1.0 Introduction
In this unit, you will be introduced to some of the works of some colonialist writers. The intention is to expose you to the views of the colonialists on Africa as depicted in their literary works. You will see in this unit that Africans are depicted as cannibals, corrupt people and people with low mentality. Chinua Achebe’s reaction to this misrepresentation is included in this unit.
.jpeg)
2.0 Colonialist Literature
Colonialist literature refers to literary works written by colonial masters in Africa, Nigeria. As we have seen in unit one, the colonialists came to Nigeria with their
“civilization” in form of religion, education, politics and culture. They tried to impose their way of life on Africans who they saw as uncivilized.
This view of Africans as savages, uncivilized, naïve and brutal is portrayed advertently or inadvertently in their novels. Most of the novels were inspired by their experiences in Africa. As a creative output, each writer records his own perspective of the encounter between Africans and the west.
The Influence of Colonialist Literature on the Development of Nigerian Literature
Chinua Achebe admits that he was actually motivated to write novels because he wanted to correct the lopsided portraiture of Africans in colonialist novels especially Mr. Johnson which is set in Nigeria. He alluded to these works as part of his motivation for becoming a writer calling them “appealing novels” about Africa. More specifically he has said:
I know around ’51, ’52, I was quite certain that I was going to try my hand at writing and one of the things that set me thinking was Joyce Cary’s novel, set in Nigeria, Mister Johnson, which was praised so much and it was clear to me that it was a most superficial picture not only of the country but even of the Nigerian character and so I thought if this was famous then perhaps someone ought to look at this from the inside. ( Achebe 89)
Looking at this from the inside involved drawing on the model of his own Igbo society and its oral traditions. By reconstructing a picture and narrative of Africa and using Cary’s fiction as a point of departure, Achebe set out to challenge the colonialist depiction of Africans and their society.
3.1 The Writing of Joyce Cary
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in Derry, Ireland, on December 7, 1888. Throughout his childhood, Joyce Cary spent much time with his grandmother in Ireland and in England. Although he always remembered his Irish childhood with affection and wrote about it with great feeling, Cary lived in England for the rest of his life. The feeling of displacement and the idea that life’s tranquility may be disturbed at any moment informed much of his writing.
In 1906, determined to be an artist, Cary studied Art in Edinburgh. He did not fare well as a painter so decided to apply himself to literature. He was an adventurous young man and in 1912, Cary served as a Red Cross orderly during the Balkan Wars. During the First World War, he served with a Nigerian regiment fighting in the German colony of Cameroon. The short story Umaru (1921) describes an incident from this period in which a British office recognizes the common humanity that connects him with his African sergeant.
Cary was wounded at the battle of Mount Mora in 1916. He returned to England on leave got married to Gertrude Oglivie. Three months later, Cary returned to service as a colonial officer, leaving a pregnant Gertrude in England. Cary held several posts in Nigeria including that of magistrate and executive officer in Borgu. Cary began his African service as a stereotypical colonial officer, determined to bring order to the natives, but by the end of his service, he had come to see the Nigerians as individuals facing difficult problems, including those created by colonial rule.
By 1920, Cary concentrated his energies on providing clean water and roads to connect remote villages with the larger world. His wife wanted him to resign and go back to England but he could not due to financial reasons. However later on he was able to sell some of the stories he wrote in Africa to The Saturday Post through a literary agent. His works were then published in this American magazine under the name “Thomas Joyce”. This provided Cary with enough incentive to resign from the Nigerian service and settled with his wife in Oxford. They had four sons.
Cary worked hard as a writer but his brief economic success soon ended as the Post stopped publishing his works. Cary worked at various novels and a play, but nothing sold and the family soon had to take in tenants.
However, in 1932, Cary managed to publish Aissa Saved, a novel that drew on his Nigerian experience. The book was not particularly successful, but sold more than Cary’s next novel, An American Visitor (1933). His next novel, The African Witch (1936) did a little better and his finances improved.
Although none of Cary’s first three novels was particularly successful critically or financially, they are progressively more ambitious and complex. He decided to change the structures and style so he wrote his next novel Mister Johnson (1939), entirely in the present tense, which is now regarded as one of Cary’s best novels.
