This is How to Stay Alive

There are many sound rules to observe as one makes their passage through this world. Studying and finding a vocation that provides long-term employment in a changing world is a good one. So is working hard and saving one's income for an uncertain and increasingly precarious future. Eating good food, but not too often. Brushing teeth and showering. Hydrating. Applying sunscreen. Looking left, right, and left again before crossing the road, and adapting the directions of one's head swivels depending on geographic location. Relaxing, and then resting-two different, but equally essential, things.

These guidelines only help in the administration of one's existence. They are not useful for the purpose of living, an activity that blurs the lines between right and wrong, an undertaking that often rewards breaking away from established dogma.

What, for example, are the rules for finding or making community in places that seem determined to condemn the individual to isolation and loneliness? How does one make a home for themselves so far from home? What precepts must one follow to find security in their identity? And what weight points must be given to history and heritage and their effects on one's life?

These hard questions do not yield easy or clean answers because the business of living is fraught with distraction, disappointment, and danger.

However, to be alive in the world, and to endeavour to participate meaningfully in its joys, sorrows, dreams, and hopes is not a fruitless undertaking. There are rewards, often manifesting in unexpected forms, for those who do not shy away from living the examined life. These gifts, often in danger of being lost during the Earth's spin and the universe's cosmic expansion, are captured in stories.

The magic of storytelling has always been the ability to condense the complexity of human experience, thought, and feeling in compelling narratives that are then capable of transmission. Drawings on a cave wall, tall tales around a campfire, hieroglyphs on a monument, theatrical productions of varying intricacy, books carrying the wisdom of the ancients, films with varying production budgets, text messages in a crowded WhatsApp group, or the hottest gossip overheard on a packed bus or train carriage-stories have always found a way to reach readers, listeners, and viewers.

The 2025 Afritondo Short Story Prize's anthology is the latest collection of stories that provides delicate, nuanced, and propulsive transmissions of storytelling that offer the curious reader with stories from Africa and its wide diaspora that hint at the possibilities of love and courage, of the malleability of identity, and the porousness of home and belonging. These stories, while not being instructive, are testament to the generosity of the short story form, and the talent and skills of the collected writers. The voices in these pages ask the reader to join the communion of readers and writers, of humanity, in this present moment that tests resolve and hope, with the gentle invitation: "This is how you stay alive."