Remembering Imagination: African Historical Fiction as Moral Witness

For #ReadingAfrica 2025, we have asked a few writers to write guest posts, recommending books from different genres. Feel free to join us over on social media for the weeklong celebration of African writing in all its forms.

By Mphuthumi Ntabeni 

There are few genres in African literature as morally charged, as historically resonant, and as quietly revolutionary as historical fiction. Through this form, the African writer often becomes both historian and prophet, re-remembering what was scattered by the violence of colonialism and reimagining what might yet be healed. Where the colonial archive sought to document the continent as absence and a terrain of conquest, resource, and raw humanity, the African novel of history insists upon presence, complexity, and voice.

At its heart, African historical fiction is not about nostalgia but redress. The genre refuses both the amnesia of postcolonial nation-states and the paternalism of European historiography. It reanimates the silences, the stories of forgotten heroes, warriors, mothers, prophets, slaves, lovers, and tricksters who bear the living pulse of a people’s story. Through their eyes, history ceases to be static chronology and becomes a moral inquiry, a celebration song of memory, a lamentation, and an act of resistance.

When Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart (1958), he did more than narrate the encounter between Igbo tradition and British colonialism. He wrote the first great African novel of memory. Achebe’s calm, lucid prose carried the authority of oral tradition and the structural discipline of modernist form. In Okonkwo’s tragedy lay the larger wound of African modernity, the clash between inherited codes of meaning and imposed systems of power. The book was both archaeology and prophecy, setting the template for an entire generation of writers to approach history as a living argument rather than static past.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o extended this project in A Grain of Wheat (1967), transforming Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion into an epic of moral ambivalence. His villagers are neither saints nor demons, but human beings caught between betrayal and redemption. In doing so, Ngũgĩ framed African historical novels as a form of ethical reckoning. The liberation struggle became less about ideology than about the cost of becoming human again after dehumanization.

African women writers have deepened the genre by returning to the body, the land, and the domestic interior as archives of history. In The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Buchi Emecheta turns the colonial encounter into a personal catastrophe, showing how patriarchy and empire conspire to deform African women’s aspirations. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) carry this torch into new eras. Through their books, African women are no longer passive witnesses to history but its moral guides and interpreters.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie’s reconstruction of the Biafran War refracts history through the lives of three characters (a servant, a university lecturer, and a British writer), each embodying the tensions of class, race, and intimacy. Beyond her immaculate prose, Adichie achieves the rehumanization of a narrative long reduced to statistics and photographs of starvation. The war becomes felt history: textured, embodied, and morally alive.

Similarly, South Africa’s Zakes Mda, in The Heart of Redness (2000), bridges the nineteenth-century Xhosa Cattle-Killing. (1856-7) movement with contemporary post-apartheid disillusionment. His juxtaposition of past and present invites a crucial reflection that history is never over. It reverberates through moral choices, through landscape, and through the very language we inherit.

In recent years, African historical fiction has grown more experimental, fusing myth, fantasy, and speculative imagination to rewrite history’s injustices. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) traces a lineage split by slavery from eighteenth-century Ghana to modern America, suggesting that historical fiction can be diasporic, multi-generational, and metaphysical at once. Similarly, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) explore the Swahili coast under German colonial rule, revealing the subtle psychic devastations of empire beyond the battlefield.

These works remind us that African history is not a monolith, and is plural, oceanic, and often contested. Through them the historical novel becomes a vessel for exploring Africa’s entanglement with the wider world, no longer as a victim, but with agency, endurance, and creative survival.

In a small way, the present writer has placed a few stones upon isivivane(cairn) of African historical fiction through his own works, The Broken River Tent (2018) and The Wanderers (2021). Both books explore what it means to be an African, living in the contemporary era under the shadow of colonial and apartheid history.

African historical fiction is not only about the past; it is also about the conscience of the present. To write historical fiction in Africa is to contest the narratives of power, to insist that memory belongs to the people, not to the colonizing archive. African writers, in this sense, become custodians of moral time, translating wounds into wisdom, absence into story, and silence into song.

To read African literature today is more than an academic exercise, or a mere literary pleasure, but an act of crisscrossing cultures in a movement between homelands and hostlands, memory and even the invention of new African based traditions. African writing, in all its hybrid forms, gathers voices scattered by coloniality, migration and history into new constellations of meaning. It does not return us to a single origin, rather it opens us up for new horizons where the act of remembering becomes not only an act of recovery, but of evolving into new forms of African identity.

Reading Recommendations

For those seeking an entry into this rich terrain, the following works form a kind of essential canon of African historical fiction:

    1.   Chinua Achebe — Things Fall Apart (Nigeria): the ur-text of African historical consciousness. Buy here.

2.   Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — A Grain of Wheat (Kenya): liberation and betrayal in the time of independence. Buy here.

3.   Buchi Emecheta — The Joys of Motherhood (Nigeria): the cost of tradition and modernity for African women. Buy here.

4.   Zakes Mda — The Heart of Redness (South Africa): the poetic return of the ancestors in postcolonial times. Buy here.

5.   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Half of a Yellow Sun (Nigeria): the intimacy and tragedy of war. Buy here.

6.   Abdulrazak Gurnah — Afterlives (Tanzania): forgotten stories of colonial East Africa. Buy here.

7.   Yaa Gyasi — Homegoing (Ghana/USA): the diasporic legacy of the slave trade. Buy here.

8.   Aminatta Forna — The Memory of Love (Sierra Leone): trauma and healing in the aftermath of civil war. Buy here.

9.   Maaza Mengiste — The Shadow King (Ethiopia): women warriors and memory in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Buy here.

10. Mphuthumi Ntabeni — The Broken River Tent, The Wanderers (South Africa): cosmopolitan African identity under the shadow of frontier history. Buy The Broken River Tent here. Buy The Wanderers here.