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1. Africa in literature and popular novels Roger Blench. Circulation version
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Africa in literature and popular novels
I. Introduction
For such a large region of the world, Africa generally has a poor showing in fiction, both in literary
works and in popular novels. It is typically known to many readers by the brutalist thrillers of Wilbur
Smith or the comic misrepresentations of Evelyn Waugh. African writers who have had popular success
are few and far between, and mostly, such as those Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, are written from the safe
perspective of expatriates. If you know and like Africa, this is disappointing, the experiencing is well
worth committing to an imaginative framework.
What is worse, however, is that ‘serious’ writers who have featured Africa in their novels, such as Greene,
Hemingway, Bellow and Updike, treat it with the utmost triviality. Either they recount their visits to kill
animals, or they don’t bother to visit at all. The focus is entirely on the white expatriates, with Africans
playing only walk-on parts, like the foil in a Platonic dialogue. We might quarrel with the
characterisation of Asian characters in Forster’s A Passage to India or Orwell’s Burmese Days but they
play an integral role in the narrative. It seemed perfectly acceptable for these writers that Africa simply
be the focus of their fictions, freighted with implausible names and inexplicable motivations.
Novels and stories by African writers based in the continent have a very different feel to writings by
outsiders. With the exception of South Africa, where a tradition of writing by whites (Paton, Gordimer,
Brink) upheld an honourable tradition of criticising apartheid, African writers tend to be very urban, to
address the middle classes of the city. The great majority of the population in rural areas remains largely
undescribed. In some ways this is inevitable; you are hardly going to choose a profession as risky as a
novelist if you are not part of the educated elite. This is in interesting contrast to African films, a
significant proportion of which are set in rural areas. I exclude the Nigerian commercial film industry
which has a stranglehold on urban melodrama. African writing is interesting and diverse, especially
incipient vernacular traditions, such as in Ethiopia and South Africa. However, I want to concentrate on
the perspective of outsiders, as much for what they point to in Western culture as in their reflections on
Africa.
Another tradition not analysed here is the Francophone Africanist writing. French literary culture was
always far more engaged with the colonies than England and began to experiment with genres far earlier.
The first detective novel set in West Africa was published in the early 1900s, and one of the pioneer
linguists also wrote a science fiction novel at the same period. By the 1930s, the French were writing
comic operas about Mali, and there is also a powerful tradition of historical novels featuring African
rulers. At another level, French writers were much more open about sexual relations between French
officials and African populations, something which was seriously taboo in the Anglophone literature until
recently. These marked differences clearly say much about the two culture, but more in-depth discussion
must be elsewhere.
II. Popular fiction
Africa loomed much larger in Britain’s imperial era of, several popular writers used it as a setting for
their adventure stories. The most well-known of these is undoubtedly Rider Haggard (1856-1925) who
was in South Africa 1875-1882, parallel to the years Kipling spent in British India (1881-1889). Haggard
travelled within South Africa, but was not the protagonist of hazardous expeditions in the interior,
although he met travellers, such as Frederick Selous, who were notable adventurers.
The structure of almost all Haggard’s African novels conforms to the ‘Lost World’ prototype. This
appears first in King Solomon’s Mines (1886), written shortly after his return to England, and is then
repeated as late as 1921 in the reprise novel Allen and She. The protagonist is mostly European, assisted

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by African guides, and either they travel intentionally into the far interior of the continent, which was
hardly known in the 1880s, or arrives there through some mischance. There they find a lost civilization,
or a cruel monarch, often with unexplained cultural links to Mediterranean, especially Ancient Egypt.
After narrow escapes, the expedition makes its way back to the city, often carrying painful but romantic
memories. The expedition is always accompanied by Africans, usually Zulu or ‘Hottentot’ [the usual
term at this period for the Khoi people], who are depicted as humorous, resourceful and often critical of
the leader. The prototype for the ‘Lost World’ was the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, first mentioned in
Portuguese sources in the early 1500s, but rediscovered by Adam Renders in 1867. At the time, it was
believed that Africans could not construct large stone monuments and that this must be the work of
outsiders. Various far-fetched theories were canvassed, including the Queen of Sheba and the
Phoenicians, ideas which live on in some of the novels of Wilbur Smith. Although ludicrous with
hindsight, such mysteries in Central Africa must still have seemed quite plausible in the 1880s.
Rider Haggard could concoct a ripping yarn, and modern reinventions, such as the Indiana Jones series of
films, are still able to pack cinemas. But the other side of his writing is that it is packed with plausible
detail about life in the African bush. From the behaviour of animals, to the travails of moving with an ox-
wagon, and the uncertain climate, it is clear these draw on
real-life experience. Africans are depicted as sceptical and
humorous, but capable of heroic behaviour in dire straights.
