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THESIS

2001

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5’08 K'lProleccauPrelelRC/Dateouorindd

BETWEEN AFRICAN WRITERS AND HEINEMANN EDUCATIONAL
PUBLISHERS: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF A CULTURE INDUSTRY

By

Olabode lbironke

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2008

ABSTRACT

BETWEEN AFRICAN WRITERS AND HEINEMANN EDUCATIONAL
PUBLISHERS: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF A CULTURE INDUSTRY

By
Olabode lbironke

The dissertation undertakes a new approach to the study of African literature,
which it derives from the interdisciplinary ﬁeld of enquiry associated ﬁrst and foremost
with Lucien Febvre and his I’histoire du livre (The History of the Book). It examines the
role of media production technology, the impact of the printing industry, editorial theory
and practice, the socio-economic dynamics of publishing, and the survival of books in
relation to changes in social structure. It argues that we can understand the historical
changes in the African world by reading those changes primarily through the prism of the
history of literary production. By exploring the historical context for the emergence and
decline of the African Writers Series, a series dedicated to the publication of African
authors by the British publishing house of Heinemann Educational Books, the
dissertation formulates a paradigm for understanding socio-historical changes in Aﬁ‘ica.
It demonstrates how knowledge of the historical and political contexts of the production
of literature, the material life that publishers, authors and products inhabit, and the
international and transcultural dynamics of production and transmission necessarily

challenge the conventional understanding of literary texts.

The dissertation identiﬁes the speciﬁc characteristics that the various markets in
which the African Writers Series was circulated engendered in the texts. That is, how

writing for an educational market, or general market, or even trade market affected the

consciousness of the writers, and the dynamics and function of textual production. It
posits that the worldliness of African literature as a product of dispersion and
dissemination through international travel and marketing effectively ushers in a post-
authenticity moment of African and Postcolonial literature that moves away from a
culture—based to a market-based theory of literature. It performs a reading of literature by
tracking author/publisher relations within the contexts of the production and reception
and concludes by proposing the term international literature as a postcolonial re-
appropriation of the Marxian appropriation of the term “world literature.” Working from
this theory of literary production, the thesis offers a fresh approach to canonical and non-
canonical texts of modern African literature by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka, T.M Aluko, Thomas Akare, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Olaudah Equiano, among

others.

C0pyn'ght by
Olabode lbironke
2008

Dedication

To my wife Funmi,
To my daughter Abigail,
And to my Mother Abigail:
To all whose beauty, love and wisdom have made my life worthwhile

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Introduction ............................................................................................ 1
Chapter Two -
The Commonwealth Period of Aﬁican Literature .............................................. 20
Chapter Three

Ibadan: Postcolonial City and the Antecedents of The Aﬁ'ican Writers Series. . . . . . . . 60

Chapter F our
Postcolonial Publishing: Editorial Practice, Authenticity and the Condition of
Translation ......................................................................................... 110

Chapter Five
International Literature: Marketing Sensibilities and The Crisis of Writing .............. 168

Works
Cited ................................................................................................. 1 89

Chapter One
Introduction

In 2003, Becky Clarke announced regretfully through the H-Net list on African
Literature and Cinema Heinemann’s decision to discontinue the African Writers Series.
No sooner had this decision been public had ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey aired plans to
digitally archive the entire Series as a Literature Collection. These apparent transitions
and transformations, eclipse and reappearance of the African Series, along with an
opportunity offered through my work with certain readers for Heinemann in the United
States academy, stimulated my curiosity to investigate, in Derridian formulation “why
and how do the [culture industry], the editorial process, and memory in general practice
their hierarchies, in terms of a body, a corpus, a problematic, a thematization, a language
or an author” (“Canons and Metonymies” in Logomachia: The Conﬂict of the Faculties,
1992: 198). The production of the Series by itself, and of cultural production in general,
is reﬂective of a selective procedure that attests to the power of an established regime of
taste and judgment. At the same time, however, the movements of textual objects in and
out of currency within a cultural milieu serve as indices of the evanescence of aesthetic
and cultural artifacts. A study of the reasons for the eclipse of the Series undertaken in
this dissertation necessarily reveals the “philosophical, institutional, editorial, or
political” (Derrida: 199) factors that aggregated to make the Series possible. In other
words, the study highlights what Appadurai has demonstrated: how the circulation of
(literary) objects cannot be separated from prevalent social, political and cultural norms;

how book production could be argued to operate according to and/or induce cultural

designs (11).

As a comprehensive and original examination of the matrices of the formation of
the canon of African literature, constituted in large part through the Series of literary
publications by Heinemann Educational Books that was promoted through a network of
ofﬁces that connected London, Ibadan, Nairobi and New Hampshire, the dissertation
proposes a reading of literature to be performed by tracking author/publisher relations
within the contexts of the production and reception of the Series from its inception in
1962 to the end of its golden age in 1984. It assumes that the preeminent and unique
place occupied by both the publishing house of Heinemann, which produced an
enormous portion of the literatures of post-independent Africa, Asia, the Caribbean
Islands, the Middle East and the Paciﬁc, as well as the African Writers Series, position
them as the necessary sites for the development of a theory of literary production that
potentially bears signiﬁcant implications for literary studies in the ﬁelds of Subaltem,
Minority, Postcolonial, Transatlantic and Global literary studies.

The core of the project is in the attempt to view the literary text from the point of
view of the material history of its production. In other words, the necessity of the
dissertation derives from two major silences in the ﬁeld of African literary criticism: ﬁrst,
the silence on the signiﬁcance of how pedagogical and institutional moments propelled
and appropriated literature in Africa; and second, the general absence of an approach to
literature understood in relation to its material history and the imperatives of the cultural
institutions and industries of its production. These silences have occurred, as I argue,
precisely because not much literary criticism has been informed by editorial criticism and

the history of publishing, or the History of the Book. The dissertation is thus innovative

in its attempts to reverse this situation and to bring together the varied streams of
criticism generated by professional academics and editors.

The dissertation explores a new and interdisciplinary approach to the study of
African literature, which it derives from the interdisciplinary ﬁeld of enquiry associated
ﬁrst and foremost with Lucien Febvre and his I’histoire du Iivre (The History Of T he
Book). This approach examines the role of media production technology, the impact of
the printing industry, reading habits, editorial theory and practice, the socio—economic
dynamics of publishing, and the survival of books in relation to change in social
structure. The larger question that the dissertation attempts to impact by adopting this
approach is the following: Could we understand the historical changes in the Aﬁican
world by reading those changes primarily through the prism of the history of literary
production? In other words, could one view the process of literary production and the
process of the making of modern Africa as cognate processes? By exploring the historical
context for the emergence of the African Writers Series, a Series dedicated to the
publication of Aﬁican authors by the British publishing house of Heinemann Educational
Books, the dissertation aims to understand the reasons for its eclipse in a deeper effort to
formulate a paradigm for understanding socio-historical changes in Africa.

The Series maintained an extraordinary success until 1985, which made it
arguably the preeminent postcolonial literary collection. James Currey, editorial director
at Heinemann Educational Books between 1967 and 1984 and manager of the Aﬁican
Writers Series, described the success in the following way: “[The Aﬁ'ican Writers Series]
became, partly accidentally, an exploitative part of Heinemann’s strategy in Aﬁica.

Again and again it gave Heinemann a presence which seemed far greater than the real

size and strength of the ﬁrm. It was a key factor in enabling Heinemann to seize
educational contracts from under the noses of established companies with a far longer
presence than upstart Heinemann” (quoted in Caroline Davis: 2005: 234). The enabling
context of the Series was constituted, in part, by the hangover from British imperialism
and colonial education. This context, the dissertation suggests, guaranteed against the
grain of the Series that their initial function, along with those of other “Third World”
Literatures in English, was ﬁrst and foremost the securing of the global triumph of the
English language, the aid it gave to the fostering of the British Commonwealth project
and the cultural dominance of Englishness, which in return afforded the writers
international recognition. The parallel emergence of cosmopolitan centers of artistic
production in a number of African cities such as Ibadan, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, the
particular atmosphere of the postcolonial/post—independent city, similar to those of Paris
and London, the dissertation argues, served to provide the main thoroughfares for artistic
creativity and added vital material, imaginative and international dimensions to the
character of African literary texts.

Codifying a moment of intense cultural outreach and of the internationalization of
African literary production, the Series was as much a function of globalized regimes of
political, economic and educational institutions, as it was also a direct consequence of the
activities of international publishers and educators. Through an examination of editorial
notes and criticisms, readers’ responses and correspondences in the Publisher’s archive,
extensive interviews with publishers and writers, reviews of the works of academic

critics, and a symptomatic reading of literary texts, the dissertation draws a portrait of the

processes of literary production as a whole, which constitute what Theodore Adorno,
from the standpoint of Marxist literary theory, calls a “culture industry.”

The dissertation insists on emphasizing the importance of redeﬁning the nature,
raison d’étre and function of [African] literature in a way that is informed by the
contingencies of its production and reproduction. It advances the proposition that
literature must be read neither as a medium, nor as an expression, but as the continuous
manifestation of complex relations. Such a redeﬁnition could provide an aperture through
the labyrinthine paths of entanglement of Africa and the world based on a ﬁrndamental
understanding of the relations of production of African literature. In conducting this
research, I have consulted the Heinemann Educational Books archives, held at the
University of Reading, England, which include Radio and Newspaper Reviews of the
African Writers Series, literary reviews and interviews, as well as editorial comments and
readers reports.

Because a majority of the writers from Africa that are most widely available and
read either as part of a curriculum or for pleasure across the world have been brought
forward by an International publisher, the study of the author-publisher relationships,
editorial comments and readers’ reports, rules of publication concerning format and style,
would greatly illuminate the most enduring questions in the study of modern African
literature: Did the avenue of international publishing dictate the imperative of writing in
European languages? For whom does the African write? Were there pressures from
“outside” on the writer to make certain aesthetic choices? The ultimate problem of
classiﬁcation of African literature today as World literature rather than as National

literature, the more conventional classiﬁcation, poses the question of how the history of

the literature addresses the experience of cosmopolitanism, which is becoming the single
most important philosophical concern of the moment.

Of relevance to the metaphysics of African writing is what W.E.B. Du Bois called
the contradiction of “the double-aimed struggle of the black artisan” who on the one hand
feels the burden to articulate the truth of his existence, an already “twice-told tale” to the
(white) world, and at the same time to address his art to that world in such a way that
seeks to “escape contempt.” Beyond this double aim, the study identiﬁes a multiplicity of
aims and strategies that are difﬁcult to put together under neat categories. Contrary to Du
Bois, the study construes the effects of multiple aims not as something that “could only
result in making him [the black artisan] a poor craftsman,” but something that allows the
texts to acquire the status of an international literature as opposed to world literature in
the conventional sense of classics of non-westem literature.

The stakes in this repositioning of African literature through an understanding of
the conditions of the production of African Writers Series are a new focus on the writer’s
relation to his/her world situated primarily within the context of the intricate networks of
personal and institutional relations connecting a broad spectrum of international
locations. In this sense, the study extends one of the major concerns of contemporary
literary theory in interrogating international organizations as sites for understanding the
interconnection between literary imagination and “the world” and its complex interplay
of economics, politics and culture. The result is the appreciation of the value of
relationality as an analytical tool. Works by Michel Foucault, who adopted relationality

for his study of western institutions of power and Pierre Macherey, who reinvented it in

his study of the materiality of the text in A Theory of Literary Production, serve as the
points of departure.

In Ethics, Institutions and The Right to Philosophy (2002), Jacques Derrida
addressed those aspects of Kantian philosophy dealing with the relationship between
politics [conﬂicts] and writing, cosrnopolitanisrn institutions and modern subjecthood,
thus pointing to the challenges of a study of writing in Africa that illuminates and attests
to the institutional, philosophical, political and aesthetic judgments that create and shape
the literatures of Africa, and perhaps, the idea of Aﬁica itself. The institutions,
philosophies, traditions and sensibilities at stake are reciprocally transformed by the
literatures. This is why Derrida’s contribution to the institutional turn in contemporary
thought, which is also interestingly an intemationalist turn, is signiﬁcant for creating the
possibility of connecting Kant’s writings on aesthetics with his political writings, and for
bringing into focus, within the metaphysics and economy of knowledge production, the
place of international institutions such as the United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In posing the question of the right to philosophy from a cosmopolitan point of
view, Derrida ﬁrst asks, “where?, in what place, can a question take place?” The form of
this question, he argues suggests “a sort of implicit contract, a supposed afﬁnity, as if a
question should always be ﬁrst authorized by a place, legitimated in advance by a
determined space that makes it both rightful and meaningful, thus rendering it possible
and by the same token necessary, both legitimate and inevitable” (2002z2). But why is
UNESCO such a place of privilege for posing the question of philosophy? Derrida argues

that because philosophy has never had “one sole memory,” the “deﬁnition of a

philosophical task and of a right to philosophy should be formulated in its cosmopolitan,
and therefore international or interstate dimension” (5). This cosmopolitan dimension is
what UNESCO prescribes in its charter, thus contracting a commitment, which it is duty-
bound to uphold, between states and peoples, “to provide the philosophical culture or
education that is required for understanding and putting into operation these
commitments made to the international institutions” (4). Similarly, this dissertation is
based on the premise that organizations such as the Commonwealth, the British Council,
the United States Information Service, and most important, international publishers such
as Heinemann Educational Books, none of which has received the kind of theoretical
attention that Derrida gives to UNESCO, can be brought under the same rubric of an
international and cosmopolitan commitment to sharing a “culture and philosophical
language.” From the moment of their existence on, “they are committed to make possible,
i ﬁrst and foremost by means of education, the access to this language and culture” (3).
Indeed, the aspect of UNESCO’s purposes and ﬁmctions not addressed by Derrida
but which his analysis impacts, is the role of UNESCO as an international publishing
house, with about 120 titles annually under its imprint, a ﬁmction that brings UNESCO in
direct relation with Heinemann Educational Books with which it not only co-published
some of its literary works from Africa and elsewhere but also competed for manuscripts
for its own African Authors Series, published under its Collection of Representative
Works program. At least two of UNESCO’s stated purposes and functions also express

HEB’s own overall operations in Africa, that is, to:

1) Give fresh impulse to popular education and to the spread of culture

2) Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge: By initiating methods of international
cooperation calculated to give the people of all countries access to the printed and
published materials produced by any of them.

The purposes and functions articulated by UNESCO coincide with those of HEB
as Alan Hill’s autobiography (1998) shows. The emergence of the publication of the
African Writers Series, marks a transforrnative moment in the history of British and
postcolonial publishing, because coming at a time when the school systems implanted by
colonialism had grown into vastly expanding school markets, leading to the conviction of
most foreign publishing houses that the only market in Africa was for educational
textbooks, it was unusual to ﬁnd a publishing house at the time that was not an
educational publisher, and most of all, for that educational publisher to take on the task of
publishing ﬁction for school use and general readership. Thus, the publication of the
Series was an adventure, a revolutionary act, at least from the point of view of Alan Hill.
The publication came from a “radical, nonconformist, missionary ethos outraged” (In
Pursuit of Publishing: 123) by the fact that “big British publishers regarded West Africa
only as a place where you sold books, not where you published them.” According to Hill,
“the idea that you could publish books by African authors, and especially by creative
writers, had not yet occurred to these great houses. . .. They were taking their proﬁts out
of West Africa, and putting nothing back in the way of investment in local publishing and
encouraging of local authors” (122-3). Thus HEB, like UNESCO encouraged local
authors, gave fresh impulse to literary education and the spread of culture: an increase
and diffusion of knowledge that made available to people of different African counties,

literatures produced by their own writers. This demiurgic act makes HEB the institutional

space where the question of literature in book form, modern literature in Aﬁica, is both
legitimate and inevitable.

Having put in relief the question of the place where the question of modern
literature in Africa ought to occur, the question of textual production as such then must be
presently posed. One of the theoretical models for this work, as already stated, is Pierre
Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production. If ever critical attention ought to be paid to
the text’s lack of complete awareness “of the means of its own realization [or] of what it
is doing” (27), it is in this context of the multiple exigencies of production and
consumption of international literature. This crucial and most important discovery by
Macherey of the textual unconscious springs directly from an approach that views the
text neither as a sole creation of itself nor of the author but as a product of a complex
process of total production in which both the text and the author participate, albeit as
essential parts. Every theory of literary production proceeds from and arrives at the
principle explicated by Macherey that the “book is always the site of an exchange: its
autonomy and its coherence are bought at the price of that otherness, which can also be,
on occasion, an alteration. A true reading, one which knows how to read and knows what
reading is, ignores none of this multiplicity” (100). Macherey demonstrates all the
dangers of book history and production theory approaches. By focusing on the process
rather than the human agents, they become impersonal, and by implying a necessary
relation between creativity and material processes, they become determined. His attempt
to grapple with these methodological limitations is rather quite interesting:

We could account for this latent knowledge (which necessarily exists, since
without it the work would be accomplished no further than if the explicit

10

conditions were not realized) by recourse to the unconscious of the work (not of

the author). But this unconscious does not perform as an understudy—on the

contrary, it arises in the interior of the labour itself: there it is at work—nor as an
extension of the explicit purpose, since it derives from a completely different
principle. Neither is it a question of another consciousness: the consciousness of
another or others, or the other consciousness of the same thing. There is no
understudy creative-unconscious to the creative pseudo-consciousness: if there is
an unconscious it cannot be creative, in so far as it precedes all production as its
condition. It is a question of something other than consciousness: what we are
seeking is analogous to that relationship which Marx acknowledges when he
insists on seeing material relations as being derived from the social infrastructure
behind all ideological phenomena, not in order to explain these phenomena as
emanations from the infrastructure, which would amount to saying that the
ideological is the economic in another form: whence the possibility of reducing

the ideological to the economic (92-3).

The tortuous route Macherey has taken in order to avoid the reductive fallacy
speaks to how treacherous materialist and contingency theories could be. How is one to
acknowledge the relationship between literary creativity and the infrastructures of
publishing, mass media, school systems, libraries, club houses and other social
networking facilities that constitute and enhance those channels through which literature
is disseminated and not credit the enabling mechanisms and conditions with the ultimate
power of realization of the text at the expense of the author? Keenly aware of the
caricature of vulgar Marxism, and determined to wrest Marx away from economic
determinism, Macherey struggles to resolve this theoretical impasse inherent in the
original hierarchy between matter and spirit, between infra and super-structure. He
reafﬁrrns with Marx on the one hand that material relations derive from social
infrastructure, that is, the particular conﬁguration of social infrastructure determines the
possibilities of relations but declines on the other hand to accept the implication that
ideology therefore derives directly from the infrastructure. Rather than attempt to hold

off the implications of taking social inﬁ'astructure as a given in a theory of literary and

11

ideological production, this dissertation assumes that infrastructures, authors, texts etc,
stand in relation to and not “behind” one another in such a way that one is neither
precedent nor causative to another, but that the possibilities of one is already engendered
in the processes and conditions of possibility of another. All are “products” of all.
However, seeking not to reduce the unconscious of the text to an epiphenomenon or
substratum, Macherey leaves it as the noncreative condition of textual production. By
noncreative, Macherey avoids the traps of Psychoanalysis and Marxism yet allows us an
understanding of the inner workings of creativity and role of publishers, etc. of the
culture industry as a non creative support of creativity, which even the self reﬂexivity of
a text cannot recognize.

The dangers of accounting for creativity via the material conditions of production
have been evident for example in scholarship on Shakespeare. Reconstructions of the
conditions of textual production in Elizabethan England such as presented in In Search of
Shakespeare (2004) much as they enrich understandings of the text, also open up the
speculations as to whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays credited to him, or
whether the texts were products of collaboration or beneﬁted from multiple
improvisations from outstanding actors employed by Companies that produced
Shakespeare etc. This tendency to second guess the authors or appear to diminish their
geniuses is the least desirable aspect of the book history approach. Yet the approach
enables access into certain dimensions of discourses and relationships that illuminate the
perspectives which the text assumes. In the archive one ﬁnds letters between editors and
authors in which both articulate a clear sense of their operational and philosophical

trajectories. Keith Sambrook’s letter, for instance, describing the publisher’s role in the

12

development of a new canon of literature in Aﬁica, cited in chapter one, is crucial in
understanding the imperatives of educational publishing in relation to the selection of
texts in the series. The suppressed portions of Soyinka’s preface form the point of entry
to the questions of modernism and the critique of the educational criteria and the
institutions of production and consumption of African literature. Here and there one ﬁnds
statements that are to be found nowhere else in the entire oeuvres of the authors. In the
very early stages of Ngugi’s writing, he, like Nurudin Farah and Bessie Head, displays a
penchant for engaging his publishers in personal correspondence that seems to offer a
justiﬁcation for his writing:

You remember the talk Judith, you and I had over the novel in Aﬁica at one of

your pubs. I said that the great novel from Africa must take count of the impact of

Aﬁican nationalism, that it seemed to me this one big movement that has affected

the lives of so many millions could not possibly be left out of any creative writing

that aimed at capturing the whole vision of Aﬁica. African writers to-day stand in
relation to their community, in the same position as the late 19thc. Russian
novelists, the Elizabethan writers (16th C) and Greek dramatists (5m BC) - who
gave expression to the emotional and intellectual consciousness of their society
poised between the past and a new era. Whether African writers will have as
bigger hearts as their counterparts, remains yet to be seen. Of those writing now,

Achebe has the best chance of doing this, if he lets his heart go. (12-10- 64 James

Ngugi to Keith Sambrook)

While conversations like the above broaden the scope of speculations about the
purpose, function and meaning of literary texts and the comparative ﬁeld within which
they operate, other documents in the production ﬁles of the authors are far more
deﬁnitive in the way they impact our understanding of the challenges facing the writers.
Achebe’s unpublished article buried in his ﬁle entitled “Publishing in Africa: A Writer’s

View” remains one of the most provocative and thorough reﬂections on the subject of

Aﬁican publishing. Achebe asserts, “when we speak of the book trade we blur the

13

difference between merchandizing and a very delicate process of bringing one mind into
communion with the mind of his fellows. This process is not akin to the cloth trade or the
beer trade. When I put on a shirt I am not in communion with the factory hand who made
the yarn, nor even with the tailor who sewed it (especially if it is mass-produced). When I
drink, I do not think of the man in the brewery who saw the bottle ﬁll with lager or
pressed the button that sealed the cap. But when I read, somebody is talking to me; and
when I write, I am talking to somebody. It is a personal, even intimate, relationship” (2).
Publishers, booksellers, critics, as intermediaries, however, cannot merely be “mindless
conduits or a conveyor belt” but must be a part of the same “historic and social
continuum” that writers share with their community of an “unarticulated feeling of a
shared destiny, a journey toward the future” (6). Achebe’s sense of the role of the
publisher in Africa requires that he no longer be a catalyst but a part of an “organic
interaction” between writer, publisher [middlemen] and audience that responds to “the
possibilities and dynamics of change”(9). He therefore concludes that “It stands to reason
that he cannot play this role from London or Paris or New York” (7).

These amorphous materials which might rather be considered print culture or
publishing history have signiﬁcant implications for literary theory. If nothing else, they
provide a relevant context for understanding the general politics of writing. As Peter
Shillingsburg put it:

But while that may seem to sufﬁce for structuralists busily sweeping away textual

surfaces, it is clear that semiotic and reader response critics might proﬁt from

knowing what editors, who have traced composition, text transmission, and
relations between publishers and authors, can tell us about the context that an

author brings to utterance in the act of creating a work of art. Clearly, it makes a
difference not only what particular text we are responding to but also what we

14

know about the creation and provenance of that text. (Scholarly Editing in the
Computer Age: 26-7)

Shillingsburg succinctly articulates the signiﬁcance of the argument of this dissertation
that literature must be understood in relation to the history and imperatives of the cultural
institutions and industries that produced it. This, indeed, is what is mostly glossed over in
contemporary theory since not much of literary criticism has been informed by editorial
criticism and the history of publishing. The few that have attempted this in African
literary criticism like Adele King’s Rereading Camara Laye, Charles Lawson’s The
Ordeal of the African Writer and The African Writers Handbook published by Hans Zell,
among others, have all focused exclusively on authorship and the cultural imperialism of
publishing. Nevertheless, the dissertation is not an institutional critique but a critique of
institutional productions of literature and literary products. It attempts to maintain a right
balance between institutional and textual critique, which forms the primal concern of
literary study. This equation Derrida highlights in relation to philosophy,

Although philosophy [read literature] does not amount to its institutional or

pedagogical moments, it is obvious that all the differences in the tradition, style,

language, and philosophical nationality are translated or incamated in institutional
or pedagogical models, and sometimes even produced by these structures

(primary and secondary school, university, research institutions. (14)

This dissertation, in elaborating the process of literary production in Africa,
adopts a method of periodization not based on chronology, but on developmental or
evolutionary stages of the publication. This paradigm, deployed by Michel Foucault in
describing the social-life of the “apparatus”—a term that recalls Althusser (that is,
mechanisms of govemmentality, systems of constraints, ensembles of techniques or

strategies), holds that apparatuses emerge within a set of local situations from urgent

needs which are very quickly erased or overshadowed as the apparatus undergoes

15

strategic elaboration in its diffused presence within the social body. The ﬁnal stage of the
development of the apparatus is the stage of its strategic completion, its overall
dominance through minimal exertion. However, the process of the eclipse of an apparatus
is the least explained in Foucault. The life of an apparatus breaks off suddenly and
completely like a line that is terminated when another intersects it. This is the essence of
the archeological method, aspects of which this project will synchronize with
Winckelmman’s theory and history of art. Winckelmman also divides the social life of a
work of art into three stages, namely: the stage in which it begins as a necessity, the stage
where it perfects beauty and the ﬁnal superﬂuous stage. More than a mere literary history
or an archeology of aesthetic form, this project gives archeology a genealogical edge in
characterizing the various developments within the Series, in Geoffrey Hartman’s terms,
as the history of the interrelationship between Genius, genius and genius loci, that is, the
power relationship between the writer, the history of writing behind him and the spirit of
the place in which he writes, its Zeitgeist.

The dissertation is divided into ﬁve chapters. The introductory chapter deals with
the theoretical considerations for the formulation of a theory of literary production in
Africa. The second chapter examines the years between 1962 and 1968, in which
Evander (Van) Milne (1962-63) and Keith Sarnbrook (1963-68) served as African
publishers at HEB. The orientation of the Series during these years was strictly tilted
toward educational publishing in the British tradition, and the editorial policies
conformed to the educational criteria. It so happens that the educational criteria for the
selection of ﬁctional works were not simply imposed; they underscored the mutual
interest of authors and publisher in an enlightemnent conception of the nature and

function of writing. Through an examination of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting

16

Narratives, Achebe’s “Novelist as Teacher,” No Longer at Ease and other writings by
Aﬁican writers that suggest an investment in enlightenment, the chapter reveals how the
Series ﬁtted into the larger cultural and political projects of The British Commonwealth
precisely because of the educational criteria.

The third chapter plots an alternative genealogy of African writing which already
manifested in the writings that preceded the Series and that thematize and problematize
Aﬁican modernity, the emergence of the postcolonial city and the crisis of nationhood.
These concerns ﬁnd their best expressions in the novels and poetry of Wole Soyinka,
Christopher Okigbo, Ayi Kwei Armah et al. The appearance of these writings in the
Series coincided with the appointment of James Currey as the African publisher at HEB
in 1968 and represents a signiﬁcant shift from educational publishing to general
publishing. It explores the aesthetic requirements of general publishing within the context
of the emergence of cosmopolitan centers of artistic production in a number of African
cities such as Ibadan, Nairobi, and Johannesburg in particular, it focuses on the speciﬁc
history in Ibadan of Mbari Productions, which had ﬁrst published locally the writers that
Heinemann Educational Books would later help to canonize through the Series as authors
of African, Postcolonial and World literature. It demonstrates that the particular
atmosphere of the postcolonial/post-independent city, the admixture of its political and
cultural histories, served as the main enabler of artistic creativity and added vital material
and imaginative dimensions to the production of the African Writers Series during the
period from 1968 to 1984. Theorizing the relationship between the postcolonial city and
literary production is conducted against the backdrop of works such as Raymond

Williams’ The Country and The City (1975) and Sylvia Beach’ Shakespeare and

17

Company as a way of highlighting parallels between literary production in the metropolis
and the postcolony.

The fourth chapter examines archival materials in an attempt to read the ﬁnal
versions of the literary texts for invisible texts. A critique of readers reports and “foul
matter” demonstrate a search for authenticity that paradoxically represented the changing
attitudes at the time of independence when it became ideologically expedient for liberal
politics to promote authentic African voices and African self representation, voices which
at the same time had to be kept distinct and pristine, in order to demonstrate a break from
colonial domination. It examines Shillingsburg’s claim that “editors have almost always
seen their roles as assistants in the author’s quest for the ideal text—the text the author
wishes the public to have” (76). It examines the role of the editor in relation to the
condition of translation.

The ﬁfth and concluding chapter examines the publisher’s entrepreneurial role in
the marketing of African literature, as one that is more important than “tinkering” with
manuscripts. His or her genius, like that of a sailor, must manifest in an aptitude for
predicting the currents and the tides of the market place and of the culture that could
either propel or turn against a particular publication. This is the moment of decision that
the publisher is always to encounter. In this chapter, we also access the language of
publishing, how the “market” represents the absolute measure of value, the aggregate of
all socio-cultural judgments. It also examines the differences in marketing along the lines
of gender and genre.

The study concludes that the questions of language, audience, aesthetic and

impact of the African Series could be most productive only if reengaged, as this book

18

does, within the context of intemational literature and book history. This approach opens
up a new line of drinking about writing in terms of the right to ﬁction and allows us to
move past the central issue of stereotypes in the anthropological episteme that
persistently dominates the understanding of African, Ethnic and non-Western literatures.
Drawing on David Damrosch, Christopher Prendergast, Pascale Casanova and Franco
Moretti, the study proposes a reconsideration of Aﬁican literature as world literature not
in the conventional sense, but in the sense of a cosmopoetics dictated by the conditions of
its primary production in a global market; an international literature that codiﬁes the
historical changes in Aﬁica only in relation to the world. Conversely, this proposition
renders the historical context for the emergence and eclipse of the African Writers Series
as a basis for a new paradigm for theorizing world literature in conjunction with the
concept of the universal.

The dissertation is thus overall a reﬂection on the proposals of Roger Chartier in
The order of Books (1992), which considers the electronic version of the Series, “an
archive of historically signiﬁcant material, which makes available works that might never
generate enough interest to be worth a print publisher investing in a new print run, but
would nonetheless still be valuable to researchers,” and how such archive ﬁts into the

model of libraries without walls.

19

CHAPTER TWO

Ih_e Commonwealth Period of African Literature.

The British Commonwealth as a political entity had a shaping inﬂuence on
publishing, on the consciousness of Aﬁican writers as such, and was determinate in the
initial formulation of the African Writers Series. The analysis that follows will bear on
how the impact of the Commonwealth was generated, especially through the production
of culture and language and how it ﬁgured in post-independence politics and politics of
culture. In so doing, it examines the issue of the production of the book as a factor that is
tied to the political conﬁguration of the times. In addition, it will examine how the anti-
colonial discursivity of African literature that was being generated at the time of the
Commonwealth in texts like No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe could be argued to
have acquired some authority from a particular strand of Abolitionist discourse, that of
Olaudah Equiano, and how the publication of the African Writers Series ﬁts into the

larger context of book production historically.

The complex and original question that the African Writers Series presents, and
which predominates over all others, concerns what constituted the necessity for the
creation of a literary series that speciﬁcally targeted Black African authors. Subsequent to
this is the question of what difference, in the ﬁnal analysis, such specialized publication
made? Approached in the mode of a historical inquiry, these questions seek to highlight
whether the publication of the series was an offshoot, an effect, of certain overdetermined
causes, or whether it is a novelty, representing a radical departure from the general

practices of book production in the Anglophone world. The multiplicity of forces or

20

factors that might be credited with the emergence of the series found an anchor in a
publisher with the pivotal instinct and ability to react to new writings, and with the
enthusiasm and commitment to put signiﬁcant resources behind such works not merely as
a form of “service” but as a highly fruitful and portentous venture. The success of the
Series as a preeminent postcolonial publication points to a convergence of intellectual,
business, cultural and political economies and interests. This convergence of interests and
judgments serves as an index and matrix for much larger relations. It made the Series
possible and may or may not have been within the power of the publisher to stimulate and
control. On this note, the productive powers of the publisher do not solely account for the
success of the literary work. According to certain formalist critics, a literary work was
ﬁrst to be evaluated on the basis of its unique and transcendental qualities. More recently,
theories that question the inherent value of texts have sought alternative approaches to
discourse analysis in institutional and historical frames. Within the fast spreading
phenomenon of the institutional turn in literary studies, the varying degrees of resistance
and accommodation that characterize the relationship between writers, institutions and
texts are now being explored for more adequate explanations of the emergence of
aesthetic form and the means and ends of its reproduction. Parts of this dissertation
address these concerns, especially as they are manifested in the publication of the African
Writers Series. In this chapter, the focus shall be limited to the changing dynamics of
political conﬁgurations that facilitated the emergence of the Series, and upon which
theoretical speculations about its historical success could be based. Cognizant of the

unwieldy landscape in which is situated the social life of texts, I shall nevertheless

21

proceed with the assumption that any account of the history of the African Writers Series

must not fail to incorporate the sociological history of the text.

The African Writers Series emerged at the very historical moment in which
homological processes in book and cultural production, and revolution, were in operation
across the world. In Latin America for example, Doris Sommer and George Yudice have
highlighted the evolution of one of African literature’s historical cousins. They describe
the 60s as the Boom period of Latin American Literature. The terms of their theorization
are crucial to an understanding of the global processes that played cognate roles in the
emergence of the African Writers Series. According to Sommer and Yudice, the 603 was

signiﬁcant for the enormous international success of Latin American literature,

[I]t was more than an explosion of narrative creativity, in fact, some observers are
skeptical about the amount of work produced during that decade, pointing out that
many of the books published then were formerly ignored works that represented a
backlog for publishers to exploit once interest in Latin America had been
established. The real explosion, then, may not be in the production of literature,
but in its reception and market distribution. At home the process of modernization
begun, in the 1930s, and greatly enhanced by the period of import substitution
industrialization of the 1940s and 19503 was ﬁnally showing results in the ﬁeld of
mass communications. New consumer magazines such as Primera plana and
Siempre, as well as major newspaper literary supplements, not only created a new
reading public, but also provided the means (along with radio and TV variety
shows) for transforming the writer into a superstar on a par with singers and
movie celebrities. And thanks to parallel advances in education, for the ﬁrst time
Latin American writers could count on a broad readership. At the same time,
Spain’s publishing capacities helped to launch the Boom by breaking the regional
deadlock that often consigned novels to their national boundaries (Theory of the
Novel 860).

The analysis of the Boom period of Latin American literature mirrors the
conditions of the production of African literature in the 603, and aptly assumes a global
validity when the experience of South Asia in the same period is considered. G. N. Devi

(1989) in his analysis of Indian literature was ﬁrst to argue that the 603 should rightly be

22

classiﬁed the commonwealth period in Anglophone literature because it was the period in
which Indian writers in the English language were accorded global appreciation, which in
turn enabled Indian critics to establish their authority over Indian literature similar to the
one English critics once had over English literature, one effect of which was to institute
an imbalance in appreciation of Indian English literature over Indian language literature.
The commonwealth period is thus the period of cultural production in 20th century

colonial history bounded in both extremities by independence and greater nativism.

It is easily demonstrable that the emergence of the Series and Aﬁican literature as
a whole was not an isolated occurrence but a structural part of an historical ensemble.
The universal resonance of the signiﬁcance of the 608 has been theorized by Fredric
Jameson, among others. However, exploring the interconnections between historical
processes in the 603 as they played out in different geopolitical zone is not the same as
Jameson’s attempt to formulate a “uniﬁed ﬁeld of theory” in which “the discovery of a
single process at work in First and Third Worlds, in global economy, and in
consciousness and culture” is afﬁrmed (207). Positing a causal relationship between
African Writers Series and the historical forces that coincide with its emergence amounts
to asserting a determinative logic of history. What is central to Jameson’s theory is an
internal logic of historical capitalism as the “ultimately determining Instance.” His theory
of history as necessity reproduces a poor blend of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, and
negates the optimism that uniquely deﬁnes the political struggles and cultural productions
of the 603. The 603 were signiﬁcant according to Jameson precisely because “the
enlargement of capitalism on a global scale simultaneously produced an immense freeing

or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces: the ethnic

23

forces of black and ‘minority,’ or Third World...” (208). He also argued that the “surplus
consciousness” dispersed and diffused throughout that period constitutes a “sense of
freedom and possibility —which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily objective
reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 803) a historical illusion—can perhaps best
be explained in terms of the superstructural movement and play enabled by the transition
from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another” (208). His historical
overdeterminism thus effectively marks with fatalism all historical change, especially the
powerful surge of transformations during the period. Jameson’s theory of a uniﬁed and
causal process is a methodological pitfall that must be avoided in the task of

contextualizing the Series and postcolonial literature at large.

