A Voice in the Crowd: The African Novel of Ideas Book Forum Response

Early 2021 was an uncomfortable time to publish a book that has nothing ostensibly to do with living through a pandemic. And so the thanks that almost always begin roundtable responses like this one are especially heartfelt in this long, weary stretch: I am grateful that Cajetan Iheka, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Bruce Janz, Ashleigh Harris, and Simon Van Schalkwyk took time they almost certainly did not have to craft such thoughtful replies to The African Novel of Ideas. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to steal glimpses of new projects that are fully of their own making. I am happy to have these colleagues and to work in this field. The African Novel of Ideas is my recovery and building out of something that probably cannot exist and yet meaningfully wants to: a mind that coheres through dedication to querying external truths. Time and again, in my work thus far, I have found in African novels an intellect striving to break free of the social and historical vicissitudes by which it nonetheless knows itself to be formed. Equally as often, I have been frustrated by the lack of a developed critical vocabulary to describe this give and take between social attunement and individual reasoning in African contexts often marked by terms of “crisis,” “urgency,” “resistance,” and the like. This does not mean that the aggregate protagonist of The African Novel of Ideas is timely; on the contrary, the trajectory of my book connects philosophical types who begin as mere loners, in preindependence contexts, and become outright pariahs in postcolonial ones. But neither does untimely mean ahistorical. The opening vignette of Simon Van Schalkwyk’s contribution to this forum, set at a University of Cape Town #FeesMustFall gathering in 2016, offers a glimpse of a real-life figure who could well be enfolded intomy book. “Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest” over whether the decolonization of science should take seriously the idea that one person can send lightning to strike another, Van Schalkwyk writes, a lone audience member “can be heard saying, ‘It’s not true.’” The particular content of this showdown over science and (Zulu) belief