Some of his other works are: Castle Corner (1938), Charley Is My Darling (1940), A
House of Children (1941), The First Trilogy (1941 – 44), and the Horse’s Mouth (1944)
which remains his most popular novel.
Cary’s themes include the tension between creativity and colonial administration, which destroys the old as it fashions the new; the conservative desire to preserve things as they are; the difference between liberty which consists of a lack of restraint, and freedom, which lies in the ability to act; and the sense that human life is difficult and happiness elusive; that fleeting joy is life’s only reward; and that love is necessary to humanity. We will treat his most popular novel Mister Johnson which has been criticized greatly by African literary scholars Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is said to be a re-action to this novel.
3.1.2 Mister Johnson (1939) is the story of a young Nigerian who had an unsuccessful career in the service of the British colonial regime. Although the novel has a comic tone, the story itself is tragic. Johnson, a young African, is assigned as clerk at an English
district office in Fada, Nigeria. He is from a different district and is regarded as a foreigner by the native. However, he works his way into local society, got married there but never really fitted in. he also has difficulties in adjusting to the regulations and mechanism of the district office and his official duties. Meanwhile, the district officer, Rudbeck, is dissatisfied with his work and life in Africa. Rudbeck decided to build a road linking Fada to the main highway and larger population centers. Johnson, as Rudbeck’s clerk is happy about the project.
Johnson is one of Cary’s joy-filled characters, possessor of a great energy that infects all around him. People are drawn to Johnson and follow him without realizing that they are being led. Indeed Johnson has no clear idea of where he is going. His delight is in seeing those around him happy. His mood infects Rudbeck and, when Johnson suggests how the books may be fiddled to support Rudbeck’s road project, the colonial officer agrees. Unfortunately, Rudbeck’s swindle is uncovered and he returns to England to be with his wife. Johnson now goes to work for Gollup, a retired British sergeant who has married a native woman and runs a local store.
Unlike Rudbeck, Gollup is an abusive drunk, racist, but he admires Johnson’s good humored courage. Johnson, in turn, enjoys the compliment to his courage. On one occasion, Gollup attacked him and he retaliates. Gollup does not take the incident seriously so does not change his attitude towards Johnson, but he cannot have an employee who has struck him in public. Johnson is therefore tired and leaves Fada. Meanwhile, Rudbeck is recalled because of a shortage of political officers. Immediately he recommences his road-building project, but funds were inadequate so he was forced to manipulate to provide the needed funds. His superior cautions him to be careful because another scandal will destroy his career.
Rudbeck recalls Johnson and Johnson’s infectious enthusiasm makes the road-building successful. Johnsons stay is short-lived because Rudbeck discovers that Johnson has been engaged in petty graft and dismisses him. Johnson turns to theft from the store to support his lifestyle and, when Gollup’s the storekeeper discovers this, Johnson kills the storekeeper. Johnson is tried for murder. The trial brings Rudbeck to the breaking point. Johnson is found guilty and begs Rudbeck to keep him from the gallows by killing him. Rudbeck follows his heart rather than the rules and does so, though the act is expected to destroy his career and possibly have other ramifications, legal and personal.
Chinua Achebe has said that Mister Johnson struck him as superficial and helped from his determination to write his own novels about Nigeria. Other critics have found Cary’s portrayal of his main character patronizing and Johnson himself childish. But these criticisms miss the universal quality of Johnson as one of the world’s creators. It is important to see Johnson as an individual character and not as a generalized racial type.
3.2 The Writings of Rider Haggard
Henry Rider Haggard was born at Bradenham, Norfolk, the eighth often children, to Sir William Meybohm Rider Haggard, a barrister, and Ella Doveton, an author and poet. His father had a low opinion of him so sent him in 1875 to what is now South Africa, in an unpaid position as assistant to the secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Natal.
He returned later to England in 1882, studies law and was called to the bar in 1884. His practice of law was desultory, and much of his time was taken up by the writing of novels, which he saw as being more profitable. Rider Haggard lived at 69 Gunterstone Road in Hammarsmith, London, from mid 1885 to circa April 1888. It was at this Hammersmith address that he completed King Solomon’s Mines. (1885). This was heavily influenced by the larger than life adventures he met in Colonial Africa.
