Opinion | African Literature’s Great 2021 Is a Gift to Readers

Take the work of Mr. Gurnah, whose award of the Nobel Prize took many people by surprise. They clearly hadn’t read “Paradise,” which traverses centuries-old trade routes between Tanzania and Central Africa. Or “By the Sea,” which moves among multiple narrators to explore how selfhood, under the pressure of migration, flickers in and out of legibility. By tracing the lasting psychic imprint of Zanzibari life on people who end up far from home, Mr. Gurnah goes well beyond the history of Western colonization with which most readers may be more familiar, offering up a body of work at once revelatory and restrained.

That’s not to say many novels recognized last year eschewed the subject. Many focus in some way on the violent legacies of European colonialism. But the insights and approaches are far from conventional. David Diop’s International Booker-winning “At Night All Blood Is Black,” for example, is about the largely forgotten history of French African soldiers in World War I. Yet it is also a gritty exercise in expressing paranoia and mental anguish through what seems, at first, like a straightforward narration of events. Through one man’s isolated rituals, captured in blood-soaked prose, Mr. Diop draws the reader into collective trauma.

In this way Mr. Diop asks readers both to learn about new things and to feel them — surely two of the major reasons most people read any work of fiction. What he does not do is offer an easy way to connect these effects to a broader idea of Africa, and that’s where things get more interesting. By holding open the experiences it recounts without predetermination, the book asks the reader to do the same. For Western readers, long fed on mistaken impressions of what Africa is, maintaining openness and humility can acquire a radical power.

The elephant in the room is always, well, the elephant: a vision of Africa as wild, exotic and unmodern. And because African writers are also aware of the odds stacked against them by long histories of bad representation, the best African literature builds this kind of purposeful openness into itself. It carefully balances the universal with the particular or the local with the global in order to do justice to real places without abandoning claims to art for its own sake. Many of the most pleasurable and achieved African novels published in 2021 wed cultural recovery to creative abundance especially well, building new worlds from deep roots.

The South African writer Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s “The Wanderers” is a good example. It moves deftly between deep knowledge of 19th-century divisions among Xhosa people and contemplation of how its main character, in grieving the loss of a father she never knew, finds new forms of cross-generational intimacy. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s “The History of Man,” out in 2020 in South Africa but forthcoming in America, similarly braids the social and the personal. Her style is deceptively simple as she describes the great mysteries of how we come to be who we are. Through the figure of Emil, a white man on the wrong side of Zimbabwean liberation history, she paints a fine-grained portrait of lost forms of Rhodesian city life.