Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”

Abstract

Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011 represent contemporary African realities and in so doing reinforce the growing significance of the prize and the short story genre to modern African literary expression. I argue that, taken together, Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison” (2007) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” (2010), both set in cities, contribute to problematic imaginings of African futures. Bulawayo does this through her representation of slum life and dystopian childhoods in Zimbabwe while Rose-Innes’s story speculates on the apocalyptic aftermath of a chemical explosion in post-apartheid South Africa. I highlight, also, how these two narratives reflect apparent relationships between the short story and the novel in contemporary African writing as well as the increasing role of the postcolonial city as a site from which unfavourable visions of postcolonial societies are generated.

Introduction

The annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape since it was established in 1999 by the British politician Emma Nicholson. Set up as a tribute to Michael Caine, Nicholson’s late husband who was a co-founder of the Booker Prize, the prize has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly up-and-coming young writers. Those who have received considerable acclaim include Nigeria’s Helon Habila, Sudan’s Leila Aboulela, and Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, whose debut novel We Need New Names (2013) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. The prize has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its valorization of unfavourable and stereotypical narratives about Africa (see Bady, 2016; Ikheloa, 2011; Pucherová, 2012).

Some critics have also highlighted the possible consequences of the fact that most of the prize’s winning and shortlisted writers live and work in the West where the majority of their works are published, circulated, and read. In this regard, Nigerian critic Ikhide R. Ikheloa (2011) argues that many submissions may be deliberately skewed to impress Western audiences in general, and judges based in the US and the UK in particular. For her part, Duborota Pucherová (2012: 13) questions the role of the prize as a Western “institution” that operates as a “legitimizing agent” for African writing in English. She argues that the interplay between the political economy of publishing, marketing, and the institutional dynamics involved in the legitimation of postcolonial cultural expression inevitably results, through the prize, in the promotion of African literature as “an exotic commodity and thus contribute[s] to its ‘othering’ while appropriating into the Anglo-American cultural capital” (Pucherová, 2012: 21).

A different view is offered by Lizzy Attree (2013), who was appointed as the prize’s administrator in 2011. Drawing on Habila’s (2011) introduction to The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Attree notes that the majority of Caine Prize writers were born after the independence of many African countries in the 1960s. She argues that most of these writers, who live and work outside their native countries, are “unsurprisingly […] less concerned with nationalism than their [postcolonial] forebears” such as Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2013: 36). Rather, these younger writers innovatively articulate, in her view, “more cosmopolitan visions of the African condition, cultural production, and the subjectivities of gender, class, and sexuality” (qtd. in Habila, 2011: vii).

This article simultaneously builds on and moves away from the foregoing arguments. I examine how the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011 use the short story to represent contemporary African realities and in so doing reinforce the growing significance of the prize and the genre to modern African literary expression. I argue that, taken together, NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” (2010) and Henrietta Rose-Innes” “Poison” (2007) contribute to dominant problematic depictions of African futures. Bulawayo does this through her representation of slum life and dystopian childhoods in Zimbabwe while Rose-Innes’s story speculates on the apocalyptic aftermath of a fictional chemical explosion in post-apartheid South Africa. These two important stories also highlight the increasing role of the (postcolonial) city as a site from which apocalyptic and dystopian visions of society are generated.

I begin by briefly tracing apparent links between the African short story and the African novel. I suggest that these links reflect Julio Cortázar’s (1999) postulation that the relationship between longer fiction and the short story is similar to that between a movie and a still photograph “which isolates a fragment from the whole” (qtd. in Patea, 2012: 11). In this regard, the career trajectories of all but one of the Caine Prize winners up to 2014 serve as a useful point of departure for exploring this relationship in recent African writing. As Aaron Bady shows:

With the exception of the 2008 winner, Henrietta Rose-Innes — who may have found South Africa a more hospitable publishing climate, having already published several novels — the list of winners tells the same, uniform story of How to Become An African Writer: write some stories, win the Caine Prize, then publish a novel. E. C. Osondu and NoViolet Bulawayo won in 2009 and 2011, and their first novels were published in 2015 and 2013, respectively; the other winners — Olufemi Terry, Rotimi Babatunde, Tope Folarin, Okwiri Oduor, and Namwali Serpell — all have novels in varying states of progress. (2016: n.p.)

