An African Alphabet

In recent years, I have rediscovered the Yaya shopping centre in Nairobi. When living in Kilimani about 13 years ago, I often used to walk from home to do some weekend shopping there, often hand-in-hand with my eldest son (who cannot have been more than 2 at the time). Since then, vast numbers of new shopping centres have sprung up: the Village Market, Adams Arcade, the Junction, and so on, but the Yaya centre remains a great place to shop.

It is blessed with what, in my opinion, is the best bookshop in East Africa: the simply-named Book Stop on the second floor. I regret that I don't know the owner's name, but it is a real pleasure to visit his shop with its great collection of fiction and Africa-related books, both new and second-hand. Yesterday, while en route back to Kampala, I came away with books by two of my favourite authors, Bamboo, by William Boyd and Waiting for the Barbarians, by JM Coetzee, plus a request that if he came across a book entitled Gordon: Misfit or Martyr he should let me know. I have no doubt that he will do so. It is how bookshops should be: owned and managed by book-lovers.

I descended to the ground floor (the Java coffee house) and immediately set about Bamboo, a miscellany of Boyd's experience, reflection and opinion. A tool that he uses in his writing is an A to Z of observations, designed to give the writer some discipline in marshaling his thoughts and the reader the opportunity to assemble his own Gestalt of the subject. There are several examples of this in Bamboo, my favourite of which amounts to a short biography of another of my favourite authors, Anton Chekhov.....

Since for some time I have been in search of a theme for this blog, I have now decided to write my own A to Z, my own African Alphabet, and this is a suitable first post: what better then this for the letter A? In the series to follow, I shall be mindful of the pointedly sarcastic advice provided by Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, to non-Africans entitled How Not to Write About Africa (which can be found on fellow-blogger Holli's Ramblings). While I can't promise to follow his advice - Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces - I can undertake that this will be a personal journey through the continent which I now think of as my home.

A is for Alphabet.