But Why, Father?
looking back on the legacy of the African Writers Series, fifty years on
David Kaiza
I n the oil-lamp lit room, the father, sitting across from his British-educated
son, attempts to assert his authority on a matter violently testing his faith.
We can almost hear his voice tighten:
“You cannot marry the girl.”
“Eh?”
“I said you cannot marry the girl.”
“But why, father?”
“Why? I shall tell you why. But first tell me this. Did you first find out or try
to find out anything about this girl?”
“Yes.”
“What did you find out?”
This “anything” about “this girl” (Clara, whom we do not dislike), concerns a resilient pre-colonial taboo. Just as Roman Catholicism had, nearly
two millennia before, wound the revolutionary faith from Judea around
pagan Roman rites, so too will Christianity not pry loose Obi’s family from
old Igbo don’ts. And on this most ancient of ancient matters—passing the
family seed—unyielding traction develops. Hence, through the father, who
daily rouses the family at dawn for supplication to the new deity, the contradiction wells out into the open:
“My son…I understand what you say. But this thing is deeper than you think.”
Thus, in its single-minded march, Chinua Achebe’s novel, No Longer at
Ease (1963), tightens on the theme of displacement-leading-to-eventual-fall;
Obi’s fall a caricature of the central leitmotif of his great-grandfather,
Okonkwo’s. Obi graduates from the sly “Eh?” to a plaintive “But why,
father?” before lurching for the finality of a tautology; as when a failure to
broker an agreement breaks down into chair-flinging, or as with the suicidal
rope that, climaxing Things Fall Apart (1958), marks the final stringing up
of old Africa, we hear the irreversible break in his voice:
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Daddy’s Little
Angel. Linocut
210 x 105cm.
©2010 Motsamai
Thabane.
Courtesy of
iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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Xilo xi n wana
ni n wana xi
ni nkoka eka
nw winyi wa
xona. Linocut
210 x 105cm.
©2010 Philemon
Hlungwani.
Courtesy of
iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
“But all that is going to change. In ten years things will be quite different from
what they are now.”
In ten years things will be quite different. We are not reading Things Fall
Apart, and since literary characters don’t know that they are literary characters, we can assume that Obi did not read Things Fall Apart either, for he
is threatening his father with a calamity that Achebe’s previous novel
already dramatized. In the more than half-century since Christianity gutted
the world of his great-grandfather, the times that Obi predicts will come
are the times in which he is already living.
Should one require a précis of Africa’s literature from the 1960s, this passage offers all the elements: Obi as Ocol, Obi as Egbo of the smart set of Wole
Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965); the type populating that cache of books like
spawn stranded outside the moist pool of time. Read No Longer at Ease and
you have nearly covered the African Writers Series (AWS) syllabus.
To read the AWS now is to feel how much the awareness of change—things
becoming quite different—struck, not only the creators of these books, but the
very characters they created. Africans knew their world was going; the unease
of Lawino when “Ocol is no longer in love with the old type”; time and events
becoming the tyrants, the future which would bring freedom also bringing
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fear, sweeping village and metaphor aside. It was not paranoia. Two generations of writers and books later, we know this change has taken place when
the smell of the African world so dear to Lawino no longer appears in today’s
African books, when the smell of yams has been replaced with the smell of
“Supreme ice cream” and freshly made “strawberry fondant.”
To read these books half a century later, then, is to be aware of the
urgency with which they were written. In turn apocalyptic and heraldic,
they mourn the past and announce a second coming (Bakayoko of Sembene
Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood marching into Dakar, which is clearly a
Jerusalem; not to a crucifix, but to rapture). These writers saw themselves
as the first of a new époque. But alas, time has shown they were the last of
the old, for they were fighting a dying war against an enemy they had
overestimated, one whom time had knocked the stuffing out of.
• • •
One imagines the excitement with which readers back then turned to the
frontispiece of each new installment of the AWS. The listing of authors was
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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Mma waka
Montedi. Linocut
210 x 105cm.
©2010 Colbert
Mashile. Courtesy
of iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
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flag-hoisting, a coming-into-independence for literature. As with each year,
starting with Ghana’s independence in 1957, when a new flag was added to
the growing forest at the United Nations headquarters, so it was with the
AWS page of honor; here a writer from Cameroon has joined, there is
Angola coming in, Nigeria yet again.
