Journal of Critical Realism

ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20

African Realism

Gerald Gaylard

To cite this article: Gerald Gaylard (2010) African Realism, Journal of Critical Realism, 9:3,
276-298, DOI: 10.1558/jcr.v9i3.276

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1558/jcr.v9i3.276

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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[ JCR 9.3 (2010) 276-298] (print) ISSN 1476-7430
doi: 10.1558/jcr.v9i3.276 (online) ISSN 1572-5138

AFRICAN REALISM
The Reception and Transculturation of
Western Literary Realism in Africa

by

GERALD GAYLARD1
University of the Witwatersrand
gerald.gaylard@wits.ac.za

Abstract. A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature

outside of Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and
period of its prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, prac-
tices and cultures travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows
us to see how realism has been relativized in such a way as to open up the
possibilities of redefinition of the notion and practice and moving beyond
them. For these reasons I am undertaking a short survey in this paper of
the transculturation, after Fernando Ortiz, of realism in Africa, tracing its
genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization
in anticolonial resistance literature and transmogrification into the magical
realism and postmodernism of postcolonial experimental writing.

Key words: Africa, magical realism, postcolonialism, realism, reception,

transculturation

realism n. 1. scholastic doctrine that universals or general ideas

have objective existence 2. belief that matter as object of percep-
tion has real existence 3. practice of regarding things in their
true nature and dealing with them as they are, freedom from
prejudice and convention, practical views and policy 4. fidelity of
representation, truth to nature, insistence upon; showing of life
etc. as it is without glossing over what is ugly or painful. (Concise
Oxford Dictionary)

1 Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Pvt Bag 3, PO Wits 2050,

Johannesburg, South Africa. Gerald Gaylard is head of the English Department at the Uni-
versity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of After Colonialism: African
Postmodernism and Magical Realism (Wits University Press, 2006) and editor of Marginal
Spaces: Ivan Vladislavić (forthcoming from Wits Univesity Press), as well as a number of
articles in the area of African studies, postcolonialism and neo-formalist criticism.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
 AFRICAN REALISM 277

‘Of course now we have science to help us understand our-

selves and expand our minds. Do you know which branch of
science has made the least advances in the last hundred years?
The understanding of consciousness.’ (Mahjoub, Navigation of
a Rainmaker)

No one’s knowledge is complete: but how the whites glorify their

ignorance! (Couto, Under the Frangipani)

A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature outside of

Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and period of its
prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, practices and cultures
travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows us to see how realism
has been relativized in such a way as to open up the possibilities of redefini-
tion of the notion and practice and how we might move beyond them. For
these reasons I am undertaking a short survey in this paper of the transcultur-
ation, after Fernando Ortiz, of literary realism in English in Africa, tracing its
genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization in
anticolonial nationalist resistance literature during the 1950s and 1960s and
transmogrification into the magical realism and postmodernism of postcolo-
nial writing which tended to be more experimental. In essence, tracing this
trajectory of transculturation allows us to relativize the powerful purchase of
western realism’s claims to authenticity and authority via its privileged access
to ‘reality’, a relativization which could grant imaginative freedom. Moreo-
ver, historicizing realism in this way opens the door for critical and other
realisms that are less historically and culturally contained.
In terms of defining realism, specifically in its cultural manifestations,
here literary, it is always necessary to keep in mind that in literature realism
is a relatively recent modern phenomenon. The mainstream of fiction, oral
or otherwise, from cave paintings to the writing of Ben Okri, has tended
to take its mimetic aspects for granted and to insist rather on the role of
the imagination as its raison d’être. Moreover, literary realism is difficult to
define given its genre-defying elasticity and multiplicity: naturalism, social-
ist realism, psychological realism, and stream-of-consciousness have all been
within its ambit, and, strictly speaking, it can be used as a term to convey any
copy of any definition of reality. Nevertheless, some generalizations about
realism are possible, and historically we can understand it as the cultural
aspect of the massive social upheaval of modernity that began in the West but
is ongoing throughout the globe. This cultural aspect might be characterized
as a belief in the ability of western signs to represent accurately, as suggested
by Erich Auerbach in his pioneering work on mimesis.
Representation or mimesis was in debate at least as far back as the Greek
philosophers, with Plato rejecting artistic mimesis as an alienated copy, whilst

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278 GERALD GAYLARD

Aristotle was more interested in different forms of mimesis. Aristotle’s Poetics,

from whence the idea of mimesis derives, argues that mimesis is the means
by which catharsis is achieved, and the therapeutic purgation and reinforc-
ing of the established social order via catharsis is the objective of tragedy.
Thus the socius reinforces itself via the consensual mechanism of mimesis.
This exposes much about the western culture from whence mimesis springs:
a culture of consensus and desire for order and dominion over the flocks of
the earth, which has the obvious appeal of making the world appear sane and
rational. Jacques Derrida makes the point that signs must be repeatable,2 and
hence mimesis is built on consensuality or sameness, and consensus itself is
culturally constructed through historically specific signs. Thus realism has
tended to be anthropocentric.
The mimetic verisimilitude of Greek philosophers and artists was a distant
forerunner of the naturalism of seventeenth-century artists such as Caravag-
gio, which in turn would influence the rise of the novel via Defoe, Richard-
son, Fielding, and later the work of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Austen, Eliot and
Dickens. Hence artistic realism flourished in the nineteenth-century novel,
accompanying the work of philosophers such as Bacon, Locke and Hume.
The underpinning to realism was partly rationalism, which meant not only
‘endowed with reason’, but also ‘sensible, sane, moderate, not foolish or
absurd or extreme; rejecting what is unreasonable’ (OED), and of course the
meaning of these terms, and hence of rationality, was culturally determined.
Not only was realism linked to rationalism, but also to science, empiricism,
industrialization and imperialism.
Nineteenth-century science was Newtonian in tenor; the flowering of the
Copernican revolution in the ideal of objectivity. As Mary Louise Pratt notes,
scientific exploration, involving the systematizing of nature and indigene in
the eighteenth century onwards as part of the imperial project, relied upon
representation.3 In order to bring this possibility of accurate representation
about, the imperial text had to reduce the distance between word and world,
this reduction being the assumption of ‘scientific disinterestedness’, particu-
larly in relationship to the cause-and-effect sequence. The incontrovertibility
of this world view within the West was such that ‘up to about 1850 almost
everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a
definite code of non-human realities’.4 However, this apparent disinterested-
ness was not culturally innocent and produced a systematization or mapping
under the hegemony of the western bourgeoisie and the authority of print,

