Revisiting Emily Thompson’s MA Thesis on the Cameroonian Postcolonial Novel

By Dr. Peter Vakunta

In a 59-page document titled “Nation and Identity: Post-colonial Aspects of the Cameroonian Novel” prepared in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of a Master’s degree in literature at the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, Ms. Emily Thompson embarks on the breathtaking trajectory of unraveling the nexus between historicity, colonial legacy, linguistics and ethnic nationalisms, as well as the ramifications of all these for literary creativity in postcolonial Cameroon.

To accomplish this mammoth task, Thompson selects a corpus of five novels written by Anglophone and Francophone Cameroonians: Taboo Love (Ngongwikuo, 1980), The White Man of God (Jumbam, 1980), A Nose for Money (Nyamnjoh, 2006), Les chauves-souris (Nanga, 1980), C’est le soleil qui m'a brûlée (Beyala, 1987) and Triple Agent Double Cross (Tisi, 2002).

Thompson provides no rationale for selecting these particular novels which not only belong in different socio-linguistic molds (French and English) but are also separated by a time-span of twenty years (three novels written in the 80’s one written in 2002 and another in 2006). She simply states:

In this work I have chosen to consider the following novels: A Nose for Money (2006) by Francis Nyamnjoh, 2006), The White Man of God (1980) by Jumbam,Taboo Love (1980) by Joseph Ngongwikuo, Triple Agent Double Cross (2002) by Janvier  Tisi, Les chauves-souris (1980) by Bernard Nanga, and C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée (1987)by Calixte Beyala. Translations of all sources are my own work and can be found immediately following the quotes in the footnotes (1).

The importance of rationalizing her choice of novels might have eluded Thompson. However, it is my conviction that being apprised of her motivations for choosing these novels out of hundreds of equally interesting novels written by Cameroonians on both sides of the Mungo would have shed ample light on the relevance of these texts to the ambit of her research. On this count the researcher ‘sins’ by omission. Given the scope of her project and time constraints, Thompson should have taken the sagacious decision of analyzing fewer novels in-depth to drive her point home rather than embrace several texts and provide a rather superficial critical analysis. 

Literature review is conspicuously absent from Thompson’s work. After the introduction (chapter one), readers expect to read a literature review, a synopsis of the theoretical foundations that underpin Thompson’s research problem and methodology. Surprisingly, she delves head-on into a reading of the novels. Here is how she introduces Chapter Two: “Chapter two compares the use of authenticity discourse and mimicry in two novels, The White Man of God (1980) by Kenjo Jumbam and Taboo Love (1980) by Joseph Anchangnayuouh Ngongwikuo as a call to resistance to European hegemony”(2). She then proceeds to pad her work with historical minutiae that does not disambiguate her unsubstantiated stance on this issue.

Further, she broaches the critical question of language choice in African literature when she observes that “Most Cameroonian writers have opted to write in either French or English, substituting words from indigenous languages where adequate expressions were absent in the colonial language”(8). A succinct literature review would have come in handy here. By not adumbrating the contradistinctive views expressed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe on the problematic use of European languages in writing African literature, Thompson’s work appears slanted, the moreso because  Ngugi has argued repeatedly that  to qualify as African,  African literature has to  be written in indigenous languages. He posits: “Literature written by Africans in European languages… can only be termed Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages” (Deocolonizing  the Mind, 27).On the other hand, Achebe maintains:

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suits its new African surroundings. (Morning yet, 62)

It is imperative to point out that Ngugi and Achebe do not share the same views as regards the use of European languages as media for the writing of African literature. This sort of comparative analysis would have enabled Thompson to argue her case more powerfully and convincingly.

It must be borne in mind that language choice in African literature is an identity marker in itself. When writers give pride of place to indigenous languages over imperial languages or resort to indigenized forms of colonial languages (Camfranglais in Cameroon, Nouchi in Cote d’Ivoire, Creole in the Caribbean and so on) as opposed to metropolitan versions of the ex-colonizer’s language, that choice in itself constitutes cultural nationalism. It is in this light that Ashcroft et al contend in The Empire Writes Back (1989) that colonized peoples respond to colonial legacy by writing back to the imperial center from the empire. This comes about as indigenous peoples begin to write their own histories, their own literatures, using the ex-colonizer’s language.

