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Vol. 1, 1997
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Articles
Linguistic Parallelism in Mariama Ba's So Long A Letter
By: Oby NnamaniEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08063695290
Abstract
So Long a Letter as the title implies is a letter written by Ramatoulaye to a bosom friend, Aissatou. In the novel, Ramatoulaye recounts the sad details of her unsuccessful marriage to Modou Fall and her subsequent attempt to survive as a single parent. It is a story laden with pain and bitterness. In an attempt to capture this effectively, Mariama Ba does not depend solely on the conventional language code. She goes a step further to weave her language into unique patterns which adequately convey this sad mood to her readers. The linguistic technique Ba employs to achieve this purpose is known as linguistic parallelism. Kofi Yankson provides a definition of this vital subject.
Keywords
Linguistics, Parallelism, Friend, Bosom, Conventional
Introduction
By linguistic parallelism we mean the use of pattern repetition in a literary text for a particular stylistic effect. Parallelism operates at the three levels of linguistic organisation. At the phonological level, pattern congruity stress may take the form of alliteration; internal or end rhyme; or isochronity in two or more structures. At the semantic level, lexical items that occur in the same grammatical slot may be either related synonymously or anonymously (14).
Content
Let us now see how Linguistic Parallelism is harnessed for stylistic effect in So Long a Letter. The entire novel is a self-stripping exercise undertaken by Ramatoulaye. In the first passage for analysis, Mariama Ba establishes a only basis for this self-disclosure. Aissatou and Ramatoulaye are not childhood friends but are women who are forced to bring up their children alone because of their separation from their husbands. Hear Mariama her: Ba uses form and language to capture this affinity in destiny. The two adverbs yesterday and today are in paradigmatic relationship with each other. They are synonymously related under the general feature/ + time/. / + Time /. Similarly the two past participles divorced and widowed are related synonymously under the general feature / - husband. The literary significance of this pattern of language on the text is that form and language have been used to reinforce the message of the text. The correspondence inherent in the two lines above is reflection of the similarity in the plight of both women. a Another use of linguistic parallelism is exemplified when Ramatoulaye tries to avert her mind from her immediate sorrow by thinking of other people faced with graver misfortunes.
Conclusion
The analysis of the three selected passages from Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter reveals how patterns of language in the form of linguistic parallelism are functional to the understanding of Ba's view of betrayal in marriage and family institutions. While the normal code of language performs the primary function of telling, the manipulated parallel structures assist the reader to get at the very pulse of the main character and indeed the novel. a In the three extracts discussed in this paper, parallelism serves three main purposes. Firstly phonological parallelism chiming - lends musical quality to the text. Secondly, syntactic and lexical parallelism serves the purpose of driving home the theme by placing it at the forefront of the reader's consciousness. And finally linguistic parallelism represents the creative artist's search within the confining walls of the language code for an appropriate term to express the inexpressible. These, in sum, are the literary significance of the use of linguistic parallelism in Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter.
References
Ba, Mariama. So Long a Letter. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1980. Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets, Burnt Northon: Faber and Faber 1959 Fowler, R (ed). Essays on Style and language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1969. Leech Geoffrey. A Linguistic Guide to Poetry. London: Longman's Publishers, 1969. Widdowson, H. G. Stylistics and the Teaching ofLiterature. London: Longman Publishers Ltd, 1975. Teaching Language in Communication. London: Longman Publishers, 1978. Yankson, K. E. An Introduction to Literary Stylistics, Obosi: Pacific Publishers, 1987.
The Journey as Trope for Female Growth in Zaynab Alkali's The Virtuous Woman
Grace Eche Okereke
Vol. 1, 1997
The Journey as Trope for Female Growth in Zaynab Alkali's The Virtuous Woman
By: Grace Eche OkerekeEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08063695290
Abstract
Zaynab Alkali has published two novels - The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman. Both novels reconstruct female experience in the journey to consciousness in sexist society. Alkali's is a welcome new voice in African creative writing and her relevance cannot be over-emphasised, for she is a lone female voice from Northern Nigerian that has undertaken to expose the reality of woman's life in a male-dominated culture. Through her novels, Alkali has led the Northern Nigerian woman out of her silence by giving her a voice to speak out in protest against male hegemony and domination, to tell the world of her troubles, of society's insensitivity to woman's predicaments and her individual struggles for survival, self-definition and self-realization in patriarchal culture.
Keywords
Virtue, Honor, Woman, Trope, Self-definition
Introduction
Although she is operating from a christian background, Alkali's literary vocality in a predominantly Muslim society that views writing as "a male privilege and the incarnation of power” (Sabbah 6), is in itself a daring departure from the Muslim ethic of female silence and inertia, and is an act of feminist protest which has earned her some vitriolic criticism (Alkali, "Keynote Address"3). This paper examines Alkali's exploitation of the journey as a trope for female growth in The Virtuous Woman.
Content
Mobility is fundamental in the construction of consciousness. Alkali in her novels - The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman - inscribes mobility (physical and psychological) as the starting point of female consciousness in Muslim culture that imposes immobility on the female. Chioma Opara (158-66) and Theresa Njoku (177-78) have variously examined the salutary effects of movement on Alkali's women, especially in their search for identity. The female hero in Alkali's The Virtuous Woman is Nana Ai. Alkali exploits the framework of the journey to plot woman's quest for the ideal of autonomy. It is a physical and psychological journey that explores the female predicament in the process of growing up.
Conclusion
Despite the short time span of the journey (two weeks) woman, in the person of Nana Ai, has attained remarkable psycho-emotional growth signified in the fact that, while she begins the journey in tears, she ends it in laughter, while she begins the journey leaning on the male (her grandfather) for support, she ends it taking control herself. She is thus transformed and is ready to undertake a new journey, to launch into a new beginning, and so The Virtuous Woman ends with a journey that is continuing in a new dimension. The journey has educated Nana incipiently in the gender politics that define female existence in her society. This process of education has also equipped her incipiently for self-definition within this politics, thereby setting Nana up as Alkali's model for the encouragement of adolescent girls in the Muslim Northern Nigerian context.
References
Alkali, Zaynab. The Stillhorn. London: Heinemann, 1983. The Virtuous Woman. Ibadan: Longman Nigeria Limited, 1987. Keynote Address. 2nd Annual Conf. of West African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. U of Calabar. 7 Dec. 1989. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and Ed. H. M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Ladele, Omolola. "The Novels of Zaynab Alkali: Another View". The Guardian. 29 Aug. 1987. 13 Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male - Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society. Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co., 1975. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam. Trans Mary Jo Lakeland. Reading: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. Inc., 1991. Mohsen, Safia K. "The Egyptian Woman: Between Modernity and Tradition". Many Sisters: Woman in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. Carolyn J. Mathiasson. New York: The Free Press, 1974. 37-58. Njoku, Theresa U. "Personal Identity and the Growth of the Nigerian Woman in Zaynab Alkali's The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman". Feminism in African Literture: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Helen Chukwuma. Enugu: New Generation Books, 1994. 176-88. Opara, Chioma. "The Foot as Metaphor in Female Dreams: Analysis of Zaynab Alkali's Novels”. Literature and Black Aesthetics. Ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1990.158-66. Sabbah, Fatna A. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984.
Eros, Psyche and Society: Narrative Continuity in Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song
Emelia Oko
Vol. 1, 1997
Eros, Psyche and Society: Narrative Continuity in Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song
By: Emelia OkoEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08063695290
Abstract
So Long a letter had its centre on the romantic pull of erotic impulses on the psyche. It seemed there that romantic love is the central human impulse. So Long a Letter therefore celebrates the pull between eros and psyche limiting the domain of human endeavour. In Scarlet Song Mariama Ba redeems the limitations of romantic enquiry by anchoring it as part of social forces. It is in the second novel that Ba situates love as part of a larger human endeavour subject to social forces. Scarlet Song therefore provides a needed counterpoint to the monologue of self and one dimension a view of So Long A Letter. An omniscient view point on many lives giving a greater density to the novel as a form is the added dimension on narrative continuity in the exploration of the pull of eros and psychic response to it as part of social action. The compelling voice of the 1st person narrator ensuring our sympathy as we travel alongside Ramatoulaye ensures that we share Rama's vision in So Long A Letter. Scarlet Song provides narrative counterpoint. To the monologue effect of So Long a letter, Scarlet Song brings the narrative diversity and variety of exposition of the 3rd person omniscient narrator that is able to do a greater justice to the variety of lives and contrary opinions that people Ba's second novel.
Keywords
Eros, Psyche, Society, Narrative, Continuity
Introduction
The singularity of vision and narrowness of Ramatoulaye's viewpoint in the first novel is countered by the greater variety of lived and larger sympathetic exploration of the second novel. Scarlet Song does not tell as in the letter; it shows many lives and allows the reader to arrive at his own conclusions. Where Ramatoulaye had compelled us to share her vision and values in the letter, Scarlet Song is more catholic in its method allowing no one dominant view; it gives scope for the proper narrative multiplicity of vision that is the novels method as a genre.
Content
Where the letter was a sustained and intense monologue of woman as experiencing self, often a victim in patriarchy suffering from woman's powerlessness, Scarlet Song brings the needed counterpoint. It is a novel from the male viewpoint telling of a man's experience from maternal to erotic love. It is the tension in the growth of Ousmane, male sensitive, loving and devoted son trying to balance the claim of maternal love and the pull of egoistic self. Ba's narrative retains the sensitivity of female exploration but questions woman's willingness to remain powerless and negate herself in love. The unifying motif in both novels is the exploration of love, which Ramatoulaye described as the spice of life. "The flavour of life is love. The salt of life is also love (Letter 3). In the first novel Ba establishes the important emotive quality of romantic love as sharing a unified vision in confronting the world. It is the break down of this romantic vision that gives pathos to Ramatoulaye's long letter recounting the breakdown of an ideal love. It is therefore essentially a woman's story full of illusion and male betrayal. It is from one dimensional but it is a story of self that woman needed to tell her past history of voiceless and self enforcement.
Conclusion
"The street! It was life and light" p.4. The road helps him and review his life, a life of hardship, and handwork "work is the only path to self advancement". give the The road and the poor quarters challenge reality of the making of Ousmane, man who faces the of creating himself in striving. It is a story of man as achieving self, mastering and reconciling himself with his environment. The romantic love for Mireille was therefore not the ideal meeting of two independent selves. It was the annexation of Mireille the eternal woman by Ousmane, the achieving male. The pattern of annexation of an entity by another stronger psyche was to repeat itself. Mireille as woman did not enter matrimony with the integrity of herself as independent. She formally renounced her religion, her country and her home. Like dependent woman she is happy to be annexed in love, as if love is an all consuming preoccupation. Ousmane's male realism shows the fallacy of female fixation in eroticism. Love is an aspect of man's many endeavour and he naturally moves to gratify other appetites. The road and its eternal winding promise is the proper metaphor introducing and elaborating male endeavour as legitimate human endeavour
References
Ba, mariama So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupe Bode - Thomas. New Horn: Ibadan, 1987. Scarlet Song. Trans. Dorothy Blair, London: Essex, 1981. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Middlesex: Penguin, 1976..
Post-colonial Discourse: The Case of Ben Okri's Famished Road
Abubakar Raliyu Liman
Vol. 1, 1997
Post-colonial Discourse: The Case of Ben Okri's Famished Road
By: Abubakar Raliyu LimanEmail:
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
Until recently, Eurocentricism has turned its attention to the gathering storm surging in the identify politics, gender debates and cultural reassertions. The ensuing polemics trace identify and cultural discourse to the emergence of radical discourse, in the third word, with the decline of colonial powers in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The new discourses, in their various colourations, according to liberal scholars, seek to challenge the very basis of western dominance through especially its totalising and absolutist epistemologies and schemata. However, this paper seeks to revisit both the literary and philosophical concerns of the new discourses. The idea is to constitute a theoretical framework upon which Ben Okri's novel, The Famished Road is glimpsed. This is of course informed by some critics' bid to lump Okri within postcolonial discourse.1 What then is postcolonial discourse?
Keywords
Road, Famish, Postcolonial, Dominance, Colonial Powers
Introduction
Stephen Howe, 2 in an article titled: "Postcolonialism: Empire writes Back", asserts that "issues of race, ethnicity and gender have become the central preoccupations of debate, to a considerable degree displacing preoccupation with class and economics"2. Whether this assertion is true or not is subject to serious ideological pollemics. To substantiate his claims however, Howe explores the ideas of some thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean - Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. These scholars are widely considered by Howe as the proponents of radical ideas rooted in poststructuralist, post-marxist and postmodernist theories. Similarly, Howe also believes that identify and gender questions have contributed significantly to the contemporary upsurge in feminist and multicultural discourses. These ideas and discourses, according to him, constitute the bedrock of post-colonial reality. Therefore, to understand the concept of postcolonialism it is necessary to look into the ideas of Derrida Lyotard, Foucault, and Said.
Content
Jean Francois Lyotard, for instance, is especially noted for his critique of modern progress in his book: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. According to an analyst of Lyotard's work, Pervez Manzoor, the problems posed by scientific culture in the twentieth century such as environmental and nuclear threat are brought about by what Lyotard calls "the crisis of knowledge and legitimation".4 Furthermore, Manzoor locates the significance of Lyotard's work specifically within the purview of scientific culture. He stressed Lyotard's emphasis on the fact that the crises he identifies in the scientific culture is responsible for the so-called "transition of high modernism to postmodernism".5 Lyotard employs two distinctive categories in his analysis of twentieth century crises. He divides the world cultures into narrative and scientific cultures. The former describes non-western cultures, values and knowledge prevalent especially before the advent of technological civilization. Narrative knowledge is distinguished from scientific knowledge on the basis of some features characterizing each category. Here also, Manzoor captures vividly the Lyotard's description of the narrative: The narrative allows a society not only to define its criteria of competence but also to evaluate according to those criteria what is performed or can be performed within it. The knowledge transmitted by narration is not limited to enunciations: it determines in a single stroke what one must say in order to be heard, what one must listen in order to speak, and what role one must play to be the object of a narrative. dity of the narrative knowledge. Scientific procedures reject narrative knowledge on the basis of the fact that it is never subject to explanation, analysis, argument or proof. Similarly, Michel Foucault employs the term discourse to show how knowledge is manipulated by power. His studies centred on the problems of discourse as both the cognitive and articulative method within the matrix of the dominant western world view. Foucault defines discourse as "a densely woven network of ways of thinking and writing that imposes strict limits on what can be thought and said".7 In the process, he questions the rules and limits entrapping discourses. In what he refers to as "discourse of discourses", he sets out to examine the discourses of other disciplines like medicine, legal, religious, sex and politics.
Conclusion
Pico Iyer's classification of a postcolonial writer and even its protean definition in The Empire Writes Back does not sufficiently qualify any contemporary literature in Africa as postcolonial. In fact, the country of residence of a writer does not matter much to the type of experiences he is representing in his works. The historical experiences Okri is bothered with are typically Nigerian and African. This can be understood even from Okri's preceeding novels, Flowers and Shadows and The Landscape Within. Moreover, it is the earnest view of this paper that creative writers in Africa should endeavour to transcent Okri's type of uncertainty in their bid, through the might and power of pen, to steer the continent away from the edge of the precipice occasioned by the designs of global capitalism through its neo-colonial agency. This is to be achieved through a coherent articulation of a revolutionary discourse in the form and content of literary practices in Africa. We are referring to a new revolutionary discourse that will go along way in demonstrating a thorough understanding of not only the social and economic problems, as it is often the case, but also the psychic and spiritual injuries inflicted upon Africa by the forces of imperialism via neo-colonialism. This is with the hope that, inevitably, Africa will graduate from the present condition of exploitation and oppression into a truly postcolonial entity, defined and determined by Africans.
