These nations think themselves the foremost men in the world. They imagine that Africa is not only the greatest part of the world, but also the happiest and most agreeable… [Their king] is persuaded that there is no other monarch in the world who is his equal.13
Between Father Cavazzi’s words and Joseph Conrad’s images of gyrating and babbling savages there was indeed a hiatus of two harsh centuries. But that would not explain the difference.
People are wrong when they tell you that Conrad was on the side of the Africans because his story showed great compassion towards them. Africans are not really served by his compassion, whatever it means; they ask for one thing alone—to be seen for what they are: human beings. Conrad pulls back from granting them this favor in Heart of Darkness. Apparently, some people can read it without seeing any problem. We simply have to be patient. But a word may be in order for those last-ditch defenders who fall back on the excuse that the racial insensitivity of Conrad was normal in his time. Even if that were so, it would still be a flaw in a serious writer—a flaw which responsible criticism today could not gloss over. But it is not even true that everybody in Conrad’s day was like him. David Livingstone, an older contemporary and by no means a saint, was different. Ironically, he was also Conrad’s great hero, whom he placed
among the blessed of militant geography … a notable European figure and the most venerated perhaps of all the objects of my early geographical enthusiasm.14
And yet his hero’s wise, inclusive humanity eluded Conrad. What did he think of Livingstone’s famous judgment of Africans?
I have found it difficult to come to a conclusion on their [Africans’] character. They sometimes perform actions remarkably good, and sometimes as strangely the opposite… After long observation, I came to the conclusion that they are just a strange mixture of good and evil as men are everywhere else.15
Joseph Conrad was forty-four years younger than David Livingstone. If his times were responsible for his racial attitude, we should expect him to be more advanced than Livingstone, not more backward. Without doubt, the times in which we live influence our behavior, but the best or merely the better among us, like Livingstone, are never held hostage by their times.
An interesting analogy may be drawn here with the visual arts imagery of Africans in eighteenth-century Britain. I refer to a 1997 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London on the subject of Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century African man of letters, and his contemporaries. The centerpiece of the exhibition was the famous painting of Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough in 1786. The art historian Reyahn King describes the painting in these words:
Gainsborough’s skill is clearest in his treatment of Sancho’s skin colour. Unlike Hogarth, whose use of violet pigments when painting black faces results in a greyish skin tone, the brick-red of Sancho’s waistcoat in Gainsborough’s portrait, combined with the rich brown background and Sancho’s own skin colour, makes the painting unusually warm in tone as well as feeling. Gainsborough has painted thinly over a reddish base with shading in a chocolate tone and minimal colder lights on Sancho’s nose, chin and lips. The resulting face seems to glow and contrasts strongly with the vanishing effect so often suffered by the faces of black servants in the shadows of 18th-century portraits of their masters.16
Evidently Gainsborough put care and respect into his painting; and he produced a magnificent portrait of an African who had been born on a slave ship and, at the time of his sitting, was still a servant in an English aristocratic household. But neither of these facts was allowed to take away from him his human dignity in Gainsborough’s portrait.
There were other portraits of Africans in Britain painted at the same time. One of them provides a study in contrasts with Gainsborough’s rendering of Ignatius Sancho. The African portrayed in this other picture was one Francis Williams, a graduate of Cambridge, a poet, and a founder of a school in Jamaica: an amazing phenomenon in those days.17 A portrait of Williams by an anonymous artist shows a man with a big, flat face lacking any distinctiveness, standing in a cluttered library on tiny broomstick legs. It was clearly an exercise in mockery. Perhaps Francis Williams aroused resentment because of his rare accomplishments. Certainly the anonymous scarecrow portrait was intended to put him in his place, in much the same way as the philosopher David Hume was said to have dismissed Williams’s accomplishments by comparing the admiration people had for him to the praise they might give “a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” It is clear, then, that in eighteenth-century Britain there were Britons, like the painter Gainsborough, who were ready to accord respect to an African, even an African who was a servant; and there were other Britons, like the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, or the eminent philosopher Hume, who would sneer at a black man’s achievement. And it was not so much a question of the times in which they lived as the kind of people they were. It was the same in the times of Joseph Conrad a century later, and it is the same today!
