Universal,Normative,and Indispensable: Exploring the Emphasis on Eurocentric Literary-Critical Perspectives in the Criticism of the Black Zimbabwean Novel

Introduction

The literary-critical theories that scholars deploy in their discussion of literary works are implicated in the affirmation, negation, and/or problematization of the culture(s) in which a given corpus is grounded. In this article, I evoke Afrocentric literary-critical benchmarks as laid down by Iyasere (1975); Wa Thiong’o (1981); Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike (1985); p’Bitek (1986); Chinweizu (1987); Achebe (1988); and Asante (1998, 1999, 2007) to explore the ways in which Flora Veit-Wild (1992b) and Ranka Primorac (2006) seem to posit Eurocentric literary-critical criteria as universal, normative, and indispensable in their discussion of the Black Zimbabwean novel. In doing this, my focus is drawn, first and foremost, to the grounding of the selected scholars’ criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel in the ideas of European theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, Gajo Peles, Aleksandar Flaker, and Mieke Bal. Second, I am interested in the arguments that Veit-Wild and Primorac articulate regarding Afrocentric literary-critical perspective on the Black Zimbabwean novel as mimetic and reductionist. This article derives from the realization that scholars of the Black Zimbabwean novel seldom discuss the critical discourses that have developed around it, preferring to concentrate, instead, on the literary texts in their various generic modes. This is understandable, given that “a literary work, by itself, is like a diamond in the dark [and it] needs light from the reader’s mind to make it sparkle” (Chinweizu, 1987, p. 250). However, it is now becoming clear that the discussion of literary-critical discourse is equally important. Out of their reading of works of art and the issues they address, literary-critical scholars emerge with regimes of thought that, in much the same manner as the literary works from which they are constructed, possess the capacity to impact a given people’s sense of self and being in the world. Considering that it emerges in a context fraught with competing bodies of critical thought on the Black Zimbabwean novel, the dearth of scholarship on any given body of literary-critical thought facilitates its perception and consequent solidification as the standard-bearing narrative on the literary tradition in question.

Conceptual Framework

This article explores the ways in which Flora Veit-Wild and Ranka Primorac can be said, in their discussion of the Black Zimbabwean novel, to posit Eurocentric literary-critical criteria as universal, normative, and indispensable. My focus is drawn to these critics because of the complex and contradictory ways in which their works are implicated in the development of both the Black Zimbabwean novel and its criticism. By exploring the ways in which the selected critics may be said to be grounded in the Eurocentric framework, I avoid relying on categories such as White/European, given that these are identities that promote “false unities and uniformities” (Tagwirei, 2016, p. 5) which “proscribe the space for dialogic contestation” (Tagwirei, 2016, p. 12). Veit-Wild and Primorac also attract scholarly attention because both have written and published extensively on the Black Zimbabwean novel (Primorac, 2001, 2005, 2006; Veit-Wild, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1999, 2006) but not much research has been done on their scholarship, except Vambe’s (2005) discussion of Veit-Wild’s reliance of the sociohistorical approach in her exploration of aspects of the Black Zimbabwean literary corpus. Also, in the most comprehensive study of critical practice in Zimbabwean literature to date, Furusa (2002) excludes these critics, arguing that they “have not been historically and culturally dislocated and they therefore source critical theories from their own culture and historical experiences” (p. 2). Furusa’s rationale for excluding these critics falls short of the realization that “we have arrived at a point at which the entire process of human knowledge is being assessed and reassessed in order to help us discover what we know about each other” (Asante, 1998, p. 8).

