Mahama's narrative bereft of vision and insight: My First Coup D'Etat

By Aghogho Akpome 

In My First Coup D’Etat (Bloomsbury Publishing, London), John Mahama, Ghana’s current president, offers an ambitious account of Africa’s post-independence transformation through the lenses of his personal experiences and those of his native country.
He focuses on the years between the late 1960s and 1980s, a period that has been described as Africa’s “lost decades”, and one that corresponds with the awakening and growth of national consciousness in him. Mahama also writes about African culture and Western influence, about the beauties of the countryside and the joys of family life.
By speaking (in his introduction) of Africa’s “survival” through periods of social, political and economic turmoil, Mahama’s view of the continent’s multiple dilemmas promised to be innovatively upbeat. But by the end of the narrative, this optimism becomes tempered by a note of cynicism expressed by a word in the Akan language of Ghana – “anaa” – which he interprets as an “invitation for doubt”; a word which questions whether we are “progressing or regressing”.
Mahama’s ethnographic sketch of Ghanaian politics since that country’s independence in 1957 is framed around correlating events and changes in different parts of Africa. He thus makes generous references to peoples, places and|happenings in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Libya, Uganda and South Africa. Mahama’s continent-wide historical approach in this book is also symbolic as it serves to recall Ghana’s pioneering role in post-colonial African nationalism as well as in the pan-African movement.
All this is important as it has been argued correctly that each country’s peculiar challenges need to be understood within the wider context of the continent’s shared history and experiences. Which may also be why this edition of the book is “adorned” by endorsements from African scholars – the recently deceased Chinua Achebe, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sierra-Leonean Aminatta Forna. Nigeria’s Booker winning author, Ben Okri, also contributes a thoughtful epigraph. (Yet, one might also surmise that Mahama’s position as the sitting vice-president – president by the time of the book’s publication – of one of Africa’s leading democracies could also have played a part in their favourable support.)
The book’s Africanist and historiographic orientations (as laid out in its introductory sections) are innovative and promising – however, its actual narrative content is a bit disappointing. In the first place, the stories tell more about Mahama’s father (to whose memory the book is dedicated), than about the author. Part of Mahama’s central focus, it appears, is the defence and explanation of his father’s wealth and roles (or lack thereof) in Ghana’s politics.

The Politics of Rewriting the Continent: Reflecting on Achebe's legacy

By Aghogho Akpome

Regarding the outpouring of stories (fictional and non-fictional) in the aftermath of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the literary critic Njabulo Ndebele observed in 1998 that this country represents “a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative”. One man who understood the potential of stories to shape social imagination was the late Chinua Achebe.
Virtually all of Achebe’s writings reflect a passionate interest in the telling and retelling of history, indicating that this issue lay at the core of his socio-political commitment, and influenced his |other signature sub-themes.
In 1998, Achebe explained how jaundiced colonial versions of African history (including those that were openly fictional and those that claimed to be factual) affected him as a young writer. He was aware that stories “had been used to set one people against another and that the depiction of himself and his colour and his people and his race has been less than just; he then realised that he had a task. Not necessarily to confront other people, but to save himself because he was aware that there was a story, that there was another story about himself which was not being told. And so all he was doing really was to bring that other story that was not being told, bring it into being, put it among the stories and let it interact.”
The best-selling Things Fall Apart remains one of the most iconic examples of the “other story” that has successfully challenged ”authoritative”, racialised and pejorative depictions of formerly colonised people. It is reported to have sold over eight million copies worldwide and has been translated into many languages. Achebe summed up his novels as “re-|creations of the history of Africa in fictional terms”, an artistic and ideological enterprise that spawned extensive scholarship and won him high levels of critical acclaim.
Underscoring the immeasurable value of these stories, Achebe reportedly rejected a $1 million offer from American rap star Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent) to use the title Things Fall Apart for a movie. It is said Achebe saw the offer as an “insult” and his representatives reportedly said the book is “listed as the most-read book in modern African literature, and won’t be sold for even £1 billion”.

