The Books Writers Think Deserve More Attention

I am thinking not of one book but of a generation. It is the writers who appeared after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the ones we might say belong to ‘the Second Generation’ of postcolonial African literature, who came of age in the post-independence disillusionment and preceded the set of Adichie and Wainaina. I make that outline because it is a large and shifting group, spread across decades, and includes Buchi Emecheta, perhaps Nuruddin Farah, and Dambudzo Marechera, Kojo Laing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Damon Galgut, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and perhaps Ben Okri and Bernardine Evaristo.   

It was only recently, in the last five or so years, that the literary world woke up to some of their work and gave Booker Prizes to Evaristo and Galgut and the Nobel Prize to Gurnah. Some of them—say, Farah and Gurnah—have been unconsciously framed as regional voices in the way that the writers before and after them are not. I’d like to see them recontextualized as more than a bridge between the First and Third Generations, which would result in them being more central to the discourse around the growth of contemporary African literature that my generation, the presumed Fourth Generation, must build. Read Obi-Young’s full interview here.