EYAMBA G. BOKAMBA
Research on the structure of African varieties of English (hereafter African Englishes, or AfrE) has made dramatic progress since the early 1970s, when it was difficult to find more than two or three article length studies on the topic. Currently there is a rich literature in different formats (e.g. books, chapters in books, and articles) that offers the reader informed analyses of these Englishes’ salient characteristics that are extracted primarily from the usual sources: newspapers, compositions by students, interviews, government publications, novelettes by amateur writers, advertisements, and magazines (Sey 1973; Jibril 1991; Singler 1991, 1997, Schmied 1991, 1997, 2006; Bamgboṣe, Banjo, & Thomas 1995; de Klerk 1997; Schneider 1997; Huber 1999; Higgins 2009). Thus far little attention appears to have been given to the examination of texts written by well‐established creative writers to ascertain the manner and the extent to which they “bend the English language” à la Chinua Achebe (1966b) to carry the weight of African cultures. This type of study is very important as a scholarly inquiry that could elucidate a major dimension of African Englishes resulting from multilingual creative writers who, like the proverbial poets, sometimes take license with the English language to convey stories and cultural meanings to their educated readership. Such intentional creations are bound to generate criticisms and misperceptions by the so‐called owners of the language and/or purists who read the texts out of their cultural contexts. This appears to be precisely the kind of perception that Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike (1980) lament. This study begins this exploration of African Englishes by African creative writers in the hopes of discovering interesting structural characteristics and also rhetorical devices they utilize in creating such Africanized linguistic structures.1
This study represents an expansion of my research on African Englishes that began under Braj Kachru’s mentorship and strong encouragement. It is inspired largely by his (1982) thought‐provoking study titled, “Meaning in deviation: Toward understanding non‐native English texts,” and by Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike’s (1980) book on Toward the decolonization of African literature: vol. 1: African fiction and poetry and their critics. The paper attempts to address the contextual aspects of AfrE by expanding the usual corpora sources to creative writing to describe the formal properties or usage of such varieties. Accordingly, it samples literary texts from selected and renowned African creative writers: Chinua Achebe, Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o, Gabriel Okara, and Flora Nwapa, to examine, first, the contexts in which these varieties are constructed, reconstructed, and deployed in such writing; and second, to address an ideological question concerning the hegemony of English, instead of African languages, in these and their colleagues’ writing.
The study analyzes the creation and transcreation of narratives in the depiction of literary characters to ascertain not only what Kachru (1982: 333) terms the “contextual” and “functional appropriateness,” but also the rhetorical devices employed by the authors to portray or invoke certain cultural imageries. This paper seeks to uncover, first, what Achebe, the late Nigerian Nobel Laureate in Literature, characterizes as the “bending” of the English language to carry the weight of the African cultures (hereafter, the restructuring of English in African creative writing). Second, the paper also discusses the perennial issue of whether African creative writers should be writing African literature in English, using nativized varieties and subjecting themselves to the assumed English L1 (i.e. mother‐tongue) norms for such works (Chinweizu et al. 1980; Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o 1986).
As a study of AfrE in contact literatures, it examines the sociolinguistic implications of the utilization of these varieties in a highly culture‐bound scholarly endeavor involving the portrayal of African cultures to non‐African contexts. The aim is to ascertain the extent to which AfrE are creative responses dictated by the multilingual’s grammar, and the writer’s command of “the ecology of language function” (Kachru 1982: 344). In this respect the study seeks to answer, first, the following three interrelated primary questions concerning the restructuring of English in creative writing. First, how do African creative writers “bend” the English language to carry African cultures? Second, what rhetorical devices do these writers employ to achieve this effect? Third, how do the resulting transcreations compare to educated varieties of American and British Englishes (respectively, AmE/BrE) in creative writing? Then in the last section it addresses two subsidiary questions: First, why do African creative writers write in English, rather than in African languages; and second, whether, pursuant to Ngu͂gĩ and other advocates of writing in African languages, this privileging of English and other transplanted European languages of Africa (TELA), namely French and Portuguese, is warranted.
Before delving into the subject of the paper proper, it is worthwhile highlighting at least two important aspects of the use of English in Africa and the ongoing debate regarding its utilization in African literature. This contextualization is critical for an informed appreciation of the complexity of the issues that involve the form, function, and ideology of English in the so‐called English‐speaking Africa. English became one of the official languages of African states as a result of the British colonization of several such nations in West, East, and Southern Africa that essentially began with the scramble for Africa that occurred in the eighteenth century, culminating with the Berlin West African Conference of 1884–1885 and ending with the advent of political independences in the early 1960s. The British colonies included Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Togo, and West Cameroon in West Africa; Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in East Africa; and Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho in Southern Africa.
