Introduction

Who is the audience of our stories? Our reliance on the English language as the primary medium of our storytelling forces this question to the fore every once in a while, especially when the people from whom the stories we tell were inspired are often unable to enjoy them in their most native tongue. The debate of languages of African literature is fierce and ongoing, and perhaps impossible to resolve here. But we often wonder about what is lost when the works we create are directed at only an audience literate in a secondary language or in the opportunities only available with printed words.

To mark the International Mother Tongue Day 2023 today, we present to you ten short stories written by African writers in English and translated into ten different African languages.

Part of what this project hopes to answer, if only as a demonstration of possibilities, is whether deliberate and intentional projects of translation and orality into the many languages of the continent can have any impact in the future we hope to build, where multilingualism is less of a barrier than a bridge between consciousnesses. How different it would be if the different peoples and cultures could speak to each other with perfect intelligibility. How wonderful to hear each other's thoughts unfettered by the boundaries of language. To enjoy the colours of each other's worldview in their true uncluttered hue. What kind of a continent would that be? And what world?

The idea of this project isn’t novel. In February 2015, Ankara Press released its “Valentine’s Day Anthology” where fourteen love stories commissioned for the purpose were translated into the native language of the writers and recorded to be widely shared among relevant readers. A few years after, Jalada Africa did a modified version, where one 2012 short story by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Ituika Ria Murungaru: Kana Kiria Gitumaga Andu Malhii Marungii) was translated into about thirty languages in 2016, and then expanded continuously until it was translated into over 200 languages, making it the single most translated short story in African writing.

In-between, a number of translation projects have been done in print and on the web — like this publication, last year, of a Yorùbá translation of a short story by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Yet they have never been enough to make a turn in the gargantuan industry that is the mostly Eurocentric language empire of African literature. When we think of African literature today, the first names that come to mind are usually writers who write in English, and other hegemonic languages — as if literature itself has become synonymous with English. And when these works are translated, they are moved back into more European languages, etc. Why is this the case? Because the industry of African language literature has never been fully developed, fully given attention, never quite fully vested with the needed agency? Seems so.

Where are the African language writers? They do exist after all, although the industry that produced them in the sixties and seventies has long withered away under the weight of the economic downturn of many African countries. And where are the original translations of works by African writers from English into their native languages (not just from African languages into English)? This one doesn’t have an easy answer. There seems to be an unstated consensus over the years that African literary or oral productions should be translated into English, but not the other way around.

Ulli Beier, the famous German expatriate whose work in the late fifties helped discover and document some of Nigeria's first literary stars, once remarked that "it is still possible for a Nigerian child to leave a secondary school with a thorough knowledge of English literature, but without even having heard of Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire." He founded the Black Orpheus journal to address this problem, publishing both English and French language authors around the continent as a way to facilitate a cultural conversation. Today, the tragedy is more profound. Students in Anglophone parts of the continent continue to study Literature in English in school, where they learn about Shakespeare and Marlowe, and perhaps some Ṣóyínká and Senghor, but no D.O Fágúnwà or Nwosu Pita Nwana, or any contemporary equivalents, and no appreciation for how damaging the absence of works by writers in African languages is to their overall grounding.

Maybe new writers in these languages don't exist anymore — which is a tragedy of its own — but where are translators instead? Writers from the continent are read in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese even, Korean, and almost every other world language except their own. It always struck one as being a tad unsightly, and an obvious contributor to a continuing decline in the industry of African multilingual endeavours.

Unlike the Valentine's Day Anthology, the choice of language into which the stories we chose here are translated was not determined by the ethnic identity of the original writers. Ngugi wa Thiong'o recommends having more African languages communicate and interact with one another, and so we have had each story translated into other African languages than the one spoken by the original writer. And unlike the Jalada Project, this focuses on more than one short story as a way to show that more African stories can and should exist in their native tongues.

Water, a story published in English by an Igbo writer, is translated into Nigerian Pidgin; Moráyọ̀, a story published in English by a Yorùbá-British woman is translated into Shona; To Have a Ghost Baby, published in English by an Igbo writer, is translated into Tamazight; The Dark-Blue Suit, first published in Portuguese by an Angolan writer is translated into Hausa; and Painted Love, published in English by a Hausa writer is here translated into Edo, and so on. Could it one day become commonplace to have African stories exist in as many other African languages as they are in non-African languages? The interaction between these languages is important not just in transporting stories across cultural and human boundaries, but also in cementing the true multilingual character of the continent in a way that can be creatively significant. Perhaps the writers themselves benefit from a kind of retrieval that extends the universality of their stories into more spaces.