The AWS’s gift to literature was the introduction of a language, a climate
of metaphor, a view of things not without its dynamism. Pumpkin roots,
egusi soup, eneke birds, Ogun, frogs jumping in broad daylight—these burst
the limits of what had been thought literarily possible, demanding attention
alongside Horatio and daffodils.
To a grateful continent, the series gifted a plot to plant a cultural flag;
appendages no more, here is the collection of our own worldview: here our
Shakespeare; here our Hard Times. To a section of Western academia then
detonating Europe’s textual heritage, the AWS stacked dynamite against
that heritage’s battlements, so in later years you had Elleke Boehmer writing
in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature that these books foregrounded “formerly marginalized historical actors—a sweeper, a peasant, a slave, an island
child, a guerrilla fighter, a fisherman.”
All the AWS writers were “great” and “powerful” and such gongs weren’t
just from African readers. Hard to tell whether it was good luck or not,
mid-century African literature was forged just as the element of literary
studies was evanescing into “cultural
studies,” and for those whom this To a section of Western academia
championed, the fame it brought was
then detonating Europe’s textual
not unwelcome. It was an unloseable
game, even for bad writers. If you heritage, the AWS stacked dynamite
were a bad writer, “textual” reading’s against that heritage’s battlements.
conflation was particularly useful. But
acclaim would have come, nonetheless, because in the 1970s decolonization
was still an unfinished business and what Ng³g² described, despite what
you thought of his prose (his “Increased waves of violence had spread all
over the country,” “A variety of accounts and interpretations,” and “A tall,
broad-shouldered person” that make it painful reading his short story, The
Martyr), was playing out in Rhodesia, Mozambique, and Namibia.
It is not the latter-day reader’s cynicism to point these out. Even back then,
the AWS’s approach was causing unease. Wole Soyinka famously refused to
have the imprint publish his books, relenting on The Interpreters, but not before
calling the series the “orange ghetto.” It was and remains the case that writers
from Africa are necessarily “African writers,” in a way that Cees Nooteboom
is not a “European writer,” and that “African writers” did and continue to
resent that tag. The numerous writers’ complaints back then, that the AWS
was controlling what was published, can be ignored because writers often
make that sort of complaint when a manuscript is rejected. However, the
charge from Ayi Kwei Armah that AWS was “a neocolonial writers’ coffle
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owned by Europeans but slyly misnamed ‘African,’” may have some merit to
it, although the content of the books and their attacks on the impact of Europe
on Africa do not fit the charge. Armah’s accusation that AWS “did its best to
stunt the growth of African talent,” was an angry one, but perhaps truer of
the low expectations held of what an African could achieve in writing rather
than the evil intentions he implied.
With hindsight, we can see that the moment of the AWS’s greatest triumph was also complicating matters for the next generation of writers. But
this goes back to the manner in which colonialism played out on the continent, and how the writers interpreted it:
• • •
The corralling of non-white populations into white dominions was a
refractory categorizer of societies, scripting the conquered into the role of
the recessive and half-made; the conqueror as the high and unshakeable.
It is a refraction that still continues in some ways today, although the world
is a much altered place. But while it held sway, the precolonial achievements
of Africa—in the metallurgy of West Africa or the medicine of BuyoroKitara, on par with or ahead of Europe—were quickly forgotten, even by
Africans.
Achievements of the Industrial Age, in reality boiling down to the growing confidence and wealth of the Western bourgeoisie (robber barons
resisted and resented by Europe’s poor and aristocrats alike), brought to
Africa a new breed of explorer-colonizer-trader, and sometime missionary.
These arrived on the continent’s shores vaulted high over human scale by
the stilts of the industrial revolution. This inflation telescoped the social context in which the greater majority of Europeans at the time lived—staggering
insecurities, exploitation, famines, ignorance, disease—depravities of the
short, nasty, brutish kind.
It would have been inconvenient to the imperial display of Sir Samuel
Baker to mention to the Acholi that he bought his wife off a slave market.
The historical forces that drove
Racist writing was confined
Europe in the wake of the 1848 revoluto the periphery, manned by tions created the nationalist fervor that
the ilk of Joyce Carey. To have would later display to Africans the fiction
that Europe was a centralized and coheresponded to Carey, as much of sive entity that had always gotten it right.
the AWS seems to have done, But imperialism was not just a catastrowas to start from the bottom. phe for Africa. History would show that,
in different milieus, it had been as devastating for the imperialist as it was for the imperiled. The social pressures
that the age unleashed on Africa likewise transformed European societies
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In memoriam
Ingwavuma van
die Timbavati
vir Credo
Vusamazulu
Mutwa, Maria
Khosa en
Linda Tucker.
