by Solomon, Barbara H. (EDT); Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. (EDT)
Interactions
A number of stories depict characters who either meet briefly or live alongside one another because of circumstances, but who are very different in background, education, values, perspectives, ambitions, and economic or social status. They are often of different races, of different religions, from different European nations, grew up in urban or rural environments, and have been transplanted to unfamiliar or uncongenial locations. Some are attempting to adapt to their new circumstances, some to dominate others, and often poverty and hard labor are the challenges they face. In some interactions, characters try to exploit or take advantage of another whom they perceive as weaker or lacking in power or status.
In Nadine Gordimer’s “Inkalamu’s Place,” a first-person narrator who has not lived in Africa for many years revisits a grand house she had known as a child, when she accompanied her father to visit a pretentious Englishman who had sired children by his several native wives. He gloried in a privileged status he would never have achieved in England, and the narrator recalls him giving her candy while his own children stood watching, empty-handed, in the background. As she notes the ways in which the abandoned house is decaying and being destroyed by the elements, she is quite pleased to see the deterioration of this symbol of the old order.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Cages” depicts the life of an isolated, poor clerk in a grocery shop. Hamid’s world has so contracted that he hardly ever leaves the shop and would have no destination if he did. The appearance one day of a new customer, an attractive young girl, fills him with longing. Hamid idealizes her as a girl who must be courted with songs and acts of courage, but with a few teasing remarks, she will dramatically disillusion this lonely and sad young man.
In Es’kia Mphahlele’s “Mrs. Plum,” which is set in a suburb of apartheid Johannesburg, a black woman recounts her experience working for an affluent white woman. The employer, Mrs. Plum, insists on using her servant’s African name, Karabo, as well as having meals together. Mrs. Plum is a devoted activist, writing and campaigning on behalf of equal treatment and rights for black South Africans. She is glad that Karabo attends the Black Crow, a club where domestics meet on their Thursday afternoons off. She has no idea that the women there have a black teacher who tells them there can be no friendship between a servant and her master. On the other hand, when the police arrive at Mrs. Plum’s house to conduct an invasive search of her servants’ rooms, she turns the garden hose on them and is arrested. Given a choice by the court of paying a small fine or going to prison for fourteen days, she chooses the prison term. On the surface, it appears that no one could do more on behalf of the oppressed black people of South Africa, but Karabo will learn how wide the chasm is that divides blacks from whites and servants from those who employ them.
In Grace Ogot’s “The Middle Door,” the first-person narrator, Mrs. Muga, is an affluent writer, married to a Nairobi doctor. She has two unexpected encounters with strangers during the long train trip she is taking. The first is with a village woman who is traveling with a live rooster as well as a bunch of bananas and a sack of maize flour. Mrs. Muga repeatedly thinks about the amount of money she has paid to travel in her first-class sleeping compartment and she is determined to rid herself of the interloper. The presence of two policemen in an adjoining compartment at first provides the narrator with a sense of security. But they have concluded that she is an expensive prostitute available to men on the train. Trying to force their way into her compartment in the middle of the night, they display their contempt for women and their conviction that as police officers they can do anything they please with impunity.
In E. C. Osondu’s “Voice of America,” the interaction occurs between two people who never meet: a young man in his Nigerian village and an American high school student living on a farm in Iowa. Onwordi becomes the pen pal of Laura Williams, and her letter becomes a spark igniting the imagination of every boy in this group of friends. Perhaps, they conjecture, she will be willing to send Onwordi some money; perhaps he could become her boyfriend, even marry her and offer to move to America to be with her. Laura’s few letters inspire glorious dreams and hopes for a romantic and luxurious future.
In Zoë Wicomb’s “N2,” a couple with a tense relationship, Mary and Harold, are traveling home on the N2 highway, a little nervous about being on the road late at night, having seen three black men dressed only in loincloths running across it earlier in the day. When their car, a silver Mercedes-Benz, has a flat tire, Harold is frustrated and angry at his inability to unscrew the bolts of the wheel to replace the tire with the spare. Themba, a tall, broad-shouldered black man, appears from a strip of bush along the road. Mary is so frightened by his appearance on the lonely highway that she aims a gun she carries in her purse at Themba. But his only intention is to help them, and Harold is embarrassed that this young man is able to do what he lacked the strength to accomplish. All in all, this is not the friendly encounter between equals that it might have been between people of the same race, but one of new and uneasy relationships.
Couples
Two vastly different stories depict married couples: “Earth Love” by Bessie Head, and “The Suit” by Can Themba. Head’s story is somewhat unusual in that it does not dramatize any conflict or problem to be resolved, as most fiction does. In “Earth Love,” the husband returns home to his wife and children after two months away in the bush. He has been successfully collecting animal skins that can be made into a blanket and sold. His gesture of feeding a nearby kitten reveals his kindly nature. The contentment of this couple is nicely contrasted with the behavior of others as his wife tells him the news of the village. Neighbors have become drunk, brutally beaten one another, had adulterous affairs, or been fired from their jobs for disgraceful behavior, but this pair, quiet, thoughtful, and well-suited, have made a good home for themselves and their children.