Today English is either the exclusive or co‐official language of these nations, serving not only as the language of all public domains (i.e. government, administration, and international affairs), but also more important, as the exclusive medium of education in pervasively multilingual societies where English is not the inhabitants’ vernacular but a minority lingua franca of the educated elite. This hegemony makes it in these countries a critical language to acquire as an educated person; forces creative writers, among others, to use it to publish their African‐based literary works and to entertain and inform readers regarding African cultural experiences (see studies in Simpson 2008). In contrast, African languages, which are the pervasive vernaculars among the masses, are infrequently used for such publications for a variety of reasons, including their putative restrictions to subregional, and therefore noninternational, spheres of spread (Ngu͂gĩ 1986; Simpson 2008; McLaughlin 2009 for counterevidence). This functional hegemony in African literature has generated, as in the case of the other two TELA, considerable acrimony among African intellectuals since the 1960s. For example, Chinweizu et al. (1980) take serious issue with this dominant and almost exclusive role that African creative writers have allowed to persist in the postcolonial era. They also severely criticize European literary critics who, on the one hand, view African literary writing in their languages as an important and enriching dimension in their literatures; and on the other hand, criticize such African writers for not measuring up to the standards established presumably by educated native speakers of English and other transplanted European languages. Overall Chinweizu et al. (1980) argue that such criticisms are unfair and inappropriate, because Africans write about their experiences that, as any national and/or subnational is bound to do, must reflect and convey its cultural milieu. A second and perhaps the best known criticism, with a strong advocacy for the use of African languages as an act of “decolonizing the [African intellectual] mind” is Ngu͂gĩ’s (1986) book. In this work Ngu͂gĩ criticizes African creative writers for abandoning their languages to privilege TELA. Quoting from a speech by Achebe, who expressed dreadfulness in abandoning one’s mother tongue but yet embraced that course of action, albeit reluctantly, by stating that:
Ngu͂gĩ (1986: 7) points out that while there is some merit to the dilemma, to abandon one’s mother tongue for English is a “fatalistic logic of the unreasonable position of English in our literature.” Ngu͂gĩ maintains that to engage in the infusion of African thought and culture via translation or trans‐creation in a foreign language as suggested by the following statement from Okara’s article (cited in Ngu͂gĩ 1986: 8), is both unnecessary and irresponsible:
Ngu͂gĩ (1986: 8) seriously questions this approach, and raises several fundamental and ideological questions, including the following:
He then comments and observes on the same page that:
The answer to this question, but not to the others, is given by Achebe and Okara, who wish to bend the English language to accommodate the African cultural experiences. According to Achebe, as quoted in Ngu͂gĩ (1986: 8):
Okara’s view, which Ngu͂gĩ characterizes as “representative of [his] generation,” states that:
Achebe’s and Okara’s answers, which Ngu͂gĩ accepts to a degree, did not settle the controversy, and therefore, a passionate debate involving the dominance of European languages over their African counterparts continues. Consequently, at the conclusion of a historic conference by African scholars from different disciplines held in Asmara, Eritrea (on the Horn of Africa) from 11–17 January 2000, under the very apt title of “Against All Odds,” to examine language policies in African public domains, a public document that came to be known as the “Asmara declaration on African languages and literatures” was released. It enunciated 10 related principles and potentially actionable paths to resolving the problem of the primordial role of African languages in public domains, at least initially. They included the following (Mazrui 2004: 129–130):
This declaration reflects not only the spirit of the “Language Plan of Action” adopted in 1986 by the former Organization of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the current African Union (AU), but its informed advocacy sentiments are also forcefully endorsed by a recent UNESCO’s (2010) Institute for Lifelong Learning expert report that are discussed below.
In summary, these issues, as partially highlighted here, constitute some of the core factors that inform African creative writers’ African English. To correctly appreciate the complexities of these varieties, we must take into account not only who the authors of some corpora are, but also what, if ascertainable, might have influenced the formal/structural choices that were made when the text(s) was/were produced. This is an old truism in any writing, but one that is often overlooked by critics of world Englishes, including African ones. This chapter dissects these factors by examining all the relevant contexts of situation that informed the sampled narratives examined here.
African Englishes are known for a number of structural variations from the assumed Standard American (SAmE) and/or Standard British Englishes (SBrE), however one defines such standards. Such variations include (a) the omission of function words; (b) semantic extension of certain lexical items from African languages to cover various meanings and functions in English; (c) occurrence of certain redundancies, including the pluralization of mass nouns; (d) retention of anaphoric pronouns in nonsubject relativization; (e) use of affirmative answers to yes/no questions; (f) unusual word order in adjectival phrases containing demonstrative or possessive pronouns; (g) borrowings from African languages; (h) inconsistent or misused verb particles; (i) analogical derivation of new words based on commonly occurring English morphemes; (j) omission of the element “more” in comparative constructions; and (k) inconsistent use or lack of tense concordance in conjoined sentences (Bamgboṣe 1982; Bokamba 1982; Jibril 1991; Singler 1991, 1997; de Klerk 1997; Schmied 1997, 2006). Among these characteristics, the most evident and productive are borrowings from African languages, the creative morphological derivations that result not only in the formation of new nouns and verbs but also in that of adverbs via reduplication (Sey 1973; Bokamba 1982; de Klerk 1997). For example, as discussed in Zuengler (1982) and Schmied (1991), East African English (viz., Kenyan and Tanzanian) contain a great deal of Kiswahili vocabulary, illustrating the role of the latter as a national language in both countries. These words include (Zuengler 1982: 116) Sufuria (‘a wide‐bottomed aluminum pot’ < Kiswahili), ugali (‘boiled cornmeal’ < Kiswahili), sukuma‐wiki (lit. ‘push the week’, ‘spinach‐like greens’ < Kiswahili), jembe (‘hoe’ < Kiswahili), rungu (‘blunt blade for hitting’ < Kiswahili), panga (‘curved blade for cutting’), shamba (‘cultivated plot of land’), wananchi (‘people’, ‘citizens’ < Kiswahili), harambee (lit. ‘let’s pull together’ < Kiswahili), uhuru (‘freedom’, ‘independence’ < Kiswahili), baraza (‘large official meeting’ < Kiswahili). More recent additions in East African English are presented in Higgins (2009), and similar ones for South African English in Silva (1997).
