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Africa has become a superpower in the world of the novel. Shortlists for the world’s major literary prizes are packed with African authors, while novelists like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have become international celebrities. But how did Africa become such a hotbed of literary talent? In this fascinating and insightful film, Nigerian-born presenter and historian David Olusoga explores the incredible story of the African novel.
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00:04The Booker Prize 2019, where the great and the good of the literary world toast the best
00:11novelists working today. This year, two of the four finalists here at the Booker Prize
00:19are of African descent, and there were four African writers on the long list. And yet
00:24these facts have hardly been mentioned in the build-up to tonight's event. And that's because
00:31it's entirely normal. For decades now, African writers have been winning awards and writing
00:38bestsellers. The African continent has become a superpower in the world of the novel.
00:44The Booker Prize of 2019 was controversial because it had two winners, Margaret Atwood
00:50and Bernadine Evaristo.
00:54But this double-win perhaps eclipsed the real story of the evening.
01:00I will say that I am the first black woman to win this prize.
01:08Evaristo's historic victory was just the latest chapter in a story that reaches back many decades.
01:16From the 1950s, black African writers seized the English-language novel to give voice to their experience.
01:25My writing is very political. I don't believe that one is writing a novel simply for amusement.
01:34As African nations became independent, these writers became the conscience of their continent.
01:43His entire life has been about saying that an artist is also a citizen.
01:49And the novel was the form where women writers could tell their own stories.
01:55It was really important, as a very young woman, to hear the voices of people who look like me because
02:02it gives your life meaning.
02:03The African novel then spread around the world, creating books that changed lives, especially here in Britain.
02:12Ben Okwui is our poet laureate. When Ben speaks, we listen.
02:20And as writers from the continent have grown in fame, they have even begun to question being pigeonholed as African
02:29novelists.
02:30When somebody calls me an African writer, I look at who's saying it.
02:35These novelists created a series of books that were funny, witty and often tragic.
02:41But they achieved something that stretched beyond the world of literature.
02:45They helped transform the image of Africa itself.
03:03The story of these great African novels has a deep personal resonance for me.
03:10When I was a kid growing up in the UK,
03:12my family back in Nigeria would send me and my siblings books like this.
03:17And every now and then, a parcel would arrive in the post full of little orange books.
03:23And like lots of people of African heritage,
03:26these novels by writers like Chinua Achebe and Gugiwa Thiongo,
03:30they were where we went to, to learn about Africa and to learn what it means to be African.
03:36But what I didn't know when I was a teenager reading these novels is that books like this,
03:42by Africans who were writing about Africa, that they represented a profound break
03:47with how Africa had been portrayed in novels right up until the 1950s.
03:57The picture of Africa presented to Western readers before these books was a bit of a problem.
04:04The most popular novels set on the continent were The Boys Own Adventures of Ryder Haggard.
04:09John Buchan's Prester John was hugely popular.
04:12The story of a Westerner battling unruly savages.
04:17These books were written as entertainment.
04:20But one writer took the African adventure story and turned it into something far more troubling.
04:29At the beginning of the 20th century, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness.
04:34It begins on the Thames, as the sailor Marlow recalls travelling from here to a great river in Africa,
04:42as he struggles to understand that continent.
04:48Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world,
04:54when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
05:01The steamer toiled along slowly, on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
05:10Prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us.
05:16Who could tell?
05:22Heart of Darkness was an attack on European imperialism.
05:26But in the 20th century, African writers began to rebel against the idea
05:30that their continent should be thought of or described as a place of darkness.
05:35And one writer in particular condemned the way European novelists like Joseph Conrad
05:40had portrayed the people of Africa as passive victims, with no inner thoughts or inner lies.
05:47What he wanted was for African writers to seize control of the novel
05:51and use it to tell their own stories from an African perspective.
05:57This writer who took on the Western canon was the Nigerian, Chinua Achebe.
06:04Born in 1930, he was educated under British rule
06:08and steeped in the colonial literature of the motherland.
06:14When I was younger, an adventure story was simply an adventure story.
06:19And if there were good white people surrounded by cannibals or savages,
06:25my sympathies would go with the good white people.
06:28I mean, I didn't see any problem there.
06:32Later on, I began to see that these stories were in fact saying more than they appeared to be saying
06:39when I was younger.
06:41And then I read them more carefully.
06:44And I began to feel and to think that every people must tell their own story.
06:53Achebe wrote a novel that gave African characters a full sense of humanity.
07:00Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, featured a highly complex Nigerian hero, Okonkwo.
07:10Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand.
07:13His wives lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper.
07:18Okonkwo was not a cruel man, but his whole life was dominated by fear.
07:24The fear of failure and of weakness.
07:28It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.
07:36I think it was the first time I had read a book entirely from a West African perspective.
07:43It mattered so much that the experience of reading and inhabiting the life of another person,
07:51the mind of another person, was also extended to African people.
07:58The novel was groundbreaking because it looked at colonisation from the viewpoint of the colonised.
