Review: Rob Spillman’s Gods and Soldiers
By Abena Ampofoa Asare
At first glance, Rob Spillman’s recently released edited collection of contemporary African writing, Gods and Soldiers (Penguin Press) appears to be organized geographically. A map with countries dutifully shaded is found at the beginning of each section, following loosely in the sequence of decolonization. Upon further reflection it becomes clear that multiple classification systems–geography, language, former colonial status—have been fused to organize Gods and Soldiers. For example, a section entitled “West Africa” is followed by “Francophone Africa,” represented by three countries on the Western side of the African continent. Then come “North Africa,” “East Africa,” the “Former Portuguese Colonies,” and finally “Southern Africa.” This riotous dis-ordering is perhaps the perfect structure of the multitudes of themes, voices, and literatures represented within this engrossing collection.

Gods and Soldiers places one more nail into the coffin of African homogeneity. It is a wonderful entry point into the vibrant cacophony that is today’s African writing.

At a recent book release party at Idlewild Books in New York, Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan writer featured in Gods and Soldiers, cited technology as an important part of his personal writing process. According to Wainaina, without the unique transnational artistic connections created in chat rooms and through email relationships, he may not have mustered up the courage to write or to share his work. Similarly, Spillman, known for his work on the literary magazine Tin House, described his journey toward African fiction through the increased access presented by the internet and new connecting technology.
Perhaps it is thanks to this technological exchange that Gods and Soldiers does not flinch when representing the complexity of a continent that is equal parts beauty and horror. The Africa that emerges within the collection is a continent wedged firmly in global economic flows of precious metals and oil, and created through centuries of migration. The stories in the collection confront broad historical trends like post-colonialism and battle against even broader stereotypes of savages and saviors. This is a new Africa—one where national boundaries are sharpest on the atlas. Though the featured writers come from only seventeen different African countries, Gods and Soldiers is a journey through the major social and political realities facing today’s Africa.
Helon Habila freshly exposes the particular horrors of thinking, writing, or loving while living under a capricious dictatorship through her depiction of the inner life of Lomba, a man incarcerated in Abacha’s Nigeria.  Meanwhile Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s comic rendering of the Kumasi Zongo is a cleverly-inverted coming of age narrative—a story of individuation through sexual impotence. Leila Aboulela’s story of a Sudanese migrant caught between his Scottish wife and his Sudanese sister provides a poignant glimpse of the cost of migration, while Fatou Diome aptly describes the technological marginalization of youth living in a country saturated by Western media yet utterly unable to participate in the Western lifestyle. Gods and Soldiers explores Africa’s multiplicity of identities, with particular emphasis on the fissures, fault-lines, and internal incongruities.
Another writer featured in the collection who was also in attendance at Idewild, Patrice Nganang, points out that “there is a bit of habit of giving all Africans the same history, whether they be Congolese, Nigerian, Senegalese or Ghanaian, and regardless of their ages.” In its political, thematic, and stylistic diversity, Gods and Soldiers places one more nail into the coffin of African homogeneity. It is a wonderful entry point into the vibrant cacophony that is today’s African writing.

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