©2010 Elza
Botha. Courtesy
of iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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Bitter Sweet
Journey of
South Africa.
©2010 Sandile
Goje. Courtesy
of iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
in ways no kinder to Oliver Twist than to Okonkwo; the French language
was as much forced on the Mandinka as it was launched against Bretagne.
A white Lawino would have recognized the anxieties of Normandy and
lamented after a white Ocol lost in the ways and language of nineteenth—
indeed twentieth century—Paris. Cavour’s Italian was as unrecognizable to
a Sicilian ear as English was to Lawino’s.
If all this was true, was it not also true that African pre-colonial imperialism in Songhai, Dohomey, Zulu, and Bunyoro-Kitara had, in similar
fashion, driven entire fellow African communities out of their pasts, given
them new names, new futures, killed their languages, and suppressed their
political aspirations? Had not Kiswahili, which came to be seen as a genuine
African lingua franca, its roots in the crimes of history?
The capital expansion of the last two centuries occasioned crisis globally,
devastating communities in Yorkshire, Congo, Sardinia, Belgium, and the
American South. What Africa experienced was not isolated. In terms of
human suffering, nothing that happened in Africa towards the end of the
nineteenth century compares in scale to the same transformations visited
upon China during the Taiping Wars, whose twenty million dead remains
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a staggering figure, even after Operation Barbarossa. On that score alone,
China was a far bigger loser than Africa in the nineteenth century.
The impact of the age registered powerfully in the finer works by Europeans of the time, the realization that race was not a decider of achievement
already apparent to its greater writers and artists (for the European avantgarde, Africa may have been said to be the continent of savages, but its fine
arts pointed a way to the future). Real racism is hard to find in the greater
works of European literature of the time, and where one suspects it, like in
Conrad, it mostly appears to be reflective of racial relations rather than a
direct hit from the author, for the better writing in the West was also a searching lamentation of the evils of the period. Racist writing was confined to the
periphery, manned by the ilk of Joyce Carey, whose Mister Johnson can hardly
be stacked in the ranks of Heart of Darkness. To have responded to Carey, as
much of the AWS seems to have done, was to start from the bottom.
While the foreign invader inevitably casts himself in the bad-guy role, it
takes exceptional intellectual talent in the writer to see in his appearance a
pattern of the ebb and flow of human society, for great literature, we naturally
expect, ought to see through its own times, rather than buy into its rhetoric.
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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Coelecanth.
©2010 Walter
Oltmann.
Courtesy of
iArt Gallery.
www.iart.co.za
Négritude’s stratagem stretched this to absurdity, but in spirit, the AWS’s
ecumenicalism was not far off. In an era that traded in political totalities,
salvaging “black pride” was as much a theology as Keynesianism and
Marxism. The power of its proto-catechism was hard to escape, and few,
with the exception of writers like the Nigerian playwright and poet, Wole
Soyinka, were able to do it. In the place of literary characters, the AWS
synod anointed spokespersons for the age. “What washes water?” Sembene’s
child character, Adji’bi’dji, asks a question not uncommon of children. It is
one of the few times the author permits her to talk, but suspicion that she
is a Muppet (for Sembene’s dead hand of intention shows clearly through
the fabric) quickly overtakes epiphany. Likewise, through the force of narrative, the humanity of Ramatoulaye’s household is permitted little space,
left unexplored, for the author ropes them fast to a historical role.
In life generally, social movements come to us as abstract intangibles,
and the unwieldy ephemera, indeed, fiction, of what man believes and dies
for will never have the sensory immediacy of pounded yam or an afternoon
sun. To make characters do and say ordinary, ahistorical things sets the
causes of their time in proper perspectives, for then we feel the fragility of
their humanity more acutely.
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What might Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain have sounded like through the
AWS ethos?