2 Derrida 1982b.
3 Pratt 1992, 28.
4 Beer 1993, 199.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 279

hence the ‘mutual engagement between natural history and European eco-
nomic and political expansionism’.5
Ontologically this belief in disinterested representation is termed empiri-
cism, which rose to prominence in the nineteenth century along with ration-
alism and modernity. The cultural specificity of western empiricism is clear if
we consider that, despite premodern African cultures being largely empiri-
cist, they tended not to posit a scientific linear causality in their empiricism;
rather they tended towards ‘agentive spiritualist causality’, as Kwame Gyekye
notes.6 Hence, empiricism in such African cultures is rather different from
that considered here as ‘the desire to make knowledge of the external world
personal has been the characteristic attitude of our traditional healers’ in
Africa.7 The nineteenth-century scientific basis of western empiricism can
be seen in its emphasis on observation or experiment, not on theory, and its
insistence upon regarding sense data as valid information; deriving knowl-
edge from direct, repeatable experience alone. So, as with realism, empiri-
cism cannot be unhinged from history; even writers such as Locke and Hume
concerned with empiricism explicitly linked their philosophies to imperial-
ism. Kenneth Harrow notes that ‘the curious assumption that reality is best
evoked for educational purposes by the use of realist techniques dates to the
nineteenth century when such fiction was intended to serve the institutional
needs of the newly literate bourgeoisie. Prior to then, a certain deference to
stylization – in art as in literature – was not thought to be incompatible with
the ameliorationist goals of the Enlightenment.’8
Realism’s basis in rationalism, science and empiricism was reciprocally
reliant upon industrialization which, in turn, arose with, and helped give rise
to, colonization. The desire for ‘sense’ was particularly potent in the rise of
modernity, for it was the quest for stability and certainty in the midst of indus-
trialism’s maelstrom, a quest for a secular humanist substitute for religion’s
ontological reassurance. Such desire was clearly that of the rising and inse-
cure bourgeoisie to embed and reify its ideology, and indeed critics as diverse
as György Lukács, Erich Auerbach, Ian Watt, Robert Alter and Christopher
Nash have seen the novel as a bourgeois genre. Yet, while it might unchari-
tably be said that realism was the literary form that enabled the ascendent
bourgeoisie to read about itself, this form nevertheless produced great works
from Madame Bovary to War and Peace.
Historicizing realism in this way helps us to define it. Literary realism fol-
lowed the definition of empiricism in confirming the existence of a positively

5
Pratt 1992, 38.
6
Gyekye 1997, 26–9.
7
Gyekye 1997, 29.
8
Harrow 1994, 62.

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280 GERALD GAYLARD

determinable world which the fictional work must represent accurately. The
ontology of this world was scientifically verifiable given enough comprehen-
siveness and rationality in the description, which resulted in the exhaustive,
if not exhausting, minutiae of description in Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy
and Flaubert, for example. Such fictional realism tended to take the forms of
mimesis: imitation, representation, reproduction, report, referentiality and
relation for ‘realism spurns paradox: it seeks referential (and reverential)
equivalence, the one-to-one locking of word and thing’.9 Perhaps the primary
image of fictional realism was therefore the mirror or window; the basis of
mimesis was that a sign can actually represent life. The emphasis upon empir-
icism and objectivity in realism also tended to be an objectification in the
sense that it posited an inherent separation between viewer/artist/self and
viewed/portrayed/other, arguably the deepest psychosocial trauma of the
West. Further, realism suggested that language is secondary in relation to the
real, that it comes after the fact.
It has even been argued, though I do not find this argument fully con-
vincing, that realism’s mimesis inherently partakes of violence. J. M. Coetzee
points out, deriving his analysis from the Girardian schema of mimetic vio-
lence, that ‘desire is mimetic – that is to say, it seeks models for itself’.10
Desire is insufficiency to itself; it is generated from a sense of lack or absence
or incompletion, and seeks to eradicate that sense or feeling with fullness,
fulfilment, which is primarily derived from mimesis and acknowledgement:
in a very basic sense, I only know myself to be present within the context
of others, and I particularly feel myself present, sense my own being, when
acknowledged by others in some way. This mimesis within desire, this desire
to ape, takes on a more sinister cast when we consider the implications of
copying what it is that others see, desire, copy, acknowledge, for as soon as
the desirable is mediated by an other, then a relationship of rivalry is estab-
lished, an Oedipal economy that cannot but lead to conflict and violence.
This economy of rivalry within desire can be linked back to the sociohistori-
cal, in this case the rise of imperial modernity and capitalism, via another
clichéd phrase: ‘the law of the jungle’, a law which depends upon an economy
of scarcity, lack, and hence conflict. Desire leads to mimesis, which in turn
leads to a mounting cycle of rivalrous violence, which in turn spirals into
the erasure of difference, for it is the loss of difference that causes rivalry;
it is always the similar, the twinned, who fight hardest: ‘the appearance of
doubles is a sign that the mimetic process has been carried to its ultimate

