Africa: The daily violence in fiction and in reality

Leye - Every other Wednesday

I was invited to The Buenos Aires Negra this year, and like other invited authors, I was given a topic for a twenty-five minutes lecture. Below is the lecture I wrote - a bit different from the one I actually delivered. 

Ever since the first hand stencils 65,000 years ago, art has captured the reality of the time. 

The first figurative cave paintings of prehistoric man appeared about 35,000 years ago. They depicted the animals they hunted, the animals that hunted them, the successful hunts they participated in, the hunts that took the lives of their fellow Neanderthals. Their art, preserved for millennia in the caves in which the sort shelter from the violence of their time, captured the reality of their lives, because, art is, after all, simply an expression of the artist; and the artist is compulsorily, a product of her time. 

We live in violent times. If you do not know this, then you probably don’t not have a twitter account. 

We live in violent times. Nations are at war with nations. Governments are at war with their people. Populations are violently divided by referendums. Man is at war with nature and Nature, through unstoppable violent force, is fighting back, trying to purge the earth of this most prolific, most violent of parasites.  

Oceans are full of plastic debris choking innocent marine life. Oceans or full migrants’ bodies: women, men, children, and unborn babies, fleeing violence only to meet violent ends beneath impassive waves - or violent rejection on foreign shores. 

Today it is not safe to be brown on a flight. To be Muslim outside a mosque. To be black in America. We live in violent times. Today, it is not safe to accuse your rapist after 35 years, when even your president will mock you.  

We live in violent times, and for this, we, writers, owe it to posterity to record the true nature of the life of the modern human in the twenty-first century. We cannot leave the job to gangster rappers alone. 

Crime fiction, of all the great genres of literature, has served humanity the most in this regard, for in crime fiction we find a true and accurate depiction of the dark heart of the human and the violence it creates everywhere in the world. 

Through the James Bond novels and short stories, Ian Fleming chronicled the violence of his time even as the flavour of said violence changed and changed again. Through the villains 007 tackled, and invariably dispatched, we get a sense for the dominating fears of the time. 

In Casino Royale, the first of the James Bond books, the super spy was pitched against SMERSH, a fictional Soviet counterintelligence agency modelled on the real SMERSH, an umbrella organisation for three independent counterintelligence agencies in the Red Army. The name SMERSH was coined by non other than Joseph Stalin himself. Book after book, Bond battled SMERSH. 

In later books, after many escapades involving the KGB and the Soviet UnionUNION, Bond’s great new nemesis becomes SPECTRE – a fictitious criminal enterprise with no alliances to any nations – just bad people doing bad things until James Bond stops them with his licence to kill. 

Similarly, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher starts his life of fiction outwitting and outshooting dirty police officers, and eventually, several books later, gets to deal with government conspiracies. 

I can’t but sense a correlation between what’s going on in the real world at the time, and the evil conquered by the heroes of these two great writers. And so it is with many other works of crime fiction: the antagonists are caricatures and composite characters of the real baddies of the writer’s real world, and the protagonists are the Christ figures, un caped Supermen and Wander women that the society under siege daydreams of. The Russians are coming: James Bond will stop them. The terrorists have a nuclear bomb and it’s ticking down. Send Jack Bower. He’ll find it just in time. The villains of our literature are the true-life humans and institutions and situations that fill our lives with violence and the threat of violence, and our heroes are the people who look like us who defeat the evil plaguing us – for in them we find hope. They are our fantasy.

Do crime fiction books contain violence? Yes. Do my books contain violence? Yes. It talks about a violent topic. Is the violence in the book similar to everyday violence in Africa? Yes. And everywhere else in the world. It is the violence that led to the ME TOO movement. It is a violence that has historically been suffered daily by half the population of the world. It is a violence that is still suffered daily by half the population of the world. It is the violence that makes it dangerous for a woman to go jogging in the park with earphones in her ears. It is the violence that makes women anxious at the thought of getting onto a crowded train. It is the violence that a young girl anticipates as she’s about to walk past a group of men. It is the paralysing violence that is permitted, perpetuated, and prolonged by the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of men in positions of power. 

Recently, a new book prize was announced: The Staunch prize which, according to its website, “will be awarded to the author of a novel in the thriller genre in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.”

Amaka, my protagonist, is a woman who has dedicated her entire life to fighting the violence and injustice suffered by women in her society. How can I write about her work without showing the violence she has dedicated her life to fighting? My Amaka may be a creation of my own imagination, but what about the many real life Amakas out there waging their own daily battles in daily struggle against violent masculinity? 

I could write a book in which half the population of men in a city are stalked by killer aliens who beat them up before raping them with their alien phalluses and eventually killing them, and my book would be eligible for this prize. Or I could write a fictitious story about a catholic priest tracked down after many years by one of the men he raped as a boy. I could make it a revenge story in which the abused man, now grown up, damaged and exceptionally skilled at torture, stalks the retired priest, rapes him like he himself was raped, then dices up his victim’s body and feeds the pieces to his pet alligator, and I would be eligible for this prize – and I might even win, but do women not get raped? Is the sexual exploitation of young boys a more serious crime deserving of exposure through literature than the exploitation of women? Are men so much more important than women such that it is so much more important to record the violence done to men, then that done to women?

This prize, unintentionally, calls for the erasure of women. Blaming the victim is where it starts; denying the violence suffered by women is a place we must never go to. Thank God for writing and thank God for crime fiction writers; we shall never forget.

In my books in the Amaka Series, my protagonist, Amaka, is our fantasy of us standing up to the patriarchy that has denied half of the world’s population full participation in all of the world’s affairs. But it is not a moral story. There is nothing moralistic in the depiction of violent crime and violent punishment in crime fiction - it’s just the way life is.  The universe started with a big bang, and ever since then, the violence of that primal event has reverberated through time. As crime writers, all we do is the listen to the times and write what we witness.