The State Of African Literature In US Ivy League

The US Ivy League university Yale recently ran a search for a professor of 20th-and-21st-century literature.

Upon reviewing the applications, Professor Wai Chee Dimock, a professor of English and American studies at Yale University, was particularly surprised at the number of US graduate students, of all races, working on African literature—nearly one-third of all applicants.

Though she willfully discarded these candidates, stating that one person in her department for the study of the entire content of Africa was enough.

Dimock said: “Already we had hired a senior Africanist, so Africa was not a high priority for us.”

Notwithstanding, of course, the diversity of Africa, its 54 countries, its thousands of languages and cultures, its centuries-long history, and vast literature–more complex than any around the globe.

One and done.

While Yale’s English department only desires a solitary Africanist to represent an entire continent of intellectual wealth, it boasts about 10 faculty members studying 19th-century British literature—a single century, a sole country–a ratio of 10:1, tantamount to a lone stream betwixt a deep ocean.

Even those names who list themselves as Africanists in US departments actually have a primary area of study in some other field. They only also cover Africa, but the continent never spans their primary research agenda.

Why would African students then venture to US and UK schools for study abroad when clearly these countries have no intentions of including them into the fabric of their institutions?

Indeed, Dimock has some tell-tale words for US graduate students studying African literature: “When job seekers are writing about authors the search committee knows nothing about, things could be dicey.”

To some extent, she must believe that would-be professors should cater their interests to the myopic viewpoints of Yale faculty.

If Dimock and colleagues have their way, which I am certain that in New Haven, Connecticut they often do, one has a greater chance of landing a tenure-track job at Yale if he studies some obscure slice of British history than if one tackles the expansive landscape of any African culture.

Why, if you rightly pursue scholastic knowledge to broaden your sense of the world, your enlightened perspectives might just cost you a job at a so-called renowned institution of higher learning. Better then that you master a provincial field of inquiry than risk losing a sought after position at Yale University.

Yale’s sole senior Africanist-to-be (she is not yet on the faculty, although Dimock speaks of her as if she has been there for years ) is Stephanie Newell, a white woman from Sussex University. Needless to say, one white woman from the UK is surely insufficient to adequately representing an entire continent of majority Black people.

But Dimock only considers the majority of Africa and her literature to be summed up by three names:

“To our surprise, almost one-third of the people we ended up interviewing were again working on Africa, and not even the usual suspects: Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer.”

Naming Coetzee and Gordimer, she proudly and quite ignorantly refers to two white South Africans as the hallmarks of African writers.

In fact, more US professors study Coetzee’s works than their combined study of literary works on the rest of the African continent.

To call that problematic would be a gross understatement.

Especially because even John Maxwell Coetzee himself, once in his life course a South African resident, no longer perceives himself to be even South African. Now officially an Australian citizen, he said: “My intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.”

Dimock mentioned that “for the most part, [applicants] were writing about authors [the Yale faculty] had never heard of: Senegal’s Boubacar Boris Diop, Tanzania’s Ebrahim Hussein, Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, Uganda’s Monica Arac de Nyeko, Mozambique’s Mia Couto, Malawi’s Shadreck Chikoti.”

She wrote: “The field seems to have grown up overnight and turned into something no one had foreseen.”

Unbenowst to the charlatan bunch that calls itself the Ivy League, African literature is and has always been alive and thriving.

The collected anthology Africa39, which features writers who are under the age of 40, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, gives a glimpse of where the future of African literature is heading.

A list of African writers is innumerable, quite lengthy to venture to include in a single document.

Chris Abani, Alain Mabanckou, Hisham Matar, Maaza Mengiste, Leila Aboulela, Teju Cole, Laila Lalami, Abdourahman Waberi, Binyavanga Wainain, Dinaw Mengestu, Taiye Selasi, Okey Ndibe, Nnedi Okorafor, Ben Okri, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Sofia Samatar, Veronique Tadjo, Miral al-Tahawi, and Chika Unigwe are merely a few names that come to mind.

And when we speak of writers whose works are in non-European languages, we would need several thousands of pages, if not millions, to hold all of those names.

