AFRICAN LITERATURE IN THE MAKING:
FROM PRE-COLONIALISM TO POST-COLONIALISM
BY
ISSAH HASSAN TIKUMAH
BEING A LEAD-PAPER PRESENTED AT
THE FIRST UNI-CV
ENGLISH LITERATURE WORKSHOP
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
UNIVERSITY
OF CAPE VERDE, PALMAREJO CAMPUS, PRAIA
11 – 12 DECEMBER, 2013
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Abstract…………………………………………………………………….
Introduction………………………………………………………………...
Oral Literature……………………………………………………………...
Pre-colonial
Literature…………………………………………………….
Colonial
Literature………………………………………………………..
Post-colonial
Literature…………………………………………………...
A Salute to African-American
Literature…………………………………
African
Literature in the Making………………………………………….
Selected
References……………………………………………………….
ABSTRACT
This paper
attempts to trace the various vicissitudes of the evolution and development of
African Literature: from oral literature, through pre-colonial literature, colonial
literature, to post-colonial literature. African literature is defined as
‘literature of and from Africa’. However, though cursory reference is made to
non-English African literature as well, the focus of this paper is literature
of English ‘black Africa’. A special page is devoted to African-American
literature because of its unique historical position in the development of
African literature. The foundations of modern African literature as an
intellectual ‘school’ are traced back to the middle of the 18th
century. Modern African literature emerged as a resistance platform, an
instrument of struggle against oppression and exploitation. Unfortunately, more
than a couple of centuries on, African literature is still faced with
formidable challenges, including lack of freedom of expression imposed by
political authoritarianism and socio-cultural reactionarism. Even though a great
deal of achievement has been recorded since its inception in the 18th
century, African literature still has a long way to go in the struggle to fulfill
its mission to foster socio-political justice and true liberty for the common
people of Africa.
INTRODUCTION
By ‘African
Literature’ we are referring to, in the words of Elizabeth Gunner, “The body of
traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages
together with works written by Africans in European languages”. One
might summarize Gunner’s definition by simply referring to African Literature
as “Literature of and from Africa”.
Africa is a vast continent, the second largest in the world. A geo-political
unit of 54 nations, with a total population of about 1.033 billion people, the
African continent abounds in linguistic and cultural diversity as its people are
rich in racial heterogeniety. There is ‘white Africa’, north of the Sahara,
with its Islamarabian traditions; and
there is ‘black Africa’, south of the Sahara, with its hybridized traditions (i.e.
a sort of cultural alloy of Islamarabian
traditions, Christo-European traditions, and pagan-ancestral traditions). The
literary works of the divergent peoples of the gigantic continent of Africa are
found in many languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature to
written literature. The concept of African literature embraces not only
literature produced by Africans on the continent, but also literary works of
Africans in the diaspora (i.e. West Indian and American writers of African
descent).
The sheer
vastness of the African continent, and the concomitant racial and cultural
diversity of its people, has for decades posed a formidable challenge for
various definers seeking to paint a monolithic picture of Africa and Africans.
As Parker & Rathbone
rightly noted, as for instance, “North Africa has in turn presented a problem
for those who have sought to define Africa and the ‘black race’”. African
literature is definitely not excluded from this problem of definition. However,
the theme of this workshop, ‘British Culture as Evidenced in African
Literature’, dictates that our discourse here be delimited to literature of ‘black
Africa’ only. This delimitation is justified for one obvious reason: After
surveying numerous definitions of literature with a mission to reaching a
‘consensus’, Dazinger and & Johnson define literature as “a verbal art; …
and its medium is the word…” As of
today, the 11th day of December in the year 2013, not a single
nation in North Africa has English as a national/official language. There may
be sizeable populations of English speakers in many North African countries
today, but the reading of literature in English is definitely a hobby of a
small elite of the populations of those countries. Thus, I beg to hypothesize,
to the extent that ‘the word’ is the medium of literature, North African
literature has relatively little to do with British culture. This is not to suggest that there can be no
cultural influence without linguistic exchange. However, as far as the concept
of literature is concerned, language is so central and encompassing a factor
that any cultural influence that excludes the medium of language can only be
rated as peripheral.
