Dr Astrov, the one person who embodies hope for the future, finds himself standing in front of the map of Africa that has dominated the final scene (even though it is described as ‘obviously quite out of place here'). It is an autumn evening, and we realise that winter is coming. Throughout the scene, no-one has commented in any way on the map. Now, quite unexpectedly, Astrov says: ‘Down there in Africa the heat must be quite something. Terrific.' It is as if in the midst of all the accumulated cold of the play – in the weather, in the gloomy house, in the relations between the characters, in their prospects for the future – Chekhov suddenly focuses on something very far away, literally ‘out there', like something impossible that looms in the farthest distance, something on which all their tawdry and totiering hopes can be projected, a reality so splendid and so far away that it can only be imagined, something immense and hot and remote. Down there in Africa the heat must be quite something.

Terrific. Over the years – over the centuries, perhaps Africa has been just that: a remote space, called by Conrad ‘one of the dark places of the earth': Europe's radically different Other. Even if, as in the Chekhov scene, it is briefly seen as hot an welcoming, there is something awe-inspiring, something wild and dangerous en terrifying about it; more otien it is threatening, a place of war and famine and scarcity, of violence, of inhospitability. For us who live here, for us to whom it is home, it is Mother Africa, a caring and generous and all-embracing reality. It is not far and foreign, but here and now. Its immediacy and urgency concerns us and defines us. Yes, we have been exposed to its famines and floods and droughts and dangers, but we also know, intimately, its generosity and nourishing closeness, the endlessness of its plains and the wideness of its skies, the splendour of its sunsets and the magic of its nights, the forceful presence as well as the subtlety of its smells, its sounds, its tastes, its textures, its colours, the uncompromising ferocity of its light and the depth of its shadows.

We know it as a space of suffering but also of joy, of lamentation and of song, a place of mourning and of celebration, of pain and of healing, of tears and of laughter, of stark reality and astounding magic. She is ours, just as much as we are hers. The here-and-nowness of its presence does not, however, restrict it to onedimensionality.

Within the ‘here' Africa invokes and accommodates the ‘there'; within the ‘now' of today it acknowledges also yesterday and tomorrow, past and present – which finds its most meaningful expression in the famous Zulu formula: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu that is, ‘I am human through other humans'. Which means that a phenomenon like ‘individualism' in literature or philosophy or anthropology acquires, in the context of Africa, a scope and a density not readily accessible to other languages. In a very real and specific sense, I experienced this during the years of apartheid in South Africa, when censorship tended to isolate artists of all kinds musicians, dancers, sculptors, painters, and also writers – from one another: but that did not mean that they had to work in isolation. Their work continued to be nourished by a sense of communality, of sharing, of being threatened together. I believe that this still, and increasingly,inspires creativity in Africa, Over the past decades – in Anglophone African literature since Achebe and until Okri, and most splendidly Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; in Francophone Africa through Menenembo and Ouologuem and Chamoiseau and numerous others the work of African writers have begun to dominate the discourse of the novel in the world, while some of them have even displaced European or white American writers from their earlier preeminence. The novel has become what it was always predestined to be: a multi- farious genre for all. Which does not mean that there areno differences.

But it is, as so otien, a matier of Vive la difference! The very hereness and nowness of Africa infuses the novel of the 21st century with its necessity and its indispensability. More than ever before, Africa has its stories to tell, its rhythms to sing, its dramatic tensions to celebrate. And that, it seems to me, is what the encounter of writers in Algeria in this year, 2009, can infuse with new strength, new dimensions, and a new sense of direction and purpose.

An article published in the first issue of PANAF Algiers2009 magazine