08:05As the characters adapted to British occupation and to the arrival of a new religion.
08:17In the book, it's actually a missionary, spreading the kind of, literally, the gospel.
08:22It was a twin gospel, it was a gospel of Christianity, but also a gospel of British justice, fair play,
08:30superiority, whatever you want to call it.
08:32It was multifaceted.
08:34And I think the book actually does gently talk about the gospel, but also the military side.
08:39You know, all of that put together in a very rich, and troubling in many ways, but very rich context.
08:53The white man is very clever.
08:56He came quietly and peaceably with his religion.
09:00We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay.
09:06Now he has won our brothers, and our clan no longer act like one.
09:11He has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart.
09:21Things Fall Apart is today viewed as a literary classic.
09:25However, it might never have seen the light of day, as there was little publishing industry in Nigeria.
09:33But in the mid-1950s, Achebe came to London to train as a radio producer at the BBC.
09:41Great artists need talents, but they also often need luck.
09:46And Chinua Achebe's lucky break took place here at the BBC, because one of his trainers was the novelist Gilbert
09:52Phelps.
09:53Achebe gave Phelps a copy of his manuscript.
09:57He realised that what he'd been given was something special.
10:01He wrote to a publisher saying he'd made an exciting discovery.
10:04The first novel to examine the break-up of tribal life.
10:09And that connection between Achebe and Phelps led to the publication of Things Fall Apart and a revolution in African
10:17literature.
10:23I don't want to sound melodramatic and say there would be no modern African literature without Chinua Achebe.
10:30But actually I am going to sound melodramatic and say that, because I believe that.
10:34It forced people who otherwise would not have respected writing coming from Africa to respect it.
10:42Because you had to respect work that was that sparkling and that true.
10:48Achebe put Nigeria on the world literary map.
10:51And he became a role model for writers across the continent.
10:56Always outspoken, his attacks on government corruption forced him into exile.
11:02You must criticise yourself.
11:04This to me is one of the real, the hallmarks of true patriotism, that you see yourself as you are.
11:12And you don't accept anything except the best from your people.
11:19But whatever problems he had with the government, the Nigerian people always recognised his astonishing work.
11:28Chinua Achebe was a very brilliant man.
11:30He taught us many things.
11:32He taught us that we are not just black.
11:34We are beautiful.
11:39He died in 2013.
11:42His funeral was one of the largest in the country's history.
11:47Nelson Mandela said that Achebe had brought Africa to the rest of the world.
11:52But Mandela wasn't just talking about the impact of Achebe's writing.
11:56Because as well as leaving behind all his novels, Achebe left another legacy.
12:02A new generation of African writers who wrote about Africa and about what it is to be African.
12:09And they were able to get their voices out onto the global stage.
12:16Things Fall Apart was published when Britain still ruled great swathes of Africa.
12:24But by the late 1950s, nations on the continent were finally gaining independence.
12:30It's a very touching moment as the Union Jack is brought down in darkness.
12:37And the Nigerian flag is gradually taking its place to the shouts of all the spectators.
12:46The time was right for African writers to tell African stories.
12:53But even the best novelists wouldn't get far without an imaginative publisher.
13:01Up there on the second floor of this building is a site of special literary significance.
13:07Because this was where the Heinemann African Writers' Series had their offices.
13:11Now Heinemann had made their name publishing school textbooks.
13:16But from the early 1960s, they began to publish a series of new novels by new African writers.
13:22Each book in the series was numbered.
13:24And they began with a republication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart,
13:29which came with a little number one stamped onto the spine.
13:33So what happened here helped a whole new generation of African writers get their books published and out to new
13:40audiences.
13:44With their distinctive branding and cheap prices, readers on the continent devoured this series of paperback books.
13:56Their success shone a spotlight on new African voices who made the novel their own.
14:05They're really important and there's a period in time where all of the greats from across the continent were being
14:10gathered together in one place.
14:12And when something like that happens, people then are aspiring.
14:16So you're writing a novel in isolation, but you're thinking there's this place that will take my work and will
14:21publish me.
14:22It was the centre of power and there was a gathering together.
14:26But also having a space for writers to look to, an outlet for them to look to.
14:31And that was important at that moment in time.
14:36One author published by Heinemann was Ngugi Wathiongo.
14:40Born in 1930s Kenya, he witnessed the brutality of colonialism at first hand.
14:47One of your volumes of your memoirs opens with you as a small boy returning home from school to your
14:55village,
14:56which you hadn't seen for several months, and the village has been destroyed.
14:59I just wondered how far you still remember that moment today?
15:03The British literally destroyed a whole culture, a whole tradition where our lives were turned upside down.
15:14And that image of after desolation, just returning home after being away for three months.
15:22And you go to a place where you were born, and all you see are burned down houses.
15:28You don't see anybody.
15:30It's an absolute sort of, you know, image of desolation.
15:37His debut novel, Weep Not Child, was published in 1964 under his original name of James Ngugi.
15:45It immediately sold out its print run of 10,000 copies.
