Animal-human communication and African knowledge of nature. Literary texts by Ilija Trojanow and Zakes Mda in comparison
Literary animal figures are (especially) not uncommon in African and German-language texts on Africa and are finding increasing interest in literary studies (see e.B. the anthology Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms edited by Fiona F. Moolla). Ilija Trojanow and Zakes Mda, who both work in multilingual contexts, also use animal figures in their literary texts. With Trojanow, the thematization of human-animal communication seems to hang somewhat in the air, e.B. when the protagonist Richard Francis Burton in The Collector of Worlds attempts to decipher the language of apes.
But if you look at Trojanow’s texts in comparison with African prose texts on human-animal communication, a different picture emerges. If you read the texts against the background of animal communication, you can see that Trojanow’s ‚Western‘ human figures make a clear separation of man and animal. With Zakes Mda, on the other hand, the boundaries between animals and humans are much more fluid.
In my contribution, I would like to examine the role of African knowledge of cross-species multilingualism for the literary representation of the environment and society. The animal communication approach not only has the potential to decolonize the Western relationship to nature, but it also questions the prevailing power relations between language and communication.