African Novels in the Classroom (review)

African Novels in the Classroom, ed. Margaret Jean Hay. Boulder: Rienner, 2000. 314 pp. ISBN 1-55587-4.

Skillfully written, a study guide can deepen students' understanding of its subject and can also provide useful teaching tips for the teacher. One can, admittedly, read novels, for example, with no regard for their narrative strategies, context, or form. Nevertheless, the effect of a consummate novel, be it complex like Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (London: André Deutsch, 1965) or simple like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), is intimately connected with its style and language of expression. Unless a study guide promotes a surer eye for form and alerts its users to the nature and function of style, unless a study guide on the novel, in particular, helps its users to come to grips with what endows a novel with its staying power, much of the meaning and impact, nay, the significance, of a novel will be lost. What is more, a novel written in and about a culture that is not the reader's own requires accurate background information to be properly appreciated. When ill-informed readers misinterpret the novel, they perpetuate an act of violence on literature, so to say, because they not only drain it of its energy, they also tarnish the image of the authors whose works they discuss and the whole tradition within which the writing itself is rooted.

The contributors to African Novels in the Classroom have written valuably on what the editor describes as the objectives of her book, which seeks to show how "twenty-four college teachers from different disciplines discuss how they use specific African novels in the classroom--why they choose a certain novel, what corollary readings they assign, what background information they present in lecture, what major themes emerge in discussion, and what written assignments then explore the students' engagement with that particular novel" (1). It is a pleasure to look over the work of these US-based teachers who include African material in their classes, and who are willing to lend their various expertises to the promotion of a literature that is foreign to many of them. African Novels in the Classroom meets one's expectations in terms of some of the canonized African novels selected: Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Bâ's So Long a Letter, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Dikobe's Marabi Dance, Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Slave Girl, Farah's Gifts, Mwangi's Going Down River Road, Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat, Nwapa's Efuru, Oyono's Houseboy, Salih's Season of Migration to the North, Sembène's God's Bits of Wood, Vassanji's The Gunny Sack, and Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal. All except three of the contributors are historians and anthropologists, and their deft, compact, thematic explorations of these novels constitute a welcome change from the traditional approaches.

The book's main deficiency is that only two of its essays pay any significant attention to the literariness or literarity of the texts as novels. The reduction of the novel into a purely sociological or historical document undermines the goal of producing a heightened appreciation of African literature because, mostly, one senses that one is reading notes that could serve as interesting background to considerations of narrative technique. Also, matters are not helped much by the genre questions raised by the inclusion in a book on African novels of Caribbean Maryse Condé's book Segu, and of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, as well as of Soyinka's Ake: The Years of Childhood. African Novels in the Classroom could be used successfully, by teachers and students of African literature, if employed in the helpful company of other more auspicious books of its kind, including Elizabeth Gunner's A Handbook for Teaching African Literature (London: Heinemann, 184; rev. 1987), which still remains the best teaching...