African Stories

Preface by Ben Okri

The short story is the most compelling of literary forms. It is perhaps the most rigorous literary form after the sonnet. It has the destiny of creating, within a few pages, a brief eternity. As from a magic lamp, with a few rubbings of prose, a genie emerges to take the imagination on a journey that becomes one’s own. A dream that becomes a reality, or a reality that becomes a dream.

African writers have a unique affinity with the short story form. Maybe it is the literary form that best approximates patterns of the African experience. Maybe also it is the form closest to the oral stories, legends, fables, and tales of origin that are part of traditional life.

The short story is very suited to Africa. For there is something a little fantastical about African reality. This has nothing to do with the exotic, which alienates the reality of the other. The slightly fantastical nature of African life might have to do with the persistence in the modern world of ancient ways of being that are coherent and ritualistically alive. The exotic implies a deviation from an accepted code of reality. African reality is not a deviation from a commonly agreed world. It is a world unto itself. It is richly diverse and yet in each place, each land, entirely true. This is another way of saying that African reality is already fictional. It is fictional because the lands breathe stories.

The African short story was born of the intersection of many conditions: the ancient African worlds, the colonial experience, encounters with world literature, postindependence disillusionment, the plethora of magazines that accompanied the emergence of an African middle class, a new African aesthetics elaborated by intellectuals in the wake of independence, the necessity for African writers to define themselves and to question the new ruling elite, and the sense of the oral tradition as representing an authentic literary matrix.

This is not true for all the writers. For the white South African writers, for example, being born on the continent, being entangled in its fate, is enough to generate the urgency that characterizes writing from the land – urgency and a sense of the land itself, its complicated history and politics, and issues of identity and language and power.

Many African writers tended to do other jobs for a living. They were lecturers, journalists, scientists, musicologists, professors, doctors, lawyers, government employees. For this reason the short story was the literary form best suited to writers who had only small snatches of time, writers who did not have the luxury of writing for a living. For such busy lives, poetry and the short story were greatly favoured. This is not to say that the novel languished. Far from it. The novel is the master form of the literature. It is just that the short story was handier.

As a result the short story became the ready form for interrogating African realities, for catching the mood of rural or urban lives, for capturing what was left of traditional mores as they were slowly fading under the assault of westernization. The short story became the portable form for bearing witness to the mysteries of being alive. It was also the training ground for the novel.

The English, American or European writer can tell a story for its own sake. They don’t have to be political. They are not compelled to be socially responsive. Flaubert can write a story about an old woman in Rouen without it being a direct or indirect interrogation of the political system. Chekhov can write a story about a woman with a lapdog who was seduced and then abandoned without it being a text about the emancipation of the Russian soul from centuries of autocracy. But it is rare for the African writer not to be telling us, through stories, about the state of African being, in a particular country and a particular time.

It is this quality, this political and cultural responsibility, that gives an edge, a constant relevance, and a sense of perennial engagement to the African short story. The troubled history of modern Africa has made its writers conjoin the functional value of their art with the entertainment that is natural to the short story. This is true whether it is Chinua Achebe, in ‘The Voter’, satirizing the political process in post-independence Nigeria, or Bessie Head, in ‘Jacob: The Story of a Faith-Healing Priest’, taking an amused eye to the complicated permutations of spirituality in Botswana, or J. M. Coetzee in ‘The Glass Abattoir’, directing his caustic pen at the horrors of meat-eating through the tale of a mother’s ambiguous literary legacy to her son. It is there in the entanglements of ritual and spirits that run through this selection. Camara Laye’s ‘The Eyes of the Statue’ examines numinous terror in the ruins of an ancient city. ‘A Child in the Bush of Ghosts’ by Olympe Bhêly-Quénum is the tale of a child encountering the dead in the forest. Its title echoes that of a famous novel by Amos Tutuola. Social commentary and satire feature in Francis Bebey’s ‘Edda’s Marriage’ and Guillaume Oyônô-Mbia’s ‘The Little Railway Station’.

