Gods and Soldiers (2 page)

In an excerpt from her novel
The Belly of the Atlantic,
Fatou Diome shows the long reach of France, via soccer, all the way to a small island off the coast of Senegal, where a boy watches the same game on TV as his sister in France. Alain Mabanckou, with biting humor, renders powerful Congolese thugs hapless through their struggle to master the right phrase of doublespeak, while Boubacar Boris Diop imagines voices for those who were silenced during the brutality of the Rwandan genocide.

 

While North African writing has similar concerns as that of sub-Saharan Africa, namely, the legacy of colonialism, North African culture has a much longer history of interaction with Europe and the Middle East. In her opening to the North African section, novelist Laila Lalami writes of growing up in a bookish Moroccan household in the 1970s, where, despite the 1956 independence, French children's literature—Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne—was the main reading in Rabat, and her middle school revelation of discovering native Berber and Arabic authors who were writing of her shared world. When Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi's seminal novel
Woman at Point Zero
appeared in 1974, it stirred controversy for its empathetic portrayal of a high-end prostitute who turns the tables on an abuser. More than thirty years later it still remains a lightning rod for debate about the lives of Arabic women. Mohamed Magani arms himself with humor (and coffee) in an attempt to beat back the repressive French occupation forces in Algeria, while in an excerpt from
The Star of Algiers,
Aziz Chouaki follows the fate of a would-be rocker as he clashes with a fundamentalist movement sweeping his once-tolerant country. In Leila Aboulela's “Souvenirs,” a Sudanese man returns to his country after living in Scotland and searches for just the right piece of his homeland to take back to his adopted country.

 

As we move to East Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina explores the contradictions—modern and ancient, united and fractured—of Kenya, and by extension the rest of Africa. Wainaina, deeply aware of the cliché-ridden lenses through which Westerners perceive his home continent, writes engagingly about stereotypes in his now-legendary tongue-in-cheek essay “How to Write About Africa” for
Granta
in 2005. “Always use the word ‘Africa' or ‘Darkness' or ‘Safari' in your title. . . . Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls.”

Fellow Kenyan Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, in an excerpt from his epic novel
Wizard of the Crow,
wields satire like a scalpel to expose the absurd genuflections of a strongman's sycophants. Abdourahman A. Waberi of Djibouti implodes reality and stereotypes in his surrealistic and comic novel
The United States of Africa,
in which Africa has taken the place of the West as the new beacon of hope and opportunity for the world's immigrants. It is now Africans who look down their noses and prejudge the poor, tired, and huddled masses flocking in from Europe, Asia, and the United States.

In a more realistic vein, the heroine of Somali Nuruddin Farah's novel
Knots,
after a disastrous marriage in Canada, brazenly returns to war-torn Mogadishu to reclaim her familial home from a warlord, while in Ugandan Doreen Baingana's story, a Muslim man converts to Christianity, jettisoning three wives but not his alcoholism or troubles.

Portugal was the last major colonizer to relinquish power in Africa, and only after the fall of the dictator Salazar in 1974. Brutal civil wars in Mozambique and Angola followed, the countries becoming proxy battlegrounds in the Cold War. With recent stability, there has been a greater artistic output from these countries. While popular in Brazil and Portugal, many writers from the former Portuguese colonies are not as frequently translated into English as their French and Arabic-speaking African counterparts. An essay by Mia Couto, the great novelist from Mozambique, eloquently describes how the homogenization of global languages imperils mystery and storytelling. In Angolan Ondjaki's story “Dragonfly,” the ineffable beauty of music and everyday objects permeate the conversation between a doctor and a mysterious stranger. In an excerpt from José Eduardo Agualusa's novel
The Book of Chameleons,
Borges is reborn in the form of a chameleon who broodingly passes his days in the library of his master, an albino who invents elaborate family histories for the recently moneyed Angolans, a new class of citizens created in the void left by thirty years of civil war.

 

The final section of the book is dominated by South Africa. Fifteen years after the end of repressive white minority rule, the entire region is still coping with the aftershocks of apartheid. Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has been praised and vilified for his portrayal of conflicted white South Africans, most critics calling his work complex and compelling, while others have accused him of racism. Coetzee himself has said that he considers his sensibilities more aligned with Europe than South Africa, and has recently renounced his citizenship for that of Australia. Here he examines the memoirs of South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, also exiled, then imprisoned for seven years for his anti-apartheid efforts.

