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Chapter 3 - Alternative histories and writing back

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

C. L. Innes
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

In his chapter on ‘National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Frantz Fanon speaks of the importance of rescuing history from the colonizer's custody. In the face of European denials of any worthwhile native culture or history, he states:

the claims of the native intellectual are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent programme. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation's legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people.

That ‘Africans did not hear of civilization for the first time from Europeans’, as Chinua Achebe declared, is a claim central to many works in the early stages of contesting a colonialist mentality. Achebe sees this as one of the main messages carried in his historical novels, Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964), the first of which will be discussed in greater detail below. Perhaps because Africa has been the victim of the greatest denial and contempt, seen as the ‘Dark Continent’, and, as Fanon puts it, the home of ‘barbarism, degradation, and bestiality’, the affirmation of its cultural validity, the delineation of a history in its own terms, has been particularly the task of novelists throughout the African continent such as Achebe from Nigeria, Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana, Assia Djebar from Algeria, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya and Solomon Plaatje from South Africa.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Alternative histories and writing back
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.004
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  • Alternative histories and writing back
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Alternative histories and writing back
  • C. L. Innes, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611339.004
Available formats
×