Representing Africa: Revisiting African Realism of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

The originality and energy of African fiction in the 1960s and 1970s derived in part from the fusion of the allegory and symbolism of indigenous narratives with the modes of European bourgeois and socialist realisms. Pan-Africanism, Marxism, and the cultural retrieval of nationalist nostalgia and aspiration all constructed competing accounts of what Africa meant. Each position claimed for itself a correct representation of Africa's reality and opposing versions of that reality and their corresponding realisms were designated as utopian or naïve or non-African and therefore false and falsifying. Implicit in each mode was a claim that it represented a continental experience, which derived from a coherent black experience. Although these modes were very different, the novels that make up the canon of those decades constitute a highly politicized literature. This has created a habit of assuming that the duty of African literature is to discover in the particular and the local what is typical of the continent. Was the politically engaged literature of the 1960s and 1970s a phase in Africa's decolonization or is it inherent in a subject called African literature? Within the canon of those decades is another African reality discernible that is not serving some continental polemic and yet is true to an African reality?