The Adventures Of The Black Hand Gang

Frank, Angela, Ralph and Keith, known together as the Black Hand Gang, prove their skill as detectives during four exciting episodes in which they uncover a forger, capture a burglar and enlist the aid of the local police when things get a bit sticky. Every story has illustrations which provide the clues discovered by the Gang. All the necessary clues are shown so you can be a detective with them. But you have to be sharp to keep up with the Black Hand Gang! As the Gang tracks down the criminals, you can keep a score of clues you get right and add them up at the end of the book.

Four mysteries are solved by a group of children known as the Black Hand Gang.

Four mysteries are solved by a group of children known as the Black Hand Gang.

The Black Hand Gang is a neighbourhood group of young Kenyans, which meets in the eastern part of Nairobi. The gang members, Onyango, Waithaka, his sister Jane, V.J. Patel and Hassan make a lot of friends trying to help other people. The story is intended as a supplementary text for children fluent in reading, to encourage reading for pleasure.

Seven years after they first came together, the members of the Black Hand Gang meet up again. They find much has changed. Whilst they cherish their shared past, they discover they have chosen different paths in life, and are preparing for adult life in different ways.

Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white (post)colonial women writers emerging from an African–European cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for conveying how African women’s literature is situated in relation to colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are not accommodated by the genre of ‘expatriate literature’. The present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women’s narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap. Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the ‘Other’, the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting and intercultural influences. The ‘African’ woman’s creation of textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the configuration of a voice and identity for the female ‘Other’ and writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the face of patriarchal traditions.

Greed, dishonesty and pride are the themes of these four stories, designed to encourage reading for pleasure. The stories are "The Three Hunters", "Nyakalondo and the Merciless Father", "Hare Learns a Lesson", and "Lion, Hare and the Thorn".