But then, perhaps the book’s objective is not to supply answers but to raise more questions about what it means to be a young African today, especially a young south African colored living in Stadmutter, with its poverty alongside great riches, its apathetic elites and politicians next to the hungry and homeless. The landscape is arid, devoid of wildlife, except rattlesnakes. It is tinder dry, ready for a conflagration.
It was fun doing a book conversation with Olufemi Terry on October 19, 2025. Perhaps it was the venue—I’ve always enjoyed doing readings at the 14th Street Busboys and Poets. The event’s room, with pictures of Gandhi, MLK and other inspirational figures on the walls, makes one feel a sense of high seriousness and purpose. A surprise, Olufemi Terry’s parents, on the verge of their 90s, were there to lend their support to their son’s debut novel. The event was organized by the Cheuse Center and its director, Leeya Mehta, did the introductions. Most of its board members were there, including Kris O’Shee, the late Alan Cheuse’s wife.
My first question to Femi, after his opening reading, was why it had taken him so long to bring out Wilderness of Mirrors. He won the Caine Prize in 2010. Most past winners had gone on to publish their debut novels a year or two after winning—the immediate wave of coverage around the prize is always huge in the UK and African media. He had been finding himself as a writer, like most of us do, and he had written other stories and essays and he had gone through multiple versions of Wilderness of Mirrors before this one was able to see the light.
Olufemi’s debut novel is different, stylistically and thematically, from his award-winning story, “Stick Fighting Days”. The short story is a Tolkien tale about a company of dumpster dwellers in an unknown city, whose favorite past time, and claim to fame, is slashing and cutting each other with sticks—a deadly and serious past-time, culminating in the story’s life-and-death climax. A commentary on the social and political neglect of the youth in an African metropolis, if one were to simplify it, but Femi’s story-telling is always more complex than that. It was influenced by his time in Nairobi city but the city is not named, and it could be any African city.
Wilderness of Mirrors is a coming-of-age narrative (sort of), and it begins with its young protagonist, Emil Silva, taking a gap year from medical school, in a fictitious city called eGeld, formerly eGoli—a city that could very well have been Johannesburg, South Africa. His father convinces him to visit his aunt—his father’s sister, Celeste Wilson, in the southern part of the country, a place very different socially, geographically, culturally and politically from the more progressive, economically prosperous eGeld. The town is called Stadmutter, meaning “Mother city”. A reference to its conservative, soil-and-blood brand of politics. Again, this fictitious place is influenced by Cape Town, South Africa. A sticker on a car in Stadmutter proudly proclaims, Fuck Technology!
It is a coming-of-age narrative, sort of, because the usual coming-of-age narratives end with the main character finding answers to most of his life-questions; here, by the end of the book, Emil ends up with as manyquestions as when he started out. But then, perhaps the book’s objective is not to supply answers but to raise more questions about what it means to be a young African today, especially a young south African colored living in Stadmutter, with its poverty alongside great riches, its apathetic elites and politicians next to the hungry and homeless. The landscape is arid, devoid of wildlife, except rattlesnakes. It is tinder dry, ready for a conflagration.
Why Cape Town? I asked Femi. What is so fascinating about this locale that writers like J.M. Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb, Alex LaGuma, have returned time and time again to it in their writings? Because he had lived there for over three years; he had fallen for its ineffable and unique landscape that at a point he thought he was going to make the place his home, forever, but gradually, after the honey-moon period, he realized no matter how long he lives there he would remain an outsider.
Stadmutter is a town of insiders and outsiders, and if you are not born an insider, you will never become an insider. One interesting fact about Olufemi Terry—he has lived in more cities and countries than almost anyAfrican writer of his generation, at least the ones I have met: he has lived in DC (his parents live there, his Sierra Leonian father worked with the World Bank and is very respected in the banking and African community in DC), he has lived in New York, in Germany, In Nairobi, in Cape Town, in Sierra Leone, right now he is lives in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. He works for the African Development Bank there. Often referencing the influence of V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian born British-Indian writer, Femi has an additional thread of his history tied directly to the Caribbean—his mother is from St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Windward Islands close to South America, and next door to Grenada and St. Lucia.
Emil, a colored south African, immediately discovers how intricate and puzzling the race politics can be in Stadmutter. His aunt and her two sons, Andres and Torrance, are not as helpless as he thought they’d be after the death of their father, and they certainly don’t need his help. The mother, his aunt Celeste, is in a steamy relationship and she hardly sleeps at home, his cousin, Andres, is a drug dealer, his other cousin, Torrance, has moved out to live with his girlfriend.
Left to his own devices in a new city, Emil falls in with the enigmatic and sinister Bolling, a German millionaire and political opportunist; and the nationalist political agitator Braeem Shaka, who is Bolling’s stooge. He also falls in with the beautiful white girl, Tamsin, and her family. Her mother, Esmee, is a detective fiction writer who exploits the color situation in south Africa in her stories. With Tamsin, Emil explores the landscape and nature, the time they spend together and their lovemaking provides some of the best writing in Wilderness of Mirrors. The language is well-crafted, its ruminations are both political and philosophical. It shows a realization and culmination of the talent Femi promised in his Caine Prize story—well worth the wait.
First novels always raise a lot of questions which a writer would often spend the rest of his or her career trying to answer. There are weighty questions raised here. Femi seems invested in finding answers to questions local to Africa and also universal. Questions about the politics of belonging, not only to nations and ideologies, but belonging to other humans—family, lovers, affiliates. It is a rumination on the rise of ultra-nationalism in contemporary politics, also a warning that such polarizing politics have always been part of our history as humans, not something that will disappear overnight.
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Helon Habila is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University. He is the author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (WW Norton), Measuring Time (WW Norton), Oil on Water (WW Norton), and Travelers (WW Norton). He is the editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story (Granta). His nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria was published by Columbia Global Reports in 2016. Habila is a contributing editor for The Virginia Quarterly Review and a regular book reviewer for the UK Guardian. He serves on the Cheuse Center's Advisory Board. He is also a Caine Prize winner.
Olufemi Terry is a Sierra Leone–born writer, essayist, and journalist. His short fiction has been published in Guernica, The Georgia Review, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and translated into French and German. His nonfiction essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Africa is a Country, and The Guardian. He was an International Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, Scotland, and a Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice in Washington, DC. In 2019, he received a grant from the Washington, DC, Commission on the Arts & Humanities. He is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story “Stickfighting Days.” He lives in Germany and Côte d’Ivoire. Wilderness of Mirrors (Restless Books, USA, 2025) is his debut novel.
November 05, 2025