Introduction: African Street Literatures and the Global Publishing Go-Slow

The path-breaking scholarship on Onitsha Market Literature (see Barber 1987, Beier, Dodson, Newell and Okome, Nwoga, and Obiechina) has laid substantial ground for discussions about street literatures in African urban contexts. The distinct locatedness of the term Onitsha Market Literature indicates the need to base any interpretation of this literature in the context in which it was produced, distributed, and consumed. When it comes to the concept that we call African Street Literatures, this relationship of equivalence is not quite so clear. Drawing on the work of the above scholars and others like them who have developed a significant body of scholarship on the popular arts in African contexts, the notion of African Street Literature also insists on locating methodologies for interpreting texts in the contexts of their material, ideological and aesthetic production. But, unlike the scholarship cited above, African Street Literature does not understand the street only as a literal location. Rather, the concept of Street Literature is theorized as a mode of reading literary form as an imprint of the structures of everyday life in the contexts out of which texts emerge (Harris and Hållén). That might sound remarkably similar to locating an interpretation of the text in its context, but there are differences: in our conception of African Street Literature, we are more interested in the ways that uneven and unequal systems of global literary production impact the literary form of texts emerging in the peripheries of so-called world literature. As such, it is literary form that primarily concerns us. Furthermore, drawing on Ato Quayson’s methodological intervention in Oxford Street: Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, the street here intersects both scales of the global market economy and the lived level of the street.

African Street Literature is a formal concern, first and foremost, because after the World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, the African publishing industry suffered, as Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay put it, ‘disastrous economic collapses’ (Bgoya and Jay, 20). This has not necessarily led to a dearth of literary production and consumption across the continent, but it has required African literary producers to find alternative avenues of publication. As such, following in the traditions of pamphlet and market literature, there has been a marked shift across the continent to modes of literary production other than the published book. I have argued elsewhere that the published book is not a sustainable form for the African literary future (Harris forthcoming). For our purposes here, the important point is that the pressures and structures of everyday life on the level of the street inform and are co-constitutive of these alternative modes and technologies of literary expression. In turn, these alternative publishing forms largely determine literary form, too, which is thereby understood as deeply conversant with the structures of everyday life. This idea draws on Eyal Weizman’s method of forensic architecture, which must be ‘tuned to the history of materials, surfaces, structures, and form’, if it is to interpret the ‘ … skins of buildings [as] complex membranes registering minute transformations in environmental conditions as much as abrupt events’ (Weizman & Herscher 2011, 115). African Street Literature hopes to develop a comparable literary approach, one that is as attentive to the everyday registers of African life as it is to the seismic – sometimes global – forces that shape that life. This requires close attention to the ‘materials, surfaces, structures, and form’ of – for our purposes – the literary as they emerge at the intersection of both the global and the local scales. As such, African Street Literature is not bound by its locatedness; indeed, in today’s virtual world, much of the materials the concept covers are instantly available anywhere on the globe, but it is the form of these literatures that act as ‘complex membranes registering’ the impact of the everyday. Like the graffito that must necessarily adapt to, enhance, and limit itself to the material aspects of the wall it is painted on, Africa Street Literature’s form is shaped by the African everyday life from which it emerges. This idea is offered then, on the one hand, as a continuation of the African popular arts/literary scholarship mentioned above, and on the other, as a corrective to a global book market in which what Eileen Julien has called ‘extroverted African novels’ (2006), which are predominantly written, published and consumed outside the continent, dominate the field of African literary studies.

The papers in this special edition are all concerned with such street forms: they cover a range of genres, from published short stories, self-published poetry (both in print and online), oral literary forms, online blogs, publishing apps, comic memes and YouTube videos. This range of genres pays homage to Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome’s Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday, but what this selection of articles adds is a body of work that is complexly mediated by the internet in a variety of ways. Even the more traditional print form of the literary journal (in Carli Coetzee’s paper on Bwa Mwesigire’s short story ‘Susu’, published in the New Orleans Review) and a book anthology of poetry, published by a small press (in Femi Abodunrin’s study of Splinters of a Mirage Dawn: An Anthology of Migrant Poetry from South Africa), are mediated by online forms. The New Orleans Review has a significant amount of its content online and, indeed, Mwesigire’s story in both the Rukiga original and in translation is available for free on the site, suggesting that this is where it will be accessed by most of its readers.¹ Abodunrin’s paper concerns itself with what he sees as a new generation of migrant writers, a generation who (like the example he gives of poet Rupi Kaur) ‘sits-in, tweets, posts and broadcasts’ (65). This generation is, for Abodunrin, the ‘fallist generation’ (65) of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements in South Africa, both of which were mobilized via social media. Indeed, the poems in Abdodunrin’s analysis reflect the mediation of abbreviated internet forms, such as tweets: one poem, by Rodwell Makombe, takes a form that Abodunrin describes as haiku-like, but which could equally be described as ‘tweetable’, since the poem comes in under the original 140-character limit set by Twitter – a number that the Twitter company based on then standard SMS-limits of 160 characters. The abbreviated poem reads:

