Trashing national identity: the portrayal of ethnic conflict in the contemporary African novel

Amy Rushton

This article was developed as an early offshoot from my research on modernity in the contemporary African novel, written in the English language. Although not a central part of my thesis, one cannot ignore the recurrence of ethnic conflict in the narratives of some notable contemporary works. This article is by no means an exhaustive account of African national and ethnic identity, but it takes a broad sweep across the contemporary African novel’s treatment of ethnic conflicts and how they undermine the possibility of returning to a sustainable nationalist ideology.

The main subject of analysis here will be Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the most successful writer to have emerged from the continent in recent years. Before addressing Adichie’s novel, it will also be asked why one of African literature’s most important writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, arguably attempts to avoid the issue of ethnic conflict in his most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow (2006). By contrast, the attention paid to Half of a Yellow Sun will explore the critical reaction to portraying a specific ethnic conflict within fictional narrative form. I will then end by addressing the ambiguities towards national stability as well as the threat of hybridity that can be found in the conclusions of Adichie’s novel and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story (2001), set at the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Inevitably, there will also be some contextualisation regarding definitions of ethnicity in Africa from its pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence eras, as well as addressing how the novels respond to theories articulated by critics such as Basil Davidson and Mahmood Mamdani. However, a brief overview is required into the African novel itself, particularly its relationship to the nationalism of the post-independence era.

Nationalism, disillusionment and conflict in the African novel

The African novel is commonly understood to have emerged in the mid-twentieth century from those newly formed nations during the period of Africa’s independence from Europe. In postcolonial thinking, the emergence of the post-independence African novel is synonymous with the project of constructing national identity. Simon Gikandi contends that the ‘period of nationalism’ occurring in these new African nations ‘created a space for the genre’, as ‘the search for a novelistic tradition in Africa paralleled the search for a political tradition’[i]

Although this nationalistic understanding of the beginnings of the African novel is rather more complicated than is suggested here, it is undoubtedly an important concept that has informed the subsequent development and readings of the novel to this day.

Alongside Africa’s interrupted economic, political and social development, continent-wide conflict disrupted the subsequent development of literary writing in Africa. On a material level, it was inevitable that in periods of conflict, most African nations were unable to sustain their own publishing industry, due to obvious factors such as a disrupted national economy. On an ideological level, it disrupted the sense of social purpose that united much of the earlier fiction writing. Consequently, the African novels that have emerged in the  twenty-first century arguably have more in common with the literary movement that succeeded the early, nationalist narratives of the post-independence novel.

By the late 1960s the literature of disillusionment was taking form as a reflection of the widespread violent conflict and political corruption which had begun to take hold throughout African society.. Such conflicts inevitably threw the nationalist project into turmoil: how can one speak of a national or even Pan-African identity when a nation is at war with itself? In terms of the novel as genre, Gikandi states that ‘in the mid-1960s the form and function of the novel changed almost overnight’, moving ‘the reader away from the sometimes celebratory and utopian tone of earlier novels to a grim critique of the narrative of cultural nationalism’. This was a generation of writers who were consciously ‘distancing themselves from the project of cultural nationalism’.[ii]

Despite the literature of disillusionment that preceded it, it is only within the last decade that African writers have begun to engage with the internal, civil conflicts of the late twentieth century. Of course, there is the historical and geographical distance of contemporary writers to consider: the lack of close proximity can help writers to tackle sensitive events. Not only are the vast majority of young African writers now living and publishing in Europe and America, a number of established writers have also found themselves latterly writing in the diaspora, such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Additionally, there now appears to be a move away from the (understandable) prior preoccupation with the era of colonialisation. Simon Gikandi has observed that the narrative reoccurrence of colonialism can be accused of creating ‘a false center of gravity’ in terms of its relationship to twentieth-century African novel.[iii] Steadily, the colonial era as the predominant narrative context is being left behind in favour of the still mostly unexplored post-independence period. However, that is not to say that the colonial legacy of post-colonial Africa is being ignored. Writers continue to interrogate the political consequences of the hasty withdrawal of the former colonial powers, such as how it sowed the seeds for the problems of ethnic division and power struggles in the late twentieth century. Indeed, ethnic division has been one of the most significant barriers to political stability in many nations, including Rwanda, the Sudan and Nigeria.

