Our Sister Killjoy (1977, Ghana)

Heart of Darkness tells the story of a British sailor who travels the river Congo in search of a lost explorer. The language is evocative and beautiful but the book has been criticised as racist, partly because it represents Africans as caricatures. Ama Ata Aidoo flips Conrad’s classic in a spunky purse-size novella titled Our Sister Killjoy, replacing the British sailor of Conrad’s adventure with Sissie, a Ghanaian student set adrift on a European quest. Sissie travels through Germany and Belgium, driven by wonder and frustration just like Conrad’s Marlowe. While Conrad populates his novel with stock African characters drawn from hundreds of years of racist colonial archive, Aidoo expertly fashions her European characters as one-dimensional figures, reducing them to stereotypical body types, names and even accents. Like Marlowe, Sissie obsesses over Europeans, but her observations about Europeans are more refined as she remains slightly more clinically detached. Aidoo comes for Conrad in a tit-for-tat literary fist-fight to show him just what is wrong with his representation of Africa.

Blackass by Igoni Barrett (2014, Nigeria)

Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins with a man who wakes up in the morning and realises he has been transformed into a bug. In Blackass, Barrett gives the story a stunning make over, in a tale about an unemployed Lagos bloke who wakes up one morning and finds he is a white man. Barrett reworks Kafka’s family drama as an urban odyssey and makes a stunning success of it. Kafka was satisfied with exploring the complications of Gregor Samsa’s new life as a bug within the privacy of the home, but Barrett is all about taking the craziness outside, where life is unpredictable and fraught with danger. He portrays Furo Wariboko’s new life as a white man in a series of adventures played out in the devious streets of Lagos.

Open City by Teju Cole (2012, Nigeria)

Open City chronicles the disjointed musings of Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist let loose in the streets of New York City. Critics who have tried to understand the inspiration for Julius have linked him to Meursault, the lead character in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, as well as Antoine in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. But I think he most resembles Austerlitz in WG Sebald’s novel by the same name. Austerlitz and Open City are both stories about very educated but disturbed men set adrift in the modern city. They both philosophise about time, history, violence, art, music, photography, and women. Austerlitz is memorable because of his fragility, which sometimes casts him in the figure of the sweet old man. Julius has a much darker edge, somewhere between a bad boy and a psychopath, which makes his exploration of history as a nightmare of violence and loss all the more creepy.

Alain Mabanckou has made it clear that African Psycho is not a rewrite of American Psycho, despite the similarity in their titles. And he is right – yes, both novels are about psychopathic men obsessed with killing and mutilating women’s bodies. However, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a handsome, intelligent sociopath, while Gregoire Nakobomayo is ugly and bumbling, too much of a scaredy cat to commit any of the murders he dreams of. But Nakobomayo’s mind is a twisted as Bateman’s – African Psycho is more about the aesthetics of murder than actual murders – and it is also very funny.