In the beginning was a river. Then the river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. There have been many attempts by this river to shame other rivers which have laid hold onto the road’s forms. At first, the old river said the other rivers had no road-building culture of their own. Then, they said the only reason these other rivers could build new roads was because they taught them the craft. And then they denied these other rivers’ roads if they didn’t follow paths of suffering and anguish. They created a new narrative of what roads from other rivers should look like. All has not been well since.
Now, they claim the new roads aren’t new roads, at all; that they are products of spirits in metallic bodies. The old river’s prizes for roads are infallible while the newer rivers’ must be poorly decided pools of inclusivity over talent. The old river attacks these other rivers with their own offspring to drive the point home. The old river keeps taking roads, but the old river is still hungry. This old greedy river will always be hungry.
Granted, Ben Okri never intended for the opening lines of The Famished Road to be interpreted thus. But in a world where the West insists on drowning us all in its racial politics, insisting—as they always have—that art from Africa and elsewhere its imperial presence dwells, surely has to be unoriginal, inclusivity-driven roughage, this is one interpretation that fits. Even as you read this, someone somewhere is preparing to run our words through Pangram. And only when that software tells them that the first two lines originate elsewhere, but the rest of the piece is virgin, will they believe that a real human somewhere in Nigeria thought out these sentences. Of course, the subsequent dog whistle will be about quality. But the sentences are bad, don’t you see? That extended metaphor has swallowed itself whole; an ouroboros even in just a paragraph. Rather than criticise the quality of these prize-winning stories independently, journalists in these publications, oh so hungry to tell the truth, have decided they must be AI-written.
In the most recent iteration of these crusades, Canadian-American journalist Vauhini Vara accused Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza’s 2026 Caine Prize-winning story, The Blue Fighter, of being almost completely AI-generated. She claims to have run all previous 25 winning stories in the award’s 27-year-history, along with The Whistleblower, a previous short story by Kundizeza, through Pangram, with all but his coming out 100% human. In her words, additional evidence includes the “..proliferation of language that is common in AI-produced writing: the not x, but y sentence constructions; the glut of metaphors; the platitudinous aphorisms….” Vauhini contacted both Kundizeza and Caine Prize Board of Trustees Chair, Ella Wakatama, prior to running her essay—proceeding without a word from the former. In the time since its publication, despite not giving space for a mounted defense by all and sundry, said story has stirred up a hailstorm of inquisitions against the literary world. The Caine Prize released a weak statement about an ongoing investigation. Kundizeza himself has released a firmer rebuttal. Tech enthusiasts and would-be Western literati keep screaming bloody murder. And BIPOC writers across the diaspora are left holding up ramparts in preparation for the river’s next wave.
These AI accusations didn’t begin with the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist. In April 2024, Y Combinator Co-founder infamously triggered ‘Delve-gate,’ over claims that use of ‘delve,’ ‘burgeoning,’ and other supposed ‘big words’ was indicative of AI use in writing. Nigerians notably pushed back against this notion, and while this was far from case zero, it was a gross foreshadowing of an imminent future. This year, with prestigious literary prizes on the line, Graham’s ilk have found their voices. Jazmir Nasir and his Caribbean and overall Commonwealth-winning story, The Serpent’s Grove, were subject of multiple stories in foreign publications like the Guardian. Earlier that same month, journalist, Alex Preston, had been under fire for utilising AI in his New York Times review of Jean‐Baptiste Andrea’s Watching Over Her. In July, Nigerian writer Jerry Falade lost a $2 million deal for his crime novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, with his Europa Content agent citing grave concerns over AI use. Prior to that, in March, Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl’s US release and continued UK distribution ground to a halt for similar reasons. And most recently, in September, Haitian–Canadian author Thélyson Orélien had his novel It Was Either That or Die (C’était ça ou mourir), stripped from the Prix Goncourt shortlist—France’s foremost literary prize—despite already selling over 35,000 copies. Save for Preston, the overwhelming majority of these authors under fire have been BIPOC, with almost the same tools used in verifying said AI use. Pangram, in particular, was used for both short story prizes without writers’ consent.
