Here is an interesting discussion on the "Zunguzungu" blog that
includes consideration of how English and Swahili literature are
considered in Tanzania. Seen at
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/some-undeducated-speculations-on-the-african-novel-in-tanzania/
(via a Google alert).
Some Uneducated Speculations on "The African Novel" in Tanzania
Posted by zunguzungu on May 1, 2008
When I was still Tanzania, I greedily purchased the few African novels
that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores
that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people
and novels for Tanzanian students. I feel safe in saying that the
comparatively high level printing, binding, and prices of the former
pretty much limited those books to tourist and expatriate buyers (or
were certainly printed with that market in mind), while the very
specific pedagogical function of the latter confined their relevance
to a similarly particular sub-section of the Tanzanian population:
young people still in school. In the first category, you had both
canonical English literaturepenguin editions of D.H. Lawrence and so
forthand literary supplements to the tourist industry, stuff like
this with books like Out of Africa and Green Hills of Africa
straddling the gap. The second market was for novels used as
textbooks, a mixed bag which I'll look at in a moment. I was therefore
an eccentric purchaser, poorly served by either marketing strategy: I
was in search of an object, "the African novel," which hardly exists
as such in the local commercial consciousness.
When I asked for a good riwaya, on the other hand, older shopkeepers
would often direct me, without discriminating, towards both canonical
works of Swahili literature (especially pious stuff like Shabaan
Robert) and towards older popular Swahili writing like Dar es Salaam
Usiku (Dar es Salaam At Night, a sensationalist crime novel from the
eighties). Younger booksellers would either peg me as a tourist
(directing me towards Dineson or Hemingway), or, if my Swahili was
good that day, would have no particular interest in me at all. The
disconnect between older booksellers and younger ones could be quite
profound, and I would speculate that it had something to do with the
disconnect between Tanzania's socialist past and its neoliberal
present; when I looked for books by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's
independence-era socialist president, younger booksellers would let me
know that none were for sale, while some of the older book sellers not
only canvassed their acquaintances to find used copies for me (taking
great and unsolicited pains to repair the books' worn bindings with
cellotape) but, on several occasions, refused even to take money for
Mwalimu ("Teacher") Nyerere's books at all.
Most of the African novels in English I was able to buy, however, were
on the shelves because they were (or had been) on the national
education curriculum. And just as "the African novel" that is
construed and taught in the West includes neither Dar es Salaam Usiku,
Shabaan Robert, nor Julius Nyerere, so too does "the African novel"
that is taught in Tanzanian secondary schools also categorically
exclude such books. Swahili classes might use them (and that's why
they were there to be bought), but pupils would only read such
Tanzanian writers in a class meant to improve their facility with
literary Swahili; in their English classes, in contrast, the African
novel would be taught, novels written in English from across the
continent.
The ways that an English/Swahili curricular split implicitly separates
the Tanzanian writers from the "African" writers is suggestive, but I
draw the distinction only because it's already drawn in the
curriculum: ever since the education ministry began requiring that all
secondary school classes (except Swahili class) be taught in English,
Swahili writing gets parochialized at the same time that the global
utility of English is being increasingly emphasized. Tanzania is one
of the few African nations where virtually all business is conducted
in an indigenous African language while English is not widely used. So
the rationale behind the shift was partly that Tanzanians need to be
better trained to face global competition, and partly the coldly
pragmatic fact that there aren't even close to being enough schools to
meet the numbers of young Tanzanians that need to be educated
(requiring them to do high school work in English weeds enough of them
out of the system that the class sizes are simply enormous, rather
than catastrophic).
All this is background to some fairly reckless speculations I want to
make. First, it it seems reasonable to suggest that "the African
novel," as it's experienced in Tanzania, is a function of pedagogy in
a more specific way that I was arguing before: after purchasing all
the African novels I could get my hands on, I found myself
inadvertently completing a version of the high school English
curriculum. And since it was a function of the books taught in English
classes, this canon of "African novels" specifically excludes the
canon of Tanzanian novels for having been written in Swahili, creating
an interesting kind of distinction between "African" and "Tanzanian."
I wouldn't want to speculate on whether, or how, this kind of
distinction is actually perceived, or practiced, but it does seem
significant that while there's a reasonably broad tradition of
Tanzanian critical writing on Swahili literature, the critical
literature on Anglophone African writers is so dominated by the West
that the canon of African writers considered worth reading in Tanzania
look quite familiar to anyone who has ever taken a course in African
literature at a Western university.
I hesitate to chalk that up to critical readers independently
reproducing the same judgments of quality in both locations, but I'll
elaborate more on that in my next post. And, anyway, there were some
surprises. For one thing, the curriculum seemed to be all men (though
I was surprised to see a Swahili translation of Mariama Ba's Une Si
Longue Lettre for sale). But more than that, beyond the usual suspects
(Okot P'Bitek's Song of Lawino (1966), Achebe's Things Fall Apart
(1958 ) and A Man of the People (1966), and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep
Not, Child (1964)), I was struck by two odd additions: Peter Abrahams'
Mine Boy (1946) and Ferdinand Oyono's La Vie de Boy (1956, translated
as Boy! ). They're odd because you can see quite clearly why each of
the other texts are there: for the three East African nations, you've
got Okot P'Bitek for Uganda and Ngugi for Kenya (with Tanzania's third
slot across the hall in the Swahili class), for the novel by a woman
you've got Mariama Ba, and you've got Achebe simply because he's
indispensable. But not only are Mine Boy and Boy! texts from the
colonial era (and to me, they feel a lot more dated than the others),
but a rather different principle of selection suggests itself if you
compare their titles.