Contextualising ethnic identity in post-colonial Africa

The ethnic differences (but not necessarily divisions) that comprise the populations of any given African nation-state are often attributed to the idea of ‘tribalism’. The late historian Basil Davidson tentatively suggested that in ‘a large historical sense’,

tribalism has been used to express the solidarity and common loyalties of people who share among themselves a country and a culture. In this important sense, tribalism in Africa or anywhere else has “always” existed and has often been a force for good, a force creating a civil society dependent on laws and the rule of law. This meaning of “tribalism” is hard to distinguish in practice from the meaning of “nationalism”.[iv] [my emphasis]

In terms of the relationship between the ‘pre-colonial’ tribe and the colonial understanding of national identity, Davidson argues that ‘precolonial tribalism was no more peculiar to Africa than nineteenth-century nationalism was to Europe’.[v]

Writing at the height of a twenty-year period that saw the some of the worse outbreaks of civil violence across the continent, Davidson acknowledges that ‘tribalism’ in the post-colonial era was developing into a concept that was less unifying, more divisive:  ‘This modern tribalism flourishes on disorder, is utterly destructive of civil society, makes hay of morality, flouts the rule of law.’[vi] With Davidson taking the instrumentalist view of identity formation, the blame for this disorder lies with the intervention of the colonial authorities as the decades of alien rule and imperialist partition left ‘no valid structures for the future’, the Europeans further intervened by ‘inventing’ tribes and, later nation building.[vii]

Furthermore, the hurried attempts of the colonial authorities at nation-building helped to lay the foundations of civil unrest: as there were perceived to be no suitable African models, these nations were based upon European – therefore alien – models. These ill-thought out political structures meant that many of these new nations were left with a system that could default to an ‘ethnic’ basis. As political structures ‘failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens, save for a privileged few’, tribalism quickly became interchangeable with ‘clientelism’, a patronage ‘dependent on personal, family, and similar networks of local interest’.[viii] This encouraged the sense of disruptive modern tribalism that Davidson referred to as the majority took to defending themselves in a ‘fragile and fallible society’.[ix] Inevitably, ethnic identity played its part in the ‘dogfight scramble for state power’ with ‘would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises’.[x]

This interventionist reading of the contemporary problems regarding ethnic conflict in Africa is one that is shared by writers as diverse as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Discussing Nigeria, Adichie takes the view that the idea of the ‘tribe’ has its roots in colonialism, as people did not consciously identify themselves as Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa [AD1]  (the three largest ethnic groups in Nigeria) until the involvement of the British.[xi] Whilst there is nothing ‘incorrect’ about understanding ethnic conflict as a problem stemming from the colonial era, this can lead to problems when writers attempt to offer solutions to the problem of unity in their narratives. We shall return to Adichie later; for now, I want to explain a surprising problem that occurs in Ngugi’s most recent novel.

Avoiding the issue: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow

One of the most renowned writers to emerge from Africa, Ngugi believes that writing should be a political act to inspire and achieve social change, which is why it is particularly curious that his handling of ethnic division is somewhat dissatisfying in Wizard of the Crow. Situated in the fictional Free Republic of Aburiria, Wizard of the Crow is most specifically a satire on Ngugi’s homeland of Kenya and its time under the dictator Daniel arap Moi (in power from 1978 to 2002).

In terms of the relationship between his social conscious and writing career, as Simon Gikandi explains, Ngugi was ‘educated in the great tradition associated with F.R. Leavis, a tradition in which the efficacy and power of the novel depended on its moral authority’, and once Ngugi adopted Marxism in the late 1960s, ‘questions of ideology and audience became paramount’.[xii] As his career developed, ‘he wanted to produce narratives that would intervene in the cultural sphere, agitating for – and promoting – change, effectively using literature to rectify what he saw as the failure of national consciousness’.[xiii]

