Anim-Addo makes a good point. Our lives are deeply, inextricably entangled, as is fleshed out in ‘Ngunga's adventures’, an early example of a decolonised children’s story, written by Angolan activist Artur Pestana. In the 1980 book, a 13-year-old orphan gets involved in the Angolan war of liberation from Portuguese rule. The colonists are all portrayed unflatteringly, but so are some Black Angolans. This makes the story more real and complex, says Richard Phillips, a professor of human geography at Sheffield University. Translated into English, the book offered British readers a “anti-Eurocentric understanding of Africa”, Phillips says, “in which Africans speak for themselves, and describe their own land, people and interests”.
In recent decades, similar has been happening with fiction in India and other parts of Asia, as well as in swaths of Africa. In a paper titled ‘Whodunnit in Southern Africa’ for the Africa Research Institute think tank, British academic Ranka Primorac notes the decolonisation of African bookshelves over the years. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, James Hadley Chase and others have increasingly given way to local writers adapting the popular ‘detective story’ form to local cultures.
Mind over matter
But is decolonising really as simple as getting British children to read books like ‘Ngunga’s adventures’ or ensuring African readers have their own detective stories? Is it about getting adult readers anywhere to dip into any or all of the 50 novels suggested in ‘This is the Canon’? What about decolonising the mindset? Isn’t that impeded by bigger forces such as geopolitics, the international financial architecture and the way modern markets work?
The authors of ‘This is the Canon’ say “reading habits are fundamentally related to mindsets”. Encouraging readers to go “adventuring” enables them to explore new worlds, encounter a breadth of beliefs and see things from different perspectives. This, the authors argue, helps change mindsets over time.
Small changes can, in small ways, set the agenda, says Anim-Addo. “If people are waiting for the biggest changes to happen then we’re already defeated.” These small changes presumably include replacing the ‘imperial gaze’, that angle of vision assumed by the Europeans in the colonies, when whole continents and their people were rendered featureless for readers.
The decolonisation debate is also about firmly moving on from the ‘post-colonial’ label once applied to literature. “I do not use that term,” says Sesay, because, “it was an imposed label, imposed as if it was a badge of honour, whereas it reinforces the suggestion that those referred to as ‘post-colonial’ still live in colonial conditions, which imposes on people an inferior mentality.” Osborne agrees, adding: “I follow Indigenous author Tony Birch's view that ‘post-colonialism’ is a luxury only for the academy.”
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