There has also been the problem of classification. Some literary writers
who wrote about Africa were not really Africans. Joyce Cary wrote
Mister Johnson, a story about Africans and Africa. It was this novel
which prompted the writing of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
According to Achebe, Mister Johnson contained distorted pictures of the
African society which he tried to correct in Things Fall Apart. More so,
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also about Africa and the African
People. The questions now are: should we call these fictions African
fiction because they presented Africans? What about the authorship? Is
African fiction to be written by Africans only? It is true that the present
form of written fiction in Africa is an offshoot of Western literary
culture infused in the western education of Africans but is it possible to
have African fiction in African form that is without any hinge on the
western form of writing? These are impossibilities since the writers of
African fictions make use of western style and values in the craft.
African literature, in its basic form, is oral. So, written literature
To classify Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad as African writers and to call
their fictions African fictions becomes a major problem in the polemics
of definition of African fiction. Fiction is an imaginative recreation of
real life experiences. This means that the subject matters in every fiction
must reflect the experiences of the society from which it emanated. One
very important fact here, being that every fictional work must show
realism not mere fabrication of unrealities purposely designed to distort
the history of a people. Chinua Achebe made a proposition that fictional
works about Africa written by non Africans tend to rewrite the history
and culture of African people in very bad manner and intentions.
Herodotus of Halycahasus, one of the early historians gave a distorted
history of Africa. He described Africa as “a continent of barbarians, and
animal-like humans with four legs without any form of culture or
religion” and this historical distortion has often influenced the western
judgment of Africa and Africans. Hence, we do not expect a better
fiction from non-Africans about Africa since they already have a
distorted history about Africa. In defining African fiction, we get stuck
about the placement of these literatures written by non-Africans about
Africa.
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