Vauhini had previously written about the Commonwealth Short Story Prize scandal in the Atlantic, embracing talking points she’d later rehash for her Caine piece in the same pub (Reflecting on what consequences of this potential corrosion of trust are to the prize’s reputation alongside literary critique of the story, referencing similar observations by other commentators). And were that to be all, perhaps expansive responses such as Nigerian writer and 2020 Commonwealth Prize African Region winner Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s essay would have been sufficient to stir the conversation into more logical waters. The Atlantic has existed almost seven times longer than the Caine Prize has been awarded, yet Vauhini’s is the first ever The Atlantic story covering the prize. Looking through the archives, one can almost say the same of the Commonwealth. There has not been a lick of coverage in the past ten years —possibly ever, with most of the 671 hits when you search those keywords leading to unrelated articles and mere one line mentions. One need not be Neil De’Grasse Tyson to see the obvious conclusion. This publication, and many others on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, couldn’t care one bit if their vindictive coverage harmed the writers and literary journals involved. If you read both Vauhini stories, you might be convinced about the existence of a gargantuan literary crisis on the continent. Herself and fellow journalists in these publications are “so worried” about what it means that the machine has become the master. But they aren’t really looking at that. They aren’t concerned about the ethical dilemmas that are emergent if these writers have indeed beckoned to AI for metaphors and plot ideas. They are more interested in proving that winning entries are badly written because judges aren’t steadfast enough to identify the AI-nese but instead defer to anti-DEI themes.
These writers mean to tell us that their vested stake in the fate of literature does not extend to Booker Prize shortlisted works and PEN America Literary Awards-winning picks. And it’s just simply coincidental that only a certain group of writers have borne the axe. Or that they have ignored poetry altogether, not because it’s a genre beyond their generalist scope, but because poetry—a space dominated by more and more BIPOCs—is free of AI use. Vauhini buttressed her claims about The Blue Fighter being obviously AI written, with an assertion that it contains stereotypical characterisation of African life. She insists that the story’s triad of unemployed father, wise matriarch, and poor environment had to be a trope. She conveniently excludes that this unemployed father had the unusual-bordering-on-neurodivergent urge to build fish tanks for fish that kept dying. She frames said environment of deprivation as static, as though the story doesn’t go to great lengths to show how those fish tanks consume their wealth. Vauhini’s uncharitable reading of the story masquerades as critique if you refuse to take off the blindfold, or you do not recognise there is one in the first place.
For whatever reason, this exercise in literary journalism failed to extend to the rest of the shortlist. If she had conformed to this standard in her evaluation, then perhaps she would have arrived at conclusions as surefooted as writer and critic Chimezie Chika did in his Afrocritik review of the final five stories. Unlike her, despite finding faults with certain writing choices in The Blue Fighter—such as the aphorism-heavy dialogue and heapings of morality—Chika’s next line of action wasn’t rushing to confirm the story’s humanity. Instead, his evaluation concluded by pipping two of the submissions for the overall prize. Poet and critic Felix Eshiet’s even more biting review in the same publication also shirks such an accusation. Both writers unanimously agreed that the Prize would be better served by other shortlisted stories. Chika says that his first instinct towards stories, and writing in general, is “not to go about with magnifying glasses looking for signs of AI in them.” as “a critic must assess a piece of writing on the basis of its literary quality.” Concerning weeding out AI plagiarism, he argues, “that while not all bad writing is AI slop, all AI slop (whatever form it imitates) is bad writing.” But even at that, Chika, like many other African and black writers across the diaspora, spots the larger schadenfreude at play. “The major issue here is not whether or not this story was written or partly written with AI or not; it is the inherent assumption that writing from black writers must be faulty in some way, which is why anyone would immediately rush to paste them into Pangram and other AI detectors to prove a point.” The word is racism. Objective racism. Chika wants such accusations treated, at least in part, with anti-racist actions. “Any category suspicion must be returned with equal suspicion.”