Please Sir, I can’t go back to that country

Look at the boils on my back

If you send me back there, they will finish me off. (Makombe 20)

Filling an entire page in the printed version of Splinters of a Mirage Dawn, the poem feels awkward in the book form where it seems more obviously made-to-fit for the mobile phone screen. Makombe’s poem draws attention to the empty space surrounding it on the page, a costly waste given the hefty price of books and printing in South Africa. Nevertheless, we might contemplate the choice of the abbreviated form given the cultural dominance of forms like Tweets and SMSes.

Despite the awkwardness of the printed page for various contemporary literary expressions, Raphael d’Abdon points out how academic and media discourse continues to value print – in this case published poetry – over other forms of poetry, such as performed and oral poetry. d’Abdon traces the ways this bias continues to structure poetic criticism, particularly in South Africa where performance poet becomes a euphemism, he argues, for black poet. d’Abdon’s paper is an important reminder to literary scholars and critics that form, and the way we classify it, is always political. It is not incidental that d’Abdon makes extensive use of a Facebook update written by South African poet Lebogang Mashile from which he takes the title to his paper. This raises a further methodological challenge for contemporary literary scholars: the need to develop an approach to the multimodal forms through which literary expression is constructed and mediated through social media today.

Such online mediations are more overt in Emmanuel Ngwira and Ken Lipenga’s discussion of comedy in YouTube clips, memes and online jokes, that circulate largely through social media. Ngwira and Lipenga take up the ways in which the logic of the meme constructs new versions of national community. Although, because of its tendency towards abbreviation the outcome, here, is that a national community becomes reduced to caricature and stereotype. Such processes of abbreviation as well as the way the meme adapts to its context, even as it travels globally, are productive starting points for scholars to think about methods for interpreting African Street Literatures.

Nicklas Hållén’s discussion of Nigerian inspirational poetry, published online, picks up on a similar issue of how models of circulation become encoded in poetic form. He uses Karin Barber’s notion of the ‘quotedness’ (Barber 2007, 27) of a text’s content across genres and modes to make this point (46). It seems to me, too, that in the Nigerian context, where revivalist Christianity is a major cultural form, the book-object becomes metonymically linked to the ultimate ‘good book’. This surely creates a melancholic sense of loss when the book-object becomes digitized. This yearning for the book as biblical-trace is apparent even in these online, app-based poetry collections where, as Hållén points out, the use of archaic language associated with biblical verse and a structure of addressivity that comes from prayer are recurrent. In the place of the lost book-object, we have a recognizably biblical tone and style, which we could read as symptomatic of the diminishing feasibility of the printed book in this context. Howsoever one interprets this aspect of what Hållén calls the ‘poetics of uplift’, what is clear is that the online publication and consumption of these texts is registered on their aesthetics and form (44).

The significance of online mediation in the making of contemporary canons is overt in the literary blog, a massively successful online form in African literary circles (see, for example, ‘Africa in Words’, ‘Brittle Paper’ and ‘Jalada’).² In this volume, Chelsea Haith interviews Gaamangwe Joy Mogami the founder of the blog ‘Africa in Dialogue’.³ Haith’s interview makes a strong claim for the importance of Mogami’s interviews in building alternative networks of knowledge production about African writing: alternative, that is, to formal academic networks that continue to rely too heavily on the publishing industry of the global north in which only a few African writers break through and which reduces literary production to the printed word (mostly novels and short stories). Mogami is interested in all modes of storytelling, and her blog involves interviews with poets, short story writers, novelists, filmmakers, editors, journalists, non-fiction writers and photographers. Furthermore, as Haith points out, Mogami’s interviews locate a metadiscourse around African literature in Africa itself, an important corrective to the way in which African knowledge production is routinely circumvented in global scholarship (see Nnaemeka, Harris 2012, Mbembe and Nuttall). As such, Mogami’s project is one of archiving African literary production in Africa and for African readers – and the open form of the blog is a far more efficient and ethical way of doing this than through academic journals, which because of unreasonable paywalls are notoriously inaccessible for many African universities and readers. The potential of online forums – both literary and critical – to continue the democratic project that forms like Onitsha Market Literature began, becomes clear then. As Mogami states, reminding us of how virtual spaces are continuous with the street: “We have always created art in the available spaces that we get and that has usually been our street landscape and recently the online landscape is opening new ways for us to create art” (84).

