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This collection of essays examines a wide range of African texts from different periods and different parts of a vast continent. These text-centred essays were brought together to give readers a sense of the wide range of African writing – in terms of themes, forms and implied contexts – but also because, despite the need to resist lazy homogenising remarks about Africa, Africans and African writers, there are certain discernible underlying coherences even among works as varied as those analysed in the essays that make up this collection. The novels and other written records of Africa may be said to carry a greater social, historical and even political responsibility than comparable texts in other parts of the world. This is the case because of the continent’s late literacy, broadly speaking, as well as the widespread and diverse forms of oppression – ranging from colonial suppression and underdevelopment to postcolonial instances of dictatorial African rule or conditions of violent chaos – and the stifling effect this has on public utterance. The analytical essays contained in this volume are attempts to draw attention to the significance of texts such as those commented on here as contributions to an archive of knowledge of different parts of and historical eras in Africa and to showcase the treasury of its literary art, even if the perspective employed is applied to a sample and limited (as it is here) to texts written in English or available in English translation.

The writers’ readiness and ability implicitly to analyse and creatively to confront the troubling, dangerous, perplexing or malign aspects of the societies from and of which they write, articulating the complex stresses from different sources to which African individuals have been subjected and the creative and courageous ways in which many among them have responded, are the qualities that inspire the writing of the essays in my collection. The subtlety and literary complexity that I attempt to highlight here are the signs – not of authors taking refuge in art from difficult socio-cultural and political situations, but of writers profoundly concerned with the African sites and times that are closest to them. My commentaries and contextualisations inevitably reflect my own geographical, academic, racial and political realities, biases and choices. There are more texts from the southern than of other parts of Africa discussed here, and not only is there a geographical imbalance, but many, many glaring omissions of other and equally significant African texts and issues. In this regard, no collection this brief could be inclusive. Nevertheless it is my hope that my essays may prompt readings and re-readings not only of the African writings addressed here, but of the many other texts by African authors already available or being and to be published – a rich and valuable resource[1] for Africans but of equal pertinence, in the issues they address and the compelling shapes they give to their thought, to the entire world.

The works discussed here were primarily[2] penned or recorded in English – the colonial language that has been so widely appropriated by African writers and so adroitly used by them to re-map their own life-world in verbally sophisticated gestures registering both independence and connectedness in the ironies of modern African selfhood. “Modernity began in 1492”, states Enrique Dussel, “with Europe thinking itself the center of the world and Latin America, Africa, and Asia as the periphery” (132). This arrogant self-elevation will only end, he suggests, “through a process of mutual, creative fecundation” in “corealization with its once negated alterity” (138). I link this with Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the need to “do battle for the creation of a human world – that is, a world of reciprocal recognitions” (155). The great Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera insists that Africans “are not isolated things. We exist”, she says, “in co-operation with other nations. So we need to put into place methods of communication” (389). But she also expresses her need and desire “[t]o explore, not with romanticism, women’s characters. But with accepting the violence that accompanies their existence” while attempting “to underst[and] the intimate complexity of their mental worlds, and their emotions,” and to explore “those moments of tragedy without [. . .] withdrawing from them” or “covering up” (385).[3] Issues of subjectivity and the various and contending power forms besetting it; different forms of cultural hybridity, ‘authenticity’ and abrogation and post- and neocolonial conditions as well as gender matters and the plight of many of Africa’s children are some of the subjects dealt with in the texts and in my discussions of them.

African English writing does not grow primarily out of the textual world of canonical (or contemporary) English literature, but emerges from the complex translations of local realities into a language now skillfully articulating African visions. Yet, by writing in a language of world-wide access, the writers of this continent lay claim to a shareable truth and sphere of experience and exhibit a border-crossing aesthetic power in their texts. Acknowledging, grasping (on the imaginative level) and coping with what are frequently dreadful or emotionally and morally taxing circumstances (as my collection’s title phrase, “dealing with evils,” indicates), these texts testify to their authors’ refusal to allow such conditions – whether psychic or social realities – to overwhelm, cow or silence them and they implicitly insist on our grappling with them to understand situations urgently in need of addressing. Their delineations of African evils and opportunities and of the tangled roots, both African and (originally) foreign, of these conditions, not only demonstrate various ways of contending with difficulties or succumbing to them; of using chances or failing to do so. Their texts are also, themselves, enactments of various ways of addressing our difficulties. In a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens that remarkably employs certain African references, he suggests that narrative artists and poets proceed to “tell the human tale” (456) which transforms disaster by imaginatively narrating it from beyond the event. The same point was made in a wonderfully African way by Chinua Achebe (Anthills 124) in insisting on the social supremacy – above either the worker or the warrior – of the teller of tales, narrating the difficult “story of the land,” which can vividly record and transmit the heroism even of the defeated.

Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse and the Novel” writes that “[t]he word in language is half someone else’s. [. . .] it exists [. . .] in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (293). This remark seems to me extraordinarily useful in highlighting the difficulties and the achievements of the modern Europhone African author. In my own analyses of African writing it is my practice to investigate and to articulate primarily the implicitly analytical qualities of the fictional text that percolate through the representational and stylistic aspects of the work, rather than to impose a theoretical perspective upon the writing and subjecting the author’s vision to that perspective; I want theory to serve the text and choose those points from theoretical or critical texts that I believe can contribute enlighteningly to its fuller understanding and appreciation. “Theory oppresses,” Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us, “when it wills or perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority – the Voice of Knowledge” (42). Nana Wilson-Tagoe, a critic I respect, writes:

We need a wider interpretive framework not only for reading contemporary texts of culture against the grain of nationalist theorizations but also for exploring productive tensions between social science discourses on culture and the performative narratives that enact contending and liberating forms of cultural identification. (225)

I link this observation with Maria Pia Lara’s remark that the productivity of written work requires two interlinked processes of what she calls “reflexivity”: one such process starts “when an author is creating an exploratory moral quest for identity through the written word,” and the other (Lara writes) is “related to” such a quest by “readers ‘in the act of reading’, which is itself a highly reflexive moral search” (16) – if it is a serious and attentive reading of a work worthy of being taken seriously, I would add.

It is my hope that this collection will contribute to the understanding that Africa’s creative writers are vital to the re-imagining of our rapidly changing continent in its numerous and diverse societies. Tendencies to interpret as “authentic” only those texts that portray pre-colonial, rural or tribal Africa trouble me, as does a tendency to limit understanding of the continent’s postcolonial literary production that countenances mainly those works that write back to the period and dominant vision of colonial occupation of African regions. Africa has a postcolonial present in which new oppressors exert other forms of exploitation or debasement upon their citizens. In a 2002 address to a gathering of African writers and scholars, Mia Couto reminded us that “the bad are not always outside,” and he insisted that “[t]he principal enemies of hope are the fabrication of regimes constructed on the basis of crime, war and misery” (3). The main title of my collection is intended to replicate Couto’s view of the fine balance between the castigation of evils and the opening of doors to the future of Africa in the memorable and resonant writings framed in the essays of this compilation.

In his beautifully lucid, Portuguese inflected English, Couto on the same occasion said to his fellow Africans: “[w]e are becoming, more so, alone with our historic responsibility of creating another history,” and he concluded: “[w]e have to build our nations in the house where our dream belongs so that our children do not have to import even their dreams” (3). The archive of African creative writing or verbal art, a sample of which I present here, is a great social resource whose importance can hardly be overestimated. African writers who are forced into exile or choose to live abroad continue to write back to the people and places on this continent and are maligned if read as primarily addressing audiences elsewhere; like the authors who remain in Africa, their vision contributes to the needs of their local compatriots. Achebe has referred to the “universal creative rondo” by which “stories create people create stories” (“What” 162; emphasis original). Africa’s diverse “stories,” while especially pertinent to Africans, require of all who hear or read them to reach out imaginatively and to join in the endless undertaking to humanise our world – a world in which ignorance, neglect and prejudice towards Africans come in many guises. What Simon Gikandi calls “the difficult relation between the work of art and the politics of everyday life” (4) is a serious challenge that the texts discussed in the pages that follow invite us to meet.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann, 1987.

___. “What Has Literature Got to Do with It?” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. By Achebe. New York/ London: Doubleday, 1989. 154-170.

Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. M. Holquist. Transl. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 269-422.

Couto, Mia. “The Impact of African Writing on World Literature.” Unpublished Address to the Indaba Cape Town Seminar. 2002. (Quoted with the author’s permission.)

Dussel, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. 1992. Trans. M. D. Barber. New York: Continuum, 1995.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. L. Markmann. St. Albans, Hertfordshire: Paladin, 1970.

Gagiano, Annie. “The African Library.” <http://www.litnet.co.za/african-library>. (Older entries archived at http://www.oulitnet.co.za/africanlib/def ault.asp.)

___. “Barbed Wire and Dreams in Late Colonial Rhodesia: Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning.” Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera. Ed. Helen Cousins and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012. 145-164. Originally publ. under the title “Buried Hurts and Colliding Dreams in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning,” Acta Scientiarum Arts & Culture 31.1 (2009): 41-52.

___. “Book Keeping in Africa.” Mapping Africa in the English-Speaking World: Issues in Language and Literature. Ed. Kemmonye Collette Monaka, Owen S. Seda, Sibonile Edith Ellece, and John McAlister. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 43-68.

___. “Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera’s Study of the Katabolism of War.” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (2007): 64-76.

Gikandi, Simon. “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations.” Research in African Literatures 32.4 (2001): 1-18.

Lara, Maria Pia. Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Writing Poscoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989.

Stevens, Wallace. “Puella Parvula.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Random House, 1990. 456.

Vera, Yvonne. “The Place of the Woman is the Place of Imagination”: Yvonne Vera interviewed by Ranka Primorac. Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera. Ed. Helen Cousins and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 2012. 375-389.

Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. “Representing Culture and Identity: African Women Writers and National Cultures.” Africa After Gender? Ed. Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2007. 223-238.