When Things Fell Apart

By Bhekizizwe Peterson

It is not surprising that Chinua Achebe, as a writer and scholar, attached great significance to the cultivation of critical thinking in society in order to negate the prevailing “poverty of thought”. His novels, he once asserted, were meant to explore “when the rain began to beat us”. This was in relation to the colonial experience and the post-independence predicaments that seemed to plague African states.
In relation to the former, Achebe noted in a famous essay, The Novelist as Teacher, that “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 from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf, delivered them.”
The essay, first published in 1965, was included in the 1975 collection of essays, Morning Yet On Creation Day, whose title evocatively intimates the deferral of the “dreams” and “promises” of the nationalist struggles for independence. The task of the artist and scholar was to simultaneously look at the past and the future from the vantage point of the present.
With regard to the present, the duty is the need to grasp and explore the Hopes and Impediments (the title of another collection of essays published in 1988) that constitute the socio-economic, political, cultural and intellectual limits and possibilities that informed post-independence African states.
Achebe’s nuanced and powerful recuperation and affirmation of the integrity of pre-colonial African polities is well acknowledged. It is his wrestling with the antimonies of “freedom” that I want to focus on. In a sense, all his post-independence novels, No Longer At Ease, Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah, are profound, self-reflexive meditations on the seemingly intractable problems that seem to beset Africa.
The list of litanies is well known: colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, poverty, ethnicity, patriarchal despots, corruption and impunity, to mention some of the key ones. What distinguishes Achebe’s reflections on the challenges that face the continent is his willingness to also cast a critical eye on African leaders, intellectuals and artists who regard themselves as enlightened visionaries and whether their ideas, analyses or works shed light or cast further darkness on the nightmares of the post-colony.

The Struggle to know a dark soul: Redi Thlabi's Endings and Beginnings

By  Sikhumbuzo Mngadi

The personal story, or the story of or about an individual’s experience, as opposed to one that raises explicitly large questions – of philosophy, politics, culture and society – the keyword here being “explicitly”, continues to exercise a notable influence on recent black South African writing. Given the times, this is to be expected: the large questions have shifted to the background and become, in the words of the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, the “political unconscious” of the narratives.
Against this background, Redi Tlhabi’s Endings & Beginnings (Jacana) is a retrospective narrative of her brief platonic, but for an 11-year-old nevertheless intense, friendship with Mabegzo, an Orlando East jackroller, that raises deeper social questions within a personal narrative framework.
The author states her approach in the preface, “(m)y fervent belief that social conditions create the monsters who terrorise our lives and make us prisoners in our own country has made me curious about their background”.
My curiosity lies in the intersection of, and tension between, the personal and the socio-historical points of view that Tlhabi uses as the basis for this memoir.
For it is in the movement of the narrative between these modes that Tlhabi finds some difficulty in attempting to process, in 2004, the meaning of the events of her brief friendship with Mabegzo in the few months of 1989, which is also the time in which he died by a friend’s bullet at the age of 22.
In this light, Endings & Beginnings could be said to perform two seemingly mutually incompatible acts within two seemingly incompatible narrative frameworks: Tlhabi’s personal narrative seeks a symbolic exorcism of the “ghost” of Mabegzo, while the other seeks to explain the broader socio-historical context that shaped him.
The narrative framework of the 26-year-old Redi Tlhabi (nee Direko) is relatively secure in its empirical method and social analysis, and it is through this that she frames another, much less secure, of an 11-year-old Tlhabi grappling with a social milieu in which metaphysical explanations of social phenomena co-exist with sociological ones. For instance, describing some of the times she had with Mabegzo, the 11-year-old Tlhabi recalls one moment in which “he launched into the story of his life”, that is, of the gang-rape of his mother and of his birth from the rape, overheard in the streets from other children. But she also recalls how these moments of “clarity” – they never were clear – would be followed by spells of absence while Mabegzo visited a “sangoma for cleansing”.