This is indeed not an entirely new trend among African writers. In a 1969 edition of the Kenyon Review’s symposium on the short story, Ezekiel Mphahlele (1969: 475) noted that Peter Abraham’s novels “followed quickly” on the heels of Abraham’s publication of a short story collection. Mphahlele also noted that writers from other parts of the continent usually wrote short stories before writing novels, even though publishers who targeted Western readers tended to publish the novels before the earlier written short stories. Discussing the economic contexts of publishing in the 1960s, Nadine Gordimer (1968: 461) similarly remarked that “publishers nurture[d] their short story writers mainly in the hope that they will write novels sooner or later”. She also noted that “almost all the interesting fiction written by local Africans (not white South Africans) has taken the form of short stories” (1968: 463; emphasis in original). ¹ Furthermore, Phillip Holden (2007) has observed that Chinua Achebe’s highly successful early novels were in fact preceded by several short stories Achebe had published in a university journal in Ibadan a few years earlier. Holden highlights the thematic continuity (in regard to the portrayal of colonization and the espousal of an emergent cultural nationalism) that marked the movement from short to long fiction in Achebe’s early career. ²

This apparent historical pattern may be insufficient in itself to explain why the short story seems to be well suited to recent African storytelling. However, it may be linked to the growing significance of the Caine Prize and the controversial claim by its organizers that its “focus on the short story reflects the contemporary development of the African story-telling tradition” (The Caine Prize for African Writing, n.d.: n.p.). The apparent connections between the African short story and longer fiction also draw attention to decades-old debates on the possible links between African oral traditions and its modern literatures. Mphahlele (1969) stated that his interest in the short story was influenced not only by Scottish and English ballads (as well as the works of Anton Chekov, Ernest Hemingway, Nadine Gordimer, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright), but also by his fascination with the indigenous South African folk tales he had learnt as a child. Nevertheless, his description of the influence of indigenous oral traditions on contemporary African short fiction in general is particularly nuanced:

Perhaps folk tales as an inherited social phenomenon have had something to do with the emergence of the short story everywhere in the world. But it cannot be said that where the oral tradition is still robust, even in urban life (as in West Africa), it has inspired or informed the short story there. (Mphahlele, 1969: 476)

Craig Mackenzie takes this further in his exploration of the ways in which the African short story (the South African short story in particular) exhibits “the penetration of the literary forms by a residual orality” (2002: 347). He focuses on the works of four writers (A. C. Jordan, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele, and Bessie Head) to demonstrate how each author attempts “in different ways to assume the mantle of the traditional oral storyteller” in their short stories. But while Attree has repeated the claim that the focus of the Caine Prize on the short story is its “most unique element” without explaining why this is so, she has rejected the idea that the prize links the African short story to indigenous oral traditions. She also rejects accusations that the prize’s association of “African story-telling traditions” with the short story rather than the novel amounts to a paternalistic view of African literature:

I would consider James Joyce one of the masters of the short story form and yet we know that he was also the writer of one of the most complex books of the modern literary canon. The short story functions in a different way to the novel, it has its own subtleties and complexities, and requires as much talent to pull off successfully as a novel, packing character, context, linguistic flare, and plot into under 10,000 words. Of course the Caine Prize encourages African writers to write longer works of fiction, but we have chosen the short story as a niche that isn’t filled by other prizes. (Attree, 2013: 12)

Attree goes on to suggest that the short story form is peculiarly apposite in writing about the social and economic conditions in the continent’s fast-growing urban centres, a view that echoes Gordimer’s influential description of the short story genre as “an ideal vehicle for social critique” (qtd. in Huggan, 1994: 63). Similarly, Mphahlele has also linked social conditions and social change to the rise and utility of the South African short story as a preferred prose form during apartheid, arguing that “the very physical presence of oppression made the sustained effort required for a novel almost impossible; and that the medium of the short story seemed suited for a fugitive urban culture such as the white society of South Africa had imposed on non-whites” (1969: 474).

