SOURCE: Huggan, Graham. “African Literature and the Anthropological Exotic.” In The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, pp. 34-57. London, England: Routledge, 2001.

[In the following essay, Huggan presents a critical examination of the processes by which value is attached to postcolonial works, specifically exploring the link between ethnographic interpretations of African literature and the role Africa itself has played in being a source of marketable cultural uniqueness for Western audiences.]

This chapter begins with the deceptively simple question: what is African literature? The question immediately begs another: African literature from which region? ‘African literature’, after all, already conveys a fiction of homogeneity that smacks of ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (Spivak 1993a: 279); as if the vast literary and cultural diversity of one of the world's largest continents could be arrogantly reduced to a single classificatory term. And another: African literature in which language? For African literature—as a body of texts written by authors of African origin, as well as an object of academic study in Africa and various parts of the so-called First World—largely means literature in English, French and other European languages, along with a smattering of the large corpus of vernacular works often little known outside of Africa, and many of which remain untranslated for a Euro-American audience unlikely to be conversant with any African language. This suggests the view of African literature as primarily an export product, aimed at a largely foreign audience for whom the writer acts, willingly or not, as cultural spokesperson or interpreter. This view is of course simplistic, overlooking as it does the geographical complexities of audience formation (local, metropolitan, trans/national, diasporic, etc.), as well as the intricate nexus of related historical reasons for the primacy of European languages in the development of African literature as a recognised literary/cultural field. These reasons would have to include—at the very least—the predominance of local oral traditions across the African continent; the specific role played by European missionaries and, to a lesser extent, government teachers and administrators in setting up and promoting print culture; the more general ideological importance of literature and the literary text for the colonial enterprise; both the short-and long-term effects of European-language education on African writers and thinkers, who now comprise by and large a cosmopolitan, internationally trained intellectual élite (Appiah 1992); the historical function of English, among other European languages, as a regional interethnic lingua franca, as well as a status-enhancing inter- or transnational medium of communication and exchange; the deployment of Europhone African literatures as ideological weapons in the independence struggles and in the continuing critical reassessment of African national cultures in the post-independence era; the emergence of African studies as a viable subject in the Euro-American academy, often presided over by African scholars who have left—in some cases, have been forced to leave—Africa for fairer politico-economic shores; and perhaps most of all, the yawning disparity in material conditions of production and consumption between Africa and the post-industrial First World, especially Europe and America—a situation that has led to metropolitan publishers and other related patrons (commercial sponsors, institutionally based reviewers and accreditation agencies, and so on) being granted a virtual stranglehold, not only over the distribution, but also to some extent the definition, of African literature as a cultural field.¹

All of this suggests that African literature, to some extent a hopeful child of the independence movements, is also imbricated with larger patterns of structural underdevelopment governing the global knowledge industry (Altbach 1975; Soyinka 1990). It also suggests the unequal state of affairs that arises when:

a hybrid poetics comes into being, combining elements from the historically dominated system (the African one) with elements from the historically dominant one (the English [European] one), and acting as a constraint on the production of literature within the dominated system, while it leaves the dominant system relatively unaffected.

(Lefevere 1983: 101)

As André Lefevere argues in his 1983 essay on the historiography of African literature, African writers are often caught between the desire to achieve recognition—and the financial rewards that come with it—with a wider audience and their awareness of the constraints this might place on their writing and the ways in which it is received. The danger exists, for example, of the edges of a certain, unmistakably politicised kind of writing becoming blunted by a coterie of publishers and other marketing agents anxious to exploit it for its ‘exotic’ appeal. So much is clear from the three obviously exasperated comments that follow, which indicate the formulaic patterns into which Western publishers have often seemed to want to assimilate African literary works. The first of these is from the Nigerian writer Obi Egbuna, who in a 1974 interview complains:

What I resent is that once you go to a university and write in English, somebody comes along, like a talent scout from a London publishing house, and asks ‘Why don't you just write something for us?’ And he expects you to write just like the African author he has published before. So there he is, defining for you what you should do.

(Egbuna, in Lindfors 1974: 17, also qtd in Lizarríbar 1998: 111)

The second, a year earlier, comes from the then President of the Ghana Association of Writers, Atukwei Okai, who laments the fact that if:

you [the writer] set out to print anything on your own, the printing costs will stagger you. If you manage to print, the distribution difficulties will blow your mind. If you give your stuff to a local publisher, you will sympathize so much with his problems that you may not write again. … So all our best work … appears first to an audience which either regards us like some glass-enclosed specimen … or like an exotic weed to be sampled and made a conversation piece … or else we become some international organization's pet.

(Okai 1973: 4)

And the third, also in the 1970s, comes from another Nigerian writer, Kole Omotoso, who, bitterly invoking the memory of the Western literary ‘discovery’ of his countryman Amos Tutuola in the early 1950s, conjures up the Tutuolan image of a ‘headless triangle’ comprising ‘[n]ative writer, foreign publisher and foreign audience’ (Omotoso 1975: 252).

These commentaries, now three decades old, are indicative of a mounting resentment among many of the first generation of post-independence African writers that their political views were being consistently diluted—or simply ignored—even as their economic interests were, on the whole, adequately served. This consensus view was to find support in S.I.A. Kotei's ground-breaking study of the parlous state of the African book trade, The Book Today in Africa (1981), a work which currently needs to be brought up to date, and which has certainly not been bettered since.² While a systematic study like Kotei's is unavailable for the 1990s, there is little evidence to suggest that the situation for African writers has improved. Many more have found their way into print, to be sure, but most of these with foreign publishers (Heinemann, Longman, etc.), and a workable infrastructure for publishing in Africa—recently dubbed, in a devastating phrase, a ‘bookless society’ (Zell 1992)—can still hardly be said to exist.³ If anything, the patronage systems that underpinned the emergence of African literature in the decades leading up to and immediately following independence have been consolidated, with the latest ‘discoveries’ often being skilfully, if not always seamlessly, assimilated to recognisable market trends.

One of the trends through which African literature has been filtered and has acquired a certain market value relates to a phenomenon that might best be described as the anthropological exotic. The anthropological exotic, like other contemporary forms of exoticist discourse, describes a mode of both perception and consumption; it invokes the familiar aura of other, incommensurably ‘foreign’ cultures while appearing to provide a modicum of information that gives the uninitiated reader access to the text and, by extension, the ‘foreign culture’ itself. Thus, the perceptual framework of the anthropological exotic allows for a reading of African literature as the more or less transparent window onto a richly detailed and culturally specific, but still somehow homogeneous—and of course readily marketable—African world. Anthropology is the watchword here, not for empirical documentation, but for the elaboration of a world of difference that conforms to often crudely stereotypical Western exoticist paradigms and myths (‘primitive culture’, ‘unbounded nature’, ‘magical practices’, ‘noble savagery’, and so on). The anthropological exotic might be seen in some sense as exploiting the exotic tendencies already inherent within anthropology, a discipline that even some of its own practitioners have seen as displaying a ‘predilection for purveying exotica … [and for choosing] the most exotic possible cultural data … [and] the most exotic possible readings’ for its own research (Keesing 1989: 460).⁴ Yet anthropology, in the sense I am using it here, is less about the ideological groundrules of disciplinary practice than about the mobilisation of a series of metaphors for the reading and writing of ‘foreign cultures’. To what extent does African literature deploy, however ironically, these anthropological metaphors? Is it justifiable to read African literature in this (pseudo-) anthropological manner; and what might be some of the implications of such anthropological readings?

