Literatures in African languages

For decades, African literary studies have been grounded in an epistemological distinction between Europhone literatures and Afrophone literatures. Each of these two poles was associated with a specific set of attributes, and the binary opposition that resulted saw European-language traditions linked to the global, the written, and the modern, while African-language traditions were often qualified in relation to the local, the oral, and the past (or tradition). In between the two poles of the global and the local, the national and the continental were thought to be better expressed through European languages, as African languages were seen as too ethnicity-bound and culture-specific. A huge theoretical effort, both by European and by African scholars, has been put into denouncing and dismantling these putative dichotomies, highlighting how this binary interpretative system is theoretically flawed, ideologically Eurocentric, and heuristically misleading. Oral literature experts, for example, have been vocal in criticizing the perception that only written Europhone literature, in its ‘modernity’, falls within the realm of aesthetics, while oral traditions, not quite ‘literature’, pertain to the domain of anthropology.

Despite the numerous theoretical objections, in the last decades successive disciplines have perpetuated the binary paradigm. In the 1990s, for example, postcolonial theory has been specifically accused of privileging Europhone literatures, identified by postcolonial critics as those able to ‘write back’ to the former colonizers, and of neglecting Afrophone literatures, alternatively thought to have been silenced and muzzled by colonial oppression, or conceived as an inert pool of ‘traditional’ genres, myths, and legend the Europhone writer could draw upon to ‘indigenize’ his/her text and ‘subvert’ the colonizer's language (Barber 1995).

In the 2000s, the binary paradigm was resurrected on two new fronts. The first of these is the burgeoning discipline of world literature, which originated outside of African studies, but which, in its ambition to find ‘universal’ or ‘global’ patterns of literary development and circulation, inevitably makes claims for African literature as well. World literature has been defined by its proponents in a way that reconfirms, if not even strengthens, the binary paradigm. First, oral literature has been outright eliminated from the definition of world literature (for example by Christopher Prendergast, 2004, 21), on the implicit assumption, it seems, that it is not ‘worldly’ or ‘global’ enough, or perhaps not ‘literary’ enough. Second, world literature, defined as comprising all those texts that circulate beyond their culture of origin, is styled as ‘the quintessential literature of modern times’ (Damrosch 2003, 4). The implication here is that all those works which do not circulate beyond their culture of origin – and Afrophone literatures, mostly due to lack of institutional support, rarely make it onto the global stage – are somewhat pre-modern, left behind. The old critical dichotomies are reinstated exactly as they were, with positive connotations attached to the first concepts (Europhone, global, modern, written), and negative connotations attached to the second ones (Afrophone, local, pre-modern, oral).

Sharing with world literature the enthusiasm for the transnational, Afropolitanism has also partly replicated the binary paradigm, with the major difference that Afropolitanism, contrary to world literature, is a notion proposed by African intellectuals and rooted in African philosophical debates. Afropolitanism was conceived by one of its major proponents, Achille Mbembe, as a view able to transcend the nativism and nationalism typical of much post-independence African intellectual history. In the 1960s and 1970s, African aesthetic and political thought, in its nativist and nationalist premises, upheld and rigidified the aforementioned binary paradigm. In those years, African intellectuals saw the first pole of concepts as negative, and the second as positive: many urged to embrace African languages as the emblem of a lost indigenous traditionality, to be opposed to the global and modern forces of colonialism and neocolonialism. The dichotomy remained intact – what changed were the inverted values attached to each pole. Afropolitanism is conceived by Mbembe as a critique to the essentialism underpinning this nativist vision of identity. Critics of Mbembe, though, argued that Afropolitanism, in its celebration of the transnational, mobility, interconnectedness, and cosmopolitanism, simply shifted back to the first pole as the positive, preferred one, without significantly unsettling the paradigm per se. Some critics further objected that nativism and nationalism have not exhausted their historical role, particularly from the point of view of stimulating and structuring political activism.

