Africa Writes, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival, dwelt on Afrofuturism and where black British artists see themselves in the burgeoning new aesthetic.

June fries itself to an end; London is sticky with the combustible residue of unseasonable heat, lager, and irrational, tabloid-whipped World Cup optimism. It’s too absurd to be an African summer; temperatures above 30 degrees are tearfully embraced, red-raw and half-naked, by the English, with a stunned but gleeful alacrity at the entrance of a jolly, party-starting relative believed long-dead.
A hundred and fourteen years earlier, the Sierra Leonean writer A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, astonished to discover the religious void in the heart of the greatest metropolis on earth, sends a letter home from London in which he decides, with horror and affection, that “the Britons are barbarians and heathens”.
This motif of seeing – by Africans of the British and of British Africans of themselves – is one of the more urgent themes of 2018’s Africa Writes event, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival. Merriman-Labor’s biographer for An African in Imperial London, Danell Jones, is discussing ‘African Literary Figures in Georgian &amp; Edwardian London’ at the British Library with Ade Solanke, author of the play Phillis in London (about the visit to London in 1773 of the “prodigy, poet, celebrity and slave” Phillis Wheatley), and the writer S.I. Martin, who “works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences”.
It’s a crackling and challenging panel, with evocative and haunting subjects as its focus. “Forgotten voices have important things to teach us,” says Jones, echoing Solanke’s entreaty for writers to “exhume these stories” and Martin’s to “not enshrine, but internalize”.
Now no longer forgotten, these are ardent tales, tragic and cautionary. Merriman-Labor’s dazzling deconstruction of the contradictions of Edwardian London – its wretched penury cowering at the feet of its titanic opulence – was published in 1909, for which he achieved a degree of literary eminence, but he was to die in poverty at the age of 41, in a state-run hospital for the poor, his legal and artistic careers eviscerated by racism.
<blockquote>“Forgotten voices have important things to teach us,” &#8211; Danell Jones</blockquote>
Wheatley’s patron in Boston – her ‘owner’ (Wheatley had been abducted in Senegambia at the age of seven) – orchestrates the publication of her poetry in London, and she is “plunged into English high society”, but Wheatley dies shortly after her emancipation, at just 31, too poor to publish the second volume of poems that may have saved her. Both Merriman-Labor and Wheatley have vexing facets to their personalities. Is the former an arriviste, as starry-eyed as any narcissistic creative, with fame and adoration beckoning on the horizon of his mind’s eye? Is the latter a malleable apologist, in her poetry, for cultural and religious imperialism? These human beings are complicated; they are impressive. But they are not always likeable.
Which begs the question: how does a writer ‘exhume these stories’ with both compassion and honesty? How can these voices be reanimated, without committing further violations upon their memory, since we can never know how they ever really felt? Even if, as Solanke quotes from William Faulkner, “the past is never dead – it’s not even past”?
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/09/29/awesome-awkward-african-night/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Read more: An Awesome, Awkward, African Night</a>
“You know, I’m against that whole redemptive arc of black literature,” says Martin. “Yes, there has to be redemption, but that comes from the reader, through self-examination, rather than the character.”
Solanke agrees. “I don’t want simple people,” she says. “Phillis is problematic. I came close several times to abandoning her story. She wasn’t the Phillis I expected. But it’s actually been transformative for me as a writer. It’s the drama of facts – and then the drama of imagination.”
In An African in Imperial London, Jones places Merriman-Labor at a political march in London which he may or may not have attended – she has no supporting evidence either way, but argues that the artist is at liberty to fabricate experiences if they support a rational truth. “I can’t prove that he was there,” she says. “But to me, it made sense in the larger story.”

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Merriman-Labor is mesmerized by London’s transport technology – “Overhead and Underfoot, Overground and Underground, Terrestrial and Celestial” – which shuttles me across the city for a second Africa Writes event at Rich Mix in East London. What would Merriman-Labor – or Wheatley – have made of the phone-scrolling throngs queuing for a salt-beef bagel on nearby Brick Lane, or the homeless man outside the restaurant gifting his incredulous dog a polystyrene tray overflowing with chips and ketchup? This is the gristle of the city, the marrow of poetry.
Rachel Long, Theresa Lola and Hibaq Osman, three members of Octavia, “a poetry collective for women of color founded in response to the lack of inclusivity and representation in literature and academia,” are sparing a few minutes to chat before rushing back to rehearsals for the evening’s show. It’s a credit to the Africa Writes programming that the events pull the festival’s central threads long and taught through centuries, across genres. And it’s striking that this collective of young female artists eschews the use of social media to promote its shows. Long, Octavia’s founder member, calls these platforms “unsafe spaces for women of color,” after a successful past event attracted a batch of abusive comments on its Facebook page.
“For me it was just like, how dare you?” she says. “How could you dampen something that was that beautiful?” The event later that evening is indeed exquisite and irresistible, both in execution and atmosphere – the boundaries of performance poetry are stretched and explored across several sets of poems which are by turns funny, tragic and uplifting.
“I feel like because so much of what we do is almost in secret,” says Osman, “that when we’re on stage, it becomes more intimate than other things I’ve been a part of. Everyone’s a bit more likely to take in the words in a way that maybe they weren’t expecting.”
It’s a night about woke female power, and the vibranium-hard Afrofuturism of the black creative economy – a widening path to artistic and financial success that was so cruelly curtailed for trailblazers like Wheatley and Merriman-Labor. Where do these black British artists see themselves in this burgeoning new aesthetic?
“What I think is so beautiful about Afrofuturism is this merging of different cultures,” says Lola. “I feel like before there used to be isolated identities. Afrofuturism will be this space where everything is embraced.”
‘An African in Imperial London’ is out now and published by Hurst Publishers. Ade Solanke’s new play ‘The Court Must Have a Queen’ runs through to September 2 at Hampton Court Palace in the UK.
&#8211; By Alastair Hagger

