ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an emerging gothic impulse animating strands of literary production within ‘the African imagination’. A young Xhosa woman in South Africa is confined to a convent, a ‘cure’ for the spirits that she has always been able to see; a little girl in London makes friends with a Yoruba ghost, and is consequently terrorised by threatening visitations; a child in Igboland hears a voice inside her head, compelling her into the scaled arms of fanged and flesh-eating playmates. As a term for categorising literary texts, ‘gothic’ first emerged in late eighteenth-century Britain to describe fiction written in the style is inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: a fantastical narrative of shadowy dungeons, archaic villainy and weird, haunting apparitions. For F. Abiola Irele, the African imagination refers to ‘a conjunction of impulses’, which are ‘grounded both in common experience and in common cultural references’.