In exploring Veit-Wild’s and Primorac’s scholarship on the Black Zimbabwean novel, I take cognizance of the appropriation of their ideas by some Zimbabwean scholars of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Manase’s (2014) utilization of Veit-Wild’s generational classification of Black Zimbabwean novelists into three distinct generations separated from each other on account of their historical backgrounds, social vision, and aesthetic orientation is a case in point. I use examples like this to problematize the import of the critics’ work on the development of critical discourse on the Black Zimbabwean novel. In that regard, I note that while Black Zimbabwean appropriation of Eurocentric literary-theoretical approaches is often presented as critical in destabilizing the polarization between Afrocentric and Eurocentric literary-critical approaches, it seldom interrogates Eurocentric agency in the entrenchment of the polarization that it seeks to address. Yet this is critical as part of the effort to contextualize the contemporary cultural experience in Zimbabwe and engender a more inclusive dispensation of “pluralism without hierarchy” (Asante, 1998, p. 7). That dispensation is likely to remain elusive if the dominant view is that the discussion of Eurocentric paradigms results in their polarization with Afrocentric ideas and that such polarization is to be resolved by leaving Eurocentric approaches unexamined. As hooks (2013) has since noted, “The future of diversity lies in creating greater awareness and greater critical consciousness” (p. 28) of the importance of subjecting all ideas, theories, and systems to searching scrutiny. Related to this is the recourse to Marxist-Leninist theories in the criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel (Ngara, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1996). In their discussion of these theories and the ways in which they are employed by Zimbabwean scholars of the Black Zimbabwean novel, Veit-Wild and Primorac present them as mimetic and reductionist, descriptors that they also attach to Afrocentric theories. This nexus in the depiction of Marxist-Leninist and Afrocentric literary-critical theories in Eurocentric literary-critical thought on the Black Zimbabwean novel is instructive in that it reveals the complexity of relationships and transactions between and among theories of literature as they “participate in a complex order, rich in unexpected turns, meanders and changes of course . . . [as well as] labyrinthine entanglement” (Mbembe, 2001, p. 8).

The Black Zimbabwean novel is understood in this article in keeping with its authorship by Black Zimbabweans in the country’s most widely spoken languages (Ndebele, Shona, and English). This conception transcends earlier definitions in which scholars such as Zimunya (1982), Kahari (1990), Chiwome (1996), Zhuwarara (2001), and Vambe (2004) compartmentalize the canon using language of literary expression. As a category, the Black Zimbabwean novel does justice to the canon’s triple linguistic manifestation but it is, in and by itself, incapable of accounting for the generic diversity of Zimbabwean literature and the critical scholarship that has developed around genres such as poetry, drama, and the short story. It also falters in the face of the contributions of non-Black Zimbabweans to the broader corpus of Zimbabwean literature but is adequate for the purposes of this article. In the same vein, most of the Black Zimbabwean novels referred to in this article are those that the critics under study focus on. Inevitably, these novels are dated, given that Veit-Wild’s text under discussion is published in 1992 while Primorac’s is published in 2006. The novels referred to in this article range from 1956 (when the first Black Zimbabwean novel was published) and 2006 (when Primorac’s critical text examined in this article was published). Black Zimbabwean novels published after 2006 fall beyond the referential scope of this article.

Eurocentric Literary-Critical Theories and the Black Zimbabwean Novel

Reading through the critical scholarship of Veit-Wild (1992b) and Primorac (2006), it is quite inviting to come to the conclusion that the two critics are grounded in Eurocentric literary-critical theories in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Eurocentric literary-critical theories are notable for their commitment to the advancement of the European cultural and conceptual agenda of global preponderance as the only and indispensable source of the world’s worthwhile values. As Asante (1998) contends, such commitment is “the result of an ideologically driven desire to . . . express a type of Western triumphalism that reduces other people to the margins of history” (p. vii). Part of the agenda of this commitment is to see to the generation of “a cacophony of voices . . . arrayed against the best interests of international cooperation and mutuality” (Asante, 1999, p. vii). Being the composite source of the literary-critical theories deployed by Veit-Wild and Primorac in their analysis of the Black Zimbabwean novel, Eurocentrism promotes the discussion of relations between Europe and the rest of the world using terms supportive of the West as “modern, global and therefore universally relevant” (Furusa, 2002, p. 3). That Veit-Wild and Primorac are possibly grounded in Eurocentric literary-critical theories is noticeable in the homage that they pay to Eurocentric literary-critical theorists such as Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and Mieke Bal, whom they quote approvingly. Veit-Wild (1992b: p. 4) exemplifies this:

Recent perspectives combine elements of structuralist, post-structuralist and formalist approaches (such as those of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin) and insights of the New Left (for example Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Foucault), forms of criticism which emerged in the context of and in response to new literary forms in post-modernist writing. While all such theories assume an intrinsic and intricate interrelationship and interaction between linguistic and social system, they attempt to set criteria for literary analysis which transcend former categorical and prescriptive ideological positions . . . Such approaches offer fresh, more detailed and varied methods to analyze the new literatures because they are less rigid, less classificatory than previous ones. By emphasizing the discontinuities and disruptions in a literary text, its open-endedness, its participation in a dialogical process, they provide flexible analytic frameworks appropriate to the nature of post-colonial and post-modernist texts; they pay tribute to the historicity of such texts, their dynamic and “diachronic” nature and serve to demystify underlying presuppositions.