The theme of our
workshop further ordains us to focus our discourse here on English literature
of ‘black Africa’ only, though nothing strictly bars us from making footnote
references to African literatures in other European languages such as French
and Portuguese.
Let me reiterate
the focus of my thesis in one simple phrase: Literature of English ‘black
Africa’.
THE EVOLUTION OF
AFRICAN LITERATURE
Oral Literature
(Orature):
Four distinct
phases are marked out in the evolutionary growth of African literature, viz:
oral literature, pre-colonial literature, colonial literature and post-colonial
literature. Each of the diverse peoples of Africa, whether we call them tribes
or ethnic groups, has got a centuries-old collection of stories and poems
passed down from generations by word of mouth. Unlike European concept of
literature as a written embodiment of artistic expression only, the African
concept of literature not only encompasses oral literature as well, but also
acknowledges oral literature as the basis of written literature. In this
respect George Joseph noted:
"Literature"
can also imply an artistic use of words for the sake of art alone.
...traditionally, Africans do not radically separate art from teaching. Rather
than write or sing for beauty in itself, African writers, taking their cue from
oral literature, use beauty to help communicate important truths and
information to society. Indeed, an object is considered beautiful because of
the truths it reveals and the communities it helps to build.
The
Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu merged the two words ‘oral’ and ‘literature’ to coin
the new term ‘Orature’.
The instruments of orature include proverbs, riddles, folktales, storytelling
and songs of praise. For centuries, orature, in its verse and prose forms, has
been used as a medium of societal education and entertainment, as well as for
preservation of communal history.
An
excellent source of enlightenment on this subject is Ulli Beier’s Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology
of Critical Writing from ‘Black Orpheus’ (1964). And I seek your indulgence
to quote a couple of passages from that illuminating piece:
About
the Ewe of Ghana, it says:
The Ewe
country makes exacting demands on its people. From the sweat of their brows,
the Ewes eke out their bare livelihood. Their part of the country has no gold
and diamonds and timber as have some parts of Ghana.
But the
people have an extraordinary gift for music and drumming and dancing. How,
otherwise, could the people of Eweland have maintained such good humour and
optimism in the face of hardship?
The
poems … are words of folk songs. Not mummified folk songs dug out from an archeological
pile; but living songs which, like farmers of old, the farmers of today are
singing at work, as they clear the bush, plant the crops and harvest them;
while they weave the clothes they wear, carve the stools they sit on or build
the houses they live in.
They
are above all songs which are sung to honour a departed one, and to mourn his
loss.
When
were they composed, these songs? And who composed them? No one knows. What is
known is that they are almost as old as the Ewe people themselves. Containing
some of the richest literary pieces in the Ewe language, the songs are highly
charged with emotion and, in Shakespeare’s words, with ‘wise saws and modern
instances’. And the thoughts are condensed in terse language, making their
translation into English a hazardous venture!…
Regarding
the Hausa of Nigeria, the book has this to say:
There
are certain kinds of rythmic utterances which one would hesitate to classify as
poetry, yet which are clearly related to it, and which illustrate the linguistic
and social basis of the oral tradition.
Among
the Hausa each individual has what is known as a drum rhythm. It identifies
him, and almost always has attached to it a series of words that either
describe him, or form themselves into a characteristic epigram. This is at the base of the oral tradition.
Similarly, each class of individuals in the society has songs composed to be
used at work, or as identification. Men are set this task according to talent,
and while the changes in the social structure are weakening this system, it is
a rare individual who cannot phrase words to a pattern with some degree of
success….
Gunner
was telling right in describing literature as ‘atomized, fragmented history’;
every piece of literature is conceived against a historical backdrop of some
sort. Literature and history are intertwined. One cannot separate the
literature of a people from their history. History is the reservoir from which
literature is fed; literature is, in turn, the medium through which history is
told. Thus, if Africa is the cradle of humanity, as it is now consensually
acknowledged, then the people of Africa must have the oldest history among the
human race. It then follows syllogistically that, insofar as orature is
counted, African literature must be the oldest literature obtainable.
