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Research - Criticisms  on African Writing

Three (Neo)colonial Male Characters of Ama Ata Aidoo       by Miriam C. Gyimah

IN THE ART OF Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neo-colonialism, Vincent Odamtten argues that Aidoo's works consistently address the issue of neo-colonialism and its impact on the educated Ghanaian elite. Citing critics like Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie who maintains that the African woman writer has a particular commitment to discuss issues of gender, womanhood and a Third World reality, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o who asserts that African writers must write against neo-colonialism, Odamtten stresses that readers and critics of African literature should also invest in reading and writing against neo-colonialism. He says, "[i]f there are writers who are writing against neo-colonialism, there should be reader-critics who complement their work" (6). He warns against reading and writing about African women characters and situations from a narrow feminist perspective. Such criticism which sometimes focuses on the ills of patriarchy through colonial impositions and those effected through "indigenous pre-colonial values and relations" promote a dichotomous analysis of African literature (4). Odamtten, then, argues for a polylectic approach to reading and critiquing these works. He says that in order to read in this manner, one must "begin to develop a polylectic understanding of Africa's economic, political, and cultural actualities" (6).

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Cultural Translation in Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and Osonye Tess Onwueme's The Missing Face   
by KO Secovnie

Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and Osonye Tess Onwueme's The Missing Face demonstrate the process of  finding a cultural identity that does not privilege an originary moment, yet provides space for a negotiated Pan-African  identity for West Africans and African Americans. Both of these plays deal with the issue of constructing a Pan-African identity through connecting African Americans with West Africans and both highlight the simultaneous necessity for and failure of cultural translation to facilitate that connection. In each play, we find a female protagonist returning to Africa only to find that the connection she initially sought was not naturally there just waiting for her. Both women (Eulalie in Dilemma and Ida Bee in Face) find the need for a cultural translation and each looks to her African "been-to" husband/lover to provide it. In each case, the expected translator fails in his duties. It is left, instead, for the West African communities themselves, led by women, to provide a translation of culture to the two African-American women that will allow them to connect with and embrace their African identity while respecting the cultures that they find in Africa (rather than the culture that they project onto Africa). These plays, then, challenge romanticized notions of Pan-African identification through an emphasis on cultural translation and reveal the failure of the male-centered model of  translation that would posit the husband as the sole translator for the wife and the "been-to" man as the sole translator for the community. Instead, a feminist agency is exerted by the West African communities in which these plays are set that undoes 1 the western notion of translation as the domain of the male, and moves it into a female-led, democratic process by which the community as a whole makes decisions about how to translate itself to the diasporic culture, thus asserting a kind of indigenous African agency while privileging the role of the female within this agency. At the same time, it allows for the intervention of  West African communities into shaping their own identities in new ways. This reshaping of identity is shown in The Dilemma of a Ghost, the story of Eulalie, an African-American woman who has married Ato, a Ghanaian man who had been studying in the United States. The couple moves to Ghana, where Eulalie realizes that Africa is not all that she had anticipated in a homeland. Ato's family, especially his mother Esi, seem rooted in their ways and intolerant of what they see as white people's ways adopted by Eulalie and Ato in their new life in Ghana. The central conflict revolves around the family's expectation that Eulalie will become pregnant and Ato's unwillingness to entertain the idea, while he allows his wife to take the brunt of his family's criticism. When, in the end, the family, led by Esi, finds out about Ato's treachery, they take Eulalie in as their own, reprimanding Ato for his failure to uphold his values and to translate those values to Eulalie. This embrace is not automatic, however. Eulalie initially romanticizes the idea of Africa. While still in the U.S. she and Ato have a conversation about moving to Africa where she demonstrates her lack of awareness about her soon-to-be home:

....
Onwueme: The Missing Face
Like Aidoo's work, Osonye Tess Onwueme's The Missing Face very early on alerts the reader to the cultural conflict to come. Based on an earlier play called Legacies, Face introduces readers to Ida Bee and her son Amaechi, who have come to Africa in search of Amaechi's father Momah. Ida Bee wants her son to know his father, who stayed with her while studying in the U.S., and to embrace his African ancestry, and so they wander into the camp led by Odozi, the elder, and his wife Nebe. The first moment of misrecognition between Ida Bee and her son Amaechi and the Idu community comes when Odozi questions the strangers about who they are and where they are from. When Ida Bee is pressed for information about her lineage, she responds:

