Six Early
Anglo-Phone African Novelists and the African Experience: A Reader-Response
Interpretation
Okpara, Macpherson
Chikaodiri
Principal Lecturer
English Department,
Ebonyi State
College of Education,
Ikwo, Nigeria
Abstract
Most extant studies on the reflection of authentic
African experience in the African novel have focused on isolated investigations
of the achievements of individual novelists. In an attempt to articulate in one
brief study the encapsulation of diverse realities of life on the continent in
the African novel, this paper critically looks at the offerings of six early
Anglo-phone African writers and identifies their contributions in projecting
the African experience. Using reader-response literary criticism, the paper
moves from an overview of the outstanding novels of each author to critically
discuss a novel, one for each, which this researcher considers the best in
capturing authentic life on the continent.
Selected on the basis of purposeful sampling, the paper argues that the
six authors - Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Meja Mwangi,
Peter Abrahams, and Ezekiel Mphahlele – remarkably apprehend African
historical, socio-cultural, and political realities in their respective regions
in particular and Africa in general. The paper concludes that those early
Anglo-phone African novelists not only provide the necessary thematic concerns
of the African novel, but also offer glimpses into utopian social visions that
could be built upon by present and future African creative writers.
Key words:
The Novel, Africa,
Anglo-Phone, African Experience, Reader-Response criticism
Introduction
The Anglo-phone African literary firmament would have
worn different thematic and stylistic colourations without the offerings of
Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi, Peter
Abrahams and Ezekiel Mphahlele who best represent the voices of early novelists
from the English-speaking West, East, and South of the continent. These writers
were all born before independence began to smile on hitherto colonized African
nations, making them harbingers of firsthand accounts of the African experience
of coloniality and the aftermaths. Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi,
Eastern Nigeria; Armah in 1939 in
Takoradi, Ghana; Ngugi in 1939 in
Limuru, Kenya; Meja Mwangi in 1948 in Kenya; Peter Henry Abrahams in 1919 in
Vrededorp, South Africa; and Ezekiel
Mphahlele in 1919 in Pretoria, South Africa. Such a heritage amply arms them
with veritable ideas which they exploited in laying the foundation for the
growth and development of African narrative fiction, a tradition that has
flourished for decades, straddling the unique authentic experiences of diverse
African societies, and birthing rich and remarkable thematic and stylistic
features. This paper overviews the achievements the aforementioned six
Anglo-phone African novelists; it highlights each author’s literary productions
and justifies the researcher’s claim of a particular novel emerging the author’s
best representation of the African experience. The researcher adopts
Reader-response theory in contributing to the making of meaning out of the
select novels. The reader-response theory, Cuddon states, is a
“theory concerned with the relationship between text and
reader and reader and text, with the emphasis on the different ways in which a
reader participates in the course of reading a text and the different
perspective which arise in the relationship thus, reader-response theory is
concerned with the reader’s contribution to a text, and it challenges, with
varying degrees of plausibility and conviction, the text-oriented theories of
Formalism and the New Criticism , which have tended to ignore or underestimate
the reader’s role.
Fundamentally,
a text, whatever it be (poem, short story, essay, scientific exposition), has
no real existence until it is read. Its meaning is in potential, so to speak. A
reader completes its meaning by reading it. The reading is complementary; it actualizes potential meaning. Thus, the
reader does not have a passive role, as has been traditionally thought; on the
contrary, she is an active agent in the creation of meaning. By applying codes
and strategies the reader decodes the text (589).
