Writing Africa

Por Futhi Ntshingila

Arte por Andrés Miró-Lugo

At the risk of tying up a pretty bow around Africa and making her a monolithic phenomenon, I want to attempt to argue that humanity, however diverse, is telling the story of Africa.  We are her sons and daughters after all, even the ones who have forgotten that the root of all humanity is deep in the belly of the continent; the ones who are ashamed of her and the ones who jealously own her as exclusively their own and those who have tasted the milk of her wisdom and are content to share.  All roads of humankind lead back to the roots of Africa.  

African storytelling in its pure orality form is an age-old tradition that has been in existence before any form of writing and/or recording was established. The advent of writing which Walter J. Ong calls the “technologizing of the word” brought about an “alienation and reintegration” of consciousness. These changes in consciousness are investigated in detail by Ong in his trilogy of earlier books.  Marginalization of oral storytelling and communities who are rooted in oral narrative traditions began with binaries introduced by what was later coined as “the grand/master narrative” of literacy tradition.  This polarity included labels of “othering” like literate versus illiterate, science versus magic/myths, individual knowledge versus communal knowledge and unreliability of orally narrated accounts versus legitimacy of written word.  Herein lays the key to unpacking the process of compromising memory; selective amnesia; injustices; marginalization and dominance of one tradition over the other.  Fortunately works like that of Lyotard’s theory of post-modernism has complicated the “Master” Narrative with “Meta” Narrative shifting the center in favor of mosaic contextualized narratives.  

As a writer from a continent rich in so many ways, I write to bear witness to what was lost in the process of disemboweling Africa.  The core of who she is was shaken to disrupt, confuse and loot her reaches. It is a privilege to have been born and raised in South Africa, a country in the continent that remains a pulpable wound.  I get to watch a shapeshifting of pain into love, powerlessness into victory, fear into understanding and courage.  I bear witness to the stubbornness of evil refusing to die, I watch the old, once powerful shrink and I get to sadly witness the newly powerful get consumed with greed and corruption.  I therefore feel compelled to write and tell these stories in all their glory, pain, beauty and ugliness.

The historic inequalities and years of oppressive rule by fear tells me that many died never having had a chance to live and express their talents. I wonder about them, and I use my imagination to channel and hear their stories. I assemble their bones, re-flesh them and request to hear their voices. This process has given me so much hope.  It has become clear to me that tried as they may have to ruin Africa and her culture, there is in her, a pristine life form that cannot be touched, be injured or be humiliated.  It remains steady, silently knowing that there will be a time where a new set of eyes and a new set of ears will look and see that there is much that can be salvaged from what we lost in madness of greed.

As a writer, I am a pair of new set of ears that listens to hear a pure tune left unexplored.  This new writing is calm and steady in probing the story of Africa.  It is familiar with waiting and has no need for approval. Africa is embracing this form of storytelling and emerging voices of all kinds who claim the continent as the mother regardless of who and what they are.  

Some of us write her story looking beyond the Western nominative ways of meaning making. We are familiar with the accusation of mythologizing her because of course, what the West doesn’t understand is deemed illogical. Some write about her pain of being misunderstood and undermined as unscientific, dark and dangerous.Some write her lamentations of poverty and being a begging bowl to the West.

A lot could be said about writing Africa and its phases from colonizers whose writing was legitimized and viewed as cannonised authority, to the rise of African intellectuals taught by missionaries whose ideologies were hegemonic and not innocent until a critical questioning class emerged to expose the fragility of colonization. In the new writing I have observed a tone of something ancient bringing forth stories untainted.   

The new narrative is ancestral moving above constraints of academic critical theories.  In fact, it is positively disruptive to the status quo. It is no longer begging to be legitimised. There is an assured calmness and grounded in channelling those lived invisible lives and were placed in unvisited graves. Older courageous writers like Lauretta Ngcobo, Nokuthela Dube, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many others show what it is to write as conduits and channels.  They paved the way for new exciting writing like Zimbabwean NoViolet’s “We need new names” which turns the tables of the regime’s status quo. Waterdancer by Tenahisi Coates, is a narrative deeply ancestral channelling stories of those who died afraid of their very own liberation even Japanese Haruki Murakami storytelling have resonance with African ancestral tone.  

The West unsatisfied with leaving things unlabelled call such stories magic realism but it is so much more than that.  It is about honouring the dead, historic figures who were shadowy until courageous storyteller brought time to light. South African, Sartjie Bartman who became the spectacle in Museums of France for her large buttocks, dismembered and placed in jars to be studied in her death.  She had unexpressed talents and gifts. Storytelling can exhume and retell such stories. The Witches of Salem took many forms from those decimated by manufactured diseases like Aids, untimely death. It is no coincidence that this tone began to develop when women storytellers entered the space, when they were no longer oppressed allowing them to shift the narrative from centre to embrace all voices.