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The continental shelf
Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman, Vanity Fair
July 2007

On the heels of such literary giants as Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer - and with a boost from the Internet - a new generation of authors, from Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie to Mohammed Magani, is telling African stories to the world.

It seems everywhere you go these days - coffee shops, bookstores, all the right parties - those in the know are buzzing about an African Literary Renaissance. Much like the literary scene of India in the 1970s and early 80s, which spawned writers such as Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai, the cultural climate of Africa, with its rapid urbanization, expanding educational and economic opportunities, and relative artistic freedom, has forged a hotbed of creativity, giving rise to a vibrant new generation of writers demanding to be read.

Nowhere was this more in evidence than at the SLS Kenya/Kwami? Literary Festival in Nairobi this past December, where a historic number of writers, journalists, and magazine editors from Congo to Cape Town, Bangalore to Boston, gathered to catch a ride on literature's new wave.

The name on everybody's lips - from cabdrivers to waiters to street vendors - was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Referred to simply by her first name ("Chimamanda" was intoned with a pride and fondness usually reserved for family - or celebrities), Adichie appeared radiant, fresh off her rock-star-style tour of Nigeria and splashy New Yorker debut. Anyone (even hideously jet-lagged Brooklynites) observing the way Chimamanda parted the crowds, Cleopatra-style, at standing-room-only readings, could sense the dawn of a new age.

While respectfully acknowledging that they've reached the spotlight in part by standing on the shoulders of venerable giants such as Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, the youthquakers are fast creating a new tradition in African letters. Breaking away from old school storytelling steeped in myth and legend and born out of a long oral tradition, the new generation has invented its own idiom, a gritty mash-up of languages (English, Swahili, and Sheng-Nairobi street slang) and cultures (Zulu, Islamic, Western, and hip-hop).

While the old pioneers continue to wrestle with the devastating effects of colonialism, racism, war, and corruption, the young guns are taking aim at post-colonial subject matter such as racial and gender inequality. The fire in their works is sparked not only by a clash of cultures but also by intimate battles waged between lovers and families. Notable too is the fact that the powerful voices black African women writers are finally being heard in numbers approaching those of their male counterparts, and to great acclaim.

Given that Africa is the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of the written word, and also a continent of 800 million people and 53 countries, it's shocking that outside of Nadine Gordimer, Achebe, and JM Coetzee we are so ill-versed in African literature. Well, darlings, that's all about to change. Fueled by the Internet (and the few savvy Western publishers who've rubbed the sleep out of their eyes), the African revolution is on your doorstep - coming to you live, instant, and wired. Lucky, lucky you.

Herewith, a primer on the legends and the comers arranged alphabetically - we won't pretend it's exhaustive - a jumping-off point that we hope leads you much deeper into the heart of African fiction.

Let the Lions Roar

Chinua Achebe (Albert Chinualumogu Achebe) is the dignified elder statesman of African letters. Long considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the revered Nigerian author is snubbed year after year in favor of an obscure Italian satirical playwright or a lugubrious Scandinavian novelist. This despite being the most translated African writer in the world, as well as the author of Things Fall Apart (1958), widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the 20th century. Its theme, the corrupting influence of Western customs and values on traditional African culture and society, reverberates throughout his oeuvre. The rap on Achebe, a self-described "cultural nationalist," is that his groundbreaking essay, "An Image of Africa," which elegantly slams Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness for dehumanizing Africans and Africa, coupled with his assertion that European and Western intellectuals consistently marginalize Africa and Africans with their misguided portrayals, has made him no friends on the Nobel committee.

It's ironic that one of the most famous African writers, the reclusive, ascetic novelist J.M. Coetzee, not only is now an Australian citizen but also refuses to identify himself with his homeland. The second South African-born Nobel Laureate (the first was Gordimer) insists, "My intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African." The role of the outsider in a dystopian society appears frequently in his work (evoking grim shades of Kafka and Beckett), most notably in The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace, each of which won the Man Booker Prize (the British Commonwealth's most prestigious literary award), though Coetzee never showed up to accept.

Best known as the voice of the voiceless, Somali novelist and activist Nuruddin Farah lays bare the African woman's battle for familial, economic, and religious freedom, savaging the age-old practices and arranged marriages and female circumcision in novels such as Maps and Knots. Believing it is the role of the writer to enact change, Farah says, "I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way." Farah has been in exile since 1974, when the Somali government pronounced his second novel, A Naked Needle, treasonable. Realizing imprisonment (or worse) was imminent, Farah stayed in Italy, where he was studying, and now resides in South Africa.