Cuddon goes further to note that several
sub-theories of reader-response have emerged in the mid-to late 1970s. Among
others, Umberto Eco in The Role of the
Reader (1979) presents the idea of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts: in the ‘open’
text the reader actively creates meaning, a ‘closed’ text conditions a reader’s
response. Norman Holland in Five Reader
Reading (1975) and David Bleich in
Subjective Criticism (1978) look on
reading as ‘wish-fulfilment’ for individual reader handles a text as they
please. Cuddon relates that Wolfgang
Iser in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976, trans,
1978) proposes “that all literary texts have Leerstellen (‘blanks’, ‘gaps’ or
‘lacunae’). These blanks have to be filled in or ‘concretized’ by the reader in
order to interpret the text. But this proposition poses a basic question: is
the text itself the cause of the reader’s interpretation, or does the reader
impose, as it were, an interpretation on the text? A possible answer to this is
that the reader supplies a set of social, historical and cultural norms but the
text calls them forth and in a sense contains them”(589). Implicitly, the
contemporary reader of the African novel is at liberty to contribute to the
creation and/or validation of meaning(s). Selected on the basis of purposeful
sampling, the novels of six authors that remarkably apprehend African
historical, socio-cultural, and political realities are studied as veritable
mirrors of authentic African experience in their time and place. The exclusion
of novelists from North Africa is a function of the Islamic tradition that
produced them and the Arabic language in which early North African novelists
wrote.
The African Experience in the Anglo-Phone African Novel:
Perspective of Six Authors
From Anglo-phone West, East, and South of Africa, Chinua
Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi, Peter Abrahams
and Ezekiel Mphahlele are some early novelists whose literary offerings best
represent the authentic African experience, past and present.
Chinua Achebe
One of the most respected and studied literary
craftspersons in the world, Achebe left behind several nonfictional and
fictional works, including memoirs, short stories and novels. His novels
include Things Fall Apart (1958)
which represents traditional Africa’s contact with western values through
colonialism; No Longer at Ease (1960)
which focuses on social and ethical questions of bribery and corruption in the
civil service in Nigeria; Arrow of God
(1964) which straddles religious, political, social, educational and
psychological issues in Nigeria under colonial rule, reenacting centrifugal and
centripetal forces in society; A Man of the People (1966), a political
satire on personal and public morality, and which also celebrates social and
ethical issues such as sexual relations and immorality; and Anthills of the Savannah (1986) which
focuses on dictatorship and nation building in a fictional African state named
Kangan.
Although
all the novels by Chinua Achebe have considerable thematic and stylistic merits,
Things Fall Apart emerges as his best
offering to the literary world, especially to African letters. Its literary
quality hinges squarely on the idea of tragedy and the tragic hero which his
protagonist, Okonkwo, exemplifies. Again, language use in the novel stands it
out of other works by Achebe: the successful experimentation with
transliteration, which Achebe calls “… a new voice coming out of Africa,
speaking of African experience in a world-wide language” (“The African Writer”
61) makes the work universal, even as other local speech patterns in it
remarkably distinguish it as a truly African writing about Africa. At a
conference on African literature in Canada in May 1977, Chinua Achebe stated
that “…the African novel has to be about Africa. A pretty severe restriction…
But Africa is not only a geographical expression, it is also a metaphysical
landscape- it is in fact a view of the world and of the whole cosmos perceived
from a particular position” (“Thoughts on the African Novel” 50). For him, the
African novel not only paints the African physical space, but also explores
aspects of the cosmology of its peoples, encompassing their realistic past and
current experiences. Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart remains his magnum opus, which displaced other novels by Africans
before it to birth what later became the tradition of the African novel. In
that one stroke of literary endeavour it redefined the African literary
firmament, straddling pre-colonial and colonial Africa and charting the
direction of the flow of the themes, language, and narrative techniques of the
written form of the African novel. Besides its lucid and ambitious
representation of the all-time issue of culture contact and the attendant
conflicts, the novel apprehends and projects the world view of the African
society in a characteristic unmatched language and form. Set in Igbo land,
Nigeria, between 1850 and 1900 (Moody et al 25), TFA represents a traditional Africa that comes in contact with
Christian missionary institutions and colonial rule. The protagonist of the
novel is ambitious Okonkwo, who wants to take the highest traditional title in
his Igbo society and commits abomination and is banished from Umuofia. While he
is in exile, Christianity and colonial elements arrive in his society; he
returns and fights them, and is ultimately destroyed by his weaknesses. His
tragic end through suicide generates a supreme irony as his people abandon his
corpse: Obierika tells the District
Commissioner, “We cannot bury him. Only strangers can” (TFA 165). An African classic, ever since its publication, the
phenomenal ideas Achebe weaves into Things
Fall Apart continue to challenge its readers and critics as they examine
and re-examine the African worldview.
