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IRCALC - Essays in African Writing

Ayi Kwei Armah: Provincialising Old Centres and Remaking the African Myth   

by Divine Neba Che

FOREMOST revisionist African mythologists like Cheikh Anta Diop and Chinweizu have successfully debunked the Western collusion in Black inferiorisation. They are joined by Ayi Kwei Armah, a dogged revisionist mythologist who in the novel Osiris Rising attempts to demythologize the racist maxim that the black world is "forward never, backward ever" by resuscitating the African past as a means of restoring her lost values. This process of resuscitation, recycling and integration may not totally erase assimilated or hybrid values, for Africa owes a debt to the modern nation states and vice versa, but is simply a process of bringing into limelight what has been rejected or ignored for

centuries: the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and Isis and the building of the image of a vibrant Africa via literature.

Our premise is that decentering former spheres of influence gives birth to new provinces where each province has a defined autonomy enabling it to operate with little constraint within the global milieu. Although this may not allow for a protracted study of Amah's works as a whole, it traces the history of a severed continent in Two Thousand Seasons and its regenerative ability in Osiris Rising using the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and Isis with the intention of rebuilding the image of a vibrant Africa. In both novels Amah�s proposition on the question of provincializing the modern nation states includes reconstructing or mending the dismembered past by making Africans more aware of their history.

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The Journal of African
Literature and Culture
JALC.7
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Gender Issues in Ola Rotimi�s Drama

by Omolara Kikelomo Owoeye


OLA Rotimi�s dramaturgy adapts Classical tragedy in order to represent history and act as a commentary on issues of tragic import in society. Moreover, the plays have severally portrayed the notions of such matters as tradition and change, the metaphysical and the very controversial issue of destiny and predestination using �the historical perspective to explain the man-God interplay in matters of destiny� (Elegbeleye and Adeoti 258). Rotimi�s achievement in the treatment of destiny is patented in The gods are not to Blame, an adaptation of Sophocle�s Oedipus Rex and such other works as Kurunmi and Ovoramwen Nogbasi. It is not surprising that critical works on Rotimi�s plays have focused more on the above subject matter than women and gender issues in the stories. However, a close look at the works would expose the gender imbalance and patriarchal nature of the African societies in which the plays are set. The little significance of women in the plays may be due to authorial choice to adjust history for his artistic and thematic intentions. Adapting authors do not owe history the loyalty to historical facts and details and this enables Rotimi, for instance, to alter the type of death that Kurunmi meets at the end of the play, Kurunmi. Ashaolu comments that �although this historical tragedy derives directly from the 19th-century Ijaye Ibadan warfare, it casts a suggestive glance at contemporary socio-political events not only in Nigeria but also elsewhere in Africa�. (99)
Anita Kern talking specifically of the prose genre makes the observation that �female characters have figured more or less prominently in various novels or short stories according to the writers� purpose or to their particular levels of consciousness regarding women�. (157) Indeed in all the three traditional genres of literature, authorial perception has always been a vital factor in female character depiction. It then becomes obvious that the absence of female participation in the political process in Rotimi�s plays, for instance, is attributable to authorial intention especially since it is a trend in his three major historical tragedies. The playwright appears caught in a patriarchal hold that makes him overlook the significance of women in socio-political struggles and familial aspirations thereby prompting the question: what could have been the benefit of complimentary female involvement as the protagonists in all the plays daringly battle to safeguard their physical and ideological territories from colonial and territorial invasion?

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The Journal of African
Literature JAL #9
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The Miriam Makeba Story                

by Benjamin Odhoji

THE above lines from her musical composition, Homeland, produced in 2000 soon after she had returned home to South Africa, are true memorials of Miriam Makeba's life. Most of these �memories of days gone by� Makeba had inscribed in her autobiography: Makeba: My Story. In this collaborative biography � Makeba was assisted by one James Hall � she grapples with memories of a painful past as an individual and as a member of a group subordinated and disenfranchised under the apartheid regime.
Miriam Makeba�s story emerges as a self-making "therapoetic" process. It is a therapy, not so much "for dealing with psycho-pathology�as for savoring the aesthetic richness of everyday life" (Kenyon and Randall 2). It is both a spiritual as well as a radical political commitment that entails subversive forms of self-representation. The painful past Makeba remembers entails mental and emotional re-experiencing of trauma. Memory is a weapon. It is a weapon against forgetfulness of a painful past. When discussing racial conflict and identity in South African novels, Jane Davies reminds us that the desire to forget seems associated with a false belief that forgetting the painful past means recovering from it while, in fact, healing is reached through reflection on and understanding of the past. Makeba urges the traumatized to remember her story. In terms of narrative form, the text presents crucial questions regarding the issues of testimony and witnessing.

