How to write about Africa

GRANTA SPRING ISSUE 93: The Magazine of New Writing, €15 in bookshops
Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkenss” or “Safari” in your title... Also useful are words such as “Guerillas”, “Timeless”, “Primordial” and “Tribal”.

Never have  a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breast: use these.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country... Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.

Binyavanga Wainaina instructs, in his essay for the current issue of Granta, ‘the View from Africa'.  
Ivan Vladislavic writes of his hometown, Johannesburg, “a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries”.

“Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost.

“In your alarmed house, you wake in the small hours to find the room unnaturally light. The keys on the touch pad are aglow with a luminous, clincical green, like a night light for a child who's afraid of the dark.”

Adewale Maja-Pearce writes of returning to Lagos from London in 1993, to claim property inherited from his father, a man who had rejected his English wife and their children and lived with a second family in Lagos. He writes of his father with the cold distance of John McGahern, setting it down, not attempting to understand.  

There is much more: Daniel Bergner on the UN in Liberia, a story by Nadine Gordimer, more fiction, reportage, photographs.
The moralising, despair and elation of much writing about “Africa” is absent. Instead, this is just a motley collection of writers with different things to say about things they've seen. That makes the book a paradox: it owes its existence to the trends it sets out to counter and critique – without a tendency to generalise Africa, The View from Africa would be hopelessly inchoate. But it's the quality of the writing that stands out. No matter the politics, this is great reading. And it ignores Binyavanga Wainaina's prescription:

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissance, because you care.

Colin Murphy