Mpalive-Hangson Msiska

THINGS FALL APART: A Resource for Cultural Theory

Things Fall Apart has been an important resource for the emergence as well as sustenance of postcolonial theory and practice. This is largely because it is a confluence of a number of conceptual tensions that are deeply implicated in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century intellectual formation. It is in that sense that one might regard Things Fall Apart as not simply a classic, but also a text that even as it takes upon itself the designation of a classic also transgresses it, embodying the transformative energy of the quintessentially avant garde, as an elaboration of a new relationship of consciousness to a changing material world (Williams 1989). More than that, the novel’s abiding appeal has to do with its expression of what Williams apprehends as a new ‘metropolitan universal’ that breaches the older universalism founded within the confines of the racial, national and western metropolitan imagination, which, in my view, enables the text to proffer a space of dialogic exchange between African and other cultures as well as, within Africa itself, between the diverse identity formations. In this way, Things Fall Apart serves as both an intensely Pan-Africanist as much as a transcultural text.

Imagined nations and imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe's quest for a country

This article argues that Chinua Achebes memoir, There was a country: a personal history of Biafra (2012) articulates a hankering after a home, a habitable country in the context of colonially derived contradictions embedded in the institutional formation of Nigeria, the failure of the nationalist and postcolonial leadership to resolve such contradictions as well as the legacy of ethnicity. It demonstrates how the memoir expresses the writers despair at unfulfilled hopes, while also celebrating utopic moments, such as his colonial childhood, the independence of Nigeria and the founding of Biafra. It is the dramatic contrast between promise and actuality that engenders a deep sense of loss, just as it inspires the belief in the possibility of a transformed and habitable Nigeria. Using trauma theory, the article also argues that the memoir is committed to ‘working through’ the historical trauma, as demonstrated by its breaking the national silence over the Nigerian civil war (1966–70), its assertion that a genocide had been perpetrated against the Biafrans and the need for accountability and justice.

Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the structure of Black metropolitan life

Abstract The paper argues that Sam Selvons novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), whilst offering a study of the metropolitan experience of post-war African and Caribbean immigrants to London, gives profound insights into the fundamental structure of Black metropolitan subjectivity generally. The theoretical work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall and, Paul Gilroy, among others, is used to illuminate particular aspects of the location of the Black subject in the London metropolis. The paper concludes by arguing that the novels rendering of Diasporic metropolitan life works with a dialectical shift in the perception of the character of the metropolis.

Situating the BRICS Phenomenon within the Histories and Cultures of Southern Africa

From 7 to 11 August 2015, more than 100 international scholars met in Livingstone, Zambia, to consider southern Africa’s place in the world. Although other ‘south–south’ relationships were considered, the conference focused primarily on southern Africa’s relationship with ‘the BRICS’, an economic consortium made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Last to join, South Africa is, economically, the ‘least’ (though it represents a crucial gateway to sub-Saharan Africa). Conference papers also elucidated broader and historically deeper south–south links and provided detailed analyses of regionally important centres. For example, topics included ‘Chinese spaces’ – enclaves of economic and social development – established or imagined in places like Cyrildene and Modderfontein in the burgeoning suburbs of Johannesburg. Topics also included Zambia’s Copperbelt, whose recurrent cycles of prosperity and recession – and its (pre)histories of trade that assisted the growth of the region’s dominant polities, Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe – have influenced the Indian Ocean world and China beyond. While some of the topics reflected JSAS’s aim to increase its lusophone coverage, with speakers offering papers on Brazil and its links with Angola and Mozambique, others contributed to panels that emphasised the journal’s multi-disciplinary strengths. Such panels broke the mould of previous BRICS studies, which have been dominated by international relations, politics and economics. For the speakers, this required producing papers based on bodies of evidence that have not been much explored in relation to southern Africa. This unusual disciplinary mix is reflected in the issue’s clusters, which include archaeology, literary studies, comparative urban studies and cross-cultural studies of violence, in addition to political economy. The articles gathered here could have emerged only in an intellectual setting that encouraged the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. Neither did the conference neglect the more familiar set of disciplines that examine the impact of BRICS; although not all are published here, it included papers on BRICS countries’ influence on agricultural development, transport infrastructure and the construction industry. And JSAS sought particularly to bring internationally recognised scholars to Zambia to join internationally recognised scholars from southern Africa. This resulted in a line-up of keynote speakers that included Pádraig Carmody, Debby Potts, Vladimir Shubin, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Ching Kwan Lee, Patrick Bond and Carol Thompson. Also among the many speakers and audience members from universities in southern Africa, more than a dozen early-career scholars had come specifically to benefit from four days of interacting with established and up-and-coming scholars, by attending a writing workshop that ‘book-ended’ the conference. The work of two of these new authors is published in this issue.

Detecting globalisation, modernity and gender subjectivity in David Maillu's Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DXT

Abstract Through a study of his detective novel, Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DX, and the debates surrounding the emergence of East African Popular literature in English, this paper reflects on the contribution of the Kenyan writer, David Maillu, to the production of a Popular discourse of Post-colonial African modernity. It argues that Maillu engages with the formation of new personal and public identities within a Post-colonial formation in which the Nationalist goal of full Decolonisation has given way to Neo-colonialism and an unethical Globalisation, facilitated by a corrupt leadership. It also contends that, whilst Maillus adaptation of “the man of action” model from the classic Western Hardboiled novel offers him an imaginative hybrid counter-hegemonic narrative of agency and structure, it also blunts the radical edge of his proposal, as it forces him to accept undemocratic and patriarchal forms of power. Even so, the paper concludes that Maillu must be seen as a significant writer who has shown how African Popular literature in its heyday was not a purveyor of “corrupt” pleasures, but rather a site of serious debate about the character of Post-colonial modernity.

The politics of identity and the identity of politics: the self as an agent of redemption in Wole Soyinka's Camwood on the Leaves and The Strong Breed

Abstract The paper argues that Wole Soyinkas Camwood on the Leaves and The Strong Breed offer us a notion of Self as Agency that is a critique of African tradition, modernity and, above all, the Post-Modernist revalorization of the subject. It is argued that Soyinka proffers a post Post-Structuralism Humanist interrogation as well as reclamation of subjectivity in which Selfhood is conceived of as a site of responsibility and transformation. The study explores the ways in which the two plays depict slightly overlapping, but nevertheless distinct progressions of the subject in its engagement with the hegemonic. It shows how Camwood on the Leaves emphasises counter-identification as the principal means by which the transformative subject disengages from dominant authority and further argues that The Strong Breed goes beyond counter-identification, suggesting the need for the transformative subjects reconstitution of an alternative vision of agency and the world. † Editors note: It is the normal usage of this journal to print Yorùbá and other African names occording to local orthographies; the subject of this paper should accordingly be Wlé óyín¯ká, but since his personal practice (and that of his biographers) is to omit tonal and other accents, we have here printed his name in the form in its more familiar form.