The writer as social thinker

Abstract

Social theory in, and social theorising about, Africa has largely ignored African literature. Yet, the works of African writers constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought and for constructing social theory in the continent. Indeed, African writers offer the kinds of abstractions, comparisons, frameworks and critical reflections on the African lifeworld – and the place of the African in the global context in the longue durée – without which it will be impossible to fully account for the nature of being, existence and reality and the nature and scope of knowledge in the African context. This introduction to the special issue on ‘Writers and Social Thought in Africa’ attempts to bring the social sciences back into conversation with literature (and vice versa) in re-articulating the philosophical dimensions of literature and the social sciences. It re-emphasises the role of African creative writers, not merely as intellectuals whose works mirror or can be used to mirror social thought, but as social thinkers themselves who engage with the nature of existence and questions of knowledge in the continent – and beyond.

Keywords:

• African writers
• African literature
• social thought
• social theory

The novel, like the myth and the parable, gives a view of society from its contemplation of social life, reflecting it, mirror-like, but also reflecting upon it, simultaneously.

– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Globalectics 2012, 16).

There is just no sense in pondering the functions of literature without relating it to the actual society that uses it, to the centers of power within that society, and to the institutions that mediate between literature and people.

– Richard Ohmann (English in America 1976, 303).

Two fundamental philosophical problems have been at the centre of the question of being. The first is the problem of human nature – and the associated challenge of human purpose. The other is the ‘perplexing’ problem of how the human mind can gain knowledge of society – and the associated challenge of establishing the criteria for such understanding (Hughes [1958] 2002, 24). These fundamental problems constitute the raisons d’etre of speculative thinking and, therefore, social thought throughout human history. While philosophers for a long time regarded themselves as the most suited to confront these problems, in modern times, both the social sciences and ‘imaginative literature’ – which, as H. Stuart Hughes rightly states, constitute ‘the two aspects of speculative thought that philosophy had once held together’ – have taken on these problems (Hughes [1958] 2002) and continue to suggest crucial and unending answers to the questions raised in, and by, social life.

Despite the ‘profound meditations’ on the nature of being, including the questions of human nature and knowledge of the world (which the social sciences and literature have provided in modern times), scholarship in and about Africa has yet to pay sufficient attention to the fundamental connections between both, and the centrality of imaginative literature in the articulation of, and as vehicle for, social thought in Africa – or what Abiola Irele (1983, 8) describes as ‘a distinctive African mode of thought, even a form of rationality’. Therefore, the need to identify the ‘patterns for comparison across apparently disparate and incommensurable domains through a process of identifying the heterogeneous, multi-layered, and interactive dimensions of such domains’ (Quayson 2003, xv–xvi), including ‘how the relations among these variegated thresholds encapsulate the social’, remains a crucial challenge to African(ist) scholars in the social sciences and literature.

This special issue is a token attempt to bring the social sciences back into conversation with literature (and vice versa), to re-articulate the philosophical dimensions of literature and the social sciences, and to re-emphasise the role of African creative writers, not merely as intellectuals whose works mirror or can be used to mirror social thought, but as social thinkers themselves who engage with the nature of existence and questions of knowledge¹ in the continent – and beyond. In this special issue, we are interested in writers whose intense engagements with the nature of existence and questions of knowledge are reflected in the interplay of critical perspectives marked by imagination and originality. Against this backdrop, we take for granted that ‘both the imaginative and the ideological [are] closely associated’ (Irele 1981, 2).

As a product of rational contemplation on how human beings relate to one another in their environment, social thought is based on ‘the interaction of three important elements: the people, their social heritage (or ‘culture’) and their physical environment’ (Otite 1978, 1). Even though some Scholars, such as E.S. Bogardus (1961, 8), have argued that ‘social thought results in part from the nature of social conditions’, and is ‘representative of a particular people in a particular milieu and condition [particularly] in its original usage’, and for these reasons, limited in temporal and spatial terms, leading Nigerian sociologist, Onigu Otite (1978, 2; cf. Irele 1981), to maintain correctly that social thought can acquire a timeless and universal character (cf. Hountundji 1983, 55–70)².

John Dewey (1910) identifies five stages through which social thought crystalises. The first stage is the anticipation or identification of a problem. This is followed by the definition and location of the problem by the thinker. The third stage is the suggestion of possible solutions to the problem. The fourth stage involves making logical deductions or experiments on the validity of possible solutions. The final stage involves arriving at a conclusion through the acceptance or rejection of the solution contemplated by the thinker (cf. Otite 1978, 2). All of these stages reflect conceptions and articulations concerning ‘the origins of human society, the ways of group life, the development and expression of social interests, and the modes of social discipline and social control, and the main causes of both cultural lag and social progress’ (Barnes 1948, vii).

