Mapped
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Eastern Nigeria on either side of the Biafran war. The story begins in the university town of Nsukka, in the quiet of a campus household, then follows the short life of Biafra as its capital falls back from Enugu to Umuahia and the region shrinks under blockade and hunger. The map runs south through the Igbo heartland, with the far northern city of Kano at its edge as the place the killing began.
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Jagua Nana
Cyprian Ekwensi
Jagua Nana, an ageing but still magnetic Lagos courtesan nicknamed for her Jaguar-car glamour, moves through the nightclubs, markets and thug-politics of the booming city as she clings to youth and to her young lover Freddie. Ekwensi maps the real Lagos: the nightclubs of the island where Jagua reigns, the colonial Marina, the crowded slums and markets of old Lagos, and the political rallies where money and muscle decide everything.
5 places →
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The Igbo country of the lower Niger, where forest villages of yam farmers and titled elders meet the missionaries and colonial officials who came upriver. Achebe built the invented clans of Umuofia and Mbanta from the towns around his native Ogidi, near the great river port of Onitsha.
5 places →