Another important aspect of many of the texts discussed in this special edition is the multimodality of their mediation and influence. Ngwira and Lipenga indicate the ways in which jokes that circulate on social media contain formal traces of told jokes; Mogami, in her interview with Haith, describes how her own writing began with ‘spoken word poetry and blog fiction before [she] started writing and getting published in literary platforms’ (84); d’Abdon writes of the movements back-and-forth across performed and printed poetry, movements so substantial that we start to question the need for a distinction between the two in the first place; Abodunrin also takes up this matter in contemplating the oral influences in printed poetry; Coetzee discusses the simultaneous translation of Bwa Mwesigire’s story, published in both Rukiga and English; Hållén’s discussion of inspirational poetry indicates the extent to which evangelical forms interface with this writing. In all these cases, and in a remarkable amount of the materials collected under the African Street Literature project (discussed at the end of this introduction), what becomes apparent is that literary scholarship needs to find ways of accounting for what I have elsewhere called this plasticity of form (Harris 2018). That is to say, the texts that might be included under the broad rubric African Street Literature are often expressed in multiple versions, multimodal, bilingual, and not interpretable as belonging to (or being influenced by) a single form of literary expression.

That said, while this movement across form suggests flow, transfer and circulation, and while the internet appears to be the ultimate medium for enabling such flows, Carli Coetzee reminds us that the African urban street is more determined by blockages and stops (she refers to the notorious go-slows one struggles with daily in cities like Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi) than flows and transfers. The flow of literary texts, too, is determined by just such blockages and stoppages. For Coetzee, in the case of Mwesigire’s story, ‘[t]ranslation is not, as the pouring backwards and forwards metaphor might suggest, a form of recycling or circulation, but instead creates an accusing pile-up of unwanted rubbish […] The Rukiga version remains “stuck”, even forgotten, as the English version comes to stand in for it and replace it’ (12). Like the ‘one-way’ water bottles that litter the African street because the lack of infrastructure for recycling, Coetzee bemoans the ways the global literary market, dominated as it is by the English language, relegates the Rukiga version of Mwesigire’s story to so much waste.

It is precisely these blockages – these Go-Slows – presented by global publishing that African Street Literatures attempt to find their way around. OkadaBooks, the Nigerian online book publishing and reading app that forms the basis of Hållén’s analysis, is named after okadas, small motorcycle taxis in Nigeria. As OkadaBooks Customer Support manager, Magnus Okeke puts it in an interview with Hållén: ‘Okadas manoeuvre traffic, and there is a traffic jam in the book distribution space in Nigeria. That is how [OkadaBooks founder Okechukwu Ofili] came up with the name “OkadaBooks”’ (87). We might consider these technological innovations as ways of addressing a literary economy that turns local languages and literary expression into waste. But this requires literary scholars to include this complex literary maneuvering in their analysis of the texts produced and circulated in these ways.

It is possible that the simplicity of online literary production might enable a revival of African language publishing. OkadaBooks, as Okeke informs us, publishes stories in Hausa that are becoming popular, and other online literary forums, like ‘African Storybook’,⁴ an open-access space for writers to publish, adapt, translate and read picture storybooks, offers some hope for a multilingual literary future on the continent. At the time of writing, African Storybook includes content that covers 166 African languages and 5574 translations of stories. This grassroots intervention into the lack of published material in African languages suggests a way forward out of the go-slow of the global publishing industry.