In the
Preface to his Sundiata: An Epic of Old
Mali, D.T. Niane lamented:
… Unfortunately the West has taught us to scorn oral
sources in matters of history, all that is not written in black and white being
considered without foundation. Thus, even among African intellectuals , there
are those who are sufficiently narrow-minded to regard ‘speaking documents’,
which the griots are, with disdain, and to believe that we know nothing of our
past for want of written documents. These men simply prove that they do not
know their own country except through the eyes of Whites.
Niane went further to quote the words of the griot, thus:
I am a griot. It is
I, Djeli Mamoudou kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté and Djeli Kedian Kouyaté,
master in the art of eloquence. Since time immemorial the Kouyatés have been in
the service of the Keita princes of Mali; we are vessels of speech, we are the
repositories which habour secrets many centuries old. The art of eloquence has
no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we
are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and
exploits of kings for younger generations.
I derive my
knowledge from my father Djeli Kedian, who also got it from his father; history
holds no mystery for us; we teach to the vulgar just as much as we want to
teach them, for it is we who keep the keys to the twelve doors of Mali.
I know the list of
all the sovereigns who succeeded to the throne of Mali. I know how the black
people divided into tribes, for my father bequeathed to me all his learning; I
know why such and such is called Kamara, another Keita, and yet another Sibibé
or Traoré; every name has a meaning, a secret import.
I teach kings the
history of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them
as an example, for the world is old, but the future springs from the past.
My word is pure and
free of all untruth; it is the word of my father; it is the word of my father’s
father. I will give you my father’s words just as I received them; royal griots
do not know what lying is. When a quarrel breaks out between tribes it is we
who settle the difference, for we are the depositaries of oaths which the
ancestors swore.
Listen to my word,
you who want to know; by my mouth you will learn the history of Mali.
By my mouth you
will get to know the story of the ancestor of great Mali, the story of him who
, by his exploits, surpassed even Alexander the Great; he who, from the East,
shed his rays upon all the countries of the West.
Listen to the story
of the son of the Buffalo, the son of the Lion. I am going to tell you of
Maghan Sundiata, of Mari-Djata, of Sogolon Djata, of Naré Maghan Djata; the man
of many names against whom sorcery could avail nothing.
It is true that
oral traditions - with a mission to blend myth with reality in an attempt to
create universal, timeless impressions - are not free from defects. On this
score I quote from Parker & Rathbone:
Yet oral traditions
… were far from straight forward. They were generated within particular
cultures and strongly shaped by local aesthetic preferences, with narratives
often advancing by way of spiritual or magical transformation rather than
incremental chronological change.
However, what is
equally undeniable is that, insofar as they inevitably originated from oral
sources, and to the extent that they were crafted by fallible men, written
sources are not impeccable either. In a nutshell, and to say the least, the
“heroic code” is by no means the monopoly of the story of Beowulf; the epic of
Sundiata is likewise entitled to the “heroic code” with equal authority.
Pre-colonial
Literature:
One of the
thinnest threads in the expressive weavage of literature is the question of
precise transitional barrier between oral literature and written literature. In
terms of form, the difference can be simple and straightforward – one is
written, while the other is not. But in terms of content, the distinction
between the two may not so easily yield to a clean-cut of the theoretical
sword. Elizabeth Gunner captured this knotty point in the following paragraph:
The relationship between
oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written
literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution.
Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by
colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African
traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on
these literatures.
The early
African writers in European languages are sometimes characterized as
translators, because much of their writings was
little more than transposition of their native oral traditions. In other
words, they were translative writers
rather than creative writers. What is instructive to note here is that in the
process of this transposition orality was in turn twisted to suit the specific character
of the written word. Thus, both oral literature and written literature
influenced each other on the transitional borderline.
