—CAPTAIN ELECHI AMADI, novelist
“… The old forms, which Capt. Elichi Amadi says we have to bring in, like the fisherman who wants fish and has to go through the gods, are changing. If I want fish I have to go to the water and get the fish and not try to go through some gods. These things are changing. I mean this now and what happens every day. People want fish, they want money from it. They are not going to consult somebody who will get in their nets and make sure it works very well. If they are going to use poison for the fish, they throw it into the water and wait for the fish to die and collect them. The old forms are going to die. The new forms of doing things have not yet taken hold on us, so we are in a society which is in flux and is changing.”
—KOLE OMOTOSO, novelist
“… satire has the value of working like an invocation. In traditional society as our fathers have told us, the best way to disarm a baleful influence, an evil spirit, is to call it by its name, that is, evoke it. You can stare this baleful influence in the face and so it becomes powerless. I think this is exactly what satire is doing.… Who are the audience of the African writers? I think at this stage of our development the power is not really with the common people. We may deceive ourselves with socialist slogans about power to the masses. The power is in the hands of the few elite who are going to determine the future of the country, and it is among these few that you get the intelligent ones who will read the novels. I do not think it matters very much that the novel is not accessible to the ordinary person.…”
—D. S. IZEVBAYE, critic and scholar
“… what our writers are tracing, what they have been charting, is a kind of moral decline due to the shock of the colonizer, the breakdown in values, the incoherence that was sort of an aftermath of our colonial experience which has produced the present situation in which we are living. The writers have always been present to report on this, to tell us about this, to write about this. They have never, it seems to me, abdicated this particular responsibility. So this moral concern may be taken as something that distinguishes the African novel today.”
—F. A. IRELE, critic and scholar
“… It should not really matter whether these things get read and understood in America or Europe. I think first our writers should aim at getting their works read locally. This is part of what I see as the failure of works like The Interpreters, not only because as some people might say it is faulty in its form, but because it is not really there—it does not belong to the society. That is why works like Things Fall Apart get read much more widely; they are directed to a certain simple but literate audience, such as school girls.… I think that within the reality of African life and African tradition there is a certain kind of sacredness which even the writer must respect, however iconoclastic he wants to be. There is a certain sacredness bound up with our spirituality.… This is the dimension which I would like to add to this discussion.”
—IME IKEDDEH, critic, scholar, editor
“It seems to me that the suggestion has been made that the African artist lives in a world of his own and that the nature of his own type of reality must necessarily and artistically be different from the nature of European reality.… I think we should always look on the African artist or the African writer as belonging to a certain community that speaks generally to humanity.… the really solid thing about the good African novel is that it is a novel whose realities have not been so exclusively culturally bound as the topic of this symposium would seem to suggest.”
—THEOPHILUS VINCENT, critic and scholar
“In this country we have a class of people who are known as poltergeist, medicine men or even rain doctors as they call them—who use incantations, incantations and so forth. That is all oral poetry; and all that the Yoruba praise singers who sing on festive days the praises of chiefs and recall past events and so forth, sing, is poetry.… Everybody enjoys and admires these praise singers, these priests; that is everybody in the rural areas. Everybody admires the rain doctor. Why is he so admired? Because his poetry is functional. The poetry tries to change some form of the human condition. If a threatened calamity, say, famine or problem of epidemic rages somewhere, they all crowd to this medicine man.… He manipulates words and sounds and appears to change the human condition.… He satisfies the demands of the community.”
—GABRIEL OKARA, poet
“… if the writer were accepted in African society he would be rather like the bird in the folk-tale that always appears on the wall and pipes a particular tune. When you hear that tune you know that there is tragedy somewhere; someone has died or something quite serious is happening. The bird disappears and within a moment you get the illumination of the bird’s visit. The writer is this kind of bird. He pipes the tune which gives the warning.”
—CYPRIAN EKWENSI, novelist, short story writer
Through a Continent, Darkly
WHICH TRIBE DO YOU BELONG TO?, by Alberto Moravia, translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson. 218 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
BY THE EVIDENCE, by L. S. B. Leakey. 276 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
ALPHABETICAL AFRICA, by Walter Abish. 152 pp. New Directions, 1974.
“Africa, that repetitive, bewildering continent in which everything is reiterated until one’s ordinary sense of reality reels and one is thrown into stupefied, visionary states of mind”—thus Alberto Moravia describes the geographical enigma that, over nine years’ time, beguiled him into making five sub-Saharan journeys, which produced thirty-eight journalistic essays now collected under the too perky title of Which Tribe Do You Belong To? The first trip, taking him across Central Africa from Accra to Nairobi in the spring and summer of 1963, produced the most exhilarating impressions and most sweeping theories; the second, during which he was attached to a crew making a film on Tanzania for Italian television, encountered more misadventures (thefts, delays, quarrels with the natives, perilous plane landings) and evoked essays more disgruntled and problematical; the third, fourth, and fifth, touring the hinterlands of black Africa in the early seventies, show considerable traveller’s fatigue and exasperation with the monotony, the impoverished sameness, the “oppressive and melancholy” lakes, the “tangled, evil bush country,” the “red, obscene cones of anthills,” the fleas, the bribes, “the wide prairies enlivened by the despairing gestures of dropsical baobabs.” By the book’s last incident (Moravia photographs some “truly peculiar women” in Chad and is scolded by “three young men, probably students, reproaching us with nationalist severity”), the impressionable fancy of this highly alert traveller seems defeated by the inexhaustible drabness of what he sees. Moravia, who has composed a fresh, even impudent book about his tour of Red China, is one of the best travel writers in the world; in English only V. S. Pritchett can match his sharpness of phrase and flair for generalization. Before the muddled, stubborn refusal by everything save the animals to be picturesque gets to him, he says a number of beautiful things about the Dark Continent and its inhabitants:
The Africans walk; for their long, indefatigable legs space is needed.
