What is Literary Activism? (Or Who keeps the housekeepers’ house?)

ABSTRACT

In August 2016, a four-day workshop brought together emerging and established African curators in Kampala under the label, the Arts Managers and Literary Entrepreneurs Workshop (AMLEW) to share knowledge and skills. In 2017, the name of the workshop changed to Arts Managers and Literary Activists (AMLA) workshop. This keynote address delivered at the opening of the 2018 edition of the same workshop, provides a historical context for the development of the specific AMLA Network as a programme of the Centre for African Cultural Excellence (CACE), a Kampala-based non-profit that promotes African ideas and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• African literature
• African writers
• AMLA Network
• imperialism
• literary activism
• neoliberalism
• Writivism

‘In a context where coloniality perpetuates itself through multiple forms of deception and confusion, clarity can become a powerful weapon for decolonization.’

– Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016)

How do we talk about the work of editors and literary critics? Let us be more specific: how do some creative writers talk of the work of editors and literary critics? As Tolu Ogunlesi (2009) asked, ‘who exactly are the proper “gatekeepers” of [the] African literary tradition and production?’ There is no straight-forward answer. One way to respond to the question is to account for oneself. Yours truly is not a gatekeeper.

The work that the people who start literary prizes and ensure they have all-African judges’ panels, the entrepreneurs who are starting bookselling start-ups using their savings from pocket money, the folk opening the doors to their houses to book clubs dedicated to discussing African books, the writers who have become festival curators because they do not like how European-curated events treat Black literatures, the writers who donate time and other resources to facilitate creative writing workshops for their less established colleagues, and other literary activists are not gatekeepers. Literary activism is not gatekeeping.

There is no House Here: How to Talk about African Literary Activism

The language of gatekeeping insofar as literary activism is concerned is problematic. What is the basis of this metaphor of gatekeeping? A gatekeeper controls access. To ‘gate’ if we use the word as a verb, is to confine. Let us extend the metaphor. A gate normally leads into a compound, I guess they call it a garden, for me, where I come from, a garden is where food grows, not grass and flowers, but you get what I mean. Inside the gate, is not just a house, we have the servants’ quarters, right? Then the main house. And of course, a gate rarely appears out of the blue. It is part of a gated community. There are other gates around. It speaks volumes about the nature of the literary sphere for which the metaphor of gatekeeping makes sense. I want to follow this metaphor, but this is enough for now. Let’s say that this is how the Western Publishing Industrial Complex operates. In fact, this is how it operates. Research has been done to prove this. Many of us here are academics, and work in this field, you know I am telling the truth.

I want to redirect our gaze within this compound, even inside the main house, to those who keep it running, but are really never seen. They appear before dinners, cocktail receptions, to set up the rooms, they appear when everyone has left to sleep, to clean up after everyone. Tomorrow, the house is sparkling clean, and the occupants did not even see the cleaners do their work. When these invisible people appear to serve, they appear in ways that do not attract attention, they behave as the invisible folk they are.

Let us think of the literary text. That book for which a million US dollar advance is paid. That book that sits on the New York Times bestseller list. In the context of its production, who do we think of as doing the ‘housekeeping’ labour? The editor, right? The publicist. The literary agent. And those get a mention at least on the acknowledgments page, they are not as invisible. Let’s push harder. The curator of that festival where the now literary rock-star met famous writer X, who introduced them to literary agent Y. The broke ‘failed writer’ who set up a creative writing workshop so other aspiring writers do not have to fail, and every year begs established writers to come and facilitate the workshop. Do you ever think of them when you read that acknowledgements page?

We learn from Carli Coetzee (2018) that the housekeeper performs invisible labour. This labour is invisibilised by the way it is feminised, domesticated, understood as chores, as informal ‘behind the scenes’ low stakes work. Coetzee goes further and suggests that we stop looking at the work of journal editors as gatekeeping, because in essence ethical journal labour is gate opening, rather than gate keeping. Coetzee understands her work as an activist journal editor as opening doors to air-conditioned rooms to bring in different airs from the usual must from incestuous networks. In fact, Coetzee goes further and calls on activist journal editors like herself, to leave the room altogether and go elsewhere where the air is different.