References
Pico Iyer, "The Empire Writes Back" in Time International Magazine, February 8, 1993, P.46 2. Stephen Howe, "Postcolonialism: Empire Strikes Back" in Weekend Triumph, Saturday April 17, 1993, P.6. The article is culled from London based "The Independence”, no date is stated. 3. Howe, Ibid., P.6 4. Pervez Manzoor, "Progress: A Fetish On Trial", in Afkar Inquiry, a magazine of Events and Ideas, published by Tropvale Limited, London, January, 1988, P.44. 5. Manzoor, Ibid., P.45 6. Manzoor, Ibid., P.45 7. Stephen Howe, Op. cit, P.6. 8. Allan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, Tavistock Publications, London, 1980, Р.121. 9. Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Columbia University Press, London, 1983, P.145. 10. John Fekete, a french scholar. He is the author of Reconstructive Encounter With The New French Though, University of Minnesota, Minneapolist, 1984. 11. Fekete, Ibid., P.XV 12. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction Theory And Practice, Routledge, London, 1991, Р.31. 13. Norris, Ibid, P.136. Jonathan Haynes, "African Literature Compared With American Literature", a Seminar Papre presented in the Department of English, A.B.U Zaria, October, 1992, Р.6. 15. Stephen Howe, Op.cit., P.6 16. Stephen Howe, Ibid., P.6 17. Stephen Howe, Ibid., P.6 18. Stephen Howe, Ibid., P.6 19. Firinne Ni Chreachain "Postcolonialism or the Second Independence?", ALA Bulletin, Vol.17, No.3, 1991 P.5. 20. Anwa Ankpa, "Europe In Its Other Word: Marginality, Cultures And Postcolonial Discourses In African Drama", Paper presented at a Seminar In the Centre for the Study of Languages and Cultural Theory, University of Southampton, Britain, 22, February 1993, P.8. 21. Bill Ashcrat, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice In Postcolonial Literatures, Routledge, New York, 1989, P.2. 22. Niyi Osundare, African Literature and the Crisis of Poststructuralist Theorising, Dialogue In African Philosophy Monograph Series (2), Options Books Press, 1993, P.19. 23. Pico Iyer, Op.Cit, P.46. 24. Ibid., P.48. 25. Ibid., Р.48. 26. Ibid., P.49. 27. Olu Oguibe, "The Famished Road by Ben Okri", Africa Events Magazine, January 1992, Р.35. 28. Ake Amosu, "Prize Writers", Focus On Africa Magazine, Vol.3, No.1, January - March, 1992, P.81. Pico lyer, Op.Cit., P.50 30. Olu Oguibe, Op.Cit., P.35. 31. Harry Garuba, "Ben Okri: Animist realism and the Famished genre", in The Guardian, Saturday, March 13, 1993, P.23. 32. Olu Oguibe, Op.Cit, P.35. 33. Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Spectrum Books, Ibadan, 1992. All references to the text are in this edition.
The Rhetoric of Negation in Osofisan's Who's Afraid of Solarin
By: N.J. UdoeyopEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128109795
Abstract
Let me start by admitting the obvious, that drama is not primarily an art of discourse. If that is so, then what has it to do with rhetoric to justify the title of this essay? Now rhetoric is the body of principle and theory having to do with the presentation of facts and ideas in a clear convincing and attractive language having about five divisions: (a) Poem (b) Narration (c) Argument (d) Remarks and (e) Peroration or conclusion.
Keywords
Poem, Narration, Argument, Peroration, Remarks
Introduction
Aristotle, a classical authority on rhetoric conceived of it as a manner of effectively organising material for the presentation of truth while he thought of poetics as the presentation of ideas emotionally and imaginatively. It is clear that drama and rhetoric have at least one thing in common: namely language "the nexus of empirical and social reality"¹. From this one thing others inevitably follow: they may share ideas, "facts", "truth", "convincingness" and "attractiveness", and finally, both are structured. Given that they both share that "nexus of empirical and social reality" and given their common concern far "truth" and "ideas", it is not difficult to see why and how some literary, artists quite overtly and delibrately combine "poetics" with rhetoric, as Femi Osofisan does in Who's Afraid of Solarin2 which may be regarded as a forensic discourse or a dramatization of same³.
Content
The title of the play is the main thrust of Osofisan's proem and as proposition of invention, it is generative in nature and function. First it is generative of the dialectic between “afraid" and “not afraid”, along with other sets of dialectics; and secondly, it is generative of the need to show proof of "afraid or "not afraid". The title of the play, therefore, is a kid of maximal proposition in which "proof" of the inferential idea generated by it is located. As Donavan J. Ochs has observed: "Invention is generally defined as the locating of either true or probable proof..."4 Thus proof of the "truth" or probability that someone is afraid of Solarin must be located within the empirical and social reality which constitutes the drama. Solarin, therefore, is both instrinsic and extrinsic as a factor in proof of "afraid" or "not afraid". As dramatic persona he is extrinsic but as "truth" or "idea", he is intrinsic, because the author uses his name as testimony to prove who is afraid and why he is (or they are) afraid. The use of testimony from external matter in proof of a proposition isvery well recognised in rhetoric. Cicero wrote of it I define testimony as everything which is taken from external matter to win credibility. Not every sort of person has impact as authority. To win credibility, influence attached to the person is sought. Either one's nature or circumstances give rise to influence. Influence in one'snature resides in greatness of virtue... (emphasis added)s
Conclusion
We have shown in this paper that Soyinka's diction is decidedly more difficulty in his prose (The Interpreters) than in his drama. We have also shown that dominant and peculiar rhythm which we have referred to as "Soyinkaian penultimate pause" is discernible is both his prose and his drama. As we said in the introduction, there is always something else to say about Soyinka's art. It makes sense, therefore, to conclude that this rhythmic device which links Soyinka's prose and drama is yet something else something which no careful reader can miss in the works of this great African writer.
References
Allan, W. Stamard (1978). Living English Speech; Longman Dathorne O.R. (1979). African Literature in the Twentieth Century: Heinemann, Eka, D. (1991). Diction and Rhthym in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters. Forthcoming in Journal of the Literary Society of Nigeria. Fowler, Roger (1981), Prose Rhythm and Metre. In Roger Fowler (ed.) Essays in Style and Language; Rortledge and Kegan Paul, London; pp. 82 -199. Gimson, A.C. (1977). A Practical Course of English Pronunciation: A Perception Approach; Edward Arnold, London. Osundare, N. (1987). Style and Literary Communication in African Prose Fiction in English. In: S.O. Unoh (ed.) Topical Issues in Communication Arts Vol. One; Modern Business Press, Uyo pp. 134-167. Soyinka, W. (1967). Kongi's Harvest A Three Course Book Oxford University Press; London. (1967) The Interpreters. Heinemann, London (1984). The Trials of Brother Jero: Spectrum Books Ltd, Ibadan. Vincent, Theo (1976). Rhythm and Meaning in Poetry. Journal ofthe Nigeria English Studies Association. Vol. 8 No. 2; 32 - 40.
Style and the Realization of Committed Discourse in Wole Soyinka's From Zia with Love
Anthona Akpabio Ekpa
Vol. 1, 1997
Style and the Realization of Committed Discourse in Wole Soyinka's From Zia with Love
By: Anthona Akpabio EkpaEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128109795
Abstract
If there is any African literary critic who has enjoyed much critical attention and fame, it is Nigeria's Wole Soyinka whose creative versatility is globally recognised. A prominent feature of Soyinka’s writings is his concern with social issues. Indeed, in very subtle but ingenious ways, he punches and pounds at the conscience of society through his various works. In his creativity also, Soyinka shows competence in and command of English - the Second Language of his country Nigeria. He also exhibits familiarity with his culture and attempts with much effort at projecting the folkways and beliefs of his native Yoruba people. As would be expected, this combination of the modern and traditional in his art, has earned Soyinka praise and acknowledgement from many critics, and condemnation from others, those especially who claim to find elements of obscurantism in his writings. To this last groups, Soyinka says, that rather thar being inscrutable, his writings are artistic manifestations with "a lo of experience" and interest in social issues.
Keywords
Love, Realization, Discourse, Survival, Necessity
Introduction
A notable quality of Soyinka's works is their social relevance. Whether based on the Yoruba world view as A Dance of the Forest is, or on history as his Death and The King's Horseman3 (which is based on events which took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba City of Nigeria in 1946), the writings focus on, and relate or humanity man in society. Elderd Jones observes that most of Soyinka's thematic preoccupation "are concerned with the factors of man in his environment, the struggle for survival; the necessity for sacrificing if man is to make any progress; the role of death even the necessity of death in man's life"4
Content
Soyinka's commitment to his society stated in his adoption of Ralp Waldo Emerson's words (as a preface to his Nobel Address), is: "I will stand here for humanity"s. This humanity extends beyond Nigeria and Africa. It represents the world of the underprivileged, the oppressed, a society and a world that faces decay in the face of advancing yet corrupting civilization and modernity. Humanity is also Africa, battling to wrest itself from the grip of dictatorship and racial injustices perpetrated by the elites, the military, the rich and the morally depraved. Soyinka's commitment is to restore sanity in society as is evident in his skillfully composed play From Zia with Loves.
Conclusion
Soyinka's success in From Zia... is very evident. His commitment to art is seen in the careful handling of social issues and the aesthetic distance he upholds throughout the play. Historical facts and fiction are interwoven yet separated in context and style of presentation. The experience of most African states is objectified in this expert treatment of form so that the theatrical performance is removed from the personal milieu of the playwright. Through this play, Soyinka has without doubt proven once more his status as a major, if not the most renowned of West African writers. He has, through From ia... made himself relevant once more to his society by exposing social ills while at the same time showing astute commitment to aesthetic perfection. From Zia with Love can therefore be said to be Soyinka's exhibition of how literary discourse can be a realization of social commitment.
References
Wole Soyinka in an Interview with Richard Awubi cited in Language and Meaning in selected Poems of Wole Soyinka. An unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Calabar, 1989, р.8. 2A Dance of the Forest, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 3Death and The King's Horseman, (London: Eyre Methwen Ltd, 1982). Eldred Jones "Wole Soyinka: Critical Approaches' The Critical Evaluation of African Literature (Ed) E. Wright. (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 64-5). 5From Zia With Love, (Ibadan: Fountain Publication, 1992), other references to this text are abbreviated as From Zia... Ngugi Wa Thiong'o Homecoming, (London: Heinemann, 1972), p.47. 'Ngugi, p.28. M.А.E. Okolie, "Literature and Social Change: a dilemma of the African Writer", Literature and Social Change Ed. A.U. Uheagbu (Acts of the 7th MLAN conference, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 1989), р. 182. 9"The Writer and the question of commitments" ANA REVIEW 1,1, Lagos, 1985, p.9. Wole Soyinka, "The Writer in the African State", Transition 31, 1967, р.3. "Femi Osofisan in conversation with Olu Obafemi in Execursion in Drama and Literature: Interview with Femi Osofisan, Ed. Muyiwa B. Awodiya (Ibadan: Kraft Books Ltd. 1993, p.23-4 Soyinka, interview with Lewis Nkosi, African Writers Talking Ed. Dennis Duerden and Cosmos Pieterse (London: Heinemann 1975), p. 174. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962). "Roger Fowler, Literature As Social Discourse: The practice of Linguistic Criticism (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., 1981), p.18. IFemi Osofisan in Conversation with Olu Obafemi in Excursions in Drama and Literature Ed. Muyiwa P. Awodiya (Ibadan, Kraft Books Ltd., 1993). 16Biodun Jeyifo, THE TRUTHFUL LIFE: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama, Villers Publications Ltd., 17Spencer David and Stanley Clages, "A talk about the theatre" Contemporary Drama 13 plays. Ed. Federics Lorca (New York Charles Scribner's Sons Ltd., 1970), p. 112. 1Lawrence Amadi, "Drama as an instructional strategy in schools" Nigerian Theatre Journal 2, No. 1 & 2, 1985, р. 219 "Soyinka with Lewis Nkosi, p.17. 2 Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature Trans. Ernest Pick, (London: Frank Cass Co. Ltd., 1971), pp. 75-6. Femı Osofisan in conversation with Olu Obafemi, p. 24.
That Nebulous Geography of Power: Reading Dictatorship and Governance in Soyinka's Power Plays
Onookome Okome
Vol. 1, 1997
That Nebulous Geography of Power: Reading Dictatorship and Governance in Soyinka's Power Plays
By: Onookome OkomeEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
This essay examines Wole Soyinka’s dramatization of power, dictatorship, and governance through his “power plays” such as Kongi’s Harvest, Death and the King’s Horseman, and A Play of Giants. By deploying parody as a textual and performative strategy, Soyinka critiques postcolonial dictatorships, exposing their corruption, contradictions, and failures of governance. His plays juxtapose traditional authority, colonial impositions, and modern democratic aspirations, highlighting tensions between history and contemporary politics. Through characters like Daodu and Olunde, Soyinka interrogates leadership, dissent, and intellectual responsibility, ultimately suggesting that parodic dramatization is itself a political act aimed at reimagining governance and democratic possibility in Africa.
Keywords
Wole Soyinka, Power plays, Parody, Dictatorship, Governance
Introduction
There are plays in Soyinka's literary corpus that easily pass as discourse of power and politics, especially political power and its dispensation in post-colonial dictatorships. Kongi's Harvest is one of such plays. So too are the television sketches, Before the Blackout and After the Blackout. Dealing with power as they do, these plays are organised as parodies of recognisable social and political idiocies, placing greater emphasis on the parodic strategic of mimicry in all daily activities. While they deal with questions and issues of power, they provoke us, the reader or spectator as the case may be on "new discursive formation, to the transformation of the discourse of an age" (Ana Lopez; 63). These uses of the parodic have been stressed by theorists of parody such as Bakhtin and Foucault. In Soyinka's power - plays meaning his plays that deal exclusively with power, its acquisition, dispensation and organisation, parody is central to the form. The contexts are often all too obvious. When the content of a particular dramatic text, say Death and The King's Horseman is historical, the need is often to parachute the historical into contemporary events. The ultimate aim is to re-read these events in the light of the contemporary. Wole Soyinka's power- plays deal with history and social phenomena, employing the strategies which the elastic definition of parody defines for literary work, including performances texts. My aim in this essay is to show that the textual practice of parody is itself a political act. This act is serious, leading not only to the laying bare of social events of significance, but also towards creating a new political credo. The new political credo is defined within the parodic practice itself. Take Kongi's Harvest for instance. This play recalls the political chaos of post-independence Nigeria. Modernity is superimposed on traditionality. But it is a failing traditional institution with all its corruption and ineptitude. It is not a system of governance that can prepare the people of that decadent Yoruba Kingdom for a place in the modern world with radio, brassband and all that. Against these two modes of governance, the play opens up another possibility - the Daudu/Segi coalition anchored in Segi's Night club. This political front does provide succour for dissent, a very important aspect of the political system that aspires towards people-oriented governance. Segi's father has a political place in Isma, currently under the throes of Kongi's dictatorship. He is put in prison for some political reasons. Segi seeks some revenge for this and other reasons. She finds a ready partner in Daodu. Daodu is politically correct, and may well represent Soyinka's political figure who will bring about his holistic idea of governance in post-colonial Africa - the gradual amalgamation of traditional political options and practices with those of the West. However, this is not as simplistic as it seems. Daodu is a very difficult character to define. His rather playful exterior further complicates matters. His dissension is sometimes tempestuous, depending more on the spur of the moment rather than the bitter logic of each situation. There were, of course, pockets of dissents in political dispensations in traditional Yoruba politics. Examples abound in ancient Yoruba political history. The fall of Alaafin Abiodun, for instance, owed a lot to internal rivalry. It was not merely the impact of the Fulani jihadists that sent this once unrivalled kingdom spinning on its tops. The case of Daodu is not singular in this respect, but it is significant. It carries with it a new modernity.
