The Languages and Literatures of Africa: the sands of Babel (review)

The present book is the updated and expanded version of an earlier publication in French by Ricard, Littératures d’Afrique noire: des langues aux livres (CNRS/Karthala, 1995). The new subtitle, ‘the sands of Babel’, borrowed from Chapter 9 and echoed in the book’s closing remarks, aptly points to the multilingualism that characterizes the continent and has an impact on its literatures. The book’s cover image is a photo of Soyinka, whose work is widely acknowledged as ‘the crown jewel of Anglophone literature’ (p. 180), revisiting his childhood classroom in Ake; this replaces the painting that evoked Tutuola in the French edition (Nigeria continues to dominate Ricard’s landscape). Two of the nine chapters (1 and 5) have been almost entirely rewritten, the result of Ricard’s constant dialogue with friends and colleagues in the Anglophone world. The title of the first chapter has been expanded, and that of Chapter 5 altered to shift the emphasis from controversies on the orthography of African languages to more global issues, even though the book still recalls the manuscript heritage of Ethiopia and Arabic manuscript collections from countries such as Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, focusing on Hausa and Fulani traditions. The other chapters have been slightly reorganized, with better signposting, a more obvious structure and some longer quotes. On the whole, this is ‘a revised and expanded translation of the original book’ (p. vii). The bibliography has been expanded, too, and the four indexes of the French edition have been merged for ease of consultation.

The new edition highlights once again the close relation between writers and their societies, taking into account political and literary events: the deaths of Senghor (2001), Tutuola (1997) and Labou Tansi (1995), the war in the Congo and the impact of Mugabe’s regime on literature. Chapter 9 presents the novel, from 1911 to the 1990s, as ‘the genre that attracts the most readers’, recomposing the world or illustrating its decomposition (p. 182). Ricard reiterates, in Chapter 2, the role of oral literature at the root of written literature and provides a solid grounding to the study of the latter, redefining oral literature and offering a survey of oral literary genres. His book illustrates the wide variety of literatures present on the continent with a kaleidoscope of works in a number of languages: Chapters 4 and 5 cover Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Ewe literatures, including an appraisal of the main genres, and survey current political and cultural issues facing each of these languages. Chapter 5 then concludes with an invitation to recognize ‘the coexistence of languages, society’s diglossic situation, and the writer’s multilingualism’ (p. 122). The book also includes new writers, and mentions works published in the past ten years such as Irele’s book on John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s plays, and Mongo Beti’s last two novels.

Chapters 6 and 7 deliberately cross linguistic boundaries, first with a study of ‘go-betweens’ who wrote in two languages (theirs and French or English): three Francophone writers, Rabearivelo (1903–37), Kagame (1912–81) and Hampâté Ba (1901–91); and three Anglophone writers in similar situations, Okot p’Bitek (1931–82), Keynote (1893–1978) and Tutuola (1923–97), whose works also reveal the differences between the French and the British colonial education systems and their impact on creative writing. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the development of African poetry in French and in English, focusing on Okigbo (1932–67), Senghor and Soyinka before introducing newer poets. For the author, while ‘Anglophone poetry has found its path’ (p. 161), Francophone poets need to rewrite their history.

The important paragraph on the future of literatures in African languages (pp. 118–22) has been partly rewritten. The book concludes on an appeal to writers to be new sozaboys, going ‘beyond the languages spoken on...