and rising Chinese industry and investment.
Perhaps among the most salient aspects of contemporary positions of political engagement by conviction is the nuanced stance authors take in relation to their own role as writers. Recent works on the treatment of historical memory, for example, continue to address the hidden episodes of a colonial past of violence, deconstructing official historical narratives without attempting to erect similarly univocal ones in their place. Authors such as Max Lobe, whose novel Confidences (2016) retraces the “secret war” of independence in Cameroon, recognize the wealth of historical and cultural heritage available in non‐written forms. His account of discovery, as a Cameroonian‐born writer living in Switzerland for many years, seeks to resurrect certain historical truths about the assassination of anticolonial leader Ruben Um Nyobe. It also gives voice to the character Ma Maliga and her experiences of the independence movement, weaving a multi‐temporal and multi‐vocal history from below. Throughout the novel, Lobe foregrounds the incongruity of his own position as the investigator‐novelist. Despite having been born in Cameroon and despite speaking the Bassa language, he is seen by his countrymen as an outsider, acculturated to a western mindset that limits and determines his understanding of the country’s past and present. His position betwixt and between Cameroonian and European identities complicates Lobe’s attempts, as a character in his own novel, to draw a clear‐eyed and critical assessment of the current injustices taking hold in the country.
Such an approach to historical memory evinces a will to uncover hidden acts of political oppression, while also reflecting on the possibility (or impossibility) of adopting a historical methodology without tripping over its attending historiographical pitfalls. One of these pitfalls, the predominance of the western archive in creating historical record and legitimizing authority, is evoked directly by Patrice Nganang’s novel Mont Plaisant (2011; Mount Pleasant, 2016), in which a fictional researcher who, like Lobe, is from Cameroon but lives abroad, this time in the United States, conducts research into the life of an elderly woman whose long life story includes becoming the 681st wife of Sultan Njoya. The novel is at once a historical fiction about life among this royal court in the early twentieth century and a reflection on coexisting but often disharmonious approaches to reconstructing history. An academically trained historian committed to the rigors of her field, the narrator struggles to depart from official history, critiquing her own position as one who is there to enforce the history and authority of dusty archives. Meanwhile she is confronted with the personal narrative of Sara, who declares her body an archive that contains and incarnates the very historical knowledge she seeks while also defying the limits of the academy’s knowledge‐making.
Lobe and Nganang are engaged writers in that they uncover new histories while deconstructing lies taken for truth about Africa’s past and present. However, they do so in a vein that is both politically engaged and self‐critical. Their works do not seek to define the contours of the authentic African novel, but they do include expectations, anxieties, and oversights related to notions of authenticity within their fictional worlds. In the end, the contemporary African authors we tend to read in the field of Francophone studies do not see themselves or their work within the strict confines of African cultural production. When Fiston Mwanza Mujila writes, in his debut novel Tram 83 (2014), about the fictional account of a city‐state that has revolted and declared its independence from a country that is not specified but could be taken for today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, it is clear that the sense of cosmopolitanism he portrays, detached from a deep sense of strictly national identity, is not specifically African but a phenomenon one finds in major cities throughout the world today, with increased divisions between the urban and rural driven by continued influxes to cities. It is as impossible to say that this is a strictly African story as it is to define what it means to be a specifically African story or author. This is a principal conviction of today’s creators as they resist expedient labels such as African, postcolonial, Francophone, and authentic.
As Nganang asks in his own Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine: pour une écriture préemptive (Manifesto for a new African literature: for a preemptive writing, 2007), calling to task an oversimplifying body of critical writing about African literature: “Au fond, est‐il possible de lire la littérature africaine, moins à partir de son inscription mimétique dans les réalités du continent, les géographies nationales, ou la conscience de ses lecteurs vrais ou potentiels, qu’à partir de son enracinement dans la vérité” (In the end, is it possible to read African literature less according to its mimetic inscription in the realities of the continent, its national geographies, or the consciousness of its real or potential readers, and more according to its rootedness in truth?) (Nganang 2007, 11). In so framing his appeal to a new approach to reading African literature, Francophone or otherwise, Nganang reminds us that language and, by extension, literature do much more than simply reflect a given reality. So must African writers aspire to more than representing to their readers what we might then come to understand as the given “truth” of the African continent. By contrast, the truth of which Nganang speaks proves far more universal, acknowledging the historical particularities of the past while allowing the African author to respond to it in active dialogue with the reader, history, and the world.
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