If we don’t feel the AWS creatures breathe, sigh, or think like sentient
beings, it is because too many were made to order. Did real life Mugos,
Bakayokos, and Obis exist only within the parallelograms of what their
creators saw as truth? By what measure is a workers’ strike in Dakar more
profound than a wildflower blossoming in Ramatoulaye’s backyard? Did a
real life Bakayoko surely not notice hibiscus? Among the myriad things
Bakayoko felt, how much did the softness or hardness of his bed decide his
mood in comparison to a speech he was rehearsing? Did he never have a
bad meal? Must we not regard him as an idea rather than a character? Did
Obi spend all his time in Lagos and not notice the Atlantic Ocean? How
about the Lagos humidity, might the weather not have been a character in
itself? What does decolonization taste, smell, or sound like?
To the attentive writer, either everything that happens is special or nothing
is. To bolster its special interpretation, a book with a preconceived idea of
human society violently disengages the multifarious, free-floating mass of
existence. Man and events are forcibly held down, kicking and screaming for
fresh air, while the writer brands them with the glowing iron of category.
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The AWS creature—speaking in strictly sensory terms—was a “forgery.”
In the end, technique, the brick-and-mortar of writing, which is transferrable
across time, too frequently counted for less than subject. The creation of a
coherent worldview in the sort of books that miss and take nothing for granted,
was brutally co-opted into a kind of protest politics, too quick to define the
group in opposition to the oppressor. To the latter generation of writer, this
created complications; for as was not yet apparent at the time, writing a book
on Africa outside of the colonial theme would require a fresh search for insights.
Without the single unifying threat of colonialism, the next generation of
writers was to see patterns of repression, except this time, it was black-onblack repression. What was seen as a “post-colonial” betrayal—describing
in spirit a similar type of government operating in Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s
Portugal, Mao’s China, Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, Argentina,
Brazil—was in short, a human story.
But the AWS, as a whole, had been too quick to lodge a patent on suffering as exclusive black property, and the confusion that resulted would
linger on for nearly four decades. Yet even within the AWS, one can detect
signs of this coming turbulence.
• • •
Few writers illustrate the difficulties involved in welding political intention
to an art form as clearly as Kenyan writer Ng³g² wa Thiong’o. With novels
ranging from the fresh sapling tale of Weep Not Child (1964) to the ambitious
A Grain of Wheat (1967), we get the outlines of confrontation between white
and black in that most virulent form of imperialism—settler colonialism:
Mugo felt nervous. He was lying on his back looking at the roof.
Sooty locks hung from the fern and grass thatch and all point
at his heart. A clear drop of water was delicately suspended
above him.
So opens A Grain of Wheat, the phrases “sooty locks,” “point at his heart,”
and “clear drop of water” gesturing overtly; one feels a vibration of excitement
at what might come. What can it mean that locks point threateningly at his heart
while a water drop is suspended above him? This narrative gesture promises
much when we realize Mugo is having a nightmare. Then he wakes up and tries
“a game he always played when he had lost sleep in the middle of the night.”
From the unconscious, through the dawn “diffusing through cracks in
the wall,” to the algorithmic playing “a game,” we have crossed disparate
barriers, as it were, left to dream for seventeen lines before we are booted
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awake by the author. But this is just the opening of the novel and it is the
enmeshing of the detention that so scarred Mugo with the coming of independence that keeps us reading.
From the start, details and characters accumulate like a generous menu
promising a gastronomic extravaganza: huts, small-holder farm implements,
long, thin morning shadows, and women from a well; then an encounter with
an old man who “ejects a jet of saliva onto the hedge.” It is this old man, Warui,
who gave Mugo the piece of land out of which he ekes a living. Warui’s introductory profile hints at an edgy relationship. He is anxious to talk, which holds
Mugo briefly. “Attacking the ground early?” he asks, and in this exchange we
sense an attempt to broach a difficult issue. “Go to it when the ground is soft,”
the old hand passes wisdom to the “reticent” protégé. Then, as though hesitating for a moment to say it, Warui “ejects” that jet of saliva. When the topic
arrives (we sense it has to be), it is a curious one. “Like Kenyatta is telling us,”
says Warui, evoking the name of the independence leader, “these are days of
Uhuru na Kazi [independence and work].” What seemed personal rises up and
at this point, we feel the hump of Big Theme underneath the blanket of impressions. But then Warui asks a dogmatic question, “And how is your hut, ready
for Uhuru?” which recoils the narrative back to the personal.
We leave Warui caped underneath his blanket, which “relieved his
wrinkled face and the grey tufts of hair on his head and on his pointed
chin.” We leave him and we encounter Githua, whose prancing seems to
be funny. It is not in Ng³g²’s arsenal to recreate scenes, so it is funny only
to the other characters in the book, not to us, and this undeveloped point
is not an isolated one. We meet Gitogo, the only son; we meet Kihika. In
fact we meet many characters and this never ends.
