After years of Anglophone fiction dominating the African literary landscape, several recent projects have made visible a fuller slate of languages and forms, such as Jalada’s publications in African languages and The New Inquiry’s series on African poetry. To this list we can now add Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, published in late May. The anthology creates space for overlooked voices and stories, and simultaneously offers a subtle challenge to the Adichies, Selasis, and Coles whose fiction garners so much attention. A new cohort of nonfiction writers is ready to tell the continent’s tales.
Safe House collects pieces in a variety of subgenres, including travel writing, true crime, memoir, and ethnography. Editor Ellah Allfrey solicited stories about the struggle for LGBTQ identity and about the Ebola epidemic, but otherwise left the subject matter open. Selections include stories about the growing Chinese population in Dakar, a murder in Cape Town, and a pilgrimage to a mythical rock in Tanzania. Such a wide range of topics and approaches does much to push back against the flattening of African experience so common in Western media (see “Africa Rising.”)
If there is a point of coherence in the anthology, it is around the concept of the safe house. Several pieces highlight a lack of safe spaces for their subjects: Barbara Wanjala, in her piece about a Senegalese NGO, describes “a lack of spaces for women;” and Elnathan John, in his piece on a Nigerian community of ‘yan daudu, or effeminate men, worries that with the country’s increasing conservatism, “the spaces occupied by the ‘yan daudu might disappear altogether.” This anthology, then, becomes the safe space where these stories are told.
However, Isaac Otidi Amuke’s entry, which shares its title with the anthology, reveals that a safe house can be a kind of prison, isolating and unsettling even as it protects from the dangers outside. Amuke characterizes life in a safe house in middle class Nairobi neighborhood as “limbo,” and chafes against the restrictions it places on his movements.
Another theme that resonates throughout the collection is technology’s role in opening up new venues for at-risk groups. In several stories, social media creates the inverse of a safe house, trading the isolation and protection of bricks and mortar for the increased connection and increased hazards of virtual visibility. Thus the protagonist of Mark Gevisser’s “Walking Girly in Nairobi,” a Ugandan LGBTQ refugee in Kenya, celebrates the connections he makes on Facebook while acknowledging that the platform has also delivered him into danger.
If social media is the inverse of the safe house, then perhaps traditional media is its analogue: concrete, safe, and a little bit isolating. Safe House taps into this tension between traditional publishing and new media, suggesting that the landscape of African literature will look very different moving forward. For all the project’s interest in hot button issues, this gesture toward a transmedial future may be its most striking contribution.
Nicole Cesare 