Haggard is most famous as the author of the novels King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, and She and its sequel Ayesha, swashbuckling adventure novels set in the context of the Scramble for Africa (the action of Ayesha however happens in Tiber). He is also remembered for Nada the Lily (a tale of adventure among the Zulus) and Eric Brighteyes.
While his novels portray many of the stereotypes associated with colonialism, they are usually acclaimed for the degree of sympathy with which the native populations are portrayed. Africans often play heroic roles in the novels, although the protagonists are typically, though not invariably, European. Notable examples are the heroic Zulu warrior Umslopagas and Ignosi, the rightful king of Kukuanaland, in King Solomon’s Mines. Having developed an intense mutual friendship with the three Englishmen who help him regain his throne, he accepts their advice and abolishes witch-hunts and arbitrary capital punishment. Three of his novels are written in collaboration with his friend Andrew Lang who shared his interest in the spiritual realm and paranormal phenomena .
Haggard also wrote about agricultural and social reform, in part inspired by his experiences in Africa, but also based on what he saw in Europe. At the end of his life he was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position he shared with his friend Rudyard Kipling. The two had bonded upon Kipling’s arrival at London in 1889 largely on the strength of their shared opinions, and the two remained lifelong friends. He was a prolific writer. His other works include:
Cetywayo and His White Neighbours; Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand Natal, and the Transvaal (1882) Dawn (1884) The Witch’s Head (1884) Hunter Quatermain’s Story (1885); Long Odds (1886) Jess 91887), A Tale of Three Lions (1887) Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888) Maiwa’s Revenge (1888). Me Fellow Laborer and the Wreck of the Copeland (1888) Colonel Quaritch, V. C. (1888) Cleopatra (1889); Allan’s Wife (1889) Beatrice (1890) The World’s Desire (1890); co-written with Andrew Lang; Eric Brighteyes (1891); Montezuma’s Daughter (1893); The People of the Mist (1894); Joan Haste (1895); Heart of the World (1895) Church and State (1895) The Wizard (1896) Doctor Therne (1898) Swallow (1898) A Farmer’s Year (1899) The Last Boer War (1899) The Spring of Lion (1899) Montezuma’s Daughter co-written with Andrew Lang (1899) Elissa; The Doom of Zimbabwe (1899); Black Heart and White Heart; a Zulu idyll (1900).
http://en.wikipedia.org/rider-Haggard# writing career.
3.3. The Writings of Robert Stevenson
Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November, 1850, to Thomas Stevenson, a leading lighthouse engineer, and his wife Margaret. Lighthouse design was the family profession. Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his maternal grandfather’s house. “Now I often wonder”, says Stevenson, “what I inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.
Stevenson’s parents were both devout and serious Presbyterians, but the household was not incredibly strict. His nurse, Alison Cunningham (known as Cummy), was more fervently religious. Her Calvinism and folk beliefs were an early source of nightmares for the child; and he showed a precocious concern for religion. But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from Bunyan and the Bible as he lay sick in bed. Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in the poem “The Land of Counterpane” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) and dedicated the book to his nurse.
He was an only child, strange-looking and eccentric, who found it hard to fit in when he was sent to a nearby school at six, and at eleven. However, he mixed well in lively games with his cousins in summer holidays. His frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school, and he was taught for long stretches by private tutors. He was a late reader, first learning at seven or eight; but even before this he dictated stories to his mother and nurse. Throughout his childhood he was compulsively writing stories. His father was proud of this interest: he had himself written stories in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to “give up such nonsense and mind your business”. He paid for the printing of Robert’s first publication at sixteen, an account of the covenanters’ rebellion, published on its two hundredth anniversary, The Pentland Rising: a Page of History, 1666 (1866).
