Search results
satiric, a joint venture of acidic creativity coloured by a gallows humour that characterises much of Mengestu’s work. 19 As Yogita Goyal notes, ‘even as they parody the dream of African freedom in this macabre game, their friendship also evokes a pan-African tradition, albeit in ambiguous fashion’. 20 In his ‘sober hours’, Joseph is working on a cycle of poems that tries to elaborate another kind of African history, one attuned to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. His work traces ‘the history of the Congo from King Leopold to the death of Patrice Lumumba
-year period and in varying locations; for example, the account of a female black pioneer rests against that of a white slave-ship captain, suggesting the need for each story to be heard. Non-fictional works The Atlantic Sound (2000) and A New World Order (2001) chart Phillips’s ongoing interest in what it means to ‘belong’ in the late twentieth century. In these later works, through visiting, and writing about, the points of the triangular trade (Africa, the Caribbean and US, the UK), and engaging with seemingly disparate notions like football affiliations and Pan-Africanism
‘warrior men and women’, and compares them to peoples across Africa who ‘earned . . . victories’ or built empires, like the Ethiopians and the Ashanti of Ghana, suggesting that they have a strong claim to the land and a pan-African identity. However, these comparisons are made without any contextualisation or problematising of very diverse histories of empires, slavery and different kinds of subjugation. It is worth noting that of all the historical memories of the Afrikaners, Mbeki chooses to reference the ‘Boer’s’ in terms of their struggle with the British, and their
into two parts: Chapters 1 to 4 focus on pan-African commonalities, while Chapters 5 to 7 offer more detailed, historicised and territorialised accounts of recent South African writing. Chapter 8 attends to a more overarching issue of the usefulness of metafictionality and postmodernity as terms to understand African literature, and also acts as something of a concluding assessment, especially since all the preceding
). Crucially, too, the city was also a meeting place for anti-colonial nationalists. A leading figure was Ras Makonnen, whose restaurant The Cosmopolitan was situated on Manchester’s busy Oxford Road. As John McLeod relates, the restaurant allowed ‘ad hoc and adversarial links’ to be forged between pan-African radicals, Indian Nationalists and Jewish groups resisting anti-semitism (McLeod, 2002: 53).17 Makonnen set up a publishing company and a bookshop in Manchester together with a monthly periodical entitled Pan-Africa. Profits from The Cosmopolitan were used to fund the
(notwithstanding all Gikandi’s caveats) to give far too little weight to the political contradictions of the period that produced Achebe and his work, I would argue. The rival claims of tribalism, regionalism, pan-Africanism and Nigerian nationhood do not represent subtle gradations of position in the 1950s, 1960s or even the 1980s: they are the fundamental stakes in debates that for many, in Biafra particularly, turned out to be life-and-death affairs. Among all of Achebe’s writings, undoubtedly the most idealistic and doctrinaire is The Ahiara Declaration. Nowhere Morrison
’.40 He effectively performs the diversity of the nation-to-be. A particularly interesting feature of Mandela’s underground journey in its later stages is that, on a far wider scale than Kaunda’s, it expanded on to an international, specifically Pan-African, stage. In February 1962 Mandela secretly left South Africa on a ‘mission’ to establish contact with what would become the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at their conference in Addis Ababa, and also to raise political and economic support for the ANC’s new military campaign. Following time spent in Ethiopia
In general, then, the woman – and usually the mother – figure stands for the national territory and for certain national values: symbolically she is ranged above the men; in reality she is kept below them. If male filial figures experience the gravitational pull to the national ground, women constitute part of its gravid mass. As, for example, in the iconography of Hindu nationalism, in many forms of African nationalism, as also in Pan-Africanism, the elevated woman figure takes on massive, even continent-wide proportions. She is the Great Mother, Durga, Mama Afrika
Literature: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester University Press, 1996). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). See also Kadiatu Kanneh’s critical account of Gilroy in her African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (London and New York
only the children who benefit from being taken away from their home. By their presence, the Kwadere children confirm, if further confirmation were needed, that the family is more than a genetic inheritance. The Lennox family has been, throughout the novel, a voluntary community. That is one of its strengths. As a trope, the Lennox family is placed in opposition to meta-narratives of social determinism, whether these are Marxism, Pan-Africanism or one or other of the many versions of globalization. 15 Although the Lennoxes may have been more