The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Nigeria is the dominant power in West Africa, in literary and in almost all other respects, but it is far from the only country in the area from which significant fiction has emerged. Political instability and undemocratic rule have obviously hindered economic and cultural development in many West African nations since independence and, in some cases, have completely stifled artistic work. Paris and London remain the literary conduits for the best-known writers from the region, but local publishers and cultural centers also are helping sustain writing there.

NIGERIA

Nigeria is by far Africa’s most populous nation and has long been one of its literary centers. Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) won sub-Saharan Africa’s only Nobel Prize in Literature outside South Africa. Despite civil war in Biafra, extended periods of military government, and often shaky and corrupt democratic rule, Nigerians have consistently produced a large body of fiction, albeit often while living abroad. Several path-breaking authors came of age in the colonial era, including Soyinka, Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), and Cyprian Ekwensi (1921–2007), and a new generation, which includes writers Chris Abani (b. 1966), Helon Habila (b. 1967), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977), has now been established.

English is the unifying language in multiethnic and multilingual Nigeria, but three other major languages—Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba—have some 20 million native speakers each. Although these and many other languages have their own unique literary traditions and cultures, essentially none of the Nigerian fiction originally written in any language other than English is readily available outside Nigeria. The work of Nigerian writers published in Europe and the United States also tends to be by authors with strong ties to either Great Britain or America, where almost all of them now reside. Several had at least some success while still living in Nigeria—notably Achebe, who moved to the United States in 1990, and younger writers such as Abani and Habila—but much of the work of those in the younger generation is almost predictably multicultural. Raised and educated in two cultures, their fiction often relies on Nigerian subject matter and themes while also being comfortable with Western literary traditions, offering something new but not too new, much like the successful fiction by a slightly older generation of writers from India a few decades earlier.

The Trail Blazers

Amos Tutuola’s (1920–1997) quest tale The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was one of the first African novels to be widely acclaimed and read abroad. The narrator of the novel relies on a palm-wine tapster to provide him with his beloved intoxicating drink, and when the tapster dies, he cannot find anyone to take his place. Because the narrator heard that some people who die do not go directly to heaven, he hopes to find his dead tapster somewhere in this world, and the novel recounts his adventures as he looks for him. With its use of Yoruba myths and idiosyncratic English, the book has a ring of authenticity of a sort rarely found in earlier African fiction. Ironically, it initially enjoyed much greater success abroad than it did in Nigeria itself, where critics were less receptive to the liberties Tutuola took with English and to his borrowings from familiar folktales. None of Tutuola’s later, often very similar, works had the same impact, and The Palm-Wine Drinkard remains a classic of African fiction.

MARKET LITERATURE

So-called market literature—mainly pamphlets of self-help and advice but also including the local equivalent of pulp fiction, as well as drama and poetry—flourished in the Nigerian city of Onitsha during the 1960s. While the literary quality was generally not very high—Cyprian Ekwensi is the only major writer to have emerged from this scene—it demonstrated the viability of a large domestic market for popular literature in Africa. Unfortunately, the industry was devastated by the Biafran war. The anthology of pamphlets Life Turns Man Up and Down (2001), edited by Kurt Thometz, is the best introduction to Onitsha’s market literature.

A YORUBA CLASSIC

Wole Soyinka translated D. O. Fagunwa’s (1903–1963) The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938, English 1968) from the Yoruba, helping bring the work of this influential author to a larger audience. In Nigeria, Amos Tutuola’s work is widely considered to be a pale imitation of Fagunwa’s.

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is the most important figure in modern African literature, and his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), marks the beginning of modern African writing. With far more than 8 million copies sold, Things Fall Apart is also by far the best-selling work of African fiction. Achebe has written a number of other excellent works of fiction, and he is also an accomplished poet and important essayist. As the founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series—long the leading outlet for African writing in English—which he oversaw from 1962 to 1972, Achebe played a central role in fostering new talent and recognizing new African authors.

Things Fall Apart is a novel about Igbo village life at a time when the white colonizers’ influence is just beginning to spread. The protagonist, Okonkwo, has risen from humble beginnings to become an important figure, but over the course of the novel, his life is marked repeatedly by the demands and expectations of tradition. Among the several violent deaths in the novel is that of a boy who had been delivered to the village as a sacrificial lamb in recompense for another murder. The boy is raised in Okonkwo’s household for several years but ultimately has to be put to death. Okonkwo also accidentally kills another youth, which forces him to flee his village. When he returns after the appointed seven years of exile, he finds Christian missionaries have spread their word and undermined the foundations of his society. He tries to combat their influence but fails and is ultimately reduced to committing the shameful act of suicide. Even though Okonkwo is the central figure in the novel, Achebe’s intention is clearly to describe a tribal way of life and how it was upset by foreign interference. Village life is far from idyllic, and the villagers display universal human weaknesses, but they live on their own terms—until the white man’s terms are dictated to them. Achebe wrote the novel in part as a response to what he considered the superficial portrayal and understanding of African life in novels like Joyce Cary’s (1888–1957) Mister Johnson (1939), and Things Fall Apart succeeds particularly well in validating a largely African perspective.

