This chapter explores the rise of the graphic narrative in Africa – starting with cartoons and comic strips and culminating in contemporary graphic novels and popular comics series. It outlines three key historical developments in the genre. It further argues that comic strips were vehicles for the colonial enterprise: they occurred in colonial journals and magazines in the 1930s/1940s and reflected colonial ideology through mimicry and racial stereotype. Second, cartoons and comics became important tools in anticolonial movements, such as in Nigeria in the 1950s/1960s and apartheid-era South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. Cartoons turned satire and mockery back on the colonizer, while comics were used to subvert the visual language of colonial oppression and to encourage resistance. Finally, didactic comics and graphic narratives (pamphlets, posters, and free-standing albums) have formed part of government policy and development work from the 1990s to the present day. This history has informed present day production. Contemporary graphic narratives combine rich local visual traditions with global trends to negotiate identity, politics, and social change. The chapter ends by examining four examples of more “serious” graphic novels, histories, and memoirs that are indicative, rather than representative, of the diversity of contemporary production.

Coetzee’s assimilation of photography in prose – through references to images, by way of ocular metaphors, or through an attentiveness to framing, point of view and lighting – owes a debt to a very early and enduring fascination with the camera. He grew up in a family in which photography was ubiquitous, with his mother, the family photographer, making a visual record of domestic life. The family photograph albums, now preserved in the Texas archive, are testimony to the way the family recorded their life across generations. In one of these albums, titled in Coetzee’s own handwriting ‘Photos Ancient and Modern’, there are pages full of photographs of the young Coetzee growing up. But the experience of the child being the object of the camera gaze was also inverted in at least one fascinating moment: it is a remarkable, imperfectly framed image of the mother, captioned ‘Snap of Mother, taken by John. 16th July 1942’. Already at the age of two years, if we take the caption at face value, we must assume that the young Coetzee was a photographer. In taking the Brownie camera – with which he was incessantly being snapped by his mother – into his own hands, the child reversed the roles and turned the lens back at the photographer.

This chapter applies the rent-conditional reform theory to the case of Nigeria across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It illustrates how, under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Goodluck Jonathan’s government coupled company creation liberalization for would-be entrepreneurs with generous awards and support for strategically placed business magnates and interest groups. Once the price of oil began to fall, and the disintegration of the PDP’s elite coalition gathered pace, Jonathan’s government quickly jettisoned the reform initiative within the Corporate Affairs Commission to placate rapidly defecting business magnates. Following the election of Muhammadu Buhari, the business creation reform agenda was similarly manipulated to develop an alliance between his nascent government and the elite business class. Once that relationship was in place, and oil rents were recovering, generous privileges were once again afforded to key magnates, and corporate regulatory liberalization went into overdrive in 2016, culminating in 2020 with the reform of the thirty-year-old Companies and Allied Matters Act.

This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

This chapter advances three arguments about the politics of company creation regulation in Saudi Arabia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. First, the liberalization of these regulations was rent-conditional. The formation and implementation of these policies occurred during periods of rising or high oil rents, but were absent during the downward trend in oil prices between June 2014 and January 2016. Second, relative to earlier periods, the ability of business and religious elites to veto economic reforms was diminished. Third, in light of this shift, the threat of popular unrest to regime stability had a non-trivial, causal effect upon the pursuit and pausing of company creation liberalization. Non-elite pressure on the Al Saud’s rule reached an unparalleled fever pitch during the Arab Spring. Record-breaking transfer payments to appease discontent were feasible in 2011, allowing regulatory liberalization to continue. However, when the fiscal realities of the 2014 oil price slump became apparent, liberalization and public munificence were sacrificed to inhibit the development of economic power outside the regime’s coalition and to maintain comparatively high military spending. Only once oil rents recovered would the reform agenda be revived.