Although the specific conditions under which Gordimer and Mphahlele wrote were different from those in the contemporary African literary landscape, there are compelling macrocosmic resonances between the two dispensations. These similarities are linked with the disjunctive social, political, and economic changes that trigger and accompany unprecedented globalization and urbanization across Africa (see Appadurai, 1990). In this context, Gordimer’s (1968) half-century old metaphor of “the flash of the fireflies” to describe how the brevity of the short story helps to capture swiftly changing social realities remains relevant to the postmodernist and postcolonial features of contemporary African writing. This underscores the argument by South Africa critics that the short story is especially well-suited to post-apartheid writing (Chapman, 2004; Titlestad, 2010). ³ Along the same lines, Rose-Innes herself argues that the “brief, eclectic contributions [made by short stories] also feel like a natural and appropriate way to consider South Africa now, or perhaps any fractured, various, rapidly changing milieu — particularly for someone who is wary of sweeping statements” (qtd. in Riach, 2016: n.p.).

I therefore read “Poison” in allegorical ways as reflecting some of the important changes attending South Africa’s post-apartheid socio-political transitions and transformations. I argue that the protagonist’s uncertainties as well as the sense of impending gloom that pervades the story may be interpreted in terms of ambivalent visions of South African society that may be simultaneously apocalyptic and auspicious. As noted earlier, Rose-Innes represents a deviation from the apparent career trend of some notable African writers whose short stories precede their novels in ways that suggest links between the two genres. Yet, the release of “Poison” during a period of increasing interest in (post)apocalyptic Afro-futurist ⁴ novels set in urban centres (e.g., Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010)) might indicate a similar and contemporaneous correlation between short fiction and the novel.

It is important at this juncture to stress the distinction between (post)apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, categories that are sometimes conflated. While the latter is associated with troubled socio-political structures such as those in the postcolonial Zimbabwean society portrayed in “Hitting Budapest”, the former reflects future doomsday scenarios which may not necessarily involve politics as is the case with “Poison” (Claeys, 2010; Collins, 2014). The link between these two and their significance for this article is the way each is associated — to different degrees — with problematic and inauspicious visions of African societies.

“Poison” is set in contemporary South Africa. The anonymous narrator of the story guides readers through the thoughts and experiences of Lynn, a young lady who is driving on a freeway away from Cape Town following an oil explosion that had happened in the city a few days earlier. The explosion has left a serious environmental hazard with a black oily cloud hanging over the city and acting as backdrop to a pervasive mood of uncertainty and impending doom throughout the story. Lynn stops on the outskirts of the city at a gas station where a motley crowd of travellers, also fleeing the city, are gathered due to what initially appears to be a scarcity of petrol. The people she meets there later find ways of getting petrol and eventually leave the station, but she refuses to join them. At the end of the story, she has been at the station for three days, hoping for the arrival of rescuers.

