Four times African writers rewrote a western classic and nailed it

Ainehi Edoro looks at books by African writers that are based on western classics – sometimes giving the original a complete makeover

By Ainehi Edoro for Brittle Paper, part of the Guardian Books Network

Heart of Darkness tells the story of a British sailor who travels the river Congo in search of a lost explorer. The language is evocative and beautiful but the book has been criticised as racist, partly because it represents Africans as caricatures. Ama Ata Aidoo flips Conrad’s classic in a spunky purse-size novella titled Our Sister Killjoy, replacing the British sailor of Conrad’s adventure with Sissie, a Ghanaian student set adrift on a European quest. Sissie travels through Germany and Belgium, driven by wonder and frustration just like Conrad’s Marlowe. While Conrad populates his novel with stock African characters drawn from hundreds of years of racist colonial archive, Aidoo expertly fashions her European characters as one-dimensional figures, reducing them to stereotypical body types, names and even accents. Like Marlowe, Sissie obsesses over Europeans, but her observations about Europeans are more refined as she remains slightly more clinically detached. Aidoo comes for Conrad in a tit-for-tat literary fist-fight to show him just what is wrong with his representation of Africa.

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