Indeed, all these Africans who were hurrying in small groups toward the market seemed already to be having a foretaste of the moment when they would plunge into the crowd and, mingling with a great number of others in the clouds of dust, in the sweat and the noise, would rid themselves of the unstable, troublesome superfluity of individual difference.
… the African is the only one among the so-called primitives who is capable of fitting happily—in fact actually by dancing—into modern industrial civilization.
The African, in point of fact, does not know what awaits him in his dance, just as, in general, we do not know what awaits us in life.
[Of a masked dancer] This mask, in fact, was not intended to arouse fear; it was fear.… The face, enclosed in the stocking and covered with shells like a reef under the sea, was an allusion to the inability of man to show his face in competition with prolific, overpowering nature.
/> Anthropologically unprejudiced as only a European confident in his superiority could be, Moravia finds what is specifically African in the thinly populated immensity, in the landscapes that repeat “a single theme or motif [such as the acacia tree] to the point of terror,” in the transnational tribalism centering on the market towns, in the “frenzy for trading” that makes Africans “one of the most contriving races in the world,” in the African’s unique success at “becoming a modern man while still preserving intact his original dancing capacity,” and in the fact—apparent, as of 1963, in the shining and incongruous commercial buildings of the African cities—“that, whereas the red star of Communism shines over Asia, it is … the white star of neo-capitalism that gleams over Africa.”
The crisp first impressions lose some starch in the later travels. Moravia’s initial sense that Africa, “a great natural space, swarming with tribes but devoid of nationality,” is destined to become one of “the great continental countries such as India, China, the United States, or the Soviet Union” runs up against the obstinate fact that the Africans cling to the institutions and arbitrary national boundaries created in Europe. The Nigerian civil war of 1967–70 represents for Moravia “a symbolic contest … between two different conceptions of nationality, the one previous to colonialism, the other subsequent to it. The defeat of Biafra was the defeat of the tribal conception.” And he admits to difficulty, as he moves through the open market of Fort Lamy, in imagining the traders “no longer unoccupied and on the alert but efficient and rational, sitting at European desks in bureaucratic offices.” Some of Moravia’s perceptions, like the things perceived, repeat to the point of monotony; the image of a red-dirt road as a bloody wound recurs close to a dozen times. But his eye remains basically attentive, his attention basically loving; some of the best pieces (few more than six pages long) are among the last, as he wanders from Timbuktu to the Mountains of the Moon. He combines the passive, even dazed traveller’s receptivity to random detail with the thinker’s determination to see through—to observe, as it were, aggressively. His essays not only describe to us wonders we will never visit, they tell some of us who were there what it is we saw.
Sitting in a posh hotel in Mombasa, Moravia observes across the dining room a tableful of specimens of “homo Victorianus”—a species extinct in Europe but surviving in Kenya:
The English today rarely have those big, slightly bandy legs, those monumental thighs, those bellies as tight as drums, those muscular chests and massive napes to their necks, those prominent chins and toothbrush moustaches.
To a passing traveller, the late Louis S. B. Leakey might have seemed such—one of those white men whose whiteness, in the Kenyan highlands, had become self-cherishing, muscular, clever, and brutal. His memoir By the Evidence savors of the satisfied adventurer, of spacious opportunities ingeniously and unapologetically seized. It was Leakey, of course, who perceived the depth of human prehistory that lay beneath the sunstruck gorges and dried lake beds of East Africa, and who seized the opportunity to verify Darwin’s intuition that Africa had been the cradle of humankind. With his discovery, in 1959, of the Zinjanthropus skull, a hominid fragment nearly two million years old, Leakey became the most famous paleoanthropologist of his time. By the Evidence is subtitled Memoirs, 1932–51, and was meant to be the middle volume of an autobiographical trilogy. The initial installment was White African—published in England in 1937, in the United States in 1966. The third volume, because of Leakey’s death, of a heart attack the very day after he had completed By the Evidence, is now never to be written. The book in hand tells, then, of neither his epochal, career-vindicating discovery nor of his extraordinary African upbringing. By the Evidence chronicles his settled middle years, between the ages of thirty and fifty. Too much of it is concerned with the organizational trivia surrounding such promotional triumphs as the 1947 Pan-African Congress of Prehistory; Leakey kept a journal, and our passage through his days sometimes plods. On the other hand, he is intriguingly terse on personal matters; his marriage to Frida Avern, he tells us, literally in parenthesis, “had, regrettably, broken up” while he was roughing it in the bush with Mary Nicol, who becomes Mary Leakey a few pages later. There is more revealed of the man in White African—regarded by the author, too lightly, as a “pot-boiler.”
