Comic Interpreting in African Literatures

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative approach that connects Anglophone and Francophone colonial contexts through an underlying dynamic that hinges on humor. Reading scenes from Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, it examines the fundamental assumptions that transmitters and receivers of messages make about their purpose and authority in an interpreting exercise. This is in order to show how those rules are belittled by interpreters in colonial or settler fiction, when their function is comic. Even so, the humor transcends the colonial encounter. Deliberately or through ignorance, the interpreters studied here create a form of cultural mediation that takes advantage of the disarray created by existing power differentials. They create a new narrative where appearances matter more than accuracy or fidelity and where “official” messages are subverted to the benefit of humor.