There are some infrastructure challenges but they are challenges that I see as opportunities. In Nigeria and across the continent, you have a publish… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.

African literature today is still struggling to emerge from the shadow of that 1962 conference, which according to Mukoma, set in motion the hegemony of the realist tradition in African literature. The realist tradition inaugurated by the Makerere Brotherhood (and yes, we can talk in terms of brotherhood because only two female writers were present) not only disregarded and arrested the growth of writing in African languages, it curtailed the growth of writing styles and flights of fancy that may be more attuned to some of the fantastical wanderings of nocturnal storytelling traditions that many may be familiar with.

It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather (as we are here today) so that we can salivate over the apparent genius of the solitary writer while we sublimate the collective geniuses (the editor, book designer, proof reader, copy editor, publicist, sales people, indexer, the literary critic, the blogger, instagramer etc.) that are involved in the production of any one book for the celebration of the singular authorial voice.