SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2009

Asare Konadu's A Woman in her Prime

One of my ongoing projects with the Stack is to read through a shelf-full of novels
in the African Writer's Series from roughly the 1960s, the combination of two
departing colleagues' gifts of boxes of miscellaneous African literary stuff. The
novels are mostly short, many but not all have been written in English. They are
mostly West African, the literary constellation revolving around Ghana, Nigeria
and Senegal. It is not a big world, at least not on the internet: I received a nice e-
mail from Cameron Duodo after I posted about his novel The Gab Boys (1967); I
touched up (very slightly!) my post on Peter Abraham's A Wreath for Udomo
(1956) when I realized that anyone Googling it on Earth was likely to have my
post on their first page of links; and the best so far was having the Lagos
magazine Farafina reprint my post on J. P. Clark's America, Their America
(1963). I'm coming to appreciate some of the similarities among these "60s"
African books, with their depictions of tough environments both rural and urban,
their love of happy outcomes and celebration of life, and their Janus-faced
didacticism, one half social criticism aimed at the national reader, the other
cultural defense ("apology," in the classical Greek sense of that word) aimed at
the Developed World, a much more well-defined entity in the post-colonial
"sixties" than today in the post-modern "aughts."

This week I have discovered Samuel Asare Konadu (1932-1994), a Ghanian

publisher and novelist who wrote many novels, at least nine by the 1971
publishing date of my Heinemann edition of A Woman in her Prime (1967).
There is very little information, although I haven't done a long search. A Woman
in her Prime was the 40th novel in the AWS, and his novel Ordained by the
Oracle was the 55th.

Woman is a critical novel of village life with a progressive message that is modern
but not reactionary. It deals with the problems of an African woman, Pokuwaa,
who is in her 30s and has not had any children, considered a tragic condition by
her society, not least by her mother. She has fired two husbands for this reason
and her third, Kwadwo, is fearful of losing her. He loves her for her own sake: she
has grown up to be a strong person and a good farmer. It is Kwadwo who
provides the unconditional acceptance that helps her to resist the psychological
pressure of her life (although the author understates this nicely).

Abetted by her obsessed mother Pokuwaa has been visiting various shamans and
healers. But the omens are never good. When lightening strikes and burns an old
tree near the village there is ominous talk of looking about for a witch. Pokuwaa's
mother sees things the old way and is much alarmed. The last straw for Pokuwaa
is when she comes across the body of a man near her farm. Out of fear, she
doesn't say anything, letting the men go out and find the missing man
themselves. A dire episode indeed.

But the last straw is a good thing for Pokuwaa. She gives up on the magic, on the
theories of fate. She decides that she must just let life run its course. She gives up
her burden. Ah, but this is a West African 60s novel, all 107 pages. So in no time
at all she is pregnant and lives happily ever after. I think that Konadu wanted to
make the point that a woman needn't have a child to be fulfilled (at least, no more
than a man does): she comes to peace with herself first, gets pregnant after. But
his view is that the traditional folkloric account that defined the emotional regime
under which Pokuwaa lived was oppressing her, and perhaps contributing to her
problems. That is, his target was not so much sexism as superstition, although he
understood the negative social consequences for women of magical explanation.

In this way his novel is interesting to the western reader today. The western
stereotype of the African novel is that it illuminates the positive side of Africa as a
cultural soldier defending the homeland. But 60s African writers, like feminists,
are often critics of traditions that have come to seem unenlightened and abusive.
They did not have much international readership and thus were not as self-
conscious as the modern African writer, who tends to criticize regimes more than
societies. They thought that they were living through a transformative time, and
they try to open doors to the future. They are gentle prophets of modernity, at
times, and it is interesting to put their optimism up against the reality of modern
Africa (I don't say that presumptuously, there are lots of ways that comparison
could be played out). And there is the persistent theme that good character will
out: that is a theme that links African and North American letters.