How about a Writing Competition Restricted to Rural Africa, or Rural Anything?

In writing, as in education and other services to, or opportunities for, humanity, there has to be an element of outreach. I am very happy with the work that organizers and sponsors of African writing awards are doing in discovering new talent, but I have often noticed these discoveries tend to focus on the continent's elites and often ignore (usually inadvertently) huge rural populations where talent might be hiding.

Profiles of the winners of contests like the PEN South Africa, Caine, Commonwealth, and many others, tend to be of writers based mostly in urban areas, writers with access to EVERYTHING (and lately everythng means the internet). This falls short of saying that these are usually priviledged writers who could probably do just fine without needing to be discovered by an international award. Every writer needs to be discovered, some may argue, and they would be right, as long as they mean every possible talent we can pounce on (as some of the awards set out to do).

I know for a fact that there is so much artistic talent in the rural areas of Africa that is not being tapped into. There are writers there who don't have an idea that something like the CAINE exists. Okay, the CAINE accepts submissions only from publishers, which means the work would have already been published by an often city-based press which drew its submissions from the cities (usually), while a Marechera sits there in Mazvihwa, Muringi, or Kezi, undiscovered, perhaps with no hope of ever going to be discovered. Who cares? Someone may be tempted to ask. But we don't go around asking those kinds of questions if we are serious about discovering Africa's (or any place for that matter)full potential, and especially if the objectives of our contests often state that we are serving Africa (or any place for that matter). Did I just say "our contests"; yes, just in case I end up organizing my own competition one day, I would have to remember this too.

I am just simply saying let us (I edit an online journal, which noone in Kezi or Mazvihwa reads)reach out more. One Ghana, One Voice, an online poetry magazine, edited from Canada, was at one time talking about sending fliers to Ghana (or producing them there; actually, producing them there because Julian Adomako-Gymah, the OGOV co-founder, is based in Ghana)and distributing them to the country's remotest places as a way to tap into the talent that otherwise would not be exposed.

I am happy, as it is, about any African writer winning an international award, but I often ponder about how representative the awards are of the full potential of Africa, etc, if they don't even attempt to reach out to Kezi. I keep mentioning Kezi because many years ago I travelled with two book people to a missionary school there, where a student read a short story that could have prompted any publisher to sign her up on the spot; and at the end, as I was talking to her,I found out that she was from Harare, where we had travelled from. Still, that worked, because we were in Kezi now, looking for talent. Don't they say location is everything?

Perhaps, when I get to launching my own contest, I will name it something like RAW (Rural African Writers). I would not, of course, be happy with associating the African countryside with rawness, but I would focus on ending the raw deal that these writers currently get, or I would switch it around and call it WAR (Writers' African Rural), which would require too much explanation. Maybe, I could capitalize on the idea of the roar and call it RWOAR (Rural Writers of Africa Rising), with a silent "W". Anything for the rural African writer....