Content
The Segi/Doudu coalition is modern. The Night Club is not a place for respectable politicians to gallivant. It is an alternative venue for the politically repressed, a classic point, of dissent, complete with the bohemianism of the 20th century political life of Europe which Soyinka knows very well. As a post of the oppressed, the Night Club is a symbol of the political alternative - the new movement. For Daodu this political refuge provides a suitable facade. The Night Club provides a brilliant cover for Daodu's opposition to the decadent political system of Kongi's regime. It also functions from another extreme. The Night Club gives a facade of Daodu as a no-serious- heir to the throne of Oba Danlola. For the habituals of the Night Club Daodu is the progressive man. Soyinka treats him as a possible choice of ruler in the aftermath of Kongi's dictatorship and Danlola's inept traditionality. This is the heart of the matter in the play. The Segi/Daodu coalition leaves a permanent dent on Soyinka's treatment of power acquisition and dispensation in post-colonial society. Educated in various modes of political subterfuge, Daodu cannot help but use the strategy of the renaissance intellectual that he is. He is a man of intense intellectual upbringing, wise in the ways of the world, but his ties to the dying monarch denies him an altruistic claim to power and governance. The tension arising from his traditional self and that of his modern posture remains the over-riding character of this political idealist. There is little doubt about Daodu's desire to change the political fortunes of Isma. His sympathy is neither for the dying tradition nor for the decadent modernity. But he is not a practical man of politics either. Faced with odd choices, he vacillates between two extremes of governance, finding no solace in the middle. All we can frankly claim for him in the chaos of Kong's political regime is that he is neither of the two. When the play ends, he gropes between the extremes of political directions which he has drawn for himself, at undecided even in the face of immense political turbulence. In the character of Daodu, Soyinka may well have predicted the political ineptitude and inadequacies of jailed Chief M.K.O Abiola, winner of the 1993 Presidential elections. True to the character of Daodu, Abiola was never sure whether or not he wanted to defend the mandate until it was annulled by General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. In Kongi's Harvest, one of Soyinka's apt denunciations of the corruption of post-colonial state, what is evident is the obvious parody of independence. He creates a political field of contestations in which he examines the new intellectual approach to the problem of governance and democracy. Yet he does not do this from a partisan perspective. Almost mute in the political debate, the authorial voice regains its vitality only after we understand the total political map which Soyinka draws of our post-colonial situation. While Daodu represents the "free mind", sometimes willing to give up his feudalistic origin for a free human society, Soyinka does not tell us if the option is free of hitches. Indeed, he seems to be saying that the past must come to terms with the present. In other words, the new Isma, represented by Daodu must look across the frontiers of Isma's political structures in order to build an enduring political future. The sterility and isolation of the Aweri fraternity which Kongi nurtures as his political and cultural tink-thank represents the distance between the governed and the governor. Against this is situated the Night Club. It is interesting that the events that lead to the eventual collapse of Kongism began in the intellectual chit-chat of the Night Club. Although Okpure O. Obuke does not quite recognise the significance of this Night Club, he nonetheless broaches the importance when he writes that "it is perhaps not quite clear what interest in the power structure in the society Daodu and Segi represent, but most probably, they symbolise the power of the common man (1980:136)". It is my opinion that Daodu and Segi represent the first truly intellectuals’ attitude towards governance of a democratic kind in a post-colonial society. The Night Club is the site of the new feeling, the new hopes, new governance devoid of dictatorship. Meaning in Soyinka's work is never a unified "truth", since one meaning generates other possibilities. In his plays, especially those that deal with power, governance and political debate, the last item being an essential part of liberal capitalism of free enterprise democracy, meaning is multi-dimensional. In Kongi's Harvest, as in other power-plays, the idea of one undisputed meaning is even more slippery. For instance, some serious and respected critics have decried the mythic conscious position in Soyinka's plays, denouncing this as the re-enforcement of infallible gods in the affairs of human¹. Yet there are others who prefer to see Soyinka's deployment of Yoruba pantheon in his plays as a mere metaphor used to examine our recurrent stupidities. Simon O. Umukoro holds his view. His reading of A Dance of The Forest shows, with vivid ancestors, illustrations, that the play is not simply about ghommids and but an allegorical illumination of a human community meeting to confess itself to its future through a thorough interrogation of its past. To take one of the many imageries of this play, Umukoro tells us. "If the half child represents Nigeria, the dance for it is a symbolic representation of the struggle for Nigeria. It suggests that different forces are struggling to own and control Nigeria”. (1994:14). This struggle, S.O. Umukoro concludes, is a contest between communism". "Western democracy, poeple's democracy, capitalism and A Dance of the Forest is the first in the series of serious plays about governance, power and the democracy. In Death And The King's Horseman, one of Soyinka's classical texts, I will examine traditional Yoruba politics in contact with European ideas of governance, and in A Play of Giants I will be dealing with outlandish dictators of the African continent. The aim, as I have done with the analysis of Kong's Harvest, is to show both the potential and the suppression of the democratic instincts as well as the kind of practice of good governance which Soyinka favours. I have been to discuss Soyinka's Death and The King's Horseman for the reason for the reason that it represents the most conservative treatment of this author's view of governance and politics, yet is provides us some clues to Soyinka's attitude to governance. Furthermore, this text is set at some distance from those I have designated as power - plays, and the deployment of the parodic is slightly different. Unlike A Dance of The Forests, the dramatic tension in Death and The King's Horseman brings into contest two cultural forms of political organisation. The play deals with the period of colonisation at the end of the British Empire. Wole Soyinka recognises the full import of literature in the course of good governance. He is fully aware of literature’s role in the restitution of Africa's cultural past. He has demonstrated in his critical writing the sacred place of the African intellectual in the fight to correct years of colonial cultural degradation as well as providing a political map for the newly independent states. Hе recognises, as Harry Garuba does that "Africa, as in other part of the world, has been implicated, as witness and participant, in what philosophers of history such as Kuhn and Foucault refer to as the collapse of a paradigm" (64). It is the collapse of indigenous Yoruba political paradigm that this play treats. It is the drama of Elesin Oba implicated in the subject of colonial political discourse. Death and the King's Horseman comes from a distinct postcolonial context. It was written in the early 70s when Soyinka was engaged in Cambridge University in what one can refer to as an intense period of re-locating his cultural paradigm in the world's cultural map provided the neccessarily angst which engendered the questions raised in the play. Death and the King's Horseman is parody of this map conceived from "a critical ironic distance", strategy which creates what Linda Hutcheon describes as both "textual doubling" (which foregrounds and reconciles) and differentiation (which foregrounds irreconcilable opposition between texts and between texts and the world). The indigenous cultural texts, the Yoruba cultural world with all its problems and that which the British colonialist presents, are inscribed as different and irrecocilable oppositions. The Pilkings represents the arrogance and paradox of the colonial text while Olunde and Iyaloja represent the indestructible of indigenous tradition. Both texts present these very well: the Ball and the apparently strange masque performance in which the Pilkingses wear the sacred Enungun masquerade is counterposed with the seemingly intractable logic of Amusa who refuses any dealing with the Polikings as long as they wear the Egungun costume. The intellectual explanation for the survival and respect for indigenous political practice is assigned to the witty dialogue of Olunde confronting Mrs Pilkings over the imminent ritual suicide of his father, Elesin Oba, performed to accompany the dead monarch into the other world of the ancestors. For the Pilkingses, the representatives of the British Empire, this act is not only barbaric; it is repressively animist. It goes against the basic logic of Western existence. Soyinka strategically emphasises this ritual practice as the over-riding platform of conflict. Although Soyinka tells us that we should avoid assigning the "facile tag of clash of cultures" to this stunning display of an ancient cultural practice, the subject of the text tells me otherwise. There is, to use Bakhtin's idea of parody, "a semantic intention" that is directly opposed to the dominant colonial text, forming a system of voicing in which Soyinka's voice opposes, in no uncertain times, the textual one. The entire text becomes a battle field of voices - two voices, the colonial voice, loud in it political importance and the oppositional voice, representing the indigenous voice, vehement in its elegant cultural counter-logic. The whole story of Death and The King's Horseman is structured around a cultural practice. The suicide undertaken by the King's Horseman is constructed as a cultural and political act. The rite itself is made up of movements of carthatic import, keenly watched by the entire society. The political import is the maintenance of a system of order in what Adebayo Williams describes as the ruins of the once powerful Oyo Empire. The textual strategy conceives of its as an oppositional system fighting the colonial havoc to local political practice. The possibility is that if the Elesin Oba fails to reach and pass through the luminous passage into the other hand, the thin thread holding the devastated political world of the Oyo Yoruba people will snap and absolute chaos will reign. When the play opens, the entire community gathers at the market place to see the Elesin Oba go through the final act (ritual suicide) which his "great forebears" have gloriously performed. The market in Yoruba cosmos is according to Williams "a signal cultural, political and spiritual position in Yoruba world" (72). It is significant that it is in this charged area that Soyinka dramatises an important history of the Yoruba in a colonial background. The entire narrative therefore focuses on what Adebayo Williams describes "as the creative equivalent of a return of the oppressed" (72). Elesin Oba fails in this important social assignment, creating a personal and communal disjuncture in the political and spiritual well-being of his society. Olunde, the son and heir to Elesin Oba, hurriedly comes back from London, sees the mess which has gone on, takes his life, ostensibly in place of his vacillating father. Iyaloja, the spokesperson of the traditional standars could not be bothered about the son's death. The son cannot take the place of the father, so the son's death is a waste, even abominable in the sight of the people. Surely certain purificatory ceremonies ought to take place to clean the society of this guilt. The entire plot is structured as a political quest in which three forms of political orders complete for the dominant place. At the centre of this quest is Olunde, whose death functions, not as a negation of life, but an affirmation of another life, the political utopia. Trained epistemology which provides the philosophical thrust for colonialism. But he is young, brash, intellectually immature. He understand his cultural roots, but this he does from a partisan position, situating everything in the background of the angst of colonial inconsistences. And because he could not understand all of this, the importance of his cultural roots weights over the inconsistencies of Europe. The action leading to his act of suicide is fast, heady and partisan. In the historical reality, the action of Olunde may have taken a couple of days. In Soyinka's text, the impression is that the actions leading to his suicide occur within the space of hours. Olunde returns from England, encounters Mrs Pilkings, makes the famous defence for the desecration of the Egungun masquerade (50) and the "I discover that you have no respect for what you do not understand" speech, goes in search of his father, finds and berates him and then takes his life; the momentary result of an unspeakable anguish. This act results in nothing. Olunde gains nothing. The society gains nothing. The collective psyche goes further down the moral drain. What the Praise Singer makes of these is very obvious: Elesin, we place the reins of the world in your hand yet you watched it plunge over the edge of the bitter precipe. You sat with folded arms while evil stranger tilted the world from its course and crashed it beyond the edege of emptiness - you muttered, there is little that one man can do, you left us flounding in a blind future. Your heir has taken the burden on himself. What the end will be, we are not gods to tell. But this young shoot has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is not the way of life (75). Soyinka seems to be saying that Olunde is the paradox of the new intellectual engendered by the first real contact with European political order. Soyinka may have some sympathy for Olunde, but the suggestion seems to be that he does not tolerate Olunde's act of suicide. Olunde is only a victim of that complex colonial order. As a political figure eager to chart a neo-traditional political order while maintaining a cultural past with all its rituals and symbols, Olunde cuts a pathetic figure. He is rooted, but somewhate sequestered from this root. In a desperate bid to prove his rootedness, he unconsciously displays his unrootedness. He commits suicide to assuage what Iyaloja describes as an act of "honour for his household and of our race" (73). The culture rejects this act. The act is sacrilegious, and so couldn't be part of the solution to Elesin Oba's intransigence. At another level, Olunde's suicide can also be interpreted as a shortening of the impending political death of the traditional order. Who takes over from Elesin Oba? Olunde's stay in England as a medical students toned up his power of rational thinking in purely European manner, his analytical sense is sharpened, his sense of justice and equity embossed, but his understanding of his Yoruba root dwindles in his haste to prove a point. His death is more a political action, not a cultural one. This act, to use Williams phrase, is a backward-looming political order (75). This explains why Williams concludes that Soyinka leaves us without doubt that "if suicide is the ultimate option avaliable to African revolutionary intelligentsia in the struggle for cultural revaluation of the continent, it must be embraced without fluiching" (75). Can we then dare read Death and in King's Horseman as a parody of two critical points in the political history of the Yoruba people in which three political voices can be easily discerned: the colonial, the indigenous, and the neo-tradition? Soyinka favours the neo-traditional with its humanistic disposition. It is in this sense therefore that one finds it easy to agree with the position of Adedayo William on the matter of the politicalness of Death and The King's Horseman. Here is the classic example of a particular ritual that, in a historical pressure, transcends its original cultural goal to assume a greater political and spiritual significance (73). Elesin Oba tire of the tradition of ritual suicide, and still "earth-bound" to the things of the flesh, becomes a negation of the political will to revitalise and sustain the collective existence of the Yoruba people. Olunde recognises this will, holds on passionately to it and seeks to protect it by every means possible. But it seems to me that Olunde's recognition tilts more towards that part of the will favouring the political, rather than the spiritual. It is evident from these cultural confrontations subsumed with the Pilkings that culture (and its spiritualism) is under the politics of bare existence in the face of another cultural onslaught - Europe's. Olunde therefore represents the liberal humanism for which Soyinka is very well associated. In Elesin Oba's discourse of failing will, Soyinka inserts the boisterousness of the neo-traditional option of Olunde, playing down father for son, emphasising the inserted discourse overtakes weak symbol of the parodied past. In a significant way, Olunde reminds one of the renaissance figures - Hamlet. Olunde is a complex and paradoxical figure. As a political figure, he is eager to chart a neo-traditional political path, but there is little evidence in the text if he knows his culture inside out. His lone act of courage may have stunned many, but this has little or no spiritual value of the entire community. A Play of Giants is about political power and the abuses to which it has been put in the African continent. This drama of the politics of the continent, in our time, opens with cruel African dictators talking about (not debating) power as they have come to conceive it. While this talk, banal and infantile, comes around to the acquisition of power, once in a long while, it pretends to look beyond it into the world of governance. But this is only briefly. Even when the talk gets this far, it veers off almost without warming. As Soyinka tells us in the introductory pages to this play, no serious attempts are made to hide the true indentities of these "players of power", they are no others than President for Life Macias Nguema (Gunema in the play) of Equatorial Guinea; Emperor for Life (ex) the Field Marshal El-Haji Dr. Idi Amin of Uganda (Kamini in the text). This is one of Soyinka's few play texts dealing directly with living leaderships, the other being From Zin With Love which deals with the Military regim of General Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon (1983-85). The need to be unambiguous in denounching the political state of the continent and of its rulers has for Soyinka become very urgent. A Play of Giants is an attempt to understand how these grosteque figures maintain themselves in power on the continent. The play opens in the Bulgarian Embassy in the United Nations with Kamini presiding over the sculptor who is sculpting the lifesize group sculptures of the three "crowned heads" - Kamini, Kasco and Gunema. Gunema opens the talk trying to make some distinction between seeking power (governance) for its own sake and acquiring power with all its responsibilities. Gunema begins by using the instance of guerrilla fighters who threaten his power. He denounces them as misfits who do not know the responsibilities of governance. For Gunema, beyond politics lies power (2); "politics is not power", concluding rather hastily that we (meaning this assembly of ignoble rulers) exist, "I think in the rare space which - power", For him therefore power is not equated to or linked in any sense with politics. Power belongs to certain gifted people, those who live in that "rare space". In the same vein, power does not have anything to do with good governance; if anything, power is divinely apportioned to those gifted to rule. Kasco clarifies this talk on power, its acquisition and dispensation when he responds to Gunema in the opening drama of the politics of rulership. "If you think first of responsibility and governing you give up search for power. Lust for power, oui. But lust lust for responsibility - I never know of it". (2). What comes out in the first pages of the first part of this rather depressing play in the buffoonery of two ignorant diabolic leaders ranting about misconstrued ideas of power and governance in the very place. (the United Nations Office) which is