In the 1960s, Achebe published several other novels dealing with conditions in Nigeria during the twentieth century, but he has written little fiction since then. His last novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), was also his most stridently political. Achebe set the story in a fictional nation, Kangan, but as in many other African novels attacking dictatorships, the real-life counterparts to the nation and some of the figures are readily identifiable.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) is best known for his plays and autobiographical writing, but he has also written some fiction. His most important novel, The Interpreters (1965), can seem almost willfully obscure, yet the constant talk of the group of intellectuals at the center of the novel yields a rich picture of newly independent Nigeria and the opportunities for a new generation—and the costs of those opportunities.

• Cyprian Ekwensi (1921–2007) was one of the first, and perhaps the greatest, exponents of popular fiction in Africa, for both adults and children. He wrote a number of rather sensational works about urban life in Lagos, most notably the prostitute tale Jagua Nana (1961).

• T. M. Aluko’s (1918–2010) novels often reflect his experience as a civil servant.

• Elechi Amadi’s (b. 1934) novels describe village life.

The New Generation

Ben Okri’s (b. 1959) first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), was written when he was still a teenager, and this shows in its somewhat contrived and melodramatic plot as well as in his still unsure style. Nevertheless, it is a forceful bildungsroman set in the Nigeria of that time. Its protagonist, the teenager Jeffia, has lived a protected and privileged life, thanks to the success of his ruthless and corrupt father. As his father’s life comes undone, Jeffia faces several crises that mark a transition from innocence to experience. Here and in his other early work, especially the collection of stories Stars of the New Curfew (1988), Okri’s portrayal of Nigerian urban life and corruption is striking. In the long novel The Famished Road (1991), Okri continues to move away from strict realism. This novel, which won the prestigious British Booker literary prize, is narrated by an abiku named Azaro. He is a spirit child who has gone through many cycles of life and rebirth and now clings to a place in the real world in which he does not entirely belong. Okri imposes his imagined spiritual world on the raw Nigerian reality in a surreal and fantastical mix reminiscent of magical realism. Although he strikes a good balance between the spiritual elements and their connection to the real in The Famished Road, too many of Okri’s later works are skewed entirely toward the spiritual, and while the lyrical language of The Famished Road is still controlled, in his more recent novels, it seems excessive.

Helon Habila’s (b. 1967) debut, Waiting for an Angel (2002), describes life under the rule of Sani Abacha in the 1990s. It begins with its protagonist, Lomba, in prison, with the later, largely self-contained, chapters describing the conditions and circumstances that have shaped Lomba’s life and finally led to his arrest. If occasionally too grandiloquent, the overall impression is strong. Measuring Time (2007) is a more ambitious novel covering several decades of recent Nigerian history. Its main characters are twins from a small Nigerian village. One brother, LaMamo, leaves while the sickly one, Mamo, stays behind. Reports from abroad—mainly LaMamo’s—bring home some of the larger problems Africa faces, and Mamo becomes a local historian. Oil on Water (2010) is set in the Niger Delta where the oil industry has brought great corruption and destruction along with vast wealth. The kidnapping of the wife of a foreign oil executive brings two journalists—one legendary but over-the-hill and the other young and just beginning his career—into this contemporary heart of darkness in which they are confronted with conditions that are far more complex and ambiguous than they appeared from a distance.

Biyi Bandele (b. 1967), whose earliest works were published under the name ‘Biyi Bandele-Thomas, is better known as a playwright, but he has written several entertaining novels. All are very funny. Even his novel Burma Boy (published in the United States as The King’s Rifle; 2007), about African soldiers fighting in Asia during World War II, is leavened by humor. While the way his novels unfold has a jittery quality, with stories within stories and episodes veering and breaking off in all directions, they hold together sufficiently and often are excellent. Bandele has a good ear for language, and his prose is playful without being too ornate. As might be expected from someone used to writing for the stage, it reads aloud very well. With its descents into madness, The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (1991) conveys the unreal and unpredictable world of contemporary Nigeria particularly well, but all of Bandele’s novels are worth reading.