First, I set out the ways in which this story lends itself to an allegorical reading. Although “Poison” is not nationalistic in outlook, and although the events in the story (the chemical explosion) could well occur in any part of the world, the story’s specific social and geographical settings conjure a unique post-apartheid South African milieu. In addition to being set on the outskirts of Cape Town, the references to important South African spatial landmarks — including the N1 and N2 national roads — have almost unambiguous interpretative signification in ways that are strongly allegorical and metonymic. These two roads are South Africa’s main land routes running through many major cities and over much of the country’s extensive Indian Ocean coastline. In addition to Cape Town, the reference to Johannesburg and Durban complete the trio of South Africa’s most important urban and political centres. One of the effects of these is the evocation of an unmistakably national communal space, what Lindesay Irvine (2008: n.p.) calls “an eloquent vignette of the ‘new’ South Africa” that recalls Benedict Anderson’s (1983) influential theory on the links between narrative and the idea of nation. The author herself has stated that while she did not start writing the story with an express political theme in mind, she “was pleased that it developed an allegorical point” (qtd. in Irvine, 2008: n.p.). Although Anderson writes specifically about novels, his analytical framework can be equally applied to the portrayal of South Africa’s diverse society and to the public events and responses narrated in “Poison”. And indeed, Rose-Innes explains elsewhere that the story “is not so much about the explosion — on a deeper level, it’s a breakdown of traditional social divisions and social groupings” that characterized post-apartheid transition (BBC, 2008: n.p.).

Another instructive way in which “Poison” may be read as allegory and/or social critique ⁵ is highlighted in Chris Thurman’s (2015) analysis of the significance of the protagonist’s presumed racial identity. Since the story does not identify Lynn with any actual racial descriptor, Thurman’s decision to describe her as white probably depends on circumstantial evidence — her apparent socio-economic privilege, poor command of Afrikaans and her tendency to focalize other characters along racial lines. It is indeed plausible in view of the author’s foregrounding of the transitional post-apartheid context of the story and her description of Lynn as

a version of herself — a middle-class woman in her thirties who has “lost her way” […] “She can’t stay in her old ways, symbolised by Cape Town which is now under threat, but she’s also not quite ready to take that step into the broader reality of the country with its dangers and opportunities”. (BBC, 2008: n.p.)

Thurman (2015: 63) interprets the crowd that Lynn joins at the petrol station as representative of a multi-racial “pressure-cooker microcosm of South African society”. He goes on to suggest that the insignia on the pick-up van, Adils-IT Bonanza, may imply that its young driver is a Muslim and/or coloured South African. From their description, the petrol attendants and taxi passengers are most probably black and coloured, while the Afrikaans “family” and Lynn appear to stand in for South Africa’s white population. Therefore, although the story may also be read outside a strict post-apartheid South African spatio-temporal context, the foregoing primary and secondary evidence validates the specific allegorical and metonymic reading offered in this article. Yet, this does not mean, as Pucherová (2012) suggests, that Caine Prize stories necessarily rehash a specific and totalized representation of Africa. What it does mean however is that the story gestures towards a representative African social consciousness.

It is against the backdrop of the allegorical and metonymic signification of the spatial and social symbolisms in “Poison” that I explore the ways in which the protagonist’s sense of uncertainty and the story’s pervading hopelessness might respectively reflect South Africa’s socio-political transition and a dystopian vision of the country’s future. The trope of movement is important in this regard, and functions, I suggest, as the dominant and most ubiquitous motif with which the story draws attention to the transitory nature of contemporary South African society.

The motif of movement appears liberally throughout the story in both explicit and implicit ways. The most explicit form is of course the interrupted journeys of Lynn and the other characters who congregate at the petrol station in search of petrol. The apparent scarcity of petrol at the beginning of the story plus the desire of the travellers to get away from the environmental catastrophe in Cape Town can together be read in terms of the social and psychological ramifications of post-apartheid transition:

There were twenty-odd stranded people, sitting in their cars or leaning against them. They glanced at her without expression before turning their eyes again towards the distant city. In a minibus taxi off to one side, a few travelers sat stiffly, bags on laps. Everyone was quiet, staring down the highway, back at what they’d all been driving away from. (Rose-Innes, 2010: 199)

It is this motley crowd, brought together by forces outside their power, that Thurman (2015) describes as being reflective of South Africa’s contemporary demographics. The particular circumstances of their coming together and the limited options of self-help available to them force them into cross-racial alliances that bear an unambiguous post-apartheid “rainbow nation” symbolism. Due to the shortage of petrol, they pool the little they are able to scavenge from all their vehicles together and fill up only two vehicles in which everyone but Lynn leaves. This collaborative project and the necessary partnerships that make it possible indicate the ways in which social exigencies in the post-apartheid era make social realignments both imperative and possible.