Kill whatever contrarian demons in your head that might suggest a simulacra where racism does not factor into this accusation cascade. It’s intentional that BIPOC writers have borne the brunt so consistently over the past 7 months. It’s intentionally insidious, a suggestion of inferiority either way—too good to have written this without help; too bad to not have been written by AI. If Vauhini—who notoriously co-wrote an entire novel with Chat GPT—and her cohort weren’t so prejudiced, nor she in particular so intent on arriving at that conclusion that she proceeded without Kundizeza’s statement, we would not be here debating whether a story submitted to a litmag was AI-assisted for prize winning purposes. These journalists can sooner list three African literary magazines than the Oscars can rid themselves of what Parasite director Bong Joon Ho described as the ‘one-inch barrier of subtitles.’ But they sure as hell are convinced of Schrodinger’s African writing: too good to have been written without LLM help; too bad to not have been written by AI. In the same year when, among others, the Troy Onyango-run Lolwe and Ukamaka Olisakwe-run Isele Magazine have increasingly published more writing from beyond the continent, proving the extent to which readers place them in good repute, conferring that a quality decline is in effect is ignorant. Shallow thinking by those who consider others shallow betraying a deep alliance with that good ol’ white power.
Visceral responses to this pattern from African writers who have experienced the American MFA system expound on this phenomenon further. Via X, US-based essayist Tolu Daniel and poet-academic and 2022 NLNG Prize for Literature Winner Romeo Oriogun have taken turns breaking down experiences at American institutions from classmates and faculty with similarly stunted views of the African literati. Memoirist and Abebi Afro Non-Fiction Foundation founder, Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe believes unequivocally that these accusations are racially motivated, drawing from her experience at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. “Within the creative writing and academic spaces, there is a generally held conception of the African writer. They believe that there is something African writers are and aren’t. Their understanding of that with [regard to] writing capacity is a certain kind of inferiority.” This culminates in moments of shock when writers from the continent excel on the page, making her wonder exactly how much we have to perform excellence. “I gave an example in a tweet of how when I was in my second year in Iowa, one of my essays got highlighted as a notable entry in the Best American Essays. A member of my program, an Asian man, asked for the essay and rubbished it before a group of people, saying that how could my ‘shitty essay’ have been selected.” In another instance, Okupe took an English as a Second Language teacher-training course. As the class proceeded, she used the word ‘dexterous’ and her teacher, a lady, remarked, “That’s such a big word.” AI simply provided an outlet for what she calls ‘envy and gross underestimation of who we are as African writers.’
In July 2025, The Telegraph ran a story titled: “Hundreds of Nigerian ‘Authors’ Use Visa Scheme to Enter Britain.” This malicious headline was merely clickbait with the article explaining that there were actually 125 Nigerian Global Talent Visa applications in 5 years, and just 54 were accepted—the second lowest percentage worldwide. But if British commentators on X had read those sections of the story, they showed no indication of such, opting for barbed, ignorant claims about African writing. The writer, even more uncharitable than Vauhini, suggested that Ben Okri and Chimamanda Adichie had only just made or secured their reputation in the same 5 years. At least two editors somewhere read through that article. At least two more people saw no issues with such a hasty claim that can be disproved with a single Google search. Looking through the replies to The Atlantic’s X post of Vauhini’s story, one can find a comment asserting that Kundizeza was only chosen because of his ‘exotic Star Wars’ name. That orientalist logic will be familiar to anyone who followed the ‘Adele Nwankwo’ literary blackface scandal from last year in which a white Canadian writer alleged to have had over 50 of his poems and prose published, only after inventing marginalised pseudonyms such as ‘Adele Nwankwo,’ a queer diaspora Nigerian. Amidst discussions on tokenism in literary spaces, the prevalent rhetoric was that BIPOC writers and marginalised writers are riding on the waves of DEI, not actual literary merit. Say it with us: reigh-si-zim.
Consequently, it’s back to proving ourselves again. Award-winning culture journalist and author Jerry Chiemeke alludes to Toni Morrison’s famous quote about racism’s primary function being distraction in explaining why this pattern of accusations bode poorly. “A lot of these have been done with malicious intent. Articles published in bad faith, especially [important] when you consider how the algorithm just takes them to the top with the kind of account that reposts or amplifies these things.” Of the first seven Google search results for Kundizeza’s name, two are about him winning the Caine Prize directly. The rest pertain to this controversy, and the actual Caine Prize announcement isn’t even the first result. “It’s a very concerted attack on our homes and institutions. There will be that question mark as to the authenticity of our work, even affecting music, fashion, and arts.” When Chiemeke adds that we’ve strayed close—or are at least on our way—to the mid-20th century where Conradian logic about African creativity held sway, it’s tough to disagree completely.