• Festus Iyayi (1947–2013) wrote socially and politically engaged fiction.

• Buchi Emecheta’s (b. 1944) work, especially her fiction, is based on her own experiences in Nigeria and London.

• Chris Abani’s (b. 1966) poignant tales are about African lives, most memorably that of Elvis in GraceLand (2004).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977), Helen Oyeyemi (b. 1984), and Uzodinma Iweala (b. 1982) already have shown great promise in their first books, among which Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) stand out. Purple Hibiscus has many of the elements typical of a coming-of-age novel, but it is the father figure—a devout Christian, widely admired as generous and public minded but a strict brute at home—that makes compelling the narrator, his teenage daughter Kambili, trying to become independent. Unlike many recent African novels dealing with war and rebellion, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun does not focus on current conflicts but, rather, the Biafran war of the late 1960s. Many English-writing authors of her generation from the Commonwealth countries have written novels about defining periods in their homeland’s recent histories of which they have no firsthand knowledge, often in what is clearly an effort to construct a foundation for their own understanding of their country’s present. Half of a Yellow Sun is such a novel and shows that this exercise can be rewarding for readers as well. In closely following the lives of several protagonists—including a houseboy ultimately drawn into the fighting, a university lecturer, and an Englishman who finds himself in the role of an observer in this war—Adichie offers many perspectives on the conflict and its personal toll. Less focused on the actual combat than how it influenced, disrupted, and destroyed so many lives, it is an affecting novel of Nigerian history that also contrast with the starker works written decades earlier by those directly touched by events in Biafra.

Ama Ata Aidoo’s (b. 1942) fiction examines the lives of African women, from the young protagonists in her collection of stories The Girl Who Can (1997), to Esi, a woman trying to balance career and a second marriage in the novel Changes (1991). In Our Sister Killjoy (1977), the protagonist, an African student named Sissie, travels through 1960s Europe. Sissie goes to Europe on a scholarship for travel, not for study, making her a cultural observer and ambassador very different from the protagonists of so many African-in-Europe novels. In visiting not only England but also, for example, Germany, she ventures farther afield than do the characters in most novels of the period. Aidoo’s presentation mirrors her character’s efforts to digest and find the words for what she experiences, ranging from straightforward prose to correspondence to verse. While the novel as a whole has a pieced-together feel suggesting that Aidoo is more comfortable with the story form, it is a unique documentation of those times—and could have been a first step in a direction that one wishes more authors (Aidoo included) had followed.

With its harsh appraisal of the promise that came with indepen-dence—Ghana was the first sub-Saharan state to break free of British rule, in 1957—quickly dashed by corruption and an unnamed character referred to simply as the man, Ayi Kwei Armah’s (b. 1939) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) is a classic of African anomie. Armah’s bleak, almost despairing novel is a wallow in filth, the protagonist literally surrounded by decay, with little hope for renewal or cleansing even in its conclusion.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and the Harvard-educated Armah’s next two novels all were first published in the United States, a trilogy of works with autobiographical elements and African settings that strive for universality. The third, Why Are We So Blest? (1971), is more polemical and political, but all are highly critical of the roads taken in Africa. While not disassociating himself from the continent, Armah arguably chose to write from a distance, publishing for a primarily Western or Western-educated audience, a path that other postcolonial authors, such as Salman Rushdie, would soon take. Instead of continuing on this course, however, Armah abruptly turned inward. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978), both first published in Africa, are much broader in their historical scope and, in effect, reimagine African history. As the title The Healers suggests, Armah’s outlook in these works is also more optimistic.

Settling in Senegal, Armah established his own publishing house and has continued to publish fiction, much of which is strongly anchored in classical African myth. While the lyrical intensity impressive in his early work can still be found, Armah’s mythmaking and didacticism weigh down his more recent work. In recent decades, Armah has written himself into a corner, cutting himself and his fiction off from the global writing and reading community. Works such as Osiris Rising (1995) and the epistemic novel KMT: In the House of Life (2002) are of interest but also unpolished by contemporary standards. Without constructive engagement with the literary community, Armah has become a peripheral figure despite the talent that, in his early works, suggested a far more prominent position for him.

