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Writing Without the Certainty of Return: Sakiru Adebayo on the Diasporization of African Literature

Explore the vibrant landscape of contemporary African literature, its diasporic dimensions, and the global acclaim reshaping narratives. An insightful journey into diverse voices and their cultural intersections.
on Dec 19, 2023

There is no doubt that African literature is experiencing a renaissance on the world literary scene. African writers grabbed the literary world by storm in 2021. In light of this, South African writer Damon Galgut stated during his acceptance speech for the 2021 Booker Prize, "2021 was a great year for African writing." Galgut's remark notably mentioned how many big global literary awards went to African writers that year.

Let's take an inventory: At Night All Blood is Black, David Diop's novel, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2021.

Veronique Tadjo, an Ivorian writer, received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for her novel, In the Company of Men, while Mohammed Mbougar Sarr, a Senegalese writer domiciled in France, received the renowned Prix Goncourt for his novel, La Plus Secrete Mémoire des Hommes. In the same year, Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi won the Jhalak Prize for her novel The First Woman, while renowned Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangaremba got the PEN Pinter Prize and the German Book Trade Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, in the Lusophone world, Mozambican writer Pauline Chiziane received the Cames honour, the most prestigious literary honour for any piece of writing produced in Portuguese.

Tolu Oloruntoba, a Nigerian-Canadian poet, won the coveted Governor General's Literary Award for his collection of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, while Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer, got a Whiting Award for Fiction.

To top it all off, Tanzanian-British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah received the world's most coveted literary honour, the Nobel Prize. However, the flood of literary acclaim for African writers did not halt in 2021. Boris Diop won the renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2022, and Noviolet Bulawayo's novel Glory was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (the second time Bulawayo has been considered for the Booker).

There are numerous ways to consider the flood of global recognition for African writing.
Is it, for example, a sign that the world has finally recognised the genius of African writing? Is it a call for African writers to assume their rightful place in the hall of fame of international literature? Is it, in any way, a result of George Floyd's death in 2020, which sparked global outrage against anti-blackness and highlighted deeply ingrained institutional prejudices against persons of African descent?

Could this global acknowledgment of African literature be a recompense for all the past injustices imposed on the region by the (Euro-American) countries that administer these awards? Is it even relevant that the majority of the award recipients are Africans residing in other countries?

This final inquiry about the diasporic situations of African writers and literature piques my interest. Whether one refers to African writers' experienced transnationality or the diasporic nature of their writings, there appears to be a dispute among critics about the possibilities of understanding contemporary African literature as diasporic literature.

Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer, won the Caine Prize for African writing in 2013 for his short story "Miracle," which is about a Nigerian evangelical congregation in Texas. Some argued that Folarin should not have received the prize since he was not based on the continent and did not write about the experiences of Africans living on the continent.

The Caine Prize Advisory Board, as well as other literary award-giving bodies on the continent, have put an end to this dispute by defining an African writer as someone from anywhere in the globe who is a national of an African country, or who has a parent who is African by birth or nationality.

To be honest, when one thinks of contemporary African writers, names like Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Taiye Selasi, Mbolo Mbue, Maaza Mengiste, Akwaeke Emezi, and Noviolet Bulawayo come to mind, all of whom are either based in the diaspora or write about Africans living in the diaspora.

Perhaps this is why Cajetan Iheka, one of the most prominent African literary critics of our day, talks about the "transnational and diasporic turn" in African literature.

Even before Iheka, Ambroise Kom argued in 1997 that African literature is orphaned because most of its writers and commentators have become increasingly diasporic. It is apparent, then, that exiled and diasporized African writing (also known as Afrodiasporic/new African diasporas/global African/postcolonial African diaspora literature) is not a new phenomenon.

This type of literature can be traced back to 1789, when Olaudah Equaino wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equaino, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, a memoir detailing the experiences of an enslaved, and later freed, African man in England, the United States, and the West Indies.

African writers wrote extensively about the experiences of Africans living in the West after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and during the time of European colonial expansion on the continent. J. E. Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), for example, is a novel that, among other things, chronicles the experiences of an African student residing in London.

There's also Kobina Sekyi's 1915 comedy The Blinkards, which satirises the group known as the 'Been-tos' (Africans who lived in Europe for a short time but began acting like Europeans when they returned to the continent).

We had Olabisi Ajala's An African Abroad (1963), a travel memoir that describes an African man's solitary voyage to India, Australia, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, during the tail end of the colonial era and the early start of decolonization. There was also Ousmane Sembene's (1962) short story "Black Girl," which depicted a Senegalese lady working as a domestic helper in France and was later turned into a film in 1966.

Furthermore, J.P. Clark, a Nigerian playwright, wrote about his stay in the United States in the early 1960s in America, Their America (1964), and Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian novelist, reintroduced us to the 'Been-to' cliché in her debut novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977).

