Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87 Read online

  Originally published as Foreword to Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos by Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Museum of Cultural History, University of California at Los Angeles, 1984.

  THE WORD “colonialist” may be deemed inappropriate for two reasons. First, it has come to be associated in many minds with that brand of cheap, demagogic and outmoded rhetoric which the distinguished Ghanaian public servant Robert Gardiner no doubt has in mind when he speaks of our tendency to “intone the colonial litany,” implying that the time has come when we must assume responsibility for our problems and our situation in the world and resist the temptation to blame other people. Secondly, it may be said that whatever colonialism may have done in the past, the very fact of a Commonwealth Conference today is sufficient repudiation of it, is indeed a symbol of a new relationship of equality between peoples who were once masters and servants.

  Yet in spite of the strength of these arguments one feels the necessity to deal with some basic issues raised by a certain specious criticism which flourishes in African literature today and which derives from the same basic attitude and assumption as colonialism itself and so merits the name “colonialist.” This attitude and assumption was crystallized in Albert Schweitzer’s immortal dictum in the heyday of colonialism: “The African is indeed my brother, but my junior brother.” The latter-day colonialist critic, equally given to big-brother arrogance, sees the African writer as a somewhat unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European, but meanwhile must be humble, must learn all he can and while at it give due credit to his teachers in the form of either direct praise or, even better since praise sometimes goes bad and becomes embarrassing, manifest self-contempt. Because of the tricky nature of this subject, I have chosen to speak not in general terms but wherever possible specifically about my own actual experience. In any case, as anyone who has heard anything at all about me may know already, I do have problems with universality and other concepts of that scope, being very much a down-to-earth person. But I will hope by reference to a few other writers and critics to show that my concerns and anxieties are perhaps not entirely personal.

  When my first novel was published in 1958, a very unusual review of it was written by a British woman, Honor Tracy, who is perhaps not so much a critic as a literary journalist. But what she said was so intriguing that I have never forgotten it. If I remember rightly, she headlined it “Three cheers for mere Anarchy!” The burden of the review itself was as follows: These bright Negro barristers (how barristers came into it remains a mystery to me to this day, but I have sometimes woven fantasies about an earnest white woman and an unscrupulous black barrister) who talk so glibly about African culture, how would they like to return to wearing raffia skirts? How would novelist Achebe like to go back to the mindless times of his grandfather instead of holding the modern job he has in broadcasting in Lagos?

  I should perhaps point out that colonialist criticism is not always as crude as this, but the exaggerated grossness of a particular example may sometimes prove useful in studying the anatomy of the species. There are three principal parts here: Africa’s inglorious past (raffia skirts) to which Europe brings the blessing of civilization (Achebe’s modern job in Lagos) and for which Africa returns ingratitude (sceptical novels like Things Fall Apart).

  Before I go on to more advanced varieties I must give one more example of the same kind as Honor Tracy’s, which on account of its recentness (1970) actually surprised me:

  The British administration not only safeguarded women from the worst tyrannies of their masters, it also enabled them to make their long journeys to farm or market without armed guard, secure from the menace of hostile neighbours … The Nigerian novelists who have written the charming and bucolic accounts of domestic harmony in African rural communities, are the sons whom the labours of these women educated; the peaceful village of their childhood to which they nostalgically look back was one which had been purged of bloodshed and alcoholism by an ague-ridden district officer and a Scottish mission lassie whose years were cut short by every kind of intestinal parasite.

  It is even true to say that one of the most nostalgically convincing of the rural African novelists used as his sourcebook not the memories of his grandfathers but the records of the despised British anthropologists … The modern African myth-maker hands down a vision of colonial rule in which the native powers are chivalrously viewed through the eyes of the hard-won liberal tradition of the late Victorian scholar, while the expatriates are shown as schoolboys’ blackboard caricatures.1

  I have quoted this at such length because first of all I am intrigued by Iris Andreski’s literary style, which recalls so faithfully the sedate prose of the district officer government anthropologist of sixty or seventy years ago—a tribute to her remarkable powers of identification as well as to the durability of colonialist rhetoric. “Tyrannies of their masters” … “menace of hostile neighbours” … “purged of bloodshed and alcoholism.” But in addition to this, Iris Andreski advances the position taken by Honor Tracy in one significant and crucial direction—its claim to a deeper knowledge and a more reliable appraisal of Africa than the educated African writer has shown himself capable of.

