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IfeOluwa Nihinlola

Africa’s foremost literary prize, colloquially called the ‘African Booker’, is about story and story-tellers, when we are not distracted by the surrounding hubbub of misconstrued interviews, clichéd labels, and drama, as recent debates about the Prize, some of them very heated, suggest. The Caine Prize for African Writing has been criticized in the past for the kind of ‘African writing’ it rewards, for narrow viewpoints, celebrating ‘poverty porn’, and for tales of child narrators being forced live the worst of what it means to be African. Those in support would tell you it has brought much-needed attention to the work of African writers. This year’s Caine Prize offers an opportunity to test, confirm or refute these views.

This year’s Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist includes stories written by a former winner of the prize, two formerly shortlisted writers, and a winner of the PEN International New Voices award. The stories are therefore the product of assured hands. But shortlisted writers and winners of the Caine prize have rarely had their credentials as storytellers questioned. Their stories, however, with a few exceptions, are often dealt harsh critical blows. So how do this year’s stories fare?

A Party for the Colonel
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F.T. Kola’s A Party for the Colonel focuses on a celebration thrown for Mr. Ibrahim, the titular colonel as nicknamed by Mohammed, his estranged son “on account of his splendid bearing and not for any participation in the military.” It is told from the perspective of his wife, “a stout woman, as sweet and cautious as a milking cow, with a face permanently crumpled into pre-emptive embarrassment.”

The story shows how systemic injustices like apartheid affect even families on the fringes. And how its effects on such families can be amplified or muted by the actions of the individual members. There is the Colonel who believes he can ride of the coattails of a system built to work against him, into success. He discovers again and again that no matter how much he earns, no matter how well he choses to bend to the system in order to get by, no matter how many parties are thrown for him, he will always be invisible to, and unwanted by the system. There is also Mohammed, an idealist who joins ANC, developing a disdain for the system that lands him in the John Vorster Square Prison, and Selima, his wife, who abandons their son Riyaz, a shy boy who spends most of the story behind his grandmother’s legs.

The colonel’s wife is the only passive one in this story, but perhaps this is why her view of things is so powerful in relating the hope and despair that connects the three generations represented.

Ms. Kola threads the backstory of these characters tightly into the story, flitting between the present and the past with an assured hand that reminds one of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. This is Ms. Kola’s first published story, but do not be fooled; A Party for the Colonel is the work of a writer in firm control of her craft.

The story is seeded from an autobiographical detail in her life that she relates in an interview for One story mag, and it is the imagery of this autobiographical detail that becomes the strongest in the story.

With a riot from the nearby prison inching upon the unsuspecting dinner guests, Riyaz, in his innocence, gives the story a crescendo to remember. We know Mohammed may not return, we know the colonel will not remain the same, and we know South Africa will also change in the time of Riyaz.

Flying
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This is vintage Elnathan John. A story about a boy who lives in a home for abandoned children. Here, Elnathan deftly uses adolescent anxieties to channel concerns about otherness in our world. Tachio, through whose perspective the story is told, flies in his sleep, and is scared of telling anyone about this, especially his young peers. He finally tells Aunty Keturah, the proprietress of the home, about his dreams and, surprisingly, understands him.

“For the first time I wasn’t afraid to talk about my flying, not ashamed. Flying wasn’t such a bad thing.” This is clearly the language of those who come out and Elnathan is not coy about this. After listening to the proprietress’ interpretation of his dreams, he says, “It was in that month, that first month of secondary school, the month she created the post of dorm leader and put me in charge that I started enjoying flying.”

Tachio copes with the taunts of his friends by thinking about the details of their lives he reads from a book of the records he finds in Aunty Keturah’s office while cleaning it, and also by thinking of what his friends would have looked like in their other lives—an idea he gets from Aunty Keturah’s explanation of his dream flights.

In this story, Elnathan explores what happens when those in power understand, embrace and protect those who are different, rather than antagonise them. Perhaps flying is an allegory: we all exist in a refuge home, oblivious to the details of our history, our past identities, and only attack those who don’t act like us in the arrogance of this obliviousness. Or maybe it is just the story of a particular boy, in a very specific home, led by a woman who is not scared of the strange, the fantastic.

Elnathan’s short, simple sentences and loads of whimsy gives Flying a veneer of lightness. With these, he however weaves a serious, emotionally-charged story that ends on a note of hope. Hope that the other will always find his place, and be assured in himself, even when his protector is gone, replaced by a walking bird.

Space
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Space is the second of a trio of stories in this year’s shortlist told from the perspective of children. The title is a bit misleading. The recent focus on Afrofuturism conditions the mind to think one of such stories has found its way to the Caine Prize shortlist. This is not so. This is the story of a boy who finds a grey man in a shed and invites his friends to share in the spectacle. The man is dying of a disease he caught while he was in Johannesburg, a detail that brings to mind Darling’s father in Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New names, who returns from South Africa with AIDS.

The four teenage boys in this story also carry the wide-eyed curiosity and desire for adventure possessed by Darling and her friends in Noviolet’s masterpiece. They shoplift—one of them has an ob-session with panties—wander around barefoot, and peep into the room of the sister of one of them.

Masande Ntshanga’s story contains sentences that at once excite the mind and sometimes confounds. There are several instances in the story in which the speech straddles either grammatical constructions that seem wrong at first, or the authentic speech of a teenager. Many times, it is impossible to say.

The boys scale a fence, share a quart of beer, and proceed to see the alien CK their friend has promised them. When CK asks them, “He’s like an alien, isn’t he?” The friends say nothing. And I sense their feeling of anticlimax, one I share at end of the story.

