With her second novel Angri, Priscillia M. Manjoh fashions a contemporary narrative style that, not unlike Voltaire’s satirical eighteenth-century Candide: Or Optimism, straddles tonalities of epic and realist literature—a style she calls ‘faction’, a mix of fact and fiction. Moving through the landscape of her troubled, traumatised country in Africa, the protagonist Joey Muki tries to make sense of division, disaster and atrocity, all the while working towards encouraging emerging solidarities, addressing justice and responsibility. Amidst the debris of armed insurrection, violence, and arrogance, Angri is about the will of women to act on their political cultures and social livelihoods.
(PD Dr. Norman Saadi Nikro, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)
Guided by postcolonial theory and the ideas of some Western and African philosophers this study’s in-depth analysis of the novels of three Anglophone Cameroonian authors addresses the question of how principles of nation formation and nationalism are influenced by both colonialism and pre-colonial in situ constituents. The analysis focuses on how nations represented in the imaginary worlds constructed by the novelists are dominated by aspects such as ethnicity, corruption, authoritarianism, nepotism, solidarity and communitarianism which marginalize the masses, leaving them in misery and abject poverty. Tracing the historical settings of the novels from 1948 till present day, the study delineates the writers’ representation of the Anglophones of Cameroon as being marginalized as well as suffering from self-marginalization and also demonstrates how postcolonial misery in Africa is not caused solely by colonialism but by several other aspects. This study reads the works of these Anglophone novelists not only as representing aspects in a nation but as tools of renegotiating a better society and a way forward for this nation.
A story of migration, wherein the characters move to and fro Europe. Eko Prize, 2015 for emerging Anglophone writers, was awarded to Priscillia Manjoh for her novel Snare which depicts challenges of culture, gender and identity.