Perhaps the biggest challenge of publishing in Nigeria is that it’s close to impossible to find a consistently reliable local printer. After several … - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

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.

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.

Let me begin, in 2003, I moved back to Nigeria to take up a position as a senior research fellow at Obafemi Awolowo university. The plan was to embark on a research project exploring how Yoruba women experience and conceptualise erotic love (This was before Lola Shoneyin gave us an incline into the erotic universe of Yoruba women in her brilliant, tragic-comic debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives).