The Columbia Guide to Central African Literature in English Since 1945

Adrian Roscoe

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231503792
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire africaine

Columbia's guides to postwar African literature paint a unique portrait of the continent's rich and diverse literary traditions. This volume examines the rapid rise and growth of modern literature in the three postcolonial nations of Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. It tracks the multiple political and economic pressures that have shaped Central African writing since the end of World War II and reveals its authors' heroic efforts to keep their literary traditions alive in the face of extreme poverty and AIDS.

Adrian Roscoe begins with a list of key political events. Since writers were composing within both colonial and postcolonial contexts, he pays particular attention to the nature of British colonialism, especially theories regarding its provenance and motivation. Roscoe discusses such historical figures as David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes, and Sir Harry Johnston, as well as modern power players, including Robert Mugabe, Kenneth Kaunda, and Kamuzu Banda. He also addresses efforts to create a literary-historical record from an African perspective, an account that challenges white historiographies in which the colonized was neither agent nor informer.

A comprehensive alphabetical guide profiles both established and emerging authors and further illustrates issues raised in the introduction. Roscoe then concludes with a detailed bibliography recommending additional reading and sources. At the close of World War II the people of Central Africa found themselves mired in imperial fatigue and broken promises of freedom. This fueled a desire for liberation and a major surge in literary production, and in this illuminating guide Roscoe details the campaigns for social justice and political integrity, for education and economic empowerment, and for gender equity, participatory democracy, rural development, and environmental care that characterized this exciting period of development.

Part I

History and Politics

1. Empire and Colonialism

In a recent history of the British Empire, N. A. M. Rodger writes, “If Empire, as Francis Xavier said, was little more than ‘to conjugate the verb to rob in all its moods and tenses,’ the English were the purest of imperialists.”¹ Such comment, saintly or historiographic, is arresting. But modern scholarship, which prefers inconclusiveness to certainty, blunts its sharpness. For it shows that, beside Xavierian disgust, traceable through Swift, Orwell, and a Conrad who dismissed even Roman colonization as “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale,” contrary comment runs, and sometimes from those felt to be loftily humanist. Edmund Spenser was a leading imperialist visionary, acquiring an estate in Ireland of twelve thousand acres on condition he develop it with Protestant English settlers—and experiencing early anticolonial protest when his mansion in Cork was torched. Michael Drayton was another enthusiast, his “Ode To the Virginia Voyage” urging pioneers to “Go, and subdue … Earth’s only paradise,” while lazy Britons “Lurk here at home, with shame.” Bacon and Milton gave colonization a horticultural hue, calling it “plantation,” Bacon writing an essay on the subject and Milton calling God the great Planter. Locke took much trouble to legitimize it and happily joined the Virginia Company. Macaulay’s Whig optimism admitted no doubt. And while older Africans might reflect wistfully on colonial days, postcolonial eyebrows rise at the reentry of British troops into Sierra Leone, French troops into Ivory Coast, and American troops into Liberia.

Modern historical and literary scholarship (cooperative synergies become increasingly manifest) subverts easy assumption and casual generalization. As with democracy in the twentieth century, so now analysis of colonialism and imperialism in the twenty-first reveals polysemy in words long jingling unexamined in popular discourse. Would Gibbon’s notions of empire resonate with those of Nyerere or Mandela? Would Conrad’s perspective on colonialism chime with that of vendors in the souks of Zanzibar?

Conjugating colonization across its grammatical paradigm thus unearths complexity in a phenomenon ancient and modern. Calendared independence days, contemporary reminders of empire, are innumerable. Inquiry at any multiethnic gathering will reveal a majority who have been, or feel, colonized. Indians will recall the rule of the British, Brazilians that of the Portuguese, Bolivians of the Spanish, Ukrainians of the Russians, Ivorians of the French. Elderly voices may even recall double colonization—Bulgarians by Turks and Russians, South African blacks by Afrikaners and Englishmen. Cameroonians might even recall a triple colonization—German, French, and British.

