This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.

The African novel exhibits formal innovations that could not have been predicted by considering its difference from the European novel or its continuity with oral verbal cultural traditions. Those innovations reveal something important about the nature of the literary imagination in Africa and the nature of the genre of the novel. This article considers three such innovations: the parental point of view, the elevation of narrative focus to take in the head of state, and the fictive state.