  To the colonialist mind it was always of the utmost importance to be able to say: “I know my natives,” a claim which implied two things at once: (a) that the native was really quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand—understanding being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding. Thus, in the heyday of colonialism any serious incident of native unrest, carrying as it did disquieting intimations of slipping control, was an occasion not only for pacification by the soldiers but also (afterwards) for a royal commission of inquiry—a grand name for yet another perfunctory study of native psychology and institutions. Meanwhile a new situation was slowly developing as a handful of natives began to acquire European education and then to challenge Europe’s presence and position in their native land with the intellectual weapons of Europe itself. To deal with this phenomenal presumption the colonialist devised two contradictory arguments. He created the “man of two worlds” theory to prove that no matter how much the native was exposed to European influences he could never truly absorb them; like Prester John he would always discard the mask of civilization when the crucial hour came and reveal his true face. Now, did this mean that the educated native was no different at all from his brothers in the bush? Oh, no! He was different; he was worse. His abortive effort at education and culture though leaving him totally unredeemed and unregenerated had nonetheless done something to him—it had deprived him of his links with his own people whom he no longer even understood and who certainly wanted none of his dissatisfaction or pretensions. “I know my natives; they are delighted with the way things are. It’s only these half-educated ruffians who don’t even know their own people …” How often one heard that and the many variations of it in colonial times! And how almost amusing to find its legacy in the colonialist criticism of our literature today! Iris Andreski’s book is more than old wives’ tales, at least in intention. It is clearly inspired by the desire to undercut the educated African witness (the modern myth-maker, she calls him) by appealing direct to the unspoilt woman of the bush who has retained a healthy gratitude for Europe’s intervention in Africa. This desire accounts for all that reliance one finds in modern European travellers’ tales on the evidence of “simple natives”—houseboys, cooks, drivers, schoolchildren—supposedly more trustworthy than the smart alecs. An American critic, Charles Larson, makes good use of this kind of evidence not only to validate his literary opinion of Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah but, even more important, to demonstrate its superiority over the opinion of Ghanaian intellectuals:

  When I asked a number of students at the University of Ghana about their preferences for contemporary African novelists, Ayi Kwei Armah was the writer mentioned most frequently, in spite of the fact
that many of Ghana’s older writers and intellectuals regard him as a kind of negativist … I have for some time regarded Ayi Kwei Armah as Anglophone Africa’s most accomplished prose stylist.2

  In 1962, I published an essay, “Where Angels Fear to Tread,”3 in which I suggested that the European critic of African literature must cultivate the habit of humility appropriate to his limited experience of the African world and purged of the superiority and arrogance which history so insidiously makes him heir to. That article, though couched in very moderate terms, won for me quite a few bitter enemies. One of them took my comments so badly—almost as a personal affront—that he launched numerous unprovoked attacks against me. Well, he has recently come to grief by his own hand. He published a long abstruse treatise based on an analysis of a number of Igbo proverbs most of which, it turned out, he had so completely misunderstood as to translate “fruit” in one of them as “penis.” Whereupon, a merciless native, less charitable than I, proceeded to make mincemeat of him. If only he had listened to me ten years ago!

  After the publication of A Man of the People in 1966, I was invited to dinner by a British diplomat in Lagos at which his wife, hitherto a fan of mine, admonished me for what she called “this great disservice to Nigeria.” She loved Nigeria so much that my criticisms of the country which ignored all the brave efforts it was making left her totally aghast. I told her something not very nice, and our friendship was brought to an end.

  Most African writers write out of an African experience and of commitment to an African destiny. For them, that destiny does not include a future European identity for which the present is but an apprenticeship. And let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it. Already some people are getting worried. This past summer I met one of Australia’s leading poets, A. D. Hope, in Canberra, and he said wistfully that the only happy writers today were those writing in small languages like Danish. Why? Because they and their readers understood one another and knew precisely what a word meant when it was used. I had to admit that I hadn’t thought of it that way. I had always assumed that the Commonwealth of Nations was a great bonus for a writer, that the English-Speaking Union was a desirable fraternity. But talking with A. D. Hope that evening, I felt somewhat like an illegitimate child face to face with the true son of the house lamenting the excesses of an adventurous and profligate father who had kept a mistress in every port. I felt momentarily nasty and thought of telling A. D. Hope: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! But I know he would not have understood. And in any case, there was an important sense in which he was right—that every literature must seek the things that belong unto its peace, must, in other words, speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of its history, past and current, and the aspirations and destiny of its people.

  Australia proved quite enlightening. (I hope I do not sound too ungracious. Certainly, I met very many fine and sensitive people in Australia; and the words which the distinguished historian Professor Manning Clark wrote to me after my visit are among the finest tributes I have ever received: “I hope you come back and speak again here, because we need to lose the blinkers of our past. So come and help the young to grow up without the prejudices of their forefathers.…”

  On another occasion a student at the National University who had taken a course in African literature asked me if the time had not come for African writers to write about “people in general” instead of just Africans. I asked her if by “people in general” she meant like Australians, and gave her the bad news that as far as I was concerned such a time would never come. She was only a brash sophomore. But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery. I don’t know how women’s lib will take it, but I do believe that by and large women are more honest than men in expressing their feelings. This girl was only making the same point which many “serious” critics have been making more tactfully and therefore more insidiously. They dress it up in fine robes which they call universality.

