This chapter will consider the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period. These prizes were awarded by the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l'outre-mer (ANEMOM). The history of this association, active from 1924 to the present day under several different names, is that of contact and exchange between writers who might be assumed to occupy very different areas of colonial and postcolonial literary space. By defining competitive criteria for literary judgement, often within the lines of national borders, literary prizes can either encourage new work or seek to preserve an existing literary order. The latter was particularly true in post-war France, where the juries for the Prix Goncourt and prizes of the Académie Française tended to remain in situ for many years (Sapiro, 1999: 317–76). The rhetoric surrounding the ANEMOM's Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire also seems to belong to the latter camp: it represents a continuous appeal to universal values that reinforces those values’ symbolic bind to the French language. French monolingualism was central to institutionalized political notions of francophonie as they developed in the post-independence era. Indeed, on the current website of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie, the ANEMOM's work is cited as a formative stage in the origins of ‘Francophonie’.

Prize culture is a key area in which the struggles for recognition in the literary field can be seen at work (Dozo and Lacroix, 2010; Ducas, 2013). It forms one highly visible part of the much larger system for conferring recognition on literary texts via the interpretations and appropriations of readers. Prizes operate an ‘economy of prestige’ (English, 2005) that generates, to use Bourdieu's terms, the production of belief in the value of certain literary works. In the sociology of literary reception, prizes provide a means with which to study questions of aesthetic judgement and taste in particular socio-historical contexts. Several detailed studies and perennial online debates have shown how specialist and mainstream prizes awarded to anglophone African authors, from the Nobel to the Caine Prize, confer and seek to promote certain literary forms and themes. While encouraging new writing in Africa and among its diaspora, the steep growth in literary prizes over the latter half of the twentieth century is bound up with the increased commercialization and mediatization of art.