The Campus as War Zone: Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Post-Independence Civil War, and the African University

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a set of contemporary Anglophone African novels critically engage the relationship between universities and war. Dinaw Mengestu’s 2014 All Our Names, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, and Aminatta Forna’s 2010 The Memory of Love are war novels that chronicle the collapse of the postcolonial state in the face of military coups and authoritarian rule in the late 1960s; in all three texts, the university takes on a stealthy significance as the institutional backdrop for that collapse. The transformation of university campuses into war zones in these novels occasions material devastation and both individual and collective trauma. It also exposes deep and longstanding entanglements between war, education, and knowledge production in the postcolony, and invites nuanced reflection on the ambivalent legacy of the 1960s for the present. Beyond these novels’ sober and bleak assessments of post-independence conflict lies an invitation to imagine how war might also serve as a source of knowledge, a means of building and improving upon the anticolonial aspirations that were never fully achieved in the era of independence.

KEYWORDS:

• University
• Anglophone African fiction
• war novel
• Adichie
• Mengestu
• Forna
• campus fiction
• 1960s

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Carol Sicherman (2005) and TTim Livsey (2017) describe Makerere and Nigeria’s independence-era universities in these terms.

2 See July (1987), Nwauwa (1997), and Falola (2001).

3 See Paracka (2003) for an assessment of how Fourah Bay College’s mid-19th century administrators of African descent pushed for a more rigorous academic program that both emphasized the study of African languages and offered training in European civilization on par with what British universities offered; Livsey for an account of local dissatisfaction with the crudely vocational curriculum of Lagos’s Yaba College in the 1930s; and Sicherman for an analysis of how anxieties over stringent admissions and examination standards at Makerere in the 1930s and 1940s came from African stakeholders who were eager for the university to command recognition and respect abroad.

4 For a meticulous survey of Ugandan student activism, see Byaruhanga (2012). Excellent studies of continent-wide student movements include Hanna (1975), Mwaria, Federici, and McLaren (2000), Federici, George Caffentzis, and Alidou (2000), and Zeilig (2013). Pedro Monaville’s (2022) recent monograph reveals that Mengestu’s university students may have a bit more in common with Congolese students, whose cosmopolitan political radicalization took place mainly after Lumumba’s assassination, were first courted and then violently victimized by Mobutu after he came to power, and held an all-night vigil that bears some resemblance to the one that appears in All Our Names.

5 See Coundouriotis (2014) and Egbunike (2017).

6 See July (1987) and Falola (2001).

7 See Wilder (2013), Paperson (2017), and Boggs et al. (2019).