15:50It's about British attempts to suppress and imprison the Mau Mau, an anti-colonial guerrilla army.
15:58The main aim is to try and bring these rather fanatical people back to normal life,
16:04to clear the Mau Mau out of their system, and bring them back to normal, decent, civilised people again.
16:10The book features a white farmer who despairs as his workers join the rebellion.
16:19Who were the Mau Mau anyway? He asked for the thousandth time.
16:24Mere savages.
16:27Previously, he had not thought of them as savages or otherwise, simply because he had not thought of them at
16:33all.
16:34Except as part of the farm, the way one thought of donkeys or horses.
16:43Kenya finally achieved independence from Britain in 1963.
16:48But for Ngugi, this liberation only produced cosmetic changes.
16:56Everywhere he looked, Ngugi saw the remnants of empire.
17:00In Africa, he believed, the Europeans had left behind what he called a cultural bomb.
17:06The administrators, the missionaries, the soldiers may have gone, but what they left behind was a colonial mindset.
17:12One that said that Africa and African languages were inferior.
17:16So his mission in writing was simple. He called it decolonising the mind.
17:23In the late 1960s, he renamed himself Ngugi Wa Thiongo.
17:29Eventually, he even abandoned English, preferring to write in his Kenyan mother tongue, Kekuyu.
17:36Language is so basic to any community.
17:41And what I found is this, very interesting, that wherever one people have colonised another, they always impose their language.
17:53Ngugi's son Mukoma is a celebrated novelist and critic, who has a special insight into why his father moved away
18:01from English.
18:03When he was writing in English, he was very popular with the elite, right?
18:06But he wasn't being read by the people who he was writing for.
18:10He didn't want to write a book that his mother couldn't read, you know, because she couldn't read English.
18:15He wanted to be in direct communication with his audience.
18:19One of the points that Ngugi made was that people had been convinced that their language was inferior,
18:25that they looked to English as just a higher form of language.
18:30Ngugi saw that as reflective of an entire colonial project, which was, you know, the replacing of the African self
18:39with a kind of British self.
18:43And that was through language for Ngugi.
18:47Appalled at the poverty in his newly independent country, Ngugi embraced Marxism to critique the Kenyan government.
18:57Poverty is like poison in English society.
19:02But in fact, when you get a few people getting the lion's share of what is produced by the people
19:10of Kenya, then this does not ogre well for our society.
19:18In 1980, Ngugi's revolutionary consciousness produced Devil on the Cross, a satire that saw Kenyans impoverished by a criminal conspiracy.
19:30History shows us that there has never been any civilization that was not built on the foundations of robbery and
19:36theft.
19:37Where would America be today without theft or robbery?
19:41What about England?
19:43France?
19:44It's theft and robbery that have made possible the developments of the Western world.
19:53It became a book of the people, right? You know, because for the first time, you know, they had this
19:58novel that was speaking to the times that, you know, we were in in the 70s and 80s, where they
20:03could recognize themselves in the novel.
20:06That novel proves that you do have readers if you write in a language they speak.
20:11The publication of Devil on the Cross was controversial, as Ngugi demanded all African novelists should now write in their
20:20mother tongue.
20:21By our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing
20:30that neo-colonial Slavish and cringing spirit?
20:35But a counter-argument came from Chenua Achebe, who thought that English was the best way for the African novel
20:43to reach a wide readership.
20:46It's always set up as the debate and it's one versus the other. I think there's space for both these
20:52perspectives.
20:54Ngugi, of course, his works are now being translated into the English language.
20:57So there's, I think, translation really is the key, you know. It's rather than Achebe versus Ngugi, it's about how
21:05do we make these works more available to more people.
21:09But the debate about language should not diminish the literary importance of Ngugi, a man who many believe should have
21:17already won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
21:19If you look at Ngugi, as a writer, and compare a book like A Grain of Wheat to one of
21:28his most recent books, Wizard, there is an astonishing range there in style.
21:36A Grain of Wheat is a book that is realist. It is set in the Maumau Rebellion. It is deeply
21:42political.
21:43If you look at Wizard, you're looking at something completely different. It's three, four times the length. It's got a
21:49comedic quality.
21:52Extraordinary things happen. People grow huge limbs, ears and noses and feet.
21:57So there is this incredible range that he has and a wonderful versatility. And I think, you know, that is
22:03his greatest strength as a writer.
22:05Not just the politics, but this ability to storytell, to narrate a story in any form he chooses.
22:13After Ngugi, the African novel was defiantly political.
22:19The Ghanaian Aie Kweama was the angry young man of African literature.
22:25One critic said his work dealt with defeat, decay, frustration and disappointment.
22:34He became famous across the continent because of one shocking novel. The Beautiful Ones are not yet born.
22:42A savage attack on how consumerism and the pursuit of wealth had led to the corruption of the people.
22:52It's showing how difficult it is to be decent in post-colonial Ghana that corruption has reached such an extent
23:03that it's impossible for an ordinary person to be simply a decent human being.
23:13How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders?
