Literature and Culture in Global Africa

Tanure Ojaide

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351711180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Engaging and interrogating the idea of a 'Global Africa', this book examines how African literary and cultural productions have changed over the years due to the social and political influences brought about by increased globalisation. Tanure Ojaide takes a variety of European theoretical concepts and applies these to African literature, oral traditions, culture, sexuality, political leadership, environmentalism, and advocacy, demonstrating the universality of the African experience.

Challenging African literary artists and scholars to think creatively about the future of the culture and literature, this new collection of literary and cultural criticism from scholar-writer Tanure Ojaide is an essential read for students and scholars of African literature and culture.

1   Introduction

Africa is a reality of multifarious experiences. It is a geographical expression, a geo-political unit, and, above all, a socio-cultural landmass. Much as the northern part of the continent has been incorporated into the Arab and Muslim ambit and there are clusters of European population in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Africa has come to establish an identity molded by its geographical location, cultural, historical, and political experiences. The people respond to their physical environment to which a living relationship has been worked out over centuries. The landscape of plains, mountains, rivers, rainforests, grasslands, and deserts has on its own conditioned a people whose existence depends on their location on that part of the earth. The African experience continues to change as the people continue to adapt to new circumstances brought about by the factors that condition it.

But much as I use the word “African” in this book, I am very conscious of diverse ethnicities or ethnic nationalities across the continent. Africa is not homogeneous and even socio-culturally operates both patriarchal and matrilineal systems, though the parts or ethnic groups that are patriarchal by far outnumber the matrilineal ones. Even within an ethnic group, despite the common language spoken, there is still diversity in different clans and the subgroups. The diversity within one group could be in the form of dialects of the language and variations in the cultural practices. It is thus a bit too generalizing to use an incident or practice among one group or its subgroup to make a statement about the very group, not to talk of the entire Africa. One should therefore be cautious on the use of the term “African” to generalize about the entire continent because such a practice or incident might just be an isolated case or an exception to the rule even within a group. I make the point therefore that Africa is very diverse and one should avoid generalizations and not just brand what is peculiar to some part as “African.” Most times, the term “African” describes what takes place in Africa, even though this is in only a part of it, and not necessarily what operates as a norm in the continent as a whole. It is mostly in the geographical and historical aspects that the African experience tends to be more uniform; one must bear in mind the location of human experience and what has happened and affected the landmass of Africa.

Africa has been undergoing changes brought about by internal and external circumstances. It is inevitable for a people to have changes in their lifestyles based on new observations from their daily and perennial ways of doing things. These changes are more inevitable as the population is exposed to other ways by other people. Africa had started to shed some of its habits and acquire new ones before foreigners – Arab / Muslim and European / Christian folks – came to the continent with the aim of changing the people to accepting the “new” ways. The foreigners were (and perhaps still are) unipolar in the sense that they propagated their way as the only way and there was no other way. Most African groups, as Chinua Achebe consistently reminded us of the Igbo people, believed that if there was one way of doing things, there should be another.

Thus, once African gods were denigrated for people to become Christians or Muslims, Africans were portrayed as pagans and uncivilized and so needed to know God and be civilized. If Africans were left alone by overzealous outsiders who wanted to change them to their respective Christian or Muslim image, the people would have developed their particular ways of moving forward. History, thus, plays a major role in the changes which have taken place in Africa. With Europeans first coming in a spirit of adventure, the Portuguese, whom my Urhobo people call Potokri, settled along the coast of west, central, and southern Africa and many intermarried with the local populations to produce mulattos. Many scholars believe this early practical knowledge of Africa would backfire on Africans as the Portuguese would turn to have slaves from the region.

The slave trade periods of European / Western and Arab intrusion were to be followed by European colonization that has changed Africa the most in its history. Once the Europeans saw the huge resources in Africa, they would come for economic reasons masked with philanthropic rationale. The European powers “partitioned” Africa among themselves as their booty of conquest. Colonization, which many scholars would argue, brought modernity to Africa, also spread socio-cultural, economic, and political changes across the continent. I am not going into details of the colonial policies of the Europeans in Africa, whether of Indirect Rule or Assimilation, but these policies affected the ways of Africans and made them to be hybrids – combining African and Western lifestyles. One can think of the economic and agricultural policies that will promote the farming of cash crops, the building of parks and plantations, and other policies that would transform the landscape of the continent into the European image and for European benefit. European missionaries came together with the colonialists and they were rivals and collaborators at the same time in their efforts to change Africans culturally so as to be more amenable to the colonial project of economic and political exploitation.

