García Márquez in Africa

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.”

Magic Realism in African Literature: A Study on Selected Works of Ben Okri and Nadine Gordimer

This article examines the evolution of magical realism as a narrative style used by African writers throughout the transition period, and how it became increasingly suited to African literary sensibilities at the time. At the same time, magical realism relies heavily on African oral traditions, serving as a site of convergence for black and white writing under apartheid, as well as exemplifying the synthesis of Eurocentric Western logic and African tradition. This article discusses the possible origins of the proliferation of African texts embracing this narrative mode in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's demise, as well as the possible reasons for the gradual abandonment of magical realist narrative strategy in the post-millennial era, while discussing magic realism in relation to Ben Okri's and Nadine Gordimer's post-apartheid novels. As a consequence of the short cohabitation of the two literary forms in African literary history, African magical realism works will be located at the intersection of celebration and disillusionment literature.

Art and Spirituality in the Covid-19 Epoch: An Exploratory Reading of Ben Okri’s Poetry

Covid-19 has infected approximately 160 million people globally since its first occurrence in China in 2019. Consequently, the whole world has been negatively impacted, with numerous people losing their lives, jobs and loved ones, including breadwinners in families. With the prevalence of the pandemic also came various views on the challenges that came with it. Literature cannot be left out of the modes that are providing an understanding of the negative impact of Covid-19 on the world. Therefore, this paper explores the poetry of the Nigerian poet, novelist and essayist, Ben Okri, in light of his thematisation of spirituality. By spirituality, it is meant the ‘recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than myself’, the times and situation(s) in which one exists’. In this paper, Okri’s poetry is considered as an essential index into how ‘the spiritual’ is conceived and articulated, even in times of pandemics. The paper adopts the Hermeneutical Approach as a theoretical lens through which Okri’s poetry may be best viewed and understood. The Hermeneutical Approach essentially entails the analysis of texts in order to develop insight or thoughtful wisdom. Furthermore, the paper proffers that Okri’s poetry is invested with a spiritual temper that makes it relevant as it encourages and makes and keeps ‘awake’ a spiritual sensibility in the people during the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis is undergirded by a predetermined set of themes, namely; race, identity, healing, spirituality, thought and consciousness that Okri poeticises about and subsequently interrogates in his poetry. In the process, Okri’s poetry also encourages spiritual renaissance and the awakening of consciousness, by tempering in a reader the inalienable fact that to change or shape reality, people ought to do it themselves. Okri’s poetry challenges people to define themselves and defy all false definitions of themselves made by others. Ultimately, the paper explicates that Okri’s poetry is charged with pointed rebuke of people’s apparent apathy towards issues such as freedom, equality and transformation (all of which belong to the great stream of ‘the spiritual’), of which he submits that people ought to take charge of how these three important entities come about and exist in society.

Universal Vision in the Fiction of Ben Okri

Okri’s fiction is a mix of fantasy, realism and oral tradition of Africa. Though the trilogy nearly covers some fourteen hundred odd pages, it doesn’t have a proper beginning or end. Okri’s view of an unnamedAfrican ghetto, which is going to get independence, is presented in these novels. He is not giving solutions to the existing problems , he is simply presenting the true nature of an African state in an elusive manner. He narrates The Famished Road through the experiences of an ‘abiku’, Azaro, a seven year old child. He uses Azaro to narrate the chaotic state of affairs in an African state , and educates Azaro with the rich African culture in the form of stories told by his mother and father, and shows the real state of Africa in the form of photographs taken by the photographer, Jeremiah. Okri’s fiction has many layers of meaning which makes the task of analysis difficult. Though several labels like magical realism, Post-colonial, post-modern text are given the trilogy defies any particular definition. After examining his Trilogy thoroughly, it seems that Okri though elusive in his writings apparently wants a new – world. The Trilogy moves in the direction of anticipating a world fine tuned to harmonious living.

Memories of Mogadishu: Reconstructing post-conflict societies through memory and storytelling

For many members of the Somali diaspora, the fear of fading memories places a sense of urgency on them to keep these stories of their homeland alive. The great African novelist Ben Okri once said, “to poison a nation, poison its stories”. Stories have the ability to harm or heal societies. Oftentimes, it is simply exclusion from the main narrative that can greatly harm or marginalize a group of people. This paper examines the use of memory in the reconstruction of a once cosmopolitan city by the Somali diaspora around the world through the Memories of Mogadishu initiative. The film by the same title is a short documentary made by the author, in which she interviews nine members of the Somali diaspora currently residing in Canada. Ultimately, this project and this paper reveal the realities of how post-conflict societies, and individuals within them, reconstruct and reconcile their memories, in this case of their former home of Mogadishu, Somalia. This paper analyses the nine interviews and is divided into the following four sections: “Memories of Mogadishu before the Civil War”, “Civil War and Leaving Mogadishu”, “Identity Revision, Memory, and Routinization”, and “Losing and Rebuilding Memories of Mogadishu (and Themselves)”.