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African(ldiana: the African setting in Canadian literature WILLIAM H. NEW Every country inherits a national cliche, each as inexact as it is widespread. Brazil, for example, is known as a land striated with coffee plantations, and Australia as a desert of kangaroos. Canada was baptized by Voltaire's pat phrase "quelques arpents de neige,'~ and Africa (its nations undifferentiated ) long ago became the "Dark Continent" to all outside it - a savage jungle of multifarious poisons, whose dangers were offset only by the challenge of survival, the hero's manliness, the heroine's brave frailty, and the prospect of hidden treasure. Such archetypes allowed King Solomon's Mines its appeal; nineteenth-century adventure writers consciously built upon their readers' preconceived notions, fulfilling them by finding yet another twist to a hackneyed plot. White missionaries I explorers I treasure-seekers headed into unknown territory/river jungle/ mysterious mountains, were attacked/imprisoned by fearful;corrupt natives, but were then saved by trusting/righteous/kingly natives, who bestowed treasure on their white friends as the dawn of understanding/ twilight of peace brought all together at last. The Imperial Theme in such adventures is scarcely subtle. In more recent writing, imperialism has become less overt, though the continued existence of the popular stereotype of Africa prevents its total disappearance. In Canada, as elsewhere, many writers have sought new frameworks for their ideas and new techniques with which to express them, but others have been trapped by conventions. Their writing, like Ralph Allen's Ask the Name of the Lion (1962) - subtitled "A modern novel of the Congo" - reflects more accurately the popular imagination than it does any observed event. Paradoxically it is events rather than imagination that most distinctively characterize this kind of writing. Ask the Name of the Lion is one of those works that dust jackets call a "thrilling narrative," whose sole appeal lies in the topicality of its plot. Ideas and inventiveness of technique are subordinated to the story, and character is less important than role. What the novel is Journal of Canadian Studies about, therefore, is less the internal rebellion in the Congo following independence from Belgium, than the confrontation between Africa and the West as represented by a set of stereotyped figures. The rebel Congolese, who are the pursuers and the putative villains of the piece, are conventionally ambitious, animalistic, ruthless, and naive. But the six pursued characters - Sierra, a U.N. representative ; Songolo, the Western-educated federal cabinet minister; Grant, a doctor from a primitive hospital; Mary Kelvin, a Canadian nurse; Chartrand, a Belgian plantation-owner reluctant to leave; and Astrid, his young Congolese mistress - are less the heroes than their own worst enemies. They flee and quarrel; the pursuers pursue; they meet in a climatic and destructive encounter; and the novel ends with the Canadian girl, the most lukewarm of all of them, managing to utter gallant things as she survives. The gallentry is not the larger-than-life action of Boadicea or Florence Nightingale, however, but simply a way of making the best of a bad job. It is exactly such a failure to discover any real heroism that marks Allen's book as a successor to Rider Haggard 's rather than its contemporary; Ask the Name of the Lion deliberately finds dubious motives where Haggard found bravery and self-sacrifice. When Songolo and Sierra stand fiercely alone in the final confrontation with Albert Tshibangu - Nkosi, "the lion," the self-styled president of the breakaway province - it is not Tshibangu they are fighting, but each other and themselves. Allen's message is clear enough: we have within us that divisive Miltonic pride that violates us; no external attack can weaken as much as one from within. But this being the case, the African setting serves merely as a topical scenario, bruiting a lot of conventional images without in any way requiring them. Theme and form are arranged together but not bound together, and the parcel that Allen has neatly tied up quickly loses its string. For all its gentility, the work of John Peter betrays a comparable format - less easy to appreciate, perhaps, because the South African settings and the anti-apartheid sentiments are emotionally attractive...

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