the oxford history of the novel in english

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950

 The Oxford History of the Novel in English
General Editor: Patrick Parrinder

Volumes Published and in Preparation

1. Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750, edited by Thomas Keymer
2. English and British Fiction, 1750‒1820, edited by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien
3. The Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1820‒1880, edited by John Kucich and Jenny
Bourne Taylor
4. The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel, 1880‒1940, edited by Patrick Parrinder
and Andrzej Gąsiorek
5. The American Novel to 1870, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person
6. The American Novel, 1870‒1940, edited by Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott
7. British and Irish Fiction since 1940, edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette
8. American Fiction since 1940, edited by Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah
Lindsay Williams
9. The World Novel in English to 1950, edited by Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford,
and Mark Williams
10. The Novel in English in Asia since 1945, edited by Alex Tickell
11. The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950, edited by Simon Gikandi
12. The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950,
edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte
the oxford history of the novel in english

Volume Eleven

The Novel in Africa

and the Caribbean
since 1950

Edited by
Simon Gikandi

1
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Names: Gikandi, Simon, editor.
Title: The novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 / edited by Simon Gikandi.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: The Oxford
history of the novel in English ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical
references and indexes.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042362 | ISBN 9780199765096 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: African fiction (English)—History and criticism. | Caribbean
fiction (English)—History and criticism. | West Indian fiction
(English)—History and criticism. | English fiction—20th century—History
and criticism. | English fiction—21st century—History and criticism. |
Africa—In literature. | Caribbean Area—In literature. | West Indies—In
literature.
Classification: LCC PR9344 .N68 2016 | DDC 809.3/996—dc23
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 Table of Contents

General Editor’s Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi
List of Contributors xiii
Introduction xv
Editorial Note xxix

Part I: The Institution of the Novel in Africa and the Caribbean

1. The Reinvention of the Novel in Africa 3

Simon Gikandi and Maurice Vambe
2. Cultures of Print in the Caribbean 20
Gail Low
3. The Novel and Decolonization in Africa 37
Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
4. The Novel and Decolonization in the Caribbean 55
Supriya M. Nair

Part II: Geographies of the Novel

5. The Novel in African Languages 71

Alena Rettová
6. The Expatriate African Novel in English 87
Simon Lewis
7. The City and the Village: Geographies of Fiction in Africa 104
Jennifer Wenzel
8. Geographies of Migration in the Caribbean Novel 120
J. Dillon Brown
vi | TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part III: The Novel and Cultural Politics

9. Women Novelists in Africa and the Caribbean 137

Elaine Savory
10. Sexuality and Gender in the Anglophone Caribbean Novel 152
Alison Donnell
11. Sexuality and Gender in the African Novel 167
Brenna Munro
12. The Novel and Apartheid 181
Andrew van der Vlies
13. The Novel and Human Rights 198
Joseph R. Slaughter

Part IV: The Novel, Orality, and Popular Culture

14. “Who No Know Go Know”: Popular Fiction in Africa and the Caribbean 217
Jane Bryce
15. Oral and Popular Cultures in the African Novel 236
James Ogude
16. Oral and Popular Cultures in the Caribbean 250
Natasha Barnes

Part V: Styles and Genres

17. The Historical Novel in Africa 269

Eleni Coundouriotis
18. The Historical Novel in the Caribbean 285
Nana Wilson-Tagoe
19. Romance and Realism 301
Yogita Goyal
20. African and Caribbean Modernist Fiction 316
Tim Watson
21. Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction in the Caribbean 332
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
22. Autobiography in Africa 344
Kgomotso Michael Masemola
23. Caribbean Short Stories in English 359
Victor J. Ramraj
 TABLE OF CONTENTS | vii

24. The African Short Story 375

Anthonia C. Kalu
25. African Detective Fiction, Mysteries, and Thrillers 393
Matthew J. Christensen

Part VI: New Frontiers

26. African Fiction in a Global Context 411

Peter Kalliney
27. The Caribbean Novel in a Global Context 427
Raphael Dalleo
28. Experimental Fictions 443
Evan Mwangi
29. The Novel in Translation and Transition 461
Shaden M. Tageldin

Part VII: Critical Understanding

30. The Novel Writes Back, Sideways, and Forward: The Question
of Language in African Fiction 483
Chantal Zabus
31. Criticism of the Novel in the Caribbean 499
Simon Gikandi
32. The Novel in Africa: Theories and Debates 515
Gaurav Desai

References 527
Index of African and Caribbean Novelists and Short Story Writers 549
General Index 565
 General Editor’s Preface

U
NLIKE poetry and drama, the novel belongs entirely within the sphere of
recorded history. Novels, like historical records, are written texts superseding the
worlds of myth, of epic poetry, and oral storytelling. Typically they are commer-
cial products taking advantage of the technology of printing, the availability of leisure
time among potential readers, and the circulation of books. The growth of the novel as
an art form would have been unthinkable without the habit of silent, private reading, a
habit that we now take for granted, although its origins are much disputed among schol-
ars. While novels are not always read silently and in private, they are felt to belong in the
domestic sphere rather than in the public arenas associated with music, drama, and the
other performance arts. The need for separate histories of the novel form has long been
recognized, since the distinctiveness of fictional prose narrative is quickly lost sight of in
more general accounts of literary history.
The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a multivolume series offering a compre-
hensive, worldwide history of English-language prose fiction, and drawing on the know-
ledge of a large, international team of scholars. Our history spans more than six cen-
turies, firmly rejecting the simplified view that the novel in English began with Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prose fiction has, in fact,
been surveyed by many earlier historians, including Ernest A. Baker, whose History of
the English Novel appeared in ten volumes between 1924 and 1939. Unlike Baker’s strictly
chronological account, the Oxford History broadens out as it approaches the present,
recognizing the spread of the English language across the globe from the seventeenth
century onwards. The “English” (or British) novel becomes the novel in English. While
we aim to offer a comprehensive account of the anglophone novel, our coverage cannot
of course be exhaustive; that is a task for the bibliographer rather than the literary his-
torian. All history has a commemorative function, but cultural memory is unavoidably
selective. Selection, in the case of books, is the task of literary criticism, and criticism
enters literary history the moment that we speak of “the novel” rather than, simply, of
the multitude of individual novels. Nevertheless, this Oxford History adopts a broader def-
inition of “the novel” than has been customary in earlier histories. Thus we neither focus
exclusively on the so-called literary novel, nor on the published texts of fiction at the
expense of the processes of production, distribution, and reception. Every volume in this
x | GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

series contains sections on relevant aspects of book history and the history of criticism,
together with sections on popular fiction and the fictional subgenres, in addition to the
sequence of chapters outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and
tendencies. Novellas and short stories are regarded for our purposes (we would stress “for
our purposes”) both as subgenres of the novel and as aspects of its material history.
Our aim throughout these volumes is to present the detailed history of the novel in
a way that is both useful to students and specialists, and accessible to a wide and varied
readership. We hope to have conveyed our understanding of the distinctiveness, the con-
tinuity, and the social and cultural resonance of prose fiction at different times and places.
The novel, moreover, is still changing. Reports of its death—and there have been quite a
few—are, as Mark Twain might have said, an exaggeration. At a time when new technolo-
gies are challenging the dominance of the printed book and when the novel’s “great tra-
dition” is sometimes said to have foundered, we believe that the Oxford History will stand
out as a record of the extraordinary adaptability and resilience of the novel in English, its
protean character, and its constant ability to surprise.
Patrick Parrinder
 Acknowledgments

A
MASSIVE undertaking of this sort would not have taken place without the sup-
port and collaboration of a number of people. My foremost acknowledgment
is to Patrick Parrinder, the General Editor of the Oxford History of the Novel
in English, who has provided clear direction for this volume as it has evolved over the
years and has closely read every chapter and provided important insights into the project.
Brendan O’Neill and his team at Oxford University Press in New York provided indispen-
sable editorial and technical support to the project. I would like to thank Jill Jarvis, my
research assistant at Princeton University for providing indispensable editorial support
to the project. In addition to reading drafts carefully and ensuring they were properly
formatted, Jill helped me stay on track as I dealt with various drafts of the project and
provided useful insights into many of the matters that arose in the editorial process. She
also compiled the composite bibliography and the index of authors. I thank all the con-
tributors to this volume for their patience over the few years we worked on this project.
I especially thank the family of the late Victor Ramraj who supported the publication of
his chapter on Caribbean Short Stories in his absence. Finally, I thank my wife and chil-
dren for having (yet again) created a space in our home for the project that they came to
know as OHONE 11.
 List of Contributors

Natasha Barnes, University of Illinois, Chicago

J. Dillon Brown, Washington University, St. Louis
Jane Bryce, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Matthew J. Christensen, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
Eleni Coundouriotis, University of Connecticut
Raphael Dalleo, Bucknell University
Gaurav Desai, University of Michigan
Alison Donnell, University of Reading
Simon Gikandi, Princeton University
Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky
Anthonia C. Kalu, University of California, Riverside
Simon Lewis, College of Charleston
Gail Low, University of Dundee
Kgomotso Michael Masemola, University of South Africa
Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Birkbeck College, University of London
Brenna Munro, University of Miami
Evan Mwangi, Northwestern University
Supriya Nair, University of Michigan
James Ogude, University of Pretoria
Sandra Pouchet Paquet, University of Miami
Victor J. Ramraj, University of Calgary (deceased)
Alena Rettová, SOAS, University of London
Elaine Savory, The New School of Social Research
Joseph R. Slaughter, Columbia University
Shaden M. Tageldin, University of Minnesota
Maurice Vambe, University of South Africa
Andrew van der Vlies, Queen Mary University of London
Tim Watson, University of Miami
Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University
Nana Wilson-Tagoe, University of Missouri, Kansas City
Chantal Zabus, University Sorbonne Paris Cité (USPC)
 Introduction
Simon Gikandi

I
N Africa and the Caribbean, as in the other areas covered by the volumes in this series,
the novel has been invested with cultural authority and institutional power exceeding
that of all other genres; but given the belatedness of the genre in these regions and its
association with a very small number of elites, this situation might strike observers as
odd. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen-
tieth century that novels began to appear in different parts of Africa and the Caribbean,
and it was not until the period covered by this volume that the genre came to occupy its
dominant place in the literary cultures of the regions. To be more specific, the novel was
not recognized as a major genre in the English colonies in Africa and the Caribbean until
the period after World War II. It was only with the setting up of the University Colleges
in East and West Africa and the Caribbean in 1949, all associated with the University of
London, that the novel came to be recognized as an essential genre in the education of
colonial elites and to be associated with the radical changes that were taking place in colo-
nial societies. Beginning in earnest in 1950 and through most of the 1960s, the genre, once
considered secondary to poetry and drama in both African courts and the colonial school,
came to represent what was new in the emerging states of Africa and the Caribbean. It
mirrored the unprecedented changes in the habits, mentalities, and expectations of the
ex-colonized, and seemed to secure the identity of postcolonial subjects. The novel would
take root in late colonialism and in the age of decolonization.
The central role of the novel in shaping postcolonial society was best summed up by
George Lamming, the Caribbean novelist, in “The Occasion for Speaking,” an essay pub-
lished in The Pleasures of Exile in 1960. Here, Lamming made the startling argument that
after the discovery of the New World and the abolition of slavery, the third most impor-
tant event in the history of the Caribbean was “the discovery of the novel by West Indians
as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian commu-
nity” (1992 b, 37). For Lamming, the novel was one of the most compelling technologies
for understanding individual and collective identity in late colonialism and in decoloni-
zation: the West Indian novelist was “the first to add a new dimension to writing about
the West Indian community” (37). The privileged status of the novel in decolonization
xvi | INTRODUCTION

was echoed by Chinua Achebe, the pioneer African novelist who, when asked about the
role of writers in the new nation, declared simply that the writer was first and foremost
a teacher: “what I think a novelist can teach is something very fundamental, namely to
indicate to his readers … that we in Africa did not hear of culture for the first time
from Europeans” (Achebe 1972, 7). From the beginning of the period covered by this
volume, then, the novel had already been identified as the dominant and privileged genre
of decolonization and, by extension, of the decolonized subject’s entry into world his-
tory and literature. By the end of the 1960s, the decade of decolonization in Africa and
the Caribbean, the novel had come to be associated with the idea of literature itself. Even
in communities with long traditions of oral poetry or epics, the novel had become the
major point of reference for public conversations, shaping the cultures of the postcolonial
nations in their foundational moment and marking new directions in the imagination of
the national and regional communities that were emerging.
In retrospect, it could be said that the novel in Africa irrupted onto the scene of writ-
ing or seemed to come out of nowhere. The numbers can tell the story here. There
were about six well-known novels written by black Africans in English before 1948—
Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930),
R. E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence (1943), and three novels by Peter Abrahams, Dark Testament
(1942), Song of the City (1945), and Mine Boy (1946). Of these, four novels were by writ-
ers from Southern Africa which, given its large white settler population, had a thriving
literary culture connected to European centers of publishing and institutions of inter-
pretation. After 1948, there was a trickle of novels that are now considered to be foun-
dations of the African canon, including Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952),
Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).
The publication of novels accelerated in the 1960s. For example, in 1962, Heinemann
Educational Books published five titles in its new African Writers Series (AWS); by the
1980s, the series, which was to become identified with the institution of African litera-
ture, would have a total of 270 titles, most of them novels. In Nigeria, only a handful
of novels were published before 1960, the year of independence, but by 2000, Wendy
Griswold was able to “locate, read, and analyze” 476 titles as part of what she aptly de-
scribed as a “sprawling literary complex” (2000, Appendix A, 4).
A similar proliferation of novels was taking place in the former British colonies in
the Caribbean. Before the period covered by this volume, there were perhaps no more
than ten well-known novels. These included H. G. de Lisser’s Jane’s Career (1913), Claude
McKay’s Banana Bottom (1933), Alfred Mende’s Pitch Lake (1934), C. L. R. James’s Minty
Alley (1936), the early novels of Jean Rhys including After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931),
Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Edgar Mittelholzer’s
Corentyne Thunder (1940). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mittelholzer had been one of
the most prolific novelists in the region, but he could not find a reputable publisher to
take his works. Like many other Caribbean writers, his works remained stillborn, caught
 INTRODUCTION | xvii

