It wouldn’t feel right to say I’m also “psyched” to read a memoir about the horrifying civil war between Biafra and Nigeria, a blight of violence and manufactured famine that ended in 1970 with the eradication of Biafra as an upstart nation (today’s situation in Darfur is all too reminiscent of Biafra’s disaster). But it is exciting news that the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has now followed his classic Things Fall Apart with a heartfelt memoir of the Biafra war, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra. This tragic period of Nigerian history was also the subject of an award-winning novel a few years ago, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie (though, as I blogged at the time, I had a hard time matching this book to my expectations). Maybe I’ll understand Chinua Achebe’s book better.

Also buzzing in the African scene: Black Bazaar by the charming Alain Mabanckou of Congo-Brazzaville, and the first authorized biography of my favorite metafictional expatriate from South Africa, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, by the brave J. C. Kannemeyer, who must have fielded an unimaginable number of cold stares and awkward silences from the famously sarcastic and antisocial (but, truly, brilliant!) Coetzee while interviewing him for the book. Kannemeyer deserves some kind of literary award just for surviving the interview process.