the symbol of world peace and democracy. The geography of power which these leaders map out is nebulous; it is the very negation of the spirit of democracy, of civilised governance, so that when Kamini says "I have no guerrillas in my country. Only bandits" (2), we perceive immediately the insertion of the author's (Soyinka's) discourse situated within this irresponsible talk in order to ridicule the warped sense of their responsibility. This prepares us for the next and accurate portrayal of the diabolic Kamini ("We call them Kondo". I catch my Kondo, I make him smell his mother's cun't). He is cruel, sadistic, foolish and ignorant. There are also the large insertion of Kamini's superstitious self which Soyinka makes incorruptible and overwhelming all of which is the negation of real and humane idea of governance. Kamini's sexual process and preference is also very well-articulated in the first part of the play. But this is done as a re- statement of European stereotype of the blackman. Once more, what is emphasised is the irony which this inserted discourse of stereotype holds for Kamini, the Chief architect of despotic madness on the African continent in the 70s, and indeed all those who represent his idea of leadership Kamini boasts of his sexual prowess. He hates what his Scandinavian collaborator, Gundum, (an possibly sex-mate) calls "Cissy, homosexuals”. For Kamini this group of sexual beings constitutes the space of discourse which is referred to as "subverts", the "Kondos". Kamini abhors this group of people. The narrative other, counter-voice, presents this as an irony because Kamini refers frequently to Europe, the source of the Blackman's insatiable sexual stereotype as "imperialist". While Kamini's position is seemingly oppositional to the politics of black representation that Europe knows and perpetuates, his actions reinforce Europe's discourse of his continent and of his kind. This strategy of utilising irony as means of re-affirming the duplicity of African leaders is well thought out. After all, it is essential, according to Kamini, for "a leader to have many wives" (4) so that the discourse of sexual prowess inhabits nebulous geography of power which according to Kasco "is indivisible" (4). Gunema's response to Taboum's description of his acquisition of power and how this is maintained is very interesting indeed. Gunema says "Power is something I must experience another way, a very different way". This is because Gunema inhabits the "nebulous geography of power". He searches to taste it. To quote him at some length: "To seize it a la boca roll and roll it in the mouth and let it trickle down inwards, like an infusion. Once, only, I think I succeed" (21). Just before Kamini calls fro a lunch break, requesting that the sculptural positions be suspended briefly, Gunema had given his other famous speech on power: "Power is the greatest voodoo and voodoo is the greatest power". (26). Many important narrative digressions occur before Gunema reveals how he achieved power through sexual means: Kamini's sacking and torture of this chairman of his Central Bank; the persecution of the European sculptor and the laughable upgrading of the 3rd secretary to the position of 1st secretary are only some of the examples. This is how Gunema describes that singular moment of glory: It happened finally, I tell you. It happened like this. I sentenced one man to death who I suspect of plotting against me. While he is in condemned cell, his wife come to plead for him. She is waiting all day in the house and when I am going to dinner she rush through my guards and fling herself at my legs, I am sorrow for her. So, I invite her to have dinner with my family. Well, I make long story short. I tell her what husband has done, that he is an enemy of the state and that the tribunal is correct to sentence him to death. She cried and cried, I feel sorry for her but justice is rigid span to power, it must not be bent. My wife is silent. She know she must not interfere in affairs of state. That night, after my family retire, I take her to bed. Perhaps she think by that I will reprieve her husband, I did not know. We did not discuss it. But I take her hand she follow me to my private bedroom. When I made love to her, I taste it at last (58). Kasco asks if he (Gunema) reprieved the woman's husband after all. He replies: "He was hanged on the appointed day. I pull lever myself". Afraid after this act, Gunema could not keep the relationship with the hanged man's wife. He garrotted her. While Gunema defines the source of his power in "sexual tasting" and the extensive use of voodoo, Kasco himself beyond "the intrigues and mundane of politics, because "Power comes with death of politics". (21). Power, its acquisition and dispensation, is for these despots a matter of personal myth, not the needs of the governed own, for or the collective good of the people. Power exists on its its ownd end and for the egotistic massage of these ignoble characters. Soyinka's portrayal is true to life. It collectivises that for gruelsome democracy, era of megalomania that overwhelmed the human desire It was for individual freedom, for the freedom of speech. indeed a period of the negation of human needs for freedom, for a free society. While the first part of the play describes in vivid and shocking terms the horrors, which these "crowned heads" instituted on the ruled, the second part of this drama of idiotic rulers discusses the relationship between the troubled and bestial rulers of this continent Russia. with the diplomatic policies of Europe, the United States and Soviet Russia. The text utilise two main narrative strategies to achieve this. The first one comes from the pathetically ignorant figures which these figures cut as leaders who know next to nothing about international politics. This strategy derives from the brutality of their acts and superstitious beliefs in the acquisition of power outside the collective consent of their people in a democratic atmosphere to that foolishly and infantile attachment to the histories of erstwhile colonial masters. Under the pseudo-intellectual atmosphere in which these leaders discuss power and politics, they often refer to their European mentors as springs of inspiration. The partial exception of this bogus claim to European ancestry is Kamini, who then displays an even bogus claim of Chaka, king of the Zulu. In Kamini's utterances about the super-powers, there are sparks of pan-Africanism, an ideology which inhabits the intellectually correct sphere of public debate about Africa's relationship with super powers in the 70's. However, it is obvious from Kamini's action that his talk about this relationship is only a mean's to a personal acquisition and perpetration of power for its own sake. Besides Soyinka invests in Kamini's-opinions about the relationship the wry humour which makes Kamini's utterances continuously laughable. The counter-voice in Kamini's narrative seems to be asking the question: how can these fools talk with rulers of the developed world when they cannot even talk constructively with their own people, or about their own situation? This may be the reason why Soyinka makes these African leaders talk, not to their European or American counterparts, but to low ranking diplomats of the foreign services of the developed world. The second narrative strategy is to pit one superpower against the other: the Russians against the Americans and one European nation against another or one European nation against one of the two super-powers. The whole of the second part of this play is overwhelmed with the self-interest which these super-powers display. The Russians rush to see Kamini after hearing of the intention of the "crowned heads" to make and display life size portraits of themsleves at the United Nations. Although the Russians think the idea is stupid and that only ignoramuses such as Kamini and his fellow "crown heads" are capable of such idiocy, these Russian diplomats rush to see Kamini, praising "his rule for being able to fight the machinations of the Western world in various guise" by keeping faith with the spirit of great Africans such as Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Nkrumah and others. But this is only a ploy. The Russians simply wanted to beat the Americans to it. While the Russians are anxious to keep the friendly link with Kamini opens, they reveal their utmost disgust for Kamini. It is through Professor Batey, the complacent pro-Amin political that ideologue who sees pan-Africanism in Kamini's rulership the Russians' double-talk becomes obvious. Agitated that the first Russian who speaks in Russian who speaks in Russian pours scorn on Kamini, describing the leader as "the overgrown child", "the buffoon", Professor Batey deadly situation only because Kamini's mood favours it. But Kamini insists on detaining these diploma against their wishes. Not even the favoured Professor Batey could prevail upon Kamini to change his mind on this matter. While all of this happening, more and more people are deserting Kamini. The latest is the Amabassador, who cleverly plots his escape and then announced the coup against Kamini. Agitated, Kamini becomes insane. Soon the US delegate who has been waiting for an hours is forcefully brought in, accused of being part of the coup to oust Kamini. The US delegate who came earlier to outsmart the Russians, are delayed. On learning of the coup the US delegate begins the whole range of politics to outsmart the Russians. The US delegate immediately gives Kamini the pledge of recognition in the face of the coup, but this time handling down a condition, "The only condition we attached to our support was that the statute of our own nation - founder, George Washington be given appropriate..." (61). Kamini is too distraught to listen. Even in this dicey situation diplomats of the superpowers still manage to maintain their interests, defining their political needs without giving a thought to Kamini's position. When the coup plotters, including enemy soldiers of a neighbouring state, finally over-run the Embassy, it is laughable to see how the "invisible" "crowned heads" go crazy to find "safety" falling flat on the face of the floor. In A Play of Giants, the dominant discourse is the unintelligible talk of African despotic leaders in which Soyinka inscribes a semantic intrusion, creating many streams of the discourses of power and politics, some of which are intellectually problematized, and each invested with its own counter-discourse. What this does is the erection of a complex body of counter-discourses, each existing on its own merit, fighting the dominant discourse. What remains harrowing is the debilitating social canvas which Soyinka paints of the African continent. Residing precariously in this political canvas, these leaders, together with their subjects, suffer and live the social contradictions of dictatorship, poverty, superstition, ignorance, greed, avarice, moribund corruption and acute political shortsightedness. Where does all this mess lead, but to a political coup d' sac? This is what eventually happens at the end of the play as all actions are frozen on the announcement of a new (fresh) coup d'etat, putting an end to the megalomania of Kamini, the profound buffoon - leader of African continent. While Kamini retains his vicious individually as the irrepressible dictator, he becomes a type, a scourge; a parody of the worst leadership on the continent. The degeneracy of the continent is therefore tied to the mental desertification of these leaders who invent dubious political space suffused with superstitions, ignorance and their megalomaniac turn. In the later part of the 20th century close to the beginning of the 21st century, African leaders, typified in Kamini (Idi Amin) herd the African peoples and their collective destiny deep into that indescribable political darkness. The picture Soyinka paints in these plays is pathetic, very disturbing. Parody does invoke laughter, eliciting critical distance which makes ciritical thought possible. But knowing the real situation (the devastated world in which Africans live), it is difficult for the Africans to laugh at this. The pain and pang associated with this life overwhelm and critical distance. For those who live this situation, the picture is all too grim, it is a firm but grim portrayal of their lives, their continent; their poverty, their miseries. Yet at important points in this misery as David Hecht and Maliqalim Simon point out in their book, Invisible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics, the people of this continent frustrated but undaunted seek the alternative political order, the micropolitics of the slums and signs shanty towns of big cities and towns. These are the most telling of what dictatorship of the Amin kind has brought upon the continent. So while these leaders think that they are in charge, a micropolitical regime which totally ignores them emerge in the slums. But all of this also leads to the political and economic dead end. This kind of political regime, like that of the despot, is only an alteration. Unfortunately for Wole Soyinka, a democrat and lover of justice and fair-play, his country is yet to witness an absolute and genuine move to free democratic principles. His country, Nigeria, only attempted this political goal during the 1993 Presidential Election. But this was aborted by the Regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. The purported winner of that democratic election is the man now in jail, Chief M.K.O. Abiola. In November, 1994 Wole Soyinka went into exile because of threats to his life. Soyinka is surely paying for his strong desire to see democracy take root in Nigeria. Nothing positive has occurred on the Nigeria's political front since Soyinka's post-Nobel play on power and politics in Nigeria, From Zia With Love.
Conclusion
1. The most trenchant of critical analysis of Soyinka's work has been formulated around the limit of his political vision or lack of it in some cases. Biodun Jeyifo is at the forefront. His materialistic reading of The Road, Soyinka's existentialist play, about the quest for the meaning of life in death, for instance, concludes in a somewhat hash tone, decrying the conspicuous neglect of street urchings, miscreants and tauts as testimony of his bourgeois bias. See Biodun Jeyifo's, The Truthful Lie: Jeyifo's analysis of the class war in The Road is particularly interesting to our discussion here. Prophetic about the collapse of communist Soviet Union, Play of Giants was published a few years before. Soyinka’s power plays illuminate the fragile, often tragic intersection of tradition, colonialism, and dictatorship in postcolonial Africa. Through parody and irony, he unmasks the absurdities of authoritarian rule while gesturing toward alternative democratic visions. His works remain urgent reminders of literature’s power to interrogate authority and inspire political imagination.
References
Cantalupo, Charles (ed) "Introduction". The World of Ngugi Wa Thiongo. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995. Garuba, Harry. "Drama and the Discourse of Democracy in South Africa." Understanding Democrarv (ed) Ibadan: Bookcraft, 1991. Hecht, David and Maliqulium Simone. Invincible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics. New York Autonomedia, 1994. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Methuen, 1985. Jeyifo, Biodun. The Truthful Lie: New Beecon, 1985. Lopez, Ana "Parody, Underdevelopment, and The New Latin American Cinema”. A R.F.V, Vol. 12, Nos. 12, 1990. Obuke, O. Okpure. "The Power Triangle in Soyinka's Kongi's Harvests", Nigerian Journal of Humanilities. No. 4, 1980. Ojaide, Tanure. Poetic Imagination in Black Africa. North Carolina: Carolina Academy Press, 1996. Schraeder, Peter J. "Understanding the "Third Wave" of Democratisation in Africa”. The Journal of Politics, No. 4, November 1995, p. 1160-1168. Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King's Horseman, London: Methuen, 1975. Kongi's Harvest. London: Heinemann, 1972. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 (Canto edition). Umukoro, 1994 S.O. Drama and Politics in Nigeria. Ibadan: Kraft Book, Williams, Adebayo. "Rituals and the Political Unconscious: The Case of Death and The King's Horseman". RAL, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993.
Reinventing the African Woman: Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo's The Last of The Strong Ones
Itang Ede Egbung
Volume 6, 2013
Reinventing the African Woman: Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo's The Last of The Strong Ones
By: Itang Ede EgbungEmail: info@caleljournail.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
Women in traditional Igbo society were given prominent positions because of the roles they played in the society. they were active participants in the agricultural and economic development of the society because the concept of gender in traditional Igbo culture was that of complementarity between the male and the female genders. The emergence of colonialism disrupted the once vantage position of women in Igbo society because it carried rigid gender ideologies which supported the exclusion of women from public domain. Adopting the feminist theory that argues that the complementarity of the male and female genders enhances the development of the society; using The Last of the Strong Ones, this paper examines Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo's advocacy for a harmonious complementarity between men and women in the modern society as it was the practice in the precolonial society. Contrary to the negative image created about the female gender in male authored works cushioned by colonial ethos, Ezeigbo reinvents and recreates active, assertive and self- confident women who play prominent roles in shaping the social, political and economic spheres of the society.
Keywords
Woman, Society, Strong, Independent, Weakness
Introduction
The image of the African woman in precolonial Africa was that of an industrious, hardworking and an independent woman. The traditional African woman played a complementary role with her male counterpart and this made her socially relevant. The traditional woman's occupation was farming, trading and other means of livelihood which made her economically independent. The notion of female dependency, weakness and docility came with colonialism, because the colonialist, armed with the Victorian values and ethos of placing the Victorian woman on the pedestal, transferred the notion to the African woman. Furthermore, since the male gender was first introduced to Western education, the early male writers popularized the distorted image of the African woman and gave her a negative image such as, a devoted mother, a domestic individual whose life revolves around the domestic hearth, an individual who stands aloof from the socio-political issues of her time, a weakling, inferior to the man and totally dependent on the man. These categorization between man and woman created social differences between the male and the female genders, and they grew and matured into social, political, educational and economic inequality. Although women are late entrants in the literary scene, they have endeavoured to correct the negative and wrong image created about the African woman. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, a post-colonial African female writer is one of the African female writers who is out to re-present the image of the African woman in the right perspective. Ezeigbo does this by creating women who play complementary roles with the men, because she believes that, complementarity does not yet exist, hence her advocacy for it. In Snail-Sense Feminism, Ezeigbo argues that: "The relationship between men and female is, therefore, based on complementarity"(13). This paper examines the role of Ezeigbo in reinventing the African woman to capture the positive image and attributes she was known for in the pre-colonial era which has been misrepresented, because complementarity is based on mutual and women's co-operation in the society. And to reinvent in the context of this paper means to change something that already exists and give it a different form or purpose. Ezeigbo's stance as a complementarist aligns with Carole Davies's definition of African Feminism which recognizes a common struggle with African men for the removal of the yokes of foreign domination and European/American exploitation. It is not antagonistic to African men but it challenges them to be aware of certain salient aspects of women's subjugation which differ from the generalized oppression of all African people (8-9). In The Last of the Strong Ones, Ezeigbo reinvents her female characters by giving them prominent roles, she gives them a voice in a society that has made them voiceless and empowers them economically, socially and politically.
