from Research in African Literatures Volume 34, Number 1

African Literature, African Literatures: Cultural Practice or Art Practice?

Michael Chapman

University of Natal, Durban

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My title is provoked by two tendencies in the discussion of literature from Africa. First, a certain hesitancy over the last decade in using the bold, singular term of the decolonisation years: African Literature, the implication being a pan-African concept. The current conference, for example, refers to the plural form, African Literatures: "versions and subversions," i.e., "the multiple facets, themes and styles emerging currently . . . that question hegemonic discourses in this field."1 Second, a tendency--to some extent, in literature studies generally--to subsume the literary work under cultural, political, or historical practice. Questions of value or quality simply vanish, there being no reason why, say, Achebe's novels are a better index to, or symptom of, the cultural aporias of colonialism or postcolonialism than any number of bestsellers or, for that matter, civil service or medical or prison reports of the period.

There are good reasons why the plural form African Literatures should be preferred. Indeed, my own study--originally advertised by the publishers as "Southern African Literature in English"--ended up titled Southern African Literatures. African Literatures remind us that Africa is far from homogeneous in language, culture, religion, style, or in the processes of its modernity. Rather, it is what Ali A. Mazrui describes as something of a "bazaar" (97). Early colonisation in the extreme north has resulted in considerable Arabic and Islamic influence; the return of South Africa to African recognition reminds us that the original people at the southernmost point--San/Bushmen--experienced the harshness first of Bantu-speaking African migrations, then Dutch colonial intrusions.

There are good reasons, too, why the literary text should be regarded primarily as a social document. African literature, at least in the colonial language, is the direct result of a political act: that of colonisation. The literature is itself, in consequence, often a political act. It is expected that the African writer address the big sociopolitical issues of the day. The writer who does not may end up being considered irrelevant. Indeed, I shall suggest that, in Africa, the close correlation between the texts of politics and the texts of art poses challenging questions as to what constitutes a literary culture, what might be regarded as the practice of art. Initially, we may consider whether such questions should be pursued under the category African Literature or African Literatures. For both categories have value.

The recently published "A–Z," The Companion to African Literatures (see Killam and Rowe) utilizes the plural form, I think, because it recognizes that diversity and heterogeneity threaten to undermine any single map of the field. Scholarship over the last decade in both the West and Africa, for example, has focused not on grand narratives, but on local contexts, whether the method be Marxist, feminist, or varieties of the post-condition. Criticism may wish, accordingly, to distinguish between the "African" novels of Achebe and Ngugi, respectively. Like British rule in Nigeria, Achebe leans towards the interaction of cultural identity and administrative coercion. An intrusive settler presence in Kenya, in contrast, turns Ngugi to material conflicts of race and class. Despite such national differences, criticism remains alert to the difficulty of foregoing the categories African Literature or African Literatures and employing, in the case mentioned above, the categories Nigerian Literature and Kenyan Literature. African countries cannot escape now the uneasy demarcations of colonial boundaries: boundaries that cut through language and group affiliations. At the same time, fundamental requirements for converting groups into nations are lacking in African countries: not only in robust economic and civil infrastructures but, more to the point in literary discussion, in the widespread, multiclass literacy of a common language. Recognizable themes and genres alone are not sufficient to delineate a national literature. Writers and readers would have to be aware that an intelligible field of Nigerian or Kenyan literature could exist, and that they were actively contributing to its development. Universities, publishers, and literary debate would be expected to air views on the construction of the canon. Such schooling is to be found only intermittently in the book-thin cultures of Africa.

To add to the difficulties of definition, it is not surprising that a criticism alert to the shaping force of context has intermittently queried whether the writers who are usually held to be the African "mainstream"-- Achebe, Ngugi, Okigbo, and others--are in fact even primarily "African" writers. Rather, these writers could be said to constitute a literary elite on a poor continent. However attuned their novels, poems and plays may be to the local scene, their work is attuned even more to the Lit. Crit. expectations of the British or French university. Their publishers are multinationals whose market is mainly non-African. The Companion to African Literatures privileges the elite in granting its authors the pre-eminence of individual entries. It is alert, nonetheless, to moves to broaden the field. In the work of scholars like Mazisi Kunene and Ruth Finnegan, oral traditions have been removed from anthropology and revalued as living, literary inheritance. We are reminded that despite the centrality of colonial languages in education and government, African speech remains majority speech across the continent. At the same time, work by academics like Karin Barber, Stephanie Newell, and others, has ensured cognizance of the popular voice: the hybrid, opportunistic city expression that translates ancient praises into panegyrics to trade unions, or that in Onitsha market pamphlets offers advice on romantic love, interfering parents, marriage plans, sugar daddies, and good-time girls. Popular here means being in demand by local people. Yet if the popular is a pan-African phenomenon, its accents are particular to fairly small, regional circulations: another observation favouring the plural form, African Literatures.