As a continent whose original imagined existence remains its foundational fiction,³ social thought in, and about, Africa cannot but be an important exercise in valuable social abstraction. Such abstraction constitutes a critical step in accessing and assessing the nature of existence⁴ on the continent. Creative writers in Africa do not merely reproduce existing modes of thought,⁵ particularly collective thought, they also establish guiding patterns of thought, invoking ‘the deliberate, explicit and individual analytic activity which takes [the existing collective] worldview [of Africans] as its object (Hountundji 1983, 63). In observing the social process, both past and present, they reflect, and reflect on, extant perspectives in understanding reality by creating new maps of existence through ideas that not only generate, but also transcend existing possibilities and ways of apprehending those possibilities. In contributing to the common store of social, political and moral ideas in society, they also become wellsprings of new ideas and new ways of thinking. It is, therefore, less than salutary that African literature has been largely ignored by students of social thought and social theory in Africa, even though social theory in Africa has received significant, if insufficient, attention from students of African literature. Yet, where African literature is recognised as part of the important sources, subjects and terrain of social thought and social theory in the continent by social scientists, a gap persists in the engagement of scholars with the works of African writers as important conveyors of intellectually elevated and elevating classic formulations (cf. Hughes [1958] 2002, 21) concerning the abiding problems of human nature and knowledge in the African context – and in relation to the rest of the world. Notable exceptions to this include Larry Diamond's (1989) important review essay entitled ‘Fiction as Political Thought’ (435) in which he argues that the literature of any society tells a lot about the culture, social structure and politics of the society, concluding that fiction, in specific contexts, can reveal more about ‘customs, conflicts, stresses, changes, and transformations than does all the formal scholarship of historians and social scientists’ (Diamond 1989).

Before Diamond, perhaps the earliest African student of politics to identify African literature as a critical channel for social and political thought is G.-C.M. Mutiso in his work, Socio-political Thought in African Literature: Weusi? (1974). Analysing novels, plays, short stories and poetry written originally in Africa by ‘indigenous Africans’ from the Second World War to 1967, Mutiso's (1974, 3) departure point was that ‘All literature, to the extent that it deals with individuals in society, contains elements of social and political theory’. Against the backdrop of the debates regarding how and why ‘in African societies art has traditionally been highly functional’, Mutiso argues that studying:

literature in order to arrive at socio-political theory may be justified by the fact that the ‘modern’ writers seek to continue [this] cultural attitude. They are socially committed and therefore write with this commitment in mind, because it has been the tradition of their culture to perceive the artist not as an individual but rather as a value creator and integrator (9–10).⁶

Achille Mbembe, one of the leading African social theorists, confesses that Congolese writer, Sony Lab’ou Tansi's oeuvre,⁷ which shows how ‘power is fundamentally a disjunctive structure, a form of transgressive disjunction’, constitutes the inspiration for one of the core theses in his famous book, On the Postcolony (Mbembe and Oboe n.d., 5; Mbembe 2001). Like many other African writers, Tansi demonstrates strongly that, as Milan Kundera (1988 [2003], 14) argues, ‘the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe’. To give a particular example from Tansi's works, Moi, veuve de l’Empire rewrites antiquity by making Julius Ceaser fall in love with a black princess, Cleopatra, and uses this to meditate on the disasters of history and Africa's encounter with Europe, which produces a politics which ‘is just a way of going to extremes with closed eyes’ (Kirkup 1995). Tansi's Widow of the Empire is not only a veritable dark metaphor that reflects the nature of existence – social, economic and political – in his two Congos⁸ and beyond, but also a reflective anticipation of the death and destruction that was to engulf other bastard countries of the European empires in Africa beyond the Congos, such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, etc.

Instructively, Mbembe echoes Diamond when he adds that ‘From Sony Labou Tansi, for instance, I have learnt more about power than I could have from any political science treatise’ (Mbembe and Oboe n.d., 5). Milan Kundera (1988 [2003]) makes a similar point in interrogating the history of the European novel – which, he argues, ‘has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era’ (6). For the author of the famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – a novel which challenges and revises Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence – ‘the radical autonomy of the novel’ allows a writer such as Franz Kafka ‘to say things about our human condition (as it reveals itself in our century) that no social or political thought could ever tell us’ (117). Perhaps Kundera invests the novel with an absolute integrity which every novel does not possess. Not every work of literature can be ‘radically autonomous’. The question of the ‘radical autonomy’ of the specific novel regarding the fundamental questions of social existence is one that can be taken up by social scientists who are interested in interrogating the literary in relation to social thought.

Indeed, while the illuminating potentials of fictive imagination in reflecting, and reflecting on, social existence in Africa cannot be contested, one of the critical perspectives which we should expect from social scientists engaging with literature is the drawing out of the limitations or perhaps the paradoxes of using ‘the fictive’ to think about or think through ‘the real’. How is the social text unlike literary text? If fiction illuminates existence, what are the possibilities and the limitations of such illumination in relation to social text? Mark Twain famously insists that truth is stranger than fiction only because ‘fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities’ while truth is not. Do the possibilities that fiction sticks to, without limitations, actually exist in African societies? If they do, how might social scientists articulate this through an analysis of African literature? Sadly, in this special issue, we did not find social scientists willing to take up these questions.