Content
Oratory Empowerment Ezeigbo empowers her female characters with the oratory power, she gives the women a voice in the society. Susan Arndt notes that "women's feeling and thoughts now become audible and the women's voice... are heard in dialogues and from the narrative perspective" ("Paradigms of Intersexuality" 48). This reinvention negates male portraiture of the female character in their works. Arndt notes that "Achebe's literary portrait of the history and culture of the Igbo was limited to the extent that he marginalized women and neglected their voice" (44 -45). But in Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones, the trend has changed as women's voices become audible. Ezeigbo sues for complementarity between men and women for the good of the society, and not for the woman to be subjugated. She exemplifies this by creating assertive and outspoken women who are members of the Oluada, the inner council committee of the Umuga community. The women are not just passive members, but their opinions and suggestions are implemented. Bhattacharji in "Re-writing History/Re-Writing Women" notes that: "The tribal society is surprisingly democratic and all matters are decided through social consensus. Women have a powerful voice in all matters -social, economic and political" (140). Ezeigbo recreates the African woman to be the custodian and historian of the traditions, values and culture of the people. This is against the female portraiture in male-authored works where women are not given prominent roles. "Before the end of the meeting, two women were chosen to take the duty of recording events as well as reconstructing the lives of the four Oluada.... So we became witnesses, custodians and critics of the unfolding events"(3). Contrary to the portrayal of the African women in male-authored works as passive, docile and unreasonable, Ezeigbo presents the traditional African women, though not educated, with a rich retentive memory where all the events of the past, present and the future are recorded. "We, the observers, listened and recorded, in our cavernous memory, all that was said at the meeting" (12). Speaking in proverbs which has been the prerogative of men in male- authored works has been transferred to women. Ezeigbo's female characters speak in proverbs without feeling that they have exceeded their bounds, because silence is seen as a female virtue in African Society. "Vocality is a male prerogative and silence a female virtue" (133). Vocality as a male preserve and silence as a female virtue inherent in patriarchal societies have been transposed into literature by male authors, but Ezeigbo reverses the trend by creating female characters who are vocal in voicing out their views. And vocality is expressed through the medium of language; language helps people to create their identity and gender. Chieme, a female character and a member of the Oluada and Obuofa in The Last of the Strong Ones is Ezeigbo's reinvention of an African woman orator. Chieme possesses the power of oratory and her fame is known all over Umuga and beyond. Chieme uses her gift of oratory and chanting to pass a moral message to the society, in order words, she uses her gift towards the growth and betterment of the society. The failure of her marriage does not prevent her from contributing positively to the growth of the society. "Who, in Umuga, was not acquainted with the skills of Chieme's prowess of oratory and poetry? She knew how to string up words to praise, chastise or vilify. Chieme, the voice that had conquered strange lands"(8). Weighty words that Achebe puts in the mouth of his male characters, Ezeigbo now imbues them in her female characters. Ejimnaka speaking in proverbs notes that: "Those who bring home ant-ridden faggots must be prepared for the visit of lizards"(11) Chieme who suffers from betrayal and abandonment from her husband because she could not menstruate is empowered by Ezeigbo to make life useful for herself and the society. Bhattacharji notes that Chieme is "a single woman who relentlessly pursues an uncommon profession and dares to carve out a niche for herself in the patriarchy"(146). Ezeigbo empowers her female characters with a voice in the society, and this empowerment enables them to contribute meaningfully to the development of their society because their views are heard and implemented. Economic Empowerment Ezeigbo in The Last of the Strong Ones reinvents the African woman with the ability to manage her time effectively in performing her roles as well as gaining economic expansion. Although her female characters are traditional women, they are uneducated, she empowers them economically, and this empowerment gives their social status. They become prominent members of the highest decision-making body of the Umuga community. In recognition of the important need to empower the woman, Nkechi Okoli in "Women Empowerment" notes that "for Africa to wriggle out of its present status of the poorest of the poor, the women who constitute the larger population must be empowered" (61). Ejimnaka is very enterprising, she sells kolanut as well as weaves mat which she sells and make money to support her husband Obiatu, and saves his name from public ridicule. Ezeigbo's women are those who refuse to depend on men for their survival. Ejimnaka tells us that: "I hated being any man's appendage. I could not entertain having to eat out of any man's hand or being under his heel all my life, as my mother and my father's other wives had been to Ezeukwu. My independence meant everything to me. Indeed, my very life, and I guarded it fiercely"(27). Ezeigbo bestows on Ejimnaka the skills of craftsmanship that is unprecedented in Umuga community. She uses this skill to decorate her husband's Obi to the admiration of visitors to the Obi. "It was not usual for our women to decorate objects with animal or human motifs.... The more our admiration, the more our conviction that Ejimnaka was behind the unique mural art" (13-12). Ejimnaka's multiple business enterprises enables her to save her husband's name from shame, she relinquishes all her savings to her husband. She tells us: "I gave him all my savings and even my capital" (32). This complementarity between man and woman is what Ezeigbo advocates, because it is for the good of the society. Ezeigbo affirms her portrayal of female character in an interview thus: "When I create strong and assertive women in my fiction, I am only doing what is natural to me because I know that there are such women in my family and among my ancestors" (qtd in Arndt 31). Chieme's profession as an orator and chanter brings her fame and wealth, these successes are what eluded her in marriage because in marriage she had a deficiency which is no fault of hers but outside marriage she excels. She tells us: This profession has taken me everywhere and brought me popularity and prosperity. I have travelled extensively to perform at funerals and on other cultural occasions. My performance as everyone in Umuga knows, is not limited to funeral laments; marriages and title-taking ceremonies (116). Ezeigbo's portrayal of her female characters contradicts Helen Chaste's argument in Sexual Metaphor that: "The caring and serving function of the male is to provide financial support and protection (both physical and psychological) which she could not provide for herself but needs in order to perform her particular domestic functions" (67). This is contradictory, because Ezeigbo reinvents and recreates the African (Igbo) woman by empowering her financially to be a formidable pillar and a source of support to her husband. This reinvention is contrary to the image created about women in male-authored works where women are created as passive, docile and dependent on the men for survival. Ezeigbo also reinvents the modern African woman after the image of the traditional Igbo woman in the society where woman-woman marriage was practiced. This form of marriage is made possible through the economic expansion of the women. This marriage affords the woman who is the husband an equal opportunity and privileges like her male counterpart. Egodi Uchendu in "Woman-woman marriage in Igboland" notes that. "Woman-woman marriage was contracted for social and economic reasons.... Others were wealthy and influential woman who married fellow women as a means of celebrating their wealth and for economic gains"(14). Uchendu argues that this privilege of marrying a wife gave the wealthy Igbo women equal opportunities like the men in the society. Uchendu argues that: in a society where gender inequality prevailed and women lacked the political and social powers men enjoyed, woman-woman marriage was an avenue for appropriating certain masculine privileges. It was an arrangement that had economic, social and political benefits for women (146). Ezeigbo reinvents the modern traditional woman after the precolonial traditional woman in woman-woman marriage to buttress the point that what raises one's social status is economic expansion and not gender. In The Last of the Strong Ones, Ezeigbo through her character Chieme, informs the readers about the existence of this form of marriage thus: "Once, I performed in the home of a powerful woman who had three wives in the land of Umulobia. It was at her father's funeral. I was amazed. Yes, a woman who had other women as wives" (16). This form of acquire chieftaincy titles in their own right, and not a title that is an appendage to that of a man. In this era that polygamy is de-emphasized, in place of woman-woman marriage, adoption is the appropriate option towards solving the problem of childlessness in the society. Ezeigbo in Snail-Sense Feminism notes that "Nowadays, adoption is seen as a viable option by some childless couples in Nigeria"(32). Social Empowerment Ezeigbo empowers and equips her female characters by making them the watch-dogs of the society. Their roles enable them to resist exploitation, oppression, marginalization and the violation of woman's right by the man. Those who violate women's right are made to suffer the consequences. Patricia Abourdene and John Naisbitt note that "women are highly visible in the quest for justice and the search for solutions"(265). Ezeigbo's advocacy for complementarity is based on the conviction that the society will be the better for it if men and women complement each other. In a reaction to the general belief that female writers are fighting for equality, Aburdene and Naisbitt note that: We are so used to thinking of women being minimized, of women fighting for liberation, that we are incapable of the next step: envisioning what the world will look like when women create institutions, collaborate as equal partners with the men, when women change the male-dominated structure they can no longer live in and then build a new world. There is a whole world out there that needs to be totally transformed so that women and men can create, desire, build and play (xxiv). Ezeigbo believes that the involvement of women in shaping the society will create a better society. Oluada, top women representatives in Umuga enforce law and order in the community. They placed a sanction on Abazu who attempted to kill Onyekozuru, a member of Oluada and Obuajo. This shows the social relevance of women. They were on the verge of marching to Abazu's compound to sit on him and his household until he reappeared from his hiding place. If after two days he was not seen, Umuda would burn down his compound in retaliation for his attack on Onyekozuru (167). This reinvention of women by Ezeigbo makes them agents of social change and a negation of the stereotyped roles they were given by male authors. Susan Arndt in "Paradigms of Intersexuality" notes that: In a clear rejection of the stereotypical or iconographic presentation of women in the literature of African men, female authors write African women back into history, culture and society. Here one finds active, self-confident women who have ambitions and play a decisive role in shaping social processes. Space is given to women's thoughts and feelings, experiences and perspectives (25). Ezeigbo recreates the modern traditional African woman to resist cultural practices which tends to silence her and make her to acquiesce. Onyekozuru resists the traditional marriage by levirate, she refuses to be inherited by her late husband's relation and basks in her new found freedom which peeves members of her late husband's family. "Some of Umeezo's people were not pleased with my new-found freedom and initiative"(58). Contrary to the African traditional belief that the man should woo a woman, Ezeigbo reinvent Ejimnaka as an iconoclast who rebuffs the popular belief by wooing Obiatu. Ejimnaka is a goal-getter as she tells us that: "Ejimnaka was not one to desire anything and not go in search of it"(32). Political Empowerment Ezeigbo in The Last of the Strong Ones, reinvents the African woman to be politically relevant in the Umuga community. Before now, important decisions that affect the development of the society were made by the men, while those that are related to domestics are considered feminine. Female children are expected to grow up to know how to be care-givers, while male children are socialized into believing that they will grow up to become important decision-makers of their societies. These socialized gender roles, Haste in Sexual Metaphor notes that: "There are a number of universal behaviours, and there are certain necessary functions in any society: child care, fighting, hunting, disposal of waste, care of the elderly, decision- making in the community.... In some cultures, they are gender- linked" (22). But in The Last of the Strong Ones, Ezeigbo reverses the case by reinventing and recreating women who are members of the decision-making body of the community. The recreation of women by Ezeigbo is modelled after precolonial Igbo system where women and men complemented each other. In Gender Issues, Ezeigbo argues that: The Igbo, for instance, operated a type of democratic system in which men and women had equal access to political participation. This type of power distribution and the concept of role differentiation in terms of gender and sex were a feature of Igbo society. Though the society was highly patriarchal, different political and social systems and mechanisms existed for women to exercise and manage their affairs (67 -68). Bhattacharji also notes that "Adimora-Ezeigbo's women come across as vibrant, vocal, politically conscious individuals, with powerful female genealogies, immersed in independent professions"(143). Ezeigbo recreates her women to be politically relevant as they join forces with the men to fight the Kosiri (white colonialists) in a war: "Umuda reviewed the part women were playing in the preparations for war and made plans on their expected role if war broke out"(182). These four Oluadas are stakeholders in the decision-making body of the Umuga community. They make useful contributions on how to drive away the Kosiri (whites) from their community, and their suggestions are implemented. Through Ejimnaka, the female strong-will is highlighted even in the face of confrontation with the colonialist. "It is the men who are afraid, not the women"(20). Ejimnaka also suggests: "let us write a letter to Kosiri and tell him what our people want"(21); and a letter was written, although the letter-writer takes advantage of the Umuga people's ignorance of the white man's language and mis- represents their intentions.
Conclusion
Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones has interrupted and deconstructed the dominant gender stereotype in African (Igbo) society. She achieves this by creating space and freedom for women as it was in precolonial Igbo society. For Ifi Amadiume has argued that Igbo traditional system enjoyed a flexible gender system but that: "This was not the case with the Victorian ideology transported to Igboland by the British Missionaries and educationists. It was from their ideologies that the expression 'woman's place is in the home' was derived" (136). Ezeigbo reinvents the African woman to reflect the traditional precolonial Igbo women who were traditional title holders, griots and husbands to other women, thereby enjoying the status of male gender in that context. These positions Amadiume argue "are indications of formal political power and authority for women, sometimes, based upon the idea of achievement and reward"(140-141). Ezeigbo in advocating for complementarity brings her feminist instinct to bear. Haste argues that the common agenda of feminist theories is "relocating the definition of self-out of a male perspectives into a female perspective. It is a claim for the right to authentic self-definition, wresting both a male conception of female Otherness, and the narrow boundaries of cultural conceptions of female roles" (101). Ezeigbo as a feminist achieves this by reinventing the African to repudiate the conventional traditional woman who is passive, docile and dependent. Rather she recreates woman to be self-assertive, vocal and enterprising who transcend the male conception of female Otherness, and achieves, molds/adapts through her contribution towards the social, political and economic development of the society.
References
Aburdene, Patricia and John Naisbitt. Megatrends for Women. New York: Villard Books. 1992. Aguirre, Adalberto & David Baker. Structured Inequality in the United Critical Discussions on the Continuing Significance of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. New Jersey: Pearson. 2000. Arndt, Susan."Paradigms of Intersexuality: Orature and Writing Back in the Fiction of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo". The Fiction of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo Issues and Perspectives. Ed. Patrick Oloko. Lagos: African Cultural Institute.2008: 17 65. Bhattacharji, Shreya. "Re-writing History/Re-writing Women: Akachi Adomora- Ezeigbo's The Last of the Strong Ones". The Fiction of Akachi Adimora- Ezeigbo: Issues and Perspectives. Ed. Patrick Oloko. Lagos: African Cultural Institute, 2008: 132-151. Davies, Carole. "Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism". Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Ed. Carole Davies and Anne Graves. Trenton: Africa World Press. 1991: 1-23. Willie, W. U. A Syntactico-semantic Analysis of the Ibibio Verbal Class. Eirm, Sunday & Ebele Eko. "New Writing Back and Reimaging of the woman in the Novels of Zaynab Alkali and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo". CALEL: Currents in African Literature and the English Language 2009: 23-32. Ezeigbo, Akachi. Gender Issues in Nigeria: A Feminine Perspective. Lagos: Vista Books. 1996. ------. The Last of the Strong Ones. Lagos: Lantern. 2006. ------. Snail-Sense Feminism: Building on an Indigenous Model. Wealthsmith Books. 2012. Haste, Helen. The Sexual Metaphor. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1993. Okereke, Grace. "African Gender Myths of Vocality and Gender Dialogue in African Literature". Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa. Ed. Mary Kolawole. Lagos: Arrabon, 1998. 133-157. Okoli, Nkechi. "Women Empowerment: A Panacea for Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria". Journal of Gender Studies 2008: 57-65. Uchendu, Egodi. "Woman-Woman Marriage in Igboland". Gender and Sexuality in African Literature and Film. Eds. Ada Azodo and Maureen Eke. Trenton: Africa World Press,2007: 141-154.
The Visionary Relevance of Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow and Helon Habila's Waiting For An Angel
Chinaka C. Mgbojirikwe
Volume 6, 2013
The Visionary Relevance of Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow and Helon Habila's Waiting For An Angel
By: Chinaka C. MgbojirikweEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
Writers in Africa use literature to see into the future of their societies. This paper focuses on Kaine Agary's Yellow- Yellow and Helon Habila's Waiting For An Angel. A close reading of these novels reveals that one of their major preoccupations is to explicate hegemonic tendencies that disintegrate society. Through a critical analysis of the texts under study, this paper exposes the conditions that defame and hold the society down. The Marxist -sociological approach serves as the theoretical framework to interrogate the issues in these texts. The paper aims to show how the authors move the society towards the truth by surmounting inherent hegemonic evils. This, as the authors aptly demonstrate, could be achieved through exposure and resistance.
Keywords
Kaine Agary, Helon Abila, Angel, Yellow, Vision
Introduction
Vision is a practical phenomenon which finds expression in virtually all aspects of human life. It is a comprehensive sense of where you are, where you are going, how you are going to get there and what you will do when you get there. Vision resides in the subconscious mind and not the eyes. It is a creation of visualized idea or ideas that one considers when engaged in any undertaking. These ideas, which are later crafted into the direction the society will be taking, form a kind of picture in the mind of the person or the society waiting to be nurtured into reality. It is thus the key to understanding leadership. Men and women with vision see more and further than others. Vision can be relevant and irrelevant. A vision is irrelevant if it is not suitable in a particular course of action. On the other hand, a vision is relevant if it is focused, specific, clear and suitable to its course or perspective. This type of vision is pivotal to the harmonious survival of any society.
