IN 1979 I WAS ASKED in a long cable if I would agree to make an opening statement at a festival of African arts in Berlin. A topic was also proposed to me: The Necessity for Cultural Exchange in a Spirit of Partnership Between North and South.
As a rule, I do not agree to speak to prescription. But in this case the prescription was given with great tact and elegance. And what was more, it coincided almost completely with my own inclinations. Nevertheless—if only to uphold my commitment to freedom of choice—I decided to make a change in the letter of the prescription if not in its spirit. Therefore, rather than talking about the necessity for cultural exchange which, in any case, was self-evident to me, I decided to speak about the factors that impede cultural dialogue between North and South, in this case Europe and Africa.
Perhaps I should not conclude this preamble without mentioning that the telex message from Berlin came to me—I might almost say, came at me—from three different sources: the Nigerian Airways, the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria and the Nigerian Police! So I had it three times, thanks to the thoroughness of the Berlin organizers. My reply, however, was never received as I was to learn on my arrival in Berlin—a perfect example of one-way traffic and a parable of sorts on the situation I was asked to deal with.
The relationship between Europe and Africa is very old and also very special. The coasts of North Africa and Southern Europe interacted intimately to produce the beginnings of modern European civilization. Later, and much less happily, Europe engaged Africa in the tragic misalliance of the slave trade and colonialism to lay the foundations of modern European and American industrialism and wealth. When the poet Sedar Senghor sings of Africa joined to Europe by the navel, he may perhaps overromanticize the relationship, purging it through the benign mother/baby imagery of the cruel malignity that often characterizes Africa’s experience with Europe. But even so, he is essentially right about the closeness.
The necessity of cultural exchange in a spirit of partnership between North and South. The key word in the topic proposed to me is “partnership”; it is also the source of the impediment, because no definition of partnership can evade the notion of equality. And equality is the one thing which Europeans are conspicuously incapable of extending to others, especially Africans. Of course partnership as a slogan in political rhetoric is a different matter and is frequently bandied about. But anyone who is in any doubt about its meaning in that context need only be reminded that a British governor of Rhodesia in the 1950s defined the partnership between black and white in his territory, apparently without intending any sarcasm, as the partnership between the horse and its rider!
Although the articulation of the colonial ideal in terms of such starkness might startle reasonable white people into indignant unrecognition, my sense of the situation tells me that in more or less polite formulations that was, and is, the fundamental attitude of Europe to Africa. Even the enunciation of the metaphor in human/animal terms is neither new nor accidental.
Let there be no mistake about it. In confronting the black man, the white man has a simple choice: either to accept the black man’s humanity and the equality that flows from it, or to reject it and see him as a beast of burden. No middle course exists except as an intellectual quibble. For centuries Europe has chosen the beastly alternative which automatically has ruled out the possibility of a dialogue. You may talk to a horse but you don’t wait for a reply!
Because of the myths created by the white man to dehumanize the Negro in the course of the last four hundred years—myths which have yielded perhaps psychological, certainly economic, comfort to Europe—the white man has been talking and talking and never listening because he imagines he has been talking to a dumb beast. In the words of Steve Biko during his last trial in the white, Christian and Western outpost of South Africa: “The integration so achieved is a one-way course, with the whites doing all the talking and the blacks listening.”
When Wole Soyinka made the now famous attempt to dismiss the negritude movement by pointing out that a tiger does not talk tigritude, Senghor—one of the founders of the movement—made an adequate reply, namely that a tiger does not talk. Perhaps, on account of its breathtaking simplicity, the depth of meaning of that answer was lost on many people. The Negro talks! And talking is a measure of his humanity.
Let me hasten to add that I am fully aware of the simplifications I am indulging in so that my basic points may stand out. I realize, for instance, that all white people cannot be exactly of one mind or equally guilty of the fault of too much transmission and too little reception; I realize that all European peoples did not participate to the same degree in the events of modern African history. But despite local qualifications that could be made here and there, I believe that the major outline of my thesis is correct.
There is one qualification, however, which I must make because it bears on the prospects of resolving the problem of dialogue. I refer to a certain ambivalent curiosity of the white man about Africans which according to one’s nature might be either a source of hope or of despair. Personally, I go along with John Milton: when hope and fear arbitrate the event I incline to the hope rather than the fear.
The hope is that if the white man is so curious about the black man, one day he may actually stop and listen to him. The fear is that the white man has found and used so many evasions in the past to replace or simulate dialogue to his own satisfaction that he may go on doing it indefinitely.
The first evasion is the phenomenon of the expert or the foreign correspondent. The white man sends one of his fellows to visit the land or the mind of black people and bring home all the news. This has included every kind of traveller: priests, soldiers, bandits, traders, journalists, scholars, explorers and novelists. Don’t get me wrong. I do not lump all these characters together in order to dismiss them with the same wave of the hand. That would be foolish, ungracious and false. Many Europeans have made enormous contributi
ons towards the understanding of Africa in Europe. Some of them have even helped us to see ourselves anew in the freshness of an itinerant perspective. But what we are talking about here is dialogue which requires two people and cannot be replaced by even the most brilliant monologue.
