Communal Intellection and Individualism in the African Novel

Abstract

The advancement of individual integrity as an alternative to the dissolution that concludes so many African novels is a compelling (and, in Jackson’s sophisticated analysis, convincing) idea. But I am nevertheless left wondering why so many African novels of ideas do end in states of dissociation and disassociation “in which intellection signals not just social illegibility but literal death”?2 I wager that if we approach novelistic form as deeply entangled in aesthetic, cultural, contextual, historical, and philosophical codes, we can trace a historical arch of the genre’s formal limitations for intellection in African contexts that explains this tendency. To illustrate this claim, I wish briefly to discuss S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Ityala lamawele (Lawsuit of the Twins), first published in 1914 with the missionary Lovedale Press and widely considered to be the first isiXhosa novel. To call Ityala lamawele a novel is to stretch the description of that genre a little far. The original 1914 text comprised a mere nine chapters and was no longer