by Landeg White
Cambridge University Press 1987

This book is a historical portrait of a village in the southern region of Malawi from 1859 to the present day. The portrait has two aspects. Magomero is a place on which many of the principal concerns of Africa’s historians in recent years are focused – the slave trade, Christian missions and their impact, colonialism and ethnicity, land alienation in a plantation economy, resistance and the rise of nationalism, peasant cash-cropping and the mobilisation of labour, the struggle for resources between men and women, and the perpetuation of poverty into the period after independence. One aspect of the portrait investigates how all these different topics appear ‘from the inside’ as reflected in the experience of a few hundred men and women.

On the other hand, the book’s overriding concern is to capture something of the tone and tenor of village life since 1859. It records the changes that have taken place in the economy, in custom, in relationships both personal and political, and in the village’s changing relationship with the broader Malawian and southern African context. Above all, it explores the different perceptions of the world that have animated village life over a century and a quarter.

Reviews

“The two most important events in Nyassa (Malawi) history occurred in the same region (‘Magomero’), yet on the surface seem unrelated. Here Bishop Mackenzie, pioneer of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, started his colony of freed slaves … Fifty years later, the Providence Industrial Mission, founded by John Chilembwe, combined to rise against the white owners of A.L. Bruce Estates, Historians have seen little connection between these two events. But Landeg White has had access to papers and is able, brilliantly, to show continuity in all this.”

Guardian

translated by Landeg White
Oxford World’s Classics 2001

1998 is the quincentenary of Vasca da Gama’s voyage via southern Africa to India, the voyage celebrated in this new translation of one of the greatest poems of the Renaissance. Portugal’s supreme poet Camões was the first major European artist to cross the equator. The freshness of that original encounter with Africa and India is the very essence of Camões’s vision. The first translation of The Lusiads for almost half a century, this new edition is complemented by an illuminating introduction and extensive notes.

by Landeg White
Cinnamon Press 2010

Maria begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother after buying an African carving that she can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long-suffering colonial wife whose letters are still kept, was not her great-grandmother, Maria begins a journey that pieces together the disparate narratives of this rich and intelligent novel, drawing together ‘people who cared not for nation or tribe but for the infinitely varied networks that were our common inheritance.’

An epic, yet intensely personal story of one young woman’s search for identity, revealing that ancestry is not always as it seems.

Reviews

“The novel is a rich, informative, sometimes alarming and often moving account … generous and perceptive … post-post colonial in the ironies and sympathies it has available for almost all its characters. A novel of confidence and subtlety.”

Stephen Knight

by Landeg White
DANGAROO Press 1993

Signed copies of this book can be purchased directly from the author.

Price: €7.99

Bounty brings a fresh perspective to the familiar story of the mutiny. The narrator is Michael Byrne, the near-blind fiddler employed by Captain Bligh to exercise his crew on the long voyage to Tahiti. Siezed by the mutineers, Byrne refused to sail with Fletcher Christian to Pitcairn Island but remained in Tahiti where his fiddle gained him unique entry into the society. After his arrest, he survived the shipwreck of HMS Pandora to be acquited at the mutineers’ court martial. An Irish minstrel, his imagination brimming with sea-shanties, he tells a tale which shifts the emphasis away from a quarrel between Englishmen to a heart-breaking quarrel between England and the South Seas.

Reviews

“… I praised Landeg White’s last book to the skies; Bounty is even better. Actually, it can’t be compared this brilliant account of the mutiny and its aftermath through the voice of Michael Byrne, Captain Bligh’s blind Irish fiddler, is a kind of balladic counterpoint to Derek Walcott’s epic Omerus…White’s so light on his feet that one wonders how Bligh and Fletcher et al come across so vividly, but they do. So does the incomprehension, the belief that we were (and are) being bountiful.”

The Observer

by Landeg White
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Two people have been murdered in Sierra Leone in what appear to be acts of ritual cannibalism. They are the nephew of the Minister for Natural Resources, and a girl with the American Peace Corps. To his horror, Detective Inspector-Eustace Tucker, a Freetown Creole addicted to Jane Austen, is put in charge of the case.

He has never been ‘up country’, and by the end of an investigation involving witchcraft, diamond smuggling and the looming elections, he has come to appreciate more than he believed possibly about the country of his birth.