When writers understand themselves as writing African literature, they take on board certain ideas of what constitutes Africa in time and space, ideas that they assume readers share. In order to make sense of literary texts, writers and readers require some common understanding of what happened and what matters in history, of what has already been written, and of where people and things are located in relation to other people and things. The academic study of African literature, too, relies on common notions of Africa, its past and its location in the world. We are calling these shared understandings, integral to imagining a work in the first place and necessary for it to be understood by those who receive it, the archive of African literature.

The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves in a tradition and center themselves in the world. Mental maps define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions to which producers of texts must respond: where stories are set, who writers write for, how texts have meaning. Writers need to imagine themselves contributing to a body of literature; readers need to understand the field in which texts are produced.

Our use of the term archive to mean the collective memory preserved and shared by narratives, texts, and maps derives but departs from the common literal meaning of archive as the sum of the documents, physical or digital, that a group, and especially the state, has produced and preserved because they attest to its past and continuing identity and, by extension, to the institutions that safeguard those documents. Even the literal archive always includes more than the documents stored in a dedicated building in the capital city and readily expands to include all materials or embodied practices intended to preserve memory. Arjun Appadurai, who defines the archive as the “material site of the collective will to remember” (Reference Appadurai2003: 17), finds it natural that the physical archive includes “artifacts, monuments, products, even whole neighborhoods and cities. UNESCO’s long-standing mission to conserve important monuments as tributes to human heritage is, in fact, a product of this ethical view of the archive as a container or body, animated by something less visible – usually the spirit of a people, the people, or humanity in general” (15). Michel-Rolph Trouillot understands the archive to include

And so can a novel or poem. Verne Harris explains that

The archive in Africa thus would include Great Zimbabwe and Aksum, Île de Gorée and District Six, an epic poem such as Sundiata, a historical novel such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and the report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It would also include adjanou dance (see Diabate, Chapter 12, this volume), the Matopos hills (see Muponde, Chapter 16), the Murambi Memorial (see Anyaduba, Chapter 15), the Eastleigh neighborhood in Nairobi (see Ogude, Chapter 20) and Les Vraies Richesses bookstore in Algiers (see Orlando, Chapter 19). In Chapter 7, Cheryl Sterling makes the case for bodily memory as an archive.

The figurative meaning of the archive as collective memory is already implied by the paper and digital archives and is not an arbitrary accretion because the latter are always collected in the name of an ideal and tasked with bearing witness to a shared past, what Ato Quayson calls the “will to identity” (Reference Quayson1997: 17). The physical archives themselves are never passive, patiently awaiting the arrival of historical researchers. Neither are they neutral or innocent. And they always still have to be accessed and interpreted, even though they play an active role in preserving and shaping the past. Appadurai is, therefore, right in suggesting that the “archives are not only about memory (and the trace or record) but about the work of the imagination, about some sort of social project” (Reference Appadurai2003: 24). If the literal archive expands conceptually and organically to include the material and embodied traces of the past that anchor history and shape the sense of an inherited memory, that is because the archive always assumes an ideal of what it should contain. The pioneering South African writer H. I. E. Dhlomo considered the physical archives “a crucial component of the active labour of creating the political imaginary, that is the intellectual and cultural horizons that shape our grasp of personal and social histories and identities: where we come from and where we are destined” (Peterson Reference Peterson, Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh2002: 29). This volume seeks to outline those horizons. Achille Mbembe writes, “The community of time, the feeling according to which we would all be heirs to a time over which we might exercise the rights of collective ownership: this is the imaginary that the archive seeks to disseminate” (Reference Peterson, Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh2002: 21). The idea of a social and cultural imaginary alluded to here by Dhlomo and Mbembe assumes that people within a particular sociohistorical formation make sense of themselves and others, organize their actions and shape their expectations, and even assume the character of the fundamental coordinates of existence like time, space, and causality against a shared, relatively stable background (see Castoriadis Reference Castoriadis1998 and Taylor Reference Taylor2004). This form of imaginary is the inspiration for African literature and the subject of this collection.

