The following is a brief extract from the interview:
How does he view African SFF?
“In African life, where I come from, there is not a strict line that divides fantasy from realistic, these two words are meshed.
“What African writers might bring to SFF? For me, I don’t want any African writer to feel to be under any pressure that he needed to bring anything new to SFF apart from the story that matters to him, which he alone can tell.
“It is precisely this feeling of
wanting to bring something unique and special that trapped African
literature, stopping it from growing for a long time. African writers,
in order to fulfil this need, ended up in writing stories that must have
a social function to perform, say to fight colonialism, imperialism,
and corruption or to educate. Most African literature ended up in
becoming an anthropological-valued literature. For me, each individual
should create without thinking of any constraint placed on him to invent
in a particular theme or expectation from any community. It is after
the birth of each story can we then be justif[ied] to begin to construct
a canon to explain what is new the story has offered.”
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