Africa39 Read Free Page A

countries from south of the Sahara, can only provide a snapshot of the potential offerings from a vast continent of storytellers, this anthology is a good place to start. There are love stories here; explorations in language that seek to bridge the gap between poetry and prose; political works of psychedelic daring; a look at the far future that comments on social repression today; re-imaginings of historical events; explorations in crime writing. There is no danger of ‘a single story’ here. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find collective concerns, unifying themes or even to coin a definition that adequately describes the range, stylistic inclinations and subjects herein. At their best, the writers of Africa39 show themselves a generation whose imaginations are unbound – time, space and circumstance are adapted, adopted and shaped in stories that are as different from each other as their creators are unique.
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    Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
    London, May 2014

The Shivering
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    On the day a plane crashed in Nigeria, the same day the Nigerian first lady died, somebody knocked loudly on Ukamaka’s door in Princeton. The knock surprised her because nobody ever came to her door unannounced; and it made her jumpy because since first-thing that morning she had been on the Internet reading Nigerian news, refreshing pages too often. She had minimised early pictures from the crash site. Each time she looked at them, she brightened her laptop screen, peering at what the news articles called ‘wreckage’, a blackened hulk with whitish bits scattered all about it like torn paper, an indifferent lump of char that had once been a plane filled with people.
    One of those people might have been her ex-boyfriend Udenna.
    The knock sounded again, louder. She looked through the peephole: a pudgy, dark-skinned man who looked vaguely familiar though she could not remember where she had seen him before. She opened the door. He half-smiled and spoke without meeting her eye. ‘I am Nigerian. I live on the third floor. I came so that we can pray about what is happening in our country.’
    She was surprised that he knew she, too, was Nigerian, that he knew which apartment was hers, that he had come to knock on her door; she still could not place where she had seen him.
    ‘Can I come in?’ he asked.
    She let him in. She let into her apartment a stranger wearing a slack Princeton sweatshirt who had come to pray about what was happening in Nigeria, and when he reached out to take her hands in his, she hesitated slightly before extending hers.
     
    He prayed in that particularly Nigerian Pentecostal way that made her uneasy: he covered things with the blood of Jesus, he bound up demons and cast them in the sea, he battled evil spirits. She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.
    He prayed and prayed, pumping her hands whenever he said ‘Father Lord!’ or ‘in Jesus’ name!’ Then she felt herself start to shiver, an involuntary quivering of her whole body. Was it God? Once, years ago when she was a teenager who meticulously said the rosary every morning, words she did not understand had burst out of her mouth as she knelt by the scratchy wooden frame of her bed. It had lasted mere seconds, that outpouring of incomprehensible words in the middle of a Hail Mary, but she had truly, at the end of the rosary, felt terrified and sure that the white-cool feeling that enveloped her was God.
    Now, the shivering stopped as quickly as it had started and the Nigerian man ended the prayer. ‘In the mighty and everlasting name of Jesus!’
    ‘Amen!’ she said.
    She slipped her hands from his, mumbled ‘Excuse me,’ and hurried into the bathroom. When she came out, he