Kiswahili award charts path for African languages

The sixth edition of The Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, suspended last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is back.

Founded in 2014, the prize recognises writing in African languages and encourages translation from, between, and into African languages. We spoke to the prize founders – literary academic Lizzy Attree, also of Short Story Day Africa, and literature professor and celebrated author Mukoma wa Ngugi (pictured)– on the challenges of growing literature in African languages.

WHAT IS THE IDEA BEHIND THE SPECIAL NYABOLA PRIZE?

Lizzy Attree: The Nyabola prize gives us the opportunity to work in a new area, which is really exciting for us. Nanjala Nyabola, the Kenyan writer and activist, approached us with the idea and the funding to target vocabulary for technology and digital rights. This was particularly interesting to us for two reasons. Firstly, we have long wanted to offer a short story prize, but have stuck with longer works because of the opportunity it gives us to focus on Kiswahili literature as a fully mastered form. But we are aware that a short story prize is a good place to start for those who are only beginning to write. Secondly, Kiswahili is often considered to be steeped in archaic, or historically poetic technical words and forms. These must be updated to accommodate the modern language of science and technology. It has been an interesting adventure to find out which words can be adapted or amended to fit with modern digital and technological advancements.

Mukoma wa Ngugi: There is also the idea that African languages are social languages, emotive, and cannot carry science. This is definitely not true. All languages can convey the most complex ideas, but we have to let them. There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.

MUKOMA, YOU ALSO WRITE SPECULATIVE FICTION; WHAT IS ITS POWER?

Mukoma: At the height of dictatorship in Kenya when writers and intellectuals were being detained and exiled, and their books banned, it was the genre writers who kept the politics alive. In fact, I dedicated my detective novel Nairobi Heat to two such Kenyan writers, David Maillu and Meja Mwangi. We inherited a hierarchy of what counts as serious literature from colonialism, the division between minor and major literature. It is important for us to blur the lines between literary and genre fiction – they are both doing serious work but in different styles. And the same goes between written literature and orature (spoken literature). Orature is seen as lesser-than but, as writers and scholars have argued, orature has its own discipline and aesthetics.

HOW HAS AFRICAN LANGUAGE PUBLISHING CHANGED SINCE THE PRIZE BEGAN?

Lizzy: Sadly, I do not think African language publishing has advanced very much in the last seven years or that there are enough academic studies focusing on this area. The demise of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa was part of the decline, or indicative of it. However, book festivals are growing, and we hope this will lead to more awards and publishing in African languages. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, is a pioneer in this area, and it was wonderful to see his novel shortlisted for the International Booker Prize recently. Although there are many other good examples of where changes are happening, considering the size of the continent and the number of languages, there is still a huge gap.

Mukoma: Jalada journal is a good example of how attitudes to writing in African languages have changed for the better. In 2015 Jalada took a short story written by Ngugi in Gikuyu and self-translated into English and had it translated to close to 100 languages. This made it the most translated African short story. But the genius of their initiative was that most of the translations were between African languages. The Jalada example is important for two reasons – it shows that innovation can happen when African languages talk to each other. And that for the younger writers, African languages do not carry the same sense of inferiority – English is just another language. All in all, I do not think the Nyabola prize, for example, would have been possible 10 years ago. A lot has changed where it matters the most; the ideology around African languages is shifting.

DO AWARDS WORK AND WHY ARE THERE SO FEW MAJOR LITERARY PRIZES IN AFRICA?

Lizzy: I think awards certainly work in raising the profile of writers and their work, but it is difficult to find funding for this kind of project.

Mukoma: It is all about setting up a viable and thriving literary ecosystem for writing in African languages. Literary agents, publishers, readership, critics, literary prizes, and so on. Prizes are just one aspect. We realised that from the onset so our winners, in addition to the monetary awards, have also been published by Mkuki na Nyota Press in Tanzania. We have been trying to get them translated into English but as Lizzy points out, funding is a huge problem. We were lucky to partner with Mabati Rolling Mills and the Safal Group. We have a de facto slogan: African philanthropy for African cultural development. But all the living parts of the African literary ecosystem have to be thriving. In this, we all have work to do.

WHY IS AFRICAN LANGUAGE LITERATURE SO IMPORTANT?

Lizzy: It has been clearly demonstrated that learning in one’s mother tongue brings huge advantages to students. And where else must we find ourselves reflected if not in our own literature, in our own languages?

Mukoma: You can think of language as the sum total of a people’s history and knowledge. We store history and knowledge in the language. To speak only English is to be alienated from your past, present, and future. It is a pain we should all feel deeply. In my book, The Rise of the African Novel: Language, Identity and Ownership, I give the example of how early writing in South African languages remains outside our literary tradition. I talk about how that leads to truncated imaginations. We write within literary traditions, but what happens to your imagination when you cannot access your literary tradition?

- Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor of literature in English, Cornell University and Lizzy Attree is an adjunct professor, Richmond American International University. This article was first published in The Conversation.