Viva Lewes Issue #152 May 2019

ON THIS MONTH: TALK
Margaret Busby
New Daughters of Africa anthologist
“If I asked you to name black
women writers how many could
you list before you stopped?”
Margaret Busby, whose longawaited
second anthology of
African-descent female writing,
New Daughters of Africa, has
just been published by Myriad
Editions, puts me on the spot.
My mind starts tracking Zadie
Smith and Andrea Levy, but I
know it’s not going to get very
much further. “Um…” I say.
“Um…”
“Exactly,” she cuts in, charitably.
“There are a lot of voices out there that have
been under-represented, and I wanted to give
people the chance to read what they had to say.”
The book is a sister volume to her celebrated
Daughters of Africa anthology, published in
1992, which had a similar remit. “At the time
you would have thought there were only a
handful of such writers, and they were all
African American,” she says, “like Maya
Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. These
were all there [in the book] and needed to be
celebrated but actually there’s a heritage that
goes back centuries, that crosses the world, and
there was much more that people could read
and enjoy.”
Twenty-five years later, she realised that it
was time to repeat the exercise. “Unless the
publishing industry becomes more diverse,” she
says, “it is always a case of playing catch-up.”
The second volume features 200 writers, some
historical but most still writing today, none of
whom were featured in the original anthology.
“There are all sorts of people’s favourites,” she
says (and Smith and Levy are both included)
“and they’ll be glad to read
those ones, but they will
discover all sorts of other
writers they didn’t even know
existed.”
Most of the pieces are
previously unpublished, and
authors were encouraged to
write something especially
for the anthology. They did
not always come up with what
might have been expected of
them. “I left it open to people
to choose the genre they
wanted to write in, and Zadie
Smith has submitted a speech, other people
have submitted a letter, a novelist has offered
some poetry, someone who is known as an
editor has written a memoir…”
To Busby’s delight, a number of common themes
interweave through the pages, so much so that I
imagined that it had been painstakingly curated.
“I wouldn’t want to be so heavy-handed,” she
laughs. “But there are so many connections that
leap out, so perhaps there was method in my
madness. Maybe it was serendipity.”
I wonder, rather facetiously, if she’s planning on
a ‘More New African Daughters’ publication
in 25 years’ time. “2044!” she exclaims. “No!
I want to do one next year! That’s the point I
really want to make: there is so much material
out there that really deserves to be profiled and
given more attention than it gets… that I could
easily do one every year and not repeat myself.”
Alex Leith
Margaret Busby appears at Charleston Festival
(22nd May, with Bonnie Greer and Diana Evans)
and the Brighton Festival (Brighthelm Centre,
24th May)
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