2021 is the year of African literature. The Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize in England, the Goncourt Prize in France, the Cammons Prize in Portuguese, and the National Book Prize in the United States have all been awarded to African or African-American writers, and the phenomenon of African literature has become spectacular.
Under the general category of African literature, African literature written in European languages and African literature in indigenous African languages can be distinguished, and African literature in European languages is the product of European colonialism, mainly English, French and Portuguese. Almost all of the African literary works that currently have access to global markets and can win international awards are written in European languages, with the number and influence of African English literature being the most important. African English literature in Africa is mainly concentrated in three regions: West Africa, Southern Africa and East Africa. For historical and colonial reasons, writing in English is the mainstream in West Africa, while in Southern africa and East Africa, English writing competes and goes hand in hand with writing in many other local languages.
Since the publication of Chinua Achebe's "Disintegration" in the 1950s, African English literature has begun its indigenization and globalization, and in the middle has experienced a period of post-colonial independence in the 1960s and 1970s and a turbulent period of political and social changes in the 1980s and 1990s, and has entered a stage of rapid development around the new century. By 2021, two African English-language literary writers, The Tanzanian-British immigrant writer Abdul Razak Gurna and the South African writer Damon Gargut, have won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the British Booker Prize, and African English literature has an unprecedented international impact and has also triggered a new wave of research in the academic community.
Literature is a mirror of society, especially for African societies. In recent years, the political and social problems of African countries are still serious, the sequelae of colonialism have not dissipated, the role of literature as a tool of struggle and enlightenment has not changed, and national history, family narratives and colonial experiences are still the themes that most writers will choose; on the other hand, young writers who are scattered overseas in Africa have frequently won awards internationally, the themes and styles of African English literature have become more and more rich and diverse, and their writing reflects and integrates the new trend of cross-racial, cross-regional, cross-cultural, and cross-language world literature.
The 2021 African English literature continues the history of African literature since the independence of African countries and the tradition of national and family narratives, including the first generation of heavyweight African writers such as Wole Soyinka (1934- ), and more of the second and third generations of new generations of African native and overseas diaspora writers, such as "post-60s" writer Damon Galgut (1963-); "post-70s" writer Mukoma Va. M koma Wa Ng g (1971-), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977-); "Post-80s" writer Nadifa Mohamed (1981-), Imbolo Mbue (1983-); "Post-90s" writer Hafsa Zayyan (1990-), Chinbdu M. Chibundu Onuzo (1991- ), etc., who paid attention to the political and social realities of the country, explored the history of families and peoples, and the identity and belonging of the post-colonial era (exiles), which were closely related to this; in addition, the cosmopolitanization of african writers also allowed the African English literature tree to grow new branches, integrated into the development trend of world literature, and also emerged a large number of works that were very "cosmopolitan" and less "African", such as, Science fiction and fantasy novels that blend African myths and legends are colorful, art novels with music and art themes are emerging, and non-fiction literary works are emerging.
National, national and historical narrative novels
Waller Soyinka, the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Time, and The Guardian for his first novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021). The story takes place in an imaginary Nigeria where a cunning entrepreneur is selling body organs stolen from a hospital for use in ceremonial events. Dr. Menka shared the news with his good friend, Star Engineer, and Yoruba Royalty Duyol Pittan Payne. Duyor was about to go to the United Nations, but it now appeared that someone did not want him to go. A novel full of satire and disrespect, Soyinka uses it to indict political, social, and religious corruption and explore how power and greed corrupt the soul of the state. Ben Oakley praised the book as "Soyinka's greatest novel, his revenge for the madness of the country's ruling class, and one of the most shocking chronicles of African countries of the 21st century." It should be widely read."
