AiW Guest Stephanie Bosch Santana.

Binyavanga Wainaina, writer and founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine, Kwani?

Traces of Binyavanga Wainaina’s address, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan”, delivered at September’s African Studies Association UK 2012 conference, have lingered with me over the past few months: the image of invisible digital networks of texts reaching ghost-like across continents, genre-bending “digital pulp,” and a pan-African literature that moves via twitter and sms rather than by printing press and shipping container. If many earlier African print publications—such as popular magazines and newspapers—have been described as “ephemeral,” the new literary world that Wainaina depicts is distinctly spectral.

When I told Katie Reid of AiW that Wainaina’s lecture was haunting me, she suggested that “Africa in Words” might be an ideal space to “exorcise” these spirits. It turns out that Katie’s idea was more fitting than I first realized. Wainaina’s address was a kind of exorcism in its own right, an attempt to rid African literary and cultural studies of the ghost of Afropolitanism, a term that perhaps once held promise as a new theoretical lens and important counterweight to Afro-pessimism, but that has increasingly come to stand for empty style and culture commodification.

The origin of this portmanteau (created out of the words ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’) is usually traced to an article titled “Bye-Bye Barbar” by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu, published in the LIP Magazine in 2005. Tuakli-Wosornu uses the term primarily to describe Africans living, and often born outside of, the continent. She writes, “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many. They (read: we) are Afropolitans—the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you.”[1] Achille Mbembe later popularized this term in academic discourse with his 2006 essay “Afropolitanism,” in which he attempts to reterritorialize Afropolitanism, in part by drawing attention to the long history of migration to, from, and within the African continent. His interest is not only in Tuakli-Wosornu’s “global Africans” but also in the world in Africa.[2] According to Mbembe, “cultural mixing” or “the interweaving of worlds” has long been an African “way of belonging to the world”—whether one resides on the continent or not (28).

And yet, for Wainaina, Afropolitanism has become the marker of crude cultural commodification—a phenomenon increasingly “product driven,” design focused, and “potentially funded by the West.” Through an Afropolitan lens, “travel is easy” and “people are fluid.” Certainly, magazines, designers, and business execs have seized the term for their own purposes. On the homepage of Afropolitan magazine, based out of South Africa, we find an essay on the legacy of the ANC alongside an article titled, “Fashion Conscious Carpeting…so much more than just good looks!” as well as an ad for “Samsonite B-Lite Fresh” suitcases.[3] There is also an Afropolitan Shop, which features kente-accented laptop bags amongst a host of other products from African designers. Touting the principle of “Trade Not Aid,” the Afropolitan Shop defines Afropolitanism as “a sensibility, a culture and a worldview.”[4] We see how easily style and “worldview” become conflated, how not only products, but people and identities are commoditized. Indeed, it’s hard not to miss this in Tuakli-Wosornu’s description of stylish Africans “coming soon or collected already” in a Euro-American metropolitan center “near you.”

Style, in and of itself, is not really the issue. Rather, it’s the attempt to begin with style, and then infuse it with substantive political consciousness that is problematic. For example, Tuakli-Wosornu maintains that “Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays,” but continues, “To be fair, a number of African professionals are returning; and there is consciousness among the ones who remain, an acute awareness among this brood of too-cool-for-schools that there’s work to be done.” Similarly, in a relatively recent article on Cnn.com titled “Young, urban and culturally savvy, meet the Afropolitans,” Afropolitan magazine’s editor, Brendah Nyakudya asserts that “to be a true Afropolitan takes more than a multi-cultural background and the right record collection—it means having a commitment to making the continent a better place.”[5] Although Mbembe’s position is perhaps more nuanced, it is strikingly similar. Distinguishing Afropolitanism from pan-Africanism and négritude, Mbembe describes Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world” (29). While Mbembe warns that pan-Africanism, by contrast, has become “institutionalized and ossified” and can slip easily and dangerously into nativism, we can perhaps also see that its longer history of Africa-centered engagement creates a more stable foundation—which, unlike Afropolitanism, is less likely to be used for aesthetic purposes alone. Afropolitanism, it seems, is a portmanteau in more ways than one: it is a general brand of cosmopolitanism cloaked in African style, as well as a literal “coat hanger” for changing fashions. Hence Wainaina’s intervention, his exorcism of this ghost that several years ago could have perhaps been seen as a lively spirit.

Where does literature fit into this debate? Afropolitanism extends ideas of fluid, easy travel to texts as “singular products.” Based on the same capitalist fantasy that economic markets are equal, it is assumed that the literary marketplace, too, is unfettered by issues of uneven development or protectionism. Wainaina points to a particular kind of Afropolitan African novel that is frequently produced—one that touches upon social and economic issues, but ultimately is written for an audience of “fellow Afropolitans.” Overall, a spirit of Afropolitanism has led to texts that are product, rather than process focused, a trend that can perhaps be changed as more and more literature goes digital. Wainaina points to the revolutionary effect that the Internet is having on African literary production, particularly via the creation of what he calls “digital pulp.” Although similar to the original print pulp in that it is often written in genre—such as sci-fi or romance—digital pulp, according to Wainaina, is even more prone to the bending and/or melding of generic conventions. This is due in part to the speed with which it is produced and published as well as to its collaborative dimension. The online medium often allows for audiences to comment on a work in real time—a much-accelerated version of the way readers were able to participate in serialized fiction in popular magazines in the mid-20^th century. Finally, Wainaina argues that we must do away with conventions that see pulp fiction as “trashy” or “escapist,” and focus instead on its ability to reach and excite readers on the continent. We don’t pay enough attention, Wainaina suggests, to literature that truly “transports” us.

Some critics have attributed the new rise of genre fiction to the continuing global recession. In times of uncertainty, such as the Great Depression, these critics argue, audiences seek out genre fiction’s vigilante spirit as a way to regain control over uncontrollable forces. Can such analyses be extended beyond the US? Or, in other words, does genre fiction serve the same function everywhere? Beyond its formal and material qualities, or even its more existential ability to “transport” the reader, there seems to be a certain nostalgia for the form, particularly in Africa. Genre fiction burgeoned on the continent in the 1950s and 60s, the period leading up to and immediately following decolonization for much of Africa. This fiction, at least in southern Africa, was often pan-African, or at least regional, in its themes and concerns. As J.K.S. Makokha notes in his introduction to Negotiating Afropolitanism, 21^st-century Africa is once again characterized by a renewed sense of pan-Africanism that is visible in economic, philosophical, and cultural frameworks: “like in the 50s and 60s, the continent and its regions, rather than singular nations, are the theatres of problem-identification, reaction and aspirations” (14). Genre fiction was used in the past to address pan-African issues, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it is being called upon again to serve a similar function.

But do these new and repurposed literary forms and networks really have a pan-African reach? Online literatures have emerged from Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, but other countries with less digital infrastructure seem to be approaching the era of Internet literature more warily. For example, the theme of the most recent Zimbabwean International Book Fair Indaba was “The Book in the Digital Era,” but while it was acknowledged that traditional means of book distribution are changing and many bookshops closing, the overall emphasis was on the print book as a product that is still necessary to sustain professional writers and reach the majority of Zimbabwean readers. The Indaba’s keynote speaker Ngwabi Bhebe noted that although individual writers are beginning to publish online in the form of e-books and blogs, only about 1 million Zimbabweans have access to the Internet. Of those who are connected, most use it primarily for email and Facebook, which is perhaps why Facebook was frequently mentioned as a useful marketing tool for new print books. 

For those of us who are privileged to have greater access to the digital world, this new spectral fiction still presents many challenges. Identifying and finding new literary networks is not as simple as a trip to the local bookstore or the university archives. Online archives of fiction are ostensibly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but simple google searches won’t get you very far (as I’ve recently found from personal experience). Instead, it requires following invisible threads and connections—one site leads to the next—only full immersion will get you anywhere in this new, ghostly world of fiction.

AiW Guest Stephanie Bosch Santana.

CALL FOR PAPERS

 The African Language Program in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University presents the

4^th Annual African Languages in the Disciplines Conference (ALD)

 Conference date: April 25, 2013

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

 Abstract deadline February 28, 2013 (details below).

Please join us on April 25, 2013 for the fourth annual ALD conference, which will build on the important conversations of the previous three years as well as celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the African Language Program at Harvard.

This conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines as well as African heritage communities to discuss the vital role that African languages play in the study of Africa and the diaspora. Possible themes include, but are not limited to, the contribution of African languages to the study of literature, music, film, performance, visual arts, media studies, history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, political science, psychology, economics, education, geography, environmental science, legal studies, and public health. Past conferences have also engaged in larger conversations about issues of translation, regional languages, new orthographies, and indigenous literary and historical genres, among others.

Please apply via e-mail to harvardald@gmail.com by February 28, 2013. We ask for a 250-word abstract outlining a 15-minute presentation as well as a brief biography. Please contact the conference organizers at the same e-mail address with any questions.

This conference is part of a two-day event sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies and the Committee on African Studies. An exciting partner conference entitled Extractive Economies and the State in Contemporary Africa will be held on April 26, 2013 and ALD participants are encouraged to attend.

AiW Guest Emily Hogg and Benjamin Poore.

In 2006 The New York Times reported that Jacob Zuma’s defence during his trial for rape was rooted in claims he made about the traditions and customs of Zulu culture. The Times wrote: “His accuser was aroused, he said, and ‘in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready.’ To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape.” Outside the South Gauteng High Court, meanwhile, a number of those who had gathered to support Zuma were wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “100% Zulu Boy”.

Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and student of Zulu, began his January lecture at Queen Mary, University of London by reflecting on how intensely disturbing he found these invocations of Zulu identity. To be a “100% Zulu boy” was, for Zuma’s supporters and detractors respectively, both the solution and the problem. Both sides figured the Zulu boy of Sanders’ title as virile masculinity in its most phallic and unreconstructed form; with, of course, the necessary elision of the female complainant at the centre of the trial.

The Spear – Brett Murray’s controversial portrait of Jacob Zuma.

The lecture, “100% Zulu Boy: Judging Jacob Zuma, Obiter Dicta”, sought to amplify the uneasy contradictions that lie at the heart of this cultural politics of 100% authenticity. Sanders described his own attempts, past and present, to become a “100% Zulu boy”, and the association of learning and performing everything under the sign of Zulu with the hope of “doing and making good”. It was performance that mattered for Sanders, recalling as he did an appearance as a Zulu boy in a school production of Ipi Tombi from his boyhood, hoping for “that perfect identity…a hundred out of a hundred.” A powerful identification with the Zulu boy, for Mark Sanders, was about getting “good marks” knowing it also means a “good Mark”. Becoming Zulu for the boy Sanders entails approval and recognition of his virility. Zuma’s trial, and the report the NYT offered, turned this virility on its head and shattered the possibility of doing and making good with prohibited sexual violence.

