Ethiopia Unbound

Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation is a 1911 book by J. E. Casely Hayford that is one of the first novels in English by an African writer and has been cited as the earliest pan-African fiction.[1][2]

Set in both Africa and England, Ethiopia Unbound relies on philosophical debates between an African and his English friend, as well as references to contemporary African events and ancient African history, to provide a context for its exploration of African identity and the struggle for emancipation. The book's reception on its initial publication ranged from comments in a letter from pan-Africanist Edward Wilmot Blyden — "The more I read 'Ethiopia Unbound', the more I see that it is not your book, but an inspiration. It has given me more joy and encouragement than anything I have seen for many years" — to a review in the New York Independent Weekly Magazine of 26 October 1911, describing it as "a volume in the guise of a story, which is but a disguise to set forth the way our Christian civilisation and our Anglo-Saxon arrogance appear to a black native of the Gold Coast of Africa ... who looks forward to seeing Africa belong to the Africans rather than to the Europeans who have partitioned it. The book is worth reading."[3]

A second edition of Ethiopia Unbound was published in 1969 by Frank Cass & Co, with an Introduction by F. Nnabuenyi Ugonna, who stated: "Ethiopia Unbound is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of African nationalism."[4]

References
  1. Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo, "Pan-Africanist Ideology and the African Historical Novel of Self-Discovery: The Examples of Kobina Sekyi and J. E. Casely Hayford", Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1999; pp. 137–153), p. 139 n1.
  2. Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: "How to Play the Game of Life", Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 135, ch. 7, "Ethical Fiction: J.E. Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound".
  3. Casely Hayford, J. E. The Truth about the West African Land Question. pp. 3–4.
  4. Hayford, J. E. C. "Introduction". Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation: Studies in Race Emancipation (2nd ed.).
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