Contemporary African literary and cultural production, we learn from Kate Wallis (2018), is not only heavily shaped by city-based literary networks and events but also complicates the binary between the local and the global. One way of understanding the work that Binyavanga Wainaina for example did in introducing other writers like Igoni Barret to superpower literary agencies, is what Coetzee calls gate opening. As a literary rock-star himself, one of the ‘chosen few’ accepted in the air-conditioned rooms of the Western Publishing Industrial Complex, Binyavanga’s introductions are not merely a form of brokerage, but gate opening. You can only be a gate-opener when you are already inside the house, with the familiarity and confidence to go out and bring inside the house, new people. So, this is perhaps the farthest I can go with the gate opening when it comes to talking about the work we do as literary activists. The average literary activist is not a superstar, they are not a literary rock-star. Most of the literary activists active today, gave up creative writing careers because the work of curation, literary activism is as consuming as creative writing, not everybody is able to do as many things at once, as others. So, then literary activists can’t open gates and doors to places they have no access to.

Come to think about it. How many of us are at least inside the gate, but not in the main house, you know, in the garden, say even in the servants’ quarters? Some of us are in the ghettos. Others are not even in the area code. We can say that some celebrity journalists, book reviewers, and even academics, the types who judge prizes worth six figures are in the compounds. They indeed open the gate because they have the familiarity and confidence to do so. This is about power. Most Africa based and focused literary activists are nowhere close to the gated community, not to mention the gate, nor door. So, the ‘gatekeeper’ label, that sometimes is whacked onto African book bloggers who read and review African books, as their form of literary activism, needs to be dropped. It is false. Literary activists do not have the power in the larger scheme of things that determine literary stardom today, given how the Western Publishing Industrial Complex works.

We Know What We Are Not Doing: The Role of Ideology

So: what are literary activists doing? Since it is not gatekeeping, not gate / door-opening, what then is it? They are building alternative houses. Grace Musila (2016, 1460) cautions that ‘any engagement with hegemony that counters its fetish of exclusion by seeking to widen accessibility to its infrastructure or disavowing that infrastructure does little to dislodge the underlying bedrock of inequality.’ Frantz Fanon (2005, 314), before Musila put it this way: ‘Humanity is waiting for something from us other than an imitation (of Europe), which would be almost an obscene caricature.’

Literary activists are not building a second Europe. They are not necessarily replicating, or even imitating the Western Publishing Industrial Complex. After all, Olúfémi Táíwò (2014) has already berated the colonised generally for imitating the honorifics, the superficial elements of modernity and condemning the intellectual bases of the same, while trumpeting empty nationalist slogans and condemning colonialism. A ready example is Yoweri Museveni (Biryabarema 2014) who says that LGBTIQA rights as an element of Western countries’ foreign policy is a form of social and cultural imperialism, while not seeing a problem with adopting free market policies. Free market policies are essentially the new phase of neocolonialism in the ever-intensifying hold of Western capitalism on our lives. For a man who has led a three decades and counting government that liberalised the cultural and higher education sectors, alongside everything else, to the extent he is already looking for private developers to give the land on which the National Theatre (headquarter of the Uganda National Cultural Centre – UNCC) sits, talking about cultural imperialism is more than ironic. It is absurd. He will say that Uganda is modern because we have mobile phones that we did not have, when he took power in 1986, or another absurd thing like ‘we have the internet now’.

It would be a big error to conceptualise literary activism as attempts to build our own versions of the Western Publishing Industrial Complex. We require a different language to talk about literary activism. The language that we are accustomed to, which has developed around gates, enclosures, and doors doesn’t work. I don’t mean to say that in the African setting we don’t have gates. I am simply emphasising the point Musila (2017, 692) makes about ‘epistemic disarticulation’. Some of the Africanist scholarship around contemporary African literature definitely comes loaded with the metaphors and frameworks created particularly to fit the Western Publishing Industrial Complex. We end up with work that in Musila’s words is full of:

blindspots, opacities and deceit that result from a mismatch of assumptions and ideas—what I term epistemic disarticulation—between researchers and the communities they study. I use epistemic disarticulation to emphasise that these disconnects are less about ignorance, and more about inability to acknowledge multiple modes of knowing and their accompanying indices of credibility. (2017: 693)

We know some of those researchers and the research they have published that assumes that African publishers for example apply the logics of what Aaron Bady (2016) calls the Big Five N.Y.C (and London) based ‘market-driven profit-oriented capitalist enterprises.’ I am talking of the random penguin, or is it penguin random now, types of publishers. Good luck finding them in the sphere where literary activists operate. Some of the publishing houses in this setting may appear like the Big Five in structure, because they are perhaps faking it until they make it, or they are pulling a fugitive move. One requires a different set of tools to understand what is happening. It starts with recognising that literary activists are knowledge producers and to use Musila’s words again, one must redraw the registers of analysis to take the knowledge that literary activists produce seriously on its own terms.