It was expected that Stevenson’s writing would remain a sideline as he entered the University of Edinburgh to study Engineering. From the start, he showed little or no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures. This time was more important for the friendship he made: with other students in the Speculative Society (an exclusive debating club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson’s financial agent; and with one professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write. Perhaps most important at this point in his life was a cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as “Bob”), a lively and lighthearted young man, who instead of the family profession had chosen to study art. Each year during vacations, Stevenson traveled to inspect the family’s engineering works. He enjoyed the travels, but more for the material they gave for his writing than for any engineering interest: the voyage with his father pleased him because a similar journey of Walter Scott with Robert Stevenson had provided the inspiration for The Pirate. In April 1871, he announced to his father his decision to pursue a life of letters. Though the elder Stevenson was naturally disappointed, the surprise cannot have been great, and Stevenson’s mother reported that he was “wonderfully resigned” to his son’s choice. To provide some security, it was agreed that Stevenson should read Law (again at Edinburgh University) and be called too the Scottish bar. Years later, in his poetry collection Underwoods (1887), he looked back on how he turned away from the family profession:
In other respects too, Stevenson deviated from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian: he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress. Within the limits of a strict allowance, he visited cheap pubs and brothels. More importantly, he had come to reject Christianity. In January 1873, his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) club of which Stevenson with his cousin Bob was a member, which began “Disregard everything our parents have taught us”. Questioning his son about his beliefs, he discovered the truth, leading to a long period of dissension with both parents:
What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said “you have rendered my whole life a failure”. As my mother said, “this is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me”. O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.(http://en.wikipedia.org//writingcareer.)
He settled in Upolu, Samoan Islands and adopted the native name Tusitala (Samoan for “Teller of Tales”, i.e. a storyteller). His influence spread to the natives, who consulted him for advice, and he soon became involved in local politics. He was convinced the European officials appointed to rule the natives were incompetent, and after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, he published A Footnote to History. This was such a stinging protest against existing conditions that it resulted in the recall of two officials, and Stevenson feared for a time it would result in his own deportation. Fortunately, he was spared.
In 1894 Stevenson was depressed feeling that he had exhausted his creative talent. He insisted that he had “overworked bitterly”. He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: “I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse – ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution”. He then suddenly had a return of his old energy and he began work on Weir of Hermiston. “It’s so good that it frightens me, “he is reported to have exclaimed. He felt that this was the best work he had done. He was convinced, “sick and well, I have had splendid life to it, grudge nothing, regret very little…take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time” (http://en.wikipedia.org//writingcareer).
Without knowing it, he was to have his wish fulfilled. During the morning of 3 December 1894, he had worked hard as usual on Weir of Hermiston. During the evening, while conversing with his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine, he suddenly exclaimed. “What’s that!” he then asked his wife, “Does my face look strange?” and collapsed beside her. He died within a few hours, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage, at the age of 44. The natives insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing their Tusitala upon their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Stevenson had always wanted his ‘Requiem’ inscribed. His novel Treasure Island is very popular among Nigerian students.
His novels include:
Treasure Island (1883); The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1883); Prince Otto (1885); Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); Kidnapped (1886); The Master of Ballantrae (1889); The Wrong Box (1889); The Wrecker (1892); Lloyd Osbourne Catriona (1893); also known as David Balfour, is a sequel to Kidnapped.
The Ebb-Tide (1894); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne.
Weir of Hermiston (1896). Unfinished at the time of Stevenson’s death, considered to have promised great artistic growth.
St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897)
Unfinished at the time of Stevenson’s death, the novel was completed by Arthur Quiller- Couch.
3.4 The Writings of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad whose name at birth was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in December 3, 1857 and died in 3rd August, 1924. he was a Polish but became a British subject in 1886. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and hen always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honour.
Conrad lived an adventurous life, dabbling in gunrunning and political conspiracy, which he later fictionalized in his novel The Arrow of Gold. Apparently, he experienced a disastrous love affair that plunged him into despair. In 1878, after a failed suicide attempt in Marseille by shooting himself in the chest, he as a childhood ambition to visit central Africa was realized in 1889, when Conrad contrived to reach the Congo Free State. He became captain of a Congo steamboat, and the atrocities he witnessed and his experiences there not only informed his most acclaimed and ambiguous work, Heart of Darkness, but served to crystallize his vision of human nature – and his beliefs about himself. These were in some measure affected by the emotional trauma and lifelong illness he contracted there. During his stay, he became acquainted with Roger Casement, whose 1904 Congo Report detailed the abuses suffered by the indigenous population.
