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The Granta Book of the African Short Story edited by Helon Habila – review
A landmark collection that celebrates a strong decade of African writing
Bernardine Evaristo
Thu 10 Nov 2011 09.00 GMT
The 29 writers in this anthology are drawn from 20 African countries, with a preference for newer, younger, contemporary voices over earlier generations. In his insightful introduction, editor and acclaimed novelist Helon Habila rightfully bemoans the way commentators talk about African literature as if it began and ended with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. He's got a point, but until 2000, when the Caine prize for African writing was initiated, the situation was indeed dire – domestic publishing industries were almost extinct and with few exceptions, such as Ben Okri, there was little international interest in African writers. India was cool. Africa wasn't.
Today African fiction is a prominent and, one hopes, permanent fixture on the literary landscape. In the past 10 years alone, the newer writers in this anthology have accumulated sackloads of international awards between them, including many Caine and Commonwealth prizes.
Habila describes these writers, born after 1960, as the "post-nationalist" generation, liberating themselves from the "almost obligatory obsession of the African writer with the nation and national politics". He orders the writers by age, youngest first, and this principle reveals that the newcomers are not necessarily usurping their elders in terms of style, subject matter, freshness and originality. Three of the strongest, most dynamic stories are by older or dead writers. In "An Unexpected Death", 54-year-old Mozambican Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa tells a macabre tale of a man killed by a lift in an apartment building. He uses modest doses of magic realism to inject some imaginative flights of fancy into an anthology otherwise dominated by more conventional slice-of-life narratives.
The deceased Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera, winner of the Guardian fiction prize in 1979, is also an invigorating voice. In "Oxford, My Oxford" he sends up the British class system and Oxford university, which he attended in the 70s before being sent down. The brilliant South African novelist Alex La Guma, who died in 1985, closes the anthology. His story, "Slipper Satin", about a woman imprisoned for having a white lover, has a vivid, simple, direct power that feels as if it was written yesterday.
Of the younger writers, Uwem Akpan, an ordained Catholic priest, writes in "An Ex-Mas Feast" about life in a Nairobi slum with such visceral detail it is painfully convincing. EC Osondu's lively, succinct prose in "Bumsters" describes a white Englishwoman who is taken for a ride by a young Gambian gigolo. Laila Lalami's perfectly constructed story "Homecoming", about a Moroccan man returning to his wife in Casablanca after five years working in Spain, is also memorable, and counterbalances Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wickedly mocking "Arrangers of Marriage", in which an "arranged" Nigerian wife moves to New York to live with her Nigerian husband, who has become ridiculously Americanised.
Zimbabwean novelist Brian Chikwava's story "Dancing to the Jazz Goblin" is one of the most quirky – a refreshing tale of a young man kicked out of home by his mother and trying to survive the hustle of Harare. Aminatta Forna also stands out. In "Haywards Heath" she writes elegantly about an elderly African doctor, Attila, who visits his past love, Rosie, in a Sussex nursing home. It is noticeable that a disproportionately high number of these stories are refracted through a European or American prism, reflecting the migratory patterns of the writers themselves, the majority of whom no longer live in Africa.
There are some disappointments. Olufemi Terry's "Stickfighting Days" describes stick-fighting at great length at the expense of characterisation and story development. Mansoura Ez-Eldin is the second youngest writer here, but "Faeries of the Nile", using the conceit of imaginary river faeries to express repressed sexuality, seems incredibly dated. In "Preference Nationale", Fatou Diome's approach to tackling racism in France is so head-on one feels run over by a truck.
Binyavanga Wainaina is one of the least risk-averse writers and "Ships in High Transit" is a veiled jeremiad about Kenya. Anarchic, iconoclastic, sarcastic, his writing is unusually rebellious, at least for this anthology. In fact, reading so many stories in sequence it's clear that a well-behaved, literal, typically third-person prose prevails, one that might be African in subject matter but English in sensibility. Africa is home to around 3,000 languages, yet there's little evidence of this in the writers' diction, syntax, linguistic energy, or the use of pidgin or vernacular. There is no Sozaboy (Soldier Boy) by Ken Saro-Wiwa here, a novel, as he described it, written in "rotten English".
The short story is often a stepping stone to writing a novel, but not all novelists write short stories, and it's a shame that three of the most exciting recent debut novelists are missing: Irene Sabatini, Lola Shoneyin and Chika Unigwe. Nonetheless, Habila has gathered together many of the biggest names around, including six writers in translation, as well as many authors one expects to hear more of in the future. This book is a landmark, a historic record and, most of all, a celebration of what has been an unprecedented decade for African fiction.
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