Despite what some of us congregated in this room believe and say about Marxism, Pan Africanism, and even Feminism as theories of change, as tools to analyse oppressive structures and organise revolution, there is a lot we can gain from how that radical thinking has named the problem. We could compartmentalise things and talk about them separately (say, publishing, prizes, creative writing instruction, magazines, podcasts, book distribution, spoken word events etc.), but it does not change the fact that the status quo that enables our oppression and marginalisation in all ways, cultural, political, social and economic (those of us who are not liberal bourgeois white men), is in bell hooks’ (2004, 17) words ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. The Western Publishing Industrial Complex, and by extension the Western media and Africanist scholarship that in terms of literary production by Africans perform the gatekeeping role, are really for literature, where imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal logics proliferate. The canon is shaped by the market and given that in the Western Publishing Industrial Complex, African literature is on the periphery, that says what we need to know about who stands where, and who sits where in the exclusive main house.

As literary activists and academics based on and / or from the African continent, we must imagine, create, and study a new human to use Fanon’s words. I want to return to Táíwò, but first to Karl Marx. We know the thesis on Feuerbach where Marx (1845) says that the point is not to philosophise about the world for its own sake, but to change it. Now, Táíwò’s (2014) problem is that some of us have misread Marx as saying that we are not supposed to philosophise, that we should focus on changing the world instead. Táíwò says that we must first know what the world is, philosophy is important in enabling us to understand the world we want to change. I (Bwa Mwesigire 2017) after all have tweeted before, that a revolution is a radical reimagination of society. Those who want to accuse us of turning Hegelian by putting the mind, ideas before the material can have fun. It was Amilcar Cabral (1966) who told the first Tricontinental conference in Cuba that theory is itself a weapon in the struggle for liberation. Ideas and culture are not a liberal bourgeois past-time. In founding the Notting Hill carnival for example, as Carole Boyce Davies (2007) shows, the Black Communist activist, Claudia Jones had long transcended the classic Western Marxist dismissal of culture as a liberal bourgeois past time. Boyce Davies locates Claudia Jones in what Cedric Robinson (2000) names as the Black Radical Tradition, to which culture is central. Literary activists are therefore central to the global Black liberation project.

We are congregating together, as university-based academics and literary activists because we both create knowledge in our different ways. Interaction and mutual recognition are important for the sustenance of our work. This is even more urgent in these neoliberal days. Public universities have been sold off to the vagaries of free market competition, and the cultural sector has faced the same fate as the universities. Knowledge and creativity are under attack under a neoliberal dispensation. We can’t afford to just sit and settle for self-commodification and deceive ourselves that we are flourishing because we got published in the West. I have to go back to Louis Althusser (2001 quoting Lenin) here, about ideology. He tells us that ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. Ideological work is inherently, political. This is why the word in the name of the network we are now all part of, is activism and not professionalism. The language of professionalism hides its neoliberal animus behind surface level ethical rhetoric.

I will supply an illustration. If you set up a book club in Kampala, you will need to buy books. The bookshops available will need to stock a wide variety of books for you to be able to choose (choice, that big lie that libertarians tell us so they can manufacture consent and take away our freedom) what you want to read and discuss, when. Sometimes you will want books that are not published in Uganda. Say, you want to read a book published in Lesotho, or Guinea Bissau, or Western Sahara, or Eritrea, wherever on this continent. As anyone who deals in bookselling in any given African country outside South Africa will tell you, importing books from African countries is one of the hardest things in the trade. The Nigerian literary superstar, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s books are published in Nigeria and Kenya too. There’s a reason beyond rights, that in Ugandan bookshops we find the US and UK published editions of her books and not the Kenyan and Nigerian editions. Or that the US and UK published editions are cheaper than those published on the continent. From the tax arrangements to the infrastructure for production and consumption, the so-called African countries remain extractive colonies.