Calibrating the literary and the social

Interrelating the imaginative/literary and the social/ideological, as articulated by Abiola Irele (1981) in his important book, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, emphasises the significance of African literature for social thought. ‘It is perhaps not too much to say that if African writing has any value at the present moment, any significance’, states Irele, ‘it is essentially as a function of the comprehensive testimony it offers of the turns and patterns of an unfolding drama of existence in which [Africans] have been and continue to be involved’ (Irele 1981, 1, emphasis in original). For the literary theorist, therefore, literature is both a direct representation of the ‘concrete facts' of Africans' collective experience and ‘a reconstruction … of the states of consciousness induced by that experience’ (2).

In advocating for calibrations as a method of reading such experience which involves the ‘translational transaction … between the literary and the social and vice versa’, but one which makes literature the starting point of approaching the social, Ato Quayson (2003, xiv–xv) argues correctly that ‘the social’ can be coded as ‘an articulated encapsulation of transformation, processes, and contradictions analogous to what we find in the literary domain’. However, Quayson elides how ‘the social’ can also depart, in important respects, from what we find in the literary domain – a problem that ought to be addressed by social scientists. Notwithstanding this omission, in reading for the social, Quayson encourages us to ‘embrace the ideological notion of using the literary as a means toward social enlightenment’ (xv). This call is emphasised in the epigram above by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012), who, in his recent work, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (16), insists that fiction not only contemplates social life by reflecting it but also simultaneously reflects upon it. Literature, as Richard Ohmann (1976) also notes in his initially controversial book, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (303), not only reflects, but must be used to reflect on, ‘the centers of power within [the] society, and … the institutions that mediate between literature and people’.

In embracing ‘the literary as a means towards social enlightenment’, Quayson (Ohmann 1976, xv) makes literature the starting point of his reading of the social and not the other way round. While this standpoint for the literary theorist helps in wresting ‘something from the aesthetic domain for the analysis and better understanding of the social’ (Ohmann 1976, xv), the reverse can also useful. As Larry Diamond (1989) demonstrates in his own essay, we can also extract something from the sociopolitical domain for the analysis and better understanding of the aesthetic because:

fiction may give us special insights into how culture and history intersect with and reshape, or are reshaped by, the lives of people, ordinary and extraordinary. For these reasons, literature may provide a precious and indispensable window into a society, a people and an era. (435)

Using Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah (1987) – ‘a chilling measure of anticipation and forewarning of the dangers of unaccountable and repressive power’ –Diamond argues further that fiction is not merely a passive reflection of society and history. As a deep reflection on the nature of being and the question of knowledge in society, fiction:

is also an active influence, reinforcing or refashioning values, beliefs, ideas, perceptions and aspirations. The teller of a story can become a powerful force in shaping the way a people think about their social and political order, and the nature, desirability and direction of change. (Achebe 1989)

Evidently, modern African writers remain some of the continent's finest social thinkers. In their fiction, poetry, drama and essays, they have produced, and continue to produce, works which constitute an essential fabric of social thought and social theorising in and beyond the continent. Indeed, African writers offer the kinds of abstractions, comparisons, frameworks and critical reflections on the African lifeworld, and the place of the African in the global context in the longue duree, without which it would be impossible to fully account for our understanding of the nature of being, existence and reality, and the nature and scope of knowledge in the African context. They also shape, or reshape, the ways in which people think about ‘social and political order, and the nature, desirability and direction of change’ (Diamond 1989, 435). Indeed, these constitute the bases of conceiving the novelist as a political philosopher (Diamond 1989).

In many ways, the art of writing constitutes a way of conceiving and/or approaching the world. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), in writing about ‘Discourse in the Novel’, alerts us not only to the ‘dialogic orientation of discourse’, but also to the ‘social life of discourse’ and ‘the fundamentally social modes in which discourse lives’ (269). The dialogic, as emphasised in the Socratic dialogues, is also dialectical. One of Africa's foremost writers and literary theorists, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012), argues (15) that theorising about the colonial situation in Africa is based on the foundational efforts of fiction writers. ‘It was fiction that first gave [Africans] a theory of the colonial situation’, states Ngũgĩ. Even though Ngũgĩ unnecessarily understates the role of black intellectuals in modern Africa, Europe and the new World who preceded creative writers in theorising about European domination and exploitation of Africa and Africans – as is evident, for instance, in Frantz Fanon's ([1952] 2008) Black Skin, White Masks ⁹ – there is no doubt that fiction helped tremendously in conceptualising and generalising important approaches to the ‘colonial situation’.

Therefore, by going back to the Greek meaning of theory (theoria), which means ‘a view’ or ‘contemplation’, and by raising questions about the relationship of fiction and theory, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012) points us in the direction of ‘fiction as theory’ or ‘fiction … as [a way of] writing theory’. He concludes that, indeed, ‘fiction is the original poor theory’, in that, when human beings were first confronted with an environment that they could not understand, they ‘invented stories to explain it’ (15). Indeed, Ngũgĩ's position captures the original dynamics of modern fiction in Africa, both in its contemporary stories and its retrospective attempts to tell the stories of the African distant past. From Africa's most famous fiction, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's (2006) award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun, the telling of African stories has always been at the centre of reflecting, and reflecting on, the African social experience.

