An "Internationalism of the Planted Earth": The Literary Origins of Bessie Head's Idea of the Village

The imperialist view of Africa as a place without history haunts African literature and determines its persistent exploration of the past and of the nature of historicity. In the context of anticolonial struggle, this preoccupation with history often took the form of an answering back, but increasingly in the postcolonial period it has become a matter of looking inward and establishing the ground for a self-critical discourse. The feeling that such a discourse has only been incompletely achieved troubles contemporary African literature. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, for example, on his return to Kenya in 2004 after many years in exile, called urgently on Africans to do more history.¹ At that moment, Ngũgĩ was marking the publication of his Gikuyu language novel Murogi wa Kagogo [The Wizard of the Crow], a satire of Daniel arap Moi's dictatorship and, hence, a work that engaged Kenya's recent history.²

Precariously positioned as a stateless exile in the 1970s, South African novelist Bessie Head took a more circuitous route in disentangling her conflicting identifications and trying to understand her history. For Head answering back was complicated because her status as an insider was ambiguous. Where did she belong? To answer this question, I focus on Head's literary imagination and the ways in which she constructed her identity as a writer in a global context. Although I argue for the historicity of her engagement with African identity, Head achieves the self-critical posture of the postcolonial writer by means of a detachment that her literary identity affords. To demonstrate this, I recover the literary influence of Ronald Blythe on Head's Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind. Blythe provided Head with a literary model between ethnography and history that she could adapt to her examination of rural Botswana. My exercise in literary recovery also aims to explain what is at stake in Head's location of herself as a writer beyond the immediate context of South Africa. Head sought to offer a view of Africa's modernity to an imagined readership made up of other writers and thus conceived her work as a kind of correspondence with a global literary community. In my analysis, the trope of the village with its associations of the enduring and the authentic becomes a vehicle by which to connect to a global idea of community that is complicated by simultaneously signaling acceptance and rejection, an inside and outside. Moreover, although the village sometimes parallels the nation, it often stands in distinction to the nation as an alternative articulation of community. Blythe's Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village provided a literary context for Head to draw on. This context, moreover, had the potential to propel the idea of the African village, central to the literature of the independence period, into a transnational context. At the same time, the comparative reading I offer draws Blythe out of an exclusively English context.

The Idea of the Village

A literary idea of the village in Africa emerged powerfully around the time of independence in such diverse works as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngũgĩ's The River Between, Camara Laye's L'enfant noir, and Mongo Beti's Mission terminée.³ At this historical moment of transition, village life seemed capable of holding in the imagination a measure of cultural integrity by appealing to a historical continuity with precolonial times. Thus the village became the focal point for some of the most powerful literary expressions of anticolonial sentiment. Mobilizing ideas of organic community, semiautonomy, and geographic integrity, the village functioned in literature as a symbol of the nation. It helped sustain the belief that all along colonialism had kept in a tightly circumscribed space the kernels of soon-to-be-born African nation-states; presumably, decolonization would enable a flourishing of the imagined community beyond the confines of the village. The villages depicted in the novels of Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Laye, and Beti all confront modernity as a multiplicity of cultural and political crises. But the authors' emphasis, even...