Transition 113: Transition: the Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora

Negotiating Africa Now

Madhu Krishnan

IN 1957 LONDON, a young Nigerian broadcaster named Chinua Achebe, on the advice of friends, showed a manuscript for a novel chronicling the saga of three families in precolonial Nigeria to an instructor at his BBC training course. The manuscript, overhauled, revised, and rescued from consignment to the dustbin of an unscrupulous typewriting service, would eventually make its way to Alan Hill who, working for William Heinemann, would publish it first in hardback and later in paperback as the inaugural offering of the Heinemann African Writers Series. The publication of that novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), has come to mark the founding of modern African fiction, the first foray of a new body of work which has since been hailed for its revitalization of English-language writing and its centrality in the consecration of world literatures. Outstripping all publisher expectations, Things Fall Apart has since become the most widely-read work of African fiction, selling over ten million copies, translated into nearly fifty languages, and enabling Achebe’s legacy as the father of African writing. Described in its initial publishers’ reports as a very exciting discovery chronicling the breakup of tribal life in one part of Nigeria, the novel was rapidly lauded for its simplicity and feted for its ethnographic inquiries, finding its way into discussions of literary value, anthropology, and colonial discourse. Writing back to the vision of Africa as a land of savagery and darkness, the distorted reflection of the continent depicted in the work of writers like Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary, Achebe’s novel became a cornerstone in the project of recuperating a positive notion of African culture and heritage. Proving, definitively, that the privilege of literary voice and aesthetic representation in imaginative writing were no longer the sole property of the colonial powers, Achebe’s novel marked the first occasion on which the continent’s cry back to its masters might be heard, enlivening anti-colonial sentiment and humanizing, for the first time on a global scale, a distinctly African story of colonialism.

Achebe’s novel marked the first occasion on which the continent’s cry back to its masters might be heard, humanizing, on a global scale, a distinctly African story of colonialism.

Corps perdu, l’âme se retrouve. Acrylic on canvas. 70 × 58 in. ©2012 Fahamu Pecou.

Considering the colonial construction of Africa, as a concept and an idea, it is difficult to ignore the potency of the Achebe story, which has become something of a founding myth. Given the primacy of imaginative literature as a form which allows us, as human beings, to access worlds, landscapes, and experiences which would otherwise remain impossibly remote, to consider the question of what Africa means to me now is almost inevitably to consider the question of what it means to write Africa, and it is impossible to address the latter without pausing at Achebe. Despite its undeniable centrality to African literatures, Things Fall Apart was not the first novel published from Africa, nor was it the first African novel to be published by a major European publishing house and feted by a European public. Yet, its impact remains, emphasized by its place in a transnational imaginary of Africa as a space of precolonial authenticity and tradition now forever lost. Since its publication, Things Fall Apart has become the African novel of note, appearing on countless school curricula, university exam lists, and maintaining a well-deserved place as one of the most influential novels published in the latter half of the twentieth century. At the same time, the novel, in its reception, would fall into a state of ambivalence, read beyond the strictly literary into the realm of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called the anthropological fallacy in black writing, that situation in which the literary is taken for the ethnographic and the imaginative for the factual. For many of its initial readers, Things Fall Apart would provide an authentic view of precolonial African tradition, authorizing a legitimized view of Nigerian Igbo society taken more for the novel’s extra-literary valuations than for its position as an aesthetic, imaginative artifact. This readerly will to authenticity, in turn, would engage a sense in which Africa, that dark place, could remain accessible, verifiable against our pre-given frames of reference. This doubling in the novel’s reception is of no little concern to the development of African writing in English and in other European languages to the present day, a situation in which the literary is never just the literary and the text is never quite just the text, but where, instead, questions of authenticity and invention, exoticism and familiarity, continually transpose, intersect, and ultimately collapse.

