Good News For African Writers

Can the future of African writing be found in today's literary journals, or is it time to think beyond the gate-keepers?

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Beware the danger of a single story—the celebrated Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously warned in October 2009, recalling the African origins of her writing. From an ocean of British and American literature taught to her in the Nigerian schools, Adichie managed to find islands of African writing and ultimately her own voice.

Twelve years later, a young African writer like me faces entirely changed conditions. If you read The New York Times you might expect me to be celebrating the recent arrival of new African literary journals. In June 2021, Abdi Latif Dahir proclaimed in the Times, "good news for African writing." Abdi Latif Dahir reported that new African literary journals, such as Lolwe and Doek, building on the legacy of earlier journals, including Chimurenga, Kwani, Jalada, Brittle Paper, and the Johannesburg Review of Books, will now become the standard bearers of new African writing.

Forgive me if I sound angry, but the New York Times may be turning the clocks back to the dangerous "single story" that Adichie warned against.

The very phrase “African Writing” is problematic. There is no such thing as "African writing." First of all, there is the infinite variety of cultures, languages, and traditions on this vast continent. And second, the ways that the colonial legacy of "literature" has played out differently in the different post-colonial nation-states. African writing has evolved into myriad forms that can´t be gathered under a single identity today.

Is a writer from Zimbabwe who publishes exclusively in the American press (like me) an African writer, or a global writer? Is an African writing from Johannesburg and publishing solely in South Africa a pure African writer? What about writers in the African diaspora in Belgium, such as Nozizwe Dube, who has never been to the continent but writes about racist discrimination in the universities in Belgium—is she an African writer? The constraints imposed when a literary journal is positioned as a journal of "African writing" already take us far away from the real good news about the future of writing in Africa.

As often happens when discussing literature, The New York Times confuses three different economies and treats them as one. When writing circulates in the world it can bring various rewards. One reward is popularity or notoriety. The sheer number of people who recognize a writer's name or her books can be measured in books sold, clicks online, or by polling people and asking, "Do you know so-and-so?" A second, related reward is a positive reputation, for a writer or her writing to be regarded as "first class." Here is the economy that The Times writes about. The Times itself dispenses many of the prizes, alongside other legacy institutions such as book reviewers, literary journals, and lucrative prize committees dispensing crucial markers of reputation, including the Booker Prize and the Caine Prize.

But Adichie's still-trenchant warning draws attention to a third economy circulating resources that are essential for the health and future of the writing itself, independent of popularity and reputation: How do writers grow? How does the writing itself emerge and get written, and then get read? While thanking The Times for identifying the new gate-keepers of reputation among African writers, those of us who are here and working need to ask what about the writing? How is new writing made in Africa, and where do we find it, and is its health and vigor really linked to the "good news" these legacy brokers of reputation are announcing? Indeed, the pursuit of reputation that the new journals enable can also sound the death knell for a vibrant future of the writing itself. 

If we're discussing popularity, the real news for African writers is not found in The New York Times or the new literary journals, it's found on Tik Tok and Twitter. The Times's audience and the power of their anointed journals is comically dwarfed by the reach and power of social media. This isn't only true in Africa. There's a reason why The Times-approved "serious" books sell far fewer copies than, for example, The Gray Series or Twilight. If what a writer wants is popularity, they needn't look to The New York Times nor any of the literary journals to dispense it.

Here in Zimbabwe new writing gains popularity when a Twitter or Tik Tok influencer shares snippets of its pages and recommends it. Caution: the Twitter influencer might have not read the book, and/or might have been paid to praise-sing a writer. Such doubts prevent us from equating popularity with reputation. Indeed, the dispensers of reputation often use the fact of an author's popularity as evidence against their quality. Reputation is a scarcity economy—value is created by denying the resource to the vast majority. So, the management of a reputation economy begins by rejecting the popular vote. Literature is anointed by gate-keepers, and African literature is no exception. As in most colonial histories, the gate-keepers are mostly remnants of the colonial administrations that first organized African cultural production around the reputational category of "literature."

Over the last 100 years, as the continent transitioned from colonial administration to Black rule, it was the literary journals, often Western (Granta, the Paris Review of Books, New Yorker, McSweeney´s Quarterly, Harper´s Magazine), that have been the gold standard for an African writer’s arrival onto "the scene." Even here in my native Zimbabwe the new generation of successful, Booker-prize listed authors, like Noviolet Bulawayo and Petina Gappah, still derive great joy and "street-cred" on seeing their essays published in this-or-that well-known journal or on Lithub or anywhere in New York.