  In his book The Emergence of African Fiction, Charles Larson tells us a few revealing things about universality. In a chapter devoted to Lenrie Peters’s novel, which he finds particularly impressive, he speaks of “its universality, its very limited concern with Africa itself.” Then he goes on to spell it all out:

  That it is set in Africa appears to be accidental, for, except for a few comments at the beginning, Peters’s story might just as easily take place in the southern part of the United States or in the southern regions of France or Italy. If a few names of characters and places were changed one would indeed feel that this was an American novel. In short, Peters’s story is universal.4

  But Larson is obviously not as foolish as this passage would make him out to be, for he ends it on a note of self-doubt which I find totally disarming. He says (p. 238):

  Or am I deluding myself in considering the work universal? Maybe what I really mean is that The Second Round is to a great degree Western and therefore scarcely African at all.

  I find it hard after that to show more harshness than merely agreeing about his delusion. But few people I know are prepared to be so charitable. In a recent review of the book in Okike, a Nigerian critic, Omolara Leslie, mocks “the shining faith that we are all Americans under the skin.”

  Does it ever occur to these universalists to try out their game of changing names of characters and places in an American novel, say, a Philip Roth or an Updike, and slotting in African names just to see how it works? But of course it would not occur to them. It would never occur to them to doubt the universality of their own literature. In the nature of things the work of a Western writer is automatically informed by universality. It is only others who must strain to achieve it. So-and-so’s work is universal; he has truly arrived! As though universality were some distant bend in the road which you may take if you travel out far enough in the direction of Europe or America, if you put adequate distance between yourself and your home. I should like to see the word “universal” banned altogether from discussions of African literature until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon extends to include all the world.

  If colonialist criticism were merely irritating one might doubt the justification of devoting a whole essay to it. But strange though it may sound, some of its ideas and precepts do exert an influence on our writers, for it is a fact of our contemporary world that Europe’s powers of persuasion can be far in excess of the merit and value of her case. Take for instance the black writer who seizes on the theme that “Africa’s past is a sadly inglorious one” as though it were something new that had not already been “proved” adequately for him. Colonialist critics will, of course, fall all over him in ecstatic and salivating admiration—which is neither unexpected nor particularly interesting. What is fascinating, however, is the tortuous logic and sophistry they will sometimes weave around a perfectly straightforward and natural enthusiasm.

  A review of Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence (Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1971) by a Philip M. Allen in the Pan-African Journal5 was an excellent example of sophisticated, even brilliant colonialist criticism. The opening sentence alone would reward long and careful examination; but I shall content myself here with merely quoting it:

  The achievement of Ouologuem’s much discussed, impressive, yet over-praised novel has less to do with whose ideological team he’s playing on than with the forcing of moral universality on African civilization [my italics].

  A little later Mr. Allen expounds on this new moral universality:

  This morality is not only “un-African”—denying the standards set by omnipresent ancestors, the solidarity of communities, the legitimacy of social contract: it is a Hobbesian universe that extends beyond the wilderness, beyond the white man’s myths of Africa, into all civilization, theirs and ours.

  If you should still be wondering at th
is point how Ouologuem was able to accomplish that Herculean feat of forcing moral universality on Africa or with what gargantuan tools, Mr. Allen does not leave you too long in suspense. Ouologuem is “an African intellectual who has mastered both a style and a prevailing philosophy of French letters,” able to enter “the remoter alcoves of French philosophical discourse.”

  Mr. Allen is quite abrupt in dismissing all the “various polemical factions” and ideologists who have been claiming Ouologuem for their side. Of course they all miss the point,

  … for Ouologuem isn’t writing their novel. He gives us an Africa cured of the pathetic obsession with racial and cultural confrontation and freed from invidious tradition-mongering … His book knows no easy antithesis between white and black, western and indigenous, modern and traditional. Its conflicts are those of the universe, not accidents of history.

  And in final demonstration of Ouologuem’s liberation from the constraint of local models Mr. Allen tells us:

  Ouologuem does not accept Fanon’s idea of liberation, and he calls African unity a theory for dreamers. His Nakem is no more the Mali of Modibo Keita or the continent of Nkrumah than is the golden peace of Emperor Sundiata or the moral parish of Muntu.

  Mr. Allen’s rhetoric does not entirely conceal whose ideological team he is playing on, his attitude to Africa, in other words. Note, for example, the significant antithesis between the infinite space of “a Hobbesian universe” and “the moral parish of Muntu” with its claustrophobic implications. Who but Western man could contrive such arrogance?