Africa in Words Guest: Bronwen Everill

In my three years of teaching African history at a variety of levels (first, second, and third years; MA students), I have continually been pleasantly surprised by the quality of debate that African history provokes, and the level of critical (self) awareness that students bring to the topic.  But that doesn’t mean they find it easy!  For those of us putting together an African history survey course aimed at first years, we may not find it easy either.  The first year that I taught African history, it was a second year course – so, the students were already more experienced – that had already been prepared – by someone more experienced.  When it came time to teach my own course, I was working with some existing material from my predecessor, but his speciality was East Africa, and mine is West Africa, so I knew a lot would need to change.

I decided to make the focus broad so that students could explore new interests in the lectures and seminars and focus on specific regions later, in their essays.  The coverage was ostensibly 1800 to the present, although I tended to start earlier than 1800 as ‘background’ for the first few weeks.  I wanted to avoid just teaching about Africa from the colonial period to the present, even though I knew that Africa’s global encounters would need to play an important role in order to anchor this history in the history these undergraduates had already studied.  I wanted to make sure to convey a sense of precolonial history and of dynamic change over time.  (I used Iliffe’s Africans: The History of a Continent as the textbook background reading.)

I also wanted to make sure that they felt they left the module with concrete new knowledge and new ways of conceiving of Africa’s role in the world. I hoped to achieve this in two ways. First, by making them take repeated map quizzes of the countries of Africa over the course of the year (to make it stick!). In my experience, students love a bit of something they can pull out for pub quizzes!  But this was also about helping them to get over the ‘Africa is a Country’ mentality (exemplified in this hilarious 

parody).

The second goal was to encourage them to think critically about the Western portrayals of Africa they encountered in the media. But I also felt that the course needed a unifying theme, in order to give a shape to the expansive topic.  Working from the assumption that they would have little experience with African history in their A levels, I decided to confront their preconceptions of the continent head-on, by starting out with Philip Curtin’s The Image of Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina’s ‘How to Write about Africa’, Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa, and this preview for the film Machine Gun Preacher.  Together, we unpacked common misconceptions about Africa in the media, and discussed the terminology that would and wouldn’t be appropriate for discussions and essays, and which I hoped would get us on to neutral ground for the rest of the year.

This approach was very successful.  Almost too successful!  I felt by the middle of the year that the ‘Image of Africa’ was getting a bit worn out as a concept.  Part of the danger of assigning this reading early was that this was one of the few things they all read, and read carefully, when they were still keen in the early weeks of university.  This made it comfortable ground (especially when they hadn’t done that week’s reading…).

So the next year I decided not to start with that, but to have a special teaching day, midway through the first term, where we would cover the ‘Image of Africa’ along with a workshop in which we would discuss writing about Africa, and essay writing more generally (I also added this excellent video from Mama Hope).  I also added a teaching day on sources in African history, to devote a whole afternoon to this topic.  We used Falola and Jennings’ Sources and Methods in African History and Getz and Clarke’s really excellent and innovative Abina and the Important Men. The teaching days were successful, and again the ‘Image of Africa’ was a popular approach for the students for the rest of the year (read: lots of essays on the topic).  But because it hadn’t been the ‘frame’ for the module, it didn’t dominate discussion as it had the year before.  So that was a bit of an improvement.  But then there wasn’t really anything holding the module together, or giving students that initial ‘in’ to a subject that is both literally and figuratively foreign to them.

The Image of Africa approach achieved my goals of giving the course a unifying theme, and helping the students learn to think critically about the images of Africa they encounter every day. One part-time, evening student told me that she had explained the idea to her mother in the context of a film preview they had seen together.  Another student told me that he couldn’t stop seeing the images everywhere now that he knew about it.  Across the spectrum of students, feedback was really positive, I think in large part because they could see how a mentality that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was still very relevant today.  Given that these students had chosen to study history, this was powerful ammunition for facing down the question of its relevance as a degree choice!

In the future, I might think about arranging the course thematically, rather than chronologically.  There is certainly an argument for this in institutions with more than one Africanist, where team-teaching is an option. This would also avoid the trap of the appearance of ‘inevitability’ when it came to discussing colonial rule.  (As many times as you warn them not to say it, essays still come in with the word ‘inevitable’ when they’ve written on the Scramble.)  Of course, I would have to be careful again to emphasize change over time, since themes can give the impression of stasis. Where a thematic approach is not an option, I think the Image of Africa approach was still really useful for the students, even if it did become a bit tiresome to read about by the end of the year.

Bronwen is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London. She has previously taught at Oxford and Warwick. Her recent publications include Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Palgrave, 2013) and (Palgrave, 2013). 

AiW Guest Toni Kan

Literary prizes are strange animals.  As subjective as they often are, they usually confer immediate entrée into the rarefied heights of the literary canon.  And because they are strange animals, one is almost never surprised when things go awry or fail to turn out as planned – like Jean-Paul Sartre refusing his Nobel, Dambudzo Marechera throwing plates at the awarding of his Guardian prize, or Helon Habila slagging off a co-Caine Prize winner’s debut novel for pandering.  In fact as James English highlighted in his The Economy of Prestige, this is often the way in which prizes accumulate their cultural capital.

Strange animals behave strangely and the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the most recent big prize to come out of the African continent, began exhibiting some strangeness right from the get-go when it called on readers to vote for their top 20 submissions in its flash fiction category.  A female writer, feeling affronted at being reduced to the status of, say, an X-factor hopeful, instantly withdrew, expressing her umbrage in a very public letter to the organizers. Exposing the flaws in the way the online voting system was organised, she was not, she said, going to take part in a popularity contest.  Prizes she argued needed sifting, panels and experts.

But there were experts aplenty to judge. Eghosa Imasuen, author of Fine Boys and COO of Kachifo judged the 20 flash fiction stories selected by readers. The judging panel for Etisilat’s prize for a debut work of fiction was made up of Sarah Ladipo Manyika, author of In Dependence; Billy Kahora, Caine Prize nominee and Managing Editor of Kwani? and Chair, Pumla Gqola, academic, public intellectual and writer.

Yewande Omotoso, Karen Jennings & NoViolet Bulawayo

A shaky start notwithstanding, this new literary prize was successfully concluded at a glitzy event, well attended by members of the Lagos literati, on Sunday February 23, 2014 at the Marquee of the Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos. Here NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (Chatto & Windus) was announced winner of the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature – the first Pan-African Prize celebrating debut fiction novels from writers of African citizenship.

Bulawayo who won the Caine Prize in 2011 for an excerpt from her novel, is also the first African female writer to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She beat off competition for the Etisilat Prize from two other female writers, Yewande Omotoso with Bom Boy (Modjaji) and Karen Jennings with Finding Soutbek (Holland Park Press)  to go home with a £15,000 cash prize, attend the Etisalat Fellowship at the prestigious University of East Anglia (mentored by Giles Foden – Author of The Last King of Scotland) and embark on a three city book tour alongside the other runner up authors.

Uche Okonkwo receives her cheque as winner of the Etisalat Flash Fiction Prize

Before Bulawayo was announced as winner, grand dame of African literature Ama Ata Aidoo came on stage to announce the winner of the flash fiction prize.  She commented that flash fiction has been practised for centuries in Africa, but it wasn’t until the advent of the internet than it became recognized as a genre.  She also highlighted the immense talent and courage it takes to tell a compelling story in a small space, before awarding the prize to Uche Okonkwo for her story “Neverland”. Uche, a graduate of the Manchester University writing programme, went home with a Samsung Galaxy notebook and £1000.

Another highlight of the award ceremony was a unique performance from celebrated music legend, Youssou N’Dour who thrilled with songs from his repertory as well as Bob Marley’s classic  ‘Redemption Song’.  The high point of his performance was undoubtedly his duet with Nigerian singer, Ruby, who joined him on stage for his hit song, “7 Seconds” originally done with Neneh Cherry.

NoViolet Bulawayo on stage with Etisalat Prize Judges, Patrons & organisers

As guests milled around after the event, conversation turned to a snafu in the documentary shown during the award ceremony. Ostensibly making a beeline for the canon, the Etisalat Prize attempted to trace the history of the development of African literature.  However, as is always the case with making lists, they left out some notables including Olaudah Equiano and Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.  While one guest argued the omission needed to be seen in the context of the prize’s focus on fiction, another argued that Soyinka wrote novels and Olaudah’s work is the first long narrative by an African. Moreover, as the same guest went on to add, the prize itself is called the Etisalat Prize for Literature not fiction.

Omissions or not, the fact remains that African writers need recognition and nothing confers that faster than a literary prize.  So we see winners of the Caine Prize winning a lot more than the £10,000 prize money, as they sign book deals and become globally renowned writers.  But the Caine Prize, like the discontinued NOMA which was awarded to deserving works irrespective of genre, and the NLNG sponsored Nigerian Prize for Literature continue to attract controversy on account of what they offer and are perceived not to offer.   In the case of the Caine Prize, critics wonder why a short story and only one author should win £10,000 and why African writing is being canonized (that word again) by foreign interests.  For the NLNG Prize the issues have been many from its insistence on awarding the prize to only Nigerians living in Nigeria (that rule has been changed) to the rotation of the prize among different genres over a four year cycle.

It is clear prize administrators are taking note and making changes, as we hope that the Etisalat Prize administrators will do too.  However, while controversy and strange behaviour keep us talking, we shouldn’t forget to pay attention to the writing that the Etisalat Prize was founded to celebrate.  Blips aside, this new pan-African literary prize has broken new ground and provides a welcome opportunity for literary talent in Africa.  Time will tell how well it is sustained and nurtured.

Toni Kan is the author of the poetry collection When a Dream Lingers too Long, the novella Ballad of Rage, and most recently the short story collection Nights of the Creaking Bed (Cassava Republic). His novel The Carnivorous City was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project.  He is one of Nigeria’s most anthologised poets and short story writers, and his work has appeared in Salthill, Drum Voices, Revue, Farafina, Sentinel Poetry Quarterly and ANA Review. He currently edits the ‘Sunday Sun Revue’, a weekly 4 page literary supplement in Sunday Sun.

AiW Guest: Daniel Watson.

At the most recent Sussex Africa Centre event, Peter van der Windt – PhD candidate at Columbia University – presented his research on  ‘Local institutions and Cooperation in the Presence of Migration: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo’. This is one of a number of projects Peter is involved in, which focus on migration, development and networks in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and more recently, Sierra Leone (further information on Peter’s research can be found here: http://petervanderwindt.com/research/).

Today, North and South Kivu in the eastern border regions of the DRC remain a source of regional and international concern. The Kivus are a complex site of overlapping forms of violence, rebellion, and displacement, and have come to symbolise many of the characteristics often attributed to the DRC, including predatory or self-interested intervention by certain neighbouring countries; violent political economies of resource extraction; and seemingly chronic levels of physical violence (with special attention given to sexual violence by donors and activists). Peter’s research focuses on two characteristics that co-exist with and to some extent structure this violent cartography, but may be overlooked. The first of these is the presence of informal governance structures and institutions that permeate the village level, with Peter emphasising the roles of chiefs and villages notables as being the most significant players in these institutions. The second is the extremely high level of internal migration among Congolese, two-thirds of whom do not reside in the village of their birth. As Peter described in the talk, it was not uncommon for some individuals and families to relocate to another village between ten and fifteen times.

Through exploring these characteristics, it is possible to add further shades to the existing images of the eastern DRC. This has the potential to provide insights into the more pacific and routine patterns of social and political order, complementing the tales of instability in the violence-wracked region. A particular concern for Peter was to direct greater attention to the networks of co-operation within villages that can assist daily life and struggles in a context of instability and a fluctuating political order. These networks and routines can be captured through the expression ‘within-village co-operation’, and one of Peter’s central concerns was to ascertain the impact of recurrent migration on co-operation within villages. Additionally, a key aim of the project was to further understanding of how village-level institutions respond to the twin pressures of migration, but also the international response and assistance programmes (chiefly from Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)) that provide assistance to migrants.

In order to explore these dynamics, Peter undertook 18 months of fieldwork in the eastern DRC, spread over six years. During this time, over 4,000 households were surveyed to build up a picture of migration and settlement, and 416 villagers (from 24 different villages) were involved in a ‘lab-in-the field’ experiment designed to establish the extent to which the inhabitants of villages – distinguished in the experiment as being either ‘natives’ or ‘migrants’ – were co-operating with each other in a context of high migration, and how local institutions influenced these relations.

This ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiment was perhaps the most novel feature of Peter’s research, and modified traditional social science ‘game theory’ approaches to understanding co-operative behaviour, in which people engage in hypothetical ‘games’ with each other designed to measure qualities such as trust and co-operation. According to Peter, there are several characteristics of Congolese social and political practice that make traditional games inappropriate. Firstly, there is not much privacy in village life: people tend to know what is going on with everybody else. Secondly, chiefs exert an influence over which migrants get to enter and fully integrate into the village. These mean that hypothetical games may not capture the realities of social organisation in the village, and could generate misleading results. Therefore, instead of people being asked to play games against a hypothetical person, villages were shown photographs of other villagers, and asked how they would distribute a hypothetical sum of money ($5, in this game) among the village. After this, the participants were then asked to repeat the exercise, but this time with the chief and other local notables present.

The results of these games were quite interesting. In private, natives and migrants within a village tended to give more of their money to members of their respective groups. However, this tendency to give more members of the same group diminished when the game was repeated in the presence of a chief. For Peter, this suggests that local institutions strengthen native-migration co-operation within villages, which needs to be taken account by development agencies and NGOs. These findings, taken in conjunction with the findings of another research project Peter is working on, also pointed to the conclusion that external actors such as NGOs do not weaken such local institutions. However, a tentative conclusion was that external actors may threaten within-village co-operation, through distributing more resources to ‘migrants’ than to ‘natives’, possibly leading to resentment between these groups.

The application of political science methods to the eastern DRC was interesting, but needs to be treated with some caution. In the following Q&A session, there were a number of questions concerning the technicalities of the ‘game’ being played, but there was a discernible unease in a number of other questions, concerning just how much had been stripped away on order to facilitate the analysis. Where, for example, was a consideration of the gendered dimensions to cooperation and authority within villages?  Were perceptions of the legitimacy of chiefs among both natives and migrants being taken into account? More broadly, there was a risk that the local institutions under discussion were being presented as permanent and fixed features of the Kivus, without considering how the current legitimacy and power of these institutions has been constructed – and reconstructed – in a region that has been the site of violent political change since the late 1990s. As one attendee noted after the event had finished, the choice of the terms ‘native’ and ‘migrant’ was also troubling. In particular, the theme of ‘migration’ suggested that there was a degree of agency underlying a person or families decision to move between villages, which can mask the violence that underpins such movements.

These questions were graciously addressed by Peter, and despite the reaction among some attendees to the methods and approaches utilised in the research, it was clear that this was comprehensively researched and innovative project. Nonetheless, emphasising how displacement and violence are central to understanding the dynamics under investigation, and how they may drive changes within the village-level institutions and external actors operating in the region, could have helped to allay some of these concerns.

Images c. of Peter Van der Windt at http://petervanderwindt.com/research/

Daniel Watson (centre) is a final year PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex. Before starting his PhD, he studied Politics at the University of Sussex, and gained an MA in Conflict, Development and Security at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the role of violence in post-conflict statebuilding in South Sudan.

AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian

The back matter of Teju Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief refers to an ‘unnamed narrator’, but if this is not meant to be the same character as Julius, our guide through 2011’s Open City, then Cole is playing a sly metafictional game. Both narrators are Manhattan-based psychiatrists-in-training, recently graduated from NYU. Both have white mothers, from whom they are estranged, and fathers who died of tuberculosis when they were fourteen. And both are in possession of similar, if not quite identical, narrative voices—voices that are slippery, deceptive, and strange.

