by Rob Spillman
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
• West Africa •
• Francophone Africa •
• North Africa •
• East Africa •
• Former Portuguese Colonies •
• Southern Africa •
Biographical Notes
ROB SPILLMAN is the editor and cofounder of Tin House, a ten-year-old bicoastal literary magazine based in Brooklyn, New York, and Portland, Oregon. Tin House has been honored in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is also the executive editor of Tin House Books and cofounder of the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, now in its seventh year. His articles, book reviews, and essays have appeared in BookForum, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as in many other magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Copyright TK
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many people who offered suggestions and advice, including Pete Ayrton, Elise Cannon, George Makana Clark, Isobel Dixon, Chris Dreyer, Ntone Edjabe, Dedi Felman, Amanda Gersh, D. W. Gibson, Cullen Goldblatt, Neil Gordon, Uzodinma Iweala, Laila Lalami, Johnny Temple, Andy Tepper, Hannah Tinti, Michael Vazquez, Binyavanga Wainaina, and James Woodhouse. I’d also like to thank the invaluable transcription wizardry of Katie Arnold-Ratliff. My wonderfully supportive agent, Betsy Lerner, kept me sane, and Beena Kamlani is the best editor anyone could ever wish for; her boundless enthusiasm, curiosity, and attention to every detail have made this daunting project a pleasure. Lastly, I’d like to thank my wife, Elissa Schappell, and my children, Miles and Isadora, for their continual support.
Introduction
African writing is ready for the international spotlight. Much like the literary scene of India in the late 1980s and early ’90s, which spawned the writers Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai, the cultural climate of Africa, with its rapid urbanization coupled with its expanding educational and economic opportunities, has created a hotbed of creativity, heralding the emergence of a vibrant new generation of exciting and innovative writers.
Over the ten years I have been editing the literary journal Tin House, I have seen an ever-increasing volume of strong work from African writers, but it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I was working on an international issue of Tin House magazine, that I threw myself into reading emerging fiction from around the world. During the six months of intense reading leading up to making final selections, I was particularly struck by the work coming out of Africa. There was a palpable sense of urgency in much of the writing. These were stories that had to be written.
More recently, I was a guest editor at a literary festival in Nairobi, a gathering that attracted writers and editors from across Africa. Throughout the week there was a visceral feeling of energy and excitement, like nothing I had experienced before. There was urgency, yes, but also an overall feeling of possibility. The younger writers were mixing forms and languages, appropriating multicultural urban street patois into their stories. From the cradle of civilization, where the world’s first stories originated, I was witnessing an African literary renaissance.
Now the rest of the world is tuning in. Young Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie recently won a MacArthur “genius” grant, along with Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize and PEN’s Beyond Margins Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, while Chinua Achebe, fifty years after the publication of his groundbreaking novel Things Fall Apart, received the Man Booker International Prize for his legendary career. African writers are showing up with regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in American and European literary magazines.
These are the headline grabbers, a mere bucket of sand in the Sahara. From Cairo to Cape Town, new, powerful voices are emerging, and more important, they are finding outlets for their work.
This volume includes a sampling of thirty different authors with a range of publishing experience, from Nobel Prize winners to unknown writers who have yet to publish their first book. The sections are organized geographically, each section opening with a nonfiction selection to provide context. The sections and accompanying maps are included for reference, not to suggest that the selected authors are the only writers to come from any particular region. One could easily create sub-anthologies featuring hundreds of writers. This anthology is intended as a snapshot of recent writing as seen through the lens of one editor, after consulting with many, many other editors, writers, scholars, critics, and everyday passionate readers.
Some of the themes covered reflect the recent history of the continent: anti-colonialism and the struggle with Western influences, the strongman rule, the rise of women’s voices in traditionally patriarchal societies, the personal and national influence of domestic and imported religions—and now, increasingly, what it means to be an independent-minded African in a globalized world.
The nineteenth century saw European nations make huge inroads into the African interior for land, lumber, minerals, and slaves. The old tribal borders gave way to an artificial partitioning of the entire continent by the Europeans in 1885. Belgium had taken over the Congo; France, West Africa, Gabon, and Madagascar; Germany, southwest, east, and central Africa; Britain, with the lion’s share, Nigeria, Ghana, and entire swaths of the south, east, and north; Italy, Libya and Somalia; Portugal, Angola and Mozambique; and Spain, an outpost in the western Sahara. African nations only gained independence from their colonizers beginning in the late 1950s, most in the mid-1960s, and inherited the artificial boundaries and groupings left behind by the colonizing powers. An all-too-familiar post-colonial pattern for many countries has been a brief honeymoon followed by dictatorship, either military or strongman rule. Corruption became rampant, and periods of political instability, marked by wars and natural disasters, deepened the plight of the ordinary citizen. Prime examples include ruthless Ugandan strongman Idi Amin; Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the Congo with an iron fist for more than thirty years; and Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president since 1980, who is desperately trying to hold on to power despite being voted out in 2008, his country now plunged into economic ruin.