23:17There were men dying from the loss of hope.
23:20And others were finding gaudy ways to enjoy power they did not have.
23:24We were ready here for big and beautiful things.
23:28But what we had was our own black men scrambling to ask the white man to welcome them onto their
23:35backs.
23:38But Kweama was far more than just a polemicist.
23:42In his mystical, experimental novel, Two Thousand Seasons, he travelled far back into Africa's history.
23:51Two Thousand Seasons, for me, is probably one of the most influential books in terms of African literature.
23:58And certainly influential in all my life.
24:01And really it covers a period of two thousand seasons from the moment when there was a kind of Arab
24:08invasion of North Africa and for two thousand years on from there.
24:13And it speaks to those who are tasked with seeing, those who are tasked with remembering.
24:19How well have they done their job?
24:22It's magnificent in its anger and its soul.
24:32That we, the black people, are one people, we know.
24:38Destroyers will travel long distances in their minds and out to deny you this truth.
24:44We do not argue with them, the fools.
24:47Let them presume to instruct us about ourselves.
24:52That, too, is in their nature.
24:55That, too, is in the flow of their two thousand seasons against us.
25:04It has a passion and a questioning and a consciousness right at the core of it.
25:11Which is, is it our job to change the world?
25:16Or is it our job to be victims of the world?
25:22In the late 1960s, recently independent Nigeria was torn apart by civil war.
25:29Some in the east wanted to break away and form a new state called Biafra.
25:36The resulting conflict haunts the imagination of many African writers to this day.
25:46The independence held such promise and such hope.
25:50And with the Biafra war, the conflict that ensued was a wound that many people felt.
25:56It was a moment in Nigeria's history where all these aspirations and all these hopes and dreams of independence came
26:04crashing down.
26:05And it ushered in a new era in Nigeria's politics.
26:10And so I think for that generation, it was something that many wrote about because it was something that was
26:17so traumatic and was so consequential to the development of the nation that they had to try and exercise it
26:25through their writing.
26:28One writer was jailed for his attempts to broker a truce during the conflict.
26:35He is the distinguished writer Wale Soyinka, a Nigerian who spent most of the civil war in prison and who
26:42for much of that time was in solitary confinement.
26:45I knew I would be released sooner or later.
26:48Either that or I would be quietly done away with in some obscure cell.
26:52It was one of two things.
26:54So one of them has come to pass and I suppose it's just a fact.
27:00During his detention, Soyinka was reduced to writing about his experiences using improvised pens and ink.
27:10There's something annoying about being reduced to this children's adventure level, you know, which you literally recreate tools.
27:19In the range of typewriter, you know.
27:21How did you improvise ink?
27:24Well, I can't tell you. Let's just say that I passed the information on to those who were likely to
27:29get in the same situation.
27:31You know, one doesn't want to have the material, you know, stop but, you know, I can't talk about it.
27:37But it came from the food which I was given.
27:38It's part of the underground wisdom.
27:40Yeah.
27:42It was hard because, you know, essentially they put him in one of the most notorious prisons and really punish
27:50him.
27:51Because he was an internationally known writer, but really kind of dehumanised him.
27:56So, you know, essentially saying, how dare you go against this?
28:01You know, you might be the internationally acclaimed writer, but in Nigeria you're nothing.
28:08The novel, Season of Anami, was Sri Yinka's attempt to make sense of the terrible things he witnessed during the
28:16war.
28:19Ofei wondered, was the bloodlust that seized upon the populace just another legacy of climate?
28:28Or, was there a truly metaphysical condition called evil that made the people so open to the manipulation of coldly
28:38unscrupulous men?
28:43People saw things people shouldn't see.
28:48It's that horror of war.
28:53Dead bodies littered, you know, on roads and buildings smashed and babies killed.
29:02So this is shocking.
29:06I think he tried to convey that horror because not many Nigerians actually saw that, but they were protected from
29:12it.
29:12So I think it's a way of registering the degree of dehumanisation that had been brought about by the war,
29:20but also that was linked to the corruption in the heart of Nigeria itself.
29:27I cannot separate the ills of my society, the repressiveness, the corruption, from the causes of the war.
29:36And, as a writer, I feel obliged to interpret my experiences in terms of what really is the normal experience
29:47of others who haven't got the kind of voice and who do not command the kind of attention I do.
29:53For me, what is most remarkable and most meaningful about Willy Schoenka is not just his writing, it's everything else.
30:00It's the man that he is, it's the fearlessness of him.
30:04And so the reason that he's been a guiding light for me for many years is that his entire life
30:09has been about saying that an artist is also a citizen, that you write your art, but you participate.
30:15And that's kind of the attitude that I have about life.
30:17And so he, for me, is a model of how you can do it, how you can occupy your space
30:25in the world and just be like, yep, this is what I'm doing.
30:28For all the trouble it had caused him in Nigeria, Schoenka's mixture of politics and prose earned him the world's
30:35highest literary accolade.
30:38The 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to an African playwright, poet and novelist.
