African writing: When the dispossessed don't know they are dispossessed
Modern African literature was the child of a renaissance. The roots are to be found in the movement of revendication that began from Olaudah Equiano’s 18th century literary activism, to the work done in the Harlem renaissance in the early years of the 20th century, particularly embodied by two eponymous figures of that movement: the Jamaican Claude McKay, tortured and alienated, and the African-American, Langston Hughes, first discovering his roots on a difficult train-ride from Mexico, and by which he resolved his conundrum through an embrace of Africa. He sang, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Not for him the ambiguity or ambivalence of a Countee Cullen, who asks in a very laden tone, or in the pregnant rhetoric, “What is Africa to me?” Like Claude McKay’s Banjo, Langston Hughes The Weary Blues belted a jazzy affirmation of his debts both to sundered memory, and to the same blood that flows through the veins and rivers of Africa and its humanity. These two became the crossborder figures that helped to animate the conscious movement of ideas, that led Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor, and of course Alioune Diop, to construct “negritude” as a conscious act of self-reclamation: the bold and auspicious move to retrieve, from the cemetery of French assimilation, the identity of the African and the disaporadic scattering, wherever the spirit of the race found new fertile moorings: from the American South to Haiti; from Harlem to Martinique; from Cartegena, Colombia, to Havana, Cuba, and so on as so forth.
From the inspiration of negritude and the work of Presence Africaine, just at the cusp of decolonization, emerged the Black Orpheus magazine of the German-Yoruba, Ulli Beier, and the Mbari movement in Ibadan from 1957; and in 1961, the Transition magazine, published by that Indian Rajat Neogy, all inspired by the African possibility – a moment of renaissance, foregrounded by the inspiring work of the great African icons of pan-Africanism in the 20th century: Nnamdi Azikiwe, George Padmore, I. Akunna Wallace-Johnson, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda - such eponymous figures of modern African history, who dreamed, however the limitations of their later abilities, of a great African century; a century which Spengler had predicted belonged to Africa, given the enui of Europe exhausted by war and by its own linear modernity.
Modern African literature emerged out of that quest to rediscover Africa – the authentic and vital essence of a thoroughly misread, misunderstood, and indeed utterly misrepresented continent, whose new voices began to be heard, starting with Chinua Achebe’s pathbreaking novel, Things Fall Apart in 1958. By 1963, following the famous conference of African Writers and Artists in Makerere, sponsored by the Mbari club and the Congress For Cultural Freedom, the question had arisen, “what is African literature?” A question of which the Nigerian critic, Obi Wali engaged, and I should say, very productively, in his very controversial essay, “Dead End of African Literature?” by proclaiming that modern African writing would inexorably enter a cul-de-sac, for as long as it is produced in European languages. Obi Wali’s argument remains, in my view, the foundational text of modern African literary criticism, and the master text to which the remarkable Kenyan novelist, Ngugi Wa Thiongo has unarguably based his critical theories, particularly on the language question, more fully explored in his famous book, Decolonizing the Mind.
These backgrounds remain fundamental to any discussion of African literature. They are, yes, the unfinished business of African writing. But I have sketched its brief history, only prefatory to responding to Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s essay, African writing in our time, on the contemporary condition of African literature. And also, although I’m in agreement with the Irish writer, Eavan Boland’s eloquent statement that the greatest duty one generation of writers owes to the older generation is, in her words, “to bury the dead and compose their elegies,” I think it is equally important to show the contiguities of the time of the writer. The central issue in African literature remains Africa’s historical dialogue with the rest of the world, particularly the west. The fact is singular: Africa’s exchange with the west is the situation of unequal exchange. It has remained so for the last five hundred years, at least.
