Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher Ouma (review)

Contemporary African literary works are largely informed by the experience of childhood. They use images, figures, and memories of childhood to engage with questions of identity, migration, and all sorts of displacement. This is the main argument in Christopher Ouma’s outstanding book Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past. After the end of colonial rule, many African countries experienced different kinds of military and civilian dictatorships, especially in the 70s and 80s—an era that also coincided with the Cold War. The period after colonial rule in Africa was equally marked by many civil wars, which began with Biafra (1967–70); these wars were, no doubt, a manifestation of a terrible colonial hangover. Hence, during this period (of the 70s and 80s), many African countries could be said to be experiencing a crisis of nationhood that culminated in a great exodus from Africa to the West. This, according to Ouma, caused the “project of identity to shift from nations to individuals, who invariably felt their identity overdetermined by their experience of the crisis of nationhood” (2). Therefore, while earlier African writings construed the nation-state as a teleological and geopolitical entity, contemporary African writers capture the zeitgeist of the 80s by challenging—through the trope of childhood—the temporal linearity, cultural homogeneity, and logical coherence that characterized these earlier conceptions of the nation-state. In other words, according to Ouma, childhood becomes a significant marker of postcoloniality. The category of the “child/ren” becomes symbolic and even pivotal in constructing and understanding postcolonial African literature precisely because it is inaugurated by and shot through with experiences and memories of childhood. It is therefore not surprising that in the attempts to mark one generation from the other and delineate literary genealogies, contemporary African writers have come up with monikers such as “children of the postcolony,” “children of the cold war,” “children of oil boom,” “children of the revolution,” and so on. This book investigates the childhood experiences of these eras, as chronicled by contemporary (diasporic) African writers who have now come of age in a new millennium.

Ouma begins the book by providing a very detailed historiography of childhood in African literature. He traces the portrayal of an Afrocentric childhood in Camara Laye’s The African Child (1959), to the intricacies of colonial childhood in Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966), down to how childhood in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) created a space for experimentation, “which is the very essence of childhood” (14). Ouma argues that childhood in early modern African literature was “symbolic of transience, mobility and becoming even though within the binary frameworks of traditional and modern values” (14). He also sketches out feminist representations of childhood in the works of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Zaynab Alkali, and Ama Ata Aidoo, among others. He shows how gendered childhoods in African literature have been read in relation to the critiques of motherhood. He, however, notes that the rise of African feminist literary criticism brought attention to the idea of “girlhood” in literary childhood studies.

Ouma proceeds to highlight the representation of childhood in African life writings and memoirs, especially in notable works such as Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile (2000), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and its sequel, In the House of the Interpreter (2012). Ouma makes an important observation that, while these memoirs by the older generation of African writers follow the classic bildungsroman style, contemporary African memoirs, especially child soldier narratives, tend to be “anti-bildungsroman” and nonlinear.

While the period of the 70s, 80s, and 90s could arguably be said to have seen the rise of children as a substantial part of the population in Africa, Ouma is certain that “it was this period that consolidated global media images of broken and malnourished children’s bodies augmented by the reality...