As it happens, most of the monologue is not brilliant but foolishly sensational and pretentious. I have drawn attention elsewhere to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Europe and America regard as a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. I have no doubt that the reason for the high standing of this novel is simply that it fortifies racial fears and prejudices and is clever enough to protect itself, should the need arise, with the excuse that it is not really about Africa at all. And yet it is set in Africa and teems with Africans whose humanity is admitted in theory but promptly undermined by the mindlessness of its context and the pretty explicit animal imagery surrounding it. In the entire novel, Conrad allows no more than a dozen words in broken English to one and a half Africans: the cannibal who says “Catch ’im … eat ’im,” and the half-caste who announces “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.”
Europe’s reliance on its own experts would not worry us if it did not, at the same time, attempt to exclude African testimony. But it often does.
Perhaps I would be allowed two liberties: first, to include Americans under the general rubric of “European” (which is what we tend to call them in Africa, anyway) and secondly, to give an example with one of my books.
An American reviewer with the amazing name of Christ writing about Arrow of God in the New York Times Book Review had this to say:
Perhaps no Nigerian at the present state of his culture and ours can tell us what we need to know about that country, in a way that is available to our understanding … in the way W. H. Hudson made South America real to us, or T. E. Lawrence brought Arabia to life.
Please note that if Mr. Christ had said that a South American had made South America real to him or an Arab, Arabia, I would have accepted my failure modestly and in good grace. But Christ’s problem seems to be fundamental: only his brothers can explain the world, even the alien world of strangers, to him! So he sent a brother to South America to tell him all about that continent and then another to Arabia. But before he has had time to dispatch a third brother to report on Nigeria, a Nigerian has jumped the gun and is talking!
So much for the dialogue between the white man and his brother concerning the Negro. It is obviously not working. The Negro talks!
The second evasion of dialogue is the phenomenon of the “authentic African.” This creature was invented to circumvent the credibility problem of the white man talking to himself. If, the white man seems to say, I must now listen to Negroes, then I had better find those as yet unspoilt by Western knowledge, which unfortunately tends to put inconvenient words in their mouths. The distinguished German scholar of African culture, the late Janheinz Jahn, who has reflected on this problem, has put it very well:
Only the most highly cultivated person counts as a “real European.” A “real African,” on the other hand, lives in the bush … goes naked … and tells fairy stories about the crocodile and the elephant. The more primitive, the more really African. But an African who is enlightened and cosmopolitan … who makes political speeches, or writes novels, no longer counts as a real African.1
As the pace of change accelerates there won’t, alas, be many “authentic Africans” around with that wholesome and unquestioning admiration for white people which was the chief attraction of the bush African. And in any case the nature of the European in Africa is also changing. A businessman who is there for profit which is no longer safe and guaranteed isn’t going to consult a witch doctor for his opinion on an investment risk! So the uses of the “real African” have narrowed drastically.
Which should bring us to the end of the road, if the white man were not so ingenious! The New York Times Book Review once carried in the same issue a laudatory review of V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River and also a long interview with him interspersed with commentary by the distinguished American writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Says Hardwick:
Now [Naipaul] has passed beyond India … to a universal “Darkness.” Talking to him, reading and re-reading his work, one cannot help but [sic] think … of Idi Amin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, of the fate of Bhutto. These figures of an improbable and deranging transition come to mind because Naipaul’s work is a creative reflection upon a devastating lack of historical preparation, upon the anguish of whole countries and peoples unable to cope.2
Elizabeth Hardwick quotes profusely and with apparent relish and approval from the growing corpus of scornful work which Naipaul has written on Africa, India and South America. Particularly interesting were his Congo travels in 1965, from which he reports on “native people camping in the ruins of civilization” and the “bush creeping back as you stood there.”
Reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s interview, an absurd and rather pathetic picture rises from the printed page: this knowledgeable American lady lapping up like a wide-eyed village girl every drop of pretentiousness that falls from the lips of this literary guru, a new purveyor of the old comforting myths of her race.
Would it, in the circumstances, be too difficult to wonder what “devastating lack of historical preparation” created Hitler, Stalin and Botha; what “deranging transition” formed the fate of Biko, or Patrice Lumumba, for that matter? Apparently, yes; it would be quite impossible. Hardwick’s last question to Naipaul was, predictably: “What is the future in Africa?” His reply, pat, smart and equally predictable: “Africa has no future.” This modern Conrad, who is partly native himself, does not beat about the bush!
The new evasion will have its day and pass on leaving unsolved the problem of dialogue which has plagued Afro-European relations for centuries, until Europe is ready. Ready to concede total African humanity. “We are the white man’s rubbish,” says an Athol Fugard character, “… his rubbish is people.” When that changes, dialogue may have a chance to begin. If the heap of rubbish doesn’t catch fire meanwhile and set the world ablaze.