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Imperial Humanist Critique on the Margins of African Canons

Bakary Diallo, born in colonial Senegal, authored the much-neglected first work of Francophone African literature. The prolific South African Richard Rive was well-recognized during his lifetime, principally for his short fiction. Diallo and Rive, in many ways different writers, today nonetheless share a particular location on the outskirts of contemporary African literary canons. This essay explores why, and with what consequences, they have been cast as complicit and quietly marginalized, and analyses strands of the neglected humanist critique within their best-known works. Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) and Rive’s “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) demonstrate that African literary expression has taken many forms, and articulated heterogeneous political imaginaries. The imperial-yet-critical humanisms of these novels are traces of non-nationalist, non-racialist, anti-apartheid, and anti-colonial traditions. They remind us that the current continent of nation-states was not the only imagined future, and that its national and Negritude literatures do not compose our only archive.