Veit-Wilds’s installation of scholars such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault as definitive voices in literary-critical scholarship suggests grounding in the Eurocentric idea of literature and its criticism. The ideas of these scholars are both foundational and instructive in light of the emphasis they place, for instance, on the need to eschew logocentrism in Derrida’s case, the death of the author as the source of textual meaning in Barthes’s work or heteroglossia, and dialogism and the carnivalesque collapse of identities in the case of Bakhtin. It is quite telling that for Veit-Wild, Eurocentric literary-critical theories are to be approached in terms of their perceived newness and flexibility. This helps carve the discursive niche within which to accord space, voice, and authority to them as universal, normative, and indispensable. Veit-Wild’s emphasis on the literary-theoretical ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Foucault as dynamic and germane to diachronic, dialogical, and open-ended interpretation of texts posits them as synonymous with literary-critical theoretical perfection. However, it needs emphasizing that all literary-critical theories are far from being perfect implements. The best that any literary-critical theory or set of literary-critical theories can do is to furnish scholars with perspectives on a given literary canon. A perspective is only a vantage point from which to see and interpret. Veit-Wild’s framing of Eurocentric literary-critical theories helps fortify the self-image of the Eurocentric perspective as sole proprietor over rational and scientific inquiry. This creates an intellectual conundrum in which Eurocentrism is misrepresented as an unavoidable point of reference. In her superlative language on Eurocentric literary-critical rubrics in the analysis of the Black Zimbabwean novel, Veit-Wild lends traction to the myth that Africa has nothing to contribute in the development of critical discourse on its literature. This myth does not only derive from the Eurocentric conception of Africa as other; but it also “runs with frighteningly predictable consistency throughout European thought” (Ani, 1994, p. 33). It is also central in the invention of the aura of indispensability that Eurocentric literary-critical theories enjoy in the criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel.

While Veit-Wild notes that the literary-critical theories she deploys in her study of the Black Zimbabwean novel emerged in response to new literary forms in postcolonial and postmodernist writing, she seems uninspired to think that the Black Zimbabwean novel can also engender the rise of literary-critical theories informed by the uniqueness of its form, content, and conditions of its birth and development. Even more pertinent is that not all Black Zimbabwean novels are postcolonial and postmodernist to justify universal adoption of literary-critical theories grounded in these trajectories. An expansive gamut of literary-critical sensibilities is implicated each time one delves into the Black Zimbabwean novel that it becomes reductionist to assume that postcolonial and postmodernist tenets are indispensable in reading a literary canon as complex as the Black Zimbabwean novel. Yet it is revealing that the tendency to fall back on reductionist models is quite pervasive in Veit-Wild’s discussion of the Black Zimbabwean novel. One only has to look at her categorization of Black Zimbabwean novelists into three generations of “teachers, preachers and non-believers” (Veit-Wild, 1992b). The forte of this generational typology as an analytical construct is that Black Zimbabwean authors in each of these generations exude basically the same worldview because they are products of the same historical dispensation. While this is critical in demonstrating how authors are shaped by history and the circumstances attendant upon their emergence and development and how these are likely to vary from generation to generation, a more nuanced analysis of the Black Zimbabwean novel demonstrates that the identities, persuasions, and convictions of Black Zimbabwean novelists are far from being simplistic. Each of these generations comprises novelists whose sensibilities are seldom monolithic, even at the level of individual authors. Thus, while Veit-Wild belabors the novelty and dynamism of Eurocentric literary-critical theories, Osundare (2002) points out their grounding in medieval European ideas:

In a rarely eclectic case of archaeology and necromancy, deconstructionists have exhumed the sagacious bones of Plato, Nietzsche, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Marx, Satre, Bakhtin, etc. For critical and analytical terminologies (and methods) they have dug deep into the catacombs of classical and medieval rhetoric for such terms as: tropes, topos, metaphor, metonymy, hypostasis, aporia, polysemy, etc., which they have dusted up and sent on “new” post-structuralist errands. There is, thus, a significant “bending over backwards” in post-structuralism, a rummage through the jungle of primeval epochs. How really self-assuredly new, then, are these terminologies, these methods, even in their new significations and functions? . . . Most times the old-new wine of post-structuralist analytical idioms feel quite ill at ease in the old wine-skin of their theory . . . The newer things appear to be, the older they really are. (p. 40)