Political independence would come to African countries but once colonialism had disrupted Africa’s indigenous move to the future and the Europeans had seen their profits and adopted neocolonial policies, things were no longer in the hands of Africans themselves to direct their own future with multinational companies in places as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Of course, the colonialists left the political institutions they established to operate when they handed power to the local political elites. The French Foreign Service engineered political changes in many African countries whose policies did not favor them economically and politically. The British were not all that different from the French when it came to maintaining the status quo in Africa for their benefit. It would take wars between nationalist and neocolonial groups for Angola and Mozambique to become independent. Thus, independence alone was not enough to change Africa in its own way with Western institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund dictating what measures African nations should adopt in their fiscal policies. The suffering caused by austerity measures especially in the 1980s has become part of Africa’s historical memory.

As the continent struggled with its realities, there arrived a New World Order that has since the 1990s turned into globalization – a world of fast communication networks brought about by new technologies. Africa now belongs to the interconnected world in which information is fast and no country is isolated from the rest of the world. Africa currently parades Western lifestyles and products in an unbalanced global world that the West gains more from than the Africans who are more at the receiving end than the selling end. The inequalities of history continue up to this day in which the odds are stacked against Africa economically, politically, and even socio-culturally. The free flow of information arising from globalization seems to be to the advantage of those who have the new technologies at the expense of those who are consumers of Western made technological products. Since African cultures are weak, unlike many Asian ones such as Chinese, Indian, and Japanese, Africa seems to be ceding much to the West in cultural and religious lifestyles than the West is accepting of the African. The question is: has the West been influenced by Africa as the continent has been influenced by the West? The answer is a resounding “No!”

This project is aimed at looking at African culture and literature and how they have changed over centuries, decades, and years to what they are today. “Global Africa” can be said to be the current reality of Africa. This new reality needs to be interrogated especially as it is faring in the area of identity in its culture and literature. The aim is to align Africa to European influences or concepts and how applicable these are to African cultural and literary practices. Global Africa is being tested in so many ways about its cultural identity and its being. The different but connected essays either directly or indirectly touch on how history has affected culture and literature. Most of the essays reiterate Africa’s current global nature. I have selected some theoretical concepts to apply to African literature, oral traditions, culture, lifestyles, environmentalism, and advocacy, among many others. In some areas, some concepts are universal and human as of power, madness, and sexuality. In other areas sociological concepts of outsiders help to explain certain African practices. In these essays, I also attempt to stretch the interdisciplinarity of African literature, which, in dealing with the African reality, integrates so many other disciplines that coalesce to form the African experience. Literature in its current state is not only about literary form but so much that inspired the writer and there are so many things in the African environment that inform the literary work: behavior in society, sex and sexuality, exercising power, dealing with environmental issues, political leadership, etc.

I also want to challenge African literary artists and scholars to rethink creatively about the future of the culture and literature after knowing where we are coming from and where we find ourselves today. I have introduced theories or concepts which have been around but not used in African cultural or literary discussion. For instance, I mention Frantz Fanon’s ideas in both The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks and used the concept of “native resistance” to approach culture and literature. It is interesting to note that Chinweizu and his co-authors were influenced by Fanon’s idea of natives decolonizing their literature and culture after winning political independence. That process of decolonization or native resistance is still ongoing in the age of globalization.

I expect this project to broaden the field of imagination in culture and literary discourses in Africa. I have brought John Barth’s ideas to approach the exhaustion of modern African poetry and the necessity for its replenishment. I have also brought Michel Foucault’s concepts to examine the highly satirical udje oral poetic performance tradition of Nigeria’s Urhobo people. In addition, I have found useful Foucault’s concepts of sexuality in my discussion of love, sex, and sexuality in African folklore and modern literature. To widen the scope of literary discourses, I have brought into perspective, for instance, “African literature of advocacy” and “new orality” in African literature. I have in fact struggled with the “new orality” which I know is there but not full blown to be easily described. I expect these latter two topics, among others touched directly or indirectly, to be pursued by other scholars as they interrogate contemporary African literature in an era of hashtag slogans.

