PagineFrom Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, Ngũgĩ’s Kenya and Mariama Bâ’s Dakar, African literature is one of the richest traditions in the world — in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu and more. Here are 114 essential African books, built around Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century (chosen by an international jury for the 2002 Zimbabwe International Book Fair), with earlier classics you can read free, 21st-century favourites, and short guides to the great African authors.
New to African literature? Begin with one of these — or follow our step-by-step guide, What to Read for African Literature →
Short biographies, what to read first, and every book of theirs on this list.
Olaudah Equiano wrote that he was born in the Igbo region of what is now Nigeria, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery across the Atlantic. He served on ships, taught himself to read and write, bought his freedom in 1766, and settled in London. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), one of the first slave narratives, became a bestseller and a key weapon of the British abolitionist movement. (Some historians question parts of his account of his birth; the book remains a founding text of Black writing in English.)
Where to start: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
On this list: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Sol Plaatje was a journalist, linguist and politician — a founding member and the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress, which became the ANC. His Native Life in South Africa (1916) exposed the devastating 1913 Natives Land Act, and Mhudi, published in 1930, was one of the first novels in English by a Black South African. He also translated Shakespeare into Setswana.
Where to start: Native Life in South Africa
On this list: Native Life in South Africa · Mhudi
Chinua Achebe is often called the father of modern African literature. Things Fall Apart (1958) — the story of the proud Igbo wrestler Okonkwo and the coming of British missionaries and colonial rule, its title taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats — has sold more than 20 million copies in some 50 languages and showed the world Africa told from the inside. No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People followed. As founding editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series he launched dozens of careers, and his 1975 lecture on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness changed how that book is read.
Reading order: Read the “African trilogy” in story order: Things Fall Apart (1958), Arrow of God (1964), then No Longer at Ease (1960), which follows Okonkwo’s grandson.
On this list: Things Fall Apart · Arrow of God · No Longer at Ease
Wole Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986. A playwright, poet, novelist and fearless critic of dictatorship, he was imprisoned for nearly two years during the Nigerian Civil War (The Man Died). His plays blend Yoruba myth with modern theatre — The Lion and the Jewel and Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) — and his memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) is one of Africa’s best-loved books.
Where to start: Aké: The Years of Childhood
On this list: Aké: The Years of Childhood · Death and the King’s Horseman · The Lion and the Jewel
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was East Africa’s greatest novelist. Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major English-language novel by an East African; A Grain of Wheat (1967) explores betrayal and heroism in a Kenyan village on the eve of independence. Jailed without trial in 1977, he wrote Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper — in Gĩkũyũ — and afterwards chose to write in his mother tongue, arguing for it in Decolonising the Mind (1986). He lived much of his life in exile and was long tipped for the Nobel Prize.
Where to start: Weep Not, Child
On this list: A Grain of Wheat · Devil on the Cross · Weep Not, Child · The River Between · Petals of Blood · Wizard of the Crow
Naguib Mahfouz, a civil servant who wrote every evening, made the Arabic novel modern. His Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street (1956–57) — follows three generations of a Cairo family from the 1919 revolution to World War II. In 1988 he became the first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He survived a stabbing by an extremist in 1994 and kept writing.
Where to start: Palace Walk
On this list: The Cairo Trilogy
Mariama Bâ was a Senegalese teacher and campaigner for women’s rights. Her short novel So Long a Letter (Une si longue lettre, 1979) — a widow’s long letter to her best friend after her husband takes a second wife — won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and is one of the most widely taught African books. She died of cancer before her second novel, Scarlet Song, was published.
Where to start: So Long a Letter
On this list: So Long a Letter
Nadine Gordimer spent half a century writing about apartheid South Africa — and several of her books were banned there. The Conservationist won the Booker Prize in 1974; Burger’s Daughter (1979), about the daughter of an anti-apartheid activist, and July’s People (1981) are her best known. She joined the ANC when it was still illegal, helped edit Nelson Mandela’s speech for his 1964 trial, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.