The ways in which Veit-Wild describes Eurocentric literary-critical theories bespeak grounding in the view that “the way Europe has structured its own thought is exactly as it should be for the rest of the world” (Asante, 2007, p. 26). Veit-Wild realizes that literary-critical theories emerge and develop in response to the need to make sense of historical, cultural, political, social and economic issues as portrayed in works of art in a specific literary tradition. However, she does not acknowledge that these issues are not uniform as one moves, for example, from Europe to Africa or America to Asia, and that literary-critical scholars rooted in different historical, cultural, political, social and economic trajectories are prone to be moved by different concerns. These concerns inform the nature of literary-critical questions that scholars ask and the tools that they ultimately develop with a view to empowering themselves so they can deal with the issues explored in their society’s literature. Therefore, it is no surprise that literary-critical theories work best in their cultures of origin. When they are imposed on other literary traditions, the priorities of their cultures of origin tend to surface in the receiving cultures. This creates a fundamental cultural challenge that has often been “solved” by harking back to the assumption that if the theories worked in Europe, they can work everywhere else. Veit-Wild’s superlative description of Eurocentric literary-critical perspectives suggests that she subscribes to this view.

The view that European literary-critical theories are universal, normative, and indispensable is also manifest in Primorac’s criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Primorac (2006) has it that her work on the Black Zimbabwean novel “rel[ies] to a large extent on a set of critical tools formulated within the context of former Yugoslavia” (p. 10). Her critical inspiration is, by her admission, furnished by literary-critical scholars such as Gajo Peles, Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleksandar Flaker, Jacques Derrida, and Mieke Bal. The dominance of Eurocentric literary-critical blueprints in Primorac’s critical work on the Black Zimbabwean novel implies that either African literary-critical theories do not exist or they are defective. These views construct Africa as an intellectual blank slate. However, it is unthinkable for a people to have artistic creations without the accompanying capacity to discuss them. In the first place, the very process of literary-imaginative creation involves theoretical exertion. This is abundantly evident in classical African story-telling traditions in which an expert narrator would, for instance, adjust the story’s details to address challenges engendered by variables such as place, time, occasion, and audience. Primorac, like Veit-Wild, does not seek out literary-critical theories implied by the very existence of the Black Zimbabwean novel. By insisting on Yugoslav literary-critical implements, she overlooks the capacity of the Black Zimbabwean novel to suggest the literary-critical theories on the basis of which it can be read, particularly those emerging from the same history and culture with it. Her recourse to Eurocentric literary-critical theories exemplifies what Asante (1998) has termed “the aggressive seizure of intellectual space, which, like the seizure of land, amounts to occupying someone else’s territory and claiming it as one’s own” (p. 10).

That Primorac looks at Black Zimbabwean literary-critical discourses as deficient is evident in her submission that “the work of [Zagreb critics such as] Gajo Peles—unlike that of any Zimbabwean critic, to my knowledge—makes available some of the theoretical tools needed” (Primorac, 2006, p. 47) for reading the Black Zimbabwean novel. In justifying recourse to literary-critical approaches associated with Eurocentric theorists, Primorac (2006) argues, for instance, that the Bakhtinian concept of the novel is appropriate in her discussion of the Black Zimbabwean novel because “it links literary history, ideology and genre, something that . . . still remains to be done in the context of Zimbabwean literature” (p. 15). It would appear that these submissions are inspired not so much by what her approach achieves for the Black Zimbabwean novel but the space it creates for her to rate Black Zimbabwean authors’ accomplishments using a hierarchizing literary-critical model in which the benchmarks are Eurocentric. Thus, it is commonplace to encounter in her work arguments to the effect that “while it is easily described as polyphonic, Marechera’s prose also fits Flaker’s description of aesthetically-dominated texts whose formal complexity impedes easy communication” (Primorac, 2006, p. 24), or that “Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns is closer than Dangarembga’s Under the Tongue to the European type of the Bildungsroman . . . [because it] narrates the entire process of its protagonist’s personal becoming” (Primorac, 2006, p. 130). In these and similar submissions, Primorac deploys Eurocentric literary-critical theories to hierarchize Black Zimbabwean novels according to the various extents to which they satisfy specific literary-theoretical expectations as laid down by Eurocentric scholars. This empowers her to understate Vera’s accomplishments in Under the Tongue:

Although it is a story of survival against all odds, there is a sense in which Zhizha’s story is not the story of a becoming. By this, I mean that it is not a story of the protagonist’s maturing, “growing up,” education or any other kind of mental development leading to identity change . . . Vera has yet to write a Bildungsroman. (Primorac, 2006, p. 159)

