Ethiopia: Magic, Spirits in African and Latin American Novels

It would not be an exaggeration to consider Nigerian writer Ben Okri as the best of his generation. Three major writing generations have emerged in Nigeria.

The first was the pre-colonial generation led by Chinua Achebe, among others. Although many talented writers from this era did not receive prestigious awards like the Nobel Prize, they remain significant figures in Nigerian and African literature. While Achebe did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was nonetheless a prolific and important writer.

The second generation of Nigerian writers, emerging in the post-colonial period, is mainly led by Wole Soyinka, often dubbed “the doyen of Nigerian literature.” The third generation is now represented by Ben Okri, with the fourth generation potentially on the brink of prominence. A key figure in this current generation is undoubtedly Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a young prodigy and rising star in Nigerian and African literature, known for her widely acclaimed novels, short stories, and essays.

Why is Ben Okri so important in African literature? One significant reason is that he pioneered a new style of writing rooted in Nigerian and African beliefs, traditions, and cultures. Ben Okri is as vital to African literature as the late Gabriel García Márquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to Latin American literature. Márquez is considered the father of Magical Realism, defined as a literary and artistic style that seamlessly blends realistic settings and characters with fantastical, supernatural, or magical elements. In this genre, magic is treated as a natural and ordinary part of everyday life, rather than a source of wonder or surprise.

Márquez employed this technique to portray the history, politics, and lives of ordinary people in Colombia during a time when things had no names and one had to point. His best novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a narrative saga of seven generations of the Buendía family, detailing the wars they fought and the struggles they waged in the imaginary tropical village of Macondo, where life feels like a dream and the dead rise at night to converse with their living relatives.

What is magical about García Márquez’s novel? His unique flair merges the fantastic with reality, introducing readers to a Colombia where myths, portents, and legends coexist with technology and modernity. These myths, along with various elements and events in the novel, recount a significant portion of Colombian history. The blending of the fantastical and the real creates a surreal depiction of the joys and sorrows, victories, and defeats of its inhabitants–those who invented what is largely known as Latin American reality.

Great writers speak in many voices and address multiple issues that transcend the borders of a single country. While Márquez speaks about Colombia, he also addresses Latin America as a whole. Similarly, Ben Okri writes about Nigeria and, by extension, Africa, due to shared historical, cultural, and psychological conditions.

In many African traditions, spirits and magic are interwoven and play a vital role in daily life, religious practices, and social structures. Belief in spirits–such as ancestors, natural spirits, and animal spirits–is common, and these entities are often consulted for guidance and influence. Magic, practiced for both beneficial and harmful purposes, holds significant importance within communities.

Ben Okri’s most notable work is undoubtedly the trilogy known as The Famished Road. This novel tells the story of Azaro, an abiku (spirit child) who experiences life and death repeatedly in an African community grappling with poverty, political corruption, and a blurred line between the physical and spiritual worlds. Despite being a spirit child, Azaro chooses to remain in the mortal realm, witnessing the struggles of his parents and the corrupt actions of politicians.

If García Márquez is labeled a magical realist writer, how can we describe Ben Okri’s literary style? Is it spiritualist, fantastic, or macabre? Okri’s novels are populated with ghosts and spirits; dead people return and speak to their relatives. The protagonist frequently shifts between forms, becoming an invisible spirit or a flesh-and-blood human. His work does not adhere strictly to naturalism or realism. Chinua Achebe, prior to Okri, wrote in a modern realistic style, using realism to portray Nigerian lives before independence and just before the end of colonialism.

The result of Achebe’s approach was the publication of Things Fall Apart, still considered a classic of Nigerian, African, and world literature. In contrast, Ben Okri does not focus on history; his novels provide intensive and extensive explorations of people, families, or societies, with little reference to historical context, although readers can identify his work with specific periods in Nigerian politics.

Ben Okri can be regarded as a political novelist in the tradition of García Márquez and other Latin American writers, as well as Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, whose Satanic Verses sparked worldwide condemnation and led to a death sentence following a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. Many African and Latin American writers are drawn to political themes because they champion the causes of the poor, the oppressed, and the voiceless. In his younger years, Ben Okri was a student in London known for his Leftist political activism as a writer for the British New Statesman magazine.

Nigerian writers, almost universally, gravitate towards political themes due to the controversial and tragic nature of their country’s post-colonial political history. Even younger Nigerian writers, who were not born during the tumultuous post-colonial periods, often write significant novels about the politics of post-independence Nigeria. Ngozi Adichie, for instance, has produced a masterpiece about the Biafran civil war, largely based on research, readings, and interviews with survivors.

Magic and spirits occupy a prominent place not only in African fiction but also in traditional societies. They remain essential features of Nigerian tribal and community life. In many African traditions, spirits and magic are deeply intertwined, playing a significant role in people’s lives and their understanding of the world. This is true across most African countries, although few writers succeed in using magic, spirits, or the supernatural to analyze societies caught between tradition and modernity.