Traditional African religions are still widespread in all African countries despite the spread of established religions like Islam and Christianity. People in rural Africa in particular are still practicing all sorts of traditional spirituality that continues to play a decisive role in their day to day their attitudes towards life and death. Traditional spirituality continues to shape their world views and their attitudes towards life and death and other existential concerns. In African countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt and others, traditional belief systems continue to hold sway on the imaginations and daily lives of millions of Africans despite advancing modernization.
African traditional religious beliefs or faith systems not only continue to coexist with established religions but also to shape their cultures, literatures and other areas of life. Most of ancient African literatures consist of oral literature that is to say fairy tales and the tradition of oral tales that were told in the evenings. they were fireside accounts of either the chronicles of imaginary characters or adventures of well known village figures, heroes or secular characters whose imaginary lives had left indelible marks on the folk imaginations. Pagan beliefs loomed large in ancient or traditional African faith systems.
According to Microsoft Encarta dictionary meaning, pagan means The Latin word pagus, from which pagan is derived, originally meant “something stuck in the ground as a landmark.” It was extended metaphorically to “rural district, village,” and the noun paganus was derived from it, denoting “country dweller, villager.” This shifted in meaning, first to “civilian,” and then (based on the early Christian notion that all members of the Church were “soldiers” of Jesus Christ) to “heathen.”
As Chinua Achebe argues in his classic “Things Fall Apart”, the advent of European Christian religion to Africa through the missionaries that preceded the colonialists, has led to a kind “culture shock’ or belief shock. the Nigerian novelists is documenting the consequences of this process on African lives as the two trends fought for supremacy or domination. To many critics, the central character of the novel, Okwonko, the tragic hero of “Things Fall Apart” who commits suicide by hanging epitomizes both the defeat of the African spirit or the heroism of Africans in the face of aggressive colonialism. According to some observers, “Okonkwo is the protagonist who is a tragic hero. It is through his successes and failures that propels the plot as white missionaries seek to change the culture he has spent his lifetime gaining social stature; he cannot experience the same success in the white man’s world , so his has no choice but to fight it.”
From the above, we can assert that “Things Fall Apart” is the first notable African literature that highlighted what happened when European modern religion came into contact with traditional cultural belief of the average African villager and his traditional belief system based on ancestral values.
The first authentically African work of literature that has brought African spiritualism or based on the adventures of imaginary spirits came from no other than Ben Okri, a prominent modern African writer in his classic, “the Famished Road” This work of fiction can be considered the first work whose leading character or hero is a spirit boy who strands both the real and the invisible world of spirits.
The Famished Road is a novel about, an African child called Azaro who is known as an abiku or a spirit child from the ghetto of an unknown African city He is constantly harassed by his sibling spirits from another world who want him to leave this mortal life and return to the world of spirits by sending many emissaries to bring him back.
According to a literary critic who wrote about the significance of Ben Okri’s novel,
The subject matter of “The Famished Road” is When I think of the time The Famished Road came out, Ben Okri’s novel, that was a big book out of Africa. I’m sure other people who were already in the world of African literature would have different viewpoints but, for me, that was my first book. It opened my mind up to what was possible with African literature in the mainstream, and I think that’s probably why I picked it as one of the best books.
Yes, The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991, probably the most prestigious prize for a novel in the English language. Tell me more about it.
It was the beginning of African literature getting a space in Western literary culture and it was very impactful on me because it told stories that I hadn’t come across before. It’s the story of a spirit child, and Africa has a strong spiritual tradition. In fact, our whole culture is based on a lot of spiritual practice. It’s not necessarily Christianity, but it’s a part of our life, of our connection to our ancestral roots. It goes with the stories that we tell. The folk tales we grow up listening to, and stories about our own relatives and family, defy our understanding of reality. The things that happened, the things we do, why we follow certain traditions: a lot is based in our spiritual beliefs.”
The late Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Columbian or Latin American novelist who invented the literary technique known as “magical realism”. If there is any resemblance between Ben Okri’s and Garcia Marquez’s works, it is there defiance of realism and resort to narratives that shocked readers as implausible at first but acceptable later on. Ben Okri’s main character Azaro, is a creature both real and fantastic because he lives in two worlds, the real and the invisible. Ben Okri seems to have used Azaro, as the characters that reflects the dreams, struggles and aspirations of the real people in the fictional Nigerian city where politics has a brutal presence.
The leading character in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, colonel Buendia is a hero of Columbia’s political and military struggles from the founding of the first village called Macondo and the story of its rise and fall in the next one hundred years based on the accounts of the lives of one dynastic family. In Garcia Marquez’s novel, the fantastic style is used to exaggerate and give more force to the stories of the inhabitants of Macondo whose lives look like visions from a sweet as well as brutal dreams.
The common thread that relates the Ben Okri’s and Marquez’s novels is found less in their narratives and more in their styles of narration. to make a long story short, both authors use supernatural events to highlight there themes. Both Azaro in “The Famished Road” and Colonel Buendia in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” are the fantastic characters of two fantastic stories.
Let us take Ben Okri’s novel “The Famished Road” and Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. The first has won the Booker Prize or the most precious literary award for fiction in English by a Commonwealth writer while the second is the winning novel for the Nobel Prize in 1982 literature from Latin America. Both are works from third world countries, i.e. from Nigeria and Columbia respectfully. This is not a comparative review of the two major works but a comparative analysis of the literary devices the authors used in their works, both of the devices being based on the traditions of their respective countries.
The Columbian writer has proved more influential more enduring and more prominent than his African counterpart in the sense that his novel has won the coveted the Nobel Prize, its influence has proved enduring. Magical realism has almost become a literary school of thought as many writers used this style in their works and achieved prominence.
Among them is the Indian born British author Salman, Rushdie who adopted magical realism techniques in his bid to portray Indian and British societies in some of his most prominent work like “The Satanic Verses”. Yet, Rushdie never won the Nobel Prize, maybe because he did not invent anything new while Garica Marquez has clearly invented magical realism as a new narrative technique widely used in the literary world. Ben Okri is still a “younger” writer and may have the chance to win the Nobel Prize if he comes up with something breathtaking and extraordinary in his next novel. Unfortunately authors like Garcia Marquez increasingly look inimitable because style alone is not the soul of a book unless it is accompanied with a truly an epic story.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2024