But it is no surprise that writers like Ebrahim Hussein, Boubacar Boris Diop, Sony Labou Tansi, and Mia Couto evade the Yale faculty’s insular thinking.

Ironically, the university recently honored African writers with its Windham Campbell prize, starting with Zoe Wicomb in 2013 and now including Aminatta Forna, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, and Ivan Vladislavic (indeed, an African sweep of the fiction category).

Perhaps Professor Wai Chee Dimock was absent during the awards ceremony, or maybe selective memory is the culprit.

Dimock pronounces:

Change is in the air. It could be that, in just a few years, “English” departments will be calling themselves “World Anglophone” departments—not the sexiest name, but at least making it clear that the literature being studied is not just from two countries but from every conceivable place of origin, from every part of the world where English is actively used and imaginatively modified by readers and writers with other tongues at their disposal.

Except that her statement is patently false, although facetiously optimistic. Her claim is that the literature in departments like Yale’s stems not only from the UK and the US, but actually is, lest you consider the addition of two white South Africans, wholly encompassing of the world’s English-speaking populations.

Oh, the dishonesties they tell.

African literature is the perpetual emerging genre to some, who endlessly like to declare that African writers are on the verge of coming onto the world stage, as if they never existed.

Instead, what is actually the case is that African contributions are always ignored by those who deceptively fashion themselves to be the intellectuals of the world.

Some Africans are susceptible to believing that schools like the UK’s Oxford or Cambridge or the US’s Ivy League are the beacon of all acumen, that they are the supreme sign of scholarly practice. I would caution those people to accepting these fraudsters and the diplomas they hand out, as the mark of utmost accomplishment.

If for anything else, their treatment of Africa, as if she is non existent, or worse a child amongst mature adults, is despicable.

We know neither to be true.

Africa is the world’s oldest continent, the world’s first civilization, and most certainly will be the last on both fronts.

A response to intimidation or envy, perhaps, the Ivy League is rather dismissive of Africa’s place in world history, present, and future. In particular, they ignore the vast contributions of African literature to world literature.

This is where, my dear Africans, I must implore you to not worship the Ivy League of the US and those faculty who, when Africans write words on a page to form a novel, remark that they must have blossomed overnight into some previously unimaginable form.

Yale faculty, like many in the Ivy League, would prefer not to see African intelligence. They would rather cite American journals on end before they would venture to even read the title of an African journal, much less an abstract.

They would rather ignore the field of African literary study in its entirety, or at the very least, co-opt it as they did Ancient African literature, mathematics, and of course gunpowder.

Many of these departments purport themselves to be the beacons of world Anglophone literature, but to normalize ignorance of Africa’s place in the world is to celebrate falsehoods about both the origins of world literature and its future.

If ever to be labeled so, these departments must first earn the title of cosmopolitan, and not be prematurely respected as such by Africans who only wish to don any Ivy League stamp of approval, but never question these institutions’ representational politics.

African writers possess the correct disposition towards these Ivy masqueraders: don’t take them seriously.

African writers, themselves, shared a field day of jokes about Yale and other US universities’ lack of coverage of their literature.

Kenyan writer Ndinda Kioko asked:

If a tree falls in an African forest and the west is not around to hear it, was it even a tree in the first place?

Ivoirian writer Renée Edwige Dro said:

Why couldn’t they realise that actually, it hasn’t grown overnight but it has been happening? And did they really think that since Chinua and Ngugi and Soyinka, we haven’t been writing? Or as they hadn’t heard of those other writers, they thought that the pen had been silent on this huge continent of Africa?

Shadreck Chikoti said about Western faculty:

It’s like everybody is suddenly waking up from a very long sleep.

Edwige replied:

“Instead of [them] saying we’ve been sleeping, they lie and say, no we haven’t been sleeping at all; we were awake all this time. But where did you guys come from?”

Ukamaka Olisakwe, Nigerian author of Eyes of the Goddess, also chimed in to the discussion.

Olisakwe said:

There’s a saying in Igbo which is loosely translated as “your morning comes when you finally wake up.” So I say, good morning to them all! Lol.