Where to start: July’s People
On this list: Burger’s Daughter · July’s People
J. M. Coetzee writes spare, unsettling novels about power, cruelty and conscience. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is an allegory of empire; Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999) made him the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and moved to Australia in 2002.
Where to start: Waiting for the Barbarians
On this list: Life & Times of Michael K · Waiting for the Barbarians · Disgrace
Bessie Head was born in a South African psychiatric hospital to a white mother and a Black father — a union illegal under the country’s laws — and raised by a foster family. In 1964 she left for Botswana on a one-way exit permit and lived as a refugee in the village of Serowe for fifteen years. When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and the extraordinary inner journey A Question of Power (1973) made her one of Africa’s most important writers.
Where to start: When Rain Clouds Gather
On this list: A Question of Power · When Rain Clouds Gather
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) — the story of Tambudzai, a girl in 1960s Rhodesia fighting for an education — was the first novel published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman, and was named one of Africa’s twelve best books of the 20th century. She continued Tambu’s story in The Book of Not and This Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. She is also a filmmaker.
Where to start: Nervous Conditions
On this list: Nervous Conditions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nsukka, Nigeria, in a house once lived in by Chinua Achebe. Purple Hibiscus (2003) is a coming-of-age story under a strict, devout father; Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), set during the Nigeria–Biafra war, won the Orange Prize; Americanah (2013) follows a Nigerian woman in America. Her talks “The Danger of a Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists” have been watched by millions.
Where to start: Purple Hibiscus
On this list: Purple Hibiscus · Half of a Yellow Sun · Americanah
1 of these is free to read in Pagine right now (📖 Read free). The rest link to a free public-domain edition or to Open Library, where many can be borrowed free.
Print it, save it as a PDF, email it to yourself or share it with a friend, book club or class. Every copy links back to pagineapp.com, and the free Pagine app tracks every book you finish.
iPhone & iPad
Android3 free books by African authors in Pagine — including titles beyond this list.
Every title on the list links to the free sources that may have it. Public-domain books are free to read and download; newer books can often be borrowed free.
The list was proposed by the scholar Ali Mazrui at the 1998 Zimbabwe International Book Fair. A jury chaired by Njabulo Ndebele considered more than 1,500 nominations from across the world, balancing regions, languages, genres and gender, and announced the 100 books in Accra, Ghana, in 2002, with a top twelve. Our list follows the creative and non-fiction lists as documented by the African Studies Centre Leiden. Most of these books are still under copyright, so we link to Open Library, where many can be borrowed free; earlier works are free in the Pagine e-reader. For younger readers, Pagine also hosts thousands of free African picture books from the African Storybook, Book Dash and more — see our Nigerian stories and the library.
Start with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Then try the Cairo Trilogy, Things Fall Apart’s sequels and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.
A list chosen by an international jury for the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and announced in 2002, to celebrate African writing. It covers fiction, poetry, plays, children’s books and non-fiction in many languages, and names a top twelve led by Things Fall Apart.
Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, in 1986. Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991), J. M. Coetzee (2003), Doris Lessing (2007) and Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) have also won.
Earlier works such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa are in the public domain. Most 20th-century African books are still under copyright; Open Library and public libraries lend many of them free.
Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, Weep Not, Child, So Long a Letter, The Lion and the Jewel, Death and the King’s Horseman, Cry, the Beloved Country and Purple Hibiscus are widely set in African and international schools. Check your exam board (for example WAEC or KCSE) for current texts.
Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov and more
Explore →🎩William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and more
Explore →🗽Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and more
Explore →🥖Molière, Voltaire, Stendhal and more
Explore →💃Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and more
Explore →🌎Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Machado de Assis, Rubén Darío and more
Explore →🏰Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Brothers Grimm and more
Explore →🛶Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen and more
Explore →🍝Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio and more
Explore →🏛️Homer, Aesop, Sophocles and more
Explore →🏮Confucius, Laozi, Cao Xueqin and more
Explore →☘️Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and more
Explore →🍁Susanna Moodie, L. M. Montgomery, Stephen Leacock and more
Explore →🦘Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Miles Franklin and more
Explore →