In addition to noting elite, traditional, and popular forms of expression, The Companion has had to note the difficulties of serious, as distinct from popular, modern African-language literatures: the precarious future of written isiZulu, Yoruba, or Swahili in economies in which the only outlet is the school textbook market. Finally, it has had to deal in South Africa's return not only with San/Bushman expression, but also with the largest, most complex book economy in Africa. There are, notably, more South African writers in the "A–Z" than Nigerian writers. The real complication is, however, that over half are not native Africans, but whites, coloureds, and Indians. Several questions enter the field with persistence: is Nadine Gordimer or J. M. Coetzee an African writer? What is a white African? What is the role of Afrikaans in African literature?

Or to introduce another complication, one that is pertinent to the current conference. As The Companion confirms in its affiliations and composition, in its editorial team and most of its contributors, the field of African Literature, or African Literatures, is shaped in survey and analysis largely by white-dominated regimes of truth in Europe, the United States, and, more latterly, South Africa.2 The issue, nonetheless, is not simply reducible to racial politics. As principal adjudicator in the project "Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century," Njabulo S. Ndbele reminds us, at least implicitly, that it was not Africans but, ironically, European colonizers who initially decreed Africa to be exclusively Negroid-black. While Mugabe rails against white farmers, British imperialism, and homosexuality as a Western disease, the Best Books--though ignoring the thorny question of who is an African--presents a variegated continent: an Africa that unselfconsciously acknowledges Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz alongside Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, the Afrikaans writer Antjie Krog alongside Ben Okri, and Nadine Gordimer alongside the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera. Titles from South Africa constitute 20% of the list (see "Africa's 100 Best Books").3

Indeed, Marechera--once dubbed non-African because of his "radical individualism"--seems to be an important influence on a new wave of South African black urban writing. Winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Prize for the Best First Book, K. Sello Duiker in his big novel The Quiet Violence of Dreams ditches the Father figures of the struggle years for the harrowing adventures of a student who

reads esoteric books . . . . So when he finds himself at the Valkenberg mental facility, it is perhaps not entirely due to "cannabis-induced" psychosis.
. . .
. . . [I]t is in the sub-culture of male prostitution that he finds answers--and comfort--for the first time.
(qtd. from the blurb)

Mugabe the person, in contrast to Duiker, treads a well-recognized path. If Achebe's Things Fall Apart stamped authority on a recurrent preoccupation and form--the clash of cultures--Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo had anticipated a second great theme: postindependence disillusionment. The two preoccupations have almost defined the trajectory of modern African literature. Duiker, however, accentuates the need for the plural form, African Literatures.

Or does he! We learn also that his protagonist's nightmare is that in the violence of South Africa, Tshepo "in one night lost his mother to death, his father to crime, and himself to daunting uncertainty. And that in discovering his true sexuality he discovered a key to a greater realm of a hidden mythical humanity where he can tap into the ancient powers that are his birthright" (blurb). African literature, in its past and present configurations, is deeply aware of the traumas of dislocation and the search for a home. So is Duiker. His novel, which is firmly located in contemporary South Africa, is a bizarre mixture of traditional, popular, and elite compulsions, all of which are valid for the present-day. The challenge is that of differentiated modernity: a trait of life and literature on the African continent. Because of the dictionary format, The Companion to African Literatures does not have to offer any overarching understanding of the field. In seeking connections across, and between, the traditional, the popular, and the elite, however, it is useful to have available the categories of both African Literature and African Literatures.

In my study Southern African Literatures, for example, the plural form acknowledged that the colonial encounter was not uniform across the subcontinent. Simultaneously, the study acknowledged the need to give the singular term "southern Africa" the substance of its common subjects and concerns. The argument applies to Africa as a whole. In the literature of all of the countries, there is the general experience of colonialism. As a result, the racial theories, practices and values of European or, in other areas, Arabic intrusions have featured prominently in the language and texts of a great deal of the literary response. To greater or lesser degrees, transitions from traditional to modern loyalties in modernising economies have led--again, in literature and life--to psychological, cultural, and social dislocations amid swift, desperate readjustments. Duiker's temper and rhythm may be very different from the temper and rhythm of Things Fall Apart. Yet both books are broadly about transitions from the old, rural, mythical memory to modern demands. Such preoccupations characterize African literature beyond the divisions of language, race, or nationality.

