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as well as between conflicting internal factions” (2000, 267). Among the titles Griffiths surveys are translations of Somali oral poetry into English, including Canadian Margaret Laurence’s A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954) and B. W. Andrzejewski’s Leopard among the Women: A Somali Play (1974). Early Somali writers in English include Omar Eby, whose anthology The Sons of Adam: Stories of Somalia was published in 1970; Ahmed Artan Hanghe’s autobiographically inflected The Sons of Somal (1993); and Ahmed Omar Askar’s biographical anthology, Sharks and Soldiers (1992). Apart from the prolific Nuruddin Farah (see below), three interesting women writers drawing international attention are the aforementioned Nadifa Mohamed, with two well‐received novels to her name; Somali‐Italian Christina Ali Farah, whose novel Little Mother (2011), translated from Italian, is a gripping portrait of the experiences of Somali migrants in Italy; and British Somali poet Warsan Shire, whose collections Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), Her Blue Body (2015), and Our Men Don’t Belong to Us (2015) have attracted widespread attention from scholarly and general readerships alike.

      A different kind of conflict – the 1994 genocide – casts a massive shadow over the literary landscapes of Rwanda and, to some extent, neighboring Burundi, which is no stranger to conflict. The sheer volume of writing on the Rwanda genocide – primarily by non‐Rwandan authors – almost overshadows the country’s pre‐genocide literatures. However, before the massive and growing library of Rwandan writing in English and French on the Rwanda genocide, there were a number of other writers. Theologian, historian, and poet Alexis Kagame (1912–1981) is believed to be among the early Rwandan writers, whose interest was mainly in Rwandan oral history, although he also had a passion for poetry. A second early Rwandan writer is Saverio Naigiziki, author of a 1949 autobiography, Escapade rwandaise (Rwandan Adventure), and a novel, L’Optimiste (The Optimist), published in 1954, which examines inter‐ethnic marriage.

In a review essay on the film Hotel Rwanda, Kenneth Harrow offers a compelling argument against historicist readings of the Rwanda genocide which emphasize its exceptionality, and in the process occlude the role of international players and institutions in making the genocide possible. Harrow’s summary of the broad strokes of Rwanda’s history that often recurs in such historicist readings is instructive: Starting with an originary discourse of tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, Harrow writes that Rwanda’s history tends to be mapped by tracing the Hutu–Tutsi relations through German and Belgian colonial incursion and “the racist Belgian anthropologies, with the privileging of Tutsis in political and economic arenas; the build‐up of resentments; the Hutu Revolution of 1959 and the Hutu ascension to power with independence in 1962” (Harrow 2005, 223). He goes on to map the various factors and players believed to have conspired to produce the 1994 genocide, and the literature that emerged in response. Elsewhere, Mahmood Mamdani offers an equally fascinating meditation on these histories, by underlining the distinctions between racial and ethnic identities and noting that in colonial Rwanda, unlike other parts of the continent, “the census did not identify any tribes. It only identified races: Hutu as Bantu, and Tutsi as Hamites” (Mamdani 2004, 14). These distinctions would later be mobilized to mark boundaries of un/belonging and competing claims to indigeneity.

      Perhaps the best known fiction on the Rwanda genocide emerged from the project commissioned by Chadian writer Nocky Djedanoum under the project “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire” (Rwanda: Writing Against Oblivion), which produced a range of powerful fiction in English and French, including Ivorian Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana (2005) and Senegalese Boris Boubacar Diop’s Murambi: The Book of Bones (2006). Expectedly, much of the early writing on the Rwanda genocide was by non‐Rwandan authors, both from across the continent and beyond. Subsequently, a growing body of Rwandan‐authored life writing and fiction filtered through. Among these are Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006) and Led by Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide; and Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s memoir, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004), which was originally published in French. Umutesi’s memoir is unique in its focus on the ordeals of Hutu refugees who escaped into Zaire after the 1994 genocide, or what she calls the invisible genocide. The atrocities allegedly committed by Rwandan Patriotic Front soldiers against fleeing Hutus in Rwanda are a subject of much debate, with firm denials from the state.