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Onuora Ossie Enekwe
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“Shades of Utter(ing) Silences” delves on the idea of women's potential to unveil constricting gender and racial laws by uttering silence, or as the title of the essay also suggests, by being enveloped in utter silence. This voicelessness, however, a cloister into the emotional space, is chosen deliberately and therefore distances itself from the mere notion of the Beti proverb of Cameroon: “Women have no mouth”.
The printed dash or the empty page does not necessarily stand for absence and lack, but for gaps and blanks which set great store by what is left untold.
...
Going against Expected Voicing
In The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, (2001)⁴ Kauna is degraded by her husband's frequent infidelity and battering. Her suffering is immense and she has all the reasons in the world to poison her husband, Shange, who one day drops dead in the living room of their house. Rumours spread that she had bewitched or poisoned him an accusation which proves to be untrue as it is later revealed he died of a heart attack. In the turmoil of death's revelation, Kauna goes mad for a couple of hours. She is hysterical and tries to convince everybody that her husband has just come home, did not touch his food, and that there was no evidence of her having bewitched or poisoned him. The news that she had gone mad proved more sensational than the news of her husband's death. It is not Kauna herself who tells her story, but her best friend Ali. On the day of Shange's death, she is described as hysterical, with a dazed look in her eyes, and having the air of the village's mentally disturbed women (PV 11-12). After the first day, as Ali observes, she sleeps intensely, is uninterested in the preparation of the funeral, and does not shed a tear –sadness is totally lacking. Her behaviour is indifferent, partly mocking, partly good-humoured, but it is also considered as estranging, insulting, and outrageous by family and community.
The oshiWambo proverb “a woman is the house,” which stands for the notion that the wife is the closest person to her husband (PV 100), is applied by Shange's relatives to force Kauna to confess where her husband's wealth is safely kept. Kauna refuses to designate someone to give a speech on behalf of the widow on the day of the funeral (PV 137-140). The speech on behalf of the widow is given by a person who is very close to the widow and who will say some favourable words about the deceased. The words, however, have either been told to the speaker or written down by the widow herself and must reflect her personal sentiments. This is the custom and to disregard this tradition is taboo. Kauna disobeys this custom by applying a behaviour pattern which is normally favoured by the patriarchal society – a woman's silence.

Deep Pool of Creativity and Power
The late African-American Audre Lorde once described women's inner silent spaces as “the home of great potential”:

Silence [...] is a site not only of resistance but of transformation, the home from which new dreams and visions are born. [... S]ilences [.. are] deep pools where “each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.” (qtd. in Stone 20)

In Maru (1971), Margaret Cadmore is such a woman. She is an orphan who is categorised by the derogative term Masarwa or Bushman and is treated like an outcast. Her namesake and foster mother Margaret Cadmore brings her up with love and dignity, which does not, however, shield her from society's vicious racial stereotyping. In Botswana, Masarwa people are considered “untouchable[s] to the local people [...]” (Maru 13) and the remote village Dilepe is a stronghold of the most powerful chiefs where Masarwa are held as slaves. As a teacher at Leseding in Dilepe, Margaret passes as Coloured, but she insists on enlightening people about her true identity. She tells everyone that she is a Masarwa and as a consequence faces severe mobbing and hostility. She is threatened with dismissal from school and suffers from loneliness. Her suffering is intensified by her unfulfilled love for Moleka, a Tswana and a son of a tribal chief, and, as Margaret sees it, by the indifference of Maru, the eldest Tswana son of a paramount chief and Moleka's best friend.
Besides school and the hours spent with Maru's sister, Dikeledi, Margaret is surrounded by an inner quietness when she is by herself:


Platform for a New Language
Silence and giving voice in Under the Tongue (1996)⁵ has been mainly considered under the aspect of “the role of language as a medium of healing from trauma” (Samuelson, “Grandmother Says,” 2) or the necessity of breaking silence.⁶ The following section will focus on the role of silence as a necessary platform for finding a new language which, as it is argued, gives silence an enlarged, productive dimension.
In reading Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue one is reminded of what Lisa F. Signori calls, in reference to the French author Marguerite Duras, a livre brûlé. The story of Duras's experimental novel La pluie d'été (1990) presents an image of a livre brûlé which has a burned hole in the middle making the text of the book unreadable. The words are destroyed, similar to Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2000) where the letters of David's story flow out of the computer due to a bullet which has destroyed the monitor. The notion that the present, dominant language can satisfactorily narrate all experience is subverted by these incidents. As suggested by Signori, “meaning must be inferred from the remaining, charred words that surround the hole, and must ultimately be recovered in the blank, in the hole left behind” (121). What serves for Duras is also applicable in a figurative sense for Vera's Under the Tongue: language is pushed “to the limit and delves into the silence at the heart of language, into the hole, the vide out of which a new beginning is possible” (Signori 121).

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Poetics of Diaspora: “La ca't,” Surrealism, and Métissage in Bessora's 53 cm   by JT Westmoreland