Chronicles from the Happiest Nation of Man on Earth
Similar to Soyinka's concern for national and social issues, South African writer Damon Galgut's novel The Promise (2021) reveals the country's historical and social problems through a family story. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Damon Gargute's first two novels, The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010), were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Promise won the Booker Prize. The Promise tells the story of the Swift family, plagued by an unfulfilled promise after the death of the patriarch. The lives of the three siblings were different; Anton was a golden boy who agonized over the unrealized potential of his life; Astrid, whose beauty was her strength; and Amor, the youngest, whose life was shaped by a vague sense of guilt. Through four funerals over 30 years, the withering family is reunited, and through the image of this one family, the novel reflects the chronic disease, revival and ultimate hope of the South African nation.
How Beautiful We Used to Be
The new generation of indigenous African writers, Imbolo Mboueh, is equally concerned with the fate of nations and races. Imbolo Mboue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Watching the Dreamer, which won the PEN/Faulkner Prize and has been translated into 11 languages and is available in opera, stage and miniseries. His novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) is one of the 2021 New York Times and People books of the year. Set in the fictional African village of Kosava, the novel tells the story of a small African village against the U.S. oil company from the perspective of the girl Tula. An American oil company has caused severe environmental pollution to local villages, with pipeline leaks impoverishing farmland and children dying from drinking toxic water. The country is led by a dictator who cares only about his own interests. With little choice, the people of the village decided to fight back. Their struggle has lasted for decades and has paid a heavy price for it. The novel attacks the specter of colonialism and the ugliness of capitalism in its desperate pursuit of profit, contrasted with the determination of the villagers to hold on to their ancestral lands and the courage and bravery of a young woman willing to sacrifice everything for the freedom of her people.
The Man of Fortune
Nadifa Mohammed, a young immigrant writer of the new generation, shifted the focus of his observations to Cardiff, England. Nadifa Mohammed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and moved to England at the age of 4. His first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2009), won the Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Luerline Rees Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award; and his second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Albert Bernard Award. Nadifa Mohammed is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Letters and was named Granta's Best Young English Novelist of the Year 2013. Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the 2021 Costa Fiction Award, The Fortune Men (2021) depicts the multi-ethnic and cultural conflicts and lives of cardiff in the 1950s. The novel centers on mahmoud matan's plight. Mahmoud Matan is a regular visitor to Tiger Bay in Cardiff, where Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese merchants and Jewish families are bustling. He was a father, a liar, and sometimes a little thief. He had many identities, but he was not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper was brutally murdered and all suspicions were focused on him, Mahmoud wasn't too worried. He was confident in his innocence, and he believed that justice could be done in this country. However, as the prospects for freedom grew dimmer, Mahmoud realized that he was in the midst of a terrible struggle against intrigue, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. In the shadow of the gallows, he began to realize that the truth might not be enough to save him. Nadifa Muhammad is a writer of deep understanding and wisdom of human nature, who has a deep understanding of how historical trends and interactions between people shape and determine the fate of people, and has created such a thought-provoking novel. Maya Jasanov, president of the 2021 Booker Prize, believes that "The Man of Fortune" shows the best historical fiction can achieve.
Identity and belonging narrative fiction
We are all Birds of Uganda (2021) and Sankofa (2021) by African-Asian mestizo writer Hafsa Zayan both exemplify a new generation of African diaspora writers in their quest for self-identity and belonging in a multicultural context. Chimbdu Onuszo is the best of the new generation of writers. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter (2012), won the Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award Prize) and the telecom operator's Long List of the Etisalat Prize for Literature; the second novel, Welcome to Lagos: A Novel (2018), was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. In 2018, Onuso was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her autobiographical play 1991, a blend of narrative, music, song and dance, premiered in 2018 at the London Literary Festival in the SouthBank Centre.
We Are All Birds of Uganda
We Are All Birds of Uganda won Stylist's Best Fiction 2021. Exploring ethnic tensions and the implications of individual identity and belonging, the novel employs a highly readable and engaging dual narrative: one is uganda in the 1960s, where Hassan struggled to maintain the family business after the sudden death of his wife. As he began to piece together his broken life piece by piece, a new regime seized power, and a growing prejudice threatened everything he had built. The second is that in london today, Samir, a young senior lawyer, feels empty in the life of his dreams. A sudden tragedy calls him home, and Samir embarks on a journey to unravel his family's legacy and find his own missing in that journey.