Indeed, it is the conception of Africa as a product of a history external to it,
generated by a conﬂict with and convergence of European forces, that provides the
imperative for African discourse to traditionally position itself as an articulation of
Aﬁ'ica’s “ontological sovereignty.” In discussing African literary production, therefore, a
full understanding of the conceptual complexity by which theories of literary production
have always engendered a parallel relation to social production is required. As master
narratives of social ontogenesis these discourses have served as means for establishing
the ontological status of African societies. They deﬁned the specialization of Aﬁican
knowledge and its production not as a paradigm imposed from without but as an ideology
actively pursued from within. The nature of the ways by which the production of
knowledge engenders social production is evident in the works of major thinkers and
Aﬁicanists such as Nkrumah, Mudimbe, Mbembe and so on. This complex concept

involved the idea of Africa that is unavoidably articulated to evoke an exceptional or

24

essential association with the structure of the society and human nature, that is, that the
very “soul” of the continent, its ﬂora and fauna, its geography and climate, its culture and
discourse, and the foundations of its very humanity are inseparable, thus making Africa
and the Aﬁ'ican both impenetrable and impregnable. This peculiarity, or particularity by
which the art of representation in African is theorized, betrays a difference that has its
roots in colonial metaphysics, one that is paradoxically inherent in postcolonial
grammatology. If the rationale for the creation of an “African” literary Series is to
guarantee an authentic voice, the constitution and rationality of that authenticity have in
effect reinforced the colonial ideologies of difference. Most illustrative of this problem is
the question, which may well now be the central motif of African thought, raised by V.
Y. Mudirnbe in The Invention OfAﬁ'ica: “Does it mean that African Weltanschauungen
and African traditional systems of thought are unthinkable and cannot be made explicit
within the framework of their own rationality?” (x). Given that all questions of rationality
assume multiple systems and modes of being, the presumption of an exclusive interior of
Black experience and expression, its classiﬁcation into a distinctive genre that asserts its
own rationality necessarily leads to a metaphysics of difference. In this chapter, the study
of the African Writers Series is intended to unravel the invisible workings of those
presuppositions that undergird the specialization of the Series and its universal adoption.
While the question of difference being highlighted here is clearly not the invention of the
Directors at Heinemann, they by and large form the historical apriori by which African
cultural identity in England was cultivated and the general practices of African book
production established. In other words, though at ﬁrst glance, astute marketing strategies

dictated the imperative and expediency of targeting Black authors for the Series, the

25

decision has its ineluctable reality only within a history that already sidelined and

neglected those writers.

The approach taken in this chapter of positing a direct relationship between
sociopolitical transformation and knowledge production is one derived from the
interdisciplinary ﬁeld of enquiry associated ﬁrst and foremost with Lucien Febvre and
Jean Martin, and their 1 ’histoire du Iivre (The History of The Book). The central claim
made by F ebvre and Martin is that book production has always been implicated in social
change, or that social change is always accompanied by book production. Reversing the
gesture of Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness (1996), which studied “the relation
between the texts of colonial culture and the larger contexts in which they were
produced” (xvii), this chapter is an attempt to unravel how African literary production
factored in the changes in the structures and instruments of empire, and to formulate a
paradigm by which we could understand the historical changes in the African world by
reading those changes primarily through the prism of the history of literary production. It
explores the historical contexts for the emergence of the African Writers Series in the
mode of book history.

The history of publishing in Europe certainly reveals the strong ideological
motivations that propelled it. The ideological orientation of the print industry, its role in
the initiation, acceleration or decline of the most crucial conﬂicts of history, has been
eminently documented. From the time of parchments to the introduction of paper, the
history of the book is implicated in “intellectual, social and economic upheavals,”

(F ebvre and Martin, 11) because of its “incomparable power for both transformation and

propagation” (10). According to Febvre and Martin, after the Monastic Age, in which

26

“the monasteries and other ecclesiastical establishments associated with them [. . .]
enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of book production” (15), the introduction of
paper into Europe “occurred at the same time as the bourgeoisie emerges as a class” (15).
The introduction of the printing presses also coincided with the emergence of the Modern
Age and with the rise of the nationalist aspirations in Europe. How these historical
transitions occurred is explained by the following logic of movements: “Just as printing
favored the growth of the Reformation, so it helped mould our modern European
languages” (319). The struggle between the humanist printers and the religious printers of
the reformation devolved into a competition among national language printers as
“printing helped raise national languages to a level at which they could provide a means
of expression for a national literature” (324). F evbre and Martin further argue:
The establishment of national literatures everywhere had begun to split up the
book market, a process which was encouraged by the development of effective
political and religious censorship. Permanent divisions were established between
the cultures of the different countries of Europe. (274)
If book production was so deeply implicated in the emergence of modern European
nations, it is no surprise, then, that this moment would become the touchstone in the
study of nationalism; after Benedict Anderson seized upon it to make the argument now
celebrated that the print culture gave rise to nationalism. What is however not explained
in Anderson, but which Febvre and Martin carefully map out but do not theorize, is not
how different forms of local imperatives took advantage of the print culture for their
preservation and eventual transformations, but how print culture reﬂected the
“international character of the book trade” (296)!

The activities of the guild of booksellers in reorganizing the commercial network

that was suitable to bookselling produced the book trades whose international nature

27

could be perceived as vital to the constitution of modern European identity. Indeed, in the
late ﬁfteenth century, the book fairs in Lyons and Frankfurt were important to this.
“Lyons was a hive of business activity: ‘almost on the border of Italy and France, in
contact with Germany through Switzerland, it is thus the warehouse of the three richest
and most populous countries in Europe’” (227). The King of France and local authorities
granted generous privileges to all traders attending the Lyons fair, which included tax
exemptions and the opportunity for foreigners visiting the fair to enter and leave the
country unhindered. Though the book trade in Lyons was huge and outstanding, it was
superseded by the F rarrkﬁrrt Fair. The Emperor became the protector of the Frankfurt
Fair’s privileges providing soldiers to escort book merchants. The same dynamic of
intemationalism which obtained in Lyons because of its geographical location, enabling
booksellers to import Italian, German, and Swiss books into France, obtained also in the
Frankfurt fair:
The fairs slowly became the rendezvous for everyone engaged in the book trade, a
centre of swarming life, a picturesque scene which writers of the day, such as
Henri Estienne, took pleasure in evoking. While booksellers and their assistants
leaned from the doorways and windows of their shops and shouted to the passers-
by the titles of the new books they had on sale, hawkers passed up and down
crying their almanacs, prints and pamphlets containing an account of current
events. Authors would be there in the crowd with a manuscript for which they
sought a publisher or to watch the sales of their books, and men of letters would
gather to seek work suitable to their talent as translators or correctors of the press.
In Henri Estienne’s words, Frankfurt was the “new Athens” where you could see
celebrated scholars talking and debating amongst themselves in Latin before an
astonished public and elbowing aside players who had come to the fair to seek
employment from the impresarios who gathered there to form theatrical
companies. Shakespeare would have found it a fascinating sight. (230)

The idea that mid-sixteenth century Europe was the “new Athens” born at this historical

moment in these fairs has persisted through the Enlightenment to date; this is the idea of

28

modern Europe as a uniﬁed Latin culture, which clearly saw itself as the direct heir of the

ancient Greek civilization.

The decline of the book trade did not however occur until after the Thirty Year
War in the 17th century. “Literature and learning were still international in the 16th
century despite the decline of Latin” (332). The international book trade declined with the
triumph of the Leipzig Fair, which did not publish in Latin but in vernacular. Publishing
from this point forward ceased to be an international affair. In the very last chapter of The
Coming of the Book (2000), there is the almost lamentable tone about this decline.
Anderson’s theory of print culture and nationalism derives from focusing exclusively on
this period, but even if we were to accept the proposition that the vernacular language
press fostered certain forms of community and consciousness, by the same token, the

international language press must have given rise to international entities as well.

At no point in the history of the world did humanity come as close to the idea of a
world language as in the 20th century. At the end of the 18th century, “French was pre-
eminent... as an international language but it could never fully occupy the place left
permanently vacant by the disappearance of Latin” (332). With the return of international
languages, it became possible for the publishing enterprise to return to its international
vocation, especially in Latin America and the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, and
hence support the emergence of what we now term “world literature.” The era in which
the English language achieved its preeminence is the era of the British Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth Period of African Literature, which is the subject of this chapter is
thus the moment in which the book trade regained its international character, stimulating

in its wake, a new international literature.

29

Comparable arguments have been made in speaking to what J can-Francois
Lyotard calls the post-modem condition. The postmodern condition of larowledge
according to Lyotard is one in which the dynamics of production are radically
transformed from their initial moment described and critiqued in Marx’ Capital. The
dramatic shift in the function of the narrative and the crisis of narratives that characterize
this condition is directly linked to the system of mercantilization of knowledge. This
system consists in the consolidation of new forms of capital which have different modes
of accumulation and circulation. The basis for such dramatic shift is the changes in the
technologies of production. The theory of technological determinism is one that has
inﬂuenced the thinking of several authors from Heidegger to Walter Benjamin.
According to Lyotard, “economic growth and the expansion of sociopolitical power seem
to be natural complements” to “the general paradigm of progress in science and
technology” (7). Indeed, “technological transformations can be expected to have a
considerable impact on knowledge” (4). The changing nature’of power in a postindustrial
society is no longer based on economics but on knowledge, that is, knowledge capital.
“Thus the growth of power, and its self-legitimation, are now taking the route of data
storage and accessibility, and the operativity of information” (47). Lyotard’s notion of the
operativity of information shall be taken up later in the third chapter when the subject of
the selection of African novels for the sole purpose of operative information would be
discussed. Here, we are concerned about his theory of the relations between narrative and
the technologies of social transformation and how his formulation of the concept of
knowledge capital parallels concepts such as “cultural capital” by John Gullory and

“literary capital” by Pascale Casanova.

30

It is no doubt the case that the production of the Aﬁican Writers Series is
reﬂective of the signiﬁcance of the Commonwealth as a constitutive power for a new
form of cultural and literary capital. According to Casanova in her book The World
Republic of Letters (2007), it is the international capital derived from the international
literary space that the activities of international publishing feed that produces great
writers. “In reality, the great heroes of literature invariably emerge only in association
with the speciﬁc power of an autonomous and international literary capital” (109). The
double meaning of the term “capital” in Casanova’s theory should not escape us: Capital,
both in the sense of capital city, center of political and economic activity and capital as
the totality of the enabling resources of production. These literary capitals provide “both
a common measure of literary value and a literarily absolute point of reference” (109).
These capitals include London, Paris, New York, Rome, Barcelona and Frankfurt (164).
These capitals also serve as consecrating authorities that “permit international writers
within each space to legitimize their position on the national level.” The story of the
emergence of Chinua Achebe as a writer told by Alan Hill corroborates the power of
consecration that Casanova elaborates:

[Things Fall Apart] was slower to catch on in Africa. In the University of Ibadan,

six months after publication, they didn’t take me seriously when I told them that

one of their alumni had written a great novel. “What! Chinua Achebe write a

novel! How ridiculous. . . !” However, the book soon made its way into the best-

seller lists throughout Anglophone Africa. It went on to sell 3,000,000 copies in
the Heinemann edition alone throughout the world. Add to the ﬁgure the sales of
the American edition, and those of the translations into at least 45 foreign
languages (in itself another record) and the overall circulation of this novel world-

wide is phenomenal even by the standards of the twentieth century. (121)

The story of Achebe and the Commonwealth is a testament to how the “Age of

colonization was characterized in large part by a process of linguistic and cultural

31

uniﬁcation” (1 16). As centers of global power, culture and art, not only do the
metropolitan capitals “supply theoretical and aesthetic models to writers on the periphery;
[their] publishing networks and critical ﬁrnctions jointly strengthen the fabric of universal
literature” (109). In talking about the Commonwealth Period of African literature, one is
highlighting an example of how linguistic territories were emerged around metropolitan
capitals and how “each linguistic territory has a center that controls and attracts the
literary productions dependent on it.” That is, how “In the aftermath of decolonization,
then, the major literary centers have been able to go on maintaining a sort of literary
protectorate. . .” (l 17):
London today, even if it now ﬁnds itself in competition with New York and
Toronto, continues to be central for Australians, New Zealanders, Irish,
Canadians, Indians and English speaking Africans; Barcelona, the intellectual and
cultural capital of Spain, remains a great literary center for Latin Americans; Paris
is still central for writers from West and North Aﬁica as well as for Francophone
authors in Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, countries where it continues to
exercise inﬂuence by virtue of its literary eminence rather than any power of
political control. Berlin is the leading capital for Austrian and Swiss writers and
remains an important literary center today for countries of northern Europe as
well as for the countries of central Europe that emerged from the breakup of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. (117)
From the world map of “literary protectorates” outlined by Casanova, our concern is the
London axis, which is “a center on consecration whose legitimacy is universally
recognized” (119). In order to establish the notion that these centers have through
political and historical reasons accumulated literary capital that launches great writers,
Casanova explores the careers of writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett etc. who were
all consecrated in Paris. “The case of James J oyce—rejected in Dublin, ignored in

London, banned in New York, lionized in Paris—is undoubtedly the best example” (109).

The African Writers Series is one of the most remarkable expenditure of the cultural and

32

literary capital of London. The writers who were published through the Series, and they
were virtually the most prominent, enjoyed instant international exposure. It is important
to note therefore that most of the writers were sometime more known abroad than in their
own countries. “Consecration by London has allowed them to enjoy literary existence on
the international level.” Indeed, the power of London cannot be better illustrated. “This
power, and the correspondingly large share of literary credit it implies, continue to confer
real literary legitimacy upon writers from Commonwealth nations” (118). The African
Writers Series also marks the moment of ascendency of the literary power of London and

the beginning of the Commonwealth period of African literature.

The beginning of the commonwealth period, coinciding with the period of
national independence of the African colonies, clearly indicates, as Robert T. Robertson
stated, an anticipation and realization of the demise of the political and economic empire.
As a result, “The British poured a great deal of energy into cultural affairs beyond the
seas in the two decades 1945-65—in activities of the British Council, the BBC, London
publishers (especially Penguin, Longrnans and OUP), and in placing Britishers at the
head of educational, media, theatre and all other cultural activities in the Empire turned
Commonwealth” (34). That the African Writers Series was born in this period by
Heinemann Educational Books, a London international publisher, competitor and
collaborator with Longrnans, Penguin, OUP etc, already invites the question of the
relationship between the Commonwealth and the Series, and its production, marketing,

appreciation and overall effects.

33

An examination of the history of 20th century publishing foregrounds the issue of
rights in a way never before experienced in the book trade. The grand issue of
legitimation is crucial in any discussion on postcolonial publishing. The book trade, being
part of the wider ﬁ'onts of European expansion, could not be separated from the general
politics of trade as such. But insofar as publishing is not about the book in itself, but
primarily about the right to re/production and the right to a territory, that is, the right to
control a territory for the re/production and dissemination of the book, the question of
rights becomes paramount. Whereas the right to re/production is conferred through a
contract between the author and the publisher, the foundational right over territories is
solely a right granted by a political history. These vestigial rights of the publisher operate
as a form of archaic mercantilism within the modern economy of exchange. The
publisher’s right is thus political, as much as it is proprietary in both senses of property
and propriety. The African Writers Series is, it can be argued from the Jameson
perspective, a child of overdetermined factors. These factors govern and are coextensive
with the destiny of the Series: ﬁrst, London publishers by default had the “natural” rights
over the territories of the former British Empire; second, the school systems implanted in
Africa by colonialism were maturing and it was to be expected that this would produce
Black self-expression as had been seen with the emergence of Black British authors of
the late eighteenth century such as Olaudah Equaino. And third, there were economic
conditions that permitted English publishers to market their books abroad in locations

where there was no well-established local or national press. .

In a correspondence with a US publisher, James Currey, the third editor of the

series from 1967-84, writes, “It is conventional for a British publisher to have exclusive

34

marketing rights in the Irish Republic, Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and
trusteeships, as these were once in the British Empire and there are strong marketing
links” (HEB archive). If the boundaries of Empire were to bequeath exclusive marketing
territories to a British publisher, they equally delineated the ecology of African discourse,
authorizing a double legitimation of aesthetic form and its reproduction. Indeed, the
Empire was particularly crucial in circumscribing the imaginary against which claims to a
heritage were being made by the African writer. It constituted the a priori afﬁnity
between the creative and publishing ventures that formed the basis for aspects of the
Commonwealth as a project that in part explored “the common heritage in language,
culture and education...” (The Commonwealth website). The immediate community of
writers to which African writers belonged was not comprised of those of the same

nationality, but of those of the Commonwealth.

The inﬂuence and friendship of Caribbean writers on African authors such as
Ngugi is well known. It could even be argued that it was this commonwealth project of a
community of writers that Achebe acknowledges and celebrates when he writes, “to call
my colonial experience an inheritance may surprise some people. But everything is grist
to the mill of the artist True, one grain may differ from another in its powers of
nourishment; still, we must in the manner of those incomparable artists of Mbari accord
appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way” (Achebe, 1991: 3). This act of
recognition from the point of view of traditional aesthetics enables the harmonious order
of creative vision and social stability. According to Achebe’s articulation of this
principle, “any presence, which is ignored, denigrated, denied acknowledgement and

celebration can become a focus for anxiety and disruption” (3). This community of

35

writers was bound together by the same experience of British colonialism which had
handed them a common language. The adoption of English as a language of instruction,
creative writing and ofﬁcial business in former British colonies, which was to form the

bedrock for the formation of the Commonwealth, was something more than a ritual

appeasement.

The reality of the Commonwealth cultural and literary project was sounded by
intellectuals like Paul Edwards who, in a fascinating expose on West African Narrative,
provided an account, now standard argument, for the adoption of English. He argued that
“it might be unwise to pursue complete linguistic, as well as political, independence”
because “political independence is resulting in even more communication between West
African nations and the rest of the world, so that a common language is going to be
indispensable” (3). The place of English as an international language thus assured
dictated, quid pro quo, that “there are certain advantages too which the African who
writes in English will have over vernacular writers, the most obvious being a far wider
audience.” According to Edwards, “He will also have a rich and complex literary
tradition in which to work” (4). This line of reasoning certainly resonated with African
writers who chose to write in the English language. As a matter of fact, the role of
Aﬁican writers in a new nation, Achebe urged, is to “do the work of extending the
frontiers of English. .. to accommodate African thought-pattems. .. through their mastery
of English”! Thus, the African writers’ mill is packed full of every conceivable grain
opening the possibility of a literature that is the true form of world literature. The
elementary fact that national literatures in the postcolonial 20‘" century were not written

in vernacular but international languages renders Anderson’s work at best Eurocentric,

36

and at worst dubious for ignoring that fact. Instead of a nativist fragmentation of the
language of empire, or the “empire ﬁghting back,” Achebe and other writers took a more
philosophical, unaggressive but productive posture which was in his words, “merely to
ask what possibility, what encouragement, there was in this episode of our history for the
celebration of our own world, for the singing of the song of ourselves, in the din of an
insistent world and song of others” (Achebe, 1991: 3) The partnership of HEB and
African writers in establishing a community of African writers came precisely from
Heinemann’s capacity to provide that platform essential for the universal celebration of

the African world.

One of the consequences of establishing a community of writers based on the pre-
established commonwealth community was the production of texts that stimulated and
cultivated a general Anglophone reading public, one to whom the Series is directed.
James Currey, in preparing the translated version of Bebey’s Le ﬁls d ’Agatha Moudio, in
1970, states: “I have the English-speaking African reader in mind. The African Writers
Series is aimed at them” (Heinemann Educational Books archives). The question that
arises then is who is this English-speaking African? What does the African Writers Series
mean to him? What does this English-speaking African share in common with other
English-speaking people of the world? How does the AWS interpellate the English
speaking African? In refusing to do a hardback edition of Ngugi’s Petals of Blood, the
editor of another major British publishing house, T.G. Rosenthal writes: “none of us feels
it sufﬁciently crosses border between Africa and a British market sensibility” (HEB
archives). Is then the English-speaking Aﬁ'ican that being whose sensibilities traverse the

borders of Africa and other English-speaking people of the world? This problem of the

37

reader’s sensibilities underlies Ali Mazuri’s complaint to James Currey over the editorial
comments on his novel, The T rial of Christopher Okigbo, when he says “I am surprised
that in your assessment you feel that this book is so African that the response in the
United Kingdom is likely to be limited” (HEB archive). The English speaking African

reader of the Series is squarely the commonwealth man.

In short, it becomes increasingly evident that this Series of publications
inadvertently or deliberately aspired to some sort of cosmopoetic character. The outcome
of such dynamics is that the ﬁnest examples of the Aﬁican novel, because of their
orientation, are fundamentally World novels, perhaps, the ﬁrst of their kind. The notion
of world novel here refers to novels whose condition of production and consumption
require and engender global networks, cooperation and understanding. This orientation
forces us to consider a theory of literature from a cosmopolitan point of view. It is no less
than this cosmopoetic sensibility of the Commonwealth Man that must have struck Paul
Edwards in noting how desirable the Series was as part of the offering for establishing
Commonwealth literature. He writes in a letter to Keith Sambrook, in 1963, “I’ve been
asked to teach a course in the Dept. of Aﬁican Studies on Aﬁica and other
Commonwealth literature in English. . .. So your African writers series is going to prove
very useful. I wonder whether there is any possibility of extending to a Commonwealth

writers series” (HEB archive).

Although it may be argued that the Commonwealth identity was epiphenomenal
in some sense, some of the most enduring effect of the publication has been the
promotion of a Pan-African identity. As Casanova has observed, “In fact, there was a

desire on the part of publishers to create the impression of a group by gathering together

38

under a single label authors who had nothing, or very little, in common. This labeling
effect (which may be compared, for example, with the promotion of the Latin American
‘boom’ of the 19605) turned out to be an extremely effective marketing strategy” (120).
This act of group labeling as a marketing strategy is what is responsible for the
preference for treatment of literatures in African ﬁrst and foremost along continental
rather than national classiﬁcations. It is easy to speculate that had the editors taken Paul
Edwards’s suggestion to convert and expand the Series into a Commonwealth Writers
Series, the Commonwealth label could today have displaced and superseded that
continental label just as the continental Aﬁican label became superordinate to national

labels.

In David Damrosch’s What is World Literature, there are analyses that are
analogous to the one presently being made in this chapter. The insistence of T.G.
Rosenthal on only publishing an Aﬁ'ican text that “sufﬁciently crosses border between
Africa and a British market sensibility” constitutes a core moment of realization of a
world literature: “[W]orld literature can also be found when a work circulates across
cultural divides separating speakers of a single widespread language. . .. A Senegalese
novel written in French can enter world literature in an effective sense when it is read in
Paris, Quebec, and Martinique” (Damrosch: 212). The transculturation that marks the
works of PG. Wodehouse, which by Damrosch’s estimation, constituted world literature
in “a very real sense,” is all evident in African literature, which is completely missing
from his considerations—except for one secondary quote of Achebe on his use of the
English language. “Not only was [Wodehouse’s] work often focused on themes of

transatlantic travel and linguistic incongruity; he was actually writing directly for an

39

international market, comically exploiting each country’s myths about the other and
playing with the many varieties of English he encountered” (121). What is peculiar about
Wodehouse is not just the transculturation but how he writes about these cultures “as if

ﬁ'om outside, ”that is, “his cultural double vision” (213).

The Commonwealth Period is thus a decisive moment in the trajectory of the
globalization of English. In fact, the globalization of English may not have occurred
without the initial stage of the Commonwealth. The proper transition of Commonwealth
literature was therefore not Postcolonial literature but International literature as it
represented the nascent conditions of “worldly transformation and dislocation” of the
ﬁctional universe (220). The very conceptualization of Commonwealth literature, it is
interesting to note derived not from Britain or its colonies but from American professors,
who at the MLA conference in 1959 organized a sessions on British Commonwealth
Literature. Robert Robertson has argued that these American professors standing outside
the Commonwealth were able to recognize in the emergent new literatures in English
from independent or about to be independent British colonies, that very moment English
language crossed the threshold to becoming a world language. “With the explosion of
the English language all over the world, carried by settlers, traders, missionaries and
ofﬁcials, the social world was so enormously enlarged that it, like the Commonwealth
itself, had to form itself into constituent parts, and each in turn produced its own version
of contemporary literature in English” (6). The importance of the emergence of these
literatures to criticism and scholarship paralleled the beginnings of scholarship and
teaching in the ﬁeld of American literature some two decades earlier (4). However, the

sense of connection these American professors bear toward “commonwealth literature”

40

was not just the familiarity of the situation but also “the natural outcome of deep currents
inside the corpus of literature in English itself. The response of its writers to a heightened
sense of place was prompted by the diaspora of English speakers all over the globe, and
that explosion of the language recovered for the literature, an emphasis on place, the
genius loci, which had been stiﬂed for a long time by the centripetal concentration

necessary for the building of a world language and a great literature” (6).

There is no doubt that the consciousness of the British Commonwealth, of the
world without and beyond, formed a major part in explaining the need or necessity of the
Series but certainly created the market for it. The commitment of the founding director of
Heinemann Educational Books, Alan Hill, who also started the Series, to the idea of the
British Commonwealth is never in question. In publishing a book on Commonwealth
literature, by that title, the proceedings of the ﬁrst Commonwealth literature conference
in the United Kingdom convened by A Norman J effares held at Leeds University, Hill

writes in 1963:

We wish to promote this book very vigorously throughout the British
Commonwealth. Quite obviously, on such a small printing there will be no proﬁt
to be made on this deal. In fact, quite the contrary. However, we feel that the
Conference is such a milestone in the cultural history of the Commonwealth that
the publication of the proceedings in book form is a matter of the ﬁrst importance.
(HEB archive)

The idea of the Commonwealth clearly supersedes the commercial interests of
publishing. And, the African Writers Series most certainly constituted, in its own eminent
right, a milestone in the cultural history of the Commonwealth. Its promotion in the
Anglophone world underscores the preeminence of the book as a means of mastery over

the world, as argued by Fevbre. And the African Writer invented ﬁ'om the renewed

41

attention brought on by the cultural institutions of the Commonwealth was fully ready for
the spectacle he was to become, even as his art served as a form of outreach to the world.
For how else could the boom period of African literature in the West be explained?
Fevbre and Martin have clearly stated how the cultured reader in Europe from the 16th
century on was more interested in the East, the Turks, the West Indies and the Portuguese
territories: “Books on America only came fourth, while Africa and the southern
hemisphere hardly seem to have excited any interest” (282). Even earlier works by
Africans that seem to have made some impact all vanished with the Abolitionist
movement. Works such as Olaudah Equiano’s narrative would have remained
permanently eclipsed by trends in British literature of travel narratives and modernist

writing, if it had not been reprinted in the African Writers Series.

Although the idea of reprinting Equiano originated at Nelsons, that it was ﬁnally
published by Heinemann Educational Books conﬁrms that unique position of Heinemann
in the publication of Aﬁican literature. The story of the reprint is told in a letter on May

15, 1963 to Paul Edwards by HEB editorial director, Keith Sambrook:

When this idea ﬁrst came up at Nelsons you will remember that I was very
enthusiastic about it and, after leaving Nelsons, I assumed that the original plan
would go through. Your decision to remove the manuscript, however, gives me
the opportunity to pass on to you a proposal which Chinua Achebe, who is the
editorial adviser on our Aﬁican Writers Series, made a month ago. He had read
extracts from Equiano in the Nelson anthology and in Hodgkin’s Nigerian
Perspectives and was anxious to bring out an abridged text in our Series. (Equiano
ﬁle: HEB archive)

The reemergence of Equiano speaks to the sense of déja vu with which new African
Writings in the 603 were greeted. The resonance of the Series was developed against the

background of national independence just as that of the slave narratives was against the

42

background of the abolitionist movement. A tradition of protest and a form of continuity
was thus suggested between Anti-colonial and Abolitionist discourses with Equiano’s
slave narrative as the bridge between the two movements. Indeed, there is a sense in
which anti-colonial discourse takes on and completes the rhetorical motions of the
abolitionist discourse. Though without due credit to him, Equiano was among the ﬁrst to
propose “legitimate trade” as alternative to slave trade. But “legitimate trade” in a
mercantilist economy meant securing monopolies over territories, monopolies that could
not be guaranteed without forms of subjugation. The implementation of trade in Aﬁica
and the rest of the colonies thus contradicted the Laissez-faire politics of the free market
that apparently formed the basis for Olaudah’s proposal. Equiano’s narrative engendered
not just a topical abolitionist rhetoric, but much more importantly, a solid proposal for
future relations with Africa based on the ethics of commonwealth, common humanity and
mutual beneﬁts, ethics that were in opposition to slavery and colonial rule. His narrative
was not only out of print by the 19608 but had also become very rare! Keith Sambrook
stated this in a letter to Chinua Achebe, on April 3, 1963: “It’s extremely difﬁcult to get
hold of a copy. There is a copy of each of the nine editions up to 1827 in the British
museum, but we could only get these through Photostats. Edwards has a copy, and there

is one in the F ourah Bay Library and one in Edinburgh” (HEB archive).

In the introduction to the Aﬁ'ican Writers Series edition of Equiano ’s Travels,
S.E. Ogude argues that “Equiano 's Travels conferred on written African literature a
legitimacy and sense of grounding based on its relative antiquity” (viii-ix). This same
grounding was clearly being sought for modern African literature by Lalage Bown in her

Two Centuries of Aﬁican English. Though there is no clear statement as to why this text

43

caught the interest of Achebe and Keith Sambrook, its editor, Paul Edwards offered some
points worth consideration. According to Edwards, it is the “simplicity and naturalness
which gives the book much of its character and interest” (xxiii). He goes further to
describe the element of “skilful dramatic simplicity” which he would also prescribe for
African writers in general. In a critique of bad West Aﬁican writing with “its fondness
for the long and obscure word, and the elaborate tangled sentence”-- a clear mark of
imitation- Edwards encouraged plainness in style arguing that it is ridiculous to waste
words when “they are doing nothing that simple language couldn’t do better”. He
concludes, “So when I praise plainness it is not to condemn all elaboration, but only this
kind of wasteful display. And though the writing here is, on the whole, plain, it is often
powerful” (7). The point here is that in form and content, Equiano’s narrative served as a
veritable point of reference for the emergent African literature of the 608. The same
cliche of observations, after all, was made in the glowing reviews of Achebe’s works.
“His literary method is apparently simple, but a vivid imagination illuminates every page,

and his style is a model of clarity” (121), writes The Times Literary Supplement reviewer.

However, these juxtapositions do not take into consideration that Equiano’s was
an abolitionist, generic slave narrative. What commonwealth literature introduced by its
very classiﬁcation, was a geopolitical ramiﬁcation in modern literary studies by which
writings from the colonies were marked apart from those of the metropolis. The
geopolitics of the Commonwealth created an imperative for an understanding of
commonwealth literature as primarily an interpretive enterprise. As The Irish Times
special correspondent put it, “In emergent Africa the importance of the creative writer

cannot be over stressed, Aﬁica today, more than ever before, needs talented indigenous

writers to interpret it to the world and vice versa” (22 Nov 1967 Achebe ﬁle, HEB
archive). The point has been elaborately argued elsewhere that modern African literature
functions as a canon of translation (lbironke: 2004). If T. G. Rosental’s objection that
Ngugi’s Petals of Blood did not sufﬁciently cross that borderline of British readership
sensibility were taken together with the transparent simplicity that Paul Edwards
advocated, and if they are to be understood properly, it must be within the context of the
interpretive framework of the geopolitics of the commonwealth. This expectation forms
the history of African writing--it is not a merely external factor. As Pierre Macherey
correctly analyzes, “This history is not in a simple external relation to the work: it is
present in the work, in so far as the emergence of the work required this history, which is
its only principle of reality and also supplies its means of expression” (93 -4). The
historical presence in literature as a form of textual reality can be illustrated in Achebe’s

third novel No Longer At Ease.

No Longer at Ease, a title taken from T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of The Magi,
expressing what Achebe calls “the resonance of an immemorial anxiety” (2001: 19),
captures not only the moment of a return, Obi’s return from England, but also transmutes
the drama engendered in that return onto a much broader stage. The dramatic action of
the novel revolves around the moment Obi takes a stand behind the box, as a spectacle of
wonderment. At the end of the novel, in the very last paragraph the narrative motif is
presented: “everybody wondered why. The learned judge, as we have seen, could not
comprehend how an educated young man and so on and so forth. The British Council
man, even the men of Umuoﬁa, did not know. And we must presume that, in spite of his

certitude, Mr. Green did not know either” (194). Achebe’s exploration of how the

45

colonial and commonwealth situations present the enigma of estrangement is
fundamental to any understanding of his works. In Things Fall Apart after Okonkwo
returns from exile, the reactions to his actions are similar to the one expressed in the
passage above. After he unilaterally intervenes on behalf of the community and beheads
the emissary of the white man, everyone asks bemused as they scrambled “why did he do
it?” The insanity of Ezeulu, in Arrow of God, Achebe’s third novel, is the direct result of
the overwhelming conﬂuence of the events heralding Ezeulu’s failure to hold the
community together under the indigenous religious traditions, and the act of desertion by
the gods leading to his inability to rationally comprehend the erosion of his power. Obi in
this case of No Longer at Ease had become unknowable to everyone. It is here that
Achebe breaks from Mudimbe and his own affirmative ideology by depicting a character
that cannot be understood even within “the framework of its own rationality.” Not “even

the men of Umuoﬁa,” his clansmen, could explain his actions.

The task of the commonwealth writer was thus to provide the explanation for an
action whose determinate ﬁeld has broadened beyond its immediate locality. Achebe like
the postmodernist writers “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard
81). What makes Obi’s actions inexplicable is based on a singular issue: he was “an
educated young man and so on and so forth.” The elliptical use of the phrase “and so on
and so forth” in this passage connects to the only parenthetical moment in the novel and it
answers directly and elucidates the ﬁnal moment of bewilderment. In the ﬁrst chapter of

the novel, the narrator presents Obi’s bio-data as follows:

At the age of twelve or thirteen he had passed his Standard Six examination at the
top of the whole province. Then he had won a scholarship to one of the best
secondary schools in Eastern Nigeria. At the end of ﬁve years he passed the

46

Cambridge School Certiﬁcate with distinction in all eight subjects. He was in fact
a village celebrity, and his name was regularly invoked at the mission school
where he had once been a pupil. (N 0 one mentioned nowadays that he once
brought shame to the school by writing a letter to Adolf Hitler during the war. The
headmaster at the time had pointed out, almost in tears, that he was a disgrace to
the British Empire, and that if he had been older he would surely have been sent
to jail for the rest of his miserable life. He was only eleven then, and so got off
with six strokes of the cane on his buttocks). (9)

The transgressive act of bribery for which he is put on trial at the end has precedence in
this letter and disguises the real ironic tone of the novel which is to be found in the
subtext: how could he betray and squander such a “privilege”? This letter to “the enemy”
also stands in for the subversive nature of African writing from a colonialist point of
view. A comparison is clearly being forced between the headmaster in the Hitler story
and the judge in the bribery scandal. The parenthesis itself is prefaced by the remark “no
one mentioned nowadays.” That preface and the elliptical “and so on and so forth” mark
the moment of metalepsis in colonial discourse by which omission is transﬁgured into
absence, and absence into a radical ontological difference which Obi embodies at the end
of the novel. Achebe’s argument appears to be that the suppression of the historical
memory of the colonial subject, the occlusion of preexisting situations, which is
necessary to the commonwealth project, and all its institutional networks of universities,

communication infrastructures and commerce, will be the very nemesis of that project.

Apart from the interpretive function of the texts that has been identiﬁed above, the
crisis of the man of education in No Longer at Ease points to a speciﬁc history that must
be understood in order to bring clarity to the crisis condition depicted in the novel. The
tlrematization of the corruptibility of the man of education runs against the grain of the
narrative and promise of emancipation through education. Education has been crucial in

the legitimation of the enterprise of Empire and the Commonwealth precisely because it

47

was the original element of the humanist principle that “humanity rises up in dignity and
freedom through knowledge” (Lyotard: 34). The assumption of this principle according
to Lyotard is that “knowledge ﬁnds its validity not within itself, not in a subject that
develops by actualizing its learning possibilities, but in a practical subject—humanity
[whose] epic is the story of its emancipation from everything that prevents it from
governing itself” (35). The operation of Heinemann Educational Books is solidly within

the ideological framework of the humanist principle.

