African Literature, AI and The Atlantic’s Pangram Cudgel

WHILE artificial intelligence as we know it is new, the controversies on creativity that it has so far elicited in creative circles and the academia are not. Especially not for the African or Black, such as the winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing, Simbarashe Kundizeza. (This author would like to take "African" and "Black" as synonyms for the purposes of this writing). To the imperial overlord, an African—or, a savage (as Joseph Conrad would put it)—does not possess the ability to reach the intellectual height to produce literature or to intellectually problematize and polemicise. The very act of putting words together, and reading by extension (as an interviewer once suggested to Adichie), as allegedly started in Mesopotamia, is alien to the Black.

It is, first and foremost, this sense of intellectual depravity attributed to the Black that one must recognize in the ongoing debates on the selective censorship of Black writers and intellectuals. When Phillis Wheatley wrote in the 18th century, her writing, instead of causing a rethink of the imperialist's view of his slave, caused even more doubts. To prove that she wrote what was attributed to her, Wheatley had to take an oral examination in 1772, before an 18-member panel which also included the then Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. Upon proving that she truly wrote the poems, her collection of poems was published only with an attestation to her ability.

Notwithstanding the proof, Thomas Jefferson, who was not just a politician but also a writer, could not agree to the resolution that Wheatley wrote the poems, or that Blacks like Wheatley could possibly exist. In his reaction, he wrote that "Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not [the blacks'] condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction". It is no surprise that Jefferson would write this; his sense of the world was White, and everything outside that Whiteness did not count. This man who famously wrote that "all men are equal" had over 600 slaves. For him, like the pigs of George Orwell's Animal Farm, some men, i.e. whites, are more equal than the others, i.e. blacks.

It is 2026, and there are more Thomas Doubting Jeffersons in the world. If you have ever thought that Postcolonialism is an overrated, overstretched, stale theory, Pangram, its sister checkers, and Artificial Intelligence are here to jerk you up to a certain reality. Here is your reality: While AI is causing epistemic violence to all fields of study and practices, the Black intellectual, professional, or writer cannot be said to be good enough to suffer the same fate as the white. If you are not another Jason Arday or Jerry Falade, then you are Simbarashe Kundizeza. For you to matter, you will have to defend not just your art against the onslaught of generative AI that has given extreme wordists a share in your title as a writer, but also against a culture that goes back to and beyond Jefferson.

Should a publishing outfit or a Prize be worried about AI use in writing? Yes. Should there be policies about it? Yes. What should not be, however, is the censorship that African writers continue to suffer in a battle that knows no colour. Kundizeza's short story, "The Blue Fighter," was suspected to be AI-generated on a comparison that his previous works differed from it in style, an allegation that the author has denied. Anyone who has taken a class on style and writing may know that style is not fixed or always the same, even when the works are by the same author. Nobel Laureates like Wole Soyinka, Anne Carson, Doris Lessing, etc cannot even be said to maintain the same styles in all of their works.

Other than showing a poverty of understanding of literary criticism, The Atlantic's publication on the Caine Prize for African Writing is an exhibit in the ever-subsisting dichotomy of Main/Other relations of the colonizer and the colonized. Kundizeza is not the first victim, he probably will not be the last. For the white imperialist, (and the infrastructure he builds) there is a sworn enmity between his ability to see the world and to see a shared problem. That white distinction that Jefferson so talked about does not apply only to abilities to do what is good, to create what is worthy and outstanding, it also applies to what is problematic and what is threatening. To admit that AI constitutes the same threat to an African writer as it does to an American or British writer, that being an African writer does not mean having a natural proclivity to co-create that threat with AI, seems to mean admitting the Black writer into the inner circle of the Anglosphere—and desecrate it.

Like Jefferson, the viable option is to deny the capacity of the African to write. But unlike Jefferson, the colonial mind of the 2020s has AI (successor to plagiarism politics) to deploy. But AI, that ubiquitous human opium, is not infallible. As an innovation, it is, so far, describable as an aggregator of stored data. An AI does not write, it maps with computational variables. Which means that it can glitch, and it so does. Pangram, the AI detector which was used on Kundizeza's story, has been critiqued as a flawed LLM, like any LLM. While Ms Vara, the author of The Atlantic's controversial article, admits at the end of her piece that she may be wrong, her work in casting doubt on "The Blue Fighter" has already done some damage. As my elders say, Asọ ò bá Ọmọ́yẹ mọ́, Ọmọ́yẹ ti rin ìhòòhò wọjà.

That doubt is like a sharp piece of bone forced and trapped in the esophagus of a writer. Literature is what struggles when writers struggle, and the aforementioned simile may be equated to the art itself retching for life. Whether or not anyone believes that Simbarashe Kundizeza's "The Blue Fighter" is a product of an AI is a tragedy in its own nursery. As a writer, he has already established for himself a name before The Caine Prize. That is without a doubt. What is more problematic is how writers are seen now, and as the latest events have proven, how African writers are seen.

In 2014, when I used to share my poems and other writing on Facebook frequently, a woman who lived in South East London, who had, by the affordances of virtual proximity, been one of my constant readers, said to me, "Your English is brilliant." That comment, which she followed up with an explanation of how many non-natives had always used bad or flamboyant English with her, was high praise for me at the time. It was one of many, but it was significant. I was just completing high school education, and here was a Research Fellow in faraway London telling me that I spoke and wrote English well. As I prepared to write this column, I thought of her, and what she might have said if AI writing was possible at the time.

I would not be able to find that out. What I have found out, however, is that AI has dumbed down the reception of my work as a writer and as an African. Some of the people who have or will read me have been claimed by AI, consciously or unconsciously. Social Media content creators and AI prompters are knee-deep in the business which the attention economy forces my audience into. To be a writer now is to accept that your reader now lives with a mental condition of learned invisibility of some aspects of your writing. You may never be accused of using AI to write, especially if you never subject your work to the scrutiny of a Prize like The Caine Prize for African Writing. But what you will be afflicted with is your reader's inability to be wowed like mine was in 2014. If you sound too good, you become a lie.

Unfortunately yet interestingly, becoming a lie is only for us who witnessed the world feed books, old and new, to AI. The writer of the future will not have the opportunity to become a lie; the writer of the future will be a lie. They are unlike me, who get to archive my pre-AI works in case anyone tries to pull a Kundizeza on me—my mentor, playwright Soji Cole, is of the opinion that archiving one's work, documenting the process, does not particularly fix the problem. The writer of the future will grow in and around AI so mortally it could be easier to say that all their life's works are never theirs.

Maybe it is even too early a call to make. Who says there will be a writer in the future when AI agents are there to create and tell stories? Who says literature is not dying and might be one of AI folktales told to future generations? Who says that, even if human creative writing manages to survive, some men and women would still be interested in spending minutes, weeks, months and years crafting what might never fetch them money or other rewards in a world where they can simply ask a progeny of Claude or ChatGPT to do the work in seconds?