A NEW poetic and literary trend among Francophone African diasporic authors, specifically those writing from Paris, is the use of surrealist techniques in a “postcolonial” context. This practice dates back to Negritude's affiliations with such European surrealist writers as André Breton. Whereas traditionally in African diasporic context, Surrealism has been used to articulate a sense of solidarity or belonging (as in the formation of the Negritude and Black Power movements), Bessora employs surrealist imagery in the immigrant context to articulate a sense of unbelonging or anxiety-filled, hybrid state of the female immigrant in Paris.
In her semi-autobiographical novel 53cm, the Swiss-Gabonese writer, Bessora, satirizes the exaggerated significance of the various “cartes” that will permit her protagonist, Zara, to become part of the French Nation through the acquisition of citizenship. In ironic tones, she fetishizes these seemingly unattainable objects, thus underscoring the absurdity of the immigrant situation as created by the French government.
The contradictions inherent in the immigrant position are clearly manifest in the continual adherence to a false hope: becoming a French citizen despite the impossibility of attaining the requisite “cartes.” By fetishizing the cartes, Bessora inflates their importance to the point at which they become absurd. In the case of Zara, it is not necessarily the carte itself that is ridiculous but the legal processes and rigorous physical rituals one must undergo in order to obtain the desired status of citizen.
In this quest, Zara is forced to negotiate not only complex bureaucratic obstacles, but also physical ones as she forms her body into the “condition” required by the nation. As Zara explains it, acceptance into the French nation is highly conditional, based on the correct “condition” of not only the body but of one's identity itself. Therefore, to become “French” not only the normalization of the body is required, but the normalization of one's identity as well. In this case, the hybrid or impure identity of the immigrant (the ultimate sign of alterity) must be transformed in order to gain access to the nation. According to Zara, the two cartes one must obtain in order to acquire the carte d'identité (the signifier of French citizenship) are the carte de séjour (resident visa) and the carte de gym (gym membership):
...
Dominant systems are more likely to absorb and make like themselves numerically or culturally “weaker” elements. But even the “inferior” or subaltern elements contribute to the evolution and transformation of the hegemonic system by producing resistances and counter discourses. (9)

Zara resists absorption into the dominant culture by emphasizing and maintaining her hybrid position (and thus her alterity) throughout the novel. Her surrealist counter discourse proposed in 53cm serves to expand the reader's understanding of the immigrant position regarding French citizenship. Different from Bessora’s use of surrealist modes in “The Milka Cow,” 53 cm does engage with overtly political themes. Bessora is not alone in her practice of using Surrealism to elucidate certain socio-political paradoxes. Since the Césaires and the Tropiques journal,2 Surrealism has been used to subvert dominant paradigms in the postcolonial francophone setting.

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IN THE BLACK Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy argues that, from the late eighteenth century to the present, the cultures of Blacks in the West have been hybrid and antithetical to “ethnic absolutism” (4-5). According to Gilroy, the modern history of the Black Atlantic is a discontinuous trajectory in which countries, borders, languages, and political ideologies are crossed in order to oppose “narrow nationalism” (12). Gilroy's term “Black Atlantic” describes the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” of modern Black cultures that oppose the nationalist focus “common to English and African American versions of cultural studies” (4). Gilroy defines “modernity” as the period from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries when the ideas of “nationality, ethnicity, authenticity, and cultural integrity” that sustain contemporary cultural studies in the West were first developed (2). Gilroy writes:

The conspicuous power of these modern subjectivities and the movements they articulated has been left behind. Their power has, if anything, grown, and their ubiquity as a means to make political sense of the world is currently paralleled by the languages of class and socialism by which they once appeared to have been surpassed. My concern here is less with explaining their longevity and enduring appeal than with exploring some of the special political problems that arise from the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture and the affinities and affiliations which link the Blacks of the West to one of their adoptive, parental cultures: the intellectual heritage of the West. (2)

There are problematic aspects of Gilroy's concept of Black modernity. The first element is Gilroy's representation of the essentialising or romanticising of Black culture as being antithetical to modernity.

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Traditional literature in Africa (orature) serves as an instrument for examination of individual experience in relation to the normative order of society. It was used, and is still being used in several parts of rural Africa to chart social progress or to comment on how society adheres to or deviates from general community aesthetic. Seen in this light, traditional literature as a creation of the imagination ultimately derives its material from the realities of society. As mirror of the society it enables the community to teach, entertain, and explore the ambiguities of human existence. The substance of human experience out of which orature is created is that which has made sufficient impact in the community to excite the imagination of the people to literary creativity. One of these experiences is civic responsibility and leadership training which is sadly lost in modernised or postcolonial environment.
Quite often in traditional literature characters are classified in three categories –heroes, antiheroes and villains. Effective leadership is usually entrusted in the hands of a heroic character. The hero is one who finds personal satisfaction in the service of his community or one who has offered invaluable services to the community. Of course, there may be monarchies and dynasties with their autocrats, dictators and despots. But the leader, where there was one, was somebody who must submerge his private interests in the pursuit of national ideals which were also in harmony with universal morality. The point we intend to make is that the ideals of good leadership are fundamental to the concerns of African oratory. African folk tales reveal three broad attitudes of communal attitudes towards leadership and social change as reflected in the three tales we have selected for study below.

Tale no. 1 Tortoise the wise
In Tale Number One1 from the North West Province, tortoise rogue and wheeler-dealer wisely accepts the authority of the lion. One day, lion, goat and tortoise go on a hunting expedition at the end of which they kill a deer. The meat is brought to the home of the lion for sharing. Lion calls on the goat to share the meat. Goat, on its part, decides to share the meat into three equal parts. Lion is angry that goat has treated him as an ordinary citizen rather than a king and therefore strikes goat with such force that he dies. Lion then turns to tortoise and asks him to proceed with the sharing of the meat. Tortoise divides the meat into two parts-one very large and the other very small. He gives the large part to the lion and keeps the small one for himself. Lion is happy with the “wisdom” of tortoise and asks him where he learnt how to share meat so well. Tortoise points at the dead goat and replies, “by looking at my dead companion”.
...
Modern Oratorical Teaching Strategies: The Dark Child and Children of Koloko
Salient methods of African education through orature are evident in Laye Camara's The Dark Child and Chin Ce's Children of Koloko. For instance both novels employ oratorical devices which include songs, legends, proverbs (or the dereliction of them) and folktales for their traditional, as against modern western, teaching strategies.
Harold Courlander notes quite rightly in A Treasury of African Folklore that the traditional African story teller employs myths, traditions, legends, proverbs and wise sayings to “(en)capsulate… the learnings of centuries about the human character and about the intricate balance between people and the world around them (1).

