Introduction: Literary Activism in 21st Century Africa

The final stages of this special issue cohered during a pandemic which has, thanks to an uneven global landscape of lockdowns and curfews, witnessed exceptional inventivity and literary activity in the digital African literary space. Literary festivals such as AfroLitSansFrontières, Aké Arts and Book Festival, Bakwa Lit Fest, Time of the Writer, Gaborone Book Festival, Heroe Book Fair, and scores more flourished across digital platforms from Instagram to YouTube. These events have accelerated transnational and multilingual conversations, while also hosting important dialogues about digital access and pan-African literary landscapes. Festivals remain key venues for knowledge production on and about African current affairs, as well as literary aesthetics and the politics of the literary marketplace. This issue’s core concern with literary activism emerges in dialogue with ongoing conversations among African writers, publishers, festival organisers and translators who work across this space (in particular in Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho and Tanzania). In 2016, we were invited, along with Grace Musila, by Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire to convene the first Arts Management and Literary Activism (AMLA) workshop, held in Kampala as part of the Writivism Literary Festival that year. Bwa Mwesigire has defined literary activism as ‘the work of building Africa-based and focused infrastructure to support literary and cultural production’ (Bwa Mwesigire 2020). As he sets out in the keynote published in this issue, delivered at the third edition of that workshop in 2018, the workshop was designed to support and promote the ‘invisible labour’ of people involved in every stage of the literary infrastructure. At the same time, he recognizes that most African literary activists do not wield significant power in the global literary system, or seek to mimic the ‘Western Publishing Industrial Complex’. Instead, alternative houses are being built, using new tools, borrowing, lending, or recycling old ones where necessary. This is a long-term process that seeks to build ‘self-reliant infrastructure’ and situates the material base of knowledge production and dissemination firmly on the continent.

Significantly this keynote, delivered at Makerere University in Kampala, was originally addressed to an audience of both literary producers and academics. AMLA’s 2018 edition brought together two workshops — one for early career researchers and the other for literary activists — with what Bwa Mwesigire described as the deliberate aim of ‘building of connections, mutual intercourse and recognition of each other’s work’. Building out of conversations and community started across the AMLA workshops, this special issue seeks to document a selection of this work. It does so with the recognition that, as Sylvia Tamale reminds us, orthodox or institutionalised approaches to documentation have historically had a deleterious impact on the visibility of modes of knowledge production which often remain invisible to more dominant orders. Instead, she argues, we must aim ‘to erase the boundaries that separate and hierarchize knowledge’ (2020, 61). We would further point to the distinction made by Moradewun Adejunmobi (2020) between visibility and publicness and the particular inflections of this distinction in the realm of African letters. She writes:

When a work attracts citation as part of a critical discourse, its visibility is heightened. The more visibility accrues to the work, the more likely it is to become a subject of either critical acclaim or notoriety. The initial publication of a novel or a volume of poetry by an Africa-based publisher might and often does attract a review in local newspapers, or local media. But when it comes to the visibility of and ultimately the value ascribed to the work, reviews of the same work in highly localized forms of publicness cannot substitute for recurrent citationality in critical discourse. (2020, 83)

In bringing together a broad range of reflections, observations and modes of engagement with contemporary literary activism across the African continent, then, we intend for this issue to move between more conventional forms of academic writing, ‘recognising that literary activism is a form of knowledge creation’ (Bwa Mwesigire 2020) and validating expansive kinds of written expression, including reflective pieces, interviews, co-authored texts, and articles that register, observe, and thereby wield their own capacity to theorise African literary activism. In the case of certain pieces, such as Edwige Dro’s reflections on her journey to opening 1949, a library and reading room dedicated to African and black women’s writing, or Abdulrahman ‘Abu Amirah’ Ndegwa’s contribution, a brief personal history of the Hekeya Arts Initiative and its promotion of the literatures of the Swahili Coast, the voices of producers and activists — those ‘invisible labourers’ of which Bwa Mwesigire speaks in his keynote — stand for themselves and on their own terms. In others, like Lineo Segoete and Zachary Rosen’s analysis of language genealogies, pedagogy and the decolonial project of Ba re e ne re, pieces aim to engage in what UNESCO, in 1993, called the basic human right of self-interpretation. Still elsewhere, essays and articles seek largely to document what risk becoming fleeting moments in contemporary literary history and provide platforms for the publicness of literary activism to gain greater purchase through critical visibility. We acknowledge and thank all those who were part of the 2016, 2017 and 2018 AMLA workshops for shaping and sustaining the dialogue and intellectual trajectories out of which this special issue has been produced.¹

