Contemporary White Fiction on Africa:Is There a Role for White Writers in Post-Colonial Literary Resistance?

Mary Helen Specht, University of Texas, Austin, Texas USA

Introduction

Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainana wrote a satirical guide entitled“How to Write About Africa in Five Easy Steps,” which waspublished by American literary magazine

Granta

and ostensiblyaimed at non-African writers who want to write about the Africancontinent. I would like to begin by quoting a few excerpts:

... Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on thecover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won theNobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts—usethese. If you must include an African, make sure you get onein Masai dress.In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hotand dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animalsand tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamywith very short people who eat primates. Don’t get boggeddown with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-fourcountries, 900 million people who are too busy starving anddying and warring and emigrating to read your book.... Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love betweenAfricans (unless there is a death involved), references toAfrican writers or intellectuals, mention of school-goingchildren who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever orfemale genital mutilation..... Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, andmention near the beginning how much you love Africa, howyou fell in love with the place and can’t live without her.... besure to leave the strong impression that without yourintervention and your important book, Africa is doomed. Your African characters must include naked warriors,loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in

Mary Helen Specht

hermitic splendor. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamoustravel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with... TheAncient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe like theMasai (not money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo orthe Shona).... The Modern African is a fat man who steals andworks in the visa office, refusing to give work permits toqualified Westerners who really care about Africa.... TheStarving African wanders through refugee camps nearlynaked, and waits for the benevolence of the West....... Remember, any work you submit in which peoplelook filthy and miserable will be referred to as the “real Africa”and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasyabout this: you are trying to help them to get aid from theWest. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describeor show dead or suffering white people.(www.granta.com/extract/2615)

Wainana’s satire of western writing on Africa is humorousprecisely because in many ways it is true. A vast number of theoretical pages have been dedicated to exploring the significantrole that texts from the colonial period and before—fiction, travel,memoir—played in creating the West’s distorted image of Africa.However, even in the post-colonial world of academic multi-culturalism and political correctness, white fictional representations—both by foreign-born and “settler” descendants—continue toexert a powerful influence over the image of Africa abroad. Thispaper will explore the common criticisms of white writings on Africa—mystification, demonization, romanticization along with thetendencies to eroticize and essentialize—as well as discuss possibleways of countering such distortions or what I like to call “post-colonial literary resistance.”Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written several books including, —

Decolonising the Mind

and

Moving the Centre

—on how todecolonize the mind of the “colonized,” but what about the mind of the “colonizer,” which has also been interpolated by an unjustsystem (albeit a system created by and for the benefit of theirancestors)? Is there a way for white writers to partake of therichness of contemporary global hybridity without “mining themargins for the sole benefit of the center”? As Edward Said asks inthe classic text

Orientalism

, “how can one study other cultures and

Contemporary White Fiction on Africa

peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective?” Is it possible for white writers toactually participate in the resistance to cultural imperialism and themargin/center binary? Or is there no legitimate role for them asproducers of cultural artifacts on Africa, especially considering theincreasingly limited resources for fiction in the publishing world?

The Literay Legacy of Colonialism

From its earliest contact with this continent, the West has tried tocome to terms with Africa by exploring, exploiting, enslaving,colonizing, Christianizing and mythologizing. It can be argued thatthis final method—mythologizing—might, despite (or maybebecause of) its intangible nature, prove to be the most enduring,the most difficult to overcome.Some writers tried to justify and generalize the assumption of western superiority through theory. Perhaps most famously, Hegelin his introductions to

The Philosophy of History

wrote: “For it[Africa] is no historical part of the world; it has no movement of development to exhibit.... What we properly understand as Africa isthe Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditionsof mere nature....”But it is the literary text that has been the primary site of cultural control, constructing and projecting the West’s image of Africa and fixing the ‘native’ African under the sign of the Other.Some of the crudest displays of literary racism were no doubtwritten, at least in part, to ease the consciences of colonial officersand justify the takeover of land by white “settlers.” ElspethHuxley, a white settler in East Africa, wrote much fiction andnonfiction about the continent, including one entitled

White Man’sCountry

. Her work is filled with essentializing statements like thefollowing from

Four Guineas

: “African art, if it is genuine, is nevercomfortable, noble or serene; perhaps for that reason it may neverreach the heights—rather will it explore the depths of fear, tormentand intimidation, with a relish of humour. It is possessed by spiritsand the spirits are malign” (175).Chinua Achebe has written much in condemnation of anothercolonial text,

Mister Johnson

, by Joyce Cary. He has even said thatthe reading of this text was one of the events that propelled him to