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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2024

Matthew J. Christensen
Affiliation:
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
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Summary

Nigerian novelist Kole Omotoso pinpoints the central challenge facing African detective fiction writers, namely ‘how to prosecute the people who are powerful enough to totally ignore the process of law. The private dick angle doesn't work; somebody has to do more than this’ (1979: 10). The conflict between the classic British whodunit's implicit promise of legal justice and the entrenched fallibilities of Nigeria's judicial system animates Omotoso's claim. For him, the scenarios and resolutions of the typical British mystery cannot credibly accommodate Nigerian realities. To plausibly provide the pleasures of suspense and catharsis, detective stories must reflect the worlds in which their readers live. Omotoso's example of legal accountability for the rich and powerful is less uniquely African than he suggests as other global crime mysteries play on the same dynamic. He also overlooks the elasticity of the ‘private dick angle’ to account for a wide range of social and judicial scenarios, including the Nigerian situation. Yet Omotoso's question about how African detective fiction writers will represent the law and the courts, notions of criminality and justice, and the relationship between the citizen and state more broadly signals the imperative for African writers to interrogate what kinds of stories their detective fiction should tell and, most significantly, to what ends.

By the early 1940s, African writers had already begun answering Omotoso's question. Rather than replicate British manor-house mysteries with little more than an Africanization of character names, the earliest writers turned the tyrannies of colonial policing and the challenges of achieving equitable justice under colonial judiciaries into rich material for suspenseful and convincing detective stories. Over time, other African writers would do the same with the criminalization of state institutions by self-dealing politicians, the authoritarianism of military rule, and the neoliberal elevation of unbridled selfinterest to a public virtue. Ghana's R.E. Obeng was possibly the first to reimagine the detective genre for an African context, in 1942, with his collection of mystery stories featuring the detective Issa Busanga. Nigeria's Cyprian Ekwensi followed Obeng later in the decade with his first two investigation narratives and was joined in the 1950s and ‘60s by writers from South Africa, Ghana, and Ethiopia.

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Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
The State, the Citizen, and the Sovereign Ideal
, pp. 1 - 26
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Introduction
  • Matthew J. Christensen, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  • Book: Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
  • Online publication: 11 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432425.001
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  • Introduction
  • Matthew J. Christensen, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  • Book: Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
  • Online publication: 11 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432425.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Matthew J. Christensen, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  • Book: Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
  • Online publication: 11 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432425.001
Available formats
×