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It has now become traditional to nod to the 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers of English Expression when thinking about the histories of Anglophone African writing. Reporting on the conference for the Kenyan newspaper Sunday Nation, in an essay that was subsequently published in the August 1962 issue of Transition magazine, J. T. Ngugi (subsequently known as Ngugi wa Thiong’o) writes of his excitement about meeting South African Ezekiel Mphahlele and Chinua Achebe,

The young Nigerian novelist whose two novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, seem to herald the birth of a society in which writers, freed from the burden of political protests and jibes at a disintegrating colonialism, can cast an unsentimental eye at human relationship in all its delicate and sometimes harsh intricacies … With the death of colonialism, a new society is being born. And with it a new literature.

(Ngugi 1962, 7)

As Ngugi wa Thiong’o would soon discover, he was being a tad optimistic about the future. In fact, his own writing career for the next fifty years would be preoccupied with various incarnations of what Gikandi, in a reading of Ngugi’s own A Grain of Wheat, terms “arrested decolonization” (2000, 98).

It is hard to contest the fact that the debates at the conference articulated a foundational set of questions that were to preoccupy African writers and critics alike for decades to come. Expectedly, the question of defining African literature, and the related one on the language of African literature, particularly preoccupied delegates, and the discussions at the conference, and subsequently, remain foundational to critical and creative approaches to African writing to date. Interestingly, the focus on definition and language overshadowed another set of debates that were broached at the conference but did not gain as much traction subsequently: the question of audience and its implications for the circuits of production and consumption of African literature. While this set of questions is better known to contemporary scholars and writers via the work of Eileen Julien (2006) and Akin Adesokan (2012) on the extroverted novel, Pascale Casanova and Sarah Brouillette on the literary marketplace, and James English on literary value, these concerns were first flagged at the Makerere conference. In his post‐conference reflections, South African writer Bloke Modisane writes:

Sparks flew during the session devoted to a dialogue between two publishers. Vital and sometimes penetrating questions were thrown – like poison arrows – at the publishers. Were African writers getting a square deal from publishers’ readers? Were they guided by preconceived ideas as to what an African novel ought to be? Did the publishers have African readers? Were the selections guided by the considerations of a European audience? At times the questions implied a difference between a European and an African audience and then the need for a publishing house in Africa was discussed.

(Modisane 1962, 5)

Like the issue of definition, this set of questions on the production and consumption of African writing was largely suspended, and to a large extent remains unresolved, returning to haunt East African writing in interesting ways. Notable here is the duo of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu. Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa,” and his subsequent work with the Kwani Trust and Kwani magazine (see below) broach the question of problematic contemporary representations of Africa, which retain a strong appeal in the international literary market; while Dinaw Mengestu takes this challenge a step further in his novel How to Read the Air by using an unreliable narrator, Jonas Woldemarian, to both stage and subvert versions of what Mengestu terms “the Africa narrative,” precisely by weaving elaborate lies that mock American assumptions about migrants’ heartrending journeys to the US.

At a time when debates about the extroverted African novel, as Eileen Julien and Akin Adesokan’s work illustrates, are at their peak, Gikandi’s reminder about the region’s receptiveness to experimental styles of writing in the 1970s – and local readerships’ embrace of these forms – is instructive. The East African Publishing House was receptive to Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, inadvertently challenging international publishers’ rigid conceptions of literary value (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii), and subsequently attracting prominent authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah, who opted for East African publishers for Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, both of which represented a shift from “the high modernist norm that had won him international prominence” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii).