Taiye Selasi is a beautiful woman. But that’s not the point. Taiye Selasi is also a great writer. But that is not the point either. The point is: She has a right to be called a beautiful woman. She has a right to be called a great writer. Why is that? She stood there on stage in Berlin, colourful skirt and a good-humoured confidence, she spoke softly about what she believes strongly, her subject was the argument that African literature does not exist – and she made her point quite brilliantly: You are a writer first, everything else second. It does not matter if you were born in London to parents from Nigeria and Ghana like Selasi, it does not matter that you were raised in Boston and wrote about a dying man in Accra like Selasi; all that matters is that you capture the universal in the individual experience. Yes, you want to whisper, yes, Taiye. And it is not even as difficult as it sounds. What is the real challenge is to combine her argument which essentially does away with any category imposed by what the boring white men who had talked before her stand for: 19th century national folly and 20th century machismo – with the fact that she has freed herself and you have not. There is a sense of belonging in literature, there is also a sense of sadness in belonging.