At over eight hundred [AD2] pages long, Wizard of the Crow covers a huge range of issues regarding social inequality and political instability, all of which relate to contemporary Kenya. What Ngugi does not tackle, however, is one of Kenya’s biggest political problems: the ethnic divide amongst its people. Since Moi’s departure from power, it has become increasingly apparent that ethnic division has become one of the key political issues in Kenya, particularly because of its links to continuing government corruption. Richard Dowden, a long-term correspondent for African affairs, opines that ‘Kenya’s politics are the most ethnicized and monetarized of any on the continent’, with the ‘primary job of an MP is seen as delivering goodies to his or her own ethnic group.[xiv] This ethnic tension erupted most dramatically during the 2007 elections: when Mwai Kibaki claimed to have won the election again, the country exploded ‘amid credible reports of rigging and other electoral violations’.[xv] The worst incidents of violent outbursts took place in poor areas that were populated by a diverse mix of ethnic groups. By the end of the initial riots, over one thousand people were killed and three hundred thousand were displaced.[xvi]

As it is becoming increasingly clear that the problems of ethnic division (particularly amongst the poorest communities) is a huge problem on the road to stability in Africa, it seems strange that this crucial issue is absent from such a contemporary, political novel. Briefly mentioned with regards to the rise of the Ruler in Aburiria, this is intended to be an indirect reference to Moi, who was installed by the British as the leader of the KADU party, comprising Kenya’s smaller ethnic groups, in opposition to the pro-independence, largely Gikuyu[AD3]  KANU party.[xvii] There is a hesitant attempt at addressing the matter in the novel’s conclusion when Kamiti[AD4]  states to Nyawira that as well as class, ‘race also matters.’ But she bats this argument away by insisting that ‘the appeal for blackness glosses over the valley between opposing positions’.[xviii] And that is all that is said on the matter.

Discussing his previous work, James Ogude believes that Ngugi does not tackle the issue of ethnic divide as he ‘tends to dismiss ethnicity as an invention of colonialism and the ruling elite in Kenya’, suggesting that Ngugi views ethnicity as ‘an ideological mask’, used by unethical politicians ‘as a way of securing their own interests against the ever-growing class divisions within their own ethnic groups’.[xix] Whilst many would concur with Ngugi’s recognition that ethnic categorisation has its roots in colonialism and that it is manipulated for political purposes, the evidence of such an argument cannot be found within Wizard of the Crow; with its interest in the inner workings of the political elite, its narrative could have portrayed how this ‘divide and rule’ tactic can be deployed amongst the people. Instead, it is dismissed as if Ngugi is too uncomfortable to deal with the difficulties that such ethnicized politics present.

So if Ngugi struggles to explain fully how the interventionist perspective on ethnic conflict impacts on contemporary African society, how does a younger generation of writers fare? To return to Adichie’s statement that it was British colonial interference that led to the Nigerian people’s associating themselves with specific ethnic categories, Adichie follows this with an important clarification: that ethnic identity in contemporary Nigeria is no longer understood to be cultural but political. Like Davidson, Adichie understands the shifting process of ethnicity from a socially useful force to a disruptive, manipulative one. The culmination of such a disruptive force is civil conflict based upon ethnic difference, or at its most horrifying, an attempted genocide. Adichie uses this context to explore Nigeria’s worse crisis of national unity in narrative form, but before we examine this, it is necessary to look at how ethnicity has developed as a political identity. 

Ethnicity as political identity: When Victims Become Killers

Before you can try and eliminate an enemy, you must first define that enemy. The definition of the political self and the political other has varied through history. The history of that variation is the history of political identities, be these religious, national, racial, or otherwise.[xx] (Mahmood Mamdani)

Although principally a critical study of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Mahmood Mamdani interrogates existing ideas concerning ethnic and racial conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Whilst Mamdani does implicate the colonial legacy (he states that the greatest crime of colonialism was ‘to politicize indignity’), he is critical of explanations that wholly blame the colonial administration, saying that the ‘claim that political ethnicity is an outcome of elite manipulation resembles the nationalist conviction that ethnicity (“tribalism”) was no more than a colonial prejudice’.[xxi] Instead, Mamdani argues that ‘by understanding political identities as embedded in particular institutions’, such identities can be conceptualised as ‘historical and not primordial, and institutionally durable as opposed to being available for instant manipulation by those in power or seeking power’.[xxii] Thus Mamdani understands race and ethnicity as political ‘identities that are legally enforced and institutionally reproduced’.[xxiii]

Furthermore, political identity is synonymous with historical understanding, with history dictating the changes of political identities.[xxiv] In terms of Rwanda, Mamdani discusses ‘Hutu and Tutsi as political identities that have changed from one historical period to another, each period indicating a different phase in the institutional development of the Rwanda state’. Here, Mamdani is arguing that studying Rwanda’s history as a nation in isolation is not as informative as understanding its relationship to the colonial and post-colonial era across the whole sub-continent.

