Boyd Tonkin: A Week In Books

Beyond the practical hassles of fighting for a publisher, an income and an audience, gifted writers who live far from the planet's literary citadels have another, more treacherous river to cross. In order to be heard, new voices from outside Europe or America often have to tell a high-volume story of conflict and crisis; to deliver tales of battles and barbarities, tyrants and rebels, and of the human flotsam swept up in their wake. Sometimes it feels as if characters in fashionable fiction from the rich North aren't allowed to have a public life; or, if they come from the poor South, a private life.

In Africa, above all, the world's war-besotted gaze can rob local authors of a right to intimacy. So it was refreshing to see, under the fan vaulting of the old Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Caine Prize for African Writing go to a defiantly original story of love against the social odds. Monica Arac de Nyeko, who won the £10,000 award for short fiction from the continent, has written in the past about the viciously protracted civil war in her native northern Uganda; for example, in "Strange Fruit", shortlisted for the same prize in 2004.

Yet the story that prevailed on Monday, "Jambula Tree", captures the "innocence" of a love affair between adolescents whose desire shakes the moral foundations of church and community. Why this earthquake, given that neither youngster feels, as their friendship swells into passion, that "these were boundaries we should not cross nor think of crossing"? Because the shocking couple are two girls, who love without shame. I hardly need explain that this theme means that Arac de Nyeko has herself crossed a line that, these days, runs deeper in Kampala than in Kensington.

"Jambula Tree" has already appeared in Britain, in the excellent collection African Love Stories (edited by Ama Ata Aidoo; Ayebia Clarke Publishing, £10.99). Among the other contributors are Leila Aboulela, the inaugural Caine Prize victor in 2000, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose shortlisting in 2002 gave her now dazzling career an early boost. Other Caine laureates who moved on to success with full-length fiction include Helon Habila and Segun Afolabi. Last year's winner, Mary Watson from Cape Town, will surely follow soon. Her story, also driven by the profane energies of unruly desire, kicks off a new anthology that matches the 2006 Caine Prize shortlistees with work developed at an associated writer's workshop in Kenya this year: Jungfrau, and other short stories (New Internationalist/ Jacana, £7.99).

It would be plain crazy to pretend that the short fiction showcased in these volumes can miraculously dodge Africa's many burdens. No one here gets a free pass out of history. In Jungfrau (just two examples among many), Laila Lalami dramatises the lure of fundamentalism among the morose Moroccan teens of "The Fanatic", while Petina Gappah makes wrenching tragedy out of Mugabe's assault on his own people in "An Elegy for Easterly".

Yet life goes stubbornly on. Kids fall in love, and lust; children revolt against parents; friends quarrel and reconcile; religion oppresses and inspires; dreams of a richer existence flare and fade. Local streams of hope and pain flow into the seas of a wider fate. Fiction of this precision can reclaim the normal decencies (and normal indecencies) of Africa that pundits and politicians will ignore.

In Elizabeth Pienaar's story, a strong migrant worker in Johannesburg, Gabriel, who once "flung a bag of cement over his shoulder like it was a beach towel", shrinks as the "grey mist" of Aids descends to muffle his power. In his last days, he must return to see the longed-for child left with his wife. Her name, and the story's, is "Rejoice".

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