This year marks the centenary of the birth of Albert Camus, the great novelist of existentialism. It’s a movement that many Americans think of as quintessentially Parisian, born of cafe-table philosophizing and fueled by packs of Gauloises. But Camus wasn’t a native of metropolitan France. He was born and raised in Algeria into a pied-noir family (“black foot,” the phrase used to describe descendants of French settlers), grew up in working-class Algiers, and pined for north Africa long after he moved to the French capital in 1942.

His most famous novels — The Stranger, which depicts a senseless murder under the Mediterranean sun; The Plague, with its chaotic scenes of a quarantined port city — are Algerian to the core, and yet Camus has often been criticized, not least by Arab critics such as Edward Said, for paying too little attention to Algerians’ plight. It’s true that he was never a revolutionary, and that in comparison to fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre he can seem almost conformist. But Camus was a far more engaged writer than his critics have allowed, and the essays, columns and speeches collected here make a strong case for his continued relevance.

Camus’ Algerian Chronicles, originally published in 1958 and now finally available in English, span two decades of colonial history, from before World War II to the foundation of the Fifth Republic. The author began his career as a young journalist in Kabylia, the mountainous coastal region populated by a Berber-speaking minority. There he witnesses a humanitarian disaster caused by severe drought, and he laments the inability of writers like himself to get anyone to pay attention. “The truth,” Camus thunders, “is that we are living every day alongside people whose condition is that of the European peasantry of three centuries ago, and yet we, and we alone, are unmoved by their desperate plight.” That theme of French indifference to Algerian life and suffering comes up over and over in this book. And things do not get any more amicable when the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN), which is still the largest political party in contemporary Algeria, begins its campaign of resistance.

The Algerian war, a conflict of devastating violence that saw the French army resort to , devastated Camus. His whole family still lived in Algiers. Though he did not support total Algerian independence (he believed in a quixotic, Swiss-style “confederation” of France and its former colonies), the French forces’ brutality horrified him. Acts of torture, he told the French, “do us more harm than a hundred enemy guerrillas.” At the same time, he refused to support the FLN’s use of terrorism; defending violence against innocent people in the name of anti-colonialism was “a casuistry of blood” that he had no truck with, unlike many French intellectuals of the time.

“I need to let you know how I feel,” Camus writes to an Algerian militant in a 1955 open letter. “Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at the moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.” It’s a hugely powerful simile, and not only because Camus suffered and nearly died from tuberculosis as a young man. Algeria was his oxygen — and between colonial repression and anti-colonial violence, Camus felt himself being asphyxiated.

When Camus published his Algerian Chronicles in 1958, the reaction in the French world of letters was distinctly muted. The author may have just won a Nobel Prize, but his moderate stance was unwelcome at a moment when France and Algeria were facing a state of emergency. That May, right-wing elements in the French army in Algiers, accelerating a political crisis that eventually led, in October 1958, to Charles de Gaulle’s installation as president. Four years later, Algeria won its independence, though Camus did not live to see it; he died in a car crash in 1960, aged just 46.

Today, although his failure to support full independence for Algeria seems off the mark, Camus stands as a powerful voice against violence and extremism, and the very late appearance of these essays in English could not have come at a better time. (Alice Kaplan, the book’s editor, provides an insightful introduction; Arthur Goldhammer, a Harvard fellow and an on contemporary French politics, is the translator.) With the future of the Arab spring uncertain and with terrorism back on the front page, these Algerian Chronicles are not only history. They’re also guides for how to be just in a difficult world.

NPR: Camus’ ‘Chronicles’: A History Of The Past, A Guide For The Future by Jason Farago

It is 1971, and Nigeria is under military rule, though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start.

Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan’s brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door Sheri Bakare?

This novel charts the fate of these two Nigerian girls, one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system and one who attempts to defy it.

“Everything Good Will Come” by Sefi Atta

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, is the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian who travels to America to study and stays there for 13 years before deciding to return to Lagos. The book is an atmospheric and vibrant love story – the love between Ifemelu and Obinze, the high-school sweetheart she leaves behind, the love between Ifemelu and her American boyfriend, the love she has for her young cousin Dike, whom she looks after in America, and the love of her homeland, Nigeria. It is also a novel about race and immigration and what it feels like to be black in America.

But the book’s biggest love affair seems to be Adichie’s enduring relationship with hair. Hairstyle is such a constant presence in the book that not a page goes past without a mention of it: straight weaves, box braids, cornrows, dreadlocks, afros, twists, raucous curls, kinky coils and TWAs (teeny weeny afros). Not to mention texturisers, relaxers, oils, pomades and hair butter. No character in her book gets away without having their hairstyle mentioned, and many are defined by it. And not just the girls. ‘The greying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot.’ ‘A dreadlocked white man sat next to her on the train, his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz.’