between what Lamming considered to be a disdainful readership and metropolitan indif-

ference: “He had suffered the active discouragement of his own community, and he had
their verdict sanctioned by the consistent rejection of his novels by publishers abroad”
(1992b, 41). In 1948, Mittelholzer boarded a boat for Britain, convinced that it was only
in the metropolis that he could succeed as a writer. Ironically, Mittelholzer’s departure
would herald the beginning of the boom in Caribbean novels in Britain. Between 1950
and 1961, reputable British and American publishers published the texts that would come
to constitute the foundations of West Indian literature. Mittelholzer’s Morning at the Office
was published by the Hogarth Press in 1950; Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952) and the
Lonely Londoners (1956) were published in London by Allan Wingate; George Lamming’s
In the Castle of My Skin (1953) was published by Michael Joseph in London and McGraw
Hill in New York; Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960) was issued by Faber and
Faber in 1960; and V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was published by André Deutsch in
1961. From the neglect of the first half of the century, metropolitan publishers were going
out of their way to publish the new, postcolonial writers.
The circumstances and the institutional context in which the novel came to acquire
its standing after 1950 will be discussed in greater detail in the first part of this volume,
but several factors need to be underscored at the outset. One factor concerns the belated
nature of the novel in Africa and the Caribbean. Why is it that in spite of the existence
of the conditions that are considered to be ideal for novelistic production—rising rates of
literacy, an emerging middle class, and the introduction of the printing press—no major
novels emerged in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth century and the first
half of the twentieth century? One explanation, associated with George Lamming, C. L.
R. James, and V. S. Naipaul, was that colonial institutions impoverished the imagination.
This impoverishment took several forms. One was that in spite of their education in the
great tradition of English literature, the colonized were not supposed to become creative
writers. In other words, colonial subjects were educated to be consumers of a literature
imported from abroad. A powerful mythology among young colonials was that while
they could become accomplished readers, writing was alien to their own experiences,
a kind of lack. Lamming noted that those among the natives who read came to believe
that “their whole introduction to something called culture, all of it, in the form of words,
came from outside: Dickens, Jane Austen, Kipling and that sacred gang” (1992b, 27).
Reflecting back on his youth and education, James noted that he had grown up “in the
atmosphere of Western Europe”: “In my youth we lived according to the tenets of
Matthew Arnold; we spread sweetness and light, and we studied the best that there was
in literature in order to transmit it to the people—as we thought, the poor, backward
West Indian people” (1980, 236). A colonial situation also impoverished culture because
it created educated elites who identified so closely with the colonizer that they were con-
temptuous of local resources for imaginative writing. Lamming argued that colonialism
was “the very base and structure of the West Indian’s cultural awareness… . A foreign
xviii | INTRODUCTION

and absent Mother culture has always cradled his judgement” (1992b, 36). For James, the
West Indians had mastered the culture of Europe and were indeed part of European
civilization, but they came “from outside” (1980, 244). Naipaul was even blunter in his
assessment of the colonial legacy of the Caribbean in The Middle Passage: “History is built
around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (1962, 20).
Among the Creole elites of the West African coast, a literary education was a means
to an end (jobs in the civil service) and a source of prestige, but rarely was it seen as the
acquisition of a literary sensibility. The cerebral education of these black Victorians, as
Emmanuel Obiechina argues in Culture, Tradition, and Society in the West African Novel
(1975), delayed the emergence of creative writing in West Africa:

It is natural to ask why the novel did not develop in West Africa until the mid-twentieth
century, even though there had been this educated middle-class elite from the mid-
nineteenth century. There may be many reasons: the most important only need be
mentioned here. First, despite their knowledge of Tennyson, Milton and Aristotle
(they quoted from them in their essays and polemics), the coastal intellectual elite
were essentially cultural parasites, despised by the British, whose culture they were
assiduously cultivating; in their turn they despised African culture, which they re-
garded as uncivilized. “Couriferism”—an uncritical imitation of Western customs—
was not conducive to creative confidence. Status consciousness, another aspect of
their Victorian outlook, also inhibited literary creativity. The Black Victorians were
keenly attached to the sedate and “respectable” professions such as medicine law and
the Christian ministry; so far as literary interests were concerned, they shared the pu-
ritan suspicion of fiction as ineffectual, frivolous, even morally subversive. (11)

Overall, literacy enabled the entry of Africans into the realm of colonial culture and
provided significant access to the privileges of modernity; it also generated a new way
of seeing the world. The men and women who were to produce novels in Africa were
no longer affiliated with traditional institutions, their modes of knowledge production,
or even established genres such as poetry and drama. But because missions did not en-
courage imaginative writing and often pressed their products to invest in more functional
forms of writing such as primers and religious materials, it was not unusual for would-be
creative writers to leave the mission in order to produce fiction. This was the case with
Thomas Mofolo, one of the pioneer writers in African languages. On its publication in
1907, Mofolo’s first book, Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveller to the East), a Sesotho version of
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, was welcomed by the missionaries at the Paris Evangelical
Seminary in Morija (Lesotho) as a major contribution to Christian literature. But accord-
ing to Daniel Kunene (1981, xiii), the same missionaries attempted to “suppress” the man-
uscript of his novel, Chaka, which, though written beginning in 1909, was not published
until 1925. Mofolo’s efforts to write fiction were constantly frustrated by the missionaries
 INTRODUCTION | xix

who controlled the press at Morija where he worked; he eventually left the mission to
work as a labor agent for the mining interests in South Africa. So, in effect, Mofolo, like
Sol Plaatje and Daniel Fagunwa after him, had to leave the mission in order to become a
novelist. Why did the missionaries, the key agents of education and culture in the British
colonies in Africa, resist an emergent African fiction and try to nip it in the bud?
In the quote above, Obiechina argues that the primary reason for this resistance was
the missionaries’ “puritan suspicion of fiction” as an ineffectual tool in the project of con-
version. But there is another, perhaps more compelling reason. Early African—and one
could add Caribbean—writers had very limited novelistic models to drawn upon. The key
novels of early African novelists rely heavily on the texts that were available to them—the
Bible, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, and, occasionally, Marie Corelli and Rider
Haggard. For obvious reasons—namely the appeal of the poetry—the language of the
King James Bible and Shakespeare infuses the works of early African fiction. The appeal
of Corelli and Haggard appears hard to fathom; but for critics who have paid attention
to the influence of Christianity on the culture of reading in colonial Africa, they pro-
vided the essential structure for novelists coming out of the Christian missions. Stephanie
Newell notes that Anglicized Creoles on the West African Coast, who ordered Corelli
“en masse from their local bookshop,” were attracted by her “spiritual and didactic ro-
mances” (2006, 102) or because, her books were, in Robert Fraser’s words “robed up as a
Protestant Parable of Good and Evil, sin and repentance” (2008, 177). Fraser also explains
the appeal of Haggard not in terms of an evangelical or Protestant fable, but in terms of
his ability to present romantic narratives that would be appropriated by colonial readers,
be disassembled, and then be reassembled to produce “a counter-romance” (176). It could
also be the case that the appeal of Corelli and Haggard was because they were prohibited
by the colonial school and hence seemed to promise a counter-narrative to the authorized
texts—the King James Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, the shadow Bible.
The absence of the key novelists of the nineteenth century from the African library
needs to be underscored because it points to what would ultimately make this tradition
of fiction different—the search for local cultural and linguistic resources. In order to pro-
duce original and imaginative works, the writers of early African fiction turned to their
native folk traditions—myths, folktales, and beliefs—which they sought to integrate into
the received Protestant narrative. Fagunwa’s classic 1938 Yoruba novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú
Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀ (Forest of a thousand daemons) adopted the structure of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress but substituted Puritan beliefs with heavy doses of Yoruba mythology. Plaatje’s
Mhudi drew heavily on the Tswana proverbs and folktales that he had been collecting
in the 1920s. Missionaries considered such African elements unchristian and sought to
repress them. For example, when it was finally published in 1925, Mofolo’s Chaka had
two chapters missing and Kunene speculates that the two chapters may have been left
out because they described “in some detail the history and customs of the Zulu” (1981,
xii). Missionaries were able to control the publication of novels not only because they
xx | INTRODUCTION

controlled the readership (most colonial readers were members of missions or mission
schools) but also because except for the few government literary bureaus, they owned
almost all the printing presses and bookshops.
Still, while missionaries seemed to look down on creative writing or to discourage it,
it was in mission schools that the first major wave of African writers was produced. As
a glance at the literary map of the continent will show, when writers finally emerged in
Africa, they were concentrated in countries and regions where missionaries were most
active. For example, a critical factor in what Griswold calls the “geographically uneven de-
velopment of the Nigerian novel” was “the varying extent of Christian missionary pene-
tration” (2000, 9). The origins of African writing can hence be traced to centers of literacy
at Achimota and Cape Coast (Ghana), Abeokuta and Umuahia (Nigeria), Lovedale and
Kimberley (South Africa), Budo (Uganda), and Kikuyu (Kenya). The majority of Nigerian
novelists came from mission centers such as Lagos and Ibadan in the West and Enugu in
the East, and the first generation of African writers in the country came from families
with close ties to Christian missions. Chinua Achebe’s father, a catechist in the Church of
England’s Church Missionary Society (CMS), was among the first generation of African
Christians in Eastern Nigeria; Wole Soyinka was born in a distinguished Christian family
in Abeokuta, an important CMS center. The same story is repeated in Ghana, where the
first group of writers were associated with Christian missions at Cape Coast, and in South
Africa, where the inaugural generation of writers came out of important mission stations
at Morija, Lovedale, and Kuruman. And because Christian missions founded and spon-
sored the most prominent schools, they controlled the circulation of cultures of literacy
in the colonies. In West Africa, the first attempts to develop a literary culture were made
at leading schools affiliated with the missions such as Achimota or government schools
such as Umuahia sponsored by Christian missions. In East Africa, it was hard to find an
author—or even reader—who had not passed through colonial institutions such as Kings
College, Budo in Uganda, and Alliance High School in Kenya. In South Africa, literary
culture had its roots at the mission school at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape.
Most of the chapters in this volume deal directly or indirectly with what has often
appeared to be a puzzle in the history of the African and Caribbean novel: Why did the
genre flourish in the era of decolonization and not before? From the discussion of the
institutions of the novel in Part I, the geographies of fiction in Part II, and the discussion
of the novel and cultural politics in Part III, readers will come to understand the specific
changes generated by decolonization. The close link between the novels, the narrative of
modernization, and cultural nationalism is important to understanding the history of the
genre in the former British colonies in Africa and the West Indies. Imagined as modern
and modernizing, the project of cultural nationalism tended to identify the novel, rather
than drama or poetry, as the ideal genre for educating new, postcolonial subjects. In turn,
decolonization engendered a visible reorientation of the values of the new subjects in
relation to the former colonies. In regard to the last point, it is important to recall that by
 INTRODUCTION | xxi

the end of the 1940s, established West Indian writers such as Mittelholzer and James had
concluded that if they wanted to succeed as writers they needed to migrate to Britain.
James noted that educated West Indians who were feeling their way to a new imagina-
tive relationship with both metropole and colony had “of necessity, to leave” (1980, 242).
Lamming described the departure of the West Indian writer for Britain as inevitable and
concluded, fatalistically, that when the new nation emerged it would have to do without
its novelists, who had moved elsewhere:

In the Caribbean we have a glorious opportunity of making some valid and perma-
nent contribution to man's life in this century. But we must stand up; and we must
move. The novelists have helped; yet when the new Caribbean emerges it may not
be for them. It will be, like the future, an item on the list of possessions which the
next generation of writers and builders will claim. I am still young by ordinary stan-
dards (thirty-two, to be exact), but already I feel that I have had it (as a writer) where
the British Caribbean is concerned. I have lost my place, or my place has deserted
me. (1992b, 50)