9 Beer 1993, 211.

10 Coetzee 1996, 92.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 281

reaches’.11 Hence the peculiarly piquant irony of realism in Africa: in its

desire to escape the hegemonic and obliterating gaze of the West and to
establish a presence of difference, it tends to imitate that rivalry and erases
its difference. We have here an uncanny twinning whereby Austen, Dickens
and Hardy are mirrored by nationalist writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
Festus Iyayi and Chinua Achebe.
Now the mechanisms of mimesis, substitution and repeatability are other
words for metaphor, which comes from the Greek and means ‘to carry across’,
yet in realism what we have is the concretization of metaphor rather than an
emphasis on metaphor’s ability to suggest, to resonate and to make unusual
links between apparently disparate objects or events. Hence metaphor is
strictured in realism and turned into something more closely resembling
metonymy with its concrete relations. Realism traditionally does not fore-
ground its systems of consensus evaluation, and hence moves metaphor away
from foregrounded valuation (‘as’ and ‘like’), towards definite and defini-
tive statement. This leads to the repetition, redundancy and disambiguation
so often characteristic of realism, so that realism can undo connections,
seeing them as coincidental or resulting from greater forces such as gravity
or history. Hence a central nineteenth-century realist text, Madame Bovary,
whilst clearly attacking the indulgence and greed of the more romantic of
the western bourgeoisie, does so in order to more firmly entrench the archi-
tectonic values and aesthetics of that bourgeoisie.
Perhaps such strictured aesthetics are unappealing to us today, but given
the enduring appeal of nineteenth-century realists such as Flaubert, Austen,
Tolstoy, as well as their contemporaries, an appeal not reducible to mere
nostalgia, it seems to me, readers are clearly able to find something enduring
in realism. I locate the reason for the endurance of these great works in the
power of description allied to our desire to give meaning to time’s passing via
plot and narrative. This seems to lie not only in meaningful description but
also in readerly self-recognition within realist fiction as many readers share
the consensual assumptions of this fiction, a self-recognition which enables
the ‘suspension of disbelief’. Indeed, it is likely that such self-recognition
causes the reader of nineteenth-century western realism to respond much
as a character within the novel’s world would respond. Realism, because it
depends upon recognition, tends to shut down the distance between author
and narrator, making it difficult for readers to disentangle the two and encour-
aging readers to make value judgements on the author and how they view the
context about which they write. Therefore the key mechanism of realism is
substitutability or paraphrasability via recognition, which has worked histori-

11 Coetzee 1996, 92.

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282 GERALD GAYLARD

cally through the dissemination of western culture, science and empiricism

via imperialism. Such a mechanism can only work if the reader can ‘identify
with’, or substitute themselves into, the work, and hence western realism’s
concern with individuality, character, emotion and psychology; its concern
that its uniform consistency and self-coherence remain uninterrupted. The
unified sovereign subject is central to realism; the centre of a circle whose
circumference is everywhere familiarizes the different and exotic. Moreover,
readers identify with realism because in it they sense both the individualistic
isolation they share with the writer and the projected imaginative resolution of
that isolation. Hence for Walter Benjamin, ‘the birthplace of the novel is the
solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving exam-
ples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot
counsel others’.12 Realism, novelistic realism in particular, is therefore dif-
ferent in its treatment of knowledge from traditionally didactic storytelling
which imparted aphoristic wisdom; realism arose in a climate where informa-
tion was more instantly available, promptly verifiable and ‘understandable in
itself’13 than ever before due to the spread of global communication.
The ability to ‘suspend disbelief’ provides the basis for the evaluation
of realist fiction: the degree of its apparent exhaustiveness and objectivity.
Fiction, if it is to be judged good, must present the illusion that it is liveable,
that it feels like the world in which the reader lives, and hence the ‘common
denominator’ quality of much realist fiction. J. P. Stern refers to this as ‘that
middle distance to which realism is committed’:14 ‘Common language,
common knowledge, common experience’,15 though the ‘common’ that has
been omitted here is ‘common sense’, with its even more obvious basis in con-
sensus. Hence the declarative and authoritative tone of much realist fiction,
which confidently purports to make clear what the reader would have known
but for lack of information, a tone which prioritizes message over code, sig-
nified over signifier, in order to maintain the illusion of verisimilitude. The
narrator of such fiction is usually an anonymous and omniscient third person
who must not appear to obscure the facts in order to retain the illusion of an
unmediated transmission of true information, hence the traditional imagery
of a transparent window or clearly reflecting mirror.
It is in this manner that nineteenth-century western literary realism has
tended to obliterate its traces, efface its mechanisms, and partially rely upon
historical/cultural amnesia. Anton van der Hoven comments that ‘when con-

12
Benjamin 1970, 87.
13
Benjamin 1970, 89.
14
Stern 1973, 161.
15
Stern 1973, 89.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 283

fronted by the limits of its own thinking, theoretical realism seems able only
to imagine that the truth must have disappeared forever … This is what one
might call the generic limit of realism, the fact that it is bound to repeat what
has already happened and to use accepted modes of understanding in doing
so.’16 Robert Alter agrees with this, saying that literary realism is a contradic-
tion in terms.17
It might be averred that realism was abolished by the modernist movement.
Modernism’s critique of imperial culture was part of a generalized historical
autocritique that began in earnest in the late nineteenth century with the
challenge to the ontological confidence of the West evident in the work of
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Heisenberg and Einstein. A particularly important
aspect of this autocritique was the questioning of science: ‘anxieties about the
relativity of knowledge, about determinism, about imaging a stochastic uni-
verse instead of a teleological one’ had begun to take hold in later nineteenth-
century science, and ‘these anxieties refined (and shared) the conditions
necessary to the rise of modernism and of quantum mechanics’.18 Modernism
began to question realism because it became increasingly obvious that nine-
teenth-century realism had radical political and epistemological elisions. For
example, Fredric Jameson has noted that the ‘truth’ of nineteenth-century
experience ‘no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place’19 due
to the diasporic globalization taking root at the time. Moreover, it became
clear that accurate mimesis was partially a façade, for unmediated representa-
tion is impossible. Thus many modern philosophers such as Heidegger and
Gadamer critique mimetic realism as ‘recognition’ and ‘repetition’, an acqui-
escence to the generational timing/logic of centrism and linear sequence.
Yet such philosophers, and modernism as a whole, also emphasize the value
of recognized tradition as ‘a productive relation of knowledge and truth’.20 Hence
modernism could not entirely reject realism. Moreover, modernism could
not entirely reject the modernity on which it depended as a springboard for
its critique, for it was a critique from within. In the fiction of writers such
as Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce and so on, the attack on western modernity is
unremitting but it is nevertheless inevitably couched within a largely western
tradition, language and epistemology. In a sense, this attack was enabled by
the very elisions and excesses within modernity itself, so the idea of fiction as
a mirror that reflects reality to itself or a window opening onto reality is not

16
van der Hoven 1997, 93.
17
Alter 1975, x.
18
Beer 1993, 195.
19
Jameson 1987, 356.
20
Melberg 1995, 4, original emphasis.

