Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?

Summary

Chinua Achebe once said something to the effect that no country has ever handed its government to writers. It was not so much a statement about the administrative capabilities or lack thereof, of writers in government, as of the true significance of creative imagination in the shaping of human destiny at a point in time. ‘The pen’ they say, ‘is mightier than the sword’. But whereas soldiers and armed forces overthrow civilian governments and impose dictatorships and totalitarian regimes across the globe, no association of writers by whatever name, has ever carried out a coup d’état to topple a country’s government, constitution and its political institutions with a stroke of the pen.

Defining the role of a writer in a new nation particularly in Africa, Achebe declared that a writer with a proper sense of history can ‘explore in depth the human condition’ and show the populace in clear terms ‘how the rain began to beat them’ – the causes and effects, actions and reactions, events and consequences in the life of a people. He revealed his own mission, commitment and vision as an African writer in near-crusading terms:

I should be satisfied if my novels especially the ones I set in the past did no more than teach my readers that their past, with all its imperfections, was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans, acting on God’s behalf delivered them.

That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment generally shared by the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand where and when the rain started beating them and how best to dry their bodies. It has remained an exciting, long and arduous journey from the past to the present with all genres and forms of literary and cultural production recalling and recording, charting and constructing, assessing and critiquing, blaming or exculpating, reconfiguring that past and projecting a new confident African future steeped in all the fundamental values of self-determination. The spectrum of that complex engagement could be rightly said to encompass critical issues in politics and social justice in all their ramifications, which form the focus of this issue of African Literature Today.