Into Africa with Margaret Laurence

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Most readers of Margaret Laurence’s fiction are aware that she spent
several of her early years in Africa, but know little about these years
or about their effect on her later Canadian writings. Out of her African
experience, in fact, came an influential anthology of Somali poetry and
folk-tales, a brilliant travel book, a promising first novel, a
collection of short stories (The Tomorrow Tamer) that many critics place
with her finest work, and a pioneering critical survey of Nigerian
fiction and drama.

Canadian scholars have, for the most part, treated this material
gingerly. It is clearly important, but it pertains to areas of literary
experience with which most are unfamiliar. Fiona Sparrow, however, has
spent as much time in Africa as Laurence herself did, and there acquired
an interest in, and knowledge of, African literature and culture that
renders her an ideal commentator for Laurence’s African years.

What she offers is invaluable factual information about the backgrounds
to Laurence’s work. Besides clarifying the biographical record of
Laurence’s stay in Africa, she examines the books she had read about
the continent (by Africans and non-Africans), throws light on how she
derived her knowledge, and above all provides a cultural context for
this aspect of her writing. Into Africa with Margaret Laurence is both
an appreciation of Laurence’s presentation of what for her was a
strange culture, and a clear account of her achievement in this area.

No serious student of Margaret Laurence’s work as a whole can afford
to ignore this book. Like Henry James, Laurence had to separate herself
from her own background in order to write about it with understanding,
and we cannot adequately comprehend the world of Manawaka unless we
obtain some awareness of the alternative that Laurence came to know.
Sparrow is an informed, mature, unostentatious explorer of the relations
between these two cultures; moreover, she instructs us in a lucid,
controlled prose that can, in the main, stand beside Laurence’s
without embarrassment. A much needed study, admirably accomplished.