It is helpful, before addressing these questions, to turn attention to a longstanding critical debate over the merits and demerits, the viability or not, of anthropological approaches to African literature. The opposing sides of the debate may be represented here by two of the most respected and theoretically informed among contemporary Africanist scholars, Chidi Amuta and Christopher L. Miller. Amuta, in his influential study The Theory of African Literature (1989), is dismissive of what he calls Africanist critics' ‘unmediated obsession with cultural anthropology’ (Amuta 1989: 22). For Amuta, this obsession marks the transition from ‘outright colonialist criticism to the faintest recognition of the specific socio-cultural character and historical determination of African literature by critics of African literature’ (Amuta 1989: 22). Not surprisingly, Amuta lists a number of well-known Euro-American critics among the culprits; but equally well-known African scholars, too, are subjected to withering critical scrutiny: Biodun Jeyifo and Wole Soyinka, for instance, peremptorily labelled ‘ethno-critics’, whose criticism performs the double disservice of ‘seeing African literary works [exclusively] in terms of the ethnicity of their authors’ and of ‘resurrect[ing] decadent ethnic myths and traditionalia, [trying] to project these onto the screen of contemporary literary works’ (Amuta 1989: 23). Amuta leaves us in little doubt as to his feelings about anthropology, which he, like several of his peers, considers to be irredeemably tainted by its associations with the colonial enterprise in Africa.⁵ His anger here, however, is more specifically directed against those literary critics of ‘the cultural anthropology school’, who tend to see culture in static terms as coherent units or discrete entities, and cultural artifacts as little more than ‘museum pieces, chipped porcelain and survivals of animistic social existence to be recovered in long-abandoned caves and the ruins of great walls and moats’ (Amuta 1989: 22). For Amuta, this type of ‘ethnocriticism’ subscribes to a hypostatized ‘traditionalist aesthetics’, usually driven by romantic-idealist notions of ‘traditional’ African cultures and often allied to an equally spurious ‘pan-Africanist universalism’ (Amuta 1989: 41).

This frontal, at times splenetic, attack is calmly counteracted by Christopher Miller, one of a number of talented American Africanists unfazed by bolekaja-style polemics.⁶ For Miller, located as he is within the Western institution, ‘a fair Western reading of African literatures demands engagement with, and even dependence on anthropology’ (Miller 1990: 4). The initial rationale for this is disarmingly, even embarrassingly, simple: ‘[G]ood reading does not result from ignorance and … Westerners simply do not know enough about Africa’ (Miller 1990: 4). But Miller then goes on to provide a sophisticated defence of anthropology, both as a medium of access to ‘modes of understanding that emanate from other [non-Western] cultures’ (Miller 1990: 21) and as a relativising methodology that allows for the exploration of the link between (local) ethnicity and (global) ethics. Drawing on recent, self-conscious approaches sometimes loosely bracketed under the rubric of the ‘new’ critical anthropology (including, among others, Geertz's analyses of ethnographic rhetoric, Tyler's postmodern ethnography and Clifford's adaptations of Bakhtinian dialogics), Miller advances the confident argument that ‘[r]elativism, retooled as contemporary critical anthropology, … becomes indispensable as a tool of intercultural critique’ (Miller 1990: 66).⁷ This critique, founded on a conversation between the texts of literature and those of ethnography, is tempered by the ironic awareness that ‘access to non-Western systems is mediated through a discipline that has been invented and controlled by the West’ (Miller 1990: 21; see also Mudimbe 1988: chap. 1). Miller still insists, however, that ‘without some reliance on anthropological texts, Westerners will not be able to read African literatures in any adequate way’ (Miller 1990: 21).

Is there any way of reconciling these two seemingly incompatible positions—the hardline anti-idealism of Amuta, which sees anthropological readings of African literature as wedding ethnic particularism to romantic fancy, and the soft-pedal relativism of Miller, which sees anthropology (more specifically, ethnography) as both necessary supplement and potential corrective to textual analysis, and as an instrument with which to understand African literature's important ideological function as intercultural critique? The middle ground is arguably occupied here by critics such as Simon Gikandi, who stop short of rejecting anthropology out of hand as a tool for students of African literature, but who point out the dangers of misunderstanding and/or misapplying anthropological models, which might result in the type of (pseudo-) anthropological reading that assumes literature ‘to be a mere reproduction of reality, and language a tabula rasa that expresses a one-to-one correspondence between words and things’ (Gikandi 1987: 149; see also Quayson 1994). It would be easy enough to show that the reception of African literary texts—to give the famous if by now clichéd example of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958)—is awash in such anthropological misapprehensions, which have often proved useful in the fuelling and reconfirmation of Western ethnocentric myths (Quayson 1994). The misconceived notion, for instance, that an African text offers unmediated access to an African culture, or even ‘African culture’, may be reinforced rather than dispelled by inaccurate views of what anthropology is, does, represents. Hence the frequent recourse to exoticising readings that begin by latching onto the cultural information putatively presented in the text, only to reincorporate that information into an available body of Western cultural myths. These types of readings also tend to succumb to the temptations of naive reflectionism (Gikandi's ‘one-to-one correspondence between words and things’) and, as a consequence, consistently undervalue the aesthetic complexity of African literary works—their structured interplay between modified local and imported aesthetic traditions; their cultivated ambiguities; their subtle modulations of voice and perspective in the multifaceted portrayal of the various cultural environments they represent. Thus, despite Miller's strictures, there is a risk of the dialogue between literature and anthropology labouring under a double misapprehension—both of the rhetoricity of ethnographic modes of representation and of the capacity of literary criticism to produce contending, possibly ‘resisting’, interpretations of the text. What is at stake here is not so much the referential validity of the text, its degree of ethnographic ‘accuracy’, but rather the politics of representation in which it is embedded and in which its writers and readers inevitably intercede. A comment made by the anthropologist Talal Asad in the course of an essay on Salman Rushdie's ill-fated novel The Satanic Verses (1988) helps bring this politics into focus. The key issue for anthropological practice, says Asad, is not:

whether ethnographies are fiction or fact, or how far realist forms of cultural representation can be replaced by others. What matters more are the kinds of political project cultural inscriptions are embedded in. Not experiments in ethnographic representation for their own sake, but modalities of political intervention should be our primary object of concern.

(Asad 1990: 260)

This emphasis on political purchase might allow for a productive alliance between literature, literary criticism and critical anthropology in a creative revisioning of Africa that undoes the work of centuries of racist European representation.⁸ As previously suggested, the particular ‘modality of political intervention’ favoured by many African writers involves a critical re-engagement with Western anthropological metaphors and myths. Like other postcolonial literatures, African literature might be seen in very general terms as having both a recuperative and a deconstructive dimension: recuperative insofar as it conscripts the literary text into the service of a continually refashioned cultural identity; deconstructive insofar as it plays on and challenges Western readerly expectation, and in so doing works toward dismantling self-privileging Western modes of vision and thought.⁹ An anthropological understanding of African literary texts might situate itself in this latter (deconstructive) context, not just in back-and-forth—what Edward Said might call ‘contrapuntal’—readings of literature and ethnography, but also in a critical analysis of the different modes of ethnographic counter-discourse that circulate in contemporary African literary works.¹⁰ The next part of the chapter analyses three of these modes, anchoring each to a well-known, if hardly ‘representative’, work of African literature: first, the deployment of ethnographic parody in Chinua Achebe's foundational Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart (1958); second, the exploration of a metaphorics of anthropological fraudulence in Yambo Ouologuem's scabrous pseudo-historical chronicle Le devoir de violence (1968); and third, the literary reworking of anthropological insider-outsider positions in The Collector of Treasures (1977), the Botswana-based short-story collection of the late South African exile, Bessie Head. Each of these literary case-studies operates to some extent as an ethnographic counter-narrative that scrutinises the questionable assumptions behind Western anthropological descriptions of, and inscriptions upon, ‘non-Western’ cultures. The objective of these counter-narratives, however, is not so much to provide a fictional corrective to anthropology's interpretive methods, but rather to explore some of the contradictions embedded within a certain anthropological way of reading. This exploration depends on the construction of a Western model reader who views African literature, Africa itself, through the distorting filter of the anthropological exotic. Yet this, it goes without saying, is not the only type of reader these works are addressing. In Achebe's case, in particular, the possibility emerges for a kind of fictionalised ‘autoethnography’ (Pratt 1992)¹¹: one which, adeptly moving between oral and written modes of representation, appears to address itself to an African readership at least partly familiar with the particular cultural practices it describes. In other words, a kind of ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois 1990)¹² is at work in Achebe's narrative: the invitation to read anthropologically might be a trap for one kind of reader while providing for another a pleasurable, if inevitably mediated, recognition of familiar cultural codes. The semiotic circuits through which the signs of Igbo culture are encoded and decoded in Achebe's novel highlight asymmetries of power inherent in the anthropological project of cultural translation (Asad 1986). An anthropological reading of the work (as will also prove to be the case, in rather different contexts, with Ouologuem's novel and Head's short stories) is therefore likely to focus on the power-politics of cross-cultural perception; and on the different culturally encoded interpretive strategies that are deployed in the writing and reading of African literature, among that large body of other ‘culturally translated’ postcolonial works.