Alan Hill’s effort to establish Heinemann as a serious educational publisher began
in January 1946, a year before the independence of India. It was also at the moment of
the victory over Nazi Germany and the triumphal return of the Labor Party. The
educational publisher carried on the banner of enlightenment, after independence, where
colonial education had foundered. The Africa Writers Series was part of the proposal “to
publish across the whole range of writing intended for enlightenment, as opposed to
entertainment” (67). During Hill’s visit to India shortly after independence, in 1956, he
makes the following remark: “Three days in Bombay, spent visiting bookshops, schools,
the university and the Education Department, were enough to convince me of the
pervasive strength of the English language. The India which British soldiers and
administrators had lost was being regained by British educators and publishers” (93).
With the establishment of new governments and, perhaps, new societies, it was clear to
Hill that insofar as the very idea of educational publishing came from “the general
realization that a democratic society must go hand in hand with education” (176) an
investment in “the liberating inﬂuence of our educational list” (Hill, 201) had become

inevitable.

48

Hill’s foray into African publishing came with a critique of Longman and Oxford
University Press which he accused of simply “taking their proﬁt out of West Africa, and
putting nothing back in the way of investment in local publishing and encouragement of
local authors” (123). Hill places his intervention along the same trajectory with the
program of the Labor Party after World War I investing in the educational infrastructure
of the colonies. “After the First World War the Colonial Ofﬁce set up government
secondary schools in Ghana and Nigeria. By the time I reached West Africa there was a
ﬂourishing school system, leading to British 0 and A Level examinations, and
culminating in the new Universities of Accra and Ibadan” (122). The educational criteria
therefore loomed large not only in the considerations of the publisher but also the writers

as well.

Indeed, in what may be considered the Heinemann Educational Books charter, in
December 18, 1963, Keith Sambrook, the general editor of the Series from 1963-66,

wrote to Paul Edwards very early in the life of the publication the following letter:

I think I met everyone in Africa who is now responsible for organizing the
teaching of African literature. It has taken on a rather frightening intensity. This is
natural enough but, much as one is interested in new African writing and wants to
see more writers of the quality of Achebe, some of the plans for honours courses
in African literature are rather daunting. Your own letter seemed to me to strike a
splendid balance.

In a way I suppose publishers are the key to all this. They can offer to publish
indiscriminately and ﬂood the market with a lot of third-rate material, or be
extremely careful and slowly build up a body of African writing which will stand
examination at degree level.

I have great hopes for the Equiano. There is great interest in Nigeria and
elsewhere. I’d like to do other reprints of older African works, though again one
has to be careful about reprinting things which are of no particular value except
as curiosities (my emphasis. Sambrook in Equiano Archival ﬁles).

49

Sambrooks’s staid but serious-minded proposal was to stave off the publication of
materials that might sell solely because of the growing curiosity about Africa and African
authors but which might not represent the best artistic tradition of the continent (personal
interview). But it puts the implications of educational publishing into focus and points to
the fundamentals of educational publishing and the selection of texts based on different
criteria from general publishing, which shall be examined as the second phase of the
publication of the African Writers Series in chapter 2. The difference between
educational and general publishing is the restrictive nature of educational publishing as
John St John who wrote the ofﬁcial history of Heinemann points out: “A good novel is a
good novel anywhere; but educational books are only good in so far as they ﬁt in with the
syllabus and speciﬁc needs of an educational system. Their suitability can only be
ascertained by discussion with teachers (not booksellers)...” (472). An example of this is
the letter to the Schools Board in which Sahle Sellassie's The Afersata (1969) was being
introduced to the school system in Ethiopia as the ﬁrst novel in English which would help
Ethiopian students in their efforts to acquire the English Language. Although, Sahle
Sellassie wrote back to the publisher to correct the impression that the novel was the ﬁrst
Ethiopian novel, the letter by and large represents the standard HEB marketing strategy
across Aﬁica to cultivate the interest of Ministries of Education in making tests available

for school use:

To Teachers of English in Ethiopia

We are sending you a copy of Sahle Sellassie's The Afersata, the ﬁrst
Ethiopian novel in English which we have published. We feel certain that after
you have read it you will want your students to read it. We are sure that their
knowledge of the background of this novel will increase their speed of reading.

We are taking the opportunity of enclosing our latest check list of the
Aﬁican Writers Series in which Ato Sahle Sellassie's book appears. These are
paperback editions of books which have already been published and welcomed in

50

Britain and the United States. We hope they will capture the attention and
pleasure of your pupils in their attempts to read English with greater and greater
ease.

All orders should be placed with your booksellers or through your normal
purchasing arrangements. (Heinemann Archive)

What is also counterintuitive about Hill and Sambrook’s proposal for the development of
an Aﬁican literature educational list, what we should rightly term the educational phase
of the publication, which is meant to be “extremely careful” in gradually building up a
canon of literature, is that it runs against the grain of commercial publishing. Talking
about the success that Heinemann has had and its reputation in England and a prominent
ﬁction publisher, John St. John states as follows, “The prosperity of the ﬁrm depended as
always very largely on books which, judged by strict literary canons, might with
justiﬁcation be classed as ‘popular’ or even ‘second rate’. A high percentage of the
reading and particularly borrowing public craved entertainment above all, even though
the literary levels of such entertainment might vary. It is not to disparage them to say that
many authors went out of their way to satisfy this demand” (355). The educational list

therefore can only be construed as a devotion to the enlightenment and emancipatory

promise of liberal humanism, which is the philosophy of the educational system as such.

It is in this context that the implicit didactic mission of African literature
proclaimed by Achebe in “The Novelist as Teacher” coincides with the enlightenment
ideology that undergirds the investments and commitment of the publisher. Achebe’s
view remains extant in African and postcolonial literary criticism to date:

Here, then, is an adequate revolution for me to espouse--to help my society regain

its belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of the denigration and

self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of
that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet.

51

For no thinking Aﬁican can escape the pain of the wound in our soul . . . The
writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration
that must be done. In fact he should march right in front . . . I for one would not
wish to be excused. I would be quite satisﬁed if my novels (especially the ones set
in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past--witlr all its
imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the ﬁrst Europeans
acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as
distinct from pure. But who care? Art is important but so is education of the kind I
have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive. ("The
Novelist as Teacher," 1965)
After over twenty years, in his last novel, Anthills of the Savannah Achebe continues to
promote the same ideas articulated in “The Novelist as Teacher” through a character that
serves for every intent and purpose as the author’s mask. Through Ikem, and the role of the
artist that he propagates in the Anthills, it becomes clear that the development of rational
thought remains the centerpiece of the search for independence that motivated African
writers in the 19608. Ikem states, "We may accept a limitation on our actions but never,
under no circumstance, must we accept restriction on our thinking" (Anthills, 223). The role
of the writer is indissociable ﬁom that of the teacher: “I want instead to excite general
enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine the condition of their lives because,
As a writer I aspire only to widen the scope of that self-examination (158). The revolution of
the mind that Achebe believes only education could facilitate, but which they were
impatient to realize, he now argues “experience and intelligence warn us, will be piecemeal,
slow and undrarnatic’ (99). The task of re-education is one that requires a political support
Indeed, the ideology of educational publishing is fundamentally political and is instrumental
to accomplishing democratic ﬁ'eedom by supporting "a good spread of general political
experience, slow of growth and obstinately patien " (139).Through Ikem, Achebe provides a

formula for social change through that revolution of the mind. Since "society is an extension

of the individual" (99), the shortcut to change social relations is to give its individuals, "the

52

greatest present one human being can give another: the gift of insight” (96). Through this,
self-reformation will be possible. Achebe argues that re-forming such a society must be
achieved by democratizing the grand essentials of knowledge (insight) among the
individuals. Ikem literally preaches to students at the University of Bassa, and by extension
Achebe is urging the Aﬁican youth, "You must develop the habit of skepticism, not to
swallow every piece of superstition you are told... when you have rid yourselves of these
things your potentiality for assisting and directing this nation will be quadrupled” (160-1).
There is no doubt that Achebe is barking back to ideas developed at the very start of his
career as a writer, which he expressed in “The Novelist as Teacher.” Ikem starts his lecture
at the University of Bassa on the note of what the novelist as teacher could accomplish:
“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control; they frighten usurpers of
the right-to-ﬁcedom of the human spirit - in state, in church or mosque, in party congress ...”

(153).

The attitude to the Enlightenment described above has resonance that is felt in
black experience as a whole. Enlightenment meant emancipation. The most powerful

expression and summation of this copulation of idea and condition is found in no other

place than Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk:

Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to
replace the dream of political power, -- a powerﬁrl movement, the rise of another
ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of ﬁre by night after a clouded day. It
was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to
know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to
know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan;
longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight,
leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

53

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those
who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull
understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how
piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician
wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there
a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was
ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If,
however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but ﬂattery
and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reﬂection and self-examination;
it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-
consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving
his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, - darkly as through a veil; and
yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began
to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and
not another. (6-7)

The earlier manifestations of the implicit faith in the liberating power and the
potentialities of book learning could be found in texts like Arrow of God, No longer at
Ease etc. During Ezeulu’s exile and imprisonment in Arrow of God, he observes the
district officer and his clerk; the narrative presents his observations in terms that reveal
what W.E.B. Du Bois described in Souls of Black Folk as “the power of the cabalistic
letters of the white man.” Ezeulu was not impressed by the Clark, but the unusual event
was that of the DO. “He too was writing, but with his left hand. The ﬁrst thought that
came to Ezeulu on seeing him was to wonder whether any black man could ever achieve
the same mastery over book as to write it with the left hand” (215). The fascination with
“cabalistic letters,” with the iconography of modernity constantly set apart the traditional
man. Ezeulu is such a man, quite representative in most ways, smitten by the sword of
letters and the seductive power of the enlightenment. So much so, he reinforces the
wisdom of the decision to send one of his sons to school, upon his return to his village.

After a short pause Ezeulu spoke direct and to the point. He reminded Oduche of

the importance of knowing what the white man knew. “I have sent you to be my

eyes there. Do not listen to what people say-«people who do not know their right
from their left. No man speaks a lie to his son; I have told you that before. If

54

anyone asks you why you should be sent to learn these new things tell him that a
man must dance the dance prevalent in his time.” He scratched his head and
continued in a relaxed voice. “When I was in Okperi I saw a young white man
who was able to write his book with the left hand. From his actions I could see
that he had very little sense. But he had power; he could shout in my face; he
could do what he liked. Why? Because he could write with his left hand. That is
why I have called you. I want you to learn and master this man's knowledge so
much that if you are suddenly woken up from sleep and asked what it is you will
reply. You must learn it until you can write it with your left hand. That is all I
want to tell you.” (234-5)

Although, the trademark subtleties of the ironic tone in Achebe’s works create a sense of

ambivalence, it also elicits sympathy for his mystiﬁed characters. As has been taken up

by other writers like Cheikh Harnidou Kane, these characters are inexorably mystiﬁed,

but in being thus mystiﬁed, they are unable to properly appropriate or decipher the

consequences of their total subjection to “the book.” It is these ironies that underscore the

transcendent narrative voice that is at once a view from outside as it is self-

representation. Another one of such characters is Obi Okonkwo’s father in No Longer at

Ease:

Mr Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And
the symbol of the white man's power was the written word, or better still, the
printed word. Once before he went to England, Obi heard his father talk with deep
feeling about the mystery of the written word to an illiterate kinsman: 'Our
women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the uli tree. It was
beautiﬁrl, but it soon faded. If it lasted two market weeks it lasted a long time. But
sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded, although no one had ever
seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white man. If you go to the native
court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are
still as they wrote them. They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow,
or one thing this year and another next year. Okoye in the book today cannot
become Okonkwo tomorrow. In the Bible Pilate said: "What is written is written."
It is uli that never fades.’

The kinsrnan had nodded his head in approval and snapped his ﬁngers. The result
of Okonkwo's mystic regard for the written word was that his room was full of old
books and papers--- from Blackie's Arithmetic which he used in 1908 to Obi's
Durrell, ﬁ'om obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha
dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier. Okonkwo never

55

destroyed a piece of paper. He had two boxes full of them. The rest were

preserved on top of his enormous cupboard, on tables, on boxes and on one comer

of the ﬂoor. (127-8)

The fascination with “cabalistic letters” turns into a form of fetishization in which
the use-value of book learning is subverted through mimicry. The contradiction during
the time of Equiano was not in the promise of the enlightemnent, but in the betrayal of
that promise by White slaveholders. Equiano became the symbol of that promise and the
object of mystiﬁcation in ways that exposes that bankruptcy of the slaveholders and
trafﬁckers. He was approached by a mystiﬁed observer: “At last he asked me, ‘How
comes it that all the white men on board who can read and write, and observe the sun, and
know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only excepting yourself?’ I answered him,
the reason was that they did not fear God, and that if anyone of them died so, they could
not go to, or be happy with God” (128-9). The big schism here between knowledge and
morality is the cause of perplexity for both Achebe and Equiano. It is the effort in
regaining the moral authority of enlightenment that makes the publication of Equiano
important in the Series. The moral argument of the abolition was based on the invocation
of reason and religion providing precedent for the anticolonial discourse. The optimism
of Equiano however contrasts with the pessimism of Achebe on the promise of the book.
Clearly, all of Achebe’s characters see the might associated with the book, and not the
right. (A critique of the instrumentality of the book shall be examined further in the
second chapter.) The difference lies in the paradoxical attitude of contemporary African
writers to the enlightenment. Whereas Abolitionists embraced the optimism of the
enlightenment, modern African writers problematized its promise. In any case, the silence

of the book that Equiano describes in his encounter already possesses the latent

56

prediction of betrayal. “I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading, and I
had a great curiosity to talk to the books as I thought they did, and so to learn how all
things had a beginning: for that purpose I have often taken up a book and have talked to it
and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been
very much concerned when I found it remained silent” (3 5). In No Longer at Ease, the
central puzzle is the inexplicable failure of the man of enlightenment. What Achebe is
reaching for is the ambivalence at the very heart of the commonwealth project itself. The
common culture fostered by the use of the English language operates at the level of
formality which deprives the culture its ability to self-invent and reinvent. All is
enumerated by Arthur Arnold in his piece “Britain’s Legacy in Nigeria” when in part he
states that “One of the more dubious legacies bequeathed to Nigeria by the British
colonial rule was English as the ofﬁcial language; this in itself was not a bad thing but,
perhaps because the colonialists themselves had been brought up on a diet of Latin, they
left behind them no feeling or respect for the language as a living thing” (HEB archive).
If the meaning of the commonwealth for all intents and purposes was unity in diversity,
which means literally the same thing as separate but equal, then the commonwealth
period of African literature represented a form of conservative emancipation. This is
evident in the insight provided by D. J. Enright about the very notion of “Commonwealth

literature”:

The language of these (non-English) writers is English, and they have entered
into competition with the Oxford Book of English Verse and its centuries — just
like any other English poet. They will have to decide whether they wish to be
judged by absolute, that is literary standards, or by special local standards. The
world will urge them to partake of that new “subject” called “Commonwealth
literature.” (Quoted in Kamala Markandaya, 26)

57

Why bring back the echoes of the debates in the 608 about the commonwealth
especially as the impact of globalization and the ultimate dominance of the English
language have swept aside the Britain/Commonwealth binary? The attempt in this
chapter was not simply a return to the question of the Commonwealth merely for interest
in historical studies; it has served to contextualize and reconceptualize African literature
within a political economy that at once stimulated and co-opted it. It has also served to
highlight how the marginal status of African literature originated and was sustained; how
the sentiments remain today as they had been in the 608. The view of these writers as
positioned abroad and only marginally related to the mainstream was very powerful.
According to a review in the Irish Times,

The literature of those countries which were once part of the British Empire has

bloomed with the advent of independence, the departure of the legions, and it has

not lacked admirers and connoisseurs here in Britain. The parallel with later Latin

literature, certain of whose chief authors came from the limits of empire, has been

remarked on. (Boundaries: Achebe ﬁle, HEB archive)
The time therefore has come to reexamine the assumptions of what African literature was
set to accomplish, if it has indeed extended the frontiers of English. In a highly
instructive piece, Achebe offers the following suggestion: “That discovery that one is
somehow superﬂuous is there, and waiting at joumey’s end, for the weary traveler from
the provinces. The great metropolis is not your little village; it has too many world-
shaking concerns to be troubling itself about your insigniﬁcant homely affairs” (2001:
98). Beneath this remark is an indictment about the separate but unequal nature of the
relations of Africa with the West, which has found expression in the use of different

categories. The Commonwealth Period, like the colonial period maintained rhetorical

categories of difference even as it proclaimed unity in diversity. The Commonwealth was

58

thus a code word, which meant, like diversity, the respect of, and keeping separate,
irreconcilable differences. This separatist cultural politics underlying the specialization of
Africa Writers Series, mirrored colonialist politics which “were actually founded on
respect for indigenous customs and, consequently, on a diffuse culturalism” (Amselle, 2).
It ultimately “amounts to an essentialist vision of culture, which is ultimately a modern
form of racism. In this sense, ethnology can lead to a legitimation of exclusion (as in

apartheid)” (Amselle, 2).

59

CHAPTER THREE

Ibadan: Postcolonial City and the Antecedents of The African Writers Series.

The African Writers Series—African literature as an archive of writings—i8 an
aesthetic formation that corresponds to the sociopolitical and imaginative forces that
brought it together just as those forces are themselves being brought together through it.
As political independence exerted an irrepressible centrifugal force within the British
empire, the greater force of uniﬁcation was not to be found in the political organizations
but in the cultural. The unitary function in the ﬁeld of culture as embodied by the Series
is indicative of the deep contradictions within the ideology of common culture that the
British Commonwealth actively promoted in the new multicultural nations of Aﬁica.
More importantly, the imperative of the literary function in modern Africa coincided with
the simultaneous emergence of cosmopolitan centers of artistic production in a number of
African cities such as Ibadan, Nairobi, Dakar, Abidjan, and Johannesburg. This chapter
examines the history in Ibadan of The Mbari Club, which had ﬁrst published locally the
writers that Heinemann Educational Books would later help to canonize through the
Series as constituting Aﬁican, Postcolonial and World literature. The particular
atmosphere of the postcolonial/post-independent city, the unique admixture of its
political and cultural histories, served as a major enabler of artistic creativity and added
vital material and imaginative dimensions to the production of African literary texts. The
work by Africa’s ﬁrst Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, illustrates the attempt by African
writers to retrieve and restore a sense of stability in the city shattered by the disastrous

and seemingly interminable transition from colonial to self rule, an experience that

60

uniquely deﬁnes the modern African/postcolonial writer as one who bestrides the
immeasurable gulf of transition.

The rise of the postcolonial city represented a moment of intense cultural outreach
and the internationalization of African literary production. The production of African
literature was as much a function of global regimes of political and economic activities of
international publishers and of the icon of postcolonial modernity, the educational
system, as it was the direct reﬂection of the transformations of the city. This chapter
demonstrates, through an examination of correspondences in the publisher’s archive and
a symptomatic reading of Wole Soyinka’s autobiography Ibadan, and his novel The
Interpreters that these superstructural and infrastructural elements produced effects in
literature that are parallel to and intertwined with the structural and operational
transformations within the postcolonial city.

As an imaginary formation, the Series crystallizes the processes of the
disciplining of artistic imagination taking place within the contexts of historical moments
and the worldliness speciﬁc to the individual artist. In other words, the African writer’s
existential alignment, together with the tension generated by the dialectics of change,
constitute the generative principles of the African literary imagination. The world of the
African writer, the prison house of his creative imagination, has been constrained by
material forces of history in the same fundamental way as world-fonnation, as suggested
by Heidegger. The effects of colonialism has, with the displacement of the old world and
the institutionalization of a ﬂedging order, presented to the writer a task, very much with

the same obligation of illustrating the underlying structure of sensibilities.

61

In the postcolony, the immediate and visible manifestations of history have been
most demonstrable in the transformations of space. As symbolic models, architectural
styles engender parallel motifs in other expressive media: in the arts, painting, music,
language, costumes, and modes of living, such that the grand orchestration of the culture
effects a complete semiotic synchronization of the imaginary functions with the material
effects. More signiﬁcant is the power behind, and disseminated through, material
structures. Mostly, with the infusion of colonizing structures such as churches, schools,
post ofﬁces, colonial ofﬁces and residences, highways and railroads among many others,
the landscape, the world, literally and ﬁguratively, of most African urban centers where
they were mostly erected, and their inhabitants, could never remain as they may have
once been. This, in variations, is the ultimate theme of African literature and the lasting
testament of the Series. Thus, Aﬁican literature shares with other world literatures the
essence of capturing the mobility of change and also of enabling resistance through the
endurance of writing. The dramatic quality of the theme ﬁnds the most spectacular
moment in the urban-turned—cosmopolitan centers of the postcolony. One of such centers
is the city of Ibadan, in Nigeria, where the production and explosion of art in the
19608effected a “Renaissance.” This chapter carries forward the theme of the previous
chapter in evoking the genealogy of African literature as it emerged as part of the history
of the book as a whole, the history of publishing in England and the West, and the
speciﬁc requirement of political re/conﬁgurations such as the Commonwealth, but with a

focus on its character as a product of a speciﬁc discipline of the imagination.

Given that literary forms, genres and collections have their moment in time, the

moment and nature of their emergence is most often a response to an urgent need. One of

62

the most compelling works of literary criticism and history that examines how speciﬁc
types of novels emerged in relation to spatial history is Raymond Williams’s The Country
and the City (1975). Williams demonstrates in this work how each material mode of
living in England has stimulated its own form of representation, and especially how the
novels he examines record “direct observation of a new set of physical and sense
relationships” (150); how in modern literature in particular, the “social character of the
city was seen as the reality of all human life” (234). Beyond English literature to World

literature as a whole, he writes:

In world literature, in Balzac, in Baudelaire and in a different way in Dostoievsky,
the image of the city grew into a kind of dominance. Balzac had shown the social
intricacy of the city, and its constant mobility, since his purpose was to describe
this, the consequent image, though complex, is clear. Dostoievsky, on the other
hand, emphasized the elements of mystery and strangeness and the loss of
connection; comparably with Dickens but drawing on different ultimate
responses, he then worked to create recognitions. . .. Baudelaire, meanwhile,
reversed both these values. . .. There was a new kind of pleasure, a new
enlargement of identity, in what he called bathing oneself in the crowd. (234)
Williams’s magisterial explorations of the ways changing life situations and perceptions
in the city equally transformed the imagination and modes of representation establish an
important paradigm, however limited, for the present task of describing the relationship
of the postcolonial city to the disciplining of the imagination as reﬂected in African
literature, and of analyzing how the dynamics responsible for the transformation of the
postcolonial city could be understood as structuring the apparatus of perceptions that

stimulate and regulate the imagination of the African writer.

Alan Hill, the founding director of the Heinemann Educational Books, publisher
of the African Writers Series, described his ﬁrst encounters with two Nigerian cities as

follows:

63

Lagos in those last days of colonialism struck me as the most terrible town I had
ever seen. The heat, the humidity, the haze of Sahara sand brought by the
“Harmattan,” were bad enough. The smells were worse. And I saw sights which
beggared description. Back streets about ten feet wide, with an open drain down
the middle, into which people openly defecated: appalling squalor and ﬁlth
everywhere.

Ibadan with its University was altogether better. I was the guest of Evans, the
publisher, for a week—staying in their house, and spending the evening with the
very numerous British academic community... nothing could prevent me from
enjoying the African night. Sitting on the veranda after dinner, watching the
ﬁreﬂies in the magical darkness, listening to the chorus of cicadas and bull-frogs
and feeling the embrace of the warm, velvety air of this immense continent, was
an experience of which I have never tired. (In Pursuit of Publishing, 193-4)

What made Ibadan better also accounts for the extraordinary eruption of creativity that
was witnessed during the 608. In Hill’s description of Lagos and Ibadan emerges the two
traditional images of the city. Lagos in this case would be in Raymond Williams’s
characterization “the opposite pole from the ideal of civilized order” (Williams: 144).
Ibadan however, with “its deﬁning centers of culture and learning,” (152) marked by the
“pursuit of industry and urbane pleasure... was the symbol of progress and

enlightenment... the school of civilization and liberty” (144).

In the discourse of modern African literature, the city has played a much different
function in the literature from those outlined by Williams. A crucial distinction needs to
be made that enables us to comprehend the nature of the conﬂict to which African
literature initially addressed itself. The city is ﬁrst and foremost the revolving door to the
greater world; a passage that is neither open nor closed. And, precisely because most of
the institutions that function within it have their origins in and/or links to the outer world,

its status as political capital is subordinated to its status as a hub.

John Pepper Clark’s poem “Ibadan” fully and concisely captured the essence of

the city:

Ibadan,

running splash of rust

and gold — ﬂung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

The paradox of the city: treasured for its ancientrress, deceptively decadent, bearing rustic
innocence and golden civilization; casting forth the broken images of sunlight refracted in
the brilliance of naturalized fragments at once irresistible and unapproachable. As
already stated, a major achievement of African literature is the embodiment of mobility.
The life and imagination of the Aﬁican writer is always on the run. He/she is a writer in a
time of change. The early African writer’s journey starts typically at a tender age but
always with the encounter of the colonial schools that tend to draw him or her away from
roots. The glimmer of indeterminate yellow light from afar is gold, not rust, and sets a
burning hope that displaces the certitudes, the comfort and security of home. The feeling
of the embrace of the warm velvety air that Hill describes is not mere romanticism, but
the real encounter of the space of enchantrnent. Nowhere has the encounter with school
been more profoundly experienced as a space of enchantrnent than in African literature.
From Ngugi’s Weep Not Child (1964) to Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1972), or Laye’s
The Aﬁ'ican Child (1961), the young hero harbors a hope of emancipation entwined with
the consciousness of responsibility. He ardently follows the train of progress to its
terminus. These novels therefore cast their riveted eyes backward on that journey re-
irnagined as reﬂections of a journey, where ideals and fantasies are lamented, not
fulﬁlled. This is why, as we shall later come to discuss, the true form of the African novel
is the tragic form. A somewhat different version occurs with the Cameroonians Mongo

Beti (Mission to Kala, 1964), and Ferdinand Oyono (Road to Europe, 1989).

65

Talking about his journey, from the eastern Nigerian village of Ogidi through
Government College, Umuahia, to the University of Ibadan where he received a
Bachelor’s degree in English, to his now eminent position internationally as a writer,
Chinua Achebe writes about what could be argued is the quintessential story of the
modern Aﬁ'ican: “an awakening story in whose ambience my own existence had ﬁrst
begun to assemble its fragments into a coherence and meaning; the story I had begun to
learn consciously... in Ogidi, the story that, seventeen years later at the university I still
had only a sketchy, tantalizing knowledge of, and over which even today, decades later, I
still do not have sufficient mastery” (38). The original conﬂict that modern African
literature was devoted to unraveling as part of the larger attempt at decolonization was
generated by the colonial school. Paradoxically, this conﬂict or crisis was a productive

crisis as it formed part of the very condition of possibility of modern African literature.

Alan Hill stresses this same point in his narrative as follows: “As most of our
West African Authors, during the early years of the AWS, had been educated at such
British govemment-sponsored institutions, some account of them would be relevant.
They were boarding schools, staffed by dedicated British teachers, giving a ﬁrst-rate
English grammar school education to highly selected Africans” (136). Just as Ibadan was
to the West, Hill reveals that “Umuahia [to the cast] was a rich breeding ground for
Heinemann authors.” The disciplinary regime in these schools, implemented through a
rigorous curriculum, is only a part of the general regime under which colonialism
disciplined most of Africa, especially regional urban centers such as Ibadan and
Umuahia. Hill’s pursuit of publishing in Africa and the establishment of the Series, was

based precisely on the assumption of a kind of harvest of the ﬁrst fruits of colonial

66

education. “It was clear to me that I should visit Africa, in particular West Africa - for
more than one reason. Achebe was not an isolated phenomenon. He was a product of the
newly established University of Ibadan” ( 122). Completely oblivious of the underlying
critique of western education, Hill remained unaware of the subtext and the conﬂict
dramatized in these novels even though it was available to him in different forms. In
talking about the publishing mission of Heinemann in view of emerging market potentials
in England and in postcolonial societies, he says, “Our concern was with English as the
major subject in the school curriculum. In the hands of a new generation of teachers
English was set fair to become the main cultural and humanistic focus of secondary
education” (83). Thus according to him, editorial policy must be reﬂective of the new
social developments: “My editorial policy was to concentrate was on two subjects -
English and Science. English ﬁtted the high literary tradition of Heinemann and had a
world-wide market” (72). The central role of the regime of the English discipline in the
cultural and humanistic education of the postcolony was seen as unproblematic by Hill.
Yet, it is precisely this centrality that was to be challenged, reversed and extended

through the Series.

The connection Hill makes between the time of independence of African
countries, decolonization and the unprecedented outpourings of literary creativity is an
important one. The roots of modern Aﬁican literature, especially the Series, in colonial
schools cannot be overemphasized. However, these do not fully account for the origins,
nature and function of the Series. The historical moment in which Africa inserts itself
into the consciousness of the world through its literature clearly reveals how the

university is inseparable from the stimulation of public curiosity and intelligence, the

67

cultivation of a reading public, and the emergence of an educated class of Aﬁicans and of
the bourgeoisie. However, the analysis of the sociology of the production of African
literature would advance in a different direction if the observations and questions that
Robert Wren raises in his book Those Magical Years (1990) were seriously considered.
In a compelling argument, Wren makes the case that Ibadan has been responsible for
producing such a huge number of authors that reducing the phenomenon to the offshoot

of colonial education might not fully explain it:

What was the common energy that Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo and Clark drew on?
What powered the surge in literary art during the 1960’s? The common locale was
Ibadan, the common experience was University College, Ibadan, established in
1948, becoming simply UI, the University of Ibadan, well after independence in
1962. Other African universities, at Legon, Ghana, and Makerere, Uganda, had
been set up simultaneously without such poetry, drama, and ﬁction. Why Nigeria?
Why Ibadan?

Some say the question is inappropriate, as if literature were a spontaneous
overﬂow of creative genius, inexplicable as it is unpredictable. It may be. Yet, at
minimum, the tools of literature must be at hand, and for an international
literature such as Nigeria’s, the essential tools were manufactured abroad. In that
sense, a colonial university in the 1940’s and 50’s was a tools supply depot. In the
late 1940’s, Britain setup similar institutions in Ghana, British West Indies,
Nigeria, Uganda— literary tools depots of high quality all. And any good tools
supply depot should do as well as any other, one would think. But colonial
universities did not have equal results. Ibadan alone produced at least four writers
worth world notice, two of them candidates for Nobels, and one a laureate. And
that makes the question, Why Ibadan? more than idle speculation. Since the tools
alone are not enough, what more was there? Might there be, even, a formula, a
discoverable pattern underlying the creation of art, a context that needs only
young people fed into it, as into one of the screaming, clanking Nigerian market
machines that wildly mangle tomatoes and onions and peppers into a paste-like
goo, the base of all good cooking? You just put stuff in, and you get the sauce.
Not that simple, but as the rest of this book will show, something did happen.
(Wren, 1990:17)

Wren in this passage appears to discount East African writers such as Okello Oculi, Okot

p'Bitek, David Rubadiri, Ngugi wa Thiongo, all of whom were products of Makerere. He

68

also seems to overlook graduates of the University of Ghana at Legon, Koﬁ Awoonor,
Efua Sutherland and Arna Ata Aidoo. However, the question “why Ibadan?” that he
posed to all those who were part of the emergence of modern Nigerian literature, whom
he interviewed, starting with the ﬁrst president of the University of Ibadan, is an
important question. It was also Wren’s method to put the production of literature within
the material history of events, similar to what Febvre and Martin described in The
Coming of The Book. What was consistent in most of the responses he got was the
image of “a happy coincidence of people whose idea of the arts is that they should be a
living form” (33). This conviction, identiﬁed by Martin Banham, among the community
of students and teachers at UI in the 19508 and 19608, is the same conviction expressed
by Alan Hill and all the editors of the African Writers Series. In response to the question

“why Ibadan?” Banharn opines,

I suspect that in other places people were quite deliberately stopping any
manifestation by ﬁrmly applying other criteria to what was the proper educational
process or what was the role of the student or what was the role of the staff. I
drink clearly the last thing one must do is to look at a few expatriates as the
stimulus, because the Nigerians themselves were the creative artists. But they did
have the facility and the opportunity. That did something for it, to be given an
audience. (33)

The notion that the expatriates and by extension, the publishers were not to be
seen as the stimulus is consistent with Febvre and Martin’s methodological precaution in
the study of book history, “We must, of course, be careful not to ascribe to the book or
even to the preacher too important a role in the birth and development of the Refor-

mation ” (The Coming of the Book, 289).

69

Indeed, contrary to what was to be expected, as Wole Ogundele demonstrates, the
University may not after all be credited with making Ibadan that much better a place, not

to mention with stimulating literary creativity. In a familiar colonial ecosystem,

The University College Ibadan then was staffed mostly by such Europeans. They
did their work very conscientiously in the classrooms or laboratories, but kept
strictly away ﬁom either the students or the indigenous population. . .. In this
regard, the university’s role became reduced to merely training young people in
the modern professions. Although a lot of research activities went on, nothing
new or original that was a product of the interaction between the institution and its
environment resulted. (Ogundele: 40-41)

All the foregoing characterizations are amply corroborated in the writings of most of the
writers who lived through Ibadan, and were part of its literary golden age. An example is
Wole Soyinka, the third sequel of whose autobiography is, as a matter of fact, titled

Ibadan.

Soyinka’s Ibadan is highly instructive in bringing together in a dynamic, vivid
and personal relation all the forces, the special conditions that have made the postcolonial
society peculiar. Conditions that bear directly on what was imaginable, tlrinkable and
actionable. Like the archetypal young hero of the Aﬁ'ican novel of the 19608, Soyinka’s
mount of transﬁguration was Government College, Apataganga, located on the outskirts
of Ibadan. In a most lyrical moment of self-discovery in the autobiography, on the very
day of his return from England where he had been for ﬁve years as a student at the
University of Leeds, Soyinka describes his natural afﬁnity to Ibadan rather than Ake, his

birthplace, thus:

But it was Apataganga that he looked for the deepest restoration of his long-
absent self, in a far more complete sense than Ake. .. Apataganga had, he felt,
deﬁned him in some unchangeable way and the major craving he now had was to
walk through the grounds of that school again while it was empty. . . Apataganga
was where he had ﬁrst understood conﬂict... ﬁ'om the very ﬁrst entry through

70

those gates he had guessed that the place would mark him for life. There was
something about Ibadan itself, a deﬁnite feeling, both restraining and exiting, that
he had taken away with him after his ﬁnal year in school. (Soyinka, 1994: 16-7)

The point of this chapter retums ever more pungently. What is in a place? What in a place
animates the imagination and permanently shapes the character of its inhabitants? What
was in the “Gangling Rocks” of Apataganga, in the “Seven Hills” of Ibadan to hold such
a tremendous importance for the personal lives and artistic careers of the writers? How is
one to account for the spark of the imagination; what keeps the combustive intensity of
creativity kindled? The answer is clearly far more complex than Robert Wren conceives
of it. Neither is it simply the result or legacy of colonial education and the productive
powers of the publisher as Alan Hill suggests. It is in that organic chemistry of material
and individual histories, of matter and spirit, place, person and production as Soyinka’s
story would illustrate. “Ibadan itself, with its rusted arteries, its ancient warrens and
passions and intrigues, that would conﬁrm what he had begun to be apprehensive about,
in himself. . ., as having a pretematural affinity to a lightning rod” (17). Evidently, the
conﬂicts that deﬁned Soyinka’s life, which he experienced there in Ibadan, he is
convinced, were unique to the place. Ibadan takes on a life and personality of its own
with passions welling up in the shared arteries of its landscape. The underlying structure
of the intrigues that it inspires lay deep within the labyrinth of its warrens. The human
characteristics of passions and intrigues, the very stuff of drama to which Soyinka’s art is
devoted, are simulations of the physical geography of the city. Soyinka’s personal
temperament and artistic sensibilities thus shaped within the larger social drama are the
lasting effects of the contradictory power of the city to restrain and to excite. It is in this

sense, among others, that he says it was Ibadan that has “turned him into an adult” (1 7).