Sanders’ extraordinary tactic in the course of the lecture was not merely to unpick the intricacies of the juridicial-legal history of rape and adultery trials in colonial and postcolonial case law: more striking was the insistent and hypnotic reading of long passages in Zulu by Sanders himself, a move that disoriented a largely Anglophone audience in interesting ways. The surprise it offered perhaps echoed the surprise offered by the judge in Zuma’s trial, Willem van der Merwe, who unexpectedly offered his closing remarks in Zuma’s native tongue. Sanders found himself resistant to the suggestion that this was merely the show of some secret patriarchal solidarity conspiring against the complainant. Rather, Van der Merwe’s masquerade was precisely that – but one that took the form of a communique to Zuma; by switching into Zulu, Sanders argued, the judge demonstrated that being a Zulu Boy is not a natural, incontestable formation but rather a role to be played.

Outside court, a supporter poses in reference to the pro-Zuma song “Letha Mshini Wami” (Give me my gun).

However Sanders argued that even as the language is in the mouths of its most persuasive, fluent speakers (Zuma spoke in Zulu throughout the trial) the identity described by the name Zulu is a fractured, incomplete one – something acquired, entered into, though also presented contradictorily as solid and homogenous. Drawing on court records and Zulu newspapers, Sanders demonstrated that Zuma’s comments at his trial were rather more complicated than the NYT’s report suggested. According to the court records quoted by Sanders, Zuma said: “I said to myself I know as we grew up and in Zulu culture you do not just leave a woman in that situation because if you do she may even have you arrested and say that you are a rapist.” The fear, located here in Zulu culture, of arrest on an unfair rape charge because of a woman’s anger at not having sex is very different to the idea that not having sex with a woman in such a situation is thought to be ‘tantamount to rape’ in Zulu culture, as the Times reported.

But in Sanders’ reading such comments revealed the fault lines in the “phallic Zulu culture” apparently “exonerated” alongside Zuma himself. In attributing the fear of female vengeance to the lessons he learnt from culture as a child (‘as we grew up’), Zuma allows the teaching of that culture to be opened up to question and to debate. Moreover, Sanders argued, Zulu culture is presented in Zuma’s own words as something which is learnt and something which he did learn, in his youth. There was a point at which, it seems, he was not 100% Zulu Boy. In this way, less complete engagements with Zulu – engagements less certain of their authenticity, engagements like Sanders’ own readings of Zulu – are shown not just to be possible but to be all that is possible, even for Zuma.

Benjamin Poore is a third-year PhD student in the Department of English, Queen Mary College, University of London, writing an AHRC-funded project on the life of Anglo-Pakistani psychoanalyst Masud Khan. His research explores the importance of modernist culture and criticism in his writing of psychoanalytic theory, and in his project of self-fashioning as an émigré in postwar London. He teaches critical theory and postcolonial literatures at QMUL. Benjamin has presented at conferences in Europe and the United States, and has book chapters and reviews forthcoming in 2013.

Emily Hogg is in the third year of an AHRC-funded PhD in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London. The project considers international discourses of human rights and African women’s writing. It focuses particularly on the ways the representations of Uganda in global human rights discourse relate to, or are mediated by, diverse forms of women’s writing from the country.

Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, delivered a paper entitled “100% Zulu Boy: Judging Jacob Zuma, Obiter Dicta”, at an event hosted by the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, on 23 January 2013.

With thanks from AiW to Andrew Van der Vlies, QMUL.

AiW Guest Dzekashu MacViban

In December 2012, I travelled to Nairobi for the 2012 Kwani? Litfest as part of the Goethe Institut’s pan-African exchange programme ‘Moving Africa’. Of the various panels and readings I attended four stood out: our Moving Africa reading, Kojo Laing in conversation, Nawal El Saadawi’s talk and Helon Habila’s lecture on the African novel.

Who’d have thought that an incongruous word like [self]-censorship would have been present at the Kwani? Litfest?  During the Moving Africa reading at the Goethe-Institut, our moderator made a comment about literary gangsterism and swear words, saying that some schools of thought did not tolerate those types of words in writing. When we were asked to react to that, Namibian writer Sylvia Schlettwein had the most appropriate response – ‘Bullshit’. It goes without saying that censorship always hangs above writers like a sword of Damocles, yet the Kwani? Litfest themed around ‘Conversations with the Horn’, opened up this perennial question to different experiences and perspectives. I couldn’t help reflect that even if the institutions that censor are no longer as rigorous as they used to be, writers are called upon to exercise self-censorship, and with censorship comes the death of freedom of expression. As Kojo Laing compelling argued – a writer should be honest in his writing and write the way he thinks, not the way institutions expect a writer to write. Thus it is the place of the writer to break taboos and banalize them in writing.

Helon Habila’s lecture on the African novel highlighted what he felt were the current trends in African fiction, mentioning ecology and the diaspora. He commented that many newly released and forthcoming books, including Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and We Need New Names by No Violet Bulawayo, focus on the diaspora. Could this be an indicator that more and more African writers are moving to the diaspora? Or that foreign publishers are more interested in stories about the diaspora? Indeed, this phenomenon is decried by Joyce Ashuntantang in a recent interview for Bakwa Magazine in which she says ‘As long as foreign publishers remain the mid-wives of our stories, they will keep determining the nature of these stories.’

Kojo Laing and Johannes Hossfeld (Director of the Goethe Institut, Nairobi)

Hearing them talk at Litfest, I noticed some striking parallels between the experiences of writers Kojo Laing and Nawal El Saadawi. Firstly, they both had an intuitive Cartesian logic which led them to question, and later dismiss the role of religion in their lives. Secondly, they became politically aware very early in their lives. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, their writing has cost them a lot. How phenomenal it would have been to hear these two writers in dialogue; they both challenge one to see the world differently.

Yet for me, the experience of travelling to Nairobi for the Kwani? Litfest was about so much more than panels and readings. It was the hours spent in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport ignored by immigration officials, waiting for authorization to enter the country. It was literary conversations while waiting in the airport with Awes Ahmed Osman, a Sweden-based Somali writer scheduled to appear at the festival, who was denied entry to Kenya. It was Helon Habila advising me that Wasafiri is a good ‘home’ for my fiction. It was the continual crash course in Cameroonian history and contemporary politics I had to give to explain myself as an Anglophone writer and editor from Cameroon. It was the Nairobi night life. All this, now waiting to be brought to life in the name of faction.

Dzekashu MacViban is the founding editor of Bakwa Magazine and the author of a poetry collection titled Scions of the Malcontent. In 2012 he participated in the Kwani? Litfest in Nairobi as part of the Moving Africa Program. His work has featured in Wasafiri, and Fashizblack among other places and is forthcoming in the Ann Arbor Review. He lives in Yaoundé and is working on a collection of short fiction. His work has been translated into Spanish and Japanese.

You can read more reflections on the 2012 Kwani? Litfest from Dzekashu and other Moving Africa participants at the Goethe Institut’s Moving Africa blog.

AiW Guest Ruth Bush

This lively one day event took place in London at Senate House on 20 October 2012, was led by Dr Caroline Davis (Oxford Brookes) and brought together a number of researchers working in the broad area of African print cultures and book history. It was funded and co-organised by the Institute for English Studies, the Department of English at the Open University and the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies (OICPS) at Oxford Brookes University.

The symposium juxtaposed two deliberately open-ended and perennial questions: how to locate Africa and how to define the book? In response, the event presented research on book and print culture in Africa across an impressive range in time and regional focus: from Xhosa praise poetry to Yoruba newspaper serials; from South African University Presses to literary prize culture in francophone West Africa. All of the papers showed the vital contribution that African literary studies can make to the central ideas and preoccupations of book history.

David Johnson’s (Open University) opening paper suggested that the definition of South African nationhood in published books was invariably compromised by actual conditions of production and reception in the early twentieth century. His research pointed to ways in which empirical research could nuance Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the relationship between print capitalism and nation-building. Anderson’s thesis was put further into relief by Karin Barber’s paper on The Life Story of Me, Segilola, by I.B. Thomas, the first novel in Yoruba, originally serialised in Akebe Eko (The Lagos Herald) in 1929-1930 – an epistolary tale of a repentant prostitute. Slow and unreliable rail networks together with uneven levels of literacy prevented the daily rhythm of reading any newspaper. Instead, Barber set out the ways in which Thomas’ book functioned as a repository for certain written forms of Yoruba, crystallised into a kind of monument to the independence of Yoruba culture in counterpoint to oral forms and ephemeral print cultures.

Jeff Opland’s (SOAS) paper on Xhosa praise poetry showed how the book’s negative associations (the Xhosa term for book remains incwadi or “poisonous bulb”) emerged through its associations with “the bible and the musket” of colonial incursion. Describing his (re-)publications of this literature after extensive archival work, Opland also demonstrated how print has been accommodated and assimilated within contemporary Xhosa culture. In the discussion that followed, dominant ideas on orality and print in the work of Martin McLuhan and Walter Ong among others were tested and refuted in the light of literary-historical scholarship that helpfully complicates definitions of “the book”, as well as “the book in Africa”.

Other papers explored a range of topics: the significant, yet little-known journal, New Writing in Zambia (1964-75); South African reading publics of the nineteenth century; South African University Presses; the colonial heritage of the Grand Prix d’Afrique noire; and use of googlegroups to enable and generate new writing during the 2007 election crisis in Kenya. The day concluded with a panel consisting of two leading publishers of African writing, James Currey and Becky Ayebia Clarke. Currey drew on his life’s work as a publisher, reflecting on the intertwined histories of British and African publishing as put forward in his 2009 Africa Writes Back. Becky Clarke drew on her experiences of working as an editor and setting up Ayebia, and evoked the important question of state support for book publishing. Lastly, Peter McDonald (Oxford University) suggested ways in which key terms of literary analysis: author, reader, book, publisher, orality, print, modernity are usefully put under pressure by new forms of archival and empirical research in book history.

We can look forward to an edited volume of proceedings from this event in 2014.

Ruth Bush is Research Fellow in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Westminster, London and Bookman Researcher at the George Padmore Institute, London. She recently completed her DPhil thesis entitled “Publishing sub-Saharan Africa in Paris, 1945–67” at Wolfson College, Oxford.

AiW Guest Rebecca Jones

Is memory imagination or plagiarism? Are artists curators or creators of memory? Is memory determined by audience? Do we remember or embroider? – these were some of the questions we sought to explore in a one-day conference and workshop called Sites of Memory, at the University of Birmingham on February 17^th 2013.

Osun Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria

The conference was the first in a series of postgraduate research conferences and workshops we’re hosting this year, the next being ‘Going Local: African Texts and Cultures’ on May 27^th 2013. Sites of Memory was motivated by our desire to explore in detail a topic that lurks within a great deal of arts and humanities research, including our own. Though the name of the conference plays on Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de memoire,’ the conference was designed not to pay homage to Nora in particular, but to explore the relationship between ‘sites’ (texts, objects, bodies) and memory more broadly.

Africanist Dr Jan-Georg Deutsch from Oxford University opened the conference with a discussion of remembrance at three sites of slave memory in East Africa, and, reflecting on the constant re-constitution of memory, insisted “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”. The following twelve papers from researchers from institutions across the UK and Ireland explored the way memory works in monuments, film, literature, Ancient Egyptian graffiti, language and even in the nostalgic practices of home bread baking.