On 3rd August 1924, Conrad died of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, under his original Polish surname Korzeniowski.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad’s novels is such as to open him to criticism. Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village. Often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. Arguably Conrad’s most influential work remains Heart of Darkness, to which many have been introduced by Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad’s novella and set during the Vietnam War. The novella’s depiction of a journey into the darkness of the human psyche, still resonates with modern readers. In Conrad’s time, literary critics, while usually commenting favourably on his works, often remarked that his exotic style, complex narration, profound themes and pessimistic ideas put many readers off. Yet as Conrad’s ideas were borne out by 20th century events, in due course he came to be admired for beliefs that seemed to accord with subsequent times more closely than with his own.
3.4.1. Heart of Darkness
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad refers sarcastically to the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. This, indeed, is a central theme of the novel; Charles Marlowe’s experiences in Africa expose the brutality of colonialism and the false rationalization given for it. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slave workers, the novelist remarks: “After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings”. Conrad, whose own native country had been colonized by European powers, empathized by default with other colonized peoples.
Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness is a dark, disturbing and haunting tale about colonial powers and trading companies, exploiting the riches and people of Dark Continent to fill their hungry belly. In this narrative, Captain Marlowe is hired by the Belgium trading company to search for a mysterious, most successful employee (of the same trading company) and powerful man named Mr. Kurtz.
Inside the Dark Continent on river Congo, Caption Marlowe finds out that the boat he is to be captain of has sunk, before he can begin his job he must salvage and repair the vessel. When he finally meets Kurtz, he realizes the terrible deeds the man has committed with the threat of violence and abuse of power. He recognizes Mr. Kurtz as pure evil and a man without any morality at all. There is a saying “Power corrupts, But absolute power corrupts absolutely” Mr. Kurtz has enthroned himself as God and King of the poor and illiterate native people. Outside the house of Mr. Kurtz, Captain Marlowe saw several stakes displaying human skulls. A horrific sight, he later finds out that Mr. Kurtz has become cannibal, and the skull belongs to the poor victims. Mr. Kurtz used brutal and inhuman violence to not only subdue and enslave the natives and force them to work for him, but to turn over their ivory and their very lives to him. He becomes the great white conqueror and god and despite his violence and brutality, his native subjects and victims respect and revere him. Instead of bringing light of civilization to the Dark Continent, the thirst for power, riches and omnipotence has turned Mr. Kurtz into an evil monster with diseased and dark heart and amoral personality. It’s the journey not into the Dark Continent, but into an exposition of how deadly and devilish a civilized man can sink for mere game of power and riches.
His works include:
Almayer’s Folly (1895); Heart of Darkness (1899); Lord Jim (1900); The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford) (1901); Typhoon (1902, begun 1899); Romance (with Ford Madox Ford, 1903); Nostromo (1904); The Secret Agent (1907); Under Western Eyes (1911); Chance (1913), Victory (1915); The Shadow Line (1917); The Arrow of Gold (1919); The Rescue (1920); The Nature of a Crime (1923, with Ford Madox Ford); The Rover (1923).
4.0 Conclusion
The colonialists presented here are mainly novelists. In these novels the colonialists present Africans and black people as people with little or no intelligence. Some of them are not as biased as some critics claim. Mister Johnson for instance could be seen as any other character in any race that is not too vicious or too virtuous. But most African critics see him as a racial representative of Africans which may not be the intention of the writer. The portrayal of the African society is that of a place where crime and moral decadence abound.
5.0 Summary
You have learnt more about the perceived biased and lopsided portraiture of the African society in colonialist literature. Some of the novels are still available in the market. Try to get copies read them and form your own opinion.
6.0 Tutor Marked Assignment
List the three colonial novelists discussed in this unit and four novels written by each of them.
7.0 References/Further Reading
Achebe, Chinua quoted in Duerden Dennis, and Cosmo Pieterse eds. African Writers
Talking A Collection of Radio Interviews. London Heinemann, 1972.
Ajuwon Bade (1987) “Oral and Written Literature in Nigeria” in Richard Olaniyan (ed)
Nigerian History and Culture Hong Kong: Longman..
Online wikipedia dictionary
http://en.wikipedia.org//writingcareer.
Leave a comment behind