One of the hottest literary issues of my youth was the supremacy war between two types of fiction writing in Africa. There was what was generally termed popular fiction on one hand and, on the other hand, serious literature.
Popular literature was basically the sherehe (party life) type of fiction. It focused on how the rich and carefree went about their lives, exploring the African idea of nightlife and pleasure, peppered with scenes of mindless consumption, violence, and all the trappings of the modern thriller. Popular fiction often featured a bad guy who broke all the rules and trampled on the rights of a seemingly weak person or group. Predictably, the underdog ended up the hero and victor. It was literature built around a flight of fancy that eventually went awry, slapping the initially unstoppable villain with a good dose of karmic punishment. Poetic justice.
Popular fiction, at least as defined then, rode on what modern literary parlance calls “art for art’s sake,” literature for entertainment’s sake. Think romance, thrillers, whodunits, the works. Of course, the definition and scope of popular literature is much broader than that.
Serious literature, on the other hand, as characterised by its proponents, captured a people’s greatest challenges. In the African context, it typically explored Africans struggling under the weight of (post)colonial tormentors. It was literature revolving around the grave, existential struggles of everyday life.
For me, and I wrote several times about it in these pages when I was a young university student, these two strands are, in the final analysis, the proverbial two sides of the same coin.
Let us use a hypothetical example to unpack it all. A novel that explores suffering in a slum gives an incomplete cosmic story if it doesn’t also tell us how those responsible for that suffering spend their days. For, in most cases, what was called serious fiction essentially focused on the perceived victim’s side of the story.
Think of Achebe in his trilogy, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God, painting an artistic picture of the havoc colonialism wrought on African lives, using his Igbo cultural milieu as a launchpad. Now, had Achebe chosen not to focus on the life of Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu in Arrow of God, or Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, and instead told the story of Winterbottom, the colonial administrator the locals called Wintabota, perhaps his novels would have been categorised as popular fiction. They probably would have told us where Wintabota spent his free time after leaving the office, perhaps frolicking in the Nigerian version of “Happy Valley”.
The term Happy Valley originated in colonial Kenya during the 1920s and 1930s to describe a community of wealthy British settlers who established themselves in the Wanjohi Valley of the Aberdare Range, near present-day Nyeri and Naivasha/Gilgil. The phrase was coined partly in irony, as the settlers, many of them aristocrats and World War I veterans, sought a hedonistic refuge from the constraints of British society.
Drawn by Kenya’s temperate climate and vast tracts of land appropriated from Africans after the British takeover, they built lavish homes and indulged in extravagant lifestyles funded by family fortunes or colonial ventures. The “happiness” of the valley became synonymous with reckless pleasure-seeking, opulent parties and scandalous affair, a sharp contrast to the hardships of African labourers and smallholder settlers around them.
The notoriety of the Happy Valley set, as they came to be known, spread through gossip, memoirs and sensational journalism. The lid on their decadent lifestyles was blown off after the unsolved 1941 murder of Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, who was found shot dead in his car on January 24, 1941. The subsequent trial drew extraordinary public attention and cemented the “Happy Valley” myth in popular culture, famously retold in James Fox’s White Mischief and its 1987 film adaptation. Perhaps it is Peter Kimani’s novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, that most succinctly satirises the happy valley farce.
The broader context, that these settlers occupied parts of Kenya’s “White Highlands” land reserved for European settlement under colonial policy, explains how a small expatriate elite could live so separately from African communities. Over time, the term Happy Valley came to symbolise both the glamour and the moral decay of the British settler class, serving as a metaphor for the excesses of colonial privilege and detachment from African realities. What made the phrase famous was the contrast between the valley’s outward “haven” image and its inhabitants’ reputation for conspicuous decadence.
Back to Achebe’s trilogy. Had Achebe chosen to tell the story of Wintabota, he would probably have produced a work of popular fiction. And while I do not think Achebe was obliged to tell the story of his people’s tormentors at the expense of his own, the complete picture could only emerge if everyone told their part of the story. For both popular and serious fiction are what Eastern societies have described as the yin and yang of life.
Hegelian dialectics, a philosophical framework developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, explains progress in ideas or history as a dynamic tension between opposing forces, the thesis and the antithesis, which eventually resolve into a synthesis reconciling elements of both. Applied to literature, this dialectic shows that popular and serious fiction are not opposing categories but complementary expressions.
Thus, the Hegelian dialectic shows how both kinds of fiction continually shape and elevate each other.
It is heartening to see that today, both popular and serious fiction work together to help us see the human experience in its totality. Otherwise, we would be like the ten blindfolded persons who agreed to touch an elephant, and each returned with tall tales about the small part they felt. Sorry for over-quoting Achebe, but he is the one who told us that life is like a mask dancing; you see it from many sides.
