The Silence We Made

On the roaring silence that has engulfed the African Literary Ecosystem

Photo by Edouard Quint on Unsplash

This essay might piss you off.

African literary circles — if we must call them ‘circles’ and not a ragtag insurgency —have never known the luxury of ivory towers. There is no Habermasian café here, no Afropolitan champagne flutes clinking over polite dissent. This is a tradition forged in back alleys: typewriters rattling like gunfire in rented rooms, pamphlets distributed like counterfeit currency, stories traded mouth-to-mouth as coded resistance. Every syllable was measured against the weight of two questions: Who is listening? And what will they erase? The archives call it literature. We know it was always war.

But let’s not canonize these ink-stained guerrillas as martyrs. Survival demanded both rebellion and complicity — the same hand that drafted manifestos might sign censors’ permits. A firebrand editorial eviscerating colonial rule could spare the local chief his blushes; newspapers ran exposés of junta atrocities alongside ads for Lipton’s ‘civilizing’ brew. This was not hypocrisy but alchemy: dissent distilled into folktales, revolution coded in proverbs, truths so finely balanced they’d evaporate under direct scrutiny. The genius lay not in the words, but the gaps between them — that charged silence where a struck bell’s hum outlasts its clang.

It has always been this way. In South Africa, under apartheid, when the state surveilled the word as though it were a weapon — and often it was — debate burrowed underground, into exile journals like Staffrider and Drum, into ciphered essays that pretended to be about aesthetics but spoke in fact, about power. Nigeria’s robust literary press culture, once thick with newspaper columns and campus journals, fell under the weight of military dictatorships and the quiet violence of structural adjustment. Zimbabwe’s literary criticism, ever alert to betrayal, operated in a hush, the state watching from behind every printed word.

We like to believe the early 2000s broke the mold. Kwani?'s ink-stained manifestos, Chimurenga's pan-African swagger, Transition's diasporic provocations—Binyavanga's Granta broadside wasn't just an essay but a grenade rolled into the genteel literary tea party. This was the era when, as Billy Kahora observed, Nairobi's writers gathered not for bylines but for bloodsport debate. Yet even these insurgent platforms couldn't escape the old traps: the donor dollar's golden leash, the vanity of self-appointed vanguards, the tyranny of western prizes creeping into creative decisions. Their eventual decline left no monuments — just the afterimage of what might have been.

Enter the digital deluge: Saraba's minimalist elegance, Jalada's linguistic mutinies, Brittle Paper's curated irreverence. But as Grace Musila demonstrates with Kenya's 2008 post-election violence rumors in A Death Retold, digital communities weaponize ambiguity — a dynamic now inflecting literary debates. #WeAre52%'s 2015 protests forced renewed (if still inadequate) parliamentary debate on Kenya's dormant gender rule. The Lamuka Collective, crystallized by Kakwenza Rukirabashaija's 2022 arrest, had been testing WhatsApp dissent since the 2016 #ThisFlag protests. The contradiction is the point: every tool of control contains its own subversion. What matters isn't the platform, but the person who is rewriting its code.

Yet even as we hack these digital tools, older power structures simply rematerialize in new forms. What the digital age has done is not dissolve hierarchies but atomize them, multiplying the number of small kings while thinning the air for dissent. A timeline might appear polyphonic but still be governed by invisible algorithms, by economies of virality and the slow creep of self-censorship. A public square, when everyone is watching, is not a freer space — it is a stage. The paradox of openness is that it produces new forms of enclosure. As Musila notes, the digital public is not a community in any stable sense, but a moving cloud of affiliations, loyalties, and surveillance, where critique is always already a potential liability. In this sense, we have not escaped the pressures that shaped Staffrider or Transition; we have simply imported them into our browsers.

And so it happened. Prize culture — Caine, Etisalat, NLNG, Booker — reshaped African literary discourse into a cautious choreography. The unspoken rule: do not bite the hand that might one day shortlist you. Yet alternatives exist. Senegal’s Éditions Mémoire d’Encrier, founded in Haiti by Rodney Saint-Éloir and later rooted in Dakar, exemplifies a pan-African model, publishing Wolof translations of Maryse Condé alongside Francophone Senegalese writers, deliberately sidestepping the Parisian literary circuit. The Abantu Book Festival funds critics, not just laureates. These models won’t dismantle our dependence on the Booker, but they expand the imagination of what counts as success. The result is a pattern not merely of silence but of deferral. Critique displaced onto whispers, onto private messages, onto nods across rooms at literary festivals. The textures of this evasion differ by country: South Africa’s fraught race politics, Kenya’s urban-rural and diaspora tensions, Zimbabwe’s nationalist paranoia, Uganda’s institutional decay, Nigeria’s obsessive prize culture. The effect is identical.