Open City is one of the greatest novels of the new century, as well as one of the most easily misunderstood. Critics, perhaps misled by his surface similarities to Teju Cole, who is young, smart, appealing, and very witty on Twitter, have described Julius as ‘charming’, ‘sympathetic’ and ‘honest’, but he is none of those things. My students, who almost uniformly hate the novel, are nonetheless astute when it comes to delineating Julius’s flaws.  One of the wittier ones once described the experience of reading Open City as akin to scrolling through a very highbrow Pinterest board: a collage of references to Shchedrin, St. Augustine, Piers Plowman, Mahler, Badiou. The comparison gets at the flatness of the novel’s tone, its endlessly unfolding allusiveness, and the near-total severance of the connective tissue between its dozens of component parts. It took several readings of the novel before I began to see the face of a character emerging, ghostlike, from the novel’s dazzling array of observations and witticisms and lyrical asides, and the figure who hides in the margins of Open City is a haunting one: Julius is selfish, cold, angry, and absolutely shattered by grief.

In Open City, Lagos is a notable absence. Julius walks all over Manhattan and Brussels, and while he is doing so, he thinks about home—but perhaps not quite as much as we might expect him to. About Lagos, he says, ‘My last visit happened two years ago, and that was after a gap of fifteen years, and it was a brief visit’. It is an offhand reference, but the timing lines up: a discussion of the Sosoliso airline crash suggests that Every Day is for the Thief takes place in December of 2005, while references to current events situate the latter half of Open City in 2007. Every Day Is for the Thief also has a somewhat unusual publication history: it was first published by Cassava House in Nigeria in 2007, before being revised and reissued by Random House this year. Therefore, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to read Every Day Is for the Thief as both a prequel to Open City and, perhaps, that book’s catalyst and missing piece. Open City, after all, begins in the middle of a sentence: ‘And so when I began to go on evening walks that fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city’.

And so, this short visit. In Every Day Is for the Thief, our narrator wanders all around Lagos, although—limited by anxious relatives, as well as by the city’s unique dangers and geographies—he does relatively little walking. He gets a ride from the airport to his aunt’s house and watches policemen extort bribes from drivers; he takes the bus and observes a woman reading Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family; he visits a market where an eleven year old boy was burned alive after an accusation of theft. He is dismayed by the omnipresent evidence of corruption; he is hungry for any evidence of high culture (a music school, a bookshop, a record store) and he is living in the wake of a half-glimpsed, uninterrogated tragedy.

In this, the novel might have us believe, he is like Nigeria as a whole, which the narrator excoriates for its lack of interest in its own history—and, more concretely, for its underfunded National History museum, which cannot compete with the repositories of culture he so loves abroad. ‘Why is history uncontested here?’ he asks. ‘There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices?’ The trickiness of the novel is evident in this passage, for the analysis of the history museum is both sharply on point and inextricably tied up with the narrator’s obsession with comparing Nigeria to the rest of the world. One of his implicit goals for the trip is to figure out how he—a self-described ‘humanist’, whose belief system is rooted in the meaningfulness of great art—could possibly have been shaped by a place where ‘writing is difficult, reading impossible’, where people believe that prayer is enough to prevent plane crashes, and where, although lives are ‘dense with story’, even the well-educated are literal-minded enough to think that simply saying out loud that one might have malaria is enough to make it so. Over the course of the visit, the narrator reveals himself as priggish, judgmental and profoundly out of place. And yet, ‘The past continues to gather around like floodwater. A too easy formulation, but what past do I have in mind? The nation’s, I think. But perhaps I am also thinking of mine, perhaps the two are connected, the way a small segment of a coastline is formed with the same logic that makes the shape of the continental shelf’.

If—as I can’t help but imagine—Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief were once a part of a single novelistic embryo, one that only later split into two disparate parts, then Every Day is for the Thief is unquestionably the weaker twin. The book is less even, less assured than Open City; it teeters occasionally towards the maudlin, and it has a tendency to over-explain. Meanwhile, Open City is a better book for leaving Lagos unvisited except in memory.  Yet to read the two books side-by-side is an extraordinary experience, unparalleled by anything in recent literature. The connections between the books glimmer and spark—in Open City, Julius remembers that his mother was unable to perform ‘the rites and the practical matters’, that ought to have accompanied his father’s death, leaving that work to his aunt; it is here that the origins of their unhealed rift lie. Every Day Is for the Thief concludes with a dream-like memory, ‘out of time’, of an idyllic neighborhood where ‘there are, perhaps, women in the back rooms of their humble houses who help prepare the bodies for their last journey, washing down what remains of a father or mother or child, fitting the heavy limbs into new clothes, putting talcum powder on the face, working coconut oil into the hair and scalp’. On its own, Every Day Is for the Thief is an imperfect piece of literary ephemera, but taken together with Open City, it tells a profound and devastating story.

Kristen Roupenian teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University. 

Africa in Words Guest: Rianne Walet

I am a cultural heritage student from the Netherlands. From September 2013 till February 2014 I had the privilege of doing an internship with the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. For five lovely months I became a member of ISM’s education team. While working on several projects, I found out how important it is to teach people, both young and old, about Africa as the amazingly varied and culturally rich continent it is.

One of the projects I had the chance to be involved in, was the development of the exhibition Brutal Exposure; the Congo which runs till 7 September 2014. The exhibition evolves around pictures taken by missionary Alice Seeley-Harris during her time in the Congo, Central Africa, in the early 1900’s. They show the brutal exploitation of the Congolese people by Belgian authorities, supervised by King Leopold II of Belgium, who was the colonial ruler in that time. Led by greed, the Belgians forced the Congolese inhabitants to grow and collect rubber and other natural resources. The suffering of an entire people was the result. These pictures have travelled all around Western Europe in the 1900’s and made a huge group of people aware of the cruel treatment of the Congolese and the insanity of colonialism, making it the first known human rights campaign ever. Now, modern day visitors have the same opportunity to see the images and learn about a terrible history which has left its mark on the Congo till this day. The phrase ‘a picture says more than a thousand words’ has never been so true.

From my point of view, the most important aspect of this exhibition was not to scare visitors with these often shocking pictures. The goal was to make visitors more aware of this history of the Congo. It also gives them the opportunity to learn more about how the crimes committed in that time still affect the Congo, and even Africa as a whole, to this day. Seeing and understanding are two completely different things, which is why the exhibitions team designed a learning room dedicated to teaching the visitors about the Congo as broadly as possible by using documentaries, books and digital information. The exhibition shows terrible events which happened in the Congo, but there are also positive sides to this story. A lecture by Mr. Vava Tampa of Save the Congo has taught me that this country has enough natural resources to provide the entire African continent of energy and food. Ms. Petronelle Moanda of the Congolese Association of Merseyside spoke beautifully about her pride to be Congolese and her ideas for the future of her country. One of her quotes has a prominent place in the exhibition: ‘It is a blessing to be Congolese and nobody can become Congolese by might, greed or power!’ It is a reminder of the strength of the Congolese people and the opportunities this rich country may have in the future. This is something which we should not forget.

This internship has opened my eyes to the importance of teaching both ourselves and others about the African continent. This involves ‘difficult heritage’ like Transatlantic Slavery and colonial histories like the Congolese history, which still plays an important (yet sometimes hidden) role in modern day Africa and Europe, but also showing people the often unseen positive sides of Africa. These are the histories which date back millions of years, the richness of African nature, resources, art and music and of course the varied cultures which have been spread all over the world. But to me, the greatest lesson of all is to learn about Africa as a continent of opportunities and development which is the achievement of its resilient inhabitants.

Link to the Brutal Exposure exhibition:
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/exhibitions/brutal-exposure/index.aspx

At the end of March we – Katie and Kate – were lucky enough to be involved in organizing the third African Popular Cultures workshop at the University of Sussex.  This collaboration between the Sussex Africa Centre PhD committee, tutors from the School of English’s 3rd year Literatures of Africa course and the African Popular Cultures workshop (established by Professor Stephanie Newell), enabled a series of exciting explorations and connections around popular and/or public spaces, and cutting edge research and cultural production today.  We felt extremely privileged to host such a distinguished line-up of artists and academics  – Professor Karin Barber, Dr Ranka Primorac, Dr Paulo Farias, Billy Kahora and Inua Ellams – and to engage with a broad range of exciting new research from doctoral students in the Sussex Africa Centre through an immersive and interactive exhibition of objects, video, image and text.  In many ways the events of the day were brought together by the work of Professor Stephanie Newell, Deputy Director of the Sussex Africa Centre who chaired the exhibition and Karin Barber’s plenary lecture, and spoke as part of a roundtable.  It was therefore particularly appropriate that many of the conversations responded to and celebrated the launch of a new collection Stephanie Newell has edited with Ono Okome Popular Culture in Africa: the Episteme of the Everyday (Routledge, 2013) – which in turn marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber’s ground-breaking article “Popular Arts in Africa”.  Across this week Africa in Words will be publishing a series of articles that document and respond to some of these conversations and the exciting work showcased at the workshop.

AiW Guest Eleanor McConnell

On the 31^st March, I was one of the students from the undergraduate Literatures of Africa course at Sussex University who were lucky enough to benefit from a special film screening of Nairobi Half Life, followed by a Q&A with one of its writers, Billy Kahora. It was an interesting set-up in which to see a film for the first time, particularly a film I knew absolutely nothing about. In his introduction, Billy talked about some of the driving forces behind the creative process and what the team of writers he led had tried to achieve in scripting the film. He mentioned the desire to write a script that would be centred on the premise of showing a ‘real’ Nairobi, and the need to create a story that was strong in its plot and characterisation which, he said, was often lacking in Kenyan cinema. Having heard these aims, we couldn’t help but evaluate the film according to Billy’s own criteria; a challenging set of standards which the film proved itself more than capable of meeting.

Nairobi Half Life is a local production and has been for the most part praised for its success in raising the standard of quality for Kenyan cinema. The plot itself seems familiar at first. Mwas is a young aspiring actor who leaves the village in an attempt to make it in Nairobi, but finds himself falling in with a dangerous crowd to survive. The rural to urban bildungsroman story is well-trodden ground for an English Literature undergraduate, but Nairobi Half Life somehow managed to feel far from familiar.

The plot has plenty of twists to keep an audience interested and enough depth of characterisation to make its protagonists intensely engaging. Standout performances came from Joseph Wairimu as Mwas, and Nancy Wanjiku as Amina, a street-smart prostitute who brings a charm and pathos all of her own to the film. The film’s real appeal, however, comes from a realism that manages to avoid feeling contrived or hackneyed. The use of language is particularly effective here, mixing English, Sheng and Kikuyu, the writers also don’t shy away from using colourful expression.

Billy Kahora

Billy spoke of the aim to make Nairobi Half Life a film that tells Nairobi as it is, without attempting to represent the city in its entirety. It’s a difficult line to tread, particularly in a context where the quest for so-called ‘authenticity’ in storytelling has become so problematic. The depiction of crime is uncompromising and difficult to watch at times, as are many other elements of life in the Nairobi slums (including the most disgusting sequence in a mass toilet I’ve ever seen.) So, the writers pull no punches, but they manage to avoid hammering the audience with the sheer desperation of it all. Mwas leads a double life that takes him from criminal to actor and back again, both spheres existing side by side. As his artistic growth progresses, so does his entanglement with increasingly dangerous crime. The audience are shown two sides of Nairobi, and how its citizens are capable of occupying multiple cultural spaces simultaneously. It’s clearly a confusing state of being, but highly thought provoking.  In leading his double life, Mwas moves not only between spaces, but between languages. English is the language of the theatre and of performance. Sheng is the language of the city’s underbelly, in which the personal and business transactions most significant to the characters are conducted. For Mwas, English is the language in which he has to pursue his own creative development. Yet, for the film’s viewers, it is the use of Sheng in combination with English that is the most significant creative exercise.

In the Q&A, Billy mentioned the idea of Nairobi schizophrenia, and his interest in the idea that it was a city that required a degree of madness in order to survive in it. Nairobi Half Life depicts a city that is chaotic and frightening but nevertheless very engrossing and Mwas’ navigation of its streets is a journey of surprising profundity, which deserves a very wide audience.

Eleanor McConnell is an English and History undergraduate in her final year at the University of Sussex.  This term she has taken the third year dissertation module ‘Literatures of Africa’.  She is looking forward to starting a Masters in Human Rights Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies next year.

Thank you to Grace Pavey for permission to use her photos from the event.

AiW Guest Lilly Kroll

Inua Ellams is in a state of flux. He is scrolling through the iPad in front of him, searching for a poem by the American poet Terrance Hayes to read aloud to the crowd of people who, I suspect, would rather hear what Ellams himself has to say. He quickly backtracks: “No, I should read only my own work”. A few minutes later, with typically quiet profundity, he admits the impossibility of “getting away from yourself” and returns to a discussion of how he first became interested in poetry at school. States of flux and fluidity are, apparently, familiar territory for the young poet, who talks with impressive poise about the implications of situating himself between Nigeria and Ireland, Islam and Christianity, Shakespeare and hip-hop, visual artist and writer. It may seem unusual for a performance poet to provide the extensive biographical preamble that Ellams does, but the setting is fitting: we are gathered for the morning session of the third African Popular Cultures Workshop, an event co-hosted by the University of Sussex School of English and the Sussex Africa Centre. Academia, as well as entertainment, forms the backdrop for Inua’s performance. Not that this fazes the young poet, who manages to weave thoughtful commentary and critical insight into powerful readings of his poetry, covering topics from childhood friends and city life in Dublin to Chuck Norris and Fela Kuti.

Inua Ellams

Following an early disappointment with the world of performance poetry – which, he tells us, involved a rainy Glastonbury, a water-logged tent and a crowd of uninterested festival goers – Inua Ellams seems to have found his feet. A poet, playwright, performer and graphic designer, Ellams is a diverse and multifaceted figure, and has been making a significant impression in the UK arts scene for some time. His first collection of poetry, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, was published in 2005, followed by an award-winning play, The 14th Tale, which enjoyed a sold-out run at London’s National Theatre in 2009. Ellams explains that he turned to theatre when he realised that what he had to say could not be contained within short form poetry, and the decision clearly paid off: his performance poetry is animated by an obvious love for the stage and an understanding of how to captivate and engage with an audience. Beneath this bold and enchanting personality lies another layer of Ellams’ poetry, denoted by acutely political and philosophical concerns. ‘Fragments of Bone’, the second poem Inua chooses to read, directly confronts sectarian violence in Nigeria, marking a distinct shift in style from the themes of magic and innocence that characterised his first poem. His sudden evocation of a machete cutting through bone also cuts through Ellams’s previously mellow unfurling of words, imploring the audience to align the personal with the political and to recognise the graphic imagery alongside the subtle.

