Shortly after the publication of Slow Man (2005), Coetzee addressed a query to the chief librarian of the University of Adelaide concerning the preservation of his electronic documents. ‘My manuscripts, since the mid-1990s’, Coetzee explained to Ray Choate, ‘are for the most part on computer disks of one kind or another, and I would like to ensure that they survive uncorrupted in case some scholar of the next generation is interested.’

Towards the end of 1979, soon after the Waiting for the Barbarians manuscript had been completed, Coetzee began thinking about his next book and embarked on a lengthy writing process that would eventually result in the publication of Life & Times of Michael K (1983). As discussed more fully in Chapter 4, the influence of photography and film on Coetzee’s second book, In the Heart of the Country, was formative and pervasive and was also acknowledged by Coetzee.1 But it is not generally recognised that this interest in the montage effects of avant-garde cinema persisted in subsequent fictions. Precisely during the formative period of the genesis of Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee was drafting a screenplay version of In the Heart of the Country, and these parallel creative writing processes, in different genres, led to fascinating intermedial entanglements that were ultimately generative for the emerging novel. While writing Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee was re-envisaging his earlier novel as a film, in effect re-imagining its story through the cinematic lens.

The African child soldier narrative is a dystopic sub-genre, underscoring the futility of war. Its origins can be traced back to the 1985 publication of Ken Saro-wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Subsequently, many novels, memoirs, and films about African children brutalized by war, were created. These narratives included magical elements in which the speaking voices are cynical and unreliable. Single-author memoirs like China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier (2004) or Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007) reveal how the child soldier, horrified by war, comes to terms with the sociocultural forces arrayed against her. Collaborative memoirs, such as Emmanuel Jal’s and Meghan Lloyd Davies’ War Child (2009), or Grace Akallo and Faith McDonnell’s Girl Soldier (2007), feature survival strategies that assume greater importance than the war itself. Novels about child soldiers, such as Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog (2015) and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2015), contain graphic accounts of war, filled with unresolved contradictions. Other fiction, such as Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen, and Me (2005) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007) contain magical apparitions and mutilated bodies framed within wars that appear endless. These variations highlight the complexities within this sub-genre.

With the development of Zimbabwean theatre from oral performance to written theatrical texts, certain genres began to emerge. This chapter focuses on a disquisition of such kinds of playwriting and the history or contexts that gave birth to the genres. It proceeds from the understanding that genres do not preexist, but are created by scholars, marketers, and creatives. When a genre is fully formed, new works by new and established playwrights use the same generic features of the old genre but also propose new codes through additions of distinctive conventions causing mutations to take place. Genres are therefore temporary markers that playwrights and critics use to stay within the bounds of comprehensibility and to manage expectations by consumers. While we may develop a language to name these genres, more and more playwrighting in Zimbabwe, and in Africa in general, is suggesting more new genres than we have a language to name them. In this chapter, and so as to escape the risk of mutation, two Zimbabwean genres, domestic drama, and protest theatre have been singled out to discuss the context in which particular genres emerge as well as a few taxonomies.

Fiction writing in the Hausa language started in the colonial period, and continued in the post-independence period with most novels written by men. The 1980s marked a watershed moment for Hausa literature with the emergence of new female writers. Popular Hausa fiction, known as Kano Market Literature soon followed, taking the form of print novellas often divided into numbered parts dealing with a variety of themes, including love, polygamy, and socioeconomic challenges. Subsequently, writers’ clubs were established as were radio programs devoted to serialization of Hausa novels. The emergence of the internet in the late 1990s further transformed Hausa fiction. Digital technology and social media platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Wattpad, made it possible to share fiction, and websites dedicated to buying and/or borrowing fiction sprang up. This chapter traces the emergence and development of Hausa literature by assessing the political economy of production, distribution, and consumption through new forms of distribution via the radio and the internet. The use of various technologies for disseminating Hausa literature calls into question the assumption that Hausa fiction can survive only in print form.

