What's My Slice of African Genre Fiction?

In July, 2008, I blogged about the importance of genre expansion in African Fiction, branching off into sci-fi/fantasy, romance, horror, and other neglected genres. Around the same time I discovered there were African writers doing this already,from the detective fiction guru Alexander McCall Smith of the now popularised The Number 1 Lady Detective series on HBO, Lauri Kabuitsile of Botswana who is a full-time writer producing multi-genre literature,to my friend Ivor W.Hartmann whose science fiction piece "Mr Goop" won the Baobab Fiction price for young readers. The much-awaited story has just been published for the first time on African Writing, a nod of approval from this very literary African journal.

Even as I have written about the need for such genre expansion, I have continued to stick with the literary fiction in my writing and, to a great extent, in my teaching. Most of the students coming to our fiction workshops in colleges bring many vampire and machine stories, often to be told, immediately, to write about real people doing real things in an imagined world. I have played my part, and I am proud, because those are the established standards in many of our courses. However, I have been thinking about what genre I would excel in if I were to free that part of me for a moment. The word "free" here is serious because as a literature major I was trained heavily in literary fiction which dismissed Stephen King in a second. By learning literature in Africa and in the United States, I joined the group of literary canonizers who would say read Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele but don't bring them closer to the literary pages of your essays. And all that is good, I concluded, as I mulled over Moby Dick and returned to Chaucer (in Middle English, which kinda sounded like Shona to me). All that was beautiful and it prepared me thoroughly for my career (as a teacher).

Now, the writer in me asks: "What genre or popular fiction field would I excel in?"

I have always dreamed (some say "dreamt") about writing horror fiction. Such fiction, informed by the core beliefs of the Shona culture that reared me and sometimes coming out of my dreams, would make great reading, stories of ghosts that would seem "real" and deadly, stories of a kind of witchcraft that would make the wizardry of the Harry Potter world look like a silly joke. Even Stephen King would consider a career change. But.... I am too damn literary to be (is it?)horrifying.

I understand, then, when Lauri, for instance, says the following:

I am one of the people who shouts the most about the heavy burden African writers have had to carry. They are only expected to put pen to paper if the result is literary, political and serious. So African Sue Townsends had to move on and become accountants or garbage collectors. African Barbara Cartlands became doctors or house maids. Popular fiction just wasn't for Africa- they said. Writers here needed to address African conditions and to the international world Africans don't laugh.

Anyway, let me sit and think. About a possible trilogy: The Ghosts of Mototi.