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INTRODUCTION
From the independence of Ghana in 1957 through the 1960s there was a period of intense excitement about the potential of newly independent African countries. Leaders like Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah were seen as revolutionary icons on a par with Che Guevara. Through the 1970s this optimism turned to despair. Rather than pan-Africanist ideals spreading across the continent from vanguard states, the inertia and corruption that had dogged the more conservative countries became the norm. Activists and artists have been wrestling with the causes and solutions ever since.
By the time Things Fall Apart was published, another Nigerian, Cyprian Ekwensi, was already writing popular novels such as People of the City (1954) and Jagua Nana (1961) about the contradictions of colonial society. Similarly, another Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi, has approached the problems of the post-colonial state from a different angle. His novels of modern Kenya also range from dealing with the Mau Mau in Carcase for Hounds (1974) to life in contemporary Nairobi in Going Down River Road (1976) or Aids in The Last Plague (2000). His thrillers reach a popular audience in Kenya. Such writers are relevant here, as the writers I have been discussing are consciously trying to relate to a popular audience themselves. Since the 1960s the amount and range of African writing available has increased—notably the number of women writers.
Still, the authors I have discussed fought for their alternative view to be seen and accepted. Achebe was one of the editors of the Heinemann African Writers Series, which helped popularise African writers. There is an ongoing fight to defend resistance against romanticisation of empire, whether in the Iraq war or Niall Ferguson’s attempts to rehabilitate the British Empire. Writers such as Achebe, Sembène and Ngugi remind us that alternatives are possible, and give us an idea of what artistic masterpieces will emerge from the current anti- globalisation movement.
General Overview
The colonial experience is not an experience that Africans would forget in a hurry. It had its positive and negative effects. The negative effects are quite numerous especially regarding the partitioning of Africa for western interests. The rise in intertribal wars, secessions, environmental degradation as a result of the exploration and mining of natural resources like oil, gold, diamond and the imposition of political leaders that rule according to western control among other factors constitute the bane of Africa’s underdevelopment. However, the colonial experience brought with it western education, language and religion. These are positive because with the acquisition of languages like English and French, African countries joined the League of Nations that use the languages and interestingly these two languages are spoken by 70 per cent of the world population. Africans are now policy makers in the United Nations and Africans have had to be the secretary general of United Nations for years. Communication in these world languages created the room for this affinity. Religions like Christianity and Islam found their way to African shores thereby improving and/or adding to the moral development of Africans. Western education also afforded Africans the opportunity of studying and contributing to world development. It is on record that many Africans have distinguished themselves in many fields of learning.
One of the major concerns of African nations is how to extricate themselves from the grip of western interests. Many African nations fought for their independence because the western powers refused to relinquish power to the Africans in their own country. Liberia got an early independence in 1948 because of America’s treatment of the place as a country where free slaves were resettled. Ghana in 1957, Nigeria got her independence in 1960. The last of the fight and the most grievous was the South African fight for independence. One question trailing these fights for independence was: Why did the colonialists find it difficult to allow Africans govern themselves? The basic answer was greed. They wanted to rule the world and acquire all the natural and economic benefits of Africa. They saw Africans as sub-humans who have no sense of culture and refinement. Unfortunately for the imperialists, the acquisition of western education by Africans, which was introduced mainly for the economic intentions, opened the critical minds of the African intellectuals who reasoned that Africans should be allowed to decide and rule their countries.
Another unfortunate aspect of western education was that it inculcated western values, culture and politics on the African intellectuals who eventually took over power after the exit of the colonial masters. The point now remains that it was as if colonialism was removed and replaced with colonial attitudes, power, knowledge, politics, greed and all manners of abuse. The masses now fight to restore sanity and cultural values of the Africans. The masses suffer from the corruption which emanated from the imperialists and now being practised by the African ruling class. The African writers, just like African historians, have been recording the African experiences in independent African states.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Critically assess the negative and the positive aspects of colonialism and how they affected the independent African countries.
The Essence of African Independence
Independence to Africans marks a new dawn. It marks the beginning of greater things and hopes. It marks the hope for economic, social, cultural and human development for the nations. It marks a new phase of history and experience. It marks the beginning of true politics by the people for the people. It marks a period of re-orientation from the shackles of colonialism to the goodness of internal rulership. It marks the end to western slavery in governance. Independence is hoped to bring about peace and an end to rancour, greed, parochialism, anarchy, brutality and economic sabotage. Independence is expected to accord Africans respect for being able to pilot their affairs without interference. These dreams have come to a stalemate as African leaders have been exhibiting the same, if not worse than the colonial pattern of politics. The African intellectuals and ruling class are products of the same evil they fought against. The African writers have been examining what the African leaders have been doing with the power they got from the imperialists.
