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  • African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence by Phyllis Taoua
  • Kwaku Nti
Taoua, Phyllis. African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

In this engaging book, Phyllis Taoua, a professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Arizona, offers a dialectical study of freedom as a phenomenon within the African context. Her study reviews and extends references to freedom in the works of noted scholars such as Frederick Cooper, James Fergusson, Basil Davidson, and Frantz Fanon as well as an impressive array of writers and novelists. Additionally, the book encapsulates an examination of the complex freedom narratives from renowned pan-African and African leaders, notwithstanding the noticeable absence of Marcus Garvey from the list. All of these strands are brought to bear on the life and work of Sony Labou Tansi, the enigmatic Congolese writer. Taoua's interdisciplinary approach to the fleshing out of her major argument takes her from the social sciences to literature and films. In the end, she argues that national liberation or independence did not deliver meaningful freedom to the majority of people in Africa. Meaningful freedom in this context is explored as a multifaceted concept that has more to it than political self-determination or national sovereignty. It also embraces other categories of freedom that are deemed intrinsically connected as they are mutually dependent. Thus, Taoua identifies instrumental freedoms that more or less pertain to the fundamental natural rights; substantive freedoms that take care of the individual's personal choices in all issues of life and existential freedoms that have to do with the intangible, the ethereal, and ethical values. The intriguing aspect of this approach is that these three freedoms are consistently reviewed within the context of each chapter.

The author addresses the disconnect between the time-honored reassessment of the various national liberations in Africa and the need for a conceptual language in the articulation of the current quest for meaningful freedom for the majority as demonstrated in the work of writers and filmmakers. Readers of this [End Page 148] significant work are sure to jettison any simplified notion of freedom and come away with the reality that this phenomenon, especially within the context of African national liberations, exhibits a multifaceted evolution over time. Taoua tracks this intriguing reality with "specific examples of how writers and film-makers explore, interrogate, and refine the idea of freedom by expanding its parameters as part of their coming to terms with how much had actually not yet been achieved" (10). As a literary scholar, Taoua identifies the contribution of the field to "an evolving conversation about freedom as an increasingly inclusive idea after national liberation" (16). This makes the critical and theoretical inquiry of the pan-African study of freedom a project, yet never a complete one. The "areas of narrative interests" that the literary world brings to this project include, but are not limited to, introspection and the intimate self, gender relations, the nation, and national liberation, the expansion of global capital, and the spiritual element.

These areas are fleshed out in the five chapters based on the seminal works of prominent novelists and filmmakers. Chapter one deals with introspective narratives that highlight aspects of intimate self, involving self-definition and identity formation within broad social and political dynamics. The argument here is that existential issues emanating from selfhood are interconnected with other kinds of freedoms such as the instrumental and the substantive. In the second chapter, Taoua posits that along gender dynamics, women's social and economic subordination within patriarchal societies make them possess a more nuanced awareness of freedom than their male counterparts. Given that "their private lives were influenced, constrained, and determined by networks of power that were not entirely, if at all, within their control" women novelists developed an increasingly specific language of freedom in their work (26). Readers are treated to a substantiation of why national liberation failed to deliver meaningful freedom within historical contexts in the third chapter. Taoua argues that the evolution of the modern African nation-states as part of the European overseas empires, global capitalism, and the post-war colonial development plans facilitate the understanding of how colonizing...

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