Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa. 
Books & arts
Language of literature: The African Francophone novel
A review of ‘Indigenization of Language in the African Francophone Novel: A New Literary Canon’
Ken Walibora Waliaula
2011-12-08, Issue 562
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/78548
Printer friendly version
Peter Vakunta’s ‘Indigenization of Language in the African Francophone Novel: A New Literary Canon’ revisits the age-old question of the language of African literature, with, as the title suggests, the Francophone novel as its centerpiece. Vakunta rehashes the old debate on whether or not African Europhone literature is indeed African as well as sheds light on the tension inherent in the African writer’s choice of a European language to capture his or her African experience.
Using three Francophone Africa novels, namely Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances (Suns of Independence), Nazi Boni’s Crépuscule des temps anciens and Patrick Nganang’s Temps de chien, Vakunta illustrates the extent to which the African novel in French, like its Anglophone counterpart, tends to domesticate or as he puts ‘indigenise’ the language of the European master and to shape and mold it into a peculiarly African character and flavour. This process of indigenisation necessarily, Vakunta posits, entails deconstructing the colonial language.
The book is divided into three chapters besides the introduction and conclusion. In chapter one, Vakunta focuses on the trajectory of conceptual debates regarding post-coloniality. He argues that for the postcolonial African literary text the use of the master’s language is replete with subversive tendencies as well as conscious and unconscious infusion of elements culled from oral tradition. This idea of subversion and infusion of orality into literature is the bedrock of the postcolonial writer’s appropriation of the European and African sources of creative projects. Also, embedded in this fusion of the European and the African elements as building blocks of the Europhone African novel, Vakunta refreshingly argues, is a form of ‘translation’ conceived in very broad terms. In this translation, the African cosmos is translated and therefore made intelligible to the outside world in a European language that is extensively and deliberately Africanised.
Chapter two is preoccupied with the orality-literacy continuum debate, particularly the transition from the oral to the written word in African literature. Reinforcing his broad conception of ‘translation in literature,’ Vakunta argues that the transposition of elements borrowed from folklore into African writing is a form of ‘conscientious translation paradigm’ that typifies the African novel in European languages.
In chapter three Vakunta, embarks on a critical reading of the three carefully selected texts to illustrate numerous instances of his indigenisation premise as a remarkable characteristic of the Francophone African novel. ‘Indigenization of Language in the African Francophone Novel’ is remarkable both in its analysis of primary texts and synthesis of various strands of theoretical and critical debates on the core and inexhaustible question of the language of African literature.
If postcolonial theory is notorious for its selective silence with respect to Francophone literature, then clearly Vakunta’s text is an important step toward filling this void. Despite or because of the so-called death of postcolonial theory, this new title is a welcome addition to the corpus of studies on postcolonial literature originating from the post-colonies in Africa.
Vakunta's language of communication in his new book is clear and accessible to the neophyte and professional alike. Students and professors of African literature would find this theoretical book an indispensable research tool. It is worth its price.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Ken Walibora Waliaula teaches African Literature in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States of America. He is specialist in Swahili studies.
* Peter Vakunta’s ‘Indigenization of Language in the African Francophone Novel: A New Literary Canon’ is published by. New York: Lang Publishing, Inc. New York. 2011, 178pp. Hardcover $72.95. ISBN 978-1433112713
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
Readers' Comments
Let your voice be heard. Comment on this article.