In his classic song Redemption song, Bob Marley mouthed the famous lines how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look.
It is sad that very few of our African prophets heeded these lines coming from a Third World cultural visionary.
I raise this issue considering the sad fact that most of our prophets are being chaperoned by the omniscient white Big Brother.
While some people can argue that only few prophets like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara and Chris Hani have been killed at the instigation of the West, it is important to note that the other living African prophets are at the mercy of the Western world.
Look at Africa’s celebrated writers. Are they not being supported by people from the West who have rescued them not only from poverty but from being jailed or killed?
I start with the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka who is more a son of a Western world than he is of Africa.
Soyinka, who is not only a famous writer, is also a proponent of good governance in his native country Nigeria. He has been a fierce critic of successive Nigerian governments. While there is nothing wrong with this, it is only surprising to note that Big Wole rarely condemns the puppet masters and chooses instead to condemn their stooges.
The late Chinua Achebe found refuge in America, a country that kept him alive a little bit longer considering his physical condition as a paralytic after a car accident.
There is also a long list of African writers rescued like abandoned puppies by the West, and our own Dambisa Moyo is one of them.
Even the writing that these writers are known for is determined by Western norms thanks to the robust patronage of the West.
In fiction, we should note that all the prizes of importance like the Booker, Caine or Nobel are Western or funded by the West and every African writer of note knows that they are prestigious prizes that are highly sought-after.
While aware that Africa is not an island since it is part of what is called the global village (whatever that means) we should know that the guidelines set by the West come with a heavy price.
Many writers (both fiction and non-fiction) appear to be writing to the test of the expectations of these prizes.
What Africa desperately needs are indigenous critics to give substance to our stories basing their analysis on Afro-centric paradigms.
In the absence of this, most of the writing coming from Africa recently is steeped in mimicry with everything being measured against white Western standards.
Coming to Moyo’s Dead Aid a book that erroneously condemns aid ignoring abundant evidence of its relevance to most African countries, we can cite the book as a classic example of writing according to the expectation of the masters.
Writing in the Guardian newspapers, Madeleine Bunting author of Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives condemned the book but noted that despite being poorly argued, Dead Aid boosted Moyo’s profile.
Madeleine argued that already there were many westerners who would want to promote Moyo’s views to cut aid budgets as pressure builds on government spending.
The danger is that she (Moyo) will end up on the wrong side of the argument since the battle is to press for more effective aid, not cut it altogether.
The critic wrote that Moyo’s proposal to phase out aid in five years was disastrously irresponsible since it would lead to the closure of thousands of schools and clinics across Africa, and an end to the HIV antiretroviral, malaria and TB programmes, along with emergency food supplies, on which millions of lives depend.
The critic further noted that the danger was that Dead Aid got more attention than it deserved since it had become fashionable to attack aid to Africa; an overdose of celebrity-lobbying and compassion fatigue which have prompted harsh critiques of what exactly aid has achieved in the past 50 years.
In fiction, writing to the specification of Western critics is now the norm religiously considered by many African writers, especially those who win the Caine prize, a literary award established in the UK in 2000.
The prize that brings international fame and recognition to African writers has been both lauded and lambasted for the type of narratives it rewards.
Since 2007, along with £10,000, the prize comes with a one-month residency at a United States university and thus unfairly seems to bear the burden of representing African talent abroad.
In 2011, Nigerian writer Ikhide R. Ikheloa called the shortlisted stories a “riot of exhausted clichés,” noting the prevalence of “huts, moons, rapes, wars and poverty.”
Of the 15 winning stories since the founding of the prize, a good many are set in refugee camps, villages, or slums.
In the 2004 winning story Seventh Street Alchemy, Zimbabwe’s Brian Chikwava describes a place where poverty is the trendsetter: “Like a colony of hungry ants, it crawls over the multitudes of faces scattered along the city roads, ravaging all etches of dignity that only a few years back stood resilient.”
Nigerians are the big winners when it comes to Caine, with five winners hailing from this nation. Kenyans follow their lead with three winning stories; Zimbabwe and South Africa have both produced two winners; and Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda have each had one.
Though open to the entire continent, North Africa is underrepresented and understandably; a reward for stories written in English, no historically Francophone or Lusophone countries have ever won the prize.
Understandably, the prize has come under attack from African literary giants like Chimamanda Adichie and 2002 winner Binyavanga Wainaina who justifiably condemned the hype around the prize.
It is a well-supported African literary prize, which was born in the United Kingdom and has been bred by numerous European and American foundations.
Though a potential career-maker, as Wainaina points out, “Caine prize can’t do what we all have to, centralise our vision for ourselves to ourselves and the world.”
The prize like all rewarded writing on Africa perpetuates the myth of the continent being a desperate place with no hope.
It is these stereotypes we should be fighting instead of fuelling just to be praised by our former colonial masters.