Ayi Kwei Armah
Another outstanding novelist from Anglo-phone West
Africa, political theorist, polemicist, poet, short story writer and novelist,
Ayi Kwei Armah towers above most of his contemporaries on the African literary
tuft in his creation of unforgettable characters and themes. His novels include
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Houghton
Mifflin, 1968; Heinemann, 1969), a novel that uses disquieting imagery to
present consumerism and stinking corruption in post-colonial Ghana; Fragments (Houghton Mifflin, 1970;
Heinemann, 1974) which uses the popular character, Brempong to relate society’s
expectations from its individual members; Why
Are We So Blest? (Doubleday, 1972; 1979) a novel which uses three
“interpreters” (Solo, Modin Dofu, and Aimee Reitsch) to portray “the problem of
evolving a notion of communal redemption” (Fraser 48). Others are Two Thousand Seasons (EAPH, 1973;
Heinemann, 1979) and The Healers
(EAPH, 1978; Heinemann, 1979) which are historical novels that seek the
righting of twisted views of African history.
Described
as “one of the most controversial writers Africa has produced” (Fraser 1),
Armah’s most outstanding novel is The
Beautyful One Are Not Yet Born, his first novel. Fraser contends that being
Armah’s first “and partly because of the uncompromising stand it takes on
certain aspects of Ghana’s national life, it[The Beautyful Ones] has attracted considerably more critical
attention than his subsequent books “(15). Set in immediate post-independence
Ghana, the novel takes a swipe at social, economic and political imbalances, as
well as imaging the ethical “problems of individual integrity in a society with
shifting values” (Moody et al 67). Its major preoccupations are with a society
faced with unbalanced development, the corruption of the post-independence
elite and the civil service, as well as foreign influences on the emergent life
of the people. The novel also lampoons uneven distribution of economic resources
and unchecked consumerist attitude, as well as caricaturing the political
leadership and stridently decrying mass apathy and despair. Armah’s The Beautyful Ones excels in the
deployment of realistic setting, characters, language, and situations: the
society in the novel is true to life; the narrative language and dialogue blend
to grip the reader, as the generous use of proverbs and other indices of local
idiom add value to the narrative; the characters and the situations are
appropriate. In fact, characterization and plot join the masterful wielding of
harsh images and symbols of rottenness and despair to accentuate the literary
quality of the novel. These are not matched in any other novel by Armah, making
it a true retelling of authentic experience of corruption in post-independence
Ghana, as in most post-colonial African nations today.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Reputed to be East Africa’s most outstanding novelist,
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has been aptly described as “a committed and challenging
writer whose works (novels, drama, short stories and critical essays) show a
progressive politicization over the years” (Moody et al 251). His novels
narrate events underlining the East African experience of pre-colonial
realities and more importantly, postcolonial struggles of the people for the
reclamation of their land and rights trampled upon by neo-imperial elements.
His novels include Weep Not, Child (1964)
which focuses on a Kikuyu family enmeshed in the struggle for independence; The River Between (1965) which relives
the conflict between Christianity and traditional ways and beliefs; A Grain of Wheat (1967) which focuses on
social, moral and racial issues of the struggle for independence and its
aftermath; Petals of Blood (1977), a
novel on social and economic problems in East Africa after independence; Devil on the Cross (1980), a highly
allegorical work that relates the meeting of the Devil and many villains that
exploit the poor in post-independence East Africa. Others are Matigari (1986) which attacks
capitalism, religious hypocrisy and corruption among the economic elite, and The Wizard of the Crow (2006), a
satirical novel on kleptocracy and autocratic rule in Aburiria, a fictional
African state.
Critics
of Ngugi consider Petals of Blood his
most accomplished work, for it aptly sums his social visions for the peasants
which is the main subject of his earlier writings. C. B. Robson, for instance, notes that in Petals of Blood
Ngugi is no longer simply evaluating. He is clearly censuring certain developments
in modern Kenya, as well as suggesting positive values to stand in place of
corrupt ones. It seems that he felt an
up–dated, more comprehensive and emotionally charged statement was needed. Secret Lives was not enough. Hence the all–encompassing fervor of Petals of Blood which draws its strength
from The River Between’s sense of
unity and order, the suffering and compassion of A Grain of Wheat and Weep
Not, Child, and the disillusionment of Secret
Lives (92).