Lamming had, however, underestimated the capacity of the new Caribbean nations to
create conditions for the production of fiction and readers for it. With independence,
England had ceased being the horizon of expectation, or primary point of reference, for
colonial writers. By the 1960s, even Caribbean writers in exile were beginning to note a new
orientation in the dominant themes of the novel and its assumed readership; there was a
move away from the anxiety of mimicry, or the colonial complex, toward a consciousness
defined by the West Indian landscape and the peasantry. Even James, a Europeanist by train-
ing and sentiment, was forced to acknowledge the emergence of a new sensibility, a “new
type of West Indian writing” among the writers emerging in the 1950s: “They are not writ-
ing with all the echoes and traditions of English literature in their minds. As I see them …
they are native writers in the sense that their prose and the things that they are dealing
with, spring from below, and are not seen through a European-educated sieve, as some of
the finest writing in the West Indies up to today has been” (1980, 243).
As already noted, a key element in the cultural transformations taking place in Africa
and the Caribbean in the period covered by this volume was the establishment of new
university colleges in the former British colonies in the West Indies, West Africa, and East
Africa. The role of specific colleges in producing writers will be discussed in individual
chapters, but it useful to note that all these colleges opened in 1949 as part of a concerted
effort to educate Africans and West Indians as cultured subjects who would play a signif-
icant role in the cultures of the anticipated new nations. As branches of the University
of London, the new university colleges were not designed to produce an African or West
Indian literature, or even to enhance the role of local cultures as resources for writing.
On the contrary, the curriculum was English to the core, with an emphasis on the classics
xxii | INTRODUCTION

and canonical English texts. At Ibadan and Makerere, the closest the students came to an
African text was in their reading of colonial novels on Africa such as Joyce Cary’s Mister
Johnson (1939), Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness (1902). The criticism cultivated at the new university colleges, which was
strictly Leavisite in its orientation, assumed a common and continuous English tradition,
and resisted any suggestion that the African university provided a space in which African
cultures, or traditions, could be reimagined. Attracting the cream of society, culled from
the most selective high schools, the new university colleges set out to chaperone stu-
dents into a new relationship with Europe and to keep them ignorant of their African
traditions. As the eminent Nigerian critic Abiola Irele was to recall, even as students at
University College Ibadan sought to assert their identity in the changing colonial order,
they “knew very little about African culture”; they knew about an African presence be-
cause they were surrounded by it, but “in terms of concrete knowledge of the African
background,” they knew “next to nothing” (in Wren 1991, 117).
But unlike older institutions affiliated with missionaries, the new colleges put literary
studies at the center of a university education and they set out to train students to ap-
preciate literature as an object of cultural value. Once literature became a desire and
aspiration, it was not long before students started to look for ways to represent their own
worlds, setting up literary magazines in which the earliest works of many of the pioneer
writers covered in this volume were first published. What was crucial about the 1950s is
that for young Africans and West Indians at the university colleges, the lived experience
was demanding attention because it was connected to what Irele aptly described as a “tre-
mendous sense of the future” (in Wren 1991, 116). Still, a question that Robert Wren asked
in his study of the emergence of African writers at Ibadan is crucial to a history of litera-
ture in the colonial world: “What was the common energy that Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo
and Clark drew on? What powered the surge in literary art during the 1960s?” (17).
There is, of course, no single answer to this question. The literary surge was some-
times enabled by the young students’ awareness of the gap between the project of the
new university—to cultivate an elite culture—and the conditions of late colonialism, or
even the tension between the Arnoldian idea of culture as sweetness and light, and the
cultures of the urban masses or rural peasants who surrounded the new universities. It is
not by accident that the earliest writing of the young writers was driven by an attempt to
discover the voices of the folk, the energies of orality, and the vibrancy of popular culture
and to incorporate it into the novel. As we shall see in Part IV, the identity of the African
and Caribbean novel would ultimately depend on the incorporation of orality and pop-
ular culture into inherited European forms. Indeed, foundational African and Caribbean
novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin
(1953) called attention to their newness by incorporating oral speech forms as essential
markers of colonial and postcolonial worlds. But there was something else happening in
these novels that might point out the reason for the surge in novelistic production in the
 INTRODUCTION | xxiii

1950s and 1960s—an awareness of the precariousness of the subjects produced by coloni-
alism. The journey from the village to the citadels of colonial high culture, or from the
country to the city, was both a privilege and a debt; it was a reminder of the authors’ ac-
ceptance into the colonial order and, by the same token, of their radical separation from
the world in which they had been born.
Many of the chapters in Part V and VI of this volume deal with the different styles and
subgenres of the novel in Africa and the Caribbean and the range of topics that have been
the subject of novel writing in English. While it has been a popular tactic in studies of
colonial and postcolonial literatures of these regions to focus on how the structures and
elements of the novel—assumed to be a European genre—have adapted to local condi-
tions, the chapters in these sections take a different approach. They are invested not in the
idea of what a novel is or was, but, to cite Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner (1996, 2),
in “what novels do” or what novels are asked to do in shifting contexts. The changes and
transmutations that we see in the history of the novel in Africa and the Caribbean for a
period of almost seventy years can be explained both in terms of historical changes that
take place as the countries of these regions move from late colonialism to independence,
and in the semantic and social context in which novels become an important and author-
itative medium for expressing social transformations. The novel may have superseded
other well-established “courtly” genres because of its European connections or its asso-
ciation with what Irele describes in the Cambridge Companion to the African Novel as “an
imaginative consciousness grounded in literate modernity” (2009, 1); but the genre was
also authoritative because it seemed to provide a form for mediating the contingent and
volatile world of decolonization. The popularity of the genre can hence be explained
by its capacity to deal with the demands of the postcolonial moment in the 1960s and to
adapt to the challenges presented by the globalization of culture in the 1990s.
For African readers in the first decade of decolonization, for example, novels were ap-
pealing because of their capacity to mediate the tension between so-called tradition and
modernity. A major preoccupation of writers during this period was the recuperation of
the African image, negotiating what was often conceived as the burden of custom, and
taking stock of a dying colonialism. The writers of decolonization preferred a form—
what can roughly be described as social realism—that seemed to fit into the project of
cultural nationalism. At this time, there was an unusual concordance between literary
form and the project of nation-building, and metropolitan publishers facilitated this pro-
cess by promoting the novel as the medium for expressing what appeared then to be a
stable and intelligible African culture. While the association with social realism would
in the end be seen as prescriptive by more experimental writers, it took hold because it
provided African readers with redemptive narratives in the interregnum, the period be-
tween colonialism and decolonization. In novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
Arrow of God (1964) and Ngũgĩ’s Weep Not Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), read-
ers could find answers to the question that had troubled them in the brutal last century
xxiv | INTRODUCTION

of colonialism—What was the logic of colonial rule and how had it affected the nature
of African society? In the novel, readers could also discover a history that was positive,
communities that were autonomous, and subjectivities that could still hold on to their
values even when they were driven by a modernizing impulse. These were the themes of
a cluster of agrarian novels published in 1966, including Nwapa’s Efuru, Elechi Amadi’s
The Concubine, and Grace Ogot’s The Promised Land.
At the end of the 1960s, just as social realism was being established as the quintessential
genre of African fiction, a new generation of writers turned to modernism to probe the
crisis of decolonization and what appeared to be its unquestioned mode of representa-
tion. In works such as Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters
(1965), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968), readers could find
a language explaining what Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) had called
“the pitfalls of national consciousness.” While there was some resistance to experimental
writing from established publishing houses that had become too dependent on the school
system, the primary market for novels in Africa, by the 1970s and 1980s, Heinemann’s
influential African Writers Series had started opening its doors to new writers, often
adopting authors who had been rejected by other publishers, most notably Bessie Head’s
A Question of Power (1974); issuing significant translations of novels in French such as
Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1981); and finally opening the doors to experimental writers
such as Nuruddin Farah and Dambudzo Marechera.
A similar pattern can be detected in the development of the Caribbean novel during
this period. Although the major writers were published abroad and for most of the 1950s
seemed to address their works to a primarily British audience, readers in the new na-
tions looked up to the novel as the form through which the colonial complex would be
negotiated and an alternative consciousness could be imagined. The dominant novels of
the 1950s and early 1960s (Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Selvon’s Lonely Londoners,
Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso
Sea [1966]) would simultaneously bring the two processes to play. Caribbean anxieties
about self and place would be represented as a precursor for a deeper search for a peas-
ant consciousness or a mythology of history outside colonial history and historiography.
Partly because of their metropolitan connection, Caribbean novels, unlike their African
counterparts, started with an adaptation of modernism, rather than realism, as the form
of decolonizing consciousness. Modernism appealed for at least three reasons. First, al-
though the major writers arrived in Britain at a time when modernism was in decline,
the modernist style had already been instituted as the major style of the novel for at
least half a century. Second, when the first group of Caribbean writers (Rhys, James, and
Mittelholzer) arrived, Bloomsbury still ruled and its writers and publishers, most notably
Leonard Woolf, seemed to have a certain affection for colonials. Third, throughout the
1950s, Caribbean novelists often assumed that their primary themes—the alienation of
subjects and the fragmentation of communities—could best be served by a modernist
 INTRODUCTION | xxv

aesthetic. In the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, a period of political and social
turmoil in the Caribbean, established novelists continued to hold on to modernism, but a
new generation of writers turned to realism to capture the spirit of the folk and establish
an alternative aesthetic. The result was novels by Sylvia Wynter (The Hills of Hebron, 1962),
Michael Anthony (The Year in San Fernando, 1965), the later Selvon (The Plains of Caroni,
1970), Merle Hodge (Crick, Crack Monkey, 1970), and Roy Heath (A Man Come Home, 1974).
With the collapse of economies and political crisis in many African and, to a lesser extent,
Caribbean countries, the years from 1980 to 1990 are now remembered as the years of post-
colonial failure. Political crisis, a euphemism for the rise of dictatorships and oppressive
regimes, had the most visible impact on literary production in Africa. During this period
leading writers were either imprisoned or sent into exile. As a matter of fact, one great
irony of African literary history was the fact that the pioneers of the African novel—
Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and Soyinka—were forced to produce their later works in prison or exile.
Though less visible, economic collapse would lead to the closure of independent publish-
ers and the retreat of multinational publishers from local markets. In addition, there was a
massive expatriation of writers, critics, and middle-class readers to Europe and the United
States. From the literary historian’s perspective, the consequence of this expatriation was
the separation of both writers and readers from the conditions that had motivated their
works in the first place and provided what Irele called “a form of validation” (2001, xii).
Ironically, what might appear to be a condition of loss and despair unwittingly created
the situation in which novels in Africa and the Caribbean, many of them published by
small presses, could move in wholly unexpected directions. For example, it was during
the years of crisis that women writers emerged as a major force in the creative writing of
Africa and the Caribbean. Women had, of course, been part of the literary canon in the
histories covered by this volume, but it was in the 1980s and 1990s that they were recog-
nized as key players in the writing of the novel in English. Evidence of this recognition
can be seen in the number of major literary prizes awarded to African women writers:
Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Condition won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1989; the
same prize was awarded to Ama Ata Aidoo for Changes in 1992 and Yvonne Vera for Without
a Name in 1994; Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991; and Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Broadband Prize in 2007 for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
From the middle of the 1970s onwards, Caribbean women writers came to redefine the
novel in English. This is the period in which Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff produced
major works located in the grey zone between fiction and autobiography. The crisis in the
institutions of literary production in Africa and the Caribbean also created spaces of exper-
imentation as small presses took up African writers to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of
metropolitan publishers from what they then assumed were unprofitable literary markets.
A more direct outcome of the crisis in the postcolonial states was the emergence of a new
novel of the black diaspora. In fact, by the beginning of the twenty-first century most prom-
inent African and Caribbean novelists were living and working abroad—Naipaul in Britain,
xxvi | INTRODUCTION

Selvon in Canada, Lamming between Britain and the United States, Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and
Soyinka (and occasionally Ama Ata Aidoo) in the United States. For a while it seemed that
the only writers who operated from Africa were white South Africans like Gordimer and
J. M. Coetzee. But what was even more significant during this period was the emergence, in
the works of young African and Caribbean writers who had grown up in Europe or North
America or spent most of their working life there, of the new African and Caribbean dias-
poras as a major theme of the novel. The new African diaspora taking shape in Europe and
North America would become the major theme in novels by Brian Chikwava (Harare North,
2009), Adichie (Americanah, 2013), and NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names, 2013). Apart
from the works of established writers, the Caribbean Diaspora in North America could pro-
vide a site for experimental new novels, including Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring
(1998), a stunning work of science fiction. The fiction of the new African and Caribbean
diaspora, and the expanding context for the novel, is explored in detail in Part VI.
Working on this volume has presented a number of challenges, many of them instruc-
tive because they are part of the context for the emergence of the novel in Africa and the
Caribbean. The first of these challenges concerns the inclusion of Africa and the Caribbean
in the same volume. As will become apparent in the discussions that follow, there were both
similarities and differences in the contexts in which the novel emerged in each region. The
most obvious similarity was that in both cases, we are dealing with former British colonies
and with similar, colonial institutions of culture, education, religion, and print. African and
Caribbean writers in the British colonies shared a common language and literary tradition
and the idea of fiction could not be dissociated from that of the English novel. The major
difference is that West Indians, products of slavery and indentured labor, were transplanted
subjects and had hence a more problematic relation to their African or Indian heritage
than writers in Africa or India. They were truly people of the diaspora. Another challenge
faced by the contributors to this volume was that the history of the novel in Africa and
the Caribbean defies clear periodization. The year 1950, the starting date for this volume,
cannot be considered to represent a definitive break or beginning. Although there are few
novels before the 1950s, the years before and just after World War II, the beginning of
what I described earlier as cultural nationalism, signaled a radical change in the colonial
contact, and this opened the way for writers to imagine the future. Finally, the notion of a
novel in English in Africa and the Caribbean is itself ambiguous. English language novels
emerged in a field informed by other European languages (Arabic, French, Spanish, and
Portuguese) and hundreds of African languages. Novels translated into English from these
other languages have moved the frontiers of fiction even further, introducing the Arabic,
French, Spanish, and Portuguese novelistic traditions to the inherited English culture of
letters. This explains the inclusion of chapters that deal with the novel in translation and in
African languages. Finally, in some chapters, contributors could not think about a history
of the novel that was not cognizant of the intertextual and interlingual relationship be-
tween writers and literary traditions. Caribbean literature in North America is a good case
 INTRODUCTION | xxvii

in point. Here, migrants whose origins lie in the Spanish- or French-speaking islands have
met with those with a distinctly Anglophone background and created a new kind of global
Caribbean literature. In the works of Edwidge Danticat, to cite one prominent example,
the Creole sounds and experiences of Haiti have entered the novel in English. Sometimes,
the movement of African and Caribbean writing to the metropolis has complicated the
traditional definitions of the novel in terms of nations and regions. It is not unusual for
a novelist such as the London-born Zadie Smith to be considered a Caribbean writer or
Dinaw Mengestu, raised in Peoria, Illinois, to be considered a major African writer. Here,
we have examples of how writers from Africa and the Caribbean, or those connected to
those places through genealogy or experience have expanded the terms of the novel and
complicated novelistic discourse.
 Editorial Note

Note on the Use of Geographic Terms

In this volume, the terms Caribbean and West Indian are sometimes used interchange-
ably to generalize the constellation of islands in the Caribbean Sea and some former
British colonies on the South and Central American mainland. Of the various names
given to the region, “Caribbean” denotes the whole arc from Trinidad to Haiti, regardless
of language or colonial affiliation; “Antilles” denotes the ex-Dutch and French territories;
and “West Indian” the Anglophone territories. When used in a specific sense, the term
“West Indian” (WI) novel or literature refers exclusively to Anglophone fiction.

