Dickens keeps inspiring African writers with a twist
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As we approach 210 years since the birth of British writer Charles Dickens (18121870) next February, it is interesting to investigate the connection between Africa and arguably the world’s greatest novelist. Several African authors have noted the influence Dickens had on their writing — Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa’Thiongo and Naguib Mahfouz among them.
Es’kia Mphahlele produced a stage play of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a revolutionary version of which was performed in black townships in the 1950s, while Ethiopia’s Sahle Sellassie Berhane Mariam translated the book into Amharic. Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate, noted that his father had a collection of Dickens’s novels that he devoured as a child.
Many of the themes with which Dickens dealt — poverty, class, exploitation, religion and emigration — are subjects with which postcolonial African writers have grappled and contemporary African writers and the broader society are still addressing. Dickens’s posthumously published retelling of the story of Jesus Christ to children every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord, chimes with the core religious beliefs of Africa’s 631-million Christians. His ventures into the supernatural world through ghost stories such as A Christmas Carol strike a chord with Africans who practise traditional religions.
Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said’s 1994 Culture and Imperialism elegantly demonstrated how culture was often used by Western authors in support of the imperial project. He showed how even great works of literature such as those of Dickens were used, sometimes unconsciously, in the service of imperialism.
Dickens’s zeal as a social reformer derived from his own difficult childhood, in which his father and family were imprisoned for three months due to the former’s indebtedness. He became famous for his social crusading. His rich portrayal of Victorian
London’s poverty would fit many of contemporary Africa ’ s greatest cities: Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo. The suffering of destitute and homeless children depicted in novels like Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit and David Copperfield would also find resonance in these African megapolises.
Dickens was an abolitionist who spoke out against slavery. He opposed British imperialism, which he felt diverted muchneeded resources from social needs at home. But he was not above embracing some of the jingoism of his Victorian peers: Dickens dismissed nonEuropean “primitive cultures” and referred to Indians as “dogs — low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains”.
SA film director Tim Greene’s Boy Called Twist was a 2004 adaptation of Oliver Twist for the big screen. The drama is set in a contemporary local context, depicting both Cape Town’s great mountainous beauty and its derelict townships. The mixed-race Twist is frequently maltreated in rural Swartland, before escaping to Cape Town by hitching a ride on the back of a truck. As with Dickens’s gang of pickpockets under Fagin, the SA Twist falls among a gang of young crooks led by a dreadlocked Caribbean
Rastafarian Fagin, tutored by the Artful Dodger. Other Dickensian figures such as the gangster Bill Sykes and his prostitutegirlfriend Nancy also appear.
Said famously implored the victims of empire to “assert their own identity and the existence of their own history”. Dickens was one of the pioneers of the “Great European Novel” during the imperial age. The first generation of Africa’s postcolonial writers were his true heirs, narrating their own anti-imperial stories from the periphery.
In contemporary Africa, a new generation of griots are producing a bountiful harvest of rich writing, some of which can also trace its lineage to Dickens’s genius. Bernardine Evaristo, Chimamanda Adichie, Maaza Mengiste, NoViolet Bulawayo, Namwali Serpell and Damon Galgut are all part of this great storytelling tradition.
Africa’s talented contemporary generation of cosmopolitan global citizens are producing the “Great African Novel” to describe their own postcolonial age of hard times and great expectations.