Having considered editors’ criteria of style, genre, and content, my focus now turns to the role of translation as a further worldly aspect of literary mediation in the period of decolonization. From the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, the translation of African novels was bound up with the value attached to cross-continental knowledge and understanding in the interlinked projects of decolonization, pan-Africanism, and African nationalism. Often referred to as the first generation of African writers, a series of landmark novels were published in French and in English during the years surrounding the independences. In his preface to the English translation of Bernard Dadié's Climbié, South African writer and activist, Es'kia Mphahlele (Dadié, 1971: x) wrote: ‘A progressively greater measure of exposure to one another's literatures in translation must in the long run advance the pan-African cause’. For five issues following the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts, Présence Africaine ran a new section printed on blue paper containing poetry translated from English, Portuguese, and Spanish language literary texts. Authors included Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, and Mphahlele. Its editor, Mauritian poet and radio broadcaster Edouard Maunick (1967: 142) described the feature's purpose, to ‘rendre visible aux uns d'abord et aux autres ensuite, cet homme nouveau qui parle un langage nouveau’. Translation, in this light, wielded political purpose, aesthetic potential, the promise of mutual exchange between African writers and readers. Nevertheless, translation of anglophone African writing into French remained minimal during the vingt glorieuses.

Postcolonial translation theory has grappled with the idea that literary translation can act as a process of annexation by dominant languages and dominant literary forms, the legitimacy of which are defined at a putative centre. The transfer between two hegemonic languages entails a different dynamic to the power asymmetry between indigenous African and European languages (Bandia, 1993: 61). As seen in the earlier Margaret Wrong literary prizes, support for the translation from and into African languages varied widely according to institutional conditions and political imperatives. There is yet to be Wolof, Pulaar, Diola, or Bambara translations of any of the authors discussed in this book, for example. As the current chapter will suggest, translation depends not only on the relative position of languages, but on material conditions, shaped by the prestige of the translated author and, at times, the translator (Casanova, 2004: 103).