If theory is approached as a fact-based framework for describing a phenomenon, then social theory is evident in African (literary) writings – including fiction, poetry, drama and essays. Also, if social theory is approached as a contemplative, rational mode of abstract thinking which attempts to apprehend and explain social phenomenon and human action, we find that African writers are constantly grappling with these in their works. As literary historians remind us, the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century Europe corresponded to the rise of realism in philosophy and the coming into prominence of the middle class, and the concomitant conviction concerning value as something which can be measured, weighed and counted (Beebe 1977, 14).

The debate about whether writers constitute mirrors or lamps points to the fluctuation of writers between the reflective and the reflexive (Beebe 1977). For Ngũgĩ, literature is at the centre of the past, present and future – both in collective and individual senses. He states that:

The novel mimics, contemplates, clarifies, and unifies many elements of reality in terms of quality and quantity. It helps organise and make sense of the chaos of history, social experience, and personal inner lives. As a creative process, it mimics the creation of the universe as order from chaos. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2012, 16–17)

For the author of Weep Not Child (1964), among other important works, what Aristotle said about poetry – that it was finer and more philosophical than history because it expressed the universal, while history expresses the particular – is truer of the novel (18) because the novel ‘analyzes, synthesises, has a view, and reaches out to beyond the space and time of its location’. Indeed, Ngũgĩ uses Karl Marx's argument that theory becomes ‘a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses’ to stress the power of literature in the conception and expression of the social totality.

(Literary)-Social thought can indeed become a material force in that the ideas, perspectives, explanations and insights popularised by writers can take hold of society and help in defining the approaches to, and understanding of, the nature of existence. African writers express what Achille Mbembe describes as the ‘sensory experience of [Africans'] lives that encompasses innumerable unnamed and un-nameable shapes, hues and textures that “objective knowledge” has failed to capture’ (Mbembe and Oboe, n.d., 5). This is evident in Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), a discourse of the clash of culture and colonialism, and stability and change, as well as in Camara Laye's ambivalent reflections on colonialism in African social history in A Dream of Africa (1966) –a novel which dramatises the fate of Guinea, and uses this to challenge the ‘socio-political base of most African countries in the second half of the twentieth century’ (Adejumo 1989, 202). It is also manifest in Sony Lab’ou Tansi's The Antipeople (1988), a harangue against postcolonial governmentality and disorder, which, Mbembe argues, points to the fact that, ‘there is something jarred, …flagrantly perverse, … [and] pornographic in the way power is exercised in the postcolony’ (Mbembe and Oboe n.d., 5), as well as Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests (1960), which reflects ‘the constant quest for moral significance in human action’ (Irele 1981, 199), and Dennis Brutus' Sirens, Knuckes, Boots (1963), a collection of poems dependent ‘upon a reference to a pre-given “beingness”’ (Luhmann 2001, 16), which expresses human dignity and courage in the face of racist threats to our common humanity.

In many ways, therefore, writers – especially those Abiola Irele (2001b) describes as ‘truly significant writers’ (4), that is, those work contain ‘profound human implication(s)’ (Irele 1981, 2) –constitute some of the most brilliant social thinkers regarding the nature of existence in Africa. Such a writer is significant because she/he does not only ‘capture the flow of experience’, she/he also ‘propose[s] broader vision of life that transcends the immediate situation to which [her/his] work refers’ (Irele 1981).

African vision(s)/fiction(s) of the world: past, present and future

Examining writers and social thought in Africa also represents an important way of engaging in literary and social reflection on the intellectual history of modern Africa. By intellectual history, I mean, following Hughes (1958 [2002], 6), a way of treating social phenomenon from the standpoint of thought rather than that of deed. The patterns of thought evident in modern African literary writing have evolved since the late colonial era. Even though we might still be able to discern overriding, fundamental issues that run through modern African writing, there are certain intellectual anxieties or concerns that seem to dominate specific eras. Despite Harry Garuba's (2005, 52) warning that the concept of generation in African writing constitutes ‘a slippery descriptive terrain in which nothing is conceptually or analytically certain’, Dan Izevbaye (1979, 7) contends that ‘A periodic evaluation of the African novel is necessary in order to develop a lively critical heritage as support for its growth’. Against this backdrop, different eras or generations have been, and can be, described by many literary scholars as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ generation writers, or as ‘(late) colonial’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘post-modern/neoliberal’¹⁰ moments in African writing (see, among others, Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 2008; Adesokan 2012; Okuyade 2013). However, as H. Stuart Hughes ([1958] 2002) argues, ‘The notion of one generation is very elastic … Obviously all generations are overlapping … all are somewhat arbitrarily defined’ (18).

