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language: English
country: Liberia
year: 1891
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 6.12.25-9.12.25
Vai writer, teacher, and missionary Joseph J. Walters’s Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess, was published in 1891, making it the first known novel in English by an African writer. written during — and partly in order to fund — his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, the novel is first and foremost a polemic against patriarchy in Vai society. the titular “princess” is engaged by her family to an older man with several wives; to escape this marriage, and in hopes of reuniting with the younger man she loves, who has left home for a colonial settlement Liberian coast, Guanya Pau and her best friend(?) Jaassah flee their home, and the novel follows them along a series of (mostly mis)adventures as they try to avoid pursuers. through Guanya Pau and Jassah, Walters presents his readers — whom he identifies first and foremost as white, Christian women in the United States — with a grim portrait of the status of women in Vai society. the book functions, then, as a plea both for missionary activity among the Vai and, significantly, for missionary education for Vai women — as Gareth Griffith and John Victor Singler note in their introduction to the Broadview edition of the novel, missionary schools (in general and in Liberia specifically) typically focused almost exclusively on boys and men.
Never had a missionary, the herald of good tidings, trod this part of the world; and oh, how true is this the case of many of the tribes of West Africa, yea, of all that continent!
Jesus Christ died to save them nearly nineteen hundred years ago, and yet there are millions in that dark land dying ignorant of His great sacrifice and love. Dying without hope, without Christ, without Heaven!
I just need to take a second to say: we can all acknowledge that this is, like, insanely evil, right? setting aside all of the other theological assumptions here, the idea that god incarnated and sacrificed himself to “save” humanity but you can only get that “salvation” if you happen to be from somewhere close enough that you can hear about it is not the mark of a loving, universal god; it is the mark of a cruel, arbitrary, local god. I have no doubt that Walters’s faith and missionary fervor were genuine, but to be honest I can only understand them as a tragic (self-)deception.
the novel does, however, take idiosyncratic stances on other things, notably the racial characteristics of Black people, whose resilience in the face of slavery and colonialism Walters identifies as “the characteristic elements of this race which conserves his vitality and betokens his perpetuity if not his superiority”. its focus, though, is not on colonialism but on gender, drawing attention at every turn to the evils of polygamy and the mistreatment of Vai women, both by men and, shaped by the patriarchal ideology and violence around them, by other women. that Walters’s solution to this problem is missionary colonialism undercuts the critique of patriarchy, but there are some passages that are still forceful now, far removed from the Vai context of the novel:
It is truly said that whatever woman has in her head to do, she will do in spite of anything. And why not? The truth is, men are ever exercising their prerogative to the letter, and we accept it without a question; but as soon as we assert ours, they brand us with transcending our sphere. So long has woman been deceived that her condition seems to be organic. I may not even now succeed; but, Jassah, the day will come, THE DAY WILL COME.
while the introduction explicitly addresses white, Christian women (“my lady readers”), there are some curious gaps in the novel’s colonial framing, insofar as it at times assumes its readers are already familiar with aspects of Vai culture, from the “Gregree” societies (into which adolescents are inducted and through which education is provided) to various songs and chants:
The witch was called in, who confirmed the decision, after counting her beads and muttering something to the unknown, imprecating upon the beads of the criminals the condign punishment and going through with the hackneyed formula:
“Yáng-Kate Yáng-Kate,
Zum bu yu vah, zum bu zhé!” etc.
the “etc.” there is doing some work — particularly because, at least according to Griffith and Singler (I admit some skepticism as to their qualifications to introduce the novel), the song is not, in fact, in Vai.
overall I would describe the novel as effusive. it has — and I say this with a certain amount of affection — the tone of a college newspaper article, which makes some sense insofar as Walters was in the middle of his undergraduate studies (though after five years of study at a non-degree-granting institution where he did both a teaching certification program and a kind of college preparatory academic program). the authorial voice intrudes regularly into the text, including a jarring but also funny comparison in a discussion of the sounds of the ritual punishment (ultimately, execution) of a group of co-wives accused of witchcraft for not mourning the death of their abusive husband:
I have heard a full chorus of my fellow-students bellow our college yell, and the developed lungs of good old ’93 roar our soul-stirring whoop, but these put together on a day when the atmosphere is most conducive to the distention of the vocal organs, would fall way below par compared with this chorus in the medicine grove.
the end of the novel is extremely abrupt — it very much feels like a beginning writer who ran out of ideas and so decides to just kill off the main character and end their story. Guanya Pau resurfaces to announce that death by drowning is preferable to arranged marriage and then disappears below the waters of the lake, never to be seen again.
if this sounds like I’m being negative about the novel I really don’t mean to be — it’s a deeply flawed but also engaging (and short) book, a fascinating snapshot of a particular moment in Liberian history, in USAmerican academic life, and in the development of African literature. definitely worth a read!
moods: adventurous, polemic, reflective