A relatively recent edition of the Heinemann Things Fall Apart, in its ‘Classics in Context’ series, features a formidable battery of prefatory notes, including a glossary (also provided in some previous editions) and a short essay by Don Ohadike, professor of African history at Cornell University, on Igbo culture and history. These notes, as explained in the Preface, are intended to ‘help non-Igbo readers to better understand Achebe's classic in its social, historical, and literary context’ (Achebe 1996: v). In its anthropological context, too; for what Ohadike's essay offers is a concise, historically contextualised explanation of some of the Igbo customs and social structures described in fictional form in Achebe's novel. Clearly, the novel's publishers are inviting us to read it anthropologically—a smart marketing move when one considers the novel's prevalence as a high-school introduction to a ‘foreign culture’, particularly in the United States. But to what extent does the novel itself encourage such a reading? What is its constructed status, not just as a ‘universal classic’ and a ‘foundation text’ of African literature, but also as a work of what the anthropologist Nancy Schmidt (Schmidt 1981) has described as ‘ethnographic fiction’?

One criterion that Schmidt uses to demarcate ethnographic fiction is a preponderance of cultural information contained more or less conspicuously within the body of the text. Things Fall Apart certainly fits this basic criterion; and it also matches, while admittedly complicating, George Marcus and Dick Cushman's longer (1982) checklist on the minimum requirements for ethnographic realism as a written anthropological form: namely, the avoidance of authorial intrusion; the contextualisation of indigenous concepts; and the emphasis on daily events that represent the reality of a particular way of life.¹³ Literary critics and reviewers have also repeatedly drawn attention to the anthropological dimensions of the novel, including David Carroll (‘With great skill Achebe in his novels of traditional life combines the role of novelist and anthropologist, synthesising them in a new kind of fiction’—Carroll 1990: 191) and, more recently, the biographer Adebayo Ezenwa-Ohaeto (‘Chinua Achebe is surely the most interesting of those … writers who are enlarging our horizons by documenting unknown territory, spiritual as well as geographical, from the inside’—Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997: 100). Achebe himself, meanwhile, has seemed to encourage an anthropological reading of the novel, claiming reassuringly in an interview with the sceptical Simon Gikandi that ‘[i]f someone is in search of information, or knowledge, or enlightenment about the total life of these people—the Igbo people—I think my novels would be a good source’ (Lindfors 1991: 26).

But what kind of anthropological reading does a novel like Things Fall Apart call for? Despite Achebe's claim—bolstered by his vision of himself as a teacher of his people,¹⁴ as well as by a tradition of didacticism in Igbo artistic practice—Gikandi is surely right to be suspicious of the view of the novel, and indeed of the African novel in general, as a source of ethnographic data (Lindfors 1991: 26). For one thing, its explanations of local events such as the New Yam Festival, or of tribal beliefs such as that in the Evil Forest, are unusually contrived in a work of such consummate, and frequently understated, rhetorical skill. For another, its description of the amateur-anthropological exploits of the District Commissioner (who, it will be recalled, wants to insert the protagonist Okonkwo's experiences into a book called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger) is clearly placed within the tradition of the postcolonial parody-reversal—in this case, Kurtz's diabolical manifesto on the future of the ‘primitive’ races in Heart of Darkness. And for a third, any role the novel might play in providing an anthropological ‘cultural translation’ must be offset by Achebe's ironic treatment of translator-figures throughout the novel—figures who make it clear that translation is an intensely political exercise of mediation between two or more parties, often of unequal size and, almost always, of unequal power.

What we are left with then, I would suggest, is in part a deconstructive exercise in ethnographic parody, a series of pointedly exaggerated, at times caricatural, cultural (mis)readings aimed at a Western model reader confronted with the limits of his/her cultural knowledge and interpretive authority. And it is also in part a recuperative attempt at celebratory autoethnography: one which, turning the language of Western evolutionist anthropology against itself, enables an allegedly ‘subordinate’ culture to regain its dignity; and to reclaim its place, not within the imagined hierarchy of civilisations, but as one civilisation among others—and a sophisticated one at that. As the term ‘autoethnography’ implies, however, there is no access to an authentic indigenous culture uncontaminated by outside influences and safeguarded against the disruption of its traditional customs and routines. If ‘things fall apart’ for the Igbo, it is because the culture is in transition, not because (in what would amount to another romantic-idealist anthropological misconception) the incursion of the white man, exposing the culture's flaws, has doomed it to imminent extinction. Such ideas of ‘disappearing cultures’, and of an untrammelled cultural authenticity, are the stuff of a European anthropological exotic that is indirectly parodied in Achebe's text. Such ideas, nonetheless, have proven remarkably durable in the critical reception of Achebe's novel. One reason for this might be, as the cultural anthropologist James Clifford has suggested, that the Western romantic ideal of ethnographic salvage has an ideological function that carries far beyond the boundaries of the discipline.¹⁵ Achebe's recuperative autoethnography, by definition, maintains ironic distance from such self-serving romantic mythologies while also ironising, through Yeats's poem, the notion that Western modernity carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. It is widely recognised that one of the greatest achievements of Achebe's self-consciously hybrid African novel is that it succeeds in attaching a local—largely ancestral, orally transmitted—body of cultural knowledge to an imported ironic sensibility, the sensibility of the modern European novel. But it is surely one of its most delicious and frequently unacknowledged ironies that some of the more fanciful anthropological readings it has inspired, once made to confront their own unspoken biases, have themselves begun to unravel—to ‘fall apart’.

If, in Things Fall Apart, ethnographic parody is used to display an exaggerated regard for local events and customs that need to be explained to an uneducated Western readership, in the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem's novel Le devoir de violence (1968), it is ethnographic satire that is deployed to show a frank disregard for the explanations and achievements of outside ‘experts’. Ouologuem's novel, a sweeping satire on Africa's romanticised cultural heritage, directs one of its most vicious tirades against the German archaeologist/anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Frobenius's exploits, mercilessly lampooned through the figure of the fraudulent ‘anthropologist-tourist-explorer’, Fritz Shrobénius, are set in the context of a wider attack on the profiteering motives behind European anthropological expeditions to colonial Africa. Christopher Miller, who has written illuminatingly on the novel, has drawn attention to the irony that Frobenius was lavishly praised by the leading Negritude poet, Léopold Senghor (Miller 1985). As Miller suggests, Senghor's enthusiasm for Frobenius as a champion of the cause of Black Africa was at best misplaced, overlooking the fact that the German anthropologist's tendentious model of African culture, based on the schematic division between lighter-skinned (Hamitic) and darker-skinned (Ethiopian) races, had developed out of transposed European rivalries, thereby providing him with a feeble rationale for his Teutonic antipathy toward France (Miller 1985; see also Ita 1973: 322).¹⁶ Frobenius's assimilationist views were not welcomed, at any rate, by a later generation of post-independence African writers; nor was there support for his oppositional grid, whose arbitrary distinction between the Hamitic and the Ethiopian was potentially disruptive of the many African states containing both ethnic ‘groups’. Finally, Frobenius's identification of Hamitic values with Islam appeared to invite a religious conflict that ‘would [eventually] benefit no-one except the ex-colonial powers’ (Ita 1973: 335; see also Huggan 1994a: 115).

