Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine: pour une littérature préemptive (review)

This Manifeste is not a research-based, academic work of literary criticism (of which Professor Nganang has written a generous amount, in German, French, and English). It is something quite different: coming from one of francophone Africa’s most accomplished younger novelists, it is a call to arms, a direct philosophical engagement with history, and a fast-moving survey of how various literary authors have dealt with (or ignored) the tragedy—Nganang’s key term—of African history. It is indeed, at the end, a manifesto for a new approach to writing in and on Africa. Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine is written in a manner that one rarely sees among francophone African writers, and as a consequence I would be hard pressed to find a book to compare it to. If the Manifeste resembles any other work, it would have to be Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World, and this is no coincidence, because Nganang finds in Soyinka’s work both inspiration and sustenance.

Before leading us into the daylight of his new African literature, Nganang conducts us on a tour of hell. This is not mere Afro-pessimism. Nganang’s vision is essentially, profoundly tragic: genocide and enslavement are foundational to history rather than unfortunate, exceptional parentheses within it. Theater, tragic theater, is at the origin of literature. As Adorno asked if there could be poetry after Auschwitz, Nganang asks what African literature can be after Rwanda. The genocide of 1994 was a “searing failure of all forms of African intelligence and imagination” (287). Among African authors, Nganang says, all but Soyinka failed to speak up as the killing was actually going on. At the end of the book Nganang reveals that the genocide took place just as he was beginning “to write seriously” (287). Genocide is so fundamental to Nganang’s vision in this book that it eclipses the watchword for almost everything done or written in Africa in the last one hundred years: colonialism. The near-disappearance of colonialism in this new conception of things may be the ultimate sign of “postcolonialism,” but it raises questions about the inclusiveness of Nganang’s historiography. Nganang moves directly from the slave trade to postcolonial dictatorship and genocide without incorporating a theory of colonialism.

Strangely, Nganang pays little attention to the group of ten francophone writers who went to Rwanda in 1998 to engage in a collective act of literary “memory” called “Ecrire par devoir de mémoire.” His attitude toward this group—which included Boubacar Boris Diop, Tierno Monénembo, Véronique Tadjo, and Abdourrahmane Wabéri—is peculiar. If, as he argues at length, the genocide in Rwanda must be seen as foundational to African literature from now on, why would he not deign to read and evaluate an entire corpus of fiction that sets out, explicitly, to confront the problem in literature? In his epilogue, Nganang takes a swipe at the group, suggesting without elaboration that “some” of its authors “came close to pure insensitivity” (“frôler la pure insensibilité,” 287). One would like to know who, exactly, he is talking about. His silence on the contents of the novels in this group remains aporetic.

I am impressed and intrigued by the argument Nganang makes distinguishing the esthetic of the traditional African griot from that of the Césairean cry (158 ff.)—between a communitarian, “authentic” ethic on the one hand, and a postslave- trade, post-genocidal, historical vision on the other. At this point Nganang joins a long line of African interpreters who seize Césaire as one of their own, and the Cahier as, despite its Caribbean origins, a profoundly African text. This has been happening since the 1950s (a fact one would have liked to see Nganang acknowledge) (see Watts 99–115). In earlier decades the Africanization of Césaire was deemed to be a demonstration of Negritude; but Nganang...