Francis Abiola Irele: contemplations on the ‘power of events and the African experience’ in African literature.

Abstract

Throughout his professional career, Professor Francis Abiola Irele worked to celebrate African arts and letters. His reflective life of the mind sought meaning in both traditional and contemporary African life and experience. Irele’s spirit of intellectual generosity, almost boundless in its scope of substantive observation and depth, contributed substantially to the development of African literary studies. Beginning with his monograph, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, through his editorships of encyclopedia and journals, this essay examines how Irele crafted a theoretical framework that lifted and continues to maintain African literary studies unto the world stage. In many ways, Irele’s contributions to African literary studies, substantiates Frantz Fanon’s statement that, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Irele’s intellectual oeuvre closely observed and followed the rise of African literature’s capacity to defy a continent’s subjugation as it strives to fulfill a civilizational shift in ways that continue to engage the imagination of African intellectuals and Africanists, globally.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa’s self-assertion
• African identity
• African intellectuals
• age grade
• age-grade Irele
• altruistic humanitarianism
• colonialism
• literacy
• Igbo
• indigenous African languages
• language question
• Life of the African Mind
• Mbari
• Irele
• memory
• oral storyteller
• oral tradition history
• slave trade
• Western educated elite.

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Notes

1 In many African communities, and depending on local calendars, each age-grade includes those born within seven to ten years of each other. Depending on relevant socio-cultural and-political issues, events, and so on used to calculate and determine relevance for an age-grade, different communities expect each group to work in ways that will enable them advance the community through the setting of and accomplishment of visible personal and collective goals. Here, Age-Grade Irele includes those African intellectuals who found themselves at the cusp of the development of African nations’ engagement of European education during the middle to late colonial period.

2 This does not mean that these two groups were in agreement about Africa’s colonial dilemmas. Rather, it means that each group knew that the drastically changing socio-cultural-political situations needed smart mediation. The frequency with which the works (fiction, poetry and prose) of early contemporary African writers like Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Mabel Segun, John Pepper Clarke, Wole Soyinka, and others reach into the traditional African corpus indicates that they were aware of their own need for ancestral support in the ongoing socio-cultural conflicts presented, to them, as shifts to a new modernity.

3 Many African scholars have noted African cultural predilections for predicting and maintaining continuity through the family. For many African societies, having children ensures, among other things, that there is someone to remember one’s name in perpetuity. A significant challenge of European colonization of Africa was this silencing of Africa’s history by muting African languages (and, therefore naming practices) during the first moments of the new dispensation.

4 Given the name of Okonkwo’s father, this would be one of the ways to fully refer to Okonkwo in the Umuofia community. Unoka means: Home-is-Supreme

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Notes on contributors

Anthonia C Kalu

Anthonia Kalu is a professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature & Languages; and, Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. She is a Past President (2013–2014) of the African Literature Association, USA. Kalu’s interests include African literatures, African American literature, African gender studies, and women in development. Her research interests include African and African American literatures and literary theory construction, Women in the African Diaspora, African development issues and multiculturalism. Her selected published works include articles in journals like Africa Today, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review, the Atlantic Literary Review, Seminar, Journal of African Literature, and the Literary Griot. Other publications include, Women, Literature and Development in Africa (Africa World Press, 2001); Broken Lives and Other Stories (Fiction) (Ohio University Press, 2003); and Rienner Anthology of African Literature (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) – the first work of its kind in African literature. She is co-editor of Reflections: An Anthology of New Works by African Women Poets (2013), the eBook, Chinua Achebe: A Tribute (1930–2013) (ALA Books, 2013.