If you’re white, can you write about Africa?
By Marjorie Kehe | 01.06.09
It’s a hot potato of a cultural question, but Jon Evans tackles it straight on in today’s Guardian. It’s not too surprising that Evans has an opinion on this one: He’s a white Canadian who has written a thriller (”Night of Knives”) set in Africa.
Evans’s novel recently attracted scathing reader review on Library Thing.
“This is a truly appalling book,” the reader wrote. “[I]t’s not a book about Africa. It’s a thriller about north Americans and Europeans set in an ‘exotic’ African backdrop. A few Africans have bit parts in it. The picture it paints of Africa is overwhelmingly negative, almost a caricature.”
The reader/critic goes on to cite Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay “How to write about Africa” and suggests that “Night of Knives” might have been written using Wainaina’s essay as a guide.
Ouch! Wainaina’s essay is only too accurate.
How many novels have you read (movies have you seen) that hew painfully close to the following advice?:
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”
Evans says he’s the first to find Wainaina’s essay to be “terrific.” He says he’s read it numerous times – and in fact says he tried as hard as possible to avoid the pitfalls it describes. And he agrees that, ” ‘Write what you know’ is a valuable safety mechanism. Writing about characters steeped in a living culture that you know only through travel and research is a recipe for offensive disaster.”
But where does that leave a white author who wants to write about Africa?
Facing a “fundamental catch-22,” laments Evans. “If I write about westerners like myself who go there, then – to quote the review - ‘It’s not a book about Africa. It’s a thriller about North Americans and Europeans set in an “exotic” African backdrop’. But had I populated the book with African protagonists, I’ve little doubt I would have fallen flat on my face.”
So does that mean that an author like Evans simply can’t write about Africa?
“I reject that notion … emphatically,” he states. “I can see how novels about westerners in the former colonial world, and particularly commercial fiction such as thrillers, can trigger a defensive reaction. Such books have all too often been patronizing and insulting… But to reject that – or any – combination of author, characters and setting as invalid is to throw a whole nursery-full of babies out with the bathwater.”
He also quotes mixed-race novelist Hari Kunzru’s vigorous defense of “Brick Lane” (which also appeared in the Guardian), in which he wrote that, “I reserve the right to imagine anyone and anything I damn well please. If I want to write about Jewish people, or paedophiles or Patagonians or witches in 12th-century Finland, then I will do so, despite being ‘authentically’ none of these things.”
You don’t have to travel to Africa to deal with such issues. Look at the cultural arguments that break out in the US over whether or not white directors ought to be staging August Wilson plays.
To whom does literature belong? Who has the right to create it, to interpret it, to claim to understand it?
I suspect that we’ll be fighting over these questions for centuries to come.
Comments
2. Herman Toerien | 01.07.09
I am a “white” South African with my ancestors coming from countries such as Sweden and Indonesia, and had been living in Africa for centuries. My Afrikaans culture and language developed in Africa.
This underlines the fact that Africa is not a simple “black” unit, and had probably not been as evidence points to both ancient and modern man originating from this continent (artifacts 2 million years old were discovered in the Wonderwerk Caves in South Africa recently).
Many “unblack” famous people such as Hannibal and Augustine came from Africa.
What is unfortunately true is that under the ANC two “versions” of the truth developed – one more or less in terms of Western thinking, and another in which Cuba’s government sets a positive example and Mugabe is a hero. A very “Africanist” policy is followed, with a Black Lawers’ Association, a black Journalist forum (which does not even allow white journalists as guests when addressed by ANC leader, Jacob Zuma, a black Business Forum etc, and is not deemed as being racist as “blacks can per definition not be racists.”
This perception is only now seriously challenged in black mainstream thinking with the establishment of a new party, Cope.
Cope does have teething problems, such as its first media release on the Israel / Hamas conflict reflects in which the ANC stance is almost copied, with the exception that Hamas is also taken to task for its missile attacks.
Naturally, my culture can write on my culture. Elias Nel (a colored) is now looking up people who can tell the stories of Namakwaland, and the best story tellers from this region are white and colored, both “groups” speaking Afrikaans. But my people also have perceptions on the country as a whole, a perception of the continent and the world. As they differ largely – same as all white Americans do not think alike on all aspects of reality – these perceptions are no more or no less accurate than those of black Africans (who incidentally also do not think alike on all aspects).
Rather respect Africans as individuals. My book, Cry Freedom too (Yahoo and Google) differs largely from perceptions of both fellow black and white South Africans.
3. Michael | 01.10.09
The issue in these types of stories is not one of cultural sensitivity but one of cultural domination. These types of stories all follow the same narrative: White man enters foreign, exotic land filled with colored people. Meets resistance from the natives. Either joins their culture and learns so much about humanity or completely dominates the culture with western logic and weaponry. Also sexually conquers a local women in order to show that he is not a racist and love has no color.
These stories occur not just in a White person writing about Africa, but also about a White person writing about Asia, or Latin America, or even Native American stories, like Dances with Wolves.
All these stories has creates the impression that White men can travel anywhere in the world and establish dominance. It’s a colonist mindset that still lingers today amongst writers who lack creativity that they have to borrow the plot from Miss Saigon in order to get a book published.
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1. J Todd Fernandez | 01.06.09
Cultural sensitivity is a tricky thing. As an American who spent the last year studying human rights in South Africa and Ethiopia with 30 other African colleagues, and visiting 5 or so other countries, I can attest there is nothing homogeneous about the Continent. When I write I am very mindful of my white, American perspective, preconceived notions and tone - particularly when talking about “traditional African culture” or making suggestions on democracy. Unfortunately, careless depictions of Africa in “fiction” have “colored” the world’s perception since authors started writing about Africa, often misrepresenting African cultures and seriously feuling colonialism and imperialism, and even homophobia. Thus writing - even fiction - carries social responsibility. Yes, “creativity is free” - but great fiction cares about the truth of the settings it borrows. When someone can only be “generically creative” - that’s ultimately not very creative.