Afrophone literatures have seldom been included in these critical debates, and remain a neglected component not only of comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and world literature, but also of African literary studies at large. Often spoken for instead of speaking, Afrophone literatures have been alternatively idealized, ignored, or misinterpreted – the binary paradigm being perhaps the most enduring of these misleading heuristic patterns. And yet, like the articles in this volume demonstrate, Afrophone authors and works offer important, and often innovative, contributions to literary theory. Critical positions, of course, vary. Some contributors to this volume, for example, endorse the liberating possibilities of the transnational turn, while some are more sceptical of its ability to overcome the Eurocentrism of previous critical paradigms; some of the Afrophone writers analysed in the articles refer back to tradition as an authenticating principle of nationalism, while some deconstruct tradition in a postmodern, or futurist way. Despite these healthy theoretical differences, all articles share a profound critique of the binary paradigm and work towards overcoming it. Some of the claims made in the articles are that Afrophone literatures are global; that they are not pre-modern but rather postmodern; that tradition is not a synonym for the past, but that it can be futurist; that the oral is also modern; that the local is as complex, as stratified, and as mobile as the global; that African languages and African pidgins are perfectly suited to representing nationhood.

The first alleged dichotomy that the contributors unsettle, whether explicitly or implicitly, is the Europhone/Afrophone one. Flavia Aiello Traore calls for ‘possible bridging perspectives across African literatures in European and indigenous languages’, arguing that the two are not ‘isolated monads’, and Sara Marzagora similarly calls for ‘an epistemological integration between Afrophone and Europhone criticism’. Rebecca Jones describes how early twentieth-century Yoruba print and literary culture was in constant ‘interaction with locally and internationally-published Anglophone texts’; English- and Yoruba-language traditions often ‘grew up dialogically alongside each other’ and were ‘engaged in debate across the language divide’ creating a veritably ‘bilingual print culture’. Jonathon Repinecz and Rotimi Fasan analyse the work of artists that use both European and indigenous languages. The multilingualism of Boubacar Boris Diop and Fela Kuti retains a sense of power relations, and the connection between European languages and colonial domination remains alive and well. Diop, for example, is harshly critical of some of his characters' ‘europhilic self-colonization’ and apery of France. Nevertheless, linguistic practices appear much more fluid and flexible than some critics have tended to assume, and while for these writers language remains an ideologically charged terrain, there is also a great deal of pragmatism underpinning their linguistic choices. Diop considers the literary use of French as a temporary and transitional stage while a Wolof-reading public is being formed, and his linguistic choice, as summarized by Repinecz, is ‘Wolof first, but still bilingual’.

Drawing from Karin Barber's notion of the ‘popular’, Rotimi Fasan analyses Nigeria's new ‘verbal entrepreneurs’, particularly contemporary hip hop musicians, whose art heavily draws from indigenous oral genres (such as Yoruba praise poetry, oriki) as much as from American models. The redefinition of the social role of oral literature is a Pan-African phenomenon, and in South Africa just like in Ethiopia, figures of oral poets have reinvented their profession by joining the music industry and becoming commercial musicians. The notion of the ‘popular’ is particularly relevant in the Nigerian case, Fasan argues, as it destabilizes long-standing hierarchies of prestige between high and low culture. The new Nigerian verbal entrepreneurs subvert the linguistic hegemony of English, the language associated with high culture since colonial times, by choosing to perform in pidgin, seen as the indigenous language that better responds to the ‘need for social identification, informal bonding and solidarity’ across the nation. In its potential to become a lingua franca and generate linguistic unity, pidgin is adopted by Nigerian verbal entrepreneurs as an instrument of cultural nation-building. The hybridity of pidgin implies a ‘deliberate rupturing of the master narrative that English represents’ and creates a ‘dialogically constituted border zone and cultural-in-between’ which dislocates the putative dichotomy between ‘globally-oriented’ and ‘locally-bound’ literatures. Pidgin, Fasan concludes, can thus be considered a liminal linguistic sphere that ‘erases the hierarchical dichotomies of local and global indexicalities, low and high culture’.

Flavia Aiello Traore's article opens by noticing that while many critics have discussed postmodernism with reference to Europhone African novels, postmodernism has seldom been related to Afrophone works. Nevertheless, Aiello Traore argues, it is a pivotal conceptual tool to analyse much contemporary Swahili-language production, for example Said Ahmed Mohamed's novels. The increased preference for postmodern techniques, in the Swahili case just like for African literary output at large, is a result of the disappointment with anticolonial and nationalist commitments, and the consequent rejection of the realist literary style that was generally used to express the two. The disillusionment with nationalism, though, does not lead Said Ahmed Mohamed to a sugar-coated vision of the transnational as a liberating space. Mohamed's novels, on the contrary, challenge nationalist utopias as much as ‘the new rhetoric of the political and economic élite which is […] centred on globalization, which […] is yet another form of “optimism” that needs to be unmasked’. And while postmodernism is indeed for Mohamed the product of political frustration, it did not push him to nihilism, but rather to ‘expand the idea of what is political’ with the objective of creating a new space ‘for possible reconfigurations of the nation’. The article is implicitly polemical against those critics who, like Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2002, 22), consider postmodernism and postcolonialism as disengaged and escapist sophistries, and claims instead that the new postmodern aesthetics of contemporary African fiction is ‘not alienated from the critical and the political stance which still animates most African novelists’.

