The Journey’s End Competes for the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa
Spears Media Press is delighted to announce the submission of its second book entry, The Journey’s End for the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Published in June 2016, The Journey’s End by Ba’bila Mutia features a superbly written narrative of life in an African city. When Akuma—a youthful African government secondary school teacher—leaves his hometown, and goes to the capital city, hardly does he know that he will be paralyzed and will not be able to use his legs again. The Journey’s End is a character-driven narrative that explores the lives of two men who meet in Yaoundé, the capital city—Lucas Wango (an elderly pensioner who comes to collect his back pay of seven years’ pension money) and Akuma (a physically challenged man who helps him recover his pension arrears). Wango doesn’t know that Akuma, aka Général, is a mobster and the boss of a city gang that commands and controls a better part of the metropolis. Running parallel to this central plot are two subplots that eventually converge at the end of the novel—Lucas Wango’s meddling in and eventual frustration with national political life and Général’s relationship with Martina, a woman he falls in love with in the city. “His creative and imaginative genius is at play” states Kehbuma Langmia in his appraisal of Mutia’s novel “as he adroitly demonstrates that joy and pain can shake hands at some point but never an embrace.”
The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa was established by The Lumina Foundation in 2005. It was conceived as a very prestigious prize in honour of Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in literature to celebrate excellence in all its cerebral grace, its liberating qualities, the honour and recognition it brings to a myriad of people, of diverse cultures and languages. This prize honours people who have used their talents well enough to affect others positively. It honours Africa’s great writers and causes their works to be appreciated. It celebrates excellent writing, promotes scholarship and makes books available and affordable by subsidizing the publication of books in the top list of the judges.
This is a pan African prize, viewed also as Africa’s NOBEL prize. It unifies Africans, celebrates Africa’s great minds, brings home Africa’s best intellectuals as judges, entertainers, great communicators and leaders in their own rights.
It was designed to be The African prize with a lot of artistic features symbolising the Soyinka personae, as a distinguished intellectual, a conscientious and sensitive writer, a lover of the arts and humanities and a stickler for excellence, good governance, equity and justice.
The winner of the Prize is awarded $20,000 (Twenty thousand US Dollars).