B. Kojo Laing (b. 1946) is another Ghanaian author whose leap onto the world stage has so far proved to be only a tentative one. Also a poet, Laing’s fiction is noteworthy for its linguistic reach. Incorporating African language and expressions, veering into the poetic, and allowing sentences to run on at considerable length, Laing’s prose is among the most distinctive of that of contemporary African writers. Beginning with his novel of Ghanaian corruption, Search Sweet Country (1986), his novels can be seem glutted, especially as they rarely contain a story arc that leads to a satisfying resolution. Rather, the pleasure of Laing’s tales is found in the often satirical and surreal way they unfold. Always interested in the clash of technology and tradition, several of Laing’s works have elements of both magic and science fiction. Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) is a futuristic vision of an idealized African metropolis, set in the year 2020. Like Armah’s novels, Laing’s early works were first published by American and British publishers; his more recent Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006), an unwieldy but remarkable novel that mixes religion and genetic engineering, has been published only in Ghana.

• Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s (b. 1971) collection of stories about Ghana and Ghanaians in the United States is entitled The Prophet of Zongo Street (2005).

CÔTE D’IVOIRE

All of Ahmadou Kourouma’s (1927–2003) few novels are political, ranging from his first, The Suns of Independence (1968, revised 1970, English 1981), about the transition from colonialism to independence, to one of the major child-soldier tales to come out of Africa, Allah Is Not Obliged (2000, English 2007). A Malinké, Kourouma has skillfully incorporated his native language and storytelling into his fiction. For example, the title of his novel Monnew (1990, English 1993), representing the defiance and contempt that dominates it, is a Malinké term with no exact French (or English) equivalent.

Kourouma’s novels are set in fictional West African countries, yet the real-life counterparts of both the nations and their rulers are often readily identifiable. His finest achievement is the satirical Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals (1998, English 2001, and as Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, 2003), which brings together many of Africa’s worst despots in a gathering to reflect on the life and sing the praises of a dictator named Koyaga, a thinly veiled portrait of Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadema. The presentation, in the form of this very traditional gathering and ritual accounting of Koyaga’s life and feats, mixing fantastical embellishments and horrifying realism, produces a devastating critique of both Eyadema’s rule and, in the many asides, his fellow despots. It is, along with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, the strongest—and funniest—satirical novel to come out of Africa.

• Bernard Binlin Dadié’s (b. 1916) offers creative impressions of an African traveling abroad in works such as One Way (1964, English 1994).

• The novels of Côte d’Ivoire-born Véronique Tadjo (b. 1955) show an impressive range.

• Côte d’Ivoire–born Marguerite Abouet (b. 1971) wrote a series of Aya graphic novels, beginning with Aya (2005, English 2007), which is set in the Ivory Coast starting in the 1970s, with illustrations by Clément Oubrerie.

Born in Cameroon, Werewere Liking (b. 1950) founded the artistic center Ki-Yi M’Bock in Abidjan in 1985. She is involved in many of the arts, principally theater and painting, but has also written several works of fiction. Some of her unconventional works are “song novels,” using oral traditions while also showing obvious theatrical influences. Even a weighty autobiographical coming-of-age novel like The Amputated Memory (2004, English 2008) has the feel of a performance piece. The often experimental nature of works such as the hodgepodge It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral (1983, English 2000) can be exasperating, yet Werewere’s inventiveness is admirable. Certainly, how she mixes genres—and pushes them to their limits—makes her one of Africa’s more intriguing avant-garde writers.

Senegal has produced several notable authors, including the filmmaker and writer Sembene Ousmane (1923–2007). Sembene’s socially engaged fiction includes God’s Bit of Wood (1960, English 1962), based on an actual railway strike in the late 1940s. This richly populated novel is as much about community as it is about a labor dispute and remains a landmark of African realist fiction. Xala (1973, English 1976) is somewhat overshadowed by Sembene’s film version of the same name, but this comic novel about a corrupt, Europeanized member of the new bourgeoisie who continues to serve French interests rather than those of his countrymen and who finds himself afflicted by impotence (the “xala” of the title) when he takes yet another wife is an enjoyable satire. Sembene’s fast-paced, dialogue-heavy The Last of the Empire (1981, English 1983) is his most direct attack on Senegalese politics. While its specifics make it somewhat dated, it still holds up well as a thoughtful political thriller.

• Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s (b. 1928) Ambiguous Adventure (1961, English 1963) stands out among the many African novels about Africans traveling to Europe to advance their studies. The novel focuses on the religious, with its protagonist, Diallo, firmly rooted in Islamic tradition and always drawn back to it.

• The protagonist of France-based Fatou Diome’s (b. 1968) The Belly of the Atlantic (2003, English 2006) is torn between Senegal and France and recognizes how difficult it is for her countrymen to fulfill their dreams abroad.