At any rate, the
first phase in the evolutionary growth of English African literature is what is
generally labeled as pre-colonial literature. Pre-colonial literature dates
from the period of the Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th
centuries, perhaps the darkest chapter in the history of homo-sapiens. The
Atlantic slave trade, which some commentators rightly refer to as the ‘odious
commerce’, involved the forced shipping of over 12 million African men and
women to the Americas as human commodities. Some of these slaves later regained
their freedom, and the lettered among them then used their literacy as a weapon
for fighting back against slavery; they published stories of their horrific
experiences in the yoke of slavery. Of the very first generation of slave
narrators, three personalities stand out: Ignatius Sancho; Ottobah Cugoano; and
Olaudah Equiano. To these three exceptional Africans, O.R. Dathorne has this
homage to pay:
They were all West
Africans who had been enslaved and who had managed to get to England only as
servants. That they survived is a testament to their fortitude. That they could
read at all proves considerable ability.
The most famous,
and also the most controversial, in that circle is Olaudah Equiano. His The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Equiano was published in London in 1789. The list of pre-colonial slave
writers, even the famous among them, is far too long to be posted here. Some of
the freed slaves were brought back to West Africa and resettle in Liberia and
Sierra-Leon, and they also chronicled their experiences.
In talking about
pre-colonial literature, it will be too conspicuous an omission to not make
reference to the medieval University of Timbuktu in West Africa. Such an
omission may not be excused even by the pronouncement of delimitation of our
discourse to English ‘black Africa’ only, for in this particular context we are
talking about pre-colonial era which predates the balkanization of Africa into
English, French and Portuguese labels.
The University of Timbuktu was established in
ancient Mali, West Africa, in the 12th century. At its peak
it had an enrollment of around 25,000 students from Africa and other parts of
the world. Silas Allen reported Michael Covitt, the founder and chairman of the
Malian Manuscripts Foundation in Chicago, in the following words:
Scholars
came from as far away as Turkey, Persia and Portugal to study at Mali's
University of Timbuktu… and many of those scholars stayed and wrote their own
manuscripts in nearly every discipline imaginable.
Among those
manuscripts are ideas on forgiveness, understanding and resolving conflict
peacefully…
“Mali has a
road map for peace for the entire world,” …
The total
number of the manuscripts of Timbuktu is estimated to be over 300,000.
Pre-colonial
literature does not refer to only literature produced before the advent of
colonization in Africa; it also includes modern literature concerned with the
pre-colonial era. Elizabeth Gunner tells us this when she refers to Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958)
thus: “Things Fall Apart is a
pre-colonial novel that ends with the coming of colonialism, which triggers
Okonkwo’s demise.” Things Fall Apart is a narrative of
conflict between tradition and change in pre-colonial Igboland of today’s Nigeria.
The British colonizers regard the Igbo culture as pagan, primitive and barbaric
and are determined to eradicate it by persuasion or by force. Okonkwo, the
protagonist, champions resistance against the intruding foreign culture.
Eventually, things fall apart in
Igboland because the order that results from the conflict is socio-cultural
confusion, a split between ancestral tradition and the new culture brought by
the white man.
Colonial Literature:
The precise
demarcation between pre-colonial literature and colonial literature is far from
clear. Colonization of Africa was formalized at the Berlin Conference of
1884/5. Although Britain had abolished slavery in 1807, and 1867 had seen the
last recorded voyage of slaves across the Atlantic, the Berlin Conference’s
formal declaration of Africa as a European possession was perceived by freed
slaves in the diaspora as a revival of slavery in a new form. As such, the
antislavery writers in Euro-America lost no time in redirecting their focus to
also embrace anti-colonial campaign. Some decades later, a body of
anti-colonial African writers emerged on the continent itself. In 1911, Joseph
E.C. Hayford of Ghana (then Gold Coast) published his Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation. Hayford’s book is
regarded as the first African novel written in English; “although the work
moves between fiction and political advocacy, its publication and positive
reviews in the Western press marked a watershed moment in African literature”. The
next few decades after Hayford’s publication witnessed a spring of novels,
plays and dramas by African pioneer writers in various African nations. These
literary works generally showed themes of liberation, political independence and
cultural emancipation.
