African Creative Writing Research (Humanities): a mixed-methods study of Humanities mechanisms and measurable outcomes across African contexts

Creative writing occupies an uneasy position in many African humanities departments, celebrated as decolonial practice yet pressed to demonstrate measurable educational value in languages and institutions shaped by colonial history. the present analysis reframes that pressure as a problem of mechanism rather than measurement alone, asking what creative writing is hypothesised to do before asking how its effects might be traced. It distinguishes three humanities mechanisms through which workshop teaching is proposed to act, namely language and memory work, craft acquisition through revision and response, and formation of a public address through circulation beyond the classroom. The article then outlines a prospective sequential exploratory mixed-methods design that would keep interpretive reading of student texts primary while permitting structured comparison of pedagogical conditions and longer-term trajectories. Its bounded contribution is a set of testable propositions, design principles and cautions against rubric reduction for future inquiry across multilingual African university contexts.