Afro Story: Africana at the push of a button
20 Feb 2021
Polar pioneer: Matthew A Henson’s book, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, is available on the Afro Story app. Photo: Bettmann
The Afro Story App, which brings together 50 texts many of them classic Africana to your phone, aims to have a profound influence on the way literature is consumed.
Born from conversations between public-health specialist John Ashmore and Hombakazi Nqandeka, the app curates texts that are in the public domain because of lapsed copyright, making them available for easy consumption through an Android smartphone.
The app is downloadable at a cost of R43 on Google Play. Users can pay using a credit or debit card, or even with airtime.
The origins of the Black Britain: Writing Black series began a year ago, in the wake of Evaristo’s Booker Prize win. “We got together to talk about how we could harness the energy and excitement of that moment to make further change happen,” said Prosser. The covers of the books have been redesigned by Black British artists and the audiobooks will be voiced by Black actors.
Evaristo told Penguin.co.uk that “these books will take the reader from 18th-century London to 1920s Trinidad; from inside the heads of women in the mental health system to inside the life of a working-class Black woman barrister making her way in a white, middle-class, male profession; from the ethics of stolen African artefacts in British museums and into a family home haunted by past that lingers in the present.”