Okupe and Chika agree with this sentiment. Voice laden with concern, Okupe laments, “My greatest worry is that by focusing and fearmongering on AI we’re undeserving the next generation of African writers. Who is making sure that there are contests? Who is making sure that in this AI-riddled world they are actually reading books by their literary ancestors? Who is teaching them craft? Who is exposing them to opportunities that’ll allow them to grow as individual artists? They [Foreign finger pointers] think they’re doing it to the most senior levels, but they’re actually doing it to young writers; a girl in Benin City writing poetry, a boy in Port-Harcourt working on his short story collection.” Nothing about the escalation of these accusations suggest that they will die down soon. If a $2 million book deal can fall through because of these allegations, what’s to say even those with smaller stakes aren’t swept up by these old rivers holding on to a perception of our roads?
The bigger problem is that some BIPOC writers seem to think that contemporaries want to absolve the community from the possibility of AI actually being used. After all, it’s not like writing wasn’t one of the first casualties of increasing competence among large language models. There is such a thing as a larger agenda at play that renders this extremely valid concern secondary to determining intent. These journalists, writers, tech bros, and their ilk cared less about literature and literary prizes in the Global South to begin with. Suddenly, they’ve become the scions of supreme scholarly sagacity who care about what the Shallow Tales Review publishes, who want writing to return to its glory days. If you leave these people to their own devices, everything will be sacrificed to Pangram. Prizes that barely receive enough support will suffer. But as Chika and everyone else posit, African writers can deal with supposed AI use by enforcing stronger literary standards and building institutions back home, without having to subject writing to the esteemed gods of San Francisco whose glee resides in being victorious over the humanities. Find them huddled around these publications in virtual spaces, yammering away at how it’s taken this long for people to concede that AI writes well and how so much of modern literature was even terrible to begin with. Arbiters of taste whose idea of exemplary literature is a Western canon that barely accommodates women.
That old greedy river is still hungry. For writer and 2022 Miles Morland Foundation Scholar Ope Adedeji, feeding its urges is not an option. “We need to continue to challenge these accusations. There’s no doubt that creative people are starting to use AI in creative processes. But unless the accuser can prove how—relying on Pangram or other AI detectors won’t count—then it’s nothing but speculation. Speculation is not evidence,” she begins before adding that this doesn’t take away the burden to preserve literary quality. “How are writers using AI? Why are they using it? What are the risks? What constitutes acceptable use? We cannot simply stop at saying AI is going to destroy literature or take our jobs. We need to understand the technology and engage seriously with the questions it raises. For example, when a writer uses AI to write a book, do they know it raises copyright issues? Or when a critic puts someone’s work into a consumer grade LLM, do they know how that work will be stored or that it will likely be used to train the model? I know these conversations are already happening in pockets of our literary community, but we need more of them. People, especially the younger writers, need to understand the legal and ethical risks.”
Chiemeke’s rallying cry is one echoed by Adedeji and many other African writers in the past few months and long before. “We need more journals, more magazines, more institutions to be deliberate about representation. Let the world be reminded that we’re, in our own rights, original storytellers,” he shares via WhatsApp. At a symposium where the writer Ama Asantewa Diaka was speaking about the Ghanaian legend Ama Ata Adioo, Okupe watched on as Diaka stated how writers in Africa couldn’t afford not to be community minded and it’s remained with her ever since. For the writers in the diaspora, she admonishes, “We do not have the privilege to be siloed only about our own success and careers. How do you use your access, resources, and knowledge to ensure the literary systems that exist on the continent are being? How are you putting their work on your syllabi or posting them on your Instagram and elsewhere? I’d say that this is the time to amplify each other’s work. If you have the money, support Lolwe, Isele Mag, Doek magazine, Ubwali, and every other publication. There are so many literary organisations that could do with that support.”
In an absolute worst case scenario where Kundizeza is proven to have employed AI, nothing changes about the quality of African literature, and that too is a truth to contend with. To subject the breadth of short story writing to a singular prize—regardless of its accumulated prestige—is to render the continent a monolith, a disingenuous appraisal which forgets that the Prize is themed. Africans are winning Nebulas and Hugos. Africans are on the panel for the International Booker Prize. Africans are charting new paths in speculative fiction and becoming the go-tos for anthologies thus. This too is what the racists want: to paint broad strokes of a billion and more individuals before slinking back into their caverns in preparation for the next assault. And whether Vauhini knows it or not, she’s merely been an unrighteous
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