Reading Panashe Chigumadzi’s “Why I’m No Longer Talking To Nigerians About Race,” published on Africa is a Country on April 7, 2019, was quite a trip. Halfway through the essay, I was certain that I would join issues with it. Bold, piquant, exacting, yet strangely endearing, the writing staked out a particular challenge to Nigerians who, it seems, have a reputation on social media for not fighting shy of hot-and-heavy gauntlets. Most people have opinions about Nigerians, who have opinions about nearly everything on earth and in outer space, so Chigumadzi’s pin-point digital pre-indaba was a lucky strike. It immediately elicited a flurry of tweets, replies, and counterreplies, most of them approving. Typically, the impulse-engineered attention did not last.

For me, though, two things stood out in that altogether necessary challenge, and they were obvious in the two tweets I sent in sharing the hot link. First, I felt that the claim that Nigerians lacked sufficient political solidarity with (southern) Africans on the basis of race was debatable (a good thing), and that, second, placing the writer Wo̩lé Ṣóyínká as the exemplary figure of that national lack of empathy could use a more considered appreciation of the writer’s involvements as a political personality.

It is true that a couple of other Nigerians came up for sharp censure in the essay, but none had Ṣóyínká’s standing, or provided enough straw on which to hang the argument. The first issue was the authors’ main beef, and she marshaled many points, some relying on personal observations and others distilled from quite impressive reading. “If it is true,” she wrote, “that we of African descent have grown up in different households, that shape our experiences of the world differently, how do we respond to the pain and yearnings of our sisters?” I imagined addressing this question with a combination of historical details and actual examples of Nigerians’ commitment to racial solidarity that Chigumadzi might have missed. Then, parenthetically, I would add a long paragraph to offer a complex picture of Ṣóyínká’s racial politics, in art and in life.

In the meantime, I hoped someone else, another Nigerian or anyone from anywhere informed about Ṣóyínká’s work, would pick this gauntlet …

Reflecting further on the task, however, it seems to me that building an argument around Ṣóyínká’s politics in relation to the black world, and to southern Africa in particular, is the more productive way to address my two quibbles with the essay. It presents an opportunity to put on record information about African literary culture that is not well-known, much less treasured. The prevalent attitudes among African creative artists, especially those who are socialized in digital culture, do not seem to sufficiently encourage habits that make confident creatures of sensibilities—curiosity, criticism and the eschewal of easy answers. It is to the benefit of Chigumadzi’s readers that they are made aware of the political exactions of writers like Ṣóyínká and others, whether or not such readers are inclined to take literature as vocation. Writers also make our history, after all, and they do so in ways that give us cause for hope, for the most part. And who knows but that refreshing relevant parts of this history can foster (actually rekindle!) the solidarity that the author felt to be lacking.