Rethinking the future of Humanities in Africa and the question of epistemological agency

Using Bergson’s theory of history and Foucault’s concept of knowledge as power, among others, the paper argues that the field of Humanities in Africa should be reconceptualised into African Humanities in order to effect what Deleuze and Guattari have defined as conceptual self-semiotisation. The discipline must undertake, as in the past, a continual critique of the concept of the human subject, but without dethroning it as proposed by some Post-structuralists. It must focus on how globalisation, science and technology impinge on the formation of subjectivity in Africa, including Malawi. Moreover, it must enact a strategic epistemological self-determination by appropriating, adapting and reconstituting received dominant theories and practices, which entails being both counter-hegemonic and consciously, but selectively, part of the dominant formation. It offers other strategies for implementing that shift, such as the deployment of the historical traditions of epistemological resistance as well as cultural and political decolonisation, as those advanced by Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, Chimombo, Oruka and Wiredu, among others.Keywords: African, Malawi, Epistemology, Human, Humanities, Subjec

Colonialism, trauma and affect: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as Oduche’s Return

The paper examines Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, which deals with the advent of colonialism in Nigeria, as a trauma narrative. It argues that, though the novel has generally and profitably been read as exemplifying the problem of cultural conflict in Africa, seen through the prism of the writer’s last memoir, its primary aim is clearly to map out a genealogy of a certain “African Post-colonial structure of feeling,” in which the fracture of traditional society in the face of colonialism dramatized in the novel is seen as, to a large extent, a symptom of the foundational trauma of Umuaro’s genesis. Thus, it is argued that Achebe deploys the fiction-genre as a discursive site for mourning the loss of a Pre-colonial cultural and political space. However, the paper does not read trauma in terms of the repetition compulsion complex proposed by Freud and Post-structuralist trauma studies, but instead, it attends to the ways in which the novel rehistoricizes trauma as a way of working through it. It considers the act of writing the novel itself as part of that process of working out the historical trauma of Post-colonial affective dysfunction

Kujoni: South Africa in Malawi’s national imaginary

This article recovers the literary and political value of Legson Kayira’s novel, Jingala (1969), dismissed as lightweight by earlier critics. I argue instead for the seriousness of its engagement with a significant aspect of Malawian life, namely the country’s historical reliance on the export of migrant labour to its mineral-rich neighbours, especially South Africa. Between 1900 and 1988, the country was the second largest supplier of contracted labour to the South African mines after Mozambique. Kayira’s novel offers significant new insights into the effects of migrant labour on Malawians’ consciousness of South Africa and themselves. In light of South Africa’s current membership of the BRICS (the economic collaboration of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as well as the BRICS’ claim to provide an alternative to the imperial legacy of Africa’s relationship with the west, a fresh look at Jingala will allow us to reconsider Malawi’s relationship with South Africa, that country’s historically imperialist role in the region and the legacy of ‘kujoni’ -- labour migration to Johannesburg, the city that represented South Africa and its opportunities. Using a broadly cultural materialist approach and Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography, as well as a world-systems theory approach nuanced by recent work in globalisation theory, the article maps out the imagined geography of South Africa represented in the novel and considers how it intervened in everyday life

Imagined nations and imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe’s quest for a country

The paper argues that Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There was a country: a personal history of Biafra (2012) articulates a hankering after a home, a habitable country in the context of colonially-derived contradictions embedded in the institutional formation of Nigeria, the failure of the nationalist and postcolonial leadership to resolve such contradictions as well as the legacy of ethnicity. It demonstrates how the memoir expresses the writer’s despair at unfulfilled hopes, whilst also celebrating utopic moments such as his colonial childhood, the independence of Nigeria and the founding of Biafra. It is the dramatic contrast between promise and actuality that engenders a deep sense of loss, just as it is what inspires the belief in the possibility of a transformed and habitable Nigeria. For its conceptual framework, the paper uses trauma theory, particularly Dominick LaCapra’s, Cathy Caruth’s, Roger Luckhurst’s and Georgio Agamben’s and also theories of national and subject formation, such as Homi Bhabha’s, Benedict Anderson’s and Louis Althusser’s. Furthermore, it argues that the memoir is committed to truth-telling as demonstrated by its breaking the national silence over the Nigerian civil war (1966-1970) and its assertion that a genocide had been perpetrated against the Biafrans and that there is need for accountability and justice