      Over in Central Africa, Malawi had a more visible literary culture, compared to Zambia. Before Legson Kayira, Aubrey Kachingwe, and David Rubadiri’s novels (see below), there was George Simeon Mwase’s rendition of the Chilembwe Uprising in 1915, named after Baptist minister and nationalist icon John Chilembwe, who mobilized Malawians in protest against British recruitment of carrier corps who were dying in large numbers in Tanganyika and Somalia (Currey 2008, 257). Mwase’s Strike a Blow and Die (1967) was rescued from the national archives by a visiting Harvard scholar, Robert Rotberg, who arranged for its publication by Harvard University Press in 1967. It was actually written in 1931–1932, during Mwase’s term in prison for tax embezzlement (Currey 2008, 257).

Across in Zambia, John Reed underlines the uniqueness of Zambia’s history as a British colony largely governed from South Africa. As a result, Reed writes, Zambia’s encounter with Europe came “transformed, harshened and provincialized, by way of South Africa” (Reed 1984, 83). Owing to this unique encounter of “experienc[ing] European culture as the colony of a colony” (83), Zambian fiction not only lacked an Africanist or protest impetus, as would be the case with Zimbabwean, South African, and Eastern African writing, but also Zambian writers felt no compulsion to take British or American writing as models. Reed counts among their influences journalistic training, non‐literary fiction in magazines, school set works, and African novels from other parts of the continent. Just as East African literature has been haunted by Taban lo Liyong’s charge of a literary desert, Zambian writing is often considered to be overshadowed by the more robust neighboring literary scenes to the south and the east, especially where English‐language writing is concerned. For Ranka Primorac, part of the issue is that Zambian English writing not only resists easy categorization, it finds itself “asserting its existence and visibility, yet being undermined by conditions of economic crisis and lack” (Primorac 2013, 101). In her view, though, the challenge Zambian writing poses is one that invites the “postcolonializing and localizing” of analytic categories, genres, and ideas of literary value, in part because, for instance, “the generic term bildungsroman, with its Eurocentric and realism‐inflected textual and cultural implications, may not be entirely adequate in describing non‐European configurations of emergence narratives” (Primorac 2013, 109). Alongside a robust body of local‐language literatures, post‐independence Zambia saw a growing list of English‐language short fiction by writers such as Kafungulwa Mubitana, Simon D. Katema, and William Saidi. A recurrent concern across these narratives is the tension between tradition and modernity, inflected with moral questions of right and wrong, which also features in the first two Zambian novels in English, Andreya Masiye’s Before Dawn (1971) and Dominic Mulaisho’s Tongue of the Dumb (1971). Other early authors are Gideon Phiri, author of Ticklish Sensation (1971); William Simukwasa, author of Coup! (1979); Grieve Sibale, who wrote Between Two Worlds (1979); and Joseph Muyuni, author of A Question of Motive (1978). In Primorac’s words, much of this fiction seeks to “thematise and transmit social change [and] transact a cultural coming to terms with modernity” (Primorac 2013, 109).

      The different political trajectories of the region’s countries inevitably shaped their socio‐cultural impetuses and, by extension, their literary cultures, at the levels of both form and content. Thus, Somali and Ugandan literature features a longer engagement with questions of civil war and post‐independence conflict, as seen in the work of playwright John Ruganda (The Burdens, The Floods) and Nuruddin Farah and Nadifa Mohamed’s fiction; while Tanzania and Ethiopia’s socialist encounters differently inflected their respective literatures, when one considers Hama Tuma’s satirical anthology, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories, or Tanzania’s extensive Ujamaa literature, both in English and Kiswahili. At the same time, Kenya’s trajectory as a settler colony, coupled with its post‐independence embrace of neoliberal capitalism,

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