The 2007 littérature-monde manifesto made a series of bold claims to break with the enduring Francocentrism of Francophonie, and thereby to open the way for a radically decentred and transnational French-language literature, which might share the same globalized perspectives and concerns as Anglophone World Literature. Around the same time, the Francophone Cameroonian novelist, Patrice Nganang, wrote an equally radical manifesto, Manifeste d'une nouvelle littérature africaine: Pour une écriture pré-emptive (2007), which stands in a contrapuntal negative relation to the affirmative, celebratory tone of the littérature-monde manifesto. Nganang's manifesto is in effect a rather provocative indirect challenge to the latter's bold ‘transnationalism’, and a rallying cry for a new (what he calls ‘pre-emptive’) French-language African literature, in which he makes a claim to a certain worldliness: for him, a long tradition of African thinking died with the Rwandan genocide, and the only hope for its rebirth is literature, but literature as essentially, profoundly, necessarily dissident. According to Nganang, contemporary African writing and philosophy have not yet truly confronted the implications of what happened in Rwanda, with the notable exception of Achille Mbembe, whose work marks a profound rupture with ideologies and prevalent African philosophies of subjectivity. Nganang occupies the same theoretical ground as the writers of the littérature-monde manifesto when they make the case for a triumphal return of a number of categories which had been widely critiqued and discredited over the last few decades, namely the subject, meaning, history and the world. I would like to look more closely at Nganang's manifesto in this light, in particular the place he accords to a differently conceived ‘worldliness’, and test it against a few examples of what he refers to as ‘post-genocide’ African writing (including his own novels), in order to assess his claim to initiate a radically new African subjectivity.