Teaching African literature in the US is a waste of time

When interviewing for a job at a Kenyan university recently, I was asked if I might come to teach the “queer stuff” professors in the US pass off as literary scholarship.

I can’t remember the exact answer I gave, but I think I said I would do a little bit of that — to make sure my students are aware of all the different ways of being intimate with a text. 

From the nods of approval I received, I could have been misunderstood to be saying that, with a good grounding in queer theory, the students would be able to tell a gay text from a distance and give it a wide berth.

If such a question were asked in a US university, the interview would probably have been cancelled because of the panelist’s exhibition of bigotry. He would certainly be fired.

But I understand where the panelist was coming from. The teaching and criticism of African literature in the US focuses on what the scholars in question know to be silly issues.

Critics have realised that writing on serious topics about Africa won’t take you anywhere in America.  This means that you won’t hear anybody talking about Africa’s literary monuments. Don’t even be surprised to see that the next kid on the block’s monograph will bear a title like “The Subversive Immanence of the African Underwear” (2020).

When I listen to scholars give lectures on African literature, there seems to be a folkloric opening formula (the “once upon a time” sort of thing) in their performances.

Here Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o become the ritualistic whipping posts as outdated dinosaurs. Let’s focus on topics of the now, such as coitus and other hot stuff like that.

But the reason Achebe and Ngugi no longer appear sexy to the US-based Africanist has nothing to do with their having written their works a long time ago. English Departments are still teaching their Shakespeare, and that guy is not a teenager.

To tell the truth, foundational African writers have fallen into disfavour because they talk about colonialism, and the white liberal establishment doesn’t like to hear an African talking about certain things. Let’s just talk about the immanent smell of African underwear and amuse ourselves to death. Quote Fanon if you want, but let it be about underwear please, not colonialism or dull topics like that.

Except for a neo-imperialist beneficiary of CIA funding, who would in their right mind find colonialism an outdated topic in Africa? Any book — whether critical or fictional, queer or straight — that denies the brutalities of western meddling in Africa is not worth the paper it is written on.

SCHOOLS ADORED IN THE WEST

Most of the US-based 21st-century African writers taught in US schools are adored in the West for the very reasons they are not taken seriously in Africa.

To the African, these writers are just clowns who, in their cynicism, consider the average American’s brain to be pubescent. Give the overgrown adolescent disaster porn from Africa (wars, diseases, limping child soldiers, etc.), and you’ll be buddies for life.

The Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah — one of the greatest Africans who ever wrote — captured this cynicism in the novel Osiris Rising (1995), in which at the very beginning of the narrative we encounter an Africanist writer who knows how to game the system by producing stereotypes of his people and distorting their history.

It is no longer western scholars that produce Eurocentric images of Africa today; the African writer in need of some grants and scholarships is ever ready to volunteer himself to perform self-orientalist minstrelsy.

I don’t read non-specialists who write about African literature because I’m sure they wouldn’t take me seriously if I went around mouthing my ignorant opinions about their fields of specialisation. But I’ve heard that they gloat in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how they hire African literary specialists from Europe these days.

Elite American universities have failed to build an infrastructure for training and mentoring new scholars in African literature, although the sub-field has been taught in US schools since the 1960s.

You can spend decades in a well-funded western institution and retire without successfully mentoring a single Africanist scholar. So you hear big African names in the American academy, but if you tried to find out who their most prominent students are, you cannot come up with any names.

As part of the neo-imperialist machinery, the US academy lures the best African scholars with peanuts (some like yours truly, Wanakhamuna, are tricked with peanut shells) to deal them systematic blows that slowly lead to social death.

Like Okot p’Bitek’s Ocol, such an African’s testicles are crushed. He doesn’t produce any knowledge in Africa and he returns to the continent at the end of the day empty-handed — no legacy, just a book or two about African underwear, and a crumpled Wal-Mart suit. 

African literature is taught in posh schools in the US (Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell etc.).

Because it is only a token subject to hoodwink the world that the so-called universities are keen on diversity, presses in those universities do not publish monographs on African literature. If they publish on Africa, it will be white-authored books on what they call African anthropology, history, and political science.

Yet the universities require from their professors books from such elite presses for promotion. The consequence is that only a suicidal scholar would risk writing a first book on African literature; the wise ones write on other more valued texts and come to African literature much later.

The cunning young professors today, as Armah’s character would do, write neo-imperialist books about topics like underwear or coitus among the wildebeest of Serengeti.

Most of the monographs in the field of African literature in the US, then, lack the panache of youthful scholarship or the youthful ones go to the other extreme of selling porn as African literature.

Is there any hope? No, not in the US. Anybody who wants to study or teach African literature should do it in Africa, limited as the resources may be in African institutions.

I’m happy I’ve eventually seen the light and will detail my experiences in the American academy in my I Dig It Now: The Memoirs of an Intellectual Hoe (2030).

The author is professor (designate  at Chuka University in Kenya. ([email protected])