So, Baldwin, whom Mukoma Wa Ngugi quotes in his essay, may indeed be right, about the impossibility of a writer writing outside of his/her time, and could have been paraphrasing Fanon about generations and historical consciousness; and the dialectical tension that Mukoma Wa Ngugi discerns between the old and new has been explained by Freud and his new disciples, including Foucault. Yet what I see, in the condition of African writing today is a far deadlier question: the inability to interpret the current time and occasion of new African writing. The problem with the current generation of African writers is a profound inability to provide a stable interpretive sense of what it truly means to be an African today, in the 21st century. There is a problem of locality and location; there is as a much a question of interpreting the world from a recognizably African prism. There is also the problem of how the rupturing of identities signal disjunctions; how displacements, especially within the new African metropolis break down our emotional hold on land; on its rituals and cycles; on its meaning that have fed generations with myths and ceremonies; on the ancestral anchor on which the African unconscious has remained vital and survived the terrifying onslaught of abduction; subjection and dispersal; how our spirits are thrust into the ambiguous space of the global megapolis, in which we have become wanderers: exiles, refugees, rootless beggars for charity; guests of city soup kitchens, NGOS, the IMF and the World Bank, and the new world order: Africans have become victims of all sorts of tyrannies – domestic and international. The African subject seems to, like all those acted upon, become a ventriloquist for all sorts of dubious funding agencies and “Charities” to which s/he depends for his occasional bread and wine – and therefore speaks, not of Africa, but of what must be said of Africa to continue the commerce of African under-dogging.
The trouble with African writing today is that the new African writer had proved singularly unable to “read the minutes of the last meeting” as the eminent Nigerian economist and modernist, Pius Okigbo, brother to the poet Christopher Okigbo used to say. The effect is quite plain: we have abandoned the space of the production of the image of Africa, to the selections made for Africa in London, New York, Paris, and so on. It is of particular interest to me that all the books by African writers published by the major international publishers, starting with the Abyssinian Chronicles by the Ugandan writer, the first major breakthrough by a new generation of African writers, have a sustained pattern. There are never any happy endings.
Indeed in all these novels, Africa is always such an happy and dreary place; a pathology of failure in the postcolonial era, marked by hunger, tyranny and dictatorship; disease; in short a failure of humanity that circumscribes even the African victim as an impotent actor in history. It is Africa of genocides and religious fundamentalists, like Eugene in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, who is unredeemed, even by his own sort of unfinished modernity. There he was: a figure of the double consciousness: half-Christian, half-savage; the classic image of the African sambo in the blackface minstrel shows: white mask, black skin; a man of deep public charity and equally profound private cruelties of demonic proportions. His is of course, the demon of a history of indoctrination, and his inability to comprehend the ancient, dignified truths of his own father, papa Nnukwu. But Papa Nnukwu’s character is not the chief appeal to the western mind reading Purple Hibiscus – not that redemptive dignity of old and vanishing Africa: it is the intriguing product of the modern African – Eugene: outwardly western, but in all material particular, savage: a true, contemporary African. Send him to Oxford, he’d remain that African “other.” That was the chief appeal, at least to the former South African, now Australian writer, J.M Coetzee.
I have nothing against showing the side of Africa that warrants critical introspection: it is just that Africa is not just one linear story of savagery and failure As the Igbo say, “atara tu uru, atara tu okpukpu”. A little bone here, a little flesh there, creates enough meaty harmony. Even in the surge of the decadent crowd of Lagos, there is something carnivalesque and celebratory of life. Africa is not a dead or dying place. It is vital and alive. It is resplendent with human spirit: this is one aspect of the story of Africa that these publishers tend to obscure by their selective readings and publishing of their African reality. Increasingly such depiction of Africa in the new literature is also structuring what the eminent Nigerian poet and critic, MJC Echeruo once called the “conditioned imagination” to consent to negation as the primary condition of Africa. African writers and critics, and here is my point, have allowed this discussion of what African literature, and the African world that it imagines means, to be expropriated from us. If the imaginative and critical enterprise of African writing is not in the New Yorker magazine, or the Times of London, or the New York Times it is no longer great or authentic. This is the symptom of the dispossessed and a continuation of the unequal dialogue between Africa and the West. No work of literature is innocent. We must be clear on this. So too, is its acts of affirmation, never innocent. It is value-laden. It is called canon making. The making of the canon of contemporary African writing is also quite clearly made in London, Paris and New York. Not in Lagos or Enugu or Nairobi or Cairo or Capetown or Dakar. There, is where we have not learnt the lesson, which Chinua Achebe laboured to teach us in 1985 when he wrote that letter to the Swedish Academy rejecting the invitation sent to him and other African, and so-called third world writers, to a writers conference to discuss African literature in Stockholm.
