The Gunny Sack

First published by the African Writers Series (AWS), whose first series editor was Chinua Achebe. Achebe was brought to meet us at my school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, by our headmaster Peter Palangyo, who also became an AWS writer, with his novel Dying in the Sun. And so publication by AWS was particularly gratifying and seemed only fitting. AWS is now more or less defunct. The book, when brought out by Penguin India, received a rather generous response from Khushwant Singh. A misprint in that edition stated that I was born in 1905, which brought an enthusiastic note from a fan congratulating me on keeping at it at my octogenarian age. The Gunny Sack  was published by Doubleday Canada in 2005 and can be obtained from them.

Uhuru Street

This is the name of the street in Dar es Salaam where I grew up; now it seems narrower and brims with people and traffic, SUVs jamming the sidewalks I used to play on. Two-storey building are being (hazardously I think) extended vertically up to six and eight storeys.

No New Land

Set in Toronto’s Don Mills, about an immigrant family from Dar es Salaam.  Even the elevator is against you.

The Book of Secrets

If The Gunny Sack  was a novelistic organization of memories, oral histories, and myths, The Book of Secrets  is the story of a written record (a diary or journal). To get an authentic sense of period for The Gunny Sack I had to consult the journals and biographies of British colonial administrators and explorers, who were, for all their faults, wonderful recorders. Book of Secrets is the story of the fate of one such journal written by a colonial administrator at the outset of the First World War as it arrived in East Africa.