Though Tom Penfold and I, the organisers of the conference, are post-graduates based in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, the conference was designed to go beyond African Studies, and so was both inter-disciplinary and global in scope. Nonetheless, the day retained a strongly Africanist flavour, with two papers exploring African sites of memory (in Timbuktu and Ancient Egypt), and a number of workshops led by Africanist scholars. It was interesting to see how African Studies could be made an integral part of a conference without the conference being explicitly Africanist; it’d be exciting in future to see African Studies being more mainstream in this way – and Europe provincialized – in other conferences.

We also wanted to experiment with ways of encouraging participation in the conference beyond the traditional speaker-audience format. To this end, we held workshops in the afternoon, led by senior academic researchers and artists working across a variety of disciplines: Dr Jonathan Reinarz, Professor Karin Barber, Dr Stewart Brown, Joanna Rossiter and Dr Benedetta Rossi. They encouraged all participants, not just those who had given papers, to discuss each other’s ideas about memory. Dr Jonathan Reinarz, Director of the History of Medicine unit at the University of Birmingham, took his group on an informal tour of the University of Birmingham’s Lapworth Museum of Geology, while Joanna Rossiter, author of the novel The Sea Change, led a creative writing workshop, asking participants to think about ways of narrating their own memories. Feedback suggests the participants found these workshops useful, and a different way of engaging with the ideas presented in the more traditional panels-based part of the conference, so we hope to build on this format further in our next conference, ‘Going Local’.

We also tweeted 15,000 characters’ worth of tweets about the conference, live-tweeting from our account @SitesofMemory. We were a little sceptical as to whether this would be anything more than a novelty. But in fact, it has created an archive of snippets of each speaker’s papers, and a number of speakers, audience members and other interested people interacted with us during the day. Again, this is something we’d like to build on for ‘Going Local’ (follow our account @GoingLocal now if you’re interested), and we’d be eager to hear your thoughts on how Twitter and other social media can be used effectively during conferences, or whether you think they’re just a gimmick?

Professor Philip Schwyzer from the University of Exeter concluded the day with a talk on ‘Putting the Past in its Place’, drawing on his timely research on the remains of Richard III, and their deployment as a site of cultural memory. Overall, Sites of Memory suggested that memory is more a comment on the future than the past. Though Jan-Georg Deutsch was right to question, in a comment to the audience after the morning’s papers, why there has been an explosion of interest in memory studies, and whether papers as disparate as those we heard that morning really had anything to say to each other, the conference also showed that it is possible to read texts alongside bodies and objects, without needing too much translation between disciplines and ways of reading. It also left us wondering whether there are ‘Africanist’ ways of reading sites (and texts) of memory, or whether we are always understanding memory in the implicitly global (Western?) frameworks we explored during the conference.

The call for papers for the next conference in our series, ‘Going Local: African Texts and Cultures’, is open now, and we’d like to strongly encourage all readers of Africa in Words to consider submitting a paper. We’ll be looking at the way the ‘local’ is constituted in African texts and cultures, and how/whether we can use the ‘local’ as a theoretical framework. The closing date for submissions for ‘Going Local’ is April 15^th. Please check our website goinglocalconference.wordpress.com for more information.

Rebecca Jones is a doctoral student at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham , where she is researching Yoruba-and English-language  travel writing in Nigeria from the early twentieth century to the present day. Her doctoral research spans newspapers, novels, local history  writing and internet-based travelogues. She is also a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on a project looking at everyday religious encounters, social identities and tolerance in southwest Nigeria. She spends a serious amount of time watching Nollywood films in the name of  “language training”.

AiW Guest Steve Haines

‘Looking for Transwonderland’ by Noo Saro-Wiwa

Working in the world of ‘international development’ I’m easily tempted to measure a country by metrics and indices.  What interests me is the percentage of the population with access to safe drinking water, the primary school enrolment rate – with particular reference to the proportion of girls in education – and the under 5 mortality rate as a proportion of 1,000 live births.

Crucial though these measurements are to assessing the scale of the issues, they shed little light on the causes.  Research reports lump together the nuance and understanding of individuals, their identity, values and their motivations, with reference to ‘cultural factors’ or ‘context’, in an unexplained classification similar to ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘other’.  And this is how mistakes are made.

So when a colleague asked for a guidebook to Nigeria, I recommended Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland. It wasn’t going to be very helpful for details of affordable places to stay (though Noo does offer warnings of her hotel in Bauchi State: “a lizard dropping rested beneath my blanket … the glass louvered windows – those tired vestiges of 1970s architecture – wouldn’t open or close fully … All this for a relatively ritzy N6,250 per night”), but the insight Noo gives does challenge our collective world view of the country.

The narrative in Looking for Transwonderland is a physical journey of place – Noo travels through the country to uncover mountain top ancient kingdoms, anodyne administrative capitals, and the vibrant jagga jagga of Lagos.  It is set against a history of peoples who would not recognise the borders of Nigeria, and whose artefacts rival the statues of Ancient Greece and the monoliths of Stonehenge – even if they don’t benefit from the same care and attention.  The book also embeds Nigeria’s history in an emotional landscape, “Slavery is seemingly another of those traumas that falls within our nations high pain threshold.  We still don’t fully understand its effects on our society and psyche”.  Noo’s Nigerian companions perversely envy the lives of African Americans.

She journeys in her perception of a country shaped by the hopes of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered by the then government for his campaigning against corruption and the environmental degradation caused by oil drilling, and is disappointed at how little has changed: “yet Nigeria for all its sapphire rivers and weddings and apes, couldn’t seduce me fully when all roads snaked back to corruption, the rottenness my father fought against and cause he died for”.  She finds her brother Ken Junior has taken on their father’s identity, just as he had taken on the family business, returning to Nigeria “after circumstances elbowed him off his chosen life path”.  To Noo, “my brother was now an oga, complete with minions and authority and responsibilities; a more laid back incarnation of our father”.

Throughout, Noo’s punctuates the journey with vignettes that for me speak to how the ‘literary’ can bring alive the idiosyncrasies of people and place: phone calls with persistent young men seeking Sugar Mummies, a dog show of savage looking mutts at a university, and sleepwalking relatives haunted by spirits – all of which somehow makes sense in the circumstances.  Nollywood films become an analogy for the country – rambling, exaggerated and easily criticised for their poor production values, but genuine and reflective of a national narrative seeking to share its own values and identity rather than measure itself against a Western yardstick.

Transwonderland itself is an amusement park built in the late eighties to attract tourists, but is now a “forlorn landscape of motionless machinery”.  The theme park speaks to me about the good intentions of ‘development’, but highlights the failings of applying Western concept of values of fun, to Nigeria where “downtime usually involves sitting sedately on white plastic chairs, eating food and dancing a little” (sure enough, she meets a group of people sitting on plastic chairs, eating jollof rice, outside of the park).

Looking for Transwonderland is a journey of identity and memory seen through the eyes of a person not trying to only understand, but to identify with, Nigeria.  Growing up in the UK, Nigeria was for Noo the opposite of the world she knew and wanted: “having to spend those two months in my unglamorous, godforsaken motherland with its penchant for noise and disorder felt like a punishment”.  Travelling on the main form of public transport: the ‘matatu’ minibus, Noo’s clothes and her accent mark her out from her fellow travellers, shifting her identity between Nigerian and Diaspora and Western.  Narrating this, she raises questions around both self-perception and the perceptions of others of ‘identity’, causing the reader to question their own frames of thinking.  I was reminded here of an equally brilliant book: Gary Younge’s No Place Like Home.  As a Briton by birth with Barbadian parents, he travels through the deep south of the United States, where his identity is absorbed into racial history, by both black and white, until he opens his mouth and begins to speak.

Illustration by Rod Hunt commissioned by Granta for the cover of ‘Looking for Transwonderland’

Noo is conscious that the nuance and understanding of Nigeria is lost to the outside world. “From a foreigners point of view,” Noo explains, “the Bini, Yoroboa, Ogoni, Igbo and Hausa are all the same; we’re all Nigerians, demoted by modern-day corruption – that great equaliser – to bit-players wading in a sea of rubbish and dereliction”.  Perhaps the strongest message I take away from this book is that the confused categories of ‘culture’ and ‘context’ can become a way of brushing under the carpet a failure of understanding.  I think in ‘international development’ we need to reflect on this, and do more to understand nuance and perceptions of self-identity, neither promoting a rosy or a bleak view, but unearthing and questioning our own assumptions.  In any ‘development’ discourse, we should dig deeper.  Alongside the world view of the ‘CIA Factbook’, BBC and ‘The Economist’, we need to pay a bit more attention to what these statistics don’t tell us and consider how we might draw reflections from a broader range of literature into our work.

Steve is Mobilisation Director at Save the Children International for EVERY ONE www.everyone.org  – Save the Children’s campaign to save children’s lives. He is also the husband of AiW co-founder Kate Haines.

Ipanema beach, in Rio de Janeiro

AiW Guest Gabriel Improta

I’m a musician and a social scientist from Rio de Janeiro and I am researching what it means to “make a living from music” in this city. For this research, I have adopted a comparative perspective between the activities of a professional musician today with those from the 1960s – the decade in which Bossa Nova and Sambajazz flourished. These styles brought Brazilian music to the world, and became an important channel of production for local musicians like Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, João Donato, Edison Machado, Raul de Souza and Sérgio Mendes, among many others. You could say that these musicians renewed their Brazilian identities through the tradition of samba, the national rhythm characteristic of Brazil whose origins date to the early decades of the twentieth century, when music was first considered a central element in the construction of Brazilian identity.

These musicians created a “modern” Samba in line with international musical innovation of the post-war period nurtured by the growth of cultural industries, in a context of increased social mobilisation for equal rights and sexual liberation. Both Samba and Sambajazz can be considered movements historically linked to the incorporation of freed slaves in the spheres of young American societies. These styles were part of the construction of a black culture and a black music. These movements were musical rehearsals of this social transformation. However, both the Bossa Nova and the Sambajazz were strongly criticised by nationalists in Brazil. Critics argued that musicians had suffered too much “influence of Jazz,” an indication of their “alienation” from the national reality. According to the criticisms, Brazil was a country of unique features (such as extreme social inequality), with social and political contexts that differed completely from those of other countries.

Since at least the 1920s, Brazilian musicians have played foxes, salsas and tangos, influenced by other Latin-American countries. And this practice never interfered with its relevance in the international scenario nor with its promotion of the cultural wealth of the country, both domestically and abroad. Rather, one might say that the strength of the many styles practiced in Brazil (be it Jazz, Dub or Samba) derives precisely from this ability of hybridisation with diverse forms of music-making, without losing its congruence with the local context. Moreover, this is not a particular Brazilian national feature, since the same phenomena can be observed in other countries.

For instance, in the Brazilian musical scenario, some of the most iconic musicians such as Pixinguinha, Carmen Miranda and Antonio Carlos Jobim were systematically accused of being “Americanized”; of having suffered too much “influence of Jazz.” And, indeed, they had; in the same way that American jazz musicians were influenced by Bossa Nova and Salsa, with beneficial results. This way of seeing, making and listening to music – at the confluence of several encounters – is the basis of Samba, Jazz, Tango and many other American and African rhythms. This practice, therefore, is both hybrid and transnational.