Achebe’s rejection of the invitation was on account that it had come time for Africans to begin to discuss their literature and other matters where it mattered most. To be clear, there is nothing absolutely wrong in discussing African literature in Stockholm or wherever, especially when it is hardly the subject of postprandial talk in Accra or Freetown or Kampala. In other words, wherever anyone chooses to discuss African writing should be alright. However, it is equally important to occasionally look the gift horse steadily on the mouth, because sometimes, it may turn out to be Balaam’s beast, and we need to listen closely to hear its utterance. MukomaWa Ngugi writes eloquently about the absence of great journals and magazines, and prizes for the affirmation of African literature. Incidentally, this was the subject of breakfast talk I had recently with the Malawian poet, Frank Chipasula and Juliane Okot B P’tek – yes Okot’s poet daughter currently living in Vancouver – at the Nutibara Hotel, in down town Medellin, at the recently concluded Medellin International Poetry Festival.
It is true that there ought to be a great prize for new African poetry or fiction or Drama or even criticism, endowed out of Lagos or Capetown or Nairobi, and administered from thence. The last such prize was announced in 1966 at Dakar, and it was also the age of those two inimitable journals – the Black Orpheus and the Transition magazine. These provided the strategic mediation fundamental for the thriving of any autonomous cultural selfhood. It is time for someone in Africa, perhaps Thabo Mbeki’s government, with its mantra of an “African renaissance” or the governments Senegal to endow an inaugurate the Aime Cesaire International Prize for Poetry, to honour the occasion of the passing of this great poet, humanist, spokesman for the black race, and freedom in the 20th century. Perhaps a Mandela Prize or a Leopold Senghor Prize, or a Zik/Osadebe Prize for African writing. There is no shortage of symbolism out of Africa around which such honors can be framed. There is also, I suspect, not a shortage of potential sponsors who might find such endowments worthy. But I suspect that, that problem is far more drastic: it is the situation of the dispossessed. A mentality of dependence in which we need our regular fixes of charity, in order to feel our humanity. We may endow these prizes, but not until they are affirmed, and given the legitimacy or charitable nod by the BBC, the New Statesman or by the New York Times, or by some critic in New York, acting on Gods behalf to define what African writing truly is, does the African writer and intellectual, and reader, takes them seriously. Prizes given from outside, it seems, however its provenance, is given greater estimation than prizes endowed in Africa and made to writings by Africans.
I make this point on the following claims: one, there is the All-Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize, administered by the Association of Nigerian Authors, but hardly any contemporary African poet enters for the prize, not since it was first won by the Guinean poet, who has also remained silent ever since. Not many African writers, critics, or journalists pay attention to the national prizes – like the ANA prizes in Nigeria – with as much interests as they pay to the prizes announced from London or New York. There, indeed, is the conundrum: African literature written and circulated in Africa is consigned to the ghetto; and it becomes invisible. This pall of invisibility makes it impossible for a cross-continental dialogue about the real nature of the contemporary African imagination, and the value of the writing produced by a contemporary generation of writers. It seems such a long time now, since African writers of just a generation ago, knew who was writing what, and engaged in fruitful dialogues that shaped the discourse of African modernity from a profoundly African standpoint.
Today, the discourse of new African writing is done mostly, irrespective of Africans think, in these metropolitan cafes, where Africa is continually “othered.” In a fundamental way, new African writing suffers from the nature of the African traffic: to get to Nairobi or Cairo from Lagos, you must first fly to London. To make a call to Lusaka from Accra, you must route your international call to London. There is no epicenter or backbone: not with the collapse of such critical centers as Ibadan or Legon or Makerere or Fourah Bay or Nsukka. There is in all these, what Achebe calls the condition of the dispossessed: it is frightening because it reproduces itself. It is the reality of the margins that works in the motion of the widening gyre of history; that produces that frightening vision in which W.B.Yeats saw all the ungainly futility of human history. To break from it would require an act of will.
*Nigerian poet, Obi Nwakanma was the Group Literary Editor of the Vanguard Newspapers, Lagos, Nigeria where he continues to write the weekly column, the “Orbit” on Sundays. He is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Postcolonial Literature at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. His new collection of poems, The Horsemen & Other Poems (2007) was published by the Africa World Press, New Jersey, USA.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/