Bringing African Writing Back Home is Critical

The more he is paid, the more he can write. The more he can write, the more the world will benefit. Moreover, he doesn’t believe writing by African writers should be deposited in a black writing ghetto in the bookshop. Good writing is good writing, wherever it came from.

At the very worst, after having been invited over, someone, somewhere really should invite him to teach at a university or teach an MFA programme. Even if only a few hundred take his book to the till, he will expect to be granted rooms in the shade of a leafy plane tree, somewhere not far from a clock tower. His days will be filled with teaching eager students, almost all of whom will be earnest, white Americans who have already dog-eared their Achebes. Some of them will grow dreadlocks for the duration and ask difficult, yet earnest questions.

The writer will live for a year or two on borrowed time; words rented from experiences fast receding. A novel, or perhaps two, will emerge. Each will detail times from an Africa that is sinking beneath the horizon. The work will be feted, but less so each time. The African writer will be little irked by how much publicity his Western publisher asks him to do: set up a Facebook account, regularly ping twitter followers with updates, visit out of the way places on cold days for an audience of 10. The third book, if he gets that far, will likely be pure anachronism. The African writer will sense that times have changed back home, but will by now be helpless to address the contemporary.

Meanwhile, his western readership, looking for the next African star, will be wondering what happened. Even being thousands of kilometres away from the action, he will sense something no longer of the present. In rooms with cityscapes for views, or across the tables of chichi restaurants, executives will be leafing through someone else’s manuscript. A new tale of African horror (or sometimes, African ‘lushness’ and ‘vibrancy’) will be required in time for the run up to Christmas.

Our African writer will look in the mirror, and notice grey hairs for the first time. There will be only one thing for it: to return home and find some more stories. And with this return, the African writer may finally realise what has been gained and lost through migration. He might then begin to see history at work.

The African writer who links migration to success (and to expectations of material well-being) is part of an ageing post-colonial condition – not a “sign of the African academics’ confident universalism”, as Paul Tiyambe Zeleza comments, “but of their insecure provincialism… [their] desperate search for legitimation from … systems and … traditions that have historically dismissed and infantalised them”.

This is the CNN worldview that Africans complain about. Of course, violence and instability have been a core aspect of many realities across the continent. However, and it’s tiring that this needs stating, so too are the delights of everyday life: love, ceremony, celebration, creation and redemption. Barring certain catastrophic exceptions (the DRC in the past two decades for instance), violence is just as much part of any society, at any time, as it is anywhere in Africa.

What is to be done? How does one ensure one’s dutifully collected shelf of African books is not ever more replete with child soldiers, AK47s and rapists? There are, I think, two parts to the answer: First, African writers should realise that there is a price to pay for a suburban existence in a sedated part of the world. Situation is critical. To engage with the world in writing, it is seldom enough to read of a world from afar.

Even the most meticulous research will miss out on the subterranean processes that are continuously at work in a society; the gaps and tensions in speech and behaviour that point to unmet desires and a world in transition. It is the work of the writer to bring these silences to voice; it is an almost impossible task when the only source of information is internet news sites, visitors from home and the occasional trip back to the motherland.

Writers who complain of the difficulties of returning home (a common moan) do so on the basis of bourgeois assumptions. They expect to live in the manner to which they have been accustomed, as if material comfort were an index of, or prerequisite for a writer’s success. They also assume that moving home to write should be a full- time occupation.

Yet, how many successful writers in history have had that luxury? Many writers have had a non-academic day job. Kafka was an insurance clerk, lest we forget. On the continent, we might consider Alaa Al Aswany in Cairo: collecting stories as a dentist by day, transmuting his work into stories by night.

However, African publishers also need to become more than what they are now. We need to collaborate, across our differences. We need to rave about our authors, and introduce them directly into each other’s markets, without recourse to a European detour. We need to help build a publishing infrastructure, which innovates and adapts to the opportunities the continent provides. African publishers also need to spell out the reality of working on the continent and what is at stake.

But African publishers can only do this with support of and respect from writers. For as long as writers view African-based publishers as dogsbody printers whose editorial opinion they consider as secondary to their Euro-American publisher, or people they can commandeer to consider their manuscript two months before it is due out in the Western market, publishers would rather work more actively with writers who understand the ideological imperative and the struggle for symbolic legitimacy at stake in the ownership of the means of production. We need to define what we cannot do alone and lobby government for support.

Most of all, we need to realise that we have currently lost control of the African story generation. We can hardly remain friends with those who try to take the stories away. We publishers should realise that there is semiotic warfare at work and that she who owns the story, owns the story.