The other South African writer to win the Nobel Prize, Nadine Gordimer, is also no stranger to controversy, having recently fallen out with her authorized biographer over the claims of embellishment in some of Gordimer's autobiographical writing. In her story “A Beneficiary,” Gordimer, who for over fifty years has chronicled apartheid's effects on all aspects of society, follows a woman going through her mother's apartment after her accidental death, where she peels back the layers on the past and present life of liberal upper-middle-class South Africans.

With the waning of the apartheid era, the new tragedy gripping much of Southern Africa is AIDS. Sadly, many artists and writers have succumbed to the disease, including Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, who died of AIDS in 2005. Vera's short story “Dead Swimmers” captures the fierce bonds between a traditional Shona elder and her modern granddaughter. Grief, in the form of a “professional mourner,” takes center stage in the excerpt from Zakes Mda's novel
Ways of Dying,
a comic portrait of the travails of a man hired by rural families to grieve at funerals. Foremost Afrikaans writer Marlene van Niekerk's novel
Agaat
delves into the complex relationship between an aging Afrikaans woman and her black caretaker. Ivan Vladislavic', who is of Croatian descent, overturns the detritus of apartheid in his story “The WHITES ONLY Bench,” where curators at an apartheid museum go to great lengths to procure an “authentic” bus bench from the apartheid era. Many younger writers are less concerned with the legacy of apartheid than with the here and now of survival in the new, complex, multicultural reality of South Africa. Niq Mhlongo's unvarnished tales of the new, urban, polyglot life have led some to call him the “voice of the kwaito generation” (
kwaito
being the name of the music that emerged from Johannesburg in the early 1990s, a mix of house and traditional chants). In an excerpt from Mhlongo's novel
Dog Eat Dog,
a black university student tries to outwit a pair of corrupt cops who have caught him drinking in public.

 

Chinua Achebe, both in
Things Fall Apart
and
Arrow of God,
highlighted the growing tensions between traditional African societies and Western values and norms, which not only challenged but were often opposed to African mores and customs. That dynamic continues still, as revealed in these stories, a dynamic further complicated by the different realities of country and city, of tribal laws and secular governance, of religion and tribe, of the legacy of the past and the promise of the future. This future faces the additional modern problems of AIDS, multinational wars, and, with rapidly spreading Internet access across the continent, greater challenges to tradition and culture.

Nelson Mandela once said that “Africa always brings something new.” Now, more than ever, this is true. My hope is that this handful of wonderful writing will open the doorway to a greater exploration of African writing and culture. For links and information about further reading of African literature, you can log on to
GodsandSoldiers.com
.

 

—ROB SPILLMAN,
February 2009

•
Nigeria
•

 

 

 

IN JUNE 1952, there was a writers' gathering at Makerere, impressively styled: “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Despite this sonorous and rather solemn title it turned out to be a very lively affair and a very exciting and useful experience for many of us. But there was something which we tried to do and failed—that was to define “African Literature” satisfactorily.

Was it literature produced
in
Africa or
about
Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or South of the Sahara, or just
Black
Africa? And then the question of language. Should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, etc.?

In the end we gave up trying to find an answer partly—I should admit—on my own instigation. Perhaps we should not have given up so easily. It seems to me from some of the things I have since heard and read that we may have given the impression of not knowing what we were doing, or worse, not daring to look too closely at it.

A Nigerian critic, Obi Wali, writing in
Transition,
volume 10, said: “Perhaps the most important achievement of the conference . . . is that African literature as now defined and understood leads nowhere.”

I am sure that Obi Wali must have felt triumphantly vindicated when he saw the report of a different kind of conference held later at Fourah Bay to discuss African literature and the University curriculum. This conference produced a tentative definition of African literature as follows: “Creative writing in which an African setting is authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral.” We are told specifically that Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
qualifies as African literature while Graham Greene's
The Heart of the Matter
fails because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa.

A number of interesting speculations issue from this definition, which admittedly is only an interim formulation designed to produce an indisputably desirable end, namely, to introduce African students to literature set in their environment. But I could not help being amused by the curious circumstance in which Conrad, a Pole writing in English, could produce African literature while Peter Abrahams would be ineligible should he write a novel based on his experiences in the West Indies.