The acceptance of commonality within difference has several consequences: one cannot Balkanize the literature into discrete language and ethnic units, a reminder of the divide-and-rule tactics of the colonial legacy. Instead, the construction of the field is based on comparative considerations. To take the example of the frontier in nineteenth-century South Africa, we can ask whether Xhosa literature would have developed the way it did had it not encountered a British settler presence on its ancestral land. The same question can be posed to South African English literature. The Xhosa praiser Ntsikana turned to syncretic African-Christian hymns; the settler Thomas Pringle injected into his late eighteenth-century pastoralism the hard subjects of slavery, racial confrontation, and miscegenation. The challenge for criticism is how to make the insights of one culture accessible to the other while respecting the epistemological autonomy of the cultures between which interchange is taking place. In comparison and translation, Africa assumes complexity.

Let me turn to my second question: concerning the relationship of the literary work--the poem, the novel--to the cultural act. As I said earlier on, we need not ignore the inextricable connection between the political imperative and the imaginative drive. This does not prevent our distinguishing, however, between the unexceptional and the memorable intervention. Here I am proffering, implicitly, a definition of literature. It is a rhetorical activity that seeks to persuade its audience. In this, I am endorsing a long tradition that encompasses ceremonies of ritual in ancient communities and modes of survival in storytelling among contemporary migrant workers. Literature in Africa does not derive primarily from a romantic aesthetic, in which justification is the originality of the word. Rather, the what almost wants to supersede the how. But not entirely. Without the how, the power of the word, the power of the communication, is lost. This is, necessarily, a precarious aesthetic. Rhetoric--the art of eloquence--can obscure rather than clarify the truth. The potential of rhetoric, nonetheless, is to assist in human conversations about what is valuable, what is not. This permits the retention, in a contested social climate, of a symbiotic relation between politics and art. Whatever the seduction of the metaphor, it is unlikely that an "African aesthetic" would be able to grant artistic significance to the politically reactionary sentiment. The challenge lies in the opposite direction. How to grant value to both the innovative (elite) and the conservative (popular) expression?

Here, an African aesthetic presents a challenge to the Western art world. Modernism and postmodernism, as the predominant art movements of the West--the one anxious of cultural loss, the other parodic of cultural richness--subscribe to the formalist aesthetic of "making strange." Marechera or Coetzee might in qualified ways agree. But there is another aesthetic satisfaction: assurance, amid alienation, of anchors of certainty, or the lessons of traditional wisdom. The challenge of any African aesthetic is to include what the West has ignored: its oral inheritance as a usable past. A literary history of English literature probably begins with Old English or, increasingly, Middle English. Nursery rhymes and folks stories are overlooked. A history of African literature should start with San/Bushman prayers, or Egyptian songs, or Yoruba myths. The history must include intersections of the elite and the popular. In South Africa, for example, Drum stories of the 1950s, in writers such as Mphahlele and Themba, veered to literary elaboration. The importance in an insecure continent of identity politics demands that testimony by both the "nonliterary" and the "literary" person be granted due consideration. Both could have a valuable story to tell. The one story might be instrumental: uncomplicated in language, expository rather than evocative. Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, for example, guarantees weight to attitudes and ideas: its power is conveyed in the authority of its experience. The stories of the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, in contrast, offer in Luuanda mingling of the prosaic life and the fantasy of people's dreams. Vieira's artful tales are qualitatively different from the compulsion of Mandela's direct voice. An African aesthetic, nonetheless, has to evaluate the strengths and limitations of very different appeals to similar social occasions: occasions often involving matters of oppression and freedom. As a start, the aesthetic dimension resides not in defamiliarization, but in human recovery: in the accessibility and sociability of communication, in the moral agency necessary to effect change. In short, the rhetorical enterprise is closely determined by the pragmatic situation: it is ends--specific goals in local contexts--that govern the invocation to value. As I shall illustrate in turning to the examples of Achebe and Marechera, this need not curtail either medium or message.

