African Horizons: The Landscapes of African Fiction (review)

African Horizons: The Landscapes of African Fiction, by Christine Loflin. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 184. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. x + 123 pp. ISBN 0-313-29733-9 hardcover.

The most incisive statement about the landscape of African fiction in this study comes from a letter by Bessie Head: "England as a country is very familiar to me as a mental picture. You can't as a writer in Africa go in for such delicate, detailed descriptions of landscape the way English writers used to. The land is too vast and monumental" (93). Although Christine Loflin quotes this statement quite late in her African Horizons, it serves in effect as the epigraph for her book because it envisions the landscapes of African fiction in organic relation to the topography and culture that produced them. In order to articulate these visions, Loflin draws a sharp distinction between European and African writers: "The European image of a landscape distinct from the human community must be abandoned, so that the significance of the landscape in African fiction can emerge" (4). Loflin is sometimes quick, as this example suggests, to offer large cultural and continental generalizations. Just as there are European landscapes that portray the human community in great detail (think of paintings by Breughel or novels by Hardy and Turgenev), so there are various landscapes (with an emphasis on the plural) in African fiction. That variety is immediately evident from Loflin's discussions of writers as distinct geographically, culturally, and historically as: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Zaynab Alkali, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Alex La Guma, Richard Rive, Mongane Serote, Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee.

Although Loflin draws at times from the work of postcolonial theorists (Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said) and feminist critics (most notably Virginia Woolf), her book is primarily a series of short readings of individual novels that focus on explicit depictions of landscape as setting. There is no concluding or synthesizing discussion but the series of individual readings do help one to understand the force of her claim that "African writers' descriptions of the African landscape are interventions in a historical dialogue about the meaning and significance of Africa, African peoples, and African land" (5).

Loflin shows an appropriately encompassing sense of landscape by including under that term such diverse settings as: the Gikuyu lands of Kenya (Ngugi); pre-World War II Lagos (Emecheta); Islamic communities of Senegal (Bâ) and Nigeria (Alkali); the Dead's Town (Tutuola); the compounds and bush of precolonial Nigeria (Achebe); the townships of South Africa (La Guma, Rive, Serote); the contested space of a South African office (Tlali); the territory of exile (Head); the rural refuge of displaced white citizens during war (Gordimer); and the allegorized terrain of empire (Coetzee). About this variety there is the richness of a large continent that cannot be subsumed under one category or definition of landscape. That said, one wishes at times that Loflin dealt more explicitly with the topographical, racial, and cultural variations that emerge from her readings of individual novels. Such an engagement would have helped readers better apprehend the abiding claims of Africa as both physical reality and cultural site, that is, as landscape in the fullest sense of the term.

Loflin seems most engaged as a critic in her final two chapters where she writes about novelists from South Africa (Tlali, Head, Brink, Gordimer, Coetzee). Perhaps it is the remarkable variety of such authors as they confronted life in white-ruled South Africa and the regime of apartheid that explains her engagement. Or perhaps it can be explained by these writers' quite explicit use of landscape to evoke human communities under a brutally inhumane rule. Whatever the reason, Loflin seems to find her subject most deeply in th ese last chapters and there writes her most useful criticism.

Nicholas Howe

Nicholas Howe is Professor of English...