Apart from the early experimental novelists like D.O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola who went back to the African oral tradition to tell their tales, the later works examined the colonial experiences and post- colonial situation. Chinua Achebe has had to write about African historical experiences. Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No longer at Ease are creative accounts of the colonial phase in Africa. A Man of the People, Girls at War and Anthills of the Savannah are post-colonial or neo-colonial accounts. However, Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City, the first before Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is an account of the life in the city of Lagos in contrast to the life in the rural settings. The effects of colonialism on the lives of the people in the city are juxtaposed with the people in the rural setting. The city is presented as a symbol of negativity because of the excesses exhibited by the Africans who practice western lifestyle.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Explain the major concern of Africans for fighting for independence and how did African writers capture it?
Independence of Ghana in Armah’s The Beautiful Ones are not Yet Born
Armah's first and best-known novel, The Beautiful Ones Are not Yet Born (1968), describes the life of an unnamed rail worker who is pressured by his family and fellow workers to accept bribes and involve himself in corrupt activities in order to provide his family with material goods. The other workers who accept bribes are able to live a prosperous life, while he and his family live from paycheck to paycheck as a result of his honesty. At times he perceives himself as a moral failure for not providing his family with the money which would allow them to have the beautiful things that they seek. His honesty also makes him a social misfit, and he is a man who is truly alone. The book is filled with images of birth, decay and death, most notably in the form of a manchild who goes through the entire life cycle in seven years. This manchild is a metaphor for post-independence Ghana.
The novel depicts with bewildering harshness post-independence Ghanaian society. The temporal setting coincides with the twilight of Kwame Nkrumah’s administration. The work was in part motivated by the author’s disappointment with the sudden collapse of the socialist democratic ideal inaugurated at independence in 1957, although the problem was not peculiar to Ghana but in most post-independent African nations. Nkrumah’s regime was like the public waste disposal receptacle (depicted in the novel), which holds much promise in its ‘gleaming whiteness’ when it was first installed. But it is soon overwhelmed by moral filth and decadence. Hence, the socialist ideals upon which independence was erected were no longer decipherable.
The man child has all the features of a human baby and within seven years it has completed the cycle from infancy to adulthood, to old age and natural death. ‘The manchild looked more irretrievably old, far more thoroughly decayed than any ordinary old man could ever have looked’ (63). The harsh economic climate which fuels corruption in the society also results in a low sense of self-worth among the people as paradoxically expressed in a writing on the toilet wall: ‘PRAY FOR DETENTION/JAILMAN CHOP FREE’ (106). There is a collapse of the distinction between freedom and bondage in this newly independent nation. Armah captures his pessimism through the Teacher, a character who has a clear perception of the origin and nature of the nation’s crises. It is as if the whole essence of independence is not to dismantle the colonial structure, but to push a few black men closer to the former colonial masters (126).
In its style of narration, characterization and setting, The Beautyful Ones does not present a sequentially ordered story of a protagonist whose life affects the course of events in the universe of the novel. Causality as narrative principle is displaced for episodicity. In fact, much of the narration takes place in the interiority of the protagonist, the man and his friend, the Teacher. Armah wraps in symbols and metaphors a nation that is firmly, almost irretrievably, entangled in the web of neo-colonial dependence, where corruption becomes infectious. Examples of such symbols include the banisterat the Railway administration building, the public lavatory, the toilet in the man’s house and the chichidodo. The untimely decay is further shown through the interconnections of opposites—light and darkness, gleam and gloom, newness and decay, sameness and difference. The preponderance of those who participate in the popular game of graft informs the author’s gloomy apprehension of reality. They include the bus conductor at the beginning of the novel, Amankwa the timber contractor, the space allocation clerk, the driver of the bus on the way to Cape Coast who offers a bribe to the police, the driver of the bus at the end of the novel, the landlord who is a party loyalist, Zaccharias Lagos, Abednego Yamoah and Koomson.
