THE AFRICAN NOVEL IS TOO POLITICAL?
from http://www.afrofutures.com/magazine/african-political/
by Tendai Huchu

As a writer of
realist fiction (perhaps not in the academic sense but in the sense of writing
outside the fantastic), I struggle with the idea that I can legitimately
produce work that does not reference the political framework in which the
society I am writing about is set. It is the equivalent of writing about living
fish and never mentioning water. The societies in which we live are political
entities and the politics determines every aspect of our existence that we may
or may not even be conscious of. Without labouring the point, politics
determines what you can or cannot do, who you may or may not marry, where you
can or cannot go, what you can or cannot say, etc, etc. In his Diary of a Bad
Year, Coetzee writes, “We are born subject. From the moment of birth we are
subject. One mark of this subjection is the certificate of birth. The perfected
state holds and guards the monopoly of certifying birth. Either you are given
(and carry with you) the certificate of the state, thereby acquiring an
identity which during the course of your life enables the state to identify you
and track you (track you down); or you do without an identity and condemn
yourself to living outside the state like an animal (animals do not have
identity papers). Not only do you enter the state without certification: you
are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you
can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state
certification…”
Coetzee
eloquently sums up the totality of the nation state’s grip on its citizens, whether
they will it or not, much better than I ever could.
I posit that a
writer coming from a prosperous liberal democracy where there is a degree of
tolerance and freedom and prosperity might find it easier to write a work that
does not overtly demonstrate the interplay between people and power, the state
and its citizens, in ways a writer from a poor totalitarian regime might not.
As a Zimbabwean who lives in Britain, I can tell you, first hand, how there is
a world of difference between how one perceives the political-power structures
in the two environments. In Zimbabwe, power is brute and overt, it looms large
over the landscape – an inescapable reality; whereas in Britain it seems to
operate as a sort of hum, a background noise that one is aware of but largely
hides itself in the background. My experience is, of course, not the same as
that of every other writer from my own country, let alone from the entire
continent – there is no single African reality – but I still wish to argue that
where people feel the direct/overt effects of the political arrangement in
their state, they cannot airbrush this from the stories they tell. Yes,
ordinary life still happens, but the individual is more conscious of the
effects of power than your typical Westerner. It is a very human trait that we
notice and remember negative things far much more than we do for positive
things.
The question
should be: Is it possible to write truthfully about African societies without
engaging with the fundamental socio-political reality that makes them what they
are? If fiction acts as a mirror to reality and the African novel is too
political, then, I believe, this is merely a reflection that Africa itself is
too political a place.
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