It’s an eternal conundrum: alphabetical, genre, size, colour? “My fiance and I were trying to decide how to arrange our books and eventually agreed we were going to do it by genre,” says award-winning novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite. “So we were like, are we going to have an African literature section, and I was like nooooo, we can’t do that – but we were having to put the books in all sorts of different places – and I realised that I wanted to see all the African books together – and I felt so guilty! So we ended up with an ‘African’ shelf.”

Braithwaite, the young Nigerian writer whose darkly comic debut crime novel My Sister the Serial Killer garnered a slew of prizes as well as a place on the Booker longlist, is on a roll on the subject of pigeonholing. She features in the BBC documentary, Africa Turns the Page, in which historian David Olusuga unpacks the compelling story of how the continent has quietly, steadily risen since the mid 20th-century to become a literary superpower.

It traces its steady rise from Chinua Achebe – the ‘father of modern African literature’ – and his seminal Things Fall Apart of 1958, through the roots of the acclaimed African Writers Series, plus vintage interviews with such luminaries as Buchi Emecheta, whose work often drew on her own experience of life as an immigrant and a single parent; to the first African laureate Wole Soyinka, and bringing the narrative up to date with 2019’s glittering Booker Prize award ceremony, scooped by Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

“I read everything as a child,” Braithwaite says. “But my relationship with African literature came much later on, partly because I was in England during my formative years. I read a lot of the classics – The Little Princess, Anne of Green Gables and that sort of stuff – then I graduated to Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment. And I know people talk about not seeing themselves in books, but I saw myself all the time because I was a tomboy, so whenever I found a tomboy I would immediately identify. But I also did have that strange thing when I was young that I only wrote white characters. Malorie Blackman (British Children’s Laureate from 2013-15) was one of the first writers who allowed me to be in a world with black characters. I don’t think I started writing black characters until I was about 19.”

She’s making up for lost time now: “I love The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka which I keep meaning to read again, it made a huge impression on me. And Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives – it was funny, it was dark, it was impactful. And Buchi Emecheta, who is amazing, and I’m so ashamed to say I only discovered about three years ago.”

The Lagos-based writer also finds her home city a huge source of inspiration. “There’s almost too much content here, if that makes sense,” she says. “You’ve got all the different tribes, you’ve got a lot of different languages, a lot of different religions – and there’s a lot of conflict, even though it’s not always apparent. Often Nigerians will remind you that Nigeria didn’t become Nigeria organically, it was Britain that made us so, and sometimes it feels we’re a country that wasn’t meant to be a country – with all the difficulties and complications that brings. There’s so much to work with, you don’t have to look far!”

Has she ever felt pigeonholed as a black or African writer? She thinks for a minute before crediting her agent and team for a “brilliant” level of support and the freedom to write in whatever style she pleases. “I definitely don’t want to stick to any one genre,” she says. “I like to play around with whatever idea or style comes to me, which can be difficult if people have identified you as a certain type of writer,” before adding, with a laugh: “The covers with the sunrise and the tree in the corner? I don’t get those! I think I’ve been really lucky – the ones who went before me have dealt with it so in a way I don’t have to.” The upbeat message of the documentary is that the label ‘African literature’ is just a label that saves you time in your search for something excellent to read.

Africa Turns the Page: The Novels that Shaped a Continent is on BBC4. Learn more here.

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Published on 07/10/2020