Ngugi uses the novel sum his achievements in his early
narratives, lending credence to his level of apprehension of the degree of
imbalance and rot, the unimaginable depth of the harm neo-colonial forces have
inflicted on the East African economic order, and its psychological effects.
Set in Imorog, Kenya, the novel represents outstanding political issues in
Kenya within the years 1970 and 1975 in which it was written. The distinctive
character of the novel derives largely from its language and literary value.
Using English with heavy influence of Gikuyu and Swahili idioms, Ngugi seems to
react to accusation of absence of “African flavour” in the language of his
earlier novels. Again, in Petals,
Ngugi makes generous allusions to East African political figures, as well as
using quotations from the Bible and writers such as Walt Whitman, William
Blake, Derek Walcott, and W.B Yeats. Moreover, Ngugi’s use of several forms of
orature heightens the domestication of the work in Africa and its literary
value; even as the journey motif and other epic features make the book tower
above his other novelistic offerings. Writing on “The political Novel”, Gikandi
sees Ngugi’s Petals of Blood as “a
structuring of the dynamics of neo-colonialism in Kenya” (144), a tendency the
author achieves by appropriating the suffering of the oppressed peasants in the
hands of their leaders who front for neo-imperialists. G. D. killam quotes Ngugi as having said
that: “… all writers can do is to really try and point out where things go wrong…
but fiction should be firmly on the side of the oppressed. Fiction should firmly embody the aspirations
and hopes of the majority…” (97). Thus, Ngugi’s greatest achievement as an
African literary artist is the deployment of art in the service of marginalized
peasants.
Meja Mwangi
One of the most
prolific novelists in Africa, his novels, which mostly focus on social poverty
and deprivation in urban Kenya, include Kill
Me Quick (1973), Carcass for Hounds
(1974), Going Down River Road (1976),
The Cockroach Dance (1979), and The Bushtrackers (1979). Others are The Return of Shaka (1989), Weapon of Hunger (1989), Striving for the Wind (1990), The Last Plague (1997), Mountain of Bones (1999), The Boy Gift (2006), Mama Dudu the Insect Woman (2007), The Big Chiefs (2007), among others.
Mwangi’s
The Cockroach Dance appeals to his
critics much more than his other works, especially his early fiction. It is the
story of Dusman Gonzaga, a professional meter-reader in an African town who
suffers depression in his search for meaning in life. Moody et al describe the
story as “a grim allegory of the plight of the urban African, perhaps of the
human condition” (239). Set in an unnamed large East African city, the novel
evidently satirizes poor living conditions on the African continent, as well as
declaiming corrupt bureaucracy and government. A novel of social commitment, it
straddles individual and collective issues such as frustrations, exploitation,
delinquency and urban squalor, and their psychological effects such as
insanity. The use of symbols and disquieting images, especially of cockroaches
to signify the squalid conditions of the people and the adoption of a variety
of narrative styles and registers (legal, literary, journalistic) heighten the
novel’s appeal to the informed reader’s literary taste; it certainly evokes the
literary achievements of Armah, Dickens, Kafka, among others. Mwangi’s social
vision for his continent in the novel remains a mirage decades after its
appearance as most African cities still grapple with the imbalances he
declaims; the cockroach still dances in every corner of the continent,
signposting the squalid conditions in which the people live and the
irresponsiveness of African leaders. Mwangi’s novel, thus emerges a realistic
projection of a failed utopian vision.
Peter Henry Abrahams
An expatriate South African writer, Peter Henry Abrahams
has been described as “an early champion of African rights” (Moody et al, 14),
and as an outstanding African author “noted for his eloquence in charting the
complex issues of the nonwhites’ struggle in his native land for a voice and
for dignity” (Merriam Webster’s, 3).
