Literature and Culture in Global Africa

143 Pages·2017·0.7 MB·English

by  Tanure Ojaide

Literature and Culture
in Global Africa
Engaging and interrogating the idea of a ‘Global Africa’, this book exam-
ines how African literary and cultural productions have changed over the
years due to the social and political influences brought about by increased
globalization. Tanure Ojaide takes a variety of European theoretical con-
cepts and applies these to African literature, oral traditions, culture, sexu-
ality, political leadership, environmentalism, and advocacy, demonstrating
the universality of the African experience.
Challenging African literary artists and scholars to think creatively about
the future of the culture and literature, this new collection of literary and
cultural criticism from scholar-writer Tanure Ojaide is an essential read for
students and scholars of African literature and culture.
Tanure Ojaide is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies
at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. He has published
nineteen poetry collections, four novels, three short story collections, two
memoirs and six scholarly books.
Global Africa
Series Editors: Toyin Falola and Roy Doron
1 Dissent, Protest and Dispute in Africa
Edited by Emmanuel M. Mbah and Toyin Falola
2 Environment and Identity Politics in Colonial Africa
Emmanuel M. Mbah
3 Poverty Reduction Strategies in Africa
Edited by Toyin Falola and Mike Odugbo Odey
4 Literature and Culture in Global Africa
Tanure Ojaide
5 Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora
Contesting History and Power
Edited by Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Literature and Culture
in Global Africa
Tanure Ojaide
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Tanure Ojaide
The right of Tanure Ojaide to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ojaide, Tanure, 1948– author.
Title: Literature and culture in global Africa / Tanure Ojaide.
Other titles: Global Africa ; 4.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Global
Africa ; 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006082 | ISBN 9781138037762 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315177700 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African literature—History and criticism. |
Literature and society—Africa. | Africa—Civilization—20th
century.
Classification: LCC PL8010 .O35 2018 | DDC 809.8896—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006082
ISBN: 978-1-138-03776-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-17770-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 John Barth and modern African literature:
exhaustion and replenishment 8
3 Michel Foucault and the Urhobo Udje oral poetic
tradition: madness, power, and resistance 19
4 Losing cultural ground in the global space: Africa’s
profit and loss in globalization 34
5 Environmentalism in African literature: origins and
development 51
6 Love, sex, and sexuality in African folklore
and literature 66
7 African literature of advocacy 84
8 The new orality in contemporary African literature 95
9 The present in the everlasting: overcoming
contemporaneity in African poetry 103
10 Literature and political leadership in Africa 112
vi Contents
11 Theorizing African literature 119
12 Conclusion: toward a new African literature
in a global age 129
Index 135
1 I ntroduction
Africa is a reality of multifarious experiences. It is a geographical expres-
sion, a geo-political unit, and, above all, a socio-cultural landmass. Much
as the northern part of the continent has been incorporated into the Arab
and Muslim ambit and there are clusters of European population in Zimba-
bwe and South Africa, Africa has come to establish an identity molded by
its geographical location, cultural, historical, and political experiences. The
people respond to their physical environment to which a living relationship
has been worked out over centuries. The landscape of plains, mountains,
rivers, rainforests, grasslands, and deserts has on its own conditioned a peo-
ple whose existence depends on their location on that part of the earth. The
African experience continues to change as the people continue to adapt to
new circumstances brought about by the factors that condition it.
But much as I use the word “African” in this book, I am very conscious
of diverse ethnicities or ethnic nationalities across the continent. Africa is
not homogeneous and even socio-culturally operates both patriarchal and
matrilineal systems, though the parts or ethnic groups that are patriarchal by
far outnumber the matrilineal ones. Even within an ethnic group, despite the
common language spoken, there is still diversity in different clans and the
subgroups. The diversity within one group could be in the form of dialects
of the language and variations in the cultural practices. It is thus a bit too
generalizing to use an incident or practice among one group or its subgroup
to make a statement about the very group, not to talk of the entire Africa.
One should therefore be cautious on the use of the term “African” to gen-
eralize about the entire continent because such a practice or incident might
just be an isolated case or an exception to the rule even within a group.
I make the point therefore that Africa is very diverse and one should avoid
generalizations and not just brand what is peculiar to some part as “Afri-
can.” Most times, the term “African” describes what takes place in Africa,
even though this is in only a part of it, and not necessarily what operates
as a norm in the continent as a whole. It is mostly in the geographical and
2 Introduction
historical aspects that the African experience tends to be more uniform; one
must bear in mind the location of human experience and what has happened
and affected the landmass of Africa.