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284 GERALD GAYLARD

dispensed with. Moreover, the realist novel did not fall into decline with the
advent of these writers; indeed, while all of these writers experimented with
the novel to various degrees, the overall format remained intact and, with the
notable exception of Joyce, the majority of them are written from a third-per-
son perspective. Hence modernism tended to substitute psychological realism
for nineteenth-century realism rather than overthrowing realism tout court.
Having said this, there is no doubt that modernism was the basis for magical
realism and other future fictional forms from the First and Third Worlds.
Magical realism has specific roots in surrealism, Kafka and Faulkner, but it
owes a huge debt to the work of all of the modernists and, as with modernism,
cannot be said to fundamentally overturn the tenets of realism though it does
present other worlds, realities and orders of being.
Socialist realism likewise did not overthrow realism but replicated many
of its primary features, despite its attempt to expose and transcend realism’s
socio-political elisions. Marx’s key notion, the dysfunctionality of capital
accumulation within western modernity, did not dissuade him from the uti-
lization of ‘scientific materialism’ which, though oppositional in spirit, was
not necessarily so in character or methodology. As Antony Easthope notes,
‘classic Marxism is logocentric. It finds a centre for itself by means of a series
of binary oppositions. Materialism/idealism, use value/exchange value and
base/superstructure are to be held in place by a foundational opposition
between the real and the apparent’.21 Many of the socialists following Marx
such as Althusser, Lukács, Macherey and Eagleton, despite their attempts to
differentiate their ‘science’ from western empiricism, also tended to elevate a
rational scientism to the same level of idealism as the individualist capitalism
they were opposing.22 The result of this scientific logic in Marxism’s analyses
is perhaps most visible in the Manichean23 and monolithic notions of power
it suggests. This replication of some of the key features of bourgeois ideology
in Marxism was a result of being characterized both by the dual imperative
to open up to reality and to interpret it in a final way, inevitably constructing
a formal discourse that remained just as closed to reality, offering instead its
own values and definition of truth. Such instrumental scientism in Marxist
critique was tremendously useful in the study of fiction, particularly enabling
African critics to analyse imperialism, but tended to ignore formal elements
and to prescribe a certain economic fundamentalism. V. Y. Mudimbe com-
ments that ‘materialist models tend to reduce otherness’.24

21
Easthope 1995, 6.
22
See, for example, in their different ways, Macherey 1978; Eagleton 1976; Lukács 1962.
23
See Fanon 1967 and JanMohamed 1983.
24
Mudimbe 1988, 197.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 285

Moreover, socialist realism in literature had its roots in the realism of the
early European novel. Raymond Williams points out that ‘the advocacy and
support of this “ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality” [has] been nor-
mally associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material
was called “domestic” and “bourgeois” before it was called “realistic”.’25 In
the Soviet Union these earlier definitions of realism were extended such that
fiction was subjected to an überframe of analysis which saw it as merely super-
structure, a diversion from or disguise of primarily economic interests, sug-
gesting that the relationship between aesthetics and society was one of direct,
though often unconscious, reflection. Thus aesthetics was actualized ideol-
ogy and a simple though rigorously demanding and hence prestigious role
for artists and critics was arrived at: the exposure of the ideology that victim-
izes the ignorant masses/artists. This tended to result, firstly, in a replication
of the elitist stance of much moralistic humanist critique. Secondly, it elided
the potential problem that ‘this is an ambiguous mission for a literary critic,
who thereby becomes, at least positionally, a sort of adversary of the work she
or he analyzes … [in] basic conflict between the notion of “false conscious-
ness” and the root word “art” ’.26 Magical realism generally has been critical of
Marxist hermeneutics, arguing that the art work can only be fully understood
on its own terms for, as Milan Kundera says, ‘the novel’s sole raison d’être is
to say what only the novel can say’.27 Thirdly, Marxist literary critique tended
to suggest the political naïvety that a correct consciousness would instigate
an entirely new beginning. These points are summarized and explained by
Myra Jehlen thus: ‘In part this difficulty in dealing with literature, and with
aesthetic issues generally, arose from the fact that Marx modelled his scien-
tific analysis of society on the mechanistic and deterministic science of the
nineteenth century.’28
If these nineteenth-century, modernist and socialist realisms were the real-
isms inherited by colonial territories, Africa in this case, then how were they
received and transculturated? Science and empiricism formed the backdrop
to the epistemological impact of mimetic realism in the cultural foreground
in Africa during the colonial period. Most African writers, uncomfortable
with taking a role on this imperialist stage and setting, adopted a form of
realism that was apparently opposed to colonization: a social realism partly
derived from socialist realism but with a strong inheritance from nineteenth-
century realism and from indigenous traditions. This adoption occurred as

25
Williams 1961, 274.
26
Jehlen 1994, 41.
27
Kundera 1988, 36.
28
Jehlen 1994, 42.

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286 GERALD GAYLARD

‘it was the rationality of realism that seemed adequate to the task of forging a
national identity at the conjuncture of global realities … it is the rationality of
realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers, Onitsha market literature
and in the earliest titles of the African Writer’s Series that dominated the
discourses of the period’.29 If any proof of the dominance of social realism in
African fiction is needed then one case survey should suffice: in South Africa
the absence of science fiction, fantasy, satire, folktale, postmodernism, and
magical realism from the pages of novels and the forefront literary journals
Sesame, Staffrider and Contrast embodied the ethos of the nation. Kenneth
Harrow,30 F. Odun Balogun31 and David Attwell32 have similarly pointed out
the relative absence of non-realist texts from Africa’s fictional canon until the
1980s.
Yet it must be pointed out that this dominant social realism was and is as
various as the writers using it, from Achebe to Paul Zeleza. Moreover, even
in its most strident form (arguably in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood or the work of
Alex La Guma), this social realism was so strongly influenced by British real-
ists such as Dickens, Austen, Conrad and Lawrence, whom many African
writers had read in school, that it did not follow Lukács’s blueprint for social-
ist realism in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Harrow concurs with me
that socialist realism was not the only influence upon African writers when
he notes that ‘it appears that the most direct influence on almost all African
novelists came from the European realist tradition’.33 Moreover, by the time
that socialist realism came to Africa, many of the cruder aspects of Marxism
that relegated culture to an ideological superstructure upon an economic
base had been debunked by critics such as Tony Bennett, Raymond Williams
and Terry Eagleton who had pointed out the relative autonomy of culture.
Frantz Fanon’s Marxism, for instance, was thoroughly permeated by a subtle
psychological analysis of imperialism. Thus, even though the early years of
independence were years of political euphoria and self-confidence in new
African nations and socialist realism was an especially powerful influence
upon African writing, it would be wrong to call the majority of African realist
writing socialist. The most obviously socialist African writers were Ngugi, La
Guma, Ousmane Sembène and José Luandino Vieira; most others are more
appropriately characterized as social realists in the sense that their projects
were about society and social redemption, often not along strictly social-