As discussed in the previous studies referenced above, the aforementioned formal features, among others, describe not one but many African Englishes that can be identified with some degree of accuracy as regional or national. While the development of such structures can realistically be argued to result from language learning, acquisition, and indigenization, they are also not totally devoid of conscious restructuring or bending. Part of this adaptation is done naturally in the acquisition of any language, including that of additional languages, the so‐called second and third languages (Kachru 1983; Herschensohn 2007). The latter type of process is referred to as substratal or cross‐linguistic influences (Aronin & Hufeisen 2009; Grosjean 2010). In creative writings, however, the variations are often more deliberative, than subconscious or accidental products for the usual reasons: (a) to culturally contextualize the text; (b) depict and differentiate characters; and (c) convey cultural meanings that can be easily accessed by any reader who is familiar with the targeted culture or may deduce it from other textual clues.
Consider, for example, two of Achebe’s classic novels: Things Fall Apart (1959), and A Man of the People (1966a). In Things fall apart, Achebe, a native speaker of Igbo (one of Nigeria’s three national languages and ethnic groups) from Eastern Nigeria, deals with the change in the Igbos’ traditions as a result of the advent of missionaries and British colonialists. The story’s hero around whom the changes are largely illustrated is a village man named Okonkwo, a rural inhabitant who typified the strong and exemplary leader of his ethnic group and village. Achebe devotes approximately two‐thirds of the 25‐chapter book in portraying in careful details the hero and the embedding cultural milieux in several respects: (a) establishing Okonkwo’s leadership skills as the greatest wrestler in the region that comprised nine villages; (b) depicting him as a fearless warrior and a no nonsense father and husband of initially three and eventually five wives who knew his cultural values and respected them; (c) depicting him as a disciplinarian who would not hesitate to punish his wives, children, or any opponent who dared to challenge him or contravene against the village’s traditions; and (d) establishing him as a truly African family man with a dozen children. Achebe further contrasts Okonkwo’s success and hard‐working habits against his father’s laziness and lack of success. Okonkwo’s wealth is defined in terms of traditional assets such as number of wives, children, yam farms and their productivity.
The narrative in the novel is presented mainly in the third‐person singular and largely through the words and actions of Okonkwo, other community leaders, Okonkwo’s father, and Okonkwo’s maternal uncle after he was exiled to his mother’s village for seven years because he accidentally killed one of his own village men. Thereafter (in Part III), the narrative is presented through the eyes of the new religion and its accompanying colonial administration whose chief spokesperson was the district officer. Much of the English language in the narrative, even in the voice of the author, is simple, straightforward, and largely devoid of most of the formal features that characterize WAE (West African Englishes), including Nigerian, except for the frequent injection of Igbo cultural vocabulary that Achebe italicizes and later defines in a glossary. Consider in this regard, first, the following two examples:
This discourse provokes a condemnation from the priestess Agbala:
Notice that while in these passages the language reflects standardized American/British English (SAmE/SBrE), the word selections and their syntax exhibit a rhetorical style and reasoning that is very much reflective of villagers. Specifically, in the passages in (8), except for the choice of earth instead of ground, there is nothing peculiar: They read just like any form of SAmE/SBrE. In (9), however, Africanisms are injected in two important respects: First, by the selection of the words in the clause “I put any crop in the earth” where the verb phrase could have been expressed differently both in the choice of the verb, put in instead of plant, and the locative could have been ground. Second, the mention of gods of the land and yams, and the sacrifices of cocks to these gods clearly invoke a rural African cultural setting.
The same cultural contextualization is maintained and expanded in (10) by the appearance of the ghostly priestess, and the comparison of lazy Unoka to his counterparts regarding their abilities in their main occupation: farming. Structurally, the use of proverbial‐like expressions, such as weakness of your machete and hoe and offer[ing] sacrifices to a reluctant soil exemplifies AfrE in lexical selection and phraseology. Further, the fact that the priestess speaks eloquently and knowledgeably about Unoka’s private work habits in this passage reveals a shared communal rural life where everybody knows about everybody else’s business. References to the seasons relative to the planting process, and the significance of acknowledging the relevant gods furthermore ground the story in a rural community. In these passages the author minimizes the restructuring of English but draws on imageries to create and reinforce the African contexts.
