Collaborative Online Children’s Literature in Africa: Reader Participation on Nigeria’s EbonyStory.com

This article identifies a discursive shift in children’s literature production in Africa that is greatly accentuated by the internet and, recently, the COVID-19 scourge. Whereas in the earlier production of children’s literature the authority to tell the story rested only on the author, contemporary storytelling authority in online children’s literature has been democratised, significantly depending on the reader’s interests and impetus. This article focuses on EbonyStory.com, Nigeria’s most important online children’s literature site, and the most reliant on the primacy of readers’ remarks for narrational motivation and story types. Drawing on Kintsch’s textbase, situation model representation, and van den Broek et al.’s concept of inferences—specifically, the varied strands of inferences that unveil how readers’ cocreation of stories happen—this article analyses Zakia, a work embedded in the adventure sub-tradition of Nigerian children’s literature. As one of the site’s most troubling teen stories, it narrates the forceful abduction of a Nigerian teenager by a terrorist group. By deploying Broek et al.’s idea of forward elaborations—the reader’s verbalising of expectations for information in a future episode of a literary work—this work analyses how the reader participates in the collaborative creation of the literary product on EbonyStory.com. The article concludes that a novel artistic production upstaging existing authorial storytelling power has emerged and that the intricate dimensions opened up by these online African story-sites are the future of reading culture and literary production in Africa.