In this sense, Paul Gilroy coined the concept of black Atlantic as an alternative approach to nationalist theories about the complex relationships that occur within black cultures interconnected by the Atlantic. He sees this network as an open, multiple and rhizomatic unit – as the concept of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (2009) –, and criticized the “unthinking assumption that cultures always flow in patterns corresponding to the borders of essentially homogeneous nation-states ” (in the Introduction to the Brazilian version of the book).

Gilroy shows black intellectual production in this context as a “counterculture of modernity” (i.e. a practice rather than a merely intellectual ”counter-discourse”). And within this context, he argues, music should be understood as a “performatic art”, and as the strongest means of expression of this culture, instead of focusing only on its rational “textuality”. Gilroy attaches importance, therefore, not only to the analysis of the spoken and textual discourse, but also, and mainly, to the musical performance which would be particularly developed in the black Atlantic cultures.

Gilroy also provides an outlet for the “fruitless and interdependent” discussion between essentialists – those who claim that black culture have essential , or traditional, origins in Africa – and anti-essentialists, those who deny the possibility of a black culture unit, and neglect the strength acquired by this movement. The author then proposes what he calls anti-antiessencialism, which allows us an alternative understanding of a black culture unit without falling into superficial essentialism (and its excluding and frustrating search for a ‘real’ home that withholds a racial essence).

When looking at the cultural practices of the black Atlantic, Gilroy called for focusing on music. He criticised the obsession with the body of slaves and their descendants;  the result of a dichotomous (and Western) approach to the relation between body and mind. This dichotomy, he explains, leads to the understanding of black music (and dance) as the lowest form of art because it would be solely physical and, therefore, never intellectual. Often, music — and especially black music — is understood as a “spontaneous” or “natural” manifestation, produced by an innate talent linked to race or nationality.

Paul Gilroy offers a valuable perspective of contemporary Western music, because it allows us to think of it in a context of intense transnational flows that we live today; it approaches globalization as a process that was gradually built in the last centuries throughout the Atlantic. This process takes place beyond the frames of nationalist ideologies, which are becoming less crucial in the lives of ordinary people. Ordinary people who, like slaves and their descendants, never have been able to dictate the cultural traits of nation, as economic and intellectual elites try to accomplish in America.This naturalization of musicality, which in reality was densely crafted as “black music”, ignores the rich genealogy of the entire process of construction of black music; a process operated by musicians of diverse backgrounds and historical periods, in the same way that characterized the making of Jazz and Samba. This complex process of invention of a black Atlantic music included a diversity of people such as the North-American composer and pianist Duke Ellington or Brazilian Sambajazz trombonist Raul de Souza mentioned by Gilroy (in the introduction to the Brazilian edition of his book) as an important reference in his youth. Another example is the Brazilian pop star Jorge Benjor, whose “spontaneous” style approximate his music to Sambajazz, Blues, and why not, to Miles Davis, as in the album Kind of Blue (1959), a paradigm in modern jazz.

Gabriel Improta is a Brazilian musician and social scientist. He is an accomplished arranger, composer and guitar player. Besides his two solo cds, Improta has played and recorded with established musicians such as Caetano Veloso, Roberto Carlos, Hermeto Paschoal, Paulo Moura, Armandinho, Francis Hime, Jaques Morelenbaum and Elza Soares. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro to a family of musicians, Improta obtained an MA in music composition from the Federal University UNIRIO (2007) and is currently studying a PhD in social sciences at PUC-RJ, in Rio de Janeiro. After reading his post, you can listen some of his musical-intellectual production in this page.

This post is part of the series Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. Click here to read the first post of the series and here to read the second.

The book “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness” written by Paul Gilroy is extremely insightful to understand music in relationship to alterity and politics. Even though scholars citing Gilroy are usually studying “black culture”, it is possible to find in his text ideas that can help anyone working with cultural analysis. In my case I’m studying carioca funk music, an electronic music produced in Brazil, initially in Rio de Janeiro, inspired by the beats of Miami bass. Carioca funk music certainly derives from black music, this link is easy to verify since the parties that preceded the bailes of carioca funk were part of a broader movement called “Black Rio”. One of the most important debates around funk is whether it represents the supposedly “miscegenation” of Brazilian society or black culture. Even though this question cannot be properly answered in here, I believe Gilroy’s book provide important tools in order to tackle the issue. I will emphasize in this text three different lessons that I believe are possible to be extracted from Gilroy’s books. Because my main field of concern as a researcher is music, this dimension is emphasized throughout the text. However, culture is understood here as a web weaved by different kinds of performances, music is only one of these different ways of acting.

Dj Dollores singing in Brasil Central Station (Rio de Janeiro – Brazil)

The third chapter of the book Black Atlantic introduce some very important guidelines to research into culture, specially concerning the intersection between politics and scientific knowledge. The first lesson has to do with the argument put forward by Gilroy that music “can be used to challenge language and writing as preeminent expressions of human consciousness.” Black music provides a fruitful context to discuss politics beyond the so-called “Habermasian dialogue,” based on a clear and rational exchange of ideas seeking the solution of problems. More than providing instrumental tools to politics, even though this is also a possibility, music provides an environment where politics and sociality are performed and enacted. For Gilroy, music, dances, and different performances crossing the Atlantic, and associated to blackness, are at the same time cultural and political statements. One of the main arguments in the book “The Black Atlantic” is related to the idea of a “double consciousness” of black expressions encompassing rationalistic and pre-modern assumptions. Therefore, in order to understand this situation of ambiguity, it is indispensable to consider more than discursive elements. Otherwise, there is the risk of perpetuating ethnocentric prejudices. By departing from exclusively textual and discursive analysis, the attention of the researcher should turn to more dramaturgical dimensions, such as, gestures, dances, and clothing.

Mc Leonardo singing in Cúpula dos Povos (Rio de Janeiro – Brazil)

The second important lesson to be considered in this post is the emphasis on the interstices and movements across boundaries. This is actually one of the main arguments in the book, as the title “The Black Atlantic” suggests. Gilroy’s attention is directed to the Atlantic Ocean and the middle passage, a name for the routes of slave trade from the continent of Africa to the Americas.  However, the notion of boundaries is not referring exclusively to geographical boundaries, but to cultural boundaries as well. This attention on movements highlights the importance of a relational sociology. But, what does it mean a relational approach? It means shedding light on exchanges, appropriations, and feedbacks. It is a simple assumption: to understand social groups we should start by looking on how they become what they are, and not by presupposing their existence. The third “lesson” to be highlighted from the third chapter of the book “The Black Atlantic” regards the relationship between intellectuals and art. The “invented traditions” of black expressions considered by Gilroy are supported by what he calls a “caste” of “organic intellectuals”. Therefore, to understand these expressions, the almost automatic association of literacy and intellectuality should be discarded. Intellectuals might possess vast amounts of knowledge and also different ways of expressing this knowledge. Gilroy points to the existence of black intellectuals that escape the classification within the two roles identified by Bauman: the legislator and the interpreter. Therefore, this intellectual is not acting as a legislator, trying to impose a single truth, but he is also not only compromised with mediation and translation. This intellectual is considered by Gilroy the keeper of a certain body of knowledge.

Children dancing Funk at Cantagalo (Rio de Janeiro -Brazil)

Those intellectuals may also help to create and reinforce important imaginaries for the constitution of national cohesion. Therefore, understanding nation’s constitution almost exclusively through “print culture”, as in Anderson’s book “Imagined Communities”, is a very partial account. The artists and intellectuals considered by Gilroy are political beings, but not necessarily and exclusively through spoken, sung or written words.  Even though there is not enough space to explore all the implications of Gilroy’s work in integrating aesthetics, politics and culture, I hope this text accomplished at least to synthesize some of his ideas that helped me a lot to think about my academic practices. The ideas being presented here are also a path to escape from the simplistic question of whether funk represents more “miscegenation” or blackness. Both options bring assumptions that cannot be ignored. First of all, “miscegenation” is already a racial classification, and I do not believe it is accurate to talk about “races” being mixed through culture. However, to say that funk represents blackness as a substantive identity is not possible as well. In order to understand funk’s connections with black culture it is crucial to bring funk’s history to the fore. But, it is also indispensable to keep track of cultural practices and exchanges that maintain repertoires and performances constructing blackness. Bruno Muniz is a social scientist currently doing a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He studies funk movement and collaborations set by funkeiros with various actors of civil society and the state. In his spare time, Muniz also enjoys making music. His last musical project was called Laranja Dub, marked by the mixture of dub, reggae and rock. To listen to Laranja Dub click here.

This post is part of the series Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. Click here to read the first post of the series, here to read the second and here to read the third

AiW Guest Tiago C. Fernandes

SIDE A: FELA KUTI

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was born in 1938 in the city of Abeokuta, south-eastern Nigeria, to a Yoruba family. At twenty, he moved to London, where he had the opportunity to study at Trinity College of Music and formed his first band, the Koola Lobitos, which was very influenced by highlife, a popular rhythm in West Africa from the early twentieth century.

Returning to Lagos in 1963, Fela Kuti sought to assimilate local rhythms, integrating them with soul music (James Brown) and jazz (Miles Davis and John Coltrane), establishing a new genre afrobeat, which reached certain notoriety in the regional circuits. In 1969, the band settled for ten months in the United States, where Fela matured his political awareness, especially through the influence of Sandra Smith, a Black Panther militant whom he dated.

The American experience resulted in a general reorientation of his career: more elaborate lyrics and themes; claims of Africanness; and inseparability between artistic expression and political statements were some of new features acquired by the band in the United States. After moving back to Nigeria, the band was renamed Afrika 70 and began an extraordinary musical production. Their music was strongly critical towards authoritarian governments, dictatorial political regimes, and powerful cultural industry in general, which caused him serious consequences: arrests, demands, defamatory campaigns and a military invasion of his “Kalakuta Republic” which culminated with violent assaults to his companions and family.

Video: Sorrow, tears and blood

His first album was produced in 1971 and was part of an independent production system, which was the only way to meet his demands of frequent releases.

SIDE B: BOB MARLEY

Robert Nesta Marley was born in 1945 in Saint Ann, Jamaica’s northern region, the same place as Marcus Garvey, pioneer of pan-Africanist movement. Son of a military white man and a young black girl, Marley lived with his mother in Trenchtown, the main slum of Kingston. In 1963, Marley founded The Wailing Wailers with his friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh. Reggae was already prominent amongst the prolific music market of the small Caribbean island. However The Wailers projected it in the international scenario.

One of the constitutive pillars of reggae is the Rastafarian ideology: a religious movement influenced by Marcus Garvey’s ideas, which has its own reading of the Bible, and recognizes the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) as the prophet and liberator of black people. In the Rastafarian ideology – assimilated by Marley in his youth – a diasporic condition emerged, articulating postcolonial identities, Caribbean folk traditions, memories of resistance over slavery and the evocation of African origins.

Video: EXODUS

Marley released twelve studio albums and four live albums between 1965 and 1983, and was raised to the category of international pop icon, recognized around the world for the quality of his compositions and the strength of their messages.