Meaning and emotion reach farther. Populations even within imperial powers may feel colonized by compatriot groups: northerners by southerners, peasants by urbanites, tradesmen by professionals, a lower class by an upper class. In the ironically titled United Kingdom, Scots and Welsh, early victims of English expansion, feel sufficiently colonized to have recently demanded, and won, devolution, though in the case of Wales only partially so. Northern Ireland’s Catholics still feel as much colonial subjects as Africans in the 1950s, and jokes about Cornish home rule reflect ambition that at one level is real. Northern England feels economically colonized by the south, and academically, too, with its redbrick universities beginning life as satellites of Oxford and Cambridge. In religion, the English Catholic writers Newman, Waugh, and Hopkins complained bitterly of Irish spiritual colonization and sought reconnection with the Catholicism of pre-Reformation England. As reformed poachers make the best gamekeepers, so the colonized can become colonizers too—witness a substantial contribution to Britain’s burgeoning empire by the Scots, Welsh, and Irish.

A European imperialism that scrambled to possess Africa nursed ancient memories as colonial victim itself, bearing invader fingerprints on its language, law, and religion. Conrad’s brooding overture to Heart of Darkness (“And this also … has been one of the dark places of the earth … marshes, forests, savages”) conjures a colonized nation that later mounted its own imperial project, for which, says Anthony Pagden, Roman precedent provided inspiration and model.² With Roman Britain later becoming a classic settler colony of Anglo-Saxon, Dane, and Frenchman, expansion perhaps sank deep into the national DNA, as those treated with violence in childhood are said to grow up and inflict violence on others.

Precisely why nations expand and conquer is rarely a simple question. Yet it is prompted by every Roman grave in Chester or York, every Andalusian Arabic fresco, Maltese Roman mosaic, Zimbabwean Victorian villa, Cameroonian German botanical garden, and West African Portuguese fort. What impulse drives this determination to push out, subdue, and settle? What notions, rational or otherwise, caused Syrian legionaries to end their days in cloudy Britain or African levies to die in Burma? And how did rural communities in distant lands, isolated and unsuspecting, respond to bullying strangers determined to disrupt their private worlds?

These are germane questions when we read the poetry of Zimbabwe’s Chenjerai Hove, the drama of Malawi’s Steve Chimombo, or the fiction of Zambia’s Lazarus Miti. Central African literature, it must be stressed, has emerged from the planning, management, and collapse of a global imperial project. In turn, that project’s nineteenth-century African practice emerged from practice earlier and elsewhere, and especially in the Caribbean. British reaction to Roman control is, alas, little known; but an expanding corpus of literature and historiography captures Central Africa’s response to British governance. In verse or prose, it registers group and personal reaction to colonial incursion and cultural change. Poets such as Chenjerai Hove, Felix Mnthali, Jack Mapanje, Musaemura Zimunya, and Steve Chimombo, and novelists such as Stanlake Samkange, Yvonne Vera, Shimmer Chinodya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Charles Mungoshi, and Binwell Sinyangwe, portray multidimensional societies contesting a common colonial domination and shaping new grammars for life after its decease.

British imperialism is a site of scholarly contestation interdisciplinary in method and noisy in debate. Inherited simplicity no longer serves. Emerging complexity, perhaps naturally, demands explicatory theory, despite the perils of applying this to the humanities, and scholars such as Anthony Pagden and Niall Ferguson are making key contributions to its development. Indeed, yesterday’s jingoism and pub-bar blather have yielded to an industry in which the Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) requires 156 international scholars and 3,500 pages even to begin mapping its subject’s complexity.

It once sufficed to inform undergraduates that African literature in English responded to a colonialism that was fundamentally materialist. The distinguished scholar Salvador de Madariaga had pronounced that Britain’s empire was at base economic, Spain’s religious, and, intriguingly, France’s intellectual—a Gallic solar system with Paris as center and sun.³ Such categorical certainty will no longer do. The historian Hilary Beckles, for one, suggests that Spanish galleons were not actually built to carry Bibles, and Anthony Pagden notes that when envious Raleigh whispered to his queen that Spain’s greatness grew from neither religion nor “sacks of Seville oranges” but from “Indian gold that disturbeth all the nations of Europe,” there were zealous Protestant advisers listening, too.⁴ Nor, if genuine, was France’s lofty concern to assimilate, which later triggered a defiant negritude, unmixed with baser aims. Robert Harms’s The ‘Diligent’: A Voyage Through the World of the Slave Trade shows via the journal of one Robert Durand that eighteenth-century Breton merchants were no high-minded savants living off the imagination but businessmen beavering for profit. Commercial calculation took total precedence over pity for the hapless cargo of The Diligent. Indeed, says Harms, Captain Durand “mentioned the African captives only twice during the entire 66 days of the middle passage, and then only to record deaths.”⁵

Theory continues to multiply. Imperialism is seen alternately as the fruit of a capitalist high summer, as overseas expansion by an upper class struggling at home, as a national sleepwalking exercise, as a desire to protect vital trade routes, as distant intervention, becoming long-term, to prop up failed local regimes, and so on. All have their proponents.