Although well outside the spectrum of conventional literary
criticism, the best-known novels will remain in print and
continue to find an audience.
Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was a generation later than
Rider Haggard, and like him, spent time in South Africa
(1894-98), first as a soldier and then as part of the press
corps. Wallace is best-known as a thriller-writer and the
author of the script for King Kong, but between 1911 and
1928, he wrote twelve collections of short stories about
Sanders, a commissioner in an invented British colony, located somewhere around the mouth of the
Congo River. The locale is thus very similar to Heart of Darkness, despite the utterly different style of the
two authors. This was a curious choice for Wallace, since he had never worked in this region, and may
have visited such places only briefly on the steamers to and from South Africa. His depiction must thus
have been drawn largely from the writings of early travellers, rather than from direct experience. These
writers were probably largely French, as some of his spelling suggest. The soldiers who act as enforcers
for the commissioner are Haousa, rather than Hausa, as it would have been written in Nigeria.
There is also a curious chronological dislocation, as the novels refer to the Congo Free State, which came
to an end in 1908, while the British colonies had in general only been established a few years earlier. It is
likely that Wallace’s descriptions of ‘the Coast’ are based on Lagos colony, which had been established
as early as 1862. However, the location in Wallace’s novels is described bordering Belgian, Portuguese
and German territory, so in other respects, it is clearly geographically situated.
The novels themselves begin with the incidents in the life of Commissioners Sanders, who is represented
as governing a vast territory with soldiers, but essentially on his own. The tribes among whom he works
are warlike, but also given to dark superstitious practices involving human sacrifice, which must be
eliminated. Sanders’ methods of doing this are the most problematic aspects of the novels for modern
readers. He hangs people instantly, or even shoots them summarily, if they contravene government law.
Milder punishments include being sent in chains to prison villages on the coast, for long stretches. The
colonial government is depicted as bureaucratic and in lacking understanding, to be over-ridden by the
‘man on the spot’. This type of rough justice is paralleled in much of Wallace’s crime fiction, where
Figure 1. 1930s illustration of Rider
Haggard

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maverick enforcers visit punishment on criminals the police are unable to touch. Nonetheless, to modern
readers this is probably the most unappealing aspect of the Sanders books.
The tone of the novels gradually lightens as other characters join the cast as the series progresses. First is
Hamilton, the captain of the Haousas, depicted as cynical and competent. Then Augustus Tibbetts,
known as Bones, who is a classic comic character, more appropriate to the commedia dell’arte than
Central Africa. Bones was evidently popular with the readers, as his character comes to dominate the
later books. Finally, Hamilton’s sister, Patricia, comes to visit and is soon incorporated as the sensible
foil to Bones’ extravagant rhetoric. This humorous aspect came to dominate the novels, so much that
Wallace even brought the characters back to England in Bones in London (1921). In these stories, Bones
outwits various types of confidence trickster by a combination of ingenuity and innocent good luck,
while retaining the vaudeville repartee with Hamilton.
On the African side, Wallace’s finest creation is undoubtedly Bosambo, chief of the Ochori, but
originally a Kru from Liberia, and a notorious trickster. Bosambo is represented as out for his own
interest, but essentially loyal to Sanders, although not averse to concealing profitable transactions when it
suits him. Before Bones came to dominate, Bosambo had a set of stories where he is the main protagonist.
However, his main function is to provide a sarcastic commentary on the strange behaviour of white
people. Indeed this is an underlying theme of Wallace’s books, that Africans find white culture as bizarre
an inexplicable as theirs is to outsiders.
Oddly enough, we have a comment from Wallace on the role played by his
African characters. He said, ‘I do not regard the native as my brother or my sister,
nor even as my first cousin: nor as a poor relation. I do not love the native--nor do
I hate him. To me he is just a part of the scenery, a picturesque object with uses’.
In saying this, Wallace was being somewhat disingenuous, as he clearly was
interested both in the details of life in the Congo, and used his African characters
as a kind of Greek chorus to comment on white civilization. Numerous details of
the text illustrate Wallace’s fascination with the region, including the use of
Bomongo [Lomongo] as a lingua franca, the use of salt and rods as a currency.
