Dr. Dowell Oba, a scholar at KolaDaisi University in Ibadan, Oyo State, has challenged the dominance of Western literary theory in African academic institutions and proposed a homegrown alternative. In a faculty lecture delivered last Wednesday, Oba argued that the tools used to read African literature were not designed for it and that continuing to use them has significant consequences.
The Lecture and Its Core Argument
The lecture, titled Beyond New Historicism: Critical Contextualism as a Culturally Accountable Framework for African Literature, was presented to the Faculty of Arts, Management and Social Sciences. Oba focused on New Historicism, a method developed by American scholar Stephen Greenblatt in the 1980s, which African scholars have widely adopted to connect literature to history and power. While acknowledging its usefulness, Oba disputed its universality, arguing that it fails African texts in four structural ways.
Four Structural Failures
First, New Historicism depends on colonial archives that erased oral traditions. Second, it cannot take African spirituality seriously as a form of knowledge. Third, it treats language as a neutral vehicle rather than a site of colonial and postcolonial struggle. Fourth, it tends to convert politically urgent literature into objects of detached academic study. Oba quoted postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, saying, 'When African experiences are forced into Western categories, those experiences get distorted. The African person becomes a version of a Western idea, not a full human being on their own terms.'
Illustrations from African Novels
To illustrate his point, Oba turned to two novels. In Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's Kintu, an Ugandan epic spanning 250 years, he argued that New Historicism could only read the family curse as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. However, his proposed Critical Contextualism reads it as a historical force rooted in Ganda cosmology, where the improperly buried dead continue to act upon the living. 'One framework explains the novel,' he said. 'The other actually reads it.'
His second example was Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body, a 2018 Zimbabwean novel written in the second person. While Western criticism might label this as postmodern experimentation, Oba argued it reflects a self stripped of stability by Zimbabwe's structural adjustment programmes, making the first person unavailable. 'The 'you' is not a stylistic trick,' he said. 'It is the only grammatical form that captures what it feels like to lose your sense of self.'
Critical Contextualism: A Four-Stage Framework
Oba's Critical Contextualism works in four stages: mapping the local historical and oral context of a text; examining why the text is formally shaped the way it is; interrogating the ideological tensions the text engages; and analysing how the text travels through publishers, prizes, and literary festivals, and whose voice gets amplified or filtered. The framework draws on African intellectual traditions, building on the decolonial arguments of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the aesthetic criticism of Chinweizu, and Wole Soyinka's insistence that Yoruba mythology constitutes a serious philosophical system.
A Demand for Plurality
Oba framed his argument not as a rejection of Western scholarship but as a demand for plurality. 'The goal is a world where African scholars speak from their own foundations and are taken seriously when they do,' he said. He acknowledged that no single framework can speak for a continent as culturally diverse as Africa and called for the development of multiple African-centred critical methods.
Institutional Challenge
The lecture closed with an institutional challenge: for African universities to invest in indigenous knowledge systems, fund oral tradition research, and support literary criticism published in African languages. Oba warned that without structural change, even the most compelling ideas risk remaining confined to a single seminar room. The seminar was chaired by Prof. Sekinat Kola-Aderoju, Dean of FAMS, and presided over by Vice-Chancellor Prof. Adeniyi Olatunbosun SAN.
