African Literature as Celebration: Reflections of a Novelist
Achebe, Chinua
Reflections of a Novelist There is an artistic taboo among my people, the Igbo of Nigeria. It is a prohibition— on pain of being finished off rather quickly by the gods—against laying a...
...To the Igbo mentality art must, among other uses, provide a means to domesticate that which is wild...
...And now I come to what I have chosen to call my Middle Passage, my colonial inheritance...
...Quoted in Brian Street, The Savage in Literature [London & Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975], 14...
...We apologized profusely to him for our undeserved luck...
...I did not see myself as an African to begin with...
...It is simply not true that the English forced us to learn their language...
...On the contrary, British colonial policy in Africa and elsewhere emphasized again and again its preference for native languages...
...not even celebration of the guarded and problematic kind accorded SUMMER • 1992 • 345 African Literature by Africa to the white man's presence in the art of mbari...
...everyday events, abnormal scandals...
...Then, looking down at the Toad on the roadside he said: "To know is very good, but to have is better...
...So whether there was method in the madness or not, there was profit quite definitely...
...On the other hand these reporters may well have believed their own stories—such was the complex nature of the imperial vocation...
...Your governments put you in prison...
...That's how to ride a horse," he said...
...Very good," said the Snake...
...Some years ago at an international writers' meeting in Sweden, a Swedish writer and journalist said to a small group of Africans present: "You fellows are lucky...
...But everything is grist to the mill of the artist...
...Anyone who is familiar with contemporary African writing knows how we stand in this matter...
...of the creative potential in all of us and of the need to exercise this latent energy again and again in artistic expression and communal, cooperative enterprises...
...Mbari extends the view, opens it out to meanings beyond the mere remembering of blessings or happy events...
...He lived in Africa...
...Now I want to suggest that in the colonial situation presence was the critical question, the crucial word...
...From the period of the slave trade, through the Age of Colonization to the present day, the catalogue of what Africa and Africans have been said not to have or not to be is a pretty extensive list...
...The diviner would travel through the village and knock on the doors of those chosen by Ana for her work...
...However, Shakespeare restores humanity to him in many ways, but especially by giving him not just speech but great poetry to speak before the play's end...
...But I also encountered Ryder Haggard and John Buchan and the rest, and their "African" books...
...Consider another disquieting presence—a man whose body was covered with the spots of smallpox, a disease so dreaded that it was personified and alluded to only in quiet, deferential tones of appeasement...
...Conrad portrays a void...
...There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding...
...I used the words stage and auditorium to describe the mbari house...
...It happened in every colony where the British put diverse peoples together under one administration...
...Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, translated by Katherine Woods [London: Heinemann, 1972], 37...
...In The Tempest, Caliban is not specifically African...
...Here in Sweden nobody pays any attention to us no matter what we write...
...One of the best images in Heart of Darkness is of a boat going upstream and the forest stepping across to bar its return...
...The Hausa who made this story are a monarchical people, and the ethos of the story accords with the ruling values of their political system...
...I am not quite certain whether all the fieldworkers who reported these absences genuinely believed their report or whether it was some kind of make-believe, the kind of alibi we might expect a man arraigned for a serious crime to put together...
...The Snake is an aristocrat who has things like horses because of who he is...
...Answer: Well . . . not really, you know . . . people of sorts, perhaps, but not as you and I understand the word...
...Africa is presumed to pursue its dark, mysterious ways and destiny untouched by explorations and expeditions...
...on the contrary it seems to have diminished...
...Therefore, the celebration of mbari was no blind adoration of a perfect world or even a good world...
...We chose English not because the British desired it but because having tacitly accepted the new nationalities into which colonialism had grouped us, we needed its language to transact our business, including the business of overthrowing colonialism itself in the fullness of time...
...It is tempting to say that this literature came to put people back into Africa...
...My position is that anyone who feels unable to write in English should of course follow his or her desires, but must not take liberties with our history...
...An abominable act is called nso-ana, taboo-to-Earth...
...it must act like the lightning conductor that arrests destructive electrical potentials and channels them harmlessly to earth...
...But it was like a window through which he saw in SUMMER • 1992 • 347 African Literature the distance a strange, magical new world...
...I was not on Marlowe's boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness...
...His heart was intrepid and to him the value of liberty was greater than the value of life...
...So let us add to our long list of absences this last item—the absence of responsibility...
...And so the young African boy enthusiastically opened his heart and mind to the exciting, wider world unfolding around him...
...And he was happy...
...Our ancestral poets, the griots, had their way of dealing with the problem, sometimes direct, at other times oblique...
...The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous...
...I think it is interesting to contrast Conrad's episode of the French gunboat with the rendering of an analogous incident in Ambiguous Adventure, a powerful novel of colonization by the Muslim writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane from Senegal, a country that was colonized by the French...