An illuminating approach to the study of the Cameroonian postcolonial novel could be derived from the works of Franz Fanon (1959, 1961, and 1967) and Albert Memmi (1965). These writers locate the principal tenet of postcolonial African literature in the imperial/colonial dialectics. In the process of indigenization, language is adopted and utilized in various ways to express widely differing cultural experiences, for in one sense, all postcolonial literatures are cross-cultural given that they negotiate a space between two different cultural spheres.

It is hard to imagine why Thompson did not see the need for a literature review that would have enlightened her on the theories that undergird literary interpretation in the African context. In his discussion on the nexus between Nation and Narrative, Homi K. Bhabha (1990) provides a succinct analysis of the interface between resistance and the notion of the third space in postcolonial literatures. As he puts it, “The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (211). A reading of seminal theoretical works like Quayson’s Post-colonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000), Obiechina’s Culture,Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (1982), Ngugi, wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), and Irele’s The African Experience in Literature and Ideology(1981), The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (2001), Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism (1993) by Jonathan White and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays(1981) by Mikhail Bakhtin would have provided Thompson with a sturdy theoretical framework on which to base her exegesis. These works discuss, among other things, the theme of mimicry and linguistic appropriation in the postcolonial novel which Thompson tackles superficially in her study (13-24).Without this theoretical matrix, her work lacks credibility.

In chapter 3 of her work titled: “Literary Orality: Reification or Resistance” (25-29) she attempts to establish an interface between oral traditions and the contemporary Cameroonian novel. True to herself, she does not fall back on works written by Africans to buttress her thesis. Rather she resorts to Hellenistic theories like those contained in Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1988). I am not discounting the relevance of the postulations made by Ong with regard to the orality-literacy continuum in the novelistic genre. In fact, Ong is credited for being an authoritative voice in this domain of literary studies.

However, this does not make his theories applicable to African Literature, much less Cameroonian literature. Had she read works like African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character and Continuity (1992) by Isidore Okpewho, “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature” in African Studies Review 28.2-3 (1985): 1-72 by Harold Scheub, “Transition from Oral to Literary Tradition” by Emmanuel Obiechina, in Présence Africaine  63.3 (1967):140-161, and Ruth Finnegan’s Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007), it would have dawned on her that the contemporary Cameroonian novel is indeed an offshoot of the traditional oral tale.

The fact that the Cameroonian novel exists as an interface between orality and literacy is a given and should have been made abundantly clear in Thompson’s work.  An intelligible discussion of orality is crucial to her project given that it upholds the view according to which creative writing in Africa is not simply a matter of drawing upon material from the folklore, but essentially of representing such material through the medium of writing, in order to give new expression to forms that already exist in indigenous languages. The predominance of oral traditions as a shaping medium is a determinant in the process through which such material is recreated and brought to a new mode of existence through writing.

In chapter 6 (46-52) Thompson endeavors to shed light on the concept of “African palimpsest” but fails to provide a credible working definition for this important component of Cameroonian literature. A reading of insightful theoretical works on this subject would have been Thompson’s point of departure. In her book titledThe African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991) Chantal Zabus provides an in-depth discussion of this concept. She defines the African palimpsest is as “the writer’s attempt at textualizing linguistic differentiation and conveying African concepts, thought patterns and linguistic concepts through the ex-colonizer’s language” (23). Another book that discusses this notion at length is Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982).

As far as the mechanics of writing go, Thompson’ work leaves much to be desired. Her work lacks coherence. There are no seamless transitions between chapters. A careful reading of the work leaves one with the sore impression that the chapters are disjointed entities held together by some invisible hooks and threads. A thesis is supposed to read seamlessly. The pages are not fraught with grammatical incongruities and orthographical bloopers but I did sport some on pages,14,15,16,18, 29,31,35, 45,47,49,50,52,55, 56, and 59.