29
Quayson 1997, 162.
30
Harrow 1994.
31
Balogun 1997, 9–14.
32
Attwell 1985.
33
Harrow 1994, 64.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 287

ist lines. Of course, literary heritages are not the only effect and affect on
writers, and the somewhat conservative provincial worlds within which much
African fiction gestated also had their role to play. Moreover, it should be
kept in mind that realism in African fiction was as much the creation of pub-
lishers, editors, consumers and critics as of writers; the rhetoric of urgency
that so dominated politics in Africa led towards the bowdlerization, misinter-
pretation and reduction of many texts, as well as self-censorship on the part
of writers.
Hence there were exceptions to the dominance of the social realist novel;
it is a severe misnomer to call Amos Tutuola or Yambo Ouologuem realists, for
instance. Secondly, there are invariably moments of the fantastic in otherwise
realist texts, for example Petals of Blood does contain descriptions of magical
paintings within it, images which, though of minor significance in the novel,
come to take on centrality in magical realist works such as Okri’s Danger-
ous Love, Jamal Mahjoub’s Wings of Dust and Dambudzo Marechera’s Black
Sunlight. Finally, it might be argued that Achebe or Ngugi’s traditionalism is
hardly realist. However, as Ato Quayson34 and Olatubosun Ogunsanwo35 have
argued, in both of the cases of Achebe and Ngugi, and many others, tradition
is subordinated to and within a realist epistemology. Hence, what seems to
have happened was at least a bifurcation in the African novel – on the one
hand there were realist texts along the lines of those by Ngugi, Sembène,
Iyayi, Achebe, La Guma, Chenjerai Hove and Es’kia Mphahlele; while on
the other hand there were more mythopoeic writers such as Camara Laye,
Gabriel Okara, Tutuola or Wole Soyinka. The argument I want to advance
here is, firstly, that whilst realism and non-realism have undoubtedly perenni-
ally coexisted, even in mutual dependency, the conditions appropriate to the
flourishing of magical realism, both in terms of production and reading that
production, have only manifested after independence because the struggle
for decolonization tended to promote social realism. As Nash notes of world
postmodern fiction, particularly its earlier proponents such as Borges, Lewis,
Joyce, Robbe-Grillet: ‘It’s in the late twentieth century that there exists a con-
certed cultural context and a conscious intellectual framework capable of
supporting them and that “appropriates” and presumes to validate them.’36
Secondly, it is possible to see a writer such as Tutuola as the spiritual grand­
father, or folkloric father, of contemporary African magical realism; neverthe-
less the work of earlier non-realists such as Tutuola, Laye, Okara, and Yamba
Ouologuem tends to lack the hybridity, syncretism and reflexive distance

34 Quayson 1997, 158.

35 Ogunsanwo 1995, 49.
36 Nash 1987, 53.

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288 GERALD GAYLARD

towards indigenous traditions that is characteristic of current African magical

realists.37 The point here is that these categories are fluid intersections of
a multitude of paths that have divergent directions and crossings, and that
‘the exception proves the rule’. The genre of realism becomes visible only
through the distance between the works that apparently compose it, because
the operative principle of any given genre or mode is difference, Derridean
différance, deferral.38 Delineating the poetics of African realism thus exposes
the reactive linearities of the new class of magical realism. The suggestions
about realism to come are offered not so much as a comprehensive descrip-
tion of realism, but specifically as the basis for what subsequent fictionalists
cite as differentiating their work from it.
Having given this caveat, we can nevertheless say that the realist inherit-
ances were utilized in the creation of a tradition of literature that Harrow
calls ‘témoignage’,39 which begins to emerge in the 1950s with books by
Laye, Leopold Senghor, Birago Diop, Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono,
for example. This literature was extended by the more sociohistorical texts
of the Anglophone authors of the 1960s and 1970s: Achebe, Okot p’Bitek
and Ngugi. Balogun claims that the formal European realism of Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart was adopted by most African writers and that ‘an ambi-
tious naturalist proletarian prose epic written in the style of socialist realism
and titled Petals of Blood … was certainly the most influential novel in Africa
from the late 1970s through the 1980s … a personification of the mood of a
continent’.40 Neil Lazarus agrees that Ngugi’s novel was ‘definitive of the new
politically committed writing that has emerged in Africa since 1970’.41 The
African social realist novel played a crucial role in terms of its opposition to
imperialism, a role which is well documented in the critical writings of Ngugi,
the ‘bolekaja’ critics Chinweizu Ibekwe, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu
Madubuike, and the work of numerous editors and compilers such as Bernth
Lindfors, Gerald Moore and David Cook. Socialist realism has been defined
and extended by Omafumi Onoge, Georg Gugleberger and especially by
Chidi Amuta in his The Theory of African Literature. Perhaps the apogee of
realism in African literature may be seen in David Rand Bishop’s inventory:
African Literature, African Critics: The Forming of Critical Standards, 1947–1966.42
The cornerstones to this realism appear as points four and five in Bishop’s
taxonomy: ‘that African literature must not falsify African realia’ and ‘that

37
See Cooper 1998, 47–8, 73.
38
See Derrida 1982a.
39
Harrow 1994, 33.
40
Balogun 1997, 9.
41
Lazarus 1990, 204.
42
Bishop 1988.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 289