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The Journal of New
Poetry
NP No.6
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Crisis of Identity in Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People            

by Smita Jha

WHEN we talk of identity crisis in African writing it is a kind that is both individual and territorial in character and does have strong social, political, religious or cultural implications within the continent. Through a century of colonial governance Africa lost much of its traditional and cultural identity to artificial nation state and ideological formations. The violence inscribed upon the continent imposed by the colonizing power has witnessed traumatic physical and psychological conditions that affect generations of African peoples and cultures. For the first generation of modern African writers led by Senghor, Achebe, etc., it was a daunting task to seek to restore belief in the lost and maligned traditions of Africa through their writings.

Achebe�s search for innate human qualities takes an ironic manifestation in A Man of The People wherein he portrays two well-rounded characters immersed in their own rationale of success and achievement and proves that western cultural invasion together with the infiltration of material luxuries poses a serious threat to tribal African values and amidst such confusion the society lost its way.
 

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JALC.7
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Memory and Palimpsestic Time in Ben Okri�s Famished Road

by Kei Okajima

1. Introduction

Despite the tremendous influence that the slave trade exerted on every corner of contemporary African life, most West African writers appeared to turn away from the traumatic memory of the slave trade, pursuing milder themes of pre-colonial Africa or post-colonial challenges of emerging nations. Indeed critics and scholars have read Ben Okri�s 1991 novel The Famished Road as such a novel.
For instance, Olatubosun Ogunsarwo, focusing on the narrative modes of the novel, celebrates the magical-realist framework used to create the typical �postcolonial� novel (50). Ogunsarwo argues that the juxtaposition of the African folkloric myth with the description of the nation� s predicament in form of a European realist novel signals the discursive multiculturality of �postcolonial� conditions, which allegedly re-formulates the colonial perception of different cultural phenomena. Ogunsarwo maintains �The inescapable intertextuality and the consequent mutual �rubbing off� underline the interdiscursivity of the novel�s textual discourse; there is a relation of mutual interdependence between the dominated and the dominators that must be recognized, since neither the imperial city nor the colony can return to a �pure� state following colonization� (45). Along similar lines, John C. Hawley applies the label �postcolonial postmodernity� to The Famished Road, asserting that �The significance of an abiku narrator � is that it moves African literature closer to the postmodern movement� (31 his italics). According to Hawley, Azaro�s presence as an abiku child embodies alternative ontological systems that are foreign to the western master narrative of history while at the same time Azaro allegorizes postmodern �resistance to the fixing of boundaries� that enable him to �imagine something new� (36). On balance, these scholars praise the happy blending of essential elements of the African mythological consciousness with the postmodern stylistic features, which ultimately creates this �postcolonial� novel. While such arguments may have its own credits, their rather easy celebration of the �postcolonial� hybridity seems to overlook the significance of the traumatic memory of the colonialism that is still alive and manifest in Okri�s novel.

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New Kenyan Writers: The Narratives of Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Owuor                 

by Jonathan Fitzgerald

KENYA elected a new leader, Mwai Kibaki, in December, 2002, after 24 years under the presidency of Daniel Arap Moi. This was not only a major change in Kenyan politics; it opened the door for a major shift in the lives of all Kenyans and especially the nation's artists. It was not long, however, before the new administration faced accusations of corruption and business as usual, but the spark had already been lit under a burgeoning artist community; change was on the horizon.
In that same year a Kenyan writer, recently returned from years living and working in South Africa, published a story called �Discovering Home�. Binyavanga Wainaina was awarded the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing for that story, the first time a Kenyan had received the honor. With the prize money Wainaina formed Kwani Trust, an organization that, among many other things, publishes Kwani?, East Africa's only literary magazine. The first issue of the magazine featured 2003's Caine Prize winning story, �Weight of Whispers� by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, another Kenyan.
In his introduction to the first issue of Kwani? (a Sheng word that literally means, �So?� but is better likened to the English slang, �What's Up�) Wainaina declared that he had been meeting talented young Kenyans working in all fields, from hip-hop artists to writers, since his return from South Africa, and, more significantly, these artists all seem to be making art that is particularly Kenyan.