Aware of European decenterings of the African as primitive or exotic, Achebe refuses to separate politics and art: African literature is a political act; the novelist is a teacher who has to show that Africans are not the dark side of the Western psyche, but rational human beings (see Achebe, "The Novelist as Teacher"). To convey his vision, Achebe utilises to his own purposes the Western novel form and the language of the colonial power. But what distinguishes his fiction--what defines his particular genius--is what T. S. Eliot saw as the mark of the great writer: whereas mediocre writers borrow, great writers steal. In Things Fall Apart the existential drama is tied to the need for ancient example; the modern, realist novel yields to its folklore origins. The relationship of tradition and modernity is not static; instead, one recalls Kunene's recovery of the myth of the origin of creation. The Supreme God dispatches Chameleon to inform Human Being of eternal life. But Chameleon dillydallies and God, in wrath, sends the swift Lizard with a message of death. Now matters are confusing, or complicated, and open to interpretation. Life is a mix of Chameleon and Lizard qualities. Truth is relative, a surprisingly "postmodern" lesson from an ancient source. Paradoxically, tradition lives!

To turn to a writer almost the opposite of Achebe, Marechera adopts the iconoclastic tone in describing his childhood memories of reading and writing (see Veit-Wild 2–3). He turned to his own use the bits and pieces of Western culture--old volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia, old Batman comics, etc.--that Rhodesian families had presumably thrown out with the latest spring clean and that ended up on the rubbish dumps of the town. Just as Olive Schreiner did in the 1880s,4 Marechera in The House of Hunger subverts imperial dominations by reclassifying books, or even scraps of text, into new generic combinations (see Hofmeyr et al.). He delights in trashing Western cultural forms, whether serious or popular. If his hyperreal style suggests modernism, there is a peculiarly African check on any reverence for the artefact. Marechera's words explode under their own verbal excess as he scoffs at the West's pretentious, high literary culture. It is a culture--Marechera implies--that had little concern for the Third World it set out to colonise.

African Literature or African Literatures? I am underscoring diversity within common guides. The temperamental differences between Achebe and Marechera remind us that if the decentring and recentering of human subjects have had a prominent role in African literature, there is little repetition of style. A tension--both problematic and necessary--characterizes the field. There is, at the one pole, the need for a hermeneutics of suspicion: the re-reading of authorities, traditions, and influences as texts are set in contexts of controversy, in which terms such as major/minor, functional/aesthetic, the West/Africa are held up for discursive investigation. There is, at the other pole, the need for a humanism of reconstruction, in which damaged identities are reassembled, silent voices given speech, and in which causes are rooted close to home at the same time as the African scene reassesses its relation to the outside world. In the latter instance, Paul Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic provides a compact name for a multiple-centered zone that is difficult to label African, European or American. Although Gilroy neglects Africa, the Black Atlantic depends crucially on Africa as focus not only of the slave trade, but of cultural migrations (Fanon and Ngugi, creolization in the Caribbean) and artistic syncretisms (the Harlem Renaissance, Picasso, African sculpture, and Cubism). In literary studies, a new alertness to bi- or tricontinental affiliations complicates any single category of belonging in a host of writers such as Sol T. Plaatje, Leopold S. Senghor, Nadine Gordimer, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Whatever the limitations of the concept, the Black Atlantic has the potential to add energy to the idea of Africa in the next, more global epoch.

Such an approach suggests several coordinates in the field. One is reminded, in retrospect, that there has always been lively debate in African literature: essentialist/materialist disagreements about negritude; Africanist versus Eurocentric arguments involving Soyinka and the bolekaja critics; realist versus allegorical patterns of novelistic truth in numerous writers, including Gordimer and Coetzee; preference about public or private worlds, individual or communal voices, or romantic or critical uses of the past. Or the question germane to the present discussion: does Africa really need an art dimension which, if not subjected to continual qualification, almost seductively assumes an extra-utilitarian aura and can act as yet another divisive element in already harshly divided societies?

This paper suggests that the art dimension is necessary. It is necessary in order to release the power of literary voices. In his study, Postcolonialism, Robert J. C. Young argues that the discourse of colonialism is best understood not in the creative work, but in the reports of institutions of control; that the novel or poem may be most valuable not for its interpretative richness, but for revealing "against the grain"--against its own intentions--the circumscriptions of the imagination in the severe historical situation (409–10). In contesting this, of course, the mistake is to adopt a diametrically opposing view: that the imaginative work--as it is usually argued in Western literary debate--offers a more concrete, more intricate understanding than any other mode of response. I hope to have qualified both of these views.