Sankofa is Onuso's third novel, which is also about the quest for identity and belonging. A woman who wants to know who she really is goes looking for a father she never knew, only to find that things are far more complicated than she expected. Anna grew up in London with her white mother and knew very little about her African father. Her mother died, her husband and wife were estranged, her daughter grew up, and she found herself middle-aged and didn't know who she really was. She found her mother's relic, a diary from her father's school days. She discovered that his father had ended up becoming president of Bamana, West Africa, and was still alive. She decided to go to Bamana to find him, and began a fun, painful, and fascinating journey.
Works on the same theme include Safia Elzilo's novel Home is not A Country (2021). Safia Elzilo, a Sultan from Washington, D.C., is the author of the poetry collection January's Children, which won the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and the 2018 Arab American Book Award, in addition to her nominations for the Pushcart Prize. The Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2015 and was included in Forbes Africa's 2018 "Under 30" list. The novel "Homeland Is Not a Country" was shortlisted for the National Book Award. The novel portrays a girl caught between various cultures, and in an unexpected journey, meets the girl she may become. The novel is full of lyrical beauty, full of gentle imaginations about belonging and home.
Science fiction, fantasy
T.L. Huchu's novel The Library of the Dead (2021) blends African mythology with magical elements of Scottish castles to set the stage for an imaginary world of the dead. T.L. Hazu is the winner of the Nommo Prize in African Science Fiction and has been shortlisted for the Kane Prize and the French Imagination Prize. The story of Library of the Dead is as follows: Ropa, a 14-year-old high school dropout, struggles to make ends meet as she tries to support her grandmother and sister with her ghost talker license and business. However, the money she gets to pass on messages between the living and the dead is only enough to pay the rent for their trailer. While Ropa seems tough, when one of her ghost clients asked her to help investigate her missing child, Ropa's conscience made it impossible for her to ignore the mother's request, even though the other party couldn't pay the fee. Ropa's investigation begins with a very unique magical library, where she discovers the hidden talents within herself and eventually completes her mission.
Library of the Dead
Another science fiction novel, Namina Forna (1987–) The Gilded Ones (2021), may be aimed at young people obsessed with the Marvel comic book Black Panther. The novel was a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by Teen Fashion. The novel tells the story of a group of highly capable warrior girls who save their lives: Sixteen-year-old Deca lives in fear and anticipation, as the bloody ritual will determine whether she can become a member of the village. Deca prayed that the blood was red so she could stay in the village, but the result was not satisfactory, her blood was golden. At this moment, a mysterious woman came to her and told her a choice: to stay in the village and obey her fate, or to leave the village and fight for the emperor in an army of girls like her. The group of girls was called Arachi, a word meaning people with rare talents nearly immortal, and they were the only ones who could stop the empire's greatest threat.
"Golden Us"
In addition, there is an award-winning fantasy novel, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber's The House of Rust (2021). Khadija Abdullah Bajabel is a Hadrami-american Mombasa writer and winner of the inaugural Gray Wolf Press African Fiction Awards in 2018. It's a fascinating novel: on the Swahili Sea in East Africa, the protagonist's fisherman father goes out to sea and doesn't come back. In the intricate eternal world, in the midst of ghosts and unpredictable life forms, the protagonist Elsa travels in a magical skeleton boat, accompanied by a talking cat, to save her missing beloved fisherman father. The novel explores themes of power, faith, responsibility, and the reciprocity of love and kindness through a protagonist who discovers that mysterious things are more specific than real things.
Art fiction
The outstanding artistic novels of the year include Mukoma Va Enguggi's novel Unbury Our Dead with Song (2021) and Open Water (2021) by British-Ghanaian writer Caleb Azumah Nelson (1994-).
