Celebrate Africa Awards 2021

Exploring Genres

On a continent as ethnically and culturally diverse as Africa, it comes as no surprise that a large body of literary works have emerged from its multifaceted people, covering a wide range of social and cultural issues, from women's rights and feminism to post-war and post-colonial identity.

Some of Africa's best-known authors write in the genre of contemporary and political fiction, such as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mariama Bâ. Some novels were even banned in certain African countries due to their controversial nature. One such work was Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, which Nelson Mandela read in secret during his time on Robben Island.

So much of popular African literature focuses on controversial and politically charged topics, forcing African authors who write in other genres to work doubly hard to capture their audience (although romance has hit a surge in recent years). With this in mind, we want to encourage our fellow African writers to investigate the wide variety of genres and subgenres available to us, and consider incorporating these varied topics into your African-themed stories. While it's true that Africa's history and continuing struggles play a large role in defining its people, there are many ways to tell the stories of those people.

Here are a few examples of published African works, and the genres and subgenres these African writers explored:

👉🏾 In the genres of science fiction, biopunk, and an unsentimental brand of Nigerian humor, you have Tade Thompson's Wormwood Trilogy.

👉🏾 Covering the genres of history, humor, and detective fiction, there's Angolan journalist and writer José Eduardo Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion.

👉🏾 For something familiar yet startlingly undefinable, Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater draws on traditional Igbo mythology, spirituality, and intertwines it with the supernatural.

👉🏾 Kiru Taye is an award-winning romance novelist whose works fall into the historical, contemporary, and paranormal subgenres, with plenty of steam.

👉🏾 In the novel She Called Me Woman, Azeenarh Mohammed, a Nigerian activist, put together a collection of twenty-five narratives to correct the invisibility, confusion, and the writing out of queer women from history. Along with the genre of LGBTQ+ biographies, her work has been categorized as feminist theory and touches on the topics of sexuality, spirituality, addiction, and suicide, along with laughter and the joy of first love.

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Our next article will teach you how to build a compelling storyline.