What is not said accumulates, like sediment in a riverbed, reshaping the course of the conversation itself.

I remember, with a kind of embarrassed clarity, the year 2015: a single retweet, a friend’s unsparing review of a celebrated writer’s work, and the swiftness with which my literary community ‘cancelled’ me. There were name-calling, mudslinging and all kinds of insinuations from people I had loved and celebrated in the past. The insults themselves were forgettable — crude, lazy — but the ritual fascinated me: how quickly former allies performed their disgust, how efficiently the machinery of disavowal whirred to life. What shocked wasn’t the anger, but its asymmetry. There is no spectacle quite like a disavowal. What I learned then, what many of us learn eventually, is that the cost of critique is rarely distributed evenly. I adapted, as one does. Learned to couch critiques in disclaimers, to let silence pool where dissent might have been. Call it cowardice if you like; I know it by its older names. Women understand this calculus. Queer writers, those from the wrong ethnicity or diaspora — we’ve always known the price of unfeathered speech, the weight assigned to every syllable before it leaves our mouths.

By 2020, it was undeniable. A year of fractures, when everything seemed to break – pandemics, economies, old friendships – the brittle architecture of our literary alliances. An ethical debate about a writer dismissed from an influential journal metastasized into a generational war, though what we called generation was merely the mask for power. Elders mistook critique for betrayal; the young mistook tradition for tyranny. I was a part of the so-called ‘coup’ against those who had seen themselves as the establishment. Yet the issue was simpler than that. The coup was no coup. Like many of the fractures that year, from the Black Lives Matter protests in the US to the ENDSARS protests in Nigeria, what we were asking for was simply moral clarity. But those on the other side chose their own interpretations.

Eventually, tribal and ethnic loyalties — always the unburied past of African letters — surfaced with a ferocity that suggested none of us had been reading one another honestly. The only winner was silence. And yet, this tension is also a sign of life. It is why I could never take the notions about the death of our literature as it has been pushed in the past by critics Ikhide Ikheloa and, in recent times, Oris Aigbokhaevbo, seriously. To quarrel over tradition is to admit it matters. The true silence would be indifference.

These generational skirmishes matter precisely because, as Simon Gikandi reminds us that African literature is a long, unending argument between the living and the dead. What he did not say is what happens when the living fall quiet, and the dead keep speaking. In our case, the argument has stalled. In its place, a hush, heavy and adhesive, clogging inboxes and group chats.

In the absence of critique, we trade in insinuation, in subtweets, in lists of names not said aloud. But what happens when one side stops speaking? When the living retreat, leaving the dead to rehearse old positions in an empty hall? The risk is not merely stagnation but amnesia. Arguments, as Gikandi suggests, are generative because they stretch the memory of a culture, forcing it to account for its past even as it invents its future. Without them, the genealogies fray. Younger writers grow untethered, uncertain not just of where they stand but of what tradition they inherit. We forget who fought for what, and why it mattered. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that literary silence is rarely accidental — it is manufactured, often through fatigue, exile, co-optation, or fear.

A few outposts persist. A few essays published against the grain. But even there, something has shifted. Engagement, when it comes, is defensive, brittle. Criticism itself feels precarious, as though one could topple the whole edifice by naming what is already obvious. And so new books appear to muted receptions, works that might have demanded argument received with polite applause or worse, ignored. Pascale Casanova would recognize this drift: a literature shaped not by internal conversation but by the gravitational pull of international prizes and the wary pursuit of legitimacy.