The man is a sort of allegorical figure who hovers indistinctly in the realm of familiar reality. He feels completely apart from all that takes place around him, more often seen on the road, going to work, returning home, visiting the Teacher or the Koomsons. His motivation for movement is ironically not so much a striving to make things better, but a psychological response to failure ‘that would not let him rest in peace’ (46).His life showshow Herculean a task it is to steer clear of corruption in a society with distorted social values. Essentially, he is a one- dimensional character who is not potent enough to change things around him. The only change observed in him is in the direction of deep cynicism, evident in his compromise. The man who rejects the offer of a bribe from Amankwa the timber contractor not only aids the escape of a corrupt minister from the hands of the law, but also asks the boatman to increase the bribe being offered to the night watchman who is standing in the way of a timely escape of Koomson: ‘give it to him, if there’s another one’ (176).
The novel begins with the man going to work at dawn in a decrepit old bus. For dirtying the bus with saliva, the bus conductor insults him. His movement from the bus stop to his office at the Railway Administration offers snapshots of physical and moral decadence—individual and collective—the banister, the ceiling fan. Whatever still retains some physical allure like the Atlantic Caprice is connected with rot. At the office, the man exemplifies the drab life of the Ghanaian bureaucrats. Poorly paid workers trudge from one brief moment of prosperity to long days of penury (Passion Week). To makeup, they create opportunities to extract reward, using their offices. The public officer shirks his responsibility or delays its performance. That creates a condition for desperation, which the officer explores to advantage. That is the situation when Amamkwa approaches the man to get his timber transported from the bush for a reward. The man declines the offer and tells his wife about it at home. But rather than being commended, his wife sarcastically refers to him as ‘Chichidodo’, a bird that hates excrement but feeds on maggots. It deepens his condition of alienation, which Abiola Irele describes as ‘a willed movement out of the self’ (1982: 25).
To escape further insult, the man visits the Teacher; another alienated being, who has withdrawn into solitude in order to escape participating in the general game of graft. Colonial and independence struggles produce no true saviours, but physical and emotional wrecks like Sister Manaan, Egya Akon and Slim Tano. Pressure from the man’s family further deepens his confusion. An attempt by his wife and his mother-in- law to get rich through a fishing boat partnership business fails. Koomson only fools them. But beyond the personal, the general despondency provides the enabling environment for a forceful overthrow of the government. Politicians of the old regime become birds of prey, hunted by the new rulers. Koomson escapes from the country with the active collaboration of the man. The humiliating process of his escape through the lavatory and the harbour underscores the vanity of irresponsible power. The novel ends with the man returning home from the harbour. The coup has not really changed anything fundamentally in the life of the nation. Soldiers and police still extort kola—a euphemism for a bribe—from travellers. The man is going back to his home, ‘the land of the silent ones’, and his dull working environment.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Critically comment on the basic symbolic reference used by Armah in The Beautiful Ones are not yet Born, to reveal the corrupt independent state of Africa
Independence and Neo-Colonialism in Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow
Though he has continued to write on both literature and politics, it was not until 2006 that another novel was published in English, the epic Wizard of the Crow. The book is a satire on neo-colonialism and the attitudes of the black ruling class. The Free Republic of Aburiria—a surrealistically exaggerated Kenya—is governed by a dictator known only as the Ruler. His three fawning ministers have each undergone plastic surgery to enlarge respectively their eyes, ears and tongue, the better to see, hear and denounce dissent. In a luxurious world separated from the suffering poor, the ministers compete to flatter the Ruler. To celebrate his birthday one suggests that they build a tower to heaven, so that the Ruler will be able to pop in on god.
Out in the city the impoverished Kamiti accidentally gains a reputation as a powerful sorcerer, the Wizard of the Crow. Along with the radical political activist and feminist Nyawira he uses his notoriety to help the poor and cure the rich of their various illnesses with his “magic” mirror. The most debilitating of these illnesses is “whiteache”, which incapacitates sufferers through a burning desire to be white, like their old colonial masters.
All through the book the Aburirian government try to get the Global Bank to fund Marching to Heaven, but are set back again and again by the activity of the poor, and particularly a group of militant women. Ngugi says of the book: “I was very much influenced by the trickster tradition. The trickster character appears in tales all over the world. In West Africa it is Anansi the spider. Elsewhere it is Hare or Tortoise. The trickster is very interesting because he is always changing. He always questions the stability of a word or a narrative or an event. He is continually inventing and reinventing himself. He challenges the prevailing wisdom of who is strong and who is weak.”