Rehearsing jam sessions through history: between the Caribbean and Atlantic Africa

The analogous colonial and postcolonial context between Jamaica and Nigeria provided the necessary elements for a dialogue through the Atlantic: both countries were under British domination, both became independent almost at the same time (in 1958 and 1960 respectively) and both were scenario of strong anti-establishment campaigns, along with the Unites States and other countries in the America and Africa.

There are three features of these anti-establishment movements that formed and influenced Kuti and Marley: the anti-imperialist discourse that permeated the liberation movements in Africa and Asia; the civil rights struggles in the United States and the subsequent radicalization of the black movements symbolized in the slogan ‘black power’; and alternative ways of development advocated by some new independent African governments.

Both Marley and Kuti synthesized issues of their time in their music and activism and their production influenced and intervened uniquely in the artistic and political scenario of their generation. Fela Kuti had a more aggressive and explicit style than Bob Marley. In his lyrics, he depicted the various political clashes he was involved during his life. Marley, on the other hand, used a more metaphorical language, especially through references to Rastafarian ideology. Such stylistic choices are clearly reflected in the rhythmic and melodic styles of the afrobeat and reggae, and the difference is easily noticeable.

The concept of Black Atlantic presented by Paul Gilroy emerges as a key reference in the recent literature to analyze the Atlantic as a space of historical affirmation of subaltern populations, providing the framework for a comprehensive analysis of these and many other manifestations.

The Black Atlantic is understood here as a geo-historical dimension, in which the epicentres are in Lagos and Kingston. This supranational approach introduces a perspective of modernity from the Afro-subalternity; a history built by numerous transatlantic trajectories in which the subjects (individual and collective) recreate and interchange the most diverse experiences.

The language that unifies this wide and diverse space is fundamentally music, according to Gilroy: “I wish to propose that the sharing of black cultural forms post-slavery is addressed through issues that converge in the analysis of black music and the social relations that sustain it. A particularly valuable procedure for this is provided by the distinctive patterns of language use that characterize the contrasting populations of the modern and Western African diaspora”.

Both Kuti and Marley developed works of unquestionable artistic value, which transcended their aesthetic dimension. Music is assumed as a mission and it is intentionally designed to engage with theoretical and political debates. Pamphlets, poetry, performance, politics, sexuality, religious and mystical appeal are intertwined and superimposed according to the occasion. If the ports have been throughout history crossing points where the oppressed classes and their culture circulated more freely, maybe that’s a good metaphor for understanding the position of Fela Kuti and Bob Marley in the Black Atlantic.

Tiago C. Fernandes is a historian with a MA in Social Work. His previous researches were related to the praxis of indigenous movements in Latin America. Last year he elaborated a PhD research project on the work and life of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti, using the concepts of diaspora and Black Atlantic. He lives in Niteroi (Rio de Janeiro – Brazil) and works at Alexandre de Gusmão Foundation, an institution linked to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brazil.

AiW Guest Gbemisola Abiola.

Tope Folarin’s Miracle depicts the prevailing belief in Christian supernaturalism, and the apparent promise of prosperity it holds for the African adherent, as the means of achieving success in the Diasporas. While the story is set in a church in America, it may just as well be located in any of the modern day Pentecostal churches in Nigeria, particularly those found in the South Western region. The predominant thematic leaning of the story is an all too familiar one, especially for a reader who is well acquainted with the Pentecostal style of worship and its different brands of expression. As the story interrogates the link between faith and prosperity – prosperity in its material and non material sense – one finds the narrator (or author?) negotiating the divide between belief and unbelief.

Transition Issue 109, where Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ was published.

The story balances on a platform of miracles: miracles to help get “jobs”, “green cards”, “good grades” and “kidneys”. This list is by no means exhaustive as the story indicates that parishioners need miracles to “forget the harsh rigidity of (their) lives” (p.74). Drawing from the nuances of the story one finds that these miracles are predicated on, or can only be acquired through, an exchange of belief. Whereas the object of belief in the larger view is God, a close up perspective points to the prophet as the subject of belief, one who is ascribed powers to heal and “perform miracles that were previously only possible in the pages of the bible” (p. 73). The earnestness expressed by the parishioners to receive their portions of miracles demonstrates how the concept of faith or belief is very far removed from being a private act of veneration, becoming instead a public display of spirituality.

Caught in this mix, the narrator is singled out for a miracle to cure his short-sight.  In the following medley of events, one finds the story strewn with signposts of hope as the atmosphere is charged with expectation. For the reader, the dramatic urgency with which the miracle is described makes one anticipate that the spectacular will indeed happen and the happy ending, which makes a story settle well in the mind, will occur. Against this expectation Folarin creates a twist, as the narrator’s sight is restored not by a miraculous act, but by the same glasses which had previously aided his sight. The language in which this is told has a playful and vivid descriptiveness to it that is laced with humour and a healthy dose of sarcasm.  Ultimately the experience opens the narrator’s eyes to miracles to believe in within his own lived experience; his family have “remained together despite the terror of (his) mother’s abrupt departure” (p. 82). To be sure this opens up the question not only of what a miracle is, but also questions the meaning of faith or belief itself. Perhaps the author is relating on a sub-conscious level with other young Nigerians who are having conversations about these concepts and interrogating how valid they are to modern life. While this does not, for the most part indicate that they have shed off their belief, for that is the way many have been socialized, what is striking is their willingness to bring their doubts and concerns about these subjects to the public space. Do they get answers? Well, that is a different matter altogether.

Tope Folarin

The story is swathed in familiar images that define Pentecostal churches and their feisty preachers and prophets. And of course there are malevolent spirits. Just as people believe that a Psychic is capable of communicating with the dead and exorcising a haunted house of its ghostly occupants, the prophet is believed to possess the ability to detect these malevolent spirits and command their exit; spirits whose sole purpose it is to impede the effecting of a miracle or the attainment of success.  Interestingly, both the prophet and the parishioners consider their faith as superior to the malevolent spirits that they believe control economic forces which threaten their prosperity and well-being, hence their confidence in miracles. Whereas it is fairly obvious that economic challenges occur in all places and are common to all people; simply put, life happens!

Some of my thumbs down moments in the story: for one, having the prayer and the whole of it too in the second paragraph, right in the beginning, felt to me alienating for potential readers. If you are not the pious type or one who can suffer the rituals of the religious, the temptation is to skim over it. This paragraph should have been made shorter:

We have come from all over North Texas to see him. Some of us have come from Oklahoma, some of us from Arkansas, a few of us from Louisiana, and a couple from New Mexico (p. 74)

Repeating information does not only slow down the tempo of the story, it also comes across as lazy and it is easy to assume that the author in seeking to fill up space had to repeat the same words.

Some of my favourite lines include:

We need our parents to understand that we are Americans. We need our children to understand that they are Nigerians. (p. 74)

This very simple line is laden with meaning; from the identity crisis suffered by different generations of Nigerians in the Diasporas, to disconnected relationships between parents and their children and vice versa. And:

We search our hearts for the seedlings of doubt…. Many of us have to cut through thickets of doubt before we can find our hearts again. (p. 75)

For most people this is familiar territory, as every so often life brings circumstances that challenge our self-confidence and sense of self-worth.

Folarin’s Miracle definitely engages in that ‘unsafe’ space of debates on the relevance of religion, especially in economically prosperous societies in the West. With arguments that claim that religion as the cause of all things evil, coupled with the skeptical stance on Christian supernaturalism and the religious viewed as blind, gullible, mindless followers – placing this story against this backdrop warms itself to the movement that demands verifiable evidence or an objective basis for establishing the necessity for religion.  Probably this makes him a bold writer or perhaps it reveals an attempt to repaint a well-worn theme in the colours of personal experience.

Gbemisola Abiola is a writer, editor and voice over artist based in Lagos. Her area of interest lies in the interconnection between literature, politics and history with a focus on how fiction shapes people’s perception of themselves and their representation in the world.  She is currently working on a PhD in the Department of English at the University of Lagos.  She loves to try new things, including trying new recipes and playing a guitar. She can reached by email at: gbemiabeow@gmail.com

This post is part of the first week of Blogging the Caine 2013, in which a group of writers organised by Aaron Bady write about the shortlist for this year’s Caine Prize.  Africa in Words will be posting on each of the shortlisted stories week by week.

Rebecca Jones has also written about Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ for Africa in Words, describing the story as a ‘thick stew, dense and tightly woven with images and words.’

Read other responses to Tope Folarin’s Miracle from:

• Beverley Nambozo at http://walkingdiplomat.blogspot.com

• Veronica Nkwocha at http://veronicankwocha.com

• KolaTubosun at http://nigerianstalk.org

• Ainehi Edoro at http://brittlepaper.com

• Aaron Bady at http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu

• Keguro Macharia at http://gukira.wordpress.com

• Scott Ross at http://backslashscott.wordpress.com

• Ben Laden at http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com

• Okwiri Oduor at http://okwiri.tumblr.com

• Kate Maxwell at http://skatemaxwell.wordpress.com

• Rebecca Jones for Africa in Words at http://africainwords.com

If you’d like to participate in ‘Blogging the Caine 2013′ email Aaron Bady (aaron AT thenewinquiry DOT com) or join the conversation here or on twitter (#caineprize).

AiW Guest Sylvia Gasana

Hauntingly beautiful!  Those are the two first words that come to mind when describing Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’.  I’m always very excited to read a story that has a title that instantly transports you. I don’t know about the rest of you, but titles play a big part in my book selection process.

‘Whispering Trees’, I repeat those words in my head over and over again, almost as if warming my mind up, preparing myself for a voyage.

The story opens up with the voice of Salim, a young Nigerian man, recounting his near death experience after being involved in a tragic car accident that claimed the life of his mother and his sight.  As we journey with Salim through his memories of early childhood, his hopes for the future and shattered dreams, his frustration at what his life is to become is almost palpable. Salim seems to have all but given up on life, but through the quiet devotion of his fiancée Faulata he finds the will to live again.  Yet just when you start to see the colour seep back into his story, Faulata leaves him and Salim’s life goes all dark again. His depression is so poignant, its almost irritating, to the point of making one want to scream out at him.

This is a story about the strength of the human soul and how the miracle of a gift can change the life of an individual forever. As we soon discover, Salim’s misfortune becomes a gift, a gift so beautiful and enchanting that any lingering feelings of pity or anger that we shared with Salim are instantly replaced with an acute sense of hope. In the three days Salim spends discovering his new life, he visits a place he loved to play in as a child, known as the ‘woods of the spirits’ or the ‘Whispering Trees’. It is in this place where so many of his memories were born, that he begins to understands that the loss of his sight has been replaced with a purpose in life so grand that it both scares and humbles him.

I myself am not a writer or an editor, so any praise or criticism I may have about Ibrahim’s story will not be about structure or style, but the sentiments I experienced in reading it.

I love stories told through first-person narration; I almost feel like I’m right there with the person, living their ordeal their joy, and the best part is the feeling that they are sharing with you their most intimate thoughts and wishes. Ibrahim does this perfectly with Salim. He lets his characters politely introduce themselves to you, giving them all very distinct voices and strong personalities. But instead of using his authorial voice to describe his characters, he lets Salim do the talking, completely detaching himself from the story and instantly creating a bond between reader and character.

