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 t… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

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.

Will they find only the record of African writing that has been served up from the conveyor belt of large corporate and indie publishing houses of western metropolis? Will some of the mediocre writing that is currently being peddled as the pinnacle of African excellence and genius by the legitimatising authority of the west be the only thing they have to subsist on and account for as our own contribution to civilisation and to the global archive of ideas? Or will they only find the realist tradition of writing bequeathed to us from the Achebe generation?

So much so that a figure like Achebe (never mind that he himself rejected the term) is heralded as the father of African literature despite being preceded by other writers such as Amos Tutuola who had published 3 books before him and even earlier writers in South Africa like Thomas Mofolo, writing in the 1800s and whose work was translated to English in the 1900s or The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, written by the Ethiopian emperor Galawdewos. This means that even the systemising and the categorising of our literary tradition is wrong, there’s a gap, a missing antecedent of writing in favour of writings and writers who pay homage to the metaphysics of English. Of course, this has meant that in the literary space, we have not been as prolific as our situation demands or the population of the continent.