In addition to the above depictions of his characters, Achebe dresses them in traditional roles that involve a variety of tests: their physical strength, resolve, beliefs, and moral aptitudes to illustrate African cultural practices and values. Such was the case when Okonkwo was forced to flee his father’s village following the accidental shooting to death of a young man during a village celebration. Okonkwo’s farms and three of his four‐hut compound were burned immediately after he fled, according to the village’s laws. He was banned from returning to the village or participating in any of its events for seven years. The hero’s ability to endure this appropriate punishment, adapt to a new life, integrate himself into his mother’s native village, and to become an important leader there as well, eloquently testifies to the leadership skills he once exhibited in his own community. He became richer by marrying two more wives; having more children; and benefiting from the strengthened friendship with his best friend who managed all aspects of his business during his exile. This community law‐based punishment was the hero’s first serious episode that commenced his personal and the village’s eventual demise, or falling apart from Achebe’s perspective.
The use of cultural imageries to portray certain situations or settings further embeds deeply the story into an African context that in turn influences the language structure as in the following statements:
The reference to a lizard in (11a) and its habit of losing and automatically restituting its tail typifies an African rural and semiurban scenery; structurally, however, there is no characteristic restructuring of English: The image is simply conveyed in SE. In (11b) the same projection of African cultural thought in what constitutes manly behavior and beliefs in power to act and punish one’s miscreant child or enemy is expressed in the italicized sentences in SE, not AfrE. The spread[ing] of the song phrase in (11c), however, appears to be suggestive of AfrE, but it could also be argued to occur in any educated variety of SAmE/SBrE. These sample passages from Things Fall Apart demonstrate that Achebe can bend or not bend the English language at will according to his creative impulse(s).
Much later in the novel, when the story moves to the period prior to the confrontation between the African and European cultures, Achebe presents us a new image of his hero and the other main character, Obierika, who, while still reflecting their cultural approaches in their defense against invaders/enemies, demonstrate a significantly sophisticated reasoning unlike that encountered in the previous two‐thirds of the book. Further, their discourse, while still simple in its syntax, exhibits very few Africanisms, as the passages in (12) show:
Notice that (12a) is a return to an earlier type of discourse structure in the novel: that of short sentences without embedding or coordination, in which the two friends and villagers express their anxieties and frustrations concerning the impending changes that are bound to destroy the fabric of their traditions, and to which their people already appear to be incapable of repelling. Here again, there are no Africanisms structurally, except for the SBrE use of the verb have as an auxiliary to allow the subject‐auxiliary inversion exemplified in ‘Had they no guns and machetes?’ In contrast to (12a), the sentence they have not found the mouth with which to tell their suffering in (12b) is clearly a common Africanism. This is precisely how one would normally express, in an African language, the idea that the individuals concerned “have not found the words with which to talk about their suffering.” Noteworthy in the above passages, which have analogs elsewhere, is the expert manner in which Achebe focuses his readers’ attention to the story in an African stream culturally, even as he empowers his rural characters with enhanced sophisticated reasoning, and yet manipulates English structure ever so slightly to periodically and appropriately transmit the target African (sub)culture.
The introduction of the new religion in the region, Christianity, marked the beginning of the falling apart of the Igbo beliefs system, as it began to test and compete against them. Okonkwo, with all his prowess and renowned hero friends, could not prevent the construction of a church in the village where he exiled himself. His abilities to defend himself physically, to mobilize others against what most of them considered as abominations that questioned and contested their core beliefs, were checked against other more reasoned voices; and by developments beyond Okonkwo’s control, including his own first son who joined the new religion and chose to flee from home. With the establishment of a colonial administrator in the subregion that included the nine villages inhabited by Okonkwo, his family and friends, new forms of punishments, along with deceit, were instituted to control the villagers. The region’s elders and the warriors no longer held sway over others whom they had controlled previously via physical force or customary laws. Such acts were consistently met with jail terms and corporal punishment administered by their own people whom the colonial government employed. Okonkwo and five other elder warriors fell victim to the new “laws” and endured seven days of imprisonment and corporal punishment when they defied them.
The advent of Christianity and colonialism, as we might suspect, injected a novel register and logic: educated speech and the use of different ways of reasoning in conflict prevention or resolution to show that changes are possible even in entrenched cultures; and that they take time. In this part of the narrative in the novel Achebe reconstructs masterfully the English language in describing the new conditions and portraying his educated characters and morphing hero: Okonkwo. Consider in this regard, first, the statement from an educated Igbo character, Mr. Kiaga, who had been converted and joined the new religion:
In this response to an outcast who sought to join the new church in the community, Mr. Kiaga is portrayed as a character who not only waxes eloquence about the new religion, Christianity, but also speaks SE like his educated white counterparts in the invading colonial administration and the new religion. Contrasting and juxtaposed to this educated eloquence were, on the one hand, the speech of a wise village elder who spoke with elegant simplicity and cultural experience, and on the other hand, that of the novel’s main hero, Okonkwo:
Notice in (14) that except for the verb phrase stop his mouth, this character’s speech is devoid of Africanisms, and yet replete with African cultural imagery, humility, bravery, and wisdom. Also in contrast to Kiaga’s speech in (13), Okeke’s and Okonkwo’s statements, especially the latter, are much simpler in that they lack the kind of subordinating and coordinating structures found in (12). Okonkwo continues to adhere to his cultural self‐defense views by repudiating Okeke’s conciliatory approach to the foreign culture and religion.