An urgency for communication is at the heart of Ellams’ creative work, be it in the way he delivers a poem – with swift pace and carefully flowing rhythm – or in the subject matter of a recent theatre project – a play based on dialogues he overheard in urban African barbershops (Barber Shop Chronicles). And Ellams is aware that a physical presence is not enough anymore: he is enthusiastic about digital communication and keen to stress his active engagement with what he gleefully refers to as the ‘Twittersphere’. Where some poets would shy away from the prospect of audience participation, Ellams welcomes it not only in performances, but also through tweets. By opening up a space between poet and audience, speaker and listener, Ellams has deservedly become the poster boy for a new brand of all-inclusive performance poetry: one that pays as much respect to MosDef as it does to Keats. And, for once, it is not critics and reviewers who are carving out these definitions – Ellams draws the very same comparison on his website, and there is nothing contrived about how both Eminem’s first album and Terry Pratchett are slipped into the Q&A session. His performance seems to be the beginning of a dialogue rather than a conclusive or restrictive show in and of itself. Ellams asks a multitude of questions – what does it mean to be an African man in the West? How does migrant life interact with city life? Is displacement a prize? – yet purposefully leaves the answers open-ended: I find myself turning them over in my mind during the rest of the day’s events, a testament to Ellams’ poetic energy and intellectual curiosity.

Lilly Kroll is a final year English undergraduate at the University of Sussex, with dreams and schemes that involve many more years of study ahead. She has a fondness for West African string instruments, deep-fried plantain and contemporary poetry, and is on the lookout for a way to combine all three of these things. Her current preoccupation is a dissertation about Taiye Selasi, diasporas and thresholds: three things that are proving far more simple to combine.

This post is part of a series that engages with the third African Popular Cultures Workshop held on 31 March 2014 at the University of Sussex. This collaboration between the Sussex Africa Centre PhD committee, tutors from the School of English’s 3rd year Literatures of Africa course and the African Popular Cultures workshop (established by Professor Stephanie Newell), enabled a series of exciting explorations and connections around popular and/or public spaces, and cutting edge research and cultural production today. Across this week Africa in Words will be publishing pieces that document and respond to some of the conversations and exciting work showcased at the event.  Read:

 Eleanor McConnell on ‘Nairobi Half Life’

Thank you to Grace Pavey for permission to use her photos.

AiW Guest Rehab Abdelghany

The 3^rd African Popular Cultures Workshop hosted at the University of Sussex concluded with a roundtable that brought together six academics and creative writers, who research, write from and about different parts of the African continent. They gathered at a table that was not really round, to share their ideas on and experiences of African popular cultures with an attentive and curious audience of students, researchers, and academics.  

The roundtable featured Billy Kahora, writer and Managing Editor of Kenyan literary network Kwani Trust; Dr Paulo Farias, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham; Karin Barber, Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, University of Birmingham; Stephanie Newell, Professor of English, University of Sussex; Inua Ellams, Nigerian-British poet, perfomer, playwright and graphic artist; and Ranka Primorac, Lecturer in English, University of Southampton. As moderator John Masterson (Lecturer in World Literatures, University of Sussex) reflected, this indeed represented “a healthy mix of artists and academics”.

The roundtable investigated the relationship between popular “text” from different places and public spaces in the African continent. It addressed questions drawn from the new edited collection it launched, Stephanie Newell and Ono Okome’s (eds.) Popular Culture in Africa: the Episteme of the Everyday (Routledge, 2013), including: How and when are everyday activities constituted into artifacts? How do audiences interact? How are texts made and where? And what do we mean by the ‘popular’ and the ‘public’?

Stephanie Newell inaugurated the discussion by provocatively asking whether – as there are so many differing conceptions and uses of the term ‘popular’ – we should abandon it entirely. She demonstrated the complexities of trying to categorise African popular cultures and spaces as either ‘popular’, ‘elite’, ‘locally produced’, ‘traditional’ or ‘imported’ and the overlapping, non-binary relationships between these terms.

Newell reflected on how her own primary material has often been described as ‘poor-quality,’ ‘low-brow,’ ‘crap,’ ‘sensational,’ or ‘ephemeral.’ She argued that while the last two labels might be critical terms with productive value, such labels involve the imposition of universal taste onto material that cannot be universalized. Here she referred to Pierre Bourdieu’s words on taste, that we spit the unlikeable and eat the likeable, thus drawing an analogy between food and cultural products. Her presentation challenged the audience to reflect on the idea of ‘taste’ and its relationship to cultural power, the ways in which ‘taste’ might mark social and economic differences between publics, but also the ways in which it might be used as a useful discursive and self-reflexive category in the study of African popular culture.

Following Newell, Inua Ellams read two poems, ‘Dear Tina’ and ‘Clubbing’, from his collection Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars (2011). The pamphlet’s blurb describes the ways in which “[c]ontemporary culture clashes with mythology as Bruce Lee angles for space alongside Prometheus” in Ellam’s poetry, and so his artistic intervention resonated strongly with questions being asked by the roundtable about how the popular might be inscribed on and entwined with the classical or traditional.

Karin Barber

Karin Barber opened her contribution with the question – how are cultural artifacts constructed out of everyday activities? Proposing the term ‘generative materialism’, Barber contended that we need to begin from below and to ask what was rejected or didn’t catch on, in order to understand the processes of genre production. She made a strong case for the ways in which this methodology might help us better understand the relationship between genre and everyday activities and the ways in which new genres might emerge from new social experiences. Barber closed with a Yoruba proverb, which she translated into English as “Not standing still is tantamount to dancing”, reflecting on the ways in which the emergence of new cultural artifacts and genres are always in process.

Kenyan creative writer and editor, Billy Kahora, spoke about Kwani Trust, highlighting the ways in which the founding and development of this independent publishing house resonate with definitions of ‘popular’ shared in Karin Barber’s plenary. Barber defined the ‘popular’ as something people can relate to or that forges common experience. Kahora explained how the Kwani? journal was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Moi dictatorship, a time of huge optimism in Kenya. The founding editor of the journal Binyavanga Wainaina placed particular emphasis on engaging with the everyday Kenyan experience, constructing writing from talk, rumours or public exchange, and publishing material that was seen as non-traditional literature, including song lyrics, street art and writing in Sheng.

Whereas Karin Barber in her 1987 essay wrote: “I want a definition of arts that includes decorations on mammy wagons and fancy bread labels, but excludes religious doctrine, football, and carpentry. ….” (1987, 74)” (Qtd. in Newell and Okome, 19), the intervention by Paulo Farias to the roundtable emphasised religion and football as major components of popular culture and everyday life in Africa. Farias highlighted that while football was studied in Newell and Okome’s new collection, alluding to James Tar Tsaaior’s “Football as Social Unconscious or the Cultural Logic of Late Imperialism in Postcolonial Nigeria”, he had not yet come across an essay that tackled religion. He argued for the multiple ways in which everyday life in Africa is connected with Evangelical Christianity and new forms of Islam, and raised important questions about what we might learn from studying the cultural artifacts that religion produces, highlighting a recent study of mosque architecture by Cleo Cantone. He also forged a particularly interesting link between religion and class in relation to popular culture, asking in what ways the relation between classes operates with the emergent new category of gatekeepers in Evangelical Christianity and Islam: “Who claims the moral authority to tell Muslims that their practices have been wrong?” he asked, and suggested that the relationship between popular culture and elite culture can be usefully looked at through this prism.

Ranka Primorac (center)

The final speaker on the panel was Ranka Primorac. She began by highlighting that she is not sure that she studies popular literature and stressing that she thinks of herself as a literary scholar. She asked why it might be that once she started studying Zambian literature and texts no-one has heard about outside Zambia, she began to be categorized in the academy as interested in ‘popular’ texts, when in fact anything printed in English in Zambia is by definition circulating in a narrow space and to ‘elite’ local readers. Speaking about two books – Norah Mumba’s A Song in the Night (1992) and Sekelani Banda’s The Chizongwe Ethos (2012) – Primorac gave a fascinating insight into the complex questions of genre and valuing in relation to Zambian literature. She showed the different ways in which both writers offer advice and moral guidance, and through this are concerned with representing and transacting everyday life. However, she argued that these writers do not compromise aesthetics or larger questions because of that and that these remain literary texts. Through these case studies Primorac powerfully demonstrated a blurring of textual elements and showed that it is often very hard to distinguish what is coming ‘from below’ and what is coming ‘from above’. She finished by emphasising “I don’t think the category of ‘the everyday’ necessarily works as a defining term of what is ‘popular’. I think all literature is in some important senses always local and always concerned with the everyday, but I am hesitant to reduce the potential of any text to just that”.

In the end, I was challenged by the various arguments the speakers put across and struck by that lack of consensus about what popular culture is. Indeed, what exactly is the ‘popular’ compared to the ‘public’ or the ‘everyday’? For example, I was left wondering why folklore, often such an active component of African people’s everyday life, is separate from the ‘popular’ and is usually researched and studied as an independent category? To me, one of the most productive elements of this roundtable was that it brought together the ‘makers’ of popular culture along with its researchers, so I could see how both sides relate to it. This revealed that whereas the producers are keen to innovate and bring the different aspects of the popular in Africa out to the world, academia is preoccupied with understanding the nature, motivations, and implications of this production, as well as with marking borderlines between terms and categories. I noticed that the artists were not as concerned with definition but instead with the means of artistic creation and propagation. Kahora, for example, in response to one question from the audience, explained that literatures might be demarcated, but in Kenya it is the middle class that controls and supports cultural production, like music. This struck me as very relevant to what Newell said about ‘taste’ and cultural power, since in this case, they will support what matches their taste, and this in turn complicates the category of the ‘popular’ even further. The question of ‘whose’ popular becomes  more compelling than ‘what’ is the popular.

Rehab Abdelghany has degrees from Cairo University. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, and is interested in African and New Zealand Maori literatures.

This post is part of a series that engages with the third African Popular Cultures Workshop held on 31 March 2014 at the University of Sussex. This collaboration between the Sussex Africa Centre PhD committee, tutors from the School of English’s 3rd year Literatures of Africa course and the African Popular Cultures workshop (established by Professor Stephanie Newell), enabled a series of exciting explorations and connections around popular and/or public spaces, and cutting edge research and cultural production today. Across the past week Africa in Words have been publishing pieces that document and respond to some of the conversations and exciting work showcased at the event.  Read:

Rachel Knighton on the Exhibition and Plenary Lecture

Eleanor McConnell on ‘Nairobi Half Life’

Lilly Kroll on Inua Ellams

Thank you to Grace Pavey and Sung Kyu Kim for permission to use their photos.

Africa in Words Guest Lucy McCann writes:

Display box for the badge produced for the ‘Nelson Mandela Freedom at 70’ campaign. The AAM aimed to get 1,000,000 people in Britain wearing the badge on Mandela’s 70th birthday, 18 July 1988.

For the 20^th anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa on the 27th April a website has been launched recording the history of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. Funded by the Amiel & Melburn Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund, ‘Forward to Freedom: The History of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1959-1994′ (www.aamarchives.org)  summarises the history of the Movement and makes freely available a selection of documents and other items held in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) Archive in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,  and some items from other repositories and in private collections.   Exhibition boards based on the website are available for loan and an education pack for schools (Key Stage 3) is in development.

The Movement began in the summer of 1959 when a group of South African exiles and their British supporters called for a boycott of South African goods in response to an appeal by the AfricanNational Congress (ANC) and the All-African Peoples Conference. Led by Tennyson Makiwane of the ANC and Patrick van Rensburg of the South African Liberal Party, the group took the name ‘Boycott Movement’ and called for a national boycott month in March 1960, winning the support of the British Labour and Liberal Parties and the Trades Union Congress. The month of action began with a rally of 8,000 people in Trafalgar Square addressed by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe and Father Trevor Huddleston. During the month many local authorities joined the boycott, over five hundred local boycott committees were established, leaflets were distributed describing life under apartheid for the black population and three editions of a newspaper, Boycott News, were published. On 21 March the South African police opened fire on men, women and children protesting against the pass laws at Sharpeville in the Transvaal, killing sixty-nine.

Poster advertising the concert held at Wembley Stadium on 11 June 1988 as part of the AAM’s ‘Nelson Mandela: Freedom at 70’ campaign. The concert was attended by a capacity audience and broadcast to 63 countries. It was organised by AAM and Artists Against Apartheid.

These shootings, when British-made Saracen tanks had been used, led to strong international protests and, in London, to another rally in Trafalgar Square and demands for the termination of British arms supplies to South Africa. In South Africa itself a state of emergency was declared and the ANC and the recently formed Pan African Congress were banned and went underground. The members of the Boycott Movement realised that a permanent organisation was needed to campaign for the eradication of apartheid and during the summer of 1960 the Movement was restructured and renamed the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). It resolved to work for the total isolation of the apartheid system in South Africa and to support those struggling against the apartheid system.

Poster to mobilise opposition to the all-white South African cricket tour planned for 1970. Along with Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) and the Fair Cricket Campaign, the AAM succeeded in forcing the Cricket Council to cancel the tour.

The website summarises the history of the Movement through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to 1994 and the AAM annual reports are available for download. The major campaigns which the AAM organised are covered – the consumer and sports boycotts, arms embargo, disinvestment campaign, particularly targetting Barclays and Shell, and support for political prisoners – and these are illustrated by a selection of photographs of events and examples of the posters, leaflets, postcards, pamphlets, badges and other material created to raise awareness. The groups involved in AAM are also described from students and trade unionists, to local authorities, churches and professional groups. Memoranda and reports written by AAM when lobbying the British government are available for download. The website also includes audio-clips and full transcripts of interviews with 35 activists and supporters and video-clips of AAM concerts and of interviews recorded for the Clarity Films production ‘Have you heard from Johannesburg?’.

The material on the website forms only a small proportion of the whole archive, the catalogue for which can be seen at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/blcas/aam.html .

Lucy McCann is an archivist at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and Secretary of SCOLMA (the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa).

AiW Guest: Dustin Zacks.

The American Law and Literature movement consistently draws discussion material from the same wells.  Consider a cursory search of just one database, HeinOnline, commonly used to browse American law reviews: one could spend countless hours perusing scholars’ various takes on Shakespeare, Kafka, or Camus’ relevance to legal minds and debates.  Kafka, for example, is mentioned in a 2009 study as being cited in 373 federal and court opinions.  Yet legal academia rarely, if ever, publishes in-depth examinations of prominent African authors whose works are readily available in English.  This is not to say that legal issues facing Africa are ignored: on one hand, Somalia’s plight and the law of “humanitarian intervention” is discussed in innumerable scholarly papers.  But not more than a small handful of those commenting have seen fit to discuss Nuruddin Farah’s evocative depictions of Siad Barre’s dictatorship in his “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship” trilogy, or his “Blood in the Sun” series of novels exploring the country’s slide into anarchy, with anything more than a passing mention.  Likewise, core aspects of Kenya’s nationhood and governance are much remarked upon: articles on minority rights, gender issues, and political pluralism are all widely available, yet again, relatively few comprehensive analyses of the contributions of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, for example, let alone other prominent Kenyan authors, to legal discussions are likely to be found.

What explains the lack of extensive examination of African literature in American legal academia? Two primary reasons can be argued for the comparative lack of depth: first, some lawyers and law professors will never accept the proposition that literature is valuable despite being something not referenced for what James Boyd White, leading voice in law and literature scholarship, called “findings,” – that is to say, some legal scholars reference non-legal texts only if those texts may empirically prove out a legal or theoretical assertion.  Accordingly, those scholars might not find value in any author’s fictional depictions of legal structures or themes, whether African or not.

Secondly, one can argue that this lack of examination is a legacy of pre-university American literature education.  One scarcely has to glance through the suggested reading list for the National Advanced Placement course in literature, with apparently only one Chinua Achebe novel representing the entire African continent, to understand that American High School teachers are, by and large, not teaching African novels or dramas.  Small surprise, then, that even leading American legal minds have not typically discussed African works in a comprehensive manner.