To set this conversation in some wider context, it is helpful to reflect on the multiple meanings and histories of ‘literary activism’. The power of printed books to harness knowledge and change ways of thinking has been a subject of political and theological debate since the rapid growth of Western print culture in the fifteenth century (Eisenstein 1979). Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis connecting print capitalism to the rise of nationalism also speaks to this assumed power of print to shape thought and ‘imagined communities’ (1983). Scholarship in African book history and anthropology has demonstrated the limits and possibilities of these arguments in several African contexts, foregrounding issues of distribution; alphabetic literacy; and the need to fully acknowledge African agency within colonial print cultures (Thomas and Barber 2012; Newell 2013; Davis and Johnson 2015). Building on that work, we wish here to shift the emphasis to the literary dimensions of hyper-contemporary print activism as the location of agency, an expression of agency that unfurls through a desire for a ‘something else’ which is not essentialist in its aims and which leverages its own forms of momentum. The term ‘activism’ is widely used to refer to forms of direct and indirect politically engaged action. In broader contexts of cultural production, it can be situated in its use by South Asian and Latin American scholars and producers as meaning more direct sociopolitical intervention (seen, for instance, in the Third Cinema movement or the adoption of aesthetic practices derived from the Soviet and Weimar schools in post-Independence South Asian cinema). We might elsewhere trace the francophone genealogies and legacies of littérature engagée (‘committed literature’), with their particular articulation of the responsibility of the writer (Sapiro 2011). Since 2014, Amit Chaudhuri has hosted a series of symposia on literary activism, accompanied by a website, magazine and manifesto. In this manifesto, Chaudhuri (2014) reflects on the distinction between market activism (i.e., that which is concerned with issues of gatekeeping, access to publishing circuits, or ‘championing’ particular voices, often those marginalised to date) and literary activism as something more ‘desultory’, whose ‘aims and value aren’t immediately explicable’. Rather than honing a definition, therefore, in this special issue we take a broad view of what literary activism is and how it is interpreted, understood and engaged with from different perspectives and locations. If, for Chaudhuri, the activism in literary activism comes from an ineffable desire to protect a kind of aesthetic valuation or validation; or, for Bwa Mwesigire, simply to create spaces and infrastructures for creative expressive acts as a mode of activism; we equally might wish to consider the role of more recent initiatives such as “Soro Soke: When Poetry Speaks Up”, an ongoing collaborative project curated by Nigerian poet Jumoke Verissimo and academic James Yeku, which serves as a living repository in real-time of writerly responses to the ongoing struggle against police brutality taking place in Nigeria today and known internationally as the EndSARS movement (Verissimo and Yeku 2020). Without suggesting anything like a combined theory of everything for literary activism, then, we wish to foreground what the productive tensions across different definitions and understandings might enable us to perceive about the contemporary literary landscape and the fullness of its work as a vector of social production and artistic creation.