Note on Racial Nomenclature in South Africa

When used in this volume, especially in reference to South African literature, the term
“colored” has a racial nomenclature that is distinct from its usage in Britain and North
America. In South African racial nomenclature, “Coloured” designated the racial cate-
gory encompassing descendants of mixed-race unions, but also the descendants of the
erstwhile Cape Colony’s slave population, drawn largely from the Indian Ocean rim (and
particularly from the East Indies, now Indonesia), and of autochthonous communities
who were not considered black African (called variously, in degrees of the pejorative,
“Hottentot” or “Bushman,” latterly Khoi, San, or Khoe-San; also Griqua). Today, the term
is used by many to self-identify, though the accepted usage in progressive South African
criticism uses the lowercase, without inverted commas, to distinguish this identification
from the apartheid-era classificatory term.
 the oxford history of the novel in english

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950

 Part I

The Institution of the Novel in Africa

and the Caribbean
 1
The Reinvention of the Novel in Africa
Simon Gikandi and Maurice Vambe

The Coming of the Novel

A
S noted in the introduction to this volume, there was an intimate relationship
between the geography of African literature, Christian missions, and the schools
that they sponsored. Committed to literacy as a precondition for conversion,
Christian missions not only introduced the culture of print to African communities but
also set out to create a new type of African subject, one whose identity was associated
with reading and writing. Literacy enabled the entry of Africans into the realm of colo-
nial culture and provided significant access to the privileges of modernity; it also gener-
ated a new way of seeing the world. The men and women who were to produce novels
in Africa were no longer affiliated with traditional institutions, their modes of knowledge
production, or even established genres such as poetry and drama. The association be-
tween the rise of literacy and transformations in consciousness that took place in Africa
from the establishment of formal colonialism in the 1880s to the period of decolonization
in the 1950s would suggest that the rise of the novel in Africa was not different from the
development of the genre in England in the eighteenth century as described in Ian Watt’s
classical study The Rise of the Novel (1957), a model later applied to the history of the genre
in West Africa by Emmanuel Obiechina in Culture, Tradition and Society (1975).
In The Rise of the Novel, Watt made the compelling claim that the English novel was
a product of significant transformations that took place in England in the eighteenth
century. Watt identified three characteristics as essential to the identity of the novel as
a genre: The first one was a philosophical transformation in ways of apprehending the
world, an emphasis on the “truth of individual experience” which mandated realism “as
the quintessential mode of representation” (1957, 13). For Watt, the novel was distin-
guished by “a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition
as the ultimate arbiter of reality” (14). The second factor for the rise of the novel, argued
Watt, was the expansion of literacy, which led to “a remarkable and increasing popular
interest in reading” (35). In Watt’s account, the proliferation of novels was in response
4 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

to a growing need for reading materials by the new reading public. A third, and perhaps
definitive characteristic for the rise of the novel, Watt argued, was the production, in the
new capitalist culture, of the modern individual:

Capitalism brought a great increase of economic specialization; and this, com-

bined with a less rigid and homogeneous social structure, and a less absolutist and
more democratic political system, enormously increased the individual’s freedom
of choice. For those fully exposed to the new economic order, the effective entity
on which social arrangements were now based was no longer the family, nor the
church, nor the guild, nor the township, nor any other collective unit, but the in-
dividual: he alone was primarily responsible for determining his own economic,
social, political and religious roles. (61)

Obiechina, a student of Jack Goody at Cambridge University, identified the same three
characteristics in his account of the rise of the African novel. He noted how colonialism,
through its new systems of education, had created a new consciousness among African
elites along the West African Coast. He observed how new forms of education oriented
the African toward Europe, leading to the increasing loss of authority of traditional in-
stitutions and their epistemologies. Obiechina stressed the expansion of literacy, which
created consumers for new reading materials, including novels, outside those prescribed
by the church. Following Watt (a close associate of Goody), Obiechina underscored the
relationship between new economic opportunities and the cultivation of individualism.
Literacy, argued Obiechina, increased “the mobility of the individual mind by widening
the individual’s experience and his imaginative capacity to enter into new situations, or at
least to envisage them with a fair degree of certainty” (1975, 4).
For colonized Africans, literacy enabled access to a new world while consolidating the
already-known universe of local traditions. In Literary Culture in Ghana, Stephanie Newell
has demonstrated the range of readings by African elites: “Chunks of Dickens, the Bible,
Shakespeare and Bacon [were] ubiquitous … supplemented at different times with refer-
ences to popular writers such as Marie Corelli or Dale Carnegie” (2002, 20). Still, accounts
that credit colonial institutions for creating the conditions for the rise of the novel in Africa
run into a number of explanatory difficulties. For one, the expansion of literacy in Africa
did not necessarily lead to the production of novels. Colonialism produced African readers
in a sustained manner from the second half of the nineteenth century to the middle of the
twentieth century, but only a handful of creative novels were produced during this period.
Even Obiechina was forced to ask why the novel did not develop in West Africa until the
mid-twentieth century, “even though there had been this educated middle-class elite from
the mid-nineteenth century” (1977, 11). In response to this issue, Obiechina explained the
belated history of the novel in Africa in terms of the parasitic nature of colonial education,
which created a generation of “black Victorians” who despised African traditions and who
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 5

pursued education for its utilitarian rather than its aesthetic qualities. The tragedy of this
kind of education was that it had created subjects whose orientation was European but who
were excluded from the institutions of colonial power. Alienated from both their native
traditions and colonial institutions, local elites did not have imaginative resources to draw
upon, and their early attempts to produce an African literature tended to flounder quickly.
There is another explanation of the belated emergence of the novel in Africa: the simple
fact that neither the missionaries nor the colonial government encouraged creative writ-
ing. The important printing presses established by missions, and the colonial literacy bu-
reaus that followed them, conceived literacy as fundamentally utilitarian. Mission presses
printed grammars, Bibles, catechisms, and related religious materials; bureaus produced
primers in African languages; neither institution considered creative writing important.
Furthermore, the structural changes taking place in colonial society at the cultural level,
including the increase in literacy, did not lead to a fundamental transformation of African
society until the late colonial period. As Olúfémi Táíwò argues in How Colonialism Preempted
Modernity in Africa (2010), colonialism retarded the projects of modernizing African society
that it had set in place; far from being the “vehicle through which Africa and modernity
were introduced to each other,” colonialism sought to exploit African resources and labor
without establishing a culture of capitalism (2). The colonial attitude to African develop-
ment may have changed after World War II when efforts were made to expand the infra-
structure and provide greater access to education, but the most fundamental changes, the
ones that were going to have a salient effect on literary production, did not take place until
the late 1950s and 1960s, the period of decolonization. Decolonization, rather than coloni-
alism, created the conditions for the emergence of the novel in Africa.

Cultural Nationalism

The most radical changes in the British colonies in Africa took place after World War II.
At the top of the list of these changes was a radical transformation in political outlook,
especially the emergence of cultural nationalism as the dominant mode of political expe-
rience and expectation. Indeed, if the rise of the novel as a genre is universally associated
with a change in consciousness among both writers and readers, then cultural nation-
alism could be said to have represented the reorientation from the culture of colonialism
and its ways of seeing. Cultural nationalism was premised on what was then a radical
idea—that the destiny of Africans was in a decolonized polity, not in the “dual mandate”
of British colonialism, which assumed a continuous and reciprocal relation between colo-
nizer and colonized. The ideal of self-determination driving cultural nationalism in Africa
represented a frontal challenge to the central theories of colonialism in Africa promoted
by Lord Lugard and his successors, especially the assumption that the identity of the
new African could only be secured by a pax Britannica; it also challenged African elites
6 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

to rethink their hitherto unquestioned orientation toward Europe. It is perhaps an exag-

geration to suggest that African cultural nationalism was concurrent with the rise of the
novel, for nationalist movements on the continent date back to the late nineteenth cen-
tury when colonized Africans began to question the colonial mandate through literary
manifestos and, occasionally, essays, poetry, and drama. During this period, nationalist
writers such as Wilmot Blyden and Africanus Horton produced powerful narratives of
African identity whose primary goal was the rehabilitation of the black race.
For these early nationalists, writing was powerfully wedded to the idea of racial reha-
bilitation. For example, Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911), considered to be one
of the earliest African novels, was an attempt to imagine the challenges and possibilities
of black redemption in an allegorical form. Other important creative works in this tradi-
tion, including the works of Kobina Sekyi (The Blinkards [1915] and the Anglo-Fanti [1918]),
were critiques of the African elites’ identification with colonial culture. But while this
early group of African writers produced narratives that sought to assert or stake out an
African identity in the colonial order, they did not challenge the colonial arrangement
itself nor seek to question the structural relationship between Africa and Europe. The
works of these writers stood for African freedom in theory, but in practice they were
much more concerned with the rehabilitation of the black race in both Africa and the
Americas. Writing was not wedded to the liberation of the nation, or even the task of
imagining a national community outside colonialism, but to the recognition of the hu-
manity of Africans and their capacity for self-fulfillment in the new world order. Between
1900 and 1945, Pan-African congresses were held in London (1900, 1921, 1923, 1945), Paris
(1919), and New York (1927) to push for the rights of the colonized in Africa and the
African Diaspora—but except for some short fictions and W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic
novels (The Quest of the Silver Fleece [1911] and Dark Princess [1928]), little creative writing
came out of these projects.
In the middle of the twentieth century, however, a significant change was taking place
within the ideologies of Pan-Africanism itself. Now, for the first time in the modern period,
black intellectuals in Africa and its diaspora were seeking a forum in which Africans could
both speak for themselves and function as active agents of modernity outside the tutelage
of colonialism. These two perspectives were summed up in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mt
Kenya ([1938] 1962), an ethnographic study of the Kikuyu, written when he was a student
of Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. At the beginning of his
book, Kenyatta stated that his main objective in writing a cultural ethnography of the
Kikuyu was not to enter “into controversial discussion with those who have attempted, or
are attempting, to describe the same things from outside observation, but to let the truth
speak for itself ” (xviii). After presenting detailed descriptions of the different aspects of
life that made up a Kikuyu social culture, Kenyatta concluded that the important matter
was not to choose between European modernity and African traditions, but to cultivate
an ideal of freedom foreclosed by colonial institutions:
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 7

As it is, by driving him off his ancestral lands, the Europeans have robbed him of the
material foundations of his culture, and reduced him to a state of serfdom incom-
patible with human happiness. The African is conditioned, by the cultural and social
institutions of centuries, to a freedom of which Europe has little conception, and it
is not in his nature to accept serfdom for ever. He realises that he must fight unceas-
ingly for his own complete emancipation; for without this he is doomed to remain
the prey of rival imperialisms, which in every successive year will drive their fangs
more deeply into his vitality and strength. (306)

By the time of the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945, then, decolonization had
replaced racial rehabilitation as the horizon of expectations of black intellectuals. It is
significant that among the attendees of the conference were future presidents (Kwame
Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta) and important novelists (Peter Abrahams). Now, the project
of nation-building went hand in hand with the task of writing. By the early 1950s, when he
was thinking of writing his first novel, Chinua Achebe could sense that there was “some-
thing in the air” (Gikandi 2009, 5). The imperative for writing of Things Fall Apart, without
doubt the foundational text of African fiction, was to recover the vitality and historicity of
African culture, an act of decolonization in itself. The primary theme of African writing,
Achebe noted in the “The Role of the Writer in the New Nation” ([1964] 1973), was

that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that
their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and
value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dig-
nity that many African people all but lost during the colonial period and it is this that
they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of
their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing
them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in
Ibo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where
he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them.
After all the writer’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to
explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless
he has a proper sense of history. (8)

The novel would be the medium of establishing a proper sense of history.

