By Muhammed Lawal

The question of whether contemporary African writers still uphold autochthony, the preservation, promotion and representation of indigenous African cultures, languages, beliefs, values and ways of life or have increasingly moved towards the commercialisation of African experience deserves critical attention. This question becomes particularly important when considering Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad and Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, Chinkemkasimma Cassidy Chukwuma’s Husband Is Useless, and, for comparison, Katy Brent’s How to Kill Men and Get Away With It and Blythe Roberson’s How to Date Men When You Hate Men.
The argument is not that African writers must write only about traditional African societies or reject modernity. Rather, it is necessary to examine whether contemporary African literature is gradually drifting from the cultural and intellectual objectives historically associated with African literature. The titles themselves provide an important point of departure because they reveal not only subject matter but also the language through which contemporary literature seeks to attract readers.

Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad presents contemporary Lagos through stories of women, relationships, marriage, sexuality and male behaviour. Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow explores Témì’s struggle with beauty standards, cosmetic surgery, family expectations and the social value attached to women’s bodies. Husband Is Useless similarly foregrounds marital and gender tensions through a deliberately provocative title. Brent’s How to Kill Men and Get Away With It explores female anger and violence through dark humour, while Roberson’s How to Date Men When You Hate Men examines heterosexual dating and contemporary patriarchy.

What is striking is the similarity in the titles. They are provocative, conversational, humorous and commercially attractive. Kuku’s titles, in particular, seem to depart from the historical cultural, political and anti-colonial concerns that have often characterised African literature. Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad uses Lagos as its geographical marker, yet the title foregrounds a broad conflict between men and women rather than a distinctly Nigerian cultural question. Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow similarly draws attention to contemporary beauty culture and the commodification of the female body. Husband Is Useless places marital dissatisfaction at the centre of its title. These are legitimate African social realities, but their presentation raises a deeper question: are African writers increasingly framing African experience through themes already made commercially recognisable by global publishing?

The comparison with Brent and Roberson makes this question more compelling. The similarity between Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, Husband Is Useless, How to Kill Men and Get Away With It and How to Date Men When You Hate Men suggests that African and Western writers increasingly participate in a shared vocabulary of feminism, dating, sexuality, gender conflict and individual self-expression. This does not prove that Kuku or Chukwuma directly borrowed their ideas from Brent or Roberson. Rather, it suggests an ideological convergence produced by a global literary culture in which certain themes and provocative titles have become highly marketable.

The crucial question, therefore, is whether African writers are merely writing about Africa or thinking from African cultural foundations. A novel can be set in Lagos, feature Nigerian characters and address Nigerian social problems while its dominant conceptual framework is shaped by Western ideas of individualism, feminism, sexuality, beauty and romantic relationships. Africa then becomes the setting while the intellectual framework originates elsewhere. This is where the question of autochthony becomes significant.

Plato’s argument in The Republic offers a useful theoretical parallel. His suspicion of poets is partly based on the belief that imitation can influence emotions, beliefs and moral character. Applied cautiously to African literature, this reminds us that literature is never ideologically innocent. Writers participate in shaping society’s understanding of what is desirable, beautiful, acceptable and progressive. If African literature continually reproduces externally generated cultural ideals, it risks becoming an instrument of imitation rather than cultural self-definition. Plato’s proposed banishment of poets can therefore be understood, in this context, as an acknowledgement of the ideological power of literary representation.

The 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers of English Expression is central to this debate because it raised fundamental questions about what African literature should be and about the relationship between African experience, European literary traditions and colonial languages. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o later intensified this debate by challenging the dominance of colonial languages and advocating African languages and African-centred cultural production. His position reminds us that African literature should not merely use Africa as its setting or subject; it should draw intellectual and aesthetic strength from African histories, oral traditions, languages and systems of knowledge.

From this perspective, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike would likely have subjected these tendencies to the same kind of interrogation they directed at Wole Soyinka and other African writers whom they considered excessively influenced by European literary traditions. In Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, they demanded an African-centred literary aesthetic and challenged cultural dependence on European models. They would therefore likely ask whether provocative, globally recognisable themes sufficiently preserve the cultural and intellectual autonomy of African literature.

The criticism, ultimately, is not that African writers discuss feminism, beauty, marriage, sexuality or modern relationships. These are genuine African social concerns. The criticism is that the titles and thematic framing may indicate a shift towards the commercial language of global publishing. African literature can embrace modernity, but it must ask: whose modernity does it represent?

If African literature becomes African merely because it is written by Africans and set in African cities, while its dominant ideas increasingly reproduce global, particularly Western, cultural frameworks, then the movement from autochthony towards commercialisation becomes a serious literary and cultural concern. The task of contemporary African writers is therefore not to reject the world, but to ensure that Africa can speak to the world from its own intellectual, linguistic and cultural centre.

Muhammed Lawal is a lecturer, Department of English, Lagos State University (LASU)