Within that, one of the most potent areas for witnessing literary activism is that of literary translation and creative multilingualism. Here literary activism seeks quite literally to enact change at the level of literary material itself, by giving visibility to translators, translating literature from marginalised languages, and stating firmly the ethical role of bibliodiversity within and beyond global anglophone hegemony (Baker 2006; Carré and Thierry 2019; Gould and Tahmasebian 2020). The 2016 AMLA workshop from which this issue took its initial impetus was a consciously multilingual event, with many of the characteristic disjunctures and attempts at mutual understanding that this implies. Writers, translators and publishers were invited from francophone spaces (Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Rwanda) and interpreters from the Alliance Française were present during the workshop. During a workshop day on literary translation, Moses Kilolo shared his experience of working with the Jalada Collective on the many translations of Ngugi’s “The Upright Revolution: or why humans walk upright”; Edwige Dro spoke of her hands-on work as a literary translator, while Felwine Sarr spoke of his work with Jimsaan Publishing House, and the need to centre translation within the African knowledge ecology (Krishnan, Bush and Wallis 2017). Afrophone literary events continue to expand on the continent, including recently an edition of AfroLitSansFrontières and the second Swahili Lit Fest documented in the present issue by Abu Amirah. We draw attention here to Segoete and Rosen’s examination of Sesotho within Lesotho’s literary culture, and the reflective pieces by Edwige Dro and Amirah which respectively explore French- and Kiswahili-language literary production, while acknowledging that the contributions remain predominantly focused on anglophone literary contexts.

This issue opens with an edited and revised version of the keynote speech delivered by Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire at the third edition of the Arts Managers and Literary Activism workshop (by then renamed to the AMLA Fellowship) held at Makerere University in August 2018. In this keynote, Bwa Mwesigire traces the origins of the AMLA Network through the larger imperative to think beyond and outside of the Western Publishing Industrial Complex. Here, he picks up on Carli Coetzee’s 2018 keynote speech at the annual conference of the African Literature Association (ALA), which made a powerful case for a shift in our thinking, as academic and cultural workers, from gatekeeping to gate opening. And yet, this ethos of gate opening is not the work of a single scholar or practitioner, nor work which is necessarily straightforward. A 2019 special section of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, titled “Ethical?! Collaboration?! Keywords for our contradictory times” and curated by Coetzee makes this plain. Featuring a range of contributions from activist-scholars located around the world, but primarily on the African continent, this series of articles repeatedly brings up the ways in which terms like ethics and collaboration often shift to serve as alibis for modes of research and engagement which remain extractive and hierarchical in their orderings. While guidance such as the “Global Code of Ethics in Resource-Poor Settings” adopted by the European Research Council emphasises the importance of fairness, respect, care and honesty as governing principles of research ethics (TRUST), the very notion that certain parts of the world remain ‘resource poor’ versus the wealth of others raises questions around the implicit hierarchies and valuations which accrue to different modes of knowledge production. In the case of literary activism, any dismissal of the African continent as ‘resource poor’ risks complicity in an erasure of the range, intensity and reach of activity. Again, we return to hierarchies of knowledge production, publicness, visibility and labour. In this context, it is important to note that at the time of this writing, March 2021, the United Kingdom’s Conservative government has just announced major cuts to its Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), a £1.5 billion portfolio of research supported by the Official Development Assistance programme which supports collaboration work across the North-South divide. As Bwa Mwesigire and Krishnan note in their contribution to this special issue, despite the rhetoric of ‘dependency’ and ‘assistance’ which accompanies the GCRF, African literary activism has used these tranches of funding as active agents, rejecting the passive notion of agency, and with creativity and agility. In many ways, the complexity of contemporary funding arrangements comes from a longer genealogy, notably the covert funding of mid-century literary activist work including Black Orpheus and Transition magazines, the Mbari Club and Chemchemi Cultural Centre by the United States of America’s Central Intelligence Agency under the auspices of the Farfield Foundation (see Davis 2020). We would be remiss not to note that much of the funding for the initial AMLA workshop as well as its subsequent editions has benefited from schemes of this nature, including grants from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account, British Academy Writing Workshop (a scheme deliberately targeted at funding capacity for academic writing training in the Global South) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council under a highlight notice coinciding with the declaration of the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent. In this sense, the particular flows of capital, resource and formation of value across geopolitical borders warrants further consideration.