Similar speeches that instantiate change with continuity are found toward the end of the novel, as illustrated in the following passages:
These passages offer injections of African rhetorical expressions, but without structural Africanisms.
In summary to the analysis based on Things Fall Apart, what Achebe demonstrates in it is his mastery of English and creativity to bend it at will as necessary to accommodate African cultures; in this case, of the Igbo people. The occurrence of Africanisms in his text does not appear to be subconscious or a reflection of interlanguage competence, but rather of conscious acts of a writer’s creativity. One of the most picturesque and amusing descriptions that demonstrates Achebe’s ability to manipulate SE to convey African cultures concerns Enoch, “the son of the snake priest,” who had become one of the most zealous followers of the new religion under Mr. Brown, the new missionary in the subregion:
The characterization of Enoch in (16) as the outsider who wept louder than the bereaved represents a poignant evocation of the highest emotions in times of grief in a family context, and thus a superlative of sorts in the portrayal of his devotion to Christianity that most of his coinhabitants mistrust. Overall the statement embeds African cultures seamlessly within what appears in all respects to be an educated variety of English; and in the second part of (16) it raises the bar on this depiction of Enoch by detailing in a comic and culturally informed manner the shape and behavior of his feet that externalized his excessive uncontainable energy. The added beauty to these types of passages is that they are presented to the readers without structural Africanisms.
In A Man of the People, however, the rhetorical devices used by Achebe are significantly different from those in Things Fall Apart. Here, the hero is an educated Igbo man who served once as a primary school principal, and eventually became a minister of cultures in a Nigerian national government. He is depicted as the villain in a new era. The narrative is largely presented in the first person singular by a university educated young man and a school teacher, who, as one would expect, speaks and reasons like a college graduate. The story revolves around the minister’s conduct as a politician who is a man of the people or a populist, while at the same time playing the politics of divide and rule, and engaging in all kinds of acts of embezzlement of public funds which the speaker and young hero decries frequently in the story without hesitation. Chief Nanga, the minister’s name, is also a womanizer who happens to possess physical attraction, money, power, and access that cannot be resisted.
What we learn from this largely moralizing story is that Achebe uses his superb skills in manipulating events, speech, and character portrayal through both language and action to achieve a first rate narrative that exemplifies AfrE mainly only through the periodic injection of Nigerian Pidgin English, a popular dialect of Nigerian English, and through Nigerian proverbs. Consider in these respects, first, the passages in (17) taken from the hero and narrator, Odili, who is commenting on the minister’s first visit to their shared hometown where the minister had once served as a school principal:
The word choices, the overall structure of the sentences, and reasoning in (17a–c) demonstrate clearly educated speech by the narrator and villain folk hero, directed to an educated urban audience. For example, the statement in (17a) that the attendance at the meeting was the most unprecedented crowd in the annals of Anata, can be appreciated and properly interpreted only by an educated or at least literate, population that knows the documented political history of Anata. The formality and degree of verbosity expressed in (17b) and (17c) with choices of terms such as gentleman, pin‐point responsibility, and conducted to their seat on the dais demonstrate further that the story’s participants and imagined audience are “educated” urban residents. Having a university education was in fact mentioned explicitly and flaunted, initially as a boasting point when the minister was being introduced to a newspaper reporter by his host, Mr. Nwege, the grammar school principal. Thereafter the minister often flaunted college education in speaking about his personal secretary, Odili, and the latter also referenced it quite frequently when speaking of the minister’s lack of such education and yet snobbish attitude toward highly educated colleagues.
Throughout the story we encounter elegant language with frequent multiclause sentences such as (18a) and (18b), and unlike in Things Fall Apart, observations like those in (18a) and (18b) by the narrator‐hero in reaction to the villain’s behavior (18b):
This multivocality seems to exemplify the discourse of educated and urban, rather than rural, African culture. These features are documented in part in statements such as those in (19) that also inject romance and pretentiousness that were absent from the rural‐based Things Fall Apart:
In many respects, A Man of the People appears to be the urban counterpart to Things Fall Apart: It is a variation on the same theme encoded largely in SE with limited and appropriate sprinklings of Nigerian Pidgin English to undoubtedly maintain the African cultural background. The narrator’s frequent questioning, reflection, and moralizing against the behavior of the minister and others of his irk throughout the book, as illustrated in (20a) and (20b), substantiate this conclusion:
Achebe is portraying in this work the political falling apart through the loss of the good moral principles that defined the Igbo’s culture, and by implication similar other African cultures, for millennia.
