Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess

Guanya Pau, daughter of a Vai chief in Liberia, is betrothed as a young child to a man she comes to despise. As her sixteenth birthday approaches and her arranged marriage looms, she flees into the forest with her devoted friend Jassah rather than submit — carrying with her a secret love for a young man named Momo, and a vow that she would rather die than become another man's unwilling wife.

Published in Cleveland in 1891 while its author, Joseph J. Walters, was still an undergraduate at Oberlin College, "Guanya Pau" is considered the earliest surviving novel published in English by a Black African writer. Walters, born in Liberia to Vai parents, wrote the book as an impassioned plea against child betrothal and polygamy, framed as a tragic, tender love story of a princess who chooses her own heart over the fate assigned to her.

This edition is in the public domain (Walters died in 1894). The text was digitized from a public-domain scan of the original 1891 printing, cross-checked against a second archival scan to recover its final page, and cleaned and reformatted by Nile Book Store. The text is unabridged.