The title of this article is multidimensional. How was García Márquez’s writing received and distributed in Africa? Beyond Africa’s colonial languages—Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Arabic—into what continental languages was it translated (Swahili, Berber, Chichewa, Malagasy, Sotho, Amharic, Swazi, Comorian, Somali, Oromo, Manding?) and distributed, in what numbers, by what networks, and to which cities of Africa’s forty-eight sub-Saharan nations with their 750 to 3,000 languages? García Márquez published a few articles about Africa and traveled to Africa, reporting, speaking, and conferring. Thereafter the African diaspora in the Caribbean figured more prominently in his work. Finally, and most importantly, the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude inspired and validated writers in possession of rich regional folklore crossed by the stresses of modernization, postcolonialism, and language politics. African writers had already novelized their folklore (e.g., Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola and Guinea’s Camara Laye), experimented intertextually and historically (e.g., Mali’s Yambo Ouloguem), and ironized their history (e.g., Cameroon’s Mongo Beti and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe). The term that was originally interchangeable with “magic realism,” “the marvelous American real,” had been coined to describe Haiti, that is, the African diaspora. Such writers as Sierra Leone’s Syl Cheney-Coker, Nigeria’s Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe, Ghana’s Kojo Laing, Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Mozambique’s Mia Couto found their realities newly believable—and readable. As the British-Ghanaian Nii Parkes observed, “One Hundred Years of Solitude taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own.”
Bury my bones but keep my words: The interface between oral tradition and contemporary African writing
