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General Overview
African literature refers to the literature of the African peoples. The African concept includes oral literature, while European views of literature often stressed a separation of art and content, African awareness is all inclusive. Literature can also imply an artistic use of words for the sake of art alone. Without denying the important role of aesthetics in Africa, we should keep in mind that, 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 the society. Indeed, an object is considered beautiful because of the truths it reveals and the communities it helps to build.
One major problem of African fiction is categorization. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the African novel gained momentum at a time of social upheaval in Africa. There were intense nationalist activities challenging the whole idea and practice of colonialism in Africa. Yet the African intelligentsia, to borrow Emmanuel Ngara's expression, that is, the new bourgeoisie or elite was a product of missionary education. The colonial powers had acquiesced to granting political, but not economic and cultural independence to its colonies. That led the new African social elite to engage in artistic form inherited from the West but inspired by local tradition. For example, in 1952 Amos Tutuola wrote The Palm- wine Drinkard based on Yoruba mythology, using African folktale tradition as form. He was followed in 1953 by Camara Laye with L'Enfant noir (translated into English as The African Child and later in the American edition as The Dark Child), an episodic novel, which relied heavily on African oral tradition to vaunt the merits of the African past, tradition and civilization to a deaf world. In 1958 and from a historical perspective, Chinua Achebe published the novel Things Fall Apart, which set out to correct the ugly perception of Africans. Ngugi wa Thiong'o followed in 1964 with Weep Not Child. It was the year of Kenyan independence and the novelist was making an urgent call to Africans to embrace education and enterprise as a way of ending Western imperialism and Indian entrepreneurship in East Africa.
If the genre of the novel came to dominate the literary scene, it was due in part to its ability to borrow from tradition, but more importantly, it was a means that the new intelligentsia, educated in a colonial context, could understand and use to herald African values outside and inside Africa. The impact of other genres was progressively overshadowed by that of novelists such as wa Thiong'o, Ousmane, Oyono, Armah, Beti, Laye, Achebe, to mention only a few. Often, novelists made oral tradition and legends their springboard. They began telling stories about self, the immediate community or village, the nation-state or the newly formed proletariat, but by and large they remained inaccessible and foreign to the great majority of the African people.
In contrast, African novel seems to belong to the people rather than to the elite because its formal complexity and intimidating status, borrowed from Western hierarchies, have never been naturalized in Africa. With the voice of ordinary people, the novel claims to be the legitimate heir of the traditional legends through which griots chronicled community history. The African novel writer tells stories to entertain and educate people in a way they understand. Like the storyteller, the writer holds the audience spellbound by the very beauty of the narrative, giving pleasure and also teaching morals and beliefs of the community, race or nation. African Novel has much in common with African oral tradition, which has been described as ‘the African classical tradition’ .
African classical tradition then finds its renewal in the novel because in a familiar way this genre puts in the context of today a number of subjects relevant to traditional and modern African values. It shows how economic, political, religious and social situations relate to pre-colonial Africa, colonialism, neo-colonial independence, apartheid, indigenous and imported religions, etc. Thus, the themes dealt with by African novelists include art, religion, urban-life, tradition and culture, apartheid, ironies of life, and pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-colonial reality, etc. Just as the common storyteller of old, the contemporary African fiction writer aims at helping his/her society to change while retaining the best features of authentic African cultures. A large number of literary authors of great talent have not lost sight of the novel’s potential to enrich human lives and African societies.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Discuss the major problems that arose in the categorization of African fiction.
African Fiction by Non Africans
There has also been the problem of classification. Some literary writers who wrote about Africa were not really Africans. Joyce Cary wrote Mister Johnson, a story about Africans and Africa. It was this novel which prompted the writing of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. According to Achebe, Mister Johnson contained distorted pictures of the African society which he tried to correct in Things Fall Apart. More so, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also about Africa and the African People. The questions now are: should we call these fictions African fiction because they presented Africans? What about the authorship? Is African fiction to be written by Africans only? It is true that the present form of written fiction in Africa is an offshoot of Western literary culture infused in the western education of Africans but is it possible to have African fiction in African form that is without any hinge on the western form of writing? These are impossibilities since the writers of African fictions make use of western style and values in the craft. African literature, in its basic form, is oral. So, written literature echoes western values.
To classify Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad as African writers and to call their fictions African fictions becomes a major problem in the polemics of definition of African fiction. Fiction is an imaginative recreation of real life experiences. This means that the subject matters in every fiction must reflect the experiences of the society from which it emanated. One very important fact here, being that every fictional work must show realism not mere fabrication of unrealities purposely designed to distort the history of a people. Chinua Achebe made a proposition that fictional works about Africa written by non Africans tend to rewrite the history and culture of African people in very bad manner and intentions.