Death of the Novel

By Mary Corrigall

The novel has been under threat for some time, or at least its defining qualities under constant revision. More recently, however, it seems as if its death is imminent. In this country, reports about the irrelevancy of the novel have been coming out more frequently than novels. There is almost a rush to discredit a work before it has even been written. The prized political novel has been deemed by many to be obsolete, or at least overshadowed by a flood of crime fiction, a new burgeoning genre here which it is thought is a better vehicle to address socio-political issues.
It's easy to declare that something is flourishing when it's so marketable.
Non-fiction works have been hailed as providing the new political and moral compass in the literary sphere, charting our realities more faithfully or immediately - Oscar Pistorius's murder trial is not even under way and Random Struik House has already announced that a book, No More Heroes, is in the offing.
Those singing the praises of non-fiction tend to be non-fiction writers who often haven't read local fiction for some time, a situation that publishers in South Africa say is so widespread there seems little reason to publish novels at all.
Can we really know, then, what state novel writing in this country is in if few make it on to the shelves?
Facts have had little to do with people making proclamations about the novel, which is what makes its status such an excellent subject for, well, fiction.
This may have been why Howard Jacobson, the British author and journalist, set out to write an irreverent novel about its irrelevancy. Zoo Time (Bloomsbury) is a first-person account by a fictional author called Guy Ableman, who is consumed by his struggle to write and sell another novel.
He enjoyed some success with his previous novel, wryly titled Who Gives a Monkey's? which set him up for a suitable run on the literary festival circuit.
But these gatherings are small, attracting mostly authors peddling their work, a smattering of|middle-aged women who sustain the egos of the male fraternity and old-age pensioners with little else to do - "literary festivals filled a gap in the calendar of the retired".

This Book Betrays my Brother

By Rob Gaylard

Kagiso Lesego Molope's This Book Betrays my Brother (Oxford University Press) engages and convinces the reader, and does so with consummate skill.
It is a coming-of-age novel that depicts the growth pains of the narrator and her friends - early-teenage girls who are coming to terms with their sexuality. It describes the excitement of dating, going to your first social, the matric dance.
The need to be attractive to the opposite sex and to conform to social expectations is overwhelming. These scenes create a convincing familial and social context, and the intimate, local feel of the narrative is greatly enhanced by the frequent resort to Setswana words or expressions (a glossary is provided).
The protagonist and narrator, Naledi, is part of a well-to-do family. Her father owns a grocery shop, Tshwene's General Store. They have moved from the township (ko motseng or kasi) up to "diEx", the extension, where upwardly mobile middle-class families live.
The narrative explores these two worlds, and depicts the social and psychological realities that shape Naledi. She and her brother experience the tension between wanting to belong to their own township-based peer groups and of being part of a privileged group that attends private schools, plays rugby (rather than soccer) and speaks English much of the time.
Naledi's mother insists, "We are not the same". In this way the novel recalls the themes so memorably explored by Njabulo Ndebele in Fools and Other Stories.

SA evoked through rural battle: For the Mercy of Water

By Konstantin Sofianos

Karen Jayes's For the Mercy of Water (Penguin) is a strange, challenging novel, and a revelation. It makes much post-apartheid literature look banal, in its concerns, and amateurish, in execution.
At a time of severe water-crisis and drought, administration over this essential resource has been handed to the corporate control of "the company", which oversees the marketised supply of water in the big cities, and ruthlessly safeguards its dwindling sources in the parched, rural hinterland. The countryside has been largely abandoned following the imposition of ferocious tariffs on water-use, left to the silent transit of convoy-trucks, and to the rule of corporate militias, the "company men".
The absolute predominance of the company, guaranteed by the extension of executive powers in the national interest, is contested only by women, those too young or too old to make the harried trek into the cities, who launch daring night-raids on the reservoirs, or re-route the life-bearing corporate pipes and conduits. In this context of a simmering conflict, an unexpected rainfall brings the company soldiers to a desolate valley-town, where they confront a group of girls in the care of an aged school-teacher, known simply as Mother.
The narrative circles around the "unfortunate incidents" that ensue from this encounter, that will leave most of the girls dead, one soldier blinded, one girl, Eve, in flight, and the apparently traumatised schoolteacher under the ambiguous protection of NGOs and aid workers. A brief online report will draw Jayes's writer-protagonist and narrator to the valley, who arrives there in the novel's opening chapter, to be followed soon after by the company's organised effort to secure the area, and establish the official narrative of events.
All of this is to say precious little about the actual experience of reading Jayes's novel. The book opens with an epigraph by the aestheticist poet Rilke, and concludes with a citation from the Qur'an, and by acknowledging the support of, amongst others, André Brink. Between those unlikely coordinates a remarkable writerly capacity unfolds, which perhaps owes something to each, and it is through this finely-wrought instrument of style that the novel's actions and scenes are relayed.