“A Continent Learns to Tell its Story at Last”: Notes on the Caine Prize

Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”

“…Those who have received considerable acclaim include Nigeria’s Helon Habila, Sudan’s Leila Aboulela, and Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, whose debut novel We Need New Names (2013) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. The prize has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its valorization of unfavourable and stereotypical narratives about Africa (see Bady, 2016; Ikheloa, 2011; Pucherová, 2012).…”

“…In this regard, Nigerian critic Ikhide R. Ikheloa (2011) argues that many submissions may be deliberately skewed to impress Western audiences in general, and judges based in the US and the UK in particular. For her part, Duborota Pucherová (2012: 13) questions the role of the prize as a Western “institution” that operates as a “legitimizing agent” for African writing in English. She argues that the interplay between the political economy of publishing, marketing, and the institutional dynamics involved in the legitimation of postcolonial cultural expression inevitably results, through the prize, in the promotion of African literature as “an exotic commodity and thus contribute[s] to its ‘othering’ while appropriating into the Anglo-American cultural capital” (Pucherová, 2012: 21).…”

“…Therefore, although the story may also be read outside a strict post-apartheid South African spatio-temporal context, the foregoing primary and secondary evidence validates the specific allegorical and metonymic reading offered in this article. Yet, this does not mean, as Pucherová (2012) suggests, that Caine Prize stories necessarily rehash a specific and totalized representation of Africa. What it does mean however is that the story gestures towards a representative African social consciousness.…”