Mariama Bâ’s (1929–1981) first novel, So Long a Letter (1979, English 1981), is presented as a letter from the recently widowed Ramatoulaye to her friend Aissatou. The lives of both were marked by their husband’s taking second wives, and while Ramatoulaye remained with her husband, Aissatou divorced hers. The novel offers a sharp criticism of the practice of polygamy and convincingly conveys the human toll it takes.

Guinea is one of several West African countries that have been largely under totalitarian rule since independence. Its most famous author, Camara Laye (1928–1980), served in several government positions under the dictatorship of Ahmed Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from 1958, when it became independent, until his death in 1984. But after publishing his novel critical of Touré’s regime, A Dream of Africa (1966, English 1968), Camara went into permanent exile. His masterpiece, and one of the great works of African fiction, is The Radiance of Kings (1954, English 1956). The novel’s main character is a white man, Clarence, who finds himself down and out in an African country after gambling away his last money and believes his only hope for bettering his situation is to obtain an audience with the king. With little understanding of the society and culture in which he finds himself stranded, Clarence is slowly drawn into it in the fantastical journey he takes to reach his objective. The beautifully written novel is an ambiguous tale that can be seen as anything from an allegorical quest to a surreal and Kafkaesque nightmare. Camara wrote only a few works of fiction, but they are commendable, from his autobiographical The Dark Child (published in Great Britain as The African Child; 1953, English 1954) to The Guardian of the Word (1978, English 1980), his retelling of the life of Sundiata, who became the first emperor of the Malian empire.

Mali—and its fabled city of Timbuktu—was long a literary and intellectual center and still has a strong tradition of oral literature. The performances of griots—a mixture of bards, poets, and singers—continue to influence many of the region’s writers. The works of some contemporary writers from Mali have been published in French but not in English, and only a few older titles by Malian authors are available in translation. These include significant novels such as Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s (1901–1991) sharply humorous story of the cost of colonialism, The Fortunes of Wangrin (1973, English 1987), and Yambo Ouologuem’s (b. 1940) only full-fledged novel, the controversial but influential Bound to Violence (1968, English 1971).

Covering more than seven hundred years of the history of the fictitious African Nakem Empire, from the thirteenth century onward, Bound to Violence is a wildly uneven and often unfocused novel, as Ouologuem rushes through some parts and lingers over others. Driven by a furious energy, it is also a very violent account. Questions arose about the authenticity of his text, as Ouologuem was accused of plagiarism and clearly incorporated passages from other writers’ work into his novel, most notably from Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934). But even if seen as merely an enhanced collage of other works, it is an often dazzling novel.

ELSEWHERE IN WEST AFRICA

Military rule and civil wars in several of the other western African nations have limited the development of a literary culture, and even though fiction is being published throughout the region now, little of it is ready for the world stage. Among the exceptions is the work of Mauritanian author Moussa Ould Ebnou (b. 1956), but much is not yet available in English translation.

Bai T. Moore’s (1916–1988) short novella Murder in the Cassava Patch (1968) is among the few well-known books from Liberia. Set in 1957, the novel begins with its narrator, Gortokai, in jail, accused of the murder of his fiancée, Tene. Gortokai’s account of his life and what led up to Tene’s death provides some insight into Liberian culture and tradition, and with the murder mystery framing the story, it is an enjoyable small work.

Sierra Leonean author Syl Cheney-Coker (b. 1945) is better known for his poetry, but his ambitious novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) also is noteworthy. Taking place in the fictional city of Malagueta, which was founded by freed slaves, it is a work of historical fiction with a strong magical realist inflection that resembles a West African version of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, English 1970). Cheney-Coker’s penchant for florid and poetic language can make it seem overwritten, and with characters like the poet named Garbage Martins, it is occasionally forced, a fanciful variation on Sierra Leonean history. Cheney-Coker returns to Malagueta in the similarly ambitious Sacred River (2014).

A journalist and outspoken critic of the regime in his native Burkina Faso (previously called Upper Volta), Norbert Zongo (1949–1998) was brutally murdered. His novel The Parachute Drop (1988, English 2004), about a Mobuto-like dictator in a fictional African country, is the most significant to come out of Burkina Faso.

• Wilton Sankawulo (1937–2009) wrote traditional tales and folklore and also was briefly Liberia’s effective head of state in the mid-1990s.

• Tété-Michel Kpomassié’s (b. 1941) wonderful account An African in Greenland (1981, English 1983) is nonfiction but one of the few literary works to come out of Togo.

• Ebou Dibba’s (1943–2000) fiction is from Gambia.