Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (review)

Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel. Eleni Coundouriotis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 211 pp. $ 19.95.

The question of just what constitutes "authentic" African literature has pre-occupied readers ever since the field took shape in the academic world in the 1960s. A large part of this concern stems from Western ignorance of 5,000 years of writing in African languages, to say nothing of an ageless tradition of oral art only now finding a place into courses on African literature. Just after mid-century, Tutuola's collection of concatenated Yoruba folktales, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), was hailed by some Europeans as an "authentic" African text because of the novelty of the writing style. Two years later, Laye's Le regard du roi (1954) earned the same sobriquet. When Le Devoir de violence (1968) burst on the French literary scene in 1968, it was called the great African novel not just by sophisticated literati in Paris, but also but local editorialists in provincial towns such as Clermont-Ferrand. Everyone, it seems, was searching for the appropriate sequel to Tarzan.

As academics began to focus attention on African literature, eventually founding the African Literature Association in 1974, a split emerged between folklorists, who considered literature written in European languages to be something less than authentic, and scholars with degrees in English or French who could not read or understand anything written or narrated in an "authentic" African language.

In Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel, Eleni Coundouriotis examines one corner of the "authenticity" debate by offering readings of a heterogeneous series of texts, fiction and non-fiction, written in English or French by Europeans or Africans. In the first chapter, Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) as well as Maran's Batouala (1969) reveal an "interplay among history, fiction, and ethnography." A series of three chapters about Dahomey forms the center of the study. The first of the three deals with nineteenth-century Victorian travel narratives and the attempt to create an "archaeology for a 'scientific' discourse of the human sacrifice." These texts tend to deny the validity of local history. The second chapter in this trio focuses on Hazoumé's Le Pacte de Sang au Dahomey (1937), a work of "autoethnography." Hazoumé's neglected 1938 historical novel Doguicimi, the subject of the third Dahomey chapter, constitutes a kind of "counterhistory" to the earlier writings about customs in that French colony. Chaper 5 on Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence shows how the Malian author "links violence explicitly" to the project of historiography while Okri's more recent The Famished Road (1991), the last chapter of the book, is interpreted as a "critique of the nationalist paradigm for liberation" in Nigeria.

The chapters on Dahomey offer a particularly rich comparative examination of the different ways the peoples of that part of Africa were viewed from both European and African angles. Solidly rooted in ethnography, that extended analysis is not matched in the chapter on Le Devoir de violence. The novel is of special interest here because Ouologuem in his interviews claimed to cover 800 years of West African history. But in this study focused on history, one finds no direct references to those historical sources that inspired Ouologuem, the Tarikh es-Sudan and the Tarikh el-Fettach. They offered detailed, if biased, portraits of the rulers of the past. Ouologuem's project, as Coundouriotis rightly points out, is to undermine both written and oral interpretations of history in order to contest those regimes in the present that claim legitimacy from the empires. There is much evidence in written, oral, and onomastic sources to suggest that his fictional narrative is based on Songhay, a well-documented empire which dominated his own Dogon region five centuries ago. Thus, while Ouologuem contests elitist readings of the past, he also draws on them and his family's personal experience to reinterpret for...