Summary

The designation “African literature” is an anomaly among geographical classifiers of global textual formations: it is a quasi-national label that, nevertheless, invites a comparative and multilingual critical engagement. To speak of African detective fiction is to address the historical and discursive logics that govern this compound literary field, whose origins lie in the histories of formal decolonization and pan-African solidarity. Moreover, detective plots have been integral to African fictional landscapes since the novel form itself began to attract substantial readerships on the continent in the 1950s and 60s. To describe this literary form as “imported” is to obscure Africans’ agency in appropriating and making their own the violently enforced cultural technologies of modernity. The African novel of detection is thus not best approached as a single literary tradition, coming down and “decolonizing” the oft-rehearsed history of the detective genre in the Global North (from its much-cited beginnings with Poe, Doyle, Christie, Chandler, and others). Instead, it is more profitably regarded as a multivalent node in a world-literary network of generic assemblages, within which it has its own set of histories and provisional points of origin. In addition to participating in intercontinental publishing circuits, African detective fiction has also, since its very beginnings, been produced by publishing ventures on the African continent itself, where it has circulated locally, nationally, and/or regionally. As an analytical category and a kind of textual practice, African detective fiction spans these differently scaled circuits of literary production and reception. And yet, thanks to the relative formal stability of texts across contexts, African detective novels are comparable both within and across those circuits. Differently geo-culturally positioned readers are at liberty to prioritize and take as foundational historically distinct textual constellations. Anything like an overview of African detective fiction’s differently scaled and intertwined histories and lineages would therefore be both difficult and pointless. Instead, it is more profitable to formulate a world-historical problem related to the genre conventions of African detective fiction, a conceptual apparatus with which to address the problem, and a cluster of comparative readings of strategically paired detective fictions from Nigeria (by Cyprian Ekwensi and Leye Adenle), Zimbabwe (by Paul Freeman and Petina Gappah), and Kenya (by Mukoma wa Ngugi and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor), which illustrate African detective novels’ potential for social multifunctionality.