Following Bwa Mwesigire’s opening essay, the next two articles examine, in turn, two increasingly high-profile independent literary initiatives based in Nigeria. In “Parrésia and the Business of Publishing Contemporary Nigerian Literature”, Aliyu Sakariyau Alabi explores the ways in which Parrésia, founded in 2012, has leveraged digital technologies and a multi-tiered publishing strategy to navigate the tension between the business of producing books in an unprofitable market and its aims at developing literary value. In “Okadabooks, E-Book Publishing and the Distribution of Homegrown Nigerian Literature”, Temitayo Olofinlua examines the growth of cultural and economic value through the development of the e-reading and publishing platform, Okadabooks. Olofinlua highlights the ways in which writers use the platform to reach and interact with readers, as well as the importance of collaboration for Okadabooks to intervene in the publishing sector and address the physical challenges of infrastructure, distribution and demand. Both Alabi and Olofinlua emphasise in their pieces the ways in which innovation and agility are put to use by Nigerian literary producers in ways which often challenge existing models of literary production. Equally, both initiatives, as these two articles trace, operate in ways which might often seem surprising to historians of the book and literary scholars based in the global North, challenging some of our conventional notions around autonomy, the relationship between the economic and cultural fields and the role of entrepreneurship in literary activism.

These pieces are followed by Lineo Segoete and Zachary Rosen’s “Critical Literary Arts in Action: The Decolonial Project of Ba re e ne re within and beyond Lesotho”, which brings a historical lens to the creation and development of literary infrastructure in Lesotho, emphasising particularly the colonial history and resulting orthographic inconsistencies of the Sesotho language. As Segoete and Rosen argue, this historical background continues to inform the ways in which the Basotho interact with literature, with direct implications for the critical literary arts, pedagogy and literary practice; the Ba re e ne re Literature Festival, in turn, seeks to decouple literature in Sesotho from coloniality through its range of programming to create spaces for cultural and narrative ownership. Issue one of this double special issue ends with three pieces which further emphasise the importance of dialogue, connection and the ownership of narrative. Chelsea Haith reviews the Botswana-based internet magazine, Africa in Dialogue, which seeks to use long-form conversations as the basis of its project of archiving and examining contemporary African literary production. Emma Shercliff reviews Bakwa 9, the first print issue of the Cameroon-based publishers and literary collective Bakwa. Themed around travel from an African perspective, the issue brings together writing in English and French to think beyond borders, even as those borders (sometimes) remain immutable. This first half of this double special issue concludes with a reflective essay by Abu Amirah, founder of the Hekeya Arts Initiative and Swahili Literature Festival, looking at the history of literary activism on the Swahilil Coast and its contemporary contours.

The second half of this double special issue opens with Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire and Madhu Krishnan’s “Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop”. In this piece, Bwa Mwesigire and Krishnan reflect on their experience of producing Odokonyero: A Writivism Anthology of Short Fiction by Emerging Ugandan Writers (Black Letter Media 2018) and the possibilities of the creative writing workshop as a space for decolonial praxis. The creative writing workshop space, they argue, can offer outlets through which participants are able to function as social agents outside of the allegedly hegemonic structures of coloniality; at the same time, the limits of creative expression remain mediated by its intersection with the wider work of social production. Bwa Mwesigire and Krishnan’s essay is followed by Mpale Yvonne Mwansasu Silkiluwasha’s “Reflecting and Reflexing on Book Awards: A Case Study of the Burt Award”. Here, Silkiluwasha uses the case study of the Canadian-funded Burt Award for children’s literature to think through the ways in which international literary prizes have impacted the moral economy of the literary field in Tanzania. The next essay in this issue, “Reading Dar es Salaam's (Female-led) Book Clubs as Paravirtual Networks”, by Zamda Geuza and Kate Wallis, too, explores the dynamics of the Tanzanian literary scene, focusing on a selection of book clubs in Dar es Salaam and their attempts to re-orient the gendered dimensions and language hierarchies of the city’s publishing and book culture. A sense of ‘place’ is also traced through Lucky Grace Isingizwe’s review of the dynamic work brought together by the first issue of Down River Road — a new literary journal launched in Kenya in 2019. We conclude this special issue with the essay by Edwige Renée Dro, chronicling her experiences promoting reading in an allegedly ‘readerless’ culture through co-founding the readers’ salon AbidjanLit in 2016 and, in 2020, 1949, a library and reading room in Cote d’Ivoire.