But there was
another front to the battle. Colonialism was predicated on the pretext of a
mission of paternalistic moral obligation to go and ‘civilize’ the ‘primitive
sorts’ out there. We all know the common stratagems of the colonialists. The
word colony comes from the Latin word ‘colonia’ which literally means a
‘farmland’. Wherever the colonialists found a ‘farmland’, their first tactic
was to deny any previous ownership of that property - they did that in
Australia and the Americas. Where evidence of previous ownership was too glaring
to be denied, as in the case of Africa, then their second tactic was to warp
and question the credibility – in fact, the humanity - of the previous owners.
As such, while African writers were engrossed in anti-colonial literature,
colonial apologists were equally frantic with copious production of their own
literature to scuttle the struggle of the African writers. The ideological
battle between the two fronts is tersely outlined by Thandika Mkandawire in the
following passage:
One task of ideas in both
the enslavement and colonization of Africa was to dehumanize the enslaved and
the colonized by denying their history and denigrating their achievement and
capacities. The colonialists’ claim to universalism for their culture and
values, and the demotion of other cultures to only particularistic and exotic
significance, could not but provoke response and resistance. It is perhaps not
surprising that some of the earliest intimations of pan-Africanism invariably
included a vindication of the cultures and histories of peoples of African
origin. And among the first intellectual ‘schools’ to emerge in Africa were
those of historians; in Ibadan, Dakar and Dar es Salaam, for example. These schools
took upon themselves the task of challenging the imperial narrative, one of
whose intentions was to obliterate the memory of their pre-colonial existence.
A quotation from
Sule Bello might shed some light on Mkandawire’s words:
In this respect the various
prejudicial, perjorative, condescending and dehumanizing references to the
African person and his indigenous traditions, or the outright tendency to deny
him any history, were all but attempts at reducing him, as a human being, by
way of isolating him from his past as well as “convincing” him of his inherent cultural,
and creative, or developmental, incapabilities as a justification for his
domination by foreign powers.
Interestingly,
the battle was waged even inside the kingdom of Jehova. Sule Bello reported Peter
B. Clark (1986) in the following words:
Thus we find that
Christianity was divided along the lines of pro-imperial missionaries who were
bitterly opposed by the anti-imperial missionaries under the leadership of the
freed slaves who came back to West Africa as missionaries. Indeed this led to
the evolution of African churches, which eventually became very important in
the nationalist struggle against colonialism.
Nevertheless,
the African writers eventually emerged from the fight as the vanguards. By the
middle of the 1960s colonialism in English Africa was all but over.
Post-Colonial Literature:
With the
proliferation of universities and colleges in post-colonial Africa, African
literature grew rapidly, both in quality and in quantity. African writers, from
Chinua Achebe in the West to Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the East, soon began to win
international acclaim. In 1986, Wole Soyinka of Nigeria became post-colonial
Africa’s first winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. According
to Ali Mazrui and others, seven major conflicts are identifiable as general
themes of post-colonial literature, viz:
… the clash
between Africa's past and present, between tradition and modernity, between
indigenous and foreign, between individualism and community, between socialism
and capitalism, between development and self-reliance and between Africanity
and humanity.
Indeed, a great
deal of post-colonial literature was devoted to expression of disillusionment
with independent Africa. One famous magnum
opus on this subject is Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969). In The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the masses of Ghana - having
fought tooth-and-nail to overthrow the British colonialists whom they had
disdained as repressive exploiters – moan and grunt with painful disappointment
with their native political leaders. Engrossed in kleptomanic corruption, the
native political leaders turn out to be just as repressive, if not even worse,
than the erstwhile foreign colonizers. Here is a couple of quotations from The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born:
How long will
Africa be cursed with its leaders? There were men dying from the loss of hope,
and others were finding gaudy ways to enjoy power they did not have. We were
ready here for big and beautiful things, but what we had was our own black men
hugging new paunches scrambling to ask the white man to welcome them onto our
backs. These men who were to lead us out of our despair, they came like men
already grown fat and cynical with the eating of centuries of power they had
never struggled for, old before they had even been born into power, and ready
only for the grave….