Which leads me back to continuing fascination with the ways the
"Africa novel" is conceptualized through reference to states of
immaturity (which I've been going on about already). In the case of
Oyono and Abrahams, the "boy" of the title is a member of the first
generation to leave the traditional home, the first to learn to read,
and the first to have a conception of the outside world. This plot, in
which the (inevitably male) protagonist becomes modern and literate at
the same time as he becomes alienated from the "traditional" world, is
a common plot structure among the writers of the late colonial and
early independence era. Yet it's also a very common way that African
writers conceptualized their status as writers. In Achebe's own
uber-canonized Things Fall Apart, for example, the novel's thematic
center is the decision by Okonkwo's oldest son to reject his father,
convert to Christianity, and go to school. Yet this decision is also,
in a very direct way, a formative event in Achebe's own family
history, which he was loosely fictionalizing: in the trilogy as he
originally imagined it (he changed his plans soon after) the first
novel would be about his grandfather's time, the second about his
father's, and the third about his own. In other words, Things Fall
Apart is not only a story about colonialism and traditional Igbo life,
but it narrates the first branch in the genealogy of Achebe as writer,
an originary moment defined by the rejection of the "traditionalism"
that Okonkwo is taken to represent.
Achebe, however, is not the only innovator here. Indeed, it would be
difficult to construct a meaningful timeline of the "African novel"
without accounting for the centrality of the trope connecting literacy
to the conditions of the novels` production themselves. Camara Laye's
first book, for example, L'Enfant Noir, (1953) is the story of a naïve
young Guinean gone to Paris to be educated, told in the nostalgic
register of an adult struggling to remember his lost childhood. He
remembers (in terms of great pathos) the moment when he forgot the
totem animal of his childhood, and the final image of the novel is the
deracinated young writer, standing in the Paris metro, struggling to
make sense of a metro map. He uses Flaubert's Sentimental Education as
his model, in other words, in order to perform the adult writer's
struggled remembrance of his childhood, a time defined by his
not-yet-being-a-writer. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's first published novel was
Weep Not, Child, a meditation on the meaning of European education in
the midst of the Mau Mau rebellion which puts narrative pressure on
the challenges of competing visions of manhood offered to the young
Njeroge. Does one seek adulthood in the forest with a machete or in
the schools with a pen? A large part of Ngugi's subsequent career
would be spent struggling to reconcile the choice both he and his
protagonist made (to choose the pen) with the road not taken, the
"traditionalist" anti-colonial resistance figured by Mau Mau. And Amos
Tutuola's first published novel (The Palm Wine Drinkard, 1952) is not
only about the search for maturity occasioned by the death of the
protagonist's father (in which he leaves home, acquires a wife,
confronts his mortality, etc), but, as I wrote here, its publication
was rendered legible in the Western publishing media through a
discourse on the youth of the African aesthetic (the novel, said Dylan
Thomas, was written in "Young English").
I could keep going on; not only is Wole Soyinka's most popular book
his Aké: The Years of Childhood, but Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, and
Nuruddin Farah's Maps carried the trend into the eighties. But what
interests me is the way that each of these texts, like Ferdinand
Oyono's La Vie de Boy and Peter Abrahams' Mine Boy are discussions of
traditionalism that take, as their point of reference, a
de-tribalizing African society (arguing for something by taking it's
existence for granted). Oyono's La Vie de Boy, for example, pairs the
protagonist's failure to be circumcised (his status as "boy" in
traditional terms) with the racial pejorative "boy" to make of this
immaturity a kind of privileged status within a modernizing African, a
society "young" in development terms yet, as growing and full of
potential, clearly differentiated from the merely tribal society of
its elders. In Peter Abrahams' Mine Boy, the "boys" who work in South
Africa's mines are used to figure the rising urban proletariat,
displacing their traditional elders on the basis of the "modern"
knowledge they acquire there and standing as representative of the
future of South Africa precisely because they are boys. These novels,
in other words, use the trope of the "boy" as a way of talking about
the very practices of literacy in which they themselves are becoming
privileged objects. They not only theorize about the role of writing,
education, and literacy within a variety of modernizing African
societies but they are, themselves, the texts through which these
theories are practiced.
While the experience of the educated son displacing his "traditional"
father was a common experience during both the colonial and early
independence era, education and learning to read in English have not
ceased to imply a profound class and generational alienation
throughout sub-Saharan Africa (and, more specifically, in Tanzania).
Broadly painting education as a "colonial" project doesn't really help
us conceptualize its continuing social function, of course. But I do
think a focus on the continuing political meaning that seems to give
the "boy" figure its privileged place in the educational curriculum
helps illustrate why colonial-era texts focused on the trials and
tribulations of the modernization project would still have such
resonance, why the work they do might still be considered valuable
pedagogical practice. And this line of thought makes me look at the
current vogue in African "boy soldier" novels and memoirs with a
certain amount of suspicion. If the "boy" novel had a certain meaning
in a time when the West could still, without self-consciousness,
imagine Africans as culturally young, what does it mean today that
books like A Long Way Gone, God Grew Tired of Us, Beasts of No Nation,
Johnny Mad Dog, and What is the What? assume such a large portion of
the West's small market for writing about Africa?
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