Beyond naming and periodisation, another dimension of ensuring Izevbaye's (1979) call for encouraging ‘a redefinition of existing literature in the light of new knowledge about literature and society’ (7) is to seek to define the fundamental and critical issues or themes that animate the literature of a particular era. In this context, Ogaga Okuyade (2013, 5) recently maps those stages as including one ‘from cultural affirmation cum nationalism (the first generation) to postcolonial criticism of the newly independent states (the second generation) to disillusionment and resignation (the third generation)’. Apart from the limitations of Okuyade's description of the key themes mapped unto generations (and the associated assumption that the issues central to a generation do not necessarily influence other generations), there is also the problem of limiting the works of certain members of a generation to the key themes that initially animated the earliest works of members of that generation. To cite a few instances, if Achebe's social reflection as dominated by ‘cultural affirmation cum nationalism’ is evident in Things Fall Apart, certainly A Man of the People (1966) would constitute a ‘postcolonial criticism of the newly independent state’, while Anthills of the Savannah (1987) reflects Achebe's ‘disillusionment’, but certainly not ‘resignation’ concerning the sociopolitical project in modern Africa. Even more evident of such trans-generational themes are Ngũgĩ's oeuvre, from Weep Not Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), through Petal of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross (1982), to Wizard of Crow (2006). What this implies, therefore, is that in researching and articulating social thought in African literary writing, even though the larger local and global sociopolitical and economic dynamics of the age might critically inform literature, the category of generation might not be as illuminating as hitherto assumed in examining the collective imagination and insight of African writers.

We are not arguing that the social bases of knowledge and knowledge production as linked with different eras or time periods are not important in tracking the course of African writing. We are only suggesting that the social bases of knowledge cannot be assumed to determine exclusively the social outlook of only the writers emerging in that era. Therefore, while the emerging writers of an era may react to, and reflect upon, the changes and continuities of their own era in particular ways, the same cannot be said of writers whose works have been published before that new era, and those who continue to engage in reflections on the present time in the context of the longue duree. Beyond this, however determined or limited the problems to which the literature of any generation or era addresses itself, the core concern is always the overall structure of society (Hughes [1958] 2002, 22) in relation to the question of existence and the problem of knowledge.

It can be argued that the writer-social thinker is the most critical category of writers in modern Africa. In his influential 1975 essay, ‘Tradition and the Yoruba Writer’, Abiola Irele (2001b) states that:

The essential direction of modern African writing, of the work of the truly significant writers, is towards the definition, in and through literature, of a distinctive mode of thought and feeling, towards an imaginative apprehension and embodiment of an African spirit. (4; emphasis added)

What Irele describes as ‘imaginative apprehension and embodiment of an African spirit’ remains at the heart of the writer-social thinker model in the continent.

The earliest modern writer-social thinkers, including Chinua Achebe, Peter Abrahams, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Naguib Mahfouz,¹¹ Mongo Beti, Camara Laye, Ayi Kwei Armah, etc., were initially concerned with the question of change in modern Africa. ‘Culture’ and power formed the pivot upon which the question of change revolved. These authors emerged in late colonial and immediate postcolonial contexts of contradictory political, economic, social as well as intellectual formations in which the question of ‘culture’ (by whatever name, including ‘history’, ‘custom’, ‘tradition’, etc.) was in serious contention, particularly in relation to the problem of power: how to reconcile the past with the present, how to gain independence/freedom from colonial rule and racialism, how to win power, domesticate it and place it at the service of the people. Many of these writer-social thinkers confronted the theoretical and practical question of culture in relation to power. Should ‘culture’ look backwards or forwards – or both ways? If it looks backwards, what would that mean for the question of power in late colonial and early postcolonial eras in the wider context of Africa's subordination in the emergent international setting? If it looks forwards, what kinds of ideological order would constitute its programmatic anchor in relating to both local and global formations and forces? The writer-social thinker speculated on the conditions under which the responses to the dilemmas of the past, the limitations and opportunities of the present and the threats and promises of the future of Africa could be approached, tamed, mobilised, adopted, appropriated and/or transcended. Thus, to use Hughes' ([1958] 2002, 15) words ‘In the shifting, transitional world of ideas in which they dwelt, the problem of consciousness early established itself as crucial’.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012, 18) captures these challenges regarding the question of culture and the problem of power in his reaction to Aime Césaire's ‘description of the havoc wrought by colonialism’. Césaire points to ‘societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out’ by the colonial enterprise (cited in Ngũgĩ, 18). For Ngũgĩ, the incomprehension and chaos that emerged from this world could not be ordered by the prose essay. Therefore, the writer-social thinker ‘turned to fiction to help [him] understand [Africa's] encounter with chaos’ (wa Thiong’o 2012). Through his novels [The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967)], set in colonial and immediate postcolonial Kenya, Ngũgĩ discloses that he realised that he ‘most seem[s] to understand the inner logic of social processes’ when he is ‘deep inside imaginative territory’ (wa Thiong’o 2012, 9). In this way, African visions of the world become strongly evident in African fiction. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is within this ‘imaginative territory’, and its dialogic as well as dialectical character, that many in Africa are able ‘to make sense of the apparently irrational forces of the colonial and postcolonial’ (16–17).