To recount this tale of African literary genesis is not to suggest that either Achebe or Things Fall Apart is in any way undeserving of the praise they have received. Indeed, both the man and his work have served as critical points of departure for African writing, at once in the nurturing of previously-unheard literary voices and in the development of a formalized category of literature consolidated as a unified class and authorized by the gatekeepers of metropolitan culture. Rather, to recall the origins and early development of Achebe’s career calls upon a wider set of practices and principles which have guided the development of African literary writing, as an institution, to the present day. As a literary class, African literatures in English have been met with a worldwide popularity eclipsed only by writing from the Indian subcontinent. In its transnational reception, however, a series of issues comes to the fore in the way in which Africa, as an idea and as a conceptual notion, has been constructed, contested, and circulated. This situation is one marked both by a broader editorial desire to expand literary horizons and a concomitant will to knowledge where Africa is concerned—a sense of approaching Africa simultaneously as the unknown and as that which can be, will be, and, to a large degree, already has been made transparent in a global imaginary. Marked by an inevitable collapse into commoditization and positioned both under the banner of authenticity and the auspices of a neoliberal world market, the dual mandate of African writing points to a larger crisis of representation as the simultaneously aesthetic and social, the singular and the collective.

. . . positioned both under the banner of authenticity and the auspices of a neoliberal world market, the dual mandate of African writing points to a larger crisis of representation.

It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that, without Things Fall Apart and, with it, the 1962 founding of the African Writers Series, the very contours of African writing as we know it today would be rather different. The Series, which in its forty years’ existence published some three hundred seventy titles, allowed the suppressed voices of African literary writers to flourish both on the continent itself and in the metropolitan centers of literary production while guiding, to a certain degree, the very parameters through which this international body of work would come to be defined. The Writers Series was originally intended to carry out two interrelated tasks. The first of these, that of providing African readers with a rich archive of imaginative literature produced on and for the continent, an alternative to the tales of daffodils, rosy cheeks, and snow storms of imperialism, has come to be the one most widely championed by early African authors who, following Achebe’s lead, sought to create stories for a population historically denied the opportunity to hear their own voices echoing out from literary writing. Through the high profile marketing and circulation of texts in the African Writers Series, many of the forefathers and foremothers of African literature—including Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Buchi Emecheta, Ayi Kwei Armah, Nuruddin Farah, and dozens more—were first able to find an international audience and a means through which to pursue authorship as a profession. Following Things Fall Apart, early examples of African literatures displayed a preoccupation with what has been called counter-ethnographic expression, a sense in which literary expression found itself concerned with rehabilitating the much-maligned image of Africa through a restoration of dignity and origins along with a simultaneous exposition of the debilitating violence of colonialism, both as a case of physical imposition and psychic trauma. In its canonization of African literature, the Series was instrumental in enabling the development of literary expression and aesthetic innovation. Laudable as this is, however, like Things Fall Apart, early African writing, in this impulse, nonetheless remained entrapped in a decidedly ambivalent image of Africa mediated from without, one which remained subject to certain conditions of production. By attempting to construct a corrective to the destructive image of Africa transmitted across the globe through literature, art, and media, early African writing, that is, served as a facet of this same conceptual field, responding within, rather than undermining, the terms through which Africa has historically been cast as a space of want and a place of lack.

A colonial invention, Africa, as a unified entity, embodies the constant struggle of representation to find a moment of closure which is forever denied.

A colonial invention, Africa, as a unified entity, embodies the constant struggle of representation to find a moment of closure which is forever denied. Africa, that is to say, remains elusive; yet, it perpetually offers its spectral presence. In its simultaneous transparency and opacity, Africa stands as a paradox that speaks as much about us, its readers, as it does about the place and its people. What makes Africa African? Who has the authority to decide? Which institutions and conventions mediate its appearance and its persistence in our collective imaginations? Defining Africa, hearing its voice, and letting it speak becomes less a simple question and more a riddle that defies any single solution. Writing Africa, from its incipient moments, has never been an innocent task, nor has it been one free from a broader interpellation into a global system of inequity in representation and its attendant distribution of power. Through its interaction and intersection with a certain overdetermined vision of Africa, constructed over centuries across a variety of discursive and material encounters, African literature, as a broadly-construed entity, has become more than simply an effort at literary creation or aesthetic innovation. Instead, to ask what is Africa now is to ask what Africa means, how it means, who and which institutions contribute to the formation and maintenance of that meaning, and how these institutions interact with the aesthetic and formalist imperatives of literary representation. Posing the question of what Africa means now, from a literary perspective, is perhaps less about what Africa means to any individual than what Africa means on a global stage defined by inequities and constant shifts, simultaneously constitutive of, resistant to, and mediated by the power of an asymmetrical transnational literary