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ibidem Press, Stuttgart
Preface to the Second Edition
Listening for the Mediated Voices of the Southern African Khoisan in Hendrik’s Dwaalstories: Ironies and Wonders
Marecheran Postmodernism: Mocking the Bad Joke of “African Modernity”
Anomy and Agony in a Nation in Crisis: Soyinka’s Season of Anomy
Finding Foundations for Change in Bessie Head’s The Cardinals
Blood Gets a Voice: Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent
Two Late Apartheid-Era Novels: Balancing the Books in the South African Present
Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood: Painting the True Colours of Apartheid
Shakespeare, (Fanon,) Salih: Can the Black Man Love the White Woman? Can the White Woman Love the Black Man?
A. C. Jordan’s Tales From Southern Africa
Memory, Power and Bessie Head: A Question of Power
Patterns of Leadership in Bessie Head’s Maru and A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga
“Barbarism” and “Civilisation” in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in Marechera’s Black Sunlight
Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk: The Noise in the Dictator’s Ear
Performances, Ethics and Aesthetics of Wealth in African Literary Depiction
Three Takes on Somali Womanhood in the Eddiesof the Contemporary Black Atlantic Context
Achebe’s Children: Resonance, Poignance and Grandeur
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition
This collection of essays examines a wide range of African texts from different periods and different parts of a vast continent. These text-centred essays were brought together to give readers a sense of the wide range of African writing – in terms of themes, forms and implied contexts – but also because, despite the need to resist lazy homogenising remarks about Africa, Africans and African writers, there are certain discernible underlying coherences even among works as varied as those analysed in the essays that make up this collection. The novels and other written records of Africa may be said to carry a greater social, historical and even political responsibility than comparable texts in other parts of the world. This is the case because of the continent’s late literacy, broadly speaking, as well as the widespread and diverse forms of oppression – ranging from colonial suppression and underdevelopment to postcolonial instances of dictatorial African rule or conditions of violent chaos – and the stifling effect this has on public utterance. The analytical essays contained in this volume are attempts to draw attention to the significance of texts such as those commented on here as contributions to an archive of knowledge of different parts of and historical eras in Africa and to showcase the treasury of its literary art, even if the perspective employed is applied to a sample and limited (as it is here) to texts written in English or available in English translation.
The writers’ readiness and ability implicitly to analyse and creatively to confront the troubling, dangerous, perplexing or malign aspects of the societies from and of which they write, articulating the complex stresses from different sources to which African individuals have been subjected and the creative and courageous ways in which many among them have responded, are the qualities that inspire the writing of the essays in my collection. The subtlety and literary complexity that I attempt to highlight here are the signs – not of authors taking refuge in art from difficult socio-cultural and political situations, but of writers profoundly concerned with the African sites and times that are closest to them. My commentaries and contextualisations inevitably reflect my own geographical, academic, racial and political realities, biases and choices. There are more texts from the southern than of other parts of Africa discussed here, and not only is there a geographical imbalance, but many, many glaring omissions of other and equally significant African texts and issues. In this regard, no collection this brief could be inclusive. Nevertheless it is my hope that my essays may prompt readings and re-readings not only of the African writings addressed here, but of the many other texts by African authors already available or being and to be published – a rich and valuable resource[1] for Africans but of equal pertinence, in the issues they address and the compelling shapes they give to their thought, to the entire world.
The works discussed here were primarily[2] penned or recorded in English – the colonial language that has been so widely appropriated by African writers and so adroitly used by them to re-map their own life-world in verbally sophisticated gestures registering both independence and connectedness in the ironies of modern African selfhood. “Modernity began in 1492”, states Enrique Dussel, “with Europe thinking itself the center of the world and Latin America, Africa, and Asia as the periphery” (132). This arrogant self-elevation will only end, he suggests, “through a process of mutual, creative fecundation” in “corealization with its once negated alterity” (138). I link this with Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the need to “do battle for the creation of a human world – that is, a world of reciprocal recognitions” (155). The great Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera insists that Africans “are not isolated things. We exist”, she says, “in co-operation with other nations. So we need to put into place methods of communication” (389). But she also expresses her need and desire “[t]o explore, not with romanticism, women’s characters. But with accepting the violence that accompanies their existence” while attempting “to underst[and] the intimate complexity of their mental worlds, and their emotions,” and to explore “those moments of tragedy without [. . .] withdrawing from them” or “covering up” (385).[3] Issues of subjectivity and the various and contending power forms besetting it; different forms of cultural hybridity, ‘authenticity’ and abrogation and post- and neocolonial conditions as well as gender matters and the plight of many of Africa’s children are some of the subjects dealt with in the texts and in my discussions of them.
