The Paradox of African Writing and AI

Ten years ago, I found myself in Lusaka, Zambia, sitting at a table with a group of extraordinary writers.

We had been invited to participate in a 12-day writing retreat by the Caine Prize for African Writing, considered by many to be the most important literary award for authors on the continent.

Among our ranks at the retreat were four former winners of the prize ( NoViolet Bulawayo , Okwiri Oduor, Namwali Serpell , and me), as well as past finalists and immensely talented Zambian writers.

During those two weeks, we wrote and workshopped our stories, and in between—as we ate and gossiped, visited local schools, and read our work to the public—we discussed the great distance between the literature we hoped to produce and the kind of work the marketplace expected from us.

We were all beneficiaries of the Caine Prize, which was first awarded in 2000 to introduce African writing to a wider international audience.

At the time, African fiction hardly existed in Western bookstores or newspaper book sections.

In the years since, it had flourished, but many of the most successful and celebrated works circled the same themes: war and its aftermath, the scourge of poverty, the persecution and murder of queer people, the trials of immigration to the West, recapitulations of popular American or European stories in African settings.

In Lusaka in 2016, we wondered whether there was room for stories that did not hew to these norms, stories that followed their own idiosyncratic paths, stories that challenged and reconceived what “Africa” means.

So many of us, after all, were living examples of the diversity and capaciousness of the term.

Even as we pursued originality in our work, we recognized that certain stories (I described them as “accessible” in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books ) would continue to earn a disproportionate amount of recognition and acceptance.

A decade later, the Caine Prize has become the setting for a different conversation about African writers and literary authenticity.

Two weeks ago, the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza was named this year’s winner for his story “The Blue Fighter.” Just five days later, the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara reported in these pages that the AI detector Pangram had flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated .

The allegation quickly became fodder for arguments far beyond the Caine Prize: about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, the state of contemporary literature, and even the legitimacy of Black intellectual achievement.

Vara’s story revived fears raised earlier this year, when three regional winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were accused of using AI , that chatbots are already winning prestigious literary prizes by fooling multiple award juries.