That the cause of the new alliances is an environmental disaster outside the control of any individual group is doubly significant. On the one hand, it might be used to suggest that developments that may ordinarily seem adverse may actually produce socially auspicious outcomes. This, in turn, may serve to undercut the story’s dominant apocalyptic orientation such that the possible futures it envisages can be understood in ways that are simultaneously adverse and auspicious. On the other hand, the circumstances that force these diverse social groups together suggest that South Africa’s unfolding social orders are likely to produce new conditions in which historical advantages are neutralized.

Perhaps the most important social symbolism of the motif of movement is the uncertain fate of the protagonist following her failure to join any of the groups of travellers leaving the petrol station, and heading together towards an unknown future. Lynn’s decision to remain alone at the petrol station may be interpreted in different ways. As noted earlier, Rose-Innes suggests that Lynn’s uncertainty reflects the disappearing “old ways” — social compositions, alliances, and privileges — symbolized by the threat posed to Cape Town by the environmental disaster. It may also be interpreted, arguably, as a form of conscious or unconscious resistance to, or apprehension of, the changes and transformations brought about by the transitional order. The effects of such a decision, of “[s]tanding alone on the highway” so to speak, is a deep sense of disorientation and impending doom:

Standing alone on the highway was unnerving. […] She had to stop herself looking over her shoulder, flinching from invisible cars coming up from behind.

She thought of the people she’d seen so many times on the side of the highway, walking, walking along verges not designed for human passage, covering incomprehensible distances, toiling from one obscure spot to another. Their bent heads dusty, cowed by the iron ring of the horizon. In all her years of driving at speed along highways, Cape Town, Jo’burg, Durban, she’d never once stopped at a random spot, walked into the veld. Why should she? The highways were tracks through an indecipherable terrain of dun and grey, a blur in which one only fleetingly glimpsed the sleepy eyes of people standing on its edge. To leave the car would be to disintegrate, to merge with that shifting world. How far could she walk, anyway, before weakness made her stumble? Before the air thickened into some alien gel, impossible to wade through, to breathe? (Rose-Innes, 2010: 203)

Her sense of foreboding is reinforced by the worsening effects of the explosion as time goes on — especially the loss of electricity and running water. When she goes to the toilet, she realizes that she has probably become poisoned — her hair is grimy, her eyes pink, and there are black specks on her face. At the end of the story, she has been stranded for three days, and although the toxic storm has not progressed further, the closing scene is described as “the last” of a lingering sunset, “poison violet and puce” (2010: 208) from which she turns her face. The narrative significance of this ending is reinforced by the fact that the entire narrative is focalized through Lynn. By this means, readers are only provided access to the set of possibilities reflected by Lynn rather than the potentially more auspicious auguries symbolized by the other travellers who succeed in forming new social alliances and moving farther away from Cape Town and from the effects of the explosion. The focus on Lynn may thus be interpreted as a narrative move by which the uncertain post-apocalyptic possibilities which she represents are privileged.

Furthermore, in refusing to join the other travellers, Lynn may also reflect the difficulties of post-apartheid national reconciliation and the problematical sceptre of enduring racial schism. In this connection, Thurman argues that Lynn’s enigmatic attitude might reflect the social “passitivity, indifference and discontent” which, in Thurman’s view, represents “internal” threats to “whiteness, Englishness and privilege” (2015: 65). It is in these specific ways that “Poison” contributes to the production of problematic African futures by skilfully sketching brief but pithy “flashes” of historical social divisions and the psycho-social disorientation of an enigmatic character converging in a postmodern urban site that is itself set within a distinct South African spatio-temporal context.

