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[24] Chapter Two The Dissemination of African Literature and Canon Formation Where the Rain Began to Beat: Chinua Achebe’s T Things Fall Apart According to Chinua Achebe “a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body”. (“Role of the Writer” 8). This saying underscores the link between history and memory in forging new ideas. Thus in order to frame literary canonization in Anglophone African Literature – the process by which some works are selected and preferred, while others are marginalized and neglected – it is imperative to look at the circumstances surrounding the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the way this novel shaped the criteria used in judging “worthy” texts of African literature as a whole, and how it largely created the pattern of dissemination for African literature. Chinua Achebe is neither the first African writer nor has he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet he remains the centripetal force behind the development of Anglophone African literature and the literary texts that are now considered the canon. Achebe is preceded in African literature by the numerous and often invisible producers of African oral literature. Even in print he has predecessors who wrote in African languages such as Shaban Robert, the Tanzanian writer who wrote in Swahili, Thomas Mofolo in Sotho, and D.O Fanguwa in Yoruba. Achebe has forebears in the English language as well. The earliest African writers to have written in English were probably Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, who were brought into slavery as children. Phyllis Wheatley was renowned for her poetry and Oluadah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the life of Oluadah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself in 1790 (?). After Equiano a number of South Africans’ works were published in English. The list includes Thomas Mofolo, whose novel Moeti oa Bochabela in Sotho was published in English in 1920 as The Pilgrim of the East. Then, came Sol. T. Plaatje, whose Mhudi was published in 1930; and Peter Abrahams, who began with Dark Testament, a collection of short stories, and went on to write Mine Boy, Song of City, and The Path of Thunder in 1948. [25] Even in his own country, Nigeria, Achebe was preceded in print by Amos Tutuola. Faber and Faber, a renowned British publishing house, published Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was written in English by a writer who had only acquired six years of primary education, yet Tutuola’s artistic quality and craftsmanship in storytelling did not go unnoticed. In his often-quoted review, Dylan Thomas held that The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a: A brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story. Or series of stories written in young English by a West African, about a journey of an expert and devoted palmwine drinkard through a nightmare of indescribable adventures, all simply and carefully described in the bristling bush{…}The writing is nearly always terse and direct, strong, wry, flat and savoury; the big, and often comic, terrors are as near and understandable as the numerous small details of price, size and number; and nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in this tall, devilish story (The Observer, 6 July 1952). Thomas’s review drew attention to Tutuola’s work. It was later reviewed in the United States by Eric Larrabee in the Reporter (12 May 1953), in the New York Times Book Review by Selden Rodman (20 September 1953), and in The New Yorker by Anthony West (December 1953) (qtd. in Larson, The Ordeal). These reviews for the most part, highlighted Tutuola’s English and style described in varying degrees as “naïve,” “barbaric,” and “primitive,” and opened Tutuola to scrutiny and notoriety. These descriptions did not sit well with Western-educated Africans, who felt that Tutuola was not representative of the African intellectual. In fact, Bernth Lindfors holds that “Tutuola may owe much of his early notoriety to the endorsement of the famous Welsh poet” (Critical Perspectives 3). Not only did critics have a problem with Tutuola’s language, they took issue with his originality. Indeed, Babasola Johnson claimed that Tutuola’s “stories are well known, and have been published in one form or another. Most of his plots were borrowed from Fanguwa’s ogboju Ode which has now been translated into English by Wole Soyinka under the title “The Forest of a Thousand Daemons”. Tutuola even gave himself away when he...

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