God's Arrows

The article contributes to scholarly conversations around the global prestige and appropriation of texts and forms by considering some implications of the role of "Achebe" as an exemplary author figure in the formation and reproduction of Africa's novelistic canon. I begin to propose new categories for critical engagement with "the African novel" via rereading The Arrow of God alongside Dominic Mulaisho's 1971 The Tongue of the Dumb. Written "after Achebe" and revered for being the first Zambian novel to reach global markets, Mulaisho's novel has also been disparaged for not living up to the literary standards set by the master texts of African realism. I problematize the center-periphery relations in "the African republic of letters," and Mulaisho's ambivalent positioning within it, by outlining certain key literary-historical processes in southeastern Africa before the fall of Apartheid and by interrogating the critical reception of his novel, which emerged out of those circumstances. While it is true that The Tongue of the Dumb appropriates certain elements of Achebean realism, I contend that it should more properly be read as part of a related but distinct local realist tradition based on Bakhtinian adventure time. The article argues for broadening the spectrum of critical approaches to the reading and circulation of Africa's fictions and against detracting from Achebe's literary achievement by turning it into a discursive tool for effacing the continent's non-globalized literary production.