While influential accounts grasp African realism as the child of decolonisation in West Africa, we trace its longue durée from formative events and institutions such as colonial and Christian publishing networks in Benin, Cape Verde, and South Africa; through the development of the idea of the African realist novel by intellectuals such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong at African universities and literary conferences, such as the 1962 Makerere Conference and 1963 Fourah Bay conference; to contemporary permutations such as the historical novel. If the purpose of the African realist novel is to give shape to regional history, we find the irreal aesthetics of Bessie Head’s Maru (1971) and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard no more or less “real” than the ideal-typical realism of Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy (1956–1957). We conclude that “realism” and its various antinomies (modernism, naturalism, irrealism, etc.) must ultimately be “reconstellate[d]” in terms of “each text’s relation to history itself” (Nicholas Brown 2–3).