Representing Africa in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing (review)

My interest in Africa is both personal and professional, beginning with several childhood years spent in Tanzania and continuing through a recent year researching children’s and young adult literature in South Africa. Thus, I was delighted with the opportunity to read and review Representing Africa in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing by Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, a scholar whose work was familiar to me. Although her focus in this text is on West African rather than South African children’s literature, the book both enlightened and confirmed some of my own insights (reported elsewhere) as I engaged in a “dialogue” with its ideas.

The first thing that I noted is Yenika-Agbaw’s voice describing her scholarly process and acknowledging her own personal background in Cameroon. As she states, Cameroon is one of a large cluster of West African countries each comprised of diverse cultures, but her experiences undoubtedly lend additional credibility to her authority as an Africanist scholar.

Representing Africa is a compilation of eleven chapters divided into three sections and an afterword. The first section focuses on illustration in young children’s books; section 2—drawing upon Yenika-Agbaw’s feminist/womanist critical perspective—concerns representations of young females in African children’s and young adult literature. Part 3 explores links between Africa and African Americans, while the final two chapters and the afterword examine issues of visual appeal (thus tying back to part 1) and authenticity in youth literature about Africa. Four chapters and part of a fifth are reprinted from earlier publication in national journals.

The book’s introduction establishes a unifying context for the entire collection, sets parameters for the work as a whole, and describes the author’s critical framework in cultural studies, specifically, postcolonial and womanist/feminist. The books discussed span picture books to young adult novels, in total more than 125 titles. Their authors include Africans, African emigrants to North America, and Westerners (most of whom lived or traveled extensively in Africa). As noted earlier, most books are set in West African countries, which, Yenika-Agbaw implies, have strong connections with African American roots.

Among the many compelling ideas in this book I will comment upon just a few. First, the issue of an author’s insider or outsider status, although far from new, is given fresh nuance. Rather than a simple identity dichotomy of either being an African by birth or not, Yenika-Agbaw, citing Trinh Minh-ha, acknowledges the complication of that status, particularly for emigrants who no longer remain quite insiders when they depart the continent. Further, even an insider’s perspective may be influenced by colonial education and taint portrayals of African cultures as backward or needy. The prevalence of writing in a European language— most commonly, English—also is an issue that contributes to colonial domination, even as there clearly are market-driven reasons for such a choice. Finally, Yenika-Agbaw also notes the tendency of many outsiders to conflate Africa’s diversity and the fact that the continent comprises more than fifty countries, each with diverse ethnicities and languages within their national borders. She points out that being of Cameroonian origin does not make her an insider even for all the different cultures in Cameroon, much less for the various West African countries.

A related issue that Yenika-Agbaw discusses is the overall stance of some authors, especially outsiders (whom she characterizes typically as former Peace Corps volunteers). She critiques well-meaning stories that romanticize, condescend to, or objectify Africans’ experiences—literature that “continues to colonize by dominating others” (10). In fact, some of the most popular literature for Western audiences is essentially white people’s stories that virtually ignore Africans except as backdrop or counterpoint to white children’s experiences. I would love to discuss this point with Yenika-Agbaw regarding a book like Beyond the Mango Tree, which is set in Liberia but not discussed in this text. Stories...