71

In another sense, Soyinka’s very language of attaining adulthood in the city of
Ibadan is loaded with all sorts of psychoanalytical undercurrents. One cannot but note the
involuntary nature of the “turn.” The sense of this involuntary turn is also present in
Achebe’s journey, as it is in most of the early African writers: from Ogidi, all the way
through Achimota in Ghana, to the University College Ibadan. It altogether illustrates the
overdetermined history of the postcolonial society that Achebe describes in Anthills of the
Savannah (198 8). But it also throws us squarely within the traditional narrative of
country and city that Raymond Williams has traced in English literature: the journey
cityward, though inexorable, is the journey into experience, into the passions of
participation in the intrigues of the high-stakes drama of humanity. Arr overlay of pathos
thereby forms around the tragic loss of innocence, of disintegration, of things falling
apart. The autobiography, Ibadan, which ends with the author’s detention and the civil
unrest in the city, a prelude to the Nigerian Civil war, could very well take on the title
Things Fall Apart. However, it does not purposefully, since it is ultimately against
obstinate pessimism and the despair of disintegration that Soyinka, the retumee, the
village protagonist, the academic monk, the civil rights leader and the revolutionary
artist, came to uphold the emancipatory promise of the educational process that he, like
other internationally acknowledged writers such as Okigbo, J .P. Clark and Achebe, began
in Ibadan, Achimota, Umuahia, etc. Because colonial education promoted itself as a
civilizational imperative, as liberation from superstition, a discourse that for the most part
was very successful in its project of metamorphosis, the crisis of the promise of
emancipation through enlightenment came into full reckoning in many works of early

modern Aﬁican literature. Thus, educated Africans were portrayed with a certain

72

elevation, a degree of messianic stature, which ultimately sets them up as tragic heroes.
The hero as an epic hero is portrayed as the leader of the people. However, in the face of
the Hamlet Complex as embodied in the character of Njoroge, in Ngugi’s Weep Not
Child (1964), a depiction of how colonial education failed because of its conservative
emancipation, became necessary. The hero liberated from the traditional life of penury
and subsistence is in “Third World” fashion thrown into a wider grid of subjugation in
the modern world. From No Longer at Ease (1963), Weep Not Child, to The River
Between (1965), the theme of the crossroads, of a tragic impasse is enunciated. In
Nigeria, it was in the poetry of Christopher Okigbo that the mood would ﬁnd its
reverberating poetic voice, especially in his Labyrinths (1971). But also, the enunciation
of the tragic impasse, brought about by the running aground of the projects of
enlightenment and modernity, extracted a response that required the Aﬁican writer to
portray the courage to bear the black man’s burden as a mark of coming of age, of
autonomy from the colonial order and responsible adulthood. This second movement that

asserts the masculinity of heroic struggle is what Ibadan produced in its writers.

It is a mark of classic historical irony that precisely at the moment the African
writer came into full awareness of the limits of the emancipatory promise of
enlightenment and subsequently embraced the disintegration of his world with
philosophical equanimity, that Alan Hill’s Heinemann Educational Books published the
African Writers Series in the greater service of Enlightenment. Achebe, whose novel was
the seed of the Series titled his ﬁrst novel Things Fall Apart (195 8) to “the resonance of

an immemorial anxiety” (2001 : l 9). According to Achebe,

73

When my ﬁrst novel appeared in 1958 with the allusive title Things Fall Apart, an
offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper titled her
piece—cleverly, I must admit—Hurray to Mere Anarchy! But in spite of the
cleverness, she could not have known the cosmological fear of anarchy that
burdened the characters in my novel and which W.B. Yeats somehow knew
intuitively. (Achebe 2001 :18-9)

His next two novels, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease were to continue as sequels,
the theme already having been enunciated in Things Fall Apart. The question is why it
did not occur to anyone that the very novels taught to children as celebrating the
authentic images of the African past and their humanity, were actually expressing doubts
about their future?! That the independence of Aﬁica, while it was rightfully expected to
mark a signiﬁcant turning point for the continent did not strike the same chord in its
writers. From whence therefore came the anxiety of the writer? Could this also be a result
of an immersion in Euro-American literature, with whom the writers are clearly familiar?
Or is it part of a universal response to larger conditions of conﬂict and capitalist
transformations? Instead of seeing the dawn of an age of enlightenment, the writer saw
the anarchy to come. What is remarkable is that all these writers in the 19608 resisted the
lure of exile and withstood the monster. This is not to say that the writer rejected
altogether the enlightenment principle as clearly shown in Achebe’s famous essay, “The
Novelist as Teacher.” The writer’s instinct was to recognize the anarchy that threatened
and to rescue society from the swirl. In this sense, the threnodic essence of the art

represents not a ﬁnality but a work towards a restorative end.

Examples of the apprehensive mood and the anxieties that pervaded the literature
could be found in most of Soyinka’s works, The Interpreters, A Dance of the Forests,

Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma among others. Contemplating his return to

74

Nigeria in 1959 and his choice of the University of Ibadan as a place to work, the signs of

anarchy were already obvious to him even while abroad:

The signs were propitious — at least within the hallowed walls of academia; it was
clearly time to return. Negotiating the conditions of his return was easy enough;
all that remained was to negotiate the manner of homecoming, to create space
around himself, large enough to insulate himself from, or confront, the menace of
an incipient disorder, one that an apprehensive few had begun to suspect from the
bearing and language of rival claimants to the midwifery of a new society; it was
a disorder he preferred to diagnose as a common lust for power. (Soyinka 1994:
12)

What Soyinka perceives correctly here is how the process of decolonization occurred
within the climate of an unstable system of power transference which encouraged all
manner of adventurism. The main stage for this adventurism was the capital city. If
political consciousness were to be the highest stage of consciousness, the political
intrigues Soyinka witnessed in Ibadan were certainly a rite of passage for him and
provided the appropriate context for his work. Even more than in the case of Achebe,
Soyinka’s anxieties were noted by the nation when the play he was commissioned to
write for the celebration of Independence, A Dance of the Forests, was withdrawn at the
very last minute, the committee having “discovered that the work struck a discordant note
in the Independence suite - subversive, cynical, iconoclastic, that it mocked the glories of
the past and was pessimistic about the future. The writer ‘had been too long away,’
lacked the patriotic spirit of hope and conﬁdence that was needed for a nation that was
taking the ﬁrst step into a rose-tinted future” (67). The roots of the writers’ anxiety lay in
the obvious reluctant withdrawal of colonial power, the clear opportunism of political
adventurers without a sense of mission, and the apparent incompatibilities of the nation.
The writers were confronted with the specter of neocolonialism and “the increasingly

corrupt and complacent class of rulers [who] existed solely to wallow in the abandoned

75

privileges of the departing colonial masters; their relationship to the masses was simply
that of leeches and parasites” (216). While the politicians celebrated and indulged
themselves, the writer was preparing the Noah’s ark for the maelstrom of the season of
anomy. It was sooner than expected. The recognition of independence as a non-event and

its portentousness eloquently described by Soyinka had revealed him to be clairvoyant:

The farewell smile on the British face was broken razor, the hand outstretched for
a genteel handshake, or snapped up in a farewell salute, cunning crab claws
whose sidewise sleight of motion hid the toxiﬁcation of the passage it traversed,
and the sowing of tares. .. (71).

It was at Ibadan, the hotbed of the national crisis that precipitated the war, that
these writers observed the unraveling of the postcolonial experimental nation, racing to
turn the tide of an even worse fate of total dissolution. The sense in which these writers
took responsibility for the nation is unparalleled in the history of national birth literatures
of the 20th century. A special correspondent of the Irish Times reports about the activities
of these Ibadan based writers in the 19608, around the same time Soyinka ends his

autobiography Ibadan:

Mr. Soyinka is still detained for security reasons. Soyinka is suspected of
arranging the purchase of arms for the secessionist Biafrans. Unconﬁrmed reports
circulating in Lagos and London suggest that the poet Christopher Okigbo, who
was the Nigerian representative of the Cambridge University Press, has been
killed in action. He joined the Biafran army as a major at the start of the
hostilities. . .. What is certain, is that present situation in Nigeria impose on the
writers a mental and emotional strain of grave severity. A few weeks after the
start of the war, a friend asked Mr. Achebe whether he still found time to write.
He retorted: “who can write during a time like this? I’m learning to shoot instead.
(Sic. Achebe Heinemann Files)

Similarly, another international journalist observed in an article titled “Two Bags Full”:

One thing Nigerian authors can’t afford yet is an ivory tower. A year ago, one
playwright was acquitted of holding up a radio station. A month ago, one poet
was principal actor in a gun-running melodrama. Nigeria’s leading novelist,

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Chinua Achebe (an eastemer like the poet), spent Christmas quietly with his
London publishers. He arrived with two briefcases: in one, manuscripts for the
Heinemann’s African Writers series; in the other, pamphlets with pictures of
gouged eyes and decapitated bodies, victims of the Ibo massacre (by Nortlremers)
last October. (Achebe Heinemann Files)

The responsibility of the writer dominated all sense of personal life and ambitions. It was
as if Ikemefuna’s harrowing scream were addressing these initiates, champions of human

liberties, “father, father, they are killing me!”

The political history and the crises of nationhood have a direct impact on the very
choice of subject matter, themes, characterization, conﬂict, symbolism and signiﬁcance
of the writings, much as the writers insist on the separation of their lives’ struggles from
their works. The very deﬁnition of art either as “the afﬁrmation of re-creative
intelligence” or “transcendental, humane but rigidly restorative justice” (Soyinka, Myth,
Literature and the Aﬁ‘ican World, 150,141), or as “restoration of celebration” (Achebe),
is totally borne out of what Soyinka describes as “depth-experience.” An examination of
Soyinka’s aesthetic theory proves its origins in the political crisis of the nation at Ibadan.
The essay “The Fourth Stage” is Soyinka’s equivalence of Achebe’s “The Novelist as
Teacher.” In the mythopoetic formulation of Yoruba metaphysics, Soyinka identiﬁes a

dimension of existence he calls “the fourth stage”:

The' past is the ancestors’, the present belongs to the living, and the future to the
unborn. The deities stand in the same situation to the living as do the ancestors
and the unborn, obeying the same laws, suffering the same agonies and
uncertainties, employing the same masonic intelligence of rituals for the perilous
plunge into the fourth area of experience, the immeasurable gulf of transition. Its
dialogue is liturgy, its music takes form from man’s uncomprehending immersion
in this area of existence, buried wholly from rational recognition. The source of
the possessed lyricist, chanting hitherto unknown mythopoeic strains whose
antiphonal refrain is, however, instantly caught and thrust with all its terror and
awesomeness into the night by swaying votaries, this source is residual in the
numinous area of transition.

77

This is the fourth stage, the vortex of archetypes and the home of the tragic spirit
(Soyinka, 1978:148-9).

It is past amazement that no one has commented on the contributions to political
discourse that Soyinka’s fourth stage represents. What is radical about the notion of the
fourth stage is the subjection of all beings: the “gods,” the ancestors, humanity and the
unborn, under the same rule of laws, the laws “of the no man’s land of transition between
and around these temporal defrnitions of experience” (148), and most important, under
the same governance of the gulf of transition. The ephemeral essence of being is thus
emphasized as the truth of art in response to power, since art’s only reference is
temporality. The same is true of the Mbari temple of art that serves as the basis of
Achebe’s philosophy of art. In the annual reconstruction of the temple, the community
comes together to contemplate itself in the old and new dimensions of its experience. In
this sense, art plays a role in the coming together and being together of a community,
which altogether undergoes constant redeﬁnition according to the dynamics of its atrophy

and expansion.

The African Writers Series is the most remarkable performance of Mbari in
modern times. For London, the place chosen by the earth goddess Ala, under whose
guidance Achebe sent his ﬁrst manuscript to Heinemann is, like Ibadan, the no man’s
land of transition. After colonialism, the role of the artist becomes central in piecing
together a broken history, in bestriding the immeasurable gulf of transition. Thus, the

proper theory of African literature is the theory of Reconstruction.

The theory of the fourth stage refers in real political and personal history to the

moment when chaos engulfed Nigeria in the course of its transition from colonial to self

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rule, and the writer’s homecoming turned into a journey homeward. Two years after his
return, Soyinka writes as one whose “perilous plunge” and “uncomprehending

immersion” mirrors that of Ogun in the immeasurable gulf of transition.

His Land Rover had taken him through at least two-thirds of the country, probing
its ritual tissues for a contemporary theatre vision, or perhaps a mere statement of
being. Despite it all, he was left with the strange sensation of being poised on the
nation’s airspace all over again, ﬂoating in a cloud of the uncertain and
unknowable, wondering yet again what homecoming promised or would bring.
(The Interpreters: 197)

The autobiography is itself a record of the transition from wonderment to total disbelief.
“It was a strange, unsettling feeling. This was his own country, the space of earth in
which he was spawned, and now he was learning, at the very late age of twenty-eight,
that it was his prison” (327). The learning process concludes only at the end with the
outbreak of violence. It was ironic that his father visiting him in prison, with his mother,
“leant across the table and gripped his hands” and for the ﬁrst time since his return years
ago, said to him “welcome home” (368). The fourth stage refers to these extreme
metamorphoses, these endless cycles of human stupidity, of disruptions and deferment of

hope that has come to characterize the postcolony:

Would the unrest ever end, he began to wonder? This was proving very different
from what he had envisaged as he grew neurotic in his haste to return home and...
yes, do what, exactly? One crisis followed another until he sometimes felt that he
was trapped in a time-warp, tossed into a centrifuge that spun him endlessly
within a fourth dimension of existence, a diabolical penkelemes Whirligig. (The
Interpreters: 260)

The modern African writer is thus the writer of the fourth dimension and African
literature, a literature of the transitions that attempts to capture the imperrnanent motions

of change. With the strangeness of the experience comes its power of enchantment. This

79

irnpermanence and therefore permanent strangeness is itself inscribed in the very

landscape of experience of Ibadan as a place of enchantrnent:

Yes, there was about Eleiyele an arcaneness, a collective eccentricity, a magnetic
ﬁeld for the bizarre married to its impermanence, a daily improvisation, of
openness to a real world, a sense of integration into physical surroundings and
humanity, all of which appeared to vanish when the campus moved to its new
home that was scrupulously geometric and consciously collegiate. The old
campus was stamped into the environment of Eleiyele, part wildlife, part civic
centre, part college, market place, nightclub and village assemblage of elders and
age-grades, arguing noisily, ﬂitting silently through covered passageways and
across overgrown lawns to raucous meeting places or solemn, attentive caucuses
of mysterious wisdoms. .. (The Interpreters: 177)

Ibadan as a political city is restraining; the excitement it stimulates, however, is its
cultural dimension, which has the even greater effect on the production of African
literature in the 19608. From the perspective of one of the leading writers of the time, we
begin to appreciate the fascination of the likes of Robert Wren with “a discoverable
pattern underlying the creation of art, a context that needs only young people fed into it.”
“What more was there?” Not the University for sure, because as soon as the University of
Ibadan was moved to its permanent site, it lost a vital sense of connection with its social
environment, as Ogundele already points out. The Eleiyele that Soyinka describes was
the temporary site of the University when he was an undergraduate. It was there that
Achebe and the rest undertook their undergraduate studies. The University had moved
from this location by the time of Soyinka’s arrival from Leeds. But while the University
was at Eleiyele, what mattered was not what was going on inside it, as the dismal report
cards of Okigbo, J .P Clark and even Soyinka reveal. It was what was going on around it,
the physical surroundings and humanity, and the modes of sociality engendered in and by

them that was to have the lasting impact on the production of art and culture.

80

The production of culture in Ibadan follows the logic of cultural formation about
which so much has been written with regards to Paris, London and Athens. London in
particular has had the same status of postcoloniality that makes the comparison all the
more cogent. It is ironic, given the expectations of University education that the center of
cultural production in Ibadan found a nexus in a particular club, one among several of
those operating within the city of Ibadan—the one created by the German Austrian Ulli
Beier. The name of this club was suggested by Chinua Achebe after the most elaborate
traditional festival of arts in Igbo culture, Mbari. “MBARI Arts Club [was located] right
in the teeming heart of Gbagi market and the surrounding streets that were only an
extension of the market” (Soyinka, 1994:69). If within the Yoruba-African cosmology all
roads lead to the market, the strategic location of the club within the restless hub of the

market guaranteed its complete integration into every mode of life in the city.

In Wole Ogundele’s biography of Ulli Beier , Beier was credited with exclaiming,
“it was impossible to sleep in Ibadan in those days” (105). The social life of the city,
made particularly magnetic by these clubs, was “easy, ﬁ'iendly and relaxing.” According
to Ogundele, “Ulli was on the dance ﬂoor in Paradise Club one night when someone
slapped him at the back, shouting: ‘Hello Ulli, what are you doing here!’ When he turned
round to look, it was the great Nnamdi Azikiwe himself, also out on ‘a night on the

town”’(105). Mbari, though devoted to the arts, shared basically the same atmosphere:

MBARI Club was as much a social centre as a cultural-intellectual organization,
and its social side needs stressing. It was a place for likeminded people generally
interested in the arts and culture to gather freely and informally — something like
the Paris Café but with an African character. There was a Lebanese restaurant
upstairs which supplied very good food and drinks at any time, and very quickly
too. At night members sat in the open courtyard to eat, drink, relax and talk. It
was an open house kept strictly informal, with a library that anybody could just

81

walk into, wander around in, and browse to his heart’s content. There were
paintings and pictures everywhere. This made it possible for people not to have to
wait for something to be happening in the place before visiting it. In any case
something or other was always happening in the place and it was a magnetic point
for the members, the university people, young American Peace Corps volunteers
(who made it a place of cultural pilgrimage), and the townspeople generally.
(Ogundele: 109)

Amid the political climate that created the nouveaux riches for whom “orgiastic
socializing” had expanded and transformed the cultural dynamics of the city, the
explosion in the music was unprecedented. As Soyinka recalls, “The history of musical
rivalry among juju, sakara and apala bandleaders had a most lively chapter inscribed in
the lyrics of the social music of the sixties, even as the bands also contended for the
patronage of the nouveaux riches that arrived with Independence” (Soyinka, 183-4). For
the political leaders and emergent bourgeoisie, “Orgies became a way of life at the top,
social parties at the slightest excuse, parties that had no beginning and no end” (322).
There were also the eating places that formed a complex of pubs all over the city where

the history of Ibadan was written:

Risikatu’s [was] yet another night roost of the Morocco brand, except that it had
no resident band, and had never been discovered by the expatriates. Sometimes,
however, an agidigbo group would stop by late at night, perhaps on the way from
an engagement. . .. Mostly the agidigbo players were wandering minstrels,
performing through the streets, then stopping, uninvited at a wedding or funeral,
or child-naming. . .. But the agidigbo group at night, playing for themselves and
fellow wanderers of the night was a different timeless sound. Risikatu’s den, even
to the smoky acoustics, was so suited to their tunes and sparse accompaniment
that it seemed it was their constant patronage of the den that moulded the space
and made it uniquely theirs (Soyinka, 182).

The power of the minstrels, of the artist and the writer to mold the city was almost
limitless. The social exhibitionism” found apt expression in the word that captured the
essence of the times: Onilegogoro, that is, “mansions of extravagant dimensions;

reﬂected in the fashion and immortalized in highlife music. The awakening at Mbari in

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Ibadan was exported to other towns and “outposts” as well. In the great upheaval in
Ibadan, Soyinka reveals how he found redemption in the new artists at Osogbo and their
experimentations: “It was to these that he looked forward when he set out for a weekend
of escape from the violence and betrayals of Ibadan, to get drunk on art and palm wine,
not neglecting dalliance with the languid courtesans, who blended the grace of rural
discretion with an ardour that contented the most demanding...” (232). It is worth
repetition that overall, it was this cultural caldron that started off the great literary period
of modern African literature. The social environment described above encouraged the
friendships between Ulli Beier, Soyinka, Okigbo, J .P. Clark similar to those that were
produced during the Elizabethan period among William Shakespeare, Christopher
Marlowe and Samuel Johnson, who were themselves Masters of the Revel. In Ibadan,
“These friendships would have an intellectual focus in Black Orpheus and a social-

cultural meeting point in MBARI Club” (Ogundele: 110).

The Black Orpheus publications which grew out of the literary activities at
MBARI Club, are the foundational publications of anglophone Aﬁican literature. Its ﬁrst
publication was by the reputable South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele. Its ﬁrst editors
were Ulli Beier, Jahnheinz Jahn, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Soyinka. In Ogundele’s

estimation of these contributions,

A more certain and quantitatively measured indication of MBARI’s impact can be
gleaned from the sales of two of its publications[]; two thousand copies of books
of poetry were sold; over three thousand printed copies of Yoruba children’s
poetry in its English translation also sold out. After MBARI ﬁrst published
Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark and others, they became known abroad and international
publishers began falling over themselves to grab their works. Thus, MBARI Club
and Black Orpheus more than fully served the purposes for which they were set
up. (Ogundele: 124)

83

The otlrers referred to here by Ogundele, are among the most prominent in the canon of
Aﬁican writing today: Dennis Brutus, Koﬁ Awoonor, U’Tamsi, La Guma and so on.
Ogundele’s notion that the Mbari Club and Black Orpheus gave the writers a necessary
exposure to the world at large underscores the cosmopolitan nature of artistic production
in Ibadan, and the cosmopoetic nature of the writing it inspired. This accomplishment

was actually lauded by Alan Hill:

Inspired by that remarkable German aestlrete Ulli Beier (who contributed three
anthologies of African Stories and myths to AWS), Mbari was an immensely
formative inﬂuence during the 19608, before the club came to an untimely end in
the Nigerian Civil War. It was Mbari who ﬁrst published Dennis Brutus,
Christopher Okigbo, Alex la Guma and Okot p’Bitek (Ogundele: 142).

However, the real point of transition from Black Orpheus to the African Writers
Series has gone unremarked in the literary history of the continent. The appointment of
DO Fagunwa, himself the preeminent Yoruba writer and probably the most translated of
Aﬁican language authors, by Alan Hill as the Heinemann representative in Ibadan was
particularly strategic, much as was the appointment of Chinua Achebe as editorial
adviser. This is because it was under the directorship of F agunwa, in the Literature
Bureau of the Western Region of Nigeria’s Ministry of Education that Black Orpheus
was published. The transference of the Bureau’s authors was thus authorized in the
person of the representative that Heinemann selected. Aig Higo who took over after
Fagunwa’s death, was himself, also a prominent member of Mbari Club! Thus the
production of literary modernity within the postcolonial city in Africa could not be

complete without their stories.

A study of literary production in Ibadan allows us to fully grasp the phenomenon

of literary modernity as it plays itself out in the postcolonial city as a result of the sea-

change of socio-cultural and politico-economic forces that, thanks to Empire, now clamps
most of the world in a combustive relation. From the account thus far, the parallels
demonstrated between London, Paris, and Ibadan etc. reveal the leveling and
homogenizing tendencies of modernity and the expanding circuit of world literary space,
that is, the replication or metastasis of the nodal points of production and consumption. In
other words, all that could be said about Ibadan has already been said about London and
other major cosmopolitan cites. In Brooker’s discussion of the modernist moment in the
metropolis, he argues that “Though a different kind of metropolis from either city [Paris
and New York], London performed a complex translation service across old and new
worlds” (Brooker, l 17). The connections between these cities guarantee a transatlantic
transfusion of literary, cultural and intellectual movements. Pinpointing the example of
writers such as Author Symons, “devotee of the Café Royal and of the Empire Music
Hall, and the major conduit of French Symbolist verse into England,” and literary
phenomenon such as “transatlantic bohemianism”, Brooker describes unique
metropolitan civilization as it shapes literary tastes and artistic temperaments. “The
irnpersonality of the city has fragmented both the city and its citizens who can only know
London in part and never as a whole” (120). This mood and perspective expressed in the
poetry of Syrnons “taught [T .8. Eliot] that there was a way to write about the ordinary
dreariness of the American cities of St Louis and Boston which in phrases and fragments
(“yellow evening”, “sparrows in gutters”, “vacant lots”) would serve for London too”
(122-3). On another plane, Ezra Pound meeting with Wyndham Lewis in Vienna Café
had enlisted him in an international project of the metropolis that “envisioned a cultural

axis connecting Paris, London and New York” (125). The centrality of the cafés,

85

restaurants etc. that was signiﬁcant to the art movement in Ibadan was also considered
crucial to Modernism in London, especially as they “energized the artistic experiment
and experimental lives. . .. The London venues and symbolic geography of respective
parts of the city played their part in this, too. . .. London cafe society, therefore, threw up a
picture of contested boundaries and the collective life along with disarray and jarring

hierarchies, as did modernist art itself’ (129).

International literary modernism is not only deﬁned by the parallel geographical
character of the city, the histories and trajectories of events that those spatial elements
give rise to are equally of importance to the nature and function of modern literature. Paul
Edwards’s illuminating contextualization of the rise of modernism is important to our
analysis of the Ibadan writers. Edwards points out that the outbreak of World War I
“prevented the forthcoming violence and disorder” of trade unions and miners, seamen
and dockers and labor in general. He argues that “Virginia Woolf’s statement about the
change in human character is usually seen not in the context of the beginning of this
period of violent social unrest and breakdown, but as tied to a particular cultural event,
Roger Fry’s exhibition...” (135). Artistic sensibilities as they are presented in art,
literature, music etc, necessarily represent the social ferment of the moment as
expressions of an apocalyptic vision. Ibadan writers, as described in this chapter,
manifest the disorder of colonialism and decolonization just as the trauma of capitalist
and technological transformations were reﬂected in Modernist literature. “The violent
cultural and political transformations that England appeared to undergo almost
unconsciously from 1910 to 1914 were consciously celebrated in its manifestoes. . .”

(138). What is also comparable to Mbari publications is the role of The Egoist in bringing

86

forward modernist writers in London. The attempt by Heinemann to bring Ibadan writers
into the mainstream of British publishing is thus reminiscent of the sometimes failed but
essentially difﬁcult efforts to publish modernist writers. A8 Casanova has indicated, it
was London, rather than New York that consecrated writers like Eliot, and it was Paris
rather than London that ﬁrst gave writers like Joyce international acclaim. The case of
Joyce is even more fascinating. Having been rejected by London, he was able to publish
Ulysses through Sylvia Beach’s library club, Shakespeare and Company. In her book by
that title, Beach documents how the bookshop and club became a “paste restante ” for a
wide variety of writers among whom were James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott
Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. In a similar fashion, Mbari
Club, too, became a cultural touchstone in Africa that was able to bring together from
time to time and publish exiled writers from South Aﬁica, Francophone writers such as

Hampate Ba etc.

One of the most signiﬁcant moments in the development of the editorial vision of
Heinemann Educational Books came with the appointment of James Currey as the
publisher of the series in 1967. Currey’s predecessor, Keith Sambrook, came to African
publishing at Heinemann in 1963 from Nelsons with a keen awareness of all that had
been published by African writers and a decade of involvement in Aﬁican educational
publishing and school book publishing— primary and secondary school, with a little bit
of college textbook publishing, but had done no literary publishing of any kind. Currey,
on the other hand, whose parents were both writers, had grown up in an environment of
great literary favor and thus was least predisposed to the educational criteria for

publishing African texts in the series. One of the very inﬂuential neighbors of Currey’s

87

parents happened to be Henry Swanzy whose weekly BBC radio program, Caribbean
Voices, gave ﬁrst hearing to and had helped in bringing forward the highly successful
ﬁrst wave of writers from the Caribbean such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edward
Karnau Brathwaite, VS. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, John Figueroa and Derek Walcott. With
visits to his parents’ home by people like George Lamming, Currey had developed an
alertness, as he calls it, for good writing that was not encumbered by any tremendous
ideological structure. His earlier work with the Oxford University Press and close
relationship with South African writers further established his credentials as a literary and

general publisher.

With his hire, therefore, he brought to the Series a new inclination that stands in
contrast to the earlier years. The exact nature of the Series and its classiﬁcation as
educational or general publishing remains a subject of intense conversation and often
disagreement between these two earlier publisher/editors. However, the shift from strictly
educational to general criteria is demonstrable in the kinds of writers that were actively
pursued and brought on after Currey became editor. Among these are Wole Soyinka and
Christopher Okigbo, the publication of both of whom, I would argue constitute
signiﬁcant landmarks in the Aﬁican Writers Series and the materialization of the sense of
the Series’ continuity with Black Orpheus and Mbari publications, that is, the ultimate
coming together of the exogenous and endogenous genealogies and trajectories of the
forces of literary production in Africa. Soyinka had already appeared at this point in the
Three Crowns Series that Currey ran at the Oxford University Press. It may well be that
Alan Hill, Van Milne and Keith Sambrook were already headed in this direction toward a

general market; moreover, since by the time of the inauguration of the Series a general

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readership in Africa could hardly sustain a venture into the publication of ﬁction, it only
made sense to explore the already established school market ﬁrst. Indeed, everything
Currey did throughout was with the active collaboration and advice of Sambrook.

The maturation of the vast possibilities of a viable general market in the 19708
signaled a break from the Commonwealth Period discussed in chapter one, even though
the primary functions of British infrastructures, especially the educational, political and
cultural ones, as the unifying and foundational forces of the postcolony would prove
more enduring than their initial mention in the discourses and practices of literature that
privileged the aesthetic as opposed to the didactic. Rather than publish anthologies of
poetry for school use, with the exception of Lenrie Peters’s The Second Round (1966)
and Satellites (1967), the African Writers Series now frequently featured collections of
poetry by individual authors, which in principle was supposed to be beyond the scope of
the publishing interest as seen earlier in Sambrook’s 1963 response to Kayper-Mensah, a
Ghanaian poet:

A8 educational publishers, we are not really in a position to bring out ﬁrst editions

of original poeu'y. If you would be interested I could pass your poem on to a

literary agent, David Higham Associates Ltd, who would, I am sure be interested

in your work and would make every effort to place it with publishers of poetry
(28 August 1963 Sambrook to A.W. Kayper-Mensah).

A similar policy statement with regards to content and level appropriateness of what goes
into an educational series, which would have disqualiﬁed Armah (The Beautyﬁd Ones
Are not yet Born, 1969), Tayib Saleh (Season of Migration to the North, 1969), Soyinka
(The Interpreters, 1970), and Okigbo (Labyrinths with Path of Thunder: Poems, 1971)

among others, had there not been a redirection, ﬂexibility or at least greater expansion of

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editorial principle, is to be found in the rejection of the manuscript by another Ghanaian

poet, Cudjoe:

I am afraid that your manuscript in the metrical structure of Ewe drumming
sounds rather too specialized for us. The Aﬁican writers Series is designed
primarily for schools, and your treatment of this subject sounds a little too
advanced for school children. Also I think the market for such a book would be
too limited to justify a paperback, which has to sell in very large numbers if it is
to be a commercial success. (Judith Verity to Dr S.d. Cudjoe July 18 1963)

James Currey in his essay “Chinua Achebe, The African Writers Series And The
Establishment Of African Literature,” gives a comprehensive account of how the Series
of publication systematically but steadily in actual practice did less and less with the
inhibitions of traditional educational publishing:

Beti's Mission to Kala and Oyono's Houseboy were among the ﬁrst titles which
presented questions about what was “appropriate” for a school textbook publisher.
One must remember that it was relatively soon after the permissive breakthrough
provided by the Lady Chatterley trial. Penguin's printer Cox and Wyman went
through the proofs of Oyono's Houseboy to search for four-letter words (the South
African censors were to be more concerned by the “boy” ﬁnding a condom under
his “madam”s' bed). Keith Sambrook and I were doubtful whether we could get
certain novels such as Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North accepted
because of a sexually violent death in London “in the land of jigjig”. Our
colleagues reluctantly agreed to the acceptance of Ayi Kwei Armah's The
Beautyﬁd Ones Are Not Yet Born, in spite of the sustained and shockingly
appropriate image of shit. We had a touch-and-go battle over Sembene Ousmane's
God's Bits of Wood, the heroic epic of labour resistance on the Dakar-Timbuktu
railway line, since one of our colleagues maintained that it would be too long and
therefore too expensive to be used in schools. (It became one of more than thirty
titles which were to sell over 100,000 copies. The English translation far outsold
the French original). (2003:578)

Indeed, by 1967, one begins to discern a certain kind of cautious openness. Given certain
conditions, Currey would now not only publish the work of an individual poet,
Christopher Okigbo, he would, in fact, consider publishing a critical study of his work as

well.

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We should be interested to see [your manuscript] although I must say that we ﬁnd
it very difﬁcult to see our way to publishing individual studies of poets. However,
sadly as we can consider his whole corpus we might be able to consider this in a
different light. (Dec 4 67. Currey to Sunday Anozie.)

The sustained effort over three years to publish Okigbo, despite the great
difﬁculty of his poetic style, due in part to its private nature and allusions, which ought to
make him the least attractive poet for Heinemann’s typically high school market, had
nothing to do with any educational criteria but with the ﬁne quality of writing found in
the elitist aesthetic circle to which he belonged. This much could be deduced from Hill’s
letter to the Nigerian Heinemann manager: “Your letter to James re the Okigbo poems: I
quite thought all this was cleared up. We printed the book long ago, as you know, all
except the prelirns. It is depressing to think that the works of this ﬁne poet are still not
available to the public because of all this wrangling amongst his ﬁiends and relatives”
(Alan to aig dec 10, 1970). About 1970 therefore, an imperative seems to have
crystallized and consolidated, which aimed to have collected under the HEB imprint, and
made available to the general public through its distribution networks, works by the best
writers from Africa, with little or no concern for the requirements and constraints of an
educational list and ﬁrm. It was this aspiration that would eventually hit a hard rock in
Ayi kwei Armah, the intense and hazardous pursuit of whose works has become the most
well-known author-publisher controversy on the continent. In a telex message about one
of Armah’s works, Hill expresses this aspiration as follows: “Two Thousand Seasons: we
feel that it is now too late for a hardback edition of this book, but we would be ready to
put it in AWS. We do not feel it is one of his best books, but I think that we ought to have
the whole body of his work under our imprint if this can be arranged” (Alan to Aig

august 4 ’76). Even in this phase of the life of the Series being articulated here, the school

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systems remained its most assured destination. Having been built initially on school use,
it was difﬁcult for the Series to shed or transcend its educational label which thereby
paradoxically guaranteed its success as well as setting the limits. This paradox marked a
situation which constantly presented itself and remained unresolved, one that was
signiﬁcantly referenced in Currey’s enumeration of the reasons for his retirement ﬁ'om
Heinemann:
Many people have asked me why, when I set up my own business, I did not start
up a counter African Writers Series. The reason is that I could see that the great
Aﬁican era of the Aﬁican writers series was over. Because the market for the
series was now predominantly outside Africa, I felt that the time had come for a
partial change of tactics. Even the best writers had been under-recognized and
under- sold in Britain. Reviewers and book shops tended to assume that because
they were published by Heinemann Educational Books in paperback there were
“just school books.” (African Affairs)
The educational label which Currey attempted to overcome during his long career as
editor and publisher proved to be just as unyielding as the “African” label that shall be
discussed in the next chapter. In the end, it was against these labels, separate and
combined, that the Series was forswom by writers like Soyinka; his two works that
became part of the Series got there fortuitously and by the sheer determination of the
editors. The paperback edition of Poems of Black Africa which Soyinka edited was
offered to HEB by a company in the Heinemann Group that specialized in ﬁction.
Rosenthal’s letter inviting HEB to join the project reads thus: “Just to remind you that we
are doing Wole Soyinka’s Anthology of Aﬁ'ican Verse, which I am sure you are going to
want to put into AWS and I am delighted to be able to say that Soyinka has in fact
already delivered all the poems and biographical notes etc. and all we have to do now

(all!) is clear permissions (T.G. Rosenthal managing director of Martin Seeker &

Warburg Limited. to James. august 18 1972). Soyinka did not, however, spare any

92

opportunity to voice his displeasure with the whole business of deploying African writing
for educational use. In the preface which was cut out from the ﬁnal publication, he
argues: “As a practising poet I am naturally concerned with the reduction of what I
consider a continuing dialogue with humanity to an instrument of torture for teachers and
pupils” (Soyinka Archival ﬁles). He further lays out the principle of general publishing
to which he subscribes, a principle that shares its origins in the very ideological
ﬂowerbed of ﬁction. His sense of the literary is nevertheless not as antithetical to
educational use as he imagines it. According to Soyinka, the educational system “may
end ﬁnally in alienating the young reader from many poets for the rest of his life. I am
convinced that the choice of poetry should be guided principally for the poem's capacity to
arouse unaccustomed sensibilities in the young reader, selected as a principle of education
not as an end. (I hope it is agreed that the former represents humanistic development and the
latter, certiﬁcates)” Soyinka’s critique goes to the heart of Alan Hill’s original vision of the
Series, which was to move away from the practices of other British and European textbook-
only publishing houses and invest in ﬁction. The materialization of the conditions for such
venture coincides with Soyinka’s critique and with the publications of Okigbo’s Labyrinth and
Soyinka’s Interpreters.

In a clear departure from the historical critique of colonialism in Chinua Achebe
(with the exception of A Man of the People), Okigbo and Soyinka demonstrate a spirit of
independence in recognizing the newness of history in the prescience and agency of the
imagination, and in reaching desperately for the future anterior as it burrows through the
threshold of an obstinate present. Soyinka and Okigbo do not chronicle colonial

oppression, but present themselves to us as “herald-men of the future” (1970: 13), and

93

their works as literature of the quest, this, according to Okigbo, “a fable of man’s
perennial quest for ﬁrlﬁllment” (Labyrinths xiv). Okigbo’s use of the word “fable” in
describing his own work is highly instructive as it sets this literature in contrast to
historical discourse. An analysis of the aforementioned works by these two writers will
illustrate the quest for ﬁrlﬁllment by the man and the artist, and the unbounded capacity
of “poetry” to effect “humanistic development,” as well as the passion of publishers in

alignment with and advancement of this movement.

