Individual Epistemes in The African Novel of Ideas

Abstract

ChinuaAchebe’s gifts to African andworld literatures aremany, but anunheralded aspect is his textualization (and therefore popularization) of the Igbo proverb: “Egbe belu, ugo belu; nke si ibe ya e belu, ka nku kwa ya.” In English, that is: “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too, if one saysno to the other, let itswingbreak.” This proverb finds its corollary in the Yoruba saying: “Ojú oṛun tó eỵe ̣e ̣ ́ fò láì f’ara kan ra” (“The sky is wide enough for all to fly without colliding”). I offer these examples from Igbo andYoruba—the twoAfrican languages I ammost comfortable in—to register the accommodationist, tolerant orientation ofAfricanways of being in the world. These proverbs, with correlations across African cultures and languages, index the rejection of absolutisms by making room for alternative possibilities and epistemologies. Enunciated in these vernacular expressions is a denunciation of the single story of a monochromatic Africa. It is important to foreground the multiplicitous affordance of African epistemologies and praxis here because African literary studies, which stresses its social referentiality, often ignores its inheritance of complexity in the simplification of the field’s commonsense. The dominant expression of this commonsense is in the emphasis on community or social collective in the determination of African literature’s political stakes. Again, the interpretation of Achebe’s work is significant in this regard for stressing the writer’s commitment to decolonization within a communitarian ethos. As Simon Gikandi observes, “Achebe’s novels were intended to both represent colonial history as it was—brutal, degrading, and destructive—while celebrating communities that had survived the detritus of this history.”1 African literary criticism has foregrounded the dissolution and celebration of communities in fiction and has pondered the imaginative possibilities in that literature for constituting counter-publics.