Co-published with James Currey (UK); Jacana Media (South Africa); Weaver Press (Zimbabwe).

Introducing the perspective of ‘writing madness’ into African literature means seeing that literature from a different angle, through the lenses of writers who have ruffled up the surface of realist representation and have explored issues and styles that represent a trespassing of borders, introducing an element of risk and instability.
This study follows the transformation from colonial narratives projecting settlers’ horror of the ‘heart of darkness’ onto the African body and mind, to African writers’ interaction with these narratives and their own projections of what constitutes madness in a colonial and postcolonial world. The regional focus is on writers from Southern Africa: Dambudzo Marechera, Lesego Rampolokeng, Bessie Head and Tsitsi Dangarembga, but also included are writers from francophone and East Africa, Sony Labou Tansi and Rebeka Njau, and an analysis of how writing by women displays the gendered violence of the process of mental colonisation.

‘Flora Veit-Wild has adopted a unique perspective, or series of perspectives, based on the notion of “madness” – perceived madness, madness as device, actual madness, and the world as mad…While the book will mainly interest the whole range of students, teachers and researchers in the field of African literature, it will also be of great interest to social anthropologists and specialists in mental illness.’ – Clive Wake, Emeritus Professor of Modern French & African Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury Flora Veit-Wild is Professor of African Literature at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Introduction – Madness in the Colony: Exclusion & Projection – Black Hamlet: Engaging with the African Healer – Surrealism in Africa? From Rimbaud to Césaire – Mad Writing, Writing Madness: Dambudzo Marechera – Time’s Gone Mad: Rhyming & Ranting of Lesego Rampolokeng – The Grotesque Body of the Post-Colony: Sony Labou Tansi – Wandering Wombs: Bodily Boundaries in African Oral Culture – Nervous Conditions as Sites of Resistance: Bessie Head, Rebeka Njau & Tsitsi Dangarembga – Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Film Kare Kare Zvako: The Survival of the Butchered Woman Cover based on the sculpture ‘Thinking about the Future’ by Zachariah Njobo (© Olivier Sultan; photograph by Peter Fernandes)