The Colonial School and the University Colleges

Cultural nationalism did not, of course, start out as a literary project. Indeed, while it was
an ideology of elites who were attuned to the role of literature in the imagination of new
8 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

communities, post‒World War II nationalism in Africa was being fueled by social and
economic factors. These included the return of disenchanted Africans from the battle-
fields of Europe and Asia, a continuing economic depression, limited opportunities for
advancement, and racial discrimination. Confronted by the empty promises made by co-
lonial authorities in their bid to get African support for the war effort, young Africans re-
turned home determined to transform the terms of the colonial contact itself and to find
a new language and form for expressing ideals of human freedom. The desire for a new
order in turn put pressure on colonial institutions, forcing them to rethink their projects
in Africa. One such institution was the colonial school.
Most elite schools in the British colonies had been established at the beginning of the
twentieth century with the explicit goal of creating an African elite almost indistinguish-
able from the one produced by English public schools. A criticism of schools such as
Mfantsipim in Ghana was that the curriculum offered to African students was “purely
an English one … based on the requirements of the Cambridge Examinations” (Boahen
1996, 296). Yet, in spite of this colonial curriculum, students at Mfantsipim had produced
treatises on Pan-Africanism and trained the earliest African writers on the West African
coast, including Casely Hayford and Sekyi. At its height, in the 1930s and 1940s, the school
was incubating a new generation of Ghanaian writers, including J. W. Abruquah, A. W.
Kaper-Mensah, and J. C. de Graft. F. L. Bartels, the first African headmaster of Mfantsipim,
made drama part of the school’s tradition as “one way of helping pupils to discover for
themselves that there is always a better way of doing and saying things as well as to enjoy
the human story in world and action” (Boahen 1996, 421). The highlight of the school year
at Mfantsipim was the staff production of plays ranging from Antigone to Hamlet. Bartels
took drama in the school curriculum so seriously that he raised money to have de Graft
sent to Britain to study drama at the University of Bristol.
Similar stories were taking place at other elite high schools in Africa. At King’s
College Budo, a school established by the Church Missionary Society in 1905 to edu-
cate the sons of Baganda chiefs, drama and music were considered centerpieces of the
school year, with an unusual combination of a nativity play, Housman’s Sister Gold, and
a “concert of Kiganda plays and European and Kiganda music” being typical (McGregor
1967, 77). As Terri Ochiaga notes in Achebe and Friends (2015), at Government College,
Umuahia, “the boys’ dramatic performances included Greek myths, fairy tales, Bible
stories, scenes from history, and elaborate Shakespeare productions” (28). At Alliance
High School in Kenya, the principal, E. Carey Francis, considered the annual produc-
tion of a Shakespeare play key to a proper colonial education. The novelist Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o recalls in his memoir In the House of the Interpreter ([2012] 2015) that at Alliance
there was “no way one could hide from Shakespeare”: “His characters had become
my daily companions, as were his insights into social conflicts. Inside and outside the
classroom, over the last four years, Shakespeare was an integral part of my intellectual
formation” (177).
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 9

A number of conclusions can be drawn from these stories of colonial education and the
institution of literature. Shakespeare was privileged as the writer who embodied English
culture at its purest, an exclusive model that the colonized students could learn from, but
not emulate. In spite of the effort put into drama education and dramatic productions,
few of the students in select colonial schools sought to become playwrights in the style of
the Bard. A few students at Alliance (Henry Kuria, Kimani Nyoike, Gerishon Ngugi, and
Bethuel Kurutu) were motivated enough by Shakespeare to write award-winning plays
in Swahili, but there is little evidence of serious scripts in English. The colonial school
seemed to produce an African elite that consumed rather than produced literature. At the
same time, by generating interest in imaginative works, the colonial school laid the foun-
dations for the emergence of African literature in English. Even though the texts taught in
these schools seemed to promote an alienating and alienated English literary culture, they
triggered a desire, among African readers, to produce a literature of one’s own. Achebe
made a similar point in his memoir, The Education of a British Protected Child (2009):

What we read in the school library at Umuahia were the books English boys would
have read in England—Treasure Island, Tom Brown’s School Days, The Prisoner of Zenda,
David Copperfield, et cetera. They were not about us or people like us, but they were
exciting stories. Even stories like John Buchan’s, in which heroic white men battled
and worsted repulsive natives, did not trouble us unduly at first. But it all added up
to a wonderful preparation for the day we would be old enough to read between the
lines and ask questions. (21)

Ngũgĩ made a similar point in The House of the Interpreter ([2012] 2015):

Shakespeare may have been beloved by the colonial establishment, pure art to be
liberally dished out to schools, but his portrayal of blatant power struggles, like con-
flicts between the feudal and the new social order dramatized in King Lear, spoke di-
rectly to the struggles for power in Kenya at the time. The play accurately reflected
the bloody struggle between the Mau Mau guerrillas and the forces of the colonial
state. Fundamentally, Shakespeare, by extension, questioned the assumed stability
of the state; he dramatized, for all the world to see, that power came from and was
maintained by the sword. (178)

Another conclusion to draw is that while elite colonial schools went out of their way to
promote drama, they rarely created the condition for the production of fiction. Drama
and related performances were promoted as sources of the moral values associated with
the legendary headmasters of these schools—character building, shared cultural values,
and the belief in authority. Within this ethos, fiction was perhaps considered to be a more
erratic and individualized enterprise. Indeed, the imaginative struggle of would-be future
10 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

novelists in these schools can be described as the difficult search for a form that might
express their disenchantment with the colonial order of things. For beneath the colonial
school’s celebration of moral values and order lay the ferment of cultural nationalism,
which, for young students, seemed to question the ideal of a colonial education as the
training of a hermetic and privileged elite. Many Ugandans returning from World War
II brought back “a new spirit of nationalism, no longer convinced of the superiority of
European civilization” (McGregor 1967, 102). Throughout the 1940s, Kings College Budo
struggled, without success, to keep out the politics of Ugandan nationalism and the griev-
ances of the Kingdom of Buganda. In 1952 the crisis in Buganda—the struggle between
the Kabaka Mutesa, an alumni of Budo, and the colonial governor of Uganda—combined
with the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya had “an unsettling effect on the school” (McGregor
1967, 127). A similar questioning of authority was being reported in other colonial institu-
tions. In 1948, the principal of Mfantsipim reported the rise of “racial feelings” among the
student body. Inspired by what the historian Adu Boahen has aptly called “the nationalist
sentiment,” students went on strike, forcing the school to be closed (1996, 376). The Mau
Mau revolt created a period of instability at Alliance High School where students from
the Mount Kenya communities—the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru—had to be screened to
determine their loyalties before being admitted to the school. Aspiring African writers
like Ngũgĩ found themselves caught between the privileges of their education and the de-
mands of powerful anti-colonial sentiments, and without outlets for these building emo-
tions, many felt paralyzed and doubtful about their ability to write. The colonial school
created the appetite for imagination, but it failed to provide the conduit for its expression.
However, the institutions that were most responsible for the emergence and consoli-
dation of the novel in Africa were the new university colleges at Ibadan (Nigeria) and at
Makerere (Uganda), established in the late 1940s to bring higher education closer to the
African. Unlike other institutions of higher education established in Africa before this
period, the new colleges reflected the transformation of the colonial mandate after World
War II, namely the shift from the idea that the colonies were wards of the British state
to a belief that the role of the colonial government was to prepare Africans for eventual
independence. Rather than producing workers to serve the colonial economy, education
was now intended to enhance the economic and social development of the colonies. Both
the Asquith and Eliot Commission Reports of 1945 affirmed the role of higher education
as an essential part of the African march to freedom. Central to these reports was the
proposal to establish colleges in West Africa and the Caribbean in a “special relationship”
with the University of London, with the explicit aim of producing not colonial middle
men and women, but of creating what Gail Low has described as “a new intellectual elite
built on cultures of print” (2011, 130‒31). The Asquith Commission imagined the new
African university as a center of liberal education, one in which English language and
literature occupied a special place. Students at the new university colleges considered a
degree in English to be a mark of status. Effectively isolated from the peasant cultures
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 11

around them, students at the university college set out to recreate and rehearse their
own culture of Englishness, setting up literary clubs, publishing literary magazines, and
rethinking the meaning of literature in the last years of colonial rule.
A glimpse at the graduate rolls of Ibadan University College alone provides readers
with a sense of the role of university colleges in the making of African novelists and crit-
ics: John Munonye, future author of five novels in the African Writers Series, including
The Only Son (1966), Obi (1969), and Oil Man of Obange (1971), graduated in 1952. Albert
Chinua Achebe, the pioneer of African writing, and Christian Chwukwunweike Moma,
who did not turn to fiction writing until later in life, both graduated from Ibadan in 1953.
Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, author of the satirical Toads for Supper (1965) and The Naked
Gods (1970), graduated in 1955. Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkeuru Nwapa, the first Nigerian
woman novelist, author of Efuru (1966) and Idu (1970), graduated in 1957. She was followed
by Elechi Amadi, the author of The Concubine (1966) and The Great Ponds (1969), who gradu-
ated in 1959, and Nkem Nwankwo, who published his first novel, Danda (1964) only two
years after graduating from Ibadan in 1962. University College Ibadan produced major
African poets, too. Christopher Okigbo graduated in 1956 and J. P. Clark in 1960. Ibadan
also produced the first African critics of the African novel: Benedict Obumselu (1956),
Aigboje Higo and Obiojunwa Wali (1959), and Michael Echeruo, Francis Abiola Irele,
and Emmanuel Obiechina (1960). A similar list can be drawn from Makerere University
College, which produced some of the most noted writers in East African during the same
period, including David Rubadiri, Jonathan Kariara, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Rebeka Njau.

Metropolitan Publishers

The development of creative writing in English was a university college affair, but it
paralleled a change in the cultural politics of institutions in Britain, including publishing
houses and the major literary reviews, in the late colonial period. The publication of
Amos Tutuola’s first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), is a telling example of the
synergetic relationship between African writers and British institutions. The publication
of a first novel by Tutuola, a then-obscure African writer, by Faber and Faber, one of
the most prestigious publishers in Britain, seemed to mark the beginning of a new re-
lation between colony and metropolis. Furthermore, the critical reception of The Palm-
Wine Drinkard, perhaps the first sustained international discussion of an African text,
highlighted the role of European institutions of interpretation in the mapping of the
direction of the novel in Africa. For editors at Faber and Faber—including T. S. Eliot—
Tutuola presented a work that was fascinating and unpredictable. Eliot, who had been
enthusiastic about the text, worried that Tutuola might turn out to be “a Problem Child”
(Low 2011, 1). But while editors seemed to be preoccupied with the strangeness of ma-
terials represented in Tutuola’s text, their correspondence reflected a deeper and longer
12 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

lasting debate on the nature of the novel as a genre outside Europe and “uncertainty
over its textual status and value” (Low 2011, 3). Was this a work of fiction or an anthro-
pological text? What constituted African literature and what was its basis of judgment?
In the offices of Faber and Faber, Tutuola’s novel was to be evaluated primarily as an an-
thropological text, an insight into the “primitive” mind, and the publishing house went
out of its way to have the ethnographic value of the text validated by leading anthro-
pologists of West Africa.
The debate about the identity of Tutuola’s text was to continue on its publication in 1952
when the divided opinions of reviewers turned out to be a debate on the nature and future
of African literature. On one side of the debate were influential European and American
critics who celebrated Tutuola’s novel as the manifestation of the primitive imagination.
Writing in the influential London Observer on July 6, 1952, the poet Dylan Thomas welcomed
the publication of Tutuola’s novel as “the brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story, or
series of stories, written in young English” (in Lindfors 1975, 8). Arthur Calder-Marshall,
writing in The Listener, described the novel as “the first work of literature to be written in
English by a West African and published in London” and welcomed it as heralding “the
dawn of Nigerian literature” (in Lindfors 1975, 9). Across the Atlantic, in the United States,
Seldon Rodman, writing in the New York Times, described Tutuola as “a true primitive” (in
Lindfors 1975, 15). Anthony West, in the New Yorker, described the new African writer as “a
natural storyteller” whose principal strength was “the lack of inhibition in an uncorrupted
innocence” (in Lindfors 1975, 17). Western critics welcomed Tutuola because of what they
assumed was his primitivist aesthetic, detecting modes of art that were unmediated by
modern reason and a language that seemed to be coming into being unconsciously.
In contrast, West African critics were unimpressed by what was hailed as Tutuola’s o-
riginality and irritated by what they saw as white patronage. They rejected the notion that
Tutuola’s work was intuitive, calling attention to his heavy reliance on Yoruba folklore.
Writing in West Africa magazine, Babasola Johnson was of the view that Tutuola’s novel
should not have been published:

The language in which it is written is foreign to West Africans and English people,
or anybody for that matter. It is bad enough to attempt an African narrative in “good
English”, it is worse to attempt it in Mr. Tutuola’s strange lingo (or, shall I say, the
language of the “Deads”?). The language is not West African Patois as some think.
Patois is more orderly and intelligible than the language of The Palm Wine Drinkard.
Patois does not contain such words as “unreturnable”, “weird” or such expressions
as “the really road”. (in Lindfors 1975, 31)

Johnson thought that Tutuola’s literary talents should have been better served if he
had written his book in “West African Patois proper” or in Yoruba (in Lindfors 1975,
32). Furthermore, he wondered why Western critics were celebrating Tutuola for the
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 13

spontaneity of his art when his stories were well known in the Yoruba repertoire, or
borrowed from the work of Daniel Fagunwa, whose Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀ (The
forest of a thousand daemons) (1938) was considered a canon of Yoruba fiction. Within
Africa, even admirers of Tutuola’s novel doubted it could provide the way forward for
what Eric Robinson called “West African expression in English” (in Lindfors 1975, 30).
In spite of the Tutuola phenomenon and the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
in 1958, it was not until the 1960s, the decade of independence, that the novel would
become the major genre of African literary culture. In fact, the institutional history of the
African novel in English can be dated to 1962 when Heinemann Educational Books (HEB)
brought out its first four titles in the African Writers Series (AWS)—Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass, and Kenneth
Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free. According to Alan Hill, one of the founders of the AWS,
the plan for the series, which was modeled on Allen Lane’s Penguin Books, “was to start
a paperback series, confined to black African authors; the books were to be attractively
designed with high quality production, and sold at a very cheap price—as low as 25p at
the outset” (Low 2011, 67). Significantly, the initial incentive for Heinemann’s entry into
Africa had not been literary but educational. The company’s interest in African literature
began when Hill, then the manager of the educational wing of William Heinemann, set
out to take advantage of the increase in the reading public after the war. After touring
Africa in 1958, Hill identified the continent as an area with tremendous publishing poten-
tial; he returned convinced that literature could play an important role in education, and
that the publishing of African novels should be in the hands of an educational, rather than
general, publisher. In Africa Writes Back (2008), James Currey, one of the architects of the
AWS, identifies African and European editors, as well as European funders, as key players
in determining what came to be described as the African novel. As the first editor of the
series, Achebe worked with local editors in Africa to acquire manuscripts from Nigeria,
Ghana, and Gambia. Achebe was keen to see the series reflect the richness and diversity
of Africa and to set a standard for new writing on the continent. Achebe believed that the
launching of the AWS was an “umpire’s signal for which African writers had been waiting
on the starting line” (in Currey 2008, 1). As the series expanded in the late 1970s, Currey
worked with Henry Chakava, the local manager of Heinemann in East Africa, and edi-
tors such as Laban Erapu and Simon Gikandi, to identify a new generation of novelists
including Rebeka Njau, Meja Mwangi, Thomas Akare, and Mwangi Ruheni.