The discussion now turns to Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” in which the difficult childhoods of the story’s protagonists reflect a dysfunctional African society and is used to articulate a dystopian vision for that society. Like “Poison”, Bulawayo’s story is set in an African city, and so follows the tradition of narratives that use African cities as sites where dystopian and (post)apocalyptic African futures are set. It also significant that in We Need New Names, Bulawayo continues her focus on the development of the same child protagonist as in “Hitting Budapest”. In this way, the writer uses the novel to provide a more detailed exploration of the same set of major themes and the broad social, political, and cultural contexts introduced in the short story. There is therefore a strong sense in which “Hitting Budapest” may be understood as a creative and utilitarian adaptation of a specific novelist sub-genre — in this case what Ogaga Okuyade (2009) has called the “postcolonial African bildungsroman”.

Okuyade proposes this as a postcolonial/African variant of the traditional bildungsroman, and as a distinct sub-genre to theorize the increasing deployment of child and youth protagonists in recent African texts. ⁶ In relation to the symbolisms of such protagonists, Madelaine Hron (2008: 28) has demonstrated the “hybrid spaces” which they occupy in postcolonial societies as well as their “nuanced and complex role” in contemporary African narratives. She elaborates on how these protagonists represent a “particularly apt vehicle” through which writers explore nuanced perspectives on postcolonial subjectivities in a variety of contexts including “multiculturalism, globalization, and international human rights”. As Apollo Amoko (2009: 200) observes, the postcolonial African bildungsroman emerged, like its European predecessor, during times of “radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously undermined, if not forever transformed”.

Similar scenarios form the historical and social backdrop to “Hitting Budapest”, a story that focuses on a single day in the lives of a group of neglected children from an impoverished Zimbabwean shantytown ironically named Paradise. The children, aged around 11, leave their homes in the slum, unnoticed by their indolent and negligent parents, to search for guavas in the nearby affluent suburb named Budapest where they briefly meet a London-born young lady who takes pictures of them. On their way back home, they come across the corpse of a woman who had apparently died by hanging. Quickly overcoming their initial fear, they make a plan to steal the dead woman’s shoes and to sell them for money with which to buy bread. Although the character delineation, action, and pithy dialogues are rendered in vivid detail, the episodic plot lacks a specific event in the story. This reflects Gordimer’s description of how short stories capture reality via “the light of the flash […] of the present moment” (1968: 459). One effect of this is that the reader’s attention becomes centred on the abject conditions of the characters. This leads Aaron Bady (2016: n.p.) to argue that “the most memorable thing about the story is actually a ‘non-story’ detail (in that it does not stem from or produce any particular action or events in the narrative)”. This thing, which has attracted considerable critical attention, is the casually mentioned fact that one of the children — the 10-year-old Chipo — was impregnated by her grandfather. Bady argues that “Hitting Budapest” is:

not a story in which we are encouraged to watch events, but in which we are shown a spectacle of non-events, the spectacle of nothing really happening. Nothing is really at stake in the story, because it is precisely the point that — in the “normal” life of these children — there is nothing much to be gained, nothing much to be lost. What happens is that nothing happens. (2016: n.p.; emphasis in original)

The story’s key narrative mission, therefore, seems to be a focus on characters who dramatize the abject conditions that exist in an impoverished society as well as their dysfunctional and unequal social, economic, political, and spatial orders. The vivid description of abjection in the story is perhaps responsible for making “Hitting Budapest” the most criticized of all Caine Prize-winning stories so far. In his critique of the Prize’s 2011 shortlist mentioned in the introduction to this article, Ikheloa (2011: n.p.), who predicted that Bulawayo would win that year, describes the story as “fly-ridden”. Though he praises the quality of Bulawayo’s writing, he attacks her for focusing on what he calls “Africa’s sewers”.

These views are echoed in Habila’s review of We Need New Names. Habila likens Bulawayo’s portrayal of Africa to recent works which, according to him, are inundated with “images and symbols and allusions that evoke, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, pity and fear, but not in a real tragic sense, more in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-porn sense” (2013: n.p.). Listing some of these disturbing images in “Hitting Budapest”, he argues that the story reflects “a palpable anxiety to cover every ‘African’ topic, almost as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning’s news on Africa” (2013: n.p.).