It should be
easy now to see there have never been people to save anybody but themselves,
never in the past, never now, and there will never be any saviors if each will
not save himself. No saviors. Only the hungry and the fed. Deceivers all. Only
for that is life the perfect length. Everyone will tell you, pointing, that
only the impotent refuse. Only those who are too weak to possess see anything
wrong with the possessing fashion. Condemnation, coming from those who have never
had, comes with a pathetic sound. Better get it all first, then if you still
want to condemn, go ahead. But remember, getting takes the whole of life.
‘…I saw men
tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same
men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils
useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been
growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the
white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his
real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all
blackness in the big old slave castle? And the men around him, why not? What
stops them sending their loved children to kindergartens in Europe? And if the
little men around the big men can send their children to new international
schools, why not? That is all anyone here ever struggles for: to be nearer the
white man. All the shouting against the white men was not hate. It was love.
Twisted, but love all the same. Just look around you and you will see it even
now. Especially now.’
No wonder, life
became hell for the most talented of post-colonial African writers: their books
were banned; some of them were incarcerated; others were killed; and yet many
others were driven into the painful, humiliating experience of life in exile. (Just
three years ago I was myself paraded at gun-point through Nigerian bookshops to
withdraw my book Niqab (face-veil): An Exemplary
Sunnah or a Repugnant Innovation? (2010) I had to run for my dear life). Thus
did political authoritarianism deal a crippling blow to the evolutionary growth
of African literature. Lamenting the situation in his native Kenya, Ali Mazrui,
one of Africa’s foremost scholars,
stated:
If the first
two killers of intellectualism in Kenya were rising political authoritarianism
and declining academic freedom, the third killer was the cold war between
Western powers and the Soviet bloc. The government of Kenya was co-opted into
the Western camp, sometimes at the expense of Kenya’s own citizens. Being
socialist or left-wing as an intellectual became a political hazard. All sorts
of laws and edicts emerged about subversive literature. Possessing the works of
Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China was a crime in Kenya, and people
actually went to jail for it. My own nephew, Dr Alamin M. Mazrui of Kenyatta
University, was detained without charge by the Moi regime for more than a year
for being a left-wing Kenyan academic in the company of other left-wingers as
Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo.
Intellectual
opposition to capitalism in Kenya became increasingly a punishable offence.
Lives of socialists were sometimes in danger, as in the case of the relatively
powerless Pinto, who was assassinated. Moderately left-wing political leaders
such as Oginga Odinga were ostracized. All these were forces fatal to intellectualism
in Kenya.
A Salute to
African-American Literature:
In talking about
African literature, African-American Literature is entitled to a special page.
By African-American Literature we mean the body of literature written by
Americans of African descent, including those in the Caribbean or West
Indies.
In her
acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison,
the first African American to be awarded that Prize, stated.
Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes
meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we
are like no other life.
I have decided
to open this chapter with Tony Morrison’s philosophical statement because I
intend to from here on adopt her phrase ‘word-work’ as my own. By ‘word-work’ I
understand ‘literature; the art of writing’. African Literature owes more than
a lot of its development to African-American word-work. Mention has already
been made of Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cogoano and Olauda Equiano - they were
all African Americans. It is instructive to note that even the very name
‘Africa’, as well as the idea of ‘Africanity’, to an immeasurable extent, owe
their development and popularity to the nostalgic yearnings of African
Americans as expressed through their word-work. Parker and Rathbone expressed
the point in the following vein:
… the modern idea of Africa emerged, in many ways,
from the dehumanizing crucible of Atlantic slavery.
It was from the crucible, moreover, that Africans
themselves first began to appropriate the idea of Africa. The first to do so
were Western-educated intellectuals from the black diaspora, men like the
celebrated anti-slave trade campaigner Olaudah Equiano and 19th-century
African Americans like Alexander Crummel, Martin Delany, and Edward W. Blyden.
