The majesty of this anthology, AFRICA 39, lies in the valiant way in which the writers approach worn themes, writes Kwanele Sosibo.
Africa 39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara, is a collection laden with narratives such as those recently filed under the label “tyranny of subject” by author Ben Okri.
Africa 39 heaves with what Wole Soyinka, in an introduction that touches on his art of trawling for books, calls “shamelessly undialectical narratives”. But it is also a collection laden with other types of narratives, such as those recently filed under the label “tyranny of subject” by author Ben Okri.
Africa 39’s majesty, however, lies in its valiant approach to these worn themes and in the variation not only of subject matter but of form.
For every story labouring over displacement, over people’s histories truncated by colonialism and the ever-present ghost of religion, there are stories of longing for romance, of nightlife in large urban scapes peppered with national brews and Afrobeats with an “s”. Between the spaces of nagging primordial questions chafing against the funk of seemingly preordained modernity, there is tenderly rendered unrequited same-sex love as in Ukamaka Olisakwe’s This Is How I Remember It and the sci-fi poetry of No Kissing the Dolls unless Jimi Hendrix Is Playing.
Although most of the texts are distinctive and worthy of the subtitle, what Africa 39 disproves, among other things, is the lie that nothing new can come from the old and nothing old can come from the new.
For full report by Kwanele Sosibo see Mail & Guardian
