NoViolet Bulawayo's new novel, We Need New Names, is an extension of her Caine prize-winning short story, ' Hitting Budapest', and yes, it has fraudulent preachers and is partly set in a soul-crushing ghetto called Paradise, somewhere in Zimbabwe. Writing is an incestuous business: style feeds on style, especially if that particular style has proven itself capable of winning prizes and book deals and celebrity. The question to be asked then is whether this new writing is a fair representation of the existential realities of Africa, or if it is just a 'Caine-prize aesthetic' that has emerged in a vacuum created by the judges and the publishers and agents over the years, and which has begun to perpetuate itself.

The result, for the reader, isn't always catharsis, as Aristotle suggested, but its direct opposite: a sort of creeping horror that leads to a desensitisation to the reality being represented. We are talking child soldiers, genocide, child prostitution, female genital mutilation, political violence, police brutality, dictatorships, predatory preachers, dead bodies on the roadside. To perform Africa, the distinguished panellist explained, is to inundate one's writing with images and symbols and allusions that evoke, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, pity and fear, but not in a real tragic sense, more in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-porn sense. One of the panellists, in passing, accused the new writers of 'performing Africa' for the world. I was at a Caine prize seminar a few years back and the discussion was on the state of the new fiction coming out of Africa.

The lowland book review