African Critics

The dominance of metropolitan publishers in the business of African literature has cre-
ated the impression that the gatekeepers of literary culture were to be found in London
or Paris. This was perhaps the case if one focuses on the transnational book trade as a
14 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

business enterprise, but from a literary point of view there is overwhelming evidence to
show that the most significant voices in the shaping of African literature and its criticism
were based in African countries. As a matter of fact, the growth of literature in West and
East Africa was due to the networks developed by local writers, editors, and institutions.
And because the local editors who provided a crucial connection between African talent
and publishers were often products of literature departments at local universities, there
was constant traffic between the literature departments of African universities and the
local branches of European publishing houses. In some cases, key editors were also writ-
ers. Jonathan Kariara, John Ruganda, and Richard Ntiru at Oxford’s East African branch
were prominent writers. Christopher Okigbo started his career at Cambridge University
Press in Lagos. There were other ways in which local institutions of interpretation chap-
eroned the African novel. The first major conferences on African literature—Makerere
(1962) and Fourah Bay (1963)—were convened by local universities in Uganda and Sierra
Leone. Often, the extramural divisions of local universities were responsible for taking
literature to the provinces as it were. Okot p’Bitek was active in the extramural divisions
of the then-University of East Africa in Northern Uganda and Western Kenya.
But perhaps the most significant way in which African critics influenced the institu-
tionalization of the novel was through the major journals of literature and criticism that
thrived in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. These journals were of two types. The first were
regional journals sponsored by governments or foundations to promote African writ-
ing. The Ministry of Education in Nigeria sponsored the first six issues of Black Orpheus,
which was founded by the Mbari Writers Club in Ibadan to provide a platform for creative
writing in 1957. Although the journal was founded by two expatriates, the Austrian Ulli
Beier and the German Jahnheinz Jahn, its editors from 1961 to 1966 were Wole Soyinka
and Ezekiel Mphahlele, two of the most prominent African writers of the period. Under
the editorship of Soyinka and Mphahlele, Black Orpheus published the works of soon-to-
be prominent writers, including Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alex
La Guma, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Grace Ogot. In East Africa, the most prominent journal
was Transition, founded by Raja Neogy in 1961. Although it was not a literary maga-
zine, Transition carried articles and commentaries by Achebe, Okigbo, Gabriel Okara,
and Mphahlele. The other class of journals was those published by individual literature
departments in African universities. At Ibadan, Horn magazine published poems and
short stories by J. P. Clark, Okigbo, and Nkem Nwankwo. Ngũgĩ’s first short stories first
appeared in Penpoint, a student magazine started at Makerere University and edited by
Kariara, later to be a senior editor at Oxford University Press in Nairobi. Magazines fea-
turing creative writing and criticism were founded at the University of Ghana (Okyeame),
Nairobi (Busara), and Dar es Salaam (Darlite).
In addition to creative writing, these journals were the first platforms for the serious
discussion of African literature; they provided the criticism that was central to the institu-
tionalization of the novel as a genre. Achebe’s first two manifestos on the character of the
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 15

new African literature, “Where Angels Fear to Tread” and “The Role of the Writer in the
New Nation,” first appeared in Nigeria Magazine, published in Lagos by the Ministry of
Information, in 1962 and 1964; Nkosi published “Fiction by Black South Africans” in Black
Orpheus in 1966; some of the heated debates on language and African literature, including
Obi Wali’s “Dead End of African Literature,” and Achebe’s response, “The African Writer
and the English Language,” were published in Transition. Future architects of African
literary criticism, most notably Abiola Irele, Michael Echeruo, and Morala Ogundipe,
honed their crafts at Horn at Ibadan.

Regional Variations

There were significant regional variations in the institutionalization of the novel in

English-speaking African countries. In Southern Africa, where white settlement was es-
tablished through wars of pacification, violence, and the alienation of their land, the rise
of novel reflected the conflicting interests of Europeans and Africans. For the European
settler writers, writing was informed by a paradox: On one hand, in terms of their back-
ground, education, and aspirations, these writers were connected to European cultural
institutions and literary traditions; on the other hand, they valued Africa as a significant
background to their literary works and as a resource for the imagination. The result of
this paradox was a tradition of writing that the novelist J. M. Coetzee has aptly described
as “white writing,” a project revolving “around the question of finding a language to
fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African” (2007, 7). Mastering the African
landscape was the European’s way of coming to terms with Africa but also a reflection of
their distance from it. Significantly, white writers were products of universities established
in South Africa and modeled on elite European institutions as depositories of modern
culture. Under the rules of racial segregation, Africans were barred from such institu-
tions and confined to a subordinate position defined as part of a customary order, even
when many of them had been educated in European ways and alienated from their natal
sources. With increasing numbers of blacks becoming literate in the middle of the middle
of the twentieth century, the colonial governments in Africa created Literature Bureaus
as cultural institutions charged with the task of providing literature to the natives.
In Southern Rhodesia, as George Kahari argues in the Rise of the Shona Novel, “the
steady growth of African education and the rapid increase in literacy were creating prob-
lems which can be summed up as—literacy without literature” (1990b, 1). In response to
this problem, the Southern Rhodesia African Literature Bureau was established in 1953
with several objectives: to make good books available to the Africans of Rhodesia; to en-
courage, assist, and advise local authors in Shona; to sponsor the publication of material
suitable for local needs; to establish a market for the books produced; and to promote
reading habits. Although the establishment of the Southern Rhodesia African Literature
16 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

Bureau was presented by colonial authorities as a benevolent gesture, one intended to in-
crease African literacy, the goal of the bureau was to patrol and then control political con-
tent in the Shona and Ndebele literatures, which were viewed by colonial authorities as
seditious. To demonstrate their seriousness in pursuit of this goal, the Southern Rhodesia
Interim Literature Committee was established to advise the Minister of Native affairs on
matters like Shona orthography. Africans were then employed and trained to run African
broadcasting programs and a printing press, and also to produce African literature in in-
digenous languages.
The establishment of the work of the bureau led to the creation of an African elite that
could read and write books in the Shona and Ndebele languages, and this class was re-
sponsible for the rise of novels in these languages. Still, the Southern Rhodesia Literature
Bureau went out of its way to control the content of the works of young African writ-
ers. The bureau had a special fund, the trustee of which was the secretary for African
Education, whose purpose was to finance vernacular publications; but these publications
had to be approved by the trustee. In addition, Europeans largely controlled the Bureau’s
editorial board, and they used this position to make sure that the novels published were
free of themes that could incite the masses. Young African writers were advised to read
and emulate Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a model of a text that would provide religious
instruction in a manner that did not threaten the established colonial order. Colonial
editors retained the power to excise parts of a book that were deemed offensive. For
example, a section in Solomon Mutswairo’s Feso (1957) dealing with land inequalities be-
tween blacks and whites was removed by the Literature Bureau censors.
In South Africa, the development of an African literary culture in the twentieth century
was controlled by a vernacular press run by missionaries. In fact, Ntongela Masilela has
noted that to consider the vernacular press in the making of African literature “is simulta-
neously to encounter the paradoxical role of Christian missionaries in both enabling and
equally disabling the emergence of modern African literary sensibilities” (Masilela, n.d.).
The enabling element of the vernacular press was that it allowed outstanding black South
African intellectuals such as Tiyo Soga and John Tengo Jabavu to use the missionary press
to found newspapers, and through these, to authorize African writing. Thomas Mofolo’s
novel Chaka, written in SeSotho was serialized in the Leselinyama, a newspaper owned by
the Paris Evangelical Missionary society in Maseru, before it was published in book form
in 1925. Another writer of early South African novels, Solomon Plaatje, was a journalist
who owned newspapers, giving him access to a printing press. Masilela has noted the cru-
cial link between the vernacular press, the emergence of fiction writing in South Africa,
and the construction of a modern literary sensibility: “The vernacular press was instru-
mental in facilitating the historical transition from tradition to modernity. Three funda-
mental themes were at the center of this progressive movement from the ‘Old Africa’
to the ‘New Africa’: acquisition of an education propagated by missionaries, conversion
into Christianity, and negotiation of European civilization” (Masilela, n.d.). Two of the
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 17

first novels published by Africans, Mofolo’s Chaka and Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930), which were
later incorporated into the African Writers Series, were first issued by missionary presses.
Sometimes, however, Africans working at the missions found the range of their subjects
restricted and their voices disabled.
In spite of the pioneering role played by black South African writers and intellectuals,
the production of fiction in the country was hampered by the establishment of racial laws
with draconian censorship rules for most of the 1950s and 1960s and, ultimately, the pass-
ing of the Bantu Education Act in 1959. The Bantu Education Act limited African access
to higher education, determined what were be considered to be the key elements of
an African culture, and curtailed the modern sensibility encouraged by the missionaries.
In defining the parameters of education for Africans, the act defined blacks, even those
born in the city, as rural subjects, tied to “tribal” cultures. The result of both censorship
laws and the Bantu Education Act was that for most of the 1960s, as literature blossomed
elsewhere in Africa, black writers in South Africa felt that the conditions of racial segrega-
tion, disenfranchisement, and political control in the apartheid state made the writing of
fiction superfluous. While racial conflict would seem to have presented the writer with
“a God-sent theme,” Lewis Nkosi complained in his “Fiction by Black South Africans”
([1966] 1973), this theme had turned out to be a poisoned chalice; Nkosi wrote that “the
intractable nature” of the South African experience seemed to resist attempts to contain it
“within an artistic form,” and this intractability had “something to do both with the over-
melodramatic nature of the political situation and the barrenness and infertile nature
of tradition” (111). But the impossibility of writing under conditions of censorship and
control were real. Nkosi was writing his essay in London where he had sought sanctuary;
Mphahlele had left South African on an “exit” visa in 1959 and was active in promoting
writing in Nigeria and Kenya; Peter Abrahams was living in Jamaica; Alex La Guma had
ended up in Cuba; Bessie Head had crossed the border into Botswana.
In considering the regional variations in the emergence of fiction writing in Africa,
an inevitable question arises: Why did the African novel flourish in West Africa, partic-
ularly Nigeria, more than any other region of the continent? As we have already noted,
in explaining the rise of the novel in Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel
(1975), Obiechina emphasized the role of literacy in fostering the emergence of the genre
in the region. His major claim was that “the achievement of literacy produces psycholog-
ical and social capacities in the individual which facilitate the growth of the novel” (3) and
that this condition had developed in West Africa at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. He further claimed that literacy was important for both writers and readers because
it functioned as a gift of empathy, one that implied a “fundamental rapport between the
novelist and reader” (4). In West Africa, where European colonialism had a long history,
the conditions of possibility of the novel as a genre were dictated by the fact that literacy
would provide “the capacity and training that the mind requires to absorb facts, realities
and experiences which may not be part of the immediate milieu” and literacy would
18 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

increase “the mobility of the individual mind by widening the individual’s experience and
his imaginative capacity to enter into new situations, or at least to envisage them with a
fair degree of certainty” (4).
Literacy enhanced the individuation of thought processes and encouraged the concret-
ization of individual subjectivities that were easily elaborated fictionally in the form of
the novel. Literacy also enables global cultural flows; African writers could appropriate
these flows and localize them so the African novel would become both a global and local
phenomenon. Without settler communities and restrictive racial laws, elites on the West
African coast could take full advantage of political and economic opportunities that de-
veloped even further when the British started loosening control over the running of the
colonies after World War II. One such development was the spread of locally owned and
operated printing presses. But Obiechina’s correlation of literacy and the novel in West
Africa raises further questions: Why did the novelistic complex first develop in Nigeria
and not Ghana, where levels of literacy were higher and of longer standing? Why did
some high schools (Umuahia, for example) produce more writers than others? Why did
University College, Ibadan, and not the older Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone become
the point of origin of African writing? There are perhaps no clear answers to these ques-
tions, but if Nigeria came to dominate the novelistic complex in Africa, it is perhaps be-
cause of what Wendy Griswold called a “combination of newness and abundance” in her
Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (2000, 21). Nigeria had the popula-
tion and the resources to respond to the changes brought by decolonization.
The development of the novel in East Africa reflected the region’s bifurcated colonial
identity. Kenya was defined as a British colony with a settler population with close ties to
Britain; Uganda was a protectorate, governed under the model of indirect rule first used
in Nigeria; Tanganyika, a former German colony, had been under British trusteeship (on
behalf of the League of Nations) since 1918. While these political distinctions had impli-
cations for the development of the politics of nationalism in the region and the reaction
to colonialism, they did not have much effect on cultural social organizations affecting
African life. Colonial cultural institutions tended to be based in Nairobi; Kenya, the seat
of the white settler elite, was a privileged colony. The significant difference between East
Africa and other regions was that here colonial institutions were established much later
(in the last phase of imperial expansion on the African continent) and because of this be-
latedness, English-language literatures in East Africa did not develop until the period after
World War II. In addition, because the Phelps Stokes Commission of 1924 recommended
that African education should be vocational and limited to the lower grades, there were
limited opportunities for higher education in the region and Africans were therefore not
exposed to the liberal arts until the secondary and university level.
But as was the case in Rhodesia, the colonial government was interested in shaping
literary culture in East Africa to forestall African grievances. The East African Literature
Bureau (EALB) was established in 1948 at the recommendation of a commission chaired
 REINVENTION OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA | 19

by the novelist Elspeth Huxley. The bureau’s goal was to promote literacy in African lan-
guages; it was based in Nairobi and had extension offices in Uganda and Tanzania. The
bureau lasted until 1977 when the East African Community formally broke up and, as
a result, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania were forced to run independent publishing bu-
reaus that competed with the local branches of leading multinational publishers including
Longmans, Oxford, Nelson, and Macmillan. However, a significant development in East
African literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s was the establishment of private, local pub-
lishing ventures that began to compete with multinationals and government presses,
trying to break what John Nottingham, a founder of the East African Publishing House
called “a British monopoly publishing position securely rooted in a British-type educa-
tional system, which seemed almost impregnable” (1969, 140). The East African Publishing
House was able to provide a venue for intellectuals and creative writers whose works had
been rejected by multinational outfits because of differences in aesthetic taste or ideo-
logical interests. Authors such as Grace Ogot, Okot p’Bitek, Charles Mang’ua, and the
later Ayi Kwei Armah were published by East African Publishing House. The 1970s also
witnessed the emergence of popular writers like David Mailu, published by indigenous
firms such as Comb Books. Another publishing trend in Kenya became evident in the 1980s
when local branches of multinationals decided to indigenize, sometimes joining forces
with other local publishers. Under the leadership of Henry Chakava, the local branch of
Heinemann Educational Books was transformed into East African Educational Publishers
with its headquarters in Nairobi and sales offices in Kampala and Dar es Salaam. Fountain
Publishers (1988) grew to dominate Ugandan textbook markets, while Phoenix grew out
of the demise of the East African Publishing House. In the 1990s multinational publishers
competed with government and private individual publishers in an atmosphere of eco-
nomic liberalization, and this opened up the literary space. If the fate of African writing in
the 1950s depended on the interests and desires of metropolitan publishing houses, by the
end of the twentieth century the majority of African novels were published in Africa for
local audiences and reflected both global concerns and very localized interests.
 2
Cultures of Print in the Caribbean
Gail Low