The Folded Leaf
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Segun Afolabi’s The Folded Leaf completes the trinity of child stories in this year’s shortlist. It is the story of a trip to Lagos, the big city, in search of a miracle. This is heavily reminiscent of Tope Folarin’s Miracle, the winning story of the 2013 Caine Prize. It starts off in the village, with prayers and departure, in a jumble of senses that feels mildly chaotic.

There’s a lot of smell at the start: the stench of a gutter; onion, garlic and a hint of sage from the trembling fingers of an old reverend—who is not a reverend; whiffs of thrown up dust; dry fish pepper soup; the aroma of moyin moyin. This overload of nasal information is a form of magician’s trick, employed by Segun to blind us to the reality of the narrator’s condition. Three pages of the story are gone before it becomes obvious that the narrator is blind.

For sight, Bunmi relies on the eyes of Bola, who is on the journey to support her and help with the wheelchairs. On the pilgrimage they witness the humiliations Nigerians who cannot shout “Do you know who I am” face in the hands of Police and protocol stewards, and the ridiculousness we’ve come to expect of depictions of Nigerian pentecostalism and her mega-pastors, in the case of this story, Daddy Cool, as he is called.

Segun Afolabi ends the story on a twist. I’m calling it a twist because it baffles me. When Bunmi chatters in the bus on their way home, her father says: “Bunmi, there is nothing — ’ he says and stops. ‘Bola does not need to be healed, you hear? He is with the Lord and he is in our hearts. Why don’t you get some rest and stop chattering? Other people are trying to sleep.” Was Bola imaginary all along? Was the whole episode in the mega-church simply a figment of Bunmi’s imagination?

Rereading this story does not immediately bring answers. It is like trying to suss out a magicians craft. If you’re like me, not a fan of things you cannot understand and wary of magic tricks, you might be miffed at Segun’s sleight. But this story is for those who still posses something akin to a child’s sense of wonder, and are still capable of ooh-aahing at a well executed sleight-of-hand.

The Sack
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Of all the stories in this year’s shortlist, The Sack by Namwali Serpell is the one that demands the most of its readers. Starting with a dream scene of a man dragging a sack that is arresting in its jaggedness, it continues to move between dreams and lucidity, between characters, and between the past and the present. Ms Serpell blends this into a fine mix with her disciplined lines that start and stop, and revel and conceal all at once.

This is a story of a master, Jacob, and his servant, Joseph. We see most of Jacob’s part of the story in a dream dreamt backwards, and Joseph’s part in a third person retelling that brings a fish-selling boy into their solitary existence. But this story is defined as much by the things left out of the page. Naila, the dead wife, who it appears was an object of contention between master and servant, is mentioned, as is her dead son, whisked away by her family after her death.

Jacob dreams of being lead to death and wonders if it will occur in the hands of his slave, who is paying down his debt. But the idea that Joseph is even his slave is ludicrous. Jacob is immobile, un-able to help himself, and this frustrates him. He knows Joseph is with him by choice, a choice that he knows is not inspired by charity. He can dream of his own death, speculate about how it would occur, even attempt to take matters into his own hands, but in the end he is at the mercy of his slave.

There is a feeling that most of what will happen in this story has occurred. We are only present, like amateur sleuths, to discern the events of the past from the details we are offered. And to witness the end.

The story ends the way it begins: with the grey sack. This time, however, we see through the eyes of the isabi boy. He is now the servant to Joseph, his bwana. His mind is “empty but for a handful of notions – love, hunger, fear – darting like birds within, crashing into curved walls in a soundless, pitiless fury.” Embedded in that final paragraph is what, it appears, drove the previous master and servant to the end of their story: love, hunger and fear.

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The ability to herald relatively unknown, or under-heard voices, has been one of the greatest tri-umphs of the prize. But this year, the megaphone of the Caine Prize is being handed to writers who already have loud voices. I remember reading Rotimi Babatunde’s Howl in the 2013 Caine Prize Anthology and wondering why it was not on the 2014 shortlist—a sentiment that was reinforced by Heleon Habila’s blog post on the Caine Prize website. I explained to myself that perhaps the judges wanted to give other voices a chance, in light of Rotini’s 2012 win. Seeing Afolabi’s story on this year’s shortlist however deflates that explanation, as he won the prize in 2005. Perhaps the Caine Prize needs to take a leaf from One Story Magazine, the publisher of F.T. Kola’s story, that does not publish an author twice.

The challenge of amplifying fresh voices is, however, not particular to the Caine Prize. Like Orem Ochei notes in his brilliant essay on the Africa39 anthology, “A paltry handful of writers winning big prizes every year, in a continent with a population of over one billion human beings, could never be the path by which we build a vibrant and representative professional and intercontinentally visible pan-African literary community.”

Take another look at the shortlist: Masande’s Space was the winner of the 2013 PEN International New Voices Award, Elnathan and Namwali have been on the shortlist before, and Namwali’s story appears in the Africa39 anthology, an anthology that is closely knitted to the prize. F.T. Kola is the only outlier here, but appearing in One Story Mag means she is no underdog.

If there was betting about the prize in the order of the blogging around the Caine Prize, my money would be on either A Party for the Colonel, or The Sack. F.T. Kola’s story is near-perfect, and it offers the epiphanic moment short stories are praised for, in Riyaz’s outburst. Namwali Serpell’s story is experimental, non-linear, and of all the stories on the shortlist is the one that most rewards re-reading. Any of the two could go home with the £5000 award and the Caine Prize would be cer-tain it has anointed another writer worthy of the best literary praise. In spite of all its shortcomings, this is the reason it will continue to be regarded as Africa’s foremost literary prize: the Caine Prize anoints gifted and essential storytellers.

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