Burying Our Dead with Song
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the son of an African Kenyan writer and popular Nobel Prize candidate, Ngugi Wa Thien ge, holds a bachelor's degree in English and political science from Albright College, a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University, and a doctorate in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The novel tells the story of four musicians in the heart of Nairobi—the Queen of Heaven, the Taliban, the Corporal, and the bartender Miriam—who gather to compete once in a lifetime competition to see who can play the best Tizita (music). Tabloid journalist John Tandi Manfredi in the audience was mesmerized by the Ethiopian blues they played. To understand this music, Mukoma takes us on a journey of self-discovery, back to the source of music— the ancient land of Ethiopia. It's a love letter to music, and the story of the Tizita is the essence of the novel, but there is no shortage of depictions of the various strata of Africa, showing the beauty, cruelty and hope of the African land and the lives of the African people.
Open Water won the 2021 Costa First Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Award and the Gordon Bern Award; writer Nelson was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Open Water is his first novel. Two young black British artists — he was a photographer and she was a dancer — met at a pub in south-east London, and they fell in love, leaving an artistic mark in a city that both praised and rejected them.
Nonfiction: Memoirs
The year also produced very good non-fiction in African English literature, notably Nadia Owusu (1982-) in his memoir Aftershocks (2021) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adich's memoir Notes on Grief (2021), the former documenting a little girl's search and determination of her identity under multiple cultures and traumas The latter deals with what the loss of a family member means for an individual in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
"Aftershocks"
Nadia Owusu is the winner of the 2019 White Award, and Aftershocks is her first book. In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells her story as a child. Born in Tanzania, Owusu grew up in Europe and Africa with her father, a United Nations Ghanaian official. Abandoned by his mother at the age of two, his beloved father died at the age of 13 and became an orphan. Her life went through a series of upheavals, living and growing up in different cities: Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi and London, and finally new York. A bruised girl, with no parents, no nationality, an uncertain future, longing to find her identity here, but a period of depression ensued. Images of earthquakes and their aftermath appear repeated throughout the narrative. Living in a cultural gap, Owusu craves belonging, strives to find his identity, and ultimately answers what home is. Her definition is pure and convincing: "I am made up of earth, flesh, ocean, blood and bones, I belong to all places, I desire all people." I am fragments. I am complete. I am home. In this memoir, the earthquake is a metaphor for family breakdowns, psychological struggles, and centuries of diaspora and colonial history.
Adich is a globally recognized best-selling novelist, and this memoir was written after her beloved father died in the summer of 2020. When COVID-19 raged around the world and separated Adici and his family from each other, her father died unexpectedly from complications of kidney failure. Aditch shares how her father's death shook her heart; she explores one of humanity's most pervasive experiences— grief; writes about being one of the millions of people who are grieving this year; writes about the family and cultural dimensions of grief, but also about the inevitable loneliness and anger that comes with it; and she teaches us how to gather our different selves and navigate the coronavirus that is still raging. Aditch's memoirs are moving descriptions of grief and mourning, reminding us that there is no right or wrong way to mourn, and that celebrating life every day is the best way to honor those we love.
Conclusion
Over the past century, African English fiction has gone through several stages, from the Narrative Model of Eurocentric Discourse to the Exploration of African Indigenized Discourse Mode to the integration and adaptation of the trend of cosmopolitan literature. In the contemporary context of globalization in political economy and the globalist paradigm in literary studies, the younger generation of African writers, whether living in their own countries or abroad, have received a relatively better education, and can break away from the Eurocentric narrative mode and the indigenized narrative mode of adhering to the nation and resisting the West, and create from the perspective of world literature. They gradually grew and matured, and slowly came to the front of the stage of African English literature, making a bright and powerful voice. Therefore, we have reason to believe that the increasingly diverse and rich African English literature will radiate endless possibilities for the future in the tide of world literature.
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