30:44He's Wally Schoenka, and he's the first African, indeed the first black, to win the prize in its 85 year
30:49history.
30:53Schoenka won the Nobel Prize and it was a very special moment.
30:56It was, in a way, a validation of what we all knew, that Schoenka was an incredible writer, amazing.
31:07But also that African writing itself, I mean, it had come of edge and that the writers from Africa were
31:18using the English language.
31:20They were actually international writers and that, you know, they're not simply writing a minority literature, but they were actually
31:29writing world literature.
31:31The Nobel Prize recognized Schoenka as a representative of the African continent.
31:39Schoenka's novels, like those of his great predecessors, were all set on the African continent.
31:45But does an African novel have to be set in Africa?
31:54This is the Penshurst estate in North London.
31:58In the 1960s and 70s, it was home to an author who gave voice to the African diaspora.
32:08Butchi Emacheta was born in Nigeria in 1944.
32:13But she came to Britain at the age of 18, full of optimism.
32:20I cannot remember when I first heard of the name United Kingdom.
32:27But my father gave the name weight in my mind.
32:31Whenever he pronounced the title United Kingdom, it sounded so heavy, so reverential.
32:41Going to the United Kingdom might surely be like paying God a visit.
32:51Emma Emacheta and her five children lived here in the 1960s and 70s.
32:58Her experiences on the estate inspired In the Ditch, her debut novel, which showed her disenchantment with the idea of
33:06Britain as a promised land.
33:09Emma Emacheta described In the Ditch as a documentary novel.
33:13It's an account of the life of a woman called Ada, as she adjusts her life in the London of
33:18the 1960s.
33:20In one passage, a neighbour mentions the colour of her skin.
33:24Ada is astonished because, for obvious reasons, back in Nigeria, her skin colour is never mentioned.
33:31Whereas here, in London, it will define her entire existence.
33:37Ada jumped.
33:40Colour?
33:42What colour was he talking about?
33:45Well, human nature being what it is.
33:49Ada looked at the back of her hand.
33:51Mrs Small's eyes followed her movements and smiled.
33:56Happy.
33:58He had put her down her place.
34:06For me, her novels really were documentaries.
34:10Because I hadn't read any novels up to now that faithfully and realistically
34:16depicted what it was like to be black and not so well off in London.
34:24It's also worth noting that she'd studied sociology.
34:27So in terms of her academic career, she was a sociologist.
34:30And I think her writing became a medium for her to express and to write about the experiences of herself,
34:38but also people that were close to her.
34:40And so there's sort of this hybrid writing that's, it's a fictionalised account, but it's very much documenting the lives
34:46of people like herself.
34:48And often those are the lives of marginalised people, people that history wouldn't remember,
34:54people that wouldn't make it into the history books.
34:56But nevertheless, she, you know, she recognises the importance of these stories.
35:02Emma Chetter might have begun her literary career on a council estate, but her work was gradually recognised by the
35:10cultural establishment.
35:13In 1983, Granta took a famous photograph of the best young British novelists.
35:20It featured the likes of Ian McEwen, Martin Amos, Pat Barker, but it also featured Bucci Emma Chetter.
35:34Many people have asked Bucci Emma Chetter how a Nigerian woman could come to Britain and make a living writing
35:39books in a language that is not her first nor her second or third, but her fourth.
35:43She appeared on the BBC in the 1980s when she discussed her struggle to become a writer.
35:51Your husband burnt your first novel, didn't he?
35:53Yes, yes. He thought I was aiming above my station.
35:57And the woman, you know, especially Bucci Emma, is supposed to be at home, docile, nice, and doing exactly what
36:03your husband told you to do.
36:04But I started writing a book, but he didn't like that very much, so he burned that book.
36:10I mean, your book is an epic. It's extraordinary. But in retrospect, I think he ought to have a little
36:17bit more sense of humour if that's possible.
36:20Absolutely extraordinary.
36:22Thank you, Bucci.
36:24Emma Chetter's stardom came about because she'd published her bleak masterpiece, The Joys of Motherhood.
36:32This has got to be one of the most ironic titles ever given to a novel, because there's precious little
36:38joy in this tale of a woman who dreams of being a loving, caring mother to her children, but is
36:44let down and betrayed at every turn.
36:47The Joys of Motherhood is so beautiful, but also for me so refreshing because it was about women.
36:55It was a book that actually said it's worthwhile that what happens to a woman propels a novel.
37:02I hadn't seen that before in African literature.
37:09Men. All they were interested in was male babies to keep their names going.
37:19God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself?
37:24A full human being, not anybody's appendage.
37:30After all, I was born alone, and I shall die alone.
37:40Sylvester Onwardy is the son of Bucci Emma Chetter.
37:45This one I particularly like because it's my mother when she was younger.
37:50But what I find striking is just the eyes, because they just remain the same.
37:54This kind of piercing gaze that she always had.
37:57As a child, he didn't realise his mother was a celebrity.
38:02We were aware that she was a writer, but we didn't really understand the significance of what she was doing.
