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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
This year, Southern Africa is upstream in the creative scheme of things. The sub-region emerged as the continent’s foremost literary bloc this year, with a dazzling show at some of the world’s most coveted prizes for fiction.

The muses were resolutely in our favour as writers Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Democratic Republic of Congo) and José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola) respectively made it to the Man Booker International Prize longlist and shortlist.

South African writer and filmmaker Lidudumalingani last month won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, while his compatriot, Nobel laureate and double Booker winner J.M. Coetzee was recently featured in the Man Booker Dozen.

In the first quarter of the year, Mujila and Agualusa began the run for the Man Booker International Prize, an add-in of the Man Booker Prize, revamped this year to promote fiction in translation.

Beginning this year, the prize started awarding novelists annually on the basis of a single title, moving away from biennial recognition for a body of work as maintained since its inception in 2015.

On the new arrangement’s maiden longlist were two African entries, “A General Theory of Oblivion” by Angola’s Agualusa, translated from the original Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and “Tram ‘83” by the DRC’s Mujila, translated from the original French by Roland Glasser.

While “Tram 83” did not make it beyond the first dozen, it occasioned rave reviews and its Lubumbashi-born novelist was hailed by The Economist’s Shelf Life as new “prince of the absurd” in the tradition of Samuel Becket.

If the English translation was two rounds shy of glory, the French original was unstoppable.

It won on the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature, was named the Best French Debut finalist of 2014 by LIRE and, in the same year, took the Literary Prize of Graz and the Golden Medal in Literature of the VI Jeux de la Francophonie in Beyrouth Grand Prix du Premier Roman de la Société des gens de lettres (SGDL).

It was also named among the nine finalists of the 2014 Prix du Monde (Le Monde des Livres), out of 607 candidates, and was shortlisted for the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste and the French Voices Award.

“Tram 83” is set in a war-riven African city where tourists and immigrants converge with one objective, exploiting its human and mineral wealth.

It revolves a professional writer, Lucien, with his friend and criminally-wired opposite number, Requiem in the debauched club, Tram ’83.

The highbrow 20th century pitch of “a novel about a novelist” which George Orwell lamented for leaving the reader out of the writer’s calculations is redeemed by the cosmopolitan crowd which converges nightly at the club.

But even if readers were out of the Congolese’s calculations, Man Booker International would be right in the loop, with the judges’ selection suggesting a general taste for obscurity.

“A General Theory of Oblivion” lends itself even better to Man Booker’s taste for the obscure with the story of a woman who bricks herself up in her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence, burning her furniture to stay warm, with radio snippets, voices from voices from next door and a note attached to a bird’s foot and a note on a bird’s foot for human contact till the day a boy from the street climb up her terrace.

The Angolan novel made it to the final six, ceding the gong to a typically obscure and disturbing novel, “The Vegetarian” by South Korean Han Kang about a woman who fancies breaking out of her fleshly prison for a new life as a tree.

Both entries are from the African Diaspora, maintaining a trend whereby the more visible African writing is from Western universities.

Quite clearly, Africa’s cultural and academic institutions must strive more eagerly to spark, attract, reward, expose and retain the best talent. This should not plug our talent drain, but also sustain a more organic representation of the continent, particularly in literature.

The muses smiled anew as the third quarter of 2016 set in with the news that that South African writer Lidudumalingani had won the Caine Prize for African Writing.

The US-based writer won the continent Africa’s most coveted literary award for his short story “Memories We Lost” originally published in “Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You”.

Set in a South African village, the emotive short story tells the revolves girl who acts as the protector of her mentally ill sister.

Caine chair of judges Delia Jarrett-Macauley lauded the story for exploring a difficult subject. This is a troubling piece, depicting the great love between two young siblings in a beautifully drawn Eastern Cape. Multi-layered, and gracefully narrated, this short story leaves the reader full.

Lidudumalingani, who “grew up herding cattle and moulding goats from clay” in Zikhovane village, Transkei, walked away £10 000 richer.

“More than being shaped by growing up in a small village, moving around different spaces, seeing other perspectives is what really helped my comprehension of space, people and writing,” Lidudumalingani told Sunday Times’ Books Live.

“This is not to say that there is nothing distinct about growing up in the villages that guides me every day and every time I sit down to write. There is a lot of it – my experience is intrinsic to who I am – and mostly cannot be translated to words. I do, however, think that there is a sense of community in the villages and my writing stems from this sensitivity of the human spirit,” he said.

South Africa-based Zimbabwean freelance writer and contributing editor of Chimurenga Bongani Kona made it to the Caine shortlist with his short story “At Your Requiem”, also published in “Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You”.

And now, in the running for the £50 000 Man Booker Prize this year is South African-Australian Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee.

This year’s Man Booker Dozen (actually 13 novels) was selected from 155 submissions published in the United Kingdom between October 1 2015 and September 30 2016 by judges Amanda Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent and Olivia Williams.

Also in contention are Paul Beatty (United States) for “The Sellout”, A.L. Kennedy (UK) for “Serious Sweet”, Deborah Levy (UK) for “Hot Milk”, Graeme Macrae Burnet (UK) for “His Bloody Project,” Ian McGuire (UK) for “The North Water”, David Means (US) for “Hystopia”, Wyl Menmuir (UK) for “The Many,” Ottessa Moshfegh (US) for “Eileen”, Virginia Reeves (US) for “Work Like Any Other”, Elizabeth Strout (US) for “My Name Is Lucy Barton”, David Szalay (Canada-UK) for “All That Man Is”, Madeleine Thien (Canada) for “Do Not Say We Have Nothing”.

“The Schooldays of Jesus”, which will only be available in September, is the only African entry in the list of 13 released about a fortnight ago.

“This is a very exciting year. The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be,” chair Foreman said.

“From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished,” she said.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 13 and each shortlisted author each receive £2 500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner be announced on October 25.

Coetzee won the then Booker Prize in 1983 with “Life & Times of Michael K” and with “Disgrace” in 1999, making him the first writer to win the prize twice. If he takes the gong home for the third time, he will crown 2016 as the year of Southern African writing.