This more complex approach to understanding ethnicity as a political identity relates to how Adichie explores the history of the Nigerian civil war in her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Mamdani’s distinction between what characterises ethnic violence in a national context is particularly relevant to the way Adichie depicts the everyday reality of a divided Nigeria. Mamdani understands ethnic conflict as a ‘violence against one who is seen as a neighbour’ that transgresses ‘across a boundary into home’, and Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel that poses uncomfortable questions about a conflict that depicts previously hospitable neighbours as sudden enemies.[xxv]

Half of a Yellow Sun: controversies with addressing ethnic conflict

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun has been a critical and commercial success since its publication in 2006. Half of a Yellow Sun is a fictional account of the Nigerian civil war that took place from 1966 to 1970, also referred to as the Biafran war. Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in Africa, with a population of over one hundred and forty million people, and two hundred and fifty ethnic groups. The civil war was, fundamentally, an ethnically motivated war against those identified as ‘Igbo’, one of the predominant ethnic groups. Years of political unrest resulted in outbreaks of violence towards the Igbo people, eventually resulting in massacres. As increasing numbers of Igbo refugees moved eastwards, the Republic of Biafra was created in 1967. But after five weeks of existence, Nigeria attacked Biafra in order to force reunification. Marked by the dissolution of Biafra, the war left over three million Igbo people dead from fighting, starvation or disease.

Biafra is still a contested part of Nigeria’s history, and although written about during and immediately after the conflict, it has since been viewed as a ‘hidden’ history. Adichie’s choosing to write about Biafra is in many ways understandable: her family is Igbo and her grandfathers were killed during the war. Adichie’s novel is narrated solely from the perspective of its Igbo characters and an English supporter of the Biafran cause. Prior to the conflict, these characters inhabit middle class life, with careers in international business and academia, as Adichie’s family did. Adichie contextualises the politics of the period leading into the war by portraying the frequent gatherings of academics at the house of Odenigbo, a physics professor at Nsukka University. These debates are usually seen from the narrative perspective of Ugwu, the houseboy, who refers to Odenigbo as his ‘Master’:

‘We should have a bigger pan-African response to what is happening in the American South really –‘ Professor Ezeka said.

Master cut him short. ‘You know, Pan-Africanism is fundamentally a European notion (…) my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,’ Master said. ‘I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible to white. But I was Igbo before the white man came’.[xxvi]

With Adichie’s retrospective insight, Odenigbo’s latter point about being Igbo functions as an ominous   statement of context for the events that will follow, as the tribal definitions within Nigeria will serve as the basis for the people to be divided by war. This notion of pre-colonial identity is interesting within the context of Half of a Yellow Sun, as the emphasis in the novel will change from a preoccupation with national identity to what it means to be Biafran and what it means to be Igbo in post-war Nigeria.

To return to Mamdani, to understand ethnically motivated violence and genocide as a legacy of colonialism, Mamdani stresses that the ‘dialectic of the settler and the native did not end with colonialism and political independence’; he argues that it is ‘necessary to think through the political world that colonialism set into motion. This was the world of the settler and the native, a world organized around a binary preoccupation that was as compelling as it was confining’.[xxvii] Even when the settler-native dialectic was removed with Europe’s withdrawal from the continent, it left behind a pattern that has been replicated many times in different African nations: one group seems to possess the power, whilst other groups must be cast in a powerless role. Adichie’s novel shows how this played out during the Nigerian civil war: there is a sense that the Igbo are being targeted as ‘scapegoats’, becoming too powerful and are thus causing inequalities in Nigeria. Adichie has spoken of being personally ‘driven’ to write Half of a Yellow Sun and she has affirmed that she had no concerns with balance whilst writing it.[xxviii] Immediately, the potential problems are obvious, such as how to approach ethnically motivated violence in the text.

