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Fiction so popular, it’s criminal: The Rise of Crime Novels in Africa The definition of African fiction is often reserved for literary writing that has international appeal, thus excluding popular and genre fiction. Though remarkable African writing...

Fiction so popular, it’s criminal: The Rise of Crime Novels in Africa

The definition of African fiction is often reserved for literary writing that has international appeal, thus excluding popular and genre fiction. Though remarkable African writing is being produced and published on the continent, by publishers such as Cassava Republic Press in Nigeria, Modjaji in South Africa and Kwani Trustin Kenya, literary fiction publishing continues to face problems of affordability, distribution and mass appeal. While there is still potential in the African market for literary works, there is also a range of other fiction which could appeal to a broader and more diverse market.

The tradition of popular and genre fiction is well-developed in Africa: from Onitsha Market Literature in Nigeria, the Pacesetters series across West Africa and the Hausa Soyayya romances thriving today in Kano, Nigeria. South African crime fiction has been on the rise for several years, and this trend has now spread to Nigeria with the launch of two crime fiction imprints: Cassava Crime, from Cassava Republic Press and Cordite, from Parrésia Publishers. African publishers are diversifying by tapping into readers’ desires to be entertained by books which are both accessible and engaged with the vibrancy and challenges of life in contemporary African cities like Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

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Introducing “Narrate Africa!”

Rise Africa and AADAT (African & Afro-Diasporan Art Talks) are pleased to present “Narrate Africa.”

Narrate Africa is a book club for young Africans, designed to stimulate conversations about African culture through literature. Created through a collaborative effort by Rise Africa and AADAT, Narrate Africa represents a shared belief in the value of African literature as an art form and a channel for discussion of African social topics.

Starting this September, the book club will feature Taiye Selasi’s “Ghana Must Go” for it’s maiden season with 6 dedicated featured members to drive discussions.

The season will include Tweet chats and Google hangouts with the author alongside written and video posts that highlight the social issues presented in the novel.

To participate and join this community of book lovers, use the registration tool on the Narrate Africa website. Registration for the book club membership is now open and officially begins Monday, August 26th. Click here to register now. Visit our website at www.narrateafrica.tumblr.com to learn more about the 6 featured members, and how you can participate as a book club member.

Contact Us: narrateafrica@gmail.com
Twitter: @NarrateAfrica
Website: www.narrateafrica.tumblr.com

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Narrate Africa is a book club for young Africans, designed to stimulate conversations about African culture through literature. Created through a collaboration by Rise Africa and AADAT, Narrate Africa represents a shared belief in the value of African literature as an art form, and a channel for discussion of African social topics.

Join the featured book club members and dozens of others as we continue reading Taiye Selasi’s “Ghana Must Go.”

Click to officially join the club | Learn how to get involved 

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The following is an excerpt from Why We Need More Diversity in Our Books By: Khoula El Otmani African literature is not one corner; it is the whole of the continent’s creativity and output. Inside you find all kind of stories and imaginations from...

The following is an excerpt from Why We Need More Diversity in Our Books

By: Khoula El Otmani

African literature is not one corner; it is the whole of the continent’s creativity and output. Inside you find all kind of stories and imaginations from South Africa to Egypt and from Morocco to Ghana. Every country has its stories and culture, with its issues from the past as well as from the present. Africa’s heritage is wide and deep.

Books are written to reflect the reality of our communities and lives. They’re also written to stimulate imagination and creativity. And we read to find ourselves on the pages, to relate to the stories, and to explore more perceptions and opinions.  

Africa is a diverse continent. There are iconic writers from every country and they write in many genres and topics, but the books are not published quickly enough for our era.

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This post is part of an ongoing theme “Contemporary African Stories.”Browse more publications related to this theme.

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Returning Our Borrowed Languages When we think of innovative ideas in Africa, our first thought may be of that which is technological, but have you ever considered innovation in African literature? Most recently, I stumbled upon the work of Ngugi wa...

Returning Our Borrowed Languages

When we think of innovative ideas in Africa, our first thought may be of that which is technological, but have you ever considered innovation in African literature?

Most recently, I stumbled upon the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o.   Thiong’o is a Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright who began his writing career in English and then decided to work almost entirely in his native tongue of Gikuyu after imprisonment in 1978.  In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his “farewell to English,” Ngugi described language as a way for people to understand themselves as well as the world.  He connects the use of language to power.  “My belief that we should be writing more in African languages stems from the simple truth that language is power. Why do you think the colonizers always taught their language to the colonized? If they could control your language, they control the way you think about things. They control you.” For him, English in Africa erases pre-colonial cultures and histories.  Our continued use of English is installing dominance of a new type of colonization.  “…Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other… . Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world… . Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”

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Guest submission: “Achebe Tribute” “ “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”- Chinua Achebe ” I read...

Guest submission: “Achebe Tribute”

“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”- Chinua Achebe

I read ‘Things Fall Apart’ when I was about ten years old; it is my earliest recollection of any kind of African literature. For a young child trying to understand what exactly colonization was about, the character of Okonkwo allowed me to peer into the mind of the African man before the European came. I saw his frustrations, understood his problems with the intrusion and invasion of his society – I was torn up over his anger against Nwoye; I understood the boy’s desire to leave his raging, egotistical father, longing for the loving ways of European missionaries. Believe it or not, Ghanaian elementary schools sometimes taught us about benefits of colonization from this incredibly sad point of view: Well… African practices were barbaric and the Europeans did save us from our destructive ways.