Ouologuem's novel feasts with cynical delight on the glaring contradictions in Frobenius's anthropology, using it as the basis for a wider meditation on fraudulent conceptions of Africa's cultural history. Frobenius's separation of African culture into positive and negative components (the Ethiopian and the Hamitic, respectively) is brutally satirised in the novel, the romanticisation of the one being derided while the vilification of the other is merely accentuated. In a typical encounter, Shrobénius's blonde, blue-eyed daughter seduces the scarcely unwilling tribesman Madoubo in what Wole Soyinka has memorably described as ‘a levelling down of the Aryan Myth, the symbolic blonde beast [being] brought to rest in the degenerate earth of black Nakem … [and all] in the context of the highest quest conceivable to German civilization—the quest for Kultur!’ (Soyinka 1976: 102). The mercenary motives underlying Shrobénius's acquisitions—the relics he collects are later sold off at exorbitant prices to European museums—make a mockery of his historical counterpart's celebration of a ‘pure’ African aesthetic in which the Ideal Essence of African culture translates into the physical beauty of African art.¹⁷ For Ouologuem, Shrobénius's exoticist ravings are more than just misguided sentiment; they are also an alibi for self-enrichment and a symptom of ‘anthropological fraud’ (Huggan 1994a). Here, the anthropological exotic matches fraudulence with cultural voyeurism—a voyeurism in which the Western reader, pornographic conspirator, becomes complicit. Shrobénius's fetishisation of African culture is ironically complemented by the sexual antics of his daughter; the European encounter with Africa is duly symbolised in the wilfully violent—mutually annihilating—erotics of interracial coupling, and Africa itself emerges as a fiercely seductive, if ultimately self-consuming, object of desire.

The satirical construction of Africa as an object of desire through which spiritual fervour masks physical appetite is further exemplified in an encounter between Shrobénius and the wily local potentate, the Saïf. Seeing through Shrobénius, the Saïf proceeds to use the German's tactics to his own ends by creating a market for acquisitive Western ethnologists eager to claim their share of the African past. A particularly successful ploy involves the fabrication of a series of ‘genuine’ tribal masks which, first aged to look like the originals, are then unearthed at opportune moments for the delectation of itinerant collectors—and the personal profit of the Saïf. The European invention of an ideal Africa is thus strategically reinvented by Africans themselves as a means of perpetuating a lucrative system of material exchange. The exotic myth of an unchanging, uncontaminated Africa is parodically preserved in European museum collections of fake cultural relics; in disinterring the masks, the Saïf simultaneously uncovers the hypocrisy of Western ‘anthropologist-tourist-explorers’ whose attempts to disguise the economic motives behind their appreciation of African art fool no one but themselves.

Through the figure of Shrobénius, Ouologuem explodes the myth of an ‘original’, unblemished Africa—the very Africa that Senghor, among others, had previously touted as the cradle of civilisation. Ouologuem emphasises the irony, instead, of a Western anthropological mission whose proclaimed discovery of other cultures actually reinforces the priority of its own. Indeed, the whole novel can be read as a satire on origins, textual as well as cultural, with its author taking every opportunity to violate the protective copyright of artistic originality. A tissue of intertextual references involving the ‘theft’ of barely modified sequences from other European and African works, Le devoir de violence flaunts its plagiarism in the face of accepted conventions of literary/cultural ownership.¹⁸ Ouologuem's refusal to respect the sanctity of textual origins reflects further on the double standards of those (diffusionist) ethnographies where the origins of a culture are inscribed within the wider framework of a redemptive narrative proclaiming its ‘salvation’ of Africa (Huggan 1994a: 116-17). Ouologuem's postulation of the origin as a site of duplicity and/or violent contestation thus arguably mines the contradictions inherent in anthropological projects in which the alleged retrieval of another culture's origins provides a spurious moral justification for the material success of one's own.

Ouologuem's novel, like Achebe's, indicates the absurdity of those narratives of ethnographic salvage in which it is assumed ‘that the other society is weak and needs to be represented by an outsider [who then becomes] the custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity’ (Clifford 1986: 117). Through the composite figure of the ‘anthropologist-tourist-explorer’, with its confluence of imperial gazes, this fraudulent testimony is arguably transferred onto a voyeuristic model reader. Le devoir de violence thus suggests, not only the spuriousness of redemptive anthropological narratives, but also the violence embedded in their exoticised, ostensibly romantic-idealist way of reading. Not that other readings fare any better in the novel; for as Ouologuem implies, the interpretations of the indigenous griots, which might be held to effect a different kind of cultural retrieval based on traditional, orally disseminated wisdoms, are no more authentic or unimpeachable than the tendentious accounts of Western anthropologists. Not for Ouologuem, then, the recuperative autoethnography of Achebe, or the double consciousness that might allow for shared recognitions of a culture's past; instead, as Wole Soyinka concludes, one ‘tradition of falsification’ is substituted for another, and the novel ends up by becoming ‘a fiercely partisan book on behalf of an immense historical vacuum’ (Soyinka 1976: 104).

Both Things Fall Apart and Le devoir de violence implicitly address a Western model reader who is constructed as an outsider to the text and to the cultural environment(s) it represents. At the same time, both novels (especially Ouologuem's) complicate the notion of insider knowledge, suggesting that insider status, however conferred, offers no guarantee of inviolacy, and that the epistemological quandary of how knowledge is obtained about a ‘culture’ or a ‘people’ is inevitably imbricated with ideological problems—with questions of power. Anthropology (which, as a discipline, has continually reformulated this insider/outsider dialectic) thus becomes a conduit for the interrogation of power relations, both within the text itself and in its connection to different readers and interpretive communities. Such questions of power are arguably central to an understanding of African literature as a hybrid product that tends to highlight the conspicuously uneven material conditions governing its own production. Certainly, they are central to the work of the (late) South African writer Bessie Head, in which the sense of being an outsider—no doubt exacerbated by Head's own tragic life-story—comes to assume overwhelming, almost pathological, proportions. All of Head's work can be seen as an impassioned exploration of various strategies of exclusion: marginalisation on the grounds of gender, sexual preference, ethnic affiliation; sanctioned expulsion and the propitiatory identification and punishment of scapegoat-figures; the irrevocable banishment that accrues to excommunication and life imprisonment. These strategies are ostensibly deployed to keep society ‘pure’; but as Head suggests, they mostly act to consolidate the position and maintain the authority of those in power. They also raise the question of the reader's position and degree of involvement. Is the reader, drawn almost inexorably into sympathy with Head's gallery of courageous exiles, outcasts and undesirables, himself/herself constructed as an outsider—if, in this case, an apparently privileged one—to the text? How is the reader positioned, and how much authority is he or she given? And which reader? For are there not different types of implied or model readers interpellated in Head's fictions; and different interpretive options available for these readers, both in and of the text?