More passages such as (20) can be cited to illustrate the educated language employed in this particular novel, the explicit condemnation of this villain‐hero and his politician colleagues, as well as their followers who secretly aspire to become like them, but such citations will not reveal any linguistic features that would characterize A Man of the People as an “African English‐based” novel. It is abundantly evident here that Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People are two pieces of creative writings by a world renowned African literary scholar in which he demonstrates clearly that he, among others of his colleagues, is capable of producing SE whenever necessary, and bending it also appropriately to achieve artistic effects, or what Kachru (1992: 308) terms “functional appropriateness” in contact literature.
The English language structure in one of Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1965) classic novels, The River Between, which deals with rivalry and conflict between rural members of the Gikuyu ethnic group in Kenya at the advent of colonialism and Christianity, just like that of Nwapa’s (1981) One Is Enough, a story of romance in urban Nigeria, is largely devoid of significant Africanisms. Like in Achebe’s A Man of the People, these authors’ works sprinkle African proverbs and thoughts without the intentional bending of English à la Achebe. This is not the case with Okara, in his classic, The Voice (1964), where he deliberately transliterates the narrative into a strongly Ijaw‐based structure, his mother tongue. The following passages exemplify Okara’s own way of bending English, to an extreme, to transmit African cultures:
The Voice is replete with passages such as (21) with Africanisms, including repetition, idiomatic expressions, rural type of logic, and inconsistent pluralization. Overall, what is shown in (21) is definitely English in lexis, morphology, syntax, and meaning; but the lexical selections and structuring are not. Instead, these key language aspects represent an African language thought pattern, Ijaw in this case; but it can also be any African language. Specifically, clauses such as Okolo’s eyes were not right, his head was not correct in (21a) very much reflect the way that one would describe in an African language the way that Okolo’s eyes and head appeared. In each of these clauses the equivalent of the verb “made” is missing, and in the second clause the apparent adjective “correct” would be expressed by the same word that is used in both adjectival and adverbial senses. In the following sentence within (21a), the verb phrase knowing too much book also typifies the way that one would describe a bookworm or nerd. These Africanisms are made much more evident in (21b) with, among others aspects, repetition talked and whispered, selection of West African‐specific sayings such as had no chest (i.e. had no courage), His chest was not strong (not enough courage), and had no shadow (lacked personality). In the third sentence in (21b) the verb spoiled, instead of “ruined,” in the clause spoiled a man’s name they say to him would actually be the same verb that covers the two English synonyms. Similarly, the verb “say,” instead of possibly “call(ed),” evokes an African language. In the last sentence the terms “inside” in the first prepositional phrase refers to Okolo’s internalized knowledge, and “shadow” in the second prepositional phrase refers to “courage” as stated above.
The passage in (21c) illustrates further these intentional Africanisms with regard to redundancies, while adding local colors with expressions such as were in the air flying like birds, swimming like fishes in the river. The conjunct because what was there was no longer there and things had no more roots in the penultimate sentence captures beautifully a common aspects of vagueness in African languages where what actually stands for “things”, and roots for “foundations” or “explainable reasons.” The last sentence instantiates both a linguistic case of conflation of two English’s near synonymous verbs, “slap” and “hit,” into a single African verb that is often rendered as “hit/strike,” and a cultural act that involves the hitting of one’s thighs to express joy.
As stated earlier, the English that Okara utilizes, and that can be seen in even more opaque passages such as (22), is intended from his perspective to “carry the weight of African cultures”:
In this undertaking, which Okara admits to have been an experiment, the rhetorical devices employed do not involve the reconstruction of the English language à la Achebe, but rather of drawing on the language’s core components and embedding them into African language thought patterns and cultural imageries. If a reader were to construe this type of narrative as an instantiation of WAE, instead of a deliberate transcreation by a creative writer to achieve a specific and limited purpose, it would be a gross error. To demonstrate that Okara has mastered SE, it is sufficient to revisit his elegant English statement in (5) cited in Ngugi (1986: 8). When that statement is compared with the passages cited from The Voice, the conclusion should be unambiguous: These are two different “Englishes” produced by the same speaker‐writer for specific purposes.
In the passage cited in (6), Ngu͂gĩ (1986) quite correctly raises several questions that demand answers from his colleagues, and by extension from other African scholars. These questions include, for our purposes here, (a) why such scholars have privileged English and other “colonial” languages over African languages; and (b) why these scholars do not have the same passion to the utilization of African languages. The paper turns, in a summative manner, to these questions with a focus on the motivations, justifications, and putative challenges in publishing in African languages. A fuller treatment will have to wait for a later study.