In a nutshell, suffice it to say that Thompson’s research is not all grime and gloom. She did a laudable job of providing a socio-cultural  basis for her analysis of the five novels she chose as corpus. My take-away after reading this work is that Thompson was hard pressed for time and had to put together some wishy-washy stuff just to obtain her diploma. Now that it is a done deal, I hope that she will revert and apply her mind to this very important aspect of Cameroonian literature for the sake of posterity.

About the author

Dr. Vakunta is Professor at the United States Department of Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He specializes in postcolonial literatures of Africa and the Caribbean. He has authored several books including, Indigenization of Language in the Francophone Novel: A New Literary Canon (2010), Cry my beloved Africa (2008), Ntarikon (2007), and more. He runs a blog at http://www.vakunta.blogspot.com

 

 

 

Works cited

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Heinemann, 1975.

Aschcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Eds. The Empire Writes

Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London and New

York: Routledge, 1989.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Trans. Daria Olivier  Paris: Gallimard,1978.

____________.The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:  University of Texas Press,1981.

Beyala, Calixte. C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée.Paris: Editions J’ai lu, 1987.

Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.

______________. “The Third Space.” Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. Identity: Community, Culture and Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart,1990.

______________. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans.Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

___________ . Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann, 1968.

Finnegan, Ruth H. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.       

_____________ . Limba Stories and Story-telling. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.

_____________. Oral Poetry.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977.

_____________.  The Oral and beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans.

Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1982.

Irele, Abiola. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London:Heinemann, 1981.

___________. “The African Imagination.” Research in African Literatures 21.1 (1990): 49-67.

___________. Narrative, History, and the African Imagination.” Narrative 1.2(1993)

 ___________. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Jumbam, Kenjo. The White Man of God. Oxford: Heinemann, 1980.

Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Bucket/Chastel, 1957.

Nanga, Bernard. Les chauves-souris. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1980.

Ngongwikuo, Joseph, A. Taboo Love. Hicksville: Exposition, 1980.

Ngugi, wa Thiong’o.  Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean

Literature, Culture and Politics. New York: Lawrence Hill and Co.,1973.

_______________.  Writers in Politics: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1981.

______________ . Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in

African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.

Nyamnjoh,Francis. A Nose for Money. Nairobi: East African publishing,

2006.

Obiechina, Emmanuel. “Transition from Oral to Literary Tradition.”

Présence Africaine  63.3 (1967):  140-161.

_________________. “Problem of Language in African Writing: The Example of the Novel.” The Conch 5.1-2(1973): 11-28.

_________________. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African  Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

________________. Language and Theme: Essays on African Literature.Washington D.C.: Howard Universtity Press, 1990.

Okpewho, Isidore. The Epic in Africa. New York: Columbia University

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______________. “African Poetry: The Modern Writer and the Oral Tradition.” Eds. Jones et al.Oral and Written poetry in African

Literature Today. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988.

______________. The Oral Performance in Africa. Ibadan: Spectrum Books,1990.

______________. African Oral Literature; Backgrounds, Character and

          Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Ong, Walter. The Presence of the Word. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1981.

_____________. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word.

London and New York: Routledge, 1982.

Quayson, Ato. Post-colonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge:Polity Press, 2000.

Scheub Harold. “The Technique of the Expansible Image in Xhosa Ntsomi Performances.” Research in African Literatures 1 (1970): 119-146.

___________.“Translation of African Oral Narrative Performance to the Written Word.”  Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature.(1971): 28-36.

          ___________. “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature.” African Studies   Review 28.2-3 (1985): 1-72.

Thompson, Emily. “Nation and Identity: Post-colonial Aspects of the

Cameroonian Novel.”  MA Thesis.  Masaryk: Masaryk University,  2008.

Tisi,  Janvier. Triple Agent Double Cross. London: Minerva, 2002.

Vakunta, Peter W.  Indigenization of Language in the Francophone

African Novel: A New Literary Canon. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.

White, Jonathan. Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism. Baltimore:The John Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Zabus, Chantal.The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991.

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