Threads of fantasy are woven through Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala’s ‘Jazz and Palm Wine’ and Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘Protista’. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is represented here with ‘The Martyr’, which emerged from the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya. The trace presence of fables and oral tales is visible in Mouhamadoul Nouktar Diop’s The Pot of Gold’ and Clementine Nzuji Madiya’s ‘Ditetembwa.’. There are tales of theft gone wrong (David Owoleye’s ‘The Will of Allah’), of a shopkeeper’s yearning for a woman who vaguely promises love (Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Cages’), a fable about power (Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘The Gentlemen of the Jungle’), and of a woman awaiting a freedom fighter’s return during the era of apartheid in South Africa (Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Amnesty’). There are funny, poignant and heartbreaking stories about individuals managing their daily lives with bewilderment and courage. They are all unique and they are all African. Nadine Gordimer said somewhere that the short story is just right for our times. The short story is just right for Africa.

But it would be dangerous to generalize about the African short story. The stories are too varied for that and the writers are equally diverse in their attitudes to their craft. All that can be said with any certainty is that the stories collected in this book are entertaining and unflinching in their gaze. They probe while being delightful. Whether they deal in spirits, love, imprisonment, the urban experience, politics, or the colonial past, whether written in English, French, Portuguese, or Arabic they all shine a refracted light on the human condition. Through these stories you could track, in an indirect way, the history of the continent and the progress of the spirit of its peoples.

It may be paradoxically easier to make stories out of lands that do not breathe stories. But where everything yields stories like the fragrance of certain flowers at twilight, it requires an altogether more rigorous art. Where reality easily lends itself to anecdote, to the tall tale, to exaggeration, a particular discipline is called for to turn the teeming worlds into singular fictions. To carve a single figure from abundance requires an art out of which a new world might emerge.

That is the gift of these stories. Each of the writers could have succumbed to the temptation to overwhelm the senses and the imagination; but tempered by the sorcery of the short story writer’s art they gave us brief pages that suggest worlds just beyond the margins. As a reader you will proceed from dream to dream, from reality to reality, in something approaching a controlled fever of the creative spirit.

The watchword of this collection is brevity. Almost all the writers could have given examples of the long form of the short story, but nothing displays the art of the short story more powerfully than compression. Th e aim is to choose stories which are not only exemplars of the form but which maintain the performance of the art’s nomenclature. Th e stories had to be short while giving the impression of being much longer. The traditional tale in most of Africa displays that paradox of space and narration. Brief experiences might be long in recounting, long experiences short in the telling. But this brevity casts long shadows in the mind.

The African imagination is as fecund as its reality, bristling with the collision of the political and the cultural, of suffering and celebration, of outrages and the spiritual, all intermingled into potent, and often pungent conditions. These will be experienced in abundance in these tales. Writers from Africa have produced such a cornucopia of good short stories that this may well be the first of two volumes. A second collection is needed to do justice to that fertility.

Another guiding principle has been the sheer pleasure of encountering so many fictional worlds. Th ere is nothing that recommends a volume such as this more than the enjoyment that the stories give. This may be in the telling or in what is told. Like finding oneself on a fast-flowing river, one is borne from tale to tale by the richness of the experience and often by the improbable speed with which the imagination is snatched to unexpected realms of life. When all the stories have been experienced, the reader may feel that they have been taken on a journey of the spirit akin to the magical strangeness of a great novel. Better still, it is hoped that the reader emerges from these pages shaken and refreshed, as if from one of those initiations that only an extraordinary experience in real life can induce.

There can be no better excuse for assembling so many stories than to offer glimpses into the soul of one of the most mysterious and least understood continents. One that is older than Atlantis, more varied than any land, and with the largest land mass in the world, yet whose contemporary existence in most people’s minds outside the continent is associated with poverty and wars and injustices.

Africa deserves to be rediscovered afresh. We need readers that will turn the pages of the continent anew and surrender to the imagination and humanity of the worlds revealed. Then Africa’s real destiny, veiled for too long, can begin a new chapter in the grand story of the world. But it begins in stories that hint at creativity and resilience and hope, renewed each day, like the wind over the savannahs at dawn.

Ben Okri