Reading Childhood A Literary Historiography

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; King, 1980). Laye, the protagonist, is in a process of acculturation through colonial education. His family agonises over the thought of sending him to school in the city. In these examples, the African child is seen as caught in between the polarised worlds of the village and the city, symbolic of tradition and modernity. In these early representations, there existed a dialectic where whilst writers like Camara
Laye represented the child as the ideal image for Africa in its process of decolonisation,
Mongo Beti on the other hand sought to represent a realist image of the African child in conflict with patriarchal authority. For instance, Beti‟s, writing as Alex Biyidi, about the African Child in Presence Africaine asks Did this Guinean, a person of my race, who was, according to him, a very sharp boy, then never see anything other than peaceful, beautiful and maternal in Africa (Biyidi, 1954:420). Beti‟s works went onto pit sons against their fathers not for access to the mother but over the figurative equivalent of a sister (Kortenaar, 2007:187). Hence Beti paints a realist image of the presence of conflict in the process of maturation for the African child, whose absence Marete (1998) also decries of in Laye‟s The African Child.
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The representation of childhood in the sands in Francophone African literature was therefore marked by the contrast of innocence and conflict. Cultural retrieval was a major aim of these portrayals of childhood. This aim was aided by the racialised consciousness brought about by the Negritude movement that swept across francophone West Africa. Hence, childhood was symbolic of a collective African identity by virtue of it being a means of retrieving a collective pastoral psyche that was believed to be African. Camara Laye uses the image of the child to rewrite perceptions of Africa that were dominant in colonial discourse. The innocence of this childhood is akin to what Blake does in Innocence and Experience in the Romantic imagination as a symbol of imagination and sensibility (Coveney, 1957:31) and as a utopia of time (Heath,
2003:20). But as Biyidi (1954) and Marete (1998) argue, the presence of conflict in the representation of childhood cannot be ignored, and they decry this romanticisation of African childhood. Indeed, in looking at the theme of childhood in commonwealth
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Abanime Childhood a la Camara Laye and Childhood a la Mongo Beti” pp. 82-90.
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Marete Absence of Conflict in Maturation in The African Child pp. 91-101.

15 fiction Desai (1981:45) argues that the African child in these narratives is in fact no romantic angel but a bundle of impulses […] trying to piece together his fragmentary experiences. Desai says that the child is a complex being, in fact often more complex than the adult, subjected to an unpredictable process of growth It is in view of the complexity of childhood that this study aims to point out how the works of Laye and Mongo Beti also highlighted the relationship between sons and fathers. Mission to Kala, for instance, portrays the haunting presence of the father of the protagonist through his (fathers) absence. During his mission the protagonist constantly worries about his fathers expectations of his results from school. There is an internal conflict in the protagonists mind throughout his mission. This omnipresence of the father is a significant trope in representations of childhood that this study intends to pursue, albeit in a more complicated context of cultural plurality in a postcolonial world. The representation of childhood in Nigerian fiction can be traced back to Okonkwo‟s family in Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart. This is through the childhoods of
Ikemefuna, Ezinma and Nwoye; with Ikemefuna, to borrow Michelle Wrights (2004:8) definition of the black diaspora, as “Other-from-within,” Ezinma occupying both a terrestrial and extraterrestrial world and Nwoye‟s childhood contested by Okonkwo using the social construct of gender. All the three childhoods are actually marked, to use Stuart Halls (1996) words, by an internal diaspora,”
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an “other-from-within”. Moreover,
Achebe‟s Arrow of God engages childhood as a site of experimentation, for example when Ezeulu‟s concept of the mask dancing is demonstrated through his attempt at using a child to make contact with the world of colonial missionaries. Hence the child is constructed as the object of change. In fact, the concept of the mask dancing refers to changing time, to transitions – the mask becomes ontological.
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Childhood in Arrow of
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Refer to Hall When was the postcolonial Thinking at the Limit p. Okonkwo wishes fora composite of Nwoye and Ezinma as an ideal child. Yet as Achebe seems to be demonstrating, childhood is not as homogenously constructed as the
Umuofia society and indeed Okonkwo expects it to be;
it is not only gendered, but also complexly layered.
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The trope of the mask dancing is highly gendered and an inscription of patriarchal authority, considering that only titled men could wear it and the masquerade ceremonies too had strong gender connotations. Its importance here is its connection to change as well as its relation to the child. Ezeulu perceives that the best way to understand a world that is like a mask dancing is to create rapport and he uses

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God is an object for mobility – of being. Indeed, as Richard Coe (1984:17) says mobility is the very essence of childhood. In the early works of Achebe, childhood is constructed within bi-cultural and sometimes tri-cultural worlds in which identities are relatively stable and fixed. But what is significant here is the image of the child as symbolic of transience, mobility, becoming, as an icon of transition, and as experimental, even though within singular, dual or triple sociopolitical and cultural milieus that are distinct. This symbolic capital has persisted in the contemporary narratives in this study, signaling to the processes that define childhood, and which give it the agency that this study attempts to foreground. Childhood in Nigerian fiction has also been represented and critically examined through feminist dimensions in the works by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Zaynab Alkali among others. Childhood in these writers works takes on a gendered perspective, using the representation of girlhood to further concerns related to feminism. The criticism that comes out of these works hardly examines childhood as an influential discourse by itself but rather as an appendage of the aspect of motherhood (Ikonne, 1992; Agbasiere,
1992;
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Okereke, 1992;
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Uwakeh, 1998;
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Alabi, 1998;
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Nnaemeka, 1997). Moreover, African feminist literary criticism does not do much in foregrounding childhood as a significant discourse but rather as a sub-discourse that affirms the rise of the adult female figure in African literature. Motherhood is discussed within the political dimension of gender (Stratton, 1995;
Schipper, 1987) and as an entry point into dealing with what Anne Oakley (1994) calls
“malestream” literature. Ina sense then, the rise of African feminist literary discourse has remained “adultist,” while it argued that motherhood was an ironical pedestal in works by male writers (Schipper, 1987; Anne McClintock, 1995; Nnaemeka, 1997). Consequently, the figure of the child has remained obscure and the ideas that childhood his son to make contact with this world. In this act is the importance of childhood as a site of experimentation and transition.
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Agbasiere Social integration of the child in Buchi Emecheta‟s novels pp. 127-137.
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Okereke Children in the Nigerian Feminist Novel pp.138-149.
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Uwakweh Carving a Niche Visions of Gendered Childhood in Buchi Emecheta‟s The Bride Price, &
Tsitsi Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions,” pp.9-21.
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Alabi Gender Issues in Zaynab Alkali‟s Novels pp. 22-28.

17 and its worldview presented remained peripheral. Perhaps, as Shulamith Firestone argues in The Dialectic of Sex (1972) motherhood was to be problematised as asocial construct, with the female adult figure divorced from childhood because of her worth and worldview as an independent adult female figure rather than for her ability to be a mother. The rise of African feminist literary criticism has howver brought significant attention to the idea of girlhood in literary childhood studies, thus dispelling the idea that childhood is a homogenous concept in African societies. Childhoods gendered dimensions are therefore crucial in the development of feminist criticism. Gendered childhoods have become significant in imaginative literary expressions and scholarship, especially those in diasporic contexts. There are accounts of growing up male or female in a global world for instance, in the anthology edited by Faith Edise and Nina Sichel titled Unrooted

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