We leave Warui. We wade through a jumble of impressions. We leave
Warui and hope that something of the clarity with which the book opens
will rescue us.
Liberation can make for a powerful story, and in the hands of a writer
with attention to detail who knows when to hint and pursue a line, what to
leave suspended, the story can make for a powerful book. But the hands
in charge of A Grain of Wheat are Ng³g² wa Thiong’o’s, whose prose is like
a door with bad hinges; it creaks just that wide and won’t go any further.
Almost immediately, Ng³g² loses control of the narrative, never really
musters the novelistic ability to let themes play themselves out within the
dialogue and description. Only upon meeting Githua do we realize that
the romantic note with which the coming independence is sounded is not
a stylistic device, but the weepy-eyed conception of that independence, and
that these eyes are the author’s. Independence and the brutalization of the
Central Kenyans are theologized.
A preset belief in the meaning of his topic mars the fantastic stories that
history gave Ng³g². That (along with an inescapable suspicion that, in
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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Cross Pigeons.
©2010 Dikgwele
Paul Molete.
Courtesy of iArt
Gallery. www.
iart.co.za
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important ways, his novels are essays with a sprinkling of literary device)
corrodes the narrative. It is what Nigerian literary commentator Charles E.
Nnolim referred to as “blind spots” that foil Ng³g² ’s writing, turning his
books into the “proverbial dirty dish that contains a delicious meal.”
Yet, it is said that A Grain of Wheat is Ng³g²’s biggest novel—that he was
in fuller control of the novelistic elements than he had managed to do in
his previous novels.
If it is true that writers read other writers to see how they write, it is also
true that they are the most unforgiving of readers. For my generation of writers, those born in the 1970s, the AWS was classroom text. To know how to
really write, we naturally turned to the American stylists. To know about
human nature, we turned to the Russians and the Japanese. It was the order
of things. Ng³g² might teach you how to feel, from Achebe you learned how
to integrate African ideas into your writing, and Okot p’Bitek taught you how
to sound authentic. But you also needed to be wary of these subjects.
It is also true that writers rarely pay attention to themes in the books they
read. Theme is a given, a dirty word, a concession writers make to keep the
reader hooked. More compelling is the urge to show that you can really write,
“to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” However passionately the case
is made about the Mau Mau struggle, the reading writer can’t help but watch
out for the distribution of the tension weight that a large narrative imposes on
the structure, to search for what tensile reinforcement the author has integrated to counteract the massive forces bearing down upon the narrative. It
is easy to detect when a book, even with the imprimatur of the publisher’s
logo, is born an already collapsed project. You know it when a novel makes
you feel incomplete, when all it rides upon is the power of its rhetoric.
• • •
What characterizes Ng³g² characterized much of the AWS and other
books of the time to varying degrees. At the other end of the scale, it characterized Chinua Achebe and p’Bitek less than it did most, for the two come
across as among the more disciplined and persuasive of the lot. But in
Camarra Laye’s breathless prose, which made every situation exciting, we
are closer to Ng³g². Sembene Ousmane and Cyprian Ekwensi, too, are
closer to the Ng³g² camp of culpability.
We cannot in any strict way place Ayi Kwei Armah in this milieu,
though. Wole Soyinka remained untouched by it to the extent that, well
into secondary school, I unconsciously thought of Soyinka as a non-African
writer. It was not without reason. The preponderance of a particular way
of looking at the world was so pervasive that an “African writer” was not
really considered “African” if his literary creation strayed away from the
discussion of blackness. Hence, Armah was not really “African,” nor was
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Kojo Lang, whose books would remain off the reading list because he was
not particularly “African,” either.
In the heat of decolonization, too much attention to literary technique
was sacrilegious. The synod had a doctrine to pass on. By this measure, a
book such as Soyinka’s Interpreters was consigned to the difficult-writer tray,
while the less achieving The African Child (1959) was praised.
To have not experienced colonialism first hand is to fail to fully engage
with the great majority of these books, for their transfer into general human
experience is limited. Yet they had set the template by which the African writer
was to be read. It was not immediately clear at the time to a schoolboy that
the thrust of literature in the classroom was prescriptive, that it was indoctrination into a certain worldview. But with growing awareness, it became clear that
those in my generation who would become writers tended to avoid the AWS.
