ABSTRACT
Although it is a simplification to say that Sub-Saharan African literature during the early stages of modernism was little touched by the intellectual and spiritual upheavals following the Darwinian, Nietzschean, and Freudian revolutions – which led to such Western metropolitan aesthetic responses as futurism, dadaism, expressionism, surrealism, and existentialism – this was in fact largely the case. As a socio-historical phenomenon, modernity was a colonial import, a colonial imposition, however much the benefits of modernization were at times desired. Reactions to it were not the result of a prolonged existential and psychological crisis beginning with the Reformation; modernity in itself was the crisis. As Michael Chapman notes, Africa as a whole responded through its various literatures to ‘the shared experience of colonialism in its abrasive, economic form attendant on strong, permanent settler populations’ (2003: xviii). Modernity arrived relatively suddenly, and aesthetic responses to it were premised for the most part upon a physical relationship to material conditions on the continent and the socio-political consequences of those material conditions. This is as true today of the social pragmatist Chinua Achebe as it is of the theoretical sophisticate J.M. Coetzee; of Steve Chimombo (immersed in Eliot) as much as Sol Plaatje (immersed in Shakespeare). Aesthetic responses to modernity were experienced in three broad stages: the early modernists set the example for African writers to free themselves from the influences of a dominant culture; the study of modernist texts at university in the 1940s and 1950s inspired future writers to explore new imaginative options; and writers from the 1960s up to the present consciously deploy modernist techniques to negotiate the crises attendant on post-colonialism (Gikandi 2003: 339).