Reputation is the real subject of the New York Times report. Perhaps the fundamental purpose of the literary journals, and the larger reputation system that anoints them, is to discover unknown writers and handhold them to literary stardom. The unassailable, late Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainana, is a case study of this system. Like me and my colleagues, like all young writers in Africa, Wainana first developed his craft and found his path largely apart from the resources of European or North American reputation-makers.

A decade of writing—lived in what Wainana called the "loose, independent, and creative" community of Kenyan writers—shaped not only Wainana's work but birthed a home-grown literary journal, Kwani, as he and his community tried to promote the strength of what they'd made together here at home. In 2002, the year Kwani launched, Wainana's short story, "Discovering Home," won the Caine Prize, often called "the African Booker," administered and publicized by a foundation in England. The prize opened doors everywhere to Wainana.

For the remaining decade of his tragically short life, Wainana's resume shifted largely to England and North America. In 2005, his landmark essay, "How to Write About Africa," won prizes across the English-speaking world when it was published by Granta. But make no mistake: Granta did not make this African writer nor African writing; they marketed him, a task at which literary journals excel. Henceforth the world would read Binyavanga Wainana; but he never abandoned Africa. Indeed, Wainana continued working with Kwani and many African institutions, investing his hard-earned reputation back home to make new conduits for positive reputations for other African writers.

Wainana's life-story shows the transformative power of reputation, which is the real subject of the New York Times article. Gate-keeper institutions can be a healthy part of the writers' world, and not only through marketing. Literary journals support new African writing by vetting it in a qualitative way through editors in London, Paris, Nairobi or Lusaka. And often there is a modest marketing budget to go with the publication, rather than leaving it all for the author to figure out, as writing on WhatsApp or Telegram does. I admire and celebrate the hard work of creating and sustaining those literary journals, and I'm grateful The New York Times cares so much about them. But, it's a very small world—the world of The New York Times—preoccupied with foreign readers and the resources they command.

Wainana's life story also reveals a fundamental contradiction between the economy of reputation, so assiduously attended to by the gate-keepers, and the vitality of the writing itself. In Zimbabwe writers and our writing thrive in realms untouched by the dispensers of reputation, the literary journals and their partner legacy institutions. Writing grows in circumstances very different from those through which reputations are made. Near the end of his life, Wainana turned down an invitation to an American gathering of "world thinkers," by sending this harsh critique:

"I assume that most, like me, are tempted to [attend] anyway because we will get to be ‘validated’ and glow with the kind of self-congratulation that can only be bestowed by very globally visible and significant people, and we are also tempted to go and talk to spectacularly bright and accomplished people – our peers. We will achieve Global Institutional Credibility for our work, as we have been anointed by an institution that many countries and presidents bow down to. The problem here is that I am a writer. And although, like many, I go to sleep at night fantasizing about fame, fortune and credibility, the thing that is most valuable in my trade is to try, all the time, to keep myself loose, independent and creative..."

If our subject is "good news for African writing" it is imperative to ask what really keeps an African writer writing, growing, and helps her find her readers. I'm happy to report that the news here is good. Speaking personally, I don´t need literary journals because, thanks to the Internet, millennial African writers can go directly to our readers. My first serious foray into non-fiction literary writing was an essay, “Why as African Millennials we Must Re-Debate Colonial Rape.”

It might have warranted space in Brittle Paper, or other highly reputed journals, but I published it using Lapp The Brand and one of the experimental online peer-to-peer blogs based out of Africa, thereby reaching tens of thousands of readers directly. Did popularity turn into a good reputation for me? This question too was in the hands of Internet readers, especially the many Facebook influencers who read and comment on Zimbabwean writing. What the gate-keeper journals thought of the essay I do not know, nor does it concern me. My primary concern is to read and write widely with as "loose, independent, and creative" an engagement as possible.

Many of us in Zimbabwe trust the opinions of Facebook influencers when weighing the pros and cons of new books. Or we read what our Twitter feeds lead us to. I myself gained reputational points when, thanks to the algorithms of Twitter my work in Newsweek was shared widely online. Here is the confusing confluence of Internet populism and colonial gate-keeper reputation brokering! Without Newsweek's imprimatur the vast readership on Twitter might not have sat up and taken notice; but without Twitter (and everything else that I've done online throughout my young career) the opportunity would not have grown the way it did.