What I love about Ibrahim’s story is the manner in which he takes a rather hopeless situation, a true human tragedy, and turns it into something beautiful, leaving the reader with a renewed sense of hope.  Salim’s story feels so real, loss is all around us, yet as you read on you feel like you are in a constant dreamlike state, transported to another world. Is that not why we read? To travel? Well, I cant wait to take to see where the rest of Ibrahim’s storytelling will take me; my bags are packed and I’m raring to go.

Sylvia Gasana is currently studying for an MA in Media Practice for Development and Social Change at the University of Sussex.  She works as a communications professional and was part of the team behind Spoken Word Rwanda’s first literary festival in 2012.

You can read Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’ and the other shortlisted stories on the Caine Prize website.

This post is part of the third week of Blogging the Caine 2013, in which a group of writers organised by Aaron Bady write about the shortlist for this year’s Caine Prize.

Africa in Words will be posting on each of the shortlisted stories week by week.  Read:

Gbesmisola Abiola on Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ 

Rebecca Jones on Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ 

Katie Reid on Pede Hollist’s ‘Foreign Aid’

Read other responses to Abukar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’ from:

• Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva: http://walkingdiplomat.blogspot.com/2013/06/bev-is-blogging-caine-sometimes-all-it.html
• Jeffrey Zuckerman: http://airshipdaily.com/blog/the-caine-prizes-prehistories-abubakar-adam-ibrahims-the-whispering-trees

If you’d like to participate in ‘Blogging the Caine 2013′ email Aaron Bady (aaron AT thenewinquiry DOT com) or join the conversation here or on twitter (#caineprize).

AiW Guest Emylia Hall

Ghana Must Go (Penguin, UK edition)

One of my favourite quotes on the subject of the craft of writing comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Katherine Anne Porter: ‘Get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your imagination exactly as if you saw them in the flesh; and finally tell their story with all of the truth and tenderness and severity you are capable of.’ In Ghana Must Go, Taiye Selasi gives us a cast of characters who pull apart and come together to tell a story with an immaculate sense of truth, tenderness, and severity. As far-reaching as the novel feels, at its heart it is the story of one family; their sorrows and rupture, and their attempts at healing. 

The novel opens with the death of Kweku, an excellent surgeon who suffers a wicked injustice in his workplace, a catalyst that turns him into an outcast in his own life. Then there’s Fola, once his bell-bottom-denim wearing wife, law-school-graduate-turned-florist, irrevocably let-down, and letting down. Their children; intense, serious Olu, who follows in his father’s footsteps, while desperate to break out of his shadow; the beautiful, brilliant, broken twins, Taiwo and Kehinde; Sadie, the last child, the twenty-year-old baby, who never feels good enough, or smart enough, or shiny enough. The six members of this fractured family constantly seek to define and redefine one another and themselves throughout the novel, handing out roles and assuming them, shackling and being shackled. They are, we are told, a family who are ‘weightless’, ‘without gravity, completely unbound’ but the reader, and author, know better; on the page they have terrific gravitas, because we’re made to care deeply for each and every one of them.

Ghana Must Go (Penguin, US edition)

While the interior and exterior lives of each character are examined with an exact and microscopic lens, the fabric of the novel is relentlessly dynamic, demanding that we buckle up and hang on tight. The story sweeps from East Coast USA to West Africa, from the snow-filled streets of Boston, to a white-sand beach in Accra and ‘urban-gray’ THIS IS LAGOS (so reads the sign, ‘not Welcome to Lagos’, or ‘Lagos Welcomes You’). We enter palatial houses and daring new-builds, village huts and warehouse hideaways. We go from randy Law professors to evil uncles to green-smoking, green-fingered sage-cum-carpenters. The story takes in poverty, racism, conflict and civil war, with a touch that is delicate, fleeting even, but always robust and provoking. A little girl, Kweku’s sister, dies with ‘the calm eyes of a child who has lived and died destitute and knows it’. A line like ‘we were immigrants. Immigrants leave’ holds a whole world in its four words, one repeated. The student Fola, with her Beatles posters and ‘tragic glamour’ is from ‘just some war-torn nation’; generically calamitous, so we’re told. These short passages and just-glimpsed back-stories are no less affecting for their brevity. Perspective switches back and forth, from past and present, view point to view point, and all written in a rhythm that took me a few pages to get used to, but, once I was tuned in – just like in a memorable scene near the novel’s close – felt joyous. The language throughout is relentlessly buoyant, unendingly sumptuous.

In an exceptional piece for The Guardian, Selasi writes about her relationship with her own family history, and the journey she went on after writing Ghana Must Go; it’s clear that autobiographical beats have inspired the story, without ever restraining it. In her memorable essay, ‘Fail Better’, Zadie Smith talks about writing as our means of expressing our ‘way of being in the world’. She writes of ‘language as the revelation of a consciousness’ and ‘the watermark of self that runs through everything you do’. Fiction, then, but our fiction, possible only through the facts of our individual existence. It strikes me that Ghana Must Go is a story that only Taiye Selasi could write, and that’s how it reads; a dispatch, at once personal and expansive. For a novel that begins with death and dying – stretching, elongating that moment in time until it snaps into infinite silence – the story ends very much with life; messy, knotted, extinguishable, inextinguishable life.

At one point Fola, arranging blooms, ponders the ‘African disregard for flowers’, and talks of ‘the indifference of the abundantly blessed’. Upon finishing the novel I returned to this line. Ghana Must Go has garnered rave reviews, glowing endorsements from literary legends, and has rocketed its author onto the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, while Selasi’s words bristle with intelligence, worldliness, and unselfconscious smarts. Abundantly blessed, certainly. But at the same time, its force field is never less than kind, heartfelt, and non-cynical; the antithesis of indifference. That’s why Ghana Must Go isn’t just a book by which to be impressed, it’s a book to love. Truthfully, tenderly, severely.

Emylia Hall was born in 1978 and grew up in the Devon countryside, the daughter of an English artist and a Hungarian quilt-maker. After studying at York University and in Lausanne, Switzerland, Emylia spent five years working in a London ad agency, before moving to the French Alps. It was there that she began to write. Emylia now lives in Bristol with her husband, also an author. Her first novel, The Book of Summers, was a Richard and Judy Summer Book Club pick in 2012. It’s published by Headline in the UK, MIRA in the US & Canada, and has been translated into eight languages. Her second novel, A Heart Bent Out of Shape (or The Swiss Affair, in the US) will be published in September 2013 (Feb 2014 in the US).

On Monday Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ was announced as the winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Building up to this announcement the five shortlisted writers spent a week in the UK, talking about their writing in the media and at events across London.  The conversations sparked by these events, the five shortlisted stories and the winner continue.  In the spirit of this, we felt it was important to ensure that our AiW Blogging the Caine Prize series was complete and to belatedly share reflections on Chinelo Okparanta’s ‘America’.

AiW Guest Lexzy Ochibejivwie

Chinelo Okparanta tells a story that is particular, yet with universal implication in a swift and detached manner. Set in Port Harcourt and Lagos, ‘America’ is the narrative of Nnenna Etoniru. The story moves between her relationship with the Niger Delta environment and her choice of a same sex relationship with Gloria Oke. The story starts with Nnenna, our first person narrator, travelling in a bus to Lagos for an interview to secure a US visa. Through her observations of the landscape she sees from the bus window, Nnenna reveals the shift in the state of nature which once ‘thrived’, to plants that are now ‘little more than stumps, thin and dusty, not verdant as they used to be’ (107). It soon becomes clear that Nnenna’s desire to secure the US visa is tied up with her relationship with Gloria, her former colleague at the Federal Government Girls’ College at Abuloma. She shares her memories of their first meeting ’she wore a simple pair of black flats’, their growing intimacy ‘she started to visit me in my flat’, and their first kiss mixed with cake icing. Nnenna’s narrative of her relationship with Gloria is shadowed by Mama’s disapproval of ‘that sort of thing’, as she walks in on one of their early encounters and repeatedly insists on Nnenna’s responsibility to provide her with a grandchild. This is contrasted with Papa’s understanding that ‘love is love’ and of the advantages and freedoms that the US might bring, but where in Nigeria, policemen are watching and penalties for this action are ‘harsh’.

The story is driven forward both by Nnenna’s desire to unite with the ‘woman she truly loves’ and the destruction of the Niger Delta by the oil industry. Nnenna’s green card will enable her to undertake a Masters’ degree in Environmental Engineering, which she argues in her interview will enable her to learn ‘first hand’ about the management of the recent major Gulf oil spill, and to be with Gloria. As the story comes to an end, once she gets the ‘green-coloured card’, Nnenna starts to feel the push and pull of freedom and attachment, of the realities at home and the dreams abroad, and to question whether she has really got what she wanted. The story finishes with a folk tale of the golden hen, that Mama used to tell by candle light, evocatively highlighting that the golden hen or the green card both are and aren’t the end of the story, and the limited resources at the earth’s disposal.

Although the voice and imagery in ‘America’ is simple and understated, the narrative is truly a complex one. As different issues and ideas push and pull at the body of the narrative, it comes across as a nice piece of parcel which one opens, only to find out that another exists which needs to be opened in order to appreciate the first. In the end, it is perhaps the contrary markers given in the America and Nigeria of the story that serve to stitch the actions together; Nnenna’s comment about the oil spill in the Gulf in America stays in my mind:

America was nothing like Nigeria, after all. Here, roads were strewn with trash and it was rare that anyone cared to clean them up. Here, spills were expected. Because we were just Africans. What did Shell care? Here spills were happening on a weekly basis in the Niger Delta area. … But a spill like that in America? I could honestly not imagine (P.118).

For me, Chinelo Okparanta’s stance for the environment is the most important thing about this story. Of course important works of poetry, drama, and prose have tackled this theme,- Tanure Ojaide’s Beauty I Have Seen, Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta, Nnimmo Bassey’s I Will Not Dance To Your Beat, J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s All for Oil and The Wives Revolt, Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground, Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow, to name just a few. However, I would argue that in no short story has the Niger Delta situation been rendered with such strokes of courage as here.

Lexzy Ochibejivwie is a PhD student at the University of Lagos.  His research interests include women and the organisation of the short story form.  He is a writer, editor and public commentator.  In his spare time he enjoys both outdoor (football) and indoor games (scrabble, chess, table tennis).

This is the final post in our series as part of Blogging the Caine 2013, in which a group of writers organised by Aaron Bady write about the shortlist for this year’s Caine Prize.

Read previous posts on Africa in Words about each of the shortlisted stories:

Gbesmisola Abiola on Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ 

Rebecca Jones on Tope Folarin’s ‘Miracle’ 

Katie Reid on Pede Hollist’s ‘Foreign Aid’

Sylvia Gasana on Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s ‘The Whispering Trees’

C.E. Hastings on Elnathan John’s ‘Bayan Layi’

Read other responses to Chinelo Okparanta’s ‘America’ from:

Keguro Macharia: http://gukira.wordpress.com/

Kate Maxwell: http://skatemaxwell.wordpress.com/

Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva: http://walkingdiplomat.blogspot.com/

Chika Oduah: https://chikaoduahblog.wordpress.com/

Veronica Nkwocha: http://veronicankwocha.com/

Aishwarya Subramanian http://www.practicallymarzipan.com/

by AiW guest Phoenix Fry

On 20 April 2013 the African Movie Awards took place at “a glittering ceremony” in Yenagoa, southern Nigeria.