2. British Imperialism

British imperialism created Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. And thus it shaped literary reaction. Around so complex a subject there is at least agreement on chronology. Nicholas Canny and his colleagues in the Oxford History of the British Empire depict England as a slow starter in the imperial game. While Portuguese caravels pushed south to the Gulf of Guinea, with Portugal operating sugar mills on São Tomé by 1460 and soon after commercially dominating Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and while Spain built a vast empire in the Americas, England’s global vision stopped at Ulster. On the high seas beyond she confined herself to snapping enviously at the heels of Spanish treasure ships, as modern-day Mafiosi might nibble at the fat of Microsoft.¹

This was still Little England. Its small ships were built for coastal trade, its pilots expert only on home ports and rivers. National consolidation rather than international expansion was paramount. But, as Canny shows, once expansionary fever struck, commerce and religion embraced. For, while bullion beckoned, before Catholic Europe English zealots were also flaunting a reformed Christianity—proof that God had smiled on a chosen people.

Before 1600, then, overseas territorial interest was minimal, despite minor stirrings with the 1562 establishment of an Anglo-French Huguenot colony in Florida. Then energetic Protestants such as Walsingham, Purchas, and the Hakluyts, failing to fire London merchants with enthusiasm for foreign projects, approached Elizabeth I, urging adventure that combined trade, colonization, and religion. Thus could England puncture Spanish pride and advance the cause of Protestant global rule. Did not England, after all, have a messianic duty to bring true religion to the world’s pagans?²

Hence, England’s first serious colonial venture, the 1585 plantation of Munster—significant as a settler experiment for later imperial governance—was also strongly religious. The blueprint envisaged introducing enough non-Catholic immigrants finally to convert all Ireland to a godly Protestantism—with results that continue to baffle the modern mind. Canny shows that, later, Bermuda’s Berkeley Plantation promoters, also marrying God and Mammon, commissioned their agent “to erect and build a town called Barkley and to settle and plant our men and diverse other inhabitants there, to the honour of Almighty God, the enlarging of Christian religion, and to the augmentation and revenue of the general plantation in that country, and the particular good and profit of ourselves.” John Winthrop, who dreamed of a colonist’s life in Ireland but woke as a 1620 Plymouth plantation leader, felt so encircled by Catholics—French to the North, Spaniards to the South, and even Jesuits in Maryland—that he wanted a Protestants-only policy for New England. And when compatriots established the Providence Island colony off Nicaragua, it was essentially for attacking Spain’s Catholic Empire. It failed when spiritual motive yielded to the same profit motive that, in Protestant eyes, so damned Spain.³

In Cromwell, the seventeenth century produced the perfect incarnation of religion and militarism. By this time, Anthony Pagden suggests, “Providentialism bulked as large in English discussion of Empire as ever it did in Spanish discourse.”⁴ Indeed, Cromwell’s Western Design was “probably a device for exporting the Revolution of the Saints.” The grim Ironside’s Gaelic adventures are the small change of every schoolgirl’s history. But Canny reminds us that his Western Design, producing the seizure of Jamaica from the Dutch, was the first deployment of the English state in the interests of transoceanic, as opposed to Irish, colonization. This stirred public interest in economic no less than in religious aspects of overseas possessions and changed English foreign policy for centuries. Protecting the few colonies secured during the early 1600s—Barbados, Virginia, New England, Providence, Jamaica—now became urgent, and it was also decided that enemy colonies could be seized by force.⁵

With the 1660 Restoration, crown and commerce made common cause. Merchants eyed territories they might seize for king, profit, or trade route protection. However, Canny’s view that Nathaniel Cruch’s The English Empire in America (1685) was purely a “commercial accounting and materialistic account,” scarcely mentioning spirituality, suggests that imperial religious heat was already beginning to cool. More exciting than God, the Virginia Company of London was creating fortunes in tobacco to rival the sugar wealth of the Caribbean, where, by the end of the seventeenth century, drawing Africa into the imperial project, there were already some African slaves and a white population of 21,000. Thus, says Canny, “a new concept of Empire had been established: it involved the assertion of dominion over foreign places and peoples, the introduction of white, and also black, settlements in these areas and the monopolization of trade with these newly acquired possessions.” Religion had lost its spark, and an inglorious African link had been established.