Since the end of the colonial rule and the collapse of the extravagant assumptions about Africa's potentials after independence, especially in the late Cold War and post-Cold War-neoliberal movement, significant writers have been reflecting, and reflecting upon, the new challenges around the question of ‘culture’ and the problem of power in Africa and beyond. Contemporary attempts not only to comprehend, but also to explain ‘the newly recognised disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of that reality’ (Hughes [1959] 2002, 16) through African creative writing has had to contend with what Hughes, in a different context, describes as a ‘vastly more complicated matter’ (Hughes [1959] 2002). In the context of different levels of deep decay or even the collapse of the state in some parts of the continent, and the simultaneous softening and hardening of the state, the implosion of the idea of immutable national boundaries inherited from the colonialists, the explosion of neoliberal ideas on the continent, identity politics of all forms and hues, including gender and sexual identities, the challenge of transnational terrorism, etc., the writer in Africa has had as much data for social reflection as she/he has been confronted with, contra Kundera, the ‘unbearable heaviness of things’. This has led both old, established and young, emerging writers into what could be described as ‘wholesale re-examination of the presuppositions of social thought itself’ (Hughes [1959] 2002). In the light of this re-examination, extant assumptions and reflections about ‘culture’ and its relationship with power on the continent have come under different forms of interrogation in African writing. How ‘culture’ and power determine, are determined by, bolster or undermine change and/or continuity in the context of the perplexing questions of the nature of being and knowledge now constitutes the basis of new and renewed social thought in African writing. For instance, hitherto forbidden or marginalised discourses, such as homosexuality, are now embraced and elaborated upon within African writing.

Writer-social thinkers in the African maps of experience

In this special issue, contributors examine the works of a few African writers whose insightful reflections on the fundamental questions of existence in modern Africa reflect the tradition of social thought in modern African writing. The contributors examine what Adélékè Adéèkó, following Quayson (2003), describes as the ‘fluid existence conducted and constituted in myriad interconnected and imaginative domains, including the literary and the social’ as evident in ‘(t)exts of all colours [which] insinuate themselves into the world without waiting to be invited’ (Adéèkó 2004, 9).

In his paper on how literature deals with trauma in the context of ‘Africa's moral imagination’, J. Rogers Kurtz argues that by examining the social thought of African writers, we can ‘refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory’. Given that modern African literature is a product of the ultimate traumatic experience, namely colonialism – and the centuries of slave trade that preceded it, the other forms of racial subjection that attended and succeeded it (including apartheid), the superpower (ideological) global politics that marginalised and devastated post-independent Africa, and the current globalised neoliberal capital which structurally relegates Africa and fuels a myriad of social, economic and political crises in the continent – it is no surprise that a running theme in the social reflection of African writers is ‘the history of fragmentation and violence’. Against this backdrop, for Kurtz, it is important to understand the ‘intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination’ as expressed in African writing. Although African writers have not resolved all the problems that arose, and continue to arise, from ‘the continent's traumatogenic contexts’, in its unique nature, African literary history offers us fresh insights into the possibilities for social transformation and healing. In this way, Kurtz indirectly rearticulates Milan Kundera's ([1999] 2003, 43) important observation that writers ‘draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility’.

It is interesting, argues Kurtz, to note the complimentary intellectual and literary energy focused on the traumatic in African social history, which is manifest in the works of leading social theorists on the continent such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Walter Rodney, Abdul JanMohammed and writers such as Achebe, Ousmane, Head, Soyinka and Armah. Kurtz concludes that ‘African social thought as represented by its leading novelists and social critics is fully aware of and focussed on the fragmenting effects of trauma’ (2014).

Melissa T. Myambo also takes up the theme of ‘trauma’, but by examining how African writers engage with the question of ‘healing’, as reflected in the works of Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembene and Zakes Mda. She argues that the way in which ‘(t)he ontology of Africanness is theorised in African literature’ which focuses on ‘the healing process’ is through the establishment of ‘African identity as foundationally dialogical and dialectical’ (2014). This departure point then enables African writers to open up ‘the possibility of a dialectical epistemology’. In a sense, African writers' attempts to grapple with the question of being are interlocked with the problem of knowledge. In this context, Myambo suggests that African writers attempt to theorise the process of healing does not lead them to ‘suturing the wound or mending the fracture’. Rather, they recognise the ‘fracture as dialectical potential’. Against this backdrop, we are led by Myambo to read Achebe's reflections on the consequences of the European encounter in Things Fall Apart simultaneously with Fanon's (1967) ‘The Fact of Blackness’ in Black Skin, White Masks as two complementary reflections on ‘the European fully ontological weighty present and the African ontologically evacuated “past”’. Consequently, what is made absent in ‘rationalist Western understanding’, as represented by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), can be made present in ‘dialectical African modernity’, as represented by Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness (2000).