Perhaps, the most illuminating description of the creative process that best
represents in general terms, the artistic impulse animating the works of 19708 outlined in
this chapter, (with their roots in the 19608 in the Mbari experiment), is by Soyinka in the
said unpublished, suppressed portion of the preface to Poems of Black Aﬁ-ica; it bears

reproduction at some length:

Consider the poet. Not the individual now but the general species. You have seen
him often in the street with matted hair, rags, a bundle of brac-a-brac, barefooted
and impervious to his surrounding. He is muttering to himself. The children stone
him and call him madman. No, he is not a poet, not even the European publishers
will touch him but wait - is there not perhaps a familiar method in his madness? &
is talking to himself. His monologue is hill of non-sequiturs, his tone switches
abruptly from an angry snarl to a private joke that leaves him chuckling for minutes.
He addresses an unseen passer-by and is strangely lucid, even wise. Aphorisms drop
from his lips, his brows frown in concentration weighing a thought, an idea,
rejecting or approving in loud debate. A childlike shyness overcomes him suddenly,
he regresses into infantile memories and re-emerges with the mythical ﬁgures that
once ﬁlled his young life, with key-words and phrases from that long-forgotten
phase. Fantasies crowd his mind on a hot blistering afternoon; his ﬂy-plagued,
scabby exterior contrasts startlingly with the luminous peace that settles suddenly on
his face...

It is a chain-reaction and it is endless. But now imagine one such markemlace
lunatic who is fortunate in moments of lucid recollection when he can set down
such a rag-bag of sensations and physical reality, and, there you have your
“difﬁcult” poet. The only difference is that the poet does not have to be actually
mad. And he does organise his material but he does often talk to himself, and in a

94

language which, at ﬁrst glance, is seemingly incoherent. (Heinemann Archive ﬁles
for Poems of Black Africa)

Soyinka here deﬁnes what could be described as the lyrical poet. If we are to accept his
deﬁnition of the African writer at this historical moment, we are bound to see a movement
in the nature of writing itself, one that turns away from and against historicism in its radical
lyricism. Soyinka may, however, be tapping into, if not evoking, a very long tradition in
English literature of representing the poet as a madman as a way of parsing the paradox of
that chaotic process of creative expression. The madness of the poet is the madness of the
solitary ﬁgure. And what Okigbo says of his poetry is equally true of Soyinka’s novels: “a
poet-protagonist is assumed throughout;. .. a personage for whom the progression ﬁ'om
Heavensgate through Limits through Distances is like telling the beads of a rosary; except
that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together on
memory ” (1971, xiv). This represents a turn from depicting the hero as a village-
protagonist framed by the tradition-modernity debate, to the hero as a poet-protagonist
framed within the subjectivity-humanism debate: from the epic narrative to the lyrical
form. In Soyinka’s description therefore, the madness of the poet-protagonist is
symptomatic of the problem of language and the impact on style in communicating the
“comprehensive instinct to phenomena.” The tension generated as this comprehensive
instinct, “the swell of the silent sea the great heaving dream at its highest” (Okigbo, xiv),
pushes against the unbreachable levees of language and is both the source of the pleasure
and derangement unique to the lyrical poet. It is “the cruelty of the rose” (Okigbo, 27), or
as John Dryden put it, “There is a pleasure sure, In being mad, which none but madmen

know!” (The Spanish Friar).

95

The madness of the poet is not only related to language, it is also related to certain
state of spiritual existence as is to be found in the prophet. Okigbo makes this leap
between the poet’s ability to articulate the feelings and thoughts of another and the
prophetic ability of discernment and divination:

Screen your bedchamber thoughts

with sun-glasses,

who could jump your eye,

your mind-window,

And I said:

The prophet only the poet. (9)

However, Soyinka’s allusion to the method in the madness of the poet is a direct
reference to Hamlet, and of course Nietzsche’s madman. On the one hand, the
correlation that is being sought in the imaginative function of the poet in relation to
reality is one that has the most powerful expression in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream:

THESEUS:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Arc of imagination all compact:

The dramatic shift in the cosmic relations of the new order of society became the most
enduring feature of this new poetics. Post-independence, the writer’s relations to self, to
his environment, to his past and future had to be completely redeﬁned. New foundations
for human behavior had to be based on a vision of the human that was discontinuous with
the past. This called for a new form of courage: the courage to imagine. The artist’s

ability to imagine the unimaginable, to “give airy nothing a local habitation and name”

then comes fully into play. Okigbo very clearly shares Soyinka’s lyricism as he invokes

96

ﬁgures in his own fable that ﬁt the description of the poet Soyinka gives above such as
Kepkanly, J adum, and Upandru. The initiate, the poet-protagonist receives the watchword
as he seeks to proceed on the journey through the labyrinths of life to the discovery of
newness, not from mother ldoto, but from Kepkanly, “a half serious half comical primary
school teacher”:

mystery which I, initiate,

received newly naked

upon waters of the genesis

from Kepkanly.

Elemental, united in vision

of present and future,

the pure line, whose innocence

denies inhibitions.

[... .]

Mystery, which barring

the errors of the rendering

witnessetlr

red-hot blade on right breast

the scar of the cruciﬁx.

and the hand fell with Haragin,
Kepkanly that wielded the blade;

with Haragin with God's light between them:

but the solitude within me remembers Kepkanly (6-7)
The reﬁain in this poem, Initiations, “And there are here/ the errors of the rendering ..., ”
underscores the failure of language to which Soyinka ascribes the difﬁculty of their brand
of poetry. This difﬁculty is due in part to the radical form of solitude to which the poetic
persona is subjected. It also arises from the attempt to see through other persons from that
condition of detachment. The basic premise of the lyrical here is that identiﬁcation can
only be achieved at the moment of displacement, and that the burden of the past can only

be relieved by a perpetual newness. The canonization of Okigbo, alongside Eliot in the

97

school curriculum in England, as part of the modernist movement speaks to the
recognition of similar patterns of sensibilities and irnageries which are deeply Bohemian
Romanticism. According to Jonathan Culler, this privileging of the lyrical is signiﬁcant to
the extent that
Lyric is the foregrounding of language, in its material dimensions, and thus both
embodies and attracts interest in language and languages—in the forms, shapes,
and rhythms of discourse. If we believe language is the medium for the formation
of subjectivity, lyric ought to be crucial, as the site where language is linked not
only to structures of identiﬁcation and displacement before the consolidation of
subject positions but especially to rhythm and the bodily experience of
temporality, on the one hand, and to the formative dwelling in a particular
language, on the other. (2008: 205)
In an apparent effort to defend the Mbari school against charges of deliberate cultivation
of obscurity, Soyinka offers a description that not only emphasizes the notion of the lyric
as a dramatic monologue but that also proposes an examination of poetry as a form of
dwelling in which the world is fundamentally reconstituted. Modernism restores the
notion of the universe as a place of mysteries and the human journey through life as
unpredictable and precarious. The epic of modernism proceeds with the poet-protagonist
as a seeker whose moment of truth comes from self-sacriﬁce like that of Okigbo’s
initiate: a casualty of the mystery that he attempts to unravel on behalf of society. The
notion of the poet as a priest whose revelation derives from the vicariousness of his
temporal and material experience and the pre-subject status that underscores universal
“structures of identiﬁcation” thereby transcends the conditions of displacement and
solitude. It is not an accident but a consistent principle of characterizing the poet-
protagonist that Soyinka’s heroes in The Interpreters are sculptors, writers etc who all

reﬂect “the general species” of the poet. The technique of employing dramatic

monologue in the novel serves quite ingeniously to remarry poetry to the narrative, the

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aesthetic to the social, linguistic and social event, and the personal to the collective
experience. Jonathan Culler ﬁrrther gives us an understanding of how the forces against
“The Romantic notion of lyric as expression of intense personal experience, have adopted
the model of the dramatic monologue as the way to align poetry with the novel: the lyric
is conceived as a ﬁctional imitation of the act of a speaker, and to interpret the lyric is to
work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude
or, ideally, drama of attitudes” (201). However, in Soyinka’s dramatic monologues, he
does not dismiss the romantic notion of poetry altogether. His is an effort to smuggle the
narrative back into the poetics of the lyrical as an attempt to simultaneously address the
questions of “what happens next” and “what happens now.”

Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters is in two parts. The ﬁrst part is the narrative of
the socio-political rot of the postcolony. The second part is an afﬁrmation of the creative
powers of man in being able to represent and thereby transform human existence. In other
words, the novel explores the dialectics of reality and representation and how
representation is always transforrnative of reality. The atmosphere of the novel is redolent
of the same atmosphere of the club houses that has been described in the earlier section of
this chapter, as helping to deﬁne the culture and art of the 19608. Indeed, the narrative
time of the novel centers on the moments the cohort of ﬁiends, whose individual and
collective memories are being read and reread with a constant “interlude from reality,”
spend together in their haunts: the clubhouses and art studios. Part of the atmosphere of
the club, which sets a series of metaphoric associations in motion throughout the story, is
the rain, the music and the mood of the characters. Sagoe, the journalist, expressed this

connection as follows: “No I am low. Damn it, I am low. And that wretched band was

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really to blame. They depressed me the moment they began to play. And then this
transition ﬁ'om high-life to rain maraccas has gone on far too long. Rain rhythm is too
complex and I am too slow to take it in. you too, tootsie” (19).

It is interesting how Okigbo and Soyinka share the image of water and the deluge
in their works, especially in Labyrinths and The Interpreters. The novel begins with the
intrusion of rain apparently amid “party privacy” at Club Cambana Cubicles where the
patrons were being treated to drinks and highlife music. The clear sense of dissonance, of
an aborted pleasure, brought about by the coming of the rains is captured in Egbo’s
reaction: “The ‘plop’ continued some time before its meaning came clear to Egbo and he
looked up at the leaking roof in disgust, then threw his beer into the rain muttering. ‘I
don’t need his pity. Someone tell God to not weep in my beer’” (1). Soyinka announces
the character of the Interpreters as “apostates” through this opening. The image of the
deluge, which Soyinka uses as the image of apostasy, of the erosion of morality and
cleansing, is likewise used by Okigbo in his poetry:

AND THE gods lie in state

And the gods lie in state

Without the long-drum.

And the gods lie unsung,

Veiled only with mould,

Behind the shrinehouse.

Gods grow out,

Abandoned;

And so do they (34)

This section of Labyrinths entitled “Fragments out of the deluge,” according to Okigbo,

“renders in retrospect certain details of the protagonist and of his milieu— the collective

rape of innocence and profanation of the mysteries, in atonement for which he has had to

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suffer immolation” (xi). It is not until the second part of The Interpreters, as we shall
come to examine, that we see the consummate image of the deluge represent apostasy
and the offering up of the apostate as a form of ritual cleansing of the group of radical
intellectuals, if not the society as a whole. It represents in the classic Soyinkean repertoire
of symbolism, with the pregnancy of Egbo’s high-school girl friend, the hope for a new
moral and social order.

To peel the layers one at a time, the mixed rhythms of music and rain parallel the
mixed marriages and strange friendships in the novel. The intrusion of the rain for Egbo
is painful particularly because it dispels his “dream of isolation” and triggers the
resumption of his nightmare by bringing back to him the reminders of his obligations to
the past, to his dead parents. The water, the “talkative puddle” speaks to him alone; in
response to which, his sudden utterance, “Well, I made a choice. I can’t complain” (8),
came as a surprise to his companions. The very last sentence of the novel, after it was
known that Egbo has betrayed his girlfriend Simi by impregnating a schoolgirl, evokes
this same reference. “Egbo watched her [Simi] while she walked towards him, eyes
ocean-clams with her peculiar sadness... like a choice of a man drowning he was
saying... only like a choice of drowning” (251). Why does water terrify Egbo in this
manner? In the ﬁrst ﬂashback of the novel as the rain interrupts the music, we are
transported back to his only visit to the place where his parents supposedly had drowned,
and where “the mangrove arches spread seemingly endless...” He had gone there with his
friends. Kola, the artist, had exclaimed upon seeing this sight, “the mangrove depresses
me.” Egbo’s response is signiﬁcant: “‘me too’ said Egbo. ‘I suppose I can never wholly

escape water, but I do not love the things of death’” (8). So, Soyinka gives us the cue

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right at the beginning of this novel that water, the deluge, is the symbol of death. If
highlife music were the music of independence, it’s being interrupted and disrupted by
the rain is an image that had to be very troubling indeed to the interpreters.

Another symbolic moment of intrusion in the ﬁrst chapter is when the apala
musicians take the stage after the highlife band, without invitation or warning:

A new band took the stand, but they had not come to duel the rain. The small
apala group had slowly begun to function as the string trio, quartet, or the lone
violinist of the restaurants of Europe, serenade of the promising purse. This was
an itinerant group, unfed; their livelihood would depend on ahns. Normally their
haunts were the streets, the markets and even private ofﬁces where they could
practice a mild blackmail. They had a great nose for the occasion and were
prepared for the naming-day before the child was born. They grew bolder, took in
the urban needs, taught style to the new oyinbos, and became as indispensable to
the cocktail party as the olive on a stick. First their tunes, then their instruments—
tlre talking-drum especially—invaded the night-clubs. And later they re-formed,
and once again intact, exploited intervals and other silences wrought by
circumstance. As this group now did. Just the one box-guitar, three drums which
seemed permanent outgrowths of the armpits, voices modulated as the muted slur
by the drums’ controlling strings. And they gauged the mood, like true
professionals, speaking to each other not to their audience, who would, if they
chose, not know this language. But fashion had changed. Denial was now old-
fashioned and after the garish, exhibitionist, bluff of the high-life band, this
renewed cause for feeling, hinted meanings of which they were, a phase before,
half-ashamed. (2 1 )

The apala group is different from the agidigbo group earlier mentioned in the discussion
of Soyinka’s Ibadan. All these musical groups together have a common history and
functioned to express the unique post-independent spirit that permeated life in most of
Aﬁica in the sixties. The boom experienced in these musical productions is ripple of
larger bursts in the production of culture to which the Mbari and the African Writers
Series contributed immensely. In the case of the agidigbo, it was the transformational
power of the art of musical poetry that captured Soyinka’s imagination. Agidigbo and

apala are both more culturally rooted and localized than Highlife which is not only

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transcultural and cosmopolitan in style but also elitist. According to the narrator of this
scene, as the apala band started to play, “The manager [of the club] stormed out
suddenly, waving his arms about and shouting ‘Who let those people in?’ But that was
only to test the reaction of his wealthier patrons. They waved at him to shut up and
chuckling he went back behind the bar” (21). The description of the band is continuous
with the description of the poet who is talking to himself. However, in this case, the band
on occasion tactically sheds the pretence of mutual indifference of poet to audience.
Soyinka’s description of the pomp and rousing style of high-life betrays his preference
for the local groups who do not own the stage but exploit “intervals and other silences”; a
clearly self-reﬂexive moment in the novel. The novel could well have been titled The
Invaders, as it carries with it an insurrectionist impulse that constantly informs, colors
and motivates the narrative, except that the invasion enacted by apala is culturally from
within and below. The irony associated with this band is that the wealthy patrons who
welcome their intrusion did not even recognize the subversive undercurrents of their
music.

An indication of discomfort is signaled through Sagoe, the most sensitive of the
group. As the band plays, “Sagoe was moaning. ‘I must lie down ﬂat on my belly. I know
you won’t believe this, but that drum timbre makes my belly run’” (21). Still in the midst
of the performance, along came a woman who takes “possession of the emptied ﬂoor.”
“She had no partner, being wholly self-sufﬁcient. She was immense. She would stand out
anywhere, dominating. She ﬁlled the ﬂoor with her body, dismissing her surroundings
with a natural air of superﬂuity. And she moved slowly, intensely, wrapped in the song

and the rhythm of the rain. And she brought a change again in the band, who now began

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to play to her to drape her in the lyric and the mood.” The “chain reaction,” if we are to
use Soyinka’s phrase in deﬁning the poet and the poetic process, is that of the
“interpreters,” the audience:
They watched her slowly lose herself, her head thrown back the better to hold
private communion with palm fronds, with banana rafters or with whatever leaves
faked tropical freshness on the artifact of the ﬂoor’s centerpiece. The lead
drummer moved on her, drawing, as it were, her skin on the crook of the drum.
Rain ribbons in club greens and orange ringed her, falling off the edges of the
open “state umbrella”, and her reﬂections were distorted on the four sides of the
mirror stem. (22)
While this is going on, Kola and Sekoni have been drawing sketches of the woman as
they have of almost any event of the evening. Egbo for his own part “turned to the dancer
leaning back against the wall [. . .] losing himself immediately in her own self-
immersion”, completing the implicit contract of Romanticism. The atmosphere of the
club assumes a most enchanting dimension: “And on nights like this, to the clang of iron
bells and the summons of shaved drums, even old women opened their wrinkled thighs to
heaven” (23-4). In the rapture of the dance, with the world shut out completely, Egbo
“looked again at her breasts, seeing them as huge moments and longing to seal himself in
time” (25). From the start of this novel, Soyinka projects the image and embodiment of
the lyrical. The dancer in The Interpreters is recognizable as J .P. Clark’s “Agbor
Dancer.” The personality of the dancer is integral to the essence of the lyrical as much as
the femininity of the dancer helps to release the fantasy of the lyric. The dancer is thus
the incarnation of the dramatis personae of the dramatic monologue of lyrical poetry. The
dancer’s solo performance mirrors the musical pretention of the band to be “speaking to

each other not to their audience” at the same time as the rhythm of her body marches that

of the drums. Oblivious of the spectators, she becomes a spectacle.

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Other moments of intrusion in the novel are not as sensual as that of the apala
band. After the party is over and Sagoe and his girlfriend leave for her house, they meet
in the wee hours of the night her mother and aunt on an unannounced visit. Dehinwa’s
mother claims that “people have been telling me that you are going with a Northerner”
(37). This “invasion” reveals the stubbornness of primordial loyalties that Achebe’s Obi
also confronts in No Longer at Ease but which Dehinwa considers “blood cruelty.” The
most telling is the ironic episode with Joe Golder, the African American character who
says to Sagoe, “Look if there is one thing I cannot bear, it is some female voice singing in
my ﬂat. It is an insufferable intrusion. I am very jealous of my privacy, 1 cannot tolerate
any fool invading it...” (187). To the reader, Golder is the one intruding, and it is clear
that his homosexual advances to Noah, which frightens him to the point that he jumps to
his death from Golder’s apartment, are directly linked to the philosophy of Voidance that
Sagoe enunciates in his Book of Enlightenment. According to this philosophy, “To shit is
human, to voidate divine” (156). Indeed, contrary to all commentaries, it was Soyinka
rather than Armah, who ﬁrst used the image of shit to represent corruption in society. Not
surprisingly, on his way to the burial of his Director, Sagoe encounters a sight whose
signiﬁcance, like that of water, conveys the degenerate character of the society. “It was
hardly ﬁve, but already Sagoe had begun to encounter the night-soil men. Next to death,
he decided, shit is the most vernacular atmosphere of our beloved country. . .. [He]
encountered ﬁrst the deserted night-cart and trailer; some distance behind, its contents
were spread on the road. To reconstruct the accident—the enormous porthole had ﬂown
open and the driver had not stopped fast enough. Over twenty yards were spread huge

pottage mounds, twenty yards of solid and running, plebeian and politician, indigenous

105

and foreign shit” (108). For Sagoe, interference masked as “midnight visitations of aunts
and mothers bearing love” (39) is as repugnant as shit, just like the kickbacks and ethnic
loyalties, and neo-colonialists, that threaten the country.

In all of these, the central question of the novel is the place of art or the artist in
society, especially in the face of such moral and political crisis. Lasunwon, the only
member of the group who is a lawyer, poses the question about Kola indignantly, as
follows: “What is he anyway that he goes round giving himself some special status in the
universe? And I don’t mean just him, it’s the whole tribe of them. Everyday somewhere
in the papers they are shooting off their mouths about culture and art and imagination.
And their attitude is so superior, as if they are talking to the common illiterate barbarians
of society” (163). Soyinka’s response comes through Kola who is seen painting what he
calls The Pantheon, through whose creation “he had felt this sense of power, the
knowledge of power within his hands, of the will to transform; and he understood then
that medium was of little importance, that the act, on canvas or human material was the
process of living and brought him the intense fear of fulﬁllment” (218). The quest and the
anguish of ever striving for fulﬁllment are thus represented in its humanistic and artistic
dimensions.

In the exhibition that takes place at the end of the novel, Egbo sees himself
represented on Kola’s canvas and he rejects it, saying, “I cannot accept this view of life.
He has made the beginning itself a resurrection. This is an optimist’s delusion of
continuity.” He goes on to argue that the whole painting was a distortion of reality: “it is
an uninspiring distortion, that is what is wrong with it. He has taken one single myth,

Ogun at his drunkennest, losing his sense of recognition and slaughtering his own men in

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battle; and he has frozen him at the height of carnage” (233). To this he gets the response,
“Well, surely you must concede him the right to select.” It is in this right to select that we
ﬁnd the new law for the living.

In publishing quintessential moderrrists like Soyinka and Okigbo, the publishers
were validating the lyrical attempts to reinvent reality rather than to merely document it.
This much we know from Sambrook’s letter about Okigbo’s poetry. It was the personal
rather than the political dimension to Okigbo’s work that was to be the principle for both
selection and the speciﬁc preference for authorial intention in the arrangement of the
content of Labyrinths. In Sambrook’s letter to Aig Higo he sounds this preference thus:
“Afterall, we want to make this a personal selection of a poet not a ‘memorial’. The m_th
of thunder poems rather emphasise political events which were very important to Chris
and ultimately destructive. But the poems he put together himself to make up labm' ths
are quite outside these events and to marry them up with poems that spring directly from
these events does jar” (4 July 68 Keith to Aig.). It could be argued that Okigbo saw his
quest for ﬁrlﬁllment as a personal quest, but he certainly also sees a connection between
that quest and the one for which he would ultimately give his life.

The sensibilities reﬂected in Soyinka, Okigbo, Armah, among others, whose
works started to appear in the Series from 1970 onwards, derive from a similar trajectory
to that of the history of the city and modernity that Raymond Williams has traced. From
this perspective, the material conditions of urban life exert pressure on social dynamics
and relations, mental health and dispositions so that they necessarily ﬁnd their way into
imaginative literature and eventually alter its nature. The important thing that has been

noted about international modernism has been the identical material and political forces

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that condition it, but more important is the real network of human connectivity at work in
the making of the movement. As Darnrosch has demonstrated in the case of Wodehouse
(see chapter one), and as is evident in the case of Pound and Eliot mentioned in this
chapter, the transatlantic character of Modernism was a result of writers traveling and
discovering new ways of expressing shared realities. The coming of the likes of Ulli
Beier and Suzanne Wenger to Nigeria in the 19508 and the going of Wole Soyinka and
other African writers, artists, musicians etc to Europe and America during the same

period ensured that the network of international modernism was extended.

Soyinka’s Ibadan quite deliberately invokes, in the second chapter, the author’s
memory of London and Paris, of the same Theatres and Cafes that Symons, Pound etc.,
some decades earlier had frequented. He had made his debut on the English stage as an
actor and playwright in the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1959 and had thoroughly
enjoyed the great literary experience of the time. “Best of all treats was to sneak quietly
into the back stalls and watch George Devine rehearsing, consulting quietly with the
playwright -N.F. Simpson, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Sean O’Casey. .. patiently
coaxing the performance of a lifetime from an alcoholic actor...” (25). As a student in
Leeds, he had been enamored by the vitality and creativity around him and “he cycled
from the remote ends of London to these sessions, his guitar tied to his back, threw
himself into the exchanges with as much ardour as any of the others. But constantly he
located himself at the outer edge of their concerns, their themes, even their search for
techniques and styles” (27). The feeling of alienation is one that he paradoxically felt
everywhere he was, even in his home country of Nigeria. On one occasion, he had been

invited to Paris by “Mr. Impresario” and abandoned there. He had to make a living for

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months performing at the cafés. There he no doubt confronted the substance of the
worldview that earlier modernist writers had experienced:

In that earlier visit he had done no more than take the measure of the Left Bank,

amused by its pretentious but caught up nonetheless in its singular vitality,

unmatched by the character of its nearest London equivalent, Soho, or Chelsea.

Even the smells and the sounds were replicated in no other city of his knowledge.

But one virtue above all stuck in his mind: students and pavement artists,

wandering minstrels, café philosophers, refugees from real and imaginary

tyrannies, black francophonies from the French “departments”... out-of-work
actors and dancers, would-be-poets and struggling writers etc, all appeared to
share one talent in common—the art of survival in the cafes and streets of Paris.

(40)

Finally, we come to a describing of Paris that echoes everything we have outlined
about Ibadan in this chapter. Soyinka learnt from this fascinating mix of individuals, the
art of survival as a vagabond himself in the streets of Paris. Paradoxically, he would need
that art in Ibadan more than in anywhere else. He would also help create with Ulli Beier,
in Gbagi market, Ibadan, a most unique atmosphere of vitality unmatched by any city of
its kind in Aﬁica during the 19608 through Mbari Club. If according to Arthur Symons,
“only Soho is Bohemia” (Brooke, 117), in Soyinka and the Ibadan writers, one is

compelled to declare “only Ibadan is Bohemia!”

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CHAPTER FOUR
Postcolonial Publishing: Editorial Practice, Authenticity and the Condition of

Translation.

The writer, as the producer of a text, does not manufacture the materials with
which he works. Neither does he stumble across them as spontaneously available
wandering fragments, useful in the building of any sort of ediﬁce; they are not
neutral transparent components which have the grace to vanish, to disappear into
the totality they contribute to, giving it substance and adopting its forms. The
causes that determine the existence of the work are not ﬂee implements, useﬁtl to
elaborate any meaning... they have a sort of specific weight, a peculiar power,
which means that even when they are used and blended into a totality, they retain
a certain autonomy; and may, in some cases, resume their particular life. Not
because there is some absolute and transcendental logic of aesthetic facts, but
because their real inscription in a history of forms means that they cannot be
defined exclusively by their immediate function in a specific work (Pierre
Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, 42)

What is authenticity? What is authentic? In deﬁning the emergence of the term

“authentic” in the history of Art Criticism in the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin

makes the following observation in his second footnote to the eminent essay “The Work

of Art in An Age of Mechanical Production”: “To be sure, at the time of its origin a

medieval picture of the Madonna could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became

‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most strikingly so during

the last one” (243). Benjamin here suggests, among other things, that authenticity is a

status that is acquired or conferred at a distance and only in the fullness of time; that it

requires as with the Madonna’s picture a recontextualization within lost time, and a

comparison between later and earlier stages of the lifecycle of an object. Most important,

that authenticity is a judgment that is always looking backwards, implying distance and

difference in the face of closeness and sameness. However, what is “most striking” about

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the currency the term acquired in the 19th century Benjamin does not tell us, but it is safe
to assume that he is referring to a whole range of things from the rise of modernism,
anthropology, to the canonization of the image of Madonna itself, all of which are
intricately interconnected cultural developments of the nineteenth century marked by the
fascination with antiquities. Benjamin’s theory of artistic production brackets off literary
production and instead focuses on ﬁlm production— because his interest was in how the
technology of motion picture was instrumental to Fascism in the production of a public.
He argues that “the enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of
writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the
phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is
merely a special, though particularly important, case (218-9). Nevertheless this provides
useﬁrl framework for talking about notions of authenticity in relation to literary
publications. His observation attests to the ways in which the belated evaluation in the

pronouncement “this is authentic” positions itself in relation to its object.

If the concept of authenticity presupposes a difference between the time and space
of the origin of an object and those of its evaluation, it also by the same token
presupposes a difference in the “processor” and possessor of the object. Paradoxically,
every successful authentication reveals nothing. When the presence that can be revealed
is presented as a resurrection, an old matter receives a new life granted by that
pronouncement, “this is authentic.” Conversely, the pronouncement can also be a form of
an unrelenting banishment into the past. According to Benjamin, “The presence of the

original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (220). The original is so called

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because it represents a beginning, which always will be, a-historically, continually

present, deﬁant to change and transformations.

However, the claim of authenticity also carries with it, a question of proof. When
we ask whether a text is authentic we demand the establishment of “Proof that a given
manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the ﬁfteenth century”
(Benjamin, 220). Similarly, we claim to have the proof that a text is written by an
Aﬁican or that the characters as they are reﬂected in ﬁction, their voices, lives and
conﬂicts are typical of the real or original Africans. In this sense, one cannot apply the
word authentic to a text without engaging in certain kinds of stereotypical generalization.
We mean that the presence of a life, a situation, a reality, a problem, a worldview or
vision that is uniquely and exceptionally African is felt or comes through to us very
strongly through the medium of a text. In this notion of the authentic, it is the universal
that is at stake. We also mean that the text is faithful to a particular essence, in fact, that it
duplicates such essence and is a successful counterfeit or simulacrum. In this other
notion, it is the question of proof that is foregfounded. Is there a proof possible that
demonstrates that an experience is unique to a people in an absolute sense? Could a
proof ever exist that a representation originates entirely from a singular form of
experience and not several or is not conditioned and mediated by techniques of
representation and reading making such proof a product or construction of extrinsic rather
than intrinsic factors? Or could such proof not be the proof that such experience is in fact
(also) a product of the narratives that claims to represent it? The sum of all this is
succinctly put by Benjamin, “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is

transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to

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the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the
authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration
ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected

is the authority of the object” (221).

The Aﬁ'ican Writers’ Series emerged at the time when the fetishism of indigenous
cultures concealed a latent but displaced desire. The valorization of the native, which
began in the discourse of the noble savage, culminated in the ideology of respect for local
customs. But respect was only to be earned if indeed an authority was established through
radical display of nativism. As soon as an authentic native identity was certiﬁed, the
veneer of respect exposed itself to be a mere fetish by reautlrorizing the teleology of
colonial intervention for the advancement or improvement of the native. The certiﬁcation
thus functions to indicate the skepticism, which is the root cause of the subjugation of the

native in the ﬁrst place.

The fetishism of all things indigenous has its corollary in the fetishism of African
authorship. Ironically, the fetishism of African authorship tends to undercut the very
object of its febrile celebration. The two centuries of controversy over Olaudah Equiano
and his work demonstrate the several sides to the problem of authenticity in relation to
Aﬁican Writing. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the Aﬁ'ican. Written by Himself has survived because it is a true and moving
account of an African slave that as a consequence of being “true and moving” succeeds in
its transmission of an argument against slavery. The iteration of his identity in the title,
“the African” and “himself,” are not merely postures but the ﬁrlcrum upon which the text

bases itself. They mediate the story of his own transformations and “substantive

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duration” through the history and economy of slavery that the names “Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa ” already project. But precisely because the narrative is thus authentic,
that is, succeeds, Olaudah must either be American from South Carolina or have received
signiﬁcant editorial assistance. Something is authentic when it becomes authentic by

being made authentic.

With the republication of Olaudah Equiano’s Equiano ’s Travels in the African
Writers Series, discussed in chapter 1, this spectral question of the authenticity of African
authorship reemerges in Anglophone literary circles. Afro-skepticism, which has been an
original element in the colonial foundations of the modern episteme, manifests itself in
contemporary literature in the idea of a ghostwriter haunting African texts. This
underlying presumption from the staples of academic discourse during the era of
colonialism established its own positivist logic which continues to be reproduced in
Africanist discourses. In his introduction to the AWS edition of Equiano ’s Travels, Paul
Edwards revisits the history of this problem in relation to the late eighteenth century and
responds to it in the following manner:

It seems likely either that Cugoano did not write Thoughts and Sentiments, or that

it was largely revised for him, for a letter exists in his own handwriting that

reveals his style to lack the literary ﬂourish displayed in his book. It has been
suggested that Equiano's autobiography, too, might have been “improved” by
another hand, and there is some evidence for revision since there appear to be two
quite distinct styles in the book, the one plain, the other rhetorical. This question
will be discussed later; but though there is always the possibility that the
rhetorical passages may be revisions by another hand, the main part of the book is
certainly Equiano's own, and in any case it is not the passages of the highest

literary pretension which best display Equiano's narrative skill. [Edwardsz xvi]
The paradigm implicit in the above posits that the style of Cugoano’s one letter must

match that of his book for him to be considered its legitimate author; that the two distinct

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styles of Equaino’s narrative presuppose two different bands; and that Equiano’s
narrative skills are best displayed in the plain rather than rhetorical style. This worldview
is an offshoot from the a priori of colonial power relations. Quoting an earlier review of
Equiano ’s Travels, Edwards states, “The Monthly Review of June 1789 praised the book,
but felt 'it is not improbable that some English writer has assisted him in the
compilement, or at least the correction of his book, for it is sufficiently well written'”
(xxii). Edward’s defense of Equiano ironically reinforces the presuppositions expressed
in the review he critiques, as he himself implies that Equiano could not have needed help
for the most part because the rhetorically distinct aspects are quite slim and thus
negligible. Noting the naiveté of the narrative point of view in the plain style—“'this
hollow place' for the ship, 'cloth put upon the masts' for the sails, 'some spell or magic
they put upon the water to stop the vessel' for the anchor”—he argues, “all these terms
help to express the speaker's simplicity and puzzlement: Equiano does not merely
describe his perplexity, his language becomes that of a perplexed boy[!]” (xxv)

Since Equiano’s narrative, Aﬁican writing has suffered under the cloud of this
kind of skepticism. Presuppositions were made not only in the realm of literary studies,
but in other ﬁelds as well. In the area of anthropology and philosophy, V. Y. Mudimbe
uses the term “epistemological ethnocentrism” to describe similar preconceptions of
Aﬁican letters especially in the famous case of Dogon astronomy. Mudimbe contends
that even in the face of elaborate documentation of Dogon astronomical knowledge
predating Western scientiﬁc discoveries, Carl Sagan persisted in holding that Dogon
knowledge was a “full-cycle return of a myth,” that is, “when Marcel Griaule makes

mythological inquiries in the 19308 and 19408, he has his own European Sirius myth

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played back to him” (cited in Mudimbe 14). According to Sagan, this certainly must be
because a “Gallic visitor” had been in Dogon country before Griaule to share this
knowledge with them. For Sagan and the rest of the anthropological knowledge
establishment, “Dogons, as primitives, could not possibly conceive such a complex
structuring of a knowledge which, through myths and rites, unites, orders, and explains
astronomical systems, correspondences of worlds, calendrical tables, classiﬁcations of
being and social transformations” (Mudimbe 142).

The inﬂuence of Afro-skepticism in the construction of tropes about African
narratives presents itself most dramatically in Adele King’s recent Rereading Camara
Laye (2002). At issue in this book is the authenticity of the authorship of at least one of
the classic texts of modern African literature, the novel The Radiance of the King. In a
fascinating self reversal, King repudiates her earlier position in The Writings of Camara
Laye (King 1981) that Laye was the author of his novels. This turnabout she claims
derives from evidence ranging from disparities in style to a series of anecdotes. Put
concisely by Abiola Irele, “the assumption that underlies her re-interpretation of Laye [is]
that the subjects of imaginative literature are either taken straight from immediate
experience or derive from the writer's reading” (Irele: 175). Another scholar, Ken
Harrow, has characterized this phenomenon within broader disciplinary practices that is
worth referencing in some detail:

The issue I am raising is the assumption about what Laye could have done, not

what he actually did. King writes, apropos the surrealistic or mystical elements in

the novel, "The African soul in Le Regard du roi would be a soul as described by

European anthropology, not the soul of an Aﬁican author" (57). Therein lies the

nub of the problem. One has to wonder where we are to locate the soul of an

African author, and whether we will be successful in locating it in the works of a

Sony Labou Tansi, Ben Okri, Ken Bugul, Christopher Okigbo (the latter having
been dismissed, along with Soyinka, by the bolekaja police), or any number of

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Aﬁican authors whose "Africanity," whose authenticity, is found to be lacking—
or worse, whose authenticity is found to be present! This is the fallacy of strictly
biographical or cultural readings: they depend upon a verisimilitude grounded in
facts that validate both the authenticity of the text and of the reading of the text at
the same time. The reading thus derived conﬁrms the "facts" which are grounded
in originary understandings of African identity. This has been by far the greatest
weakness in Aﬁicanist critical thought for ﬁfty years (2005:174-5).

As we shall soon begin to examine, the problem of authenticity has not only deﬁned
Africanist critical thought, it has also conditioned editorial theories. This is reﬂected in
the processes of the publication of African literature. A reformulation of the problem
identiﬁed by Harrow might ask: why, in the second half of the twentieth century, must
African thought and critique undergo a test for the authentication of its discourse? To

reverse Beckett’s question: Why has it mattered who is speaking?