38:07We were aware of the kind of what she went through, how she, the process of writing, because it was
38:11very much a domestic thing,
38:12because she used to write in the kitchen, and so it's very much something we saw every single day.
38:18But to actually understand the impact that she had on other people, that only came much later.
38:24And for me, really, it was after she died.
38:27She had this impact on particularly women of a certain age.
38:30And I think she was a role model, because of the fact that she had quite a difficult life.
38:35And she triumphed against diversity and all those things.
38:38And her story is quite a powerful one.
38:41So I think that resonated with a lot of people.
38:44But also the fact that she was writing about things which nobody else was writing about at that time.
38:50So why is a novelist who made such a mark in the 1970s and the 1980s not better known today?
38:59I think she's a very important voice.
39:02I think, though, as a black woman writer, she was somewhat overtaken by the American black women writers,
39:10the Alice Walkers and the Maya Angelus.
39:17Since Emma Chatter's death in 2017, her son Sylvester has been republishing his mother's novels to get them back in
39:26the public eye.
39:28I decided that I was going to make sure that all those books remained in print forever.
39:33It also gave me the opportunity to reread all the books again, which is quite interesting.
39:38And in a funny way to rediscover my mother, see her in a completely different light.
39:42And I think she'll be gratified that this is happening.
39:45And I think it's what she deserves, really.
39:51But by the early 1990s, one voice of the African diaspora was to achieve global recognition.
39:59Good evening and welcome to the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction, coming to you live from Guildhall in London.
40:05In just under 50 minutes, the chairman of the judges will announce the winner of certainly the most prestigious of
40:11the literary prizes.
40:11The Booker Prize for 1991 goes to Ben Ocri for the Famished Rose.
40:21Ben Ocri was born in Nigeria, but went to school in London.
40:26Like Emma Chatter, his writing speaks as much to Britain as it does to Africa.
40:32Ben Ocri is our poet laureate.
40:35When Ben speaks, we listen.
40:38He has an eloquent and a statesman-like status amongst us Africans in the diaspora.
40:49He understands Europe and writes in those traditions and does it very well.
40:53But he never forgets his African gaze.
41:00In 1991, Ocri became the first ever black writer to win the Booker Prize.
41:08When my first novel was published, I went home and my father rather cunningly got together all the elders of
41:16our town.
41:17And they contributed a certain amount of money, impromptu, to buy me a pen to carry on writing.
41:24I suppose this will buy me quite a lot of pens.
41:29His Booker-winning novel, The Famished Road, was written in Notting Hill, but it tapped into Nigerian myths in which
41:38the living dwell among the dead.
41:42When Ben won the Booker Prize, I think what it signalled to everybody else is that that kind of literature,
41:49that kind of imagination, that kind of non-linear way of thinking, that kind of celebration of an African cosmology
41:56could be appreciated.
42:00I just love the magic realism in the novel. I loved his prose style. I found it incredibly immersive. And
42:07I love the spirituality that he was, the Nigerian spirituality that he was exploring in the novel. So it was
42:14just had a profound effect on me.
42:17I dedicate this prize to all those who struggle and who suffer in silence and in public and who never
42:23stop fighting and always keep on dreaming. Thank you very much.
42:32Ocri's success showed that Africans could write books that were highly experimental, but also that had deep emotional resonance that
42:40could connect with readers across the world. And importantly, he also showed that Africans could write books that could break
42:48in to the bestseller lists.
42:51Aminata Fauna is one of this new generation of writers from the African diaspora. Happiness is centred around a character
43:01from Ghana staying in London.
43:05When I came to write happiness, instead of having the Westerner go to Africa, I brought the African character to
43:13the West, and I wanted to show readers what a city like London, a country like Britain,
43:19what Britain looks like from a West African perspective, to invite Britons to look at themselves from the outside.
43:31Fauna's father was from Sierra Leone, a country that from the early 90s was devastated by 10 years of civil
43:39war.
43:44Fauna only spent a small part of her childhood in the country.
43:48But she brought the war to an international leadership in The Memory of Love, which examined the scars left behind
43:56by the conflict.
43:58For me, the task of an artist is to hold the pain of a country, to memorialize it, and to
44:05find a way to help a country bear it.
44:11He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end.
44:17He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot.
44:25There is nothing to do but to keep on existing in this exact time and place.
44:32This is what hell must be like, waiting without knowing.
44:39Not hell, but purgatory.
44:44Worse than hell.
44:50The Memory of Love tears you apart.
44:53The Memory of Love tears you apart.
44:53It's a book that takes you into direct aftermath of war, and deals with quite severe trauma, but not in
45:00a way that is watching.
45:02It's in a way that forces you as the reader to experience it at many different levels, and also to
45:07experience the difficult decisions people make about survival.
45:11What has been the reaction of Sierra Leonean readers to your book that examined that trauma of that war?
45:19I don't expect Sierra Leoneans actually to sit and read all my work, but the fact that the work exists,
45:29and it exists for future generations, I think is tremendously important.
