The best way to listen to music is on shuffle—one never knows what comes next or what to expect. The unpredictability, the sudden change of groove as the music shuffles, reminds me of life as we know it—or, perhaps it is like being in a Leye Adenle crime novel, an unpredictable universe. When life gets complicated, I plug into my playlist of Afrobeats songs, listening as the steady groove of Niniola’s Maradona segues into Timaya’s reggae infused Kom Kom. Here, I find a comforting escape. The appeal and power of Afrobeats lies in its heavy danceable musical beats, with vocals riding the waves of the riddim, inviting the listener to konko-below and forget their sorrow. With every note and beat drop, it is clear that the musical team behind the song, just like the listeners, are enjoying themselves.

Contemporary Afropop music is unapologetically local; the lyrics a stream of often vacuous words strung together, just for rhyming effect. This creates memorable rhythm and shared social symbols from random objects—like how cassava becomes a metaphoric phallus or how “assurance,” according to  Afropop superstar Davido’s prescription, is a conferment of expensive gifts as an expression of love. Made without an external white gaze, Afrobeats functions without rules, channeling the spirit and language of the locality of production to have far reaching aesthetic merit and social impact in ways that Anglophone African literature rarely does. This is instructive, perhaps anthropologic: as a genre, Afrobeats—lyrics proudly sung in indigenous languages or pidgin English, interspersed here and there with English or French—grew within the African continent, finds its popularity at home first before achieving fame abroad and still holds strongly to its African identity. Despite its growing popularity abroad, the genre makes no effort to make itself eligible  to any audience apart from its original constituents in Africa.

The contemporary literary equivalent to endogenous Afrobeats is the market literature tradition in Kano, northern Nigeria. For many years, writers, like Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, writing in Hausa, have explored their lives for themselves and in their language, using paper to quietly challenge a conservative society by telling stories of life and love desired and lived in secret. For these writers, mostly women, there is little need to “perform Africa” because their readers are close to home, grounded in their language and the signs it points to, as well as the social meaning it connotes.

The idea of “performing Africa” is rooted in pandering to a Western audience by deploying the stereotypes often associated with the continent. Because Afrobeats is made with a local audience in mind, it has stayed above this posturing. However, many Anglophone African writers have had to contend with African critics calling out the stereotypes, the performativity, the false representation, and pandering present in some African literature—or as Makoma wa Ngugi states in his book, The Rise of the African Novel: “the battle that Achebe carried to Conrad has now become fratricidal to the extent that African writers and critics are accusing other African writers of offering the West a Conradian Africa.” This alludes to how the sad phenomenon of “poverty porn” plays a central role in performing Africa through embodying a historical Western perception and stereotypes of Africa and Africans.

As a discussion within Africa’s literary circle and beyond, critics of poverty porn have, for the last decade, pushed the boundaries of representation. But, perhaps most importantly, they tell the world that African identity isn’t a single, simple idea—one that is riddled with poverty, starving children, helpless women, and jobless men—rather, it’s a complex, multifaceted confluence of ideas and realities. Helon Habila points to this in his critique of NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names. And over the last decade, the Nigerian critic, Ikhide Ikhleoa, has called out instances of poverty porn in African literature shortlisted for awards. Given the diversity of the continent and genres, most of the examples used here are culled from Nigeria.

In order to break this poverty porn induced perception of Africa and the performance of Africa in literature, the need then arises to present an alternative story far removed from the endless destitution in media; to produce works that conform to a certain progressive standard and avoid the trap of poverty porn. That is, literary works that show the Western eye a cosmopolitan Africa, with trendy coffee shops and fashion outlets dotting the streets of Yaba, Lagos; the tech revolution sweeping through Nairobi, Kenya; the high-rise buildings dotting the skyline of Johannesburg; or successful, middle class Africans in the diaspora—otherwise called Afropolitans. Makoma wa Ngugi goes on to critique this alternative representation of Africa—particularly in Chimamanda Adichie’s works describing them as suffering “from an African, middle-class aesthetic” and “diaspora slumming” because Adichie chose not to tell the “single story of poor, fly-infested Africans.”

Smashed in by historical and ill-informed stereotypes about Africa and critical calls to write a new Africa, it might seem that there is no in-between; an African writer is either writing poverty porn or over-representing by telling stories of successful, latte drinking middle-class family melodrama. This demand on African writers limits the imagination, the scope of their writing and the power to speak truth to power—or as the Nigerian-Ghanaian writer, Taiye Selasi, argues, results in the pigeonholing of African writers and denial of artistic freedom. But if the work of the artist is to create (and stay honest to reality, without prejudice or agenda) and this work ends with creation, does it then make sense to limit the imagination of an African writer with the burden of ideal representation?

Habila, in response to what he calls “performing Africa” in  Bulawayo’s debut novel, writes that the better parts of the book occur when “Bulawayo … is enjoying herself—when she doesn’t feel she needs to be both a player and a commentator at the same time.” Then Habila writes: “The world is a dark and ugly place, a lot of that ugliness and injustice is present in Africa, but we don’t turn to literature to confirm that. The news is enough. What we turn to literature for is its ability to transport us beyond the headlines.” Despite his advice, Habila fails to see how his criticism of Bulawayo censors and denies her the privilege of self-expression and enjoyment as she attempts to write and speak her truth. Perhaps an even more dangerous implication of Habila’s criticism is that if Africans fail to tell these stories then others will, à la American Dirt style. And, on the other hand, he then goes on to confirm the reality of many lives on the continent which Bulawayo writes about.