African English writing does not grow primarily out of the textual world of canonical (or contemporary) English literature, but emerges from the complex translations of local realities into a language now skillfully articulating African visions. Yet, by writing in a language of world-wide access, the writers of this continent lay claim to a shareable truth and sphere of experience and exhibit a border-crossing aesthetic power in their texts. Acknowledging, grasping (on the imaginative level) and coping with what are frequently dreadful or emotionally and morally taxing circumstances (as my collection’s title phrase, “dealing with evils,” indicates), these texts testify to their authors’ refusal to allow such conditions – whether psychic or social realities – to overwhelm, cow or silence them and they implicitly insist on our grappling with them to understand situations urgently in need of addressing. Their delineations of African evils and opportunities and of the tangled roots, both African and (originally) foreign, of these conditions, not only demonstrate various ways of contending with difficulties or succumbing to them; of using chances or failing to do so. Their texts are also, themselves, enactments of various ways of addressing our difficulties. In a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens that remarkably employs certain African references, he suggests that narrative artists and poets proceed to “tell the human tale” (456) which transforms disaster by imaginatively narrating it from beyond the event. The same point was made in a wonderfully African way by Chinua Achebe (Anthills 124) in insisting on the social supremacy – above either the worker or the warrior – of the teller of tales, narrating the difficult “story of the land,” which can vividly record and transmit the heroism even of the defeated.
Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse and the Novel” writes that “[t]he word in language is half someone else’s. [. . .] it exists [. . .] in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (293). This remark seems to me extraordinarily useful in highlighting the difficulties and the achievements of the modern Europhone African author. In my own analyses of African writing it is my practice to investigate and to articulate primarily the implicitly analytical qualities of the fictional text that percolate through the representational and stylistic aspects of the work, rather than to impose a theoretical perspective upon the writing and subjecting the author’s vision to that perspective; I want theory to serve the text and choose those points from theoretical or critical texts that I believe can contribute enlighteningly to its fuller understanding and appreciation. “Theory oppresses,” Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us, “when it wills or perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority – the Voice of Knowledge” (42). Nana Wilson-Tagoe, a critic I respect, writes:
We need a wider interpretive framework not only for reading contemporary texts of culture against the grain of nationalist theorizations but also for exploring productive tensions between social science discourses on culture and the performative narratives that enact contending and liberating forms of cultural identification. (225)
I link this observation with Maria Pia Lara’s remark that the productivity of written work requires two interlinked processes of what she calls “reflexivity”: one such process starts “when an author is creating an exploratory moral quest for identity through the written word,” and the other (Lara writes) is “related to” such a quest by “readers ‘in the act of reading’, which is itself a highly reflexive moral search” (16) – if it is a serious and attentive reading of a work worthy of being taken seriously, I would add.
It is my hope that this collection will contribute to the understanding that Africa’s creative writers are vital to the re-imagining of our rapidly changing continent in its numerous and diverse societies. Tendencies to interpret as “authentic” only those texts that portray pre-colonial, rural or tribal Africa trouble me, as does a tendency to limit understanding of the continent’s postcolonial literary production that countenances mainly those works that write back to the period and dominant vision of colonial occupation of African regions. Africa has a postcolonial present in which new oppressors exert other forms of exploitation or debasement upon their citizens. In a 2002 address to a gathering of African writers and scholars, Mia Couto reminded us that “the bad are not always outside,” and he insisted that “[t]he principal enemies of hope are the fabrication of regimes constructed on the basis of crime, war and misery” (3). The main title of my collection is intended to replicate Couto’s view of the fine balance between the castigation of evils and the opening of doors to the future of Africa in the memorable and resonant writings framed in the essays of this compilation.
In his beautifully lucid, Portuguese inflected English, Couto on the same occasion said to his fellow Africans: “[w]e are becoming, more so, alone with our historic responsibility of creating another history,” and he concluded: “[w]e have to build our nations in the house where our dream belongs so that our children do not have to import even their dreams” (3). The archive of African creative writing or verbal art, a sample of which I present here, is a great social resource whose importance can hardly be overestimated. African writers who are forced into exile or choose to live abroad continue to write back to the people and places on this continent and are maligned if read as primarily addressing audiences elsewhere; like the authors who remain in Africa, their vision contributes to the needs of their local compatriots. Achebe has referred to the “universal creative rondo” by which “stories create people create stories” (“What” 162; emphasis original). Africa’s diverse “stories,” while especially pertinent to Africans, require of all who hear or read them to reach out imaginatively and to join in the endless undertaking to humanise our world – a world in which ignorance, neglect and prejudice towards Africans come in many guises. What Simon Gikandi calls “the difficult relation between the work of art and the politics of everyday life” (4) is a serious challenge that the texts discussed in the pages that follow invite us to meet.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann, 1987.
