Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
Summary
Unhu, that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate life's eternal interweaving that we southern Africans are famed for, and what others call ‘ubuntu’.
– Tsitsi Dangarembga.The Book of Not, 102–3To liberate a person to bond with other persons in an organic community, society needs to balance unique individual desires and social ideals. This article will explore this idea, through the examination of the relationship between a person and the community, that is, between the individual and society, as well as the ethical notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and responsibility for one's actions. How does a person relate to the community metaphysically and socially? Does the reality of the individual person have primacy over the reality of the community? Does the communal social order erase the concept of the individual in thought and practice? Is the individual secondary to the community? Indeed, how can a community or society develop an ethic of humanity free of social inequities and injustices?
These are some of the conceptual issues that Tsitsi Dangarembga's second novel, The Book of Not (2006), in full The Book of Not [Stopping the Time], appears to raise, and which I shall focus on in this study, employing the Zimbabwean unhu principle of personhood.
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- Information
- New Novels in African Literature Today , pp. 117 - 129Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009