Podcast: African Literature

Participants:Nicholas Carlie – HostBrita Strand Rangnes – Associate professor at the University of Stavanger, literary critic.

African literature today

Host: Hello, I’m Nicholas Carlie, and today we’ll be talking about African literature. Literature is a unique way of experiencing stories from other cultures and seeing life from another perspective. And there is a lot of exciting literature and perspectives coming out of Africa these days. Together with my guest, I will be discussing some specific examples of this, as well as the rich tradition of African storytelling. My guest is Brita Strand Rangnes. She is an associate professor at the University of Stavanger, as well as a literary critic.

Host: Hello Brita, how are you?

BSR: I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Host: It’s nice to hear you!

BSR: Likewise.

Host: I would like to talk about the surge of African voices in English literature that we are seeing. Tell me a little bit about what’s going on there.

BSR: Well, we have a lot of African writers. We’ve had a lot of African writers for quite a while, and we now have more than ever. Now we have a lot of African writers writing from within their own culture, from within their own experiences – and of course, contributing not to African literature, but to literature. So, it’s really great to see how much more diverse the field of literature is getting. We just had the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 awarded to an African writer from Zanzibar. So, a lot of things are going on right now.

Host: Would you say that we have just been ignoring them for a while, or is there something happening that is catching the world’s attention in a new way?

BSR: I’m not sure we have been ignoring them. A lot of people have been reading and enjoying African literature for a long time, and we have had a lot of really important literary voices coming out of Africa for decades. So, I’m not sure that we have been avoiding African literature, but I think that it’s becoming more and more difficult to claim that you’re well-read without also reading African writers.

Host: There’s a very rich tradition of oral storytelling in Africa. How does that translate into modern African English literature?BSR: Well, of course, that is a bit problematic, isn’t it – in the sense that the very etymology of the word ‘literature’ is linked to letters, to writing? How do you talk about oral traditions in literature? But we do see that a lot of African writers are incorporating this kind of oral storytelling, this tradition, in their literature. This is quite interesting in terms of understanding why African culture, African storytelling, has been ignored for so long. We have given preference to the written stories, not the spoken stories, in Western culture, and we then have this idea – that was quite dominant for a long time – that there was no African literature because it was oral. If we look at one of the most well-known, well-established African writers today, he is getting quite old. He was born in 1938, and he is Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer who has written a lot of novels and essays, who has written in lots of different genres. He’s been suggested for – or shortlisted for – the Nobel Prize a number of times. But in 1986, Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote a text that he called Decolonising the mind, which refers to this concept of decolonising African countries, that African countries were to liberate themselves from those European colonisers. But his idea here is that it isn’t enough to be decolonised physically, politically, geographically. You must also decolonise your mind. And here he is talking a lot about this oral tradition that was really being suppressed by colonists. And that’s why this oral tradition was neglected in schools and education systems, where classics – written classics, especially European classics – were given precedence. So, Ngugi is one of the African writers who is trying to incorporate this storytelling, what is referred to as ‘orature’ – which is the equivalent of literature, just oral – into African writing; he encourages and wants African writers to make use of that oral storytelling in their writing. And of course, the African continent is extremely diverse, and it is very, very complex. So, we don’t get one – or an – African literature; we get literature from a lot of countries, from a lot of different peoples, from a lot of different societies, communities, classes, and so on. We get very varied literature coming out of Africa, just as we get very varied literatures coming out of Europe, the states of South America, Asia, whatever. So, we get a multitude of African voices.

Host: Are there certain themes that are recurring or subject matters that are recurring?

BSR: Oh, that is really difficult to say. Just like it’s difficult to say about any sort of continent. But of course, a lot of the themes we will recognise, because they are human, right? It has to do with tradition versus expectations versus individuality. It has to do with elements of how to grow in life, how to negotiate your past. But of course, a lot of the text will also deal with specifically African issues, either conflicts or colonial and post-colonial issues. And it might deal with different geographical, cultural, religious aspects than any European or American literary tradition would do.

Host: Tell me a little bit about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is getting a lot of attention these days.

BSR: Yes, she’s gotten a lot of attention for quite a while. She’s a very interesting example of one of the most prominent African writers now. Adichie is Nigerian. She is from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria, and she has written several best-selling novels. Her most well-known would be Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah. But Adichie is also a very interesting example of a young African or a new African author/writer who is sort of trying to negotiate the tradition that she’s from with the literary tradition that she knows. And she has talked a lot about, and written about, her way into literature and how she started writing – and she started writing at a young age. She’s born in 1977, by the way. She has talked a lot about when she started writing when she was very young. As a young child, she was starting to write stories and trying to do what a lot of us do as children: to write our own stories. She was writing stories where every character had blue eyes, and everyone was eating apples. They were drinking ginger beer. They were talking about how wonderful it was that the sun finally came out and she said she’s from Nigeria. No one had blue eyes. No one drank ginger beer. She’d never tasted or seen an apple. She ate mangoes! No one talked about the sun coming out because the sun was always out. But this was what she had read in every book that she had read, which were English children’s books ... What was going on? So, this was what she thought writing was – it was writing about these people. And it wasn’t until she started reading books by another very prominent Nigerian writer, much older than Adichie – namely Chinua Achebe, who’s most well-known for his novel Things Fall Apart – that she realised that people could look like her and still be a character in a book. People could be doing what she was doing and still deserve to be written about and to be read about, which was quite an eye-opener for her – because she didn’t know that there was a way to represent her story and her truth.