That said, I do not wish to suggest that published book writers should be considered as diametrically opposed to African Street Literatures. Indeed, OkadaBooks has recently republished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and non-fiction at a remarkably affordable price (less than 1000 Nigerian Naira per novel). They have also started republishing a selection of classics from the Heineman/Pearson African Writers Series at extremely low prices (250 Naira per book). This remediation of classic African novels may be the most sustainable way of maintaining the relevance of those novels for future generations of readers. The question of the sustainability of the book object is made clear when we hear from OkadaBooks’ Magnus Okeke that the company has instituted a system of payment whereby one can use phone credit to pay for downloads because ‘[t]here are young people who don’t have bank cards to pay for books. So the phone credit is a flexible option’ (89). This simple, structural fact is an example of how we need to consider the relationship between street life and the production and consumption of literary texts. Right now, Chimamanda Adichie’s global success is such that OkadaBooks is sure to sell numerous copies of her novels on their app. But I cannot personally imagine being able to read all 430 pages of Half of a Yellow Sun (in my 4^th Estate version) on a mobile phone. Yet, it seems likely that in the future, online publishing apps like OkadaBooks will replace traditional publishing in Africa, especially if one compares contemporary book sales with the number of users on platforms like this (OkadaBooks currently boasts 23 000 books, 253 000 users and 1 million downloads on their website; see Harris forthcoming for an extended discussion of this issue). If this shift from print to online publishing happens, one wonders if the days of epic and sustained narratives, such as Half of a Yellow Sun, might be a thing of the past, making way for the more abbreviated forms of online consumption.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that two of the contributors to this volume happen also to be poets (d’Abdon and Abodunrin), both of whose works are published in Splinters of a Mirage Dawn, discussed by Abodunrin here. Two of the pieces published take the form of interviews, which, as mentioned above, is an important form of engaging with African knowledge production about African literatures. If African Street Literatures are to be taken seriously, I suspect that we will find the boundaries between the academy and social media, blogs and libraries, scholars and poets, and others, being further blurred. This, I speculate, will make itself clear not only in the emergent forms of street literature, but in the modes, methods and forms of scholarship, too.

***

A note on the African Street Literature Research Project

The African Street Literature project, from which this special issue emerges, is a research project based at Uppsala University and funded by the Swedish Research Council (2017-2020). The project, which is run by Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hållén, focuses on literary infrastructures and forms of literature that emerge and are shaped by the specific factors determining everyday life in sub-Saharan Africa’s megacities. This literature largely exists outside of the literary establishment of the global north most often because it stands at an oblique angle to the literary market in which the novel remains the made-to-fit literary form of commodity capitalism. The field of African literature has been and remains dominated by scholarship on the African novel. This is partly because of the efficiency of the novel as a literary mode that travels and partly because of the importance of the novel in the formation of post-independence African culture. But publishing in Africa is in crisis and the African Street Literature project takes as a starting point the fact that books, largely imported, written in global cosmopolitan languages, and with a cost disproportionate to most Africans’ means, are not all that relevant in Africa today. Moreover, the form of the novel, which structures the reading activity in certain ways – requiring leisure/non-work time and a certain kind of sustained focus – no longer fits into the pace and structure of everyday life in the African city.

This, of course, does not mean that Africans do not read, nor does it mean that there are not literary infrastructures that exist outside of the global book publishing industry. Indeed, the African Street Literature project starts from the idea that our understanding of African literary production must take a far wider spectrum of literary form into account. African urban environments have seen a proliferation of literatures that register a wide archive of the everyday, one that takes into its scope global forces – such as economics and environmental change – as well as the lived level of the street. The aim of the African Street Literature project is to collate contemporary scholarship about alternative literary infrastructures and forms on the continent today, in order to generate literary debate and discussion for a sustainable view of the African literary future. Part of this work is to engage with methodologies of selection and access to these new literatures. The project works in collaboration with the Nordic Africa Institute’s Library, where new archival methods are being developed to address the challenges that librarians face when trying to collate and curate multi-modal and often informally distributed literature. Furthermore, the project aims to produce open-access academic publications that bring together scholars working on such materials to forge new ways of thinking about how we might produce a more sustainable field of African literary studies, one that is more responsive to the scale of the African everyday. As such, we hope to encourage scholars working in this field to be in touch, to contribute suggestions and texts to the archive, and to contribute to the three special editions, of which this is the first, that we plan for the project’s first phase. Should you be interested, please contact Ashleigh Harris ([email protected]) or Nicklas Hållén ([email protected]).

ORCID

Ashleigh Harris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6207-3067

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2016-01144].

Notes

1 http://www.neworleansreview.org/susu-2/

2 http://africainwords.com; https://brittlepaper.com; http://jaladaafrica.org

3 https://africaindialogue.com

4 https://www.africanstorybook.org