Able to perceive Africa because of their very removal from it, these thinkers
laid the foundations of what came to be known as ‘pan-Africanism’. They did so
by appropriating not just the idea of Africa, but also the 19th-century
European language of race. In early pan-Africanist thought, Africa – or
‘Ethiopia’, as the continent continued sometimes to be called – was seen as the
home of a distinctive people, the ‘Negro race’. It was only towards the end of
the 19th century that these ideas began to develop within Africa
itself…
The following is
a quotation from Morrison’s famous book Beloved
(1987), the book that won her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under
every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons,
sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way they were right. The more
coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they
were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to
persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the
deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks
brought with them to this place from other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks
planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread,
until it invaded the whites who had made it…
It is remarkable
to note that blacks were deemed so worthless that they were not even considered
capable of fighting an organized war-fair – all they were thought capable of
was unleashing sentimental, irrational violence besides their “natural” role of
carrying and hauling. It was by the power of word-work that African Americans
won their right to fight in the American army. I quote from William Andrews:
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African
Americans deployed their pens and their voices to convince President Abraham
Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war to end slavery,
which black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 black soldiers
joining the Union army.
In 1773, three
years before America’s independence, Phillis Wheatley published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religion and
Moral, which is considered to be the first African American book. Until then,
the natural belief of whites was that slavery was the natural occupation of
blacks because blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, and that the incontrovertible
evidence of the intellectual inferiority of blacks was their inability to write
and publish any intellectual works like their white masters. However, from the
second half of the 18th century, starting from Phillis Wheatley,
Olaudah Equiano, William Brown, through Booker Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B.
Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Malcom X, Countee Cullen, to Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, to mention only a handful of the most noteworthy, African
Americans decisively debunked the notion of black intellectual inferiority by
inundating the Euro-American intellectual landscape with unprecedented degrees
of ornate eloquence and literary embellishment. These African-American
word-workers proved themselves to be such unparalleled standard-bearers of
mastery of literary form and content that even the most eloquent of white
political leaders, in their desperate moments, had to turn around and borrow
from their superior impressionistic oratory. At the height of World War II, the
refrain of British prime minister Winston Churchel, in his anxiety to whip up
defiant patriotism in the British army, was Claude McKay’s protest poem at the
1919 Washington race march:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot ….
One particular
contrast is of special interest here. As late as the 19th century,
writing was still considered an exclusively male domain in European culture. We
are told that the author of Pride and
Prejudice (1813), Jane Austin, perhaps the most famous English female
writer ever, wrote her books secretly “behind a door that creaked”, so that she
had the chance to hide her manuscripts before visitors could enter, because
hers was a time when “English society associated a female’s entrance into the
public sphere with a reprehensible loss of feminity” In
the case of African Americans, it was a woman, in the person of Phillis
Wheatley (at the age of just 20), who piloted
the era of word-work. Thus, by their power of word-work, African Americans
championed the cause of humanity by subduing both gender bias and racial
prejudice. Today, African American literature has parallel recognition with
Euro-American literature anywhere in the world.
What is most
pertinent to note in this chapter is that, by their literary prowess, African
American word-workers not only rose to their rightful seat of dignity in the
American society, as well as fought for human dignity for Africa as a whole
through their decolonization campaign, but they also inspired their bretheren
on mainland Africa to stand up against both foreign exploitation and domestic
colonization through the power of word-work.
AFRICAN
LITERATURE IN THE MAKING
It is obvious from
the foregoing discussion that the history of African literature is a history of
struggle against oppression and exploitation, and for liberty and
self-determination. Unfortunately, more than two centuries after it began with
the emergence of African writers in the second half of the 18th
century, this struggle has yet to be won. Trans-Atlantic slave trade may have
been abolished, but ‘domestic slavery’ has been entrenched by acute economic
depravity. Colonization was dethroned only for the more pernicious subtlety of
neo-colonization to be enthroned in lieu. The ideal of négritude/‘the African
personality’, with true cultural emancipation as its underlying principle, has
remained a dream only. In the wake of the politicking of ‘Globalization’, with
its underlying motive of Western cultural hegemony, it is yet to be seen precisely
which course African literature is going to chart – resistance or obeisance? Huge
strides have been made in the quest for gender justice – thanks to Mariama Bâ and
others, but the objective has yet to be fully realized. On a general note,
socio-political and economic justice has remained too far from satisfactory on
the African continent. In a particular sense, and above all, foreign
colonization has been replaced with domestic colonization whereby weaker tribes
are moaning and grunting under the dead-weight of exclusionary degradation and
marginalization by stronger tribes. African word-workers, from Ngugi wa
Thiong’o
in the East to Ola Rotimi in
the West, have made some considerable efforts in the fight against tribalism on
the continent. And yet tribalism, the potential genocidal mass-grave of the
African peoples, has remained the greatest threat to the very survival of
Africa. It is against this backdrop that I maintain the humble opinion that
African literature is still in the making and will remain incomplete until
African word-workers have succeeded in bringing about – among other goals of
socio-political justice – the total eradication of tribalism from the African
continent.
