Assassins of African Literature (3): For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him (Matthew 13: 12). 1) Good things have happened to literature from the continent in the last 2 decades or so. It has, largely, flourished. The internet, a larger class of well-educated middle class, and--honestly--access to western countries have all contributed. If there is any continent whom the American MFA in Creative Writing has had its most positive impact, it might be writers from the global south, African ones especially. Some of us who went to America did so to get out of our countries (or the enclave that was North Cyrus as was my case). But the net value of that migration has been, I believe, immense for the continent. Even some of our luminaries--Achebe, Nwapa, Ngugi, Coetzee--and others, lived in the west at one point or the other. Achebe died in America. Nwapa in Britain. Coetzee is an Australian citizen. What these writers wrote or saw have vastly made the continent's literature what it is today. And in their footsteps is a new generation of writers who are breaking molds and etching names in sand. This is what makes the first and most insidious argument of the assassin ideology truly insidious: That the most important thing about a writer is his identity; how he represents himself to the world. The writer who claims to be African, truly African must cultivate a certain identity, even an appearance. Sometimes, it is marked by an afro hair or dreadlocks. Sometimes, just a piece of clothing that points to that identity. Now, there is nothing wrong with any of these, yours truly is guilty of the clothing thing. My point is that there is an enforced conciousness that one has to look a way as marker of this identity. It cannot be enough to just be, incontrovertibly, African. You must act it. You must speak it. Aye, you must manifest it. You must confess it. The last part is where the pull and coersive power of the assassin ideology does its first damage: I am an African writer therefore I am so and so...Now, once you make that confession, you are chained to something truly creatively and intellectually dark. It lurks beneath your pen, transcelike and amoeban. You are required to be creatively bound by the prescribed character of that specie of writers: "African Writer". You inherit the political cross of thematic concerns that you might not be interested in. You are chained spiritually to discourses that may be of no interest or persuasion to you. You are classified, categorized, apparelled with a conscioness that asks only that you protest. You must submit to philosophical paradigmns that you find silly. As a matter of fact, you are coerced to assert a belief in a single one: that the world is divided into two groups, namely the oppressor and the oppressed. And the paradigmn: is it true, really? Were the French and German philosophers just this smart? Is there a situation in which the tussle in society can be between the zealous and the lukewarm? Can it be between the wise and the foolish? How about the wicked and the kind? Ours is a generation in which very few questions, if any, are asked of anything. Encouraged by the tribalizing power of social media, we merely sweep into ideological tribes and intellectual silos...The assassin ideology grows its branches out of this strange soil. Put a diacritic on top of your name to show that truly you are an African writer. Wear beads. Speak about the ways in which you want to tell "our stories and center African ways in the world"...Once you begin making these confessions, you have become sold into the assassin ideology. You have signed a contract whose content you have never seen. You have made a grievous mistake, for the identity of a writer can, but does not have to define them, and not certainly their work. This is true of some of the greatest writers writing today. Take Kazuo Ishiguro, Rohinton Mistry, Imbolo Mbue, J M Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and others for instance. They may be writing about the places of their births, but they don't pursue "subaltern" identities (I am here borrowing the subaltern term from Gayatri Spivak). Or, at least, those identities are not pronounced in their reflections on their work. Could Africa even have writers who no one even knows or who do not do interviews and events? Is a JD Salinger possible? An Elena Ferrante? How about a Thomas Pychon or a Harper Lee. An African writer must speak the language of the oppressed. Ah, the whites! The Europeans! The west! The "western establishment". The publishing industrial complex in the west! Diversity!!!...Again, nothing wrong with these preoccupations. My people say eni ti o su ekun shi nriran (he who cries can still see). The problem then is when the tears blind you. When it is unceasing, then blindness sets in. The partial view of everything obscures a true view of the world. Yes, there may be oppression, but that is not the whole picture. Is the west responaible for where Nigeria for instance is today? Indeed, but so too is ignorance, greed, and ethnic fanaticism. No western politician is forcing people dying of hunger in Ilorin to go about screaming "Emi lokan! and voting for a party that has destroyed th country. Or, which westerner is arming the crazies in the forests of Awka who go about burning stores yelling "Biafra or death!" But the assassin ideology, like most ideologies, is a cataract of the mind. It creates the most insidious type of blindness: a partial one. It's end effect is that it robs the writer who has little, even that which he has.