Things have not gone well in Africa for quite a while. The era of colonial freedom which began so optimistically with Ghana in 1957 would soon be captured by Cold War manipulators and skewed into a deadly season of ostensible ideological conflicts which encouraged the emergence of all kinds of evil rulers able to count on limitless supplies of military hardware from their overseas patrons, no matter how atrociously they ruled their peoples.
With the sudden end of the Cold War, these rulers or their successor regimes lost their value to their sponsors and were cast on the rubbish heap and forgotten, along with their nations. Disaster parades today with impunity through the length and breadth of much of Africa: war, genocide, military and civilian dictatorships, corruption, collapsed economies, poverty, disease, and every ill attendant upon political and social chaos! It is necessary for these sad conditions to be reported, because evil thrives best in quiet, untidy corners. In many African countries, however, the local news media cannot report these events without unleashing serious and even deadly consequences. And so the foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world’s attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from an anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.
In a 1997 calendar issued by Amnesty International USA in a joint effort with the International Center of Photography, a brief but important editorial message criticizes some current journalistic practices:
The apocalyptic vision of the newsmakers [does not] accurately document the world community. Nor are they particularly helpful in forming a picture of our common humanity.18
And the text goes on to set down the principles which guided the selection of the twelve photographs in the calendar, as follows:
[They] document an authentic humanity. They also communicate the fact that every person, everywhere, possesses an inalienable rightness and an imperishable dignity—two qualities that must be respected and protected.19
There is a documentary film which I have seen more than once on PBS which is not troubled by Amnesty’s concern. It is about sex and reproduction through the entire range of living things, from the simplest single-cell creatures in the water to complex organisms like fishes and birds and mammals. It is a very skillful, scientific production that pulls no punches with respect to where babies come from. It is all there in its starkness. Was it necessary to conclude this graphic reproductive odyssey with man (or rather woman)? I did not think so. The point had already been more than well made with apes, i
ncluding, I believe, those that invented the “missionary position.”
But the producers of the documentary were quite uncompromising in their exhaustiveness. And so a woman in labor was exposed to show the baby coming out of her. But the real shock for me was that everybody in that labor room was white except the Ghanaian (by her accent) mother in childbirth. Why were all the rest white? you may ask. Because this was all happening in a hospital in London, not in Accra.
I am sure that the producers of that program would reject with indignation any suggestion that their choice of candidate was influenced in any way by race. And they might even be right, to the extent that they would not have had a meeting of their production team to decide that a white woman would not be an appropriate subject. But then, such deliberations do not happen except perhaps in the crude caucuses of the lunatic fringe. Race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom. But it may lie, unseen, in our subconscious. The lesson for that production team, for those who broadcast their product, and for the rest of us is that when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
1998
Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature
Of all the explosions that have rocked the African continent in recent decades, few have been more spectacular, and hardly any more beneficial, than the eruption of African literature, shedding a little light here and there on what had been an area of darkness.
So dramatic has been the change that I am even presuming that a few of my readers may recognize my title as a somewhat mischievous rendering of the subtitle of the book Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The mischief lies in my inserting after the word “politics” the two words “and politicians,” like dropping a pair of cats among Ngũgĩ’s pigeons.
Ngũgĩ’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak of African literature in European languages is not only an absurdity but also part of the scheme of Western imperialism to hold Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a writer in English and decides that he can no longer continue in the treachery. So he makes a public renunciation of English in a short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say, Ngũgĩ applies the most severe censure to those African writers who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no longer threatens anybody!
Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngũgĩ and myself on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writers is that while Ngũgĩ now believes it is either/or, I have always thought it was both.
I took my stand on this from the very beginning of my literary career, and have enunciated the position at different times and in varying forms of words. No serious writer can possibly be indifferent to the fate of any language, let alone his own mother tongue. For most writers in the world, there is never any conflict—the mother tongue and the writing language are one and the same. But from time to time, and as a result of grave historical reasons, a writer may be trapped unhappily and invidiously between two imperatives. This is not new in the world. Even in the British Isles, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots may suffer anguish in using English, as James Joyce so memorably reminds us. Perhaps the real difference with Africa is the sheer size, the continental scale of the problem, and also—let’s face it—we look quite different from the English, the French, or the Portuguese!
In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically evaluated in many parts of the world. It was an enormously important moment, and year, in the history of modern African literature. The gathering took place at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
The other event of 1962 was not as widely publicized as the Makerere Conference, but it was to prove at least as portentous. It was the decision by one farsighted London publisher to launch the African Writers Series on the basis of no more than three or four published titles. Conventional wisdom in the book business at the time was inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as a little harebrained. But in the next twenty-five years this series was to publish more than three hundred titles and establish itself without any doubt as the largest and best library of African literature in existence.
