“IT WAS THE VIRGIN JESSICA who taught me about wickedness. I once asked her why she was called the Virgin Jessica. She looked at me with strange eyes and said that it was because she was a very special person.” A child’s infatuation with her mother’s adopted sister is at the centre of Mary Watson’s short story Jungfrau, set in South Africa. A modern tale of love, jealousy and adultery, it won this year's £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing — the “African Booker”.

Convincingly written in the voice of a girl whose father is conducting an illicit affair with her aunt, the story concerns the child’s emotional tensions as she is drawn into the world of the adulterous couple. She both rejects and craves the attention of her mother, who is preoccupied with the impoverished children she teaches.

Watson, who lectures in film studies in Cape Town, allows the reader to understand exactly what is going on before the child herself does. — my fellow judge, the critic Maya Jaggi, praised its “psychological clarity”. Others applauded the writing, which sparkles from the first sentence.

Jungfrau both embraces and subverts social issues in the new South Africa: the privileged child envies the poor ones and feels guilty when an attempt to wrest her mother from them causes a terrible accident. Watson — who would have been “coloured” under apartheid — never mentions the race of her characters. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions. Her willingness to show and to resist the urge to tell is evidence of her skill, and that African writers are finally becoming free of the burden to act as mouthpieces for the continent, instead concentrating on story-telling.

In the past 20 years writing from the Indian sub-continent has flourished. With limited (though growing) opportunities to publish, writers in Africa have some way to go. Finding a home market among peoples for whom a book is still the price of the take-home wage, and universal literacy still a dream, is difficult.

Since its founding in 2000, the prize has had a powerful impact on the resurgence of African writing, in particular introducing it to a Western audience. Winners include Leila Aboulela, whose second novel, Minaret, was published by Bloomsbury last year and whose plays are regularly on BBC radio. Last year’s winner, Segun Afolabi, has published a well-received book of short stories. Three years after it was shortlisted in 2001, Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Helon Habila, the 2001 winner, published his first novel, Waiting for an Angel, to great acclaim and is about to publish a second. These are some of the names to watch as Africa — the new India — takes its place on the stage of world literature.
www.caineprize.com

Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones is published by Bloomsbury at £14.99

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