With her long-cool-drink-of-water demeanor and serious street cred, Nadine Gordimer, a founding member of the once banned African National Congress and "the conscience of South Africa," earns the title of Grande Dame of South African Literature. For more than half a century, her short stories and epic novels have articulated the real-life ramifications of apartheid in the lives of ordinary men and women. A master of employing multiple viewpoints - often those of the oppressed - she also has the chops to authentically paint the psychological nuances of apartheid's supporters, revealing the panoramic range of human experience under repression. Despite Gordimer's international fame, her novels Burger's Daughter and July's People were once banned in her own country. Ironically, when Gordimer received the Nobel Prize, in 1991, Nelson Mandela still did not have the right to vote.

Feminist-book-club favorite Doris Lessing was born in Persia (modern-day Iran) but grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At 13 she chucked high school to pursue the glamorous life of the self-educated intellectual, and at 15 abandoned home to escape her controlling mother. Lessing's early work mines the politics of race, crystallizing both the lives of dispossessed black Africans and the seemingly barren lives of white colonials, but it was the politics of gender that shot Lessing into the spotlight and the literally canon. Published in 1962, The Golden Notebook, a brutally honest, unapologetic rendering of female aggression and rage, is widely considered to be a feminist landmark in fiction.

Wizard of the Crow is the latest novel by Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the scourge of African dictators and warlords. His nearly 800-page magnum opus is a sweeping satire of an African despot and his acolytes. Never one to cast a blind eye on government's corruption, Ngugi (formerly James Ngugi) landed in jail for his 1977 play, I Will Marry When I Want. While in the slammer he wrote an entire novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper, and also stopped doing his primary writing in English. Believing passionately that the only way to sever ties with colonialism and develop a true, authentic African literature is for African authors to reject the language of the oppressor, Ngugi urges his countrymen to write in the tongue of their indigenous cultures. Currently ensconced in sunny California, Ngugi now writes in the Niger-Congo language Gikuyu, and then translates his own work into English.

Prolific poet and magical-realist novelist Ben Okri's work is born out of the ancient oral storytelling traditions, steeped in African mysticism, and is deeply influenced by his childhood memories of the Biafran war for independence from Nigeria. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road, a lyrical and dreamlike account of a spirit child living in the urban ghetto of Lagos. Because Okri's tales are peppered with political and social commentary, populated with memorable characters from the underclass, and spun in a wide array of dialects and languages, he has been called the African Dickens.

The first African recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature was Nigerian Wole Soyinka, in 1986, 20 years after the playwright, novelist, and poet was imprisoned for writing an article appealing for peace between the Biafran rebels and the Nigerian government in the midst of Nigeria's bloody civil war. Soyinka's 22 months in solitary confinement gave rise to his memoir, The Man Died. While greatly influenced by the mythology of his own tribe, the Yoruba (particularly their stories about Ogun, the god of iron and war), his two densely plotted, moralistic novels, The Interpreters and Season of Anomy, have also inspired critics to tease out comparisons to the works of Great Dead White Male Authors William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Catch the New Wave

In 2003 the 30-year-old Nigerian "It girl" Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie served notice to the male-dominated lit patriarchy when her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, beat all comers for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an artful and evocative depiction of the legacy of the Biafran war, was nominated for the U.S.'s National Book Critics Circle Award. Perhaps the fastest-rising star on the African literary scene, she has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. Eerily, Adichie grew up not only in the same university town as Achebe but in the very house he once lived in.

The shadow of the Idi Amin era hangs over the lives of three middle-class sisters in Ugandan author Doreen Baingana's Tropical Fish: Tales out of Entebbe, winner of both the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award for short fiction and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First in the Africa region in 2006. The book's subtitle is a not so subtle jab at Isak Dinesen (also known as Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen) and her book Out of Africa. By forgoing the cosmic wide-angle lens of her fore bearers, Baingana gets at big truths by going micro. Her stories, like those of Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali, dwell less in the history and politics of the homeland, more in the modern, messy intimate politics of home life.

