“African literature is taking over the world” Ben Okri

In a new essay by Nigerian award-winning writer, Ben Okri, published on 7 September, 2020 by Brittle Paper to mark their 10 years anniversary, Ben Okri said that African literature is taking over the world and no mistake should be made about it.

The essay which talked about how much literature in Africa and by Africans has changed in last decades, began by extoling the growing number of published African writers.

He said, “There was a time when to be considered as being part of African literature you had to be published in the African writer’s series. Now all the best publishing houses find it de rigueur to have an African writer on their books. It is the most expanding literature in the world...”

Okri shared that he isn’t surprised by the expansion, which he credited to his long, “singing of the incalculable richness of African realities and how it will explode in literature in the time to come.”

He went on to say explain how these African realities are improving and have improved African literature.

“There are few traditions that have both, in equal measure, the inclination to respect – indeed revere – tradition and the evolutionary impulse to make new, to create new dances, angles, dreams, inflections, forms. When you add to this mix the tremendous pressures on African life, from poverty, politics, suffering, tradition, modernity, along with the immeasurable beauties of African reality – the ancestral creativity, the capacity for joy, the unimaginable resilience, the incredible playfulness, the wild humor, the big laughter, the immense capacity for forgiveness, the amazing hospitality, the fertility of stories – when you take all these together and hurl them into the creative matrix, then you have a recipe for the possibility of a literature so great that it will one day rival that of the Russian, the American, and surpass the Latin American.”

Okri charged his readers to not underestimate African Literature. Said it “is taking over the world. It has sprouted from Africa, but it has grown in all the corners of the globe.”

He continued: “It is a literature of the native lands, but it is also a literature of sensibility, of exile, of migration, of travel, of home-leaving, home-staying, homecoming. It is a literature that can no longer be contained in a continent, or by a school, or a name, or a homogeneity. It is a literature of all schools, of new schools without a name, a re-invention of the past, a transmutation of the storytelling earth.”

Okri in his essay recalled how African literature was treated in the past, “with a ghettoization”. He referred to the literature now as a “universe”.

He explained: “It always has been the fact that the excellence of its practitioners transforms the perception of a place, a school, a tradition, a nomenclature. It is a literature of great stories, of great laughter, of great suffering, of great technical abilities. The literature has altered the geography of world literature. And it is only just beginning. The genie has been released from the bottle and cannot be put back there again. And it is one hell of a genie, bursting with centuries of stories and dreams to create and share.”

In one of the concluding paragraphs of his essay, Okri eulogised the idea of a literary community. A community where everyone knew themselves like what was obtainable in the sixties.

“I have always been a little envious of the beautiful times of the sixties when the writers of Africa all knew one another, fraternized with one another, and came together in argument and solidarity at the universities, the festivals, the great conferences. They came together and celebrated together and unleashed their manifestos or their mockery of manifestos together.”

He expressed his dream of a vast festival like the FESTAC of old, capable of hosting all African writers writing today.

“I am hoping that this would be the beginnings of that realization,” He said. “Till then we have here this mighty forum on Brittle Paper, celebrating and curating the big virtual festival of our beloved literature.”

Okri in a wordplay with some popular African novel titles, including his “Famished Road” buttressed the earlier point of the continuity of African Literature.

“Not falling apart we are flying together, not palmwine drinkards we are literature drunkards. We are interpreters, petals of stories, celebrating the joys of writinghood, our roads not famished but multiplying, in dizzying profusion...”

“Welcome to the harvest of the last ten years, in a new century, a new millennium, on the cusp of one of the greatest changes in the human story, when at last black people can begin to live out their potential and soar in their creativity, to give a new magic to what it means to be human…” He concludes.