Selected References:
Achebe, C.(1959). Things
fall apart: (Oxford: Heinemann)
Armah, A.K. (1969). The beautiful ones are not yet born. (Oxford:
Heinemann
International)
Bello, S.(undated). Emerging perspectives on the origins, functions and
consequences of ethnocentrism
in African affairs. (Kano: ARADA)
Dazinger, M.K. & Johnson, W.S. (1961). An introduction to literary
criticism. (Boston: Heath & Co.)
Mkandawire, T.(eds) (2006). African intellectuals: rethinking politics,
language, gender and
development. (London: Zed Books)
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. (New York: Penguin Books USA)
Niane, D.T.(1965). Sundiata:
an epic of Old Mali.(Essex: Longman Group)
Parker, J. & Rathbone, R. (2007). African history: a very short
introduction. (Oxford: OUP)
Ulli Beier (eds) (1964). Introduction to African literature: an anthology of
critical writing
from ‘Black Orpheus’
(1964). (Lagos: Longman Nigeria
Ltd.)
Gunner, E. A. W. African
Literature.
http://www.academicroom.com/topics/what-is-african-literature...
World Population Statistics: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com.africa.popu
Gunner, E. A. W. African Literature.
http://www.academicroom.com/topics/what-is-african-literature...
World
Population Statistics: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com.africa.popu
Parker, J. &
Rathbone, R. (2007). African history: a
very short introduction. (Oxford: OUP) p.8
Dazinger & Johnson (1961) An introduction to literary criticism.
(Boston: Heath & Co.) p.1
George, Joseph, "African
Literature", in Gordon and Gordon, Understanding Contemporary Africa
(1996), ch. 12, p. 304.= wikipedia, ibid
Adali-Mortty,
G. “Ewe Poetry”, in Ulli Beier (eds) (1964). An introduction to African
literature: Anthology of critical writing from ‘Black Orpheus’). (Lagos:
Longman Nigeria Ltd.) p.3
Scharfe,
D. & Aliyu, Y. “Hausa Poetry”, in Ulli Beier, op cit, p.34
Niane,
D.T.(1965). Sundiata: an epic of Old Mali.(Essex:
Longman Group)
Dathorne,
O.R.. “African Writers of the 18th Century: Ignatius Sanchos;
Ottobah Cugoano; and Olaudah Equiano”, in Ulli Beier, op cit, p.235
Documentary on
Manuscripts from medieval University of Timbuktu.
http://newsok.com/documentary-on-manuscripts-from-medieval-university-of-timbuktu-will-be-screened-in-oklahoma/article/3882127
Mkandawire, T.
“Introduction”, in Mkandawire, T.(eds) (2006). African intellectuals: rethinking politics, language, gender and
development. (London: Zed Books) p.5
Bello,
S.(undated). Emerging perspectives on the
origins, functions and consequences of
ethnocentrism in African affairs. (Kano: ARADA) p.25
Armah,
A.K. (1969). The Beautyful Ones Are Not
Yet Born. (Oxford: Heinemann International)pp.80-1
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. (New York: Penguin Books USA) pp.198-9
Mariama Bâ’s So Long a
Letter (1981) is a moving tale about socio-cultural injustices against
women in African society.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
The Black Hermit (1962) is a dramatic
tale about tribalism in Africa.
Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to blame (1979) is a
tragic tale about tribalism in Africa.
