Complete the revolution of the literature curriculum

In November last year, Prof Akin Adesokan of Indiana University, Bloomington, invited me, alongside Prof Cajetan Iheka of Yale University, to be co-respondents in a virtual African Literature Association Lecture, co-presented by Prof Lily Saint of Wesleyan University and Professor Bhakti Shringarpure of Connecticut University.

Saint and Shringarpure’s lecture, titled ‘African Literary Studies in Crisis?’ was based on the findings of a survey they had conducted among literature lecturers across Africa to establish which writers and texts they most regularly taught.

By their nature, surveys are prone to slippages, and findings of surveys are never that hard to dispute. Nonetheless, surveys give useful indications on trends and common perceptions, as was the case in the particular survey that Saint and Shringarpure conducted, whose findings show a dreadful picture of African literature in Africa, and representative authors and texts of African literature in many universities in East, West, and southern Africa.

In summary, Saint and Shringarpure found that despite the enormous diversity of genre, themes, and a huge number of literary writers in Africa, the idea of African literature that dominates reading lists in universities in Africa remains pretty much what it was in the early 1960s, when themes of colonialist violence countered by nationalist aspirations inspired creativity and animated critical debates.

So, as at 2020, African literature in universities in Africa still prioritised the novel as the most taught genre, followed by autobiographical writings, poetry, drama, and then essays. Of these, male written literatures were preferred, drawn mainly from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Senegal.

Among the most read and taught writers, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was tops, followed by Nigerians Achebe and Chimamanda, and South African Coetzee.

Fixation

This fixation with the so-called canon of African literature poses a problem far graver than what Saint and Shringarpure allude to as the crisis of underrepresentation or freezing of the idea of African literature in its generic diversity, stylistic innovation, and thematic concerns.

In my view, these findings point at two foundational problems with literature departments in Kenya specifically and Africa generally.

One of these problems is the regrettable lapse of communication between the mainstream academy, if universities can be viewed as such, with other institutions that create literary knowledge on Africa, both within and beyond the continent.

In Kenya, for instance, it seems that there is little formal and informal partnerships involving university lecturers and book sellers, literary events organisers, and even patrons of literary awards, something that creates avoidable blind spots across the board.

This need not be the case, given that all along, many academics acknowledge that university education, and all education for that matter, should allow for conversations across different groups of people who seek to understand themselves and their place in the world.

While the generation of Ngũgĩ, p’Bitek, Ousmane, Oyono and Achebe did this in the context of the nationalist identity politics of the 1960s, current realities of planetary, cosmopolitan and other unbounded forms of citizenships call for a shift in the priority literatures that we need to teach.

And there is enough of such literature to be taught, given the sterling literary works that have emerged, thanks to support from different quarters with an interest in contemporary forms of literary and cultural creativity.

In fact, Saint and Shringarpure acknowledge this paradox of having minimalist and recycled reading lists amidst bountiful literatures, when they note that “the last two decades have seen astonishing growth for African literature in the global North and South, evidenced by lucrative publishing deals; new prizes and grants; literature festivals; the establishment of many new presses and imprints; and an increase in blogs and platforms that disseminate and discuss these developments."

Artificial bifurcation

The artificial bifurcation of trends in literature departments in universities, and their variants in other spaces of literary scholarship, shows how for good or bad reasons, departments continue to lag behind literary times, stuck in the grove of petty quarrels about sterile debates when the world of literary creativity and criticism moves forward.

This is the indictment that Saint and Shringarpure hint at; our obsessive commitment to an archaic idea of African literature – represented by the 1960s canon – distracts us from focusing on more current ideas of African literature and its representation within and beyond the continent.

This is why the most mentioned authors, as Saint and Shringarpure indicate, are the Ngũgĩs and Achebes at a time when the likes of Ugandan Jennifer Makumbi and Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste have reconfigured African tales, introducing current and more urgent debates about our being.

This points at the second problem of the curriculum of African literature as we currently conceive it.

The findings of Saint and Shringarpure’s survey suggest that departments of literature in Africa are trapped in European and American logics in course design and conceptualisation, which allows for totalising claims. For instance, while the widely embraced pan-Africanist agenda of the 1960s and 70s could have justified having a unit called the African Novel, the ideological shifts of the present and the high number of novels that emerge out of the continent in a year makes such a course impossible to mount and its title misleading.

The problem, therefore, is that the after-lives of earlier debates continue to haunt any meaningful debates about curriculum-related issues and, subsequently, limit the extent to which the curricula could be innovatively revised so as to accommodate new perspectives without losing the value of pioneer contributions.

For instance, the curriculum revolution – make no mistake, there was a revolution – that was engineered by the Ngũgĩ-Anyumba-Taban crew took race as its discursive standpoint at a time when other bases of marginalisation, such as gender and age, were rampant. One would imagine that the decolonisation agenda that Ngũgĩ and his friends initiated would be systemically embraced while considering other variables of marginality, but that is yet to happen because, as the recent altercations in these pages show, we still seek to debate same issues on the same terms as were set over 30 years ago. And in so doing, we have stymied debates that could have been pushed to their logical ends to see how, for instance, the decolonisation agenda could be extended to mainstream voices that were previously marginalised, not on account of their race, but perhaps sexuality, gender, and generation.

Of all the issues raised in Saint and Shringarpure’s survey, and subsequent lecture on whether African literature faces a crisis, therefore, I think what should worry us more than the recycling of our representative voices and texts is the permutations of institutional, ideological, and other frameworks that make such recycling possible or even necessary. And while some of these frameworks may be beyond the influence of individual departments of literature, others are not.

Indeed, literature departments in Kenya today can, if they choose to, avoid the moral cowardice that hindered a radical review of curriculum and begin to teach units that reflect contemporary societal issues, speak to creative innovations beyond the university spaces, and restore the discipline back on the path of complete decolonisation, by which I mean embracing all previously muted voices, not least of sexual, racial, and generational minorities.

The author teaches at the University of Nairobi