Put baldly, we do not necessarily need to turn to the novel to diagnose, for example, the discourse on AIDS in Africa. Yet a valuable ingredient of the novel involves the subjective realm: the psychology of the experience, the impact on human relationships, on community life. Story takes precedence; its value is in the telling. To know how the story feels is to know its truthfulness. The literary dimension should continue to insist, therefore, on a somewhat elaborate view of quality. Here Achebe's formulation of the novelist, as teacher, remains a key concept (Achebe, "The Novelist as Teacher"). It encourages a view of quality that is dignified by another view too often in short supply in literary debate: that of humility, or a sense of service. It would be inappropriate for African criticism to be the mean, carping affair that is so often revealed in the Western habit. Instead, in turning to the story--that is, to the most intense and comprehensive expression of the self in society--interpretation and appreciation need to identify the social project: does it apply the rule of diversity in a multilingual, multicultural environment? If not, the story might be less than truth telling. Next, identify the cultural purpose: are the stories usable? If not, value might be diminished. Does the narrative as we feel keenly our differences convince us of our shared humanity, whether the style is unobtrusive (Achebe) or flashy (Marechera), whether the genre is the poem, the novel, the play, or the testimony? Or any of the hybrids of popular experience: hybrids that--as in the example of Marechera--often collude in undermining the elite convention. Without ignoring the social or political demand, the literature should remind us that life is enlarged by both unexpected and wise insights into human conduct. It should remind us that style is not extraneous to, but shapes the sensibility.

In none of this--it should be evident--does African literature occupy a position that is utterly antithetical to any other literature. In setting up contrasts with the West, one is not suggesting dichotomies of understanding: the West and Africa, after all, have experienced forms of (admittedly, unequal) exchange for over four hundred years. Writers such as Conrad, Yeats, and Eliot have had a formative influence on the elite stream, whether in Africa or the West. Popular forms in Africa clutch not only at local issues, but also at elements of a pervasive, international pop culture. My discussion suggests both the impossibility of separation and the challenges of overlap. I mentioned briefly that the anxieties of art practice being overwhelmed by cultural practice are not confined to African literary discussion. One thinks of Harold Bloom's defense of Great Books in the United States. Autonomous art space in Europe and the USA, however, will continue to command a freedom that is unlikely to accompany the word "autonomy" in the heavy cultural politics of Africa. Flag independence has not seen real economic independence. Some might blame the neoliberal reach of the West; others might direct a sardonic eye at the increasingly octogenarian inheritance of the liberation movements.

To summarize, the plural form African Literatures helps chart the range and the variety; the singular form helps lend coherence to the field of study. Whatever we prefer, the creative response is to utilise the terms as nodes of debate. To polarize politics and art, for example, does a disservice to both African Literature and African Literatures. Instead, it is in the dialogues of text and event that the African voice finds its own power of speech. Art practice is located in cultural practice. In Africa, such identification releases the possibility of value.

NOTES

1. Program description, conference on "African Literatures: Versions and Sub-versions," Humboldt University of Berlin, 1–4 May 2002. Chapman's paper was delivered at the conference.

2. The editorial team is the late Douglas Killam together with Ruth Rowe, both University of Guelph, Ontario; Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas; Alain Ricard, Centre d'études d'Afrique Noire, University of Bordeaux; and Gerald Moser, Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois.

3. The concept "Africa's 100 Best Books" is that of Ali Mazrui, Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, New York, and one of Africa's leading writers and scholars. His thoughts were spurred in 2000 at Chinua Achebe's seventieth birthday celebration. Later in the year at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, Mazrui referred to the ranking in 1998 of the Modern Library Board of the USA, which chose 100 Great Books in English of the 20th Century. Joyce's Ulysses was ranked first and, on the list, the only authors whose mother tongue was not English were Conrad, Nabokov, and Rushdie. No African writer whether black or white made the top 100. The judges--concluded Mazrui--"were probably too Anglo-Saxon in their prejudices, even if some were from the wider Commonwealth." Organized by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in collaboration with the African Publishers Network, the Pan-African Booksellers Association and the Pan-African Writers Association, the two-year project, "Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century," was completed early in 2002. A sixteen-person jury--chaired by the South African writer and academic Njabulo S. Ndebele and including African academics working around the world as well as the Egyptian Minister of Culture--ranked Achebe's Things Fall Apart as the most significant African book of the twentieth century (see "Africa's 100 Best Books").

4. See discussion on The Story of an African Farm as a "proto-modernist novel" (Green).

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------. "The Novelist as Teacher." (1965). Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1988. 27–31.

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