___. “What Has Literature Got to Do with It?” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. By Achebe. New York/ London: Doubleday, 1989. 154-170.
Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. M. Holquist. Transl. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 269-422.
Couto, Mia. “The Impact of African Writing on World Literature.” Unpublished Address to the Indaba Cape Town Seminar. 2002. (Quoted with the author’s permission.)
Dussel, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. 1992. Trans. M. D. Barber. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. L. Markmann. St. Albans, Hertfordshire: Paladin, 1970.
Gagiano, Annie. “The African Library.”
___. “Barbed Wire and Dreams in Late Colonial Rhodesia: Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning.” Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera. Ed. Helen Cousins and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012. 145-164. Originally publ. under the title “Buried Hurts and Colliding Dreams in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning,” Acta Scientiarum Arts & Culture 31.1 (2009): 41-52.
___. “Book Keeping in Africa.” Mapping Africa in the English-Speaking World: Issues in Language and Literature. Ed. Kemmonye Collette Monaka, Owen S. Seda, Sibonile Edith Ellece, and John McAlister. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 43-68.
___. “Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera’s Study of the Katabolism of War.” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 64-76.
Gikandi, Simon. “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations.” Research in African Literatures 32.4 (2001): 1-18.
Lara, Maria Pia. Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Writing Poscoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989.
Stevens, Wallace. “Puella Parvula.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Random House, 1990. 456.
Vera, Yvonne. “The Place of the Woman is the Place of Imagination”: Yvonne Vera interviewed by Ranka Primorac. Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera. Ed. Helen Cousins and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 2012. 375-389.
Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. “Representing Culture and Identity: African Women Writers and National Cultures.” Africa After Gender? Ed. Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2007. 223-238.
Listening for the Mediated Voices of the Southern African
Khoisan in Hendrik’s Dwaalstories: Ironies and Wonders
Assessments of the present state of the Southern African Khoisan people’s life and culture fall into three main categories: (1) a belief in the virtual extinction of the people, with the traces (mainly in rock paintings and engravings) seen as faint, vanishing and enigmatic, arousing at best a romantic nostalgia; (2) an insistence on the recognition of the Khoisan cultures and languages that are still viable, despite the inevitable processes of modernisation and social deterioration (for example, the Nama language in South Africa has an estimated 6,000 speakers)[4] along with a sense of the value of the store of knowledge possessed by older members of existing groups; (3) a recognition of the both initiatory and enduring relevance of Khoisan cultural work from earlier times as a resource that is still (despite many filters and inevitable distortions) to some extent “available” in the present.
The larger context to this essay, which cannot be ignored, is the bleak scenario of the precarious survival of some of the Khoisan peoples and their cultures, and of the dwindling expressive and revivalist possibilities for the remaining languages. The clearest evidence of this precariousness is the rapidly dwindling number of contemporary speakers of Khoisan languages. Cognisance needs to be taken of the threats to these cultures presented by land confiscations and by forced relocations; by racial contempt and suspicion often shown towards the Khoisan by members of a wide spectrum of other cultures, and by the relentless, inevitable modernisation that is occurring in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola – the four regions where Khoisan people (or their inheritors) are found in significant numbers.[5]
The debasement and dislocation of one such group has been unforgettably described by the Namibian poet Dorian Haarhoff. In a poem titled “San Song” he depicts the gawked-at and debased existence of a Khoisan group formerly employed as trackers by the South African Defence Force, in the following sardonic description: “literary clans of pre and post / Van der Posts, praise / the primitive pre-cursor / grunter-gatherer, pristine man” (Haarhoff 851). Improvements in the conditions of life of these and other remaining Khoisan groups may nevertheless be achieved through the many attempts being made to consolidate their interests and to preserve and revive their cultures. First Nation status is being sought for the Khoisan peoples through representations to the United Nations Organisation.