There has been concern over the portrayal of Abdulmalik, the Hausa neighbour of Olanna’s aunt and uncle in Kano. The Hausa are Nigeria’s largest Islamic ethnic group and Abdulmalik is first introduced as a friendly neighbour.[xxix] He next appears at the beginning of the war, when Olanna discovers her family’s bodies in the aftermath of a massacre. She witnesses him in a ‘blood stained’ kaftan amongst a group of armed men, shouting aloud, ‘We finished the whole family. It was Allah’s will!’[xxx] Brenda Cooper fears that the ‘portrayal of Abdulmalik plays into the dominant, Western stereotypes regarding the African people, their wars in general and Biafra in particular’.[xxxi] Cooper uses Mamdani’s concern over a ‘pornography of violence’ attached to African ethnic conflict: Mamdani is extremely critical of how the American media continually portrays an image of Africa that perpetuates ‘a level of violence that is innate and inevitable, assuming fixed biological or cultural characteristics of Africans’.[xxxii] Mamdani’s argument is that whilst genocidal violence cannot be ‘rational’, it can be ‘thinkable’ in order for us to understand the political and historical context of why what happened did happen.[xxxiii] However, without this level of insight, Cooper warns that depictions of Darfur, Rwanda […], or Biafra run the risk of reproducing knowledge about Africa that merely reinforces some of the worst stereotypes, whether the author is an ignorant American newspaper reporter or an original, young Nigerian voice.[xxxiv]

Whilst critics have shown concern over the portrayal of violence in the novel, I feel that there has been an overemphasis on its non-African readership. Whilst I do think its war narrative has contributed to Half of a Yellow Sun’s commercial success in Europe and America, nevertheless, the narrative is overwhelmingly concerned with the more mundane, everyday realities of war. John C. Hawley agrees, noting that the novel ‘never dwells on its horrors in any sustained way’.[xxxvi]

It is inevitable that by writing about Biafra, there is a danger that Adichie risks adding to what Cooper terms ‘the figurative arsenal of Western mis-representations of Africa.’[xxxvii] Cooper asks that ‘when families are butchered and cut up in the novel, when good men participate in gang rape […], then what is added to our knowledge of Africa?’[xxxviii] But I feel that the more important question is to ask what would be removed from ‘our’ knowledge, if Adichie had never written the novel? The huge success of Half of a Yellow Sun has written Biafra back into being a period of Nigerian history that had all but ‘disappeared in fact if not in memory’, as Wendy Griswold says.[xxxix] Adichie has repeatedly spoken of her single-minded determination to write about Biafra particularly because of its unwillingness to be spoken about. If Adichie’s handling of violence in the novel is difficult to justify, could it not be that the very act of violence is always difficult to justify?

Ambiguous futures: the return to disillusionment?

Aside from its portrayals of violence, one of the most notable aspects of Half of a Yellow Sun is its conclusion. Kainene, the twin sister of protagonist Olanna, crosses enemy lines to access the Red Cross convoy that has been detained. Hours, days, weeks, then months go by. She has disappeared. Neither the characters nor the reader learn what has happened to her; such disappearances became commonplace during Biafra, with most people never discovering what happened to their friends and relatives.

As powerful as this conclusion is, Adichie is not the only contemporary writer to end a novel on African national conflict in this way. I argue that the symbolic function of physical disappearance invokes the ambiguous future of particular nation states; Zoe Wicomb is one writer who takes a bold step in troubling the idea of a brighter future for post-apartheid South Africa by using disappearance as a recurring leitmotif in her novel, David’s Story (2000).

Wicomb’s novel is comprised of a number of diverse, intermeshed narrative strands that gravitate around David Dirkse. The underpinning narrative is set in 1991, the year of Nelson Mandela’s release, which is also the beginning of the end for apartheid. David has devoted his life to serving as a guerrilla activist for the ANC and is now facing the dismantling of its military wing. David is filled with paranoia and a good deal of his anxiety concerns the key disappearance in the novel, which concerns Dulcie, his ANC colleague who has disappeared after being dragged off into the night. The paranoia that floods Wicomb’s text culminates in David’s death, his body drowned, and it is unclear if he died at his own hand or whether his paranoid instincts proved correct. David’s Story addresses the hypocritical aspects of the ANC’s behaviour towards those in its ranks. As a black South African, Wicomb appears to be investigating how some of the dubious practices in the name of liberation may have caused the new South Africa to be founded upon yet more inequalities, especially regarding women. Moreover, David’s ambiguous suicide, along with Dulcie’s unsolved disappearance, appears to mirror concerns over present-day South Africa. David’s Story was written only six years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, yet there is already a nervous ambiguity present regarding its progress. Today, with South Africa still teetering on the edge of economic and political crisis, Wicomb’s narrative ambiguity reads not so much as pessimistic but prophetic.

