The New Generation of African Writers: Redefining Africa's Narrative.

Petina Gappah, the Zimbabwean author, discusses the African writers who reshaped the narrative of Africa, from Chimamanda Adichie to Binyavanga Wainaina, Ben Okri, Helon Habila, and others. Gappah recounts discovering the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing anthology on a flight to Geneva, which included works from these writers. The stories, written by Africans who had studied, worked, and lived abroad, yet returned home, provided a shock of recognition and a sense of wonder. The stories were about African lives and included the themes of striving, ambition, disappointment, heartache, joy, and love. This was the Africa that Gappah knew, and it was the Africa that was missing from the narrative in the West.

Breaking the Colonial Narrative

Gappah explains that the first generation of modern African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Nadine Gordimer, wrote against the background of Africans being presented as mute objects of colonial patronage. They presented Africans as fully-formed subjects with the agency in their own histories. They tackled themes such as colonialism, independence movements, and the disillusionment of the post-independence African state. Ben Okri was the first black African writer to win the Booker Prize in 1991, for his novel The Famished Road. This demonstrated that African writers could go beyond the colonial condition and its aftermath and that stories about families grappling with modernity, love, and loss, spirituality and religion, and a joyful Africa, even in poverty, had an audience.

Gappah met Molara Wood and Muthoni Garland on Zoetrope, an online writing community where they read and workshopped each other's writing. Together with other writers, they formed the African Writers Trust, an organisation that promotes the development of African literature. The African Writers Trust organises writing workshops and connects African writers with publishers, agents, and other writers.

Gappah concludes that the generation of writers that followed the first generation of modern African writers are daring to invent the future. They are not limited by the narratives of colonialism, independence movements, and disillusionment with the post-independence African state. Instead, they are telling stories about a modern Africa that is complex, diverse, and full of hope. They are challenging stereotypes and reshaping the narrative of Africa in the world.

By Gbolahan Isama MS.