‘Africa is dying and no one gives a damn’: combating colonial historiography with revisionism, temporality in Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments

ABSTRACT

The colonial historiography of Africa renders the continent historyless, oriental, and primitive. This cultural misrepresentation of Africa has dominated Western imagination and influenced the relationship of the West with Africa for a number of decades, while traces of this prejudice still subsist till now. Like other Africanist writings that repudiate jaundiced colonial African historiography, Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments (2012) offers a literary theorisation for interrogating the historiography through revisionism and temporality. Ipadeola assumes the role of a historical revisionist, making efforts to rectify Western ahistorical perception of Africa through empirical historical events, sites, and panjandrums. He uses the power of poetry to reinvigorate Africa’s past, projecting it as a tool to rebuild the future of the continent. As a revisionist, he refuses to accept the traditionalist colonial perspective of African historiography that is pro-West, but calls for a revisit and celebration of Africa’s past as a defining moment in the history of a continent relegated to the margins of global economy and development. Drawing on Ipadeola’s position, this article contends that Africa’s history should reflect triadic temporal linearity, rather than limiting its historical development to then and now, because doing so is self-defeating.

KEYWORDS:

• African historiography
• the Sahara
• Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab
• Tade Ipadeola

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While Whitman believed that poetry should not be encumbered with strict formal features and demonstrated this by adopting plain style and rejecting conventional poetic diction in his poetry (Redding, 2013, p. 55), his rejection of traditional form of poetry revolutionised poetry as a literary discourse that needs not pay homage to the classical poetic canon (see Beach, 1994, p. 74). Just like other modernist poets, contemporary poets do not consider it fashionable to write in traditional forms, but prefer to use free verse as the dominant style choice in their poetry (Hudson, 2014, p. 18). Toeing the path charted by the modernist avant-gardes, contemporary poets do not see any justification for writing ‘ponderous poetry’ (Pandey, 2004, p. 53), since it truncates emotions and hinders effective poetic communication. Contrarily, a relatively few number of contemporary poets subscribe to the opinion that the beauty of poetry is grossly compromised when its formal features are eroded and replaced with disruptive modernist techniques. These poets believe that formal features of poetry help to accentuate the art, deliver emotional pleasure or aesthetic appeal to the reader, and make poetry memorable. Ipadeola belongs to this group. With the publication of The Sahara Testaments, he has certainly proved he has flair for formal poetic style, even though he used free style in his other collections. His choice of formal style in TST is a clear indication that contemporary Nigerian poets can reinvent formal verse and emulate first generation of Nigerian poets who experimented with formal verse.

2. He published this collection with Temilola Abioye.

3. See Ayo Okulaja’s ‘Tade Ipadeola to Build Library in Memory of Kofi Awoonor with $100,000 Nigeria Literature Prize’, the Premium Times, 10 October 2013. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/146392-tade-ipadeola-build-library-memory-kofi-awoonor-100000-nigeria-literature-prize.html (accessed 7 July 2021)

4. See ‘Songbird’.

5. Ngũgĩ calls it ‘globaletics’, which is an attempt to liberate literature from the ‘straightjackets of nationalism’ (Ngũgĩ Wa, 2012, p. 8) and evolve ‘a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue […] that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region’ (Ngũgĩ Wa, 2012, p. 8).

6. See Peter Akinlabi’s ‘A Landscape of Speech: A Conversation with Tade Ipadeola’, https://africaindialogue.com/2020/03/02/a-landscape-of-speech-a-conversation-with-tade-ipadeola/ (accessed 10 June 2020).

7. I consulted the Scribd edition. See https://www.scribd.com/document/74262613/Book-Dialectical-Materialism (accessed 12 May 2020).

8. These are some of the goals Patrick Manning believes African historians should pursue in the 21st century in order to strengthen relationship between African history and world history.

9. See http://sarabamag.com/in-conversation-with-tade-ipadeolas-the-sahara-testaments/ (accessed 12 May 2020).

10. Afronomad is a made-up word coined from ‘Afro’ and ‘nomad’ referring to someone who loves peregrinations round Africa. I have used the coinage here loosely to describe a traveller who is an African but does not limit their travels to the continent alone. The right neologism for such a person is glomad formed from ‘global’ and ‘nomad’, even though its meaning is slightly different from its conception or usage in this article.

11. I accessed this book on JSTOR. See www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv105bb1g (accessed 3 June 2020).

12. Italics original

13. This is a quote from Karl Mannheim (1991, 234).

14. See https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/1022 (accessed 14 June 2020).

15. As above

16. See https://www.rareresource.com/aegyptosaurus.htm (accessed 14 June 2020).

17. A line in James Phillips’ song, ‘Africa is Dying’, from the album, Soul Ou, released in 1994. See https://jamesphillips.bandcamp.com/album/soul-ou (accessed 18 June 2020).

18. This rhetoric is credited to Hillary Clinton who used it in her 2016 presidential election campaign speech to describe President Donald Trump’s supporters. According to her, ‘you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it’ (see Lam, 2018, p. 33). I have used the same term here to portray the imagistic representation of deplorable statistics that is churned out of Africa every now and then.

19. This vision must have informed Ipadeola’s mention of Guermah Massinissa, an Algerian youth who was shot dead by the police in Algeria in 2001. The killing is a metaphor of how Africa jeopardises its future by killing those who will do it proud in future.

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Emmanuel Adeniyi

Emmanuel Adeniyi currently teaches at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria. He is a fellow of Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany, and World Journalism Institute (WJI), New York, USA. His research interest covers Postcolonial Literature, Diaspora/Migration Studies, Eco-criticism, Oral Literature, Literary Stylistics, Film and Media Studies, intersection between music and literature, Memory Studies, Sacred Texts, among others.