Host: So, I guess perspective is the keyword here: seeing something from a different angle, from the angle of the person who actually owns the story?

BSR: Definitely. And of course, also propagandising who owns the story because we all own stories, right? But we own different parts of the story. Another example from Adichie here: she talks about when she went to the United States for the first time, and had never before thought of herself as Black, because in Nigeria, that wasn’t something that was problematised at all. And when she got to The United States, she all of a sudden had to navigate blackness. She’s written a lot about this, and she’s dealt with this a lot. Quite a few African writers have negotiated the issue of what happens when you’re transported from your society to … let’s say, the people who have gone from former British colonies and then moved to England, to London, for instance, or in the case of Adichie: Did she, when moving to the United States, become a non-American African? And how you navigate that, exposing and discussing and analysing and drawing attention to the racism and the cultural biases and so on in the United States, from a very different perspective than what we’re used to? So of course, this both deals with different perspectives within the culture, within the society, within the history of African nations – but also, of course, with the world. Because as with any other great literature, as I said, African literature is world literature and it deals with human, with global, with overall topics.

Host: If I was going to delve into African literature after this conversation, where would I begin, and can I expect anything special?

BSR: I don’t think you should expect anything special. I think you should expect to find writers that you’re going to love, writers you’re not going to like, stories you recognise as true for you, stories that you don’t particularly pay attention to … just like you would any other sort of body of literature that you want to delve into. We’re talking about a huge continent. If we look at the African writers who’ve received the Nobel Prize in Literature, we have an enormous variety of people. According to the Wikipedia page, any [Nobel Prize-winning] writer born in Africa is an African Nobel Prize winner, for instance Albert Camus. France have claimed him as their own a long time, but he was born in Africa. And then we have two white African writers from South Africa. We have Nadine Gordimer, white writer from South Africa. We have the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, and we have this year’s Nobel laureate, Abdul Razzaq Gurnah, who is writing from Zanzibar in Tanzania. He is writing and also drawing from the Arabic culture of Africa. So, we have such an enormous variety. We have a lot of female writing voices from Africa. We have had so many women writers who’ve been writing for a long time. We have new voices emerging, and I would say: start with whatever piques your interest. I have personally very much enjoyed a young writer from Zimbabwe called NoViolet Bulawayo, especially her novel We Need New Names, where she also deals both with her culture, a very specific Zimbabwe culture, but also with the United States, because her protagonist moves to the United States. So, she’s trying to negotiate both a very, very poor, destitute background in Zimbabwe and what happens when she then gets to the United States – very interesting sort of lens to watch both her Zimbabwean background and her encounter with the United States. But as I said, there are so many different voices, so many different books to choose from. So, I would say that one way to start could also be by just listening to Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘The danger of a single story’ or one of her other TED-talks or other talks that are out there – and just have fun with it. Of course, if you want to read a classic, Things Fall Apart is never wrong. If you want to read more about the political and read more of a non-fiction but yet historical account, I will definitely also recommend Decolonising the Mind. But again, there are so many interesting, wonderful books, both classic and very young emerging writers.

Host: I do feel a little silly now asking what African literature is like. It’s like asking ‘what colour are fish’? I’m curious, African literature – and we’re speaking about it as a whole – are these translated texts or are they written in the English language?

BSR: It all depends, since African literature contains a multitude of languages. Some are written in the colonial languages, be that French or English or whatever. Some are written in African languages. But most of the texts that we’ve been discussing today are written in English, because we’ve been talking about literature from former British colonies. So, these are writers that are very, very much part of English literature in the sense that they are texts that are written in English. And of course, that opens a global market, a global audience. For instance Ngugi, whom I talked about already: he’s very explicit in his text Decolonising the Mind about wanting African writers to start writing in their own vernacular, writing in their own African languages. A lot of his books over the last decades have been written in his Kenyan language, Kikuyu – and then, of course, been translated into English. So, there is a variety of languages in African literature, because there is such a variety of languages on the African continent. But a lot of them are writing in the languages of the colonisers, which also, in many ways, reflects the linguistic diversity within countries that have been randomly drawn, whether borders have been randomly drawn on a map, and whether linguistic communities will use the language of the colonisers rather than the vernaculars, which can be very, very different and varied within countries.

Host: Brita Strand Rangnes, thank you so much for your time!

Produsert av Både og for NDLA