45:35But Fauna's novels also range beyond the bounds of Africa.
45:39Her 2013 book, The Hired Man, was set in Croatia.
45:46And she is suspicious of that catch-all label African novelist.
45:52When somebody calls me an African writer, I look at who's saying it.
45:57You know, if a Sierra Leonean says to me, she's a Sierra Leonean writer, I love that, right? They're claiming
46:02me.
46:02At other times, as somebody who is frequently labelled, I'm suspicious of labels, because labels are put on people in
46:10order to try to constrain them,
46:11in order to try to distill them down to only one thing.
46:15And it's impossible nowadays to do that.
46:18It's been impossible forever, actually.
46:20But, you know, it is self-evidently impossible nowadays.
46:25We live in a global context.
46:28So it doesn't make sense to call somebody an African writer, unless you also accept that that person is many
46:35other kinds of writer as well.
46:38These labels are always reductive, and writers are always railing against them.
46:43I mean, I'm also called a black British writer.
46:46But actually, I own it, because that is the perspective from which I write.
46:50But at the same time, white writers don't often wear these labels.
46:55You know, white, male, middle-class writers are not called that.
46:58So I can see that it's problematic, and I understand why it's problematic, but I can see that it also
47:03serves a function, just in terms of identifying who we are and what we might be writing about.
47:12I will do all kinds of acrobatics to avoid saying African writer.
47:17So a writer of African descent, or a writer from an African country, and all of those things.
47:21Because I, too, have problem with that.
47:23Because African writer has come to be something that seeks to limit what someone does.
47:29And so I think that, you know, Aminata's refusal of a term, or refusal to be bound by that, is
47:35absolutely right.
47:36Because we lose something where we say, well, you should only be able to write about this continent, or this
47:41family, or this region.
47:43Because the themes that are being explored are much wider than that.
47:47One writer who has transcended the label African novelist is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
47:55Set in both Nigeria and America, her three diverse books fight against Western stereotypes of Africa.
48:05Those stories have been told so often, and are told so singularly, that they start to define an entire place.
48:13And you cannot understand Africa if that's the only thing you know about it.
48:16Her most famous novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, looks back to the Biafran War.
48:22But it is as much a tale of love and youthful idealism as of the conflict itself.
48:31A student leader spoke into the microphone, and the singing stopped.
48:36Some young men were carrying a coffin with Nigeria written on it in white chalk.
48:40They raised it up, mock solemnity on their faces.
48:44When they lowered the coffin into the hole, a cheer rose in the crowd and spread, ripple-like, until it
48:52was one cheer.
48:54Until Olana felt that everyone there had become someone.
49:05I decided to write about Biafran because I grew up in the shadow of Biafran.
49:09And my grandfathers died in the war, my parents lived through it, they lost everything they owned.
49:15And so when you're born into a family that was deeply affected by something that you did not experience, I
49:20think that if you're a storyteller, there's something in you that then wants to try and make sense of it
49:25through storytelling.
49:26I think what Chimamanda is able to do in Half of Yellow Sun is to weave quite massively a sort
49:32of a history.
49:33There's a real sense of what happened in the build-up to the war and during the war.
49:38But that's not at the expense of the human story.
49:41This is actually why you have to tell the story, because it's important for us to remember.
49:46I really think it's important to remember.
49:48I think we live in a society that is so eager to forget.
49:53And when we forget, it's not just that we risk repeating what happened in the past, which I think is
49:59obviously reason enough to remember,
50:01but also that we should remember for the sake of remembering.
50:04We should remember because the people who passed away deserve to be remembered.
50:10Adichie is important not just for her books, but because her writing has made her a global celebrity, a role
50:19model for other novelists.
50:22Chimamanda occupies space in many different spheres in a way that I haven't seen other writers do.
50:30And she seems to have captured the public's imagination.
50:33I think prior to Chimamanda, it was like, you have to look a certain way if you were an author.
50:38And then she came along and just tossed that out the window.
50:41So it became cool to be a writer and be fashionable.
50:48In Adichie's wake, authors like Oyinkan Braithwaite now have the freedom to write best-selling genre fiction.
51:00Braithwaite grew up in Britain, but moved to Nigeria as a teenager.
51:05The country's commercial capital, Lagos, is a huge inspiration on her writing.
51:11There are things that my characters get away with that I think is because they are in Lagos.
51:16Lagos is mad, which is why it's a great backdrop for a thriller.
51:20Lagos is a crazy, crazy, crazy place.
51:24And there's so much range.
51:26You can be living in Lagos and feel like you're living in Dubai, for example.
51:32You've got everything.
51:34And then, not too far away from you, there's someone who doesn't know where their next meal will come from.
51:42There's so, so, so much going on.
51:44It's material for every genre, to be honest.
51:48Her debut novel uses the city as a backdrop for a darkly subversive crime story,
51:54My Sister, the Serial Killer.
51:58I'm just drawn to women who don't fit those modes.
52:04In life, we're not all pure, we're not all good, we're not all kind.
