Before I get into this, I was challenged over the methodology of these posts last week by Dilman Dila, who pointed out, quite fairly,

the lists are misleading, especially in relation to the African countries, and only perpetuates systemic and platform/corporate biases against African authors. Eg, the Uganda list doesn’t have Okot p’Bitek and the Kenya list doesn’t have Ngugi, though both names are in the Top 10 of Goodreads list!

All feedback is welcome, and this spurs me to give a bit more detail about what I am doing here.

The lists I publish for each country are of the books which are more than 50% set in that country, and have the highest number of owners on LibraryThing and the highest number of raters on Goodreads, taking the geometric average of the two figures. I will generally do eight books for each country, unless there are very few, in which case I will stop at five. I may not always make it to five in the future, but so far it’s proved reachable every time.

At the early stages, I was listing all of the books tagged with the name of each country on LibraryThing and Goodreads. But I realised that in a significant of cases, a lot of books get tagged as relevant to country X without the majority of the text actually being set there – sometimes the author has close links, sometimes the plot has a small element set in country X, sometimes it’s just reader ignorance. (You can imagine what I faced with Guinea, which is coming next week.)

This means that my lists differ from those that Goodreads and LibraryThing serve up for each country, which rank books by the number of times a book has been tagged as relevant to country X. I have deliberately chosen a different metric, taking the number of people who have rated (GR) or own (LT) a particular book, as long as more than half of it is set in country X. (You can also dig out the number of people who own a book on Goodreads, or who have rated it on LibraryThing, but it is more effort.)

So I record the extent to which books set in country X have penetrated Goodreads and LibraryThing, ie by and large the Western English-speaking world (though Goodreads has some interesting pockets of support for other languages); but in the relevant entries, I will also regret where these do not include indigenous authors and will suggest further reading – as I did with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for Kenya.

For Uganda, the Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi got two books in the top eight, and I’m afraid that the top book by Okot p’Bitek, a combined edition of his poems Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, scores only 764 raters on Goodreads and 156 owners on LibrayThing, some way below the threshold to make my list.

Often, particularly in Africa, colonialist narratives have prevailed, and I hope that what I am doing is a first step to mapping out where that is worse and where it is better. (I was pleasantly surprised by Cambodia, for instance.)

This is a start, not an end, and perhaps I’ll be able to run a different methodology some time in the future. And don’t let me stop anyone else from looking for an improved version.

Having said that, on to this week’s country, Zimbabwe. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set there. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood	Alexandra Fuller	57,199	3,669
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm	Nancy Farmer	16,328	6,042
Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale	John Steptoe	20,967	4,628
Nervous Conditions	Tsitsi Dangarembga	22,417	2,262
The Grass Is Singing	Doris Lessing	14,926	2,330
We Need New Names	NoViolet Bulawayo	23,165	1,487
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa	Peter Godwin	9,454	939
Martha Quest	Doris Lessing	2,642	1,125

This week’s winner, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is a childhood memoir of growing up in a white farmer family in Rhodesia in the dying days of white rule, and what happened after the war was lost. I checked, and although the Fullers started in England and ended up moving to Malawi and then Zambia, that’s well after the halfway point in the book so it definitely qualifies. The LibraryThing winner, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, is a children’s science fiction novel set in a future Zimbabwe.

The top book set in Zimbabwe by a Zimbabwe-born author is Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. The nearest miss – which would have been ninth on the list if I went any further – was Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, a fantasy satire that is clearly about Zimbabwe.

I disqualified eight books. The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, is mostly set in England and I don’t know why a number of readers have tagged it as relating to Zimbabwe. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, is firmly set in Botswana. The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie, has about 20% of the plot in Rhodesia, with the rest in South Africa, England and at sea. The location of King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard, is disputed but in any case less than half of the book takes place there.

More than half of I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives, by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda, is set in the USA (I found a copy and counted the pages). Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller, seems to be more Kenya than Rhodesia. I awarded A Girl Named Disaster, by Nancy Farmer, to Mozambique a few months back. And the majority of Scribbling the Cat, by Alexandra Fuller again, seems to be set just across the border in Zambia and I counted it in my Zambia list published (belatedly) last week.

This is the first in a run of five African countries (not sure if I have stated this previously, but in principle I am running through the countries of the world in order of population). The next four are Guinea (Conakry), Benin, Rwanda and Burundi.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands
Oceania: Australia