Today, many nations are still struggling to come to grips with postcolonial rule, often teetering between rapid transitions from military to democratic governance, but representative governments are beginning to take hold, however precariously, as witnessed by the surprising violence surrounding the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya, a country generally thought to be the most stable of African countries.
A few key dates to keep in mind:
We open with West Africa, represented here by Ghana, the first black African country to gain independence, and Nigeria, the most populous African country, with 80 million people and, not surprisingly, the richest output of literary work. Nigeria has been plagued by a series of corrupt governments that have exploited the oil-rich nation. Writers have had moments of freedom of expression but also harrowing periods of repression—in 1995, despite an international outcry, the Nigerian military executed the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa-Ogoni for exposing the overly cozy ties and unseemly goings-on between Shell Oil and the military junta.
It has been fifty years since Nigerian Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart, a classic work of anti-colonialism that became a worldwide literary sensation, its commercial and critical success opening the door for many other black Africans. It seems fitting to reproduce he
re Achebe’s seminal 1965 essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” in which he explains why he chooses to write in English versus his native Ibo. Other prominent African writers, most notably Kenyan Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, have argued that colonial languages limit African thoughts and ideas, and that Africans should express themselves in their native tongues versus the languages that were imposed upon them. Achebe, on the other hand, makes the case that his African stories and ideas will find a larger audience if written in a more universal language, even within Africa itself, a continent of 800 million people, fifty-four nations, and over two thousand languages.
Art and politics have always been powerful allies in Nigerian fiction. In Helon Habila’s masterful story “Lomba,” an imprisoned writer is forced to write love poems for the prison superintendent. In Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, the legacy of the devastating Biafra-Nigerian civil war is felt on a deeply personal level. Chris Abani and Mohammed Naseehu Ali focus on the changing role of women in traditionally male-dominated societies, Abani portraying the life of a poor prostitute, Ali an empowered Islamic woman whose husband is forced to publicly prove his ability to sexually please his wife.
The next section comprises work from the sub-Saharan former French colonies, commonly referred to as Francophone literature. Francophone culture has been heavily influenced by the concept of Negritude, a movement founded in Paris in the 1930s, which put forth the independence and validity of black culture. This anti-assimilationist philosophy has been closely identified with L. S. Senghor, a Senegalese poet who became the first president of independent Senegal. This black nationalist movement was fueled by the Harlem Renaissance and Haitian artists and championed by French intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre, who called Negritude “anti-racist racism,” and was later embraced by African Americans in the 1960s. Here Cameroonian Patrice Nganang, one of today’s most prominent Francophone writers, examines the legacy of Senghor’s Negritude and its relevance today.
In an excerpt from her novel The Belly of the Atlantic, Fatou Diome shows the long reach of France, via soccer, all the way to a small island off the coast of Senegal, where a boy watches the same game on TV as his sister in France. Alain Mabanckou, with biting humor, renders powerful Congolese thugs hapless through their struggle to master the right phrase of doublespeak, while Boubacar Boris Diop imagines voices for those who were silenced during the brutality of the Rwandan genocide.
While North African writing has similar concerns as that of sub-Saharan Africa, namely, the legacy of colonialism, North African culture has a much longer history of interaction with Europe and the Middle East. In her opening to the North African section, novelist Laila Lalami writes of growing up in a bookish Moroccan household in the 1970s, where, despite the 1956 independence, French children’s literature—Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne—was the main reading in Rabat, and her middle school revelation of discovering native Berber and Arabic authors who were writing of her shared world. When Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi’s seminal novel Woman at Point Zero appeared in 1974, it stirred controversy for its empathetic portrayal of a high-end prostitute who turns the tables on an abuser. More than thirty years later it still remains a lightning rod for debate about the lives of Arabic women. Mohamed Magani arms himself with humor (and coffee) in an attempt to beat back the repressive French occupation forces in Algeria, while in an excerpt from The Star of Algiers, Aziz Chouaki follows the fate of a would-be rocker as he clashes with a fundamentalist movement sweeping his once-tolerant country. In Leila Aboulela’s “Souvenirs,” a Sudanese man returns to his country after living in Scotland and searches for just the right piece of his homeland to take back to his adopted country.
As we move to East Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina explores the contradictions—modern and ancient, united and fractured—of Kenya, and by extension the rest of Africa. Wainaina, deeply aware of the cliché-ridden lenses through which Westerners perceive his home continent, writes engagingly about stereotypes in his now-legendary tongue-in-cheek essay “How to Write About Africa” for Granta in 2005. “Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. . . . Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls.”