African literature be engagée’, both of which uphold the edifice of the other
points which are largely concerned that this literature be truly African, indig-
enous.43 In other words, African realism was a buttress for nationalist move-
ments and sentiments, which explains its leading role from the 1950s and
beyond.
Therefore in defining realism in African fiction, I must make it clear that
what I am referring to was specifically a social realism that posited its mimeti-
cism as the most accurate approach to ‘external truth’, and often as the most
appropriate tool with which to contribute towards society, specifically the
struggle for liberation. In this utilitarian respect African social realism was, at
least initially, triumphantly successful. The primary cause for the adoption of
social realism in African fiction is pointed out by Patrick Chabal:
The fact that the African nation-state was not, like its European counterpart,
the result of the natural ‘organic’ historical development of the interaction
between the indigenous ‘nations’ and ‘states’ is fundamental to the under-
standing of contemporary Africa – as is the fact that since African cultures
were oral, the development of a written African literature could only come
about through the appropriation of the colonial European language.44

The adoption of social realism enabled African writers to comment directly

on colonialism. In this process of adoption the baby was resocialized or ‘tran-
sculturated’45 and, ironically, came to resemble the tradition of its previous
parents more and more closely in the crisis of the new parents’ attempts to
overthrow that tradition.46 In other words, what lies behind realism’s mimesis,
as suggested above, was desire, desire for presence and being, a desire in this
case to individuate from parents who defined the black child as not merely an
absence, but a negative absence of light, enlightenment, culture, morality. The
nuances of mimesis in Africa result from this desire. Initially mimesis took
the form of imitation of western models, but when this proved inadequate
to fulfil being, then mimesis turned to the rivalrous local in order to achieve
recognition and acknowledgement, to fill its lack. However, there were other
reasons for realism being taken on board and changed in the process.
Firstly, it enabled African writers and theorists to use the realist tradi-
tion that they had inherited from colonial education without too much
re-evaluation or literary experimentation, which was important given the
urgency of the need to rid the colonies of imperialist governments. The aes-
thetic accompaniment to this political urgency was the stenographic power

43
Bishop 1988, 178.
44
Chabal et al. 1996, 5.
45
Pratt 1992, 6.
46
See Chabal et al. 1996, 27.

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290 GERALD GAYLARD

of reportage of situations that were often extraordinary in and of themselves.

The corollary to this in criticism was the adoption of mimetic realism, for
a typical African critic has ‘tended to apply mimesis to their statements on
African literature far more often than they have concerned themselves with
Mimetic critical theory’.47
Secondly, this almost ‘natural’ adoption of social realism also enabled
African writers not only to compete on the same ground with western writers,
albeit with a different game plan, a vital form of black pride when it had
been so battered in the imperial arena, but also to seize a moral high ground
unavailable to western or other writers. This gave the African writer a rel-
evant, if not crucial, social role in a situation where the role of writers was
tenuous, if not virtually ‘brand new’. Writers could be valuable comrades in
the struggle for freedom from the colonial or neo-colonial oppressor. Brenda
Cooper notes that
writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and
Ayi Kwei Armah have all dedicated themselves to building such national
cultures … [O]ut of a brave, concerted and consistent critique of the cor-
rupt state, there has often emerged within African fiction, an unambiguous
commitment and dedication to the nationalist project of political reform.
National cultural strategies have been adopted with political and aesthetic
consequences.48

Realism in Africa betokened a political seriousness that denied aesthetic indul-

gence, was relatively accessible to readers, and created an ethical agency.
Thirdly, as Coetzee has pointed out of settler art,
it is not oversimplification to say that landscape and art and landscape
writing from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the
twentieth [and beyond] revolve around the question of finding a language
to fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African … The quest for
an authentic language is pursued within a framework in which language,
consciousness and landscape are all related.49

This quest for authenticity is similar to the nativist nostalgia for an unspoilt
Africa, a golden age that, when accessed, would yield the ‘language to fit
Africa’. Both settler and nativist are concerned with the authentic and often
fall into nostalgia in order to recover it, though their reasons for such concern
with the authentic come from opposite sides of the same imperial impact.
This returns us to the earlier argument that mimesis depends on repeatabil-
ity; western culture is able to continually reappropriate an already contami-

47 Attwell 1985, 30.

48 Cooper 1998, 52.
49 Coetzee 1988, 7.

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 AFRICAN REALISM 291

nated (because delusory) origin through the natural ‘talent’ and individual
‘genius’ of the artist. Genius thus metaphorically mimics nature, reinscrib-
ing and compounding the imperialist contamination at the origin. Whilst
the origin is not all-determining, its axioms invariably infect the attempt at
newness. This is particularly apparent to me in Ngugi’s well-known insistence
upon writing in indigenous languages which, while laudatory, is not particu-
larly helpful to emerging writers keen to access an audience wider than that
of their home language.
Fourthly, realism in African literature in English was adopted because of
the influence of the Anglo-realist tradition, primarily via schooling. Attwell
calls this ‘British empiricism’, which is ‘positivist in philosophy, realist in aes-
thetics’.50 Attwell identifies the first major literary inheritance of this empiri-
cism as ‘the British conception of the public function of literature’51 which
was ‘dedicated to a view of literature as rich national possession, the vital
centre of the nation’s cultural health’.52 This was ‘convenient in a climate
of nationalism’ in Africa, ‘but the naivety of its sociological premisses, and
the direct, unmediated relation it assumes between literature and society
(literature “reflects” and “criticizes”) are misplaced in a stratified, heterog-
enous and hegemonic context’.53 Stern echoes this when he says that ‘the
system that works – this, and nothing but this, is reality for the realist’.54 The
second major influence of Anglo-empiricism had its effect primarily in terms
of the uncriticality of engagement with sociohistorical contextuality and
the organic traditionalism of much African literature and criticism. These
tendencies were informed by ‘the lack of any tradition reflecting critically
on the social totality’55 within British intellectualism. Thus Anglophone
African literary discourse inherited a British critical tradition of ‘a unifying,
experientialist discourse, one which reinforced African criticism’s search
for Africanness, for community, for continuity with the comforting origins
of the African experience, and for a sense of tradition in which a nationalist
orientation could find support in an age of conflicting internal pressures’.56
In a more general sense, Anglo-empiricism can be linked to a pragmatist
anti-psychologism that runs through much African social realism (despite
Fanon’s profound linking of politics and psychology, for one example that
proves the rule). Ashis Nandy points out that one of the processes central to

50
Attwell 1985, 30–1.
51
Attwell 1985, 58.
52
Attwell 1985, 60.
53
Attwell 1985, 61.
54
Stern 1973, 113.
55
Attwell 1985, 62.
56
Attwell 1985, 65.

