In this article, I walk you through the Caine Prize winner, participation by gender and synopses of five stories that made it to the 2021 shortlist of the Caine Prize.
Ethiopian-American writer snatched the 2021 Caine Prize from a Kenyan and three other Africans on July 26, making it the fourth time a woman won the annual fete in a row.
The Street Sweep earned Meron Hadero the £10,000 award.
She had been in the 2019 top five shortlist too.
“What stood out for the judges was the subtle but powerful ending, and how everything comes brilliantly together in a clever twist, that sees Getu transform; and the reader pushed to question the thin line between ‘making it’, and the necessary subjugation of the soul,” Goretti Kyomuhendo, the lead judge, said of Hadero’s work during the award ceremony.
In the 2021 contest alone, three out of five competing stories were by female writers, a fact that now, in part, lifts a lid on Africa’s literary present and future, by gender.
Two more women, both Ugandan nationals namely: Doreen Baingana and Iryn Tushabe, were also in the shortlist for their Lucky and A Separation stories, respectively.
Writers Makena Onjerika (Kenyan), Lesey Nneka Arimah (Nigerian) and Irenosen Okojie (Nigerian-British) won in 2018, 2019 and 2020, in the order stated.
Overall, since 2000 to date, many women have won the title compared to men, an endeavour that has also seen Nigerian writers win more.
Men in the 2021 list were Kenyan Troy Onyango for his This Little Light of Mine story and Rwandan-Namibian Remy Ngamije for his The Giver of Nicknames piece.
Baingana, Tushabe, Onyango and Ngamije went home with £500 each.
SYNOPSES
Street Sweep
In this year’s winning work, Ms. Hadero tells a tale of an 18-year-old Ethiopian named Getu Amare from a poor neighbourhood in Addis Ababa.
Getu, a professional street sweeper, over-ambitiously does his all to mingle with the high and mighty in the affluent Ethiopia’s NGO world.
The story of Getu peaks during his visit to a high-end hotel with hopes of inheriting the position of a senior aid worker who is about to fly abroad.
It is those hotels where a bottle of water costs way much than a beer ordinarily would.
Despite his sweaty shirt and cheap attires, his brilliance takes him past the inquisitive guards at the hotel’s gate to ‘make it’ to the farewell party.
Just like it is with most cases for many jobless youths, Getu ends up with only business cards stacked in his jacket pocket.
No job, just verbosity laced with hope and wishes for a better future.
His hopes are quashed greatly when ‘his friend’, whom he had helped with (his friend’s) work around the city, is chauffeured outside the expansive hotel premise to his bewilderment.
Definitely, he has been (mis)used and dumped!
Using vivid description, Ms Hadero makes the story stimulating, such that the reader unsuccessfully withholds their intermittent demand for a laughter, the protagonist’s sad situation notwithstanding.
It is drama after drama.
In the voice of Getu’s mother, the tragedy of the NGO story in Africa is revealed.
She laments how the officials of the NGOs around them are gobbling donor funds as locals choke in poverty.
The story by Troy Onyango, a master in creative writing, thematises deadly accidents on Kenyan roads, technology-aided dating, love and ‘women who eat fare’ – a typical Kenyan experience.
Borrowing from the Listener Kid’s song title, This Little Light of Mine, Onyango sets his story in Nairobi and goes down the memory lane of the protagonist to the accident prone Salgaa stretch.
He tells the story of Evans, a disabled protagonist, who finds trouble in the silence of his two-year-old solitude after he was involved in a freak road accident on his way home for Christmas festivities.
This Little Light of Mine was the song playing in the bus seconds before the calamity that fractured Evans’ legs.
The accident which nearly killed him sat him on a wheelchair.
He is constantly on painkillers. The IT expert now works from home; his quiet house.
Wheeling himself around the house, he cannot even spot one single neighbour.
Evans’ social life has been shuttered. He cannot go clubbing around the city and mingle with girls as was the case two years ago.
He masturbates as he struggles to watch porn on his phone.
A dating app is the only connection he has with the outside world of women.
He equally hates women after his ex-girlfriend terminated his ‘tenure’ as the owner of the yam.
“Omg! You are a cripple? Sorry but I don’t do cripples!” a prospective new-catch had told him over the App.
Well, you must have heard of a Kenyan joke that some women do not show even an ounce of compassion to orphans and cripples and even go ahead to ‘eat their fare’, too.
Evans’ money is ‘eaten’ by a self-confessed late-night female reveller.
He offers to pay Uber upon the tipsy girl being dropped at his doorstep. However, she cunningly insists on taking a regular taxi.
