r/africanliterature

Hey, I run Nantygreens, a small literary platform that's been publishing poetry, short stories, and essays from Nigerian and African writers since 2011. Mostly volunteer-run, no funding, just people who believe the work deserves a home.

Earlier this year we put together our first anthology, 3 Poems and Some Stories — a collection of some of the strongest pieces we've published over the years. It's free to download, and if any of it resonates, there's an option to pay whatever feels fair. Every bit goes toward putting out the next volume.

If you like African writing that isn't trying to perform for anyone, it might be worth ten minutes.

Link: https://nantygreens.com/3-poems-some-stories/

Happy to answer anything about the platform or the writers in it if anyone's curious.

I was expecting a dense theoretical slog and instead got one of the sharpest, angriest, yet most accurate essays I've ever read in a while.

In essence, Césaire says what actually horrified Europe about Nazism wasn't the cruelty itself. Europe had been fine with that cruelty for centuries — as long as it was aimed at colonized people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What made Hitler unforgivable, in his reading, was that he turned those same methods on white Europeans, on European soil. So the violence was not the problem, but the where and whom was.

This reminded me about the early coverage of the war in Ukraine, when reporters kept expressing shock that this was happening to "people who look like us." It seems that, 70 years later, the reflex (and maybe the underlying values?) is still the same.

The essay, albeit short, is rich with illuminating reflections. One other idea is the argument against then European claim that Africans and other colonized people were uncivilized before Europe brought them the "enlightenment". As an example, Césaire leans on the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius as a "good" European witness who admitted African societies were sophisticated. Interestingly though, and this is not in the essay, if you dig into Frobenius, he couldn't actually accept that Africans built those achievements themselves. He invented a whole lost "African Atlantis" theory to explain the art and sophistication. This idea is the intellectual cousin of "aliens built the pyramids."

Anyway. "Discourse on Colonialism" is wildly relevant for something written mid-colonial-era.

Do you think there's a meaningful causal link between Europe's colonial practices and the violence of Nazism?

We discuss Cesaire's essay at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, I will link it in the comments.

This is my first book by a Cameroonian author, and I am beyond pleased. Beyond pleased not because it wasn’t a traumatic book (title is telling), but because it is so incredibly well written.

I can’t even find the words to describe how exquisite Xaviere’s writing is. I mean, she spent about 12 pages describing the first time Bessem and Fatima met, and that’s coming from someone who usually does not enjoy overly descriptive books. Somehow, she made every page worth reading. This book is so love-letter coded.

Fatima and Bessem meet in August 2004. Bessem notices Fatima for the first time on the football field, muscular, focused, the only woman playing, and completely at ease. Barely 20 pages into the book, I already knew the beginning and the end of their story. I even had a hazy idea of the middle, but I also knew there was so much more to learn.

It is such a sad story, and I wanted to know every part of it because their story didn’t end after Fatima’s “disappearance” following a police raid at the only gay bar in town.

In Cameroon, where same-sex relationships are criminalized, the odds are stacked against Bessem and Fatima from the very beginning. Things become even worse when Fatima’s older brother, Mahamadou, a staunch hypocrite of a Muslim, discovers their relationship. He violently assaults them, an incident that ultimately precedes the police raid. To be frank, because of the reality of living in a country where same-sex relationships are punishable by law, I couldn’t help but think both women should have been much more careful.

The relationship between Fatima and Bessem felt like genuine love. I loved reading about their time together because it felt so real. Of course they had ups and downs like every relationship, but the love Bessem had for Fatima never disappeared. Even thirteen years after Fatima vanished, she was still searching for her in every place she could think of.

Thirteen years later, Bessem is now a university professor living a relatively quiet life, occasionally and secretly dating other women, but she has never truly moved on. After unexpectedly seeing a mutual friend, the last person who may have seen Fatima, she embarks on one final search for her lost love.

Beyond the romance, I also learned so much about Cameroon’s culture, religion, politics (as much as a fictional novel can teach), and the Anglophone-Francophone conflict. And can we talk about Jamal? Bessem’s male best friend, who is also gay, marrying a woman… sigh. The many ways people are forced to survive in societies that refuse to let them live authentically.

When I finished reading this book, all I could say was, wow… wow… wow. Zero complaints. It really does end in tears. I happened to finish it on a flight, and maybe if I hadn’t been surrounded by strangers, I might have cried.

This was such a beautiful debut for me into Cameroonian literature, and I will definitely be reading more from Musih Tedji Xaviere. It is heartbreaking, beautifully written, and one of the best-written books I’ve read this year.