Marita: or the Folly of Love (review)

With the publication of Marita: or the Folly of Love, the study of the contemporary West African postcolonial novel solidly situates itself in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast, foregrounding the cultural tensions between the Africans of the Gold Coast towns and the progressively more controlling British colonial rule in the 1880s. The context of conflict here is the realm of marriage, and the text addresses the complexities arising when the institution of Christian marriage (and of course its colonial endorsement) interfaces with traditional conjugal and gender norms. Stephanie Newell presents the first full publication of the novel since it originally appeared in installments in the early Gold Coast newspaper, the Western Echo, in the years 1885-88. Written by an anonymous author, A. Native, the novel links the theoretical discourse of postcolonialism with those of popular culture and gender studies.

As in much of African popular literature, the developing urban backdrop defines the social setting of Marita, and the cultural conflict between indigenous and foreign norms and the unsettling of ancestral ways are largely a result of the colonial experience. In 1884, the British instituted the Marriage Ordinance in the West African colonies in order to regulate and license civil weddings without explicitly and actively enforcing a Christian value system. However, the Ordinance, as Newell states, "described a very Christian form of marriage, sanctioning monogamous and lifelong unions, disallowing polygamous individuals from contracting statutory marriage, disallowing Ordinance spouses to marry by custom, and allowing divorce cases to be brought before the High Court on charges of adultery" (6). Urban West Africans felt increased pressure, especially from churches, to conform to the new code of values associated with the Ordinance. The novel portrays the disastrous results of African men and women marrying according to the Marriage Ordinance, for the new unions transformed well-mannered women into raving shrews determined to seize domestic power and emasculate their husbands. The novel becomes an ideal glimpse into the social, cultural, and political sensibilities of an educated African male elite from the early colonial period, a perspective captured by the narrator's clear androcentric bias, his low opinion of the uneducated masses, and the plot's moral tag that clamors for the preservation of patriarchal control within the domestic sphere.

In addition to the novel, the publication includes a thorough introduction by Newell that provides a social and historical context for the work, explaining the birth of the Marriage Ordinance and the public response. She also speculates on the identity of the author, doing some detailed detective work through stylistic and grammatical comparison with literary works of known Gold Coast writers. Finally, Newell offers a literary analysis firmly rooted in the sociological conditions occurring in the Gold Coast in the 1880s, specifically conjecturing about the effects of these social changes upon the Western-educated, urban elite. Her research highlights the postcolonial and gendered potency of this early work of African popular literature. While her historical and literary research is comprehensive, Newell still leaves room for exciting areas of analysis of this rediscovered text.