Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia

Abstract

Built around a discussion of two interconnected case studies, the article seeks to help pave the way for a systematic study of a national literary tradition whose presence in the world literary space may be described as spectral. Through a discussion of a critically neglected Zambian literary archive from the 1960s and 1970s, and a survey of reading habits conducted in a Lusaka bookshop in 2010, it argues that Zambia’s postcolonial literature in English embodies what may be called a literariness of crisis, in which books are a desirable and valued but scarce social good; and that such sociopolitical conditions have been productive of a specific kind of local genre competence which may, in turn, be tied to a certain configuration of flexible and economical local ways of reading.

Keywords:

• Zambia
• cosmopolitanism
• African Writers Series
• Mulaisho
• reading

Notes

1. I am grateful to Nikki Ashleigh, Sekelani Banda, Mulenga Kapwepwe, Malama Katulwende, Dominic Mulaisho, Steve Moyo, Norah Mumba, Dickson Mwansa, Billy Nkunika, Masautso Phiri and Monde Sifuniso for friendly collegiality over the years.

2. They are: Andrea Masiye (Before Dawn), Robert Baptie (Sakatoni and Other Stories and The Drummer of the West and Other Stories) and Fergus Macpherson (One Blood). For an up-to-date list of NECZAM and other locally produced Zambian literary publications, see Primorac “Overshadowed Literature”.

3. My deepest thanks are to Aristaricko Banda, Kennedy Bwalya, Stephen Miti, Thomas Tembo and Wezzy Thembo, for the manner in which they adopted my research project as their own.

4. I owe the formulation of this question to a conversation with Marja Hinfelaar.

5. This essay does not take into account the relationship between written and oral, or published and not-published textual forms, or between writing in English and literatures in the other Zambian languages – though eventually all of those should also be taken into account.

6. In recent years, two Zambian writers have claimed the attention of international readerships. Namwali Serpell’s short story “Muzingu” was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2010, while Ellen Banda-Aaku won the Penguin Prize for African writing in 2011 for her novel Patchwork.