Caught in the Crossfire: Writing Conflict in Two African Novels

Abstract

The link between history and literature is particularly clearly seen in the last fifty years of writing out of Africa especially in those narratives which focus on the damaging fall-out from wars of liberation and the dismantling of Empire. In this context, the history of Africa is a history of violence and African literature is writing that attempts to reflect (and reflect on) the conflicts embedded in Africa’s disengagement from Europe and its legacy of violence. This paper looks at two different kinds of conflict, and the very different construction of violence, in two novels published almost half a century apart, and the ways in which they address the problem of writing an inclusive national narrative: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), set in a village in Kenya in the days leading up to Independence in 1963, and looking back on the period of the Emergency, is one of the first fictional representations of the impact of a war of liberation on an indigenous population. Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) set in the five years that followed the declaration of Independence in Zimbabwe in 1980, is a powerful contemporary rendering of the continuing impact of such wars. Both texts redefine commonly experienced conflict through the lives of ordinary people, focussing on local figures caught in the crossfire of globally driven forces.