Corresponding with the city: Self‐help literature in urban West Africa

Abstract

Contemporary West African self‐help literature is preoccupied with the theme of marriage. The reader’s correct choice of marriage partner and subsequent happiness in the home are fundamental concerns of the genre. This article asks about the extent to which locally published self‐help literature – and popular literature more generally – is inseparable from urbanization in West Africa. Do these pamphlets arise as a direct consequence of urbanization in the late 20th century? What kind of “self” is produced to be “helped” in this literature? In addressing these questions, the article situates locally published self‐help literature in relation to recent theorizations of urbanization and popular culture in Africa, and in relation to the fierce current debate about the usefulness of “modernity” as a term to describe postcolonial urban cultures. Popular misogyny is also addressed, and the controlling role played by God in West African discussions of marriage and relationships. The article suggests that the authors of self‐help pamphlets in West Africa can be regarded as “urban correspondents”, corresponding with the city as its writers, its products and its cultural echoes.

Keywords:

• self‐help
• urbanization
• popular literature
• West Africa
• modernity
• marriage

Notes

1. This personal information is drawn from a short interview with Stella Adebayo in Lagos on 10 August 2005.

2. The problem of identifying reliable publication dates for West African popular pamphlets, and the reasons for their elusiveness, are discussed below. When no publication dates have been printed inside pamphlets I have written “nd” but I have also included a date inside parentheses to indicate the year in which the text was purchased. I am grateful to Esther de Bruijn for providing me with a copy of How to Choose Your Life Partner Without Making a Mistake by Evelyn Tay.

3. To a large extent, Dartey’s pamphlet is cushioned from the difficulties faced by other self‐published authors in the cities, because it is published under the auspices of the Christian Council of Ghana, which paid for it to be printed at the Anglican Press in Accra.

4. As Esther de Bruijn suggests, since 2000 increasing numbers of women writers have started to appear in print in Ghana. For a study of female‐authored self‐help pamphlets and the contradictions faced by Christian women marriage guidance counsellors, see Newell, “Devotion”.

5. This is not to imply that the movement of culture and commodities in West Africa takes place on a level cultural playing field in which contemporary global citizens share resources freely among one another. American culture is hegemonic in West African cities, as in other poverty‐stricken nations, and it is often regarded by postcolonial consumers as a sign of social and economic “superiority” to their own social and economic forms (see Appadurai).

6. African cities must not be regarded simply as products of colonial and postcolonial history. Each African town has its own particular history, often stretching back several centuries. A plurality of political, doctrinal, economic, military and architectural formations make up Africa’s urban geographies: the African city is not simply a “modern creation” (Anderson and Rathbone 11; see also O’Connor).

7. For a small sample of such novels, see Ayi Kwei Armah, Tadjo, and Okri.

8. For a discussion of the ways in which “the crisis” constitutes contemporary African subjectivities, see Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman. Mbembe and Roitman argue that African selves are severed from the past and the future as a result of “the crisis”. Forced to improvise constantly in order to survive, people are stranded in an immediate present, and they respond to this perpetual “contemporaneousness” with extremes of mental and physical violence (99–100; see also Simone, For the City 5).

9. On the differentiation between the terms “popular literature” and “locally produced literature”, see my introduction to Readings in African Popular Fiction.

10. See, for example, A Native’s (pseud.) Marita, or the Folly of Love, which was originally published between 1886 and 1888 in The Western Echo of colonial Ghana. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Samuel Smiles’s Self‐Help was immensely popular in West Africa, particularly in Ghana’s literary and debating clubs; Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People became popular after the Second World War.

11. Wheelan finds that 85% of American self‐help books are written by men (84); this gender percentage is probably slightly higher in West Africa, where women have emerged only recently in significant numbers as popular novelists.

12. The label “textual commodity” is my own, and requires further theorization and development; it is inspired by studies such as Wendy Simonds’s Women and Self‐Help Culture: Reading between the Lines (1992), in which the history of self‐help books is analysed in relation to the development of consumerism in Western society.

13. For a small sample of the many studies and discussions of changing gender relations in West African cities, see Dinan; Nugent; Ekekwe; Turner; Barber “Popular Reactions”.

14. The critique of the term “postcolonial” is extensive and familiar (see Mohanty; Ahmad).

15. For studies of the burgeoning West African home video and DVD markets, see Meyer and Moors; see also Okome; Dogbe.