Abrahams novels include Mine Boy (1946;
reissued by Heinemann AWS, 1963), the story of Xuma, young man confronted with
a strange and oppressive culture in an industrial city in South African; The Path of Thunder (1948) a novel about
‘a young ‘mixed’ couple who love under the menacing shadow of enforced segregation’; Wild Conquest (1950), a historical
narrative of the great northern trek of the Boers; Tell Freedom (1954), a semi-autobiographical writing on the author’s travails in the slums
of Johannesburg; A Wreath for Udomo
(1956) which renders the author’s utopian vision of liberated African countries
and the establishment of a Panafrican state of which Udomo becomes Prime
Minister; A Night of their Own
(1965), a novel about the plight of the Indian in South Africa; This
Island Now (1966) which presents the story of Josiah, a totalitarian and
despotic leader who exemplifies power and its diverse utilization; and The
View from Coyaba (1985), a historical novel about four generations of
a Jamaican family that descended from
slaves that escaped from their masters.
Although
each of Abrahams’ prose works touches on the human condition and parades
distinctive literary merits, Mine Boy
emerges his definitive masterpiece as a creative narrator of the African
experience. The novel not only brings to fore the suffering of black people
under apartheid, but also envisions a liberated South Africa made possible
through collaboration of the suppressed, traumatized and exploited groups in
the society. Set in impoverished and traumatized African townships serving the
large industrial and mining interests in and around Johannesburg, the novel
relates the riveting experiences of a young man, ‘Xuma from the North’ who
travels to Johannesburg to look for a job. He succeeds in finding a job, as
well as love, friendship and respectability. Xuma is, however, assailed by
personal, social and psychological problems that attend exploitative and
insensitive humanity. His personality is soon torn apart by his exposure to
power and wealth which he partakes in producing, but cannot own. Comparable, at
the literary front, to other great African novels such as Ousmane’s God’s Bit of Wood, Ngugi’s Weep Not Child and Petals of Blood that apprehend working class people’s struggle for
justice and human dignity, Abrahams’ Mine
Boy stands out for its sweeping portrayal of the evils, discriminations and
exploitative proclivities of apartheid. Thematically, Mine Boy encompasses social, psychological and ethical questions of
the day. Socially, it deals with patterns of life within and beyond the
township; as well as lampooning racial division of labour in industry and
laying bare the underbelly of trade unionism under apartheid. Psychologically,
it relates problems encountered in rural-urban drift such as alienation,
schizophrenia and melancholia. Ethically, it unravels that earlier norms of
behavior become irrelevant in debased, makeshift communities associated with
exploitative mines and industrial cities.
A narrative of epic proportion, the literary
quality of Mine Boy derives partly
from its commitment to the restoration of the dignity of the black race in
South Africa under apartheid and its skilful representation of the tragic
situations that confront the blacks. The debilitating conditions the miners
work strip them of their humanity, destroying in the end some of the black
characters notably producing several drunks exemplified by Daddy, Johannes, Liz
and Lena. Ultimately, Lena and Ma Plank are destroyed by the city and
insensitive racial apartheid forces. Lea is jailed while Old Daddy dies after
being knocked down by a car; and the tragedy is taken to the climax by the
death of Johannes and Chris in the mines. In all these, Xuma emerges a
respectable hero; the strike he initiates draws even the sympathy of Paddy, who
joins the crusade for the freedom of the blacks though he is white. Bamidele
sums the transformation of Xuma from a rustic figure to a hero when he submits
that the city “builds in him a strong will and undoubting spirit of resistance
against the oppressive and dehumanizing racial policies that make life
unbearable for the blacks in South Africa. Though he might end up in jail, at
least he has initiated the spirit of struggle, he has abolished the impotent
reticence that was hitherto the characteristic attitude of his people” (13). In
the novel, Abrahams represents the South African experience of the evils of
apartheid, most notably its physical and psychological violence against the
black race.
