Africa - a fiction of the european imagination

A book I will just have to read. Africa is going to be the centre of more than just humanity's beginnings. It will be a war zone soon - for other peoples' wars.Just as it has been the creation of other peoples' imaginations.

Africa’s first Nobel Prize laureate, Wole Soyinka, has published his latest book: Of Africa, in many ways a summing up of his earlier pronouncements about the continent vis-à-vis its relationship to the West.  The Nigerian writer has written so many books (plays, poems, essays, autobiography, novels, political commentary) that his publishers no longer list the works opposite the title page.  By my rough calculation, these works total around fifty titles, and I’ve read almost all of them.  That is how important Soyinka is to African letters. Hard to imagine what the shape of African literature, let alone Nigerian politics, would be without Soyinka’s strong moral voice.

Is there anything new that Soyinka can say?  The answer is an emphatic yes.  In his preface Soyinka explains, “Ultimately…it is humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment—both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual)—that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.  This interrogation constitutes our primary goal in its limited excursion into Africa’s past and present.”

Acknowledging that Africa is a “continent of extremes,” at the same time Soyinka states that Africa is “an intimate part of the history of others” (think European colonialism, slavery in North and South America).  Yet, “History has erred.  All claims that Africa has been explored are as premature as news of her imminent demise.” These quotations are from the preface, laying out the territory explored in the rest of the book.

 “Africa remains the monumental fiction of European creativity.” Notice that the verb is in the present tense.  Soyinka continues, “Every so-called nation on [the] continent is a mere fiction perpetrated in the cause of external interests by imperial powers, a fiction that both colonial rule and post-independence exertions have struggled and failed—in the main—to turn into an enduring, cohering reality….  Africa has paid, and continues to pay, a heavy price for the upkeep of a European fiction.”

Ultimately, they both write about power and how that power (whether external or internal) has shaped the African continent: Achebe, the continent’s heart; Soyinka, the continent’s mind.

Of Africa is the most significant book about the Africa—especially as an antidote to the ills of the rest of the world—that I have read in years.  Reading Soyinka’s dense prose is often a challenge, but the message is long overdue.

Wole Soyinka: Of Africa 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/28/always-for-the-sake-of-religion/