"To our surprise, almost one-third of the people we ended up interviewing were again working on Africa, and not even the usual suspects: Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer. The field seems to have grown up overnight and turned into something no one had foreseen. Here and there we ran into some vaguely familiar titles—Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow,NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names, Helon Habila's Oil on Water—but, for the most part, people were writing about authors we had never heard of: Senegal's Boubacar Boris Diop, Tanzania's Ebrahim Hussein, Congo's Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda's Monica Arac de Nyeko, Mozambique's Mia Couto, Malawi's Shadreck Chikoti.
Since English is not the only language spoken in those African countries, some of the job applicants also knew French, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, Chinese, or regional languages such as Swahili, Wolof, Chichewa/Chinyanja, and Zulu. Through these, they gained access to a number of vernacular genres also peculiar to Africa: township tales, newspaper short stories, bus-travel blogs, time-machine fantasies. And the archives they were looking at? Well, among others, the archives of the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau, founded in Bali in 1957—a logical extension of the 1955 Bandung Conference, a historic meeting hosted by Indonesia, featuring 25 nonaligned nations in Africa and Asia. The current rapprochement between Africa and China gave the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau a timeliness one would scarcely have suspected a generation ago.
This "scramble for Africa" is of course nothing new. Since the late 19th century, the natural resources of the continent—rubber, ivory, gold, diamonds, coffee, cotton—had fueled European colonialism, to be topped only by oil in the 20th century. In the 21st century, multinational corporations once again have their eyes fixed on Africa, knowing that their state-sponsored rivals from China—the biggest investor—are already far ahead, building roads, clinics, and soccer stadiums, and reaping huge profits from energy extraction. If this year's MLA is any indication, literature departments are also getting into the act, playing catchup perhaps but also hoping to do things a little differently."
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2015/02/17/a-literary-scramble-for-africa/
- Ikhide
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