Michel Foucault famously traced a genealogical study of the rules of “authenticity
and attribution” and the “system of the valorization” that produced the author function as
a requirement of discursivity in western culture. If the author function mirrors the deed of
title in an ownership society, then it is by that function both the instrument and measure
of value, unity, individuality, and historicity. According to Foucault, “modern literary
criticism, even when—as is now customary—it is not concerned with questions of
authentication, still deﬁnes the author the same way: the author provides the basis for
explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformation,
distortions, and diverse modiﬁcations (through his biography, the determination of his
individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic
design)” (1 l 1). From this exposition therefore, it becomes possible to locate, beyond
African critical thought, the epistemological tradition based on the author ﬁrnction that

has invariably generated the imperative of authenticating African authorship. This

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practice however has a different effect within the relations of colonial power: in a
colonial context, the process of authentication often devolves into or engenders Afro-
skepticism. The variance of value, the absence of stylistic unity that would conﬁrm the
individuality of the writer and situate him within streams of historical currents are the
basis for questioning the authorship of Equiano and Laye’s works, but so also are their
statuses as Aﬁican slave and colonial subject, respectively. Indeed, stylistic variations in
an oeuvre have not typically been a reason to posit a ghostwriter in the history of western
narrative theory. The best formalist criticism and discourse analysis associate unitary
language with exterior ideological interests that are “cultural, national and political”
(273), interests which act upon the irreducible, living heteroglossia internal to language.
According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the “classic and purest model of the novel as genre” (324)
in the European tradition is Cervantes’s Don Quixote precisely because it embodies “the
primordial dialogism of discourse” (275). The question that then continues to persist in
the practice of authentication of African texts is: why it does matter whose “hand” it is
that marks the surface of the text? At what point does the hand of the editor become an
obstructing rather than a helping hand? It is apparent that in all cases in which African
authorship has been in question, it has been the role of the editor that has been found
controversial. The question of how editorial function enhances or vitiates author function
is the point succinctly elicited by Irele in the case of Camara Laye:
All that King's investigations indicate is that his French mentors intervened in his
work, presumably to tidy up his texts and, in the case of Le regard du rot, in an
endeavor to expand its scope; in this case, we are in fact entitled to the view that
these interventions were not altogether beneﬁcial. Here, one might cite the
example of Ezra Pound's emendations to the original manuscript of T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land, as revealed in the facsimile edition published by Eliot's wife

after his death, emendations that were so extensive as to have sparked doubts
about the wisdom of Pound's interference. But this has not occasioned denial to

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Eliot of the authorship of the poem; indeed, Eliot himself was so little troubled by
this collaboration that he paid firlsome tribute to Pound whom he acknowledged
as "i1 miglior fabbro." Nonetheless, the example raises the question of textual
ownership, as to how much intervention is acceptable to justify ascription of a

work to a particular or sole author. (Irele 175)

Irele foregrounds here the relationships essential to the production of literary
texts, relations Foucault describes as the irreducible properties of discourse. These
properties he argues reside in relational coordinates of texts outside the author function.
The author function after all is that “mode of circulation, valorization, attribution, and
appropriation” associated with the “system of property,” through which “a system of
ownership for texts,” “rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, [and]
rights of reproduction. .. were enacted” (Foucault 108). The designation of texts by their
authors does not occlude the textual operations of narratological “shifters” by which the
author’s plurality of self is elaborated. In unwitting agreement with Bakhtin, Foucault
asserts, “there exist properties or relationships peculiar to discourse . . ., and one must use
these to distinguish the major categories of discourse. The relationships (or
nonrelationship) with an author, and the different forms this relationship takes,
constitute—in a quite visible manner—one of these discursive properties” (117). It thus
appears that we get a sense of the necessity of understanding author ﬁrnction in
connection with other systems upon which it is dependent. However, the author function
in itself and the theory based on the author’s individuality is as productive as those based
on the text’s peculiar production relationships. This much is acknowledged by Harrow
even as he rejects the conclusions reached by King:

However, true or false, the exposition of the political world in which a Francis

Soulie and Camara Laye moved, especially the period between the 19308 and
19508 in the case of the former, and the postwar years for the latter, provides us

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with an inestimable portrait of the times. Fascist thinking and collaboration by the

Belgian literary intelligentsia, French conniving and colonial manipulations of

Aﬁican intellectuals, the politics of esteemed publishing houses like Plon and De

Noel, and most important of all, the neglected world of the small literary journals,

the baseline for cultural work in those years (172 ).

The task of this chapter therefore is to determine how “visible” these relationships, these
discursive properties are within African literary texts and what implications should they
continue to have for criticism.

The question of the authenticity of African authorship itself is a paradox precisely
because Aﬁican writers were initially valued not for being writers as such, but for being
writers from Aﬁica. To be a writer from Aﬁica meant that one had the authority to speak
about Africa in a way that colonial writers such as Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, Joseph
Conrad etc., could not. As this represented the changing attitudes at the time of
independence, it became ideologically expedient for liberal politics to promote authentic
African voices and Aﬁican self representation, which at the same time must be kept
distinct and pristine, in order to demonstrate a break from colonial domination. For this
reason, it mattered above all else who it is that is speaking, whether the story is told by
the man or the lion. Within this regime of authenticity therefore, relationships between
writers and their compositors, editors etc. employed by publishers, which are mostly
taken for granted in European literature, become suspect whether or not the publisher
engaged in signiﬁcant work to prepare the manuscript for publication. Similarly, the
presence of middlemen in book production, who happen to frequently originate from the
metropole, automatically transforms the text from being African, from being an

expression of the “African soul.” Even though the conditions of writing in Africa are

quite literally the same as those in Europe, in almost every facet, the relationships that

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constitute publishing have always meant something different. This explains Irele’s
perplexity as to why so much has been made of the supposed editorial interventions on
Camara Laye’s work, while it seems to have been taken for granted that the interventions
by Ezra Pound on Eliot’s work have had no effect on the legitimacy of attributing the
work to Eliot. It becomes increasingly clear that Aﬁican writers overall were held to a
different standard, were not allowed to be writers in the same way as European writers;
constantly at stake in their professional relationships is the possibility of tainting or losing
their appeal or credibility, that is, their authenticity and originality as writers. And
though, the African writer understands that there is not one single way of realizing the
ideas of the text, variations in his text are quite literally indicative of some form of
assistance.
The conversation generated by Achebe’s decision to produce a second edition of
Arrow of God has done more than has ever been acknowledged to demonstrate the
principle of the instability of the text, and to put into question the notion of the pure and
original authoritative forms. P. Zirimu in a letter archived at the University of Reading,
on the second edition of Arrow of God expressed delight that Achebe, if not the critics,
recognized that the integrity of the text was not in any original and intrinsic form:
I rapidly combed through both versions of Arrow of God, side by side; noted
some “minor” changes, extensions, cuts, emendations; one long story cut. I have
yet to re-read the whole novel. But it doesn't look as if it's going to shatter any
patterns of my earlier response to the novel. I can't be sure that the "cuts" were
necessary. I have never, ever since I was in a position to have my own personal
literary values, I have never believed that any creative expression was the one and
only possible realisation of the creative impulse, effort or what-have-you. But, I
am glad to know that Chinua feels that way (“Preface”)-about the Arrow of God.
For, for me it is the “greatest” of the four novels; the most “textured”, the most
complex and difficult (?). And I have been bothered by the fact that some of my

friends, some of whom are writers in their own right, have even failed to ﬁnish
reading the novel. (Achebe ﬁles)

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The modes of authentication always cast editorial intervention either by the author, reader
or publisher in opposition to author function. If Eliot was not bothered by Pound’s
interventions, why should the African writer be bothered by editorial emendations. But
there is no doubt that colonial relations have altered the author function.

In the reviews that followed the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart it
became clear that authenticity became a mantra for the West in reference to works from
Africa that weer deemed promising. This was the case in The Times Literary Supplement
review of T FA: “the great interest of this novel is that it genuinely succeeds in presenting
tribal life from the inside” (quoted in Hill 121). Indeed, the New York Herald Tribune is
more direct in its own review of the novel as “an authentic native document, guileless and
unsophisticated” (121). The view of African literature as an “authentic native document”
sums up the total essence of the epistemic system that acted upon, branded and possibly
directed the course of literary development in Africa. The simultaneous operation of
thought which brings together the concepts of “authenticity,” “nativism,” and
“document” best illustrates the convergence in the modern episteme of anthropological
and scientiﬁc processes. This is the moment that the word “document” came to refer in
the widest possible way to autochthonous knowledge or forms of representation in Black
Africa. In this hermeneutic structure of the neo-anthropological regime, it is not the
individuality of the author as hitherto constituted in western literary criticism, but the
exterior elements of culture, which qualify the document, that are signiﬁcant. This
moment marks the transvaluation of the process of authentication of the document from

its basis in individualism to that of “the insider,” and ultimately to nativism.

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The horror story is still being told of how, even in 1973, Soyinka’s lecture on
literature and society had to be delivered at the department of social anthropology
because the English department at Churchill College, Cambridge “did not believe in any
such mythical beast as ‘African literature’” (Myth Literature and the African World, vii).
It must also be noted that the whole notion of the empire writing back, which presumes as
Achebe has characterized it, a corrective mission, reinforces and reauthorizes the nativist
paradigm. Applauding F. J. Pedler and quoting him, Achebe asserts a fundamental
relationship between decolonization and self representation: decolonization requires, and
is incomplete without, “the right of a people to take back their own narrative” (44). The
authenticity of narrative becomes imperative especially against the background of
“Europe’s imposition of a derogatory narrative upon Africa” (45). Thus Pedler’s
comment in 1945 about the publication of two short stories in a magazine in Gold Coast,
now Ghana, foreshadows the foundational appropriation of Aﬁican literature in the
service of authenticity:

Here is a dramatic treatment of a contemporary social phenomenon which leaves

one with the hope that more west Africans may enter the ﬁeld of authorship and

give us authentic stories of the lives of their own people. (quoted in Achebe, 43)

In this manner, Africanist thought embodies a shift in the author function of
modern literary criticism. However, neither Africanist thought nor modern literary
criticism transcend the use of a singular criterion of authentication. The theoretical
alternatives between individualism and nativism no longer capture the multiple relations
of production that are responsible for the literary text. The idea that literature must be
understood in relation to the history and imperatives of the relationships, cultural

institutions and industries that produced it underscores a post-authenticity theory of

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literary production in which the author becomes “a variable and complex function of

discourse” (Foucault, 118).

The little that has been written on the African Writers Series takes for granted the
belief that the Series was a commercial exploitation of African writers, a pseudo-
literature imposed by cultural imperialism for the entertainment of a curious western
audience plagued by the acedia of industrialization. This is why in The Post-Colonial
Exotic, Graham Huggan would insist on a different category, the anthropological novel,
to describe African novels, despite objections by writers like Elechi Amadi that “the
European critic is apt to see anthropological data in an African novel, while the same sort
of thing in a novel by Jane Austen is merely description of ordinary life” (Robert Wren
84). There is no doubt an anthroposcopic imaginary dominates western understandings of
African literature that pre-classiﬁes and pre-interprets the Aﬁican novel. This
anthroposcopic imaginary constitutes the basis for the pleasure of the publication, which
publishers must instinctively know if they are to be successful in the business. Alan Hill
surely recognized the growing need created by independence to see Africa from the

inside when he started the series.

In a review of Koﬁ Awoonor’s novel This Earth, My Brother, Basil Busacaa
expresses this pleasure of Aﬁ'ican writing thus: “What we encounter ﬁrst is the happy
shock of meeting with a writer who is textually exciting. Koﬁ Awoonor. . .can be his own
man stylistically, yet summon at need any rhythm or resource of the language (Awoonor
File. Emphasis not in original). ” As James Currey, the general editor of the Series from
1966-85, stated, what gave the African Writers Series its initial breakthrough was the

surprise, “happy shock” if you will, of picking up a novel only to see on the back cover,

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the black face of its author. Quite revealing then is the manner in which the Series, thus
packaged by the publisher, also packaged “blackness.” In a letter to Eddie Iroh, author of

F arty-Eight Guns for the General, James asks the following questions:

I attach the suggested cover photography? How do you react? Do you think a
black person should appear? Or is the fact that it is in the African Writers Series
enough? Do you think it needs more action? Or do you think these things will
draw people to the book? (AWS Files)

Eddie Iroh’s response addressed to the manager of Heinemann Nigeria is as follows:

What I wonder about is: in a world pleasantly prejudiced against the African and
subtly skeptical about his abilities, is there not the possibility that the AS [African
Writer] is dismissed simply by his tag, even before he is read and judged? (AWS
Files)

Such were the nature of the arguments, and as Soyinka put it: it has become necessary
and rightful, to ask whether the irnpresario role and marketing strategies of European
publishing houses in bringing the African writer to a wider international readership has
done more literary harm than good. It appears that every addition to the Series continued
to extend and generate a narrative independent of the individual texts themselves. The
tendency of orienting the Series toward a targeted market became pronounced as texts
were increasingly deemed publishable and selected for how much they offer their readers
insight into what was going on in Aﬁica. This trend is best illustrated by the letter
addressed to James Currey in 1980 by Richard M Moose, then the United State Assistant
Secretary of State. “Again, let me thank you for the books and commend the African
Writers Series. I frequently tell my colleagues and prospective travelers to Africa that
there is no better way to know Africa today than to see it through the eyes of its

contemporary authors.” It would seem that the ideology of authenticity has privileged the

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African writer in much the same way that Achebe and most of the writers preferred, that
is, to become moutlrpieces of the continent. However, the triumph of authenticity as a

major criteria for selection of texts, the development of expectations for African writing
along those lines have their effect on the lingering perception of African literature today

as applied art.

This phenomenon is not an isolated event but a direct consequence of a global
transformation of knowledge and the role of narratives that Lyotard has expressly
theorized. It could be argued as Lyotard has, and as Benjamin before him, that “the nature
of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation”
(4). As already examined in the ﬁrst chapter, technology here refers to a wide range of
apparatuses responsible for material and social functionalities. The transformations of the
postmodern/postindustrial society that he writes about have a deﬁnitive feature by which
“We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not
translatable in this way will be abandoned...” (4). The same can be said of the
postcolonial society and might explain the fact that a number of African language
literature writers like Ocot P’tec actually translate their own works into English as a way
of ensuring their continued and wider dissemination. Another signiﬁcant contribution of
the African Writers Series is the translation of Francophone, Europhone, Arabic and
African language literature and oral texts. The transactions between postcolonial writers
and the postmodern culture industry across the geopolitical and historical axis of what
Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic are transactions that engender, and are only possible
within, the condition of conversion and translation. Applied or translatable ﬁction

therefore is one that provides information above all about the society it depicts. Authentic

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9

literature is thus one that participates in “the ideology of communicational ‘transparency,
which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge” (5). Authenticity
becomes important in these transactions because it is the aim of every translation to
reproduce the “intended effects” and “liberate the language imprisoned” in the original
text (Benjamin: “The Task of the Translator”). However, as Darnrosch has observed:
“translation can never really succeed if a work’s meaning is taken to reside essentially in
the local verbal texture of its original phrasing” (291). Thus, as we will examine in the
later section of this chapter, the adaptability of literary language in translation serves as a
foil to the notion of authenticity. In the overall scheme of things, the pressure to
commodify the literary enterprise of narrative ﬁction, which as a part of the totality of
knowledge systems Lyotard considers to be narrative knowledge, is driven by the fact
that “Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive
power is already, and will continue to be, a major——perhaps the major—stake in the
worldwide completion for power” (5). The information, the textual knowledge of Africa
that the Aﬁ'ican Writers Series provides for the likes of Richard M. Moose is thus

strikingly reminiscent of the whole project of “Orientalism.”

In what ways then did the editorial policies generate or promote the notion of
authenticity as aesthetic criteria? Indeed, especially for minor authors whose works shall
be examined in detail in this chapter in relation to editorial expectations and input, the
editorial policies and techniques used in the selection and preparation Vof text for print
reveals a signiﬁcant effect. The criticisms and contributions of readers and compositors
such as Richard Lister, whom Currey describes as “a novelist in his own rights and a

careful guardian of authors’ individuality,” were not only substantial in some cases, they

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also in a strange way, consciously or otherwise, provided the writers with a perception of
their work that sooner or later became part of the writers’ own way of describing their
work and mission. This is due to the fact that the review process is sometimes an Open
one whereby writers and reviewers know each other. Writers get copies of reviews and
reactions of editors and readers and do often respond to them. The identity of readers has
mattered in cases. The more eminent they are, the more likely it is that the writer would
be deferential to their opinion, if only in the hope of future relationships. T.M. Aluko for
example was almost always referring to the editors as “experts.” On one occasion, in a
letter to Currey on March 7 1973, he wrote: “Presumably you in the trade are more
qualiﬁed in this matter and so one must accept your judgment. I look forward to receiving
my own copies of the ﬁnished product” (Aluko ﬁles Worshipﬁrl Majesty). However,
through the course of time, one saw a transformation that led Aluko to the point of major
disagreement with his editors and compositors. In a letter to Ingrid Crewdson on the 18th
of December, 1981, Aluko challenges an editorial suggestion by arguing that “While I
still concede to you that this is your ﬁeld, the intuition of an author makes me think that I
am right in this argument. I hope you will ﬁnd the argument acceptable and concede the
point to me. Please let me know if -you still feel otherwise.” Even at this moment, eight
years later, he still curiously makes a distinction between the role of the author and that
of the editor. The preparation of manuscripts for publication was the editor’s exclusive
domain. The precise activity that Aluko expects to be carried out once he submits his
manuscript, which is part of the common understanding between most African writers
and the Heinemann publishers, over which he quibbles with James and Ingrid, is adduced

in the letter by Keith Sambrook in his letter to Aluko as early as 1968:

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I enjoyed it very much and, as usual, I found myself laughing outright in some
places. There are some very ﬁrnny incidents. At the same time it makes its main
political point very well. I have started “tinkering” but in the most harmless way I
assure you. There is nothing structural to alter: I am just doing some internal sub-
editing, splitting up a few sentences, changing the odd word here and there. I hope
this will be alright but in any case you will have a chance to change things back if
you don’t like what I have done. (Keith to Sam 4 july 1968)

The basic work of “tinkering” is the ﬁeld of the editor. But this is not even the
preference of the publisher as writers are, for economic reasons, encouraged to edit their
own works. James explained this to Aluko while preparing Wrong Ones in the Dock “We
could put it in the hands of an editor and Spend £250 on having it worked on. But the
evidence of your other books is that your own writing craftsmanship is all that is needed.
Also another editor would not necessarily be a sympathetic inﬂuence” (James to Tim jan
29, 1980). The complexity and complications of these transactions are well illustrated in
a letter in which Sambrook discusses the prospects of Aluko’s Chief the Honourable
Minister with his Nigerian counterpart.

Between ourselves, I could never become very enthusiastic, and I was slow on

editing it. It is a pale imitation of A Man of the People. I like Tim’s earlier novels

very much indeed — particularly the creation of a small town world. But I don’t
think this big-town, political satire comes off and it is bound to be held up against

A Man of the People — and it won’t look good then. At least, that’s my view I

will write a letter to Tim explaining some of this — not exactly in these terms, of

course — and I hope you will be spared any backlash (Chief the hon. Minister
march 10, 1970).

Sambrook published Chief the Honorable Minister against his better judgment about the

cultural and literary value of the novel because there was market for it.

It becomes obvious from years of editors and authors working together in the
publishing of African novels that James regarded very highly the judgment of Richard
Lister. His report countered the more positive note sounded by John Wyllie and may

better explain J ames’s hesitation about the text:

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The subject is one which naturally arouses compassion and there is much of
interest here. Unfortunately it was marred for me by being almost unreadable; the
author does not write badly, but he managed somehow to arouse at every stage of
the book an almost insuperable reluctance to continue reading it. It's an uphill
struggle the whole way, against some kind of Stodginess or lifelessness of style,
and the effort for me simply wasn't worthwhile. (Richard Lister 5-6-79)
Even John Wyllie’s report was double-edged and instructive of the hierarchies of taste
that different audiences almost always imply. This differentiation and its implication
were to be the tightrope walked by publishers of the African Writers Series. The
challenge implicit in mapping out different markets was not so much dictated by cultural
differences as it was by the inbuilt hierarchies of taste and judgment. Wyllie however was
unperturbed by the different-audience, different-product-quality approach he was
advocating at the same time that the parallels he constructed between the Wrong Ones
and Oliver Twist suggested a historical diachronism, which in and of itself is suggestive
of unequal social evolution:
The Wrong Ones in the Dock' is, I think, a book which, as it stands, would be
better appreciated by Africans, [. . .] other than those teaching at Universities
than by white readers. ...I think that even for African readers the book could be
much improved. . .. All that said. I would like to repeat that I admire what Aluko is
trying to do with his book because I feel that his effort is timely and that the tale
he has to tell is as vital to the history of Nigeria as, for instance, Zola's 'Germinal'
or Dicken’s 'Oliver Twist' were, to social conditions in France and Britain, when
they were written. . .. For the rest let me repeat that I am very much in favour of
the book being printed because it is a most humane and valid document and one

that should be widely read in all Anglophone countries (John Wyllie Aluko
Editorial File).

The question that must not escape scrutiny in Wyllie’s report is what he means by
a “valid document.” However, it is interesting how his and C .C. Ihekaibeya’s report
helped Aluko ﬁame his argument for the eventual publication of his novel. Adding to the
ambivalence that other readers feel about Wrong Ones, Ilrekaibeya writes, “Aluko is

highly topical in this novel and there is no doubt that he may, solely on this strength,

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appeal to a section of the popular readership. But this is a work I am unable to feel
enthusiastic about, certainly not in its present form.” (Aluko Archival Files) Perhaps
Currey became convinced that the topicality of the novel was the basis for its validity and
justiﬁes its publication; one may never know. But the blurb selected for the novel
foregrounds the notion of the authenticity and credentials of the author to narrate the
African experience, thus implying that the view of the novel as a document was not far
removed ﬁ'om the original conception of the texts and constantly formed part of the
criteria for selecting texts. The blurb reads thus: “T. M. ALUKO was one of the ﬁrst
wave of Nigerian writers who between them did so much to enable readers to see Africa
as it is rather than as foreign novelists had seen it from outside.” However, Aluko’s
argument is more direct about the value of the novel:
Needless to say that as the author, I feel I have told a story of great human and
topical interest and I have faith in its success... the sense of loyalty I have come
to feel that I have for Heinemann [is due to] my double capacity as an author and
a shareholder.. I naturally want to see the book in print before the topicality of the
case wears out completely. . .. (Aluko Editorial Files)
Aluko sounds the note of urgency about the ephemerality of the case upon which the
novel is based; as if to say the document itself is an ephemeral document, thus
undercutting the argument that the story is “of great human interest.” The language by
which Aluko describes his own work and ascribes value to it cannot be divorced from the
feedback he got from the publisher, as David Cook and other readers disputed between
themselves the quality of the novel in precisely those terms. What is of the most
signiﬁcant interest in the case of Aluko is the suggestion that novels correspond to

current affairs and thus constitute documents, the validity of which could be investigated

by asking the questions about “what these documents meant, but also whether they were

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telling the truth, and by what right they claim to be doing so, whether they were sincere
or deliberately misleading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered with”
(Archeology of Knowledge 6). Harrow has argued that such questions, which have
become baseline in Africanist thought, also constitute its very weakness.

Authenticity as a paradigm of literary creativity and criticism, as it relates to the
publication of the Series, could be further illustrated by the example of another minor
novelist, Akare. Currey remarked about his novel The Slum in a letter to the Managing
Director of Heinemann in Nairobi thus: “Keith and I share your feeling about the
fundamental genuineness of his work” (To Henry Chakava.l979 June 13). In a similar
tone with the rave that accompanied the emergence of Marachera, Chakava’s report
glowingly reads:

In Akare's THE SLUMS we have got a novel which, perhaps more by accident
than design overcomes these major weaknesses and effortlessly succeeds in
presenting a chunk of slum life to the reader. His tell-it-as-it-is raw realism of
handling life in Majengo, the “mother town of Nairobi” will deﬁnitely strike a
more realistic code to all those intimate with life in Nairobi.” In this way the
novel effortlessly widens its social spectrum...

The critic looking for a well-made novel is bound to be disappointed. This work
does not have a story-line, it does not have discernible or set themes. It seems to
aimlessly and purposelessly roll on, This apparent weakness is to me its strength.
This style is more in keeping with the people the author is depicting their lives are
chaotic, aimless and purposeless [sic]. The novel does not have characters cutout
in the conventional mould. They are simply shown living their lives. The script
has numerous linguistic and typing errors, a number of bad passages and pointless
episodes, but I feel that a careful and sensitive editorial effort could be extremely
rewarding. If this is sensitively done what will unravel is a sparkling image of
Nairobi slum life, easy to identify and real, an image which will remain implanted
in the sensitivities of the Kenyan reading public for a long long time (Henry:
Akare Editorial Files ).

It is the ‘tell-it-as-it-is” quality of Akare’s novel, which brings out the real slum life in all

its sprawling, desperate, meaningless but intimately sparkling imagery that editorial work

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is to salvage. Chakava’s sense of the necessity of deploying the editorial function to
salvage this text is echoed by another reader, J aqueline Bardolph: “The plight described,
the vision expressed is not about the Slums, but from M which is an uncommon
achievement. A ﬁ'ightening vision from a totally desperate world” (emphasis in original).
What is being celebrated by these readers is the ability of Akare to capture the “soul of
the slum,” that moment in realism when narrative transcends description, reproducing it
not as a sirnulacrum but in a metonymic relation. Akare is himself aware of the premium
on his mode of realism and he writes the publisher about an interview he gave: “Anyway,
it was a surprise to me because it was an interview which I never dreamed of [or] even
expected. And all of it was taped for the radio Denmark. We moved to the slums where
the book is based and a slummer too was asked some several questions which of course
his answers were all in the book [sic].” The point here is to demonstrate how editorial
comments and recommendations could be argued to have provided some African writers
with the language with which they increasingly described their role as writers and the
function of their works. The search for an authentic tamper-proof representation of the
Aﬁican experience by Africans themselves is the form anthropological knowledge takes
after colonialism. It is important to note that the anthroposcopism implicated in the
reception of the Series was not altogether lost on the publishers of the Series; it was
anticipated as it was exploited for commercial gains.

It is the case that there were two major ideological divisions and poles within the
directorate of the publishing house, around which the editorial decisions revolved: the
more conservative educational publisher in the ﬁgure of Keith Sambrook on the one

hand, and the more adventurous laisserfaire general publisher in the ﬁgure of James

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Currey on the other. 18 the publisher the key? Should the publisher be concerned about
what he publishes and decide what will become available to the public, or should the
public be allowed to have unlimited range of texts from which to choose? And should the
relationships of author and publisher be considered part of the irreducible property of
discourse as Foucault argues? The question of commitment has always been raised in
relation to the writer. The African Writers Series brings the question of a publisher’s
commitment to the forefront- how that commitment impacts the work of art.

The question of the extent and limits of the productive power of a publisher in
relation to textual products is one that has not been posed with the theoretical rigor it
deserves; it is often assumed, taken for granted and merely asserted in mostly indirect
ways. This same question, taken on by African writers as soon as the African Writers
Series got underway, is most succinctly formulated by none other than Africa’s ﬁrst
Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, who when asked to edit an anthology of poetry for

Heinemann Educational Books makes the following prefatory remark:

Time alone will tell whether or not the second scramble for Africa has done more
literary harm than good. This anthology has been made possible (and even
necessary?), however, by the very fact of such a promiscuous affair. Its claims to
difference is [sic] essentially the one of approach, an attempt to restore that willful
entity called a poem to its self-validating existence, to rescue it from the
asphyxiation to which it is increasingly condemned by the heavy-footed ogres of
Eng. Lit, African poetry and even THE POET. The ﬁrst is the monster creation of
universities, schools and ministries of education, the second by pundits on their
ubiquitous platforms of journals and conferences, the last by publishers and the
automatic caste tendencies of the so-called emerging societies. Underneath it all
the body of the poem is slowly ground to powder until it appears to have
completed the sinister cycle back to what many claim it is — a mere ﬁgment of the
imagination. (Emphasis in original Soyinka Archival ﬁles)

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Although, this remark was by and large edited from the ﬁnal version of the anthology, it
nonetheless sits in the shadow of all debates on modern Aﬁican literature. The question
that has been “made possible and even necessary” by the convergence of the impresarios
of modern culture in Africa, starting in the 19508, is quite simply put thus: is THE POET,
the writer, an invention of the publisher, of the culture and knowledge industry? Justice
cannot be done to this question before the entire “sinister cycle,” the production line, the
process of literary production as a whole or the social life of texts, is laid bare, and its
implications and consequences ﬁrlly analyzed. This forces us to examine that indeﬁnite
and indeterminable realm of the Social from which a text makes its course. A book, a
successful publication, after all, is a representation of an alignment of forces, interests
and judgments. For this reason, Theodor Adomo’s point that the real signature of the
modern situation is the liquidation of the individual lays the groundwork for a
sociological theory of aesthetics, one that takes into full consideration the fact that “The
autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure
form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated
by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control” (The
Culture Industry: 99). The complex question of the publisher inventing the writer is thus
the question of what aesthetic, editorial and political reasons accumulate to explain the

emergence and eclipse of the Aﬁican Writers Series.

However, Soyinka’s call for the autonomy of “the poem,” itself conservative, is
belated because it attempts to obliterate the trace of all productive forces from literature
and from discourse—in fact to ignore discourse itself— forces without which it could

never exist. The multiple exigencies that characterize the practice of African literature

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bear implications for our understanding of literature that cannot be simply ignored. These
multiple exigencies relate to the construction and collections of Aﬁican literary texts in
such a way as to deﬁne the discourse of modern African literature as a discourse of
contingency wherein the crisis of autonomy engendered by the writer’s enunciative
powers is recognized. Nevertheless, Soyinka’s objection is symptomatic of a nervous
elitism that, according to John F row requires, “the professional claim to, and the
professional mystique of, autonomy of judgment; [as] the basis both for the struggle over
the organization of work and for individual self-respect (that is for the particular mode of

subjectivity) grounded in this relation to work” (1995: 125).

In what follows, an attempt will be made to read Akare’s The Slum and Achebe’s
Arrow of God for the possibility of traces left by the seduction of “authentic” narrative. I
will attempt to examine the validity of Derrida’s theory that “A trace is never present,
fully present, by deﬁnition; it inscribes in itself the reference to the specter of something
else. The remainder is not present either, any more than a trace as such” (Paper Machine
151). This analysis allows us to open up the generative possibility of the deconstructive
moment in which textual elaboration and conditions of translation are shown to contradict
both editorial and authorial claims to authenticity. It will be an attempt to enunciate a
relational theory of literary production, one in which the African Writers Series is no
longer understood on the basis of its authenticity and the dominant anthropological

episteme.

The myth that ﬁrst must be disposed is the notion that Akare was representing the
soul of the slum from the inside. The narrator, who we must always insist, is never the

same person as the author, throughout the text refers to dwellers of the slums as “they”

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from which he recoils, in fact he engages in damaging and condescending criticisms of
them that are paradoxically borne out of his knowledge of and proximity to the slums.
His life in the slums, sleeping in an abandoned vehicle and working in a carwash, is an
accident that he was never reconciled to and that forms the basis of his nihilistic,
countercultural, cynical and deﬁant sensibilities. “If anybody had told me that one day I
would come to live in this place and, worse, in these wrecks, I would have knifed him”
(22). The novel begins with a moment in which the narrator expresses his iconoclasm as

follows:

The bell tolled and its echo kept ringing into my ears for some time before fading
away. I sat. Dong, dong, dong, it repeated again. I kept sitting under this statue of
Queen Mary holding her young infant son, Jesus, in her arms. I watched them.
The people. Disappearing into the church. I knew why. And what they were going
to do. It was Sunday morning and yesterday was Saturday. They were going to
pray in the Mass as they were Catholics... I mean Christians. I’m a Christian too,
with a Christian name, but a ﬁrnny thing: I couldn’t go into the church, or I never
went. I’m somehow ashamed or something, I don’t know what. I think I know
why. It made me swear: “On myself and the Satan of my arse, I will never attend
church again.” (1)

The semiology of the bell, which tolled in Arrow of God as well, shall be examined in a
while. What we expect to happen when the bell tolls is not always the focus of these
narratives. In Akare in particular, we are not to hear in the receding monotone of the
church bell a strange terror of a macabre and incipient tragedy but the simulation of a
comprehending attitude of familiarity, indifference and ridicule; of hearing, watching and
disdain. Sitting under the image of Jesus and Mary, “love and tenderness” appear to him
only as the experience of infancy just as the Christians, the people, the slummers
“Disappearing into the church” are infantile because of their dream of ever escaping the
troubles of the world. The slum is a big world; big because it contains the world itself as

a function of the most powerﬁrl institutions of civilization. Neither the narrator nor the

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slum is closed to the world. Both are of the world, in the world and never separate or
separable from it. Above all, like the dregs of palm wine, the slum is presented as the
distillation of the world. Indeed, the narrator does not speak to portray the slum but to
confront the world with itself. Thus, the corruption and debauchery this enclave of the
abject makes the church the source of both an embarrassing and scandalous lmowledge
and of the steeling resolve, the vow upon the obscene to forever abjure it and by so doing,

any notion of redemption because “all people are devil” (46)!

However, the cynicism of the narrator is not an expression of the general vision of
the slum. It is a direct expression of the narrator’s own frustration in being trapped in a
place where he feels he does not belong. The narrator reveals of himself, “I came to
Majengo when things fell apart.” He had a promise of education and good life and
support from family until one day when everything changed forever: the members of his
family were killed in an unfortunate accident. The bitterness from this colors his vision of
life. There is no difference between the way he views the slum and the wider world. He
stands in the slum as the center of his universe looking out to society and the world, all
formed around him in concentric circles. The book cannot for this reason be considered
an “authentic” story about the slum, but a story about the world seen from both
standpoints of the slum and the outside world. The point of view is thus very
complicated. The narrator does not identify with the slum because of his background. He
considers his predicament a temporary setback and aspires to ﬁrlly rejoin the work force
and take his place in society; like some others, he after all has a high school certiﬁcate.
His view does not simply represent the soul of the slum, even if he attempts to represent

his subject position as such. In fact, the novel is really about popular consciousness. He is

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knowledgeable enough about current affairs in the world and Africa. His take on the
important issues of the time reﬂect a combination of intelligence and cynicism, but also

class limitations, and fast and loose conjectures.

One of his friends, Massopo, actually displays an uncanny and perhaps tilted
knowledge of world history. He writes names of world ﬁgures and important places and
events on every wall and only needs a beer and “Bhang” to reel off with an endless ﬂow
of information. “Massopo was brainy, though he looked a failure in life because of too
much daily drinking and the dope” (9). He tells the story from Vietnam to the Civil
Rights Movement to the Soviet Union, IRA, Che Guevara, Castro to African and local
politics:

Ku Klux Klan, that’s an American organization which is very tough down the US

there. Always clad in black robes and masks. Even Nixon fears them. Black

Panthers, these are our fellow blacks in US, and Black Power is their soul cry. F u

Manchu, Black Sunday and Dracula, these are Christopher Lee’s movies. . ..

Harlem and Black Ghettos, these are like slums here. Just like the slums,

Makaburini, Mathare Valley and those along the Nairobi river. In US they call

them Harlem and Ghettos. Cotton comes to Harlem and Shaft are movies, and I
tell you, man, the black soon gonna take over from the whites. . .. (9-10)

These individuals, and especially the narrator, form themselves into a class that
looks down on the waSwahili and women. Those are the “real slummers”! Their
misogyny and even homophobia are attempts to retain for themselves a sense of pride by
demeaning others who are more vulnerable. “Those of the slum girls with no hope of
getting married. Mothers of two, three or four bastards. Sons of different fathers. Mother
girls who can walk till morning with no one to rape them. All the slummers were bored
and fed up with them. Nearly all the boys had laid them. Too cheap” (18). The contempt

is equally expressed toward homosexuality, which is considered the Arab’s game (157).

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“On the way we met this Ali, a slummer who had turned into a homosexual and all
because of the good things of life. We cursed him. Hussein spat. With him a Boer,
perhaps. I hoped he would get pregnant on the back and give birth to a creole” (112). The
truth of the proposition that common experience does not produce common interests or
esprit de corps cannot be better illustrated in the actions of the narrator and his peers. The
central irony of the novel is precisely the self image of this group that does not see
themselves the way others see them, but does see and treat other people the very same
objectionable way the group is being viewed and treated. They consider themselves
fortunate not to be females: “1 think soon we will be having forced marriages. Otherwise
the women will start raping us. Men are not interested in marriage. They marry and wed
for only a night. The next day the woman is gone, I said. We are lucky that we were born
male, he sighed. Yes man, nobody to bullshit you, I said” (101). This sense of perverse
pride, similar to the one we ﬁnd in Alan Silitoe’s character Smith in The Loneliness of a
Long Distance Runner, explains why the narrator turns out in the end, with the act of

theft to be an unchanged character.