Hybridity as a threat

It needs to be acknowledged that novels such as Half of a Yellow Sun and David’s Story do not employ a simplistic dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in their portrayals of ethnic conflict: although balance can be near-impossible to maintain, ethnic diversity is acknowledged as complex and ambiguous, largely because of its political basis. However, they also show that the possibility of hybridity as a positive state of identity is both threatening to and threatened by political powers.

Aside from expressing ambivalence towards the idea of the unified nation-state, David’s Story also portrays the sense that hybridity is often seen as a threat to political powers, concerning the issue of who exactly constitutes ‘a nation’. Part of David’s paranoia stems from threats and accusations that he believes are being made against him (from both outside and within the ANC), and some of this seems to be about David’s research into his mixed heritage. Annie Gagiano suggests that the novel’s ambivalence is a reaction to ‘the post-liberation sidelining and betrayal of Coloured activists’, with Wicomb rejecting the essentialising narratives that claim a separate Coloured or Griqua identity, and her dissatisfaction, in 'new' South African national narratives, with the erasure, or the failure to recognise, the presence and the contribution of Coloured South Africans to this society. [xl]

Half of a Yellow Sun also explores the idea of hybridity as a threat to national unity, via the character of Richard, a white British man. Richard arrives in Nigeria to research regional artwork and to work on his novel, but ends up falling in love with Kainene and stays. Of all the characters, it is he and Odenigbo who are the most optimistic about the Biafran cause, and Richard identifies himself as ‘Biafran’. When secession is announced, Richard considers this moment with Kainene as ‘a new start, a new country, their country’, as ‘he would be Biafran in a way he could never have been Nigerian – he was here at the beginning, he had shared in the birth. He would belong’.[xli] Yet Richard never does ‘belong’, as his whiteness means that whilst he is never accepted as ‘Biafran’, he is also never under the same level of physical threat during the war. What Richard’s ethnicity does allow him is a voice, as Adichie explains:

Richard’s being a Biafran – of sorts – but then being white meant that he could tell the story to the world, in a way that a black Biafran couldn’t. And I felt that was important because I do think that the way the war was reported, that it was often from a particular point of view, that you often didn’t get the black Biafran voice telling the story of the war.[xlii]

Richard becomes an odd sort of national hybrid: not totally Biafran but neither is he really a British expatriate in Nigeria. He becomes a conduit, a bridge between the two cultures of Biafra and the West. When Kainene tells him that he has been asked by Colonel Madu to write for the Propaganda Directorate, as ‘they want experienced insiders’, Richard is ‘thrilled’ at being referred to as an ‘insider’ (p.305). Then he realises that Madu ‘would not have asked me if I were not white’. On hearing this, Colonel Madu retorts:

‘Of course I asked you because you are white. They will take what you write more seriously because you are white […] The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die. They will believe a white man who lives in Biafra and who is not a professional journalist…’[xliii]

Despite his determination to become and remain an ‘insider’, the doomed relationship of Richard and Kainene symbolically mirrors the doomed state of Biafra: whilst Richard pledges allegiance to the Biafran cause, his life as a Biafran is ultimately concluded when Kainene disappears. Like the state itself, their relationship cannot survive the divisive order of ethnic division; in times of conflict, no hybrid state can be allowed to exist.

Conclusion

Novels such as Half of a Yellow Sun and David’s Story suggest that contemporary African writing is becoming increasingly reminiscent of the literature of disillusionment from the late 1960s. Not only do writers such as Adichie and Wicomb share an ambiguity towards national stability in their work, but the rejection of redemptive conclusions in their narratives is also a return to the disillusioned novels of the 1960s onwards. The twenty-first century African novel is already a stark contrast to the ‘magical realist’, playful techniques of the novels of the 1990s.[xliv]