From an African‐centric and intellectual perspective in general, Ngu͂gĩ (1986) is absolutely correct in questioning the hegemony of English over African languages in African literature and other scholarly productions, especially in view of the fact that many of the latter are more widely spoken than the former in almost all the so‐called English‐speaking African states (Baldauf & Kaplan 2004; Bokamba 2007; Kaplan & Baldauf 2007; Simpson 2008). Ngu͂gĩ’s questions have been the subject of ongoing debates in African intellectual circles in Africa and in the African Diaspora since at least the onset of massive decolonization in the 1960s and have led in part to the articulation of the OAU/AU’s Language Plan of Action for Africa that was formulated by African scholars (including this writer) at a meeting held in Kampala, Uganda, in 1986 and subsequently adapted by the OAU’s heads of states and governments in 1987. Recent publications directed to the issue include Bamgboṣe (2000), Chumbow (2005), Ngu͂gĩ (2005), Bokamba (2007), Anchimbe (2013), and especially UNESCO (2010) in which the following statements are indicative of the importance and scope of the problem for the latter:
Herein lie some of the answers to Ngu͂gĩ’s (1986) questions. In particular, the statement in (23a) restates the obvious: that European languages of wider communication (ELWC) are the exclusive media of instruction for the majority of the schooled students. This means that those who are fortunate to have formal education and to succeed academically so as to complete not only elementary school (5–6 years) but also secondary school (6) and perhaps tertiary education (4–5) become literate; they maintain that literacy and knowledge in their ELWC‐based education. This is not the case, however, in their home or community language(s) to which they have minimal literacy experience or none at all. Even if an African lingua franca were used in a transitional bilingual education system, usually up to the third grade, the secondary school and the technical college (two years) and/or university, educated Africans will generally not have developed writing and reading proficiency in their mother tongue or lingua franca unless they specialized, at the university level, in African languages (including linguistics) or African literature.
This exclusionary training in ELWC/TELA creates and reproduces diglossic communities in the language of education and the African vernaculars that are largely limited to oral communication. Specifically, the postprimary educated Africans can function in the TELA and the vernaculars, but their less educated compatriots are excluded from all communication conducted in the former. It is these domestically educated classes and their counterparts elsewhere in the world, but not the vast majority of the less educated populations, that creative writers target as consumers. Exclusionary education in English or any other TELA creates a pool of consumers of African scholarship, and that pool in turn economically and professionally dictates the selection and advancement of the language of publication. Under these circumstances, African literary scholars have very little choice unless they abandon their economic and professional pursuits in the interest of African‐centric ideologies; or unless there is a national language of wider communication (e.g. Amharic, Arabic, Bamanankan/Bambara, Kiswahili, Lingala,´ isiXhosa, and isiZulu) that is studied at school and can offset to a certain extent the advantages offered by a TELA. These are precisely the conditions that permitted the dramatic growth of the publication industry in Kiswahili in Tanzania during the Ujamaa doctrine era (1964–1985) under President Julius Nyerere when novels, fiction work, social studies of different sorts, and newspapers in Kiswahili became so accessible to the average reader (Roy‐Campbell 2001). The choice of a language in creative writing or any other scholarly undertaking by African intellectuals should not be seen in dichotomous terms: either a TELA or an African language, but rather as both depending on the domestic or regional linguistic market(s) available to the writer. For example, speakers of African languages of wider communication (ALWC), also known as transborder languages, which have significant literate speakers can easily pursue this bilingual path with enormous benefits for both the target populations and the development of the language itself.
But why do African scholars not pursue this option? The answer is partly provided in the second sentence in (23a) which restates a commonly known myth, taken as a truism in much of Africa: that international languages, generally ELWC/TELA, “are the only means of upward economic mobility”; and in part by the equally fallacious converse that African languages are not sufficiently developed to accommodate scholarly communication. These myths facilitate the marginalization of African languages, and the linguistic hegemony of TELA in the higher public domains which, in turn, entails the political domination of Africa through ukolonia as discussed extensively in Bokamba (2011) and by other scholars (e.g. Bamgboṣe 2000; Chumbow 2005; Ngu͂gĩ 2005; Anchimbe 2013). That is, in addition to the previously discussed myths, African literary scholars write in English and other TELA because they are imbued with ukolonia (Bokamba 2011: 161):
One might ask, do these concerns merit the kind of passion that Ngu͂gĩ (1986) and the Asmara Declaration on African languages (Mazrui 2004: 129–130), among others, advocate? The answer is a definitive “yes,” as UNESCO’s (2010) part of the statement in (23c) indicates. Writing creatively in African languages is not only a sine qua non condition for their structural elaboration and national self‐esteem for their speakers, but also crucial for mass indigenous knowledge production, reproduction, and diffusion in these languages (Ngom 2009; Jahnke 2009; Bokamba 2011). The achievement of these goals will in turn facilitate the expansion of education to the masses; reduce dramatically the pervasive illiteracy in much of the continent; and produce informed and critically minded citizens in their interethnic vernaculars to become their own spokespersons with the capacity to demand and create conditions for participatory democracies in their respective countries. During the past 60 years plus of political independence, exclusionary education in TELA has unfairly privileged a small elite that monopolizes socioeconomic powers at the detriment of the vast majority of the population that is subjected increasingly to grinding poverty, often in the midst of scandalous misuse of natural resources (French 2004; Tréfon 2004).
