TEBOGO AND THE BACCHAE

...Literary echoes in Bolaji’s Tebogo and the Bacchae

By Paul Lothane

In previous books published by Omoseye Bolaji, there are echoes of Shakespeare, Jules Verne (Around the world in 80 days), George Elliot (Mill on the floss), Chinua Achebe, Charles Dickens, and many others.

In this new work, Tebogo and the Bacchae, we are introduced to Biggie again (who featured in Tebogo and the epithalamion); the same Biggie “who studied literature”. Of course, previous works had shown Tebogo himself had more than a passing interest in Literature too, but Biggie is “In a different league”.

In Tebogo and the Bacchae Tebogo himself muses over the character of a woman who seemed to wreak havoc on men who loved her:

Tebogo found himself thinking of a book, The concubine (by Elechi Amadi). The female protagonist of the book, Ihuoma, seemed to bring great suffering to her suitors. But that was fiction of course!

At the park later on in the book, Biggie is prodded to deliver a short “lecture” on African literature:

“Tell me, Biggie,” (Tebogo) said, “is there anything like African Black Literature? Over the decades…”

Biggie pondered. “Of course,” he replied. “Tentatively, some pundits might ask: can we dub writings in foreign language like French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, African literature? Then we realize that if African writers decide to write in their mother tongues, the fact is we’ll be limiting and fragmentizing; balkanizing ourselves. The fact is Africa has thousands of indigenous languages. How do we read our best writers if they only wrote in their mother tongues? Imagine never being able to read Achebe’s fiction if they were published only in Igbo? Or if Eskia’s books were written in Tswana? How could he be read around the world? Ngugi from East Africa, famously, decided he would only be writing in his Kikuyu language. Then of course, he and an army of others would now translate these books into English and other western languages for the world to read!

“African Black literature? It is – simplistically – the type of writing we Africans can always identify with, despite essentially small differences in culture, mores, traditions. Our black writers come from dozens of African countries yet we feel like we understand virtually every society. The African village life, depicted by the likes of Achebe, Elechi Amadi (both Nigerians) Bessie Head (South Africa and Gabon) Kofi Awoonor (Ghana), Camara Laye (Guinea) Ngugi (Kenya) Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Zakes Mda (RSA) etc…we understand it all. The influence – I almost said ravages – of western culture on African life. The white man’s school. The religion he brought. Modern amenities. The conflicts resulting from all this. The subtle, some will say, insidious inculcation of the white man’s culture. Internet. Facebook has changed the world. We see our youngsters now obsessed with it, always on facebook. Internationally in the conservative, Arab world facebook recently played a key role in fomenting revolutions in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya…”

Biggie noticed that Tebogo’s attention seemed to be tailing off...

Of course in this new work, Biggie is also the one who draws parallels between the classical Bacchae, and what happens in Khayachow town: with two hapless protagonists ripped apart.

This work, like the last three adventures, was published by Eselby Jnr Publications. This is an impressive addition to the Tebogo Mokoena Mystery series, with an attractive lay-out by Godmore Jnr Mofokeng