Modern Africa

Abstract

Modern is a complex word which means different things to a geologist, an historian and an aircraft-designer. The senses of ‘now existing’ and ‘of recent origin’ have grown further apart in every century since the word appeared in English in 1500. Much that now exists is held to be obsolete, in life and literature. Competing voices claim their own modernity and modern becomes increasingly highly charged when it means what is now desirable and elastic in its sense of now existing. Podsnap’s ‘not English!’ has been replaced by ‘not modern!’ Africans have suffered most from other people’s misguided attempts to modernise them, and much of their literature has been inspired by a reappraisal of their own present place. But African fiction is worth the attention of everybody interested in the state of the novel. It poses various challenges, not least to developments in criticism which are losing touch with what novelists actually write.