Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
Pages: 326
Year: 2017
Category: African Studies, Anthropology, History & Criticism, Literature, Social Sciences
Dimensions: 229 x 152mm
How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds
This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being
human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research
is conceptualised, taught and practised in universities across Africa.
Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the
right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and
represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and
universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are
labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of
the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The
book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws
attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities
for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It
speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded “frontier African” at the
crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative
conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary
identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic
assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality,
interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge
traditions in Africa.
Price range: £35.00 through £36.00
About the author
Francis B. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal, where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana. In October 2012 he received a University of Cape Town Excellence Award for “Exceptional Contribution as a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities”. He is recipient of the “ASU African Hero 2013” annual award by the African Students Union, Ohio University, USA. He is: a B1 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF); a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011; a fellow of the African Academy of Science since December 2014; a fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa since 2016; and Chair of the Editorial Board of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press since January 2011. His scholarly books include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005); Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006); “C’est l’homme qui fait l’homme”: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d’Ivoire (2015); and #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016).
Review
“Twenty
years after his death, valued by some scholars and writers but
discounted by others, Amos Tutuola here finds a compelling advocate.
Nyamnjoh reveals a voice that both embraces a range of African communal
experience beyond ‘lettered’ reach and challenges commonplace aesthetic
and philosophical constructs of African knowledge. And he shows why
Tutuola matters, in his own time and now.”
Milton Krieger, Emeritus Professor, Western Washington University
“Francis Nyamnjoh invites us to rethink contemporary cosmopolitanism
through strange encounters and marvellous episodes recounted in the
stories of Amos Tutuola, a mid-twentieth century Nigerian Yoruba author.
This might seem an endeavour more implausible than the tales
themselves, but reading will change your mind.”
Richard Fardon, Professor of West African Anthropology, SOAS, University of London
“Tutuola’s tales of frontiers, of incompleteness, of crossroads and
conviviality advance profound epistemological perspectives on being and
knowledge that we will do well to acknowledge. Nyamnjoh positions
Tutuola as a vernacular theorist whose narratives are a fount of
hermeneutical and epistemological insight. Much is often made of the
idea of vernacular theory but this book is an exemplary instance of
putting that idea into practice.”
Harry Garuba, poet and scholar, University of Cape Town
“The book is an important contribution to African intellectual history.
It offers a fresh and original interpretation of the life and work of
Amos Tutuola, but at the same time marks a substantial advance in the
ongoing epistemological debates on the study of Africa…. Based on his
concept of the incompleteness of human existence, Nyamnjoh opts for an
inclusive, dialogical and interdisciplinary approach. Of special
interest is the way in which he relates ethnography to fiction and his
focus on the real life experiences of ordinary people. This is a seminal
work which no doubt will have a significant impact on current
epistemological thinking.”
Professor Bernard Lategan, Founding Director, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS)
“Weaving varied ethnographic accounts together with richly textured
historical perspectives, Nyamnjoh traces and rehabilitates the checkered
career of an unusual and often controversial literary icon.”
Sanya Osha, author of African Postcolonial Modernity: Informal Subjectivities and the Democratic Consensus