We are all too conscious of the unevenness and partiality of this special issue, not only in terms of language but also in terms of geographies, with a particular emphasis being placed on both Nigerian literary initiatives and spaces of literary circulation and value in Tanzania. However, we hope this collection of articles, position papers, reflective pieces, reviews and co-authored texts can begin conversations across broader geographies within both creative and critical literary networks. Together these pieces explore new methodologies for African literary studies that work to document and analyse literary infrastructures across print and digital spaces, emphasising the productive possibilities of scholars and literary activists working in dialogue to build visibility and value structures for new modes of literary and knowledge production.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the British Academy's Writing Workshop programme which supported this work.

Notes

1 In particular, we are indebted to the editors of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Lynda Gichanda Spencer (Rhodes University) and Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi) who we collaborated with to conceive and facilitate the British Academy funded workshop for early career scholars in 2018 and a follow-up edition at the Hargeysa International Book Fair in 2019, out of which articles in this special issue by Temitayo Olofinlua, Aliyu Sakariyau Alabi, Mpale Yvonne Mwansasu Silkiluwasha and Zamda Geuza directly emerged. We would also like to acknowledge the inspiring work of Gaamangwe Joy Mogami (Africa in Dialogue) in establishing and shaping the linked AMLA fellowship with Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire in 2018. Kirk Sides (University of Bristol) and Billy Kahora (University of Bristol) co-facilitated the 2018 early career workshop, while Tadiwa Madenga (Harvard University) provided invaluable support as the workshop co-ordinator. Alabi Aliyu, Doseline Kiguru, Edgar Nabutanyi, Eve Nabulya, Florence Athieno, Jama Musse Jama, Jonathan Mugenyi, Makau Kitata, Mpale Silkiluwasha, Rosephine Nyiva Mwizi, Serah Kasembeli, Temitayo Olofinlua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Wasike Chris and Yusuf Serunkuma were all participants in the 2018 AMLA Writing Workshop for Early Career Scholars of African Literary and Cultural Studies (see Kasembeli 2018; Madenga 2018a, 2018b for a series of reflective interviews published on Africa in Words coming out of the workshop). Abu Amirah, Aminu S. Muhammad, Anike Bello, Clifton Gachagua, Giovanni Patrick, Harriet Anena, Kearoma Mosata, Ope Adedeji, Peter Nawa, Sumayya Lliyasu and Tobi Jaiyesimi were the 2018 AMLA Fellows. Speakers for the 2017 AMLA Workshop included A. Igoni Barrett, Amatoritsero Ede, Beverley Nambozo, Billy Kahora, Donald Maasa, Dzekashu MacViban, Emmanuel Sigauke, Gloria Kiconco, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Nyana Kakoma, Pamela Acaye and Troy Onyango. Speakers for the 2016 Arts Management and Literary Entrepreneurship Workshop included Afrikult., Aristoc, Deborah Asiimwe, Edwige-Renée Dro, Beatrice Lamwaka, Felwine Sarr, Kgauhelo Dube, Louise Umutoni, Moses Kilolo, Sumayya Lee, Terry Ayugi, Wartson Atukwatse and Zukiswa Wanner.