What informs this ﬂatness is the conviction that the narrator possesses the
superior view of reality and humanity. Humanity at its core is seen as corrupt. This
corruption is illustrated through pages and pages of descriptions of sexual perversion.
One such description follows after the police, who extorted money from a gang, then

molested them,

We took the way behind the hall, the path between Sophia Hotel and the Pumwani
Aﬁican Bar. The path was dark, only supplied with a dim light from this public
toilet. It was full of human shit which was left by both young and old, men and
women. Very beautifully arranged in a row along the bamboo cane as a fence
around the bar. The path was very private because at a time like this people didn’t
pass here. We took it. Then reaching this stunted bush of a ﬂower we came to a

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stop. It was me who heard the noise. It was so faint that you mistake it with those
made by the movement of cats. Cats are so many here at this time. At last I heard
the voice. It was the female. I knew why. . .. I picked up a paper and this time I
was more careful not to pick a shitted one. I lighted it and approached the stunted
ﬂower. I lifted it up. Bent to peep underneath. The light reached them. A man and
a woman. (20-1)

Much as the narrator shows distaste for the corruption around him, he is himself a part of
it. “I have eight bastards here in the Slums. Yes. Eight. Four buried. Buried because the
mothers were lousy, careless and cheap” (84). But he is not alone. The high and mighty
are implicated as well. The children that populate the slums are the product of powerful
men’s patronage of prostitutes. So too are the founders of the greatest religions depicted
as “fallen”. In the only apostrophe in the novel, the narrator addresses the universality of

corruption,

Damn this place. May God burn it and all the people. Ministers, why don’t you
come for your children? Managers and directors, why leave them in suffering?
Why are you aﬁaid of being seen in daytime? Why come and park your cars at a
distance in the dark? Why let them be forced out at a very early age, into
prostitution, making them wear out quickly? Why let them be forced into abortion
because they don’t have enough support for the young ones? Who will marry
mothers of two, three, four? Who will marry killers? Aborters? Who will marry
Rehema, Nuru? Wangare, Abiba, Rash, Sophia, Hadija, Mariamu. .. [The narrator
lists about a hundred more names]. Who will marry Miss Majengo? Who will
marry them? These women of the world? The soldiers of Women’s Liberation?
Christ have mercy. But no. You are the worst. You didn’t marry Maria
Magdalena. You died without a wife. So why should we? Mohammed the Prophet
didn’t, so why should we? You satisﬁed your appetite on your apostles and when
Judas refused you called him a traitor. You feared that he would tell the world.
And so too you, Mohammed. You’re all the same, Gods. Maria had the ﬁrst
degree adultery with God. To get Jesus. Joseph was impotent. He did not know
who impregnated his wife. No. He knew. But he played the cool part. The part of
an incapable. Yes, this is all shit. Bullshit. (86-7)

Before us is held up the image of the lost humanity of fallen man, and the
slummers are no exceptions. “Perhaps this place should be demolished. It is a lost city.

Losing the lives of so many. Me, included” (99). Christ, Mohamed, and the Members of

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Parliament, everyone is implicated in the system of corruption and is lost as well. The
central point of hypocrisy is being staged in the apostrophic statement above. It is
precisely because the well to do, mainstream society itself confronts the spectacle of its
hypocrisy in the Slums that it stigmatizes it. “. .. in the Slums there is never a secret. 1n
the Slums everything is known. And that is why the politicians want it demolished
because their secrets are known here” (105). The implication of the universality of
corruption that the novel projects is that corruption cannot be made into a unique and
intrinsic attribute of the slums. But this is what the narrator argues against. To describe
the narrative as tell-it-as-it-is is to ignore the element of idiosyncrasy, irreverence and the

narrator’s propensity for sweeping generalizations and misconceptions.

Another argument that vitiates the notion that the narrative could be reliably
depended upon to guide our understanding of the lives of those outside of mainstream
society is the narrator’s encounters with the specie of African he calls “Black
Europeans.” The mutual deceptions, the sexual exploitation of the narrator by these
women reveal anything but a “guileless” slum dweller. These were “Daughters of
ministers, directors and general managers who have only seen pictures of the slums and
swear that such places were only found in China and America” (58). One of such women
is Zakia who showed up in a Mercedes Benz for a carwash one afternoon and asked to be
given a tour of the slum afterwards. “She reversed and we rolled off. She told me that
she wanted to take a drive around the Slums. And that I was to be her guide” (63). This
tour is important on several levels: it mirrors both tourists and readers. This moment in
the text could be considered the moment the text turns against itself by enacting a relation

with its object and readers that contradict the claims of its author, reviewers and

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publishers. As they proceed though a tour of the slum, the narrator is truthful only about
his lies. “I lied about that, saying it was a college for two-shilling tarts. Is it? She asked.

Yeah. That is where they are taught al the business. . .. Then she asked me why I was not
chewing miraa today. I lied, telling her I didn’t have any cash...” (65). This relationship
would lead to sexual encounters with Zakia, who introduced the narrator to a host of

other women who want to take a tour of the Slums as well.

Then came the question which was like a bomb to me. And it was from Zakia. Do
you know any waSwahilis who are waganga? That was it. Witchdoctors. In the
Slums they are known as Sharrifs. Most of them are cheats, liars. What they do is
all shit. I wondered when people will realize the truth about them. They would
read to you from a Koran type of book, tell you to bring a black chicken for the
job, give you some irizi and all the funny things that you were to use. Everyday
we see women coming to them, all beautiful. The trouble with them being men.
(129)
The society depicted in this novel is apparently chauvinistic and misogynist. The
“black European women” are oppressed at home much as the women in the slum. Their
search in the slum for mystical powers to turn their domestic problems around strikes us
as being more than ironic. Black magic or black power is the authentic blackness that is
always elusive. Doubly ironic is the fact that the women are also being exploited by the
narrator who leads them to the witchdoctor that would give him the most out. It is not
only the “very high-up women [who] are coming into the Slums to the Sharrifs for black
magic over their husbands... but top men too. Ministers and all” (154). All those who
make the slums what it is are returning to it for an impossible quest for salvation, an act
of irony that could only be their nemesis. Toward the end, Zakia and her friends return

with complaints that the black magic did not work, but were not at all disillusioned. They

request to try another witchdoctor! Thus, the search for the authentic witchdoctor

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parallels and parodies the search for the soul of the slum or the soul of Africa. The
narrator’s idiosyncrasies and dissimulations, which are essential for his survival in the
face of very harsh conditions of existence, represent concerns far removed from
investments in bourgeois aesthetics and morality. The purposelessness of form, the
limitations of language and the tensions of underworld survival, however powerfully
intimated by the narrative, are not the exclusive elements of slum literature and do not
particularly contribute to a successful rendering of the essential slum life in Akare’s The
Slum. The novel is therefore not authentic in itself but by the pronouncement of the
editors, reviewers and publisher, and authenticity here as in the case of Arrow of God is

only an expression and afﬁrmation of stereotypes.

The argument that nothing is authentic in itself but in relation to its speciﬁc use
value at a given point in time is an argument that echoes Walter Benjamin, whose
formulation helped in initializing the discussion at the beginning of this chapter. If the
search for the authentic in The Slums translates to the search for black magic, in Arrow of
God it is the image of Africa as a child of nature, in the words of Karl Marx, the asylum
of the gods or the place of tradition. In ascribing the term “authentic” to these texts, one
is either asserting the “uniqueness and permanence” of the societies they represent or the
“cult value”/“ritual function” of the texts themselves as aesthetic objects. Akare attempts
the portrayal of a contemporary setting and problem. Achebe on the other hand in trying
to decipher the root causes of a contemporary problem seeks its origins in tradition. It
could be argued that if one challenges the application of “authenticity” to The Slums, it is
not clear how easily Achebe could be untangled from the label. From a modem readers’

perspective, the world of Arrow of God is unique precisely because “The uniqueness of a

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work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition” (Benjamin:
223). As Emily Apter suggests, tradition as a unique aspect of African narratives is
important within the calculus of what is marketable of African texts: “In the marketing of
Third World difference, what sells? [. . .] A traditional African writer or an Afro-futurist?”

(Translation Zone: 100)

It may well be that Achebe, looking back at tradition portrays it in terms with
which we are now very familiar. On a CNN program, Anderson Cooper’s “360 Degrees”
(September 29, 2006), a documentary aired titled “Where Have All the Parents Gone?”
narrated by Christiane Amanpour. In talking about the problem of Aids and the success
of the Riders for Health with its representative Barry Coleman, the CNN anchor,
Amanpour raises the following question: “And if AIDS can be corralled in the Masai
country where every day still passes much like it did centuries ago, why can't it be
controlled in all of Africa? (on camera): It's almost like a simple solution that works. It's
not massively complex.” This remark is a reﬂection of the sense of uniqueness and
permanence of the African condition against which the authenticity of representations are
measured. That is, an authentic representation of African is measured against a particular
discourse about Africa, with the image of Africa located as a place of tradition. Achebe
reproduces similar lines in Arrow of God in describing life in Umuaro after Ezeulu
returns ﬁ'om exile: “The heavy rains stopped as usual for a spell of dry weather without
which yams could not produce big tubers despite luxuriant leaves. In short, life went on
as though nothing had happened or was ever going to happen” (244). Achebe is more
gracious and nuanced than Amanpour as to allow for an appearance of change in

tradition. The rhythm of nature and the religio-cultural rituals that it gives rise to reserve

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no sympathy for Ezeulu, the chief priest who has been abused by the British district
ofﬁcer, just as it would be impervious to the tragedy in the end when his son dies and he
suffers a mental breakdown. Indifferent to the fact that the Ezeulu family was tethered to
extinction and the deity and its priesthood had self-destructed, the rhythm and traditions
that sustain the life of the community continues, regardless.

Achebe reﬂects Benjamin’s sense of tradition, “This tradition itself is thoroughly
alive and extremely changeable” (223): “In his extremity many a man sent his son with a
yam or two to offer to the new religion [Christianity] and to bring back the promised
humanity” (230). By restoring and re-inscribing the ritual of the new yarn within the
Christian notion of Harvest and First fruits—itself a carryover of an ancient Jewish
tradition—, the Umuaro tradition changes but lives on. The novel might best be seen as
amenable to a ritual function of art:

Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the

cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—ﬁrst

the magical, then the religious kind, it is signiﬁcant that the experience of the

work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual

function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its
basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.” (223-4)

Benjamin further provides for us a way of understanding the ritual function of art in its
equivalence in aesthetic ideologies and modes of representation that assert their use value

only within a limited and restricted world of experience.

Achebe’s Trilogy Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease were
clearly written in the same spirit that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Souls of Black Folks, which
was to ﬁnd a way of rearticulating a subject or tradition to which little signiﬁcance had
accrued because of a problem of the “veil”. In a response to Conrad, Achebe attempts

what Du Bois had done before him in articulating “the strange meaning of being black”:

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“In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an
appropriately positive note in which I suggest from my privileged position in Aﬁican and
Western cultures some advantages the West might derive ﬁ'om Africa once it rid its mind
of old prejudices and began to look at Aﬁica not through a haze of distortions and cheap
mystiﬁcations but quite simply as a continent of people. . ., often highly gifted people and
often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society” (261). The feeling of
being privileged in two cultures that most of the writers harbor, and the implication of
this for the literature, will be the subject of discussion presently. There is no doubt
however, that the unconscious of the literature presumes that the writing is an act directed
against the sensibilities of a skeptical or conﬂicted audience. But the communities of
Umuaro and Umuoﬁa are communities within the veil of tradition as much as they are
within the veil of an implacable world. The classic plot of Things Fall Apart and Arrow
of God derives from the absolute unwillingness and inability of the white invaders to
understand the traditions of the people they are colonizing and the inability of the people
to comprehend the change that is brought upon them. Both construct parallel and ironic
understandings of one another and of the same events. Gestures of goodwill turn very
quickly into provocations. The paradoxes are not limited to this. In Arrow of God the
District Ofﬁcer and his team construct narratives about the traditions of the local people
that attempt to offer a positive description of that tradition from the standpoint of its
original context and use-value: this only succeeds in pointing to its contemporary
presence as a disruptive, archaic and atavistic residual, thus validating in reverse, the

anthropological discourse of modernity.

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The end to which the ritual function of art is deployed is the perpetuation of
community. Ritual is the mechanism for the normalization of community. The
relationship between myth, literature and community has been explored in details by Jean
Luc Nancy. Here ritual is the acknowledgement of the precarious equilibrium of “life in
common,” a fragile equilibrium which must constantly be restored. As always the
necessity of ritual derives from the precipitation of a terminal crisis of community. In
Arrow of God, the symbolic order goes out of sync with the natural order when the
District Officer detains the Chief Priest for two moons thereby preventing him from
observing the lunar calendar, which he takes stock of by eating every moon one of the

thirteen sacred yams.

This conﬂict is similar to the crisis in Wole Soyinka’s magnum opus, Death and
the King’s Horseman when Mr. Pilkings orders the termination of a ritual by which
Eleshin Oba is to offer himself for the continuity of his community. Winterbottom, in his
own case, out of admiration selects the chief priest for the position of paramount chief, a
position which had hitherto not been a part of Igbo political system but which is required
by the British administration for the success of Indirect Rule. Ezeulu rejects the attempt
to incorporate him into the state system and incurs the wrath of the colonial
administration because of his sense of personal integrity that is tantamount to acts of
native insubordination and insolence. A detention of Ezeulu is effected; and for this he
misses two months of ritual. By the time the yams were ready for harvest, he is two
months behind in ritual observations. He cannot skip the rituals and the yams could not
be harvested without the rituals being fulﬁlled. This has implications not only for the

current harvest: unless the planting season were changed, which would be possible only if

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the natural order were changed, the crisis would continue year after year. The community
thus faces a serious threat of extinction. But the option for Ezeulu does not and could not
include changing the ritual itself because the ritual is the essence of the community,
without which it could not hope to survive. The centrality of the ritual of the new yam
feastival in the novel is obvious from the very beginning and prominent at the end. The

ritual is described in the following manner:

This feast was the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. Before it a
man might dig up a few yams around his house to ward off hunger in his family
but no one would begin the harvesting of the big farms. And, in any case, no man
of title would taste new yam from whatever source before the festival. It reminded
the six villages of their coming together in ancient times and of their continuing
debt to Ulu who saved them from the ravages of the Abam. At every New Yam
feast the coming together of the villages was re-enacted and every grown man in
Umuaro took a good-sized seed-yam to the shrine of Ulu and placed it in the heap
from his village after circling it round his head; then he took the lump of chalk
lying beside the heap and marked his face. It was from these heaps that the elders
knew the number of men in each village. If there was an increase over the
previous year a sacriﬁce of gratitude was made to Ulu; but if the number had
declined the reason was sought from diviners and a sacriﬁce of appeasement was
ordered. It was also from these yams that Ezeulu selected thirteen with which to
reckon the new year. (253)

With the exile and imprisonment of the chief priest by the British colonial
administration comes a discontinuity never before experienced by the community, one for
which there exists no clear solution within its metaphysical structure. This impasse, while
having no reference point in the historical reality of the Igbo, being a ﬁctional account, is
by no means beyond the realm of comparable reality. One only needs to make the
connection with the historical account of the Aztecs by Tzvetan Todorov in his Book,

The Conquest of the Americas. Todorov claims that the coming of Europeans was
something that was inconceivable within the symbolic order of the Aztecs. Because there

was nothing that prepared them for the possibility of any other existence outside their

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own, their entire apparatus for making sense and acting in the world broke down
completely, becomes inoperative, thereby ensuring their defeat in the hands of Hernando
Cortes. Achebe invents a conﬂict that simulates this moment in the “contact zones” of
cross-cultural encounters that test the limits of interpretive systems. The impasse to
which Umuaro elders offer their solution is as stated:

We all know the custom and no one can say that Ezeulu has offended against it.
But the yarns are ripe in the soil and must be harvested now or they will be eaten
by the sun and the weavils. At the same time Ezeulu has just told us that he still
has three sacred yams to eat. What then do we do? How do you carry a man with
a broken waist? We know why the sacred yarns are still not ﬁnished; it was the
work of the white man. But he is not here now to breathe with us the air he has
fouled. We cannot go to Okperi and ask him to come and eat the yams that now
stand between us and the harvest. Shall we then sit down and watch our harvest
ruined and our children and wives die of hunger? No! Although I am not the
priest of Ulu I can say that the deity does not want Umuaro to perish. We call him
the saver. Therefore you must ﬁnd a way out, Ezeulu. IfI could I would go now
and eat the remaining yams. But I am not the priest of Ulu. It is for you, Ezeulu,
to save our harvest.'(Page 260)

The solution the elders propose invokes a very pragmatic and even materialist
view, one that concerns itself with the conservation of the physical existence of the
community. It is one that has a universal resonance: that above all, to use Foucault’s
formulation, “Society must be defended”; that the voice of the people is not the voice of

god; it must become the voice of god.

These are not the times we used to know and we must meet them as they come or
be rolled in the dust. I want you to look round this room and tell me what you see.
Do you think there is another Umuaro outside this but now?‘

'No, you are Umuaro,’ said Ezeulu.

'Yes, we are Umuaro. Therefore listen to what I am going to say. Umuaro is now
asking you to go and eat those remaining yams today and name the day of the
next harvest. Do you hear me well? I said go and eat those yams today, not
tomorrow; and if Ulu says we have committed an abomination let it be on the
heads of the ten of us here. You will be free because we have set you to it, and the
person who sets a child to catch a shrew should also ﬁnd him water to wash the
odour from his hand. We shall ﬁnd you the water. (260)

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Ezeulu consults with his god to ﬁnd a remedy to this situation. It is unheard off that any
problem could arise to which the gods do not have an answer. But the divination
produced no conclusive answer due in part to the interruption of the process by the sound
of the church bell robbing the reader of the only moment of hierophantic encounter in the
novel. It is highly signiﬁcant that Achebe does not allow the gods to speak @3111 in the
novel. This is particularly striking as the agency of the god Ulu is denied by the failure to
break through the veil of the supernatural into the realm of human reality. What we have
is the description of a process of divination that ever approaches but is never able to reach

the divine.

From the rafters right round the room the skulls of all past chief priests looked
down on the mound and on their descendant and successor. Even in the hottest
day a damp chill always possessed the shrine because of the giant trees outside
which put their heads together to cut off the sun, but more especially because of
the great, cold, underground river ﬂowing under the earth mound. Even the
approaches to the shrine were cold and, all year round, there was always some
ntu-nanya-mili dropping tears from the top of the ancient trees.

As Ezeulu cast his string of cowries the bell of Oduche's people [Christians]
began to ring. For one brief moment Ezeulu was distracted by its sad, measured
monotone and he thought how strange it was that it should sound so near-«much
nearer than it did in his compound. (Page 263)

It becomes clear therefore that Achebe wrote about the supernatural from the
point of view of man and not from the point of view of the gods. This approach is
precisely what distinguishes a realist narrative from a nonrealist one. The distraction of
the priest by the “sad, measured monotone” of the church bell highlights his corporeal
gravitation that the world is too much with him. More than this, it also underscores a
moment that Soyinka has written much about, which is ironically the only possible

discovery to be made in Arrow of God: that the docking of the ship of modernity on

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African shores coincided with the twilight of the gods. A moment in which the only
possible story is the human story and the only possible medium is realism. The gods
cannot speak in Arrow of God because they have already deserted. At the end, Ezeulu
contemplates this act of betrayal thusly: “Think of a man who, unlike lesser men, always
goes to battle without a shield because he knows that bullets and matchet strokes will
glance off his medicine-boiled skin; think of him discovering in the thick of battle that
the power has suddenly, without warning, deserted him”(285).” It is understandable then,
that Achebe’s third novel No Longer at Ease breaks with the discourse of tradition that
has exhausted itself. The collapse of the symbolic order of tradition is therefore what
Arrow of God represents. It is not a justiﬁcation or nostalgia for tradition. The spectacle
of its rituals, the coherence of its world and the inability to reenact the ultimate gestures
of restoration as is the function of all rituals herald the apocalyptic dawn. “What could it
point to but the collapse and ruin of all things? Then a god, ﬁnding himself powerless,
might take to his heels and in one ﬁnal, backward glance at his abandoned worshippers
cry: If the rat cannot ﬂee fast enough Let him make way for the tortoise!” (286). In fact,
one could take it a step forward. The representation of the failure of ritual to restore order
is in itself, a parody of tradition. The elders of Umuaro were therefore wrong to feel
vindicated by the destruction of Ezeulu that “no man however great was greater than his
people; that no one ever won judgement against his clan.” With the collapse of tradition
comes not the validation but the dispersal of community, “inciting people to take
liberties; and Umuaro was just ripe to do so.” The subordination and subjection of the
people that follows in No Longer at Ease point to the notion of conservative

emancipation of the colonial regime.

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How then do we make sense of the novel if it is not as critics have unanimously
expressed the validation of the rituals of community? What is a post authenticity reading
of Arrow of God to yield? According to Benjamin, “the instant the criterion of
authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is
reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice —
politics” (224). Clearly, Achebe offers his Nigerian readers a story that warns about the
dangers of centralization, that political authority must not be based on culture or religion,
just like Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. All these things have proven to be the
boulders upon which the country, and indeed most of African and postcolonial nations,
continually stumbles. “The narrative’s reference may seem to belong to the past, but in

reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation” (Lyotard: 22).

Achebe’s depiction of what is now widely regarded in modernist discourse as the
moment of the twilight of the gods, gained the status of a trope that could easily be
identiﬁed in the language of modern Aﬁica literature. But the philosophical implications
of the concept of the twilight of the gods as was enunciated by Frederick Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy marks the moment of ascendency of the scientiﬁc worldview and
the decline of mythopoeic worldview that is being projected through Ezeulu and the Igbo
villages. According to Foucault, the “death of god” is the condition for the emergence of
anthropology (Order of Things). The underlying story in all the classical theories of
realism from Barthes to Lukacs is the commitment to the agency of man. This story of
the agency of man ﬁrst told through the genre of the novel, according to Jack Goody,
constitutes “an anthropological breakthrough in storytelling” (20073). In a way, critics

like Graham Huggan are right for labeling the Aﬁican novel an anthropological novel,

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but they are wrong for the reasons by which they came to that conclusion. Achebe’s
novel is as anthropological as any novel to the extent that it demonstrates the emergence
of a new pragmatic framework for the survival of the Umuoﬁa community that is no
longer based on the supernatural or theological injunctions.

It is this desire of the realist writer to capture a truly heroic human story as
opposed to the story of the interventions of the gods, and present us with a portrait of
Africa’s “successful enterprise” with life and society that informs the production of the
second edition of Arrow of God, contrary to claims by Achebe as to the structural defects
of the ﬁrst edition. Indeed, Keith Sambrook has described the editorial suggestions he
made regarding the text as an attempt to remove roadblocks in the path of readers like
him who do not share the cultural orientation of Achebe (personal interview). However, a
close look at the most signiﬁcant section that was cut out reveals what Lyotard already
alerted us to, namely: the abandonment of everything that does not translate. The long
episode which has now been published separately as children’s literature is folkloric
material that extols the virtue of contentment (see appendix). This demand for “unity,
simplicity, communicability” etc. in the name of realism speaks to the condition of
translation and to the notion of authenticity as a condition of translation, which could be
argued to have the most enduring impact on the style and rhetorical repertoire that
informed the overall character of the Aﬁ'ican Writers Series. Indeed, it is arguable that the
Series constitutes the very canon of African literature as a discursive formation; and that
it is demonstrable that this body of African literary texts exists primarily in the mode of

translations without originals, a formulation that registers the fact that African writers are

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necessarily translators in a linguistic situation in which the distinctions between “source”
and “target” are constantly interlocked and interchanging.

The notion that narratives always already exist in a condition of translation has
been expounded by Bakhtin. According to this theory, “All forms involving a narrator or
a posited author signify to one degree or another by their presence the author's freedom
from a unitary and singular language, a freedom connected with the relativity of literary
and language systems; such forms open up the possibility of never having to deﬁne
oneself in language, the possibility of translating one’s own intentions from one linguistic
system to another, of fusing ‘the language of truth’ with ‘the language of the everyday,’
of saying ‘lam me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other’
(Bakhtin 314-1 5). More recently, Emily Apter in The Translation Zone (2006) revisits
the set of geopolitical encounters and narrative relations that in Mary Louise Pratt’s
Imperial Eyes (1992) constitute “contact zones.” Apter sees in translation, “a signiﬁcant
medium of subject re-forrnation and political change” that “highlights that ‘eureka’ spot
where consciousness crsses over to a rough zone of equivalency or crystallizes around an
idea that belongs to no one language or nation in particular” (6). It seems quite obvious
that the African writer as a maker of representations is not just a translator of the world or
self into language. Famed for being a citizen of many worlds, s/he is much more
responsible for maintaining the modular through which the dynamics of interaction
between the systems of value and apparatuses of perception of those radically different
iterations of self and “world scattered in meaning [are collected, reconstituted and
condensed] into a ﬁnished and self-contained image” (Hitchcock 179). The African

Writers Series as a literature-in-translation emanates from a peculiar surface of

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emergence that doubly inscribes the discursive possibilities, variations, and functions.
The manifestations of this condition of translation are most profoundly signiﬁed at the
level of the hermeneutic possibilities that it lends itself to or resists. This condition
underscores the refracted essence of the literature and the necessity of a post-authenticity
hermeneutics that compels us to “accept the reality that texts come to us mediated by
existing ﬁameworks of reception and interpretation” (Damrosch: 295).

Although Obiajunwa Wali would very early in the history of the formation of the
Aﬁican canon challenge the very Africanness of its discursivity, his criticism of the
replication of “Western” aesthetic, cultural, and thought patterns, which tend to reinforce
alienation, has not resulted in any major shift in the terms and practices of African
literature. The claims of literatures written by Africans but in “someone else’s language”
to be a legitimate representation of the African self have never been successfully
challenged, not even by the ﬁerce indictment of the Bolekajas that African writers in their
adoption of Eurocentric poetics are complicit with colonialism. For several critics,
prominent among whom is Ngugi, this debate about Eurocentric impulses is a
fundamental problem, because they believe it is crucial that African writers express
themselves in a medium that does not needlessly constrain or distort the freedom of their
creativity, the relationship with their Aﬁican audience, and the possibility of promoting
the urgent social transformations and re/formation of autonomous identities in Africa.
The debate crystallized in the binary of authenticity and inauthenticity, which, however,
has since become outmoded in contemporary critical language. The point being reiterated

here is that the frustration arising from this theoretical containment in the poetics of

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realism is itself a product of a complete misapprehension of the destiny of modern
Aﬁican literature that the Series inaugurated.

The author-audience organic relation is clearly the measure of authenticity that
Achebe prescribes. This prescription becomes necessary precisely because of the
disjuncture created by the transatlantic nature of production and consumption. He argues,
“Because of our largely European education our writers may be pardoned if they begin by
thinking that the relationship between European writers and their audience will
automatically reproduce itself in Africa” (Hopes 40). The relationship Achebe conceives
between African writers and their audience is determinate of the spirit of African
literature, one deﬁned by a very different kind of function from those that have deﬁned
European literature. In “The Novelist as Teacher,” Achebe presents a letter written to him
by a reader of his works to show that the society expects the writer to play the role of a
teacher. In this letter, the reader says, “your novels serve as advice to us young” (41-2).
He uses this to affirm the convergence of his society’s ostensible desire for a teacher with
his ultimate aim as a writer. This attitude is not considered praiseworthy in contemporary
European understandings of literature. As Benjamin succinctly makes the point, “Not
only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the
concept of an ideal receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art” (69).
This general sentiment is also echoed in a letter by the British novelist Frank Yerby to his
publisher A. Dwye Evans: “To a writer the reader is at best an irrelevancy; when you’re
writing, he doesn’t even exist, nor should he” (quoted by John St. John, 354). It is indeed
this condition and articulation of strategic difference, one in which language, audience

and aesthetics are inextricably and mutually implicated, demonstrated by works

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published in the Series that has remained, by and large, inadequately theorized. It is thus
worth examining the structural and historical circumstances that dictate this ﬁrnctional
differentiation within the relation of a writer’s social space and the implications of such
relations for the foundation and overall formation of African Writers Series as a
discursive order. Furthermore, an examination of the ways in which the transatlantic
nature of the transactions inﬂuenced living and writing across cultural, linguistic, and
political positions that condition a discursive tradition is long overdue.

Achebe, like most other Aﬁican writers, is indeed aligned with the project of
conversion to modernity, which requires the work of translation. This is made more
explicit in his statement about how he intended his works to function:

Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second

handle on reality; enabling us to encounter in the safe, manageable dimensions of

make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real

life; and at the same time providing through the self-discovery which it imparts a

veritable weapon for coping with these threats whether they are found within

problematic and incoherent selves or in the world around us. What better
preparation can a people desire as they begin their journey into the strange,

revolutionary world of modernization? (emphasis added, Hopes 170).

Achebe’s view converges with that of Frow who takes the position that “the work of
intellectuals [read knowledge class] is the implementation of modernity” (89). Ezeulu in
Arrow of God says it all when he relates, “My spirit tells me that those who do not
befriend the white man will be saying had we known tomorrow” (55). So inexorable was
this commitment to conversion to modernity that it became the generative principle of a
series of imperatives which included a critique of ethnic identiﬁcation and cultural
nationalism. Such critique is exempliﬁed in the strong rebuttal of negritude by emerging

Aﬁican writers in the sixties whose works featured prominently in the African Writers

Series.

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The project of conversion to modemity, coupled with the transatlantic circulation
of the literature, bear their effect on the very rhetorical mode of the texts, which “is
always a process of translation and transference of meaning” (Bhabha: 26). This process
has its equivalence in what Stephen Owen has described in contemporary European
literature. Owen presents us with an interesting problematic of what it means to produce
national literature in a global world. He argues that for the work of a Greek poet to get to
Rumania, it must ﬁrst pass through the lines of distribution in New York, Paris, or Berlin,
and “if the Greek poet’s work is judged valuable for the world market in those centers, it
may be translated and only then exported to Bucharest” (121). What Owen describes here
is the globalization of knowledge production and the transformation of knowledge
production in a globalized world market, which he later shows has its colonial side.

The outcome of the history of asymmetrical power relations is reﬂected in the
privileging of “translatable” procedures and mechanisms for the authorization of
statements. A text always in a process of translation and transference of meaning
automatically enables multiple matrices of meaning. In the conversion to modernity, with
the West wielding the power to superimpose its own matrix of meaning because of its
monopoly over the means of knowledge production, the exclusionary process of “canon”
formation in postcolonial literatures is thus already preestablished. This Soyinka
perceived at the very beginning, but without paying deeper attention to the ways in which
the nature of Aﬁican literature engenders a double matrix. He laments, “apart from his
own discovery the African writer has experienced rediscovery by the external eye. It is
doubtful if the effect of this has any parallel in European literature” (“And After The

Narcissist?” 56).

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It is evident that the multiple matrices are directly tied to the “surface of
emergence” or relations of production that have imposed certain fundamental constraints
on Aﬁican literature. On the one hand, the institutions that are responsible for the
production of African literature are predominantly situated in speciﬁc geo-political and
economic domains outside the continent. This has a dramatic effect on the publishing
processes, and thereby preconditions the kinds of texts that are eventually selected for
production. Clearly, Aﬁican writers themselves may have agendas that are different from
those of the publishing industrial complex or the politics of publication and promotion,
which can foreclose the possibility of a text’s emergence. Accommodations are thus
inherent in the very act of writing African literature just as the texts themselves are
products of difﬁcult negotiations between ﬁne boundaries.

The condition and poetics of translation can be better understood if one examines
the character of Okeke in Things Fall Apart as the very archetypal ﬁgure of Achebe and
the African writer. Okeke is himself the modern hybrid character in whom elements of
the trickster ﬁgure have survived. Achebe’s preoccupation with trickster ﬁgures can be
seen in Nanga (A Man of the People) and the Oldman (Anthills of the Savannah). Okeke’s
appearance represents a highly signiﬁcant moment in the novel. This is where Achebe
constructs the “privileged position” of the translator as author, a phrase Irele and Achebe
repeatedly remind us applies only to these middlemen who, by their embrace of
modernity, become the unique agents of progress and transformation. The conﬂation and
valorization of the role of the translator and spokesperson in the text mirrors the very
position of the African writer, The African Writers Series and the “canon” of African

literature. In a very fascinating passage in Things Fall Apart, the white man says to his

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interpreter, “Tell them to go away from here. This is the house of God and I will not live
to see it desecrated.” But Okeke, the interpreter, in a more politically careful manner,
says to the angry and rampaging “spirits and leaders of Umuoﬁa,” “The white man says
he is happy you have come to him with your grievances, like friends. He will be happy if
you leave the matter in his hands” (170). This is the kind of pressure and talk that
characterizes not only Things Fall Apart but also the discursivity of the Series, the canon,
built on and/or around it. It demonstrates the precise power of an individual writer in the
terms that Lyotard has expressed. “A Self does not amount to much, but no self is an
island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever
before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal
points” of speciﬁc communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Of better", one is
always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even
the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse
and position him at the post of sender, addressee or referent.” (15)

To theorize the condition of translation is to claim it engenders the mutability and
indeterminacy of the subject constituted at the very point s/he engages in a discursive
practice. Foucault’s genealogical method that “entertains the claims to attention of local,
discontinuous, disqualiﬁed, illegitimate knowledges” (Power/Knowledge: 83) helps in
situating literature and experience in Africa. One of the precautions of the genealogical
method is not reading texts from the point of view of the “knowing subject,” as a
“synthetic activity of the subject.” Once the sovereignty of the subject is disrupted, the
notion that texts are allocated a set of values, which is found in the intention of the

author, then becomes difﬁcult to sustain. Foucault argues that discourses themselves, by

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the very “rules of their formation” and “surfaces of emergence,” “form the objects of
which they speak” (Archeology: 49). By this logic we can deduce a more important
principle that texts generate the context of their discursivity. It seems therefore that the
argument that there can be no subjectivity before the act of enunciation enables us to
understand the mode of speaking in African literature as a whole. The act of enunciation,
according to Foucault, deﬁnes “the various statuses, the various sites, the positions that
[the subject] can occupy or be given when making a discourse” (54). In Aﬁican literature,
the notion of the “transcendental subject” can no longer account for the narrative because
it is in that very narrative that the “dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with
himself can be determined” (55).

“The function of translation and the role of the translator,” Peter Hitchcock
argues, “go to the heart of the dialogics of the oppressed” (170). The translator’s
subjectivity at the moment of enunciation can be described as being marked by “a politics
of disguise and anonymity that takes place in public view but is designed to have double
meaning or to shield the identity of the actor” (Scot: 19). This is why the role of Okeke is
so important in theorizing the condition of translation. Okeke as a trickster ﬁgure has an
antecedent in folklore, and Amos Tutuola has masterfully translated this ﬁgure into
contemporary discourse. Could one argue that the hidden pattern in Things Fall Apart is
similar then to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts? I think there are strong reasons for such a
position. Achebe makes two important observations about the nature of ﬁction: ﬁrst, “the
sheer prodigality of man’s inventiveness in creating aetiological ﬁctions; second, not all

ﬁctions are equally useful or desirable” (Hopes 142). For Achebe, Tutuola presents the

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paradigm of what aetiological ﬁction is, which he goes on to endorse because its “truth is
not like the canons of an orthodoxy” (153). He asks and suggests:
Why does Amos Tutuola’s The Palm- Wine Drinkard offer us a better, stronger
and more memorable insight into the problem of excess than all the sermons and
editorials [...]? The reason is that Tutuola performs the miracle of transforming us
into active participants in the powerful drama of the imagination in which excess
in all its guises takes on ﬂesh and blood [...]. [T]he novel is made unforgettable
for us because of Tutuola’s inventiveness not only in revealing the variety of
human faces that excess may wear, but also in his deft explorations of the moral
and philosophical consequences of breaching, through greed, the law of
reciprocity which informs like a gravitational force the seemingly aberratic
motions of his bizarre, ﬁctive universe. (143-44)
The question then is what does Achebe have in common with Tutuola, or Okonkwo with
the Drinkard? Once it becomes clear to us that they both come “from a common
backcloth” (Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage 11), the understanding that the
restoration of social order is possible through the spectacle of the negation of its breach
will become available to us. It becomes clear, therefore, that the image/experience of
Africa is not like Mudimbe’s gnosis that resists representation in the language and
epistemological forms of the West. Given all the imperatives at work in the production of
these images, the essential ambivalence that renders them readily susceptible of being
interpretated against their own grain vitiate efforts to co-opt them into the supreme
unidimensional canonical obligation of legitimation. As a matter of fact the literature
undermines both imperial discourse as well as the nationalist discourse in Aﬁica. It
cannot then recruit subjects for the nation-state with which it is also at war. Ngugi’s
chapter: “Art War with the State” in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams elaborates some

of these issues. The discourse of African literature is not the “rhapsodist of the eternal” or

of manifest destiny, but that of the strategic struggle and matter-of-life negotiation that

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Okeke represents, one that the elders of Umuaro put into practice in asking Ezeulu to eat
the sacred yams. I use “struggle” advisedly as opposed to resistance or opposition.