Content
It is therefore considered suitable for the purpose of this paper. In Africa, societies provide a rich context for shaping the imagination of her writers. If the continent is engulfed in visionless leadership, there is no observable dearth of writers and visionaries to drive home its course. In this view, Achebe contends that literature offers kinetic energy necessary for social transformation and change (167). Each phase of the continent's socio-historical evolution spawns its own corpus of writers who exploit the timeless relationship between literature and society and make bold and visionary statements concerning the state of the continent. Through literary texts, writers build formidable intellectual and optimistic resistance at what they see and reflect as an intolerable society. This point to the visionary relevance of writers to achieve certain needs and ends. Joe De Graft explains that: On the surface, these ends are many and varied; but at the deepest psychological level, they are closely related to man's compulsive need and therefore search for sanity and security in a world that theatres annihilation from all directions (3). The high tempered zeal of Kaine Agary and Helon Habila in the texts under study is best vindicated by the above statement. Emenyonu equally opines that "writers must be relevant to the needs and aspirations of their societies..." (v-vi). In being relevant, Ojinnah adds that Agary and Habila have taken up arms on behalf of the people (7) in the societies presented in these texts. Agary and Habila portray societies characterized by frenzy and stubborn hope. The novels fueled by outrage are trenchantly biting interrogation of a cocktail of adversities including the free fall to anarchy. The authors, like in most works of historical fiction, have made use of and synthesized recognizable historical facts and incidents into the fictional fabric. In the beginning of these novels, the authors present air-tight prison-like societies. Lomba, in Habila's Waiting For An Angel is a political detainee moved from one prison apartment to a more obnoxious prison apartment. In Yello-Yellow, the protagonist, Zilayefa, finds the air in her ljaw village suffocating. Thus, she wishes for freedom at all costs: I was open to all sorts of things. The only option I was unwilling to consider, that tormented my quiet moments the most, was to remain in my village (39). Ironically, getting away and becoming free from village entrapment for the bigger world becomes a story of adventure that ends in a misadventure. This could be because Laye was not aware that the entire society has been plunged into a huge barrack. Habila describes the situation like this: Everyday came with new limitations, new prisons (224). A critical reading of these novels would invariably reveal a period, as Habila explains, terrible to be alive especially if you were young, talented, ambitious and patriotic (223). In addition, James, a character in Waiting For An Angel tells Lomba that during this period, people became too busy trying to stay out of the police and army (192). The society becomes where dreams are never realized because something always contrives to turn them into a nightmare (164). The indirect comparison of the characters in the novels with the crab paints a picture of holistic societal retardation: people became like crabs in a basket pulling anyone who tries to stand up (Waiting… 183). Invariably, the land became a land of pygmies and visionless people. There is equally a vehement comment on the mismanagement of resources. For instance, the absence of working refineries which led to incessant fuel scarcity in a society from whose soil crude oil is being lifted. In Yellow-Yellow, Agary describes that: Long queues at petrol stations were a common sight… As petrol prices went-up, bus fares went-up, the price of bread went-up, and school fees went-up, but salaries remained the same (110). This reality is equally exposed by Habila in Waiting For An Angel: Ahead of them is a Texaco filling station, but like all the other filling stations it has no fuel (207). The authors also expose the diverse protracted ethnic and interpersonal clashes inherent in the societies. In Yellow - Yellow, Agary opines that: There was fighting between neighbours, between friends and between communities. Things were such that, with frustration weighing heavily on everyone, even those who prided themselves on being easygoing and having no enemies were dragged into miniwars… which were over property, contracts and even girlfriends (106). The authors seem to be saying that one of the most pernicious consequences of societal evils is the culture of violence that it creates among the people. In Waiting For An Angel, Habila labels the North-South ethnic polarization which reached unprecedented heights (226) as the cause of the clashes. Agary states that: People were convinced that the land's unpredictable leader was deliberately fanning the embers of ethnic conflict to shift focus from himself and his bid to succeed himself in the promised upcoming elections (109). Consequently, dialogue, bargaining, compromise, all essential elements of effective governing style were de-emphasized in these texts. The characters are compelled to submit to senseless commands. In Waiting For An Angel, Habila explains: We lived with guns to our heads (226). He equally captures the monstrous effect of the evil scenario in the image of the recurring dark sun as Brother explains to Lomba: here na so heat full everywhere. Heat and Soja. If the heat no kill you, Soja go harass you (131). In addition, the authors reveal that the visionless leadership in the texts created criminalized economy. Virtually, all segments of the economy are rendered comatose by corruption, shady deals and fraudulent practices. In Yellow-Yellow, Agary notes that: There was so little confidence in the fairness of justice that very few waited for the court's decision. The judges were so corrupt that a simple case would be adjourned over and over again until the litigants and their lawyers got the message and paid some bribe to the judge. Whoever acted quicker received a judgment in their favour (106). Both authors show that selfish and visionless leadership as seen in these texts could legitimize the notion that the essence of political power lies in its use as an instrument for the private plunder of public resources. This is revealed by Agary in Yellow-Yellow: The picture of Admiral's party that came out in the papers and soft-sell magazines showed beautiful, happy faces of people enjoying incredible opulence against the hardship suffered by the majority of the country (122). In this view, Akpuda, in Celebrating God's Own Robot opines that these kinds of leaders are visionless and selfish, and he thus describes them as: Patriarchs of crumbling quarters. Presidents for life. Founding fathers who founded only their own estates (43-44). Agary and Habila also expose the unforgettable trampling upon of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The visionless leadership in the texts silences all forms of opposition. In Yellow-Yellow, Agary explains that: All those who dared complain about the land's leader mysteriously disappeared... one after the other, people who spoke out against the government were jailed, attacked and killed by 'armed robbers' or invited to meetings where they were served poisoned tea (99). In Waiting For An Angel, Habila highlights that: Abacha used plain, old-fashioned terror. There were more official killings, arrests and kidnappings... traditional rulers were deposed, newspapers were shut down and their publishers and editors arrested... the looting of the treasury went on as briskly as ever before (227). The exposure of these forms of evil attests to an honest and vivid representation of a rigid and despotic leadership, which is an indelible index in the society. Meanwhile, through the exposure of these societal ills, the authors call on the people to resist them. In Waiting For An Angel, Joshua sees the society plunged in the midst of these ills as not normal and therefore needs to be salvaged. He comments that: “in a normal country there wouldn’t be a need for revolutions; there wouldn’t be a Poverty Street” (159). Thus, the societies portrayed in the texts are engulfed in class divisions and confrontations between the ruling class and the common masses. On this, Amuta explains clearly that: This intra-class schism between the cultural and the intelligentsia and the political/business arms of the elite has driven most African novelists into open partisanship with the broad masses and direct opposition even confrontation with the political business class. (77). Consequently, using the rejection of Morgan Street for Poverty Street in Waiting For An Angel, Habila is able to envisage a holistic resistance and overhaul of the entire society. The people opt for Poverty Street because according to them: We don’t know who Morgan is or was some colonial administrator, perhaps, a reminder of our hopeless, subjected state. No, that name is too grand for us. We are poor, neglected people. If we were to choose a name for ourselves, we’d choose a plain and simple one, something that reflects our reality (171). The people opted for Poverty Street because they do know what poverty is (171). It is a realistic reflection of their existence. While Habila records a collective resistance, Agary on the other hand records a personal rebirth of the protagonist, Laye, which is synonymous to the collective resistance and rebirth of the society. Laye thus comments: However, if I lived, it was an opportunity for a personal rebirth along with Nigeria … I would focus only on completing my education and making my mother, Sisi and Lolo proud of me (177). Prior to this rebirth, Laye is portrayed as an existentialist outcast and a personification of the plight of the individual immoralist in an atmosphere of moral and spiritual decadence. The death of the Head of State in these novels parallels the breakdown of a monstrous empire. It also brings with it new hopes and surmounting of the hitherto lawless and visionless society. According to Agary: What was indisputable was the excitement in the air. People breathed as they had not breathed in a long time. They talked about tomorrow as if they really believed in it, as though magically all the problems in their lives would be fixed tomorrow (176).
Conclusion
The implication of this is that the authors' vision for their societies is relevant because through the meticulous manipulation of words, the broken soul of the society is healed. Hope Eghaga observes that: Some words heal the broken soul, mend the potholes which their policies have inflicted on the land. Some words testify against them, the apes in power (7). In conclusion, Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow and Helon Habila's Waiting For An Angel highlights socio-political issues, make sympathetic and humanitarian statements on the plight of the traumatized, alienated and broken. This situation is brought about by either violence or the parasitic relationship that exists in a strict social stratification. Through visions of exposure and resistance, the authors see that wars would definitely end if people share and love. This is why the authors advocate revolution to end an unfair social and economic order. In a language that is simple, though spiced with imagery, Kaine Agary and Helon Habila bring out their unique visions of life in a new and egalitarian world order where peace and love prevail.
References
Achebe, Chinua. “What Has Literature Got to Do with it?” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Agary, Kaine. Yellow-Yellow. Lagos: Dialkshop, 2006. Akpuda, Annanze. Celebrating God’s Own Robot. Nigeria: Whyten, 2003. Amuta, Chidi. Towards A Sociology of African Literature: Oguta: Zim Pan, 1986. De, Graft Joe. “Roots in African Drama and Theatre” African Literature Today No. 8 Ed. Eldred Durosini Jones.Ibadan: Heinemann, 1976: 1 -25. Eghagha, Hope. Rhythm of the Last Testament. Lagos: Concept, 2002. Emenyonu, Ernest. Literature and National Consciousness. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1989. Habila, Helon. Waiting For An Angel. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Ojinmah, Umelo. “Issues in African Literature: Today and Tomorrow” Lead Paper Presented at the Ernest Emenyonu International Conference on African Literature Organized by ANA, Inno State. Opening Ceremony Programmes. 4th7th4th7th August, 2010:5-11.
Terrorism and the New Imperialists: An Analysis of Meja Mwangi's The Bushtrackers
S. I. Akhuemokhan
Volume 4, 2006
Terrorism and the New Imperialists: An Analysis of Meja Mwangi's The Bushtrackers
By: S. I. AkhuemokhanEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
The critic, Eustace Palmer, divides literary tradition in Africa into two streams, in regard to the novel. He claims that the first stream is pioneered by Chinua Achebe and has its preoccupation with African rural life, while the second stream is pioneered by Cyprian Ekwensi and its concern is with life in the urban areas. In this second stream exists a "second generation" writer from Kenya, Meja Mwangi, who follows in the footsteps of Ekwensi in his depiction of the moral, economic and political circumstances peculiar to life in the metropolis. This essay attempts to analyse one of Mwangi's less celebrated novels, The Bushtrackers, in order to ascertain the author's opinion on terrorist activity in contemporary Africa. Two of Mwangi's former works, Carcass for Hounds and A Taste of Death, are known for their bias in favour of terrorism during the colonial period, but The Bushtrackers is exceptional in that its statement is relevant to the 21st century. Through analogy, the novel demonstrates that imperialism is still alive, albeit in a different guise, and that as such violent counter-reactions by the "colonized" cannot be ruled out. Notwithstanding, it concludes that the effective solution to this new imperialism is not necessarily in lynching the foreigner, but in Africa's willingness to face squarely its own social and political failings.
Keywords
Terrorism, Neo-imperialism, African literature, Meja Mwangi, Postcolonial criticism
Introduction
A lucid and impartial definition of terrorism is supplied by the sociologists. Calhoun el at in their book, Sociology. According to Calhoun and his team, terrorism is simply "the spread of terror" (429). Most other definitions are less objective, depending on whether those defining the term are sympathetic or unsympathetic towards this controversial method of social reform. For instance, Calhoun et al themselves provide an alternative definition which implies sympathy: "[Terrorism] is a form of social action... a response to social-structured conditions, such as those that exist when people who consider themselves a national group lack a state to represent them" (429). In contrast, the definition given in The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics underscores the frequent antagonism that terrorism inspires: "[The term is] almost invariably used in a pejorative sense to describe life-threatening actions perpetrated by politically-motivated self-appointed sub-state groups" (492). Whether one prefers Calhoun's definition or the definition of the Oxford researchers, it is evident that terrorist activity is more than just violence. It is a calculated political strategy with a calculated target. More pertinently, it has become an inescapable part of life in the twenty-first century: the Madrid Conference on Terrorism held two months ago, marking the first anniversary of the train bombings in the Spanish capital and an attended by two dozen prime ministers, and heads of state from across the globe, established this fact beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, the conference x-rayed a critical element in the discussion on terrorism, which is the problem of banning terrorism and at the same time upholding human rights. As Calhoun has discerned, some forms of terrorism are occasioned by social oppression.
Content
Like all other nations, Africa has not been exempted from terrorism, and it is therefore no surprise that the African novelist, the "teacher" (Achebe, qtd in Ojinnah 4), has something to say about it. This essay concentrates on the thoughts of a single Kenyan, Meja Mwangi - in his novel The Bushtrackers (TB). The Bushtrackers features a hero who turns terrorist and concludes with an implicit vindication of his tactics. Such vindications are not uncommon to Mwangi. His first two novels Carcase for Hounds and A Taste of Death, were tributes to the Mau Mau uprisings. Such vindications are not even uncommon to African writers. A case in point is a fellow Kenyan, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, who is probably the best-known pro-terrorist novelist in sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, Wole Soyinka joined the camp, judging from his posture in his second novel, Season of Anomy, and his latest autobiography, Ibadan. Consequently, The Bushtrackers cannot claim to be alone in its terrorist inclinations. Notwithstanding, no other novel readily comes to mind that treats with such subtlety and humour an issue that is, in effect, tragic. And in the process, no other novel touches so curiously on another inescapable reality of the twenty-first century, which is the noiseless but continued management of the African nations (and the coloured nations as a whole) by Europe and America. With wit and candour, Mwangi presents the two sides of terrorism - the politically motivated life-threatening action as well as the response to social-structured conditions by people who feel they lack adequate representation - and in so doing he alights on the very crisis between violence and human rights, which is at the heart of the debate on terrorism today. Meja Mwangi has, with justification been described as "one of the most exciting of [the] new East African writers" (Palmer 105). He has attracted much critical attention on account of his earlier works, Kill Me Quick and Going Down River Road, but reviewers have remained comparatively reticent on The Bushtrackers. For example, the above-mentioned Palmer has produced some scholarly work on Mwangi's first set of publications but apparently never proceeded to write on The Bushtrackers. In a general critique on Mwangi, Palmer notes a trait that follows the author into later life; namely, that "the analysis of the social realities in the new African urban aggregates... is one of [his] major preoccupations" (105). Palmer thereby sites Mwangi among African writers with an urban rather than a rural focus. Palmer notes further the most striking characteristic, perhaps, of Mwangi's art, which is his "touching compassion for the social or political underdog, a quietness of tone which emphasizes rather than obscures the very serious problems being analysed" (105). Elizabeth Knight is among the few reviewers to specifically discuss The Bushtrackers. In line with Palmer, she begins her discussion with a favourable assessment of Mwangi's position in relation to his colleagues: "With his distinctive prose style he is easily the most outstanding writer in English in Kenya today" (156). Part of his distinction she attributes to his ability to write satisfactorily for both students of literature and casual readers. She takes The Bushtrackers as an object lesson, remarking that it is "a venture into popular fiction" (156) and so violates some of the expectations of language and plot that govern the regular approved school text. Irrespective of this Knight claims that it "works very well, making Meja Mwangi one of the very few East African writers who can write successfully for the English-reading popular market" (156). It could be the novel's nonconformist status as a work of popular fiction that has led to its neglect by the critics. Despite the fact that it was written some years back and treats issues of international concern, nothing has so far been documented on its exposition of either terrorist activity or oblique Western control of the third world. The work may be imaginary but it contains its own truths. The aim of this essay is therefore to examine terrorism in The Bushtrackers, first by looking at the socially-structured conditions that foster it and second by looking at it as a form of response, in order to uncover Mwangi's statement on the role of violent political operations in modern Africa and the new imperialism. SOCIALLY-STRUCTURED CONDITIONS In the opening pages of the novel, the author makes it plain that his chosen society is not restricted to that of the orthodox, unassuming Kenyan citizen. It