I
N The West Indian Novel and its Background ([1970] 1983), Kenneth Ramchand explores
the contexts of Anglophone Caribbean writing that gave rise to writers such as Roger
Mais, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Samuel Selvon: popular edu-
cation in the Anglophone Caribbean in the nineteenth century; debates surrounding the
use of standard and vernacular Englishes; the context of newspaper and little magazine
publishing in the Caribbean; migration to the metropolis as well as the rise of nationalism
and its impact on writing. Published at a time when practical criticism and close reading
was the dominant pedagogic force, and Caribbean literature was only just being taught
in higher education institutions, such scholarly work represented a daring departure.
Yet Ramchand prefaced the second edition of his seminal survey with an all too casual
aside: “Literary criticism can only benefit from literary scholarship and background stud-
ies if it retains its identity as criticism. The contexts are presented in order to make the
novels more easily accessible, and not because of a primary interest in the conditions that
are said to have produced the novels” ([1970] 1983, vii).
Ramchand was, of course, writing before the institutionalization of book history as a
disciplinary field that would be preoccupied precisely with those queries about the ma-
terial and textual conditions of Anglophone Caribbean print cultures: their contexts,
histories, reach, and spread. Subsequently, Roderick Cave (1987) and Peter A. Roberts
(1997) as print historian and linguist, respectively, unearthed a surprisingly rich early
Atlantic print cultural history. Reinhard Sander (1978, 1979, 1988) and Rhonda Cobham-
Sander’s (1981) doctoral dissertation had already blazed a trail by uncovering a rich in-
terconnected literary history of newspapers, little magazines, and journal publications
in the first half of the twentieth century that foreshadowed the rise of nationalism and
its literary expressions; Cobham-Sander, in particular, took issue with Ramchand’s pre-
sumption, following Lamming’s characterization of the Caribbean as “a lonely desert of
mass indifference and educated middle-class treachery” (Lamming, 41), that the postwar
boom in Anglophone Caribbean literature published abroad in exile reflected a his-
torically parochial culture if not an actual literary wilderness at home. Scholars such as
 CULTURES OF PRINT IN THE CARIBBEAN | 21

Selwyn R. Cudjoe (2003), Leah Rosenberg (2007), and Belinda Edmondson (2009) have taken
pains to map out diverse and localized publishing fields, both elite and popular, that rectify the
common perception that Caribbean literary history began with exiled postwar writers pub-
lished in the metropolis; other writers, including Kalliney (2007, 2013) and Low (2010) have ad-
dressed networks and cultural patronage in the metropolis. Future scholarship on Caribbean
literary history should be mindful of the imbricated histories of excavated local literary, po-
litical and intellectual publications, traditions and allegiances, and questions of cultural pa-
tronage, which determined those who became (wo)men of letters and those who did not.
Print and printed materials have had a presence in the Caribbean since the 1700s and a
long view of Caribbean print cultures is needed to come to terms with the astonishing
liveliness, diversity, and longevity of local print cultures and some of the transnational cir-
cuits of which they are part. In a necessarily selective sketch, this chapter will address four
interlocking themes: printing and publishing, the role of newspaper and literary maga-
zines in the cultivation of audiences, the relationship between local and metropolitan
print and literary cultures, and finally the sustained presence of print and literary cultures
across the island communities. These interlocking themes will show intimate historical,
social, and material connections between printing and publishing; imbrications of news-
paper, literary magazines, and book publishing history; and relationships between local
and metropolitan print and literary cultures, whether antagonistic or cooperative.

Early Print History

Despite regional diversity in language and expression linked to the successive waves of vol-
untary and forced migrations from Europe, Africa, India, and China, the use of the English
language, which links together a significant cluster of the island nations of the Caribbean
in a shared history and culture, was the direct result of British colonialism. For much of
colonial history, fluency in English was a key factor in creating and reinforcing social strat-
ification; differences in English and its dialects were to become as “important as shades
of colour” in the Caribbean (Roberts 1997, 77). While plantation society in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth century did not value literary culture, literacy and numeracy
were required to enable accurate record-keeping necessary for the management and con-
trol of people and property. Printing presses moved down the eastern seaboard of North
America to be introduced in the early part of the eighteenth century to Jamaica (1718),
Barbados (1731), and Antigua (1748). In Jamaica, the then-governor Sir Nicholas Lawes
argued for and obtained permission for the introduction of a government controlled press
on the island in 1716; as a result, Robert Baldwin set up his print works in Jamaica. Official
documents, newspapers, periodicals and other ephemera, learned writing (particularly of
a medical or scientific nature), planter manuals, and pamphlets to counter the antislavery
tracts from England formed the bulk of materials that were printed locally.
22 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

Newspapers especially formed an important early source of printed material, contain-

ing official notices, reprints of European and North American news items, shipping in-
formation, local news and advertisements, and regional news. Readers would use the
paper as a public forum for social and political disputes, but literary material, particu-
larly poetry, and letters on different subjects also could be found on their pages; these
exchanges were invaluable in building up a tradition of letters, testimonials, and memori-
als. The inclusion of literary material in newspapers was also not unusual. For example,
The Barbados Gazette, established in 1731 as a subscription weekly, included essays and
plays by local writers from its albeit small elite local literary circle and a range of poetry
that included epigrams, humorous verse, riddles, tributes, elegies, lyrics, and love poems.
Responses and letters by the white planter classes indicate an awareness of literary ac-
tivity in Europe. With the printing of texts on botany and medicine, grammar and poetry
books, newspapers, theatrical productions, and lectures on science, Antiguan planter so-
ciety was not unlike its counterpart in colonial Virginia: both were part of an Atlantic
culture linked to British society.
Among the white population, public forms of address such as orations, eulogies, ser-
mons, letters, poetry, autobiographies, and diaries form the substance and the language
of a literary and intellectual tradition, especially in Trinidad and Tobago in the early nine-
teenth century. Transcribed slave narratives and petitions were also important additions
to locally printed matter and provide a recurring historical seam of social, political, and
literary concern. The Trinidad Spectator, for example, printed “Jim the Boatman,” a fic-
tional autobiography of a slave discursively framed as “advocacy literature,” bringing
readers’ attention to “the plight of the free coloured and blacks” so as to help “alleviate”
their situation in the post-abolition period (Cudjoe 2003, 95). Transatlantic antislavery
discourses and concerns were also present in novelistic romances such as Michel Maxwell
Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca (1853) and Adolphous (1854). The latter was serialized in the
Trinidadian in the first quarter of 1853, a radical newspaper that also published local
responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as well as reports from
American presses detailing the cruel treatment of slaves. That Emmanuel Appadocca was
published in book form in London was perhaps no coincidence, for London in the mid-
nineteenth century can be seen as a transatlantic meeting ground for different literary tra-
ditions, or, as Belinda Edmondson claims, for “the English [novel] tradition, the American
anti-slavery writing and the Caribbean newspaper stories tradition” (2009, 63). London’s
transatlantic importance would also again come to prominence in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury with the postwar literary boom in Anglophone Caribbean writing.
Custom house records from 1700 to 1780 show that the West Indian colonies accounted
for about one-quarter of British book exports to the New World, the latter constituting
just under half of all English book exports. Book traders in the colonies looked toward
London and metropolitan publishers and booksellers for their wares, whether in the form
of imported and expensive editions, pirated copies of what were available in the metropolis
 CULTURES OF PRINT IN THE CARIBBEAN | 23

or, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, cheaper colonial editions. Throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, newspapers carried information, ideas, and cultures
across the Atlantic that afforded an important link with the wider world. Imported ma-
terial and reprinted extracts in newspapers were recast locally, offering a distinctly local
perspective on news items, politics, and trade. Speaking as they did to local concerns and
audiences and cognizant of wider social, political, and cultural movements, Anglophone
Caribbean newsprint marked important geopolitical distinctions within Atlantic print cul-
tures and contributed to the development of a nationalist culture. The Trinidad Free Press,
for example, carried extracts reproduced not only from English presses but also American
publications, publishing items on George Washington and James Fenimore Cooper and
excerpts from Uncle Tom’s Cabin alongside local writers. Issuing announcements and re-
ports of public lectures and encouraging responses from their readers, newspapers played
a useful material role in fostering debating clubs and literary associations, encouraging a
wider, albeit elite, literary culture beyond the printed page.
Popular education for the masses in the Caribbean islands began with the British govern-
ment’s Negro Education grant of £30,000 per annum starting in 1835 and reducing yearly
until 1845; the grant called on local legislature to institute compulsory education to pro-
vide for “the religious and moral Education of the Negro Population to be emancipated”
and missionary schools were in part funded by the scheme (Gordon 1963, 20 and 25). Some
secondary education provision, particularly for middle-class children, was introduced with
the goal of growing an educated laity or servicing the lower levels of teaching, adminis-
tration, and the professions. Built upon endowments left by wealthy planters, secondary
education in Jamaica and Barbados was publicly extended to middle classes of all colors
from the mid-eighteenth century, although private education had already been available
for children from middle-class families. Education commissions were periodically set up
to advise on reforming the school system curriculum, which was torn between the desire
to instill practical skills through vocational instruction (e.g., agricultural knowledge) and to
teach academic subjects (e.g., Classics, English, History) and the three “Rs” in elementary
schools. Educational teaching, curriculum content, and textbooks were based on English
and sometimes Scottish models, even up to the mid-twentieth century.
The Cambridge School Certificate administered by the Cambridge Local Syndicate and
competitive island scholarships that offered university places in England from the late
nineteenth century onward tied secondary education on the islands even more securely
to Britain. Textbooks commonly used from the late nineteenth century such as the Royal
Readers and Royal School series produced by the Scottish educational publishing firm,
Thomas Nelson, were sold throughout the British Empire. Localization in educational
publishing for the West Indies begun in the earlier part of the twentieth century; Nelson’s
influential West Indian Readers produced from 1926 onward represented, arguably, a move-
ment toward more regionally specific textbooks. However, with the exception of incor-
porating local flora and fauna, much of this reader’s content—and especially its literary
24 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

material—was still based on English content. Literacy and education tied the print and
book cultural world of the Caribbean to Britain but would also provide the terrain for re-
sistance to colonialism. Robert Fraser observes that the work of the high nationalist gen-
eration of Anglophone Caribbean writers are “peppered with acknowledgements” and
detailed citations of the Nelson’s West Indian Readers, testifying to the “avidity with which
they were absorbed”; these school readers supplied V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Wilson
Harris, Samuel Selvon, Austin Clark, and others with not only “images and references”
but also “metaphors of the colonial condition” (Fraser 2008, 91).