Here in Southern Africa, I know many millennial and upcoming writers, like Zimbabwean biochemist Yvonne Maphosa, who are finding commendable success and audiences by serializing their novels on Twitter. By publishing through Twitter, Maphosa need not concern herself with the tantalizing promises of the literary journals or their closely-held reward of "fame." She only cares about the writing. As Maphosa commented, “The new writing, formerly given a stamp of approval by literary journals, today can become almost Instagram-like shows.” 

In its preoccupation with the reputation economy, The New York Times has also overlooked the real couriers of new African writing: WhatsApp and Facebook. In Zimbabwe novels are being uploaded and distributed on WhatsApp groups, accessible to the many readers who cannot afford Internet access. In Zimbabwe, most digital communication is carried through the cell-phone networks, not the Internet, because access to Wifi and Internet uplinks are expensive and rare.

Recently I wrote, for New Internationalist, about Zimbabwean domestic workers who will forsake collecting monetary wages from their rich employers in exchange for getting to broker access to the home-owner's WiFi—a far more lucrative enterprise than the house-cleaning that is their offcial "job." In Zimbabwe, poor people use their cell phones, not the Internet. For this reason, digital publishing is hosted on cheap Chinese-manufactured Mobitel cellphones, and WhatsApp is far-and-away the most robust publishing platform available.

While Western writers who enjoy unlimited Internet might use Amazon Kindle or Smashwords, etc., here in Zimbabwe we publish on WhatsApp groups, similar to online journals, but cell-based. The writing community gathers and evolves in these digital spaces. On WhatsApp and in Facebook groups I'm currently self-training to become a WhatsApp reviewer (of short stories published on WhatsApp) and a self-trained editor, too. I don´t need to cut my teeth interning at a traditional literary journal, like some MFA degree graduate in Washington DC or New York might do.

If there is a whiff of defensiveness in The Times’s assessment that the new literary journals are the "good news" African writers have been waiting for, it is because the widely-available conduits of publishing popularity—nearly all of them Internet-based—have also begun to develop and dispense reputations, effectively challenging the strangle-hold of the old legacy institutions. Here in Zimbabwe, thousands of readers subscribe to Telegram-list reading rooms like the Public Information Hub (run by occasionally-jailed writer Hopewell Chin´ono). The Public Information Hub is a Telegram "reading room" where long-form writing about corruption and rights abuse is posted, discussed, and also translated by city readers into native languages (and more compact digital forms) that rural readers can share too. The effectiveness and reach of this approach to publishing takes power away from old gate-keepers. “Encrypted Telegram reading rooms, broadcasting long form non-fiction that exposes state wrongdoings, are taking away the vanishing space of the censored traditional book fair in Zimbabwe,” says veteran Zimbabwe freelance writer Tichaona Jongwe. 

Another flourishing space that has replaced the legacy literary journals is the humble blog, a literary and non-fiction medium that came onto the scene in the early 2000s. After fizzling out in the 20-teens, blogs have recently gained new strength as curatorial "reputation" brokers. Like the legacy journals, the blogs now cull "quality" from out of the vast sea of writing. One example is the Zimbabwean blog called “The Big Saturday Read” (BSR). Produced by a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer, the BSR publishes weekly long-form writing that examines the intersection of culture and political suppression in Zimbabwe. Remarkably, it draws in 340,000 Twitter followers, more than any of the local newspapers. Its focus on current events is a backdrop to its function of hosting and rewarding new non-fiction prose. Blogs in Zimbabwe like the BSR have attracted tens of thousands of readers. at home and among Zimbabweans in the diaspora, and have eclipsed traditional newspapers among a popular audience.

One attraction of blogs as a home for long-form writing in Zimbabwe is that such blogs can be made by anyone. They are not the vestigial limbs of the old colonial administration. Moreover, they can be read by anyone. Not only do a handful of Zimbabwean city readers (the ones with access to Internet) along with those in the diaspora in Europe and South Africa, read it online; a significant portion of those readers, myself included, translate the blog posts into local languages (or when posts appear in Shoana or Zulu, translate them into English) and "downsize" the documents for easy, fast distribution through WhatsApp and the cell network that is Zimbabwe's real space of publication. I'm proud to be a “blog-downsizer,” as we call them here in Zimbabwe. I read the latest BSR every Saturday, because I can afford Internet; and on finishing I translate its 1500-word nonfiction essays into PDF texts that I can further distribute in my WhatsApp groups, so that rural readers with slower internet can read too and be part of the national weekly debate.