To return again to the question of how ‘(t)exts … insinuate themselves into the world without waiting to be invited’ (Adéèkó 2004, 9), particularly in the context of how ‘culture’ and power formed the axel on which the question of change is approached by writers, Moradewun Adejunmobi argues that ‘(f)rom the last years of the colonial period to the early twenty-first century, a prominent strand of African literature has pursued a deeper understanding of postcolonial African subjectivity by situating the African subject within a web of power relations’ (2014). Even though this preoccupation with power has attracted criticism, it has persisted. However, she calibrates Patrice Nganang's Dog Days (2006) – in light of Mbembe's reflections on power and Scott's insights into the nature of resistance (1990) – in examining a different reflection on the question of power relations and subordination in Africa. While it can be argued that a Marxian inflection regarding ‘false consciousness’ is pervasive in the theorisation of the nexus of power and subordination by many African novelists, Adejunmobi argues that Nganang emphasises an ‘unimpeded understanding of the mechanics of … subordination’ by the subordinated in Africa. Nganang does not merely interpret the prevailing dynamics of power on the continent, he also ‘engages and interrogates the premises informing diverse interpretations of trends in African social and political reality’. However, the understanding of the mechanics of subordination, as represented through Massa Yo in Dog Days, does not preclude the subordinated from participating in another level of subordination as a way of validating his own agency or humanity – or reclaiming his dignity. This can produce a specific form of double subordination in the postcolony; that is, subordination of others (for example, Mboudjak) by the already subordinated (for example, Massa Yo).

Without losing his fidelity to aesthetic excellence, Nganang presents a theory of African leadership through Massa Yo's relationship with the prostitute that is perhaps more nuanced than the perspectives on clientelism and neo-patrimonialism that have been overused in explaining Africa's predicament. Combining a Dostoevskyian existential crisis in an African context (which leads to what Adejunmobi describes as ‘the pursuit of procurable indulgence’) with a hint of Marxian alienation, but one limited by a certain kind of consciousness of their existential dilemmas, Nganang presents us with a social context in which, Adejunmobi argues, ‘the pursuit of procurable indulgence does not amount to mere personal proclivity’ (2014). Beyond this, it also represents ‘a deliberately chosen response to a socio-political configuration that dispenses benefits to some, and withdraws benefits from others’ (Adejunmobi 2014).

Reflecting, among others, on Bessie Head's A Question of Power, which Biodun Jeyifo (2001, xiv) describes as ‘an intricate, highly wrought novel’ containing ‘passages of haunting speculations on nothing less than the entire history of the troubled spiritual odyssey of mankind’, Shiera el-Malik situates the writer ‘alongside anti-colonialism's rejection of racialism’ with ‘an emphasis on imagination as a challenge to dehumanising practices’ (2014). El-Malik links Bessie Head and the late literary theorist and public intellectual, Edward Said, on the basis of their shared ‘epistemological points of departure’, which she describes as ‘insurrectionary approaches to the dynamics of power’. In a theory of the African condition which could be articulated from her oeuvre emphasised, for example, in her autobiography, A Woman Alone (1990) – Head links ‘poverty, white privilege and institutional political economic structures’ in explaining how racialised division of labour is created and maintained in South Africa.

Gibson Ncube analyses how the public sphere in North Africa has been re-theorised through literature by focusing on the works of Rachid O. and Adbellah Taïa. The novels of the two authors, he argues, ‘attempt to recuperate histories and discourses of “marginal” sexuality that have long been excluded and disregarded in the Maghreb’ (2014). These writers interrogate the relationship between ‘culture’ and power in North Africa in providing the discursive and, therefore, the social possibilities of change. By ‘centring on the homoerotic body’, Ncube suggests, the authors disrupt ‘the logic of homogeneity’ and show ‘that there are multiple possibilities of considering identity and sexuality’ in Arab-Muslim communities. By placing private sexuality at the juncture of publicness, Rachid O. and Adbellah Taïa not only help in convening a new kind of public, they also provoke a new understanding of publicness in an assumedly ‘unchanging’ society. Because writers can think with, and think beyond, the possible, Ncube concludes that ‘they have the potential to transform the very same sociocultural context from which they originate’ (2014).

The contributors to this special issue demonstrate in different ways, and by using different writers, how social thought is produced from specific contexts in modern Africa. However, the validity, significance and implications of such thought are not limited to the specific contexts of their production. The writers whose reflections on the social and the political questions which are examined here speak about specific conditions in the African lifeworld, yet they also speak about the conditions that enable or disable our collective humanity, both historically and contemporaneously. They produce discourses that ‘contribute to the formulation of a distinctive vision of the world determined by or derived from the African experience’ (Irele and Jeyifo 2010, xv). In their abstract reflections on the existential challenges faced by Africans, and the historical and contemporary problems that Africans face in knowing their world, African writers have helped to critically illuminate the fundamental ways in which these challenges and questions can be faced and answered, respectively. In articulating, in the realm of ideas, the field of experience in the African context and Africa's relation to the rest of the world, African writers have provided important perspectives for understanding the problem of history (local, continental and global), the nature, legitimacy, hindrances and the banality of power and the blight of disempowerment, the predicaments of ‘culture’ and modernity, the paradoxes of change and continuity, the contradictions of racial and ethnic relations, and the agential and structural possibilities that can provide intellectual solutions to the perennial problems of society.