Law students miss out when their teachers do not use law and literature to teach the personal effects of the law.  Perhaps more than in many other areas of law, the creation and inner workings of international legal structures, to say nothing of opinions rendered by international tribunals, have direct consequences in many African countries.  A personal literary account of the horrors that generate the need for a truth and reconciliation commission, or an account of how corruption and tribalism can shatter a family or village will, for many students, teach more about the need for legal accountability than endless PowerPoint slides explaining acronyms of international legal tribunals.  James Boyd White’s opinion on the mission of law and literature seems particularly apropos here; to teach us the personal side of the law, to empathize, and to direct “one’s attention to a plane or dimension of reality that is normally difficult or impossible to focus upon.”

Furthermore, American legal scholars are missing out on opportunities to remain grounded in the local when making legal or theoretical pronouncements about international legal structures.  Some American scholars, in discussing international human rights law, for example, might primarily be concerned with the fundamental steps necessary to establish the opportunity for an American-style capitalist liberal democracy to flourish and fundamental rights that are in accord with American opinions.  However, when considering the work of Ngugi, to give just one example, one is left with the impression that this is necessarily not the desired, or suitable, model.  In other words, it is difficult to argue authoritatively what is needed without recognizing that fiction and literature has a part in teaching us what may be wanted.  Discussing what international norms of fundamental rights are or should be must necessarily encompass what local values and perspectives are; ignoring African authors and literary accounts suggests we may be disregarding critical access to those viewpoints.

Dustin A. Zacks is an attorney in civil practice in West Palm Beach, Florida.  B.A., University of Michigan, 2004; J.D., University of Michigan Law School, 2007.  His most recent Article, comparing legal themes in the works of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and V.S. Naipaul, was published in Volume 34, Issue 1 of the Northern Illinois Law Review and is available online at SSRN.com.

Okwiri Oduor

AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru  

As I began to read ‘My Father’s Head’, I thought for a moment that it was going to be yet another Caine Prize story set in church and about cunning priests and their gullible as well as crafty worshipers like last year’s winning story, ‘Miracle’, by Tope Folarin. That thought was, however, cut short when I realised that Fr. Ignatius, who comes to the old people’s home where the narrator works, is not in this story to preach morality or to expose religious fallacies. Okwiri Oduor has creatively used the figure of the priest in this story as a trigger that prompts the narrator’s journey to search for her father’s head. This short story presents a recollection of painful, repressed memory. Memory that is so deeply hidden that it takes a lot of skill and patience for the events that led to the loss to come to the surface.

In ‘My Father’s Head’, Oduor manages to bring out, in beautiful prose poetry, the different tensions that are characterised by loss and memory. The narrator is a lonely young woman working in an old people’s home. She has been away from home for a long time and is silently mourning the death of her father. Most of the people she relates with in the story are presented as faceless, nameless people. The reader only gets to know them by descriptions such as “the woman who hawked candy in the Stagecoach bus”, “the man whose one-roomed house was a kindergarten in the daytime and a brothel in the evening”, or “the woman whose illicit brew had blinded five”. It therefore comes as no surprise when the reader learns that no matter how hard she tries, the narrator cannot remember the shape of her father’s head.

It is after meeting the priest from Kitgum that she eventually gains enough courage to summon the image of her father from where it has been buried deep in her memory. The best way the narrator knows how to do this is by drawing, and yet no matter how hard she tries “his head refused to appear within the borders of the paper”. The picture of her father therefore remains unfinished for a long time because it has no head – only a face. Oduor uses the headless drawing of the father figure as a powerful image for the incompleteness of memory in the recreation of the past and history. Even after she recreates his head, she still admits its inadequacies acknowledging that “in the end, he was a marionette and my memories of him were only scenes in a theatrical display”. In this way, Oduor manages to write about several ills that continue to ravage the continent without necessarily fetishizing these issues. By recreating the memory of her father, the narrator remembers “the famine undulating deeper into the Horn of Africa” and through the old man at the old people’s home, the violent events of the 1998 bomb blast in Nairobi are recalled without necessarily painting the violence in graphic colours.

However, as the story moves towards the recalling of her father from the dead, one aspect that stands out in the narration is the vivid and constant description of food. Food colours the whole story and the earthy taste of roasted groundnuts, the warm street-roasted maize and the aromas of cinnamon flavoured tea, sour lentils and okra soup rise from the paragraphs, culminating in the detailed description of the father’s body after he was flattened by a cane tractor. The narrator says that her father’s people called to report the death “with a measured delicacy: how his legs were strewn across the road, sticky and shiny with fresh tar, and how one foot remained inside his tyre sandal, pounding the pedal of his bicycle, and how cane juice filled his mouth and soaked the collar of his polyester shirt”.

For me it feels important to look at this story, and its constant description of food, in relation to its publication in the South African anthology Feast, Famine and Potluck. This anthology was published following a 2013 call by Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) for writers to send in short stories that explored the concept of food under the overarching idea of feast, famine and potluck. Interestingly, two of the short stories that were longlisted for the SSDA competition were later shortlisted for the Caine Prize: Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’ and Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’. While there may be restrictions of a literary authenticating institution like the SSDA asking writers to fulfil a certain brief, I feel that Oduor effectively manages to marry her creative ideas to fit within the requirements of this literary prize or competition.

Despite that, I am also of the opinion that, in an effort to put food at the centre of the story, some of these descriptions end up becoming unnecessary for the story’s development. The constant description of food contributes, instead, to a clouding of the main narrative. I want to argue that to some extent, this style leads to the fragmentation of a beautiful short story and more work might be needed to make it gel together like the mixture of “cassava flour and bubbling water” that the narrator and her colleague cook at the old people’s home.

Doseline Kiguru is a student at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa where she is currently working on a PhD in the Department of English Studies. (She can’t wait to finish her thesis!) Doseline has previously worked as a journalist, a researcher, and also published several short stories as well as story books. She also loves to read children’s story books because it makes her feel like a kid all over again and again! dosiekiguru@yahoo.com

Last year Africa in Words took part in ‘Blogging the Caine Prize’ – a carnival of week-by-week blogging around the shortlist for the annual Caine Prize for African writing.  While there is no ‘organised’ carnival going on this year, the prize continues to showcase some fantastic writing. Africa in Words will be sharing a review or comment piece each week on one of the 5 Caine Prize shortlisted short stories, by different contributors, some regular, some new. 

Inspired by the reviews on Brittle Paper, we are posting our own in the same order:
Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’.  Read Rachel Knighton‘s AiW review.
Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’. Read Katie Reid‘s AiW review.
Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’.
Tendai Huchu’s ‘Intervention’.
Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’. 

The stories are all available to download and read for free on the Caine Prize website. Read them, our reviews and others, and let us know what you think.

Read next week’s story, Tendai Huchu’s ‘Intervention’, HERE.

AiW Guest Anthea Gordon

In Binyavanga Wainana’s influential essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, one of his many salient pieces of tongue-in-cheek advice is: ‘be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.’

Tendai Huchu

Tendai Huchu’s The Intervention leaves neither the impression that interventions from outside can impact Africa, nor that The Intervention itself will change the continent: in this sense, he avoids Wainana’s criticism. Nevertheless, doom still hovers over the text’s relationship with Africa. Or at least for the group of disaffected Zimbabwean diaspora that the story focuses on. Gathered in a living room in Leicester to watch the news of the Zimbabwean election results, apathy, cynicism and failure are a large part of existence.

The story is narrated by Simba, a young Zimbabwean who spends most of the story in a drunk and stoned daze, his voice made distinctive by the use of language peppered with Shona slang and abbreviations from ‘coz’ to ‘wtf’. His observations as he sits with his friends watching the news range from the deeply cynical (‘Nothing we did or said meant a fart; that was the truth of it’), to the provocative and antagonistic (‘”we’re a nation of bums, innit” I replied, knowing this would goad him’) to the uncertain and unreliable (‘I can’t quite remember what else we spoke about, zoned out as I was’). He is a character who will no doubt spark disdain in many readers of the story. Indeed, a review in Brittle Paper by Kola Tubosun remarks on Simba’s use of the word ‘effing’ with indignation: ‘Who is this character? A twenty-two year-old Zimbabwean visiting England for the first time and intent on convincing us of his acquisition of street and teen lingo?’ The other characters – a young couple, Sarah and Tamu with a failing relationship, Simba’s friend Z who is at least two-timing his girlfriend Precious, the owner of the house in which the story is set – don’t come off much better.

The interventions of the title, along with Simba’s observations, suggest a hopeless futility about the state of Zimbabwe and the lives of the Zimbabwean diaspora, thereby presenting yet another doomed narrative for Africa: exactly what Wainana warned against, and what the Caine Prize is often criticised for encouraging (see Ikhide R Ikheloa’s 2012 review and a recent article in the Zimbabwe Standard). The first ‘intervention’ occurs when the young couple, Tamu and Sarah, ask for relationship advice from the older members of the group. Fraught dialogue between the couple about Tamu’s disloyalty, periodically interrupted by the news, creates dynamism which drives the story forward. Yet ultimately the event portrays Zimbabwean traditions as misplaced in a contemporary UK sitting room, as Simba observes: ‘This thing, this intervention that we were trying to do, was a sort of attempt to bring Shona, old school ways of doing things to the UK, like we were Tetes and Sekurus, but we were found wanting.’

The second intervention is a poem (in performance poetry terminology poems are sometimes called interventions) which is not created by Simba but comes to him as a ‘pressure from an unknown dimension, a place before thought where only feeling and emotion matter’. Described like a miracle, the poem and lead up to it marks an unconvincing and cloyingly earnest switch in tone and language, inconsistent with the cynicism and linguistic casualness of Simba’s character up to this point. Moreover, the poem itself consists of clichéd African motifs such as the crying of suffering children and a call for help, with phrases such as ‘The mystical ancestors/The wide African skies/The children of Africa cry’. If we are to read ‘The Intervention’ for what it appears to tell us about Zimbabwe, or the state of Africa as a continent, the picture is pretty negative.

But this is only one way of reading the story. We do not read the Pulitzer Prize winners against the marker of what it tells us about America, so why do so for literature from or about Africa?

Central to the story is its first person narrative, and what Huchu does well is to explore the milieu of how a particular diasporic Zimbabwean poet experiences the everyday. First person narration is a technique which Huchu uses elsewhere to portray perspectives that writers don’t often chose to explore: his story ‘Hello’ is a telephone conversation between a suicidal person on a bridge and a stranger. It features long stream-of-consciousness monologues giving insight into the mind of someone about to end their life. His well-received 2012 novel The Hairdresser of Harare is told in the first person by a character with unlikeable traits from arrogance to jealousy to disloyalty (as well as more sympathetic ones), and yet through this, it tells a full and nuanced story of daily life in Harare, covering topics from relationships to style and beauty to poverty and wealth to homophobia.

That the personal and ordinary is of concern to Huchu in The Intervention is clear from the story’s beginning: a detailed description of defecation, a universal bodily function. The story continues in an enclosed domestic sphere, with the juxtaposition of the confined sitting room against the global reach enabled by the TV’s roll call of news from various countries creating an intensity which is absorbing and raises questions about the link between the personal and political. The disjointedness of Simba’s voice which mixes jarring slang terms and abbreviations, irreverent nicknames for members of the royal family and biblical quotations, casual direct speech with the elevated musings of a poet, all contribute to the sense that the story conveys an individual world view.

Whilst there were elements of the story I found unconvincing, the crafting of this narrative voice enables an exploration of the complex relationship between domestic and political space as experienced in the diaspora. While it doesn’t offer conclusive comment on Africa in general or even on Zimbabwe in particular, it does raise important questions about politics, creativity, tradition and perception.

I didn’t particularly like the story on first reading; I thought it was a shame that the particular facet of Zimbabwean diasporic experience Huchu chose to focus on was one of such despondency and despair, especially considering the more hopeful tone of The Hairdresser of Harare. Even so the portrayal of a character with such an unusual voice and personality – a character unsympathetic, despairing, thoughtful and cynical – make for an unexpected and engaging read, and one which bemuses and raises questions as much as it satisfies.

Anthea studied English and Related Literature at the University of York. She has worked at PEN International and written for Think Africa Press, and recently returned to London from Abuja where she lived for a year, working for Nigerian publishing company Cassava Republic.

Last year Africa in Words took part in ‘Blogging the Caine Prize’ – a carnival of week-by-week blogging around the shortlist for the annual Caine Prize for African writing.  While there is no ‘organised’ carnival going on this year, the prize continues to showcase some fantastic writing. Africa in Words will be sharing a review or comment piece each week on one of the 5 Caine Prize shortlisted short stories, by different contributors, some regular, some new. 

Inspired by the reviews on Brittle Paper, we are posting our own in the same order:
Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’.  Read Rachel Knighton‘s AiW review.
Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’. Read Katie Reid‘s AiW review.
Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’. Read Doseline Kiguru‘s AiW review.
Tendai Huchu’s ‘Intervention’.
Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’. 

The stories are all available to download and read for free on the Caine Prize website. Read them, our reviews and others, and let us know what you think.

Read the next story, Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’, HERE.

AiW Guest Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed

Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ initially felt like two different stories told in three parts. This was until I gave it another read and realised its three separate parts tell an interesting coming-of-age story. Our narrator, Kaba, is at an awkward phase in her life – twenty-something and just graduated … so what next?

It begins with a graduation party thrown by her family and this beautiful opening paragraph:

‘It was a departure of sorts, last time I saw them. Or maybe not at all. I had left sigh by sigh, breath by breath over the years. By the time my leaving party came, I was somewhere else entirely.’

Part 1 is also filled with such a delectable description of food it would make you develop a serious craving for what Chela is writing about:

‘My parents’ cross-cultural marriage made for an exciting culinary event. From my father’s side came slow-cooked beef shin in a giant dented tin pot. Simply done, relying only on the innate flavour of the marbled red cubes of flesh and thinly sliced onion getting to know each other for hours. It was smoked by open charcoal fire and lightly seasoned with nothing but the flecks of salty sweat from nervy Auntie Nchimunya constantly leaning over the steaming pot. Mushrooms were cooked as simply as Sister Chanda’s existence. Fungi was hoped for in the night and foraged for at dawn. My favourites were curly-edged, red on top with a yellow underskirt and fried in butter. My lip curled as someone passed me a bowl of uisashi, wild greens and peanuts mashed into a bitty green mess.’

Efemia Chela

For those that love words and love food, this is literary food heaven. As I read this part of the story, it brought me back to the works of South African Shubnum Khan’s Onion Tears and Ugandan-born Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s memoir The Settler’s Cookbook, which write descriptively about food and cooking. While The Settler’s Cookbook is not solely about food – as food is used to tell a much larger story – I still fondly remember scenes, such as when Alibhai-Brown recounts the evening meal of Indian railway workers, which was a mixture of rice and lentils.

The second and third parts of the story, explore Kaba’s life after her graduation party and her entrance into the big bad world. Yet, Chela tells a different story – one not of ‘certainties and absolutes [or] in plans and futures’. In this part, Chela captures in familiar and unfamiliar ways the issues facing Millenials (or generation Y) – a university degree, the crisis is somewhat over, but there are no jobs. Take this global phenomenon, and situate it within the African job market, where there is such high youth unemployment (degree or no degree), and sprinkle it with a degree that is not seen as practical, and I can understand the frustration our narrator must feel.

While Part 2 shows that Kaba’s life post-graduation is not that great, it also shows how much of an independent minded woman Kaba is. Her parents want her to go back to school and study law (something more practical), but she ‘stubbornly … believed … [t]hat there was really a place in the world for what I believed in’.  So she ‘rented a room in the bum end of town’ and plotted her future. Her wealthy parents did give her some money, well ‘pittance for rent’, but the more she stood her ground for what she wanted, the less they sent to her.