The novel and decolonization in Africa

The Chapter examines the development of the novel in Africa in relation to the movement of decolonisation, reflecting on why the novel emerged at the same time as the concern with decolonisation and what particular conditions made it a discursive site where questions of history, colonial and Post-colonial identity and the role of culture in public life became central

Sexual Politics in Malawian Popular Fiction: The Case of Aubrey Kalitera\u27s Why Father Why

Aubrey Kalitera is one of the most prolific writers of popular fiction in Malawi. He has published numerous novels and short stories. In 1976, his novel No Taste of Business was published by Heinemann East Africa. Since then, however, he has followed the example of David Maillu of Kenya by setting up on his own: writing, printing and distributing his own works. In 1987, Kalitera surprised Malawi by producing and direct-ing what is perhaps the first ever commercial film to be made locally.^ He is one of several writers within the country trying to provide a Malawian form of popular fiction for a huge local readership of western popular literature. Despite the effort of writers like Kalitera, there has been negligible critical attention paid to them largely on account of the overall neglect that popular literature has historically suffered in academe. The advent of Deconstmction has, to a large extent, changed the way we perceive relations of difference within the domain of Uter-ary inquiry. This critical approach has sensitized us to the way literary taxonomy is grounded in various discursive and material practices which are linked to broader political interests in society. In the Httle that has been published on African popular literature so far, there is no account of the manner in which such fiction manages the question of gender even though one might argue, it is popular literature more than high literature that is likely to give us a more accurate indication of existing gender ideologies since the former more than the latter, as Antonio Gramsci once observed, is intimately connected with traditional notions of power

Divine ways of cognition: the burden of the poet-seer in Soyinka's Idanre

Book synopsis: Literary duelist and inimitable dramatist, Soyinka, bursts into the historical scenes of Africa, taking on issues and societal flaws that most writers simply leave ou

Post-colonial theory

Book synopsis: 350 A-Z entries cover major topics including historical figures and important social movements, producing an essential resource for teaching and research Extensive cross-references and a complete bibliography for each entry guide further reading A comprehensive subject index, topical outline, and directory of contributors provide valuable tools for inquiry and research Written by a team of nearly 200 contributors, including many noted scholars, under the editorship of F. Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo of Harvard University 75 black and white illustrations offer visual perspective and support to comprehensive textual conten

Detecting globalisation, modernity and gender subjectivity in David Maillu's Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DXT

Through a study of his detective novel, Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DX, and the debates surrounding the emergence of East African Popular literature in English, this paper reflects on the contribution of the Kenyan writer, David Maillu, to the production of a Popular discourse of Post-colonial African modernity. It argues that Maillu engages with the formation of new personal and public identities within a Post-colonial formation in which the Nationalist goal of full Decolonisation has given way to Neo-colonialism and an unethical Globalisation, facilitated by a corrupt leadership. It also contends that, whilst Maillu's adaptation of “the man of action” model from the classic Western Hardboiled novel offers him an imaginative hybrid counter-hegemonic narrative of agency and structure, it also blunts the radical edge of his proposal, as it forces him to accept undemocratic and patriarchal forms of power. Even so, the paper concludes that Maillu must be seen as a significant writer who has shown how African Popular literature in its heyday was not a purveyor of “corrupt” pleasures, but rather a site of serious debate about the character of Post-colonial modernity

Wilson Harris

Book synopsis: 350 A-Z entries cover major topics including historical figures and important social movements, producing an essential resource for teaching and research Extensive cross-references and a complete bibliography for each entry guide further reading A comprehensive subject index, topical outline, and directory of contributors provide valuable tools for inquiry and research Written by a team of nearly 200 contributors, including many noted scholars, under the editorship of F. Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo of Harvard University 75 black and white illustrations offer visual perspective and support to comprehensive textual conten