The dysfunctional society at the centre of “Hitting Bupadest” is set in a carefully contrived African urban space with transnational and globalized iconographies in the form of symbolically named streets — AU (the African Union), SADC (the Southern African Development Commission), and IMF (the International Monetary Fund). The juxtaposition of the indigent slum, Paradise, where the children live, with the nearby, affluent suburb of Budapest, where they go to scavenge for food is also significant. These representational choices have loaded symbolisms, one of which is the global character of the extreme socio-economic inequalities they reflect.

The single most portentous iconography of these representations is perhaps the image of the slum that is fast becoming a ubiquitous trope for socio-economic transformation in general, and a compelling critique of the impact of globalized capitalism on contemporary postcolonial urbanization in particular. Conditions in these spaces have been linked to widening inequalities precipitated by neoliberal economic policies in developing countries. These policies, according to Ashley Dawson and Brent Edwards (2004), trigger socio-economic processes by which the bulk of the growing global wealth becomes transformed from different forms of collective ownership into the private property of a few corporations and individuals, and invariably result in the proliferation of slums:

Structural adjustment programs, widely deployed throughout the developing world by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, have turned the state into a mechanism to expand this dynamic of privatization. As countries slashed spending on domestic programs such as education, health, and agricultural production, local production sectors were hollowed out. Just as was true during the initial round of what Marx called primitive accumulation in British agrarian capitalism, the neoliberal dispossession of the commons has pushed peasants off their land, but this time on a global scale. Inequality, political instability, persecution, and environmental degradation have generated a massive exodus toward urban areas. Notwithstanding differing regional and national dynamics, the end result of this burgeoning inequality has been the growth of massive squatter settlements, where people live and die in conditions of appalling misery. (Dawson and Edwards, 2004: 4−5)

Achille Mbembe has noted in this respect that “[w]ays of seeing and reading contemporary African cities are […] dominated by the metanarrative of urbanization, modernization, and crisis. Indeed, for many analysts, the defining feature of contemporary African cities is the slum” (2008: 5). Rightly or wrongly, this view is reinforced by claims that the majority of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums (see Pieterse, 2008). However, the proliferation of slums has not been limited to postcolonial countries but has indeed been a global phenomenon, a fact underscored by Mike Davis’s (2007) famous description of the modern urban world as a “planet of slums”. Uri Linke has demonstrated, furthermore, how, in contemporary times, “[u]rban poverty is globally dispersed across all continents, from the geopolitical peripheries to the economic centres — from the Third World to the First World” (2012: 296). Nevertheless, abject poverty remains a recurring aspect of the dominant aesthetic of narratives set in Africa’s urban spaces — literary and otherwise.

In this regard, it is important to consider briefly some of the ways in which such troubling representations of African cities contribute to the production and circulation of uncomplimentary visions of Africa. In her critique of the science fiction thriller film District 9, Adéle Nel (2012) explores how the pervasive imagery of abjection in the portrayal of a Johannesburg slum appeals to what Barbara Creed (1993: 10) describes as the “desire […] for perverse pleasure”. Similarly, Gareth Jones and Ramola Sanyal interrogate the ways in which the production of the postcolonial “slum as spectacle becomes part of a fluid representational stock of images and experiences that circulate, with the potential to be picked up and acted upon by diverse actors” (2015: 433). Focusing specifically on representations of Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the Indian city of Mumbai, they argue that the slum has assumed “a representational significance far greater than an immediate concern with housing conditions or service provision” and has increasingly become “a popular subject for novelists, journalists and academics […] tourism, art, film and documentary” (2015: 434). This illustrates how the portrayal of the abject conditions of Bulawayo’s protagonists in “Hitting Budapest” operates within a complex representational context from which stereotypical visions of African subjects emerge.