Ezekiel Mphahlele
A contemporary of
Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele was also a vanguard of the struggle for the
liberation of the blacks from the evil unfriendly tentacles of apartheid. Early
critics of Mphahlele’s writing recognize his promising commitment to artistic
representation of the black experience. For instance, Lewis Nkosi observes that
Mphahlele’s “most recent fiction reveal how keenly aware he is of the
intractable nature of South African experience when it has to be contained
within an artistic form; and that intractability has something to do with the
over-melodramatic nature of the political situation and the barrenness and
infertile nature of tradition”(223). Nkosi was referring to Mphahlele’s short
stories, notably some of those contained in his collections, The Living and Dead (1961) and In Corner B (1967). Besides critical writings such as The African Image (1962) and Voices
in the Whirlwind and other Essays (1972), Mphahlele co-edited Modern African Stories (1964). He also
edited and contributed to African Writing
Today (1967). His other non-fictional works include Let’s Talk About Writing: Prose (1985) and Let’s Talk About Writing: Poetry (1986). His notable prose works
include his autobiography, Down Second
Avenue (1959) which is respected as a South African classic; The Wanderer (1971), another
autobiographical novel; and Chirundu (1979)
which focuses on power and change, especially on “the symbols of destruction
and of sexual power gone mad”( www.goodreads.com).
Down Second Avenue is the definitive novel that remarkably establishes
Ezekiel Mphahlele in the South African literary corpus. The work has been
hailed as “as a classic of South African literature, not only for its
documentation of human indignities under the apartheid system, but for its
insight into problems of education and creativity” (Moody et al 227). It is set
in an urban slum, Marabastad which “seemed to be turning inside out, showing
all her dirty underwear” (Down Second
Avenue 91); typical of slums birthed by repressive rule, economic advantage
and urban drift (reminiscent of the setting of most fiction by black South
Africans). The actions of this autobiographical novel take place in the early
days of African nationalism and intense racial policies while its preoccupation
with social and educational themes makes it quite engaging. As part of its
social reflection, the novel paints the picture of the structure and
maintenance of life in the slums, its effects on family and personal relations.
It also relates the prevalence of traditional values pitched against religious
beliefs and agents of segregation. The educational value of the work lies in
its discussion of the stages of personal development and various reactions to
educational opportunities. Beyond the realistic nature of its themes, the
novel’s literary merits also stand it out. Though an autobiography, it appeals
clearly to the literary artistic sense what with the author’s deployment of
imagery, local colour, episodic narrative technique, engaging plot structure,
among other elements of literariness. Again, the work makes evident the creed
and practice of a committed writer who elevates the protest tradition in black
South African writing. Thus, Mphahlele ranks high in the portrayal of the
African experience in his prose writing and merits consideration as an early
Anglo-phone novelist with remarkable commitment to championing a continent free
from segregation and its attendant evils.
Conclusion
This essay identifies the achievements of Chinua Achebe,
Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Meja Mwangi, Peter Abrahams, and Ezekiel
Mphahlele, six Anglo-phone African novelists, in projecting the African
experience in their novels. It highlights each author’s literary productions
and justifies the researcher’s claim of a particular novel emerging the
author’s best representation of African historical, socio-cultural, and
political realities. Achebe stands out in the recreation of Africa’s contact
with the West and the resultant culture conflict, even as he recreates social
and ethical questions of bribery and corruption, religious, political, social,
educational, and psychological issues. He also reenacts centrifugal and
centripetal forces in society, and satirizes personal and public morality,
dictatorship and phantom efforts at nation building in Africa. Armah apprehends
the issues of corruption, individual versus society, as well as attempting to
correct misconceptions about African history. Ngugi portrays East African
experience of pre-colonial realities and postcolonial struggles of the people
to reclaim their land and rights trampled upon by neo-imperial elements. Meja
Mwangi focuses on social poverty and deprivation in urban Kenya, as well as
decrying individual and collective issues such as frustrations, exploitation,
delinquency and urban squalor, and their psychological effects such as insanity.
Together with Mphahlele, Abrahams relives the evils, discriminations and
exploitative proclivities of apartheid as well as social, psychological and
ethical questions. Thus, the early Anglo-phone African novelists studied in
this paper not only provide the necessary thematic concerns of the African
novel, but also offer glimpses into utopian social visions to guide present and
future committed African creative
writers.
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