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Beginning with An African Eclipse (2000) Chin Ce’s oeuvres foreshadow a general communal retardation most poignant in the Koloko and Gamji fictions. Seen together as one movement, Chin Ce’s writings trace a movement in the major characters from one of social preoccupation to that of psychological transition in awareness and growth. 'A Farewell' (AE) highlights this movement in a prefatory manner. The three ways: left, right and middle signify three choices involving two extremes and a middle course, an important element in Chin Ce's oeuvres. Before the choice is made, we must face ourselves, our fears, and actions represented in 'only our own graffiti.' The choice of a middle alternative is imperative from the flagellation of the other extremities but it is a lonely route that marks a separation from friends, old values, and life ways. In Children of Koloko, Yoyo represents this third factor and his separation from his two friends, Dickie and Buff, finally marks his attainment of growth as we shall see later. With the choice enacted in full awareness of the sense of alienation engendered, progress is sure even if the social outcome of this progress in political and social discourse may be uncertain. 'May 29 1999', a historical poem on the inauguration of Nigeria's last democracy confronts us with the grotesque physical paunch and slovenliness of Nigeria's new civilian leadership which combine with poetic epithets to forecast political disaster. 'The curse of the triangle' is another slavery which the new government portends for the generality of the Nigerian people. Ce's cynicism has been justified in the society-evident lack of direction that rated that country one of the most corrupt nations on earth under the government of Olusegun Obasanjo. It is the fraud of nation building which Africa’s postcolonial founding fathers had mistaken for patriotism. Its impact on the younger generations to come is being witnessed in contemporary politics of attrition and dislocation of previously honoured traditional values, a situation that Chin Ce forewarns in his second fiction Gamji College.

AN African Eclipse projects Ce's striking portrayal of military (and civilian) dictatorships in Africa. In these poems are Ce's contribution to the African political discourse often concerned with the failures of those who acquire leadership positions, either by force or elections, to perform their duties thus reducing the land to the collapse of conscience, morals and ethics. Chin Ce cries for the land, confronts and curses the dictator in a combatant, almost revolutionary stance, and offers a hope for the masses of his land with whom he identifies. He is among Nigerian contemporary poets who are burdened with the years of plunder and dispossession under civilian and military despots and thus find political poetry an outlet of emotions. One recalls Louis James’s words (in Obafemi 36) that "[in] a situation as explosive as that of Africa today, there can be no creative literature that is not in some way political, in some way protest." The poet understands and pursues a duty, which is the entrenchment of social awareness among his people usually the downtrodden and those silenced through systematic oppression. In his versification, he calls the attention of his kin to the "characteristic evils [of politics] and the consequences of its defects" (Egudu 84).

A remarkable strength seen in Ce's political poems is that they contain sharp and apt images of the oppression of the masses encapsulated in a tone that is at once combatant and direful. In her Comparative Studies in African Dirge Poetry, GMT Emezue sees the craft of some modern poets as their means for mourning the irretrievable economic and political reversals in their land. She opines that "…the overall threnody of the African eclipse qualifies as a modern African dirge poetry in all its aesthetics" . According to her, the poets of Nigeria, over the years, have come to evolve a poetics of lamentation, an elegy for a land rich in both human and natural resources but condemned by destructive leadership inadequacies (132).

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LIKE the works of many other politically-conscious Nigerian poets –such as Ada Ugah, Odia Ofeimun, and Niyi Osundare – Chin Ce's collection of poetry, An African Eclipse, is clearly concerned with the ethical and moral transgressions of Nigeria's political leaders in its post-independence years. Yet, one would like to demonstrate here how Ce's poetry offers something more profound than a simple sketch of the various past injustices inflicted on a largely poor Nigerian population by both civilian and military leaders following the official end of British colonial governance. Indeed, this paper argues that Ce's An African Eclipse conceptualises a non-personal force of Life that not only conditions a revolutionary way of being for its readers but also functions as an ethical principle that has the potential to become the antidote to the diseased morality of Nigeria's political leaders. In a little-known article on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze laments 'the sadness of generations without teachers' (77). It is a sentiment that finds its conceptual correlate in the frustration that characterises Chinua Achebe's criticism of post-independence Nigerian leadership. 'The Nigerian problem', Achebe writes, 'is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership' (1). Given the context of a succession of corrupt civilian and military administrations, Achebe's frustration with the inability of Nigeria's leading political figures to assume the role of teacher to the nation seems entirely merited. But the concept of a teacher to the nation goes further than simply setting a good example for others to follow. 'Our teachers', Deleuze continues, are those who find 'ways of thinking that correspond to our modernity'. That is to say, our teachers are those people who can find ways of thinking that are not antiquated or antithetical to our present situation – those that are mindful of our 'difficulties as well as our vague enthusiasms' that we experience in life (77).