Primorac’s declarations insinuate that at the heart of her work on the Black Zimbabwean novel is a commitment to mastering the authority to determine who is a successful Black Zimbabwean writer and who is not. What this amounts to is that non-Zimbabwean critics of the Black Zimbabwean novel get to decide which Black Zimbabwean authors are to be celebrated or decried. Thus, one notes the sense of authority with which Primorac (2006) argues that Samkange’s The Mourned One “belongs to a genre Bakhtin calls the biographical novel [which] narrates the typical aspects of any life course: birth, childhood, school years, marriage, the fate that life brings, works and deeds, death and so forth” (p. 27). Her verdict on Nyamfukudza’s The Non-Believers Journey is equally authoritative:

It is tempting to relate Nyamfukudza’s novel to Bakhtin’s definition of the Bildungsroman: but although Nyamfukudza’s narrative follows its hero—the “non-believer,” Sam Mapfeka, who, in 1974, travels from an urban township to a war-torn rural area to attend a family funeral—to the very brink of Bakhtinian personal emergence, this, in fact, does not happen. (Primorac, 2006, p. 28)

The emphasis on literary-critical approaches associated with Bakhtin, Peles, Bal, and Flaker in Primorac’s work expands the reach of the Zagreb version of Eurocentric literary-critical theories. Using these theories, she concludes that the Black Zimbabwean novel is underdeveloped on account of what she perceives as its failure to satisfy Eurocentric literary-critical expectations:

Taken collectively, the twelve novels analyzed by this book tell the story of the impossibility, in Zimbabwe, of telling a story of such a double emergence: no young person in any of the novels is shown emerging “along with the world.” The novels that attempt to tell such stories (Nervous Conditions and Harvest of Thorns) establish truncated versions of the genre. Others (Echoing Silences and The Stone Virgins) read like bitter distortions of it. Yet others (by Hove and again Vera) represent static characters in static worlds, or (Zenzele) point at narratives of emergence as absent. (Primorac, 2006, p. 176)

For Primorac, the Black Zimbabwean novel is to be classified as developed in keeping with the extent to which it satisfies the letter and spirit of Eurocentric literary-critical rubrics. This expectation does not consider the context in which the authors write, the history they have to reconstruct, the culture and traditions they have to reclaim, and the people they have to rehumanize in the aftermath of centuries of abasement (Fanon, 1967b). In contrast to Primorac’s commitment to rather rigid generic classifications, emphasis in the study of the Black Zimbabwean novel is to be applied on the ways in which it advances the struggles of African people to spell their proper name (Baldwin, 1963). In that regard, the Black Zimbabwean novel becomes a repository of the experiences and aspirations of Zimbabwean people. The experiences and aspirations that the Black Zimbabwean novel embody constitute what p’Bitek (1986) has called “ammunition for one big battle, the battle to decide where we are going and the kind of society we are building” (p. 13). For Achebe, the big battle that p’Bitek refers to is the task of reeducation and regeneration that has to be undertaken in order to set Zimbabweans on the road to authentic self-determination. In the unfolding of that task, the Black Zimbabwean novel occupies center-stage as “a storehouse of images, symbols, words, narratives and ideas that we are free to use, if we feel called to such work, for invoking a future made of the best values we can know” (Armah, 2006, p. 262). This is in addition to the numerous aesthetic functions that it fulfills in the society’s being and becoming.

Emphasis on the satisfaction of this or that aspect of Eurocentric literary-critical rubrics scuttles the significance of the Black Zimbabwean novel in the quest to self-name and self-define. While the novel may have originated in Europe, the uses to which it is put as it is assimilated into the different cultures of the world cannot be the same as those to which Europeans put it. Every culture has priorities and challenges that inform how artists handle and utilize various art genres at their disposal. The expectation that the novel in a non-European context should be analyzed on the basis of Eurocentric benchmarks disregards the journey that the genre has traversed, its limitations in the midst of new cultural territories, the modifications it has experienced in its peregrinations, and the capacity of receiving cultures to suggest literary-critical theories on the basis of which their versions of the genre are to be read.