I would also argue that any assessment of "good news" for African writing needs to include the SMS newspapers, [give two names or an example]. These are crowd-sourced writing platforms fed by sending SMS texts from your phone that feature new writing created by the audience and vetted only by the algorithms of popularity. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, communities circulate news and new literary writing by using cheap cellphone SMS to publish and share among themselves. Community writing circulated this way is the only means for publishing to a general audience in my rural district, [name of district]. Such experimental, unedited, crowdfunded current affairs writing is unpredictable and exciting, though it is a subculture wholly unknown to the gate-keepers of reputation.

The future of African writing will also include radio essays. Yes, old fashioned radio is part of the future here in Southern Africa. I am not referring to podcasts of literary work, downloaded and listened to by commuters with access to Internet. Most of the readers/listeners here can’t afford that. In Zimbabwe, it's the old FM and short-wave analogue broadcast channels that carry literary dramas, which are actually expanding in popularity. The reason is clear: radio reaches people. Public taxpayer-funded shortwave radio in Zimbabwe reaches up to 95% of the population while the internet and podcasts only reach 33%. In neighboring South Africa, 91% of residents listen to broadcast radio weekly. In Zimbabwe literary dramas, mostly adapted from novels, air every Thursday evening, followed religiously, like soap operas in the USA, especially in rural districts. School children get to know literary essays and novels by saying “oh, I heard it on the radio.” Old school radio, which is rapidly expanding, is a more important part of the future of African writing than are the equally old-school literary journals.

One facet that makes the literary journals seem so archaic in this part of the world is they insist obsessively on delivering their work in print artifact, and generally avoid carrying commercial advertising. “For the literary journal, carrying commercial advertising is seen as committing the sin of lacking authenticity, lacking purity,” says independent poet Kudakwashe Magezi in Johannesburg. Yet the newer media carrying African literature—SMS newsletters, WhatsApp boards, radio broadcasts, or Twitter novel serialization, for instance—often include commercial advertising, because writers need money, not just eyeballs or reputation, to sustain our writing. Literary journals that are in most cases funded by grants or foundations and shun commercial advertising don't pay well, if at all. Fame—in their limited circles—is your only reward.

Here in Zimbabwe whenever we circulate popular fiction in WhatsApp or Telegram groups, we insert short texts of advertisers selling clothes, cars, or bottled water, and some money trickles down into the hands of writers. We are experimenting with new ways of publishing that also create financing. Good or bad, such self-commercialization is surely unpredictable and exciting. Writers in Africa get to feel the joy of taking the reins of our own creation.

Finally, the future of African writing cannot be found in literary journals because by their nature literary journals publish only a handful of submissions per year. The literary journals conjure the resource of reputation by operating on a scarcity model—quality is guaranteed by reducing 1000 submissions to 50 finalists to the 20 pieces that can fit in an issue (that is published eight months later and after that submitted for next year's literary prizes). Meanwhile, I will have read several hundred new writers by looking at my cellphone for a few hours each day. The future of African writing won´t wait on the snail's pace of old literary journals.

Perhaps the most telling shortcoming of The New York Times article is its focus on journals that publish primarily in English and French, the colonial languages. Such journals are the vestigial limbs of colonial rule. African writing has long been limited because the infrastructure of literary publication—from schools to review organs to literary journals—tends to exclude African languages in favor of English and French. These effectively became the default language of African literary production. So strong has that limit been, that journals and newspapers written in Swahili, Zulu or Fulani have only belatedly emerged and have trouble surviving. I myself take pleasure in reading the vernacular Shona language, in the short story drafts of friends trying to write in Shona.

In South Africa, online literary works published in the vernacular Zulu African language are promoted on social media and have gaining popularity over some English-language outlets. They're part of the good news for African writing, that you won't find in the literary journals, or The New York Times. But The Times is either unaware or unconcerned with African writing that falls outside their 20th-century model. It's old-fashioned and paternalistic to assume that the African writing of yesterday or the present is what we should expect of the future.

And here is where Adichie's warning comes back in its strongest echoes. When the resources that support African writers and literature are held in the reins of powerful Western players, colonial hands, African writing will suffer. Privileging colonial languages and legacy gate-keepers may be necessary for acquiring fame, but it fatally skews the matrix of power within which African writing will either thrive or be killed by powerful actors.

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