This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

African writers often bemoan Western readers’ tendency to view their work “anthropologically,” which is to say as a transparent reflection of a culture of origin. This ethnographic approach partly derives from African literary studies’ relationship to African Studies, writ large, with its roots in the social sciences and area expertise. But it is also sustained by the difficulty of placing African writers within Western pedagogical frameworks. This challenge is most apparent when Africans – obviously the majority population on the continent – are minoritized by Western curricular categories. There are also subtler questions at stake. On what scale (regional, national, continental, or global) are contemporary African writers best read as negotiating the relationship of social affiliation to aesthetic representation? How does African literature register in a Western classroom comprising students from disparate and often culturally variegated backgrounds, some of which reflexively minoritize Black and Brown writers, and some of which do not? Finally, what are some interpretive and pedagogical alternatives to seeing literary representation by Africans as necessarily representative of broader African social and cultural dynamics? This chapter draws on my own experience teaching African writing in a US university context to propose a criterion of reading for “the weird” as an alternative to reading for culture. In prioritizing African texts that are boldly unrepresentative of broader literary and cultural trends – as in the chapter’s main example of Ghanaian writer Martin Egblewogbe’s wry and existential short fiction – this approach breaks free from the aesthetic limitations of “minority literature” while introducing truly novel forms and voices to the English literature curriculum. As a result, it urges students toward a sense of curricular decolonization as an essential tool for foregrounding radical aesthetic idiosyncrasy.