WEALTH OF IDEAS

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 storie...

The Sacramento Bee Book Club will be hosting Zimbabwean-born author, Alexander McCall Smith, at the Pavilions Shopping Center near, not in, Borders Bookstore. Although I am not a reader of the detective series (you can't read everything), I plan to attend this April 25 event. But wait, I will be already at a writers' conference where I am teaching workshops on the making of a story. And talking of the making of a story, the idea of the Number 1 Lady detective agency is fantastic. The concept, the idea of detective stories set in Africa; that seems to be one of the latest sexy things about Africa nowadays, next to celebrities acquiring Malawian orphans. Worthy causes both. In fact, I have often lamented the near-absence of tangible genre literature in Africa and, it seems, Alexander McCall Smith has opened up a phenomenon in detective stories that may soon rival what J.K. Rowling has done with wizardry. And new African writers are also already establishing their names in the det...