The Languages and Literatures of Africa (review)

What speaks for this book, evidently, is the broad experience in the field of African literature and the long history of encounters with all the major writers and critics that the author, Alain Ricard, brings to enrich the vexed question of the relationship between language and literature. As Ricard demonstrates, that relationship takes a different turn when viewed within the context of Africa's historical situation. This peculiar turn must, he suggests, inform any genuine understanding of African literature more in terms of Ali Mazrui's conceptualization than of Cheik Anta Diop's. According to this approach, a focus on the relationship between language and literature takes us away, cheerfully, from the unproductive epistemological binaries of colonial and anticolonial discourses. Since no African literary text, regardless of the language in which it is written, foreign or autochthonous, can hope to escape the language question, the true path to the production of meaning, to the unlocking of every text, must be in an appreciation of the writer's relation to the politics and problem of language. Ricard's theory operates at three levels. It tracks how the frontiers of coexisting languages, the linguistic plurality in social situations, dictate artistic possibilities and choices. It delineates how a particular linguistic consciousness shapes the overall forms of expression and production of meaning. And it explores how a writer experiences linguistic consciousness, either as a rift, as a fusion, or as an opportunity to invent something new.

To highlight the linguistic consciousness as the space "where literature is shaped and where the inevitable path that the text must follow is to be found" (30), Ricard takes us through an examination of the nature of African languages with the aim and effect of destabilizing the colonialist hierarchies such as those imposed, for example, on the relationship between written and oral languages. The most intriguing aspect of the book is the indication of the epistemic potentiality of tonal African languages. This tonality, inadequately represented by the Roman orthography, manifests an intrinsic quality that dictated the necessity of the six or so different pictographic orthographies in precolonial Africa. This quality, it is argued, is also reflected in the overabundance of rock art, in partial writings, and in Meroitic writings; indeed, it could present a basis for accessing and demarcating an alternative to Western epistemological systems.

The book is a combination of different discursive forms. Most conspicuous is the layout, which takes the form of a book history, especially with all the explorations of manuscripts, alphabetic representations, and the production of autochthonous language literatures in book form. This exploration of African-language literatures within the framework of the text almost serves as an independent survey of the historical development of protonational literatures as well as modern Europhone African literatures.

The simultaneous explorations of the language situations in Africa, the sociohistorical developments, and their ways of having informed or defined the character of literature in Africa are instructive; nevertheless, it is not always clear or convincing how specific histories of both creative writing and criticism or "models" such as Soyinka and Tutuola effect the overall epistemic break that the history of the so-called language situation in Africa could enable. The strength of the book in proposing a profoundly linguistic approach to the study of literature appears to be the same quality that renders the reading experience less stimulating. And if, as Ricard submits, conflating language and race is a fallacy, it is certainly worth serious consideration whether the conflation of language with knowledge in the book might not equally be fallacious.