Africa Is a Country

Not the Caine Prize

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Not the Caine Prize

By
Tom Devriendt


Since 2004, Le Salon africain (part of the annual Geneva Book Fair) awards the Ahmadou Kourouma Prize to an ‘African oeuvre, essay or fiction that reflects the spirit of independence and creativity which is the heritage of [Ivorian novelist] Ahmadou Kourouma’. This year the Prize goes to Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga for her latest novel ‘Notre-Dame du Nil’. Of the past 8 winning books, not one is available in English:

2011 Photo de groupe au bord du fleuve (Emmanuel Dongala)
2010 Si la cour du mouton est sale, ce n’est pas au porc de le dire (Florent Couao-Zotti)
2009 Solo d’un revenant (Kossi Efoui)
2008 Le Bal des princes (Nimrod)
2007 Le paradis des chiots (Sami Tchak)
2006 Babyface (Koffi Kwahulé)
2005 Matins de couvre-feu (Tanella Boni)
2004 Survivantes, Rwanda 10 ans après (Esther Mujawayo & Souad Belhaddad)

In a recent profile of French-Congolese (RC) author Alain Mabanckou, the L.A. Times blames “the parochial tastes and pinched profit margins of the U.S. publishing industry [for] hav[ing] restricted Mabanckou’s visibility on U.S. bookshelves”. I can’t think of any other reason why these 9 Prize-winning works haven’t yet been translated. By not doing so, the Anglophone publishers are keeping their readers from accessing a Francophone world of imagination that spans more than a quarter of the African continent — not to mention the Francophone diaspora. Don’t tell me there’s no interest.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.