This chapter offers a brief historical overview of selected works by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Legson Kayira, Charles Mungoshi, Aldino Muianga, Miriam Tlali, and Yvonne Vera to foreground the historical and material presence of migrants from other Southern African countries in Johannesburg’s literary archive. Tracing trajectories of change and continuity in the post-apartheid migrant city, the chapter shows how South African texts have shifted from employing intra-African migrants as marginal figures or metaphors for post-apartheid urban precariousness and/or multiculture toward more nuanced depictions of migrants as embodied urban agents post-2008. While Johannesburg at best serves as a fragile home for migrant and diasporic characters who often remain dislocated or temporary sojourners in the city, the urban imaginaries by intra-African diasporic authors bring into focus narratives obfuscated by a narrow linguistic and national literary history of Johannesburg, reclaiming the continent’s long-standing place in the city’s literary archive.

The past is freighted for queer Africans. Because of the ubiquitous accusation of being “un-African,” envisioning historical existence for same-gender-loving and gender-diverse Africans offers the promise of establishing cultural authenticity in the present. Queer pasts, however, tend to be elusive, complex, and contested – as recent novels explore. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea gives readers glimpses of a queer relationship from the past through two unreliable witnesses recounting their differing versions of what happened many years later, underlining the inevitable mediation of memory and narration. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing places a more straightforwardly “gay” character in the 1790s, but this biracial, culturally hybrid figure entangles homosexuality with the history of slavery. Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu and Nakisanze Segawa’s The Triangle take on a queer past that has been leveraged for homophobic ends, rather than leading to an acceptance of gay people – the story of late nineteenth-century Bugandan leader Mwanga II. Mwanga’s execution of Christian pages has been represented by missionaries then and Ugandan politicians now as the result of demonic homosexual desire. Kintu’s and The Triangle’s counter-interpretations of this historical nexus show the past and present to be linked sites of political struggle, rather than seeing the past as the source of an authenticated belonging.

Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.