The Bakhtinian idea of the novel is also emphasized by other White critics of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Gaylard (1999) embraces this concept, arguing that it is “not only inclusive of difference and otherness but occurs outside of conventional time and space” (p. 85). As a literary-critical rubric, carnival entails the tendency to dispense with established ways of seeing and doing things. While it embodies possibilities for both innovation and anarchy, Gaylard limits himself to carnival as innovation. This links his work quite easily with Veit-Wild’s in which the yoking together of often incongruent concepts in a work of art is celebrated as a mark of creative genius. Carnival is at the heart of the Menippean novel which, according to Gaylard (1999), is a genre whose significance in African literature is to be found in the fact that it “attempt[s] to expand the traditionally Africanist or nativist boundaries of the African novel” in the context of the view that “the whole world is now what Marcuse called a global village . . . which a Menippean type approach could address” (Gaylard, 1999, p. 80). What is not stated in this and kindred assertions is that the Eurocentric option from which the Menippean novel originates is merely one approach toward data in a world that teems with cultures and civilizations, most of which are more ancient than White/European culture and civilization. By centering the European-originated Menippean novel as the best genre with which to explore global village exigencies, Gaylard resists countenancing the fact that “[w]e all possess the cultural capacity to see, explain, and interpret from the vantage point of our existential location” (Asante, 1998, p. 23). His emphasis on the importance of Eurocentric literary-critical theories in the discussion of the Black Zimbabwean novel reinforces grand narratives of European supremacy that inspired the perception of non-Europeans as less than human and therefore suitable for enslavement and colonization.

Afrocentric Literary-Critical Theories in Eurocentric Critical Thought

The passion with which Eurocentric critics argue for the universality, normativity, and indispensability of Eurocentric literary-critical theories in the criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel is also palpable in their negation of Afrocentric literary-critical theories. This is particularly implied in the packaging of Afrocentric literary-critical theories as mimetic and reductionist. This view is emphasized without due regard of the fact that every literary tradition is a way of making sense of the world. The way(s) in which any given people look at the world and make sense of it constitute(s) their culture. A people’s literature is inseparable from their culture, given that it is part of the assemblage of instruments that they use to interpret the world. The critical appreciation of any given literary canon is, of necessity, the criticism of the culture from which the literature is emerging. Therefore, to study the Black Zimbabwean novel is to study part of the body of efforts made by Zimbabwean people “in the sphere of thought and action to describe, justify and praise the action through which they have created and kept themselves in existence” (Fanon, 1967b, p. 188). The study of others and their culture is in itself an act of imposition which, in most cases, unfolds from the critic’s point of grounding in his or her culture. The process involves harnessing perspectives in a given body of thought and bringing them to bear on another body of thought. Eurocentric critical thought goes beyond this, focusing on Afrocentric literary-critical theories as incapable of facilitating the scientific study of the Black Zimbabwean novel:

As a postgraduate student at the University of Zimbabwe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the recipient of a strangely male-centered, streamlined and polarized version of Africa’s literary history. The MA course I took on “African Literature and Ideological Thought” was informed by a combination of Afrocentric and Marxist ideas: on the reading list, there were both the founders of Pan-African nationalism (some of whom advocated the return “home” of the African diaspora), and Lenin’s treatise on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. When it came to literary texts, the course represented a succession of literary texts as a gradual (although not straightforward) progression towards a pre-set goal: a “correct” representation of the essence of “African reality,” which was tied to the anti-colonial struggle and the ideals of national and cultural liberation. Writers’ achievement was measured in terms of their texts’ perceived proximity to this goal; that is to say, the relative “correctness” of their style and “vision.” For example: the socialist orientation and “realist” stylistic accessibility of Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiong’o were praised as “authentic,” while the quasi-modernist stylistic opacity and mysticism of the Nigerian Wole Soyinka was condemned as un-African, despite (paradoxically) the use Soyinka made of Yoruba myths and beliefs. (Primorac, 2006, p. 7)

Primorac depicts Afrocentricity, Pan-Africanism, and other literary-critical ideas deriving from them as detrimental to the development of the canon. Through recollections of how her graduate professors at the University of Zimbabwe in the late 1980s to early 1990s framed debates on African literature, she dismisses Afrocentric literary-critical theories as strange and rigid. She queries the Pan-African historical background that accompanies the birth and development of Afrocentric literary-critical theories. Given that the Black Zimbabwean novel emerged as part of the African imaginative response to colonialism, reference to Pan-African nationalist consciousness is unavoidable as part of the effort to explore the corpus within the confines of its Afrocentric mandate to “deepen and expand its people’s awareness of their world . . . clarify their history and identity, and prompt them to correct action, throw light on [their] society’s moral problems and supply inspiring examples” (Chinweizu, 1987, p. 258). Understandably, Primorac looks at this chapter in the history of Zimbabwe in terms of the high expectations for inclusion created by the advent of independence. She struggles to countenance the prescriptive nature of the ideas she was exposed to, presumably because they echoed the violence and dictatorship of the colonial yesteryear. However, her description of Pan-African and Afrocentric approaches to the Black Zimbabwean novel as “strange” inscribes the very binaries that she sets out to indict.