The dialogized discursive condition of production, I would argue, is also the
condition of a translation relation, which carries the possibility of manipulation and
therefore agency by the person of the Janus-faced translator. It is in this translation
relation that one would ﬁnd the African writer in Achebe. Not only does the writer serve
as a medium of linguistic and cultural translation of Aﬁica, s/he also serves to ﬁlter and
translate the incoming “threat” to Africa.

Achebe has been cast as a classicist, who is interested in ethnography and the
representation of the true order of things. It is ironic that Achebe, like Foucault, in
applying himself to the relations of things, the orders by which they are mutually
established and interconnected, raises problems for the very notions of realism and
representability that permit us to read African literature as having a link within itself to
"tribal life" or Aﬁican historical reality. Realism and representation promoted in the
Western “canons of orthodoxy” stressed the capacity of language to capture the structures
of existence. It is in this regard that African literature serves “as a sustained project of
demythologization of [...] the myths of legitimation and delegitimation” (Jeyifo 52). And,
I believe, it inevitably forces us to rethink the notion of “writing back” as being marginal
or inapplicable in African discourse as exhibited in the African Writers Series.

To write in a colonial context or about the colonial effect in a one-way shape or form is
not the same thing as to have dialectical relations with the colonial discourse.

The distinctiveness of the conditions of translation lies in the imperatives of its

production, but also in the distinctiveness and intersubjectivity of worldviews and

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epistemologies that are implied in it as an art and practice of translation. This marks my
point of criticism of Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence. It seems to me that Bhabha’s
central concern with the problem of ambivalence is, “can the colonial moment ever not
be contingent [...]?” (194). I agree completely with his argument to the extent that my
paper is also an attempt to delineate the complexion and complexity of contingency in the
context of colonization and the production of African literature. That said, Bhabha’s
move toward generalizations beyond the context of colonization, the very idea that the
nation anywhere is “split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its populations”
(148), requires nuance. It is the very heterogeneity of the nation’s populations that
constitutes the ground and necessity for the nationalist discourse of centroversion to
which the canon of European literature corresponds. The modes and patterns of
ambivalence therefore manifest in disparate contexts in differing conﬁgurations
according to the variations in degree of autonomy and subordination in colonial
moments.

The immanence and mutations of the colonial situation conﬁne the African writer
to the position of the translator and middleman in the Publishing Industrial Complex and
the pedagogical apparatuses of the dominant world order. By that position, can he really
simultaneously claim to have the “autonomy of judgment” and “organization of wor ”
which F row reminds us are the basis for the formation of discursivity? “The formation of
the knowledge class,” F row reiterates, “characteristically takes place around the
professional claim to, and the professional mystique of, autonomy of judgment; this

forms the basis both for the struggle over the organization of work and for individual

16S

self-respect (that is for the particular mode of subjectivity) grounded in this relation to
wor ” (125).

It was G. G. Darah at the University of Ife who coined the phrase “agbero
bourgeoisie” to refer to Nigerian capitalists. The image of “agbero” is that of the bus
conductors who are paid daily for ﬁnding passengers for buses. They do not own the
buses. Irele presents the picture of the African knowledge class as what we might begin
to view within the “agbero” paradigm: “Because we have not yet been able to establish
on anything like a ﬁrm footing the institutions and material conditions for the production
of knowledge, we are not in a position to command authority even in areas of scholarship
pertaining to our continent. We do not control the means of production and transmission
of our own discourse.” (“Aﬁ'ican Scholar” 64)

The fornration of the Series as literary capital cannot be any different or
disentangled from the process of the formation of economic and cultural capital. It is the
institutions and political economy that generate all these pressures and imperatives, that
determine what knowledge counts, what we should ﬁrst tackle. As Apple says, we must
not “ignore the complex relations between cultural capital and economic capital” (106).
However, the African bourgeoisie and the knowledge class have both failed to secure the
autonomy of the means of production necessary for the formation of both forms of capital
and/or their relocation. Heinemann's African Writers Series with all its contributions and
successes remain fundamentally an international/multinational enterprise which took on
from local initiatives such as Mbari Publications, the East Aﬁica Publishing House etc.
We must therefore begin to assess the far-reaching implications of these situations for the

constitution of the African Writers Series as well as its commanding force and promise.

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What I have explored in this Chapter is the “multiple exigencies” of the
conditions of translation that characterize the production and practice of African
literature. I conclude that Achebe has given us a good illustration of these exigencies and
the ecstasy of self-apprehension in a tragic colonial encounter through the ﬁgure of
Okeke as a representation of the modern African writer. I have classiﬁed the discourse of
modern African literature as a discourse of contingency precisely because of the crisis of
legitimation that the shifting and transversal conditions of Okeke’s enunciative power
engender. These multiple constraints on Okeke’s enunciative power serve as indicators of
the problems and dilemmas of African literary production. Thus, Okeke allows us to raise
a fundamental question concerning the ground or groundlessness upon which the story of
Africa’s coming of age is told. This fundamental question exposes the disjunction
between the translation relation and pedagogical function of the story. As the theory of
this contingency and disjunction has yet to be institutionalized into a canon of criticism,
one can understand why it has taken this long for “Okeke” to emerge as a problem. No

longer does authenticity apply to him.

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CHAPTER FIVE

International Literature: Marketing Sensibilities and The Crisis of Writing.

[Nigerian] novels published in Britain are far more likely to use village settings
than novels published in Nigeria, and this preference is holding steady [. . ..] In
fact, however, Nigerian novels are far more likely to feature trafﬁc jams in Lagos,
a boss’s assaults on his secretary’s virtue, or how urban youth confront
temptations to easy money through crime. Political novels, on the other hand, are
disproportionately more likely to be published in Nigeria than in Britain. (Wendy
Griswold: 528-9)

David Darnrosch argues in What is World Literature? (2003) that the term:
“world literature,” coined by Goethe, was one that “crystallized both a literary
perspective and a new cultural awareness, a sense of an arising global modernity” (l).
The rise of metropolitan and postcolonial cities and the constellation of the modernist
movement discussed in the preceding chapters attest to the essential relation of material
and literary cultures. Indeed, it appears impossible to speak of literary culture outside of
the political economy of a mode of existence and production. Taken to its conclusion, this
logic implies that whenever one speaks of “world literature” one is necessarily speaking
about an aspect of globalization. This at least was the view of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” cited by Damrosch: “The bourgeoisie has through
its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country. [. . .] national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures

there arises a world literature” (in Damrosch: 4). According to Marx, World literature is

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coextensive with a world market precisely as a consequence of the cosmopolitan
character of production and existence that the world market engenders. Also in the
preceding chapters, attempts were made to identify the speciﬁc characteristics that the
various markets in which the African Writers Series was circulated engendered in the
texts. That is, how writing for an educational market, or general market, or even trade
market for that matter in which Vicky Unwin, James Currey’s successor at Heinemann
tried vigorously after 1985 to promote the Series, affected the consciousness of the
writers, and the dynamics and function of textual production. As we shall see, this view
differs from Goethe’s conception of world literature. It is thus necessary that an attempt
be made to distinguish between Marx’s and Goethe’s conceptions of world literature; and
in order to make this distinction even clearer, we propose the term international literature
as a postcolonial re-appropriation of the Marxian appropriation of the term “world

literature.”

The eminent broadcaster, editor and reviewer, Edward Blishen, was ﬁrst to
announce the emergence of the African Writers Series as the emergence of a new world
literature: “I shall tell my grandchildren that I owe most of what education I have to
Penguins and that through the African Writers Series I saw a whole new, potentially great
world literature come into being” (Quoted in Hill, 123). Blishen’s prognostication is apt
as a signiﬁcant number of the texts published in the Series now appear prominent in
World Literature curriculums. It is legitimate to ask whether this is not the natural destiny
of these texts in the ﬁrst place. The default assumption between writers and publishers

was that the texts were not meant primarily for local distribution but for international

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distribution. It was ultimately desirable that it be actively distributed to the very extent of
Heinemann’s reach. Currey makes this explicit in his solicitation of Songs of Lawino:
I do feel very strongly that easier access to the text [Okot P’Bitek’s Songs of
Lawino] through the A.W.S . would ensure that it was even more widely studied
not only in Africa but also in Scandinavia, Britain, Australia, the Caribbean,
Malaya, the Philippines and wherever there is an excited new audience for writing
from Africa. As you will realize the Nigerian market is on its own very substantial
and local stocking is crucial for supply. (James Currey to Leonard Okola East
African Publishing House 5th May 1978)
The international channels of distribution that HEB makes accessible to African writers
are part of what Currey is convinced contributed to the canonical status of some of the
texts such as Things Fall Apart and The Interpreters (personal interview June 2005).
Asked what made Things Fall Apart the great novel that it has been for 50 years, Currey
automatically responds: apart from the fact that it as such a very interesting and well
written novel, it’s inclusion in the African Writers Series explains its staying power. This
assertion he supports by the fact that Things Fall Apart and The Interpreters were already
out of print before they were reproduced in the paperback Series but have been in print
ever since. The same is true about Ngugi’s novel ﬁrst published in hardback by William
Heinemann, The River Between, as reﬂected in a correspondence between Sambrook and
Janheinz Jahn. “Dear Mr. Jahn, 9 December 1965. E: River Between is now

unfortunately out of stock. The paperback is to be published early in January and we will

send you a review copy of this as soon as it is available-- Keith Sambrook.”

The entrepreneurial mode of operation in Heinemann Educational Books
allowed for strategic innovations that were directed towards a transnational promotion of
books and caused two of the major revolutions in postcolonial publishing which were the

publication of the African Writers Series as a paperback series, and the stocking of the

170

texts in bookstores as a series rather than as individual publications (an approach that has
now further encouraged ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey to archive the entire Series,
regardless of the relative popularity or obscurity, success or otherwise of individual titles,
as a Literature Collection). This meant the texts were not only available but were
relatively affordable, mostly below £1, with signiﬁcant margins of discount for Aﬁican
booksellers. The big sales in one location allowed for ﬂexibility to absorb losses
elsewhere. It thus became possible to market the Series as a collection and promote it
world over to the point it very quickly developed the reputation for being stolen the most
of those books lost to libraries across Aﬁica!

The success of the Series had an exponential effect on the company’s stature. As
James Currey put it: “[The Aﬁ'ican Writers Series] became, partly accidentally, an
exploitative part of Heinemann’s strategy in Aﬁica. Again and again it gave Heinemann a
presence which seemed far greater than the real size and strength of the ﬁrm. It was a key
factor in enabling Heinemann to seize educational contracts from under the noses of
established companies with a far longer presence than upstart Heinemann” (cited in
Caroline Davis 234). The power of Heinemann Educational grew because of the Series as
it was able to edge out its competitors like Macmillan, Evans etc. On a particular
occasion, Macmillan, in partnership with a Tanzanian publishing house, had demanded
the right to publish a title by Palanyo. Alan Hill makes the following remarks about this
attempt: “Had Peter agreed, he would have denied himself access to the world market —
which was what the AWS could uniquely provide” (235). One cannot overemphasize the
role of the African Writers Series in giving different expressions and faces to the

indescribable admixture of passions, of the animated suspense of expectations and the

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tremulous conviviality of yesterday’s adversaries. At the same time, the network brought
about by the coterie of publishers travelling across old frontiers, such as Alan Hill, eager
to harvest the ﬁrst fruits of independence, provided publishing service for Aﬁican
authors. A writer writes from the freedom of his soul, but it has yet to be shown what
direct connection there is between the time of independence of African countries, of
decolonization and the unprecedented outpourings of literary creativity. Alan Hill was
instinctively right in seeing in the overseas expansion of the Heinemann Educational
Books the overall simultaneous social and political transformation of Africa.

Speaking of this transnational reach of Heinemann and the international impact
of the production and distribution of the African Writers Series, Alan Hill remarks: “In
1958 a remarkable episode changed the direction of my publishing life and added a new
dimension to the ﬁnn’s list. It was also a turning point in the history of English literature
in the twentieth century and a momentous event in the cultural development of black
Africa” (120). Hill is referring to the chain of events that were prompted by the
publication of Things Fall Apart and the Series that it gave rise to; that is, how these
amount to a seismic shift in transnational cultural relations, and how as part of the
cultural transformations enabled by the exchange, they have changed the way the world
thinks. In Hill’s story, he describes his return to England after a long period of the pursuit
of publishing in the postcolonial world: “To visit HEB Inc. in its early years was to
experience a journey in time. It was like travelling back 30 years to those far-off days
after the war, when Edward Thompson and I shared a room, a typewriter and very little
else. Since then, we had conquered the world” (290). An interesting part of his tale

involves how going back to England is some sort of retrogression. The work of the

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publisher had involved an act of active engagement with the world- all things exciting
were now happening out there on the global stage and the intensity of these activities and
the role of African Writers Series in generating world-wide excitement, were what
Edward Blishen had testiﬁed to, summing up the mood during the great period of African

literature.

The sense that “the world is too much with us” echoes through the
correspondences from African writers to Heinemann publishers. When Nurudin Farah
ﬁrst informed his publisher about the manuscript that was later to be published under the
title A Naked Needle, he ﬁrst conceived it in terms of world citizenship. He wrote, “I’ve
just have begun a novel --provisional title is A Native of T he World” (Farah to Currey, 7th
oct 1969). As this conceptualization mirrored Farah’s own living situation, Currey would
later invoke it in jest “We have greater difficulty keeping in contact with many people
who stay in the same place. Obviously you are a practiced nomad!” (Currey to Farah
(18th may 1970). Nomadism is a less fancy way of saying cosmopolitanism, but it is a
condition of postcolonial writing ﬁrst articulated by Edward Said (Orientalism). An acute
sense of “worldliness” that Carole Boyce Davies argues in her book Black Women,
Writing and Identity (1994) is a unique consequence of the “migrations of the subject.”
The worldliness of Aﬁican literature as a product of dispersion and dissemination
through international travel and marketing is obviously quite different from the notion of

world literature that Goethe espoused.

Goethe’s view of world literature could be argued to be a form of “imperial self-

projection,” to see itself reﬂected in the mirror of the landscape beyond, one in which a

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global perspective of Irnperium ascertains what constitutes literature from place to place
and ascribes values as to what is a useful contribution and “of great value to us”
(Damrosch: 9). In Goethe’s actual formulation however, a less critical conclusion could
be reached that deﬁnes world literature as literary texts that serve as “windows to foreign
worlds.” In this case, the literariness and value of these texts would still be based on the
needs of the receiving culture which would then require texts from abroad to be authentic
representations of foreign cultural processes. The origins of world literature and global
literature as we know it today could be traced to these formulations that derive from
Goethe. Among several attempts to reconceptualize world literature has been “The World
Literature and Cultural Studies Program” by Kristin R088. R088 argues that it is important
to establish “a global comparative ﬁeld” in order to “present both dominant and emergent
cultures as dynamically related” (1993: 667). From this perspective, the “world” in world
literature would mean “merely a relational way of thinking about global literature and
culture” that does not isolate Europe and the US. This in a sense would allow for
comparison not based on a First or Third world oppositionality but a realization that “the
conditions that prevail for the vast majority of people in the so-called underdeveloped
world are now those of, becoming the lived experience of, the people inhabiting the
world centers of capitalism” (675). Ross’s attempt is to contravene the hierarchy implicit
in the conﬁgurations of world literature courses in the West. However, her intervention

relates to world literature within a pedagogical framework. ‘

David Damrosch among others has developed a more elaborate concept of world
literature: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond

their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language [. . .]. In its most

174

expansive sense, world literature could include any work that has ever reached beyond its
home base [. . .]. [A] work only has an eﬂective life as world literature whenever, and
wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture”
(4). In giving world literature a non-pedagogical general theoretical orientation,
Damrosch reproduces or replaces the ﬁrst world-third world binary with original culture-
foreign culture binary. Some of the important questions that arise from this are the
following: what is the notion of an original culture? Would original culture refer to the
culture portrayed in the text or the cultural perspective from which the texts looks on to
the world? Would the original culture be the culture of the novel as a genre or the author?

What would be the original culture of a multicultural text? The notion of “original

culture” is a backdoor way of reafﬁrming the origin of literature in national culture.

Damrosch’s further attempt to clarify his concept of world literature does fall
short and in fact complicates the cultural marker already laid down by introducing yet
another marker, the linguistic: “a work enters into world literature by a double process:
ﬁrst by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its
linguistic and cultural point of origin. A given work can enter into world literature and
then fall out of it again it if shifts beyond a threshold point along either axis, the literary
and the worldly” (6). This theory assumes a given threshold above or below which a text
might be considered world literature. It also assumes that the boundaries of language and
culture are coextensive and coterminous; that literatures could not cross linguistics
boundaries without also crossing cultural boundaries and vice versa. The condition of the
production of African literature, as has been discussed in this dissertation, stem from that

unusual experience that does not ﬁt into the established modes of thinking either about

175

notions of world literature or about literature as such. This is probably why of all the texts
of world literature examined by Damrosch not a single one of them is by an African
author. In fact, the chapter “English in the World” that could have opened up the whole
question of postcolonial literature focused instead exclusively on Anglo-American and
immigrant writers in England and the United States. Postcolonial and Aﬁican literatures
today, constituted by texts that are written in international languages and from a sense of
a shared transnational, if not global, cultural experience, were given a passing glance in

only one paragraph:

Intimately linked to translation as it is, world literature can also be found when a
work circulates across cultural divides separating speakers of a single widespread
language like Arabic, Spanish, or French. A Senegalese novel written in French
can enter world literature in an effective sense when it is read in Paris, Quebec,
and Martinique; translation is only a further stage in its worldly circulation. (212)

There is a preference, from the focus or lack thereof, for world literature in
translation over postcolonial world literature. The former specie of world literature as
Emily Apter’s Translation Zone very transparently presents it, is the old comparative
literature with a focus beyond European languages and literatures and with less of an
emphasis on studying literature in its original language. One of the consequences of this
recalibration is the tendency to compare and to cluster Minority literatures and “Third
World” literatures together, especially along the lines of Diaspora literatures. This
territory has been effectively conceded by theorists of world literature despite the obvious
fact that “The age of colonialism was characterized in large part by a process of linguistic
and cultural uniﬁcation” (Casanova: 116), a fact which automatically eliminates the
linguistic and cultural otherness that Damrosch seems to put down as marking the

threshold of world literature. It is the elimination of the mirror of difference in

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postcolonial literature that makes it difﬁcult for conventional concepts of world literature
to accommodate it and why theorists like Damrosch are not able to expand their

theoretical base to include Aﬁ'ican literatures in English.

The concept of world literature has yet another problematic association and this is
its being constituted by classics of world’s great civilizations or canonical non-westem
literatures in English or translation. The problematic relationship between the notions of
literature and civilization, especially written civilization, explains at times the reluctance
in meddling with “Third World” literatures. Invoking Senghor’s “civilization of the
universal,” Achebe encourages postcolonial writers to join in the “preliminary
conversations” that are essential in the progression of universal civilization: “to any
writer who is working in the remote provinces of the world and may now be
contemplating giving up his room or selling his house and packing his baggage for
London or New York I will say: Don’t trouble to bring your message in person. Write it
where you are, take it down to that little dusty road to the village post office and send it!”
(Home and Exile: 2000: 94). This enjoinment derives ﬁ'om an understanding and rebuttal
of the notion that western literature is a vehicle of universal civilization. Based upon the
metaphor of “the vast network of postal services that knit the British Empire together”
(76), Achebe argues for a world civilization and literature that basically allows
postcolonial writers to write in! Such calls only further legitimize the hierarchical

classiﬁcation of literature based on notions of civilization.

The time has come to salvage that aspect of World literature which Damrosch
describes as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (5) from other dominant forms of

world literature by emphasizing its basis in international languages and markets. This is

177

to effectively enter a post-authenticity moment of Aﬁican and Postcolonial literature that
moves away from a culture-based to a market-based theory of literature. There are several
bases for which one could classify and theorize international literature. One such

proposition is by Michael Denning:

Like “world music,” the “world novel” is a category to be distrusted; if it
genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing
device that ﬂattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single
cosmopolitan “world beat,” with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of
globalization, often as empty and contrived signiﬁer as the modernism and
socialist realism it supplanted. There is, however, a historical truth to the sense
that there are links between writers as unlike as Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz
Nadine Gordimer, Jose Saramago, Paule Marshall and Pramoedya Ananta Toer,
for the work of each has roots in the remarkable international literary movement
that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century under slogans of
“proletarian literature,” “neorealism,” and “progressive,” “engaged,” or
“committed” writing.” (“The Novelist’s International”: 703)

The validity of Denning’s argument has been demonstrated through the discussion on
international modernism in chapter three and the connection between writers in different
political and literary capitals. International literature is thus deﬁned among other criteria,
by international literary movements. The other criterion that is being spotlighted here is
the market: the totality of that mechanism constituted by “the literary chit-chat which
makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange” (quoted
in Berube, 2002: 96). There is no telling the impact that marketing has on the
contingencies of the reception of literature, but there is no doubt that that category of
what we hereby call international literature is arguably more dependent on the “market”
and susceptible to market manipulations. Texts could appeal to readers based on cultural
and national afﬁnities and intellectual and entertainment values, but faced with an inward
looking detached audience an additional layer of challenge presents itself to the

impresario of international literature to highlight or create yet some other value for the

178

texts. This is not because the texts lack an intrinsic value in themselves, but that the
conditions of production and distribution invest them with their fair share of “the crisis of
evaluation” in literary and cultural studies. As Michael Berube has noted on the subject
of the crisis of evaluation, “And because we are uncertain [. . .] about what counts as good
literary, critical, and theoretical work, it sometimes appears that the only criteria of
evaluation we have are mercantile criteria: what’s hot, what’s selling, what’s the newest
latest” (97). Nowhere is the evaluation of literary texts based on “currency” and “market
value” than in the editorial theory and practice of (International) Publishers. The
relationship between market value and literary value is a complex one that matters to
different actors, but has a very lasting effect on the destiny of a text, and indeed, the
deﬁnition of a whole culture and its literary enterprise. Berube’s description is correct
about the workings of the culture and knowledge industries, in their totality, and even
with regards to the promotion of literary texts: this is reﬂected in the publisher’s letter to
Ngugi on the publication of his novel Weep Not Child (1964): “It always happens with a
novel that sales come within the ﬁrst few months of publication, though with a novel like
yours one expects a small but steady hard-cover sale to libraries, etc., for some time. We
want the person who cannot afford the hard-cover, however, to be able to buy the
paperback whilst the novel is still ‘news’” (27 April 1964).

The mode of evaluation of texts presented to the publishers of the African Writers
Series reﬂects the mercantile criteria. The moment of decision is always based on one
common denominator of how texts would play or perform in the market. One example

that also allows us to account for the eclipse of the Series is the production of T.M.

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Aluko’s Wrong Ones in the Dock. James Currey writes what is perhaps the most direct
assessment of the publishing situation:

Unfortunately, in the deepening depression we have had to look at our publishing
budgets for 1981 and decided to postpone quite a lot of work, including I am
afraid, Wrong Ones in the Dock.

We have had to consider every book in terms of how quickly we can expect to get
our money back. We have had Joe Osadolor over from Ibadan and he feels that
they can only commit themselves to an initial order of 1.000 copies. While this is
realistic, we do depend on Nigeria in particular to sell your books [. . .] But an
order for 1.000 does not give us a sufficient contribution to build a big enough
print run to be able to keep the book at a price the market can afford. As it is of
substantial length, it is estimated that the paperback price would be close to £3

[.. . .] The worrying situation leads us to be cautious. It is particularly frustrating
for you in that after some years of writing silence, you have produced a new novel
when the market has turned against us. Naturally, if you can ﬁnd other publishers
who take a more optimistic view, either in Nigeria or Britain, then you should tell
us. (James Currey 1"t Dec 1980)

In Currey’s response, we get the view of the language of publishing, how the “market”
represents the absolute measure of value, the aggregate of all socio-cultural judgments.
Indeed, in question is the literary and cultural value of Wrong Ones, and it is expected
that the author would understand this point if communicated in the pragmatic terms of the
market prospects for the text, rather than the evaluative. The fact that the novel was
eventually published indicates that the market was not as dead set against Wrong Ones as
Currey suggested. Aluko’s response to Currey’s tactical rejection of the novel has
everything to do with the decision to publish the text after all, as much as the reader’s
reports may have had their impact. The publisher clearly has a more important role than
“tinkering.” This is his role as an entrepreneur. His genius, like that of a sailor, must
manifest in his aptitude for predicting the currents and the tides of the market place and

of the culture that could either propel or turn against a particular publication. This is the

180

moment of decision that the publisher is always to encounter. It is the moment that

determines the career of a publisher.

Indeed, a most deﬁning feature of international literature is its relationship to
international trade; predicated upon a far less stable system of market dynamics because
the imperative of investments in foreign literatures might not be as crucial or enduring.
Lawrence Hill of the Three Continents Press made the observation in 1979 that points to
the early signs of the turning of tide against the Series: “I still don’t understand why sales
of Aﬁican authors should decrease as successive books are published. Shouldn’t it work
the other way around?” @awrence Hill 1979 Bebey’s ﬁle). Also in 1981, we begin to see
correspondences explaining to writers like the one to Aluko why their manuscripts may

be on hold:

By the standards of British publishing the sales of The Land’s Lord have been
good. It is now hard to sell a ﬁrst novel at all. However, I’m afraid that sales of
The Land ’s Lord have so far been, by the standards of the Aﬁican Writers Series,
a little modest. It is frankly slow work getting attention for new writers in Africa.
There is a tendency to go back to the earlier writers partly because people are lazy
and there is now a substantial amount of critical material about the established
writers. (Currey to Echewa)

The process of canon formation is the process of closure which Currey by sheer
observation of the culture instinctively recognized. This process of canon formation
occurs simultaneously with the collapse of the Nigerian foreign exchange market in 1982
and the African debt crisis-all of which are themselves linked to the crisis of state
systems on the continent. The story of the Series to a great extent mirrors the biography
of the continent itself: from the moment of independence in the 19608 to the period the

IMF and World Bank came actively on stage in the 19808.

181

In another letter by the publisher of the Series to Echewa, Currey writes: “In the
present world depression we are being encouraged to delay publication on books. I wrote
to your agent before the pressure was really on about delaying the book but I did hope
against hope that we would be able to ﬁt it in during 1981” (Currey to Echewa: 1981). By
the time of the publication of The Crippled Dancer in 1985, James Currey, sensing that
the time of the great period of African literature was over, had retired, leaving Vicky
Unwin to manage the Series. In three different letters to the publisher, the feeling of
frustration on the part of Echewa, which is representative of the other writers, becomes
palpable, but so is the increasing sad awareness of the inextricable connection between

literature and the marketplace:

In the event that you haven’t already scheduled publication, let me note once
again that the situation in Nigeria is likely to continue as is for some time.
Consequently we must ﬁnd a way to get around it rather than just sit it out
passively. Are you publishing any books at all now for the Nigerian market? If so,
how are you handling them? (The Crippled Dancer ﬁle 1985)

Please let me know what is going on and what your time table is for the book’s
publication. While realizing that Nigeria represents a sizeable portion of the
book’s potential market, I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to accept the proposition that the book’s
publication should [be] tied to economic conditions in Nigeria. Those conditions
may not improve signiﬁcantly for the rest of the decade—who knows? (The
Crippled Dancer ﬁle 1985)

I would like to know when exactly they plan to publish the book. If its publication
is tied to an index of economic conditions in Nigeria, the book may not be
published till end of this decade. (The Crippled Dancer ﬁle 1985)

Although it was not until 2003 that the Series was discontinued after a long moratorium,
it was around this time, in 1985, that a bad swing in the economic condition of Africa
dealt a permanent blow to the life of the Series. Unwin was no longer looking for sales

for new titles in Africa, but in the trade market in the West: “I think it will help us a great

182

deal to have the US rights as the USA is one of the key markets these days. The Nigerian
market is only important to us in general backlist terms as it is the initial printruns that we
are worried about. The main market for the ﬁrst printing of any AWS now lies in the
west” (Vicky Unwin to Echewa 1985:54). What remains a puzzle for most observers of
the development of the Series is why despite the rise of the Black Studies programs and
the establishment of Aﬁican Studies Centers in the United States, a viable market could
not be found to sustain it. The promise of the 19708 that “The African Writers Series is
being raided by academics not just in the literature departments but also in all the other
social science faculties: history, anthropology, sociology, politics, religious studies”
(Currey to Nurudin Farah Sardines 1982), had shown itself without foundations. A whole
study of the travails of Africana publishing in the US and the reasons for the dissipation
of the great enthusiasm expressed in Hans Zell’s letter in 1969 has become overdue and

even urgent:

It really is rather amazing how several major US. publishers —not previously
having published any Africana material at all or very little —are now suddenly
trying tojoin the “gravy train”. As far as I can gather, no less than 6 major US.
publishers are about to announce their own African Studies of African Literature
series. In any event, publishers like Heinemann and Deutsch are now reaping their
well deserved beneﬁts for their pioneering efforts in the Aﬁican writing ﬁeld.
(Hans Zell 1969.)

The insurmountable nature of the dependence of international literature on
international trade underscores the place of the Publishing Industrial Complex. This
industry operates as an Althusserian apparatus, or in the words of Adomo and
Horkheimer as a “Culture Industry.” The Western publishing technology and network,

which enabled African literature in the ﬁrst place, pose problems for it. Horkheimer and

183

Adomo, like Althusser and Edward Said, have argued that the “technological rationale is
the rationale of domination itself” (121). The technology of domination, as Glissant has
posited, “provides, on its own, models of resistance to the stranglehold it has imposed,
thus short-circuiting resistance” (1 5). The question for the African writer then was how to
“move the center,” how to produce “national” literatures in a global world and retain their
“ontological sovereignty” in the midst of the multiplicity of imperatives and complex
apparatuses that mediate, transform, subvert, invert, and pre-situate the reception of those
texts. The whole notion of “moving the center” of cultural production has been an
obsession of Ngugi. But this obsession belies a crisis, which has been with him
throughout his writing career:

AM: Do you have plans for any other books?

JN: No plans at present... You see, I have reached a point of crisis—I don’t know

whether it is worth any longer writing in the English language.

MG: Would this not be playing up to the narrow nationalism of which you said

earlier you do not approve — would you not be limiting your audience?

JN: It is very difﬁcult to say. I am very suspicious about writing about universal

values. If there are universal values, they are always contained in the framework

of social realities. And one important social reality in Africa is that 90 per cent of

the people cannot read or speak English... the problem is this-J know whom I

write about, but whom do I write for?

(My emphasis. Interview by Alan Marcuson, Mike Gonzalez, Sue Drake, Dave
Williams “Union News” Friday November 18th 1966).

The African writer like Ngugi is no longer concerned about writing for that
generic generous and free spirit for whom Sartre says a writer writes. His literature is
essentially an international literature. International literature is writing in an international
language and to an international audience, that is, to no one in particular. International
literature is produced in a place outside the author’s home country. International literature

is distributed through and depends upon the networks of international trade. International

184

literature engenders a crisis of writing. This crisis is not the Du Bois paralytic crisis of

double consciousness, but crisis that is the very source and raison d’étre of creativity.

Ngugi’s expression of a crisis of consciousness, which has been thoroughly
examined by Omafume Onoge in his piece “Crisis of Consciousness in African
Literature”, is characteristic not only of modern African literature but also of
contemporary literature and thought. Although, the link between poststructuralism and
postcolonialism has been examined by Simon Gikandi, Anthony Appiah and in Aﬁican
Cinema by Ken Harrow among others, there has yet to be any compelling study of the
correlation between the politics of decolonization and the critical practice of
deconstruction. Quite ironically, deconstruction has often been viewed instead as
oppositional to the politics of decolonization, which is seen as been premised upon the
untenable claim to autonomous subjectivity. Hence, Africanist suspicion toward
deconstruction and poststructuralist skepticism or even contempt toward postcolonialism.
However, the arguments for addressing this misunderstanding are already implicit in the

works of Homi Bhabha and, especially, Gayatri Spivak.

In Death of a Discipline, Spivak addresses an important question that is relevant
to understanding the ways in which the crisis of writing and thinking item a standpoint of
the former colonies ﬁt into and effects a pluralization that demands inclusivity, which
necessarily decenters and “overwrites” (72) dominant and exceptionalist ideas of the
globe: “Let us repeat Derrida’s question: Can democracy function without a
logofratrocentric notion of collectivity?” (47, 32). An iteration of this question is repeated
throughout the book: “Who are we?” “How many are we?” “Who are they?” The

presentation of this question as undecidable constitutes an apology for humanistic

185

disciplines in the face of an increasing support for the social sciences at the expense of
humanities, and is laced with uncharacteristic subtlety, by another important concern
about the place and relevance of “postcolonial literature.” Literature supplements the
Social Sciences just as Area Studies ought to supplement Comparative Literature. On the
one hand, “Let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open,
and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so” (26). On the other hand, “one hopes

[. . .] we [. . .] are opening up toward [that] [. . .] mysterious thicket of the languages,

dialect, and idioms [. . .] rather than reining them in” (39).

Part of Spivak’s concern is the fear of “US-style world literature becoming the
staple of Comparative Literature in the global South” (39). Hegemonic Comparative
Literature as she calls it, arises out of “inter-European hospitality” (8) It highlights the
distinction and hierarchy between “Areas” and “Nations”, the exceptionalism of
European nations and the perpetual appropriation of emergent peripheral cultural forms.
Much as Spivak’s arguments challenge the arrogance implicit in categories such as world
literature, her sense of the speciﬁcity and place of postcolonial literature appear at best
confused. Although, at the beginning of the book she states “For now I want to repeat my
concern for the literary speciﬁcity of the autochtlrone, which, lost in the shufﬂe between
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, could not appear at all in Comparative
Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism ” (15), her analysis of selected postcolonial
writers undermines that concern. If the ultimate aim of the New Comparative Literature
or Planetary Literature is to touch Africa, Asia etc. in its move beyond European borders,
and if such comparativity would produce the analysis that “A careful reading of literature

coming out of ‘the third world,’ with attention to language and idiom and respect for their

186

grafting, will show that the inevitable themes of tradition and modernity, collectivity and
individualism may be in play in many different ways” (66) then, it has achieved very
little indeed. For Spivak, what was wrong about her “sense of the inclusiveness of

Comparative Literature” was that it was untimely! (35)

It is clear that while Ngugi shares in the general crisis of consciousness that the
expansion of the ﬁeld of African literature caused in collision when community and
collectivities could no longer be determined a priori, he would altogether reject the
gesture of inclusion in comparative or world literature. However, Spivak’s reversal of Du
Bois’s concept of two souls in one body into an Aristotelian formulation of one soul in
two bodies most succinctly captures the new manifestation of the crisis that Ngugi
expressed. The crisis is no longer one of the individual but one of the collective. It is thus
instructive that Spivak ends by invoking the question of the disapora: “It is such
collectives that must be opened up with the question ‘how many are we?’ when cultural

origin is detranscendentalized into ﬁction—the toughest task in the diaspora” (102).

Brent Hayes Edwards’s book The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation,
and the Rise of Black Internationalism tracks how the metropolis uniquely enabled a
certain kind of mobility, convergence and collaboration of black peoples across different
regions of the world that gave rise to black radicalism. The history he traces is similar to
the one Paul Gilroy has elaborated upon in The Black Atlantic. All of which stakes out
the indissociable nature of any theory of Aﬁican literature from the broader diasporic
context. The institutional apparatuses that have enabled black thought and creativity as
we have seen in the case of the African writers Series have never really been State

oriented, thus making the reliance on international or transnational alliances and

187

structures almost unavoidable. According to Edwards, “it is precisely the discourse of the
Communist International that opens the possibility of a Black International” (264). A
comparable argument has been made in this dissertation about the origins of the Series in
the Commonwealth. It is not just at the discursive level that the eclectic nature of black
radicalism in early 19008 was manifest, “it should be underlined that the ‘means towards’
a Black International is primarily a trio of periodical publications: the Negro Worker, La
Race negre, and Le Cri des Negres ” (265). An important question would be to see how
the African Writers Series extends the tradition of black radicalism and collaboration.
However, it is the nature of the support and dissemination networks of these publications,
the production relations and their political economies, and the crisis they generate which

must be accounted for in any material theory of Aﬁican writing and literature.

188

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