The Continent‘s #1 Book of 2024
One of World Literature Today‘s 75 Notable Translations of 2024
One of Brittle Paper‘s 100 Notable African Books of 2024
“[A] fascinating novel”
“[A] masterful tragicomic work”
— Alex Tan, Words Without Borders
“While Samahani — Swahili for ‘forgive me’ — depicts enslavers’ great depravity and brutality, Baraka Sakin’s signature satirical voice wryly lightens the unbearable. The tone is of a sardonic knowing, deadpan as it describes intimate daily humiliations.”
“With his brilliant storytelling that compels the reader from the first page, unable to predict the protagonists’ fate until the very last page, Sakin has done his part in forging a path towards sincere conversations and reparations by shedding light on lives and experiences that history has not taken into account.”
“Using magic, love, violence, and scatological humor, Baraka Sakin recreates a
past not with the detailed realist attentions of a Hilary Mantel or Maggie O’Farrell,
authors of deeply researched historical fictions set in sixteenth-century England,
but with a criticism of the historian’s tools, of who and what is erased in written
accounts, and of how viewing our past through these lenses can limit our beliefs—
and our loves—in the present.”
—Marcia Lynx Qualey, Prairie Schooner