Magical Realism and Jungian Archetypes in African Storytelling

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.

That is how Ben Okri opens The Famished Road, his 1991 novel narrated by Azaro, a spirit-child born already remembering the companions he left behind. If you arrive at that sentence with Jungian archetypes already in hand — the trickster, the great mother, the shadow — you will feel the click immediately: here is the collective unconscious with the lid off. And half a shelf away, the literary histories will tell you that this mode of writing has a birthday, 1967, the year One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared in Buenos Aires, and a passport stamped Latin America.

Hold those two things side by side. One of them is wrong, and the shape of the error is worth more than the correction.

The myth a lot of smart readers carry

The myth goes like this: magical realism was invented in Latin America in the 1960s, and when African writers use it, they are working in a borrowed form — applying an imported technique to local material. It is rarely said that baldly. It survives in softer phrasing: Okri as "the African Marquez", Nigerian fiction praised for its "Marquezian" texture, a syllabus that puts Cien anos de soledad first and everything else after.

It is a tidy story. It is also backwards, and it quietly turns a description of the world into a stylistic choice.

What the record actually shows

Amos Tutuola, a Yoruba writer from Abeokuta in western Nigeria, published The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952 — fifteen years before Marquez. His narrator walks into the land of the dead to retrieve his tapster, and the book's grammar, its logic, and its dead-town geography come straight out of Yoruba oral narrative, which had been carrying that cargo for a very long time before anyone printed it.

The term itself is older still and not Latin American at all. The German critic Franz Roh coined Magischer Realismus in 1925, writing about painting.

And the material predates every label. Amadou Hampate Ba, the Fulbe scholar from Mali, spent decades transcribing epics his elders held in memory, among them the tale of Njeddo Dewal, a figure of engineered calamity whose appetite structures an entire narrative world. Kojo Laing in Ghana, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Kenya — whose Wizard of the Crow was written first in Gikuyu — Yvonne Vera in Zimbabwe: the shelf is long, and it is not a shelf of imitators.

Jung himself went to look

Here is the part that should interest anyone who has read Memories, Dreams, Reflections closely. In 1925 — the same year Roh was naming a style in Germany — Jung travelled to Mount Elgon, on what is now the Kenya-Uganda border, and spent time among the Elgonyi. He watched them greet the sunrise. He asked, through interpreters, about dreams.

The answer he received has been quoted ever since: the ritual specialist told him that the big dreams had stopped coming. Since the British arrived, he said, the District Commissioner knows everything, so the dreams are no longer needed.

Jung understood he had been handed something enormous. But the vocabulary he brought home — primitive psyche, participation mystique borrowed from Levy-Bruhl — placed the people who taught him at an earlier stage of the same development he located in his Zurich patients. That framing did real damage, and it is worth naming plainly rather than angrily. He took the evidence. He returned a theory in which the evidence's owners appeared as an earlier draft of himself.

Is African magical realism the same as Latin American magical realism?

No. They share a surface and differ at the root. In the Latin American tradition, the fantastic element is generally understood as a literary strategy — the writer's deliberate suspension of a realist contract the reader also holds. In much African fiction of this kind, the element is not a suspension of anything. It is the reported furniture of the world the writer grew up being told about, set down without apology.

The table is a translation, and every translation loses. Note which column has proper nouns in it.

The mechanism: where the figures are kept

This is the hinge. Jung put the archetypes inside — inherited furniture of an individual psyche, shared because human nervous systems are shared. Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Fulbe frameworks put many of the same figures outside: in a web of relations that includes the dead, the not-yet-born, the crossroads, the river, and the obligations running between them. The figures are not contents of your mind. They are parties to your situation.

Once you see that, the literary question resolves itself. The magic was not added to the realism. The realism was added to the magic — a European narrative convention laid over an existing account of how the world is populated. Okri is not decorating. He is describing, in a form that had to be bent to hold the description.

Which also explains why the archetypal reading fits so well and slips so easily. It fits because the figures really are patterned, and Jung was right that patterns recur. It slips because the lens has a built-in verb: it turns is into represents.

Reading your own family without dissolving it

If you have used this material to understand your family — and many of us in the diaspora have — you will know the move I mean. An aunt tells you that your grandmother visited her in a dream and said something specific about the house. You hear it, and some trained part of you begins converting: the great mother, unresolved inheritance, the psyche processing a loss.

The conversion is not worthless. It has probably explained things about your parents that nothing else did.

But notice what it costs. She gave you testimony and you took delivery of material. Done silently, that is a private analytic act. Done out loud, it tells the person in front of you that her account of her own night is best understood by someone with a different framework. Two generations of that and a family stops telling you things.

The workable position is not a compromise between the two. It is holding both, uncollapsed: her account stands as she gave it, and your pattern-reading stands as yours, and you do not require her to trade. That is harder than choosing, and it is the only version that leaves the relationship intact.

Names and terms

• Abiku (ah-BEE-koo) — Yoruba, Nigeria and Benin: a child understood to have come before and to be capable of returning. Accounts of what is owed, and by whom, vary by lineage.
• Ogbanje (aw-GBAN-jeh) — the Igbo term for a related understanding, with its own distinct logic; the two are cousins, not synonyms.
• Esu (EH-shoo) — a Yoruba orisha of the crossroads and of messages between worlds. Missionary translators rendered him as the devil. He is not.
• Njeddo Dewal — a figure of calamity in Fulbe narrative from the Sahel, preserved in the epics Amadou Hampate Ba transcribed.
• Collective unconscious — Jung's term for a layer of mind he held to be shared across humanity, stocked with recurring figures rather than personal memories.

Back to 1967

1967 is a real date. It is simply not the date the mode began. It is the date a European and North American reading public agreed to start noticing, which is a fact about that public, not about the writing.

That distinction is the whole discipline in miniature. A theory can be an instrument for seeing a tradition, or a claim to have arrived at it first — and archetypal reading, used carelessly on African material, slides from one into the other without announcing the move. The Akan of Ghana keep a proverb for exactly this: se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.