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the resilience of structured oppression is ‘the anti-psychologism which oppres-

sion breeds and from which it seeks legitimacy … Many years ago Theodor
Adorno and his associates had found a link between authoritarian predisposi-
tion and anti-psychologism (which they, following Henry Murray, called anti-
intraceptiveness)’.57 Thus representation in African social realism tended to
take the political as the real. African realist works from the 1960s until the
present have typically tended to elide the empiricism underlying their selec-
tion of the overtly political as the typical, the ‘natural’, the valuable. Just as
western modernism replaced spirituality with aesthetics, African nationalism
displaced western aesthetics with ‘real’ politics. For example, Adewale Maja-
Pearce says of Iyayi that ‘it is difficult to deny the truth of his political vision,
to which all else is subsumed … The plot is kept to the minimum necessary
to move the story along. This is an advantage in a novel where characteriza-
tion is equally simplified for the greater purpose of the message.’58 In the
opening of Iyayi’s Heroes, for example, we find a bare recounting of place and
time that reproduces (‘passed and repassed’) the axiomatics of journalistic
epistemologies in a prototype of reflection:
It was the third year of the civil war and it was the evening of the last Friday
in the month of June. There was no light in the city for fear of the air raids
and everywhere it was dark and uneasy and the soldiers were nervous as
they paraded the dark streets, waiting, watching, anticipating. Osime Iyere,
a political correspondent with the city’s Daily News, stood inside his bed-
room by the window and parted the dark blue curtains very slightly and
looked out at the military jeeps as they passed and repassed the front of his
house … I hate rumours.59

Such reproduction of ‘factual’ epistemologies, of nationalist/realist impera-

tives, was based upon the very necessary search for ontological and ideologi-
cal certainty after the destabilizing effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism
which became crucial for the emergent African literature. In Heroes the
journalist questions his past assumptions and experience but not his epis-
temological bases, so that by the end of the book he believes that ‘a move-
ment … will write the history of this war and give each man and woman his or her
proper due’,60 and therefore he still ‘hates’ the uncertainty of the language of
‘rumours’. Such a quest for stability, certainty, was partially derived from the
realist ideal of unified subjectivity of character and of character’s centrality
to experience. As Nash notes, ‘the intuition of a “self” is a constant on which

57
Nandy 1987, 23–4.
58
Maja-Pearce 1992, 79.
59
Iyayi 1986, 1, original emphasis.
60
Iyayi 1986, 247, original emphasis.

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the narrative’s operation relies; it’s offered without question as an entity to

be identified according to thoroughly consistent “laws of causality and prob-
ability” ’.61 This search for an integrated selfhood led to difficulties in living
within a fragmented present and/or past.
The outcome of these reasons for the adoption of realism was a national-
ist, traditionalist and utopian social realism. I accept Stern’s argument that
‘Realism has no consistent political “line” to advocate’62; nevertheless, within
a particular sociohistorical context, African realism in both critical and fic-
tional forms tended to be utopian or romantic in the guise of a disinterested
reportage. As Armah argues in ‘African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific’:
The myth of an Edenic Africa … allows African leaders to pretend that
the mere dispersal of colonialism will allow Eden to be restored. Romantic
African Socialism thus bypasses the necessary ‘purgatorial stages’, the class
struggle which according to ‘Scientific Socialism’ must precede the estab-
lishment of an egalitarian order.63

This romanticism is visible in the lyrical and epic tendencies of African realism
which is often far from the analysis of social manners and microscopic detail-
ing of the European novel and explains how it is that allegorical utopian texts
such as Armah’s The Healers and Ngugi’s Matigari can be regarded as realist,
for the lyrical is put to the service of immediate social ends. Such roman-
tic/utopian tendencies meant that African realism tended to be partisan to
nationalism and the national liberation movements for, as Mudimbe notes,
‘this intellectual nationalism depended heavily on political nationalism’.64
Even when African realists have mounted stinging attacks upon the compra-
dor elite who have been misruling their countries in the post-independence
period, these have often taken the nation and its epistemologies as their
boundary of reference. The problem with this is that what may have been
necessary to liberation at one stage has tended towards entropy and impris-
onment at another.
Western literary realism was inherited by African writers, who transcul-
turated it, along with a number of other ‘Third World’ writers, into a social
realist mode primarily due to the urgent desire for decolonization from the
1950s right into the 1980s. This was part and parcel of the first stage of post-
colonialism which might be more accurately named anti-colonial national-
ism. However, as we know, postcolonialism grew into a more subtle critique
of imperialism of all sorts, from the political to the psychological, developing