• • •
The decline in productivity that began for African literature in the 1970s
can also be seen as a search for another way of seeing, for it is in this decade
that we see greater experiments with technique, shifts in philosophy, and
the emergence of individual styles. The dogma that built up, which made
it risky to critique the AWS, helped little. What you disliked about the AWS
might be understandable, but that thing went deeper than you thought.
The intermediary generation of writers who wanted to marry the girl
called technique, was asked how much he had found out about her background. Such a marriage could only produce “a sick book; sick with the sickness…of the human condition”—as Achebe said memorably of Armah. But
the notoriety of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969), meanwhile,
arose not so much from what Armah was talking about as from how he talked
about it. Kojo Lang’s inexorably paced prose is a valuable suggestion on how
to see everything, a useful guide to avoid being particularistic.
In another ten years, the next generation of African writers was to look,
not back to the 1960s, but across the Atlantic, for it was not simply that
magical realism was in vogue, but that in impressive ways, the affinities of
Africa and Latin America made clear that the answers lay elsewhere.
And yet, if the 1980s were mostly barren, the 1990s might not have
existed at all, which was not the same for the early 2000s, for the generation
of writers born in the 1970s has doubtlessly formulated its own philosophy,
if not amalgamated so much from everywhere. Prose more than subject is
what propels the new Kenyan writers Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne
Owuor. In Wainaina’s new book, One Day I Will Write About This Place
(2011), we find psychological accuracy and engagement of the kind not seen
since Soyinka. In Owuor’s prose, grace and sinew combine as if her sentences were tracing the pirouettes of a dancer. Both give reflexivity to the
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African character, freeing it from social context by activating the psychological dimension neglected by too many within the AWS. In a way, the
essential liberation, as Reggae musicians say, is mental.
On the other side of the continent came the sterling success of Chimamanda Adichie, with whom the new generation will doubtless be identified, just
as Achebe was with the old. Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), is an
important riposte to the writers of the 1960s. The courage with which Adichie
confronts ethnicity, the one topic the AWS generation pretended did not exist,
has perhaps broken the most urgent taboo of African literature. Ng³g² fooled
no one when he denied its preeminence in Kenya. After Half of a Yellow Sun,
an African book that fudges with tribalism cannot be considered sincere.
The decline the literature suffered from the 1970s through to the end of
the century was perhaps inevitable, and while one might question the true
literariness of the work that AWS elevated, the series remains the single most
important record of a pan-African transition. While the new writer’s relationship to it is difficult, there is no denying that the older generation had access
to an Africa that was fast disappearing. The 1960s generation was there to
record it. It must have been quite something to have evoked the feel of carved,
worn wood, the aroma of cashew nuts in hot ash, of walking barefoot in a ripe
banana grove, to have had the privilege of penning the soul-snaring lines of
Wole Soyinka. It may not have been deliberate to evoke that world, but how
many suspected that metaphor would be one of the victims of change?
A parallel story builds up when you follow the transition of metaphor
and motif from old to new African writing, to trace how the “very” in Obi’s
“Lagos is a very big place” punctuates rapt wonder at the new city, to the
characters of Igoni Barrett’s short stories who barely notice the city. No
longer outsiders to Lagos, Barrett’s characters’ concerns are dental hygiene
and the efficiency of the bus service: Lagos domiciled, Umuofia the curious
outpost, villages to which Adichie’s Kambili and Jaja now travel in a Mercedes to experience the strangeness of pre-modern ways.
Ezeulu’s yam, taken from the “bamboo platform” and roasted over wood
fire, gives way to Tesiro Dore’s “Supreme ice cream,” “Dansa orange juice”—
freshly made “strawberry fondant” and crusted donuts as “appetizer or
dessert.” Somewhere along the way, dessert became so ubiquitous to urban
Africans that you cannot remember when you first had it anymore than
you remember your first sneeze.
The greater struggle for the new writer has been, as Gerald Gaylard
described, not only the “freeing of energies from the draconian grip of
colonialism,” but also liberation from “opposition to it.” With inexorable
cruelty, Ocol’s worldview triumphed over Lawino’s. But a fondness for the
tone and feel of the bygone era that the AWS captured, which won’t come
back, lingers on, like doting on an uncle who can’t open his e-mail, but was
a zestful swinger in his day.
Kaiza • But Why, Father?
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