Carey Baraka has written a long, richly detailed portrait of Ellah Wakatama, the Zimbabwe-born editor who may have shaped the 21st-century African canon more than anyone else, and it is worth your time. Published by Psyche under the title “The Bookshelf Builder” and edited by Alizeh Kohari, it opens at a writing weekend in Nairobi, where a group of East African writers were trying to work out how to turn their manuscripts into published books. After talk of moving to London or finding agents, a Somali author who had won some of the continent’s top prizes said that what they really needed was to be adopted by Wakatama. Baraka, a Kenyan writer from Kisumu, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian, uses that moment to ask how a girl from Harare came to hold this much influence.
The answer begins in a childhood that reads like a novel. Wakatama, the daughter of Shona-language novelist Pius Wakatama, stopped speaking for six months as a child in Iowa because she couldn’t make herself understood in English, and a speech therapist used The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to help her recover. She grew up in Zimbabwe during the liberation war, the child of a mother who refused to let her knit balaclavas for the Rhodesian army. Books became her refuge and later her calling. In college she announced that she would read no dead white men, and the professor’s reply, “craft your own reading list,” set the course for her career.
That career took her through Penguin, where, as a junior editor, she was bothered by a Modern Classics list with no Achebe and no Ngũgĩ, and set about licensing African authors including Dambudzo Marechera, Bessie Head, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. At Jonathan Cape she acquired Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy and Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird, and she supported Parkes’s decision to reverse the usual convention of italicising non-English words, a choice she calls political. She later moved to Granta and is now editor-at-large at Canongate. Baraka also recounts how she offered to edit Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body for free when the author was planning to self-publish, then helped place it with Graywolf Press, and how she wrote a contract clause demanding an extra fee if the book reached the Booker shortlist. It did.
Baraka’s profile follows the cost of being the only Black person in the room for decades, the grief that pushed her to leave a comfortable corporate perch, and her blunt assessment of the post-2020 rush to sign Black writers for huge advances that were set up to fail. It also explores the idea of the “literary godparent.” Baraka compares Wakatama to Chinua Achebe, an editor and gatekeeper whose AWS series launched a generation, but Parkes pushes back, saying he resists the notion of godparents for African writing, an idea that doesn’t exist for Western writers. Her latest project is Pfumo, a Pan-African literary collective she co-founded to help African nonfiction writers reach international readers, and Baraka sat in on one of its workshops in Accra. It is a good prompt to ask who decides which African books get made, and what it would take to have more homegrown pathways.
It’s a 26-minute read, and it’s equal parts profile, history lesson, and reflection on how African literature gets made. Read Carey Baraka’s full portrait of Ellah Wakatama on Psyche, then tell us what you think: does African literature need its Ellah, and should it?
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