Rémi Armand Tchokothe contests the association between Afrophone literatures and the local, showing that contemporary literary output in Swahili speaks to the global as much as its Europhone counterparts. Contemporary novels in Swahili ‘accommodate national, regional and global facts’ and transcend the ‘local semiotics of space’, enacting processes of ‘trans-localization’ and ‘trans-spatialization’. Works by Swahili writers such as Said Ahmed Mohamed and Kyallo W. Wamitila profoundly defy the contraposition between ‘Europhone global’ and ‘Afrophone local’ by establishing a constant dialogue between the two poles. This dialogue, Tchokothe argues, is well captured by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's concept of ‘globalectics’. Unlike world literature's privileging of the global, globalectics focuses on the interconnectedness, co-constitution and exchanges between local and global literary systems. In Ngũgĩ's understanding, globalectic texts ‘bring into mutual impact and comprehension the local and the global, the here and there, the national and the world’, and this definition, Tchokothe shows, applies very well to Wamitila's and Mohamed's novels, with their critiques of globalization, Pan-African allusions, reactions against European philosophy, East African referents, and comments on Zanzibari history and politics. The article is critical of disciplines like world literature that exclusively focus on literary works that have the social, cultural, and economic capital to reach a global audience, but on the other hand is equally critical of the tendency of African literary criticism to only consider Afrophone works for their contribution to local, or at best national, debates. Ultimately, Tchokothe suggests that the definition of world literature should take into account the globalectic qualities of a literary text rather than just its circulation.

Sara Marzagora also criticizes the exclusion of Afrophone literatures from critical debates on world literature. She argues that the discipline of world literatures, just like postcolonial studies before it, perpetuates a vision of Afrophone literatures as narrow, peripheral, and constricted. Against the celebratory praises of a new planetary system of literary circulation, her article claims for literary traditions a right to disconnectivity, or, in other words, the right to be disconnected from literary globalization ‘without being labelled pre-modern or being considered unable, because of internal weaknesses or external constraints, to project themselves onto the global market’. On the other side, Marzagora argues that the transnational turn in Euro-American humanities can stimulate Africanists to revise the most essentializing forms of nativism and nationalism, based as they are on a politicized idea of discrete and fixed identities. New, productive critical perspectives could emerge from an analysis of connectivities, interactions, and cross-influences, first of all between different African-language traditions, second between African-language and European-language African literature, and third between oral and written literature. The article is equally critical of the most extreme forms of deconstructionism, and while it argues for a de-essentialization of African literary features, it also rejects a complete relativization. As a theoretical solution, Marzagora proposes to conceive African literature as composed of multi-layered and intersecting literary systems – a perspective able to ‘mediate between identity-as-essence and identity-as-construct, between the global connectivity and localized networks, between cosmopolitan dialogues and culturally defined concerns; between the continental, the national, and the ethnic’.

Jonathon Repinecz's article details how, not dissimilarly from postmodern Swahili writers, Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop emphasizes in his works the multiplicity, relativity, and malleability of meanings and embraces a notion of truth as partial, context-dependent, and self-contradictory. Diop's Wolof-language novel Doomi Golo (translated into French by the author with the title Les Petits de la guenon), in Repinecz's analysis, ‘challenges the reification of tradition as backwards or belonging exclusively to the past’, interrogating the ‘act of traditionalization’ which happens in the present, and rethinking traditionality in ‘futurist’ terms. Diop defies the conception of tradition as a past authority that is beyond appeal, and rejects the nativist vision of tradition as a static and immutable ‘archive’ or a ‘library’ to go back to in order to authenticate identity. Instead, Diop's work ‘calls for a move away from what we might call a rigid or conservative traditionality’ and ‘illustrates the possibility of a traditionality that is not only open but oriented towards the future, and more specifically towards the potential for future change embodied in youth’. Doomi Golo is ‘explicitly dialogical’ and creates an ‘ongoing conversation’ around the meaning and self-contradictory character of received wisdom – ultimately pointing to the possibility of generating collective meanings via acts of traditionalization, de-traditionalization, and re-traditionalization.