For Ce, this simply cannot be said of the post-independence Nigerian political leaderships. Indeed, the political emphasis of Ce's An African Eclipse ensures that the collection is not without (many) examples of the impoverished condition of what one might call 'State thinking'. So, Ce writes of the profligacy of political administrations and the manner in which such recklessness and wastefulness is learned and repeated by the Nigerian everyman in the damning social commentary of 'Prodigal Drums'; he writes of the rampant egoism of Nigeria's political leaders in 'African Eclipse', which results in the social blight of self-interest and self-importance and claims of billions of dollars in oil revenues siphoned from the Nigerian economy by some Nigerian leaders and their families; and he writes of the willingness of the politicians to hide rather than disclose and resolve social problems and injustices, in the poems of 'The Second Reptile' and 'The Champ'. Taken in concert, Ce's cutting overview of State thinking presents a scathing indictment of a leadership that demonstrates a complete inability to empathise with, and react to, the experience of being a modern Nigerian. However, in Ce's essay 'Bards and Tyrants' one can trace the inability of the political leadership to form an appreciation of other Nigerians to a failure of thinking itself. Linked to his discussion of the degeneration of the integrity of the Nigerian university system, Ce reasons that the inadequacy of State thinking is due to the failure of Nigeria's political class to engage in deep personal thought at the hands of a 'liberating' literature:

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THIS DISCOURSE is centred against the background of public attitudes and orientation towards military or democratic  governance in Africa. It evinces the relationship between political and legal sovereignty in Chin Ce's Children of Koloko,  a book that artistically anatomizes the Nigerian society in its grossest sense in order to give the reader a proper understanding  of that society.  African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history from where it derives its pre-occupation. From the late  1970s till date, African literature continues to be inward  looking, x-raying the entire continent with the people trapped in serious socio-economic crisis. According to Chidi Amuta:

Rhetoric and Narrative in Children of Koloko
Chin Ce's biggest asset in Children of Koloko is his ability to describe characters and scenes so vividly, and, by these descriptions, appeal greatly to readers' senses thereby creating a sense of presence and immediacy in the story. This outstanding element of style comes across in the lucid flow of language and the linearity of his plot narrative. Though the stories are told from the first person narrative perspective, Ce is able to enter imaginatively into the emotional streams of other characters and, by the use of simple evocative words, record his observations with poetic lyricism and dramatic immediacy. The narrative of Children of Koloko covers almost every aspect of life and governance, but the leadership factor underlies the literary substance of the novel. The problem of leadership hovers over everything in the narrative and hence becomes the source of societal tragedy. Among the people of Koloko we encounter an experience: an experience of a living world that is slowly dying. Ce lucidly cartographs the familiar anguish that surrounds the exclusion of African masses from the common wealth –the prodigal desire of their daily lives. The book becomes a parable on the Nigerian situation where power is consolidated in a few hands and they run away with politics which is achieved by demagoguery and deceit. Said Khamis sees this as "characteristic of the third world but not completely absent in the developed world" (57).

Children of Koloko begins with what an ideal society should look like. This is amply demonstrated in Yoyo's observation of how the ant community organize themselves. Yoyo imagines a system that is inclusive, no high ups and no low downs, they are all involved in the business of building the community from where they all eat:

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Vassanji: The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
The departure of the colonizing power forced the postcolonial world out of balance placing the formerly colonized nations into a new and continued version of dependence upon the West. M.G. Vassanji's novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, covering fifty years of Kenyan history, focuses on neocolonial imbalance and the elaborate postcolonial reappraisal of cultures. In the beginning of the text, the Kenyan people are on the lowest rung of the social ladder with whites and Indians in power. In 1965 after Kenya assumed political independence and Jomo Kenyatta became president of the new nation, an elaborate repositioning of the classes occurred. This tumultuous period contributed to a chaos that fed lawless activities, realigning individuals in Western nations with Kenyan politicians and private citizens in the extortion that harmed the Kenyan people yet again. Vassanji's elaborate novel depicts an international racketeering allowing some individuals like the protagonist, Vik, to get very  rich. The novel begins with a confession:

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Achebe: Things Fall Apart
The colonising agents of education, religion, and language erase individuality and contribute to instability in the world in each of the following texts. Each text depicts a different stage of colonial power: the imposition of rule, the initial occurrences of strikes against colonial authority, and the effects of colonization. In the first text, several things fall apart with the imposition of colonial rule: a man's life; his tribe; and Nigeria, his country. Achebe begins Things Fall Apart by quoting the first four lines of The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

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THE POPULARITY of Antigone within Western literature, art and thought has been discussed at length, most famously by George Steiner who classifies it as "one of the most enduring and canonic acts in the history of our philosophic, literary, political consciousness" (1984 preface). At the heart  of the tragedy is the conflict between Antigone, who sets out to bury her brother, and her uncle King Creon, who has issued a decree forbidding this burial. Antigone's appeal largely derives from this central conflict, a conflict that appears straightforward, but on closer inspection reveals the intricate  nature of the various oppositions it explores, such as that between woman and man, individual and state, private and public and the gods and mankind. Not only does this complexity make the conflict between both protagonists tragic to begin with, but it also ensures Antigone's continuing attraction as a source for philosophical and artistic inspiration.