It was my good fortune to be linked closely with both events. I was present in Makerere among colleagues young, hopeful, and self-assured. I heard Christopher Okigbo, who was to die four years later fighting for Biafra, declare in his high-pitched, cracked-bell voice that he wrote his poetry only for poets. Another Nigerian poet, looking around him, pronounced East Africa a cultural desert. And I heard Wole Soyinka, sitting across the hall from me, recite lines of poetic parody he had just composed in mockery of Sedar Senghor.
But it was not all plain sailing, in spite of our youth and optimism and an altogether heady confidence in our future as creative artists and in the future of our newly independent (or about-to-become-independent) nations. We had this problem of definition. What was African literature? And it was, more than anything else, a question created by the anomaly of Africans writing in European languages, a phenomenon imposed on us by a history which was peculiarly, and painfully, African. When people say to you, “Europeans write in European languages; why don’t Africans write in African languages?” they are indulging in perhaps well-meaning but quite ignorant and meaningless comparison.
As for the African Writers Series in that same eventful year of 1962, I was invited to be its founding editor and I was to spend a considerable part of my literary energy in the following ten years wading through a torrent of good, bad, and indifferent writing that seemed in some miraculous way to have been waiting behind the sluice gates for the trap to be released. All of this stuff was written in English. How can one explain this?
Our acts and motives as writers seem to be in need of careful, and even repeated, explanation these days. We must justify what we do over and over again—“for the avoidance of doubt,” as legal draftsmen in military regimes are fond of saying in their numerous decrees. Perhaps it is a sign of our incompetence that the case was not made clearly and unambiguously in the first instance.
The story was told me by an elder in my village about a drummer long ago who was not very competent on the drum but who managed to achieve a kind of fame by an open admission of his shortcoming. Like better drummers, he would name and salute a notable arriving at a ceremony. Having done this in drum language, our drummer would proceed, for the avoidance of doubt, to inform the person concerned by word of mouth that the drum had just saluted him.
I thought I had already spoken all the words I needed to speak on our predicament with language in African literature, but perhaps my intentions were not well enough translated to the drumsticks. So let me try again, briefly and directly.
I write in English. English is a world language. But I do not write in English because it is a world language. My romance with the world is subsidiary to my involvement with Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria is a reality which I could not ignore. One characteristic of this reality, Nigeria, is that it transacts a considerable portion of its daily business in the English language. As long as Nigeria wishes to exist as a nation, it has no choice in the foreseeable future but to hold its more than two hundred component nationalities together through an alien language, English. I lived through a civil war in which probably two million people perished over the question of Nigerian unity. To remind me, therefore, that Nigeria’s foundation was laid only a hundred years ago, at the Berlin conference of European powers and in the total absence of any Africans, is not really useful information to me. It is precisely because the nation is so new and so fragile that we would soak the land in blood to maintain the frontiers mapped out by foreigners.
English is therefore not marginal to Nigerian affairs. It is quite central. I can only s
peak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians in English. Of course I also have a mother tongue, which luckily for me is one of the three major languages of the country. “Luckily,” I say, because this language, Igbo, is not really in danger of extinction. I can gauge my good luck against the resentment of fellow Nigerians who oppose most vehemently the token respect accorded to the three major tongues by newscasters saying good night in them after reading a half-hour bulletin in English!
Nothing would be easier than to ridicule our predicament if one was so minded. And nothing would be more attractive than to proclaim from a safe distance that our job as writers is not to describe the predicament but to change it. But this is where the politics of language becomes politicking with language.
One year after the Makerere Conference, a Nigerian literary scholar, Obi Wali, published a magazine article in which he ridiculed the meeting and called on the African writers and the European “midwives” of their freak creations to stop pursuing a dead end. And he made the following important suggestion:
What we would like future conferences on African literature to devote time to is the all-important problem of African writing in African languages, and all its implications for the development of a truly African sensibility.1
Having set that rather clear task before “future conferences on African literature,” Dr. Obi Wali, who was himself a teacher of literature and a close friend of the poet Christopher Okigbo, might have been expected to lead the way along the lines of his prescription. But what he did instead was abandon his academic career for politics and business.