Fellow Kenyan Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, in an excerpt from his epic novel Wizard of the Crow, wields satire like a scalpel to expose the absurd genuflections of a strongman’s sycophants. Abdourahman A. Waberi of Djibouti implodes reality and stereotypes in his surrealistic and comic novel The United States of Africa, in which Africa has taken the place of the West as the new beacon of hope and opportunity for the world’s immigrants. It is now Africans who look down their noses and prejudge the poor, tired, and huddled masses flocking in from Europe, Asia, and the United States.
In a more realistic vein, the heroine of Somali Nuruddin Farah’s novel Knots, after a disastrous marriage in Canada, brazenly returns to war-torn Mogadishu to reclaim her familial home from a warlord, while in Ugandan Doreen Baingana’s story, a Muslim man converts to Christianity, jettisoning three wives but not his alcoholism or troubles.
Portugal was the last major colonizer to relinquish power in Africa, and only after the fall of the dictator Salazar in 1974. Brutal civil wars in Mozambique and Angola followed, the countries becoming proxy battlegrounds in the Cold War. With recent stability, there has been a greater artistic output from these countries. While popular in Brazil and Portugal, many writers from the former Portuguese colonies are not as frequently translated into English as their French and Arabic-speaking African counterparts. An essay by Mia Couto, the great novelist from Mozambique, eloquently describes how the homogenization of global languages imperils mystery and storytelling. In Angolan Ondjaki’s story “Dragonfly,” the ineffable beauty of music and everyday objects permeate the conversation between a doctor and a mysterious stranger. In an excerpt from José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons, Borges is reborn in the form of a chameleon who broodingly passes his days in the library of his master, an albino who invents elaborate family histories for the recently moneyed Angolans, a new class of citizens created in the void left by thirty years of civil war.
The final section of the book is dominated by South Africa. Fifteen years after the end of repressive white minority rule, the entire region is still coping with the aftershocks of apartheid. Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has been praised and vilified for his portrayal of conflicted white South Africans, most critics calling his work complex and compelling, while others have accused him of racism. Coetzee himself has said that he considers his sensibilities more aligned with Europe than South Africa, and has recently renounced his citizenship for that of Australia. Here he examines the memoirs of South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, also exiled, then imprisoned for seven years for his anti-apartheid efforts.
The other South African writer to win the Nobel Prize, Nadine Gordimer, is also no stranger to controversy, having recently fallen out with her authorized biographer over the claims of embellishment in some of Gordimer’s autobiographical writing. In her story “A Beneficiary,” Gordimer, who for over fifty years has chronicled apartheid’s effects on all aspects of society, follows a woman going through her mother’s apartment after her accidental death, where she peels back the layers on the past and present life of liberal upper-middle-class South Africans.
With the waning of the apartheid era, the new tragedy gripping much of Southern Africa is AIDS. Sadly, many artists and writers have succumbed to the disease, including Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, who died of AIDS in 2005. Vera’s short story “Dead Swimmers” captures the fierce bonds between a traditional Shona elder and her modern granddaughter. Grief, in the form of a “professional mourner,” takes center stage in the excerpt from Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying, a comic portrait of the travails of a man hired by rural families to grieve at funerals. Foremost Afrikaans writer Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat delves into the complex relationship between an aging Afrikaans woman and her bl
ack caretaker. Ivan Vladislavic’, who is of Croatian descent, overturns the detritus of apartheid in his story “The WHITES ONLY Bench,” where curators at an apartheid museum go to great lengths to procure an “authentic” bus bench from the apartheid era. Many younger writers are less concerned with the legacy of apartheid than with the here and now of survival in the new, complex, multicultural reality of South Africa. Niq Mhlongo’s unvarnished tales of the new, urban, polyglot life have led some to call him the “voice of the kwaito generation” (kwaito being the name of the music that emerged from Johannesburg in the early 1990s, a mix of house and traditional chants). In an excerpt from Mhlongo’s novel Dog Eat Dog, a black university student tries to outwit a pair of corrupt cops who have caught him drinking in public.
Chinua Achebe, both in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, highlighted the growing tensions between traditional African societies and Western values and norms, which not only challenged but were often opposed to African mores and customs. That dynamic continues still, as revealed in these stories, a dynamic further complicated by the different realities of country and city, of tribal laws and secular governance, of religion and tribe, of the legacy of the past and the promise of the future. This future faces the additional modern problems of AIDS, multinational wars, and, with rapidly spreading Internet access across the continent, greater challenges to tradition and culture.
Nelson Mandela once said that “Africa always brings something new.” Now, more than ever, this is true. My hope is that this handful of wonderful writing will open the doorway to a greater exploration of African writing and culture. For links and information about further reading of African literature, you can log on to GodsandSoldiers.com.