Leakey was born, his first memoir tells us, in 1903 of missionary parents in a mud-and-thatch hut in Kabete, eight miles from Nairobi, then itself “little more than a scattered collection of corrugated-iron bungalows, and offices, gathered for convenience round the railway station.” Born prematurely, he was swathed in cotton wool, and had to be kept dry not only from rain leaking through the thatch but from the saliva of Kikuyu visitors, who believed spitting to be an anti-curse courtesy. In the isolated mission outpost, Leakey and his siblings learned Kikuyu along with English, and all his life he dreamed in Kikuyu. He was initiated into the tribe, with full rites, as “Wakaruigi, son of the Sparrow-hawk.” His playmates, the games they played, the bedtime stories he heard, were all African. Though his family several times made the long trip back to England, the boy found himself, when he entered British public school, in 1919, painfully disadvantaged—unfamiliar with cricket, accustomed to playing football barefooted, incapable of swimming (crocodiles discourage this recreation in Africa), innocent of Greek and of firsthand encounter with the theatre, yet habituated to an independence improper for English schoolboys: at the age of thirteen, in accordance with Kikuyu custom, he had built himself a house and begun to live in it alone; at English boarding school he was required to get permission to go shopping, and to wear a straw hat and dark suit on a Sunday country walk. So his outlook was biased rather differently from the conventional “homo Victorianus,” colonial subspecies; on his digs he insisted, to the scandal of Kenyan white settlers, on both digging beside his “boys” and carrying water with them. His imperfect indoctrination into European ways not only made his schooling awkward (at Cambridge he was rebuked for playing tennis in shorts and a sort of bush jacket) but may account for an abrasiveness that rubs through the memoirist’s civil manners, for his unseemly delight in academic contests, which he always wins, and for the earthiness and voracity of his scientific approach.
For instance, in By the Evidence he heartily advises all would-be zoologists, “Always, as a matter of routine, examine the stomach contents of any dead animal to which you have access,” and by way of illustration relates with a zest not quite infectious his own delighted discoveries of “a mass of water beetles” in the stomach of a giant pangolin, of millipedes and centipedes inside a civet, of cucumber seeds and red biting ants in an aardvark, and of “bracelets, beads, necklaces, and many other indisputable indications of the human meals that had been eaten” inside a crocodile he has shot. There is something savage about Leakey’s resourcefulness—he tells us how to replace a broken car spring with strips of green hardwood and freshly skinned goat hide—and uncanny about his luck. “Leakey’s luck” was a phrase coined by his rival prehistorians. On holiday in England, he was approached by a neighbor about some flakes of flint in one of his fields; though the spot had been snubbed by British archaeologists, Leakey opportunely dug, and uncovered, he tells us, “an example of the earliest known dwelling anywhere in England.” The casual skills proclaimed in this volume range from dog judging to handwriting analysis, of both the English and the Gujarati scripts. He displays by his own account authoritative expertness in museum curatorship, ornithology, the care of sick animals, the primitive art of string figures. During the war he functions as spy, broadcaster in African languages, graphologist, even footprint castmaker. Some of his sentences are downright comic in their bustle of enterprise:
As well as gathering valuable information by chatting with the local people while I watched the Verreaux’s eagles, I also located a series of Late Stone Age living sites belonging to the Kenya Wilton culture.
I could look back on the previous eighteen months as having been very rewarding. I had written t
hree books, White African, Stone Age Africa, and Kenya: Contrasts and Problems. I had also almost completed the research necessary for my first book on Olduvai Gorge and had undertaken some exciting studies of pygmy chimpanzee skulls.
But there was nothing comic, or especially lucky, about the archaeological discoveries that are Leakey’s main accomplishment. From the age of twelve, when he began to collect obsidian arrowheads lying about Kabete, he had a passionate, rather patriotic faith in East Africa’s richness for the study of Man’s prehistory. The Zinjanthropus skull came to light after thirty years, off and on, of “crawling up and down … with eyes barely inches from the ground.” The spot in the Olduvai Gorge where Zinjanthropus was found is marked by a plaque, and can be reached through a little detour off the main road from the Serengeti Plain to the Ngorongoro Crater; it has become a tourist spot. But even now it seems lonely and barren and strange; a few orange-cloaked Masai herdsmen wander in the middle distance as if the immensities of African space were still untroubled. The great, lovable antagonist of Leakey’s memoirs (and the first volume more vividly conveys this than does the second) is African space. The difficulty of getting there, of nursing machines through roadless terrain, of locating water sources in a geologically parching land, of finding a significant bone in an ocean of rubble—against such odds Leakey, no mere scientist, looms as a hero.