Primorac’s discomfiture with Afrocentric literary-critical theories could be linked to the thinking that these theories are meant to replace the hegemony of Eurocentric literary-critical theories with a hegemony of their own in the study of the Black Zimbabwean novel. It also speaks to the aversion of Eurocentric scholars toward radicalized African thought in which reference to Pan-Africanism demonstrates that the theories are not emerging in a context devoid of blueprints. By harking back to the vision of the founders of Pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity captures the collective interests linking African struggles across time and space. This bears witness to the importance of memory in literary-critical discourse. As Achebe (1988), Wa Thiong’o (1997), and Asante (1998) have since made clear, the loss of memory renders the identification and pursuit of any set of priorities impossible. In fact, a people who lose sight of their memory are more than likely to suffer misrepresentation as “marginal . . . [and] detached from place and purpose” (Asante, 1999, p. 96).

Primorac (2006) also argues that Afrocentric literary-critical theories are inspired by rural orature and a pristine African cultural past that can no longer be recovered:

In terms of methodologies of reading, the course was further informed by Ngugi’s own thoughts on “decolonizing the mind,” and by an earlier debate on the direction of African literature spearheaded by the Nigerian critic, Chinweizu. Chinweizu and his co-authors wanted African writers to develop an aesthetics inspired by rural “orature” (oral literature) and to refrain from “Western,” modernist-inspired stylistic experimentation practiced by Soyinka and others . . . They assumed that cultural purity could be recovered in postcolonial Africa through firmly fixing and separating “African” from “non-African” identities and cultural traits. (p. 7)

African orature is a dynamic and adaptable cultural resource that “draw[s] from an oral tradition that is still very much alive” (Obiechina, 1993, p. 220). The uses to which Ignatius Mabasa puts Shona folklore in Mapenzi (1999) vindicates this. In that novel, Mabasa “uses the Shona people’s oral art forms to overcome both self-censorship and real or imagined state censorship” (Mutasa & Muwati, 2009, p. 157). Thus, as an aspect of the Black Zimbabwean novel, folklore diversifies writers’ narrative options while endorsing the staying power of African knowledge economies. In continental African literature, Chinua Achebe’s and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s international acclaim is inseparable from their grounding in African orature. Achebe’s (1958) Things Fall Apart, for instance, has a total of nine embedded oral narratives, comprising myths, folktales, and pseudo-history. As Obiechina (1993) argues, each of these oral narratives

brings something to the total meaning of the novel, some insight to clarify the action, to sharpen characterization, to elaborate themes and enrich the setting and environment of action [b]ut [m]ost importantly . . . to define the epistemological order in the novel. (p. 205)

The same holds for Armah’s (1968) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in which “there are at least three embedded [oral narratives] . . . all framed in the context of a critique of post-colonial Ghana, its politics and its ruling class . . . to reinforce the parabolic texture of the novel and to give it thematic direction and sharpen its moral force” (Obiechina, 1993, p. 222).

Primorac’s analysis of Afrocentric literary-critical theories also involves the negation of decolonization in the aftermath of centuries of European conceptual domination in Africa. As a concern of primary importance in Afrocentric literary-critical theories, decolonization accentuates the need for African people to “dismantle supremacist beliefs and the structures which uphold them in every area of African life” (Chinweizu, 1987, p. 6) without promoting “ignorance of foreign traditions” (Chinweizu, 1987, p. 6). What makes this important is that the mind is the principal arena on which liberation commences. Without decolonization, previously colonized people remain the slaves that imperialism intends them to be. The alarm that Primorac registers with regard to decolonization in Afrocentric literary-critical theories evinces that while the need for the phenomenon

exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized . . . [its] possibility . . . is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women; the colonizers. (Fanon, 1967a, p. 27)

Emphasis on decolonization in Afrocentric literary-critical theories testifies to the realization that European domination of Africa is “accompanied by a relentless cultural and psychological rape . . . [which creates] a stultifying intellectual mystification that prevents Europe’s victims from thinking in a manner that would lead to authentic self-determination” (Ani, 1994, p. 1). Given that “[t]he minds of African people are still crowded with the image of Europeans as superior beings” (Ani, 1994, p. xxi), Afrocentric literary-critical theories on the Black Zimbabwean novel cannot avoid centering decolonization if Eurocentric epistemic violence is to be contained. Decolonization constitutes a call to intellectual arms. It embellishes African literary-critical discourse with a dimension that clears space for hitherto suppressed African knowledge economies to take their place as part of Wa Thiong’o (1993, 2012, 2016a, 2016b) has called “a common global culture” in which all cultural flowers have the opportunity to bloom.