Consider, for example, how the gravitational pull of the Caine Prize reshaped short story aesthetics in the early 2000s. Stories began to favor particular tropes: poverty narrated with lyric restraint, diaspora longing rendered in spare prose, political trauma leavened with dry humor. I could mention stories with these specific aesthetics, but I won’t, because that isn’t the point of this essay. My critique is at institutions and not at individuals, after all, the literary economy begets what it consumes. The Caine Prize didn’t just reward African writing; it taught us how to perform ‘African-ness’ for London. By 2015, the ‘lyric poverty’ story had become as predictable as a colonial ethnography, only this time, we were the native informants, polishing our suffering for the judges’ gaze. In this way, external prestige did not merely reward but actively molded what African literature made visible to itself.

But silence is not emptiness. It accumulates. It curdles. It produces its own kind of noise — spectral feedback of all the things unsaid, the critiques deferred, the arguments aborted. And though this too, is not unprecedented, Ato Quayson reminds us that the African Writers Series was born from precisely such a crisis, a refusal of colonial indifference — it feels, in this iteration, uniquely exhausting. Perhaps it is the speed of digital culture, or its tendency to metabolize scandal into banality, dissent into mere content. Where once a sharp essay might have lingered, sparked reply, now it is a 280-character flare, gone before the heat registers.

The danger is not that African literary criticism is dead, but that it has entered one of its cyclical retreats: those tense intervals between generations when no one is quite certain how to speak without being devoured by the speech act itself. And if history is any guide, it is in precisely these silences that the next provocations take shape — not in prize-winning books or on festival stages, but in obscure WhatsApp threads, anonymous blogs, impolite voice notes. Perhaps somewhere, someone is already restless.

Nigerian literature after the Biafran War fell into a comparable hush. The fervor of the 60s and 70s gave way to a weary detachment in the 80s, with many leading figures in exile, and those at home retreating into allegory or historical fiction. South Africa too, experienced a lull in the early 90s, a paradoxical quiet in the moment of apartheid’s collapse, when literature struggled to adjust to the dizzying new order. Zimbabwe's literary scene under late Mugabe became a terrain of ghost texts. Novels like Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight (1980) were initially banned; essays in Zimbabwe Writing journal faced redaction; and careers like those of Chenjerai Hove were stifled by state suspicion and paper shortages under structural adjustment. These silences were never empty; they were thick with the unsaid. Yet even these eras of repression bred countercurrents: Buchi Emecheta’s Lagos and Njabulo Ndebele’s Johannesburg proved that silence could be a canvas, not just a void. The problem was never the absence of speech, but its fractured circulation — a lesson for our digital age.

And yet. And yet.

The story we like to tell is one of rupture and renewal, of bold movements obliterating the past. But the real work is quieter, stranger. Not the invention of new spaces, but the cultivation of spaces that remember: where critique becomes care, disagreement doesn't mandate exile, and we finally learn to distinguish scandal from stakes. This won't be orderly. It won't be safe. It demands we risk the one currency literary culture truly values: proximity. And like all meaningful acts, it may arrive too late.

These spaces already stir to life — not as institutions, but as living ecosystems where dissent breathes as freely as praise. Picture it: literary salons migrating to encrypted chats, rogue librarians trading PDFs like samizdat, underground review circles where clout matters less than courage. These won't be the glossy, influencer-ready forums we've outgrown, but messy, breathing organisms — Telegram channels where critics spar without fear, pirate radio stations broadcasting banned verses, collectives where writers ghostwrite each other's most dangerous thoughts.

Let truth adapt as all suppressed things do: as satire when platforms censor, as graffiti when presses refuse ink, as oral histories when archives burn. Real literature has always thrived in interstices — the marginalia that becomes canon, the joke that conceals a manifesto, the deleted tweet that spawns a movement.

The proof surrounds us. The Johannesburg Review of Books operates like a digital speakeasy — no bouncers, no cover charge, just voices. Lolwe's crowdfunded pages demonstrate readers will pay for what prizes ignore. The African Speculative Fiction Society and Isele Magazine crown art without colonial approval. These aren't alternatives to the system; they're evidence we never needed it.

So let them call us unreasonable. The establishment misread our silence as surrender, our patience as permission. No more. Somewhere in Lagos, a teen is archiving this essay to a private server, planning to take its argument apart just for sports. In Nairobi, a writer is drafting a rebuttal under a burner account (I am here for it). In Harare, a circle is gathering where no algorithm can track them.

The revolution won't be curated — it is already humming in frequencies only the censored can hear.