A great number of playwrights have revisited Sophocles' original, but its contemporary popularity is particularly striking on the African stage, where Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Athol Fugard, Fémi Òsófisan and Sylvain Bemba have given Antigone post-colonial relevance in a variety of 2 settings. It may seem strange that African playwrights would turn to texts that represent the classical Western canon. After all, Greek tragedy originally came to colonial areas through imported, and forcefully imposed, Western educational systems, and in that sense could be seen to epitomise imperial Europe. In their seminal study on post-colonial drama, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarify that it is precisely this enduring legacy of colonialist education that explains the "prominent endeavour among colonised writers/artists" to "rework the European ‘classics’ in order to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity" (16). Still, whether or not African reworkings of Antigone should be considered counter-narratives to the Western canon is a question in need of closer investigation, and one that will be discussed later. This paper will focus on Fémi Òsófisan's reworking of Antigone, entitled Tègònni: an African Antigone (1994). It will first examine Òsófisan's decision to draw on Antigone within the context of Nigeria. Then, it will discuss Antigone's representative value within her "new" surroundings, the (meta)theatrical aesthetics that characterise her cultural translocation and, finally, the political implications of this translocation for Antigone's status as a Western canonical figure.

The Choice of Antigone
As Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explains in his study on African adpatations of Greek tragedy, Sophocles' Antigone is a play  that "can be adapted into any situation in which a group is oppressed, or in which, in the aftermath of struggle, the forces of community and social order come into conflict with the  forces of personal liberty" (170-171). Òsófisan's Tègònni: an African Antigone well fits this description. It is set in Nigeria under British colonial rule, while also referring to the military dictatorships that have held Nigeria in its grip almost incessantly ever since its independence from Britain in 1960. Tègònni was first produced in 1994 at Emory University in Atlanta (Georgia, USA), which Òsófisan was visiting during one of the most chaotic periods in Nigerian history, following the military junta's violent intervention and annulment of the presidential elections of 1993. In the production notes Òsófisan explains that Tègònni is intended to "look at the problem of political freedom against the background of the present turmoil in Nigeria –my country– where various military governments have continued for decades now to thwart the people's desire for democracy, happiness, and good government" (11).

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IN HIS WORK on Chinua Achebe's novels, entitled ‘Chinua Achebe and the Tragedy of History ,' Thomas Melone says that the content of literature ought to be judged as "a portion of his destiny" (T. Melone, 1973, 12). Explaining his reasons, the Cameroonian critic says that every authentic literature should be a "carrier of humanity" ("porteuse d'humanite"), since it should, whether it be African or European, "witness for man and his destiny"; because, continues the critic, "men are first of all men ..., their identity is fundamental, and their destiny human" (T. Melone, 1973.12). More than any other form of literary criticism or appreciation, comparative literature highlights this universality of even' creative literary art. Universality, however, does not mean that one must necessarily compare authors from different countries or different cultural backgrounds. It is possible to compare and contrast two or more writers from the same country, from the same village, even from the same family, and finally, an author can be compared to himself. One comes up with interesting findings, in comparing, for example, the Chinua Achebe of No Longer at Ease with the Achebe of Arrow of God. The young graduate returning from England, unable to find his feet in his former home, and the village of Umuaro no longer thesame under sweeping religious attacks on the gods that had hitherto guaranteed its security and unity, both are witnesses each in its own way to the same cracking society under the invasion of foreign culture. Does it mean that the celebrated Nigerian novelist has said everything when he published his famous Things Fall Apart, and that thereafter is he only repeating himself Far from it? The novelist is comparable to a surveyor, whose field is the human society; in each novel he observes society from a particular point of view. The product of his artistic (here literary) creation is a "portion" of man's struggle with life, i.e., with his destiny, and this "odyssey" reproduces, mutatis mutandis, similar characteristics, whether it talks of Achilles, of Antigone, of Hamlet, of Obi Okonkwo or Ezeulu.

Why the Child as hero?
Poetry is best appreciated, not by reasoning, but by feeling, i.e. by entering into the ecstatic sentiments of the poet at his moment of writing. The poetic verse aims, therefore, at arousing these sentiments in the reader, and not at a logical understanding of the passage. Whereas prose may receive one clear interpretation or explanation, no one interpretation can ever exhaust the wealth of meaning couched in a few poetic verses. If it is true that a piece of literary work escapes its author once it is set down on paper, it is even truer of poetry than of any other form of creative writing. There are certain experiences in life which, in order to retain one's mental health, were better felt than reasoned about. By his age, nature, and psychological make up, the child feels things and does not reason about them, at least in the cut and dry syllogism of the adult. The child's innocence, his openness to every instinct and desire his connivance with nature, his instinctive intransigence for purity and truth... are among the qualities that make Melone believes that the only poetic state is childhood; in the sense where the poetic state or condition may be interpreted to mean the ideal state of paradise lost. The first aim, therefore, of a novelist whose hero is a child could be the desire, conscious or not, to travel back along the slippery steps to his lost Garden of Eden.