Films about Africa are another topic, almost equally dismal, but we should not
pass on from Sanders without mentioning the version of the novels made by the
Hungarian-British director Zoltan Korda in 1935, after Wallace’s death. As the poster shows, the
African-American singer, Paul Robeson, was given lead billing, and indeed he gets to sing affectingly in
the film. The actual film is a curious hybrid, since Korda sent a crew to Africa to record picturesque
cultural scenes, which were integrated into what was essentially a studio film, with the Thames doing
duty for the mighty Congo. It seems that Robeson took part with the idea of representing the character of
Africans with dignity and what passed for realism during the period. However, the film was subsequently
re-edited in the studio to underline a sententious moral about the ‘White Man’s Burden’. Robeson,
needless to say, was outraged, and requested that his name be removed from the film. Perhaps the
ultimate tribute was the making of a satirical parody, Will Hay's Old Bones of the River (1938) only a
few years later, which mocked the colonial posturing of the earlier film.

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There is yet another striking novel set in the Congo, although less specifically defined, by the author C.S.
Forester, best-known for his Hornblower novels. Forester had already published The African Queen in
1935, so he had ‘form’ for Africa, but The sky and the forest (1948) is a much stranger book. To begin
with, it has no European protagonists, which is rare to vanishing point in these novels. Set in the early
period of the Congo Free State, it covers both the depredations of the Arab slave trade and the advance of
rapacious Belgian forces. The lead character begins as a
powerful ruler and is brought down by the slavers, escapes and
eventually begins to rebuild his life. There is nothing in
Forester’s biography to suggest why this topic interested him
and no evidence he ever visited this region of Africa. His
depiction must be entirely from written sources, which are
almost entirely in French, as for Edgar Wallace.
Whether it is this popular tradition, or merely chance, but the
Congo continues to fascinate fiction writers far more than other
parts of the continent. Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980) is a
type of near-future science fiction merged with the Lost World
tradition of Rider Haggard. Obviously realism is not on the
agenda when an expedition seeking a rare mineral encounters a
lost city inhabited by a race of super-gorillas. Nonetheless, as
always with Crichton, a great deal of care is taken with the
background, and the details are only marred by a few errors.
Like its prototype, King Solomon’s Mines, the narrative
unspools rapidly, and the highly implausible is made to seem
momentarily believable. As often with Crichton, a film was
made of Congo, which won awards for its truly execrable
quality. In many ways this shows how difficult it is to make a
credible visual image of something wh ich is easily imagined
from the page.
John le Carré, usually reliable when excoriating corruption and double-dealing among the wealthy
middle-classes of which he is so obviously a member, took a seriously wrong track with The Mission
Song (2006). It purportedly describes the double-dealing between a British Secret Service consortium and
a group of shady Congolese warlords intending to institute a coup and install a puppet ruler in the Kivu
region. Salvo, a translator with quite improbable skills, learns that the real purpose of the meeting is to
gain access to the region’s minerals and attempts to expose the shady negotiations, ending in his own
arrest and potential deportation. Despite the partial African setting, the real target, as usual, is the
duplicitous British establishment, all of whom continue to speak in a way that feels at least thirty years
out of date. None of the African scenes, told in flashbacks, have the slightest credibility, since le Carré
has no ear at all for either the sound and feel of the region, or the nature of daily interaction.
The last volume of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman Papers, Flashman on the March (2005) rather
unexpectedly1
turns to Ethiopia. This describes with characteristic brio Flashman’s involvement in a
secret mission associated with the Napier Expedition (1867-8) which ended with the assault on Magdala
and the suicide of the Emperor, Tewodros II. MacDonald Fraser’s confections are openly based on a
dense reading of the historical sources, and the details of life in Ethiopia are thus drawn with accuracy
and attention. Nonetheless, it is very clear that the author has never travelled in Ethiopia, for the book
1
In that it is not prefigured in previous glimpses of his biography.
Figure 2. Front cover of
Blackwood's magazine which
published the original version of
'Heart of Darkness'.

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lacks a feeling for the landscape and the colour of daily interactions which is a conspicuous pleasure of
some of the Flashman books set in Asia.
III. Literary authors
If we discount Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), a philosophical journey by an Ethiopian prince, Africa
probably appears on the literary scene with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902). Initially published
as a serial in Blackwood’s magazine it rapidly became a widely read text and a set book on university
courses. Most famously it was adapted and updated by Francis Ford Coppola to the era of the Việt Nam
War in Apocalypse Now (1978). Although the background of the novel is the atrocities of the Congo Free
State, Conrad does not really use the book to condemn them, something only apparently noticed by
African critics long after its establishment as a classic. The brutality of the book is essentially a backdrop
to the psychological breakdown of Mr. Kurtz, and a perverse romance. Some of the detail of river
navigation intersects with reality, but Africans who appear have no more personality than a cardboard
box.