...Conrad was giving vent to the popular conceit that Europe's devastation of Africa left no mark on the victim...
...Can you show me then how it's done...
...You see, it is significant, for example, that the moment when churchmen began to worry and doubt the existence of the black soul was the same moment when the black body was fetching high prices in the marketplace...
...A day was chosen for the unveiling and celebration of the work with music and dancing and feasting in front of the house of mbari...
...and you don't want to do that...
...The Toad is a commoner whose horsemanship, acquired no doubt through years of struggle and practice, avails nothing in this hierarchical society...
...One suspects he knew his terrain...
...The words are those of one of the characters, the Most Royal Lady, a member of the Diallobe aristocracy: A hundred years ago our grandfather, along with all the inhabitants of this countryside, was awakened one morning by an uproar arising from the river...
...The ability to do both is in my view a great advantage and not the disaster some of my friends insist on calling it...
...SUMMER • 1992 • 349...
...I went to a good school modeled on British public schools...
...he was called the decorator of its victims, not their killer...
...It is inevitable, I believe, to see the emergence of modern African literature as a return of celebration...
...We must ask them: we must go to learn from them the art of conquering without being in the right...
...One of the earliest short stories I wrote was called "Chike's School Days," and it ended like this: The first sentences in his New Method Reader were simple enough and yet they filled him with a vague exultation: "Once there was a wizard...
...The Toad jumped down and the Snake slid up the side of the horse back into the saddle and coiled himself up as before...
...True, one grain may differ from another in its powers of nourishment...
...It is not my intention, however, to engage in a detailed evaluation of the colonial experience, but merely to ask what possibility, what encouragement, there was in this episode of our history for the celebration of our own world, for the singing of the song of ourselves, in the din of an insistent world and song of others...
...I read lots of English books there...
...If we should now draw a line under this list and add up all the absences reported from Africa, our grand total would equal one great absence of the human mind and spirit...
...So what do you do...
...By that crazy act of shelling the bush, France managed to acquire an empire in West and Equatorial Africa nine to ten times its own size...
...If there are valuable things like gold or diamonds that you are carting away from their territory, you proceed to prove that they don't own them in the real sense of the word—that the people and the valuables just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived...
...Some of my colleagues, finding this too awkward, have tried to rewrite their story into a straightforward case of oppression by presenting a happy monolingual African childhood brusquely disrupted by the imposition of a domineering foreign language...
...but he is the quintessential colonial subject created by Shakespeare's genius at the very onset of Europe's Age of Expansion...
...asked the Snake...
...Celebration does not mean praise or approval...
...John Buchan, by the way, was a very senior colonial administrator and novelist...
...These chosen people were then blessed and separated from the larger community in a ritual with more than a passing resemblance to their own death and funeral...
...Generosity has not prospered...
...And they were not foreigners but fellow Nigerian youth...
...Human figures, animals (perhaps a leopard dragging along the carcass of a goat), figures from folklore, history, or pure imagination...
...That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king, and so long as we know and practice it we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for their bellies...
...This auditorium was then filled to the brim with sculptures in molded earth and clay, and the walls with murals in white, black, yellow, and green...
...And he rode away...
...With pleasure," said the Toad...
...Question: Were there people there...
...but in place of a flat floor there was a deck of steps running from one side wall to the other and rising almost to the roof at the back wall...
...In an important study of this phenomenon Philip Curtin tells us that Europe's image of Africa, which began to emerge in the 1870s, was found in children's books, in Sunday school 346 • DISSENT African INIterahne tracts, in the popular press...
...let me explain...
...Colonization may indeed be a very complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the people, the history of others, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in their honor...
...Cheikh Hamidou Kane, standing as it were at the explosive end of the trajectory, tells a different story...
...I was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces...
...In the fullness of time that same story will stand ready to serve a revolutionary purpose using what was always there: an unattractive, incompetent, and complacent aristocracy, exposing it not to laughter this time but to severe stricture...
...It does mean that these languages must co-exist and interact with the newcomer at the present time and into the foreseeable future...
...You construct very elaborate excuses for your action...
...Churchmen at some point wondered about the soul itself...
...Any wonder then that they should be subjugated by those who are endowed with these human gifts...
...From denying the presence of people standing there before you, you end up questioning their very humanity...
...To them, celebration is the acknowledgment of a presence, the courtesy of giving to everybody proper due...
...Does my writing in the language of my colonizer not amount to acquiescing in the ultimate dispossession...
...Architecturally, it was a simple structure, a stage formed by three high walls supporting a peaked roof...
...Lesser attributes such as culture and religion were debated extensively by others and generally ruled out as far as Africa was concerned...
