African Literature Today 30: Reflections and retrospectives ed. by Ernest N. Emenyonu (review)

The thirtieth issue of African Literature Today (ALT) is the latest in a long and illustrious line of publications originating in the era of decolonization. On the cover of this issue is a photograph of shantytown dwellings near Cape Town, signalling its rootedness on the African continent and commitment to social and cultural justice. ALT was started at the University of Sierra Leone in 1968. Its key stated aims were to serve as an in-house journal for African universities and to make the emerging canon of African literature accessible to a large readership. In 1971, it switched from biannual to annual publication and became what it is today: a cross between a book series and a journal, each new issue organized around an overarching theme. In the past, ALT has helped to articulate some of the key debates in African literary scholarship: it has asked questions about the languages of Africa’s literatures, literary evaluation and canon making, genre and gender, myth and modernity. The thirtieth issue carries calls for contributions for future issues on the short story and the relationship between politics and social justice. This issue itself is, unsurprisingly, dedicated to ‘Reflections and retrospectives’.

Much has changed in the world of literary scholarship since the ‘brave new sixties’ (as James Currey put it in 2001 on another occasion for retrospection, when the ALT editorship passed from Eldred Durosimi Jones to Ernest Emenyonu). And yet, in the guest editor’s introduction to this issue, Chimalum Nwankwo formulates its critical agenda with the great debates of the past firmly in view. The fundamental question the issue encapsulates, he writes, is ‘how does the artist or writer help the human condition positively?’ (p. 6). The answer, as he sees it, lies in the tension between a multiple reappraisal (of received wisdom regarding individual writers, genres and contexts) and a continent-wide constant: ‘the African mind [sic] wails for the didactic, for the art which teaches, the art which enlightens, the art which overtly heightens consciousness and conscience’ (p. 7).

The nine article-length contributions that follow address this tension in a surprisingly pared-down number of ways. Framed, by and large, as overviews of individual authors’ oeuvres or key works, four pieces in this issue are to do with South Africa, while another four are about Nigeria. Only one (by Kwawisi Tekpetey, on the early work of Ousmane Sembène) is not about the work of an author emanating from the two most powerful and influential literary nations on the continent. Tekpetey engages with Sembène as a literary figure firmly oriented towards pan-African emancipation.

The other contributions to this issue are: Maureen N. Eke’s piece on national belonging in the work of Nigerian dramatist Zulu Sofola; Louisa Uchum Egbunike’s article on Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City; Ernest Emenyonu’s tribute to Ekwensi; Shalini Nadaswaran’s examination of gendered relationships in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru; Blessing Diala-Ogamba’s and Hellen Roselyne Shigali’s treatment of psychological violence and gendered representations (respectively) in Bessie Head; Sophie Ogwude’s tribute to Dennis Brutus; and Joyce Ashuntantang’s analysis of Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue. While many of these contributions gesture towards the notion of ‘African literature’, all are, in fact, able to draw primarily on national literary traditions and imaginaries.

The geographical and conceptual framing of this celebratory issue of ALT usefully points towards an emergent set of questions relating to the supposed desire of African readers for socially aware literature. Is the didacticism of which Nwankwo speaks indeed a necessary ingredient of ‘African literature’? If so (or, if in evidence), does it need to be related exclusively to nation formation and nation building? May the pan-Africanist critical framing of canonical texts and authors function as a default mechanism for engaging with globally non-consecrated (or more weakly consecrated) African national literary contexts? Can the social awareness of...