Part 2 also introduces another theme – sex. Kaba may be unemployed and struggling financially, but at least she is not ‘starved for sex’. Here is where we experience the possibility of an almost threesome occurring, but also see that Kaba is not trapped by gender binaries or sexual boundaries. This is explored through a one-night stand with a woman:

‘I wasn’t dogmatic enough in my desire to be a lesbian but I liked the symmetry of being with a woman. Breast to breast. Gender didn’t matter really anyway. I talked to Alice over coffee about it. I remember saying, “Boys. Girls. Whatever. We’re always just two people searching… fumbling towards something.”’

Yet, by the time we get to Part 3, life is a lot harder for Kaba, whose ‘gait changed’. So hard, she even ‘consider[ed] prostitution quite seriously’. Instead, she opts to use a business card she stole from the pockets of the drug-addicted art director of the company she interns at, which she sees as her only chance for survival.

Chela’s story explores the awkwardness of being twenty-something quite well and the choices we make at certain junctures in our life. While many twenty-something’s might not have chosen the path Kaba chose, I did admire her ability to forsake her life of privilege and wealth in order to forge her own path. I am also sure some of us can relate to the confusion and uncertainty of being that age.

Chela’s writing also draws you in, not only through her description of food – which is one of the highlights of this story – but it also made me feel like I was in each scene. I was at the graduation feast and could see the ‘shiny mouths’ on her little cousins. I could also see the ‘bit of red garden egg’ stuck in her uncle with the ‘Ampapata nose’’s beard, the ‘chitenge-covered desk beside the second buffet table’ with the ‘stack of records’, and her older brother’s face illuminated by the ‘glow of a MacBook’.

Finally, there is the subtle and not-so subtle ways in which the title ‘Chicken’ itself comes into the story. There’s the obvious – during the graduation where ‘three plain white chickens’ are slaughtered for the feast (and well the feast itself). Then there’s the not-so-obvious – in her bed the morning after the night before when she finds an inner lip tattoo of ‘an egg.  A single egg’ on the woman she slept with. And it appears again in part 3 with the eggs ‘just lying around inside‘ Kaba. What then are the implied connections between the chicken and egg in these different parts of the story? Are there even any?

The beauty of this story lies in the fact that the possible connections between the chicken and egg could mean different things to different people. It could signify the many ways in which a particular situation can manifest – the death of the chickens at the beginning of the story could be Kaba saying goodbye to her university life and hello to the cruel world; the extraction of the eggs inside Kaba could also be interpreted as another form of loss, but it could also be a chance for someone else to bring an individual into this world that hopefully might not be as torn as our narrator. Or it could mean nothing more than chickens and eggs. Whatever it may be, ‘Chicken’ leaves you to consider these questions and more long after you finish reading.

‘Chicken’ was certainly a delight to read and, at 23, Chela is definitely a writer we should keep our eyes on.

Zahrah is almost done with her PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and also works as a Researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. When she’s not doing either of those, she’s blogging about her true love – African literature – at bookshy.

Last year Africa in Words took part in ‘Blogging the Caine Prize’ – a carnival of week-by-week blogging around the shortlist for the annual Caine Prize for African writing.  While there is no ‘organised’ carnival going on this year, the prize continues to showcase some fantastic writing. Africa in Words will be sharing a review or comment piece each week on one of the 5 Caine Prize shortlisted short stories, by different contributors, some regular, some new. 

Inspired by the reviews on Brittle Paper, we are posting our own in the same order:
Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’.  Read Rachel Knighton‘s AiW review.
Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’. Read Katie Reid‘s AiW review.
Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’. Read Doseline Kiguru‘s AiW review.
Tendai Huchu’s ‘Intervention’. Read Anthea Gordon’s AiW review.
Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’. 

The stories are all available to download and read for free on the Caine Prize website. Read them, our reviews and others, and let us know what you think.

AiW Guest: Madhu Krishnan

Okey Ndibe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1960. A novelist, political columnist and essayist, he moved to the United States in 1988 at Chinua Achebe’s invitation, helping to found African Commentary. His critically-acclaimed first novel, Arrows of Rain was published by Heinemann in 2000 and his follow-up, Foreign Gods, Inc by Soho Press in 2014. Okey has earned both an MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has taught at numerous universities around the world, including the University of Lagos, Trinity College and Bard College. He is currently Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in the United States. Okey was kind enough to speak with Africa in Words following his book launch during Africa Writes at the British Library in London on 13 July 2014. The following transcript has been lightly edited for coherence.

MK: I wanted to start by asking you about your second novel Foreign Gods, Inc.. There has been quite a long gap between your first book, Arrows of Rain and this one. What was the experience of writing a second novel, as opposed to a first novel, like for you?

ON: The process of writing this novel was very interesting, because I actually started writing Foreign Gods, Inc. soon after my first novel was published. The first novel did so well with Heinemann that they asked me to write the second novel as quickly as possible. I told them that I don’t actually write so quickly, but that I could write a series of short stories and so I began to write what I thought would be a short story called ‘Foreign Gods, Inc’ and other short stories. But sixty pages into this story I knew it was not going to be a short story. Then I thought that it might actually be a short short novel, so I called my publishers and said we’re in luck, we’re going to get a novel. It’s not going to be long at all. The novel turned out to be a thousand two hundred plus pages. It took so many years to write. At this point I knew that I had this monstrosity and I spent four years cutting it down to 506 pages. I then showed it to my agent and she suggested further cuts. And eventually, by the time the publisher accepted it was 346 or 47 pages. And of course the editor did some more cutting. So it was a different experience then, because the first novel came more or less around size. This one went from being what I thought would be very small to extremely massive and I had to spend quite a few years cutting it down. Hence, that hug gap between the novels. And at times I wanted to abandon it and do something else, but I was so taken with the story that I couldn’t put it down to write something else.

MK: Yes, I remember you said in another interview that you just had to keep working on it so you could see how it ends!

ON: Exactly.

MK: Creatively, is there a difference when you’ve already had a novel come out?

ON: I think for me the fact that I had a novel published already just meant a certain kind of confidence to take on what I imagined was a more complex tableau. It helped; it boosted my confidence that I had a book that was already published in the world and read by so many people. But there was also a measure of anxiety, you know. The first book had been universally loved – actually – there was one American woman who reviewed it and hated it – but, you know, near universal applause for the first novel. So even though I had confidence I also wanted to write a novel that would at least be equal to the first one. And the jury has been sort of equal – some people feel the first novel has an edge and some people, in the words of one American review, think the second one has blown the first out of the water.

MK: Foreign Gods Inc, as a novel, is quite critical of just about everybody. You have some moments which are quite critical of America, of the way immigrants are received in America. It’s also quite critical of the ways in which America exports its religions, its popular culture and its aspirational lifestyle, but you’re also very critical of Nigeria. The second Ike gets off the plane he’s just met with corruption after corruption after corruption. Have you received any criticism from either side about this?

ON: Well, I have been scolded, actually. An American woman who reviewed the book for a blog said that this was a brilliant, original novel, that the characters were wonderfully achieved, the dramatic situation was very engaging, but she said that it was not realistic that the character would find himself in this situation in America. But on the whole I think that this is a novel that is admittedly dark, but then there is a lot of humour in it. Even Ike’s interactions with the people around him, with this crooked pastor, have moments of great humour in them. I’m attracted to stories like that, which can be bleak and dark, where therefore the moments of humour become essential to them. On the whole people have loved it, though. The important thing is the authenticity of the story.

A blogger in America talked about encountering Teju Cole in Washington DC when he read there and asking a question about what he felt was a negative view that runs through the story [of Open City] and asked, if you had to do it again, would you change things around. Teju said, ‘look the question is not whether the story is dark or whether it is negative; it’s whether it’s true.’ And of course there are different versions of the truth, but a writer has the ability to explore these issues, these different directions. I tend to agree with that sentiment.

MK: One of the characters I found quite interesting was Queen B and that relationship between Ike and Queen B. In the last ten years or so, there have been a large number of novels written by people from the African continent but set at least in part in America, which deal with the often-troubled relationship between Africans and African-Americans. How did you feel about that when you were writing the novel, especially as an African in America?

ON: I have to say that in my mind, on some level I see Africans and African Americans as one people really, but these people have been cut apart from that by history and other forces. When Africans come to America one of the things that they are told quickly is that you guys work hard, unlike these African-Americans who don’t want to work hard, who don’t want to seize the opportunities. Some Africans believe that narrative, and I tell them that we haven’t had the experience of suffering and subjection, the horrific destruction of infrastructure that African-Americans have faced. When I arrived in America I arrived with a certain kind of comfort which, if I had grown up in America, maybe I wouldn’t have. Having said that, there’s also some African-Americans who find the African presence uncomfortable, which is a shame. I’m troubled by that difficult relationship and I wanted to bring it to the fore of the novel. The thing is, Ike’s problem isn’t that he married an African-American woman. Ike’s problem is that he married somebody who is not from his social and intellectual class. He could have married a different woman, but he left that relationship on account of the flak from her father. Interestingly, a young African-American woman read the book and then called her father upset at what she said was my negative portrayal of African-Americans. But I say to that, no, I wasn’t portraying all African-Americans. I was portraying one character. Just like when Ike goes to steal the god, I’m not portraying all Africans as people who steal gods. Overall, though, it’s a difficult situation and I wanted to portray that in my novel.

Okey Ndibe © Africa Writes

MK: Another theme in the novel is the idea of return, Ike’s return to Nigeria after a long period of absence, which is another trope that we see a lot in African writing from the last few years, such as Adichie’s Americanah or Cole’s Every Day is For the Thief. What do you think it is about the novel of return that is making it such a pressing issue for African literature now?

ON: I think it speaks to our experience. In a lot of ways, literature is a mirror of experience, of life. I think that from the 90s there has been a slow interest by a lot of African immigrants either from the UK, Europe or America to explore the prospect of a return to their roots. But of course they have changed. When they return they find that sometimes their values have become inimical to their dreams and to their imagination of how to carry on their lives. Adaptation is always ongoing and you suddenly feel like you have lived in America for so many years without ever really feeling American, and then you return to the place that you have left, your native place, and you find that in a lot of ways you’ve become a stranger there as well. So that particular experience of… of feeling estranged from different places at once lends itself to great fictive and literary exploration.

MK: And it isn’t just the person that changes, right? In the novel, there’s that great moment where Ike’s driving through town and doesn’t recognize anything.

ON: Precisely. Everything is subjective, because suddenly great changes occur. So Ike goes to his uncle’s shrine and his uncle has a cell phone, in fact two cell phones. And Ike doesn’t like to use a cell phone in America, yet suddenly he sees his uncle in his shrine, in the middle of a prayer, and his phone rings and he shouts hello. That sort of thing. He sees a bridge over the river which was brought by a politician who had a lover from the village and so there is a lot of transformation. And there is the transformation of the spirit of the community; so people can send texts, you have Facebook, you have the internet. It’s a huge quantity of change and yet in a lot of ways there are things that are so contrary to the modernist impulse which we also encounter in the village.

MK: In the novel, one of the big agents of change is America, that American influence, whether it is through evangelical religion or that amazing scene where Ike sees the kids watching basketball. But it’s not new basketball, it’s a twenty year old video. So what do you make of that seemingly intractable forward march of American influence in all of these different spheres of life?

ON: Well it used to be, which is part of what I’m exploring in the book, that when I was young and growing up in Nigeria the land of the white man was England. That was it. And so, I would not have dreamt twenty five years ago of sitting down to watch a basketball game. Then I went back to Nigeria several years after I went to America and people were asking me about Michael Jordan. There was an interest because people were just astonished that these athletes who just threw balls through a hole could make so many millions of dollars, more than most football players. And the thing about America is that it brings so much money in, and then you have its sheer size, its sheer power in the world, all of which create this fascination with America that I have found to be deepening in Nigeria. And as you rightly point out, it is also through the evangelical movement. Everywhere you look there are signs for churches. It’s become comical almost. And the spelling! Like you might see a sign say ‘mighty’ but spell it ‘mity’, you know.

There is that great fascination with America and that has come with an entire accoutrement of American things. When I taught as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Lagos, a student of mine walked up to me and said, ‘Prof, what is cooking man’, sort of just speaking the way that he imagined Americans speak. I told him it was okra stew that was cooking. So my novel is partly about the way that we consume one another’s illusions. Here are people watching this very old American game and just fascinated by the idea that these people get paid millions, bags of money. They are consuming in their minds, they are imagining that they want to start eating like Americans. They want to give up their local cuisine and start eating pizzas and hamburgers and drinking Coke, because this is the way they feel Americans eat and drink and so on. And of course, in New York and in London and elsewhere wealthy people have now developed a taste for African… what we might call exotic deities. In both cases we see the ways in which we consume one another’s illusions. There’s a trafficking in images. In the case of the kids, the men and women in the village, it’s that they are really consuming the crumbs of the politicians who have stolen their resources and who have transferred them abroad. The crumbs are what they are given.

MK: So do you think that the fact that people have been sold these images is why they keep putting up with it?

ON: I think it has a lot to do with it. The images are very strong. I’ll tell you a story, talking about the power of America. I was in Japan in 1993 as a guest of the Japanese Government. I came into my hotel room and turned on the television and the show was in Japanese. But they kept showing images of Michael Jordan soaring through the air, dunking the ball. Then they’d pan to the streets and show all of these images of people crying: men, women, children, just weeping. And the commentator was running these comments. Since I didn’t speak Japanese, I imagined, I conjectured, that Michael Jordan must have died, that was why they were crying. I quickly went to CNN to find that Michael Jordan had just announced his retirement for the first time from basketball, and his fans in Tokyo in Japan were crying. That gave me a new insight into the power of American culture – the depth and reach of America’s cultural power. Michael Jordan and people like OJ Simpson were given passports to cross this line and become basically non-raced, un-raced, as it were. They were no longer black, even though Michael Jordan’s skin is extremely black. They just became someone we could all be like, if we just drank Gatorade or wore Nike shoes, then we could all be like him. So those images are projected into Africa in a context of great poverty and they have a quick, penetrating impact.

MK: Much has been made in the last eight or nine years about this idea of a renaissance of African literature, especially Nigeria, the idea of new Nigerian writing. Now I know that you’ve been working in the area since the 80s or before so I was wondering whether you think it is true? Is there a new Nigerian writing or is it just that we’re taking notice of it, in the West, in a different way now?

ON: I think that it is just that we’re taking notice of it in the West now. I get asked this question a lot in America, of why it is that African writing is suddenly important. And I say that people have always been writing, but publishers in the capitals in New York, London and Paris are only now taking notice. It’s part of the logic of the marketplace. You could give them a gem and they will ignore it until somebody gambles on one and it works. And then suddenly they are all asking if you know any African writers, to bring them their way. And then because there are always gifted African writers, suddenly you find a profusion of African writing.

When I finished Arrows of Rain I sent it to an agent. Actually, first I sent it to American publishers and some of them never responded. Others praised the manuscript but said it was not for them. Then I found an agent and she sent it to five publishers. Out of the five, three wrote to say they were not interested. One wrote back and said this novel is amazing but I don’t think there is a readership for an African writer’s novel. And then one editor at a press said that she loved it, but wanted more time to have two other editors read it. At that time Heinemann had offered me a contract and they wanted me to sign quickly. My agent wanted to risk it and wait, but I said ‘Look one or two of the editors could read it and say the same thing: that Americans may not be ready for an African novel. I’ll go with Heinemann, who wants my novel.’ And now my current publishers have bought the rights so an American edition will be released, it will be re-released in January. They are very excited about it. They are really doing a lot of marketing for it because they think it will have a huge market. And all of the professors I have heard of who have used it in the classroom have had a great experience. One professor told me that he asked his students to read half of it for the first class and every single one of them walked in and said that they couldn’t stop so they read the whole thing. Yet, twelve or thirteen years ago when I was selling it American publishers were not ready. Major publishers in the UK were not ready. Suddenly, now they are ready.

