SOURCE: Lazarus, Neil. “After the Break: Trends in Radical African Literature since 1970.” In Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, pp. 185-234. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Lazarus suggests that the 1970s witnessed a collapse of the intellectual infrastructure within which much African writing was composed, creating a crisis in the intellectual community in Africa. This conflict, which Lazarus explains in the context of Ayi Kweh Armah's work, has led many African authors, writes Lazarus to re-examine their novelistic horizons by moving away from the seminal moments of past history, such as independence, and to focus increasingly on Africa's current predicament.

I have tried to argue that Why Are We So Blest? must, by any standards, be accounted a novelistic failure. The novel's sweeping dogmatism, its manichean racial and sexual essentialism, and its conspiratorial view of African history, all combine to destroy its internal plausibility...