Last week found myself mulling over African literature as I read the newspaper. The story which caught my eye was the torture of a UK resident in Morocco at the instigation of the CIA who believed he was a high-ranking terrorist. The man was later flown to Guantanamo Bay and further torture ensued.
Last week found myself mulling over African literature as I read the newspaper. The story which caught my eye was the torture of a UK resident in Morocco at the instigation of the CIA who believed he was a high-ranking terrorist. The man was later flown to Guantanamo Bay and further torture ensued.
Reading the details gave me a chill of recognition and it took me a while to realize what it was: the story sounded amazingly similar to the events depicted in Wahome Mutahi’s book Three days on the cross about the torture of suspected dissidents by the Kenyan police.
That book was a work of fiction but it was obviously based on true events. What the stories had in common was the sheer irrationality of the mindset of the torturer and the complete helplessness of the tortured: the two of them caught in a deadly dance from which the latter inevitably emerges broken.
Although Mutahi was a gifted writer- his Daily Nation column was brilliant - Three days on the cross is a disappointment as a work of fiction. It takes a subject that African writers have returned to repeatedly- repressive governments- but fails to give this topic the in-depth and multi-dimensional treatment it deserves.
The reader doesn’t get any insight into how and why repression becomes such an indispensable makeup of the state. As much as I hate to criticize the work of a departed genius like Mutahi, my criticism is leading me on to a wider point.
It seems to me that the bulk of African literature has been too excessively focused on two key themes: dictatorial governments and the identity crisis flowing from colonialism. These themes have often been tackled well especially the latter.
Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s The River between are both brilliant works of literature that capture that in-between point where a society is irrevocably transformed. How do people react to alien ideas?
How easily does the fabric of society tear once faced with foreign influence? How do two completely different cultures mesh? These are the kind of issues that these books deal with very well.
There has also been an extensive focus on the totalitarian governments that have tragically characterised post-independence Africa.
In the case of books like Wa Thiongo’s Devil on the cross, there are interesting insights into how the corruption from the top permeates to those ruthless and immoral enough to make their way into the world at whatever cost.
Somewhat related to this are the plethora of books that deal with Africa at war- a more recent example being Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a yellow sun set during the Biafra war in Nigeria.
However I think that there are many aspects of post-Colonial Africa that have been largely absent from the literary landscape. It is the ordinary day-to-day existence of people- a continent that is acutely aware of the past but living very much in the present.
With Africa now largely at peace and with less political repression than ever before, there is plenty of terrain still left unexplored. There needs to be a conscious effort not to have our literature forever weighed down by themes of colonialism and post-colonial repression.
There are endless issues of identity, culture and class that should be explored as Africa embraced twenty-first century. Of course that doesn’t mean a focus on happy stories-One obvious example is the endemic poverty that afflicts the majority of the continent’s inhabitants and this doesn’t appear to be a central preoccupation for Africa’s writers.
Literature has to be a profound way of expressing the human condition, but the lives of the very poorest among us are virtually ignored.
The Dickensian nightmare of the average street kid is virtually absent from Africa’s literary canon. The flip-side to that is of course rise of the upper class. As income inequalities grow wider, the kind of people depicted by American novelists Tom Wolfe and Brett Easton Ellis are now fairly common in any major African city.
There can be few topics as ripe for literary dissection as the new upper class. Although it lends itself to satire as Wolfe and Ellis proved, there are very serious issues to be explored.
As the older generation makes way for the new, Africa needs its writers to chronicle the full range of the continent’s present situation.
Non-fiction books on Africa are necessarily constrained by their subject (whether historical, economic, political or otherwise) Fiction on the other hand can soar above that and leave a permanent mark for posterity.
It is not a luxury, but a window into a society’s soul. Writers might not be able to change the world, but they can bear witness and that in its own way is very important.