Chimamanda Adichie, 36, sits before me now in a hotel in London: contained, amused, sexy and intellectual. Her own hair is succinctly tethered, but it looks as if, were she to free it, it would be ready to spring into action at any time.

‘I am obsessed with hair!’ she exclaims, before settling happily into a long session on the subject. ‘As you can see I have natural, negro hair, free from relaxers and things. My hair story started when I was a baby. My mother had boys and she desperately wanted a girl, a girl with hair. I came out with a lot of hair and she was thrilled. As I was growing up she would do things to my hair but what I loved the most was when she stretched it with a hot comb. I was terrified too, because when the comb touched your ear it was so painful, but I loved the idea that my hair would then be straight. So when I was three years old I already had the idea that straight hair was beautiful and my hair was ugly.’

In secondary school her hair had to be natural or in braids. Even now, Adichie says, her two nieces who go to school near Lagos have to have their hair cut short, like boys. (‘They are continually texting me, to ask me to buy them a wig. I believe strongly that we should be proud of our hair, but if my 15-year-old nieces want a straight wig, I’ll buy them a straight wig! Life is short.’)

On the last day of secondary school Adichie ‘relaxed’ her hair. ‘It was this huge girl occasion for me and my friends,’ she says. ‘A relaxer alters the hair chemically and makes it permanently straight. But it also burns the scalp. And sometimes the hair just refuses to be totally straight, so they’ll use a tong and then it smells just like burning goat.’

She progressed through a series of hairstyles before she moved to America. ‘But here’s the thing – in America I suddenly found out I was black. I’m black! What does that mean? Suddenly I started thinking, why do I want my hair to look like white girls’ hair? This is absurd.’ In Americanah, after Ifemelu gets the relaxer treatment in the salon for the first time, the hairdresser says, ‘Wow, girl, you’ve got that white-girl swing!’Adichie writes. ‘She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss.’

Adichie well remembers the day she cut off all her hair, and is now a keen exponent of the natural hair movement, though it is only popular in America; back in Nigeria hair is still straight. She has a friend who will not even answer the door without her wig, and ‘the salons there don’t know how to care for our hair any more. They only know about wigs and weaves and relaxed hair.’

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“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”

Anthills of the Savannah is a 1987 novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. A finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize for Fiction, it has been described as the “most important novel to come out of Africa in the [1980s].”

The novel takes place in the imaginary West African country of Kangan, where a Sandhurst-trained officer, identified only as Sam and known as His Excellency, has taken power following a military coup.

Achebe describes the political situation through the experiences of three friends: Chris Oriko, the government’s Commissioner for Information; Beatrice Okoh, an official in the Ministry of Finance and girlfriend of Chris; and Ikem Osodi, a newspaper editor critical of the regime.

Other characters include Elewa, Ikem’s girlfriend and Major “Samsonite” Ossai, a military official known for stapling hands with a Samsonite stapler.

Tensions escalate through the novel, culminating in the assassination of Ikem by the regime, the toppling and death of Sam and finally the murder of Chris. The novel ends with a non-traditional naming ceremony for Elewa and Ikem’s month old daughter, organized by Beatrice.

White American Writer Joe Mozingo Traces, Discovers & Chronicles His African Ancestry

“I always had kind of a longing to understand the history of the place I lived in, and I think that kind of came from the fact that I had no family history that I knew of. … Then when people started asking me my name … I kept wondering, how is it that we don’t actually know where this name came from?”

“I met a professor, who was Sherrie Mazingo, and she was black, and she had done a lot more research than I had on our genealogy, and had been to a family reunion in North Carolina. [She] came back with the news that the name was African, and that we all descended from the same person, and he was, in her words, a ‘Bantu warrior.’ My uncle, out of nowhere, said we did in fact come from Virginia, where this slave had landed.”

“There was the period in Virginia, that I had never known about, where free blacks and poor whites were mixing and even getting married.”

“We think he landed when he was about 11 years old, near Jamestown, and basically when these Africans arrived, you know they figured they wouldn’t live more than a couple of years — there was no reason to have a lifelong slave — so they treated them as indentured servants.

“Edward appears to have had a contract with his master to work a certain amount of time.”

“There was this brief period when Edward did well, and then the rich classes really wanted to put the squeeze on the poor to create this system of slavery, which really marginalized the poor whites and the free people of color. Their fates went downhill really fast; they were suddenly out of money. One of them even re-indentured himself to pay off some debt.

“They basically started leaving the area, and that was the time they could reinvent themselves. Those that were light-skinned enough could say they were white, and wherever they landed they came up with a new myth. You know, people said they were French Huguenots, Portuguese — anything but African.”

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