Here again, the limits of an anthropological way of reading are tested, primarily through the construction of an enigmatic reader-figure within the text who slides almost imperceptibly between ‘participant-observer’ and ‘informant’ positions.¹⁹ This subtle interplay is probably most evident in the short-story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977), Head's fictive exploration of the changing social habits, but continuing social injustices, of village life in post-independence Botswana. The stories, taken as a whole, represent an anthropological portrait of a society in transition—confused, susceptible to new as well as older forms of corruption. Yet, as in Things Fall Apart, this anthropological portrait is from the outset heavily stylised, mediated through an ingenious conflation of Zulu proverbial and Christian hagiographic storytelling traditions. What emerges (and again, the analogy with Achebe's novel proves instructive) is a series of interlinked ethnographic folktales, which pit the communal wisdom of a more or less cohesive, orally transmitted culture against the deeply suspect explanatory accounts of a series of shadowy outsider-figures: independent researchers, visiting observers, amateur fieldworkers, storyteller-historians. In The Collector of Treasures, however, the relationship between these two primary knowledge-sources is mutually subversive. Certainly, the first knowledge-source proves no more reliable than the second: for one thing, it is suggested that the wisdoms encapsulated within, and disseminated through, Tswana oral traditions are vulnerable to ideological manipulation; and for another, these traditions themselves are shown in several cases as being reinvented to serve individual self-interest or to legitimise already established, as well as newly emergent, hierarchies of power. But then again, it becomes apparent that it is precisely this informed neo-Marxist interpretation of Tswana society that forms the basis for an anthropological reading that is insistently ironised in the text. Take the opening, contextualising sentences of the story ‘Witchcraft’:

It was one of the most potent evils in the society and people afflicted by it often suffered from a kind of death-in-life. Everything in the society was a mixture of centuries of acquired wisdom and experience, so witchcraft belonged there too; something people had carried along with them from ancestral times. Every single villager believes that at some stage in his life ‘something’ got hold of him; all his animals died and his life was completely smashed up. They could give long and vivid accounts of what happened to them at this time. The accounts were as solid as the reasons people give for believing in God or Jesus Christ, so that one cannot help but conclude that if a whole society creates a belief in something, that something is likely to become real. But unlike Christianity which proposed the belief in a tender and merciful God eager to comfort and care for man, there was nothing pleasant in this ‘dark thing’ in village life. It was entirely a force of destruction which people experienced at many levels. Since in olden times, the supreme power of sorcery or witchcraft was vested in the chiefs or rulers, it can be assumed that this force had its source in a power structure that needed an absolute control over the people.

(Head 1977: 47)

It is tempting to read the story that follows, involving the ‘bewitchment’ of an embattled single mother, Mma-Mabele, as a fictional exemplification of the (pseudo-)anthropological principles delineated in its opening paragraph. Yet this interpretation is clearly inadequate and, as in several other stories, readers are left to draw conclusions that question, even contradict, the cultural information with which they have been provided. Whatever the case, the rhetorical overkill of the opening passage (‘Everything in the society’; ‘Every single villager’) sits uneasily with its highly tenuous hypotheses and working assumptions (‘one cannot help but conclude that’; ‘it can be assumed that’). With a tone unsettlingly poised between anthropological specificity and storytelling axiomatics, and a narrator simultaneously identified as authoritative insider (‘informant’) and speculative outsider (‘participant-observer’), the story immediately puts us on our guard about the cultural practices it claims to examine, and which its informed anthropological perspective seems in the end to mystify in its turn.

Other stories in the collection confirm these suspicions, setting confident beginnings against ironically anti-climactic endings (‘Life’, ‘Snapshots of a Wedding’), and the sober edicts of scientific rationalism against the spirited inventions of magical thought (‘The Wind and a Boy’); or, at their most extreme, emphasising the lack of understanding, the alienation even, of a modern, educated narrator who is clearly out of touch with the ‘primitive’ society whose rites she disapprovingly observes (‘The Special One’). The narrator of ‘The Special One’ might herself be seen as special: a self-confessed outsider, the most obviously judgmental of Head's significantly anonymous female narrators. Yet perhaps it would be more accurate to see her at the far end of a spectrum of ironically treated observer-figures in Head's stories—figures who are neither fully involved in nor completely disengaged from the social mores they claim to witness. Although Head, unlike Achebe or, particularly, Ouologuem, makes no explicit reference in the text to anthropological (mal)practice, it is at least implied that these various observers are attempting—with no great success—to avail themselves of anthropological interpretive techniques. Yet in channelling cultural information through the alternative, constitutively unreliable medium of the communal storyteller, Head also suggests the limits of a reading based on alleged insider experience. Head's narrators might be seen in the end, then, as breaking down the conventional (if by now somewhat dated) anthropological distinction between the foreign ‘participant-observer’, possessor of analytical expertise, and the local ‘native informant’, owner-guardian of cultural knowledge. An anthropological reading of the stories thus arguably challenges the twin shibboleths of ethnographic authority—outsider expertise and insider experience—while also questioning the boundary between these two apparently divergent interpretive sources. Such a reading, ironically enough, is entirely compatible with current trends in anthropological thinking. In this sense, Head appears less interested than Achebe or Ouologuem in exposing the follies of ‘cod’ anthropology, and in exploring the implications that such aberrant anthropological readings might have for an uninitiated audience eager to translate what they read into more familiar codes; rather, she is concerned to show how anthropology and (oral) literature might enter into productive dialogue—by providing a series of cautionary parables on the illusoriness of absolute cultural understanding, and on the power-politics that underlies contending claims to cultural knowledge.

Things Fall Apart, Le devoir de violence and The Collector of Treasures might all be seen as varied examples of a counter-ethnographic impulse within African literature that warns of the dangers of self-privileging anthropological misreadings of literary works. What happens, though, when such anthropological misreadings are reinstated in these works' reception; and when the anthropological exotic forms an integral part of the metropolitan marketing machinery that has helped bring African literature into the limelight, and upon which it still largely depends? It is impossible within the mostly speculative context of this chapter to ‘prove’ a hypothesis such as this one, which would require considerable (and not always readily available) statistical support. What the remainder of the chapter does, instead, is to trace a set of narrative guidelines that suggests the retention of an ‘anthropological fallacy’ in African literature at the level of the institution. The particular institution I have in mind here is the publishing industry—more specifically, the operations of the world's largest publisher and distributor of English-language African literature: the British-based company, Heinemann Books. The Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS) has undoubtedly performed a valuable service, both in fostering the reputations of many gifted African writers and in bringing an increasing number of African literary works—the Series now runs into the hundreds—to the public eye. The emergence of English-language African writing in the 1950s and 1960s, and the wide respect in which it is held today, would be unthinkable without the momentum provided by Heinemann's promotional enterprise, worldwide distributional networks and financial support. But how, exactly, has Heinemann chosen to promote African literature? A cursory history of the Series suggests that Heinemann, for all its well-intentioned activities, may have contributed to the continuing exoticisation of Africa through misdirected anthropological images; and that the Africa it has promoted by way of its talented literary protégés has been subjected to a self-empowering, implicitly neocolonialist ‘anthropological gaze’ (Lizarríbar 1998: chap. 4).

The development of the Series, established in the early 1960s under the stewardship of its veteran impresario, Alan Hill, must first be understood in the wider context of the African publishing crisis to which I previously alluded. This crisis, as I suggested, might itself be seen as a single component in the vast neocolonial engine that drives relations between Africa and other Third World regions and their First World ‘benefactors’ today. The publishing industry in Africa, indeed, affords a rueful object lesson in how structural conditions of underdevelopment produce reliance on the very outside sources that reinforce cultural, as well as economic, dependency (Kotei 1981). Low literacy rates; a fragile intellectual infrastructure; the prohibitive costs involved in printing, transporting and purchasing books in such a huge, divided and desperately impoverished continent; the perceived lack of a cultural atmosphere conducive to the development of local production/consumption networks (Irele 1990)—all of these are contributing factors to a history of catastrophically low levels of book production in Africa and to the continuing, largely enforced reliance on importation and outside agencies of support. Yet these are also indicators of a neocolonial knowledge industry: of the educationally reinforced dependency-mechanisms by which many African writers and, by corollary, their local readers are persuaded to believe that cultural value, as well as economic power, is located and arbitrated elsewhere.²⁰ Camille Lizarríbar, to whose pioneering history of the African Writers Series I am greatly indebted here, sums up the position for many contemporary African writers as follows:

African authors will often turn to foreign publishers because of a general mistrust in local publishing, and to be assured of a higher quality product. Therefore, both writers and books are geared primarily towards an outside audience. This vicious circle seems to be a well-established mechanism which hinders the growth of an African book industry by continuously directing its resources and products towards an external supplier and consumer.