As Jeremy Weate (2013) has put it, the infrastructure in place is for the extraction of raw talent like the minerals from the ground, transportation of the same to Europe and North America where apparently value is added, so the manufacturing of the products is happening there, and then finished products are sent back to the places where the raw materials were drawn in the first place. So, the infrastructure that exists is for the extraction of raw materials and the circulation of consumable goods from Western Europe and North America. We can have debates about this for decades, unless we struggle against it, by building self-reliant infrastructure here and engaging our governments, nothing will change. As Cabral (1966) tells us, we can’t shout imperialism out of town. We have to fight it. Some pragmatic people, you know, in Lester Spence’s (2015) terms, call them hustlers have decided it is better to take advantage of the imperialist structure of the book market and now produce from the countries that have unfettered access to our own markets. It is a ‘smart’ business choice to manufacture and distribute from London or New York given that the challenges that Africa based publishers face in accessing African markets won’t exist. But the real revolution is in destroying this imperialist structure. This is the revolutionary work that cultural and literary activists are doing. We must watch out and not be reduced to hunting grounds for raw materials to be exported for refining.

Of course, we know from Audre Lorde (2007) that the revolution is not a one-day event, it is a series of otherwise mundane activities, it is a process. And sometimes it gets lonely. Sometimes we want to see results at this very moment. And most times we are disappointed because the struggle isn’t registering quick results. This space, this network exists so we can encourage one another. We can retreat from the noise out there, from the click baiting bloggers mining our private lives for scandal, from hustlers leaking information about their own private lives to manufacture notoriety and market their new products; we are here to hug one another, listen to one another’s troubles, pat ourselves on the back, refuel, heal, and return to the various battlefronts.

The Writivism Roots of the AMLA Network

To understand the foundation of the AMLA Network, we have to look at the elder sibling programme within the Centre for African Cultural Excellence (CACE), the Writivism Literary Initiative. The story starts in 2012. My friend Kyomuhendo Ateenyi, a law student here at Makerere then and I, used to have countless conversations about art, poetry and heritage. Ateenyi from when he joined university in 2008 wrote and published poetry and political commentary on university notice boards and his blogs. We worked together on a law magazine, Prima facie, around 2009 and 2010. He was also a political activist and a political party man. He chaired the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) branch at Makerere. We shared so much. Although I was two years ahead of him in law school, I too wrote, even if less prolifically, for the national newspapers and a personal blog, and I was an active member of the FDC branch. As a law student, I was also a human rights activist in a different capacity.

2012 found me in Budapest, Hungary where I was studying Human Rights. I was not sure the liberal nature of the work most human rights activists do would lead us to the freedom Ateenyi and I used to discuss. Both of us were raised by primary school teachers in the rural districts of Masindi and Kabale, respectively. The more I was learning at the Central European University (CEU), the more I was losing interest in the ‘development’-laced, and I want to echo Makau wa Mutua (2008) here, racist liberal human rights agenda. I was becoming a cultural nationalist of sorts. Or perhaps, I had always been, but I was now becoming conscious of my cultural nationalism. Ateenyi was one of the people I was having conversations with about these crises.

So, when Sheila Kulubya (2011), a lecturer of Public Affairs Reporting at Makerere University at the time, tagged me in a Facebook post about the fifth Harambe Bretton Woods Symposium (HBWS), a four-day event at Yale, Harvard and Mount Washington Hotel, I thought I could take the chance to create something through which to channel my interests in changing our world through a different lens. Ateenyi was the obvious respondent for these ideas and suggestions. Would he be interested in joining me to start something? I drafted an application for the HBWS. The application was long and detailed. It posed questions I hadn’t asked myself. In the process of filling that application, a concrete idea came together. I shared the draft with Ateenyi. He approved most, added a few things and I submitted and waited.

The application was successful and with the support of CEU, I went to America. I would be a liar if I omitted the fact that in the Mount Washington Hotel where we spent the last two days of the symposium and signed the Harambe pledge is where, in the mid-twentieth century, the infamous Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had been formed. There, in America, at the HBWS, I met a Zimbabwean who told us that she was using literature in history and other disciplines’ classrooms at the secondary school level. I was smitten. I asked her if we could add her to our pair, because her work resonated with our ideas. She accepted. Ateenyi accepted too. The three of us, namely Naseemah Mohamed, Ateenyi and I formed the Centre for African Cultural Excellence as a vehicle to realise our connected ideas. I returned to Budapest.

After my last exam at CEU, I headed to Brussels for a Global Changemakers (GCM) Euro-Africa Youth Summit. I had been selected alongside 59 other young activists and aspiring entrepreneurs to this bootcamp of sorts. I was excited to reconnect with old friends like Loyola Karobwa who had been a classmate at Makerere and a fellow think tanker thereafter. In Brussels we were grouped according to our backgrounds and I ended up in the human rights group. Each group was required at the end of the summit to present a project idea they’d have worked on together.