MK: As you know, Africa in Words, for whom this interview is taking place, is a blog started by PhD students. You yourself are a professor at Brown University, so it felt appropriate for my last question to ask you what you think is the future of scholarship on African writing? Has it kept up with the inventiveness of the writing?

ON: I want to see scholarship catch up. I think that there is so much important work coming out but I don’t think there has been an adequate level of critical engagement with that work. But I’m hopeful because there are so many great young scholars and students who are engaging with the work, with the important tropes. I’d like to see African scholars and readers engage more with the work, as well. It’s a pity that one has to come to London to find this kind of audience. I’m lucky that when I go to Nigeria that I get huge turnouts, but it is largely because of my political column. People want to see the trouble maker. I’d like to see more of a vibrant reading culture emerge in Nigeria and other African cultures and for structures of publishing, too, so that we are telling the world from Nairobi or Lagos or Dakar what is important, rather than always having the validation come from the West.

Madhu Krishnan is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in 20th and 21st Century Postcolonial Writing at the University of Bristol. Her research considers the construction and dissemination of an idea of Africa in contemporary African writing, interrogating the contours of representation in the creation of ‘global’ and ‘local’ African literatures. She has published numerous articles on African literatures and postcolonial studies in journals including Research in African Literatures, Textual Practice and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her monograph, Contemporary African Literature: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

AiW guest: James Smith.

Broken Monsters and Broken Dreams

I read Broken Monsters on a night flight from Cape Town, on my way to interview Lauren Beukes following her contribution to the Edinburgh Book Festival (2014 edition). It made the world seem a smaller place. The plot raced so quickly I struggled to keep pace with the themes, like vainly reloading a literary twitter feed lost in an everywhere of urban decay. I had finished reading it by the DRC (according to KLM’s little moving map anyhow) even if that only meant crossing a digital representation of a 10km-distant arbitrary line borne of corporate greed and colonial need. Broken Monsters explores similar themes to much of Beukes’s earlier work, blurring the connections and disconnections that motivate mass culture and individual’s struggle to live – or at least not die – in worlds balanced between materiality and magic. The coordinates of reality, dreams, structure and agency are pulled away from us.

Beukes was part of a session, together with fellow South African first-time author C.A. Davids (author of the beautifully written and compelling The Blacks of Cape Town), entitled ‘South African Literature Goes Global’; the only real point of intersection being that both authors are South African and sometimes write about the South African ‘overseas’, the world outside of South Africa and the rest of the African continent.

We – the rhetorical ‘we’ – are obsessed with genealogy and taxonomy. Trajectories and labels. Neatness and order. Genre stacked upon genre. Africa. Europe. Race. Ethnicity. Speculative. Literary. Post. Ante. Apartheid, of course, represented this to the nth degree, and casts a long shadow still.

So, we find ourselves in a session with Lauren Beukes and C.A. Davids, somehow still feeling shoehorned into the broadest possible South African theme: the global. Their books are markedly different. Beukes represents the vanguard –  globally – of South African speculative fiction, flitting across genres in an anarchic sense-making exercise. Davids is more in a South African political tradition: austere, forensically picking at the seams of Apartheid and the complexities of identity. Both blurring boundaries. Always blurring boundaries.

In The Blacks of Cape Town Davids plays with the definitions of Apartheid racial categories, in doing so not only subverting the machinery of Apartheid but also the veracity of generations of family history and by extension personal certainties and intimacies. She shows how notions of belonging, of home and exile, are contingent on much more than place and history. There is no either/or as defined by an airport arrivals hall or family tree, only the dealing with what is next, whether it is prosaic or earthshattering.  In Broken Monsters Beukes switches cities and continents, post-recession Detroit could equally be the Johannesburg of earlier books. The identikit context forces us to confront the power of technology, media and corporation to render everywhere equally strange and tractionless, and maybe, actually, there is some comfort in that. We all have to find ways to live in a world where the future is simultaneously bound by the past and cast adrift from it.

Post-Apartheid Fiction?

And yet we have a new boundary: the post-apartheid. An era of promise, reconciliation, and reconfiguration. It has been an era of uncertainty and of the forging of new identities. The banner of the anti-Apartheid movement has fallen away and former comrades may now be at odds. Former alignments have transformed into delineations. Civil society organisations, political parties, church groups and the media have all had to re-orientate themselves in relation to the governing party. The African National Congress, too, has suffered the hangover of the post-liberation-movement-in-power. It is not easy.

A lack of jobs and worse than hoped for economic growth has limited economic liberation. The hegemony of the ruling party has limited political debate. Corruption and a lack of capacity has limited service delivery. While many challenges have been met – an inspiring constitution, a painful reconciliation, a genuine political democracy, stability – there is still much to be done.

In many ways everything is more messy now. The psychotic, obsessive compulsive neatness of Apartheid with its borders, categories and rafts of racist policy was an easy thing to rail against, or I suppose support if that was your inclination. Even in the death throes of Apartheid, up to close to the very end, there was a sense of certainty. The Apartheid government would not go without a struggle; and then, of course, it did. And what next? What now?

Mess, a good mess, but mess nevertheless. There is the uncertainty of multi-speed emancipation, political: yes, economic: no, reconciliation: in part. The messiness of identity, alignment and community in a country where taxonomy was suddenly less important, although now important in other ways, and above all else, the legacy of Apartheid, as a fact, as a ghost, as an excuse, and as an inter-generational legacy. I had the sense that South African fiction quickly turned in on itself, it became introspective when before it been expansive. Isolation and uncertainty replaced idealism and indignation.

Genre fiction, other than Apartheid fiction as a genre, began to emerge. In discussion with me, Beukes identified the emergence of two groups of writers, one more explicitly political using the genre of crime as a means to interrogate the disappointments of modern South Africa (Margie Orford is a case in point, also at the Ed Book Fest this year), another implicitly so, using speculative or science fiction to neatly sidestep self-flagellation or the impossibilities of writing in a post-idealist idiom. The possibility of genre fiction could expose the impossibility of the new-old South Africa. The sci-fi one-two of Beukes’s novel Zoo City and Neil Blomkamp’s film District 9 was a watershed, South Africa no longer isolated, no longer newly back in the fold, but now contributing to global genres via distinctly local themes. Another boundary blurred.

Mess and Genre

If we embrace mess, and recognise it in others, we can be more certain in our  collective uncertainty. It is ours, not mine alone, a sort of post-modern Ubuntu.  We live in the future and the past, but never quite in the instantaneous present. The right now is just too slippery a concept in South Africa and possibly always has been, which possibly explains the also slippery South African notions of ‘just now’ and ‘now now’.

We might rail against lazy compartmentalization, but perhaps the one delineation we can firmly grasp is the democratic election of 1994, two decades past, and if the ‘new’ South Africa remains a strange place then perhaps

South African authors can help make sense of that, regardless of genre. For Beukes, perhaps we need to raise ‘obfuscatory zombies’ to make sense of somewhere where real life monsters lurk and seek reconciliation and even parole, in the recent case of Eugene de Kock of Vlakplas infamy.

The combination of forensic dissection, deep introspection and, well, zombies, allow us to reimagine ourselves, and South Africa’s past, present and future. Zombies break down our deepest dichotomies: living/dead, conscious/unaware, society/anarchy. After all, what are zombies, except a means to help us make sense of who and what we are?

James is Professor of African and Development Studies and Vice Principal International 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). @jrsmith7.

James has written on Lauren Beukes’ work and the Ed Book Fest (2013) for AiW before – see ‘Lauren Beukes and African Science Fiction’

James spoke to Lauren Beukes and Carol Ann Davids after their 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival session on Saturday Aug 9th. This session, ‘South African Literature Goes Global‘, was part of the Book Fest’s Voices from South Africa theme, which is hosting a range of South African writers in Charlotte Square Gardens this year.

Worth catching if you can today (13 Aug) will be prize-winning author Niq Mhlongo, who the Africa Book Club aptly describe as “part of a young generation of black writers who depict their country without concession” – Mhlongo will be in discussion about his latest novel, Way Back Home – a boundary and border crossing contemporary critique – in a book Fest session entitled ‘When traditions collide with modernity‘, at 3.30. Buy tickets here.

As her debut, C.A. Davids’ The Blacks of Cape Town is a nominee for the Ed Book Fest’s First Book Award – you can vote for The Blacks of Cape Town here.

@edbookfest      #EdBookFest
The world’s largest public celebration of the written word, right in the heart of Edinburgh.
9-25 August. Tickets now available edbookfest.co.uk.

AiW Guest Réhab Abdelghany

Last month, the Royal African Society’s annual Africa Writes Festival brought to the UK an audience with the eminent Ghanaian playwright, poet, novelist and academic, Ama Ata Aidoo: a festive event in its own right.

Having seen her elegant photo in the British Library’s booklet announcing the event, I expected to see her walk in like the celebrity she is, but Ama Ata Aidoo’s entrance was closer to that of a beloved granny that you have been impatiently waiting for to regale you with enchanting stories.

© Africa Writes

Katy Eagleton, Head of Asian and African Studies at the British Library, introduced the interviewer, Dr Wangui wa Goro. It was only very fitting that an Africanist of wa Goro’s standing would play hostess to Aidoo whom she introduced as “a literary living legend”. Aidoo has been influencing generations of readers worldwide, including some who have grown into the new voices of the continent like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who Aidoo praised as belonging to “a category on her own”.

The aim of the conversation according to wa Goro was to reflect on Aidoo’s expansive literary career and the main themes that have emerged from her work. However, in addition to that, I believe that the beautifully witty, humble, and brave character of Aidoo herself was what really emerged, and that this is what we truly got to see on this rare occasion. Concluding her deservedly long introduction of the author, wa Goro hoped the event would be “our fireside conversation”; a wish that was immediately granted thanks to the friendliness Aidoo inspired, her eloquence, wit, and interaction with the audience.

We were then treated to a short film on Aidoo’s life and literary achievements, with a younger Ama among her people in Ghana speaking about the influence her mother’s stories had on her choice of themes and way of telling stories. The traumatic impact of the slave trade and the aftermath of slavery on Ghanaian consciousness stood out both in the film, and in Aidoo’s own ensuing conversation. I remain haunted by a shot of a huge stone gate near the shore leading to the ocean with the words “Door of No Return” carved on its top arch.

Bitter Legacy

Talking about Ghanaian memory of a shared history with slavery, Aidoo explained: “I think we Ghanaians are scared of that part of our history. There is internal slavery and external slavery. Among Ghanaians you do not talk about slavery, you do not call anybody a slave.” She went on to suggest that this did not address the problem nor heal the memory: “It has gone underground and coloured everything in our life, because we did not face it and the people from the diaspora are coming to compel us to deal with it. These attitudes impacted very negatively on our ability to communicate properly with the diaspora.” She stressed that Ghanaians are still “very nervous” of the presence of people from the diaspora “because they remind us of what we don’t want to deal with”. This nervousness was succinctly evoked by Aidoo in the highly charged dialogue between little Anowa and her grandmother from her play of that name shown in the film.

Aidoo’s most intensive handling of the legacy of slavery in relation to the diaspora is in fact not in Anowa (1970), but in her first play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), which unfortunately passed unmentioned that evening. Anowa was central to the conversation and the folk tale motif that Aidoo brilliantly reinvests in it, drawing on the West African tradition of warning girls against selecting their husbands as opposed to suitors approved by the family, was given particular emphasis. Aidoo cited Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard as a pioneering example that reworked the same motif, commenting: “Tradition is that these marriages do not succeed. I am glad I held myself from making too big a departure from tradition.”

The Writer, The Character, The Critic

Interestingly, Aidoo also shared with the audience her experience of writing the ending to Anowa and the different possibilities she experimented with: “When they ask me why did you kill Anowa? I did not kill her; she committed suicide.” In the alternative ending she considered, Anowa would have stepped on stage mad and dressed as a Victorian English woman. However, Aidoo discarded it, explaining, “it would have been even more cruel to let Anowa survive as a mad woman”.

Ama Ata Aidoo and Wangui wa Goro © Africa Writes

I found Aidoo a writer who is not possessive of her characters; she gives them voice, but then lets them decide their own destiny. The way she spoke about them showed that the line between her self as an author and her characters is so well defined that they emerge with a free will. Wa Goro’s attempts to peep behind that line went unrewarded as Aidoo was not persuaded to talk about Esi’s choices in Changes, even when wa Goro argued saying “you wrote her!” Aidoo retorted: “She is not me!”.

Although she is also an academic, the critic in Aidoo perhaps vanishes when her creative self reigns: “I don’t sit down saying I am going to write a novel about transition and a woman etc.; it is you critics who pick these things.” Indeed she is no less defiant an interviewee, surprising and challenging, as she is a thinker, writer or critic. No wonder wa Goro, describing her, said: “each time we’re surprised and shocked by the new things Aidoo brings and challenges us,” and went on to tell her: “You don’t shy away from controversy.”

Aidoo was also unwilling to answer questions without questioning what was in them for her audience.   When asked to talk about her stories, Aidoo exclaimed in disbelief: “if you google it, you will get this information!” Humorously pretending to respond to wa Goro, she turned to face the audience and satirically conjured up what I may dub as mock-storytelling: “Ok, once upon a time!” which sent the charged audience into waves of giggles. Similarly when wa Goro asked her to tell us about Changes, Aidoo again, going against the tradition of the conventional interview, retorted ironically “No!” and added: “What shall I tell you? The book is there!” Aidoo, like her characters, is a woman who is outspoken and alert to ironies, bringing the theatrical and dramatic into play within the framework of the formal conversation set up.

Influences & Beginnings

The highlight of the evening for me was Ama Ata Aidoo emerging from wa Goro’s questions as an oral storyteller: telling us about her beginnings, sharing memories of some unforgettable situations that shaped her life, and retelling one of her mother’s stories.

Writers very often owe the fostering of their talent to parents or grandparents whose act of telling stories instilled the passion and motivation to contribute their own. Aidoo appeared in the film proudly saying: “I definitely remember that my mother told us folk tales. I was a good listener to my mother. ‘Maybe I should add to the world’s wealth of stories,’ that was what I thought.” Earlier on in the day, talking about her debut novel Kintu with Kate Haines, Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi acknowledged her debt to her father and grandfather. Similarly, Olabode Ogunlana dedicated his book The Rare Leaf: Yoruba Legends and Love Stories, launched at Africa Writes, to his paternal grandparents whose oral stories inspired him.

Ama Ata Aidoo © Africa Writes

Aidoo’s skill with storytelling, oral and written, is not only owing to the influence of her mother, but also of the village storyteller, some of her teachers, and the books she read. She explained that back then, it was not usual for mothers to tell stories to their children. Interestingly, the village had its own professional storyteller: “we would gather in his place of an evening and he would tell us stories.”

Aidoo remembered with the audience certain situations in her early life that seemed to foreshadow her future literary distinction. When she was 15 years old attending Wesley Girls High School, a teacher asked her about her dream career. “Without thinking, I said I wanted to write poetry.” The teacher replied that poetry could not earn young Ama a living. Aidoo thought the teacher must have felt her words could be discouraging to the aspiring student, and the next year, she presented her with an old silent Olivetti typewriter. Aidoo’s smile beamed as she told us how that became a great source of encouragement prompting the start of her publishing in the school magazine.