Comparative Study of the Experiences of' Toundi, and Njoroge
Some of the points raised here above, about the artistic benefits of the child-hero, do not apply to the two novels under consideration. While one could describe Camara Laye's African Child as an unbroken chaplet of one nostalgic childhood memory after another, it would be almost impossible to imagine any atom of nostalgia in Oyono's mind, or Ngugi's either, when they bend over the creation of their Toundi and Njoroge respectively. For while The African Child affords the Guinean undergraduate in Paris a salutary fight into fancy from the cold, indifferent, lonely and capitalist atmosphere of the French capital - exactly as Louis Guilloux's 'Pain des Reves' does for the novelist from Brittany in Nazi-occupied France of 1942- the two novels being studied evoke rather the same bitter taste in the reader's mouth as Mongo Beti's Remember Ruben. If nostalgia there was, it is rather for a childhood that never existed, or rather that is not allowed to exist as it should. Toundi and Njoroge belong to the generation of African children who never had any childhood - a model of which one reads in the Edenic memories recounted by the hero of The African Child; they rather resemble the generation of those European children born in the late thirties, and whose childhood was spent in concentration camps or in cities terrorised consistently by Nazi brutality. A Sigmund Freud would have summed up all I have said here above in one short phrase: that sort of childhood is just a "reve manque"- a lost dream - if not a nightmare, like that of Morzamba in Remember Ruben. And who likes to recall a nightmare? Except, of course, for some very serious reasons best known to the author. These reasons already form the subject-mater of several commentaries on Oyono and Ngugi, and will only be very briefly dealt with here. We shall now examine and compare the nightmarish experiences of the two child heroes.

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Violence and Oral Metaphors in Chin Ce's Gamji College  by Devapriya Sanyal

This reading will demonstrate in Ce's second published prose fiction true images of this postcolonial violence that has modern African states such as Nigeria in a vice grip – a post-war violence, as brutal to the psyche of individuals as it is to the state, perennially threatening to consume the national cultural and political ethos of the entire African region. Thus while Gamji College in a larger artistic perspective may deal with the character of the nation states of Africa under the various civilian and military regimes that govern them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Brown par 1), its oral metaphors of violence are rendered in a manner that few recent fiction narratives in the African region have attempted. The objective of this study is to look at the story-teller's conceptualisation of violence, and how it envelopes his narrative, characterization and language in a way that brings out the message in its glaring entirety.

Chin Ce's story of a metaphorical African-Nigerian nation (Gamji College) is divided into three sections entitled the "The Cross", "The Bottle" and “The Gun". Each of these sections is as separate from the other as the characters in the stories are different. The only link is that all the action happens in the college although at different times. With this arrangement, quite similar to the author’s first published work, Children of Koloko, this collection of stories, told through the viewpoint of three major characters, gives us added insight to the author's vision regarding the youths (college students) of his country represented by Gamji in the three stories.

Fanaticism as Violence
The metaphor of religious fanaticism is clearly noticeable from the first section entitled "The Cross”. Here the author seems to suggest that the nation’s Ivory tower is, in a Nigerian parlance, “the cross” that it has to bear in a modern transitional society. While the second story “The Bottle" focuses on the lack of direction among the youths as seen in their drinking (inebriation) and wildness of manners, the last section "The Gun" is a metaphor of violence and realpolitik as practised by Africa’s modern political dictators and their teeming supporters. All are probable and real life portraiture of contemporary Nigerian society.
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ALTHOUGH J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace has garnered a great deal of critical attention in the six years since its publication, most  critical literature written about Coetzee's novel attempts to identify and delineate a process by which the protagonist David Lurie lifts himself out of a state of disgrace, often claiming that a condition of grace is the former professor's ultimate destination. Yet, as Ron Charles observes, the moment one begins to consider the nature of Lurie's (dis)grace, "the novel's title begins to refract meaning in a dozen directions" (20). Furthermore, commentators continue to struggle with what Gareth Cornwell calls "the fertile indirections of its narrative style" ("Disgraceland" 43.) Indeed, combined with Coetzee's deceptively simple prose, Disgrace has encouraged a range of equally convincing, yet widely divergent, interpretations.

