Not long ago, a group of East African writers gathered at my house in Nairobi for a writing weekend. We were all working on manuscripts – novels set in Kenya and in Kazakhstan, histories of people in Ethiopia and Uganda, works we each imagined would be our magnum opus – but the problem, invariably, was how we might turn these into published books. Over beers and pizza, we brainstormed. Maybe what we needed was to be agented in London or in New York. Maybe what we needed was to move to London or New York. Maybe we simply needed to support each other, edit one another’s manuscripts. (But how would that help us get published?) Then, a Somali author who’d won some of Africa’s most important literary prizes for shorter work, chimed in. What we needed, he said, was to be adopted by Ellah Wakatama.
To be an African writer today – especially one writing in English, especially one younger than 40 – is to reckon with the idea of Ellah. Born in Zimbabwe when it was still under the Rhodesian flag, and now based in Britain, she is an editor-at-large at Canongate, an independent publishing firm. But it is more accurate to describe her as the most powerful woman – person – in Anglophone African literature today. From friends whose books she has touched, one hears of the fury of her red pen, of what they describe as the best editing they’ve ever experienced. From those who’ve worked with her, one hears of a person who doesn’t suffer fools, nor clichés like ‘suffer fools’. No other individual has so influenced the 21st-century African canon, if there is such a thing. Wakatama calls it ‘the bookshelf that my grandchildren will refer to’. Her lifelong project is to shape that bookshelf, to turn it into a library unto itself.
The night went on, as did the weekend. We’d all laughed when he said it, but beneath our laughter were three uneasy truths:
There were no publishers in East Africa who would put out our work. We were doomed to try and find our own way into publishing networks in the West. Having a literary godparent was what had worked for generations of African writers.
In the beginning was Chinua Achebe. It is a rule of African literature that any exegesis has to begin with him. Achebe is famous as a novelist – Things Fall Apart (1958) really is one of those great books that everyone should read before they die – but he was more important as an editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series (AWS), which introduced Western readers to an array of African authors, fledgling and established alike. Novels by African writers had existed before Achebe but, for writers of a certain generation, the AWS was arguably the only publishing vehicle for their work. The great Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance, had his first book published because he gave his manuscript to Achebe.
Know Your MBA Exams | |