incorporates the Kenyan bandit, and the reader is plunged headlong into intrigues over the shipment of Indian hemp and deadly battles between accomplished criminals and government's struggling security forces. A number of characters immediately register their presence in the drama. The first is Al Haji, the international smuggler and drug baron who directs a multi-million-dollar poaching organization. He is aided and abetted by an impressive company of gunmen, including the Italian cop-killer, Ricardo, and a local thug known as Kuria. Valiantly resisting these bandits is the long arm of the law, represented chiefly by a modest two-man partnership of forest-rangers, popularly known as "bushtrackers". One bushtracker, John Kimathi, is a black man, and the other Frank Burkell is his white friend. The conflict in the narrative is generated by these two unequally-matched groups ... Al Haji with his American sponsorship and criminal authority, and the two inauspicious bushtrackers. Mwangi turns Al Haji's aggression into an analogy for the intrusion of a global superpower into the affairs of a young under-developed state, and as he shows, the violence of the latter is no more than a response. A peculiarity that quickly emerges about the social structure in the novel is its influential foreign sector. This sector comprises white settlers who are hardly mentioned apart from the humble Frank - and hundreds of tourists who flock into the land annually, providing Kenya with its main source of revenue. More than anything else, however, the foreign influence is summed up in the person of one individual, Al Haji, a complex man indeed. He is an African-American who, after multiple changes of identity, finally naturalized as a Kenyan citizen. He is a metaphor for Western infiltration at its most cunning. He is "a ruthless bastard" (BT 149), in the words of an embittered acquaintance. In a nutshell Al Haji is an outlaw, and his life of felony did not begin in Nairobi. In New York, six years prior to the happenings in the novel, he was the object of a man-hunt and managed to escape from the States "only half an hour ahead of the FBI agents who wanted him in connection with several offences" (7). Landing on Africa's shores, he traversed the peninsula by air, land and river, eventually terminating in Nairobi after months of tortuous journeying. His "homecoming" became immortalized in his name; Mwangi describes the entire ordeal in this amusing fashion: "After months of numerous hardships in the various African climates, he had arrived in Nairobi, thin and foot-weary. In memory of his pain-filled pilgrimage through the cruel motherland, he had changed his name to Al Haji, meaning 'The Pilgrim' in Swahili" (58). Thus, it is established from the outset that Al Haji is a stranger. A second peculiarity of the society which emerges in the novel is the impact of foreign currency upon the settlers and indigenes. They have an undue reverence for dollars and pounds sterling, it seems, which makes smooth Al Haji's operations. When Al Haji initially arrives Nairobi, he links up with the resident crooks, but he lives in obscurity, relatively speaking, until his old mentors in the States come to his rescue. They are an Italian Mafia family known as the Delories, and their funds provide Al Haji with the coverage he needs to appear respectable while quietly working in their joint interests. The Delories purchase a six-hundred-acre plot of land and build Al Haji a ten-bedroom mansion, complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool, a golf course, an orange plantation and two trout streams. From this sanctuary he runs an import-export business which is generally conceded to be shady, even though nobody seems to care on the home front. A section of Nairobi's European community, for example is said to "[know] Al Haji well, and... to have had some dubious dealings with him at one time or another" (149). The African community equally knows him. Aside from the "high-ranking government officials and business associates" (7) that he entertains at his residence, Orange Estate, his regular guests are "corrupt customs officers, law enforcement agents and quite a few members of parliament" (8). This is Mwangi's inaugural remark on contemporary African society. Before the first few chapters close, the reader has become conversant with Al Haji's duties as the official representative in East Africa of the Delorie "empire" (9). His number one assignment is poaching, and in consequence he remorselessly depletes the game reserves. Al Haji's dealings should not be underestimated; he is an extortioner who has his finger on the nation's financial pulse. In one brief but vivid scene, the reader is presented with a picture of an elephant that has fallen prey to his men. The sophisticated machine guns the men used are from Al Haji's personal stock, and the scene says all that needs to be said both about the ex-fugitive's attitude to his adopted country and the treachery of certain African indigenes: The elephant, a healthy forty-year old cow, had been shot neatly through the heart with a high-powered rifle and her tusks cruelly dug out of her puzzled face with sharp axes. There was no blood except around the bloody stumps left on the sides of the cow's mouth. [Kimathi and Frank] stood silently and looked at the carcass, weighed down by the sense of utter hopelessness that accompanied such sights.... "She was pregnant," Kimathi said, going round the huge carcass. (84) It is difficult to estimate the full extent of the damage done by Al Haji. He reduces elephants to ivory for the Chinese, leopards and tigers to skins for clothing European ladies, and the grassland to "special African marijuana" (155) for eager New Yorkers. The novel records that many bushtrackers die in combat with his men. Much later in the novel, his Italian aide, Ricardo, carelessly burns down thousands of hectares of parkland in his attempt to wipe out an anti-poaching squad. While stressing Al Haji's misdeeds, the author wants the reader to be conscious of the fact that this character is not working in isolation. He is the ambassador of an empire. In this event it is the Delorie empire, but it follows the precedence set by other empires all the same. The areas of control stretch across Africa and Asia, and a principal objective is the flow of materials out of Africa and into the nation of the imperial parent or beyond. Since the "parents" involved here are criminals, their traffic is approximately criminal: "Marijuana... ivory... diamonds smuggled from Tanzania...stolen cars... smuggled textiles... illegal firearms and, especially in Nairobi where corruption was a way of life... crooked property speculations" (58). It is imperialism in a new dimension. The reader can better appreciate the situation by deliberating on a comment made by the protagonist of a novel by Peter Abrahams. The novel is entitled The View from Coyaba and the protagonist's name is 'David. His comment is with respect to a new mode of colonialism that has become the trend in the latter half of the twentieth century. David argues that this is "the age... not of direct conquest, but of what they [call] covert operations, and destabilization and disinformation; the true hand, now, [is] hidden" (The View from Coyaba 321). In other words, the contemporary era is that of the hidden conqueror: the discreet powers behind "undemocratic institutions"; e.g. the World Bank, the UN and the IMF, according to another African novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah (Osiris Rising 117). A literary critic, Udenta Udenta, alludes to these powers as the forces of "re-colonization". Udenta explains it as follows: "Re-colonization is a process whereby the erstwhile colonial powers... decide to cement and make permanent the structures and institutions through which colonialism was successful in the first place" (163). The instruments of the re-colonizer he lists as "high finance capital" and "heightened foreign participation" in economic enterprises - - in a word; money. Obviously, the mechanism of re-colonization allows for the silent persistence of First World domination, which is the reality being parodied in The Bushtrackers. In the narrative, in line with the actual trend at present, a profoundly crafty game of politics is being played, with the Delories pulling the strings of power from distant America. In the interim their man in Africa decides to pull a few strings of his own. This leads us to the last detail to note about the social structure of the novel, which is that the terrorism starts from the summit. In fact a considerable degree of the overall confusion in Kenya is spearheaded by power-brokers outside its borders. Illustrative of this are the deadly skirmishes in the game reserves, which are the direct result of the Mafia's meddling. Again, Al Haji's "taxation", to be reviewed in the ensuing sub-section, is the definitive example of "politically-motivated life threatening action", and sparks off an unprecedented outbreak of violence in Nairobi metropolis. TERRORIST RESPONSE In the opening paragraph of this essay, among other things terrorism was defined as "a response" to given conditions by people who "lack a state to represent them". This is a synopsis of Kimathi's plight when he is eventually faced with Al Haji's taxation. Al Haji and his gangsters are transparently oppressive. Regardless of this, government is reluctant to screen one of the country's top personages; the police is incompetent to check him and the law courts are poised to defend him. He enjoys a sort of "diplomatic immunity" emanating from the combined moral laxity of the native authorities and the bulk of the populace. Tension mounts as the criminal power-play gathers momentum. Al Haji wants to expand his coasts, and this demands huge amounts of money. Accordingly, once he discerns that Nairobi is conducive for corrupt practices, he organizes a protection racket to "tax" its small-scale businessmen. Kuria, alias "Scarface", is the leader of the gang commissioned to extort money from the shop-keepers, originally on a monthly basis but invariably on a weekly basis. The rationale for the collection, ironically, is protection from hoodlums. The racketeers move by night, in a small group and armed with daggers and pistols. Their manner of extraction includes beatings, maiming, raids and arson and later on rape and murder. In the passage coming shortly, the racketeers stop by at the shop of Uncle Eater, Kimathi's only surviving relative. Kimathi has recently married and retired from bushtracking, and it is his first experience of the tax. The passage is relevant not only because it lays open Al Haji's business methods but also because it exemplifies the typical rhetoric of popular fiction: [Kimathi] turned to Scarface. 'Who are you?' 'We provide services,' the man answered. 'What sort of services?' Kimathi asked, when no more information was forthcoming. Scarface smiled patiently. 'You mean...' Kimathi couldn't get the words out of his mouth. 'You guys have got a protection racket going?' 'This is a rough neighbourhood,' the man said, glancing from Uncle Eater back to Kimathi. "But no strong words, please. We prefer to call it a tax. People pay taxes to the government for education, health, roads. Why not for something more practical like personal security? Tax, not racket, mind you'. 'Tax, you son of a bitch?' Kimathi pushed forward and came face to face with a second automatic held by one of the henchmen. 'Relax,' the man said quietly. (100) Kimathi pays up, like everybody else but it does not forestall the menace. The Kenyan authorities turn a blind eye, and in the interim - Scarface and his crew grow progressively more arrogant. One ill-fated day they visit Uncle Eater's shop in Kimathi's absence, rape Kimathi's pregnant wife, Sofia, and bludgeon his uncle on the head. Neither Sofia nor Uncle Eater survive the attack. Kimathi is left with nothing except the box of tools he used as a forest-ranger: "The trunk containing his war booty... [a] collection of hunting knives, clubs, bows and arrows" (BT 185). Frank adds a couple of AKS rifles and some magazines and the two-man team of old is ready for vengeance. By the time Kimathi manages to rouse himself for action, the author makes a telling allegation. He says: "The time for caution was long gone" (185); the implication being that Kimathi waited too long before reacting. Both Kimathi and Frank are champion game-rangers and crack marksmen. The tactics they employ for Al Haji are purely an extension of the tactics they used in the bush, and had they been used much earlier, Al Haji's game would have been stopped mid-track. As things turn out, it is when the disaster is complete that Kimathi makes a move. Dressed in his abandoned ranger's uniform, with a bow in his hand and a quiver of poisoned arrows slung across his shoulder, he proceeds towards the haunt of the racketeers and, guerilla fashion, conceals himself in a darkened doorway. When the gang arrives it takes only one of his poisoned arrows to reverse the direction of the spread of terror. Kuria and his men, who minutes before were confidently raking in cash, "never [having] to wait for more than a minute" to collect (186), fire two wild shots into the air and fly before Kimathi like frightened chickens. They are adept with fire-arms but unprepared for such archaic weaponry. In panic they retreat to Kuria's flat where the real terror begins: The arrow he had used was charged with a mixture of snake poison and potent roots of some wild killif shrubs. Shortly after their arrival at Kuria's flat, as they were deciding to call a doctor to extract the arrow stuck in [their comrade's] back, the victim went into violent convulsions. His eyes dilated. He started to swell and his skin turned green all over. They watched in horror as he gnashed his teeth, chewed his own tongue and foamed at the mouth, exuding a mixture of froth and blood. His hands dug into the floor till the finger-nails broke and bled. He thrashed on the floor like a dying crocodile and in three minutes he was dead. For the next ten minutes, Kuria and his men sat and watched the grotesque figure on the floor, too terrified to move or talk (187). Al Haji miscalculates in that he stubbornly sends his men out again the next night. The outing finishes with the two vigilantes, Frank and Kimathi, waylaying the men and forcing an entrance into Al Haji's sitting room. In the encounter, Al Haji, Ricardo and Kuria are killed. It is almost too easy. As soon as the decision is made to react with violence the enemy is defeated within hours. Of course, Mwangi is not presuming that terrorist activity is always so straightforward. The idea underlying the novel is that certain conditions may make it unavoidable and that when it is availed of, it has its own advantages. This is not an extraordinary notion. It was publicized several years ago" by the radical psychologist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, in his renowned expose on imperialism in Algeria, The Wretched of the Earth. It was re-echoed by the South African literary critic, Lewis Nkosi, in his book on imperialism in his homeland, The Translated Heart. Fanon and Nkosi are two voices among a multitude that advocate drastic measures to a foreign menace. Nkosi, for instance, insists that where there is no parity between assailants, as it was with the blacks and whites in South Africa, or in Mwangi's case the rangers and their American-backed antagonists, the victory .of the weaker party lies in "revolutionary terrorism" and "in-fighting in the nooks and crevices" (56). The fictional David clinches the matter when he reminds his audience that there can be no clear-cut battlefield in a liberation struggle: "The frontline is everywhere and nowhere" (The View from Coyaba, 295). In effect, one of the truths that emerges from the novel is of prime concern in the real world at present, which is that terrorism may be a step towards safeguarding human rights rather than a threat to the same. There are instances where violent politics is plainly illegal, as with Al Haji's unorthodox collections. Accordingly, the NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, avowed in Spain: "I know for sure that when trains are being blown up in Madrid, when twin towers are demolished (in New York)... I have no hesitation to define what that is. That is terrorism" (qtd in Kirka). But the matter is not always so unambiguous, as the world well knows. "The issue has long been delicate," Kirka concedes, "because governments often use violence to accomplish goals - leading to charges of 'state terrorism' - and because one group's 'freedom fighter' or 'martyr' is another's 'terrorist'".
Conclusion
The novel cannot be said to have a happy ending, and this is the first conclusion that can be drawn from the author's exposition of terrorism. At best, it is a necessary evil. The casualties are many and the international kingpins emerge unscathed. Kimathi and Frank get rid of Al Haji and drive off (innocently) with a suitcase of money, but it is small compensation for the human losses and, more importantly, it has next to no effect on the offenders tucked safely away in the United States. In the age of indirect conquest and "covert operations", as David phrases it, eliminating the available culprits can bring but temporary relief. Be that as it may, these are not the gravest problems that the novel raises. The worrying factor is that the Kenyan community remains at the end of the day as it was at the beginning, decadent and dollar-intoxicated, and there is nothing to indicate that it will repent. This means, in turn, that the framework for re-colonization is left in place. Corruption is the people's lifestyle, Mwangi confesses. As long as this situation is unaltered, there are good chances that the Orange Estates on this continent, whether inside or outside the African novel, will continually be staffed by fresh delegations of Al Hajis.
References
Abrahams, Peter. The View From Coyaba. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Armah, Avi Kwei. Osiris Rising. Popenguine: Per Ankh, 1995. Calhoun, Craig, Delia Light and S. Keller. Sociology. New York: McGraw Hill, 1994. Kirka, Danica. "Terrorism: The Next Frantier." MMV The Associated Press. 11 March 2005. Madrid, Spain: 23 Apr. 2005.http://www.ebsnews.com/stories/2005/0... Knight, Elizabeth. "Mirror of Reality: The Novels of Meja Mwagi." African Literature Today. 14 (1983): 146-157. McLean, Iain. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996. Mwangi, Meja. The Bushtrackers. Nairobi: Longman, 1979. Nkosi, Lewis. The Transplanted Heart: Essays on South Africa. Benin: Ethiope, 1975. Ojinnah, Umelo. Chimua Achebe: New Perspectives. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991. Palmer, Eustace. "Two Views of Urban Life: Meja Mwangi Going Down River Road, Nuruddin Farah A Naked Needle". African Literature Today. 9 (1978): 104-108. Udenta, Udenta. Ideological Sanction and Social Action in African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1994.
Millennial Battle: Ogaga Ifowodo and the Emergence of the Third Generation Modern Nigerian Poets
Thomas Inyabri
Volume 4, 2006
Millennial Battle: Ogaga Ifowodo and the Emergence of the Third Generation Modern Nigerian Poets
By: Thomas InyabriEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
The challenges of the 21st century on African literature are very palpable. An appreciation of the dynamics of modern Nigerian poetry into the millennium reveals a facet of these challenges. This paper studies these dynamics and the peculiar circumstances within which the third generation of modern Nigerian poets emerged. Focusing on Ogaga Ifowodo and his poetry, the paper is particularly concerned with the ways in which these young poets have grappled with their incarnation and their tussle to define themselves within the tradition of modern Nigerian poetry.
Keywords
Poetry, Language Policy, National Integration, Lingua Franca, Nativisation, Poet
Introduction
POETIC BEGINNINGS IN MODERN NIGERIAN POETRY As Harold Bloom (1973) would tell us, poetry has become more “subjective” in postmodern times. In this sense therefore it has continued to be more egoistic. developing in a state of mental and [creative] tension (Inyabri 1). Many critics have corroborated these assertions. Tracing the origin of modern African poetry, J. P. Clark (-Bekederemo) has come out with a classical model that could be relevant to us. For Clark (1970), the origins of modern African poetry can be located in the complex endeavour by the colonized African to appreciate, simulate and perhaps surmount the linguistic codes of the colonial master.
