Prosper Batariwah
Prosper Batariwah is a Ghanaian lawyer with strong research interests in legal pluralism, family law, and natural resource governance in Africa. He is the co-editor of the comparative family law book, Family Law in Africa: Perspectives on Selected Systems of Marriage (Talbot, 2023).
A few weeks ago, I was leisurely scrolling through Instagram when I chanced upon
a snippet of an old PBS interview of Chinua Achebe from 1988. In this video, Chinua Achebe—dressed in an African print shirt splashed with yellow and brown colors, with eyes cabined by large rectangular spectacles—talks about his experience studying English literature at the university. Explaining why his experience compelled him to write literature in a different way, he notes that when he read books like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he soon realized that he was, “one of those savages running up and down on the beach, and I was not on Marlow’s steamer…as I thought;” the epiphany of realizing one’s place in the universe, he says, makes one feel the need “to write a different story…”1
For many in the West, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the paradigmatic text of African literature— thus making him the most visible, not notable, standard bearer of African literature. Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, a man who gains fame by defeating a wrestler who had previously remained unbeaten for nine years. He attains a status as a respected man and elder. The introduction of Christianity to his people causes dramatic social changes, leading to an unfortunate chain of events that culminates in Okonkwo’s killing of a colonial messenger and his subsequent suicide. Things Fall Apart unearths the tension between local and colonial at the point of contact, setting the scene for others to explore how to negotiate the consequences of that contact. In this short piece, I try to survey more broadly the tensions in African literature and how these evolve in the modern day.
First, African literature has always been uncharacteristically difficult to restrain, cage, homogenize, and simplify. This enigmatic feature imprints it with the capacity to subsume different cultures, feelings, and emotions—of both individuals and their collective societies—that straddle both the political and the social, thus making it a bundle of pluralisms. I am using pluralism here in a very capacious way—beyond institutions, but on two levels, the personal and the communal. The absence of fine lines can be unsettling. Is the thing an elephant or not? Recall John Godfrey Saxe’s poem, Blind Men and the Elephant. Plurality of experiences is usually treated as something that needs to be remedied—an illness in need of a cure. Here I give a few examples. There is a biblical story of a man possessed by many spirits. Upon seeing Jesus, the spirits, collectively called “Legion,” are exorcised and the man is again himself: a unified intra-human existence restored.2 The second example is the experience of many French colonies. In pursuit of the colonial policy of “mission civilisatrice,” the Code Napoléon was introduced into these colonies, a Code which has since been kept to varying degrees. One thing it did was derecognize marriages other than civil marriages; customary marriages, therefore, could not be marriages properly so called. The idea that the “primitive culture” must give room to the modern championed a vision of a unified law poorly ill-equipped to embody other normative traditions. Even where we have championed multiculturalism, it is one-dimensional. That is, the co-existence, with us, of others. The internal dimensions of plurality—that one can feel many things deeply, alone and with others—can escape our attention. Where we acknowledge internal plurality, “intersectionality,” we call it, we are unsure how to engage with it.
Africans, post-colonization, have moved towards a recognition of their status as personally and communally plural beings, accepting, for instance, that the ancient wisdom of their elders can coexist with the imported cultures of imperialism. Thus, plurality on the continent is celebrated widely. In religion, many see nothing wrong with combining their Christian or Muslim beliefs with the indigenous worships and traditions—many are syncretists par excellence! Creolized versions of Western languages exist and have become so influential that they attain a distinct form of their own. Legal systems combine elements of foreign law and locally grounded law. Even where legal systems choose to delegitimize customs, people resist by doing, by living, by existing in ways they choose. People, simply vivent! In other words, plurality is a state which defies simplification—it is its own form.
