Peter Wuteh Vakunta

Introduction

Introduction

The term ‘pogrom’ seems to be a befitting epithet to describe the wanton killings and verbal vendettas that characterized the campaign rallies preceding the August 3 local government elections in the rainbow nation of South Africa.

‘La vie est un sale boulot’ finds a niche in the corpus of sociological novels[1] on two counts. Primarily, the text arises out of a social context plagued by ontological problems. The backdrop against which the narrative unfolds is Libreville in Gabon.

In ‘Blot on the Landscape’, Cameroonian poet Ngong issues an effective wake up call decrying the rapidly declining state of the environment. The volume is a battle cry, urging everyone to fight back against the forces—including human nature itself—ravaging the Earth.

Howard W. French, celebrated author of 'A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa' (2005), has come up with yet another masterpiece intended to enlighten Africans and friends of Africa about the economic, human and ecological implications of Chinese migration to Africa.

Esther Lamnyam, celebrated author of Love under the Kola Tree: What City Moms Didn’t Tell You about Creating Fulfilling Relationships (2009) has come up with yet another powerful tool intended to enable readers to live impactful lives.

The book has two partitions. Part One sheds light on the sociolinguistic and linguistic structures of Camfranglais. In Part Two, the author provides readers with a lexical inventory of words and expressions that have come to be considered the functional vocabulary of Camfranglais speakers.

It is hard to disagree with a weighty viewpoint expressed by a concerned Africanist.

Literary translation is a highly meta-linguistic [1] transaction requiring not only perspicacity but also mental flexibility, the more so because far from being a mindless replacement of lexical items in the source text by equivalent linguistic elements in the target text (Catford, 1966), transla