The main characters Kamiti (“of the trees”) and Nyawira (“she of work”) are archetypal figures, and appear to represent a number of things, including the rural/urban division, and black pride versus class struggle. However, there is a price to pay for making the characters archetypes. One of the strengths of God’s Bits of Wood is in the subtle complexity of the portrayal of the strike and its participants. In Ngugi’s books Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow most of the struggle takes place offstage.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
Assess the presentation of neo-colonial situations in Africa as presented in Wizard of the Crow.
CONCLUSION
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the African novel gained momentum at a time of social upheaval in Africa. There were intense nationalist activities challenging the whole idea and practice of colonialism in Africa. Yet the educated Africans that is the new bourgeoisie or elite was a product of missionary education. The colonial powers had acquiesced to granting political, but not economic and cultural independence to its colonies. That led the new African social elite to engage in artistic form inherited from the West but inspired by local tradition.
For example, in 1952 Amos Tutuola wrote The Palm-wine Drinkard based on Yoruba mythology, using African folktale tradition as form. He was followed in 1953 by Camara Laye with L'Enfant noir (translated into English as The African Child and later in the American edition as The Dark Child), an episodic novel, which relied heavily on African oral tradition to vaunt the merits of the African past, tradition and civilization to a deaf world. In 1958 and from an historical perspective, Chinua Achebe published the novel Things Fall Apart, which set out in the very words of its author, "to set the score right about my [his] ancestors." Ngugi wa Thiong'o followed in 1964 with Weep Not Child. It was the year of Kenyan independence and the novelist was making an urgent call to Africans to embrace education and enterprise as a way of ending Western imperialism and Indian entrepreneurship on the eastern coast of Africa.
If the genre of the novel came to dominate the literary scene, it was due in part to its ability to borrow from tradition, but more importantly, it was a means that those educated in a colonial context, could understand and use to herald African values outside and inside Africa.
However, African writers, like nationalists, politicians and scholars, have shown an abiding concern with the condition of Africa before, during and after colonialism. Their literary creations need to be considered along with other modes of social inquiry in abid to achieve a holistic understanding of the root of the continent’s unending crises. They are also necessary in the task of re-making Africa. From a wide range of theoretical perspectives, scholars have interrogated the challenges of governance and development in contemporary Africa. Since the 1950s, the quest of African nations for political liberation and socioeconomic transformation has remained at the fore of discourse among politicians, social researchers and intellectuals—a group to which creative writers belong. Expectedly, from dependency theory to Marxism, from a functionalist approach to modernization and post- modern options, prescriptions for the continent’s development are as varied as the perceived symptoms of its ailment.
SUMMARY
Unfortunately, political independence has not resulted in the much desired freedom and transformation. The elite, who took over power from the colonialists, rather than dismantling colonial structures of social injustice and oppression merely, preserve them for opportunistic ends. Thus, the post-independence years in many ex-colonies of Africa are characterized by indices of under development: economic dependency, huge local and foreign debts, ethno-religious violence, mass unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, electoral fraud, corruption, inadequate or dysfunctional infrastructure and so on. Neo-colonialism concentrates political and economic power not in the hands of the people but in the hands of minority elite whose loyalty seems to be more toward the advanced nations of Europe/America.
In this regard, many African novelists contend that the source of Africa’s underdevelopment is the dislocation of indigenous social formations by Euro-Arabian imperialism. That dislocation accentuates crises of development after independence. Efforts to address the problem should, therefore, begin with a constructive engagement with and not a destructive displacement of the past (as imperialism implies). They commend a social formation that promotes partnership, co- operation, democracy and good governance. Here, self-reliant, communitarian and egalitarian principles of traditional African societies is suggeted. They advocate with great clarity a system of education that has Africa as its starting point, in the study of the world—a system that truly seeks to liberate African intelligence to work for the benefit of the continent. These novels interrogate the nature and causes of, and possible solutions to, the myriad of problems confronting Africa. However, there seems to be a measure of agreement about the negative impact of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Sahara slave trade, Euro-Arabian domination as well as neo-colonialism, on Africa’s well-being by most post-independent African novelists. As Mazrui rightly submits, African societies are marked by ‘conquerability, docility, malleability, and fundamental inferiority’. All these are depicted in African novels about the post independence era.
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