With the booker Prize for this year going to South African writer Demon Galgut, Africa is once again proving that it is a continent rich in story telling traditions and styles and that a new generation of writers is taking shape and enjoys recognition long after colonialism left the political scene.
This year is particularly a boom year for African literature as the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah snatched the Nobel which is the most prestigious international prize and Demon Galgut won the much-coveted Book prize earlier last week. Both the Nobel and the Booker prizes were long dominated by European winners.
Africa appeared on the international literary map at the turn of the century when colonialism was a dominant political reality across the continent and no major works appeared in African languages or in English. Europeans had a monopoly over the production, publishing and circulation of global literature and indirectly dictated both the themes and contents of the writings that enjoyed commercial success across the globe.
Literature in Africa was largely present in the form of oral tales and traditional story telling methods before colonialism penetrated the continent and started to subvert its literature as it did other aspects of life. The first truly post-colonial novel in English was Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” that is still enjoying mass readership and contemporary relevance.
Gurnah may be considered a writer dealing with themes relevant to the effects of colonialism in Africa, but African literature flourished long after the demise of colonialism and advent of what is known as neocolonialism about which many prominent post-colonial contemporary African writers have built their careers and reputations. In this category of writers we find Armha, Wa Tiongo, Ben Okri and many others.
The year 2021 can thus go down in the history of African literature as a critical turning point that confirmed the continent’s emergence as a heavy weight of world literature. In this highly competitive world of commercial literature, African writers are proving their salt while American and European brands in in relative decline. In these two continents, literary commercialism and mass circulating cheap and banal books are invading the market. American and European writers see to have gone out of imagination or themes that are significant and relevant to the world beyond their borders.
African writing on the other hand is on the way of unprecedented flourishing and acceptance by readers everywhere in the world because the African experience is relevant to the destiny of the entire world. Otherwise how would you understand the phenomenon of African books by African writers are going through a period of ‘renaissance’ while low quality books by American and European writers are no more attracting the attention of the global readership as they did in the past. These books may be best sellers but they are not classics that have enduring appeal despite the passage of time.
Neocolonialism is not a dying species as it is surviving by changing its forms and expressions. Politically Africa is still a victim of Western neocolonial manipulations, subversions and diktats as current events testify. Western powers are out to undermine Africa’s political gains by subjecting its people to economic poverty, the debt burden, aid dependency and ‘vaccine apartheid’ in the current fight against the pandemic for which the quantity of vaccines Africans receive is disproportionate to the size of its population.
According to recent information, African books about neocolonialism by African writers are witnessing resurgence and new popularity simply because the effects of neocolonialism on Africans and the global readerships are still appealing. Neocolonialism is shaping the world in the image of the West and this is not only the exclusive concern of Africans but also people everywhere in the world. Mass migration, growing poverty, unequal economic relationships between the West and the rest of the world…etc., are all themes that are being explored by African writers to the benefit of the whole world.
And his is also the reasons behind the current resurgence of African literature and the winning of both the Nobel and the Booker by African writers. This is of course an unprecedented phenomenon that will not stop very soon. Africa has a vast pool of new generation of writers who are picking up the same theme and exploring I from different perspectives. Thus the neocolonial theme is filled with new ideas and themes large enough to inspire writers for the coming one hundred years as neocolonialism as a political, economic and social phenomenon and manifestation is metamorphosing into new forms and new manifestations.
Demon Galgut is a South African writer who is honored with the Booker Prize for his novel “The Promise”. According to information released in connection with his win, “The South African playwright and novelist wrote his first novel aged 17 and won the 2015 Sunday Times Fiction Prize for his eighth book, “Arctic Summer.”
Upon receiving the prize, the author was quoted by the media as saying, “It’s taken a long while to get here, and now I think that I shouldn’t be here,”
“Galgut said somewhat modestly, adding that he was “stunned” to win the award. He also dedicated the prize to all African writers. “I would like to accept this on behalf of all the stories … that come from this wonderful continent,”
Galgut did not write about the effects of neocolonialism on Africa. He won the prize for portraying South African society after Apartheid. He has written extensively about post-Apartheid South Africa. According to critics, Galgut’s “The Promise” is his” ninth book, and had already won acclaim among critics for its menacing and bleakly funny portrait of the Swart family, descendants of Dutch settlers who are desperately holding onto their farm and status in post-apartheid South Africa. Literary critics likened his experimental prose to modernist masters like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner, while others noted his debt to fellow South African writer J.M. Coetzee.”
In a way Galgut’s book is the history of Apartheid in the last 40 or so years and its negative effects that continue to shape the fate of many white families down to this day. There is here a parallel between the neocolonial theme and Galgut’s portrait of Apartheid’s effects. Bot deal with history that is not yet dead. Speaking of his book, Glagut said that he was writing about something that is past but not buried.
The promise in a way portrays race relations in South Africa during the time of Apartheid and after it formal ending, because, as one critic noted, it is the story of “a white South African farming family across four decades that are punctuated by a death in the clan. The matriarch’s dying wish — or promise — is to gift a house on the property to the Black woman who has worked for the family her whole life. But the children are conflicted over whether to follow through on their mother’s wish.”
We can perhaps interpret Galgut’s “The Promise” as a portrait of slavery in the age of South African political freedom. During Apartheid land belonged to the white minority while the black majority worked under conditions that are not different from slavery. Although South Africans gained their political freedom they have not yet won their economic freedom. Thus Galgut deals with a theme that is not yet dead. This is also a theme that has polarized South African society and contributes to the current crisis in the ruling party and the post-Apartheid establishment as well as radical politicians from the Economic Freedom party led by the maverick Julius Malema.
Writing about Galgut’s book, the New York Times Book Review was quoted as saying that, “Galgut got the idea for the novel, which Europa Editions published in the United States in April, from a conversation with a friend, who described going to a series of funerals for family members. It sounded like the perfect narrative vehicle for a family saga. Galgut began working on a novel centered on a family — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes — whose matriarch dies of cancer in 1986, when South Africa was convulsing with political unrest. The novel’s title refers both to the unrealized promise of social equality after the end of apartheid, and to the matriarch’s promise to leave a house to a Black servant, Salome, which causes a rift in the family.”
Galgut is the third writer from South Africa to win the Booker, following Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee, who has won twice. Other African writers have also won the Booker prize for fiction. Notable among them is Nigerian author Ben Okri who won it for his famous novel “The Famished Road” about Nigerian life and politics after independence.
We can ask at this point why African writers are so obsessed with historical facts and fiction. The answer can only be simple. The reason is that Africans have history on their side as they were and still are the victims of their past history that continue to shape their present realities.
Africa is rich simply because it has a rich history still misunderstood and abused by the Western neocolonial rulers who are making life harder for hundreds of millions of African through a subtle international system of subversion and political diktat. This reality will also give inspiration to younger African writers who will certainly pick up their pen to write how their continent has been undermined and continue to suffer from neocolonialism’s unequal relationships between the West and underdeveloped Africa whose politics, economy and culture is still controlled by Western multinationals while its history is escaping similar fate thanks to its writers.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION NOVEMBEBER 14/2021