Encountering the Book

Aidoo started her education in a one-classroom village school: “We didn’t have a library at the village, of course, but we had one at Wesley Girls.” There, Aidoo humorously remarked, “Jane Austen was definitely in the library, but Enid Blyton was not in the great tradition,” expressing how fond she was of Blyton’s and R.L. Stevenson’s adventure books, and boasting of coming across Bram Stocker’s Dracula in the 1950s “long before Hollywood”.

Her first encounter with the published word was in the village school through primers written in her own Akan language. Ama discovered another secret trove when she went to live with her cousin and his family. She found out he kept lots of book in drawers: “So I would wait until my cousin and his wife are out of the house and I would open the drawers,” and there Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry came out to her for the first time.

Although she happily shared the titles she liked best by other authors, Aidoo withheld her favourite among her own works, wittily unyielding to wa Goro’s attempts: “I will quote my sister Buchi Emecheta at this; they are like my children. I do not have favourites and even if I do, I won’t tell you.”

Storytelling, Different Ways

Commenting on having been named the first to publish flash fiction in Africa by the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the unconvinced Aidoo retorted: “I do not believe in being first in any business; who steps? Where did they get this?” Then, the magnificent oral storyteller picked up her tablet, tapped her fingers on the touchscreen and read out to a mesmerized audience “Tuppence”, a condensed story about a minister’s young son who, taking advantage of his father’s powerful position, oppresses his school classmate.

Ama Ata Aidoo © Africa Writes

The conversation closed with Aidoo expressing hope for Ghana’s publishing scene to flourish and lamenting the fact that it is still largely limited to school textbooks: “I wish we had in Ghana one tenth of that energy in the publishing in Nigeria.”

The evening was a wonderful experience of oral storytelling from a master craftswoman. Ama Ata Aidoo keenly allowed her audience into areas of her world, which, in her view, excluded all that can be ‘googled’. Afterwards, she appreciatively signed every copy presented to her, refusing to turn down any one in the phenomenal queue despite the approach of the British Library’s closing time and entreaties from her staff.

Perhaps I have stopped short of giving Aidoo her due honour by presenting her substantial list of continuing achievements and well deserved host of prestigious prizes, but I am tempted to follow in the master’s own footsteps and ask you “google it”!

Réhab Abdelghany has degrees from Cairo University. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, and is interested in African and New Zealand Maori literatures.

AiW Guest Emma Shercliff

Review of panel discussion with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf of Cassava Republic Press; Valerie Brandes of Jacaranda Books; Verna Wilkins of Tamarind Books and Susan Yearwood, agent and founder of Susan Yearwood Literary Agency. Chaired by Simi Dosekun.

Genre fiction was a hot topic at Africa Writes 2014, with panel discussions on sci-fi, travel writing and romance providing a contrast to the greater focus on literary fiction at the 2013 Festival. There had been some discussion of genre publishing at the previous day’s session on ‘Developing Contemporary African Writing’, but the difference in this panel (expertly moderated by Simi Dosekun, who stepped in at short notice after Margaret Busby was unable to raise her voice above a whisper) was that speakers were asked to explore ‘the business of publishing genre fiction in Africa’. This focus on the commercial aspect of the publishing industry made for a particularly thought-provoking and entertaining session – and one of particular interest to me, as I am working part-time with Cassava Republic as part of my PhD research.

There was general agreement that one did not establish a publishing house, particularly in Africa, to make millions: Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, who is based in Abuja, suggested that if one is insane enough to found a publishing venture, one has to be either ideologically or economically driven – and it became clear that all four panelists were the former rather than the latter. Verna Wilkins set up Tamarind Books (now part of Penguin Random House) in 1987 when her own children didn’t see themselves in the books that they were reading. Valerie Brandes established Jacaranda in order to expand notions of ‘black writing’ in Britain, aiming to represent the cultural and ethnic diversity and heritage of readers in London today. Bibi (and her husband, Jeremy Weate) founded Cassava Republic because they felt that ‘the conversation about African writing was taking place elsewhere’.

© Africa Writes

The panelists were asked why a publisher might choose to publish genre fiction. Susan Yearwood, who established her literary agency in 2007, said that she was interested in expanding into genre fiction because it ‘opens the doors financially’. Bibi explained that the creation of Ankara Press, an imprint of Cassava Republic that will launch in October with six romance novels, all by African writers and set in Africa, marks a decision to branch out from an initial focus on literary fiction and high-quality non-fiction into publishing with more of a mass appeal. The reasons for this are two-fold, and complementary. Firstly, if Cassava Republic wishes to reach a broad (and therefore commercially more rewarding) audience they need to publish the type of fiction that those readers wish to read. Secondly, Bibi has a strong ideological motive for publishing genre fiction; she wishes to produce ‘progressive’ romance novels that reflect the lives of modern African women. Creating novels with African characters and settings alone is not enough (‘if I’m going to dare to go into romance, it has to be meaningful, it has to have a message’); Bibi wishes to transform ‘the way in which women see the world and the way the world sees women’.

Valerie Brandes’s motivation for establishing Jacaranda was similar: she wished to provide ‘an answer to the way in which black people in the UK were being represented’, with the aim of publishing ‘broad and true stories about who we are’. Valerie talked about the difficulties of breaking into the publishing establishment – she has found herself pigeon-holed by agents as a ‘black’ publisher (‘they look at you and they see your market on your behalf’) – but recognized that technological changes had made access to publishing tools and the market easier than in the past.

Both Valerie and Bibi were quick to acknowledge the role played by ‘pathfinder’ publishers like Verna Wilkins and Margaret Busby. Verna talked about her struggle to establish Tamarind Books where, in the early days, she was writing, publishing, marketing and selling the books herself. Verna had to convince the publishing establishment that a market for her children’s books existed when not a single bookshop on the Charing Cross Road was selling a children’s book featuring a black character. She recalled taking her books to the Afro Hair and Beauty Show in order to make sales – which she did, selling £3500 of books in 3 days. (Verna relates elsewhere how her 5 year old son brought home a ‘This is Me’ booklet from school in which he had coloured himself pink – assuming that it wasn’t possible to have a black child in a book, as he had never seen one). However, thanks to ‘pathfinders’ such as Verna, today’s children – and Verna emphasized that her books were for all children, not just black children – can read about a black tooth fairy or a strong, black female giant who makes rainbow lollipops and pineapple jam to cure hiccups. Tamarind Books are widely read in the UK and further afield – and have spawned a new generation of children’s books that reflect the reality of our multicultural lives.

Verna Wilkins © Africa Writes

The panelists were asked where they found their authors. Valerie said she had received two books from agents but had discovered other authors herself by following writers on Twitter, reading blogs and magazines and attending events. Bibi said that the call for submissions at Ankara Press (in 2011) had yielded a lot of interest, but most of the manuscripts they had received had been unuseable in their original formats. She had worked closely with a small number of authors to develop them and it has been ‘a long gestation period’. Nevertheless, Bibi said she has found working with the Ankara Press romance writers ‘the most joyful experience of my publishing career’. She attributed this partly to the fact that ‘they had no sense of baggage or a sense of super-stardom’ and were more responsive to editorial suggestions than some more established ‘literary’ authors she has worked with (perhaps because romance authors may be more used to working in this way; editorial guidance for romance writers is often extremely prescriptive, resulting in the formulaic fiction that their readers – and publishers – desire).

The difficulties of marketing and distribution for small publishers were touched upon. Valerie noted that even in the UK and US it is ‘extremely difficult to get distributors to notice you’. Bibi stressed that ‘we have to think of marketing in unconventional ways’. Ankara Press’s target audience is ‘online & mobile’ and social media is the obvious way to reach them. Ankara Press will launch its first six titles in e-book format, downloadable to e-Readers or to mobile phones, before publishing ‘purse-sized’ novels in print form several months later. This seems an ideal way to test the market and to circumvent some of the distribution issues faced when selling physical books in Africa, where, even in the comparatively developed economies of Nigeria and Kenya, bookshop and distribution networks bear little comparison to those in Europe or North America.

Books for the masses?

To what extent a move to genre fiction will result in ‘books for the masses’ remains a matter for debate. Even in Nigeria, now Africa’s largest economy, the female literacy rate is only just over 50% and GDP per capita a paltry $3000. Reading is associated for many people with education, and not something that is done ‘for pleasure’. However, crime and romance novels – alongside self-help, business and faith-based titles – have long been the staple diet of the African reader. Well-thumbed copies of James Hadley Chase and Frederick Forsyth novels are sold from tiny dukas across Tanzania and Kenya. Shelves of (imported) crime and romance novels are on offer at bookstores in Ibadan, Lagos and Abuja. (And it is not just women that read romance – a man sitting opposite me in Lagos airport recently was avidly engaged in a Harlequin novel). In northern Nigeria, there is a vibrant market for locally-published love stories, or Littattafan Soyayya, written in Hausa and published as cheap pamphlets. These sell in their multiple thousands, echoing the heyday of the Onitsha chapbooks.

© Africa Writes

Clearly genre fiction in Africa is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the focus on creating romance, in English, specifically for the African market, ensuring that these novels reflect and empower modern African women, and the use of new digital formats to reach the reading masses. Cassava Republic is by no means the only publisher to have spotted the gap in the market. South Africa has led the way in romance targeted at a black female readership, with Sapphire Press and Nollybooks both publishing novella-length, affordable stories of aspiring city-based career women juggling work and love-lives. In January 2014, Kachifo (Lagos) announced that it was launching Breeze Books to publish genre fiction, which it defines as romance, mystery, thrillers, and Sci Fi/ fantasy novels and short stories. Cordite Books, an imprint co-founded by Lagos-based Parresia Publishers and writer Helon Habila, put out a call for submissions in August 2013 for crime novels by African authors. In 2012, Storymoja (Nairobi) launched its Drumbeats Romance series, featuring ‘passionate, sexy love stories from East Africa’.

The rewards for these publishers are potentially vast. In 1998, Nouvelles Editions Ivoriennes (NEI), based in Abidjan, launched a popular romance list called Adoras – a Francophone Mills & Boon, set in West Africa. Over 10,000 copies of each of the initial 6 titles were sold in the first few months and the list was subsequently expanded to 38 titles. Whilst some of the gender stereotypes perpetuated in the novellas are problematic, the commercial success of the series is undeniable and the list continues to sell throughout Francophone West Africa. Several titles on the Adoras list are now available as e-books via Amazon and one of the titles, Cache-cache d’Amour, has been made into a short film and watched by millions of West African viewers. Affordable pricing (and clever marketing) was a key factor in the success of the series – the books cost the same as a lipstick.

The power of the publisher

For me, this panel discussion highlighted the potentially transformative power of the publisher. So often overlooked in literary debates, the publisher can be vital in contributing to social change. Bibi suggested that ‘we need to think as black & African people how to use genre fiction to create our own myths & symbols’. The key will be to meld this power with commercial success by ‘giving the audience what they want, but in a way that is different from what they imagine they want’. 

It would be easy to surmise from attending Africa Writes that the African publishing industry is thriving. It is therefore important to put this panel in context. Perennial issues such as piracy, problematic distribution, the high cost of paper and the poor quality of production continue to bedevil publishers on the continent. The Nigerian Publishers Association is battling to convince the government to repeal a 62.5% book import tax, which has the potential to decimate the industry. 90% of African publishing is still dominated by textbook publishing, upon which most publishers rely. Literary output is tiny in comparison and, in many cases, donor funded. This funding will inevitably, in time, shift elsewhere – and publishers must produce commercially successful fiction to become sustainable.

On the positive side, by providing African readers with content they want to read, scenarios in which they can imagine themselves and characters with which they can identify – as well as an accessible and affordable mode of delivery – a small number of dynamic publishers have a real chance of transforming the African literary scene and the contemporary reading culture. Watching companies such as Kachifo, Parresia, Cassava Republic and Storymoja shape the world of genre publishing in Africa will make for fascinating viewing.

Emma Shercliff is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her research explores and documents the role of female publishers in shaping the literary landscape in Africa. Emma worked in the publishing field for over ten years and was formerly Managing Director of Macmillan English Campus, a digital publishing division of Macmillan Publishers. She is currently based in Abuja, where she is working for the British Council on a research project looking at approaches to gender within teacher training in Nigeria.

AiW Guest: James Smith.

During the Edinburgh International Book Festival I managed to catch three South African authors, Lauren Buekes and C.A. Davids, and Mark Gevisser. Three authors, writing in three different genres (although I realize that ‘genre’ in itself is somewhat problematic when talking about South African writing – more later).

I was very struck by the first question posed by the audience in both sessions: “what is the future for South Africa”? Last year at the Ed Book Fest I sat in a session with Marli Roode where she talked about her debut novel Call it Dog (Atlantic, 2013) and she was asked a similar question. My initial reaction was – this year and last – mild irritation, we are here to talk about the books after all. My next reaction was why did the audiences react like this? Was there something especially parochial about Scottish audiences (or audiences in Scotland)? I don’t think so; I’ve been to plenty of Edinburgh Book Festival sessions with authors from other countries and they haven’t been appointed as proxy literary ambassadors, asked to do fact and not fiction. It must be something to do with how we view South Africa from afar, what it represents, and it what it means to us? Mandela, Tutu, despair, hope, segregation, forgiveness, rainbow.

The world being both big and small meant I ended up sitting next to my old Johannesburg housemate, then a student now a cultural critic, at the Beukes and Davids event. After a somewhat…. heated post-event debate it became apparent to me that it wasn’t simply an issue of exotic, symbolic South Africa driving discussion at the event, ‘doing politics’ seemed to be central to literary authenticity back home as well. There was almost a moral obligation to write about South Africa, and to write about somewhere else or write obliquely through different genres was apolitical, or political by omission. Essentially, South African writers had a responsibility to write about South Africa.

Alongside the Voices from South Africa thread running through the Book Festival was a Scottish independence thread. Now, not every Scottish author was writing about independence, nor in the sample of stuff I attended were they either being chastised for not writing about Scotland or queried regarding their views on civic verses ethnic nationalism. This does not mean, of course, that a Scottish author in South Africa might not be asked these questions – or about whisky or rain for that matter – but my sense was that there was indeed a peculiarly South African set of obligations a South African author is expected to discharge.

So far this blog post is ‘anecdata’. My thoughts leavened with fragments of evidence. Luckily, I was able to speak in person with C.A. Davids and Lauren Beukes after their Book Fest event. What I took from these conversations was not the obligations of the South African writer, but the constraints of the South African novel. It is hard to publish in South Africa, it is hard to earn any kind of living, it is hard to get your books read. The authenticity of authorship in South Africa actually refracts itself through the realities of the country, not the obligations of the medium.

A recent article by Leon de Kock, ‘The SA Lit Issue Won’t Go Away’ (Mail & Guardian, 22 August 2014), turns on the constraints of place, scale and genre: can, and should, South African authors write about elsewhere? Can ‘SA Lit’ be global, or must it be context-bound, grounded in South African history and geography? For de Kock, this is perhaps not a crisis of identity, more a creative opportunity. It is both liberating and disconcerting to be writing in and outside of South Africa, to play across scales or use genre to interrogate South Africa. For Beukes and Davids, implicit within this ordinal perspective of literature is, of course, the issue of money. What sells? What constitutes a bestseller in South Africa? What is or isn’t a risk for a local or indeed international publisher?

