This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.