By situating ethnic conflict at the heart of their narratives, Adichie and Wicomb are part of a new generation of writers who are willing to address some of difficulties in Africa’s recent history. Although there are contentious issues attached to these novels (particularly with regards to authorial objectivity), these young writers are confronting events that elder literary figureheads may find difficult to confront, such as Ngugi. Writers such as these are also looking beyond the colonial era, not just for literary material but also for ways in which to critically respond to it, such as the historical perspectives put forward by Davidson and Mamdani. In doing so, a new generation of writes are giving voice to those issues that have directly affected the people of their home-nations, and where the repercussions of divisive events are still present. In confronting these difficult pasts, these writers are writing back into existence past events that have been hidden, ignored even. As John C. Hawley reflects, in doing so, such contemporary fiction ‘suggests that time, and art, may by default have become the only effective means to digest the poison of the past, and to slowly heal from within the damage that has been done’[xlv]

Bibliography

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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun (2006; London: Harper Perennial, 2007)

Cooper, Brenda. A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language (Suffolk: James Currey, 2008)

Davidson, Basil. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992)

Dowden, Richard. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (2008; London: Portobello Books Ltd, 2009)

Gagiano, Annie. ‘Adapting the National Imaginary: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels’ in  Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 811-824

Gikandi, Simon (ed). The Encyclopaedia of African Literature (New York & London: Taylor & Francis, 2003)

Gikandi, Simon. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2000)

Griswold, Wendy. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton University Press, 2000)

Hawley, John C. ‘Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 39, No.2 (Summer 2008), pp. 15-26

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Wizard of the Crow (2006; London: Vintage, 2007)

Ogude, James. Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (London: Pluto Press: 1999)

Wicomb, Zoe. David’s Story (New York: The Feminist Press, 2001)

 

Notes

[i] Simon Gikandi, ‘Novel’ in The Encyclopedia of African Literature, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York & London: Taylor & Francis, 2003) p.392>/p>

[ii] Gikandi, ‘Novel’, p. 393

[iii] Gikandi, ‘Novel’, p. 391

[iv] Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992) p. 11

[v] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 75

[vi] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 11

[vii] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, pp. 10-11

[viii] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 12

[ix] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 12

[x] Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 251

[xi] Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s response to a question posed at Guardian Book Club event for Half of a Yellow Sun, chaired by Professor John Mullan, 13 October 2009

[xii] Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2000) p .36

[xiii] Gikandi, Ngugi, p.36

[xiv] Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (2008; London: Portobello Books Ltd, 2009) p. 423

[xv] Dowden, Africa, p. 89

[xvi] Dowden, Africa, p. 89

[xvii] The Gikuyu are the largest ethnic group in Kenya; also the name of their language. Ngugi identifies himself as Gikuyu and adopted Gikuyu as his primary written language from 1984 (see Ngugi, Decolonising the Mind (London: James Currey / Heinemann, 1986).

[xviii] Ngugi, Wizard of the Crow, pp. 731-2

[xix] James Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (London: Pluto Press: 1999) p. 39

[xx] Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) p. 9

[xxi] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 14, 15

[xxii] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 15

[xxiii] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 15

[xxiv] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 15

[xxv] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 14

[xxvi] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006; London: Harper Perennial, 2007) p. 20

[xxvii] Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 14

[xxviii] Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s response to a question posed at Guardian Book Club event for Half of a Yellow Sun, chaired by Professor John Mullan, 13 October 2009

[xxix] Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 40

[xxx] Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 148

[xxxi] Brenda Cooper, A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language (Suffolk: James Currey, 2008) p. 139

[xxxii] Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Darfur, the Politics of Naming’ (2007), quoted in Cooper, p. 139

[xxxiii] Mamdani further develops this distinction between ‘thinkable’, as opposed to ‘rational’, violence in terms of the Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers, p. 8

[xxxiv] Cooper, p. 139

[xxxv] John C. Hawley, ‘Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 39, No.2 (Summer 2008), p. 21

[xxxvi] Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 148

[xxxvii] Cooper, p. 139

[xxxviii] Cooper, p. 139

[xxxix] Wendy Griswold, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 229

[xl] Annie Gagiano, ‘Adapting the National Imaginary: Shifting Identities in Three Post-1994 South African Novels’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), p. 817

[xli] Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 168

[xlii] Audio interview with Sarah Crown, Guardian Unlimited website

[xliii] Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, p. 305

[xliv] The 1990s have been referred to as the decade of creative drought for African literature, which is arguably a consequence of the violence and economic strife that affected so much of the continent.

[xlv] John C. Hawley, ‘Biafra as Heritage and Symbol’, p. 16