Rather than think of Beukes, Davids and Gevisser as exemplars of different genres, writing for different audiences, reasons and to different sets of rules, it is productive to reflect on their commonalty. Each made it quite clear that they wrote because they wanted to. They wrote what they wanted to (to paraphrase another South African writer). Davids told me she wrote her book, The Blacks of Cape Town (Modjaji, 2013), because she wanted to draw on her family’s past, engage with their political history and produce an intensely ‘South African’ novel. Beukes wrote about Detroit in Broken Monsters (Umuzi/HarperCollins, 2014) because it could be a proxy for Johannesburg, an urban everyman of a place. Gevisser wrote his autobiography of his relationship to Johannesburg, Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg (Jonathan Ball/Granta, 2014) because it would postpone writing another commissioned political biography of a South African president, a particular genre that promised “diminishing returns” he told the audience after his reading, in which he describes the humour involved in his own same sex marriage in downtown Joburg.

I think it is very easy to get caught up in ordinals and dichotomies – a particular book is this or that and therefore ultimately is more or less South Africa. This makes for too-easy a nuance, which is not really nuance at all. We simply need to hyphenate or concatenate and we have new things which are possibly not really new and almost certainly didn’t need defining. For Beukes in particular, thinking about the delineations of genres or “genre wars” is a pointless exercise, it’s the mix that matters as that is what drives experimentation and enables more people to write. Davids is possibly the writer of the three who most closely identifies with ‘SA Lit’ but equally felt that the sheer growing diversity of South African, African and ‘global’ literature was great.

In contemporary South Africa it is not really about literary pigeonholing, it’s about the critical mass, the mess (again). This may seem an aphorism, but really it may be an antidote. These novels and new authorial voices shed new light and cast new shadows, they flit through scale and perspective, and they tell both new stories and old myths. They help make sense, obliquely and acutely, of a complex today, which is in one very important respect clearer but in many other more confusing than the past. The most important point is that they do all of these things, individually, and in communion, collectively. Beukes spoke of the creative community of Cape Town-based writers she is part of, who read each other’s material, encourage, collaborate and grow.

In contrast, Davids outlined the limitations of publishing in South Africa, small markets circumscribed by often prohibitively expensive books, the problems of multiple languages and relatively small numbers of people who regularly read novels. Selling 2,000 copies of a novel in South Africa would make a bestsellers list. This breeds conservatism amongst larger publishers, but possibly creates creative (if risky) opportunities for smaller publishers like Modjaji. There are ways around this; both Beukes and Davids are involved in initiatives and programmes to make reading more accessible through innovation and technology. Beukes is involved in Yoza.mobi, for example, delivers free, bite-sized stories through mobile phones to encourage younger people to read. Davids is getting involved in grass roots initiatives to increase reading amongst the youth. There are other older ways to expand reading, going back to the era of semi-disposable pulp fiction or making use of e-readers. Technology and tradition present opportunities.

Much effort is being made to highlight new authors, through anthologies, blogs, twitter, community. Beukes was aghast in Edinburgh when asked by an audience member to identify just one up-and-coming author: “there are so many”. Established South African authors, generally, are very supportive of emerging South African authors.

My abiding sense of the ‘responsibility’ of the South African author, right now, is not that they must use literary fiction to engage with politics or as a political act. Rather, it is that if they do indeed have a responsibility it is to forge something new, new communities of writers, new styles, new topics, new formats and new communities of readers. There may be politics in the text no doubt, but there is Politics in the act of writing, and reading.

James is Professor of African and Development Studies and Vice Principal International 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.

James has written on Lauren Beukes’ work and the Ed Book Fest (2013) for AiW before – see ‘Lauren Beukes and African Science Fiction’ – and also after the 2014 event in the Book Festival’s ‘Voices from South Africa’ theme – Lauren Beukes and C.A. Davids, ‘South African Literature Goes Global’.

‘AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian’

If it has been a long time since you’ve read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden—and if, in the meantime, your memory has been clouded by a series of overly charming movie adaptations—you may have forgotten that the book opens with a shocking scene that is entirely unsuitable for children. The book’s protagonist, Mary Lennox, has grown up in India, the unloved daughter of a weak-willed colonial official and a narcissistic socialite. Mary’s neglectful parents leave her to be raised entirely by servants, failing even to inform their neighbors of her existence. As a result, when a cholera epidemic sweeps through their compound, killing most of the household, the forgotten child is left to wander alone for days, scavenging for food and wondering where all the people have gone. ‘How queer and quiet it is!’ nine-year-old Mary thinks, shortly before a pair of soldiers discover her and bluntly inform her that she is now an orphan and everyone she knows is dead.

Devilskein & Dearlove, Alex Smith’s YA re-imagining of The Secret Garden, is well aware of the darkness at the heart of its predecessor’s otherwise saccharine-sweet cultural presence. The book’s heroine, Erin Dearlove, is a little bit older than Mary Lennox, but she, too, is frighteningly alone in the world—her entire family has been murdered in a home invasion. This fact, introduced early on, may put off some readers, but a single bleakly humorous sentence on the first page pulled me in: ‘[Erin’s] face was scrawny, her sandy amber hair unbrushed, she used convoluted vocabulary with spite, and she never smiled, because she had no parents’. Like Mary Lennox (who is described in The Secret Garden’s opening pages as a ‘tyrannical and selfish…little pig’) the Erin Dearlove we meet at the beginning of the novel is unapologetically nasty. She arrives at her aunt’s Cape Town apartment complex, Van Riebeeck Heights, and immediately offends everyone by lamenting her lost wealth and loudly claiming to be glad that her parents are no longer around. Lonely, yes, but even angrier at the hand fate has dealt her, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with the cantankerous old man living on the top floor—a man with a reputation among the local children for being a scary old devil.

It’s an arresting set-up, made even more so by the fact that the old man, Mr. Devilskein, is, literally, a devil, whose job is to collect souls for an evil corporation known as The Company. He is eager to harvest Erin’s soul, along with that of Kelwyn, the boy who lives next door. Once the supernatural element is introduced, the book begins to teeter slightly under its own weight. The Company and its creaking machinations force the story forward, but overall, they are a distraction from the interpersonal relationships that give the book its emotional resonance.

And the book is undeniably affecting. For all her bad behavior, Erin is a brave and funny heroine who gets off lots of good lines. (When Devilskein warns her not to snoop about his kitchen, she snaps, ‘I am not domestically inclined. What could your kitchen possibly contain that is more interesting than any other kitchen on the planet?’). Angry female protagonists are still relatively rare in children’s literature, and Erin’s refusal to be comforted by platitudes feels both refreshing and true. It’s also unusual to encounter a book that mixes humor so boldly in with tragedy; most of the novels I’ve encountered that deal with young people recovering from trauma are grindingly serious; Smith, in contrast, is never afraid to risk a joke.

However, Smith does make a surprising choice early on in the novel, one that significantly lessened the book’s impact on me. Erin, it turns out is not a spoiled rich girl, as we are initially led to believe; she is actually a lovely child who comes from a nice, middle-class family. Her ‘bratty’ persona is a defense mechanism that serves to shield her from the full horror of what happened to her. The details of how precisely this works are fuzzy, but in practice this psychologically questionable device serves both to absolve Erin from her misbehavior, in a way that feels too easy, and to flatten her emotional arc. Instead of learning from her mistakes and growing as a person, for much of the novel, Erin has little to do but ‘heal’. This healing is described using earnest therapeutic language that sits uneasily beside the light touch of the book’s opening pages. ‘A psychiatrist friend had told (Erin’s aunt) that in response to the extreme trauma she had suffered, Erin had created an alternative reality for herself’, Smith carefully explains; later, that same psychiatrist friend notes that ‘Physical exercise (helps) prevent depression’, so Erin takes up jogging, gets a tan, and sure enough, starts feeling a whole lot better—and looking prettier, too. To tell the truth, I was much fonder of the troubled, traumatized Erin we meet early on than I was of the sweet, pretty, wholesome, and somewhat flat character who replaced her. Smith should have allowed Erin to retain a bit more of her personality as she recovered, not to mention some of her flaws; that would not only have offered a more accurate representation of life in the aftermath of trauma, it would have helped us stay invested during the book’s rollicking, action-packed, but hectically paced ending.

Of course, The Secret Garden doesn’t live up to its opening, either. Once Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, the book becomes a blatant advertisement for the revivifying health benefits of Good English Air (as opposed to the disease-laden air of the colonies) and Good English Servants (as opposed to slavish Indian servants, who spoil upper-class children by allowing themselves to be slapped). This is the second re-imagining of a Victorian-era children’s classic I’ve read recently—the other was Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which takes on Rudyard Kipling—and I can’t help but wish that both novels had been a little more interested in exploring their predecessors’ fascinatingly messy colonial histories. But that might be too much to ask of a YA novel that has already taken on quite a lot; in the end, all Devilskein & Dearlove would have needed to be successful was a story that did justice to the miserable, infuriating, and completely compelling young girl at its heart.

Kristen Roupenian teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University.

Filed under: Books, Reviews

AiW Guest Mehul Gohil

A friend said “I know Mehul bought a bunch of Delany and so on. On the NBO streets.”

Another friend thought which streets? Turned to me and asked “Pray tell, Mehul, where did you chance upon this treasure?”

I said:

It’s not so hard. Find a weekday. Pick a time – around 5:30pm when rush hour starts to peak. Start from just outside Wakulima Market (the other side of it, the non-Haile side, the side where it seems you will end up on the railtracks). You might have to cross a stinky swamp just as you exit Wakulima (on the other side) to get there (especially in this rainy season). Regulars like me know which stones and wooden planks to step on when crossing the swamp waters. I suggest you wear gumboots on your first excursion. Here you will find about half a dozen book hawkers strewn across a length of about one hundred meters. It’s the cheapest place. They sell the books for 30 KSh each (about 35 cents in USD). My latest find here was a juicy 600+ page Herman Melville collection of ‘tales, poems & other writings’. You will find lotsa sci-fi; largely because most sci-fi (all?) novels have the cheap paperback look. If you find 10-20 books you like, you could hustle a deal for all of them for a mere 200 KSh (just over 2 dollars USD).

Next stop is inside Wakulima Market itself. The price goes up slightly – 30 to 100 KSh. Usually, they have a boring collection here. Needless to say, I have never found anything worth it. But I still do check the place, simply as part of the ritual of my book-hunting addiction.

Then you come out of Wakulima, now on the Haile-side, and you can fish around. There are a bunch of random book hawkers in the vicinity at this time of day. Sometimes you might get lucky with something good, like To Our Scattered Bodies Go.

The real goldmines are on Tom Mboya Street, but you may want to take a detour to the Bridge Over Railways. That’s the one just past Kenya Poly towards the tracks. Just at the foot of the bridge you will find a bunch of book-kiosks. Mostly here it’s school books, but if you talk to the book hawker fellows nicely, they will take you into the backdoor areas of the kiosks where their ‘godowns’ are. I’ve found some Delany here. You might meet an old fellow, who looks like he’s in his sixties now, I don’t know his name, I just know how he looks. A head full of grey hair, no balding, square face with a grey moustache. He should probably be considered a legend in Kenyan literature, because I think he may have been the first book hawker in Nairobi. He has been in operation at this same spot since the early 1990’s. My dad used to take me to this place on Saturday afternoons when I was a kiddo and he would buy me a bunch of DC comics and hardcover illustrated science books and so on. I bought my first DeLillo’s from here in the mid 1990’s (End Zone, White Noise and Ratner’s Star…apparently I thought they were sci-fi novels, and that didn’t change on reading them). It is these invisible Kenyans that make life tick. Go to some litfest-hayfest and you find a bunch of yuppie-like literati who have got to be good looking. Back at the Bridge Over Railways the guys are so hard to see but that’s where the books come together.

You might want to take some further detours along Haile and Moi Avenue. At the ‘Agip’ petrol station, adjacent the Central Bank. The collection is mostly girly pulp fiction. Nora Roberts and such hairstyles. But even here sometimes I get wonderful stuff; last year I managed to pick up a bunch of Philip K. Dick’s.

Outside the Tusky’s (the one next to Bomb Blast) you will find one of the more popular book hawker spots. But this one is no longer as good as it once was. There appear to be some turf wars going on between the book hawkers. For a couple of years (2010-2012) the book hawkers at this spot were different guys and their collection was generally kick-ass. I bought over a hundred books just in those couple of years from this spot. But now the news guys seem to have liased with City Council askaris and had the good fellows kicked out. The bad guys have taken over and their collection is crap. So is their customer service. Plus they have hiked the prices to over 200/=. Stuff they have is mostly these big hardcover things about cookers, sewing, modelling, Ferrari cars, organic chemistry, Princess Diana and so on. Boring things. They have killed it for this particular spot. When it was good, the place was jam packed with book enthusiasts and we used to block off this section of the pavement completely.

Further down, are some other book hawkers. Again nothing much that interests me. Just after Kenya Cinema there is this gulley and this spot also used to be good. There was another old fellow who had some very interesting books. Then his sons came in and took over and messed it all up. The old guy is no longer there and the sons now sell DVDs instead of books.

You can then cross over to the other side of Moi Avenue and find three other book hawking spots. These ones are good. Lots of Philip K Dick here if you want. Philip K Ubik is alive and roaming in downtown Nairobi and, as long as he is read and used as directed, is absolutely safe.

Now onto Tom Mboya. Several spots here and you can definitely try the stalls inside the buildings. But the sci-fi motherload is at the spot just after the Tusky’s (the one diagonally opposite National Archives). The dude who runs this spot has got everything you would want when it comes to sci-fi. I found six Delany novels here. Sometimes you have to be patient (this is a general rule), come in day after day, because these fellows like to sell out one lot before they replenish. But this guy always has something worth buying. Last week I picked up a book because it had a nice cover: metallic look with the word “LIGHT” creeping through. By M. John Harrison. I’d never heard of him. It was a wonderful wonderful read.

The other fine spot is next to the other Tusky’s (the one at the short road that connects Tom Mboya with Moi Avenue). Here, there is an excellent selection of a more literary sort of fiction. I have bought Beckett, Pynchon, DFW, Doris Lessing, and even Soyinka’s The Interpreters from here (I have NEVER seen The Interpreters in any formal Kenyan bookshop. And it’s one hell of a novel). It’s like these two bookhawkers know what their clients want and therefore they seem to specialize. But I suspect they may not even be conscious of it. Instead, some strange kind of natural selection goes on.

If you have a Kindle, some of the electronic shops on Tom Mboya can hook you up with cheap and pirate .mobi format books. You give them a list of 50-100 books, pay them like 1000/= and they will hunt them down. You collect after a few days.

There are other spots I have not mentioned, downtown Nairobi is a rich place for books. There are those fellows around Alliance Française, on Kenyatta Avenue, on Ronald Ngala and so on. Over Easter, I was playing in the National Chess Championships at Kenyatta University and got to pass by Githurai – 12 kilometres East of the city centre – every morning for four days. Just at the roundabout next to the highway, I discovered a bunch of book hawkers there too – mostly selling pulp fiction. And who knows what is happening in Mombasa? Kisumu? Nakuru? Whatever you do, don’t think the only Women of the Aeroplanes are those you see within the established literary circles. People in Kenya are reading.

Mehul Gohil is a writer born and living in Nairobi, Kenya. His fiction has previously been published in Kwani? and online at Short Story Day-Africa. He is included in the Africa39 list which showcases the most promising 39 African writers under the age of 39. He is currently putting together a short story collection.

This piece is the first in a 3 part series. In part 2 Mehul will write about some of the interesting people he has met on the Nairobi streets whilst buying books. The final part will explore how this book hunting phenomenon fits with his loner persona by showing how it has made him become an explorer of the intricate skeleton of downtown, an explorer who sets out to discover the best spots for a loner to read a book