52:08Also, writing about a character who's perfect from morning to night is really boring.
52:13Writing about imperfect characters is a lot of fun.
52:19Have you heard this one before?
52:21Two girls walk into a room.
52:23The room is in a flat.
52:24The flat is on the third floor.
52:27In the room is a dead body of an adult male.
52:30How do they get the body to the ground floor without being seen?
52:34First, they gather supplies.
52:38My Sister, the Serial Killer is the book that I am most jealous of,
52:42because I wish I had published that book.
52:45I think it's brilliant.
52:47But I know that you wouldn't get My Sister, the Serial Killer without volume.
52:52All of the writers who've come before her had to have been publishing and selling their work at different levels.
52:58That then allows it to break out so it becomes a book that you see everybody reading.
53:02And the fact that we've reached the point where we can be making noise about a book that's about a
53:08young African girl who's a serial killer,
53:10seems to me such an achievement and such a wonderful thing for us to have reached that point.
53:19The African novel has come a long way since Achebe's masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, a book set in Nigeria with
53:28a flawed and tragic protagonist.
53:32Today, African novelist can emerge from London as well as Lagos and follow the stories of not just one hero,
53:40but of twelve heroines.
53:45Bernadine Evaristo's Girl Woman Other conveys a panorama of the black British experience.
53:55It begins with Amma as she strolls by the Thames.
54:01Amma is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city.
54:06A few early morning barges cruise slowly by.
54:10To her left is the nautical-themed footbridge with its deck-like walkway and sailing masked pylons.
54:15To her right is the bend in the river as it heads east past Waterloo Bridge towards the Dome of
54:21St Paul's.
54:22She feels the sun begin to rise, the air still breezy before the city clogs up with heat and fumes.
54:29A violinist plays something suitably uplifting further along the promenade.
54:34Amma's play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the National tonight.
54:42I wanted to write a novel about black British women and I wanted to create as many protagonists as possible
54:50who would feature in the novel on an equal footing and eventually I settled on 12 co-protagonists
54:57and the novel is about their lives.
55:00Her book is not an easy book, it's one that challenges you.
55:04She bends the form of what a novel can be in a way that's very exciting
55:08and I hadn't seen before in quite that way.
55:10It's something she's always done but she kind of perfects it here.
55:14I wanted to show multiplicity in a sense as a weapon against invisibility and stereotyping.
55:23That's why it was important that I would not aim to represent black British womanhood
55:28because we can't be represented, because we are as pluralist as any other individual in this society,
55:35but I just wanted to show the spread of who we can be, the possibility and the possibilities of who
55:41we are.
55:41That was my intention.
55:43And of course, it's a novel that made history by winning the Booker Prize.
55:50Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.
55:56I was genuinely surprised when my name came out of the chair's mouth.
56:00I was like, oh my God, I was swearing.
56:07But Evaristo wants her success to be just the start of the story.
56:13I'm a diversity champion and I have been all my life, so, you know,
56:16I would really like another black woman to win the Booker Prize in the next few years.
56:23If that doesn't happen, and there are always sort of worthy contenders for these prizes,
56:28and if that doesn't happen, then I'm going to kick up a fuss.
56:33Bernadine winning it is fantastic.
56:37It's taken so long for an African woman to win the Booker Prize,
56:42and, you know, she's not going to be the last.
56:45These prizes are important.
56:47I mean, it's been a breakthrough moment for my career,
56:49but I don't want it just to be a breakthrough moment for my career.
56:53I want people to be, you know, coming up really quickly and walking off with the Booker.
56:59Thank you, everybody. Thank you to the judges, of course.
57:03Phenomenal. You know, one man, four women. It made a difference, I think.
57:07Two women of colour. That made history. So, thank you so much.
57:15It would be crazy to me to judge a Booker Prize without looking to African writers of all generations,
57:22because I think what they're doing is so creative, so bold in pushing the boundaries of the novel,
57:28of narrative, of the literary form, that you can't have a serious prize without looking at the writers coming out
57:34of Africa.
57:34Today, hugely successful novels written by Africans are just part of the cultural mainstream,
57:42and modern African writers are still inspired by authors like Chinua Achebe and Bucheb Emacheta.
57:50It's been an extraordinary journey since Chinua Achebe's groundbreaking novel.
57:57The story is power, and this seems to me to be so basic.
58:05To a humanity that every generation will discover.
58:11To a new wave of authors who've turned the African novel into a global business.
58:17It has always been my dream to be around at the tipping point where African writing is no longer foreign.
58:23We're close to that, and to me that's the best thing for readers. It really is.
58:33To Mexico next, where giant volcanoes simmer and ancient and modern cultures collide.
58:40Earth's festival of life here on BBC4.
58:43Then back to Africa with Storyville and the woman they called Mama Africa.
58:48Singer and activist Miriam Makeba at 11.
58:51The end, as you're in the middle of the world.
58:54It really, it really is a popular next episode.
58:58What a great or real story has the highest.
58:59No place has the highest.
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