In his introduction, Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri writes that the Caine Prize for African Writing “has turned out to be a regenerator of African literature,” a literature that skilled a growth within the instant post-colonial period however is much less well-known as we speak. The largely younger writers represented within the assortment have, he continues, delivered “tales political, tales harrowing, tales humorous, tales advised with vitality and keenness and intelligence.” All that’s abundantly evident within the editors’ selections. The inaugural piece, by the Egyptian author Leila Aboulela, mirrors her personal life as an immigrant to Scotland. Shadia, a younger lady, has fallen behind in a statistics class and asks a Scottish classmate for his notes: “Her ignorance and the approaching exams have been horrors she needed to flee,” Aboulela writes, however on the value of putting up a dialog with a person who has a unpleasant ponytail and earring: “The entire of him was pathetic,” she sniffs, and even when the younger man, barely understandable due to his accent, expresses an curiosity in Islam (“Ah wouldnae thoughts travelling to Mecca), she will be able to discover no bridge to him. Different items converse to the issue of crossing cultures, the Nigerian author Rotimi Babatunde’s “Bombay’s Republic” being a sidelong working example: A Nigerian soldier finds himself preventing the Japanese in Burma, save that the enemy has vanished as a result of the British have put out the phrase that “the Africans are coming and that they eat folks,” a calumny that calls for a response—and finds one when he returns to his homeland. All of the tales are wonderful, however some are particularly memorable, amongst them Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison,” the 2008 winner, which presciently speaks of an environmental apocalypse that finds the solar over Cape City “a pink bleached disk, just like the moon of a special planet.”
