Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the Postcolonial African Novel

In the last decade or so, the postcolonial African novels that have had the most impact have been those employing marvelous or fantastic realism. ¹ Whether such novels have achieved their critical acclaim because published abroad (and mostly read there) is not clear. This new genre has not only been explained in terms of cultural hybridity, but has also been traced back to African oral-mythic narratives. These causal explanations are fine, but they do not fully relate the novels to the primary concerns of the main genre(s) of postcolonial African novels that were produced, roughly, between 1958 and the early 1980s. The concerns may be summarized simply as culture and nationhood. The one implies myth, folklore, etc.; the other, history and politics. But just as culture has intertwined with the politics of nationalism, so have myth, folklore etc. intermingled with history. The outcome of this cross- and intermingling has been the displacement of history by myth in the postcolonial African novel in English. In an inverse way, the marvelous or magical realism of the new novels is a logical development of this displacement. I am not concerned in this essay, however, with the new novels, but with that displacement—the substitution of myth and culture for history, especially for precolonial history.

To the extent that culture can be distinguished from history, Europhone African literature started, initially at least, more as a reaction to a specific historical moment than as an expression of culture. That history is of course colonialism, which it responded to in subject as well as in pedagogic aims. It has massively counternarrated the colonial experience and tried to complement—or even be a substitute for—history in the educational curriculum. Strongly implied in its early objectives too was the recuperation of the precolonial past. Indeed, "postcolonial African literature," its now universally preferred name, still foregrounds that origin and occupation at the expense of all else. Chinua Achebe, one of the early and acknowledged legislators of this literature, spoke for all when he declared in 1975:

Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse—to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. . . . I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery. (44-45)

This at once cultural and political manifesto bespeaks an early appreciation of the new literature's role in the necessary comprehensive redemption of black Africa after the ignominies of the slave trades and colonialism, and in their transcending. So much of the literature's imaginative powers, it was hoped, would be bent toward these projects.

But how satisfactorily has postcolonial African literature answered to the task of engagement with the precolonial past? How sturdy is its historical imagination—especially in its most popular form, the novel, whose thematic and formal properties are of the same narrative impulses as those of history and historiography? But rather than seek answers in specific novels that critics identify as "historical," I focus, in the rest of this paper, on the more general problems confronting the historical imagination in postcolonial Africa, and which hint at contemporary political and cultural attitudes.

Anyone interested in the historical novel cannot but be struck by the relatively small number of African novels that can be so categorized, and by the ambiguity of the contents of those few. Equally striking is the tiny quantity of speculative, theoretical, or textual criticism devoted to this genre in the African novel. Considering the weight of history on postcolonial African literature plus the declared intention of using it to reclaim the precolonial past, one might...