Note on contributor

Wale Adebanwi is an Associate Professor in African American and African Studies, University of California-Davis. He obtained his PhD in political science from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and another in social anthropology from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar. He is the author of Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He can be contacted at [email protected]

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the chief editor of JCAS, Fred Hendricks, copy editor, Jamie Alexander and other members of the editorial committee for their suggestions and advice. The idea of this special issue emerged from a meeting of the editorial committee at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa where I was a Senior Rhodes Scholar. I am grateful to Adélékè Adéèkó of Ohio State University, USA, and Ebenezer Obadare of University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA, for their critical comments on the introduction. I also thank the referee for this special issue, and Lynda Gichanda Spencer, who was responsible for arranging and editing the responses to the articles.

Notes

1. Milan Kundera ([1988] 2003, 5–6) suggests that ‘The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. … A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality’.

2. Paulin J. Hountonjdi ([1976] 1983, 56) in his famous and controversial rejection of ‘ethnophilosophy’, insists that the adjective ‘African’ must not change the meaning of the substantive term of ‘thought’ (‘philosophy’), adding that the interent ’universality must be preserved’.

3. Abiola Irele (2001a, 7) has argued that ‘for historical reasons.… Africa has emerged as an operative concept, which can be applied to an entire area of existence and historical experience’. He adds that, ‘It is essential to bear in mind that this notion, starting as an ideological construction, has developed beyond this contingent factor to assume the significance of objective fact.… The term is thus closely bound up with the emergence in Africa itself of a self-focused consciousness of which literature has been an essential medium of expression’. Before Irele, famous Africanist, Melville Herskovits (1960, 15), in a paper entitled ‘Does “Africa” Exist?’, states that Africa ‘is thought of as a separate entity and regarded as a unit to the degree that the map is invested with an authority imposed on it by the map makers’.

4. I share Milan Kundera's ([1999] 2003, 43, emphasis in original) position that ‘A novelist examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility’. I think this is what the ‘truly significant’ novelist does. Abiola Irele (2001a, ix, emphasis added), evidently agrees with Kundera where he argues that ‘Modern African literature, in particular the literature expressed in the European languages, can be interpreted as a dramatization of and medication upon the problems of existence posted by this situation [of trauma]’.

5. On the basis of their articulation and/or elaboration of ‘collective thought’ (of the past and present), leading African philosopher Houndtonji ([1976] 1983, 55–56, 62–63), will reject African writers as philosophers, because he argues that ‘spontaneous, collective systems of thought common to all Africans or at least to all members severally, past, present and future, of such-and-such an African ethnic group’ is a ‘palpable fiction’. Abiola Irele (1983, 27) notes the refutation of Hountonji's ‘restrictive’ definition of philosophy, particularly regarding his dismissive attitude towards ‘the notion of a collective philosophy derived from a reconstruction of the world-views and systems of thought of traditional cultures’. Irele argues that Hountondji ‘limits the possibility of an intelligent and coherent formulation of the facts of experience’, while excluding from the purview of philosophy ‘those other areas of mental activity in which are engaged the deepest responses of mankind to experience and which cannot but add a vital dimension to the theory and practice of philosophy’ (Irele 1983, 27).

6. Writing in the same vein, Roy Sieber (1962, 8) states that ‘art for art sake – as a governing aesthetic concept – seems not to have existed in Africa’.

7. From his first play Conscience de tracteur [Translated as The Second Ark] (1979), and others La Coutume d’etre fou [The Custom of Being Crazy] (1980), Je soussigne cardiaque [I, The Undersigned Heart] (1981), La parenthèse de sang [Parenthesis of Blood] (1981), Antoine M’a vendu son destin [Antoine Sold me His Destiny] (1986), Moi, veuve de l’Empire [I, Widow of the Empire] (1987), to his novels, L’Ante-peuple [The Antipeople] (1983) and La vie et Demie [Life and a Half] (1979).

8. His parents are from the Republic of Congo (otherwise called Congo-Brazzaville) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (otherwise called Congo-Kinshasha).

9. In this work – and also in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and A Dying Colonialism (1965) –Fanon, before Achebe, Ngugi and many other modern African writers, theorised the nature of colonialism and racism ‘and the psychological damage they caused in colonial peoples and in the colonizer’, as Kwame Anthony Appiah (2008, vii–viii) rightly argues. Fanon ‘also wrote provocatively about the role of violence in the anticolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth century and his ideas were enormously influential on intellectuals around the world’ (Appiah 2008).

10. Akin Adesokan (2012, 1), in writing about this corpus of work which we have grouped under ‘post-modern/neo-liberal moment’ literature argues that the novel of this era ‘remains fraught with a paradox, the productive foreignness of a sensibility that is estranged from its own interests’. Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton (2008, ix) also reflect the tension of and in this categorisation among the ‘emergent generation of writers the most visible and celebrated of whom now reside in Euro-America, and whose corpus forms part of a borderless, global, textual topography’.

11. Some find it difficult to identify Mahfouz as an ‘African writer’. He too, as his reaction to the Nobel Prize in 1988 again emphasised, saw himself as an ‘Arab writer’. However, since Egyptians are Africans, even if also Arabs, Mahfouz cannot but be considered an African writer. He was certainly one of the continent's most outstanding writer-social thinkers. The Swedish Academy in awarding him a Nobel Prize stated that Mahfouz's ‘rich and complex work invites us to reconsider the fundamental things in life’.