The assurance of return is a prominent metaphor in most African diaspora literature from the late colonial and early decolonial periods. The main character (born in Africa) frequently returns to their native country and is expected to contribute to national progress. This is the point at which postcolonial African diaspora literature diverges from its precursor.

In the new African diaspora tales, we see how postcolonial disenchantments complicate the topic of return while also devitalizing inflexible commitments to the nation-state. In essence, the crisis of postcoloniality (which led to the formation of hyphenated identities for many African writers) makes the diaspora question unavoidable not just in the lives of African writers, but also in their writings.

This discussion regarding the diasporization of African literature is, of course, embedded in the politics of reading and artistic valuations, as well as the complex terrain of global publication. When debating this issue, one must ask: which African writers have access to major Western publishers such as Knopf and Random House? Which African literary works are picked for global book clubs? What modern African works do literature teachers teach?

It is also worth noting that the idea of the diasporization of African literature appears to be more widespread in the Anglophone literary world, and that the majority of so-called new/global African diaspora writers are published in Britain, particularly the United Kingdom. To put it frankly, the fight over African literature's diasporization is, in many ways, a dispute over African literature's Americanization.

There are Africans writing from other parts of the diaspora (think Cristina Ali Farah, Olumide Popoola, and Ingy Mubiayi, whose works represent the various communities of the new African diasporas across Europe), but Anglo-American African writings continue to dominate. For example, few people in the Anglophone African literary scene are aware that the classic work On Black Sisters Street by the Dutch-Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe (who, by the way, now lives in the United States) was first published in Dutch as Fata Morgana. After being translated into English in 2009, the novel grabbed the literary world by storm and went on to win numerous literary honours.

There is an underlying regional politics behind the publication and distribution of new African diaspora literature that should be highlighted here. That is, while discussions concerning new Afrodiasporic literature are unapologetically centred on Anglophone literature, there appears to be a representational dominance of writers of West African (particularly Nigerian) heritage.

One explanation for this situation is that African countries have varied colonial legacies and postcolonial realities. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, structural adjustment programmes (SAP) and post-independence conflicts drove many West Africans westward in search of better pastures.

The harsh postcolonial circumstances (combined with the 1965 US immigration statutes that permitted Africans to migrate to the US) resulted in West African diasporas that have now reached adulthood in the West.

Furthermore, in the case of Nigeria (Africa's most populous country with a sizable contemporary diaspora compared to many other African countries), successive military regimes in the 1980s and 1990s destroyed the country's publishing industry to such an extent that many Nigerian writers began seeking out Western publishers, which invariably influenced the extroverted content of most of the country's literature.

In a country like South Africa, the situation is quite different. The post-apartheid political and economic situation in South Africa has not deteriorated to the point where a Black South African literary diaspora is required, at least not on the scale of Nigeria (I am aware that there is an entire world of literature produced by South Africans in the diaspora during the anti-apartheid struggles, but I am referring here to more contemporary South African writings).

Furthermore, South Africa's publishing business is one of the strongest on the continent, hence, unlike many West African writers, modern South African writers are not required to turn westward for publication. In terms of African writing in English, in a place like postcolonial Zimbabwe, where the publishing industry is also affected by the country's dire economic situation, Zimbabwean writings today (even when published outside of Zimbabwe: consider Petinah Gappah and Tsitsi Dangaremba) tend to favour localised Zimbabwean experiences over diasporic ones.

Even Noviolet Bulawayo, who can be considered an outlier in this regard, puts her second novel (also published in the West) in Zimbabwe. Bulawayo is hardly the first African writer who has returned to writing exclusively about continental Africa after becoming well-known for his work on the new African diasporas.

Imbolo Mbue, a Cameroonian-American writer, returns to the continent in her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, after receiving great praise for writing about a Cameroonian family in America in her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers.

And, in a country like Angola, where postcolonial economic and political conditions have made local publishing difficult, many contemporary Angolan writings, which are often first published in Europe and sometimes in Brazil (I'm thinking of Agualusa, Ondjaki, and Epalanga's works here), remain stubbornly set in Angola and solely about Angolans at home.

Furthermore, a quick glance at recent francophone African writings translated into English (Veronique Tadjo's In The Company of Men, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black, Boubacar Boris Diop's Kaveena, Alain Mabanckou's The Death of Comrade President, and others) demonstrates that the majority of our French-speaking African writers, even when based in the diaspora, remain committed to writing about continental African lives and experiences.

Overall, postcolonial African diaspora literature is a genre that is constantly being formed, unmade, and rebuilt, therefore totalizing or conclusive claims regarding its creation or future are impossible. One must also consider the fact that the distinction between African and diasporic African experiences is frequently blurred in many of today's literary works.

As a result, current African diaspora narratives are transforming the way we think about migration; they show us how migration is more than just going from one place to another; it is also about the installation of movements within places, the relativization of spaces, and the paralleling of locales. To paraphrase Derek Attridge's reading of Zoe Wicomb's October, current African diaspora tales demonstrate that geography is more than just a map, but also a lived reality that is constantly diminishing and increasing.