I’ll be judging the Evaristo Prize alongside Juliane Okot Bitek and Uhuru Phalafala. If you’re eligible, please send in your poems. We can’t wait to read them!

Also, writing an essay to defend African literature against racist platforms is just writing an essay to show that you are brilliant. There is nothing revolutionary about it. What is revolutionary is organizing among ourselves. Those of us who have been able to create platforms or accumulate power for ourselves have to protect those coming after us. What do you think your essay is going to accomplish? We all saw the relentless witch-hunt of Jason Arday. We all read the many essays written in support of him. What did they accomplish? You are demanding essays as a means of fighting people who are going to be commissioned by big publications with the means to influence the algorithm. I need us to really wake up to what is happening around us. Your brilliance cannot save you or anyone else. What can save us is relentless organizing, and this does not mean we have to condone cheaters. Nope. What it means is that we have to protect ourselves when we know that those coming for us are not seeking genuine answers. Rather, they are seeking our complete extinction, and I say this as someone who is working on an essay about all of this.

If the Caine Prize withdraws the award from Simba, then I propose that African writers boycott the prize. We cannot afford to be spineless in this fight against the erasure of writers whom racist platforms consider vulnerable simply because they have not been published or acknowledged in the West. They came for the Commonwealth Prize, and those people are now saying they are going to restrategize. We don’t even know what that looks like. The same thing is happening to the Caine Prize. Why are these people, who are so quick to put our stories through Pangram, not putting stories published in The New Yorker through Pangram? There has to come a time when we demand that the people who provide platforms for our work grow a spine and defend us. Because providing a platform for African writers and then failing to protect them when racist wolves come for them is deeply problematic.