The next major player in African stakes is Ernest
Hemingway (1899-1961) who published the non-fiction
Green Hills of Africa (1935), as well as the stories The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936) and The
Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936). These narratives all focus
on hunting and the internal struggles of men. Even
women play almost no part in them, let alone Africans.
The idiotic grin of Hemingway sitting over a slaughtered
lion in 1934 probably tells you everything you might
want to know about the depth of his insights into the
variety of human experience. Indeed one of the earliest
critical reviews, by John Chamberlain in The New York
Times, observes: ‘Green Hills of Africa is not one of the
major Hemingway works. Mr. Hemingway has so simplified his method that all his characters talk the
lingo perfected in The Sun Also Rises, whether these characters are British, Austrian, Arabian, Ethiopian
or Kikuyu’. I find it hard to disentangle my moral repulsion in relation to Hemingway’s enthusiasm for
killing from my critical faculties, but his tin ear for speech styles is a prominent aspect of his acclaimed
writing style, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
At around the same time, Graham Greene was making the first of several trips in Africa, initially as a
traveller (to Liberia) and later as an MI6 agent (in Sierra Leone). The Liberian journey produced a non-
fiction account, Journey without Maps (1936) and the sojourn in Freetown The Heart of the Matter
(1948). A later novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1961), set in the Congo (again!) clearly draws on the
experiences of Albert Schweitzer in Lambarene, Gabon. Whether Greene visited the Congo is unclear.
As a good journalist, Greene was prone to exaggeration and Journey without Maps was certainly that.
Greene met George Schwab, who was then leading the Harvard University Liberia Expedition, an
impressive multi-disciplinary enterprise whose ethnographic results were later published (Schwab 1947).
Greene could have chosen to learn something about ‘the natives’ who appear with the same relentless
uniformity as elsewhere in his work. In the later novels set in Africa, the main focus is on the tribulations
of white expatriates with Catholic guilt issues. It really seems hard to know why the tedious exploration
of Catholic guilt which dominates The Heart of the Matter ever resonated with the public. As the novel
travels to its inexorable and completely predictable conclusion, you begin to wish Scobie would top
Figure 3. Ernest Hemingway (1934)

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himself as quickly as possible2
. It is one of those novels that, were it published today, would be
consigned to the self-published corner of the internet. It somehow, also helps focus attention on the
strange nature of literary fame. Once ensconced like a toad, in a corner of the English studies department,
it is hard to show it the door.
The Anglo-Irish novelist Joyce Cary (1888-1957), who did spend time in Nigeria as a District Officer
(1914-1920), and by all accounts was a conscientious officer trying to bring roads and infrastructure to
what was then the remote northwestern region of Borgu. He published three novels reflecting this
experience, Aissa Saved (1932), The African Witch (1936) and the one for which he is most famous,
Mister Johnson (1939), a tragicomic account of the downfall of a Yoruba clerk in the colonial service.
Cary’s books have the advantage over the others discussed here that they were written by sometime who
really had spent time in a remote region of Africa, and African characters play leading novels in the
narrative. Nonetheless, one suspects Cary was mystified by the local environment in Borgu, and the
actual peoples with whom he worked. Although the first two novels, long out of print, try to describe this
society, they are meandering and difficult to understand. To be fair, this was a period when social
anthropology was in its earliest period of establishment, and the intellectual tools to make sense of a
diverse mosaic of languages and cultures remained to be developed. Mr. Johnson, on the other hand,
deals with a familiar character in Nigeria up to the present, an expatriate Southerner isolated in the North.
Although anointed with the classic epithet in English literature courses, you don’t have to be Chinua
Achebe to think there is something wrong with its clunky chain of narrative. To make sense of Mr.
Johnson, an author would really have to delve deeply into Yoruba culture, and this was clearly not on
Cary’s agenda.
Saul Bellow (1915-2005) set only one novel in Africa, Henderson the Rain King (1959), but he
considered the main character to be most like him, and the novel to be one of his best. Indeed it formed
part of the Nobel Prize citation in 1974. However, he clearly did not have a sensitive understanding of
other cultures, when he asked, ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad
to read him’. Henderson the Rain King is as depressing as this quotation suggests. The novel is really
about a middle-aged white man’s attempt to ‘find himself’, and the African background as convincing as
and eighteenth century engraving of Tahiti. Bellow uses implausible African names, Romilayu and
Dahfu, and invents strange tribes, the Arnewi and the Wariri. Indeed his second encounter, with the
‘giant wooden statue of the goddess Mummah’, must win some sort of prize for unconvincing interaction,
as if Bellow were drawing on Kipling’s The Man who would be King for his pagan idol.
