If we do not start the deliberate project of infusing our vision of the world now with what we want to see, if do not start publishing in vast quanti… - 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.

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?

If we don’t like the structure of our present is, if we think the books by African writers coming out of the western publishing establishments do not speak to the fullness and totality of the reality we see around us or how we want to appear now and into the future, we have a responsibility in the present for the sake of tomorrow to flip the script and create our own publishing infrastructure across the continent that is more than the skeletal ones that we currently subsist on and over-celebrate.