The Invention of History in the African Novel

Lily Saint • Wesleyan University

February 12th @ 6pm • Russell House

Coincident with the development of a significant mission-educated literate African intelligentsia at the end of the 19th century was the question of how best to know and represent what was real about the precolonial African past. The novel offered an alternative framework for telling history that could circumvent both European historiographic and ethnographic traditions. Not without its own rules of engagement, the novel nonetheless offered and continues to offer a more flexible framework for the representation of African pasts. This was particularly true for the first novels published on the continent, beginning with Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, written in 1908 though not published until 1925. This talk explores the early origins of the realist novel on the continent as a rival form of historiography.

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