Abstract
Introduction
Whereas Cassava Republic, based in Abuja, has made progress in 2015 towards establishing itself as a significant publisher of African fiction, Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go (2013) published an article in The Guardian (4 July 2015), addressing issues to do with African writers and their writing. He asked: who is considered an African writer; what should an African writer write about (when he or she is criticized, on the one hand, for writing “poverty porn” and, on the other, for writing too much about educated, cosmopolitan elites), and for whom is the African writer writing (for home or international readerships in the absence of viable African publishing industries).
2015 has seen a flurry of debut novels from Nigerians who have made their name and learned their trade as short-story writers. The Caine Prize figures in most of their curricula vitae. Although some are residents in America, others are living, writing, and publishing within Nigeria.
Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won many other honours and commendations. For a selection of reviews, interviews and supporting material see the author’s website: http://www.chigozieobioma.com/.
Nigerian-American Chinelo Okparanta has lived in the USA from the age of 10. Her debut novel Under the Udala Trees brings together the history of Nigeria (the protagonist’s father is killed and she comes of age in a Nigeria scarred by the Biafra War) and a lesbian love story. Carol Anshaw, reviewing in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/under-the-udala-trees-by-chinelo-okparanta.html?_r=0), writes that, while highlighting the authenticity of the Nigerian setting, the “story that slides over it reads much like American lesbian novels of the 1950s. Ijeoma runs the classic gantlet of being queer in a benighted society”.
In Nigerian A. Igoni Barrett’s novel, Blackass, the central character, a man born and bred in Lagos, wakes up one morning and discovers that (except for his posterior) he has turned into a white man. Helon Habila, reviewing for The Guardian (14 August 2015), describes the book as a “cocktail of Kafka and comedy”, specifically as a “modern day Metamorphosis”.
Elnathan John, who also lives in Nigeria, has published a novel, Born on a Tuesday, a brave study of Islamic fundamentalism. In an interview for The Guardian (3 April 2016), he says: While I deeply love Nigeria, there is an issue of where I need to be. I landed from Jo’burg at 4am this morning — returning from a writer’s retreat in Zambia. I came back to no electricity, and fuel queues. Thankfully, I still had a little fuel in the generator. These little things can seem big. I don’t have an office, I work from home. The politics are draining too. But it is important writers are here, or at least stay in touch with Nigeria, and write the stories that need to be written. No one else will write them for us.
Two Nigerians were shortlisted for the Caine Prize 2015 — Segun Afolabi for The Folded Leaf and Elnathan John for Flying. Both have made the shortlist in previous years.
Although Nigerians still dominate West African writing and publishing, it is pleasing to note the expansion of the Sierra Leonean Writers Series, http://sl-writers-series.org/, which has recently opened its first bookshop in Sierra Leone as well as making its publications easily available through Amazon and African Books Collective.