A useful, brief introduction to the complexities of the study of Khoisan people’s lives in the past and present is to be found in a published keynote address[6] by Professor Phillip Tobias, the renowned anatomist-palaeontologist of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa – a paper titled “Myths and Misunderstandings about Khoisan Identities and Status” (19-28), in which Tobias states quite firmly (necessarily, in the face of many prejudices, however self-evident a point it may seem) that “the genetic make-up of the Khoisan relates them more closely to the peoples of Africa, than to any other people” (23). Tobias writes that
The evidence of San-like figures in the thousands of prehistoric rock painting sites scattered in a wide arc from the Drakensberg and the Maluti mountains down to the folded mountain ranges of the Eastern and Western Cape, shows that the San were in earlier times distributed all over southern Africa and, to judge by the paintings, looking very much as they do today. (28)
In an early (1964) study of the ecology of the San people, Tobias saw in the “preNeolithic economy [. . .] of the Bushmen [evidence that] culture predominates over biological considerations in ensuring survival” (qtd. by himself in “Myths” 24) because the “inventive genius and flexibility” of these societies provided the qualities ensuring their survival on this continent – probably over almost 30,000 years.[7] It has been said that “San rock art is a monument to the breadth, subtlety and interrelatedness of San thought” (Lewis-Williams; qtd. in Tobias 25).[8]
San or Bushman culture is in our time inextricably linked with, though in some ways distinguishable from, Khoikhoi culture – hence the blanket term Khoisan. According to the specialist historian Elphick, Khoikhoi people probably acquired cattle in the area now known as Botswana and spread southwards, displacing (to some extent) but also to a large extent socially interacting with the aboriginal San groups, their Khoikhoi language and social status becoming dominant. Unlike (broadly speaking!) the exclusively hunter-gatherer Bushmen, the Khoikhoi kept livestock (sheep and cattle), although they also relied on veld food like the San, often employing and intermarrying with them (Elphick 10-42). Tobias confirms this by referring to “evidence that domestic animals [have] been in South Africa for about 2,000 years” and to “evidence that hunting and herding had co-existed for a long time” in this part of the continent (26).
The historian Noel Mostert has written rather beautifully that “Khoikhoi words crack and softly rustle, and click. The sand and dry heat and empty distance of the semi-arid lands where the Khoikhoi originated are embedded in them.” He adds: “But so is softness, greenness. They run together like the very passage of their olden days” (35). Touched as it is by a sort of tender nostalgia, Mostert’s description brings one to the point of the extreme scarcity, the scantiness of verbal recordings of Khoisan expressive culture. Because so much of the knowledge, lore, skill and wisdom of these peoples is irretrievable, the little that is available has taken on especial value.
Amongst academics and others interested in these early southern African cultures it is well known that (from about 1860) a German philologist then working in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek, and his English sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, learnt and also devised an orthography for one of the numerous Cape San languages (/Xam), producing some 12,000 pages of transcript from their /Xam informants with accompanying English translations. This is an invaluable archive concerning the beliefs and social practices of a particular San culture, the evidence recorded at the time of (and clearly registering) the colonial disruption in the Cape region, when Khoisan people were subjugated, enslaved and often ruthlessly hunted down (leaving out of consideration the depredations of smallpox and other “imported” diseases). There is a scattering of other verbal records in both English and Afrikaans, but the Bleek-Lloyd collection[9] is likely to remain the chief documentary source for a verbal expression of a particular Khoisan group’s vision of life in an earlier southern Africa.
To say this is not to overlook the limitations and probable distortions of even these records, since they were transmitted under the constraints of highly unequal social relations between the recorders and the informants, who patiently dictated their lore to outsiders (Bleek and Lloyd) with a very recent knowledge of the language. The information was translated by the latter into a language (English) perhaps not particularly well fitted for communicating the lineaments of the original culture. A contemporary researcher among the Ju/’hoan (San) people warns against “the ultimate linguistic colonisation, that of a local oral tradition by the literate mind-set” (Biesele, “‘Different People’” 7) – a warning one might need to “apply” retrospectively to recognise that even the treasury which the Bleek/Lloyd transcripts and translations represent was established with somewhat unreliable, perhaps distorting instruments.[10]
As an extension of this warning, Biesele records another caution – against what I would call museumisation (which is a form of commodification) of earlier cultures such as those of the Khoisan. She writes in an article: “We try to ‘fix’ other peoples in categories learnable by rote, and the result is that individuals become invisible. The ways they are transforming themselves [. . .] [t]heir great, current histories of themselves flatten into trite minor fictions” (“‘Different People’” 15).
Along the same lines, Helize van Vuuren warns against the “use [of] glib phrases” such as “reconstructing voices from the past,” and on the tendency to “romanticis[e] these ‘little people’ [. . .] as symbolising the original South African presence.” She asks: “But are we perhaps merely recolonising exotic material into our defunct white canon with the aim of revitalising it?” (211). There is probably no escape from the accusations of exploitation and contamination attendant upon the contemporary researcher’s efforts, for, as Tony Morphet has noted, “there is no independent Bushman archive,” we must simply acknowledge “that all forms of collective memory can now only be mediated through the formal archive of established social power” (98). Even a conference such as “Against All Odds”[11] (held to celebrate Africa’s indigenous languages and literatures), in being funded, among other instances, by such bodies as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation was to some extent an example of this (inevitable?) infiltration of the “original” – by the powerfully modern, probably alien cultures – which is the dark side of globalisation.