Next, Evans’s phone is blocked after the sweet M-PESA message is received on the other end. He has been conned!
The story ends in a suspense, with the woman ‘apologising’ and promising to be in Evans’ house in a bit.
As is typical of many Kenyan bachelors, Evans cleans dirt in his room at a meteoric speed despite the chronic pain in his legs. The girl has said that she is coming over, you know!
But the prediction is that she will still show no empathy at any slight opportunity with Evans, who sounds to be monied.
Reading this short story, a reader in Kenya might be wondering why the writer settled on the Listener Kid’s song title instead of the more familiar Wanakula fare line in Sauti Sol’s hit song “Nairobi”.
But the answer lies in a flash back at the accident scene.
Rémy Ngamije, in “The Giver of Nicknames”, tells a tale of the disquiet between rich and poor kids in schools.
While taking the character of a clown, the persona – a student – reflects on his ‘justified’ hate for his classmate at a top Namibian institution; the antagonist, whom he had nicknamed Donovan “Donnie Blanco” Mitchell alias ‘the rapist’.
His hate for Donnie Blanco had emanated from the manner in which he (Blanco) would boastfully tell his classmates about his affluent family’s trips to various parts of the world.
“The year I dubbed Donovan Mitchell as Donnie Blanco, his family had taken a tour of the Spanish-speaking world,” says the persona.
The disparity is that Blanco’s family believed in traveling as the best education whereas middle class parents, like that of the protagonist, believed in education as the best education.
Their female teacher, the protagonist notes, celebrated Blanco’s compositions even as theirs were belittled.
“Blanco’s globe-trotting essays, always marked down our writings, using her socially distanced red pen to tell us we needed more traveling in them, broader horizons, higher skies and a keener sense of adventure.
Basic Bs and discouraging Cs are what you’d get if you had not been on a first-class British Airways flight to Amsterdam or Basel.”
Blanco was no doubt a rapist, whom he had caught red-handed mounting a girl in their school.
He reported the matter to their teachers, only for their parents to be summoned and the teachers silenced by the overflowing money from the rapist’s family.
The girl was badly intimidated and served with no justice.
In her “Lucky” story, Doreen Baingana piles her words around a civil war somewhere in the heart of Uganda.
The war is pitting the Lakwena rebels and government soldiers.
At the centre of the war are eleven pupils and a teacher who are stuck and starving in school. They cannot travel anywhere, lest they be hunted down and killed.
The guavas in a neighbour’s compound turn out to be their sumptuous delicacy.
The work’s title, Lucky, finds meaning when the rebels finally invade the school as the children, together with their teacher, hid in a dormitory.
The narrator peeps through the window and sees many armed rebels baying for their blood.
Just when they get sure the criminals were gone, their teacher becomes the first to open the door.
The teacher unluckily takes the first bullet and falls dead at the verandah.
The story ends with the protagonist escaping unhurt and the only daunting task being to wrap the remains of their teacher from the over-joyous flies.
A Separation, as told by Iryn Tushabe, is about the tough experiences of a Ugandan woman who leaves her country for doctoral research in Canada at the University of Regina.
She is separated from her conservative village life, as illustrated in her grandmother’s way of living, to a liberal western society where she has to stay for the purpose of her study.
The protagonist has a faint idea of who her mother was, but she is consoled by the words of her grandma, now also deceased, who once told her that the dead, like her mother, are alive and with them in spirit.
This is utter paradox.
The researcher is separated not just by the distance between continents but also from people whom she cares about.
Conclusion
From the tragedy of the NGO world, poverty and joblessness in Ethiopia, to the troubled social life of people living with disabilities and con women who eat fare in Nairobi and the death trap which is Kenyan roads; from the exposé on discrimination between rich and poor children and heads who compromise misbehaviour and harbour criminals in Namibian schools because of being bribed, to the suffering and death of innocent people during an uprising in Uganda and to the loss studying abroad brings to peoples’ families, the stories that were scrutinized for the 2021 Caine Prize perfectly mirrored the African continent.
Presently, rebels and bandits are leaving trails of death and widespread fear not only in Uganda but also in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan and Nigeria.
Non-governmental organizations are too many in Africa but poverty has been on the rise despite such organizations receiving billions in donor funding.
As we write this, so many people who are abroad have no means of traveling back to say goodbye to loved ones after death and families have divorced due to long distance love life.
The Caine Prize, named after the former Chairperson of the Booker PLC, Sir Michael Caine, is an annual award for African writing of short stories by writers born in Africa.
Published stories are currently being received for consideration for the 2022 prize.