African literature and culture are at a critical crossroads. We find ourselves at a period of history in which globalization is so important that it could impact Africans more than colonialism did to us socio-culturally. That impact will tell tremendously on the cultural production of literature which reflects the people’s experience in all its totality. We have to be careful on the choice of what direction to take from the crossroads. We cannot continue to sit there and feel safe and comfortable. We have to move forward and that means we have to consciously choose what road to take from the crossroads. While the global reality of Africa is at stake, we should not be like the wire grass that bows to whichever direction the wind blows. We should follow that direction that will lead to a vibrant literature that best serves Africa’s needs and also reflects our “being” as Africans.

I approach this project with not only the insight of a writer of poetry and fiction but also as a reader and literary scholar. I suggest a tripartite approach of writers, readers / students, and literary scholars / critics to contribute to the new African literature. Each of them is a stakeholder in African literature and the dialogue among them will move the creative works into a most up-to-date state. Let me end this introduction with what I said at the acceptance of the 2016 African Literature Association Fonlon-Nichols Award for writing excellence in Africa at Atlanta, Georgia, on April 9, 2016:

Having their angst about the direction of modern African literature, Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike in 1984 published Towards the Decolonization of Modern African Literature. Many of us may not agree with the tone of their book, but it meant to shock to make African writers reflect on the direction of their literature at the time. Many of us in the Alter / Native tradition in African literature might have been influenced by it. The decolonization of modern African literature is an ongoing process and nobody knows exactly when and how it will be completed. However, globalization has challenged or, at best, complicated the decolonization process. Some may argue about the gains of globalization in African literature in promoting some writers and their works. Others will argue about the erosion of Africanity in African writers’ works, even as the Western canon is firm on the sanctity of its literary values. It appears to me that culturally Africa is losing more than it is gaining from globalization because of the inequity in the global system. Why should there be a Western canon and not an African canon in literature? It is true that literature, a cultural production, is bound to be dynamic, but how much change can African literature undergo and still remain African?

African literature should be at the vanguard of human and individual rights as well as such an issue as climate change. The activist role of literature connects us to our roots, since we are not air-plants but rooted in the tradition of functional literature. Bearing in mind the state of things in contemporary Africa, our literature should fashion new visions to overcome the challenges of our current reality and uplift the underprivileged and disadvantaged. We should not be shy but bold and frank about ourselves so that our self-criticism can lead to the correction of our past and present errors towards a better future. Our individual desires should be subsumed in the communal or racial desire to give pride to Africa. We should assist in breaking down power structures of patriarchy, political and economic elitism, and others to allow the majority of our people, men and women, young and old, feel equally attached to our separate nations.

I notice a certain literary exhaustion in modern African literature especially in poetry and we should strive towards the “next best thing,” to put it in John Barth’s words, rather than hanker only after the past. We need “replenishment” in the literature by challenging our realities with new literary forms and techniques that can best capture our current realities. There should be effort to eliminate the dichotomy between Africans living and writing in the West and those at home for a more unified African literature.

Our publishers should engage in more ways to tap our talented writers in the continent so as to publish and promote their works. There are many talented young writers who are like needles lost in the literary haystack. It should not be for publishers in Africa to republish writers that Western publishers have already exposed to the world; it should be the other way around. I also challenge our literary scholars to fish out the talented voices from the many inaudible voices of younger writers and bring them to scholarly and public attention.

Works cited and references

Achebe, Chinua. The Education of the British Protected Child. New York: Farrar, Giroux and Straus, 2008.

———. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. New York: Anchor, 1975.

Azevedo, Mario J. ed. Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005.

Chinweizu, Onuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimensions, 1984.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

———. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Gordon, April A. and Donald L. Gordon, eds. Understanding Contemporary Africa. Fifth Edition. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013.

Gyekye, Kwame. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Martin, Phyllis M. and Patrick O’Meara, eds. Africa. Third Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Mazrui, Ali. “The Africans.” Segment 1. BBC Documentary on DVD.

Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Heinemann, 1969.

Moyers, Bill. “A World of Ideas – Writers. One on One Interview With Chinua Achebe” on DVD.

Ojaide, Tanure. Poetry, Performance, and Art: Udje Dance Songs of the Urhobo People. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.

2 John Barth and modern African literature

Exhaustion and replenishment

John Barth (born 1930) may not be widely known to many African writers and literary scholars, including those studying American literature. Many would therefore wonder what this American novelist and literary scholar has to do with modern African literature. Barth was a university professor at Pennsylvania State University (1953–65), University of Buffalo of the State University of New York (1965–73), University of Boston (1972–3), and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95). An award-winning fiction writer, he is known for his postmodernist and metafictional narratives as well as his essays. His fictional works compri...