John Updike (1932-2009) described his own subject as ‘the American small town, Protestant middle
class’ and there is reason to think he should have kept that focus. Nonetheless, in 1978, he branched out
with The Coup, a novel about an African dictatorship, set in the invented country of Kush, which is a
sub-Sahelian country similar to Niger. The dictator, Elleloû, is both a Muslim and a Marxist and Updike
late claimed it was based on Muammar Gaddafi. However, its over-the-top style and heavy humour have
consigned it to the remainder bins, while college students continue to read about the travails of Harry
Angstrom. Updike had visited Africa as a Fulbright scholar, although apparently did not learn anything
about its culture as a result. The ranting style of the dictator, both condemning America and nostalgic for
his education there, contrasts with the supposed African characters, whose speech mimics the tedious
rhythms of suburbia. According to Kathleen Lathrop in 1985, The Coup is a ‘modernist masterpiece’.
Despite the insistent thud of prizes on Updike’s doormat, this one has been forgotten, for discernible
reasons.
2
Raymond Chandler apparently felt the same. In a letter dated 10 Aug 1948, he wrote ‘Am reading The Heart of the
Matter, a chapter at a time. It has everything in it that makes literature except verve, wit, gusto, music and magic’.

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Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (1998) is a rare beast, written by an established novelist who
grew up in part in the Congo, but which was written many years later and clearly the product of
significant research rather than just memory. Kingsolver does not otherwise write about Africa, and is in
many ways the sort of safe writer beloved of literature departments in American universities. The book
concerns rather extreme missionaries during the early period after Independence, and the protagonists
eventually have to be flown out for their safety. Told largely from the point of view of children, the
father is a missionary of an extreme persuasion, not uncommon at the period. The first part of the book,
which presumably derives from direct experience, is set directly at the mission and describes the society
among which the women find themselves. Even so, African society is depicted as enigmatic, harsh and
observed, not understood.
IV. And?
What can we conclude from this? First that the rarity of depictions of Africa in the wider canon probably
reflect its deep strangeness, its inability to fit tidily into the canon. Literary authors who make the attempt
almost invariably produce unconvincing results, because they are too absorbed in addressing their
characteristic audience. Either you ride roughshod over probability in describing motivation and
language, as in the case of John Updike, or you make an attempt to describe a very alien worldview and
discover readers are few and far between. Where Africa does make an appearance in the literary novel, it
is treated as a colourful backdrop, with no attempt to give the reader a feel for place, personality, or to
help the reader understand ways of thinking in a different language. This is curious, because presumably
part of the reason we admire literary novelists is their presumed insight into the human condition and the
way they extend our sympathies. If they do not do this, then perhaps their grasp of humanity is not so
universal as typical academic cant would lead us to suppose.
I imagine the defence of the literary establishment would be that this is to miss the point. These authors
want to make points about the human condition, and to complain about a lack of credible reference points
would be like condemning Lucian of Samosata for inaccurately depicting the moon in his True History
(ca. 160 AD). Alternative and re-arranged history are perfectly respectable genres. But this won’t do; we
still expect rounded characters and credible motivation in alternate histories. I think we have to conclude
that literary novelists are both self-absorbed and lazy, and thus simply can’t bothered to deliver on
credibility. They are correctly banking on assumption that the vast majority of their readers wouldn’t
know Dakar from Dhaka.
Many of the literary novels mentioned here have been well received and feature on university courses.
This is all too plain when you conduct a cursory web search on the title, as the most immediate hits all
concern course notes, and plot summaries intended to assist hapless students to pass their exams.
Academic references almost invariably feature the post-colonial and various types of stereotyping, so we
know at once we are not in for a joyous read. As a result they take on a life of their own, independent of
whether they are actually worth reading. Literature becomes a task like any other, to be absorbed and spat
out.
Should we then admire popular novelists more than we do? Popular novelists stand by their sales, or
more recently, downloads. Their numbers of readers are not artificially pumped up the tired requirements
of university literature departments. If people continue to read them, they clearly speak to each
generation, regardless of their prose style, or the infelicitous expression of racial and gender prejudices.
Some of the authors described in this essay have largely been forgotten, such as Edgar Wallace, while
others continue in popular consciousness, like Rider Haggard. But they are worth remembering, and
indeed worth re-reading, and not merely with an ironic eyebrow raised. The fantastical elements may still

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appeal to our imaginations and the feeling for Africa will be enjoyed by anyone with an affection for the
continent.
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