61
Nash 1987, 34.
62
Stern 1973, 53.
63
Quoted in Innes 1995, 5.
64
Mudimbe 1988, 169.

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a careful analysis of the relationship between self and other and a more thor-
oughgoing critique of realism, both western and social. By the 1980s more
and more examples of what we might call magical realism began to emerge
in African writing, perhaps exemplifying a turn inwards after some social
gains had been won and lost.
The magical realism that evolved in this later wave of postcolonialism did
so for a number of different reasons. My sense is that a broader transhistori-
cal sensibility was the prime motive in this ‘second wave’ critique of realism;
writers wanting to understand how it was that the promises of independence
crumbled so quickly began to ask probing questions about the epistemologies
of a realism that seemed to promise so much without illusion yet regularly
yielded terrible results, questions about why it is that kingdoms come and go.
Moreover, African writers began to feel that social realism was too reductive
and truncated a form to convey their realities. So the development of African
magical realism was perhaps less a reactionary rejection of realism per se
than an attempt to expand the form to include traditional cosmologies.
However, there were of course other reasons, centring on the feeling that
our understanding of the real has been under threat for some time now,
perhaps a period as long as four hundred years, but certainly of at least one
hundred, by exponential acceleration in a number of key areas. Firstly, the
loss of a clear colonial enemy since independence and a far greater fluidity of
travel, creolization and exchange have impacted on Africa. Moreover, there
has been acceleration in terms of industrial and technological development
and their impact upon humanity and human culture, an acceleration leading
to a sense of exponential pace, loss of control and even vertigo. Secondly,
the notion of progress has become untenable, or at least been questioned,
given the potential for human self-immolation in world wars, in nuclear tech-
nology and environmental destruction; a potential that has also issued in a
more acute sense of mortality and a flourishing of apocalypticism and con-
spiracy theories. Thirdly, Giddens’s de-traditionalization has accelerated so
that human society is fragmented, hybrid, globalized, decentred more than
ever before. Fourthly, the indeterminacy which had its roots in the Coperni-
can revolution and its more recent manifestations in Heisenberg and Ein-
stein has flowered, exposing the limitations of science, not only from within
science and academia, but also outside of it, so that the purely rational has
come to be seen as a limited technique for understanding reality. As Salman
Rushdie notes:
The fiction of the Victorian age, which was realist, has to my way of thinking
been inadequate as a description of the world for some time now … After
that, I suppose, the 1960s represented a kind of a shift in people’s percep-
tions. The simplest of these was the perception that reality was no longer

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something on which everyone could agree, which it had been at the time
of the great age of the realist novel. For realism to convince, there must
be a fairly broad agreement between the author and the reader about the
nature of the world that is being described … But now we don’t have that
kind of consensus about the world.65

Fifthly, the rise of a number of sceptical movements, including the ecological

movement, minority activisms, concern for endangered tribal peoples, the
anti-globalization movement, psychedelic culture, and so on, has led to the
questioning of instrumental rationality and materialist culture. It is no hap-
penstance that these accelerations have accompanied the ‘linguistic turn’
away from empiricism and objectivism that has been evident in the develop-
ment of postmodernism, relativism, critical realism and a number of other
movements and ideas. Indeed, one could say that empiricism was so tainted
by the violence of imperialism that it gave realism a bad name. The increased
popularity of non-realisms is thus partly rejection of this violent history, partly
escapism from the disorientating forces of globalization and disaggregation
and partly an attempt to grasp and understand these forces and find modes of
expression and representation adequate to them. This popularity is evident
in the rise of gothic fiction, romances, science fiction, fantasy, horror, post-
modernism, and, not least, magical realism.
Africa has not been exempt from these global forces; in fact, they have
been exacerbated by local postcolonial sociohistorical changes in the last
twenty years of the twentieth century, which has prompted correspondingly
substantial challenges to both nationalism and realism. That magical realism
is the most appropriate term for the fictional manifestations of these social
changes and challenges to realism and the real is open to debate, and other
terms need careful consideration. If we were to consider critical realism, for
instance, we would have to include a large range of variables in considering
social mechanisms in Africa, ranging from culture-specific values and mores
to ancestor worship. However, the clinching fact here is that critical realism
was not adopted as a term to describe post-nationalist literary realism in Africa
or elsewhere, while magical realism has been adopted as a term to refer to
a wide range of fictions, from Latin America initially and then elsewhere in
the so-called ‘Third World’ and ‘First World’. Accepting this term, therefore,
magical realism does have the main feature of inclusivity; typically no world
or worldview, no matter how apparently outlandish, is considered unimport-
ant and not given space. Indeed, the term does have purchase because many
of the cosmologies and worldviews in African traditions can be described
as ‘magical’ in the sense that their mechanisms are spiritually determined.

65 Reder 2000, 57, original emphasis.

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African magical realism has tended to critique western realism for its empiri-
cism and from an outsider’s perspective with a magical cosmology. Moreover,
accompanying this inclusivity is magical realism’s tendency towards aesthetic
de-familiarization and political complexity. These features have done much
to expand our understanding of realism, its historical limitations and its pos-
sibilities. Tayeb Salih, Dambudzo Marechera, Ivan Vladislavic, Kojo Laing,
Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Ben Okri, Bessie Head, Yambo Ouloguem and Mia
Couto, amongst others, have produced fiction that might be characterized
as magical realist and have in the process done much to expand our notion
of what realism is and can be. By the same token, postcolonialism has not
been able to escape harsh socio-political realities and a rhetoric of urgency,
making sure that the socialism that inspired its earlier forms has been main-
tained, albeit significantly challenged, altered and extended.
The significance of this reception and transculturation of western realism
in Africa is at least twofold. On the one hand, it demonstrates the ability
of ‘classic’ forms to survive and endure. In this case, realism has proved
to be remarkably plastic and the enduring power of its descriptive mode
is evidenced in the use of that mode for highly disparate subjects: from
the parlours of nineteenth-century London in Austen to the trances of
a contemporary urban shaman in Harare in Marechera. It must be said,
however, that this may be more of a tribute to the flexibility of language
than to the malleability of realism per se. Thus, on the other hand, we also
see the limits of western realism in its transculturation by African writers
into a form better able to convey something of their concerns and realia.
Indeed, they have created a representational form that, while recognizable,
is substantively different from its earlier incarnations, a form that strains
at the bit of generic constraints and the very notion of representation. In
this affectionate deconstruction, this homage that is also a critique, we see
the way in which transculturation evolves: by the recombination of modes
previously thought of as incompatible and the use of what might appear to
be inappropriate. Transculturation here, because it involved the violence of
colonialism at the origin, has tended to map psychological mechanisms onto
the socio-political terrain, and vice versa. Moreover, in transculturation we
see that no theory or methodology is truly objective and omniscient in the
sense that it is invariably culturally, if not otherwise, coloured. Furthermore,
what also becomes apparent is the trajectory of postcolonialism away from
anti-colonial nationalism and towards a theory with a more complex under-
standing of power and resistance. Postcolonialism’s notion of resistance now
includes ambivalence, mimicry, sly civility, strategic essentialism and silence
alongside the outright confrontation that its initial nationalist oppositional
format advocated. In this trajectory, postcolonialism and realism are inter-

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twined, suggesting that realism never has been immune to history and the
dictates of culture, context, time and change. Now that is realistic.

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