African literature captures the essence of this plurality largely because “the history of African places her outside the contending hegemonies of the world,”3 says Wole Soyinka, and:
“Africa may have captured the imagination of schools of artistic representation from time to time, most notably toward the closing of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries in Europe, but there it ended. It did not attempt to dictate or disseminate her artistic traditions or prohibitions—contrast this with some religions—in any hegemonic manner but left the temperaments of national and international artists to find within her treasure house whatever they sought for their own creative fulfillment.”4
The presence of plurality in African literature makes certain that the canvas for painting is infinite, that room exists for others, even if those others threaten to displace already existing visions. Thus, in telling the African story, drawn from the fact of Africanness and the continent’s history, one realizes the presence of many pluralities. African scholars may draw substantively from African storytelling but write in French or English. They can write quintessential African stories with titles drawn from European poems or pamphlets. The title of Things Fall Apart, mentioned at the beginning of this piece, is taken from William B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming. The Francophone Cameroonian novelist, Mongo Beti opens Perpétue et L’habitude Du Malheur with a quote from Voltaire. One may object: why should African scholars continue to write in languages which have painful histories on the continent? While all “art is propaganda,”5 and some, bad propaganda too, there is some acceptance that there is a core of art that exhibits a universal piousness, capable of crossing the threshold of acceptable art forms which one may liberally draw upon. Teju Cole, speaking profoundly about the artist Caravaggio, says, “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror, and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are, and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary.”6 He adds:
“I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and its most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: he meted it out to others and received it in his own body.”7
More importantly, African writers have long wrestled with the question of identity constituted by plurality and the relationship between personal plurality and communal plurality. The strands are difficult to tease out for full exploration. Widely popular, though, was the Négritude movement championed by Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas who worked tirelessly to articulate “a common sentiment of racial belonging, as a term of self-affirmation, a response made imperative by their condition as members of a humiliated race within the universe of life and experience imposed by French colonialism.”8 Anglophone writers would write in their own way, and they did not always agree with the Négritude movement. Yet these experiences about negotiating the African experience in the world sometimes looked longingly at the past. While it is not wrong to excavate the past for values, there is a risk that literature may reify into a form of reductionism and essentialism which may not take us very far. The village life trope may have had its day, but it has the propensity of retaining in the Western consciousness, the idea of Africans as “happy-go-lucky natives.”
Furthermore, early African literature seems to stress the communal over the personal and considering the fever of decolonization, this makes sense. But the world has changed in many ways and the place of the African in it is more complicated beyond the village. Interestingly, it is in the marginalized among us, that the personal is reinserted into the conversation. For example, Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter explores the tensions between colonization, feminism and religion in Africa. For others, like Somali writer Nuruddin Farah or the South African Nobel Laureate in Literature Nadine Gordimer, writing was also a process of reconstituting or rehabilitating humanity in places which have in recent memory been thought of and described as sites of violence, or oppression. When we read about everyday life in Khartoum, of people who walk, talk and laugh, we reassess the picture of those places in our minds. The search for a delicate balance is more intensely felt in a new cadre of African writers, who have moved beyond the village to the city, talk Chimamanda Adichie, and who traverse continents, talk Teju Cole. Other more adventurous writers are humanizing populations deemed to have pariah status on the continent, queer people especially, for example, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Arinze Ifeakandu.
From Négritude conceptions of the African as a living, breathing being, we are at a point where that looking glass is being shattered in favor of another. Modern African writers are telling us that it is not enough to be simply African, one can be other things, too. The insertion of intersectional and peripheral lives is changing the way we think of Africanness. But it was the Négritude that told us that “Négritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamour of the day […] It thrusts into the warm flesh of the sky.”9
1. I subsequently tracked down the full interview on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrT6BqOckX0.
2. Luke 8:26-39.
3. Wole Soyinka, “Of Africa”, Yale University Press, 2012, p.24.
4. Id.
5. Taken from George Orwell’s book, “All Art is Propaganda”.
6. Teju Cole, “Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time”, The University of Chicago Press, 2021, p x. 28.
7. Id. p. 29.
8. Abiola Irele and Léopold Senghor, “Poet-President of Négritude” in “The Pan-African Pantheon Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers” (ed, Adekeye Adebajo), Manchester University Press, 2021, p. 452.
9. Aimé Césaire’s poem, “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”, 1939.