Trouillot explains that the assembly of archives is

The archive here has to be read as anchoring explorations of national identity, thus turning the archive and archive-building into a major theme in most fictions.

The existence of physical archives presumes an agreement about what matters in stories and which stories matter. That is true of what we are calling the archive of African literature but was also true of the harmful fantasy implied by the imperial archive, which has, in recent times, come under close scrutiny. As Marlene Manoff reminds us, the “Fascination with records of the British Empire is not limited to official documents; it also extends to a vast literature produced by civil servants of the Empire and by Victorian and turn-of-the-century writers, including Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, T. E. Lawrence, and H.G. Wells. The novels depict an Empire held together, not by force, but by information” (Reference Manoff2004: 15). Is it surprising that when postcolonial writers, African writers included, set out to write they were invariably involved in reinterpreting and recontextualizing the information in the imperial archive and thus calling into question the colonial version of events by paying close attention to silences and absences in the body of that archive (see Kortenaar, Chapter 1, this volume)? Achebe, in his novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987), sees this process of archive-building as the struggle over memory – the will to remember, even those little acts of resistance that only the storyteller and the story can carry on to the next generation (Reference Achebe1987: 128) (see Musila, Chapter 14, this volume).

The ideal that inspires the collection of physical and digital archives remains perforce unattainable, for it is never possible to document everything that ever occurred, to collect every document written, or even to make a complete survey of all the contents available in the physical archive. In practice, many things that, in principle, should have been documented never were or were incomplete; many documents that should have been included were lost or never collected; and no one has a full grasp of what the archives contain. After all, archives themselves by their very nature are selective; they foreground certain facts and repress others. The incompleteness both of the archives and of our knowledge of the archives does not, however, prevent people from trusting that there is a continuing identity and collective past that the archives attest to. Archiving, writes Ogude, is “a dynamic instrument of remembering and not simply preserving” and a “deliberate project” of novelists and other writers (Reference Ogude and Ogude2015: 138).

What we are calling the African archive has a relation to what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire or sites of memory, locations or texts or images where collective memory is concentrated and preserved. Nora includes key literary texts among the sites of France’s memory. However, Nora’s understanding of sites of memory emphasizes the loss of memory, and African literature’s relation to memory is distinct from that of France. In France, modernity has disrupted any continuity with the past, stripped the world of memory, and replaced it with history-writing, “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of that which is no longer” (Nora Reference Nora1984: xix; our translation). Where once the social world had been permeated by memory, now specific consecrated sites are all that remain, general memory having been destroyed by a historical thinking that opened a gulf between the past and present. Whereas memory “is an always present phenomenon, a lived link to the eternal present” (xix), the “mission of history,” says Nora, “is to destroy and bury; it is the delegitimation of the lived past” (xx). As historical thinking develops, memory recedes. A people that lived entirely in history would not retain sites of memory; a people that lived in memory would not need them (xx).

Nora finds that in France literal archives constitute a prosthetic memory to replace a lost spontaneous memory that was once an integral part of the environment (xxvii). To some extent this is true as well of what we are calling the archive of African literature. For many in Africa, and that certainly includes readers of literature, especially literature in languages of European origin, there has also been a large disruption of memory. In such cases, there is no longer direct access to that which has been disrupted other than the carryover of survivals gleaned through memory and the deliberate attempts by states to create official sites of memory for new nations created from the former colonies, what Nora calls “the rituals of a society without ritual” (xxiv): Heroes’ Acre, Freedom Park, museums of apartheid or genocide or slavery. African literature is at once the continuation of memory and the proof that memory is at risk and needs to be preserved. If everyone remembered, there would be no need to remind them. African novelists must act as teachers, Achebe (Reference Achebe1989) felt; poets must serve as memory keepers; novelists must do research.¹ In other words, African writers at once rely on a common memory and invent it; preserve the archive and create it.

