oa-Tunya, it is described as “a gash in the earth” where water flows restlessly. Namwali engages with history by writing in the voice of a white male settler called Percy M. Clark, offering insight into the lives of 19th European settlers. After Livingstone is interned at Westminster Abbey, we meet Sibilla, the “ambiguous” girl child of a maid Adriana. The novel weaves together the larger historical theme of colonial-era Zambia—formerly Northern Rhodesia—with science fiction elements. Serpell juxtaposes the fascism of the 1940s with the fantasy-like birth of Sibilla, whose whole body is covered in hair. A historical novel of fantasy, magic, murder, and intrigue, The Old Drift connects women across races, generations, through colonialism and its overthrow.
Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe
At an all-girls boarding school in Western Uganda, Ainé—an abbreviation of Ainomugisha, which means “blessed”—is a good student who does not make trouble. Impressionable, and perhaps naïve, Ainé is out to impress her headmistress. When her sister Mbabazi shows up at her school, Ainé is more than elated. Because desire is so intricately tied to sisterhood, Tushabe’s novel shares a complex view of it, because her protagonist’s sister is a Black queer woman. The Western Ugandan setting and focus on high school girlhood is, to this reader, reminiscent of the novels of Goretti Kyomuhendo. In this novel, the conservative Christianity of the school creates a push and pull between tense and blissful passages of desire and the principles and pressures of orthodox morality.
