Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou have gathered together ten wide-ranging essays in a salutary reassertion of humanistic values in general and of the essential humanism of African cultures in particular. In an age of acute STEM propaganda, the instrumentalization of education systems, and the promotion of individualism worldwide, the essays in this valuable collection celebrate “African humanism as a philosophy of life that emphasizes the centrality of human beings in the universe” (1).
Acknowledging the often dystopian reality of postindependence African history, the essays do not ignore the extent to which Africans have failed to live according to that philosophy’s fundamental precepts of hospitality, communality, and mutual respect (as implied in the concept of ubuntu), but they insist on the continued validity of those precepts. Stemming the erosion of traditional values—which does not necessarily imply the rejection of everything Western—might lead to “enhanc[ing] the structure and development” of African society (6).
Vetinde and Samou have organized the essays into three sections: “Foundational Visions,” “Power, Dystopia, and Postcolonial Violence,” and “History, Trauma, and the Pedagogy of Human Rights.” The first section ranges from a broad analysis of (mainly) West African orature (covering everything from jokes and adages to epic narrative) through two single-text analyses—of Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel She Plays with the Darkness, and of Louis Camara’s more recent Au dessus des dunes (2014; “Above the Dunes”). In the latter, editor Vetinde makes the intriguing argument that apparent misanthropy can be consistent with humanism; the narrator of Camara’s novel—the dog Nestor—in relating the vicious treatment he has received at the hands of human beings illustrates “the paradoxical relationship between misanthropy and humanism” by implicitly demonstrating a “longing for the emergence of a better society anchored in humanist principles” (48).
The three essays in Section Two cover a similarly broad range, responding to three of the more glaring failures of humanism in recent African history: violence against children, notably, the conscription of children as soldiers by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army; the dehumanization of Black South Africans under apartheid rule; and “feymania”—the nexus of fraud, corruption, and oppression caused by the 40-plus year rule of President Paul Biya in Cameroon. Marie-Thérèse Toyi’s essay on recent East African fiction argues that even in the face of the extreme violence of war and genocide, ubuntu survives: indeed contemporary East African fiction advocates, she says, for dignity. Hervé Tchumkam offers an intriguing read of André Brink’s fiction. Referring to novels written during apartheid, in the interregnum between the release of Mandela in 1990 and the first fully democratic election of 1994, and in the postapartheid period, Tchumkam claims that “by breaking the chains of submission and silence, [Brink’s] writing restores a voice and memory to the disenfranchised Black South Africans” (80). While that claim strikes me as somewhat hyperbolical, Tchumkam’s analysis of Brink’s humanistic impulses in general and his comments on Brink’s use of Afrikaans—the “language of the oppressor” par excellence—as an African language through which to decolonize the mind, are very intriguing.
Jean-Blaise Samou’s essay on “feymania” broadens the scope of this collection by offering five paintings by Bernard Baifang as the subject of his analysis. Produced in the period 1998–2002, these paintings all essentially satirize the corruption and misrule of contemporary Cameroon. As with Camara’s misanthropic canine narrator, Baifang’s stark representation of the dehumanizing behavior ultimately points to the resilience of a humanist thinking that grounds his work as a “militant art oriented toward catharsis” (105).
The collection’s final section focuses on human rights and is probably the most varied in subject-matter in the book. Uchenna David Uwakwe’s essay tackles a fascinating and potentially highly contentious topic—the rhetoric of General Ojukwu’s speeches during the Biafran War of 1967–70. Unfortunately, the essay is not very clearly organized or argued and fails to engage with what should surely be crucial comparative questions regarding the relative claims to humanness of Igbo and non-Igbo Nigerians, and on precolonial and (post)colonial notions of political communities/nations.
Koni Benson’s chapter further extends the range of subject matter under consideration. In a lapidary analysis of a six-part comic-book series published between 2014 and 2016 that chronicled the resistance—particularly by women—to apartheid forced removals from the Crossroads settlement near Cape Town, Benson hits on multiple issues of, among others, cocreation, coauthorship, feminist agency, the role of historians in cultural work, dominant versus subaltern narratives, and the battles between memory and forgetting. She concludes this very rich essay by describing the “creation and afterlife of … Crossroads: I Live Where I Like” as “an example of cultural production that aspires to pull history into the future by refusing the inherited boundaries of art, activism, and African history” (141).
The book is rounded out by a thoughtful pedagogical essay by Janice Spleth who describes how she has used Henri Lopes’s short story “Le Complot” (“The Conspiracy”) to integrate the teaching of human rights and African literature in the contemporary classroom. Focusing on the torture of the doctor in the story, Spleth reads “Le Complot” in tandem with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights to provoke challenging political and ethical questions. Spleth rightly warns against giving non-African students the impression that human rights violations are limited to “third-world” countries, and ends her essay by suggesting ways to make what is learned from such classes “portable” to the students’ home country.
Despite some unevenness, this wide-ranging book offers sterling support to those who continue to advocate for the humanities and for those who continue to insist that appeals to traditional African values can be meaningful.
