In an interview on White in Africa

What is African literature?

It comes in different varieties. One is African literature written by Africans, and which in South Africa has a particular dimension. Another is white writers writing about Africa. Some people deny there’s any such thing as “white writing” but in fact there clearly is. White writing is a phrase used by John Coetzee [Nobel Prize for Literature 2003]. It’s about the predicament of the white person in Africa – people who have been dropped down, willingly or unwillingly, in an alien environment, and who try to make an accommodation with it. Now a writer like Nadine Gordimer [Nobel Prize for Literature 1991] thinks she’s made such an accommodation with Africa that there is no such thing as white writing at all, but when you look at her books they’re essentially about the same problem: the white man in Africa. It goes back to Conrad and probably further.

Who would you like to start with?

Let’s start with Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe. Achebe is black, but we would think of this book as extremely European and dating back to an older writing tradition in Africa, aimed at people who have an English or British education. It’s a totally wonderful book about a man who engineers a coup in a West African country and what happens to him. Remarkable resonances now, of course. But it’s about what happens to him and his group of friends. The whole coup fails, the conspirators variously executed or assassinated, but it ends up with a fairly ritualistic ceremony in which, despite everything, African values reassert themselves.

Despite what?

In spite of the country’s Westernisation. It’s a Sandhurst trained army officer who tries to take over the country. But what Achebe is saying is that the country will essentially remain African.

And what would that African-ness comprise?

I think it would comprise a large dependence on ritual and traditional African beliefs. Ben Okri, writer of The Famished Road, once gave me an example of that. He told me that if a businessman, going to a meeting with British Airways on some important contract, saw a chicken in the road on the way, he’d go to a soothsayer to ask what that chicken was trying to tell him, even at the risk of being late for the meeting.