Business so fueled expansion that merchant trading companies, often bearing royal patents, litter seventeenth-century history like confetti. A frenzy of Silicon Valley proportions spread. Company names conjured exotic horizons and adventure (a serious study is needed that links colonialism with schoolboy reading). While, for our purpose, it anticipates colonial instrumentality in nineteenth-century Africa, the list is interesting in its own right. P. E. H. Hair and Robin Law tell us that it included the East India Company, the Royal Africa Company (by 1700 the biggest shipper of slaves to the Americas), the Virginia Company of London, the Providence Island Company, the Newfoundland Company, the Assada Company, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, the Muscovy Company, the Company of Adventurers of London Trading to Parts of Africa, the Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea, the Scottish Guinea Company, the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, the Gambia Adventurers, the Royal African Company, and the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies.⁶ On companies of clerics sailing to convert Spanish colonials to Christianity, however, the record is silent. Yet the Elizabethan religious seedling eventually recovers, enjoys vigorous Victorian growth, and survives even the imperial sunset. Hence, on any objective assessment, Christian missionizing has made an unrivaled contribution to Africa’s health, education, and, crucially, to the rise of its modern literature. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s Ndabaningi Sithole, in African Nationalism and Roots of a Revolution, suggests that African nationalism and, ultimately, political freedom, were unthinkable without the modern schooling that Christianity brought. The list is long of writers in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia (as elsewhere across Africa) who are mission-educated. And it transcends mere coincidence that the first presidents of independent Malawi and Zambia were ardent Christians (one a less than model elder of the Church of Scotland) and that Zimbabwe’s first black leaders as freedom dawned were both Christian clerics.

Yet while commercial energies rose, British colonial settlement beyond Ireland in the early seventeenth century still embraced only North America and the Caribbean. Afro-Asian trade beckoned, but not conquest or colonies. Long after their Portuguese allies, English merchants moved only slowly into West Africa, establishing factories at Whydah, Kormantin, Anomabu, Cape Coast, Sherbro, Winneba, Takoradi, and Dixcove.⁷ Business was strictly by leave of local chiefs, and misbehavior courted deportation. Writing on early Euro-African encounters, Megan Vaughan asks who was using whom when she notes that between 1475 and 1540 the Portuguese shipped more than twelve thousand slaves from the Bight of Benin and São Tomé to the Gold Coast, not for onward carriage to the Americas, but for purchase by wealthy African chiefs.⁸ And as late as 1752, Hair and Law remind us, the Board of Trade could observe, “In Africa we were only tenants of the soil which we held at the goodwill of the natives.”

Though colonizing Africa did not appeal, slavery linked the continent to Britain’s Caribbean empire. Crucially, too, patterns of governance among the West Indian planter class foreshadowed later practice in Central and Southern Africa. Growing spectacularly rich, Barbadian settlers, for example, soon coveted the rights and privileges of the aristocracy at home. Granted legislative assemblies, and flaunting a wealth many an English grandee could only envy, they created a confident, indeed impertinent, relationship with London. And fortunes could also be made elsewhere. Virginian prospects allured even transported convicts. The hero of Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722) insists that “in Virginia, the meanest, and most despicable Creature after his time of Servitude is expir’d, if he will but apply himself with Diligence and Industry to the Business of the Country, is sure (Life and Health suppos’d) both of living Well and growing Rich.”⁹

Scholars agree that in North America, without the El Dorado that Raleigh conjured, land and agriculture assumed a defining place at the heart of settler colonialism. Ominous for the future experience of Central and Southern Africa, a conviction also arose that those blocking access to land must be swept aside. Hence, in New England and the Caribbean a species of apartheid emerged that Southern and Central African settlers would later imitate, with profound familiar implications. In contrast to Spanish and Portuguese practice, there was no miscegenation, merely a vertical distance between rulers and ruled. Partly for this, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, with British experience in mind, could later write that in terms of human relationships, colonialism for the black race in Africa was a disaster.

3. Legitimizing Empire

The violence born of British privateers roaming the seas to pillage became a global enterprise, the object of philosophical enquiry, and even of legal justification—as highwaymen, dissatisfied with roadside spoils, might seize a victim’s park and orchards and then find their crime...