In their discussions of (dis)grace, critics have viewed Lurie as a burgeoning Stoic, a man threatened by emasculation, and an individual suffering from a lack or intimacy while positing that the novel depicts the attainment of grace through "secular humility" (Kissack and Titlestad 135) and the struggle to remain human in an inhumane world. However, despite the novel's concern with states of (dis)grace, the trajectory David Lurie's life takes during the course of the novel might be better understood as a process of existential maturation. Rather than chart the fall and subsequent redemption of a "mighty" academic, as Melanie Isaacs's father sardonically remarks, Disgrace documents the end of David Lurie's reluctant acceptance of aging and mortality (Coetzee 167). In fact, Lurie's strikingly powerful fixation on mortality not only girds the aforementioned readings, but may also explain the "odd kink in [the novel's] narrative structure," namely what "the first quarter of the story [has] to do with what follows" (Hynes 1). It is only after David Lurie acknowledges and internalises his own eventual mortality that he discovers anything akin to grace. Indeed, Lurie's period of existential maturation, his gradual acceptance of life's eventualities, also marks a period of creative self-discovery during which Lurie finds his voice as he composes a comic opera "that will never be performed" (215). Disgrace, then, may be read as David Lurie's journey from estrangement to sexual, creative and existential self-actualization.

The first quarter of the novel, rather than depict Lurie's tumble into disgrace as many commentators have suggested, presents us with a man who has been isolated from, and disengaged with, the world for some time already. Tellingly, Disgrace opens with Lurie thinking that "[f]or a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well" (1). Since Lurie  regards physical intimacy as a problem which must be solved as one would fill in a crossword puzzle or balance a budget, we may infer that, for him, sex is little more than a chore he must perform periodically. In other words, Lurie's sex life lacks the sort of emotional intimacy one would assume he enjoyed as a married man. Furthermore, the line reveals Lurie's acute awareness that ageing will only make solving the problem increasingly difficult. Thus, as Michael Gorra observes, Coetzee's opening line only "tells us that David Lurie hasn't solved the problem at all" (7).  Thus, Lurie's relationship with a prostitute named Soraya only reveals the inadequacy of physical intimacy to satiate his hunger for emotional intimacy. Although Lurie claims "that ninety minutes a week of a woman's  company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage" and that "[h]is needs turn out to be quite light after all, light and fleeting," he nevertheless longs for a different arrangement with Soraya (5). Indeed, Lurie admits to having developed "an affection" for Soraya that "[t]o some degree, he believes…is reciprocated" (2). Yet, despite his apparent rejection of emotional attachment, Lurie indulges his need to share his life with Soraya:

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Africa in Western Canons
A century of European (British and French mainly, but also Portuguese, German, Italian and Spanish) colonization left behind an African continent dazed, bewildered and confused. This is why modern African writers see the need for and admit a commitment to the restoration of African values. In fact, the Western world equates knowledge, modernity, modernization, civilization, progress and development to itself, while it views the Third-World from the perspective of the antithesis of the positive qualities ascribed to itself. Such negative stereotypes are perpetrated by a system of education,  which encourages all the errors and falsehoods about Africa/Africans. Writing on the jaundiced portrayal of Africa/Africans in Western canonical works, Edward Wilmot Blyden asserted over a hundred years ago that:

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THE STUDY focuses on the relationship between literature and memory and thus, addresses a theme that over the last two decades has become one of the central issues in literary and cultural studies. Memory and literature intersect in many different ways. Literature is one of the media that plays a crucial role in the process of representing and constructing both individual and collective memories. Throughout literary history, literary texts have engaged in a discussion of the implications, the problems, and the purposes of remembering (www.uni-giessen.de). Literature, moreover, participates in the processes of shaping collective memories and of subversively undermining culturally dominant memories by establishing counter-memories, which seek to consider, for example, gender-conscious or ethnic perspectives on past events. One of the recurring themes as far as literary representations of  memories are concerned is the complex interaction between memories and identities. The intimate relationship between literature and memory is particularly obvious in genres such as autobiography, biography, or fictional biography.

The Anglophone problem is a historical reality in Cameroon and has had a profound influence on the literary imagination of many Anglophone writers from Bole Butake to Epie Ngome to Bate Besong, to Charles Alobwed'Epie and John Nkemngong Nkengasong amongst others. Modern Cameroon is made up of Anglophones and Francophones because the nation was colonized by the British and French. The Anglophones in Cameroon are a minority, constituting about one-fifth of the population and occupying less than one-tenth of the national territory. Alobwed'Epie states that "in Cameroon usage, the term is used to designate the opposite of Francophone on the one hand and, on the other, to designate people native to the S.W (Southwest) and N.W (Northwest) provinces" (49). Although fact is mixed with fiction, Nkengasong's text educates and allows the reader to participate in the (re)creation and (re)interpretation of events and processes that form identity crisis and alienation in a nation. Moreover, the manner in which Nkengasong manipulates characterization, storytelling, and imagination to enact memory is enriching. Across the Mongolo is relevant in the information it coveys and functions as historical data and as an avenue through which nationhood and bilingualism in Cameroon are conceived. This study aims to explore various facets of the intimate and complex relationship between literature and memory from different vantage points in Nkengasong's Across the Mongolo.

This essay hopes to show that the subject of the Anglophone problem has indeed inspired a range of reflections on the notion of memory, trauma, and history. It intersects with Nkengasong's creative springboard. His creative imagination is influenced by a multiplicity of social, cultural, political, and economic trends of the Cameroon nation. The argument here begins with this recognition. Alienation, we contend, is as central to Across the  Mongolo as neocolonization. Secondly, through his creative imagination Nkengasong reveals the tension and predicament of a minority in the nation. It is in this wise that we refer to the Anglop