Themba’s “The Suit” begins with a loving husband, Philemon, taking great pains not to disturb his sleeping wife, Tilly, as the day begins. He will prepare and serve a breakfast on a tray to her in bed. This contented man is shocked to be told that his wife has had a lover for three months, a man who arrives every morning after Philemon has left for work. When he returns home after hearing this news, he catches Tilly in bed with her lover. A bitter Philemon does not humiliate his wife in public, does not send her away, does not seem to vary from the contented routine he once enjoyed. Tilly mistakenly thinks that her husband will come to forgive or ignore her adultery, but this is not the case; instead, her furious and disillusioned husband will punish her endlessly for her transgression.
Political Turmoil, Violence, and Injustice
A considerable number of African stories and novels depict the historical and contemporary oppression and institutional brutality of much of the continent. Tribal hostilities that once led to warfare waged with spears or machetes now lead to civil wars with modern weapons. Many who once dreamed of the glory of freedom from European rule now face the bitter experience of deprivation, injustice, and cruelty at the hands of their own people.
In “Eighteen-Ninety-Nine,” Olive Schreiner chronicles the life of an unnamed Boer woman whose first memory is that of a Zulu attack on a group of Boer settlers, including her parents, traveling in the Northern Transvaal to escape British rule. She and her cousin, the only survivors of that massacre, are adopted by a Boer family that settles close to the Witwatersrand. A strong and clever woman, she leads the life of a hardworking farm wife, a life marked by daily toil and isolation but also by the satisfaction of raising her sons, husbanding their stock, and bringing in successful crops of maize, pumpkins, sweet cane, and melons. Her hopes for the future are all focused on her grandson, Jan, who demonstrates his fine character and intelligence as a young boy. While there are many stained-glass windows in the churches of Scotland and England that are memorials to the brave British who lost their lives in the conflict with the Boers, this story serves as a moving
memorial to those who fell on the Boer side.
Ironically, the violent events in Alex La Guma’s “The Lemon Orchard” occur in a field that is touched by silvery moonlight and perfumed by the scent of the rows of lemon trees. In stark contrast to the setting, a group of at least five white men is marching their black prisoner, with bound wrists, to a spot where they plan to whip him severely—to teach him his place. Their victim’s offense: being “cheeky.” That is, he has had the temerity to bring two white men before a magistrate, seeking damages because they had beaten him. Referring to him as a “hotnot,” they demand that their captive display his submission by responding with the words “Yes, baas.”
In “Lomba,” Helon Habila dramatizes a year in the life of a prisoner, a political detainee awaiting his trial that will probably never take place. A journalist, Lomba is accused of organizing antigovernment demonstrations, even though he was only covering the protest as a reporter. He describes the prison’s physical conditions, the rats, mosquitoes, lice, beatings by guards, and the punishment by days in solitary confinement. Even more devastating is the psychological toll: the loneliness, the hopelessness, the loss of one’s identity and sense of humanity. “Lomba” captures the plight of those who live in a land in which the powerful—often the legal military leaders—can do as they wish and the accused can be made to disappear behind prison walls.
The diverse stories in this collection reflect the lives of characters struggling to survive grinding poverty, tyrannical governments, cultural upheavals, and disintegrating relationships. Despite all of the very particular details of distant locations, readers can recognize and identify with the universal human condition that emerges at the heart of African fiction. Sadly, some of the authors whose stories appear in this collection have paid a heavy price for their commitment to the accurate depiction of life in Africa as they know it. In some instances, they have been physically attacked, made the victims of intimidation, or forced to flee their own countries to live in exile abroad. The work that they have created endures as a testament to the courage of the artists who attempted to bring insight, order, and meaning to a world that is often violent or chaotic.
LEILA ABOULELA
Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. She grew up in Sudan, studying at the Khartoum American School and a Catholic missionary high school. Graduated from the University of Khartoum in 1985 with a degree in statistics, she earned M.Sc and M.Phil degrees at the London School of Economics. Aboulela was awarded the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for the story “The Museum” and published the story collection Coloured Lights in 2001. She is the author of three novels: Minaret (2005), The Translator (a New York Times Notable Book in 2006), and Lyrics Alley (fiction winner of the Scottish Book Awards in 2011). All of these novels were long-listed for the Orange Prize. Aboulela, who has lived in Abu Dhabi and Aberdeen, currently lives in Qatar.
The Museum
(1997)
At first Shadia was afraid to ask him for his notes. The earring made her afraid; the straight long hair that he tied up with a rubber band. She had never seen a man with an earring and such long hair. But then she had never known such cold, so much rain. His silver earring was the strangeness of the West, another culture shock. She stared at it during classes, her eyes straying from the white scribbles on the board. Most times she could hardly understand anything. Only the notation was familiar. But how did it all fit together? How did this formula lead to this? Her ignorance and the impending exams were horrors she wanted to escape. His long hair was a dull colour between yellow and brown. It reminded her of a doll she had when she was young. She had spent hours combing that doll’s hair, stroking it. She had longed for such straight hair. When she went to Paradise she would have hair like that. When she ran it would fly behind her; if she bent her head down it would fall over her like silk and sweep the flowers on the grass. She watched his ponytail move as he wrote and then looked up at the board. She pictured her doll, vivid suddenly, after years, and felt sick that she was daydreaming in class, not learning a thing.
