Thanks guys—I’ve gotten inboxes from some of you who seem to think I’ve given up on writing,which is impossible for me to do.When I speak of “craft” & “African writer” it’s to express how “African” is used to preclude one in literature/art, as in life,from the category of “human” https://twitter.com/NovuyoRTshuma/status/1283026209312583683

To be “African” is to be fetishized— African subjects can only tell us about being “African,” not “human.” So when someone reads about “Africans,” it’s to learn about that “special category.” When I pick up a book populated by white subjects it’s to learn about being “human.”

This is an even more intractable situation if one is say an Anglophone African etc—having been violently coralled into the “modern world” via colonialism, which we are ie irrevocably global in our lives—it is to be as a consumer/spectator,not creator or participant, in the world.

This feels false—if we think just of the way we, “Africans,” consume art—I see us discussing it here all the time, movies, series etc—it is to participate as humans. So when being “African” is a category to render one unintelligible, to me that is nonsense.

There’s a lot one can say about this. In my essay on HoS in the Journal of Southern African Studies,I talk about craft,& posit that “Zimbabwe’s history” is the history of the world—just like “Britain’s history” is the history of the world—bc the world formed that history & space

When I read Dostoevsky,Morrison, Roy,Owuor etc,I see the world. That being “African” & writing about African subjects synthesizing life in “Africa” means I’m talking only to or about “Africa”—never the world—can only be bc Africans are not seen as part of the world,even as we are

I personally as an “African writer” get tired of it—I get tired bc these are false yet powerful categories, they impede the kind of work I want to do or discourage me from such work, you get sucked into ontologically false conversations that distort you as an “African”

There were the African writer festivals in Germany,where we were expected to delineate “Africanness” for a white audience—not meeting as human beings. “Teach Africa.” It is nonsense. For me such spaces are to meet other African writers,catch up on gossip & plan future exploits.

As an artist,if one determines we should meet, let us meet as human beings. The moment a white audiences expects to meet me as an “African,” they are asking for a performance. I mean,what is Africa? I certainly,like anyone,know how to perform Africa,but what is the point of that?