Mia Couto, Mozambique's foremost novelist, was active in his country's mid-70s revolution against colonial Portugal and has gone on to become a literary hero of his liberated country. With his trade mark surreal, playful prose style (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges eating, drinking, and speaking Portuguese), Couto's most celebrated novel, Under the Frangipani, draws readers down into the world of the dead to find spirits old and new wrestling over the soul of Mozambique.

Cameroon-born journalist Ntone Edjabe is the editor of the uber-cool Cape Town-based magazine Chimurenga, a multilingual journal spinning a funky mix of art, culture, and political writing from and about Africa. Recent themes included "Music as Weapon" and "Futbol, Politricks & Ostentatious Cripples." Edjabe chose the name Chimurenga not only because it means "struggle for liberation" in the Zimbabwean language of Shona, but also because it is a description of the music that stoked the rebellion against British colonialism and the white-supremacist regime that rose to power in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1970s. Music is clearly Edjabe's obsession: at present he is at work on a highly anticipated book on the Pan-African influence of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late, great Nigerian bandleader and father of Afro-beat, while supporting Chimurenga and himself by working as the most righteous D.J. in Cape Town.

A native of war-ravaged Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna, broadcast journalist and novelist, describes the legacy of 20 years of civil war on one family in her 2006 novel, Ancestor Stones. When she began researching her own family's past for her memoir, she had no clue what she might dig up. The Devil That Danced on the Water (2003) is her horrifying excavation of the truth behind the execution of her father, a prominent dissident.

Nigerian Helon Habila credits E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel with luring him into the dark art of fiction writing and spurring him to go back to college. In 2001 Habila won the Caine Prize (established in 2000, the Caine is commonly referred to as "the African Booker Prize"), as well as the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, for a selection from his first novel, Waiting for an Angel. Due to a lack of publishing venues in Nigeria at the time, Habila, like many other African authors, had to self-publish the book, but after winning the Caine prize the novel was reissued by Penguin. Habila's most recent novel, Measuring Time, features twin brothers facing equally tragic futures: one battles sickle-cell anemia, while the other, a soldier of fortune, kills for cash.

Last year, the 24-year-old American-born Nigerian Uzodinma Iweala beat down the doors of the international literary establishment with his blunt, brutal, heart-stopping debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, the hallowing tale of a child soldier in an unnamed African country who morphs from innocent soul into murderous butcher. Iweala won both the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and the Los Angels Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Where some young writers would be setting their careers on cruise control, or cashing in, Iweala is currently stealing time to write before attending Columbia Medical School this fall.

Congolese Alain Mabanckou's 2003 novel, African Psycho, a macabre but comical take on a would-be serial killer, is his first book to be translated into English (from his native French). The Los Angeles-based Mabanckou is published by Soft Skull Press, a cheeky, freewheeling outfit launched in the back of a Manhattan Kinko's, and now one of a number of small publishers, including Akhashic and Archipelago, gambling that daring American readers will crack international novels.

Algerian Mohamed Magani is at the epicenter of the Maghrebian literary landscape. In 1987, Magani won the prestigious Grand Prix Litteraire International de la Ville d'Alger for his transcendent novel, La Faille du Ciel. While his work is not in print in the United States, excellent translations can be accessed online courtesy of the heroic efforts of Words Without Borders. Consider the Web site a brainy dating service for your intellect - a way to hook up inquisitive readers with otherwise unobtainable but potentially mind-blowing texts.

Although Yvonne Vera died two years ago at the age of 40, it would be a gross oversight to leave out the Zimbabwean writer, as she is at once emblematic of the outspoken African women writers finally finding publishers, and part of the vanguard of writers addressing the varied and complex roles of women in contemporary African society. Her final book, The Stone Virgins, offered a rare and bracing look at how the 20-year-long war for Zimbabwean independence affected women. She explained her mission thus: "I am against silence. The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades." And undo it she has.

Known for his frank, take-no-prisoners style and a sly, diabolical wit, double-barreled literary talent Binyavanga Wainaina is the firebrand editor of Kwani?, a new, Nairobi-based literary magazine at the heart of the burgeoning Kenyan literary scene, as well as the winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for "Discovering Home," an excerpt from his eagerly awaited first novel, due out next year from Graywolf Press. Wainaina's stingingly smart satire How to Write About Africa, published last year in Granta, created legions of fans, who have enthusiastically forwarded the piece to so many people in Africa that the story is now almost considered spam.

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