I had read Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and several of her short stories, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions among other African realist prose and felt that their beauty worked on both the level of the form, but most importantly in humanising theory. Realist fiction was propaganda with a small p, in the sense that W.E.B Du Bois (1926) called all art, propaganda. Big P propaganda is the advertising we see, that’s not art at all. So, for our group, the idea was that we would promote realist fiction around ‘human rights’ issues as a way to change minds. I suggested that we bring the words writing and activism together, to make Writivism, as the project name. The group accepted my idea. That’s how the word Writivism was created.

I returned to Uganda, from Brussels. I told my colleagues, Ateenyi and Naseemah about the interest this Writivism idea had generated in Brussels. I proposed that we as CACE house the project. They accepted. I consulted with the members of the human rights group from the GCM summit. They had no objection to CACE owning the name, even implementing the project. And thus, we worked on a grant proposal, coined the tagline, “Connecting Literature to Reality” and hit the ground running. The GCM folk awarded us 2300 Swiss Francs to implement the pilot of the project. We decided we would hold a creative writing workshop, run a short story prize, and publish an anthology.

Truth be told, we were learning from the Caine Prize. By that time, thanks to the internet, I was in touch with several people of my age from other African countries, including Uganda who had been to the Caine Prize workshops and had been published in the Caine Prize anthologies. My classmate at CEU from Kenya, Bemih Kanyonge, had introduced me to Kwani and I knew at least something about the journal. Of course, I had met (online) Emmanuel Iduma, the publisher of Saraba magazine, and they had published some of my work. In fact, I had also been part of a gang of six writers, mainly from Nigeria, that had won the Short Story Day Africa chain story competition. This is the milieu that created Writivism. It was a digital writing community really that gave the programme its core.

From the African Writers Trust mentoring programme that had produced the anthology, Suubi, we learned that mentoring could work online. Two of my friends, Harriet Anena and Gloria Kembabazi had been part of it. It was this knowledge of how online mentoring worked that informed adding it to the programme. We had wished for access to literary communities as high school students, so we added outreach to schools. Because access to literary material in book form was deemed limiting, we partnered with newspapers to co-publish the stories that would come out of the workshop. And finally, we organised a prize awarding ceremony, around which what has now become an annual festival was conceptualised. Because for some reason the festival, whose sixth edition starts at the end of this week, as we close these twin AMLA Network workshops, has become even bigger than the prize around which it was formed, I would like to say that the rest is history, as regards Writivism.

At the Franschhoek Literary Festival, when Yewande Omotoso was asked to explain what Writivism is, she said that Writivism to her, is advocacy for African writing. Recently, Akwaeke Emezi (quoted by Writivism 2018), chair of the 2018 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction, tweeted that writers ‘don’t have to italicize non-english words when submitting to an african writing prize with african judges.‘

The Writivism mission as articulated by those who donate their time and expertise to create other ways of being creative outside the Western Publishing Industrial Complex is activist. It is not just important that the mentors (like Omotoso) and judges (like Emezi) articulate the Writivism vision eloquently, even emerging writers who submit their work to the prizes understand what is at stake. One example will suffice. Ghanaian writer Akotowaa (quoted by Writivism 2018), longlisted twice for the Writivism Prize has tweeted, ‘it’s really wonderful to have an African organization hold a competition for African writers judged by African readers/writers. It’s something about gazes/lenses … ’

In 2015, Prof. Grace Musila was in Uganda, at Makerere where the second Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference was held. Although we were unable to meet in person, thanks to Facebook, we had a conversation about knowledge production and the role and place of non-university-based knowledge creators for example what creatives are doing, including through Writivism and other projects and its interaction or lack thereof with university-based academics in Africa.

The conversation with Musila led to further introspection. Earlier in the year, I had attended an international literature showcase in Norwich courtesy of an African Writers Trust recommendation and British Council funding earlier in the year. While there, as a literature professional, I had appreciated that our work in curating an annual festival, running an annual prize, publishing, coordinating mentoring, etc. was recognised, in its own right. That I didn’t have to feel like I was occupying a ‘writer’s’ place, that I was a professional and visible, no longer the sweeper of the house where writers live, but an occupant of that house and a participant in the conversations held therein.

But still, something was off. Could we talk of literature professionals back home in Uganda, in the same way we could in Norwich? Our UK based colleagues had specific labels as editor, curator, fundraiser, publicist, etc. On my part, the label founder really meant all the specific things our colleagues introduced themselves as. As a founder, you often are the fundraiser, the publicist, the accountant, the curator, the editor, etc. It is hard.

