There is an exquisite pleasure unique to Agatha Christie and which the African literary tradition has, largely, shied away from exploring. It is the pleasure of receiving all the clues and still arriving at the wrong conclusion. Oh, the anguish! You sit with the suspects in the library, you have the timeline, you have the weak alibi. And Poirot, when he gathers everyone together in the drawing room, is keen to note the detail that you skipped on page thirty. That is the real art of the whodunit which lies in its ability to convince you of how close you were to the solution.

African literature features murder. Indeed, there have been murders in African literature since a very long time ago, and they have often featured in allegories of politics, colonialism, and domestic tragedy. But what African literature does not feature as much is this precise, almost mathematical pleasure encompassing the closed world of the suspects, the fair-play clue, and the twist that pays off your concentration rather than your emotions. This is not an objection but it is a question of form. The continent’s crime fiction is quite real and celebrated. It just doesn’t wear the same costume that Christie made popular, and that question should be asked.

 

Crime, But Not Quite Mystery

Take, for instance, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. This can be considered the most internationally celebrated African crime novel of the past decade. It won the LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller, was nominated for 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and received multiple other awards. It is thrilling, humorous, and impossible to stop reading. However, this is not a whodunit.

The story starts with the narrator’s sister confessing a murder before it really began. We learn who committed the crime on the first page. What we do not know, and what the novel explores throughout its entire length, is what the narrator will do about it, and what that says about obligations, beauty, instincts, and the family that produced them both.

This is crime fiction in the broadest sense of the word; however, it is not a mystery novel in Christie’s sense. The difference is essential as it allows learning about something very important – about what African crime novels tend to be about. The murder itself is not the point, as it is merely a pressure point that makes everything else visible: sisterhood, complicity, patience, and rules of who needs to be protected in a family. Christie’s puzzle asks, “Who did this and how do we prove it?” Braithwaite’s novel and a lot of other African crime stories ask, “Now that we know who did it, what do we do with each other?”

 

Where the Whodunit Did Take Root

The exception, and it is a genuine one, is the case of Southern Africa, where an actual tradition of procedural and puzzle-oriented crime fiction has developed. In the 1970s, James McClure’s series of novels about Detective Kramer and Constable Zondi (starting with The Steam Pig), which won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger, took the form of a police investigation. This is a classic whodunit plot with an aim to reveal the workings of the apartheid police, and no longer did the mystery and the politics belong to two different enterprises. Rather, the procedural process itself, the interrogation of witnesses and the tracking of forensics, becomes the means through which a racist state investigates or doesn’t investigate its crimes, and ways it is dramatised.

Sally Andrew’s Tannie Maria mysteries have managed, even more remarkably, to build a cosy African whodunit complete with a small Karoo town, an amateur sleuth who writes recipes, and the type of charming, puzzle box feel which is Christie’s closest relative. The overall trend in Southern African crime fiction, according to authors working within the field, is a flourishing literary genre that includes both township thrillers and village mysteries. This points to the fact that the whodunit is not structurally unsuited to an African context. It is only a genre which has developed differently in different regions.

In other cases, the best examples of what could be considered to be close approximations would involve the addition of mystery elements to thrillers that have a different purpose from the start. This is the case with Femi Kayode’s Philip Taiwo mysteries, where a private investigator searches for clues that expose the workings of power in both a megachurch and a political dynasty. The same holds true of Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist and When Trouble Sleeps, thrillers in the city’s underworld. These are joys to experience, yet they are just not that particular joy which comes from the closed room and the planted clue.

 

Why the Gap Might Exist

It might be tempting to give an easy answer to this question, but a few realistic answers could also be given. First, the literary prizes and international publishing for the last few decades have favoured African literature that carries serious testimony of colonialism, wars, displacement, and trauma passed through generations. A puzzle that is created purely for its own sake can seem, in the eyes of gatekeepers whose education prepares them for this, like it is ducking its responsibilities. The other reason is more pragmatic, and it is that the whodunit requires an infrastructure that is needed by genre fiction but not by literary fiction which is a market for pulp, affordable paperback runs, and serial publication in magazines. These are the sorts of infrastructure that allowed Christie to publish almost one novel a year for half a century. The publishing environment has never been as developed for African writers as it had been for a British writer during the 1920s in Collins Crime Club.

Architecture is also part of the equation. The quintessential whodunit thrives on containment that takes the form of a country manor, the snowbound train, the deserted island thanks to inclement weather. It is a form built on an insulated world that stays closed up long enough for the detective to examine it rationally. However, African crime fiction, which focuses on murders, has usually opted for an entirely different approach by expanding the scope of the narrative beyond the murder itself and implicating whole systems, such as a police force, a church, a history of a family’s silence, by means of just one murder. This is not a smaller ambition. It might just be a different ambition more concerned with the walls rather than the sealed room itself.

 

What a Savoury African Whodunit Might Look Like

None of this is an argument that African literature ought to mimic Christie. It is, however, an argument that the pure joy of deduction she brought with her has a natural place here that still remains relatively untapped. Imagine an enclosed circle constructed in a compound or a church elders’ convention or a wedding party stranded in a washout. Imagine a detective whose modus operandi was not simply forensic but social and as a character who could read a room in the way Miss Marple read a village – who understands that in a small and connected world, every single person carries a motive they have never spoken out loud. The raw material from which that story might be made, the richness of the family, responsibility and history implicit in African society, is even richer than anything Christie had to work with in the drawing room setting of an English novel.

In other words, the gap is not a gap of ability or resources. It is a gap of desire for something different – the joy of being tricked fairly. There is a writer somewhere who has the determination to include twelve clues and the discipline to use only one. That book has not quite been written yet. However, everything it would take to do that has already been laid out and waiting for someone to notice, as Poirot would. And I dare say Monsieur “Porrot” excels at what he does just because he pays closer attention than anyone else. And by relying more on the little grey cells, of course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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