“The Blue Fighter” follows Tinashe, a young boy whose family is plunged into financial difficulty after his father leaves his profession to pursue his passion for building fish tanks. As the family’s financial situation deteriorates, Tinashe’s mother is forced to confront a difficult choice between supporting her husband’s ambitions and ensuring the family’s survival.

The longlist, announced on 6 October, brings together fiction, memoir, poetry, history, children’s literature and non-fiction from publishers across Africa and the Caribbean. The prize's emphasis on publishing is significant at a time when conversations about African literature increasingly extend beyond writing itself to questions of rights, ownership, distribution, translation and access to global markets.

“Wes, I want a divorce.” Muna’s words poured out through her morning breath in a whisper. Wesonga did not hear her but she immensely enjoyed the relief of letting them out after they had been stuck in her throat for years, perpetually threatening to purge the same way she purged after eating boiled eggs, but unlike the eggs, she always managed to push down the words. 

Writing in My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem reflected on the cost of this uneven distribution of opportunity, saying she was “angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.” It is a particularly useful way of thinking about the leadership gap because what is lost is not simply a woman's promotion or a seat at a table. It is the talent an institution may never discover because it did not give that person the opportunity to exercise authority in the first place.

That is when I stumbled upon data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the Kenya Demographic Survey of 2022. Goddamn it. The kids are sleeping with the enemy, and it isn’t working. Surprise? Apparently, 34% of all households in Kenya are led by women. Divorce is huge. Eleven per cent of married women and 5% of married men are choosing to walk, instead of strangling each other (hurrah!).