In October 2023, Bloomsbury began to republish titles from the vaunted African Writers Series, an imprint that published 359 books between 1962 and 2003. Put out by the London-based publishing house Heinemann, most of the early AWS entries were originally written in English, but soon translations from other languages into English appeared. The AWS sought to establish a center for African writers, ensuring they were read in countries other than their own. For African readers, the AWS soon became the dominant way of identifying and consuming the broader category of so-called “African literature.” As the Ugandan journalist David Kaiza once put it, “To a grateful continent, the series gifted a plot to plant a cultural flag; appendages no more, here is the collection of our own worldview: here our Shakespeare; here our Hard Times.”’

When Heinemann stopped publishing the series, most of the books went out of print and became almost impossible to find. Those that survived were generally by writers whose fame had taken hold outside the series’s bedrock audience — authors like Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Buchi Emecheta, who all hewed closely to the AWS model. AWS novels tended to follow a similar script: a protagonist, usually male, often educated in the Western system, struggles to locate himself within both his African tradition and a European Christian tradition, a struggle that ultimately leads to his downfall. The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah disdained this model as a box constructed by a British publisher within which books by African writers had to fit. For him, the AWS “did its best to stunt the growth of African talent.” And so it happened that the most gifted writers of the post-independence 1960s set — including Armah, Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel in 1986, and the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who did not write about an African identity forged in relation to colonialism — found themselves on the fringes of the AWS canon.

Most Anglophone writers from African countries accrue cultural capital through association with literary outfits in the imperial core: an American or British publisher, agent, or prize. Abdulrazak Gurnah, the most recent African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, had all three — book deals with Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury, a big agent in London, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1994. For a spell, he was even editorial advisor at the AWS. And yet, for him, the system didn’t quite work. Gurnah had been publishing for decades, but remained relatively unknown. Even for keen readers of his books, the 2021 Nobel win was a pleasant surprise; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the poster boy of AWS, was the expected choice among African writers. But neither he nor Achebe — whose Things Fall Apart inaugurated the AWS, and who was the series’s first editor — ever won it.

As some of the original AWS titles return to print and the Bloomsbury imprint seeks out new African writers “to add their voices to the project,” I have no idea what comes next. Will the series resume its former central position for African writers, or will a newer publishing outfit become dominant? There are now a number of African, English-language publishers — such as Cassava Republic and Masobe Books — that publish African novelists, but they all have to reckon with the fact that global capitalism pushes Anglophone writers from the Global South toward publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. that can offer bigger advances, better funded production, and more established distribution networks. There is little incentive for a writer as famous as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for instance, to publish with an African publisher. Books like hers are published first in the West, and then East African or West African rights are sold to local publishers. Even the AWS reissues, under the auspices of a British publisher, might be overlooked in a market flush with titles distributed by the Big Five American houses.

The protagonist of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men (2021) is a Senegalese writer called Diégane Latyr Faye, who is obsessed with a fictionalized version of Ouologuem (whose acclaim as the first African writer to win a prestigious French literary award was marred by later accusations of plagiarism). Throughout the novel, Diégane and his colleagues, fellow African writers living in Paris, have lengthy arguments of the sort that plagued early AWS cohorts, questioning what it means that their literary careers exist entirely in a foreign country. “We bemoaned the fact that some of our elders had fallen into the slave hold that was complacent exoticism,” Diégane says. “Those same forerunners, enjoined to be African but not too African, in obeying these two equally absurd imperatives, forgot to be writers.”

The Most Secret Memory of Men is, in my view, the finest book to be written by an African author in years. Part of its point is that this is a useless designation, that modern African writers shouldn’t be seen as just that and nothing more. And Sarr attempted to buck the trend with more than just self-critique — he co-published his novel with both a Senegalese and French publisher. Still, when his novel won the Prix Goncourt, Sarr was lauded as the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to win the prize, victim of the very thing Diégane protested, just like his hero Ouologuem, whose Bound to Violence (1968) was marketed by its publishers as the “first truly African novel.”

In what is either a cruel irony or an elegant exhibition of the state of affairs, when Other Press published The Most Secret Memory of Men in the U.S. last year, it also reissued Bound to Violence. The accusations of plagiarism that led to the latter’s fade into the background were, in 2023, reframed, per the New York Times, as “an artistic technique” or “assemblage” à la Picasso. For Ouologuem’s part, after being promptly dropped by his Western publishers, he refused to defend himself or try to salvage his global literary reputation. Apparently, until he died in Mali in relative obscurity, he wouldn’t even speak French.