Herodotus of Halycahasus, one of the early historians gave a distorted history of Africa. He described Africa as “a continent of barbarians, and animal-like humans with four legs without any form of culture or religion” and this historical distortion has often influenced the western judgment of Africa and Africans. Hence, we do not expect a better fiction from non-Africans about Africa since they already have a distorted history about Africa. In defining African fiction, we get stuck about the placement of these literatures written by non-Africans about Africa.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Explain the proper categorization of Fiction by non Africans about Africa.
African Fiction by African Slaves
Another controversial aspect of identification of African fiction is the inclusion of literary works by African slaves in America, India and Europe. The African works best known in the West from the period of colonization and the slave trade are primarily slave narratives, such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). There is also Alex Harley’s Roots which also gave accurate account of the slave trade experiences of the Africans in fictional mode. In the colonial period, Africans exposed to Western languages began to write in those tongues. In 1911, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman) of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) published what is probably the first African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation. Although the work moves between fiction and political advocacy, its publication and positive reviews in the Western press mark a watershed moment in African literature. Interestingly, the emergence of African American literature now subsumes the literatures of slave Africans.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Explain the contribution of slave narratives to the development of African fiction.
African Fiction by Africans in the Diaspora
Many African writers write abroad. For sure, the society and environment they write from influence them a lot. Many of these writers left the continent out of protest while some left for economic reasons. Most of them write novels about the experiences of the western world. There is nothing African in their works. The African style, culture, environment and society are not reflected in the stories. Instead, the stories are bent towards celebrating western values and civilization. The question now is: do we classify these works as African literature merely because they are written by Africans even though the subject matter in their stories does not reflect Africa? Many African writers have become westernized to the extent of preferring to write about New York, White House, Hurricane Katrina etc instead of the immediate African socio- political experiences. To get western readership, these African writers in the Diaspora tend to consider the immediate interest of the western populace.
Although some African writers have also made impact even though they wrote from outside Africa, many of them were already known in Africa before they left the African shores. We have such names as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ben Okri, Niyi Osundare and recently Chimamanda Adichie, Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
Appreciate African Fiction by African writers in other continents as truly African literature.
African Fiction in African Languages
Many critics of African literature consider literatures written in African languages as ethnic literatures since they serve the interest of the ethnic group that uses the language of the literature. Most novels written in African languages have not been accessible to non-users of such languages unless the work is translated. Since Africans have thousands of languages, it becomes more appropriate using Western languages such as English, French and Portuguese as the language of fiction in order to reach out to millions of people with diverse language forms. Some critics of African literature believe that English Language is an imperial language representing colonialism in all its facets. They advocated that African writers should use their native languages in writing literatures. When it looked as if there was no compromise in this direction, most of the critics began to suggest the evolvement of an African lingua franca. Some suggested Kiswahili while others suggested some other language forms like Hausa, Yoruba and Acoli languages. Most of these critics undermined western audience for African literatures. They believed that African novels are for the consumption of African people alone. Many writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Okot P’Bitek, Wole Soyinka amongst others practised writing in their native dialects but these never yielded wider acclaim. The advocates of this theory believe that African fiction will truly be identified as African if written in African languages expressing African ideas and philosophies.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 5
How does the writing of African Fiction in English help in the development of the genre?
CONCLUSION
African literature as an institution of several associated units has defied definition but some see it as "the sum total of all national and ethnic literatures of Africa." Abiola Irele finds it futile to de-emphasize the social function of literature, because without its social functions, African literature does not merit its existence. The problem of defining Africa's limits is relegated to the background, and the need to establish the affinity of Africans and Diasporans becomes paramount through reference to social experience and history.
In my view, little has changed today with regard to bringing together the distant cousins of Africa and the African Diaspora, and Irele's suggestion that the focus of literary studies should be on the social functions of African literature holds true. Furthermore, for literature to reflect its society, it must be presented in the form that comes naturally to the people's appreciation of art. Moreover, in time to come, due to extreme pressures of life in modern cities, the society will resort to less time-consuming ways of reading and communicating what can be seen as happening. In each transition, as a historical development of social language itself: finding new means, and new forms and then new definitions of changing practical consciousness become inevitable. This prediction by Raymond Williams is relevant to the whole world, including that of the African literary genre.
SUMMARY
The debate over the scope of what is called African fiction has continued to generate significant interest ever since the emergence of African literary writing in European languages. Discussions of this debate have in the past often highlighted the inherently normative character of the idea of an African literature in African languages, by African people and for African people. By tracing the history of the debate, this unit seeks to distinguish between the actual role played by African languages in the emergence of a literature identified as African by its practitioners, and the ideological function of the debate for Africans who write in European languages. From this perspective, appeals for a literature in indigenous languages appear to serve the purpose of ethnic signification on behalf of a tradition of writing that continues to rely on European languages at the levels of both creative practice and theoretical formulation.
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