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The Journal of African
Literature
JAL No.6
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�Genealogies of the Spirit�: Ancestral Reclamation in the dramas of August Wilson                         

by Shirley J. Carrie

CONTEMPORARY Black intellectuals and artists like August Wilson often signify the historical dispersal of peoples of African descent in a redemptive narrative that suggests that diasporic body can be re-born through the restoration of the dead. More importantly, the commemoration of the ancestor figure anchors the diasporic subject to their own uncertain present by enabling them to redeem the past. This cultural reclamation of an African origin and/or roots is often tied to the solemn remembrance of the Ancestor. Thus, the demand for the humane treatment of the ancestral dead is viewed as having both social and psychic consequences for the generations that follow. For many Black artists throughout the Diaspora, the aesthetic recovery of African origins often serves as a way to bridge those ruptures that exist between the uncertain present and the elusive past. As the renowned African American playwright August Wilson articulates in The Ground on which I Stand, �all of art is a search for a way of being� (46). For Wilson, the stage serves as symbolic space of cultural rebirth�it is a way of being, which he views as being invested with the strength of his African ancestors (19-20).
 

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JALC.7
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African Mythic Context and Postmodern Philosophy in Aminata Sow Fall's Le Jujubier du patriarche      

by M�doune Gu�ye

IN THE wake of the announcement of the death of grand narratives by postmodernism, postcolonial critics announced the death of such �essentialisms� as race, nation or even gender in their works.¹Aminata Sow Fall's Le Jujubier du patriarche² illustrates that deconstructive vein of postcolonial literature with a discursive strategy, underwritten by the interaction of genres. Le Jujubier du patriarche opens in the mode of novelistic fiction and closes through that of epic poetry. Constructed in a dialogic relationship between the novel and the epic, the work transposes one genre, which is tied to the African oral tradition, into another, which emerges from the Western literary tradition.³ The novel's structure is characterized by the weaving of traditional mythological elements into a contemporary fictional text. This literary strategy allows the author to produce a narration written in the fiction of orality⁴ by creating a framework of oral enunciation via the technique of alternating voices. By achieving a collage of traditional speech within her novelistic discourse, Aminata Sow Fall makes Le Jujubier du patriarche emerge as the prolongation of the myth, which she installs at the core of the real.⁵ Here we examine the novelistic and epic styles of the work and the discursive implications that convey an ethno-nationalist counter-discourse on Senegalese society.
The novel opens with a narration that recounts the ritual pilgrimage to Babyselli that happens every year. The description of the physical setting lingers on a canal which used to be �the cradle of the Natangue⁶ river [...] [and] has long been dry, but [...] has had the time to crystallize, better to echo the epic song that tells the extraordinary adventures of their glorious ancestors� [le berceau du fleuve Natangu� [�] [lequel] a tari depuis longtemps, mais [�] a eu le temps de se cristalliser pour mieux rendre l'�cho du chant �pique qui conte les aventures extraordinaires de leurs glorieux anc�tres] (9). In combining the past of such a locus with the present of the residents and pilgrims that inhabit it, the novel's opening announces, through the temporal interlacing of the narration, the interaction of genres that dominates the work's structure.

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Literature
JAL No.6
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Rethinking Feminism and the African Woman�s Identity in Tess Onwueme�s Tell it to Women

by H. Oby Okolocha

Onwueme is a playwright for whom drama serves a feminist purpose. Like the majority of contemporary women writers in Nigeria, Onwueme continues the literary and dramatic tradition of feminist concern for women�s issues. Her plays demonstrate a commitment to exploring the challenges facing modern women in changing times. Thus drama, for her, is an excursion into the issues of gender, feminism, identity, race, history, national and international politics, specifically as they affect women. In Tell it to Women she makes statements on the nature of feminism as practised by educated women in Nigeria; she provides an insider�s exposition of the identity of the African woman and gives a participant�s evaluation of the benefits and consequences of feminism as an ideology adopted by educated Nigerian women. This woman�s point of view, dominant in Onwueme�s writing and in the creativity of contemporary women writers, is a perspective that has not been adequately provided in the literary output of male writers.

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The Journal of African
Literature JAL #9
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�Global flows�: Ethnographic studies of the Hindi Movie in Africa               

by Anjali Gera Roy

THE celebration of Bollywood as a culture of globalization to illustrate the reverse flows from the non-west to the west is juxtaposed against the long history of transnationalization through which Hindi cinematic texts were incorporated into African cultural practices to assume African ethnic or national identities. Attention to the difference between the subaltern audience of Hindi cinema in the past and the cosmopolitan consumers of Bollywood in the present also point to an alternative narrative of subaltern cosmopolitanisms through which cultural exchanges took place between ordinary folks in the process of trade and travel.

