The Narrow Path (1966) is #27 in Heinemann's African Writer's Series. It appears to be straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the misadventures of Kofi (meaning he who was born on Friday) as he attends a series of Catholic schools in coastal Ghana in the 1930s and 40s, following his itinerant headmaster father, a loving but hardworking and strict man; also the childhood story of the book's author Francis Selormey (1927-1983). It serves as a document of life in rural Ghana at the time, without much commentary on larger issues or indeed much reflection. It is typical of the genre, recounting a strict regime that included corporal punishment and at times dire consequences for youthful transgressions, neither of which seemed to extinguish the protagonist's penchant for mischief, of which there is plenty.
The themes are: coming to terms with a strict father whose excesses reflect the hardships of earlier times; life as the headmaster's son and the new kid on the block; coming of age and attendant crises with honesty, school, money and romance; and the tensions that define the life of a young African student in the post-colonial era, caught as he is between traditional life and the brave new world opening up before him. Subjects of previous posts here that are relevantly similar are the much more philosophical (and Muslim) Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure (1962), the very similar but more intense Chukwuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel (1973), and the more recent and far more edgy El-Nukoya's Nine Lives (2007). For more of the persistent theme (also ubiquitous in Asian fiction) of the youth who is caught up (in this case) in the contingencies of rural west African culture check out Nkem Nwanko's Danda (1964), Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1977) and the excellent Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991). The Narrow Path is worth reading for some local color and for impressive verisimilitude but a slight volume in the context of the AWS.
Showing posts with label Ghana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ghana. Show all posts
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Asare Konadu's A Woman in her Prime
One of my ongoing projects with the Stack is to read through a shelf-full of novels in the African Writer's Series from roughly the 1960s, the combination of two departing colleagues' gifts of boxes of miscellaneous African literary stuff. The novels are mostly short, many but not all have been written in English. They are mostly West African, the literary constellation revolving around Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. It is not a big world, at least not on the internet: I received a nice e-mail from Cameron Duodo after I posted about his novel The Gab Boys (1967); I touched up (very slightly!) my post on Peter Abraham's A Wreath for Udomo (1956) when I realized that anyone Googling it on Earth was likely to have my post on their first page of links; and the best so far was having the Lagos magazine Farafina reprint my post on J. P. Clark's America, Their America (1963). I'm coming to appreciate some of the similarities among these "60s" African books, with their depictions of tough environments both rural and urban, their love of happy outcomes and celebration of life, and their Janus-faced didacticism, one half social criticism aimed at the national reader, the other cultural defense ("apology," in the classical Greek sense of that word) aimed at the Developed World, a much more well-defined entity in the post-colonial "sixties" than today in the post-modern "aughts."
This week I have discovered Samuel Asare Konadu (1932-1994), a Ghanian publisher and novelist who wrote many novels, at least nine by the 1971 publishing date of my Heinemann edition of A Woman in her Prime (1967). There is very little information, although I haven't done a long search. A Woman in her Prime was the 40th novel in the AWS, and his novel Ordained by the Oracle was the 55th.
Woman is a critical novel of village life with a progressive message that is modern but not reactionary. It deals with the problems of an African woman, Pokuwaa, who is in her 30s and has not had any children, considered a tragic condition by her society, not least by her mother. She has fired two husbands for this reason and her third, Kwadwo, is fearful of losing her. He loves her for her own sake: she has grown up to be a strong person and a good farmer. It is Kwadwo who provides the unconditional acceptance that helps her to resist the psychological pressure of her life (although the author understates this nicely).
Abetted by her obsessed mother Pokuwaa has been visiting various shamans and healers. But the omens are never good. When lightening strikes and burns an old tree near the village there is ominous talk of looking about for a witch. Pokuwaa's mother sees things the old way and is much alarmed. The last straw for Pokuwaa is when she comes across the body of a man near her farm. Out of fear, she doesn't say anything, letting the men go out and find the missing man themselves. A dire episode indeed.