The graphic depiction of filth and poverty in “Hitting Budapest” reflects postcolonial dystopia in its social, political, and economic ramifications (see also Morrison, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2002). Sarah Lincoln (2008: 99) points out that representations of this type in postcolonial African narratives reflect “the continent’s continued status as a ‘remnant’ of globalization — a waste product, trash heap, disposable raw material, and degraded offcut of the processes that have so greatly enriched, dignified and beautified their beneficiaries”. Similarly, Kenneth Harrow has also traced the use of such imagery in African cinema to theories that link the “material to the psychological, sociological, and political” (2013: 1). He argues that “trash, above all, applies to people who have been dismissed from the community, marginalized and forgotten, turned into ‘bare lives’ in ‘states of exception’ for others to study and pity” (2013: x).

It is important, in closing this discussion of Bulawayo’s story, to note its unmistakable critique of the generational divide and of the father figure represented not only by Chipo’s abusive grandfather, but also by the boy Bastard, one of the protagonist’s companions. Bastard is the self-appointed leader of the group who seems to typify male domination. Within the story’s short time span, he physically abuses all but one of his mates. He is inconsiderate towards the pregnant Chipo, snaps at Darling, provokes Stina, and calls almost every one of them unpleasant names. He is the one who throws stones at the corpse and proposes that they steal and sell the dead woman’s shoes. This image of the male figure is reinforced by the children’s view (while speculating on the sex of Chipo’s baby) that “boys kick and punch and butt their heads. That’s all they are good at” (Bulawayo, 2010: 3).

The picture, completed by Chipo’s abusive grandfather, highlights the violence that has marked the socio-political dysfunction of many postcolonial African nations under the control of androcentric and gerontocratic power structures. The inscription of postcolonial societies within an unequal and exploitative global economic system intensifies the dire living conditions of the majority of young subjects such as those typified by the child protagonists of “Hitting Budapest”. It is significant that none of them has a vision of a future in Zimbabwe; they all desire to emigrate, uncaring whether to South Africa or to the West, where millions of Zimbabweans have moved to since the country’s worsening political and economic crises of 2000. But even this hope of emigration is brutally undermined by the doubts raised by Godknows and Bastard. The children are rendered speechless by Bastard’s gloomy prediction that they will end up being “stuck” on the fringes of those foreign societies like Darling’s Aunt Faustolina who, he says, is probably “cleaning poop off some wrinkled old man” (15) in America. The hopelessness implied by their speechlessness here recalls the sentiment expressed earlier in the story by Darling: “After crossing Mzilikazi we slither through another bush, gallop along Hope Street past the big stadium with the glimmering benches we’ll never sit on” (2; emphasis added) [2]. These dystopian elements all combine to conjure a predetermined sense of a bleak future that is belied by the children’s boisterous and irreverent laughter in the story’s last lines.

This article has examined the growing significance of the Caine Prize for African writing, foregrounding its positive impact on the careers of shortlisted and winning writers. I have highlighted criticisms against the prize’s perceived valorization of negative narratives about Africa as well as the arguments offered in its defence, especially with regard to the innovative approaches adopted by different entries. I have also briefly explored features of the African short story and its apparent links with the novel, paying attention to the ways in which the short story seems to be well suited to contemporary African story-telling demonstrated by the growing dominance of the Caine Prize. More significantly, the article has highlighted the different ways in which NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison”, both set in African cities, imagine the futures of post-2000 Zimbabwe and post-apartheid South Africa. While the former uses the desperate socio-economic conditions of impoverished and neglected children in a Harare slum to dramatize socio-political dystopia in Zimbabwe, the latter is a post-apocalyptic narrative that explores the psycho-social disorientation accompanying ambivalent social realignments in post-apartheid South Africa. The pervasive gloom underlining both stories, especially the graphic abjection of Bulawayo’s child protagonists, has the inevitable effect of projecting uncertain futures for the African societies reflected in the respective narratives.