General Overview:
According to its founders, Flash Fiction Ghana "was created for lovers and admirers of this classic genre of story-telling." It was designed as a portal to convey the best Flash Fiction in Ghana. It has lived up to that expectation. Today, the blog has the largest collection of Flash Fiction stories in Ghana, and has virtually no competitor in West Africa. Till date, the blog has over one hundred stories from more than twenty writers most of whom are not "published authors."
As a genre, flash fiction is closer in length to micro fiction (typically ten to three hundred words) than to traditional stories and novellas which range anywhere from a thousand words to even fifty pages. Flash fiction is typically narrated within three hundred and a thousand words, and concerns with a single event, one to three characters, and is set at a single location, and contains only bare information necessary to understand the single event. Twist endings have also come to be associated with the genre.
Several reasons make this resource particularly interesting. First, Flash Fiction was developed at a time when mobile phones were gaining ground in Ghana, and all of Africa, and when teledensity was at an all-time high. Much of Africa had not experienced the technological revolution - the coming of the PC and the early days of the internet - the same way the rest of the globe had. The hyper-texted online blogs and interactive websites that had experimented with the internet in its early days were virtually non-existent in many places in Africa until the early to late 2000s due to infrastructural reasons. Thus, PCs never became as ubiquitously present in homes as they were in the the Americas and Europe until the past decade. Thus, the "true" technological revolution began with mobile phones rather than PCs, although the distinction is not as clear any longer. In any case, by the time Flash Fiction was launched, it had met a rather eager audience hungry for local content.
Secondly, there are interesting possibilities for considering the heuristics of translanguaging, code-switching, and other discursive practices which are unique to the specific linguistic milieu of these writers. Note that even though English is the de-facto official language in Ghana, there are almost fifty other spoken and nine government-sponsored written local languages; and the average educated Ghanaian easily speaks both English and one or more local languages. The rhetorical fall-outs of this multilingualism is reflected variously in the stories in this resource.
Thirdly, as a whole, these stories provide a more intimate glimpse of a Ghanaian (and by extension, African) modernity which is not overdetermined by the trite discourses situated almost entirely in postcolonial tensions. One could say that to a large extent, these are commentaries on mundane domesticity, and average aspirations, yet also highly critical of the banal experiences they communicate. The curators of these stories have rightly categorised the stories in genres, including Action, Science Fiction, Drama, Children's Literature, Mystery, and Romance, among several others.
Finally, this would be an interesting resource for those generally unacquainted with this art form in Ghana or those generally new to African Literature.
The following submission guidelines was curated from the Flash Fiction Ghana website:
"Submission guidelines:
1. Submitted stories must not:
– Exceed 1,000 words (suggested minimum length is 500 words).
– Contain intense explicit language and imagery bordering on extraneous profanity and vile erotica.
2. Submitted stories should be sent to flashfictiongh@gmail.com.
3. Submitted stories should be attached to e-mail, in PDF or MS-Word format for easy review.
4. The subject line of the e-mail should read “Submission”.
NB: A received submission does not guarantee that the submitted story will be published on the blog. After successful review, notification will be sent if a submitted story will be published or otherwise."