One great difference from Nora’s France, however, is that the disruption in memory in Africa was the deliberate result of the violent project of colonialism. When it comes to African literature, we need to constantly remember that it was often produced under conditions of ruin, preserving fleeting events and repressed knowledges and carrying over the survivals, those traces that have survived colonial violence and erasure, which can only be captured through a process of narrative recovery. This takes us back to Quayson’s idea of “the will to identity” or what Simon Gikandi calls willing new realities into being (Reference Gikandi1991: 2), thereby offering the possibilities of knowing the past and creating alternative (sites of) archive that new and contemporary literatures can build on and reference. When we trace the footprints, an archaeology of African literary genealogy, we are able to witness a rich sedimentation of knowledge, symbols, history, and experience that only literature can offer through the power of imagination and representation.

African literature, however, also preserves a more direct relation to the past than Nora can imagine for France. Many Africans continue to inhabit a société-mémoire, such as Nora says “assured the conservation and transmission of values” and “assured the regular passage from the past to the future or indicated what of the past needed to be retained for the future” (xviii; our translation), and we can expect memory of the kind whose loss Nora laments in France to be stronger in much of Africa.

The distinct relation of African literature to memory is acknowledged whenever academic courses in African history or politics assign African novels. The frequent presence of novels on the syllabi of history or political science courses displays a respect for literature as a source of historical knowledge that is rare in other areas of the world. While the practice of treating African literature as history can often be symptomatic of a misreading whereby literary texts, and novels in particular, are read as merely sociological documents rather than appreciated as aesthetic creations, such a misreading is but an unfortunate byproduct of something that is true of and particular to African literature: the shared project of remembering. And more importantly, African literatures, more than any other national literatures we know of today, are often acutely intentional in their goal of creating an alternative historiography different from that given by colonialism. African literatures were also very deliberate in preserving certain facets of African cultures that were threatened by colonialism, and by apartheid in the context of South Africa. A foundational writer like Sol Plaatje of South Africa declared that his intention in writing his novel Mhudi was to “interpret the back of the native mind” – to present an African perspective of African history and to preserve Sechuana proverbs and oral traditions, which he felt were fast disappearing under the tyranny of colonial culture. For writers like Plaatje, as Ogude (Reference Ogude and Ogude2015) argues, the foremost challenge confronting the African writer was to provide a narrative history written from the African perspective and, indeed, to preserve for posterity a record of a rich tradition threatened by extinction under the onslaught of colonialism. The idea of record-keeping through reimagination is one aspect of archive-building that African literature has been engaged in over the years, and it is directly related to its oral resource base, one of whose many objectives was to capture historical memory. That is why the postcolonial critique of the archive places the oral tradition at its core and complicates the notion of “recording,” expanding it beyond the objective materiality of the media to include the subjective experience of remembering (the living witness). It was, indeed, this desire to create an alternative archive and history, to preserve aspects of African cultural practices, that led many Western critics to dismiss the earliest African literature as anthropological, political, and lacking aesthetic imagination.

The stories that matter to African writers are inspired by an anti-colonial counter-archive that has rarely had a physical counterpart. Examples of a literal physical counter-archive would be the South African History Archive, established under the auspices of the United Democratic Front and Congress of South Africa Trade Unions and housed at Wits University; the records of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress collected at the University of Fort Hare; and the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) records deposited with the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape. Perhaps the most prominent example is the published records of the South African TRC, “fundamentally an archival intervention dedicated to finding a liberatory memory praxis for a democratic South Africa” (Harris 70). We hasten to add here that the South African TRC archives themselves have in turn given rise to a myriad of alternative archives, seeking to contest and revise the TRC itself. And although not every African state has South Africa’s resources to create a physical counter-archive to the imperial archive, and in most cases, the anti-colonial archive remains implied, it is worth noting that other modes of archive-keeping had also been engineered in the rest of the continent.