You can read elsewhere about the glitz and the glitches – this blog focuses on the films themselves. On this one page, you can catch the trailers for almost all the ‘Oscar’-winning films, and become something of an expert in contemporary African cinema.

The festival jury – including Brits John Akomfrah, June Givanni and Keith Shiri – gave the bulk of awards to Nigerian films. Does this tell us about the Nigeria being a centre of excellence for African film-making, or does it reflect the bias of a Nigeria-based awards show? You decide.

Confusion Na Wa (Nigeria)
Best Film / Best Nigerian Film

Heroes And Zeroes (Nigeria)
Best Director: Niji Akanni / Best Editing / Best Screenplay

Elelwani (South Africa)
Best Actress / Best Production Design

Assassin’s Practice (UK/Nigeria)
Best Actor: Justus Esiri

Hoodrush (Nigeria)
Best Supporting Actor: Gabriel Afolayan

Virgin Margarida (Mozambique)
Best Supporting Actress: Hermelinda Cimela

Fuelling Poverty (Nigeria)
Best Documentary

Stones In The Sun (Haiti/USA)
Best Diaspora Feature

Adventure Of Zambezia (South Africa)
Best Animation

Last Flight To Abuja (UK/Nigeria)
Best Film By An African Abroad

Blood And Henna (Nigeria)
Costume Design

The Meeting (Nigeria)
Make-Up

The Last Fishing Boat (Malawi)
Soundtrack

The Twin Sword (Nigeria)
Visual Effects

Nairobi Half Life (Kenya)
Sound

Uhlanga, The Mark (South Africa)
Cinematography

Kokomma (Nigeria)
Most Promising Actor: Belinda Effah

Phoenix Fry, is a diploma-qualified teacher with over seven years’ experience of developing and delivering training for young people. He is currently completing an MA in Creative Entrepreneurship, specialising in popular world cinema. He has:

• delivered two successful sessions in running and marketing film screening events
• made presentations at the BFI, Shortcutz London and Winchester University
• given support, training and technical assistance to new film clubs inSydenham, Catford and Forest Hill
• helped the Frontline Club find alternative sources of funding.

AiW Guest Justine Atkinson on the upcoming ‘Africa in Motion‘ Film Festival:

Fallous is a young Tunisian boy who is always running. We follow him as he journeys through his village, down winding paths bordered with lush green forests, greeting each neighbour as he passes, until he climbs up a large mountain to the tallest point where he looks down over his small village with a sense of awe and freedom.

As the end of Eid is approaching his family decide to buy new clothes in celebration. Whilst his father is choosing shoes for him from a second hand stall in the market, Fallous hears the chimes of something spectacular, and in his searches he catches a glimpse of a pair of curly-toed, golden shoes, with small bells on the toes. As they disappear from his sight, he feels a sense of urgency and leaving the safety of his father’s side he pushes through the crowd following the chimes. As the crowds disperse he sees a blue shop window with intricately painted unicorns on either side. It calls to him.  As he walks closer a wonderful pair of black, shiny shoes, with wings on are unveiled – ‘’perfect for running!’’ he thinks.

From this moment on it is as if nothing else matters, he prays for the shoes, dreams about the shoes, he can’t eat or sleep. The film then captures this emotion by transporting the audience into his dream through the magic of animation. Within this Fallous momentarily has the shoes, he can run alongside horses and can even fly, but they are quickly snatched away from him as falls back into reality.

These scenes are taken from the Tunsian film My Shoes, and offer a glimpse into often unexplored realities. It allows audiences the opportunity to experience African culture through the eyes of African people, exploring its similarities and differences. It captures movement in both literal and metaphorical forms and is due to be shown at this year’s Africa in Motion Film Festival, set to take place in Scotland between the 24^th of October and 3^rd of November.

This film encapsulates our 2013 festival theme, ‘Twende: Africa on the Move’ (“twende” is a Swahili word which translates as “let’s go!”), capturing Africa’s diverse richness and beauty through movement. My Shoes will be one of more than 40 films screened at Africa in Motion this year, adding to the diverse array of images brought to Scotland from across the African continent.

This festival will show the interconnected nature of film movements, and how one of the greatest popular art forms can provide a window into a plethora of cultures.  Through an expertly curated programme of contemporary African films, art exhibitions, panel discussions, children’s and schools workshops and engaging Q&As it will explore a broad definition of movement. Key strands will include the movement of people across regions and borders with films about immigration and asylum, to political, religious and social movements, to movement in its more literal form with films about sport, dance and the vibrancy of African cities and street life.

This year’s festival will be packed with special events, including a distribution forum discussing opening new markets for African film in the UK, a documentary screening day, masterclasses with a number of African filmmakers and industry professionals and engaging Q&As following screenings. As always we will hold our annual Short Film Competition, which is now going into its 7^th year. This competition aims to nurture and support young and new filmmakers from all over the continent, providing a prize for the winning film to be invested in future projects made by the filmmaker.  A high profile jury of local and international film specialists and established African filmmakers select the competition winner.

This year we have developed many new and innovative initiatives using the festival as a platform in order to develop wider audiences and distribution for African cinema.  These include the AiM Nomad Cinema Series that will voyage across communities carrying new stories and ideas across Scotland. Using a pop-up cinema screen we will take films outside of the traditional screening venues to screen films in bars, community centres, schools, parks, a zoo…

To ensure that the festival is able to travel to the widest possible audience we have also partnered with a leading VOD platform Africafilms.tv to create an online version of the festival. We will choose a selection of films from AiM 2013 including shorts, features and documentaries that will become available on AfricaFilm.tv, so that people from all over the world can engage with the festival.

These are just a few events and activities that are set to take place during this year’s festival. We don’t want to give away too many details yet, so you can look forward to the programme formally launching on our website at the end of September (www.africa-in-motion.org.uk).

Contact the festival: info@africa-in-motion.org.uk

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Africa in Words Guest, Professor James Smith of the University of Edinburgh, writes:

Professionally I research the role science and technology play in shaping Africa’s development. Thus I naturally have an interest in the writing of Lauren Beukes given her position in the vanguard of the new science fiction that has been flowing from Africa. That, at least, is the introduction I had in mind to write. Like bed nets and mobile phones the African reality is a bit more complicated and unexpected.

I had the pleasure to hear Beukes speak twice at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival and she definitely referred to her latest book, ‘The Shining Girls’, as “high concept fiction”, and what’s more it isn’t even set in Africa (even if Chicago is apparently a secret proxy for Johannesburg). So much for my Sci-Fi ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis; you see…. complicated.

Complicated can be good, sometimes it may even be wonderful if it can be successfully navigated, unstitched or divined. In all three of her novels Beukes deals with big, complex things. In The Shining Girls the focus is on pioneering women attempting to live their lives in times not yet ready for them. Zoo City is concerned with the past and identity, and the coming to terms with who one is and how others see us. Moxyland creates a sort of distorted, techno-Apartheid in order to explore the excesses of a future whose every facet is made by corporations.

In each of her novels Beukes focuses on ordinary people “kicking against reality”, she highlights the extraordinary in everyday life. This is probably most apparent in The Shining Girls where the time-travelling serial killer, Harper Curtis, is rendered as banal in his lust and violence in comparison to the powerful women who are (mostly) to become his victims. The time travel conceit acts primarily as an unexplained thread to tie the women’s lives together.

In her Edinburgh Book Festival talk and elsewhere, Beukes described the genesis of Zoo City as a sort of mental Polaroid slowly developing to reveal a young black woman, living in ramshackle inner city Johannesburg, opening a closet and putting on a sloth as if it were a backpack. Its what Philip Pullman might have ended up with if he’d swapped the Ivory Towers of his parallel Oxford with Hillbrow’s Ponte Tower; the sloth instead a daemon in need of a crash course in the Group Areas Act.  

In each of Beukes’ novels her protagonists are fighting to make their way in a world of constraint and conflict, where women have no equality and little opportunity, where Zinzi December is doomed to be labeled, “animalled”, in public perpetuity as she searches for some peace, where the poor have to live out their real lives as the virtual playthings of those who own the bandwidth. The characters are the thing, when they are so finely realised that they relegate a time-travelling serial killer to a bit part, or when the kernel of an entire novel is a mental snapshot of a young girl carrying a sloth.

For Beukes, her fiction becomes a way to overcome the friction of “issue fatigue”, of living in a contemporary reality we have become increasingly inured to, in much the same was as allegory overcame political censorship in Apartheid South Africa. The abstract austerity of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians contrasts with the agency invested in the protagonists in Beukes’ novels. Her novels might be grand in vision but they are intensely personal in focus. This is, I think, the strength of her writing so far. As her characters struggle to balance their dreams in dystopias, Beukes hones their humanity within complex contexts and concepts.

I had intended to write about the emergence of a genre of African science fiction concerned with the hybridity of the hypermodern and tradition, propelled by films such as District 9 and authors such as Beukes. As luck would have it, the author Beukes shared the stage with in the first Edinburgh event, Russia’s Mikhael Shishkin, shared an insight into writing that gets me (almost) off the hook. He said that there are two kinds of writers, those who are the master of the novel and those for whom the novel is the master. If you’re the former you can ring a bell and write on cue. If you’re the latter, you wait in a state of perpetual angst waiting for the bell to ring. In a world that is fair the latter would be the better writers.

But the world is not fair, and if there are bells its not always clear who is ringing them. It’s a perpetual contestation between agency and hope and history and power, continually reshaped by politics and progress and technology. In her South African novels Beukes’ protagonists grapple to reconcile their history in the midst of the most modern and fractured of worlds.

Africa’s relationship to past and present has never been straightforward and has often been contradictory, and it will only become more complex as Africans flex their agency in creating new ways of living. On reflection, I don’t think its African science fiction I’ve been reading, it is more like the advent of a high-concept, post-colonial genre where the boundaries of reality and the cores and peripheries are not what they were, are never what they seem, and not what we mean.

James is Professor of African and Development Studies and Assistant Principal of Global Development at the University of Edinburgh. He has studied, worked and lurked in (mainly South) Africa for almost 20 years, most recently on things like tsetse flies, sleeping sickness and alternative forms of energy. His publications – hopefully not classified as in the genres of science or speculative fiction – include Science, Technology and Development and Biofuels and the Globalization of Risk (both Zed Books).

@jrsmith73

AiW Guest Tom Penfold.

Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute of Taxi Poetry (Umuzi, 2012) is an appeal to the imagination – the reader’s and South Africa’s. Set through a week in the life of Adam Ravens as he tries to make sense of the murder of his idol and mentor, Solly Greenfields, a quest for truth, meaning and a way forward unfolds. Through Adam’s struggles for understanding, and his encounters with his son, students and colleagues, Coovadia begins to question just what changes or is lost when you only encounter snapshots of an experience and are excluded from the rest. Buried in the middle of the novel lies an image to this effect; as Adam walks down taxi filled streets, “the presenter on Cape Talk […] disappeared and reappeared from different sliding doors as I went along”. A narrative may seemingly be headed in one direction but you can – and Taxi Poetry suggests you usually do – open the door to the same familiar voice in a similar place, that is  still somehow unexpected, changed. The journey, like taxi poetry, “made nothing happen, a nothing that was nonetheless a happening”. Problem # 1: Solly’s murder started just such a journey.