Rachel-Long-Africa-Writes-2018-image-by-Erefua-Boakye-picture-1

Talking African Writing in London

Trust Matsilele says writing for FORBES AFRICA changed his life. The most remarkable and harrowing story of the lot is his own.
His crisp declamatory picturesque articles, told with conviction over the last two years, were born of years of struggle, pain and disappointment from birth.
At just eight months old, his mother abandoned Matsilele and his twin brother at the door of Harare Central Police Station in Zimbabwe with nothing but a tiny bag of clothing. Luckily, within 24 hours, they were adopted by their aunt, who had just moved back to Zimbabwe, after years studying in the United States.
“My aunt had no kids, but all of a sudden, she had this heavy burden to carry,” says Matsilele.
The twins moved to their new home, a mission school in Mwenezi, a small district in southern Zimbabwe, with their new parent. They lived a middle-class life and almost forgot they had been abandoned. In 1992, their guardian moved to South Africa to work. The twins moved in with their grandmother in the village. This meant goodbye to bread and butter for lunch at school.
“My grandmother tried to make sure we had good lunchboxes when we went away for sports at school but on a day-to-day basis we struggled to carry lunch to school. We walked 10 kilometers barefoot to school and herded cattle after school,” he says.
It was a struggle until their aunt started making a bit of money in South Africa. In 1996, she sent the boys to boarding school where Matsilele traveled in a bus for the first time.
“I was in the drama club and we went in a bus to Masvingo and I was so happy. School was OK but I couldn’t afford somethings like freezit (sweet ice) so I washed clothes for kids from urban areas, who came from better backgrounds, to make money. It was hard. I could see my poverty clearly. I remember my brother and I at some point wishing we went to a poorer high school, with kids like us, but my aunt had done the best she could so we were grateful.”
Matsilele left high school to set foot in his capital, Harare, a bustling city, for the first time. It was a painful reminder of a place where his mother abandoned him, but also a chance to study journalism; paid for by his brother.
Here, 19-year-old Matsilele saw a traffic light for the first time.
“As much as I was aware of their existence, I had never seen them. It was all shocking for me. My brother struggled to pay my fees so I had to work during the day and take classes at night. It was hard to make ends meet. Even money for a taxi to work was hard to get. I remember one of my classmates religiously brought a pie for me. Sometimes even if I was struggling to go to school, I would remember the pie I would get and I would make my way there.”
Hard work, on a pie a day, earned Matsilele a diploma in journalism. He moved to South Africa thinking it would be easy to get a job. It wasn’t.  South Africa has a 25.5% unemployment rate and with 2.2 million immigrants looking for work.
No job, no money, no food and no roof, Matsilele hit rock bottom in a country he thought was paved with gold; to find home was a dumpsite. He lived there for four months picking up scrap metal and bricks to sell.
“We used some rags and plastics to cover ourselves if it was raining or cold. Police came to harass us at any time of the day. I remember it rained one night and my passport was in my pocket and it got defaced,” he says.
Life on the harsh streets of South Africa was dangerous, so Matsilele moved to a squatter camp to live with his cousin.
“We would walk for about two hours to look for jobs on the streets. Any jobs, like cutting lawns or general work. I did that for two years just to have a bit of money.”
Matsilele’s nephew, who worked for The Zimbabwean newspaper, based in Johannesburg, showed him a glimmer of hope and invited him to his office to talk about a job.
“When I got there he had gone for a conference and the people at the office refused me entry. I think I was too scruffy or dirty and looked like a street kid,” he says.
A week later, he went back and the nephew employed him.
“To get meaningful money for someone staying in a squatter camp, about R1,000 ($70) a month, was hard but I was writing about 40 articles a month at R40 (less than $3) a story.”
This resilience marked his entry to the world of journalism.
“I moved to a small place with a friend of mine and together we bought our first bed. This was a huge adjustment coming out of a squatter camp. We had never owned a bed,” he says.
Another friend offered to help pay for Matsilele’s honours degree in journalism, at the University of the Witwatersrand, to better his chances in life.
His honours supervisor recruited him for a job at CNBC Africa, the sister company to FORBES AFRICA, as an online journalist. Here, he met Chris Bishop, Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, and he says this changed his life.
“Bishop is one of the best people I have ever met. He has stayed a bit in Zimbabwe so when he heard I was Zimbabwean, we immediately connected… I asked if I could write for FORBES AFRICA and he said ‘yes’… I couldn’t believe it. A man like me who was abandoned by his mother and stayed on the streets being allowed to write for such a publication? Who would have ever thought? It was even beyond my wildest dreams.”
Working here opened doors for Matsilele, one of them— speaking at a conference at the University of Southern California in the United States in 2015.
Three years later, Matsilele walks upright, looks people in the eye and debates with conviction. He says working for this publication has helped him shake off his terrible feeling of being a nobody in a rural village who became a street kid in a foreign land.
Just over a decade after he slept under the stars in the rubbish tip, Matsilele is now studying classics in Vancouver, Canada, for the next three years.
A few months after leaving South Africa, Matsilele has been invited to give talks about his work for FORBES AFRICA.
“My presentations are based on my work at FORBES AFRICA and with Chris Bishop. It was like learning journalism from scratch even though I had written more than 300 stories. If there is anything FORBES AFRICA should be grateful for its having changed the life of a journalist,” he says.
Matsilele is living proof that hard work in Africa, sprinkled with a bit of FORBES AFRICA, can change your life.

Tag: Writing

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