The first days of term, when the classes started for the M.Sc. in Statistics, she was like someone tossed around by monstrous waves—battered, as she lost her way to the different lecture rooms, fumbled with the photocopying machine, could not find anything in the library. She could scarcely hear or eat or see. Her eyes bulged with fright, watered from the cold. The course required a certain background, a background she didn’t have. So she floundered, she and the other African students, the two Turkish girls, and the men from Brunei. Asafa, the short, round-faced Ethiopian, said, in his grave voice—as this collection from the Third World whispered their anxieties in grim Scottish corridors, the girls in nervous giggles—“Last year, last year a Nigerian on this very same course committed suicide. Cut his wrists.”
Us and them, she thought. The ones who would do well, the ones who would crawl and sweat and barely pass. Two predetermined groups. Asafa, generous and wise (he was the oldest), leaned over and whispered to Shadia: “The Spanish girl is good. Very good.” His eyes bulged redder than Shadia’s. He cushioned his fears every night in the university pub; she only cried. Their countries were next-door neighbours but he had never been to Sudan, and Shadia had never been to Ethiopia. “But we meet in Aberdeen!” she had shrieked when this information was exchanged, giggling furiously. Collective fear had its euphoria.
“That boy Bryan,” said Asafa, “is excellent.”
“The one with the earring?”
Asafa laughed and touched his own unadorned ear. “The earring doesn’t mean anything. He’ll get the Distinction. He was an undergraduate here; got First Class Honours. That gives him an advantage. He knows all the lecturers, he knows the system.”
So the idea occurred to her of asking Bryan for the notes of his graduate year. If she strengthened her background in stochastic processes and time series, she would be better able to cope with the new material they were bombarded with every day. She watched him to judge if he was approachable. Next to the courteous Malaysian students, he was devoid of manners. He mumbled and slouched and did not speak with respect to the lecturers. He spoke to them as if they were his equals. And he did silly things. When he wanted to throw a piece of paper in the bin, he squashed it into a ball and aimed it at the bin. If he missed, he muttered under his breath. She thought that he was immature. But he was the only one who was sailing through the course.
The glossy handbook for overseas students had explained about the “famous British reserve” and hinted that they should be grateful, things were worse further south, less “hospitable.” In the cafeteria, drinking coffee with Asafa and the others, the picture of “hospitable Scotland” was something different. Badr, the Malaysian, blinked and whispered, “Yesterday our windows got smashed; my wife today is afraid to go out.”
“Thieves?” asked Shadia, her eyes wider than anyone else’s.
“Racists,” said the Turkish girl, her lipstick chic, the word tripping out like silver, like ice.
Wisdom from Asafa, muted, before the collective silence: “These people think they own the world . . .” and around them the aura of the dead Nigerian student. They were ashamed of that brother they had never seen. He had weakened, caved in. In the cafeteria, Bryan never sat with them. They never sat with him. He sat alone, sometimes reading the local paper. When Shadia walked in front of him he didn’t smile. “These people are strange . . . One day they greet you, the next day they don’t . . .”
On Friday afternoon, as everyone was ready to leave the room after Linear Models, she gathered her courage and spoke to Bryan. He had spots on his chin and forehead, was taller than her, restless, as if he was in a hurry to go somewhere else. He put his calculator back in its case, his pen in his pocket. She asked him for his notes, and his blue eyes behind his glasses took on the blankest look she had ever seen in her life. What was all the surprise
for? Did he think she was an insect? Was he surprised that she could speak?
A mumble for a reply, words strung together. So taken aback, he was. He pushed his chair back under the table with his foot.
“Pardon?”
He slowed down, separated each word. “Ah’ll have them for ye on Monday.”
“Thank you.” She spoke English better than he did! How pathetic. The whole of him was pathetic. He wore the same shirt every blessed day. Grey and white stripe.
* * *
On the weekends, Shadia never went out of the halls and, unless someone telephoned long-distance from home, she spoke to no one. There was time to remember Thursday nights in Khartoum: a wedding to go to with Fareed, driving in his red Mercedes. Or the club with her sisters. Sitting by the pool drinking lemonade with ice, the waiters all dressed in white. Sometimes people swam at night, dived in the water—dark like the sky above. Here, in this country’s weekend of Saturday and Sunday, Shadia washed her clothes and her hair. Her hair depressed her. The damp weather made it frizz up after she straightened it with hot tongs. So she had given up and now wore it in a bun all the time, tightly pulled back away from her face, the curls held down by pins and Vaseline Tonic. She didn’t like this style, her corrugated hair, and in the mirror her eyes looked too large. The mirror in the public bathroom, at the end of the corridor to her room, had printed on it: “This is the face of someone with HIV.” She had written about this mirror to her sister, something foreign and sensational like hail, and cars driving on the left. But she hadn’t written that the mirror made her feel as if she had left her looks behind in Khartoum.