Beyond Self-Deprecation and Racism

There are few (if any) contemporary African writers who have been subjected to more strident critical attacks for their manner of depicting African history in fictional form than have Yambo Ouologuem of Mali and Ayi Kwei Armah of Ghana. According to critics such as Yves Benot (1970), J. Mbelolo ya Mpiku (1971), and Phanuel Egejuru (1978), Ouologuem deserves condemnation because of his negative, even perverse, depiction of Nakem, his fictional equivalent of pre-colonial and colonial Africa in his novel, Bound to Violence (1973). Such a portrayal, these critics maintain, is an exercise in self-deprecation and a distortion of history. Armah, on the other hand, is attacked for alleged racism in Two Thousand Seasons (1979). Scholars such as Kirsten Holst Petersen (1976), Bernth Lindfors (1980), and Peter Sabor (1981) argue that Armah twists African history by what they consider to be his racist and offensive description of non-Blacks (Arabs and Europeans) in that novel. In this article, I wish to argue that, while these critics are quite correct in detecting some distortion of African history in both novels, they have faulted the authors for the wrong reasons. Also, I will try to demonstrate that some avoidable errors of interpretation which have continued to plague these works are largely due to an absence of proper historical and socioliterary considerations in some assessments of the texts

Race (biology · Racialization · Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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