...But quite clearly the griot who fashioned that story, whether he was aware of it or not, concealed in the voluminous folds of the laughter the hint and the glint of iron...
...Ana combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of the moral order in human society...
...Conrad's intention, high-minded as usual, is to show the futility of Europe's action in Africa: Pop would go one of the six-inch guns...
...If we accept that, and I don't see that we have much choice, then we had better learn to appreciate one another's presence and to accord to every people their due of human respect...
...still, we must, in the manner of those incomparable artists of mbari, accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way...
...A character in John Buchan's famous colonial novel, Prester John, has this to say: I knew then the meaning of the white man's duty...
...In one striking passage in this novel Conrad reveals a very interesting aspect of the question of presence...
...The new literature in Africa is aware of the possibilities available to it for celebrating humanity in our continent...
...To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit...
...We see remnants of that preference today in the Bantustan policies of South Africa...
...The picture of Africa and Africans that they carried in their minds did not grow there adventitiously but was planted and watered by careful mental and educational husbandry...
...But that would be wrong, because people never left Africa except in the guilty imagination of Africa's antagonists...
...So these African creatures have no soul, no religion, no culture, no history, no human speech, no I.Q...
...I have used the word presence quite a few times already...
...The Toad jumped into the saddle, sat bolt upright and galloped most elegantly up and down the road...
...A habit of generosity to Africa has not grown since Gibbon's time...
...Most often, they found it...
...To her right and left, other deities took their places...
...As for the woman depicted in copulation with a dog, was there much to choose, as oddities go, between her and the white man...
...Please descend...
...Their story had been told for them and they had found the telling quite unsatisfactory...
...Sometimes Africa as an anthropomorphic personage steps out of the shadows and physically annihilates the invasion—which of course adds a touch of suspense and even tragedy to Europe's enterprise...
...I shall end by telling a very short Hausa tale, from Nigeria: a miniature masterpiece of the story as a two-edged sword: The Snake was once riding his horse curled up, as was his fashion, in the saddle...
...It was an acknowledgment of the world as these particular inhabitants perceived it in reality, in their dreams and imagination...
...Its denial was the keynote of colonialist ideology...
...I hated their guts...
...Fifteen years 348 • DISSENT African Literature ago I wrote a different kind of poem, in English, to commemorate the passing away of the Angolan poet and president, Agostinho Neto...
...a small flame would dart and vanish, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened...
...Did the black man have a soul...
...I offer mbari as one illustration of my precolonial inheritance—of art as celebration of my reality...
...Now, that does not mean that our indigenous languages should now be neglected...
...That was when I said no, and realized that stories are not innocent...
...The difference between the two stories is very clear...
...Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964], vi...
...It is aware also that our world interlocks more and more with the worlds of others...
...Our grandfather, and the elite of the country with him, was defeated...
...Twenty-one years ago when Christopher Okigbo, our finest poet, fell in the Biafran battlefield, I wrote for him one of the best poems I have ever written, in the Igbo language, in the form of a traditional dirge sung by young people when a member of their age group dies...
...Let me simply say that when at the age of thirteen I went to that school modeled after British public schools, it was not only English literature that I encountered there...
...If we shift our focus from history to literature we find the same hardening of attitude...
...That boy was me...
...To call my colonial experience an inheritance may surprise some people...
...The era of separate destinies has run its course...
...Chike read it over and over again at home and then made a song of it...
...we are no flatterers of the emperor...
...It is a prohibition— on pain of being finished off rather quickly by the gods—against laying a proprietary hand on even the smallest item in that communal enterprise which they undertook from time, and to which they gave the name mbari...
...Finally, if the worse comes to worst, you may even be prepared to question whether such as they can be, like you, fully human...
...The Igbo insist that any presence that is ignored, denigrated, denied acknowledgment and celebration can become a focus for anxiety and disruption...
...Conrad's famous novel Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899, portrays Africa as a place where the wandering European may discover that the dark impulses and unspeakable appetites he has suppressed and forgotten through ages of civilization may spring into life again in answer to Africa's free and triumphant savagery...
...Its major affirmations were the "common knowledge" of the educated classes...
...Norton & Company, 1972], 37...
...He took his gun and, followed by all the elite of the region, he flung himself upon the newcomers...
...forest scenes, scenes of village and domestic life...
...As he passed the Toad who was walking on the road, the Toad said: "Excuse me sir, but that is not how to ride a horse...
...One can imagine the emir and his court laughing boisterously at the telling of it...
...Nothing could happen...
...Everyone can see in that simple tale the use of story to foster the status quo in a class society...
...It was performed by the community on command by its presiding deity, usually the earth goddess, Ana...
...Only the newcomers know...
...Conrad insists on the futility of the bombardment but also on the absence of human response to it...
