Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
For 10 years, Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes and his friend the Nigerian writer Chris Abani have sifted through piles of manuscripts looking for Africa’s new poetic talent. Since 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund has been assembling a formidable archive of writing through the New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series.
A chapbook – a small publication usually under 40 pages – is an accessible and honoured format for poets to publish focused selections of their work. In this series, each chapbook features an emerging African poet, and is presented as part of a beautifully designed box set of 10 or more chapbooks. Besides the poetry itself, each box set also showcases the work of a commissioned African visual artist. The artists include Sokari Douglas Camp, Victor Ehikhamenor, Ficre Ghebreyesus and Aida Muluneh, among others.
This ever-growing archive has now published over 100 poets, and offers a window into the diversity of African poetic expression today.
Marking the project’s 10th anniversary is a new anthology called Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry, edited by Jordanian writer Siwar Masannat. It collects Dawes and Abani’s rich introductions to each box set and has a foreword by Masannat. In it, readers learn about the impact of the series, offering a layered and necessary account of how these chapbooks have transformed the visibility of African poets over the past decade.
My work as a scholar of African literature focuses on recovering overlooked histories and interrogating the spaces in which literature is made and circulated.
This new anthology matters because it documents not just poems, but a cultural movement that redefines what an African literary archive can be, and why poetry remains central to that conversation.
Decidedly diasporic
While the series places Africa at the centre of its imagination, its focus is largely diasporic, shaped by Africans living outside the continent. The majority of the poets live in the US or the UK. Poets based on the continent form a minority and are scattered geographically.
The editors acknowledge this imbalance, attributing it to “better access to workshops and craft education” available to diaspora poets. The result is an archive arguably shaped less by the immediacies of the continent and more by the diaspora’s sensibilities and infrastructures.
Nigeria, more than any of the 25-odd countries included in the chapbooks, shapes the aesthetics of the series. This reflects both the density of the country’s literary networks and the curatorial choices of the editors. They rely heavily on personal connections and prize pools to spot new and emerging talents.
A recurring feature of the poets in the series is the “hyphenated African”: Somali-American, Ghanaian-British, Ethiopian-German, Sierra Leonean-American. Some were born in countries outside Africa or migrated as toddlers. Their Africanness is claimed through memory, nostalgia, heritage, or family history, rather than geography.
The editors assert that all the poets “self-identify as Africans in the full and complicated way that Africanness is best defined”. This also underscores how the project expands the category of African poetry. In fact, the transcontinental profile of these writers shows how African poetry today cannot be read solely through a nationalist lens. The hybridity of identity and place becomes central. Many poets occupy in-between spaces – culturally, geographically, linguistically and emotionally.
Still, the series impresses on many other levels. Particularly in its commitment to highlighting the continent’s plural and localised poetics, and in its rare, long-term investment in the future of African poetry.
Gender
The series has been notably attentive to gender parity. Women poets like Warsan Shire, Safia Elhillo, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Momtaza Mehri, Tsitsi Jaji and Vuyelwa Maluleke, among others, form a significant portion of the archive.
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This signals an important feminist turn in African poetics. The chapbook form becomes a space where African women’s voices are nurtured and given international circulation, countering historical silences. The poets here highlight a generational continuity of feminist expression.
Intergenerational
The birth years of poets in the series range from 1963 to 2007, showcasing a vibrant intergenerational dialogue. The older poets often engage in socio-political critique informed by post-independence transitions. Millennial and Gen Z poets frequently explore themes of identity, queerness, internet culture, displacement and decoloniality with linguistic experimentation and digital fluency.
Ghanaian poet Tryphena Yeboah, in her chapbook, A Mouthful of Home, exemplifies this:
I TELL MY MOTHER I WANT A BODY THAT
EXPANDS
Into a map. She wants to know where I’ll travel to. I say
“myself”.
The act of travel becomes a metaphor for self-mapping that captures how younger African poets reimagine movement, belonging and home as internal, affective geographies.
In contrast, South African poet Ashley Makue, in her chapbook, i know how to fix myself, offers a more visceral expression of embodied trauma and inherited violence:
my mother is a war zone
they don’t tell her that
these men that pee in her
and leave with gunpowder in their chests
Living archive
The New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series has been an extraordinary intervention in the history of African poetry. It has foregrounded a generation, opened an aesthetic safe space, and created a beautiful, living archive.
Dawes and Abani introduce each of the box sets with two introductions – what they call “simultaneous conversations” – and they often debate identity, the style of the poetry, circulation, and other issues.
This is more than an impressive catalogue; it is a breathing archive of African poetic consciousness, one that resists static definitions. It captures the fluidity of identity, the urgency of voice, and the diverse shaping of African poetry today.
What it tells us: that African poetry is thriving, diverse and globally mobile. What it does not tell us: how poets working entirely from the continent might imagine and enact African poetics differently.
But by foregrounding new and emerging voices, the Africa Poetry Book Fund affirms that poets remain vital chroniclers of the African experience, articulating emotion, history and imagination in ways that other forms of writing often cannot.
They don’t just do this through publications, but running prizes, supporting African poetry libraries and maintaining a digital archive.
– African poetry is celebrated in a groundbreaking publishing project
– https://theconversation.com/african-poetry-is-celebrated-in-a-groundbreaking-publishing-project-267772
