Here is an African proverb for you: ‘Until the lion has its own historian, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’.
African fiction has, at its core, been about passing a deep message across, rather than being fiction for the sake of fiction. While you may contest the wisdom in this, it is the reality of African fiction and one that did not just appear but was born from decades of being spoken about and, consequently, fighting to do the speaking instead.
One definition of Politics, according to the Oxford Languages is ‘activities aimed at improving someone’s status or increasing power within an organization’. I chose this definition because it best explains where this post is going. Keyword here is power. Power to fix a narrative, power to be heard, power to be, to live in a state of dignity and confidence in one’s identity.
Literature is a form of fight back and has always been because stories move the common man—not legislative bills, not policies read on podiums or spread through newspapers with their heavy terms and statistics, but stories.
This happened, and so this happened, and so this happened.
“The black man was a barbarian and so we alighted to teach him how to be human—to be civilised, and force was necessary like with domesticating wild animals.”
“The black man is not much different from an ape so to be truly human, they must speak our language, denounce their culture (though in the same breath we claim they have no culture) and let us teach them our ways—the human ways.”
Chinua Achebe said, “to justify the plundering they’d done, the white man had to tell stories” and these stories never favoured the black man. African literature began, in part and in earnest, as a reclamation of the narrative.
Chinua Achebe’s works, starting with Things Fall Apart, a story depicting Africans in their elements with customs and systems and a working power structure, as humans with feelings and the complexity that is the human nature, was a response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and a reclamation of the black man’s identity. Then when that was done, and Nigerians became disillusioned as those in power continued from where the white man stopped, he wrote about politics and corruption in books like Anthills of the Savannah and A Man Of The People.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in A Grain Of Wheat challenges the apartheid and writes about the Mau Mau Uprising, an actual fight for the freedom of the Kenyan citizen. And when, in his older years, he refuses to write in the colonial language and instead writes The Perfect Nine in Gikuyu, he raises another fist to the colonial influence on his creativity.
How about our Francophone kin, Leopold Senghor, Aime Césaire, Leon Gontran Damas and David Diop with their poems and blazing pens denouncing the narrative that to be fully human, fully civilised, you must be less black and more French? The politics of the Negritude movement was the reclaiming of the black identity in the face of French assimilation.
Next, we have Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta, the torchbearers of feminism in African fiction. Like with Chinua Achebe humanising the African man from the caricature sketched by the white man, these women told stories of women as women rather than as men’s playthings. They moulded women from one-dimensional sex objects into moving, thinking people capable of influencing their world. They protested against the portrayal of women by male writers in their time.
Even with contemporary writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Half of a Yellow Sun (war, displacement, feminism), Damilare Kuku with Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow (feminism, body autonomy, sexuality) and Chimeka Garricks with Tomorrow Died Yesterday (oppression, corruption, violence), we see retellings of socio-political issues from the vantage point of the affected.
Here, the lion tells the story, so history does not record the hunter as hero.
Whether through stories about gender and sexuality, corruption, war and displacement, feminism, or harmful cultural practices, African fiction has always been political.
And whether writers want to admit it, we write from a place of experience no matter how fantastical our imaginings, and every thinking human is influenced by their socio-political reality.
So, the question isn’t whether African fiction is political—it is—but whether someday African fiction will be ‘just fiction’. And African writers will be free from the pressure to write something profound and groundbreaking or give deep meanings to their characters and draw parallels to people or events in the political space.
Sometimes I envy Western writers, not for anything but the freedom to write without so much scrutiny and expectations from literary critics and readers alike who have been taught to see their fiction as intellectual fiction and nothing else. I envy that they can write whatever they want without feeling the need to make it make sense or speak to a social issue; that they do not worry about being misrepresented or read as a form of exotic literature.
African fiction still has much to protest: not much has changed in politics since the time Chinua Achebe wrote his books, so writers will keep writing fiction that is political in everything but name. Looking at the state of things, this will continue for a while, but nothing lasts forever, and maybe the very protest nature of African fiction will result in the death of African fiction as protest literature.
Maybe we will protest our way out of protest, protest against protest. Decide to not let colonialism or politics be the yardstick for good African fiction, like Mubanga Kalimamukwento and her award-winning novel, Obligations to the Wounded, about the lives of Zambian women, with a focus on love, obligations, family, and belonging. Not dominant discourses in African literature, but powerful despite, and maybe because, of this.
Maybe there will come a time when we decide what we will write or export to the Western audience because we own our stories and no longer pander to what is tasteful to their palate. Maybe there will come a time when our own publishers will be giants, in Africa and the world, and African fiction will, finally, stop trying to prove a point and bask in the beauty of being ‘just fiction’.
Maybe, someday, African fiction will no longer be synonymous with politics. But until then, the lion must keep writing its story.
