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Safaris in the Bush of Ghosts: Gamara Laye, Saul Bellow, and Ayi Kwei Armah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2019

Extract

The land of Zanj is vast, wrote Suleiman the Merchant. Its plants are all black in colour.

When he gets to heaven, I don't think he'll walk through the pearly gates. He'll swing in on a grape vine. – Pat Buttram, actor, upon the death of Johnny Weismuller, January 1984.

I did not know the time that I entered into a dreadful bush which is called the “Bush of Ghosts” because I was very young to understand the meaning of “bad” or “good”. This “Bush of Ghosts” was so dreadful so that no superior earthly person ever entered it. – Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Type
Insight
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984 

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References

Notes

1 See also Cooley, William D., The Negroland of the Arabs (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1966).Google Scholar (This is a republication of the original dated 1841.)

2 Armah, Ayi Kwei, Two Thousand Seasons (Chicago: Third World Press, 1984).Google Scholar (Hereafter cited as TTS in text.)

3 Pageard, Robert, Literature negro-africaine (Paris, 1968), pp. 8287.Google Scholar

4 Hughes, D. J., “Reality and the Hero: Lolita and Henderson the Rain King ,” in Malin, I., Saul Bellow and the Critics (New York, USA: N.Y.A. Press, 1967), pp. 6991.Google Scholar

5 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton, 1963), p. 50. (Hereafter cited as HD in text.) No easy matter this view: “You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence,” p. 41.

6 Tutuola, Amos, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (New York, USA: Grove Press, 1962), pp. 151-52.Google Scholar (Hereafter MLBG.)

7 Hodgen, Margaret Trabue, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1971), p. 358.Google Scholar

8 The Republic and Other Works, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Anchor, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), p. 47.

9 Raskin, Jonah, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York, USA: Random, 1971).Google Scholar

10 “Tarzan is an Expatriate,” Transition 7, 32 (1967), p. 13.

11 AP/UPI Reports, The Ann Arbor News (Michigan, USA; January 23, 1984).

12 The Ann Arbor News, January 23, 1984.

13 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1968).Google Scholar

14 Cary, Joyce, The African Witch (London: Michael Joseph, 1949)Google Scholar; (New York: Harper, 1962, preface).

15 Wynter, Sylvia, Afterword to Johnson, Lemuel, Highlife for Caliban (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973).Google Scholar See JanMohamed, Abdul R., Manichean Aesthetics (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983)Google Scholar for an elaborate treatment of Wynter's earlier compact theses.

16 Yambo Ouologuem, Bound to Violence, trans. “The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa,” by Ralph Manheim (Heinemann, 1971), p. 23. (Hereafter BV in text.)

17 Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King, trans, from the French by James Kirkup (London: Collins, 1965), p. 77. (Hereafter RK in text.)

18 Norris, Christopher, The Deconstructive Turn, Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy (Methuen, 1981).Google Scholar Also, V. Y. Mudimbe, L'odeur du pete (Presence Africaine, 1982).

19 “The Originality of Conrad,” in Heart o) Darkness (Norton), p. 209.

20 Lillian Feder, “Mallow's Descent into Hell,” Heart of Darkness p. 187.

21 Herbert Gold, “Fiction of the Fifties,” Hudson Review 12 (Summer 1959), pp 192-201.

22 George Stade, “Review of Freaks,” New York Times Book Review (March 5, 1978), p. 9.

23 Hughes, ibid.

24 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (London: Heineman, 1958), p. 75.Google Scholar