Because of their problematic relationship with the colonial archive, African historians and writers are perhaps more aware than others of the insufficiency of all documentary archives. If history-writing has long presumed written sources, when it comes to African history-writing this assumption has to be revised. To speak of collective memory is to raise the question of how memory is transmitted, orally or in writing (see Olaoluwa, Chapter 2, this volume). The written sources for African history may date back many centuries – think of the rich materials written in Arabic or Arabic script preserved in Timbuktu, not to mention Pharaonic Egypt (see Oluoch-Olunya, Chapter 6, this volume) – but their reliance on literacy, and on print in particular, means that such documents preserve a past as recorded by the literate and those with access to power: scribes, colonial officials, missions. Historians of Africa have long known that, in order to recover the past, they needed to turn to oral sources, the official memories preserved by griots and memory keepers. Ogude has called the repertoire of oral memory “library-building” (Reference Ogude and Ogude2015: 11), an allusion to the proverb attributed to Amadou Hampaté Bâ, “In Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns down.” This is another figurative reference to the physical archive that builds upon a meaning already presumed by the literal definition.

What comes to mind was the deliberate move in the 1960s in East and West Africa, among literary scholars and historians, to return to the oral resource base. In the area of literature, the now well-acknowledged Ngũgı̃ revolution at Nairobi University was a call to return to oral sources as legitimate sites of knowledge. The historian Bethwell Ogot, the editor of UNESCO’s General History of Africa, turned to oral sources in his PhD work on the history of the Luo of Kenya, much to the spirited opposition of his supervisors at Oxford, who had refused to accept oral sources as legitimate archives for knowledge production. What followed was a revolution across the continent that saw the rise and acceptance of African oral sources as legitimate archives. Looking at Karin Barber’s work on Yoruba Oriki (Reference Gikandi1991), Maina wa Kinyatti’s Thunder from the Mountains: Mau Mau Patriotic Songs (1980), and Wajiku Kabira and Karega Mutahi’s Gikuyu Oral Literature (1988), to mention but a few examples, it is clear that oral literature and oral sources in general began to take hold in the academy in Africa. Therefore, if the anti-colonial counter-archive informs African literature, it is also true that this archive was fueled by a deliberate recourse to an indigenous resource base that was constantly being reactivated, as Quayson (Reference Quayson1997) has reminded us.

Historians seeking to retrieve the African past also rely on the memories of those who experienced or witnessed events. Think of the projects to recover the memories of survivors of apartheid violence, participants in labor struggles, or women’s lives. A major inspiration of African literature, too, is imagining the unwritten stories of the past, what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” (Reference Hartman2008: 11).

To the work of historical recovery and reimagining, literary writers add an element of myth-making. The physical archive is frequently rich in unexpected and yet-to-be-discovered material. By definition, that is not the case with the implied archive of collective memory, the subject of this volume, which is an understanding that is to some extent already shared. This volume is concerned primarily with what writers assume they and their readers know and should know, and not with new discoveries. Our interest is in the frame, historical and geographical, and even grand-historical, in which recovered stories are located. Novelists, poets, and playwrights have been at least as responsible as historians for creating that collective memory. As they cross-reference each other’s texts, African writers have embroidered a vast and strong shared sense of history and geography. Literary texts are fully aware that received ideas have to be accessed and one powerful tool given to us to access and organize ideas is narrative – story – because it provides the space for fabrication and the language for framing received ideas into something new. This collective memory shapes the questions that African literature asks, the conventions that texts reproduce or rewrite in order to produce meaning, and the intertexts that texts invoke in order to locate themselves within or against a tradition.

Our use of the term archive, while much larger than the physical archive, is more modest than Michel Foucault’s use of the term to mean “the law of what can be said” (Reference Foucault1972: 129), “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” shared by everyone writing within an episteme, a common space and time (130, emphasis in original). Where Foucault is writing of an intellectual paradigm so large that it is not perceived by those who think and write within it, our archive is concerned only with what is classified as literature, not with all that is written; and the writers who invoke and contribute to our implied archive do so consciously. Nevertheless, even if our sense of archive is not as all-encompassing as Foucault’s understanding of discourse, we can still say of our archive what Foucault says of his, that it groups events and histories

It is the constellations of African collective memory reflected in African literature that this volume seeks to chart.