Literary Cultures

The impact of print culture and the avidity with which it was consumed can be witnessed
in the liveliness and activities of the debating societies and literary organizations. This
included the provision of a reading room stocked with newspapers, journals, and books,
organized lectures and debates and, later, campaigns to widen access to places like the
Trinidad Public Library. These associated activities signal the substantive beginnings of
literary institutional culture in Trinidad in the mid-nineteenth century. Debating clubs
helped hone both political and literary rhetorical skills; coverage of these events in the
press helped bring the pressing issues of the day to a wider readership. Many of these ac-
tivities in the late nineteenth century would be directed at, by and for groups with specific
political, cultural, or racial affiliations; for example, they addressed free people of color or
people of East Indian descent. In Jamaica, there were important attempts to encourage
reading among the newly educated by organizing reading clubs for small farmers and their
families. Such clubs also offered imported English magazines, for example, temperance-
led and religious newspapers such as British Workman and Band of Hope Review. Frank
Cundall’s 1879 report on libraries in Jamaica (and their histories) points to the existence of
official, unofficial, private, and semi-private libraries and reading clubs. In Black Jamaica,
W. P. Livingstone wrote that “the taste for reading” was “spreading rapidly,” with “the cir-
culation of the principal newspapers” and “the value of books imported” between 1885
and 1894 doubling with “new subscribers being largely those negroes who are rising up
from the mass” (1899, 204). Ivy Baxter records that near the close of the nineteenth cen-
tury there may have been “one thousand four hundred and fifty adults and one thousand
eight hundred and twenty children” in small rural reading clubs set up for small farmers’
families (1970, 80). Baxter also indicates that membership of many of the more substan-
tial libraries remained restricted to those who could afford their subscription rates; free
public libraries were largely phenomena of the 1950s and were at first the result of “joint
effort” between the British Council and the Jamaican government (1970, 80).
The development of a literary culture emerged alongside, and was influenced by, lib-
eration struggles in the Americas such as the Cuban wars of independence; these found
 CULTURES OF PRINT IN THE CARIBBEAN | 25

expression in concerns about “political and social reforms,” promoting “autochthonous

cultural values,” pondering the practice of slavery but also instilling patriotism and civic
pride (Cudjoe 2003, 141). Particularly in the twentieth century, these issues would take a
more politicized and nationalistic path. In Jamaica at the turn of the century, the Afro-
Creole elites put forward their political and cultural vision for a new national polity
through a loose literary institutional network of newspapers, literary associations, de-
bating clubs, and other organizations. The consolidation of a middle class of African and
European descent had begun to shape political and cultural life on the different Caribbean
islands, and especially in Jamaica. This group was responsible for the growth of print
culture and its associated activities, and particularly for the sudden increase in reading
rooms, newspaper circulation figures, and book sales.
Some of these activities were initially shaped by colonial institutions and their hege-
monic values, but they were very soon to find life away from, or in tension with, those be-
ginnings. The Institute of Jamaica, established in 1879, was supported by colonial govern-
mental funds to function as the center for social historical and cultural information about
all things Jamaican; putting on both scholarly and popular lectures, conducting classes in
art, and offering awards and prizes, it also functioned as a library. From its early begin-
nings as a colonial institute, the organization evolved into a center for the promotion of
Jamaican history, arts, and culture. Other forms of colonial cultural patronage came in
the form of Sydney Olivier, as Colonial Secretary and then as Governor of Jamaica, ex-
patriate journalists such as W. P. Livingstone and William Morrison, the minister W. C.
Murray and the English folklorist Walter Jekyll. All of these individuals fostered a lively
cultural environment and mentored individual writers; Livingstone, for example, sup-
ported Thomas McDermott’s publishing venture, the “All Jamaica Library.”
The turn toward documenting, recording, and representing folk cultures and writing in
vernacular dialects owed something to cultural patronage and to the anthropological fas-
cination with folk by figures such as Walter Jekyll, who declared that “English gentlemen
have always liked their peasants, it’s the ambitious middle class that we cannot tolerate”
(in McKay 1979, 71). Claude MacKay notes that he was encouraged to write in dialect by
Jekyll despite the prejudice of the time that damned it as “a vulgar tongue” and “the lan-
guage of the peasants.” In his memoirs, McKay remembered Jekyll advising him, “now is
your chance as a native boy put the Jamaica dialect into literary language. I am sure it will
sell” (1979, 66‒67). As a celebrated folklorist, Jekyll thought McKay’s poetry exotic, “the
thoughts and feelings of a Jamaican peasant of pure black blood” ( Jekyll 1912); he sent
McKay’s work to a London publisher where it was published in 1912. Cobham-Sander has
explored the ambivalences and contradictions that accompany cultural patronage of the
educated Afro-Creole middle classes especially. She argues that while such patronage en-
couraged the literary and cultural production of a small group of privileged individuals,
it also placed limitations on what the latter could write, and how their writing affected
the larger colonial polity. The fascination with the peasantry also extended to Jamaica and
26 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

Trinidad’s cultural elites, who were beginning to write about folk as the basis of the na-
tion’s authentic culture in the 1930s.

Publishing Experiments

As editor of the Jamaican Times between 1900 and 1914, Thomas MacDermot, more than
any other figure at this time, spearheaded these early attempts at literary nationalism.
He was a union man and an active member of the Jamaica Local Literary Association
who wrote, supported, and published local writing in the Jamaican Times, and then later
supported it through the “All Jamaica Library.” Under his editorship, the Jamaican Times
moved from being “a magazine geared especially to the teachers and to the agriculture
and rural people” (Baxter 1970, 348) to one representing the respectable middle classes
dedicated to an ethos of education, modernization, and self-improvement in various
forms. Aimed at a middle-class readership in Jamaica, it also reported on the Jamaican di-
aspora in Central America and in the United States. The magazine gave local writers the
best chance of being published. Rosenberg argues that MacDermot’s interest in folk life,
which also mirrored the concerns of the new Jamaican elite at the time, took concrete
form in the stories of working-class life and peasantry in the Jamaican Times. These stories
inaugurate what would later be seen as “the hallmark tropes of Anglophone Caribbean
literature,” with its emphasis on “creole languages, verbal battles, urban yards” in the
more radical work of the Beacon group of the 1930s (Rosenberg 2007, 34). Written by the
middle- or aspiring middle-class writers, these newspaper stories revealed anxiety about
the hierarchical markers of differentiation and distinction between the classes.
MacDermot argued for Jamaican identity and literature to reflect island concerns. He
urged writers to be “as native as they felt it in them to be, both in manner and matter” (in
Roberts 1951, 96), encouraged poets such as W. Adolphe Roberts and published Herbert
de Lisser’s early essays and Claude McKay’s dialect poems. In 1903, publishing under the
pseudonym Tom Redcam, he inaugurated the “All Jamaica Library,” a book series that
was to include poetry, fiction, history and essays. The “Library” was advertised as com-
prising twelve numbers priced initially at six pence, a “price so small as to make … pub-
lication generally purchasable.” All books published in the series would be “dealing di-
rectly with Jamaica and Jamaicans, and written by Jamaicans” and published locally by the
Times printery; the public was urged to support “this attempt to develope [sic] neglected
resources of mental and aesthetic wealth” (Redcam 1904). In “The Unusual Preface” to
MacDermot’s second novel and fourth title in the series published in 1909, One Brown Girl
and –, he declared that the novel was not offered to any publisher outside Jamaica.
Setting out some of the reasons behind his decision to publish locally and the motiva-
tions behind the series, MacDermot gave two clear reasons for his actions: first, a desire
to produce literary material that his countrymen would read and take pride in as fellow
 CULTURES OF PRINT IN THE CARIBBEAN | 27

“son[s] of the Island,” and second, a belief that much “local colour, detail and dialect”
which was necessary to “render the picture as conceived by a writer a faithful one” would
very likely have to be “sacrificed” to “fit a local story for publication abroad.” Jamaican
readers, likewise, should be obliged to support their local publishing and writing through
the purchase of the book; only with such “minimum of fair play,” MacDermot argued,
can “other stories … follow along the same channel of publication” to foster “the growth
of an Island literature” (Redcam 1909, i‒ii). MacDermot’s brief account of the publication
of his first novel, Becka’s Buckra Baby (1904), records that the entire first print run of 2,000
copies sold out, requiring the publisher to reprint another 1,000 copies which also “pretty
well sold out” (Redcam 1909, iii). The price of the novel was set at one shilling; this in-
crease in pricing policy from six pence to one shilling was perhaps motivated by a need
to balance price against the length of the novel, the cost of publishing and the work that
went into “the exacting work of passing these pages through the Press without any re-
laxation of attention to the daily labour for a living wage” (Redcam 1909, ii). Unlike some
of the earlier books produced in the “All Jamaica Library,” One Brown Girl and ‒ does not
contain advertisements, which may have added to the cost of producing the novel and
also, most likely, indicated a dwindling of the level of support for the publishing venture;
the latter is hinted at in MacDermot’s chastisement of “the fine talk” and “the nice expres-
sions of enthusiasm and regard” that avail little “if the enthusiasts do not buy the local
publications that they declare so well deserve support” (MacDermot 1909, ii).
For writers like MacDermot, local publications would also move the book trade out of
a position of underdevelopment, functioning merely to service metropolitan publishing
houses as an export market for, for example, colonial editions. Colonial editions of books
to be sold were usually marked “not to be sold or imported” and were an important
part of a differential metropolitan pricing policy that targeted different global book mar-
kets particularly in India, North America, and the British colonies. They were, typically,
produced in smaller and cheaper formats, as in Macmillan’s colonial library, bound in
cheaper cloth, and sold at significantly reduced prices when compared with metropolitan
editions. Large discounts were also available for colonial booksellers in return for bulk
orders and steady sales. Although they could be taken from the original papers, colonial
editions were not typically original imprints; as such they might have provided British
publishers with a method of recuperating the costs of publishing the first print run of
new books. The production of colonial editions and the significantly larger discount of-
fered to colonial booksellers enabled metropolitan publishers to dominate the colonial
book trade, of course.
As a series, the “All Jamaica Library” comprised only four titles of the twelve that were
to make up the original series. Significantly, not only did the writers’ association with
newspapers and print media facilitate their own publications, but their journalistic careers
also fostered a keen awareness of local audiences and interests. A. R. F. Webber’s Those
That Be in Bondage—a Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters was published
28 | INSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

by the Daily Chronicle printing press in 1917. Webber, who edited the Guyanese Daily
Chronicle, also published a British Guiana history and yearbook locally in 1931. Not
much later, MacDermot’s local publishing experiments were repeated by Herbert de
Lisser, editor of the Daily Gleaner but as a more commercial venture. The emigration
of writers like Roberts and McKay to the United States marked a deflationary moment
in the movement toward cultural and literary nationalism. W. Adolphe Roberts, Claude
McKay, and Jean Rhys made their journeys to the United States and to Britain in search
of professional writing careers. Migration may have had some impact on the way that
writers approached their subject matter. McKay, whose poems were published in the
Daily Gleaner and whose first volume of poetry was issued in Jamaica, was praised ini-
tially for his rendering of dialect. In contrast, McKay’s later poetry is written in standard
English, reflecting his appeal to a different kind of readership, a move that was moti-
vated, as Edward Baugh notes, “by what he saw as the slighting of the Creole poetry”
(2001, 233). McKay is a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and his novels are viewed
by some critics as founding texts of African Caribbean fiction. Roberts, a novelist, jour-
nalist, poet, and historian, migrated to the United States but kept his connections with
Jamaica, publishing Six Great Jamaicans (1957) with the Pioneer Press and returning to
Jamaica to help set up a local branch of the Jamaica Progressive League, a lobby group
for Jamaican self-government.
Cobham-Sander (1981) argues that by the time of the outbreak of World War I, the
mood of nationalism and patriotism that characterized literary production earlier had
turned into one of imperial loyalty; the interwar years also ushered in a new entrepre-
neurial opportunism which did little to foster the attempt at collectivism and literary men-
torship that had characterized attitudes toward young aspiring writers in MacDermot’s
time. However, Herbert de Lisser, who was one of the migrant writers whose loss was
bemoaned by McDermot, did return and rose to become an influential figure in jour-
nalism and literature. As the secretary and then chair of the Institute of Jamaica and
the editor of Planter’s Punch (starting in 1920), de Lisser became one of the pillars of
the Jamaican establishment. De Lisser’s business acumen influenced his career as a nov-
elist. In contrast to the earlier generation, his successes were based on his understanding
of publishing essentially as a business enterprise rather than as a nationalist project. De
Lisser exploited his business contacts to sell advertising and availed himself of the Daily
Gleaner printing facilities to publish Planter’s Punch, a successful conservative middlebrow
annual directed at predominantly white upper and middle-class Jamaica women but also
at an Afro-Creole elite; his fiction also found its way into the pages of the magazine to be
reissued in novel form after a successful reception. And some of this fiction also obtained
a literary afterlife by reappearing in magazine form.
De Lisser’s novels were serialized in the Daily Gleaner or the Planter’s Punch; some were
then republished in book form locally with The Gleaner Company and also in London
with the publishing houses of Methuen and Ernest Benn. Although Jane’s Career was first
 CULTURES OF PRINT IN THE CARIBBEAN | 29

serialized in the Daily Gleaner, serialization was stopped before the end and the story was
published in novel form with The Gleaner Company, and then published by the London
firm of Methuen. The novel was also reissued in Planter’s Punch at the close of 1940, with
a sequel, Myrtle and Money published in the subsequent annual issue of the magazine
(1942). De Lisser’s third novel, Triumphant Squalitone, was first published by The Gleaner
Company as a cheap local edition in 1916; according to de Lisser’s preface, the manuscript
was sold to the local firm of Fred L. Myers and Son at “fully 50 percent below its cost of
production” so as to build an audience for local writing. Myers and Son included general
advertisements in its 1917 book publication. In his author’s note to that volume, de Lisser
argued that colonial editions were still too expensive to purchase, costing as they did “at
half-a-crown per copy” and cheap local editions were made possible by only including
advertisements, claiming that “the reading public” can afford to purchase the novel was
thus “entirely [due] to the merchants and business house of Kingston.” Advertisements in
the book, offering a range of products from household products to champagne and cars,
indicate that the book’s intended readership were Creoles or whites with a reasonable
disposable income.
However, whether such commercial subsidy worked is not entirely clear because de
Lisser’s subsequent novels reappeared in Planter’s Punch only to be published in book form
with the London firm of Ernest Benn. However, de Lisser cemented his links with the
new affluent mercantile and industrial classes, who supported his writing by placing ad-
vertisements in his local publications; both Rosenberg (2007) and Cobham-Sander (1981)
have argued that such links have had a significant impact on de Lisser’s work, moving it
away from the nationalism of the populace to that of the privileged white(r) elites. As an
annual, Planter’s Punch included both light and serious reading on notable local personali-
ties and visiting celebrities, aspects of Jamaican life, culture, and taste, middlebrow fiction
(albeit mostly de Lisser’s) and occasionally poetry. Although the annual was successful
as leisure reading for more affluent classes, de Lisser’s effective monopoly of the writing
published in the magazine made it less effective at providing opportunities for nurturing
new generations of local writers.

Little Magazines

In the 1930s and 1940s, important local and regional little magazines and reviews such
as the Forum Quarterly, the Forum Magazine, Bim, the Quarterly Magazine, Trinidad, The
Beacon, Picong, Callaloo, Kyk-over-al, and Focus began to publish a range of poetry, fiction,
dramatic scripts, reviews, and essays, all of which reflected a new and buoyant period of
creativity marked also by cultural political concerns. The economic depression and labor
unrest of the 1930s fanned the flames of cultural nationalism so that many of these maga-
zines were informed by a desire to stimulate thinking about the nature and character