The global flows of Indian images to Africa must be framed against oceanic flows of images between Africa and India in contact zones of the past forged through travel and trade. Positing �the coastline of Benin Republic and Togo as a vortex, incorporating items and ideas from across the sea into its littoral�, Dana Rush focuses on one such �vortextual phenomenon�, that is, the incorporation of India − via chromolithographic images (mostly Hindu) − into the eternally organic religious system of Vodun (2008: 150). While the Vodun imagemaker Joseph Kossivi Ahiator, who incorporates Indian items into his own images, claims to have been inspired by his spiritual journeys to India, Rush provides a rational explanation of the travels of Indian images to Africa through the arrival of chromolithographs to Africa as early as 1891 when the first colour reproductions were executed in Mumbai (Rush 2008: 59-60).

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Literature and Culture
JALC.7
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Can the Subaltern Speak? Language and the Crisis of Identity in Nadine Gordimer�s  July�s People     by Sura Khrais

IN July's People, Nadine Gordimer depicts the transformation of a white family when its old certainties are progressively broken down the moment the Smales are forced out of the dead shell of the past into an uncertain present as they flee riot and violence in the city to find shelter in their black servant�s village. Critics have long discussed the implications of the transformation of the white bourgeois culture represented by Maureen and Bam, the white mistress and the master, and their children, when they are exposed to a new class structure that of July�s native people and to which they try to adjust. The linguistic relationship between the white heroine (Maureen) and the black hero (July) reflects three different phases of linguistic communication which undermine a crisis of identity defined by in the postcolonial binary opposition of the Self / the Other.

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Journal of
African Literature
JAL No.8
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Remembering the Past: Conflict and War in Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me, Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins and Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra    by Sarah Anyang Agbor


NADINE Gordimer's None to Accompany Me, Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins and Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra transmit a vivid picture of the reality of war and offer an insight into its various aspects. Some aspects of the novels depict the fear and anxiety of the paralyzing violence of war in the various spheres of ordinary life: those of work and intellectual activity, private and social life. How does the majority of the people in the representative societies of the chosen texts suffer and endure their effects and search for a means of survival? The interesting question is to what extent do their common experiences of that reality bring African women writers from different ideological and social camps closer together? Do these experiences create a common ground for them, one which allows them to transcend their ideological barriers and meet for a constructive recognition of one another? How do the different races in Southern Africa and ethnic groups in Zimbabwe and Nigeria perceive the conflict and in what ways are the various spheres of their lives, their attitudes, and visions affected by it? This approach is based on the premise that conflicts and wars are not carried out in abstract political, economic, or social systems, but in the concrete lives of people because they are the perpetrators and/or victims, and it is in their bodies and souls that the most devastating effects of such conflicts are to be found.
War is one of the recurring absurdities of postcolonial African societies and the world all over. Although war is ugly enterprise, it remains central to human history and social change. One of the significance of the African literary imagination has been its capacity for a compelling recollection of colonial, civil and ethnic (tribal) wars. Civil wars have been fought in some African societies such as Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sierra-Leone, Somali, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Zaire. The effect of war on human characters is quite revealing in the novels of Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Nurrudin Farah, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Buchi Emecheta, Yvonne Vera, and Lesego Malepe amongst others. Using the New Historicists theory, the cultural and sociopolitical degradation which war brings and how it affects the identity of characters in Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me, Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins and Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra are the general foci of this study.

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Journal of
African Literature
JAL No.5
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Nationhood, Otherness in Ayi Kwei Armah�s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born           by Sarah Anyang Agbor and Edwin Ntumfon Tangwa

IN postcolonial context, the term nationhood acquires significance beyond the dictionary definition of �a group of people, who believe themselves to constitute a nation, have things in common with each other and share a sense of nationhood� or as �an imaginary community where people believe themselves to have some sort of link, or commitment to others in the nation, most of whom they will never meet� (Harrison and Boyd 48). In Africa and elsewhere it is rather by the bulwark of independence struggle that the sense of nationhood was strengthened by �otherness�. The relationship between the colonised and coloniser was that of the �self�� and the �other� in a state of perpetual opposition. The �link� and/or �commitment that existed among the colonised in their common goal was the prime motivation for independence which was synonymous to the quest for nationhood. Harrison and Boyd go further to argue that, in order to have meaning, �nationhood� must be closely associated with the desire for self-government and the creation of a state to express that desire� (40). ...

