Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning and the Politics of Adaptation in African Literature

African literature has often been theorized through an implicit act of adaptation. If orality is the material foundation of African literature, as many have claimed, then the story of modern African literature often turns out to be the development from spoken to written forms (Chinweizu and Madubuike, 1980, p. 4; Irele, 2001, p. 11). But it is easy to find other examples of ‘adaptation’ as an implied metaphor or metadiscourse for the African literary. Chinua Achebe, for example, inspired fiction writers to take up the work of writing history by describing the African novel in terms of its recovery (or rediscovery) of the past (1964; 1965); Okot p’Bitek wrote poems as ‘songs,’ melding musical performance with the written word (1966); the Sundiata epic was rendered as a prose narrative by Djibril Tamsir Niane and Camara Laye (Niane, 1965; Laye, 1978); and Wole Soyinka recast Greek drama in an African context (1973). One might even regard the broad appropriation of Africanist narrative itself — the monopoly on representation enjoyed by texts like Heart of Darkness — as a kind of adaptation: Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, for example, adapts Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, a revisionary inversion which reframes and reconceives the object of its quasi-oedipal antagonism.