Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

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?

Running through Mr. Allen’s review is the overriding thesis that Ouologuem has somehow restored dignity to his people and their history by investing them with responsibility for violence and evil. Mr. Allen returns to this thesis again and again, merely changing the form of words. And we are to understand, by fairly clear implication, that this was something brave and new for Africa, this manly assumption of responsibility.

Of course a good deal of colonialist rhetoric always turned on that very question. The moral inferiority of colonized peoples, of which subjugation was a prime consequence and penalty, was most clearly demonstrated in their unwillingness to assume roles of responsibility. As long ago (or as recently, depending on one’s historical perspective) as 1910 the popular English novelist John Buchan wrote a colonialist classic, Prester John, in which we find the words: “That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility.” And the idea did not originate with Buchan, either. It was a foundation tenet of colonialism and a recurrent element of its ideology and rhetoric. Now, to tell a man that he is incapable of assuming responsibility for himself and his actions is of course the utmost insult, to avoid which some Africans will go to any length, will throw anything into the deal; they will agree, for instance, to ignore the presence and role of racism in African history or pretend that somehow it was all the black man’s own fault. Which is complete and utter nonsense. For whatever faults the black man may have or whatever crimes he committed (and they were, and are, legion) he did not bring racism into the world. And no matter how emancipated a man may wish to appear or how anxious to please by his largeness of heart, he cannot make history simply go away. Not even a brilliant writer could hope to do that. And as for those who applaud him for trying, who acclaim his bold originality in “restoring historical initiative to his people” when in reality all he does is pander to their racist and colonialist attitudes, they are no more than unscrupulous interrogators taking advantage of an ingratiating defendant’s weakness and trust to egg him on to irretrievable self-incrimination.

That a “critic” playing on the ideological team of colonialism should feel sick and tired of Africa’s “pathetic obsession with racial and cultural confrontation” should surprise no one. Neither should his enthusiasm for those African works that show “no easy antithesis between white and black.” But an African who falls for such nonsense, not only in spite of Africa’s so very recent history but, even more, in the face of continuing atrocities committed against millions of Africans in their own land by racist minority regimes, deserves a lot of pity. Certainly anyone, white or black, who chooses to see violence as the abiding principle of African civilization is free to do so. But let him not pass himself off as a restorer of dignity to Africa, or attempt to make out that he is writing about man and about the state of civilization in general. (You could as well claim that fifty years ago Frank Melland’s In Witchbound Africa was an account of the universality of witchcraft and a vindication of Africa.) The futility of such service to Africa, leaving aside any question of duplicity in the motive, should be sufficiently underscored by one interesting admission in Mr. Allen’s review:

Thus, there is no reason for western reviewers of this book to exult in a black writer’s admission of the savagery, sensuality and amorality of his race: he isn’t talking about his race as Senghor or Cleaver do: he’s talking about us all.

Well, how obtuse of these “western reviewers” to miss that point and draw such wrong conclusions! But the trouble is that not everyone can be as bright as Mr. Allen. Perhaps for most ordinary people what Africa needs is a far less complicated act of restoration. The Canadian novelist and critic Margaret Laurence saw this happening already in the way many African writers are interpreting their world, making it

… neither idyllic, as the views of some nationalists would have had it, nor barbaric, as the missionaries and European administrators wished and needed to believe.6

And in the epilogue to the same book she makes the point even more strongly:

No writer of any quality has viewed the old Africa in an idealized way, but they have tried to regain what is rightly theirs—a past composed of real and vulnerable people, their ancestors, not the figments of missionary and colonialist imaginations.