We learnt about old powerful Kingdoms and the oppression of our people when colonial rule eventually took over, but little was said to reclaim our own traditional practices. Traditional practices were evil, and for the major part have remained so till today. Growing up in a city with little ties to extended family made it easy for me to completely disregard traditional culture, and it was simple to believe that our traditions did not have much to offer beyond pretty cloth and fun cultural dances.

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Dynamic African Libraries The library was the first place that allowed me the freedom to explore the world of literature. However, growing up I was disappointed in not being able to find many novels by African authors in my local library, which...

Dynamic African Libraries

The library was the first place that allowed me the freedom to explore the world of literature. However, growing up I was disappointed in not being able to find many novels by African authors in my local library, which delayed my exposure to African literature. Reading our stories is necessary to understanding our history, our people and preparing for our future. Libraries are the catalyst for development through reading and literacy. As Africans around the world, we should create the environment needed to protect our stories.

Most of us who have gotten ourselves through formal education have been exposed to authors such as: Shakespeare, Lois Lowry, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, George Orwell, J.R Tolkien, William Golding, J.K Rowling. If not name at least we recognize they easily by the books they’ve written such as Hamlet, The Giver, Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, and Harry Potter.

But what about J.M Coetzee, Ben Okri, Mariama Bâ, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ngugi wa Thiong’ o, Uwen Akpan, Ousmane Sembene, Waris Dirie, Heon Habila, Maaza Megngiste, and Alain Mabanckou? If not their names then maybe you’ll know some of their book titles such as Waiting for the Barbarians, The Famished Road, So Long a Letter, Nervous Conditions, A Grain of Wheat, Say You’re One of Them, God’s Bits of Wood, Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad, Oil on Water, Beneath the Lions Gaze, and Broken Glass. Or maybe not. If you’re not familiar with these titles or authors it’s because many libraries do not have enough literature written by African people from the African perspective on the bookshelves. It is crucial to write our own stories to fill bookshelves and then create multi-dimensional spaces for where our stories can be housed and appreciated. We do not have enough libraries in our African countries. The libraries that we have stock more stories of the West or the East and very few stories of our own. If we do not advocate for libraries to expand to include more African literature we need to build more of our own.

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Talk Africa: “Must Things Fall Apart?” When I applied to grad school, one of the schools I chose was Brown University. I had this fantasy that I would run into Mr. Achebe in the halls, maybe drop by his office, and endear myself to him through my...

Talk Africa: “Must Things Fall Apart?” 

When I applied to grad school, one of the schools I chose was Brown University. I had this fantasy that I would run into Mr. Achebe in the halls, maybe drop by his office, and endear myself to him through my writing. So, when he passed this week my mother called me, and told me my friend had passed away. In that moment, my fantasy fell apart, I knew that I would never hear his calm voice giving me critics on my writing, never encourage me to continue honing my craft. I chose to believe this will never happen because he has now gone on to power, because I’m sure he would have been more than happy to speak with a fellow member of the continent, he just seemed like that kind of person.

For me, I was more surprised when I heard he had passed because he seemed like a monument of our community, erected one day, as a pillar of literary excellence, destined to stay forever, leading the charge on African-self identification. His cultural critic of my nation, Nigeria, was striking and firm, demanded it turn its back on corruption, greed, and instability. I expected that voice to remain constant and present forever, only falling back when another person, maybe groomed by Achebe, could step in.

The ability to use language to tell a story about the way the world is, to demonstrate how wrong we are to let it stay that way, were at the core of his incredible talents. Time and time again, he reminded us that there is more to the continent than hunger, and disease, by being a beacon of intellect and creativity. While I will freely admit I have not read all of his novels, I respected the reputation he built for himself. Through his work, he raised the consciousness of the Western world, allowing them to see us, even for a moment, from our own perspective. Thanks to his words many intellectuals on the continent crossed over onto the global stage, sharing the magnificent beauty of our continent’s great minds.

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Everything Changed When The Fire Nation Attacked | Kimani Okearah Media is a language we’ve developed to communicate on a wide scale. From hieroglyphics to books to television to this sentence you’re reading right now, it’s all a process based on...

Everything Changed When The Fire Nation Attacked | Kimani Okearah

Media is a language we’ve developed to communicate on a wide scale. From hieroglyphics to books to television to this sentence you’re reading right now, it’s all a process based on combining our linguistic resources -patterns of movement, symbols, and sounds- to connect to each other. Sometimes this communication is direct, like a live viewing or a VoIP (voice-over internet protocol - think Facetime) conversation. Sometimes it’s passive, like reading an ancient text, swimming in the knowledge of our ancestors. We’re going to use this understanding of media as a language to explore how its misuse can maintain ideological divisions. We’re gonna get down with messaging techniques using the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It gave me life. Maybe I can give it back.

Racism exists as an ideological system of power in Western society. We classify individuals and their communities based on impressions of a global minority - in our reality, it’s various groups of Europeans insisting on an imperial legacy based on their claim to the fabricated concept of “whiteness.” If this system is negative, then it must have a counter, a positive system in which these individuals are exempt from these racial classifications. Unfortunately, no such system exists. If you don’t fit the social perception ascribed to your visual appearance, you’re considered an anomaly. Many of us have lived this, and it doesn’t feel good. This ‘racism, or lack thereof’ approach that we in creative media embrace is a result of exceptionalism (also called Chauvinism for hilarious French reasons). Exceptionalism is the social agreement that the ideology of the dominant group is exceptional, and therefore anything that does not coincide with this ideology is an unwelcome departure.  The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender uses exceptionalism in a reverse binary as a code to both enable and challenge the dominant social ideology. Flameo, hotman!

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