(Lizarríbar 1998: 58)

Unquestionably, this state of affairs lies behind the unparalleled success of the Heinemann African Writers Series, and goes some way toward accounting for its (along with other leading Euro-American publishers') virtual monopoly over the distribution of African literature today.

Various myths of origin surround the emergence of the Series. Several of these relate to the formative role played by Chinua Achebe: one of the Series' founding editors; the author of its inaugural and, in several respects, catalytic volume (Things Fall Apart); and still far and away its leading generator of revenue (it has been estimated that Achebe's novels alone are responsible for a third of the Series' total sales). Another relates to the landmark decision of Van Milne, an experienced recruit from one of Heinemann's competitors, Nelson, to launch a low-priced trade-paperback series that would effectively piggyback on the existing African educational market. The most important figure, though, and self-designated founder of the Series, was Alan Hill, the then director of Heinemann's lucrative educational branch, Heinemann Educational Books (HEB). As Hill, now retired, relates in his self-congratulatory autobiography, In Pursuit of Publishing (1988), the overseas development of HEB was serendipitously connected with the demise of the British Empire. A three-day visit to Bombay in the mid 1950s was enough to persuade Hill that ‘[t]he India which British soldiers and administrators had lost was being regained by British educators and publishers’ (Hill 1988: 93), especially Longman and Oxford University Press. Enter HEB and, shortly thereafter, the African Writers Series, which was also to profit from what Hill called ‘the winds of [political] change’ in Africa (Hill 1988: 192).

As Lizarríbar convincingly demonstrates, the self-important, blatantly neo-imperialist rhetoric of Hill's autobiography ‘sustains contemporary theories which propose a form of neo-colonialism of Third World countries by the former colonial powers of the West, this time through economic and educational channels' (Lizarríbar 1998: 74). In Pursuit of Publishing is also remarkable for its redeployment of atavistic ‘Dark Continent’ imagery in the service of pioneering First World enterprise, as Hill's numerous formulaic allusions to Conrad's Heart of Darkness attest. (Here, for example, is our man in Nigeria: ‘Periodically we slithered off the wet track into the darkness of the bush; but thankfully we always skidded back on again. Occasionally we would cross a clearing with a circle of primeval mud huts. It seemed like a journey back into a deep past’ (Hill 1988: 122).) As Lizarríbar concludes of the abundant light-and-dark images that traverse Hill's expeditions of African ‘discovery’, his vision of the creation of the African Writers Series can be seen as:

a mixture of the … missionary mentality, which proposed education as the route into the light of Christianity, and [a combination of] western values and his own business savvy, which made him aware of the potential market involved. As a modern missionary, Hill would not merely bring light into the Dark Continent; … he would provide a light that would allow the Dark Continent to reveal its own mysteries through the mediation of literature and good business sense.

(Lizarríbar 1998: 83-4)

While it would be exaggerating the case to claim that the Series has moulded itself to Hill's self-image, its marketing approach has often shown symptoms of a controlling imperial gaze. This gaze is evident, not just in patterns (especially early patterns) of selection and editorial intervention, but also in the blatantly exoticist packaging of AWS titles, particularly their covers. As emerges from early assessments of titles earmarked for the Series, a certain style and tone were expected, often conforming to Euro-American preconceptions of ‘simplicity’, ‘primitivism’ and ‘authenticity’ (Lizarríbar 1998: chap. 4). These preconceptions also hover round the edges of the early titles' covers, several of which feature emblematic images and designs and, in black and white on the back cover, a crudely amateurish photograph of the author for what appears to be ethnic identification purposes. These covers arguably betray a preoccupation with the iconic representation of an ‘authentic Africa’ for a largely foreign readership, a preoccupation also apparent in appreciative assessments of the works' putatively anthropological content. Hill's triumphal vision of the corrective role to be played by the Series shows this clearly:

In place of the misconceptions of colonialist times [the African Writers Series] has given us a true picture of African traditional societies as they move into the modern world, depicting their humanity, their artistic achievements, as well as their cruelty and superstition—a mixture very familiar in the history of Western European civilization.

(Hill 1988: 145)

This pseudo-anthropological view, in which the reconfirmation of exoticist stereotype masquerades as the newly minted expression of a previously misunderstood cultural reality, has been influential in the metropolitan reception of AWS titles—not least because of their insertion into a ready-made educational market. As an offshoot of HEB, the Series was initially intended to function within a residually colonial African educational system modelled on European standards (Lizarríbar 1998: 121). As James Currey, in charge of AWS from 1967 until 1984, remarks matter-of-factly: ‘This was a series published by an educational publisher and used in Africa for educational purposes, at university as well as at school level’ (Unwin and Currey 1993: 6). Yet as soon became clear, the educational function of the Series was by no means restricted to Africa; it could be geared to the education systems of Europe and America as well. And a valuable marketing strategy—particularly though by no means exclusively outside of Africa—was to play up the anthropological dimensions of literary texts often touted as virtually unmediated representations of African society, culture and history. Literature emerged as a valuable tool for the student of African customs, a notion reinforced by the provision of glossaries and other paratextual phenomena—introductory essays, photographs and illustrations, the paraphernalia of annotation.²¹ Yet this well-intentioned work of sociohistorical explication, still intrinsic to the ethos of the Series, did little to correct stereotypical views of a romantic Africa of ‘primitive’, even primordial, tribal existence. Hill again on Achebe:

The great interest of [Things Fall Apart] is that it genuinely succeeds in presenting tribal life from the inside. Patterns of feeling and attitudes of mind appear clothed in a distinctive African imagery … [Achebe's] literary method is apparently simple, but a vivid imagination illuminates every page, and his style is a model of clarity.

(Hill 1988: 121)

Hill's account of the development of the Series, charted through a series of glibly classified stages or period-movements, oscillates between a diachronic, ‘historical’ view of African social transformation and a synchronic, ‘anthropological’ view of a distinctive African culture. Both views, largely essentialised, indicate alternative reflectionist readings of African literature as either a window onto the ‘real’ Africa or a barometer of its changing culture.

Several caveats, however, should probably be entered here. Hill's philosophy, while influential, can hardly be said to enshrine AWS policy, which, as might be expected, has undergone numerous changes in the four decades of its existence. The Series during that time has expanded far beyond its original educational mandate, and the vision of Africa it presents is far more varied and complex than Hill's suspiciously disingenuous classifications imply.²² The AWS, while certainly marketed for a foreign and, increasingly, a global audience, has always catered for a sizeable African reading public as well, as is still very much the case today. (This can be seen, for example, in Bernth Lindfors's 1990 statistics on the prevalent use of AWS texts as school/university set texts—Lindfors 1990, 1993.) What is more, African writers have chosen by and large to send their works to Heinemann, in the hope not just of financial reward and a large overseas, as well as African, audience, but also in the legitimate expectation of unbiased treatment and professionally conducted peer review. The view of African literature—to repeat—as an exotically cultivated export product risks falling victim to the same historical inaccuracies and cultural homogenisations of which Hill himself might stand accused. All of these might be considered as extenuating circumstances. For all that, the history of the Series, relaunched in 1987 under Vicky Unwin and still as active as ever, arguably reveals at least some of the characteristic preoccupations of the anthropological exotic: the desire for authenticity, projected onto the screen of a ‘real’ Africa; the insistence on the documentary value of literary and, especially, fictional sources; the attempt to co-opt African literature into a Euro-American morality play centring on the need to understand ‘foreign’ cultures; the further cooptation of this educative process for the purpose of lending moral credence to a self-serving romantic quest. Thus, while it remains true that the AWS has done much to provide the working conditions in which African literature continues to flourish, it has done so under circumstances that might be considered, at best, as inconsistent with many of its writers' overtly anti-colonial beliefs. And, at worst, it might even be claimed that the Series has helped—inadvertently no doubt—to project a certain image of an emergent continent, ‘expressed’ through its literature, that ‘reinforces negative stereotypes which have defined the “Dark Continent” and its people to the Western world’ (Lizarríbar 1998: 140).

