On Monday, July 11th 2011, there will be a good lot of anxious Africans waiting for the news of the winner of the 2011Caine Prize for African writing. Most of those excited Africans will be Ugandans and Botswana, Zimbabweans and South Africans. Of those excited Africans will be a select group of five, Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, Uganda’s Beatrice Lamwaka, Botwana’s Lauri Kubuitsile and South Africa’s David Medalie and Tim Keegan who will vie for the ten thousand pound prize award with an all a month’s residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC, as a ‘Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer-in-Residence’.
On Monday, July 11th 2011, there will be a good lot of anxious Africans waiting for the news of the winner of the 2011Caine Prize for African writing. Most of those excited Africans will be Ugandans and Botswana, Zimbabweans and South Africans.
Of those excited Africans will be a select group of five, Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, Uganda’s Beatrice Lamwaka, Botwana’s Lauri Kubuitsile and South Africa’s David Medalie and Tim Keegan who will vie for the ten thousand pound prize award with an all a month’s residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC, as a ‘Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer-in-Residence’.
The question one would ask is that do this year’s short stories portray a picture of improving literary fiction in Africa? One Ikhide R. Ikheloa would say a big no. in his "EMAIL FROM AMERICA: The 2011 Caine Prize: How Not to Write About Africa” he ascertains that the creation of a prize for "African writing” may have created the unintended effect of breeding writers willing to stereotype Africa for glory. He goes on to add that the mostly lazy, predictable stories that made the 2011 shortlist celebrate orthodoxy and mediocrity. He dismisses all the stories as cheap stereotypical reflections of Africa for the western market except for David Medalie who almost rescues the prize from the murk with "The Mistress’s Dog”, an affecting tale involving a well-fed dog.
Ikhide’s criticism, however biting is not entirely wrong or right, typical of any criticism in the realm of the arts. The irony however is that writing should really never be something that is written for awards. In fact every writer will tell you the cliché that they write for themselves, but nothing is as sweet as being acknowledged by your own peers as excellent in what you do. So secretly, every writer would like to win awards.
The problem with African writing is that it is primed for the good markets, the western world where ordinary people buy fiction books and collection of short stories. A common string which notes many award winning African writers is their relative experience of living abroad or writing for the Diaspora. But then is money should not be the motivation of a writer who knows no other trade than to write, then ‘to write for oneself’ would be the one way ticket to hell, or at least the abject poverty that African writer constantly wallow in. So the likes of Ikhide might be easily taken for writers who want to win award so much and when they don’t, they specialize in trashing the whole art in a desperate act of sour grapping.
Away from ideological arguments, someone has to win the Caine prize on Monday. For me Lauri Kubuitsile’s ‘In the spirit of McPhineas Lata is typical of the stereotypes Akhide talks about. It misrepresents rural african communities and feels artificial, which men dragging their tails to sob about how one ‘superman’ McPhineas Lata has taken over their wives spirits in life and even more in death. The South Africans have tried to construct real life stories in apartheid South Africa from the Afrikaner’s community view. The Mistress Dog impresses with the unity of message, simplicity of expression and freshness of the plot. Tim Keegan’s orgy of Violence is almost too predictable and like a leaf out of the South African Truth and reconciliation commission report.
Even though with the bias for Beatrice Lamwaka, Butterfly Dreams may touch on an old topic, the war in northern Uganda and may evoke sentiments of trying too hard to milk a bad episode in African politics, but the her approach is refreshingly devoid of sympathy seeking and has strengths in its ability to focus on the small picture of a small family ravaged by war, not the politics of it, like Keegan does with What Molly Knew. The gem for me is NoViolet Bulawayo ‘Hitting Budapest’ - easy unforced dialogue, humor without trying too hard at it, and most all obeying the first rule of short stories – show, but don’t tell! A literary award largely depends on the thinking of the judges but if it were I, the Caine prize should go to Botswana, Uganda or to South Africa’s David Medalie. Fortunately, it isn’t, so we can only wait.
Note: The winner of the £10,000 prize is to be announced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, London on July 11th 2011.