Our sense that there is an archive of shared assumptions presumes that there is an African literature, but we acknowledge that Nigerian novels do not share all the reference points of South African novelists or Algerian ones. The archive of black South African writers differs from that of white writers, even if they overlap. And the collective understanding we have called the “archive” differs substantially depending on what language one uses. Gikandi writes of “maps of Englishness” (Reference Gikandi1997), and there is no doubt there are as many maps and histories as there are languages in Africa. However different those maps, they are all imagined to be superimposable upon one another. The nationalists who sought independence for the various colonies from their imperial metropoles did so in the name of the continent and the race. Africa often figured in the name of the party leading the anti-colonial struggle (e.g. African National Congress, Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde). Our volume assumes that writers on the continent and in the recent diaspora imagine an African literature to which they are contributing, distinguished from European, American, or Asian literature or from literature in general, and these versions of African literature do not exclude each other but deliberately imagine themselves as coextensive. African literature, even when directed to Nigerians, South Africans, or Algerians in particular, imagines itself and is received by readers as African (but see Oduor, Chapter 3, this volume for an argument about what this means).

Writing on “Literature of the World between 1500 and 1800,” Zhang Longxi expresses this thus:

Herein lies the power and authority of literature: its capacity to offer and preserve cumulative layers of the cultural archive of societies, stitched in a complex web of language and myth that constitutes the very essence of collective memory.

The evidence that there is an African literature is that increasingly there are physical archives of that literature, and, as we have noted, the existence of physical archives presumes a larger project of collective memory. Academic researchers comb through publishers’ records or old newspapers; increasingly there are digital projects to recover and preserve literary inheritance, such as the Manuscrits francophones du Sud program or the Women Writing Africa project; and university libraries (albeit primarily in North America and Europe) purchase the personal archives of major writers. African literary archives have made possible the recovery of literature and knowledge about literature that would otherwise be forgotten. Those working in the archive, think of Bernth Lindfors or Stephanie Newell, have uncovered the first West African novel or the first Nigerian novel. The physical archives of African literature are indispensable, for, as Sophie Heywood writes of French African literature, African authors “have been disproportionately subject to censorship, and extensive editorial interventions by publishers in the global north,” and “the ratio of published to unpublished work in the francophone authors’ oeuvres studied to date has typically been 20% to 80%, while the reverse has been true for their Northern counterparts” (Reference Heywood, Sutton and Livingstone2018: 80). Nevertheless, those who work in the physical literary archives at, say, the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas or the National Literary English Museum at Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) always presume a project of African literature and even a project of Africa to which they are contributing.

African writers in different locations have varying ideas of the past and of space, but their implied archives overlap. It is that shared archive, which at a minimum contains precolonial polities, slave trades, colonialism, apartheid, independence struggles, local animist traditions, Islam and Christianity, European ethnography, and the African diaspora, that this volume attempts to outline. This volume is about how twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and readers of African literature have constituted the archive that they needed. African literature has many identifiable points of origin: for example, oral verbal culture, the first writings by people on the continent, the advent of printing, colonialism, European literary genres. This volume of the Transitions in African Literature series is not concerned with identifying absolute origins or foundations but with studying the ways points of origin have been retrospectively identified and even invented (in the sense in which tradition is always recreated) by writers and by critics in order to serve the needs of the present. The narratives that are told of history determine the origins and ancestors that one locates and identifies with.

Our volume can only suggest the outlines of the collective imagination that it seeks to document. The implied archive itself shapes a narrative of Africa, what is told but also what is not told, what is repressed. Readers will inevitably think of chapters that should be here but are missing. That incompleteness is something this volume shares with the physical archives. Nevertheless, we trust that this collection performs the role of suggesting there is such a thing as a collective understanding, however variegated, that can be documented and analyzed so that students of African literature can be introduced to the field of African literature and can begin to ask why things are remembered in the ways that they are.