Let's talk about the elephant in the African literary room: the glorification of suffering. It seems like African literature—at least the kind that gets global recognition—is locked into a cycle of trauma, war, famine, and corruption.
Are African writers writing about poverty because it's real, or because it's profitable? Publishing gatekeepers, predominantly in the West, tend to reward one version of Africa: the broken one. But so are African joy, innovation, romance, tech revolutions, and wildly diverse cultures.
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina exposed this formula in his satirical piece How to Write About Africa. Africa has more than pain. It's time the world reads all of it.