Protest poetry has long been a central element within South Africa’s literary culture and was arguably the defining genre of the country’s anti-apartheid literature. This chapter traces this history from the 1950s to the present. It argues that the genre has evolved through a rolling wave of distinct literary moments deeply linked to the prevailing politics of the time. These include the Colored poetry of the 1950s, the anti-poetics of the 1970’s Black Consciousness affiliated Soweto Poets, the dramatic worker poets of the 1980s, and today’s #Fallist reincarnation of the genre. In offering this history, the chapter disputes traditional understandings of protest and, instead, proposes a new definition of a genre that is characterized by a call for change that is never achieved. Moreover, it highlights the importance of audience and demonstrates how each wave, describing an increasingly desperate need for social and political change, has been addressed to an ever-widening demographic.

After the publication of Dusklands in 1974, film became an increasingly central interest for Coetzee, shaping his creativity in multiple ways, eventually culminating three years later in a cinematically inflected novel. Notes composed at the end of the writing of the ‘Vietnam Project’ already show the growing pull of cinema, as Coetzee began thinking about his next novel: ‘New book: film script, with explicit commentary’.1 In the final stages of writing Dusklands, Coetzee appeared to be searching for a form of writing that had the visual force of large-scale, high-resolution moving images projected on the cinematic screen. Thinking about the power of film, Coetzee observed that by contrast, television’s ‘essential failings were its tiny screen and the poor definition of its images’, making it unable to ‘convey anything of the dynamism’ of the war.

African prison writings began to emerge as a recognizable literary genre in the early twentieth century during colonial rule when imprisonment became widespread and institutionalized. Thus, the initial development of African prison writings is a manifestation of and a confrontation with European colonial modernity, which used the carceral system as a coercive instrument against restive populations. The further transmutations of this genre are inseparable from political developments on the continent. Although a few prison writings were written by white prisoners, it was when Western-educated blacks were incarcerated for anticolonial agitations that African prison writing emerged in the form of resistance literature. Ironically, many postcolonial African regimes imprisoned an evolving black intelligentsia and dissenters. They in turn wrote about their imprisonment and expressed their disillusionment with the excesses of African nationalist leaders, most of whom had experienced imprisonment by colonial authorities. Currently, prison literature has diverged from its early anticolonial and antipostcolonial political focus. It now includes writings by and about prisoners inspired by neoliberal notions of human rights and the idea that self-introspection manifested in confessional writing is therapeutic and can reduce recidivism. This chapter explores the origin, entrenchment, and the current spread of African prison writings.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of the conditions under which natural resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes pursue or eschew the liberalization of domestic economic regulations in the twenty-first century. I term this the rent-conditional reform theory. This model focuses on three salient groups: political elites who devise and implement policy, economic elites who enjoy non-competitive privileges, and the non-elite citizenry who may or may not participate in private entrepreneurship. This model illustrates the demands and constraints both economic elites and the citizenry impose upon political elites amid the pursuit of economic liberalization.

Critical scholarship on travel writing in Africa has largely concentrated on texts by European travelers or Eurocentric manifestations of the genre in Africa. A consequence of this is the inference that Africa has a scant body of travel texts or lacks a tradition of travel writing. This chapter disrupts this view and traces the genre of travel writing in Africa by circumventing the rigid generic boundaries. It maps the many dis/continuities of forms and shapes of the genre in Africa from before the twentieth century to date. This study offers a survey of the generic characteristics of African travel writing informed by a multitude of conditions and realities of writing and positionality. It explores the tradition of African travel writing complicated by the conflicting histories of imperialism and the writers’ cultural realities and engagement with space; the triangulation of travel, labor, and leisure in African travel writing; the politics of deconstructing a Eurocentric form; and the transformation of the genre in the digital space in Africa. In this chapter, African travel writing serves as a basis for theorizing travel and the African continent functions as a point of departure and arrival in networks of travel and writing.