Taxi Poetry inscribes verse onto the side of minibus taxis and Adam is the only taxi poet to have started at the bottom and worked up. From driver to sliding-door man, to taxi poet, and finally instructor at the Institute of Taxi Poetry, Solly appears as his guide and support at every step, despite his own personal reluctance to see the lyric entangled with the whims of academia and bureaucracy. And his death at the hands of an unknown assailant leaves Adam lost. As his week unfolds Adam is faced with increasingly problematic issues that are marked out throughout the narrative. He feels a sense of duty to a bedraggled cat; is reunited with his former employer; challenged by difficulties at work; tasked to oversee the visit of (in)famous yet ailing taxi poet Geromian who took a path so very different to Solly; and is unable to understand his teenage son. As the story unfolds each problem becomes more of a happening, more complex and entwined. Soon realising he is being taken down a route he can no longer predict, with stops that show he has missed something, Adam is forced to reconsider all the relationships that have defined his life and his vocation. Who is he? Who is his son? Most importantly: who was Solly and what, really, is taxi poetry?

Tapping into issues that lie at the heart of contemporary South African life, Coovadia constructs a narrative that reminds readers to look again at their life and themselves. Appearances are not always the reality and this is a novel that misleads with its humour, easy familiarity and fluid language. In reality the characters are portrayed with a bulky physicality, the relationships between them are being wrenched in multiple directions, and the questions the reader is forced to ponder are anything but comic. But Coovadia’s skill is precisely in this tangling of reality and appearance. At once this is an easy read yet challenging – but a challenge that pays off. The freshness of the word, the wit of the narration, and the intimate depiction of Cape Town in all its ugly beauty makes you want to read this novel and undertake a journey that, like any journey in a mini-bus taxi, has its surprises.

Most people who read this novel will know of South African literature that is more controversial and spectacular; they will know that love is a difficult relationship to understand; they will know that appearance and reality are never as similar as they seem. Thus, in a way, The Institute of Taxi Poetry is about nothing. But, to give Solly the last word: “Taxi poetry makes nothing happen but that is the very same nothing which makes absolutely everything matter”.

………………………..

The Institute of Taxi Poetry is published by Umuzi.
It was shortlisted for the 2013 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and for the 2013 University of Johannesburg Prize for Best Creative Work
For more on the novel, see here.

Tom Penfold has just completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham. He specialises in South African literature and examining its relationship with politics. If asked to talk in more detail than that he usually ends up talking about milk (metaphorically).

By Africa in Words Guest Jürg Schneider.

In a period of dramatically shifting geopolitics where markets as well as people have to readjust in an accelerated pace to new constellations of players and rules there is a lot of excitement about the changes that Africa is now going through – economically, politically, and not least socially. Here, I will inquire into the extent to which the market for contemporary African art, on the African continent and in the West, has changed and developed since the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The way the international art community talks about African artists and contemporary African art has definitely altered in recent years. As a starting point, I take Susan Vogel’s seminal exhibition Africa Explores which took place at the New York Centre for African Art in 1991. There had been several earlier precedents, most recent at the time Magiciens de la Terre in Paris, but Africa Explores, which sought to challenge the “widely held misconception about 20th century Africa […] that there is no modern Africa or African art, merely second-hand Western culture”, received a great deal of critical international attention and established itself as a milestone in the historiography of African art.

More than twenty years have passed and while there is no need to further discuss whether there is modern, or as I would prefer to say, contemporary African art, or not, two more of Vogel’s statements from 1991 deserve a closer look; her analysis that “there are few commercial art galleries in Africa, and no system of independent alternative spaces to form a critical presence”, and that “the lack of patronage by African collectors is the single greatest problem for International African artists”. Both comments address, speaking in market-economy terms, issues of supply – artists and galleries – and demand – clients, galleries, museums – of the international art market. [1]

To begin with the supply side, there exists today, ”a great wealth of internationally acclaimed artistic talents living and working on the continent” as art advisor Bomi Odufunade, director of Dash & Riallo, explains [2] (not to forget those living and working outside the continent).  Seemingly referring to Vogel’s statements twenty years earlier, Odufunade places much emphasis on the “growth and success of independent visual art spaces and cultural centres across Africa” deploring at the same time the fundamental lack of major institutions in Africa collecting contemporary art. What has changed, in Odufunade’s view, is that “a new generation of seasoned African collectors have emerged from across the continent.” However, she does not go into any further details as to what these African collectors are actually collecting. Certainly, this depends on where on the continent these collectors come from. Nigeria, for instance, currently among the most vibrant and dynamic art scenes on the continent, with a burgeoning middle class, has a long tradition of collecting art. However, according to Joost Bosland, Director at Stevenson – a contemporary, rather experimental art gallery with spaces in Cape Town and Johannesburg (with whom I had the opportunity to discuss these issues) – most Nigerian collectors still tend towards more conservative art purchases, even when buying contemporary African art.

Image: Wura-Natasha Ogunji. From: http://www.ccalagos.org/

Bosland admits that on some levels there are definitely markets developing in Africa but at the same time there is also a tendency to overstate what is actually happening. “It’s more in the media than in reality”, he says. There are others joining Bosland in his cautious assessment of the art market’s readiness for contemporary African art, and Edward Frankel quotes both major collector of African art Jean Pigozzi, and the Africa curator at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Yvette Mutumba, on this in his article “Something new out of Africa”, which appeared during this year’s Art Basel.

Nevertheless, there is a perceptible dynamic changing and challenging the international art market. African art is increasingly being included in international art fairs and museums. In 2013, for instance: Art Dubai invited Lagos-based curator Bisi Silva to select and work with galleries and art spaces located in West Africa. Silva selected five spaces to work collaboratively with their artists to produce exhibitions for Art Dubai, namely Centre for Contemporary Art (Lagos, Nigeria – Silva is director); Espace doual’art (Douala, Cameroun); Maison Carpe Diem (Ségou, Mali); Nubuke Foundation (Accra, Ghana); and Raw Material Company (Dakar, Sénégal). The founding director of Raw Material Company is the Cameroonian Koyo Kouoh, who was also associate curator of SUD 2010, Salon Urbain de Douala, a project in which will see the participation of Tate Modern in 2013. In November 2012 Tate launched a two-year project entitled “Across the Board” which consists of a series of events featuring emerging African artists and exploring recent practices in the continent, which will take place in Douala (Cameroon), Accra in Ghana, and Lagos in Nigeria. While at Art Dubai 2013, African art was displayed in the Marker section which focuses each year on a particular theme or geography; at Art Basel this year the African continent was given prominent space during “Focus Africa”, a discussion between Yvette Mutumba and the Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga; and African art is to have its own international fair, 1:54, in London from 16 to 20 October 2013, to coincide with Frieze.

On the other hand, there are definitely more venues and platforms on the continent where emerging or established artists can showcase their work than a couple of years ago. Alongside established platforms such as Espace doual’art, Dak’Art or the Bamako Photography Biennial there are more recent initiatives in Ethiopia (Addis Foto Fest), Nigeria (Lagos Photo), Benin (Biennale Benin) and DRC (Rencontres Picha. This, the third edition of the Biennale de Lubumbashi, was suspended in 2012 “for financial reasons” and postponed to October 2013.) Right now, even if “the scene is […] more fluid, more vibrant than ever before” (Bisi Silva) and “contemporary art from Africa is on the rise” (Cristina Ruiz), according to South African curator Mark Coetzee, only “a serious museum investment in contemporary art from the continent [will] ensure that it will continue to be seen and studied far into the future even if the market loses interest”. To sustain the current dynamics and interest in African contemporary art, maybe it is time, as Achille Mbembe has argued recently, “to leave the west to itself and look elsewhere and look differently”. [3]

AiW Guest Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Mukoma wa Ngugi and his father Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

I love to write and have been doing it for a long time now.   Along the way I have learned, mostly through mistakes, a few things that I want to list here below with the hope they will be of use to African writers who are just starting out.  As with all advice, some of it will be useful and some of it will not.

The Writing Process

1.  Read and then read some more.  Reading is the apprenticeship that enlarges your creative muscle. Reading is the theory, and writing the practice.  

2.  Have no aesthetic hierarchies.  By this I mean, sometimes the story line that comes to you will require the form of realist fiction, at other times it might lead you to popular genres.

3.  No one writes a perfect first draft.  And if it appears to happen, it is because the story or poem has been rewritten several times in the writer’s imagination.

4.  Go through multiple drafts before you give your novel to your first reader – their criticism will be more useful then because it will deal with issues such as character development, or the structure of the novel, instead of being bogged down in sentence syntax.

5.  Learning to take criticism is part of writing.  The key to using criticism is realizing that your reader might give you criticism that is wrong to a specific character or scene but relevant to the overall novel.  Weigh the criticism but always remember you are the writer and it is your story.

6.  It is okay to start a novel and fail.  Most writers have half-finished manuscripts collecting dust in a safe somewhere.  No piece of writing ever goes to waste – a line, a character’s disposition, some descriptions will be useful later.  Think of failed pieces of writing as spare parts.

Getting Published

7.  Find pleasure and value in your writing appearing in a local paper or magazine.  It is not always about your work being in international journals and magazines.   A piece of writing that connects even with one stranger is a successful piece.

8.  Submit to more than one place if the journal or magazine editor will not get back to you within six weeks.  It is unfair of editors to ask you to submit exclusively to them only to reject your work half a year later.

9.  Find an agent by talking with writers you know.  Find a writer whose work you admire and find out who their agent is.  If you can’t find an agent, look for publishers (often independent) who are willing to accept unsolicited work.

10.  Do not sign a bad contract but at the same time do not negotiate yourself out of getting published.

11.  If you cannot find an agent and must negotiate on your own behalf, here are the basics from my experience.  Royalties should be somewhere between 8% and 13%.  The future of the book, at least a good chunk of it is in electronic publishing where the publisher does not incur a large overhead – e-royalties should be between 25% to 40% if not more.

12.  Do not give your publisher rights to parts of the world where they do not distribute books.  For example, for a US publisher reserve African rights.  If it is a West African publisher who does not distribute in Eastern Africa or in Europe, reserve those rights for yourself.  Advances will be different from house to house.

13.   Be professional and handle edits in a timely manner and hold your publisher to the same standard.  The publisher is not doing you favors in as much as you are not doing them a favor.

14.   Take your writer’s ego out of the equation when working with your editor.  You are both working on getting the best book possible out there.  Accept, modify or decline editorial advice based on what is good for the book.

15. It’s all about the book!

Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Black Star Nairobi (Melville, 2013) and Nairobi Heat (Melville, 2011).

Read a recent conversation with Mukoma Wa Ngugi, where he talks to Africa in Words about Black Star Nairobi, his concerns and preoccupations as a writer, and the ways in which his writing enters into dialogue with his father’s.