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A HISTORY of TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN LITERATURE.Rtf A HISTORY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN LITERATURES Edited by Oyekan Owomoyela UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS © 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A History of twentieth-century African literatures / edited by Oyekan Owomoyela. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8032-3552-6 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8032-8604-x (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Owomoyela, Oyekan. PL80I0.H57 1993 809'8896—dc20 92-37874 CIP To the memory of John F. Povey Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction I CHAPTER I English-Language Fiction from West Africa 9 Jonathan A. Peters CHAPTER 2 English-Language Fiction from East Africa 49 Arlene A. Elder CHAPTER 3 English-Language Fiction from South Africa 85 John F. Povey CHAPTER 4 English-Language Poetry 105 Thomas Knipp CHAPTER 5 English-Language Drama and Theater 138 J. Ndukaku Amankulor CHAPTER 6 French-Language Fiction 173 Servanne Woodward CHAPTER 7 French-Language Poetry 198 Edris Makward CHAPTER 8 French-Language Drama and Theater 227 Alain Ricard CHAPTER 9 Portuguese-Language Literature 240 Russell G. Hamilton -vii- CHAPTER 10 African-Language Literatures: Perspectives on Culture and Identity 285 Robert Cancel CHAPTER II African Women Writers: Toward a Literary History 311 Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido CHAPTER 12 The Question of Language in African Literatures 347 Oyekan Owomoyela CHAPTER 13 Publishing in Africa: The Crisis and the Challenge 369 Hans M. Zell The Contributors 389 Index 393 - viii- Acknowledgments Sometime in 1984 the editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press asked if I would consider editing a volume on the history of twentieth century African literatures. I eagerly embraced the opportunity, because I shared his conviction that such a book was both necessary and of potentially great appeal to a sizeable audience. Furthermore, the interest of the press in the subject represented a major advance for African literary studies, and African studies in general—the addition of another top-flight university press to the number making African material available to the serious reader. The volume makes its appearance now several years behind schedule owing to the difficulties inherent in assembling commissioned original essays according to the timetable I naively established at the start. I have since learned from those with more experience in such ventures that the delays are quite typical. They have nonetheless tested the patience and dedication of those contributors whose chapters came in on schedule. My greatest gratitude is due, therefore, to my contributors, who have borne with good grace the frustration of long delays in seeing the fruition of their efforts. I hope they will agree that the result has been worth the wait. Several passages in the following chapters have been translated from other languages. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations have been by the contributing authors. For the rest, I bear the responsibility for whatever flaws the texts contain. -ix- Introduction In the half millennium that has elapsed since Christopher Columbus's fateful "discovery" of the New World, humankind has experienced profound revolutions directly related to Columbus's voyage and those of the European explorer-adventurers who came after him. Nowhere has the impact of those revolutions been more dramatic than on the African continent, for as a consequence of the voyages Africa quickly became an object of European attention—as either an obstacle or a restocking facility for ships on their way to the spices of the Indian Ocean, as a treasure trove of possessions to be transferred from one European power to another in treaties concluding intra European wars, as a source of slave labor for the new plantations in the Americas, and as a group of colonies supplying European empires with raw materials, markets for finished goods, and career opportunities for European civil servants. That original relationship between Europe and Africa has undergone many transformations in the past five centuries. The last of these was decolonization—the formal termination of imposed European rule and the resultant transfer of power to Africans. The colonizers finally acknowledged the inevitability, and even desirability, of that process in the years following World War II, when they began the belated work of cultivating suitable Africans to assume power on the departure of their European rulers. The transformation, observers agree, is still in progress. What is important for our purpose is that, as an integral part of that process, African literatures, essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, came into being. In this volume Africa is conceived as a cultural entity, not a geographic entity. Accordingly, the book excludes the countries of North Africa, for while they share some historical experiences (such as colonialism) with the countries below the Sahara, they are in fact Arab in culture, outlook, and lingua franca, and they perceive themselves to be part of the Arab world. The literatures discussed in the following pages, therefore, are those of the sub Saharan countries, which share a cultural unity. Another result of this cultural conception of Africa is the exclusion of the literature produced by European and other foreign settlers on the continent, past and present. A partial exception is that of the white community of South Africa: the perva -i sive weight of apartheid on the consciousness of writers, settler or native African, along with its equally pervasive ramifications in the life of the country, necessitates occasional allusions to certain settler writers and their works. Studies of African literatures implicitly or explicitly argue a continuity with traditional verbal artistry, which, in the absence of a popular writing tradition, was exclusively oral. One can read that intent, for example, in Jonathan Peters's assertion that "the production of fiction in West Africa is virtually as old as communication through the spoken word." Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike similarly see the traditional narrative forms of African societies as "Africa's oral antecedents to the novel" and argue at some length against critics who suggest differences between the two ( 25 -32). But while there can be little doubt that some connection does exist between the traditional forms and the modern, it would be an error to imagine that modern African literatures wholly evolved from, or had an unbroken relationship with, traditional verbal artistry. The modern literatures are quite evidently a legacy of the European irruption on the African scene, and they differ markedly from the traditional forms. It is also futile to suggest that the differences between traditional forms and modern literatures are immaterial, as the proponents of "orature" suggest, or that the distinction that one is oral and the other written is of little significance, as Wellek and Warren argue ( 21 -22), and as Andrzejewski, Pilaszewicz, and Tyloch also do in their book Literatures in African Languages (18). Oral performances are by their nature intimately personal and immediate, involving a performer in close physical contact with an audience—performer and audience sharing not only the same spatial and temporal space but also a cultural identity. Literature's audience is characteristically remote, oftentimes separated by vast spatial, temporal, and cultural distances. Fortunately, we need not be concerned with determining the extent of the field covered by the term "literature" (even though a resolution of the question would be desirable, for the manner of its resolution would determine whether or not "orature" was an unnecessary neologism, "written literature" redundant, or "oral literature" an oxymoron). Another important difference between traditional African oral art and modern African literature involves the identity and social standing of their respective practitioners. Like the Mali griot, who according to D. T. Niane "occupie[d] the chair of history" in his village ( viii ), the traditional oral artist was required to be deeply immersed in the traditional mores and the history of his or her community. This incumbency invested the artist with some formal or informal authority, along with commensurate dignity, even if (as was sometimes the case) he or she eked a living out of mendicancy. The modern writer does not have the sort of worry Niane expresses on behalf of the griot—that of being regarded as an object of scorn—since in the postcolonial context he or she is a member of the elite class. But although the modern -2- writer would claim the same legitimacy the traditional artist enjoys, as witness Wole Soyinka's lament that the course of affairs on the continent is set by politicians and not artists ( 18 ), that claim has little basis or justification, given the circumstances of writers' constitution as a westernized elite class. African writers bear the traces of their origination as a class in colonialists' desire to hand control to worthy successors they could trust to oversee and preserve the sociopolitical structures colonialism had built. In its present conception, therefore, African literatures inevitably reflect the social and cultural alienation of the writers from their communities, as well
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