Arabic colonization long predates European colonization in Eastern Africa, resulting in a vibrant literary culture, especially poetry, initially in Arabic but later in Swahili language, that survives to date. The Swahili‐language novel, for example, is among the most highly developed African‐language novelistic traditions in the continent.3 3 See Desai (2001).
4 4 What constitutes East or, better still, Eastern Africa is still subject to debate but there is a general agreement that Ethiopia is part of this geopolitical configuration. Ethiopia has a very long history of writing. The debate as to whether Swahili is an indigenous language is now definitively settled.
5 5 See Boldrini and Davies (2004).
6 6 See especially Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s three most influential works: Writers in Politics, Moving the Center, and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. No other writer or critic has mounted a more sustained case for reading African literature ideologically than Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
7 7 See Andrews and McGuire (2016).
8 8 For fuller discussion of the characteristics, norms, and contexts of the European Bildungsroman, see Moretti (1987).
9 9 Boes (2006, 235). On colonial ideology in Africa, see Mamdani (1996, 3–6).
10 10 The classical normative Bildungsroman by its nature is evolutionary and providentiary, with narrative progression mirroring the psychological and social growth of the individual gesturing toward eventual mutual accommodation between the society and individual. But there are what Jameson in “The Experiment of Time” (2006, 101) calls intermediate steps which collapse the destiny of the individual with that of the social collective.
11 11 It’s ironic to think of the colonial world as objective. For a thorough critique of the discourse of human rights, human personality development, and the Bildungsroman, see Slaughter.
12 12 Amoko here echoes and modifies two famous essays, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” In his provocative argument, he terms Arnold and Levis’ nationalist attempts to institutionalize literature intentional fallacy, that is the idea that literature must always be in tandem with nationalist sentiments.
13 13 The atrocities committed by the British army in Kenya were not peculiar. In Southern Africa, they were preceded by the near extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples of present‐day Namibia, then known as South West Africa, by the Germans.
3 Of Authenticity and Engagement in Francophone African Cultural Production
Brian Valente‐Quinn
A clear‐eyed assessment of the shortcomings and disciplinary blind spots of the study of Francophone African literature would need to reckon with the degree to which the field perpetuates what Valentin Mudimbe memorably called the “invention” of Africa. In asking what is behind the “knowledge” that we now profess to have regarding Africa, Mudimbe concludes that our understanding of the continent rests upon “a silent dependence on a Western episteme,” or modes of knowledge deeply rooted in ethnocentric, anthropological approaches (Mudimbe 1988, x). Understandings of the historical “underdevelopment” of Africa are frequently set along dichotomous categorizations, leading readers of African literature to consider the traditional and the modern, or the oral and the written as mutually exclusive concepts, often with the implied assumption that the continent is slowly working its way from the former to the latter. In fact, our point of departure in the study of Francophone African literature tends to exclude what lies beyond the boundaries of our limited categories. This exclusion has doubly blinded readers and scholars, first by privileging cultural forms that emerged by way of the colonial encounter. Secondly, the field of Francophone African studies can often mislead the reader or student by focusing solely on works that have passed through European or North American hubs of publishing or distribution. As literary scholar Maëline Le Lay points out in her study on Swahili literary and theatrical production in the Democratic Republic of Congo: “Si le dynamisme de ces écrivains dits ‘francophones’ a le mérite d’avoir fait connaître cette littérature sur la scène littéraire européenne, il a aussi eu pour effet de concentrer le regard du public sur l’écriture des Africains en diaspora. Le lecteur lambda d’aujourd’hui croit ainsi connaître la ‘littérature africaine’ alors qu’il ignore tout ou presque de l’activité littéraire réelle sur le continent africain” (While the dynamism of these so‐called ‘Francophone’ writers has the merit of bringing this literature to light on the European literary scene, it has also had the effect of focusing the public’s attention on writing by diasporic Africans. Today’s average readers will therefore believe they know about ‘African literature,’ when they know nearly nothing about the real literary activity taking place on the African continent).1
Do the many blind spots of Francophone studies therefore preclude any claims to insight by the field? Are our readings of Francophone works condemned to be mere misreadings of what we call Francophone Africa? An overview of the debates connected to Francophone works indicates the frequent reappearance of a number of key terms that, for better or worse, have long framed discussions of African cultural production. Perhaps chief among these are the stakes surrounding notions of political engagement and authenticity, two framing notions that have often proven more misleading than enlightening. Within these we may also include the oft‐debated language question, that is, whether African artists should create in European languages in view of reaching a global audience or commit to writing in African languages to privilege an African reception of their works. When defended to the letter, such requisites to African cultural production can result in circular debates, denying creative liberty to authors on one hand, and, on the other, leading readers to embark on a misguided and exoticizing quest for the truly “authentic” African creative spirit.
Perhaps a more productive approach is to address not how authors reflect the position of a prototypical authentic or politically conscious African creator, but rather how they problematize, redefine, and realign the prisms through which their works are read and understood. This allows us to interpret these works as acts of performance, a term that refers here to language’s ability to create new meaning and not merely to reflect a given reality. Lydie Moudileno provides an example of such a reading when, in discussing postcolonial authors of the Republic of Congo, she speaks of processes of postcolonial parading, which she describes as “un acte de profération identitaire qui passe par une théâtralisation – plus ou moins contrôlée – des corps et des images dans un espace particulier, et qui se pose en résistance à (ou en compétition avec) d’autres imaginaires et d’autres mises en scène auxquels le sujet substitue une auto‐fiction dont il s’approprie le contrôle” (an act of identity pronouncement that passes through a more or less controlled performativity of bodies and images within a particular space. This act takes place in resistance to (or in competition with) contending imaginations