As I have suggested, this negative view summons up the image-repertoire of an anthropological exotic which serves to celebrate the notion of cultural difference while at the same time assimilating it to familiar Western interpretive codes. These assimilationist tendencies are also apparent in what Achebe calls ‘colonialist criticism’: the type of Euro-American response that raids African writing for evidence of ‘universal’ (read, Western) patterns of human history and behaviour.²³ (Hill's view of the Series as providing a ‘mixture [of humanity and cruelty] very familiar in the history of Western European civilization’ might be taken here as symptomatic.) But at this point, what should we make of Achebe's own formative role in the development of the Series; or of the respects he pays Hill in his unequivocally appreciative foreword to In Pursuit of Publishing? Might there not be a danger here in subscribing to a bifurcated reception model—one in which African writers, through their dealings with Western ‘agents of legitimation’ (Bourdieu 1993), are inevitably compromised, suckered into successive reinventions of an Africa that the White Man has known all along? While there are several well-documented instances of African writers locking horns with Western publishers, reviewers and critics (within the context of the Series, two names that come immediately to mind are those of Ayi Kwei Armah and Kole Omotoso), it would be unwise to conclude from this that African literature and the Western literary/critical industry are necessarily at loggerheads; that Western publishers and critics inevitably misrepresent Africa, and that Western readers are automatically complicit in such misrepresentations; and that a guaranteed corrective can be provided for these patterns of abuse by the encouragement of homegrown epistemologies, the cultural-nationalist protection of resources, and local ownership of and control over the means of cultural production. Such ‘nativist topologies’, as Kwame Anthony Appiah calls them, often depend on a binary ‘us/them’ rhetoric which negates the transculturative potential inherent in a lengthy history of European encounters—however invasive—with Africa, as well as in more recent developments of capitalist globalisation—however uneven—that have made an irrevocable impact on the configuration and transformation of African national cultures; which blinds itself to the crucial understanding of modern African literature as a product of the colonial encounter, rather than as ‘the simple continuation of an indigenous tradition [or] a mere intrusion from the metropole’ (Appiah 1992: 69-70); and which risks merely supplanting the Western-academic ‘rhetoric of alterity’ with a form of ‘ersatz exoticism’, through which Africans vainly attempt to assert their cultural autonomy by fashioning themselves ‘as the image of the Other’ (Appiah 1992: 72). For Appiah, it is pointless trying to forget Europe by erasing the European traces of Africa's past: ‘since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us’ (Appiah 1992: 72).

I would echo Appiah's insistence that Europe is, like it or not, a part of Africa; and that African literature is best regarded as neither celebratory self-expression nor reprehensible Western imposition, but rather as a hybrid amalgam of cross-fertilised aesthetic traditions that are the historical outcome of a series of—often violent—cultural collisions. The anthropological exotic in which African literature is implicated is, in part, an attempt to convert this violence into palatable aesthetic forms. This attempt, perhaps, comprises what I would call the ‘postcoloniality’ of African literature: its global market-value as a reified object of intellectual tourism, or as the reassuringly educative vehicle of a cultural difference seen and appreciated in aesthetic terms (see Introduction). But the anthropological exotic is also, like other forms of the exotic, a medium of unsettlement; it contains unwanted traces of the violence it attempts to conceal. As I have suggested in this chapter, the deployment of strategically exoticist modes of representation in African literature, often ironically mediated through an anthropological discourse of ‘scientific’ observation, has a destabilising effect on the readers it addresses. Destabilising in several senses: first, because it reminds these readers of their interpretiver limits and of the inevitable biases behind their attempts to construct Africa as an object of cultural knowledge; second, because it redeploys the anthropological technique of participant-observation as the metaphor for a self-empowering, but also potentially self-incriminating, cultural voyeurism; and third, because it illustrates the ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1987) that underwrites the colonial encounter—an encounter of which anthropology, as well as African literature, is the historical product (Asad 1972). It has been said, uncharitably no doubt, that the current ‘literary turn’ in anthropology is another variant on the motif of ethnographic salvage—the discipline's attempt, through heightened powers of critical self-reflexitivity, to save itself from itself and from its own exoticising tendencies. I favour the more generous view—also espoused by Miller—that anthropology remains a useful, if inevitably flawed, tool of cultural exploration and self-critique (Miller 1990: esp. chap. 1). But on the question of whether anthropology is a necessary supplement to the critical work of textual analysis, I must confess to a certain scepticism. There is an anthropology in African literature that is less about the establishment of techniques for information retrieval and interpretation than about a cultural politics of reading in which the desire for ‘information’ itself becomes deeply suspect. Miller is quite right, I think, to warn about the dangers of cultural ignorance. But African literature does more than warn about these; it also suggests the dangers of a misappropriated cultural knowledge. These dangers become apparent when we turn to the global knowledge industry and to the—often predetermined—role that an ostensibly postcolonial literature is made to play within neocolonial knowledge networks. African writers, almost by definition, are well aware of this dilemma—a dilemma that several of them have chosen to dramatise in their works. Perhaps what is needed is less an anthropological understanding of African literature, more a sociological grasp of the specific material conditions under which such understandings are constructed; and a wider historical sense of how cultural knowledge about ‘foreign’ cultures is effected, through which channels that knowledge is routed, and in whose interests it is deployed.

Notes

1. Recent and not-so-recent attacks by African writers on censorship and the systematic state repression of writers and other artists indicate a further, internally generated reason for the underdevelopment of the arts in many post-independence African nations. Wole Soyinka, for example, has written that:

   [t]here must be few independent African countries today that have not experienced the truncation of their artistic and intellectual potential in the process of nation building. Some governments have been merely episodic in their execution of cultural repression … [while others] have been more systematic, their mechanics built into the very definition of government, into the relationship between the ruler and the ruled.

   (Soyinka 1990: 112)

   As a prime example of the latter, Soyinka points to the case of Malawi, which has banned so many African literary works that it becomes impossible to know ‘what African books are actually read’ there (1991: 113), and which has installed a pseudo-British public educational system ‘in order to create a British-educated elite to administer the nation along the manners of the old colonial masters’ (1991: 113). Meanwhile, Soyinka himself has been among the victims of state repression in Nigeria, which temporarily lost its Commonwealth status after the execution of one of its premier writers, Ken Saro-Wiwa.

2. An exception to the general rule is the relatively large body of work on the publishing industry in Nigeria: see, for example, Bello and Augi (1993) and, most recently, Griswold (2000).

3. The pages of the African Book Publishing Record, edited by Hans Zell, do not make for particularly happy reading. Despite the periodic announcement of new (often foreign-funded) initiatives in the African publishing industry, the journal's entries tend to return to the same overriding issue and concerns: the continuing stranglehold of the multinationals; the chronic lack of resources and the incompatibility of existing materials with local needs and interests; the poor quality of book production; the ambivalent role of international sponsors—‘Northern co-publishers’, development agencies and, above all, the World Bank—in supporting local projects; and the premium placed by African writers on publishing abroad.

4. For a recent perspective on this dilemma, see di Leonardo (1998: 306-7). As di Leonardo, an American anthropologist, suggests, the discipline is in crisis because it has ‘failed to communicate to the public how the understanding that there are no “people without history” utterly changes how we envision Others’ (1998: 307). Contemporary anthropologists are hindered by a popular perception of their work as reconfirming the ‘timeless essences’ of the peoples/cultures they study—a perception fuelled, in some cases, by the work of anthropologists of earlier generations. Ironically, it is not just that anthropology is often viewed as being in league with exoticism, but that anthropologists themselves are correspondingly dehistoricised, seen (as in the title of di Leonardo's book) as ‘exotics at home’. Di Leonardo's passionate diagnosis deserves to be quoted at length:

   At every turn, the dead hand of the ethnographic present constrains progressive anthropologists from articulating intelligent perspectives on Others'—everyone's—lives. Attempting to counter the horrors of the ‘raiders of the lost ark’ frame, we are forced into unwitting impersonations of technicians of the sacred, and thus into complicity with an essentializing, ahistorical perspective that leads us right back into the global pool hall with the (often sociobiological) human nature experts. Schooled by American Anthropology past, the public sphere cannot ‘read’ scholarly commentators' careful historicizations of Others' lives, and so popular representations of Samoa parallel the ‘timeless’ Kalahari and other fictions of ‘primitive’ human lives. … What anthropologists have done to the!Kung San and Samoans and so many others has been brought home, deservedly, to anthropology. We are Difference, Otherness, Essence, the Once and Future Anthropologists. … Anthropology is always the same, and primitives have no history. We are all Stone Age Nisa, all timeless Samoans—exotics at home.