Africa has been undergoing changes brought about by internal and exter-
nal circumstances. It is inevitable for a people to have changes in their
lifestyles based on new observations from their daily and perennial ways
of doing things. These changes are more inevitable as the population is
exposed to other ways by other people. Africa had started to shed some
of its habits and acquire new ones before foreigners – Arab / Muslim and
European / Christian folks – came to the continent with the aim of changing
the people to accepting the “new” ways. The foreigners were (and perhaps
still are) unipolar in the sense that they propagated their way as the only
way and there was no other way. Most African groups, as Chinua Achebe
consistently reminded us of the Igbo people, believed that if there was one
way of doing things, there should be another.
Thus, once African gods were denigrated for people to become Chris-
tians or Muslims, Africans were portrayed as pagans and uncivilized and so
needed to know God and be civilized. If Africans were left alone by over-
zealous outsiders who wanted to change them to their respective Christian
or Muslim image, the people would have developed their particular ways
of moving forward. History, thus, plays a major role in the changes which
have taken place in Africa. With Europeans first coming in a spirit of adven-
ture, the Portuguese, whom my Urhobo people call Potokri, settled along
the coast of west, central, and southern Africa and many intermarried with
the local populations to produce mulattos. Many scholars believe this early
practical knowledge of Africa would backfire on Africans as the Portuguese
would turn to have slaves from the region.
The slave trade periods of European / Western and Arab intrusion were
to be followed by European colonization that has changed Africa the most
in its history. Once the Europeans saw the huge resources in Africa, they
would come for economic reasons masked with philanthropic rationale. The
European powers “partitioned” Africa among themselves as their booty of
conquest. Colonization, which many scholars would argue, brought moder-
nity to Africa, also spread socio-cultural, economic, and political changes
across the continent. I am not going into details of the colonial policies
of the Europeans in Africa, whether of Indirect Rule or Assimilation, but
these policies affected the ways of Africans and made them to be hybrids –
combining African and Western lifestyles. One can think of the economic
and agricultural policies that will promote the farming of cash crops, the
building of parks and plantations, and other policies that would transform
the landscape of the continent into the European image and for European
benefit. European missionaries came together with the colonialists and they
Introduction 3
were rivals and collaborators at the same time in their efforts to change
Africans culturally so as to be more amenable to the colonial project of
economic and political exploitation.
Political independence would come to African countries but once coloni-
alism had disrupted Africa’s indigenous move to the future and the Europe-
ans had seen their profits and adopted neocolonial policies, things were no
longer in the hands of Africans themselves to direct their own future with
multinational companies in places as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Of
course, the colonialists left the political institutions they established to oper-
ate when they handed power to the local political elites. The French Foreign
Service engineered political changes in many African countries whose poli-
cies did not favor them economically and politically. The British were not
all that different from the French when it came to maintaining the status
quo in Africa for their benefit. It would take wars between nationalist and
neocolonial groups for Angola and Mozambique to become independent.
Thus, independence alone was not enough to change Africa in its own way
with Western institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund dictating what measures African nations should adopt in their fiscal
policies. The suffering caused by austerity measures especially in the 1980s
has become part of Africa’s historical memory.
As the continent struggled with its realities, there arrived a New World
Order that has since the 1990s turned into globalization – a world of fast
communication networks brought about by new technologies. Africa now
belongs to the interconnected world in which information is fast and no
country is isolated from the rest of the world. Africa currently parades West-
ern lifestyles and products in an unbalanced global world that the West gains
more from than the Africans who are more at the receiving end than the
selling end. The inequalities of history continue up to this day in which the
odds are stacked against Africa economically, politically, and even socio-
culturally. The free flow of information arising from globalization seems to
be to the advantage of those who have the new technologies at the expense
of those who are consumers of Western made technological products. Since
African cultures are weak, unlike many Asian ones such as Chinese, Indian,
and Japanese, Africa seems to be ceding much to the West in cultural and
religious lifestyles than the West is accepting of the African. The question
is: has the West been influenced by Africa as the continent has been influ-
enced by the West? The answer is a resounding “No!”
This project is aimed at looking at African culture and literature and how
they have changed over centuries, decades, and years to what they are today.
“Global Africa” can be said to be the current reality of Africa. This new real-
ity needs to be interrogated especially as it is faring in the area of identity in
its culture and literature. The aim is to align Africa to European influences