Learning and mastering English is not the panacea that it is often made to be in the so‐called English‐speaking African countries: it is simply one of the capacitating factors for personal upward mobility if and when other conditions are met. To publish in selected African languages does not and should not exclude the production of similar works in English, and other TELA. The pursuit of this option is dictated by professional development for any African scholar wherever he/she resides, and also by market forces in the context of a globalized economy into which Africa is incorporated. With its estimated 2,035 languages (Heine & Nurse 2000), Africa is one of the most multilingual regions in the world, and its inhabitants’ language practices for centuries have always accommodated multilingualism (the use of three or more languages) for various purposes. To dichotomize, rather than complement, the utilization of TELA such as English with their African counterparts is unwarranted by these practices. And to argue, or even suggest, that the use of selected African languages in education and scholarly works will impede African people’s socioeconomic development is both fallacious and unsupported by language histories and current practices elsewhere in the world, including in largely monolingual South Korea, Japan, and China (Bokamba 2007; Djité 2008).
This study is an attempt to answer a number of questions regarding the structural characteristics of African Englishes exemplified in African creative writings with a focus on selected novelists: Achebe, Ngu͂gĩ, Nwapa, and Okara. Its thrust is to assess the extent to which, if at all, some or all of these writers reconstruct the English language in their writings to convey the African cultures represented in their works. A subsidiary question is if there is a bending of Standard American/British English, how are these Englishes restructured? Do they appear, for example, as established regional or national African Englishes that are characterized in part by Africanisms in lexis, syntax, semantics, and rhetorical styles (Bamgboṣe 1982; Bokamba 1982, 1991; Schmied 1991, 1997; de Klerk 1997)? Or, do these creative texts demonstrate transcreations that still adhere to the standard varieties of English with appropriately encoded and limited Africanisms to capture African cultures? This chapter also addresses questions involving the almost exclusive use of English in African creative writings, in works that represent a major dimension of indigenous knowledge production and African cultural diffusion. The fundamental issue in this regard is the wisdom of the exclusive use of English at the detriment of African languages.
This chapter has uncovered, through a painstaking examination of texts from the selected creative writers, three incontrovertible facts: First, all four authors (Achebe 1959, 1966a; Okara 1964; Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o 1965; Nwapa 1981) are proficient writers of SE. As such, none of their respective novels exhibits interlanguage English with characteristic grammatical errors that are generally attributed to African language transfer. Second, except for Achebe and Okara, Ngu͂gĩ and Nwapa do not engage in the bending of English, at the least in the works surveyed here, to transmit African cultures. And third, Achebe, unlike Okara, deploys adeptly a series of rhetorical devices (repetition, Nigerian Pidgin English, deployment of (sub)culture‐specific proverbs, ascription of village/rural features to characters, and embedding of narratives to the story’s locality) to restructure the English language at will as dictated by the African contexts. These devices are much more widely exemplified in Things Fall Apart than in A Man of the People, that focuses on an educated urban audience. In contrast, in Okara’s The Voice the bending of English is a literal translation from his mother tongue without injecting other Africanisms. These creative writing data demonstrate clearly that highly educated African speakers of English can write like educated native speakers of this language, and that, as multilinguals, their writings cannot be divorced from the multilingual speech communities in which they live and about which they are writing, as has always been the case in the history of creative writing. As Kachru (1982: 341) has observed:
Using a non‐native language in native contexts to portray new themes, characters, and situations is like redefining the semantic and semiotic of potential of a language, making language mean something which is not part of its traditional ‘meaning’. It is an attempt to give a new African or Asian identity, and thus an extra dimension of meaning.
The use of English in what was termed “deviation” in the 1980s, or “transcreations” from a contemporary perspective, will, therefore, remain a reality of African scholarship just as varieties of native speakers’ English are (Lippi‐Green 2012).
As for the hegemony of English in African literature and in other scholarly endeavors in Africa and by Africans wherever they reside, versus the neglect or squandering of African languages in these works, what the paper hopes to have argued convincingly is that English and African languages can cohabit the same intellectual spaces. They can complement one another in serving as languages of knowledge production and dissemination, without exclusion, whenever feasible with respect to the language ecology, marketability, and the author’s proficiency in African languages. For example, the same novel or book on any topic can be published both in English and in one or more African regional or transborder languages that constitute the writer’s linguistic repertoire. If the writer cannot do so, other scholars can translate her/his work(s) from English to an African language, and vice versa. Exclusionary publishing in a TELA after over 60 years of political independence demonstrates an egregious squandering of African best linguistic resources, and an ukolonia mind set with its implied inferiority complex (Bokamba 2007, 2011). Those who advocate the Africanization of the media of African literature but practice the opposite will need to reexamine their ideological stances against their practices. It is time for Africanist scholars and their counterparts elsewhere to present a balanced picture of African Englishes, of the role and place of English, other TELA, and of ALWC in today’s globalized Africa. Partial and uncritical analyses do not do justice to the complex issues discussed in this study.