Who controls and owns African literature?

By Tolu Ogunlesia

The literary world is once again shining a spotlight on Africa. There are new prizes: the South Africa-based PEN Studzinski Literary Award for short stories and the Penguin Prize for African Writing, a pan-African prize covering both fiction and non-fiction genres. There’s a new book series, the Penguin African Writers Series, which will include not only new books from emerging writers, but also classics taken over from the defunct Heinemann African Writers Series. And next year South Africa will be featured as the ‘Market Focus country’ at the 2010 London Book Fair and African writing will be showcased at the Gothenburg Book Fair.

The African ‘Greats’ — Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Okot p’Bitek — have given way to other names such as Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina, Sefi Atta, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Chika Unigwe and Brian Chikwava. They have become the new faces of contemporary African writing.

This explosion of literary talent and publishing opportunities might be likened to a similar one that accompanied the heady post-independence days of the 1960s. But in spite of all the inspiring and exciting happenings of recent years, there still remain nagging questions regarding who exactly are the proper ‘gatekeepers’ of African literary tradition and production.

In interview published in Transition magazine last year, Achebe, speaking about the early covers of his classic, Things Fall Apart, said: "…I have a general sense that we, African writers, have been presented as oddities." He referred to the cover of the original 1958 Heinemann edition as a ‘questionable depiction of strangeness’.

In a January 16, 1959 pre-publication announcement of Things Fall Apart in the New York Times Book Review, he is referred to as ‘Miss Achebe’, and in the blurb that accompanies the first African Writers Series edition, published in the early 1960s, his Igbo ethnic group is referred to as the ‘Obi tribe’. Regarding that early error, Achebe said: "That error persisted. You sometimes even see it running through to this day."

In the hands of outsiders

Such depictions are to be expected in a world where the production –– editorial and publishing aspects at least –– of ‘canonised’ African Literature is largely in the hands of ‘outsiders’.

At the recent "What’s Culture Got to Do With It" Conference in June organised by the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, Prof Raisa Simola, presenting a paper that touched on Uzodinma Iweala’s 2006 novel Beasts of No Nation, informed the audience that while the book has been translated into Finnish, its revered ‘ancestor’ Things Fall Apart, has yet to be translated. The interesting question therefore is — who makes these translation decisions, and on what basis?

Some books win awards and establish their positions in the African literary canon in the West, but most Africans remain unaware of them.

But all of this is not to take away from the obvious fact that these are interesting and even exciting times for African writing. African literature — an endlessly debatable term in itself –– is in the middle of the kind of renaissance that characterised Indian writing in the 1990s.

We are witnessing the strong rise of a literary movement, defined not so much by grand nationalistic or ideological themes — as was largely the case in the 1960s and 1970s — as by a fervent and uncomplicated desire for Africans to tell their own stories, whatever those stories may be, however marginal they may appear to a world that wants to talk only about African poverty, famine, wars and child soldiers.

Debates like this will continue to dominate discussions about contemporary African writing. Geographical location and exile, language, authenticity, even the supposedly simple matter of ‘who is an African writer?’ will be difficult issues to ignore.