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In a sharp essay, Ngito Makena turns the market into a site of resistance for Black women, exploring the tensions between the Black body, the gaze, and heritage.

I hate being in the market. It is probably the most un-African thing I have ever said. As a Black woman, voluptuous, with unruly hair that defies whatever Sir Isaac Newton was on about, this should not be an opinion I hold so deeply. But I do. Soko demands too much of me: my body, my time, my very being. It summons me to be visible while reminding me that visibility comes at a cost.

In her essay 'Soko,' Ngito Makena does more than describe a place; she turns it into a stage for the bodily and social experience specific to Black women. The market — traditionally a space of life, trade, and community — becomes a theater where the drama of the gaze unfolds. Every stall, every vendor, every customer is a mirror held up to the narrator, reflecting an image she did not choose.

Makena weaves the web of expectations with finesse: to be a Black woman is to embody joy, abundance, availability. The Black female body is a text that others read without permission. The 'unruly' hair is not merely an aesthetic detail; it is a manifesto against the social gravity that would have us conform, be smooth, docile, predictable.

The author does not stop at denunciation; she explores the cracks in this assignment. Between the desire for belonging and the need for freedom, the narrator oscillates, searching for a third path. The market, with its organic chaos, becomes a site of possible reclamation: no longer enduring the gaze, but challenging it, redirecting it.

'Soko' is a text that resonates far beyond the vegetable stall. It speaks to how everyday spaces are political, how the Black body is a battlefield. Makena writes with surgical precision, each sentence a scalpel dissecting layers of meaning. One emerges from this reading with a sharpened awareness: loving or hating the market is never trivial.

What gives this essay its strength is that it does not conclude. It leaves the narrator — and us with her — in the in-between, between heritage and emancipation. Perhaps this is the only honest stance: to refuse being defined by place, by the gaze, by history. And to invent, each day, a way of being in the world that is truly our own.

Soko: The Market as Metaphor for the Black Female Body

African literature's positioning is an active, ongoing process of negotiation, not a fixed state. Its future depends on embracing creative complexity and narrative sovereignty over seeking external validation or conforming to global expectations.

The criticism of Nigerian literature, and by extension African literature, has often framed itself as an inventory of lack. We catalogue its shortcomings, its absences, its failure to meet standards it never chose. Yet this stance, however legitimate, risks trapping us in a perpetual state of deficit. It is time to shift the gaze: instead of questioning only what is missing, let us interrogate what is being built. The work of cultural positioning is not a failure to bemoan, but a perpetual construction site, an active negotiation between our heritage, our present, and the world's gaze.

Recall the intellectual clashes of the 1960s and 80s, where figures like Obi Wali and Chinua Achebe mapped the terrain of a foundational debate. Write in the vernacular or embrace English? Forge a distinct aesthetic or engage with Western traditions? These were not theoretical questions; they struck at the core of our postcolonial identity. Their legacy is not a fixed answer, but a method: that of relentless questioning, a refusal of narrative ease. African literature was born in this tension, and this may be its most enduring strength.

Today, the landscape has shifted, but the core dilemma persists, clad in new garments. It is no longer solely about language, but about circuits of legitimacy, the expectations of the global market, the weight of international literary prizes. The danger is subtle: that our literary output, in its quest for recognition, might unconsciously conform to expected narratives, to 'Africanities' calibrated for export. The true work of positioning, then, is to resist this pull, to cultivate a complexity that defies easy categorization.

This demands particular vigilance from us—readers, critics, and publishers. We must cease asking our novels and poems to 'represent' a monolithic continent. We must welcome dissonant voices, intimate stories, and formal experiments that do not seek first to explain Africa to the world, but to explore it for its own sake. Narrative sovereignty is not decreed; it is practiced, line by line, in the choice of subject, the mastery of language, and the courage of opacity.

The future of our literature, therefore, does not hinge on securing a definitive place on a global literary map. It resides in our capacity to embrace the precarity of our position, to make it the engine for endlessly renewed creativity. The site is open, and it will remain so. Our task is not to close it with a definitive work, but to participate in it, generation after generation, with the rigor and audacity our history deserves. The positioning of culture is a verb, not a state; a continuous action that commits us all.

The Unfinished Work: Positioning African Literature in the World

In the African literary landscape of the past decade, politics has never been a matter of mere slogans. It seeps in—sometimes in full light, sometimes through contraband—into the folds of a love story or the silences of a fractured family. The second installment of our series on African political fiction reminds us that, for our writers, the political is first a matter of gazes, of bodies, of memories that refuse to be silenced.

Consider *The River of Lost Souls* by Hemley Boum: here, the Anglophone Cameroon war is not a backdrop but a presence that corrodes the most intimate bonds. Boum does not describe battles; she shows how a nation unravels through the fissures of a family. Politics, for her, is a matter of empty chairs, unsent letters, silences that weigh more than speeches.

In contrast, *The Shadow King* by Maaza Mengiste plunges into the Italo-Ethiopian resistance with poetic violence. But again, power is not only played out on the battlefield: it is negotiated in women’s gazes, in photographic archives, in the reinvention of memory. Mengiste reminds us that politics is also a war of narratives.

Closer to home, *The Patience of the Baobab* by Djaïli Amadou Amal explores the political through the lens of forced marriage in the Sahel. The book does not brandish a placard; it shows, with surgical precision, how power structures anchor themselves in female bodies. Each page is an act of silent resistance, a cartography of ordinary dominations.

What unites these works is their refusal to separate the political from the sensuous. They offer us not manifestos but lives. And it is in this novelistic density that the reader may find a sharper understanding of the mechanisms of power—its flashes and its shadows.

As the decade closes, one question lingers: how will African fiction continue to inhabit the political without being reduced to it? The next novels will tell, but one certainty already stands: politics, under the pen of our writers, has never been more alive, more complex, more necessary.