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Liberian novelist and author of She Would Be King, Wayétu Moore, wants Africans to tell their own stories: ‘A recent book I read portrayed Africa as a uniform experience—overly simplified and stripped of nuance. It reminded me of why it is so important for Africans to tell our own stories, showing the plurality of our voices, our struggles, and our triumphs.’
I recently reread Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, and it reframed my understanding of how we carry grief as a part of our contributions to history.
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About the Author
is the author of the novel She Would Be King, and the memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction and the 2022 William Saroyan Prize for Nonfiction. The Italian translation of her memoir, I Draghi, Il Gigante, Le Donne, was awarded the inaugural Inge Feltrenelli Literary Prize in 2023.
Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
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