The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah�s The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born (1968) may read as an allegorical story of the failure of an African ruling other Africans from colonial inherited precepts and the transformative capability of a new man emerging from the state of near-hopeless opposition. The protagonist is an anonymous railway office clerk, simply called "The Man," who struggles in the slums against poverty on one side and material greed on the other. He is pressured by his acquisitive family and fellow workers to accept the norms of society: bribery and corruption in order to guarantee his family a comfortable life. His virtues go largely unrewarded; his wife thinks him a fool. At the end of the novel, the moral strength of "the man" is contrasted to a once-powerful politician who has been deposed in a military coup. Independence in Ghana, like in most African countries becomes an avenue for a new kind of colonisation.

Sindiwe Magona: Interrogating Black Township Life in Apartheid South Africa                     by Dianne Shober

SOUTH African author Sindiwe Magona was only five years old in 1947 when she was forced to leave the safety and security of her idyllic rural Transkei childhood for the squashed environs of Guguletu township in Cape Town. Her enforced relocation was not unlike many other black children of her era. Magona describes her poignant farewell to family and friends, realizing even as one so young that making such an important transition to the big city meant leaving childish ways, meaningful traditions and loved ones behind, some of whom she would never see again.

Her father collected his three young children from Gungululu in 1947, a fortuitous moment in the history of the nation. Should he have attempted to do so just a year later, the legislations implemented by the new Afrikaner government would have made such relocation impossible and the family would have been forever separated, the steely apartheid policies locking blacks in their respective geographical prisons.

In her first autobiography To My Children�s Children written while living in America in the 1980s and apartheid restrictions limited images of township life for most global readers, not only does Magona seek to bridge the geographical divide but also the ignorance that time creates when the memory of location housing is distant and obscure. Her gaze jerks across time from that of a wide-eyed child to a critical adult as she narrates their two day train journey to Cape Town from her rural roots, the scenes from her train window shifting from the opulence of white homes to �less impressive buildings� to squalid shacks haphazardly arranged in an area devoid of trees, but nevertheless teeming with life (20).

�Imperfect Sympathy�: Naguib Mahfouz and the Portrait of the Nubian                by Sophia I. Akhuemokhan and Abigail O. Eruaga

A study of the Nubian in the works of Mahfouz may not be absolutely considered postcolonial in that the Arab presence in Egypt cannot be strictly equated with a colonizing Western power, and in turn the Nubian cannot be categorized as a subaltern. Nevertheless, postcolonial theory has directed our focus to a number of realities in the Arab/Nubian situation, such as the tenor of Arab leadership, the potential of discourse to disseminate racial stereotypes convenient for the prevailing power structure, and the need for a counter discourse to at least expose, if not rectify, the error. Postcolonialism has so sensitized Third World researchers to racist presumption that even a renowned postcolonial writer like Mahfouz is not exempt from attack.

Colonial Chattel, Postcolonial Whores: The African Daughters of Sefi Atta and Isabel Allende         by Rosetta Codling

OPPRESSIVE tentacles stemming from the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade span further than the mere colonial shores of Europe onto the African and American coasts. The legacy of the atrocity of profiteering from the trafficking of human flesh spreads onto centuries and into the current millennium of processed �postcolonial� thought.  By far, the most enduring yoke of this historical period is to be seen in the enduring psychological constraint of the �colonial mentality� (on the part of the oppressor and victim) to this very day. Black is still negative and White is still glorified. Betty Freidan in her monumental treatise, The Feminine Mystique (1997) on the state of the contemporary Post-Modernity female, omitted the African Diasporic female entirely. Such an omission was symbolic of the transparency of Black women in terms of recognition by the mainstream White female society. In short, the African Diasporic female didn�t merit a clause in the fight for securing rights for the Post-Modern female.

The novelists Sefi Atta (Nigerian) and Isabel Allende (Peruvian) sculpt African Diasporic female protagonists of different dimensions to illustrate the harsh reality of their lives. These tragic heroines provide authentic representation. The conflicts that the protagonists face in terms of �color hue� racism are equally authentic.² The staid, classical, Western female (tragic?) heroine is White and embroiled in battles against White males that attempt to marginalize her existence based, primarily, upon her gender and/or class status. But, for the African Diasporic female there are other challenges. These challenges extend beyond the borders of her breasts and genitalia.

Fiction as Praxis: Exploring Iyayi�s Marxist Aesthetics    By Jude Agho and �Dele Bamidele

IN the 1970s and 1980s African writers saw the need to make specific initiatives that would situate the liberation struggle of Africa in popular culture and folk art. The result was that the writer became a cultural manager and promoter and subsequently a political activist.