As a contribution to language revitalization, this project is also a crucial move for corpus building. By having this anthology online, written in their respective scripts (along with a later planned print anthology), we seek to create more spaces online for texts in African languages that can be beneficial for speech technology creation and language learning tools. And by focusing on not just the big and prominent languages — we have Shona, Tamazight, Twi, Swahili, Nigerian Pidgin, Edo, Tiv, Ibibio, etc — we show that a language does not need to be big and popular to be capable of carrying the weight of modern literature. The argument to the contrary, by those who don’t know any better, needs to die a natural death. (All of these notwithstanding the paradox that a project of this nature still needs to be presented to the world first through English, not always considered an African language).

This project would not have been possible without the full and unwavering support of Sterling Bank Nigeria, who have given us more than we asked in funding and moral support, and whose commitment to our vision on this project has been a reliable backbone. We also thank individuals like Sarah Ládípọ̀ Manyika, Ìyìn Abóyèjí, and Dr. Kẹ́hìndé Ládiípọ̀, whose early commitment pushed the project off the ground. Manyika kindly waived any fees in relation to her short story Morayọ̀, translated and read here by Zukiswa Wanner; and Troy Onyango donated his payment to the translators of his story. Their support has allowed us to support our writers, translators, editors, web designer, and illustrator. Thanks are also due to the literary publications, like Isele Magazine, Guernica, Agbowó.org, Asterisk Journal, etc, where some of these stories were first published, and to their editors and relevant authors for recommending the work.

Translators are the world’s modern mirrors, helping to ferry beauty in words, and cultural realities, from one language into another. They are also often overlooked, especially on book covers, when it is through their labour that stories manage to escape the confines of one language boundary into another. Today we celebrate them, depending on their competence to facilitate and improve communication and community in our multilingual spaces. We hope you enjoy the stories, listen to their readings, and share them with your contacts via Whatsapp and other spaces.

Stories, themselves, are important vessels of culture. In each of the stories featured in this anthology — and the ten more stories that will be commissioned to go along with it in the print version — each writer has grappled with what makes us human, in the most profound of ways. From the encounter of a man on a beach in Mombasa, just out of a relationship, and at a crossroads of moral directions (Onyango) to a flash fiction about a neighbourhood compound and the antics the little children and toddlers there get up to when parents are not looking (DianaAbasi); from the challenges with keeping in-laws happy in a marriage where cultures are different, and financial expectations are at variance with reality and modernity (Musodza) to the painful reunion between an apparition and his widow — taking the reader through the outlines of their tragic fate (Adébáyọ̀), each story has something to say, deftly, about the dynamics of the human condition.

We thank the writers for making the works available for this purpose. We also thank our illustrator, Moussa Kone, whose interpretation of each of the stories brings them to life in a vivid and uniquely engaging way.

The International Mother Tongue Day is marked on February 21 every year to remember the people of Bangladesh that were killed on February 21 1952 for insisting on recognition for their language in Pakistan. The United Nations had since adopted it to promote multilingualism and the awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity. Many countries on the African continent today continue to cause violence to the language diversity of their people through wrong-headed educational policies. Today is a day to reflect on how that can change for the better.

This imagined continent without language barriers is perhaps a quixotic mirage. In there, English is just one of many tongues through which stories are encoded — no bigger and no smaller than the thousands of the other tongues across the land. There, all aspects of society, from politics to education, from science to culture, are experienced in the many mosaics of the continent's linguistic repertoire. Competent, useful, and sufficient; not limited to the same strictures of colonial conditioning that has come to define much of our modern culture. But is it therefore not worth reaching for? With stories at least, we get a little glimpse into each other's worldview. With translations, our thoughts refract through each other's tongues to bring us, even if a little, closer together. And with audio recordings, and the virality of social messaging apps, we reach even bigger audiences than the written word possibly could.

To help us at OlongoAfrica continue to publish and provide support for translations and other original work, please consider a one-time or ongoing donation to us, via paypal at OlongoAfrica@gmail.com. Or if you have other ideas, reach out to us via publisher@olongoafrica.com. You can also subscribe to The Brick House annually and get writing and quality journalism from nine different publications for the price of one.

Do enjoy our offering.

Ẹ ṣé, thank you, dalu, sọsọño, msugh, medaase, nagode, asante, tanmmirt bahra, shukran, merci, tatenda, gracias…

The editors.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Olajide Salawu