The novels discussed by Tchokothe and Aiello Traore share many traits with the Tigrinya-language play analysed by Tedros Abraham. Beyene Haile, just like Said Ahmed Mohamed and Kyallo W. Wamitila, extensively uses experimental techniques commonly associated with postmodernism, such as non-linear narration, meta-literary passages, and intermixing of genres. Weg'i Libi is a dialogic, open-ended work that refuses (or perhaps, due to censorship constraints, is not allowed) to give definitive answers to questions of identity, history, and nationhood. Just like Boubacar Boris Diop inserts in his novel numerous meta-discussions on the meaning of tradition, Beyene Haile too considers tradition in dialectic terms, not as an essentialized past authority, but as a vital and fluid component of a future-in-the-making. In Weg'i Libi, different traditional performances interrupt the dialogue of the characters, who stop their conversations to attend, and comment upon, the performances. Beyene Haile makes it clear that tradition can and should be renegotiated by casting women in roles that Eritrean genre conventions generally assign to men. The playwright refuses to essentialize the past, but similarly rejects Afropolitanism and exile, urging his audience to commit to Eritrean nation-building. Nationhood and the construction thereof are dramatized, discussed, and staged throughout the duration of the play, and the nation is perhaps Weg'i Libi's real protagonist. The play, however, also includes transnational references to African and Western philosophy, but the ‘globalectic’ – we can say following Tchokothe's proposal – nature of the text is, according to Abraham, ambiguous, as the author's Afrocentric position stands in contradiction with his heavy reliance on European history and examples. The article suggests that the global and the local are perhaps not easy to mediate. It also supports Aiello Traore's observation that postmodernism does not necessarily translate in cynicism and apathy, but that it can be bent to serve new forms of cultural activism and political engagement.

Tedros Abraham's article draws attention to the peculiarity of the Horn of Africa – a region where European languages never supplanted indigenous languages, and where the diglossia described by Fasan, with colonial languages becoming the language of power and high culture and ‘vernaculars’ associated with powerlessness and low culture, never took shape. The Horn, nevertheless, is not devoid of its power hierarchies, which, as elsewhere, translated in linguistic hierarchies – nor is it devoid of mechanisms of internal imperialism and cultural imposition. Teferi Nigussie's article highlights how Oromo language and literature have been marginalized throughout Ethiopia's modern history, and just gained partial recognition starting from 1991. As the novels by Isaayas Hordofaa and Gaaddisaa Birruu show, nationalism and nativism are still central to Oromo literary production, structured as it is on the attempt to subvert the dominant Ethiopian historiography and its denigration of Oromo people and culture. Oromo literature veritably ‘writes back’ to what Nigussie refers to as the ‘illiberal Abyssinian system’. At the same time, the Oromo example indicates that the Horn of Africa can be read as a rather self-sustained literary system with its own local centres, local peripheries, and local literary power relations – a conclusion that complicates and contests the binary geographical model underpinning postcolonial theory and world literature, based on the idea of a single world centre and single world periphery.

The idea of local centres and local peripheries is very much present in the article by Rebecca Jones, which illustrates how the local is multipolar and stratified, and not at all static and homogeneous as some proponents of Afropolitanism/world literature assume. Jones analyses the different strategies employed by Yoruba writers to make sense of the ‘national other’, comparing in particular Ọmọyajowo's novel Adégbẹ̀san and its ‘geographic approach to depicting the nation’ with the ‘political representation of the nation’ emerging from Debọ Awẹ's Kọ́pà. Common to both is the ‘use of synecdoche to represent the nation’, whereby, in Karin Barber's words, ‘the Yoruba are the Egba writ large, Nigeria is Yorubaland writ large’, meaning that the other is represented as an extension of the self. The notions of travel and translation are central to the texts' mediation between the local and the national – mediation that is captured by Jones with the use of the term ‘translocal’. In this process of mediation, though, the ‘translocal’ never quite becomes ‘national’, and the novels are characterized by ‘an absence figured in the nation’. Nevertheless, the novels ‘think about people who are not like us, but who are ultimately translatable, as if through travel and encounter, the nation can eventually be comprehended’.

All together, these articles urge us to address the academic imbalance between Europhone and Afrophone literary studies, and point at the need to collectively recognize the contribution of Afrophone authors and texts, in all of their epistemological, imaginary, political, and theoretical wealth, not only to African literary criticism, but also to ‘globalist’ disciplines such as comparative literature, postcolonial theory, and, more recently, world literature.