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The death of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 2025 at age 87 has prompted a reckoning on language, authorship, and cultural sovereignty across Africa. A novelist, playwright, and theorist born under colonial rule in Kenya, Ngũgĩ became the continent’s most forceful voice for writing in African languages and for breaking the dependency on colonial forms. His essays, novels, and public stance reshaped how generations of African writers understood the relationship between language and freedom.
This is the achievement–writing matters where it is read.
African literature has long suffered the weight of other people’s narratives. The African woman, especially, has been flattened in fiction—either sanctified in struggle or framed in trauma.
These myths persist because they simplify, because they serve the reader outside the continent more than the life within it. Writers across Africa are discarding the idea that the West defines what literature is or what relevance means.
From Ibadan to Kampala, from Accra to Nairobi, writers are producing work for their own readers, in their own rhythms, without waiting for foreign validation. Prizes, if they come, are received with respect but no longer carry the authority to decide value. The centre has shifted. No pedestal remains.
Literary festivals flourish in Lagos, Abidjan, and Johannesburg. Publishers like Masobe in Nigeria, Huza Press in Rwanda, and Cassava Republic across the continent are printing fiction that speaks to the people who inhabit it.
It is also why readers in the Caribbean must turn toward Africa with fresh attention. The rupture of slavery severed memory, but not completely. The atavistic self remains.
Fiction from Africa carries both the present and the texture of the time before separation. The landscapes, names, and gestures found there will feel familiar to the Caribbean reader in ways that do not need explanation. Our continents share both history and unfinished memory.
Nigerian presses like Masobe publish thousands of copies of fiction meant for regional readerships. Sudan remains in collapse. Ugandan literary life continues despite censorship and fatigue. Out of these countries came and whose fiction avoids the debris of explanation and write what is often a collective reality of women in and out of Africa.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer whose work explores womanhood, memory, and the tensions between tradition and modern life. Her acclaimed collection Tropical Fish offers vivid portraits of young women navigating love, loss, and identity in postcolonial Uganda and the diaspora.
Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese-born, Scottish-based author whose fiction explores the emotional terrain of migration, faith, and cultural dislocation. Her novels—Minaret, The Translator, Lyrics Alley—focus on the inner lives of Muslim women living between worlds.
Baingana was born in 1966 and raised in Entebbe. She studied law at Makerere University and completed her MFA at the University of Maryland. She returned to Uganda to co-found the Mawazo Africa Writing Institute and teach creative writing across the continent (Wikipedia). As a child, she grew up in a household where reading shaped perception. “We had books all over the place … Our parents read. … We had horrible TV. That helped a lot,” she recalled (Africa in Dialogue).
Her story collection, Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe (2005), traces the lives of three Ugandan sisters through education, migration, sex, illness, and religious exploration (Wikipedia). The language remains exact. In “A Thank-You Note,” an HIV-positive narrator describes the virus in her body: “Stories of its power spread and grew like tree roots, curling out of the ground; abnormal, ugly, strong.”
Baingana has said she wanted to portray Uganda “as it is … calm, ordinary, textured,” and not through a Western lens of catastrophe (Feminist Africa). She writes through sensory witness: “What did I smell, hear, touch? By writing this down … we can make the reader also sense the same” (Africa in Dialogue).
Aboulela was born in 1964 in Cairo, raised in Khartoum, educated at the University of Khartoum and later at the LSE. She moved to Aberdeen in 1990 with her children and began writing soon after. “Fiction was a secret, enjoyable world running parallel to my life … The trauma of that move was the catalyst that launched my journey as a writer,” she said (World Literature Today).
Her first collection, Coloured Lights (2001), includes the Caine Prize–winning story “The Museum,” in which a Sudanese student is shown African exhibits in a Scottish gallery: “He expected me to feel proud. Instead, I felt lost. Homesick. On display.”
A critic observed that Aboulela “handles intense emotions in a contained yet powerful way … capturing the discrete sensory impressions that compound to form a mood” (Wikipedia). She described English as “a third language, refreshingly free from the disloyalty of having to choose between my father and my mother’s tongues” (Borders Literature Online).
Aboulela’s later collection, Elsewhere, Home (2018), won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. In 2025, she received the PEN Pinter Prize for making “the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction” and for her “clarity and grace” (The Guardian).
Baingana writes stories that build around taste, touch, family, weather, memory. She ends them at the precise moment when experience has been made visible.
Aboulela shapes fiction through silence and allegiance. She constructs emotional scenes through routine—a prayer, a walk, a moment of speech withheld. The story ends when the moment ends.
Doreen Baingana insists that African femininity must be seen in its full range, not collapsed into the figure of the victim. “African femaleness,” she writes, “is consciously constructed in opposition to ‘the stereotype of African women as victim’”. In her linked short story collection Tropical Fish, young women embody personal ambition, reflect national identity, class responsibility, and postcolonial virtue. Baingana said, “Privileged young women … must represent all the impoverished throngs … we must be graceful, hardworking, upright.”
Leila Aboulela builds her fiction around faith and interior allegiance. “Spirituality is not an exotic theme … it is as central to character as desire or ambition,” she told World Literature Today. Her characters experience belief as innate as racism. A peer-reviewed study of her fiction notes how she portrays “ugly incidents of racism and harassment of Muslims, particularly Muslim women wearing hijab” (SSRN).
Both writers rejected imposed narratives—about the continent, about race, about womanhood. Baingana’s stories stay close to physical sensation and emotional accuracy. Aboulela’s unfold across cities and languages, but hold steady to spiritual and personal detail. Together, they reshape African fiction from the ground up.
As Caribbean readers come into our own, we need writing that knows its ground and does not explain itself, writing that speaks from experience rather than performance. The stories coming out of Africa—plain, exact, shaped by memory and place—have always spoken to us, because our islands were formed from the fracture of continents, and our people carry Africa, India, Europe, Arabia, and China; if not in the body, then in the emotional registers shaped by generations of living together, side by side, and slowly percolating into one nation.
This is something no one can deny when Carnival arrives and the body speaks with certainty—not through the external features of race, but through rhythm, through movement, through a memory older than country, drawn from continents never entirely lost. The more we listen to ancestral voices singular and collective , the more we find our way in the world.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. Visit www.irasroom.org
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