But the last straw is a good thing for Pokuwaa. She gives up on the magic, on the theories of fate. She decides that she must just let life run its course. She gives up her burden. Ah, but this is a West African 60s novel, all 107 pages. So in no time at all she is pregnant and lives happily ever after. I think that Konadu wanted to make the point that a woman needn't have a child to be fulfilled (at least, no more than a man does): she comes to peace with herself first, gets pregnant after. But his view is that the traditional folkloric account that defined the emotional regime under which Pokuwaa lived was oppressing her, and perhaps contributing to her problems. That is, his target was not so much sexism as superstition, although he understood the negative social consequences for women of magical explanation.
In this way his novel is interesting to the western reader today. The western stereotype of the African novel is that it illuminates the positive side of Africa as a cultural soldier defending the homeland. But 60s African writers, like feminists, are often critics of traditions that have come to seem unenlightened and abusive. They did not have much international readership and thus were not as self-conscious as the modern African writer, who tends to criticize regimes more than societies. They thought that they were living through a transformative time, and they try to open doors to the future. They are gentle prophets of modernity, at times, and it is interesting to put their optimism up against the reality of modern Africa (I don't say that presumptuously, there are lots of ways that comparison could be played out). And there is the persistent theme that good character will out: that is a theme that links African and North American letters.
Related novels that are subjects of blog posts here include Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys; Francis Selormey's Narrow Path; Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure; Nkem Nwanko's Danda; Chukuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel; Cameron Duodu's The Gab Boys.
This week I have discovered Samuel Asare Konadu (1932-1994), a Ghanian publisher and novelist who wrote many novels, at least nine by the 1971 publishing date of my Heinemann edition of A Woman in her Prime (1967). There is very little information, although I haven't done a long search. A Woman in her Prime was the 40th novel in the AWS, and his novel Ordained by the Oracle was the 55th.
Woman is a critical novel of village life with a progressive message that is modern but not reactionary. It deals with the problems of an African woman, Pokuwaa, who is in her 30s and has not had any children, considered a tragic condition by her society, not least by her mother. She has fired two husbands for this reason and her third, Kwadwo, is fearful of losing her. He loves her for her own sake: she has grown up to be a strong person and a good farmer. It is Kwadwo who provides the unconditional acceptance that helps her to resist the psychological pressure of her life (although the author understates this nicely).
Abetted by her obsessed mother Pokuwaa has been visiting various shamans and healers. But the omens are never good. When lightening strikes and burns an old tree near the village there is ominous talk of looking about for a witch. Pokuwaa's mother sees things the old way and is much alarmed. The last straw for Pokuwaa is when she comes across the body of a man near her farm. Out of fear, she doesn't say anything, letting the men go out and find the missing man themselves. A dire episode indeed.
But the last straw is a good thing for Pokuwaa. She gives up on the magic, on the theories of fate. She decides that she must just let life run its course. She gives up her burden. Ah, but this is a West African 60s novel, all 107 pages. So in no time at all she is pregnant and lives happily ever after. I think that Konadu wanted to make the point that a woman needn't have a child to be fulfilled (at least, no more than a man does): she comes to peace with herself first, gets pregnant after. But his view is that the traditional folkloric account that defined the emotional regime under which Pokuwaa lived was oppressing her, and perhaps contributing to her problems. That is, his target was not so much sexism as superstition, although he understood the negative social consequences for women of magical explanation.
In this way his novel is interesting to the western reader today. The western stereotype of the African novel is that it illuminates the positive side of Africa as a cultural soldier defending the homeland. But 60s African writers, like feminists, are often critics of traditions that have come to seem unenlightened and abusive. They did not have much international readership and thus were not as self-conscious as the modern African writer, who tends to criticize regimes more than societies. They thought that they were living through a transformative time, and they try to open doors to the future. They are gentle prophets of modernity, at times, and it is interesting to put their optimism up against the reality of modern Africa (I don't say that presumptuously, there are lots of ways that comparison could be played out). And there is the persistent theme that good character will out: that is a theme that links African and North American letters.
