War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill an existing gulf in the Nigerian Civil War narrative and create an alternative discourse against the largely upper class, male-centered voices that have hitherto characterized civil war novels.

The “African male literary tradition” and revisionist polemics in Isidore Okpewho’s writing

African literature has been very polemically, but usefully engaged, by feminists and other concerned gender stakeholders in the past three decades on the note that its foundational discursive platform of representation is patriarchal, largely representing the female body as ‘absent’ and ‘other’ in the imaginative landscape of canonical African(ist) expression. While these critical efforts have significantly succeeded in interrogating phallocentrism in African male writing, they have, however, failed to recognize several masculinist indicators in the latter that have purposively undermined the hegemonic/patriarchal frame of maleness. In this article I argue, through a reading of Isidore Okpewho’s first three novels, that certain representations of African male writing preceding those of the contemporary turn portray revisionist attitudes to patriarchy, or any form of hegemonic masculinity. In these, the African woman is made to gain visibility and she becomes active on her own social terms. I thus debunk popular feminist-oriented claims that the canonical African literary male tradition necessarily inscribes the African woman in the stereotypical narrative of being a ‘mother-nation/mother-Africa image’, ‘prostitute’, ‘witch’, or socio-cultural other. I suggest a more careful, distilled, and responsible approach toward the politics of agency and power involving gender and identity (re)formation in the African world, culture, and literature.

Speculative vertices, Ogun mythopoesis, and (the) fourth/further stage(s)

Wole Soyinka’s seminal essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” which appears as appendix in his collection of critical essays, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), has been read and critiqued as an important work of myth, mythopoesis, tragedy and the Yoruba pantheon. To date, no meta-critical study has yet treated the essay as essentially speculative fiction, or as an invented model or construct for variegated possible future applications, or even as an authentic African futuristic artistic invention. This is important in present times as a resurgence of earlier genres and trends populate the literary world, thereby raising the need for underpinnings, connections, projections, and conflations such as this article presents. With the application of archetypal author-, text-, and context-oriented theoretical modes alongside historicity, this essay navigates and re-interrogates “The Fourth Stage” and its numerous critiques in the contexts of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, finding it a practical model for African futuristic mytho-cultural and literary productions. I also through this essay expose the multiple areas of possible applications of such inventiveness in the reappraisal and re-interrogation of the problematics and maladies of the postcolony.

Une si tendre critique: L’Afrique des écrivains migrants d’origine congolaise en Belgique francophone

The article is dedicated to the portrayal of Africa in the writings of the French-speaking Belgian writers of Congolese origins. We analyse subjective representations of Africa, both critical and idealized ones, from which emerges a vision of the continent brimming with contradictions. On the one hand, it is an alluring, vast and fertile land with abundant flora and fauna, as well as clime and landscape dearly missed by migrant writers – the land embodying the concept of “paradise lost” or the notion of a nursing mother identified in the migrant writers’ texts with the idea of homeland. On the other hand, although abundant in natural resources, Africa appears to be the continent of extreme poverty, hunger, violence, racism, persecution and ethnic cleansing – the territory still exploited by global powers on which colonialism unveiled its new face defined by a seemingly neutral term – globalization. This dichotomous representation – a far cry from the simplified, impoverished visions of Africa offered by the European media – is conditioned by the specific existential situation of the migrant writers: remaining physically away from Africa, but still having a deep emotional, mental and cultural connection with their land, they are capable of perceiving it in a different light – thus, from a perspective which sharpens critical thinking and with tenderness resulting from the longing for their homeland. Hence, the circumstances of the migrant writers allow them to take an idiosyncratic, ambivalent and intellectually-affective stance – a specific critical tenderness, or: tender critique – through the prism of which the writers depict African realities and change the perception of these realities in the consciousness of the European readers.

Die vermeldingsnetwerk van gekanoniseerde Afrikaanse skrywers in die Afrikaanse literatuurstudie (2000–2020)

From the point of view of systems and field theory, the value attached to a work of art, for example a literary text, is not only the result of the intrinsic characteristics of the text but also includes connections with institutions such as publishers, and factors like literary prizes, the value judgments of literary historians, of reviewers, and of literary critics. The current study examines the mentions of canonized Afrikaans writers in nine academic journals over the past two decades, taking into account more than 5 000 publications and more than 70 000 pages. It is shown which authors are mentioned most, but also which authors are mentioned most often together, and it is shown that authors are mostly mentioned together in the terms of genre. Although the current study represents a large study of the visibility of authors in the study of Afrikaans literature, suggestions for further research are also made.

Culture and Igbo notions of masculinity in Nigerian children’s literature

Children’s literature conveys the cultural and indigenous artistic experiences of the people to whom it is attributed. Earlier studies on modern Nigerian children’s literature focus mainly on the representation of moral etiquette with little attention to gender. The twin theme of culture and masculinity has not been paid close attention by scholars of children’s literature in Nigeria. In applying Igbo notions of masculinity, in this article I examine the role of oral tradition and culture in the construction of masculine identity in children’s literature in Nigeria using Ifeanyi Ifoegbuna’s Folake and Her Four Brothers, Anthonia Ekpa’s Edidem Eyamba and the Edikang-Ikong Soup, and Ikechukwu Ebonogwu’s The Champion of Echidime. I show how the ideals of masculinity, as visible and permissible in the traditional Igbo society, are, in particular, constructed and communicated through various oral and cultural norms such as praise poetry, war songs and dance, wrestling, and drumming. I reveal that oral and cultural traditions in children’s literature reflect attributes such as strength, toughness, honour, protection, respect, heterosexual desirability, and the projection of self-pride as acceptable and embraced masculine values among the Igbo in Nigeria. I also demonstrate how oral and cultural tradition is replete with masculine ideologies and messages that promote male dominance in the Igbo society.