The Rape of Shavi: (Omenala Press)

A group of Europeans fleeing a nuclear holocaust, crash-land in the west African kingdom of Shavi, presenting King Patayon and his people with a set of problems that not even Ogene, the all-powerful goddess of the lakes is able to resolve. With the voice of an accomplished story teller, Nigerian born Buchi Emecheta has created a moving story set partly in Britain and partly in an imaginary country on the fringes of the Sahara.

About the Author :
Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos, Nigeria in July 1944. She emigrated to England in 1962 with her husband and two small children. After the break-up of her marriage and now with five small children to support, she lived in a series of slum apartments, while working full time at the British museum and studying for a Sociology degree. In 1972, she contributed a column about black British life to the New Statesman magazine which formed the basis for her first published novel In The Ditch. While her children were growing she worked for a number of years as a teacher and a social worker, before settling down in the 1980s in her north London home as a full-time writer and academic. Buchi Emecheta wrote 16 novels during her lifetime including The Joys of Motherhood, Second-Class Citizen, and the Slave Girl in 1978 for which she won the Jock Campbell New Statesman award. She wrote several children's stories and plays for stage, TV and radio, as well as a formal autobiography Head Above Water. In 1983, she was included as one Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature. She died in London in 2017 at the age of 72.

Review :
In "The Rape of Shavi (1983), Emecheta's most unusual work... The arrival of a group of Europeans fleeing from nuclear holocaust ... is the fictional pretext to investigate the infringement of African culture and customs through Western intrusion. The violence implied in the title has therefore a more collective and metaphoric meaning than in other Emecheta's works, as an entire country rather than a single woman is raped." Luca Prono, 2013; "A gentle, perfectly constructed fable...wise, moving, subtle and profound" San Francisco Chronicle; "a very good story artfully told: the rational provoking arguments about multi-racial societies and military law, are dropped into the narrative with a natural, unobtrusive cunning, rare in modern fiction." London Review of Books; "provocative storytelling" New York Times; Emecheta's prose is "like that of a community singer of tales...steeped in the tradition of a difficult rural life" New York Times Book Review; "Emecheta's dystopian fable pits Western and African forms of feminism against each other, in order to determine how far feminism may go in Africa, and what might be its most productive relation to African traditions." John Hopkins University Press