Related novels that are subjects of blog posts here include Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys; Francis Selormey's Narrow Path; Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure; Nkem Nwanko's Danda; Chukuemeka Ike's The Potter's Wheel; Cameron Duodu's The Gab Boys.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Duodu's Gab Boys
In 1967, ten years after Ghanaian independence and within a year of the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in a military coup in 1966, Cameron Duodu published The Gab Boys (he went on to a long and distinguished career as a journalist and editorialist, most recently criticizing Robert Mugabe's destructive clinging to power in Zimbabwe). Duodu simultaneously represents two currents in West African literature of the time, on the one hand the exploration of cultural conflict and political corruption in post-colonial African society associated with novelists and playwrights such as Chinua Achebe and Ama Ata Aidoo, and on the other hand the optimistic affirmation of African cultural strengths found in poets of the time such as David Diop and Frank Kobina Parks. These themes come together in a very compassionate discussion of the way that individual people, rich and poor, are pushed to compromise themselves as they try to navigate a near-chaotic transitional society.
Unlike a lot of politicized African literature, however, Duodu writes in a comic spirit, and presents a world where young people cannot be prevented from having fun: a celebration of the indestructible joy of youth. Kwasi Asamoa is one of the "gab boys" (the name refers to their expensive gaberdine trousers), local youths who have been educated in the early years of independence, only to find themselves idle as the economy slips into kleptocracy. Both economically marginalized and despised as snobs by the uneducated, they loll about Pusupusu, their rural village, making wisecracks and causing trouble. Eventually the local lawmen devise a plan to drive them away by holding them liable to a tax that these teenagers obviously cannot afford, and Kwasi must run away first to a friend who drives a taxi in Accra and then to a job as a cleaner on the railroad. Trouble with the law, with money, with tough guys and with alcohol dog him as he tries to establish the most basic arrangements of work and shelter.
Tough as this is, Kwasi's narrative is the story of a young man having fun with his friends, with girls, and with discovering the world. The interlude with the taximen on the streets of the big city is particularly good, four men sleeping in one room and working all night are nonetheless having a grand time of it and acting as if they owned the city. Even the death of one of the gab boys in a railway accident is an occasion for a raucous road trip back to Pusupusu, as everyone comes together after various differences and the village elders are forced to admit that they were wrong to try to drive away the youths.
The mechanisms of informal democracy based on familial and tribal loyalty are well-depicted. The ending is unabashedly happy, with the young people learning to understand the traditional village drumming. There is good, sustained attention to the welter of local dialects and overlapping languages, with much discussion of words and rhythms. A most enjoyable book.
Unlike a lot of politicized African literature, however, Duodu writes in a comic spirit, and presents a world where young people cannot be prevented from having fun: a celebration of the indestructible joy of youth. Kwasi Asamoa is one of the "gab boys" (the name refers to their expensive gaberdine trousers), local youths who have been educated in the early years of independence, only to find themselves idle as the economy slips into kleptocracy. Both economically marginalized and despised as snobs by the uneducated, they loll about Pusupusu, their rural village, making wisecracks and causing trouble. Eventually the local lawmen devise a plan to drive them away by holding them liable to a tax that these teenagers obviously cannot afford, and Kwasi must run away first to a friend who drives a taxi in Accra and then to a job as a cleaner on the railroad. Trouble with the law, with money, with tough guys and with alcohol dog him as he tries to establish the most basic arrangements of work and shelter.
Tough as this is, Kwasi's narrative is the story of a young man having fun with his friends, with girls, and with discovering the world. The interlude with the taximen on the streets of the big city is particularly good, four men sleeping in one room and working all night are nonetheless having a grand time of it and acting as if they owned the city. Even the death of one of the gab boys in a railway accident is an occasion for a raucous road trip back to Pusupusu, as everyone comes together after various differences and the village elders are forced to admit that they were wrong to try to drive away the youths.
The mechanisms of informal democracy based on familial and tribal loyalty are well-depicted. The ending is unabashedly happy, with the young people learning to understand the traditional village drumming. There is good, sustained attention to the welter of local dialects and overlapping languages, with much discussion of words and rhythms. A most enjoyable book.
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