The closest I could come to finding a more legible word to use in the place of founder, was entrepreneur. I described the work of superstar writer door-openers like Binyavanga as writer-entrepreneurs, writer-preneurs. (Kakoma 2014) In 2016, we suggested an annual workshop where we bring together literary entrepreneurs and arts managers in Kampala and connect them to academics working in the field. The aim was to recognise the work the activists do as intellectual, as a form of knowledge, to make the case that literary entrepreneurship and arts management are forms of knowledge that academics must respect and interact with but also that ‘practitioners’ should interact with academic knowledge.

I returned to Grace Musila and she said she was available to collaborate to make the idea of workshop real. I asked Kate Wallis, whom I knew from the Kwani Manuscript Project, as Writivism had hosted the launch of Kintu, the winner and first book in the series, in 2014. I had also been a speaker at the 2015 Africa Writes festival that Kate had curated. I knew her as an academic who works on literary networks but also as a practitioner. She in turn introduced me to Madhu Krishnan at University of Bristol. Madhu in turn introduced me to Ruth Bush, at the same university. The five of us worked on the first ever AMLA workshop. It was not called AMLA, though. It was AMLEW. Arts Management and Literary Entrepreneurship Workshop.

In the same year, Thando Mgqolozana (Sosibo 2016), inspired by the #MustFall movements in South Africa had taken steps to decolonise the White Supremacist South African literary sphere. The same year we held the first AMLA workshop was the year the inaugural Abantu Book Festival was held. The curator, Panashe Chigumadzi, one of the many voices of the #MustFall movement and a debut novelist of Sweet Medicine had attended the adjacent Writivism festival. She was going to curate the inaugural Abantu festival.

From Literary Entrepreneurship to Activism

Through interactions with Abantu Book Festival, between 2016 and 2017, we questioned the implications of labelling the work we do as literary entrepreneurship. For Chinua Achebe, this work was akin to ‘Cultural politics’. By following logics of entrepreneurship, of ‘professionalism’, we are trying to destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools. Audre Lorde (2007) has already told us that it doesn’t work that way. We have to leave what Carli Coetzee has called the air-conditioned room if we are to bring meaningful change. Since most of us aren’t in that room anyway, we have to give up dreams of being there, and those of creating other rooms like it.

The Arts Management and Literary Activists (AMLA) Network is here to create a community of literary activists and academics working in this field of research. To build a consciousness that we are all freedom and knowledge workers. We are here to replenish one another’s energies, to hold one another accountable, to value and recognise one another’s work. We are deliberately holding two workshops, one for early career researchers, another for literary activists together to enable the building of connections, mutual intercourse and recognition of each other’s work.

We can’t hide our heads in the sand and say that economics and the nature of the world don’t affect our work. It is a problem that our governments have sold out to free market policies. They don’t see the need for imagination and knowledge production in their ‘development’ dreams. And so, the little money that enables our work comes from embassies of Western countries, their departments of International Development, etc. Of course, we can’t forget Fanon’s (2005) message that we are still owed reparations, but we also can’t let these governments and the managerial class that runs them off the hook. We know, following Dani Wadada Nabudere (1980), that the real ruling class in the neo-colony is in the so-called mother country, the UK’s and US’s ruling classes are the ruling classes for the neo-colonies. The Musevenis are really mere fixers for imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. That doesn’t get the managerial classes off the hook. We are dissatisfied by the hypocritical application of anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify homophobia when economic policies are White Supremacist and continue to impoverish us.

To return to the metaphor I started with, the AMLA Network is here to keep the houses of what would be the housekeepers in the neoliberal gated enclosed house. Of course, we know from everything I have said that what is being built, what has been built is not necessarily a house. So, the AMLA Network is here, to use Panashe Chigumadzi’s (Bwa Mwesigire 2016) words, to ensure that we are like Jazz, comfortable with uncertainty. We drop a notch and pick a notch. What we are doing is about improvisation, without being in free fall. We are not sellouts for insisting that we can have modernity that is not tainted by coloniality. We are dissatisfied with anti-imperialist rhetoric that stops at policing who sleeps with who and how but does nothing for our freedom dreams. We are here to make not only the dreams of creative writers possible but to ensure that our colleagues who are working to create environments that make imagination possible are healthy. We are here as cultural workers. This is what it means to us to be literary activists.

Thank you for bearing with me, all this while.