Primorac’s challenges with Afrocentric literary-critical theories in the criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel are anticipated in Gaylard’s (1999) contention that “[t]he younger generation of African artists does not want to bind itself to folklore and tales, because it is precisely this imposed restriction to the exotic, and in the end, to the primitive that entails an acceptance of Western hegemony” (p. 99). What is left unsaid here is that in the development of Afrocentric literary-critical theories, emphasis is not so much on the retrieval of pristine African culture but the centering of African cultural values that are instructive in developing ideas that liberate and empower African people. Gaylard, like Primorac, looks at African folklore as primitive. His views reminisce erstwhile European anthropological scholarship in which Africa is cast as the home of the exotic. This perspective invents differences between Africa and Europe in favor of the latter. It flourishes in the context of the European realization that cultural genocide is indispensable in the bid to make slaves out of a given group of people.

African folklore embodies the experiences and teachings of African ancients. Although it has its roots in the past, it is neither archaic nor fixated on the past. Thus, while Gaylard argues that the so-called younger generation of African novelists do not desire to be bound to folklore, a number of them actually make conscious and extensive use of it. Dambudzo Marechera is one Zimbabwean novelist whom Gaylard identifies as averse to African folklore. In his award-winning novella, The House of Hunger, Marechera (1978) derives some of his imagery and symbolism from African folklore. The story entitled “The Resilience of Human Roots” (Marechera, 1978, p. 128) in which a young man rebels against his father and travels to a distant place where he finds freedom and returns home to be met by the same father who declares authoritatively that “[a]ll this time you thought you were actually away from me, you have been right here in my palm” derives from Black Zimbabwean folklore. The same story also makes reference to man-fish and humans who metamorphose into various kinds of animals in keeping with narrative tendencies in African folklore. Charles Mungoshi (1975) also draws substantially from African folklore in his novels, particularly his internationally-acclaimed Waiting for the Rain. In this novel, the Old Man, Old Mandisa, and Garabha epitomize the contemporary provenance of African folklore. As occupants of the chair of African history and culture in the novel, they serve as the vehicles through which Mungoshi’s viewpoints are channeled. The Old man, for instance, is the custodian of “drum culture” (Vambe, 2004, p. 55) which, as Vambe (2004) further notes, “is a form of spiritual scaffolding that provides reassurance about the undying testament of ‘traditional’ African culture in the face of the colonialist onslaught” (p. 55). In addition to the Old Man, Old Mandisa and Garabha, the importance of African folklore in Mungishi’s Waiting for the Rain is also evinced by Matandangoma, the diviner who digs into African folklore to emerge with the Magaba folktale in a last-minute attempt to save Lucifer, the novel’s anti-hero, from impending destruction. While Vambe (2004) argues persuasively for the ambivalence of the author’s vision in this novel, Mungoshi’s perspective on African folklore is clear in the Old Man’s elation when he realizes that Garabha’s song and tune are not any of the old war chants but “something that the boy has made up himself . . . with the unerring ear of the old musicians” (Mungoshi, 1975, p. 165).

Conclusion

The inclination to quote approvingly from European critical theorists and the reluctance to refer to Afrocentric literary-critical theories except when they are to be undermined bear witness to the selected critics’ commitment to ensuring primacy for Eurocentric literary-critical theories in the study of the Black Zimbabwean novel. By claiming exclusive entitlement to “space,” “voice,” and “authority” for Eurocentric literary-critical theories, Veit-Wild and Primorac reduce Black Zimbabwean novelists to mere apprentices in the use of borrowed implements while portraying Eurocentric literary-critical criteria as universal, normative, and indispensable. This facilitates the reading of the Black Zimbabwean novel in ways that promote only the kind of discourse that Eurocentric scholars are comfortable with. In the process, the nuances of Afrocentric narratives of revolutionary agency, resistance, and self-determination are played down and myths to the effect that Africa is the land of epistemic insolvency and philosophical emptiness that were at the center of the colonial pillaging of Africa are bestowed with a new lease of life.