1 - Spatiality from Empire to Independence

Summary

The years immediately preceding formal independence in West Africa were notable both for the frenetic pace of spatial negotiations and for an explosion of literary writing emanating from the region, consecrated in the metropolitan publishing houses of London and Paris. The confluence of these two factors was of no little consequence for the development of West Africa as a (post)colonial space. Characterised by a range of anti-colonial movements that traded upon the right to space, as well as last-gasp imperial policies intended to protect European interests through a continued mastery of space, the 1950s and early 1960s marked an apex in the development of alternative and lateral ways of thinking through the soon-to-be independent region. In this chapter, I focus on four touchstone novels written in that period: Nigerian Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952); his countryman Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954/1963 revised edition); Senegalese Cheikh Hamadou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë (1961, but originally written in 1951); and Cameroonian Mongo Beti's Mission terminée (1957). Heeding Wilder's caution that texts must be neither fetishised nor sociologised but instead read in order ‘to elaborate the political and discursive fields that made […] colonial and anticolonial politics intelligible’ and from which they spring, this chapter reads these four novels alongside a range of legislative, economic and non-governmental documents in order to examine how space, as a social system and process, is elaborated within. In this chapter, as elsewhere in this book, my aim is not to suggest that either the aesthetic or materialist aspects of each text supersede the other. Rather, my aim is to consider how these two sides of the literary function together, allowing each work to operate simultaneously as artistic objects and as cultural artefacts that arise out of a set of specific socio-political conditions in a manner that extends beyond a simple model of response or resistance. These four texts share a preoccupation with the spatial in their respective narrative forms, emerging through the repeated occurrence of journeys and quests; the contrast between bounded and open spaces; and the interaction between spatial formations and the development of subjectivities. Equally, these novels demonstrate the highly distinct literary modes through which these concerns develop, foregrounding both the diversity of spatial formations and the specifically aesthetic nature of space's literary performance across locations and contexts.