In 1973 Coetzee gave an early manuscript version of what would later become ‘The Vietnam Project’ to his friend Daniel Hutchinson. In a covering note he drew attention to the parallels between the two stories of Dusklands that were, on the face of it, worlds apart: ‘You will notice that these two stories are thematically and formally identical. I am puzzled by this phenomenon and would be most interested to have it explained to me.’1 ‘The Vietnam Project’ was set in contemporary America, and in the story’s centre is Eugene Dawn’s marital and mental breakdown against the background of his classified Vietnam War research; ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ is a semi-fictionalised account of a late-eighteenth-century Cape frontiersman who embarks on an expedition to Namaqualand. In a subsequent interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee thought that the two narratives shared ideas, ‘but otherwise the relation is loose’.

This chapter examines the contemporary upsurge of African speculative fiction. After the global financial crisis that started in 2007, the production, circulation, and consumption of African speculative fiction (ASF) increased significantly. Starting as a relatively unknown and independent phenomenon, authors, publics, and publishers globally embraced ASF in the long decade that followed the Global financial crisis (2007–2020). Now, ASF authors and fans have both constructed a cultural infrastructure in which the genre can flourish, most notably in the form of the online ASF magazine Omenana and the African Speculative Fiction Society. Moreover, ASF works compete for major awards and involve publishers from the core of the world-system: for example, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Disney started producing Iwájú (Nelson 2021). This chapter provides insight into this ASF phenomenon. It discusses why the upsurge took place, how the history of the genre before the upsurge has been understood, and what the role is of terms like “African,” “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” “Afrofuturism,” and “Africanfuturism” for understanding the genre. Finally, it provides an outlook on ASF’s possible future.

The shairi is the genre of Swahili poetry characterized by an incredible versatility. For more than 200 years, it has traveled across media, from dance poetry to manuscripts in Arabic script, radio programs, WhatsApp groups, and school curricula; it has spilled over into hip-hop lyrics. It encompasses poems that have often been treated as belonging to mutually exclusive categories, like “traditional,” “modern,” and “popular,” and associated with different temporalities, spaces, and actors. Thus, as the chapter shows, the shairi lends itself to think about genre as a flexible frame. It zeros in on its capacity to be constituted in dynamic relations, defined by but also defining changing social worlds. By drawing on “historical poetics,” the chapter shows the multiple intersecting ancestries of the genre, sometimes forgotten sometimes rearticulated, that account for the genre’s flexibility. The genre’s critical potential lies particularly in challenging persisting notions of a teleological literary history.

This chapter retraces the theoretical debates on autobiographical writing in Africa and proposes a pluralistic approach to the continuum of self-referential genres allowing for the writing of the self in postcolonial African contexts. Focusing on Francophone West Africa, firstly, the autobiographical imperative in the colonial French school system where writing on oneself was an imposed educational practice, is pointed out. Secondly, the function of autobiographical writing as a deconstruction of the condescending colonial ethnographical gaze on African cultures from the 1950s onwards is underlined. Using Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s set of memoirs as prominent examples, the chapter further elaborates on both the distress and richness of cultural hybridity in postcolonial life writing before venturing into the specificities of women writers’ contributions. Ken Bugul’s series of not less than five texts marked by their volatile autobiographical pact, oscillating between a referential and an autofictional mode, is analyzed in more detail. The chapter shows that African autobiographical writing in French has not produced a fixed genre that would imitate the colonizer’s canon, but rather that it is inventive in mixing and innovating established genres such as memoir, autoethnography, travelogue, childhood narrative, and autofiction.

In the run-up to the publication of J.M. Coetzee’s first book, Dusklands (1974), Ravan Press’s publisher, Peter Randall, asked the new author for a photograph of himself for the book’s jacket cover. Coetzee was initially reluctant to provide a picture and also reticent to supply biographical information about his schooling, family background and personal interests, because, as he put it, such information ‘suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in’.

This chapter provides an overview of the core findings of the book. It outlines the key theoretical and methodological insights gained through a qualitative comparison of the politics of corporate regulation and liberalization in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, including the introduction of the theory of rent-conditional reforms. It further outlines the relevance of the rent-conditional reform theory to ongoing debates around the political and economic effects of natural resource wealth, particularly amid the potential global transition toward a less carbon-intensive economy.