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General Overview
Chinua Achebe explains that Africans did not hear of culture for the first time from the Europeans. This means that Africans have a system of thought of values and of self-assertion. Anxiety over self-revelation is not much of a problem when the exposure is channelled through conventional forms that mask the writer's identity to some extent. In the African scene, simply telling tragic stories like that of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart used to be a conventional way of telling an African story. But this reached its saturation point about the time Achebe published his second novel, No Longer at Ease. Before then, African writing had always favoured a political novel because it doubled over with fighting for freedom. Literature, in the oppressive milieu of the African colonial scene, was testimony to social aspirations, and by necessity, the only available vehicle for social change. The likes of Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka, with their sophisticated obfuscation, flirted and refined the African political novel until it gained the attention of the world, especially the West. They mingled it with modern forms of art that were in vogue in the West but had not yet caught on in the African scene.
The Sociology of African Novels
African writers have been concerned with their society. The social mores and the cultural values have been of concern with them. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe presented the typical Igbo society before the advent of colonialism. He created a clearer picture of the cultural values, laws and mores of the people. Umuofia is presented as a perfect society with their standard form of government. They have everything moving until the invasion of the whites that disrupted their values. The Igbo society in the novel is presented as pure and full of life. It was the western values that destroyed African values and relegated African laws as primitive and unrefined. African society is presented as a barbarian society in European novels and African writers have been struggling to correct this ugly presentation. That was why Achebe stated in his creed that his mission is to espouse and correct the years of denigration and self-abasement which “the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” .
In Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, we see Omokachi Community in her natural state. There are ways by which physical and spiritual things are treated. There are natural justice and spiritual essence. Madume died because he violated the laws of the gods. Any greedy fellow dies in his greed. Madume suffered that. Ekwueme died because he wanted to twist the hands of the gods. There is a belief among the people that whoever challenges the gods to a fight always fails. The community believes that the gods have superior power.
In Peter Abraham’s Tell Freedom, we see a writer presenting the South African society at the grips of Apartheid and how the black South Africans have been subjugated to live as animals and turned to slaves in their own land. In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child and A Grain of Wheat, the author presented the problem of disinheritance of land from the blacks. The East African society was engulfed with the politics of land as a result of colonialism.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Assess the major concern of African novelists with their society.
The African Novel and African Personality
Apart from the issue of culture the next issue that bothered African novelists is the issue of African personality. Africans were seen as people without value to life and a lawless people. In some European novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson we have distorted images of African personalities which made Europeans brand us as uncivilized. African novelists became concerned about correcting these anomalies. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is presented as a perfect man who acted according to the dictates of his society. At the age of 18, he has three titles, three wives and three yam barns which are the indices of growth in his society. It is the arrival of western values that destroyed a great personality like Okonkwo who got himself hanged for discovering that the values of his society have been thrown into the abyss. However, in No Longer at Ease, we see Obi Okonkwo in a mess because he wanted to behave according to the whites by collecting bribe. Achebe tries to present the fact that European values are distorted and worse than African values. In Jagua Nana, by Cyprian Ekwensi, we see an urban city filled with prostitution and other forms of vices. The urban city is synonymous with western values. Many African writers have been trying in their various works at placing the African personality in positive lights.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Explain how African novelists have been presenting African personality.
African Novel and Social Mores
One fundamental character of the contemporary African novel is that it provides a specific manner of narration which identifies human names in such a way that suggests that they are to be regarded as individuals in the contemporary society. The mark of true realism therefore, is the depiction of an age when the individual’s experience and the bourgeois exploration of the individual’s experience reaches its highest form and this individual is not a fragmentary experience but the quintessential representation of a particular historical social experience. The political life of a nation and its social national dilemma is thus depicted through an individual experience, the individual himself being shaped by the socio-economic circumstances in which he finds himself. In Festus Iyayi’s Violence, Idemudia and his three friends depict the dilemma of the Nigerian worker. Their cognitive self-awareness and existence are not only an individual’s idiosyncrasy but a reflection of the shaping spirits of their time and environment. Every individual is judged by his way of life as related to the social mores.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
How do African Novelists reflect African social mores?
African Novel and African Culture
In most African novels, the issues of culture are presented. Apart from Chinua Achebe who presents African culture as a way of telling the whites that Africans did not hear of culture first from them, there are salient aspects of African cultures in most novels. In Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Woods, the cultural placements of women in Senegal are revealed. We see women struggling to make a better place for their society. Also in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, we see the African culture in a Moslem society where the culture of the people and their religion are mixed. The novel is a long letter narrating the ill- treatment of women according to Moslem rules. Here, a woman’s attempts at reforming these odds were met with stringent measures that left her desolate. Back to Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, we see the Igbo culture concerning marriage, hunting, widowhood, belief in the supernatural, respect for elders and natural medicine. It is difficult to get an African novel without elements of culture.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 5
What elements of culture are revealed in Achebe’s No Longer atEase?
African Novel and the Question of Leadership
Most African novels seem to be an attack on the ruling class. Since independence the question of leadership has been a very sensitive issue in Africa. The African novelists have been commenting on the bad administration of most African countries. In 1966, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, was described as a prophetic novel because it predicted the first ever military coup in Nigeria. It was glaring as at that time that the civilian government in Nigeria was very corrupt and that military intervention was the only option. In most parts of Africa, there have been the issues of leadership problems. There are countries in Africa where dictatorship and anarchy are the order of the government. In North Africa, for instance, Muamar Gaddafi of Libya has been in power for over thirty years. The same applies in most East African countries like Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Congo DPR etc. The abuse of political power in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Liberia and Sierra Leone among other countries has been satirized in most African novels. Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born is an attack on the corrupt government in Ghana. Dambudzo Marechere’s House of Hunger exposes the feelings of hopelessness in Zimbabwe.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 6
How have African novelists been reacting to the issue of leadership?
CONCLUSION
It is clear that the African milieu has so much effect on the African novel as the writers draw their themes and subject matters from their environment. The sociology of the African novels revealed that the African writers are expressing the society to which they belong. They are reflecting the desires and wishes of their society. According to Ngugi wa Thiong’o the African writer is like a “sensible needle who records with varying degrees of accuracy and success the conflicts and tensions in his changing society”. This means that African writers see themselves as custodians of the people’s history, culture, aspiration and development. This is why they question the problems of leadership. This is why they project the culture of the people and record every details of good and bad governance for posterity.
SUMMARY
The African milieu has provided enough space for the African novelists to weave their stories. African novels have been in the vanguard of projecting African culture, personality, social mores and the question of leadership. They have acted as sensible needles in the record of the political, social and the economic changes in their societies. Most African novels are written with the commitment to express the African hope, worldview and thought system. In all, they aspire to fashion a near-perfect society for their people.
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