Caine Prize for African Writing Shortlist

By Gigi on Wednesday 1 June 2011

The Caine Prize for African Writing is the dream child of Sir Michael Caine who wanted recognition for Africans who wrote in English. He did not see his dream come to fruition, but his friends and family carried it on and every year since 2000 someone has won the prize of £10,000.

Followers of African blogs and African authors know and understand the incredibly diversity of the continent and how complex the dynamics are, how vivid the pictures drawn are, how the people described are at once sophisticated, complex and civilized despite the general tendency the World has had in the past to label them otherwise.

The prized writings from people of other ethnicities describing Africa seem to sell better and tell the story from the perspective of an observer. Hollywood has made movies out of the diamond trade and the injustice to the people, they've explored a dictators rise and fall in Uganda and blithely skimmed over much of the history that has perpetuated the situation in Somalia in an effort to tell their side of the story. They have often followed the rules candidly laid down in a rant by Binyavanga Wainaina and made us cringe to hear them.

They cannot be blamed for writing what they know, because it is our duty and our right to write what we know about our ancestors, about the oral history passed down through generations, about current political situations told from the view of a protestor on the street in Gabarone, a store manager unable to open his shop in Cairo on the day of anger, a spectator at President Goodluck Jonathan's inauguration. We have to tell these stories.

In honor of the writers who were shortlisted for the Caine Prize we offer you their stories, told by them in English.