...This paradox was not peculiar to Nigeria...
...When all was ready, after months or even years of preparation, the makers of mbari, who had been working in complete seclusion, sent word to the larger community...
...But he was not alone in that...
...To be able to do all that we had to put away our different mother tongues and communicate in the language of our colonizers...
...Hamidou Kane celebrates a human presence and a heroic struggle...
...But I believe the event does invite a 344 • DISSENT African Literature second way of apprehension in which the roles are reversed, and those still and silent dignitaries of molded earth seated on those steps in the royal pavilion become the spectators of the world as a lively scene...
...To begin with, Caliban knew not his own meaning but "wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish...
...Of course, praise can be part of it, but only a part...
...Very good indeed...
...Indeed, the two side walls and the back wall encompassed a stage of sorts, in which the community in the foreground is the audience looking into the enclosure with its festive walls and the massed arrangement of sculptures on the steps...
...Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition [New York: W.W...
...The running battle between the emperor and the poet in Africa is not a modern phenomenon either...
...His Calibans make "a violent babble of uncouth sounds" and go on making it right through the novel...
...The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning...
...The sculptures were arranged carefully on the steps...
...She is mother and judge...
...Or, if I insisted on the boat ride, then I had to settle perhaps for that "improved specimen," as Conrad sarcastically calls him, more absurd than a dog in a pair of breeches, trying to make out the witchcraft behind the ship's water gauge...
...What good can superb horsemanship do to a man without a horse...
...But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me...
...set pieces from past displays of mbari, new images that had never been depicted before—everything jostled together for space in that extraordinary convocation of the entire kingdom of human experience and imagination...
...that they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you...
...it deliberately sets out to include other experiences—indeed, all significant encounters that humans make in their journeys through life, especially new, unaccustomed, and thus potentially threatening, encounters...
...For example, when Europe made its appearance in Igbo society out of travelers' tales into the concrete and alarming shape of the district officer, the artists immediately gave him a seat among the molded figures of mbari, complete with his peaked helmet and pipe...
...Thereafter, when new generations of explorers and administrators went to Africa, they went with a prior impression of what they would find...
...You say, for instance, that the people in question are worthless and quite unfit to manage themselves or their affairs...
...Sometimes, they even made room for his bicycle and his native police orderly...
...I must now emphasize one final point...
...He went to China to get a lamp...
...It is the scene where a French gunboat is sitting on the water and firing rockets into the mainland...
...At the center of the front row sat the earth goddess herself, a child on her left knee and a raised sword in her right hand...
...I took sides with the white men against the savages...
...The Snake slid out of the saddle down the side of the horse to the ground...
...And talking of dispossession, what about language itself...
...Periwinkles" got into it, and also "Damascus...
...This historical fantasy demands that we throw out the English language in order to restore linguistic justice and self-respect to ourselves...
...With Hugh Trevor Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford in our own time, no bursts of light, no matter how brief, have ever illumined the dark sky of the Dark Continent...
...Note however that it is the African forest that takes the action: the Africans themselves are absent...
...The white district officer was obviously not a matter for dancing...
...For me it is not either English or Igbo, it is both...
...But futility, good heavens no...
...It's not...
...Thereafter, they moved into the forest and, behind a high fence and under the instruction and supervision of master artists and craftsmen, they constructed a temple of art...
...Contrast this with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness three hundred years later...
...You might say that difference was the very reason African writers came into being...
...He has to take all the risks...
...I came in contact also for the first time in my life with a large number of other boys of my own age who did not speak my Igbo language...
...In other words I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes...
...African history seemed unimaginable except perhaps for a few marginal places like Ethiopia where Gibbon tells us of a short burst of activity followed from the seventh century by one thousand years in which she fell into a deep sleep, "forgetful of the world by whom she was forgot" to use his famous phrase...
...Once every so often, and in her absolute discretion, this goddess would instruct the community through divination to build a home of images in her honor...
...Therefore the agenda of the colonist did not, could not, make provision for the celebration of the world of the colonized...
...It was a meaningless song...
...Popes and theologians debated that for a while...
...Mbari was a celebration through art of the world and of the life lived in it...
...We lived in the same dormitories, attended the same morning assembly and classes, and in the evenings gathered in the same playing fields...
...For, as another character in Ambiguous Adventure says to a Frenchman: "We have not had the same past you and ourselves, but we shall have strictly the same future...
...of art in its social dimension...
...About sanity I cannot speak...
...This is a big and complex matter that cannot be fully explored here...
...The problem some people have with the word celebration may arise, I suspect, from too narrow a perspective on it...
...I read Treasure Island and Gulliver's Travels and Prisoner of Zenda, and Oliver Twist and Tom Brown's School Days and such books in their dozens...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
