You Should Read African Fiction

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” - Jean Rhys

There are two things I hope to achieve from writing this article. The first is to happily yap about some of my favourite African novels. The second is to invite you to Africa, to show you that you can find home there, just as I have found a home in the UK.

I can’t remember the very first fiction novel I picked up because I grew up surrounded by books. But one of my most memorable early reads was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It gripped me completely, and it still holds a huge space in my heart. It was the first time I travelled to Eastern Nigeria. a place I only physically visited last year, yet one that already felt familiar. Achebe transported me into a precolonial world where I imagined myself as a woman leader, perhaps even a powerful queen. I read it and felt proud to belong to a history of complex, powerful men and women who came before me.

Then I met Kambili.

I wished she were my sister so she could live in my house and be free from her ruthless father in Purple Hibiscus, and for months, I mourned Jaja. I wasn’t entirely sure I loved Chimamanda after what she did to those characters, but this is perhaps proof of how deeply she writes. When I later read Americanah, I knew two things: that I loved her storytelling, and that one day I would live abroad. The novel helped me imagine what it meant to leave home, to see life refracted through the lens of Blackness in a world obsessed with race. Years later, living in the UK, I sometimes think about how fiction prepared me for this.

Very early on, I became convinced that Africa’s greatest natural resource might just be its storytelling. That belief turned into what I consider a healthy obsession with African writers. I discovered Lola Shoneyin and Tsitsi Dangarembga during my African Fiction 300-level class. For a long time, my most prized possessions were my dog-eared, highlighted, bookmarked copies of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives and Nervous Conditions. They were chaotic, heart-tugging, and layered.

For years, I thought literary fiction was all there was. Then in 2020, I encountered Oyinkan Braithwaite. When she signed my copy of My Sister, the Serial Killer with the words, “Shalom, here is hoping that words and tales always bring you joy,” I knew they always would. Her thriller unsettled me in ways literary fiction hadn’t. It expanded my understanding of what African fiction could be.

I fell in love again through the mythic, romantic worlds of Bolu Babalola’s Love in Color, and through love stories by writers like Adesuwa O’Man Nwokedi and Lizzie Damilola Blackburn. African fiction was not just literary and heavy, it was tender, funny, thrilling, romantic, and sharp.

As a Nigerian, I travelled to Ghana first through the plane Peace Adzo Medie provided in His Only Wife. I felt the heat of Nairobi without boarding a flight in Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi. I created new rooms in my heart for the characters in Wahala by Nikki May and On Black Sisters’ Street by Chika Unigwe.

I have lived in Africa for years, but my favourite lens through which to view my world is fiction. And my favourite thing about fiction is this: it allows you to travel without leaving your room. It stretches your empathy. It complicates your understanding. It gives you ancestors, sisters, brothers, lovers, cities, and histories.

Why should you read African fiction?

Why should’t you?

And when you do, you might find yourself in Lagos when you least expect it or fall in love in Accra. You might grieve in Enugu or sweat profusely in Nairobi. You might recognise yourself in someone whose life looks nothing like yours. And you might just find a home there.

By Shalom