   (1998: 307)

5. For a more detailed discussion of the case against anthropology in colonial Africa, see Adotevi (1972); for a partial rehabilitation, see Falk Moore (1993) and, particularly, James (1972). For other useful discussions of the ambivalent role of anthropology in both supporting and critiquing colonial authority in Black Africa, see Mudimbe (1988) and the essays in Asad (1972); see also the work of Said (1989) and Minh-ha (1989)—neither of whom has any formal anthropological training—for their influential, if somewhat tendentious, critiques of anthropological ‘master narratives’. See also Note 7 below.

6. For an example of bolekaja criticism, so named after Nigeria's system of aggressive transport touting, see Chinweizu et al.'s memorable tirade in their book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1983) against interfering Western critics, who are told in no uncertain terms to ‘keep [their] hegemonic hands off African literature’ (Chinweizu et al. 1983: 302).

7. Just how new the New Anthropology is is a matter of some contention within the discipline (see, for example, Marcus and Fischer 1986). The New Anthropology, which is arguably marked by a greater degree of disciplinary self-reflexivity and by an attention to the textuality—the rhetorical constructedness—of ethnography, is no doubt open to misunderstanding partly because it has become the object of attention for literary/cultural studies' scholars from outside the field. For a blistering response to ill-conceived, but increasingly fashionable, attacks on anthropology from outside the discipline, see di Leonardo (1998: 43-50). See also Note 4 above.

8. On the damaging cumulative effect of several centuries of distorted European representations of Africa, see Hammond and Jablow (1977); see also Mudimbe (1988), who argues convincingly that European discourses of/about Africa, including those derived from anthropology, contributed to nothing less than the invention of a ‘Dark Continent’ that served European psychosexual desires and expansionist needs.

9. The notion that postcolonial literatures devolve both deconstructive and recuperative readings is taken from Ashcroft et al. (1989), particularly the opening chapter. The tension between deconstructionist theories and the politics of indigenous self-empowerment is central to continuing debates on the political effectiveness of postcolonial criticism: for further reflections on these debates, see the concluding chapter of this book.

10. For both the theory and the practice of ‘contrapuntal’ modes of critical reading, see Said (1993). My use of the word ‘counter-discourse’ here is derived in part from Helen Tiffin, who uses it (via Richard Terdiman) to examine the ways in which postcolonial writers have responded to and creatively transformed the canonised work of their European precursors (Tiffin 1987). For an attempt to apply this term to anthropological, as well as literary, ‘classics’, see also Huggan (1994a). The notion of ‘counter-discourse’ remains useful in postcolonial studies, even if it has spawned a whole school of ‘writing-back’ interpretations, including my own, that began some time ago to follow all-too-predictable lines. ‘Counterdiscursive’ approaches to postcolonial literatures have arguably fallen out of fashion (see Introduction); but not so much because they are seen, unfairly I think, as reinstalling the European dominant but rather because literature-based approaches have themselves lost ground during the institutional turn to postcolonial cultural studies (see Conclusion).

11. Pratt uses ‘autoethnography’ in her book Imperial Eyes (1992) to refer to ‘instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's terms’ (Pratt 1992: 7). Autoethnography thus necessarily implies a dialectical relationship between ‘foreign’ codes of representation and ‘indigenous’ experiences—a dialectic maintained, often for ironic purposes, in several contemporary African literary works.

12. For an explanation of Du Bois's term and its applicability to literary works intended for reception by both ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ audiences, see Sollors (1986).

13. For supplements to Marcus and Cushman's list, see Marcus and Fischer (1986); see also Geertz's considerations of ethnographic rhetoric, particularly in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988). For a useful discussion of possible areas of overlap between literature and ethnography, see also Krupat (1992), esp. the first chapter.

14. The classic essay here is ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ (1989b, first published in 1965); see also Achebe's own contribution to Teaching ‘Things Fall Apart’ (Lindfors 1991).

15. See Clifford's explication of the trope of ‘ethnographic salvage’ in his essay ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’ in Clifford and Marcus (1986). As Clifford suggests, the idea of rescuing putatively ‘vanishing’ cultures is best seen as a romantic popularisation of an anthropological paradigm that has itself arguably vanished. But the idea, nonetheless, has retained its ideological force, especially outside the discipline:

    The rationale for focusing one's attention on vanishing lore, for rescuing in writing the knowledge of old people, may be strong … I do not wish to deny specific cases of disappearing customs and languages, or to challenge the value of recording such phenomena. I do, however, question the assumption that with rapid change something essential (‘culture’), a coherent differential identity, vanishes. … Such attitudes, though they persist, are diminishing … [b]ut the allegory of salvage is deeply ingrained.

    (Clifford 1986: 112-13)

16. For a useful historical essay explaining some of the reasons for Senghor's misplaced enthusiasm for Frobenius, see Ita (1973).

17. For an overview of Frobenius's deluded conception of (pan-)African culture and aesthetic philosophy, see the opening two essays in the Frobenius Anthology (1973), ‘The Nature of Culture’ and ‘Reflections on African Art’. For a more recent essay which further punctures the myth of Frobenius's benevolent Afrophilia, see Fabian (1992).

18. For the prosecution, see Sellin (1971); for the defence, Miller (1985).

19. In other, non-fictional works, Head herself arguably occupies this intermediate position. See, for example, her sociological/anthropological portrait of village life in Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981).

20. For different, but equally impassioned, diagnoses of this dilemma, see the essays by Soyinka (1991) and Omotoso (1975); in the wider context of literary publishing in the Third World, see also Altbach (1975).

21. A more detailed treatment is urgently needed of the ideological function of ‘the paratextual apparatuses’ (Genette 1987) surrounding postcolonial literary works. Introductory studies like Ashcroft et al.'s make occasional mention of paratextual devices like glossaries, arguing that these may serve both to inform the reader and, by drawing attention to what s/he otherwise would not understand, to install cultural difference into the text (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 56-7, 61-4). Equally, however, glossaries and other translational mechanisms might be seen as ways of domesticating the text, making it available for what might be euphemistically called ‘general consumption’. To date, the only essay that I have come across that deals in any detail with the ideological effects of the paratextual is Wendy Waring's (1995); for a discussion of this essay in the context of the metropolitan packaging of contemporary Aboriginal writing, see Chapter 6 of this book.

22. See, for example, Adewale Maja-Pearce's unabashedly celebratory overview of the first three decades of the AWS: ‘In Pursuit of Excellence: Thirty Years of the Heinemann African Writers' Series’ (RAL 1992), in which he lauds ‘the increasing diversity of voices that have emerged from the continent in recent years’ (Maja-Pearce 1992: 130). As Maja-Pearce—who has himself played an important editorial role within the Series—suggests, ‘The genesis of the African Writers' Series has become part of the mythology of modern African literature itself’ (1992: 125). While this is true, it may also be—as Lizarríbar suggests—part of the problem. The constitutive role played by the AWS in the creation of ‘the mythology of modern African literature’ is itself in need of critical analysis, precisely the kind of analysis Lizarríbar—however provocatively—presents.

23. See Achebe's eponymous essay in the collection Hopes and Impediments (1989a). The question of colonialist biases in Western criticism of African literature is far from resolved, even though the angriest exchanges—often ad hominem—probably belong to the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

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