Bitterkomix

I’ve been racking my brains for dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels in African literature these last months. I can’t think of any. I wonder: is this because dystopian African fictions are unpopular, or is it that they simply don’t exist? It’s a puzzle, and an intriguing one at that. Suppose, for a moment, there are no dystopian novels on our continent: how should we understand this?

One place to start is by considering that dystopian novels only make sense within a narrative of utopia; that is, the idea that we can engineer ourselves, society or the world at large to create perfection. The wonderful literary conceit of a dystopia is to imagine that in doing so, in exerting human agency to make perfection, we undo human agency.  Consider prototypical dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale or Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. In both, the attempt to engineer a more perfect social order challenges the very foundations of human agency, the ability to intend.

However, the Anglophone African novels I’m familiar with seldom presume this degree of individual agency. Sometimes this is because of the role of history. J M Coetzee’s hauntingly beautiful novel, The Life and Times of Michael K, is perhaps as close as any continental author has come to a reocognisably post-apocalyptic novel. But even here, the world of Michael K is very much weighed down by the burden of history, which does not undo individual agency, so much as render it shocking, a breach in the fabric of what is possible.  Individual agency is a muted, fragile thing. In K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, the protagonist is riven by the violence of his childhood and adulthood, and his psychological world takes on hallucinatory shades, so that the broken dreams of the city are in some ways more forceful than his character. Alex la Guma’s novella, A Walk in the Night, takes this anti-humanist motif even further. There is really only one character in the novel – the dark and despairing cityscape – and the individuals are its battered manifestations.

Individual agency in fiction is also constrained by the role of the ancestral world. This is particularly evident in the novels of Zakes Mda and Ben Okri, who write a form of what they call spiritual realism, in which the ancestral world underlies and gives substance to perceived reality. One of Okri’s later novels, Starbook, takes on the quality of myth, of legend and fable, and yet the narrative point of the hero is to learn to give himself up to the mysteries of the ancestral world; that is, to unlearn his agency. This world is itself eventually undone by ‘a strange plague … a cold white wind and wherever it blew it created vacant spaces … the white wind began to erase hills and valleys, it erased the memories of people, it erased villages and towns.’ But the coming of colonialism is not figured as a collective act of individual agency. It comes as a sickness of the spirit, not as an act of will.

Within these imaginary landscapes, there is no thread of o’erarching human agency with which to weave dystopian or utopian novels.

The emphasis on o’erarching is there for a reason. The history of dystopian ideas is very closely linked the history of utopian thinking. As far as I know, the first utopian novel was Thomas Moore’s eponymous novel in the early 16th century. It’s interesting that it began just as the age of European expansion did. At about this time, rationalism and secularism were beginning their slow ascent. It’s worth considering how these historical patterns may have shaped first European, and then Anglo-American, conceptions of individual agency. In studies of colonial history, what stands out, more than anything else, is the startling arrogance of colonial endeavours. It’s as if they simply did not consider the possibility that their will might be thwarted, that they might not know very much, that they were in fact very small figures in the achingly brief narrative of humanity, that they were the architects of a fumbling tragedy, not a masterful triumph.

The dystopian novel is in this sense a celebration of the terrible power of individual agency within the western canon, one which explores the theme of o’eraching human intention. It is perhaps best personified in the figure of Thomas Moore, who was both a humanist of outstanding conviction, and a powerful opponent of the Reformation in Great Britain – so opposed was he, and so strongly did he stand by his Catholic principles, that Moore had many ‘heretics’ tortured and burnt at the stake. He was later beatified by the Catholic Church. It is by no means tenuous to claim that the historical figure of Moore embodies the very contradictions of the utopian/dystopian imagination.

But its  silent twin, the novels of post-colonial Africa, bear witness to the way in which this unfettered exercise of the will has given rise to an equally powerful imagination. At their best, they are often complex expressions of human frailty, of the way in which we are shaped by forces beyond our power and ken. They remind us to stand with some humility and acknowledge that we may not always be the masters of our own triumph, nor the masters of our own downfall.