Chapter 9 - Myth, Orality and the African Novel

Summary

African authors have been skeptical of the term ‘magical realism’, as it suggests that their texts are derivative of Latin American writing. This chapter proposes that such concerns over categorization underestimate the shaping force that African magical realist texts have on the concept of magical realism. Further, criticism of magical realism often suggests that the ‘magic’ in magical realism comes from irrational indigenous belief systems and the ‘real’ from the rational West. However, this suggests that Western capitalist modernity is more rational than it really is. Through an analysis of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) and Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land (2006), this chapter argues that these texts use a combination of written and oral forms to question the rationality of capitalism and in so doing reshape our understanding of magical realism.