Content
Using the fictive relationship that exists between Shakespeare's legendary characters, Prospero and Caliban, Clark thinks that Caliban and the African writer have a common problem (1). This problem is not really what they both lost to their imperial lords, but what they gained, namely the legacy of language (2). Language becomes an ambiguous legacy for these 'benefactors' as they can use it to articulate their mind, at the same time it is a burden to manage. As a form of language therefore, modern African poetry originated within that tension inherent in utilizing this colonial language and extricating the poet from its domineering images. Addressing what he calls “The Communication Line between Poet and Public” (sic) Clark further elucidates this point. There he opines that the emergence of modern African poetry can be traced to the education of its poets (61). This education dwells predominantly on their models, the Anglo-modernist poets. It is thus not farfetched that this learning gave rise to the first generation of poets in Africa who more importantly, simulated and attempted to live above those domineering images. For the first generation of modern Nigerian poets, the attempts at living above these dominant Anglo-modernist images, betrays itself in the utilization of indigenous folk traditions and experiences of their time. This way they hoped to carve out their own identities. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T. S. Eliot contends with the implications of cultural history, tradition and the individual talent. He sees the talent of the individual as a phenomenon within the wider context of tradition. Engaging “the mind of Europe”, Eliot argues that “every nation, every race, has not only its own creative but also its own critical turn of mind” (71). He went further to contend that the best works of great poets are those, which “… the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immorality most vigorously” (71). For this study, Eliot’s theory has a lot of implications for the continuum of modern Nigerian poetry into the millennium. Our theoretical posture is also predicated on the Bloomian paradigm of reading the origin of Anglo-American poetry. He (Bloom) holds that “ephebe or beginning poets” establish their identities in a subtle combination of anxiety and influence. Albeit its intricate mythography, this theory simply means that poets gain prominence through the influence of their “precursor poets”. This poetic influence for Bloom is not just a simple phenomenon. It is what he calls “influenza, … an astral disease” (95). Poetic influence thus articulated becomes a two-edged sword, beneficial on the one hand and destructive on the other. It is destructive because an “ephebe” could be drowned by the gigantic image of his poetic fathers, whom Bloom continually refers to as “covering cherub” and “sphinx”. On the other hand, it is beneficial because it creates an impulse of creative anxiety in the “strong poet” one who has the potential to be prominent. This anxiety fires the creativity of the strong poet to establish his own identity, hence, his own fame. This influence, and consequently the anxiety are betrayed in an interesting act of “intellectual revisionism” (29). In itself, revisionism is a “creative correction” (29) of the works of the precursors. It is important to note that this act of revisionism has been identified by Bloom as the hallmark of modern poetry. This strain of intellectual revisionism makes the “strong poet” deviate from the paths of his poetic father(s), insisting that they had got it wrong at that point of his deviation. This is a phenomenon, which Bloom topically terms “kenosis” (77). At kenosis therefore, the strong poet carves a niche for himself. Thus, he gives birth to himself. But all this is a paradox. For in giving birth to himself his precursors live on (within the ambience of his works). This is what has been mythically described as “Apophrades” “the return of the dead” (60). “Aphophrades” therefore, is the same thing as Eliot’s present-ness of the past. In this regard, it goes without emphasis that there is a father and son relationship in the poetry of some cultures. Following Fruedian psychoanalysis, Bloom further sees an Oedipus complex governing the relationship between the muse, the precursor and the strong poet. The muse is the mother image to which the strong poet treats with filial jealousy. He sees the precursor as a father, a rival from whom he (the strong poet) must wrestle his freedom. In that way he possesses the muse (his mother) and becomes his own man the son of his father (63). To this study, it is this complex that has brought Nigerian poetry through to the 21st century. As it would soon be shown, a certain psychology of rivalry intellectual and creative characterizes modern Nigerian poetry. This rivalry is in any case healthy. It is the force that has continued to sustain productivity in the genre. THE EMERGENCE OF THE THIRD GENERATION OF MODERN NIGERIAN POETS Izevbaye (1995) and Adesanmi (2002) have suggested that there are three generations of poets that have evolved in “modern” Nigeria. This classification though, only stands to serve the purpose of studying Nigerian poetry within that scope. This point has to be underscored because poets like Okara, Clark (-Bekederemo) and Soyinka of the first generation, and Osundare, Ojaide and Chinweizu of the second generation are still vibrant in contemporary Nigerian poetry. Today we have a new generation of young poets that make up the third generation. This generation of poets has been described in various manners. Adesanmi records that the British critic, Jane Bryce refers to them “as producers of “the third text” in Nigerian writing. Niyi Osundare and Odia Ofeimun have referred to them as the “CNN generation of Nigerian writers” and “the clap-trap generation of writers” respectively (17). Although some of these young poets are yet to gain international recognition, others have attained national and international acclaim. Amongst this multiplicity of voices we have Ogaga Howodo, Akeem Lasisi, Maik Nwosu, E. C. Osondu, Angela Agali, Remi Raji, Toyin Adewale (-Gabriel), Chiedu Ezeana and Joe Ushie etc. A study of these three generations of Nigerian poets reveals influences from a preceding generation. In some cases there is a conscious effort at disrupting the poetics of the precursor(s). This was the sentiment coupled with the drive to explore modes of expressions more germane to contemporary issues that saw the birth of the second generation of modern Nigerian poets. These poets and their critics thought that their precursors (Okara, Clark (-Bekederemo), Soyinka, Echerou, Okigbo, etc) were enjoying an exaggerated attention. They went ahead to indict some of the critics of that generation for ‘mid-wifing’ this inflated ego. It is in this regard that Chinwiezu et al. (1980) saw the first generation of modern Nigerian poets as “aping” Anglo-modernist poets. Furthermore they hold that much of African poetry lost its traditional flavour in the creativity of these poets. Chinweizu and his co-critics thought that this adoption of Euro-modernist poetics was indiscriminate. Hence, it becomes a destructive web in itself: An alien technique, based on an alien sensitivity that is rather too formalist ambiguity for ambiguity's sake, sprung rhythm for sprung rhythm's sake, etc obscure them as they try to present or explore thoughts that are rooted in the traditional African setting (183). Thus, it is the impulse to embattle this "willful obscurity", privatism, abstractness and many other Eurocentric nuances that characterized the rise of the second generation. This generation was particularly put off by the mystification implicit in the myth-based texts of the first generation. Soyinka's "Idanre ..." and Okigbo's "Labyrinth ..." are two examples of these texts. It is important to mention that, the psychology to embattle their forebears does not just arise as a remote creative impulse. The radical movement of the mid 70's and early 80's also fed this spirit. This radical factor is quite obvious in the early poetry of Ojaide, Osundare, Ofeimun, Bayo Ogunjimi and Chimweizu. Some of their titles further underscore this posture: Children of Iroko (1973), The Poet Lied (1980) and Songs of the Market Place (1983). Although many critics have shown that the sentiments of the second-generation backfires on them, a phenomenon which Bloom refers to as "misprison". However, our attention is not so much on it as it is on that spirit of embattlement. An appreciation of the evolution and emergence of the third generation would also reveal the same battle by strong poets to establish them-selves. In the case of the third generation, it seems that all the odds were up against their incarnation. Hence their undying spirit to be born. To appreciate the embattlement and birth of the third generation, it would be necessary to engage briefly, the socio-political and economic space within which they emerged. This would throw more light on the kind of poetry they wrote. As it was for the second generation, the historical dynamics of Nigeria conditions the emergence of the third generation. For the second generation the schism of the civil war and its consequences go a long way to fuel their revolutionary spirit. However, for Ifowodo and his generation, it is the repercussions of the post-civil war years that are more impressionable than the war itself. Post-war Nigeria plummeted steadily into a polity of cultural, moral and socio-economic degeneration. Macebuh (2002) opines that by the mid-80's the best of the first and second generation had already been seen. The sour state of the polity had forced that cream of Nigerian scholars (from Achebe, Echerou, to Jeyifo and Iyayi) into exile. By the late 1980's through the 90's, dictatorship had been fully enthroned, the pursuit of educational excellence had been abandoned and the economy left in shambles. In this situation they was a psyche of desperation and moral decay. This is not far-fetched as all that was left of indigenous values were ruptured. Materialism, betrayed by the inordinate pursuit for wealth held way. As this writer notes somewhere else, this again “is an absurd reaction to the myriads of materials and [mental] poverty in the country” (50). These circumstances have a deep impression on the third generation, who began to have a mind at the time. They became the progenies of this depravity, having a heritage of “deprivation”. Macebuh again defines this generation succinctly. Using the Igbo youths as a paradigm he referred to them as: “… these illustrious children … these anger-ridden, money-driven avengers of a collective grievance …” (14). For him they are “the authentic children of the war and all its dislocations” (13). In the enterprise of their art therefore, these young Nigerian poets lacked the critical heritage that was vibrant in the country before and immediately after the war. During the mid-80's when their poetry was emerging the serious critical insights that would have nurtured their sensibility were in exile. Thus, as Oditta (2001) writes, the journalist became the ultimate critic for his generation. For Macebuh this situation was unfortunate because: Such out pouring inevitably lacked the discipline of systematic study and research for it is simply impossible to derive from the hastily and merely provisional offerings of the newsroom or editorial office any lasting interpretation either of social history or of social doctrine (4). With this unfortunate reality Ifowodo's generation was faced with the woe of an impending non-recognition. Moreso, major criticisms from abroad were silent on them. Available ones thought that the generation would not be able to sustain the seasoned creativity established by the first generation (Nwosu 1999 and Adesanmi, 123-4). However, these young poets have converted these stereotypes into productive anxieties. As it would soon be shown, this generation has stamped its presence in modern Nigerian poetry. Nwosu believes that, as the 21st century unfolds this generation would be the true inheritors of the millennium. It is in this conviction that he dismissed all the stereotypes against his generation as “clear cases of fixation” (36). In an introduction to Voices from the Fringe, Harry Garuba extends the battle on the side of the third generation, when he says “literature like land, is not a birth-right” (XV). In these words, he echoes Bloom, who says, “Poetry is property as politics is property” (78). This metaphorization of the art leaves it to be possessed by any formidable generation. Hence, it is in this spirit that we present the new voices of Nigerian poets, true voices of the 21st century. OGAGA IFOWODO'S POETRY AND THE DEFINITION OF THE THIRD GENERATION MODERN NIGERIAN POETS As a poet who was born in 1966, Ifowodo suits that definition by Macebuh as a true child "of the war and all its dislocations". He was not only born into the war, but has also lived within the vagaries of the nation's history. He has experienced all the despotism of this country and was locked up in 19997 by the Abacha's regime for his activism. He won the Association of Nigerian Author's (ANA) prize for poetry in 1993; and was the recipient of the Barbara Freedom Goldsmith Freedom to-write Award in 1998. These are amongst many other international literary honours. It must be for the above laurels that Adesanmi refers to him as one of the "shining lights" of his generation. Ifowodo's poetry is an outstanding representation of the poetics of his generation. In them he has truly captured the socio-political realism of his era. This study will draw references from his two collections Homeland and other poems (1998) (hereafter referred to as Homeland ...) and Madiba (2003). In "For Arts Sake," the first poem of Homeland ..., the poet shows his awareness of the socio-political/literary challenges that faces his generation. However, he is poised to assert his humanity and produce the art that stings and is enjoyed. Thus, he writes "For arts sake we shall shun/pain and write lyrics of the ear" (11). As it would soon be obvious, 'pain' is a major trope that launched in the poetry of Ifowodo's generation. What more, considering the daily reality of their time. In fact Adesanmi has characterized the poetry of this generation as "an aesthetics of pain" (121). However, this generation has learned to balance their pain with a slant of humor. Thus, they "... shun/pain and write lyrics of the ear". However, even the humour here must be taken as a loaded code. For it is also, an alternative expression of the painful reality of the time. This dialectical sense of pain is palpable all through Ifowodo's first two collections. In "She lay dying at Oshodi", (1920), "Poem to the Child of My Time" (32-3) and "Homeland" (the title poem), this imagery is vividly captured. "She lay dying at Oshodi" recreates the gory experience of the poet persona in Oshodi. Amidst the scum and chaos of Oshodi a train crushed a little girl. She becomes a victim "... of a headless world" (20) in which she grew. Perhaps more tragic for the poet, is the irresponsiveness of the victim's society. For they could not advance "... a ministering hand", because they are even "deader than her dying self" (19). The fate of this child is also that of another person in "Drift wood" (15-6). In this case also, the dead is shown as a victim, carrying the curse of a "profane world". Again "the funeral crowd of hawker/commuter, bus boy, pick-pocket etc." (15) are portrayed as living-dead. They lack a true sense of remorse which, for the poet, is a result of a prolonged period of collective abuse "... Perhaps we have lived too long on 'dung hills/to know dignity worthier than dogs and dung beetles" (15). The litters of corpses in major Nigerian cities are realities of the poet's time. Perhaps in no era, except during the civil war, are corpses so commonplace in Nigerian cities. In some other regard, Oha (1999) depicts such corpses as part of "the semiotics of the drama of violence in the [Nigerian] city". As this researcher had noted somewhere else, it is "an index of a deceased system" (54). In some other poems namely: "our Eyes are Born Again", (Homeland....24) and "God punished you, Lord Lugard" (Madiba, 21), the poet narrates the reality of his time with absurdity. Few lines from the poems above will suffice. In "Our Eyes are Born Again" the poet depicts the poverty of his society and the resilience of the people thereof. Daily, our eyes are born again. To sorrows wider than the world: The cooking pot is home of spiders And lizards are landlords of the kitchen. Affirming the death of fire in countless huts, Who braves the market place Drains purse and heart For a spoonful of salt (Homeland....24) "God punish you, Lord Lugard" (21) is a multi-layered humorous poem, which captures the condition of a post-colonial society. It reveals the repercussions of its heterogeneous citizens to mediate their penury via the colonial language. In his attempts to solicit for charity, a desperate beggar decides to exert some pressures on the English language: "help me for chop, I beg. God go bless you" (iv.i). But thinking that "some flourish, or polish ..." could "persuade" (iv. li-iii) better he pleaded further: "... Good day, brodas and sistas. Half massy on me, please half sampaty Allah's piss for you....." (iv.iv, vii) Although in his first collection, Homeland...., Ifowodo shows his reader that he is writing predominantly for his generation, it is in Madiba that he comes up more unequivocally on this theme. The poem "Theme of the Half-child" (65-68) is an imaginary dialogue between the poet and Wole Soyinka a literary giant of the first generation. In this fairly long poem, Ifowodo shows his generation as the real sufferers of the harsh history of Nigeria. Though Soyinka claims his own generation is "wasted", (sect. 1.i) Ifowodo contends that part of Soyinka's pain was his own choice. Ogaga: you chose your suffering, because you're a poet Like your friend, Okigbo ...(II. xii) As for him (Ogaga) he was born into his predicament, denied of his humanity: Ogaga: ... I was born into war, a half-child, to play with bombs, ... ... At my birth, the world had gone blind! (II. vii, x) By Soyinka's own confessions, he "... had seen the sun warm the misty/morning's boastful hoe. The farmer's vow/at down's light promised the fattest cow". (I. ii-iii). On the contrary Ogaga's contemporary reality is bedeviled "... you saw a promise/I threats, and death for the praying mantis". (II. v). Apart from the topical definition of his generation as "the Half-Child", Ifowodo makes bold to distinguish his generation from his precursors' when his persona argues: Ogaga: some grief, but grown too large to be the same, a cough, now tuberculosis, a name that eats away the lungs and stops the heart. (II. xvii xviii). It may seem to some readers that the grime in the poetry of Ifowodo creates a predominant sense of pessimism. This would not be a true appreciation of the vision implied in his poetry. For in spite of the pain that pervades his poetry, Ifowodo also has an unwavering sense of optimism. We have seen this clearly stated in "For art sake". It is this strong refusal to be despaired in the face of tyranny and deprivation that Adesanmi refers to as "... our stubborn belief in the redeemable destiny of our country" (123).
Conclusion
This paper has tried to theorize the third generation of modern Nigerian poets. The aim is to locate them within the tradition of modern Nigerian poetry. In doing this, the research has historicized the psychology of modern Nigerian poets. The purpose here, is to enable the reader distinguish the socio-political and aesthetic impulses that lunched in each generation. In theorizing the third generation, the study has utilized western theoretical standards. This has been done mindful of current trends by post-colonial critics to evolve local critical standards for local literatures. It is the view of this researcher that theories developed in the west can also make in-roads to appreciating indigenous arts. The theories that have been applied here have also helped in re-reading the literature of Africans in the Diaspora. In fact, it is a major paradigm adopted by Henry Louise Gates Jnr. (1987). This goes further to show that in a post-modern world no culture can be self-enclosed. However, it must be emphasized that, although this study talks of the "influence" and "anxiety" of poets to their precursor(s), the tradition does not correspond exactly with that of the West. While we could trace the influence of succeeding generations of Euro-American poets to a major literary figure(s), in Nigeria, like most post-colonial cultures, we do not have central figures attracting succeeding generation of poets. The point above must be emphasized because, in Nigerian poetry, poets grapple more with the poetic standards of a group of precursors. Ifowodo and his generation for instance, grapple with the assumptions of their immediate precursors as well as the generation before that. Thus, this chain of re-actions has established the third generation within the tradition of modern Nigerian poetry.
References
Adesanmi, Pius. “Europhonism, University and Other Stories: How Not to Speak for the Future of African Literature.” (Eds.) Toyin Falola and Barbara Harlow Palaver: Essays in Honour of Bernth Lindfors, 1 : Trenton: A.W.P., 2002. 105-36. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: O.U.P. 1973. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jennie, Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, 1: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Enugu. Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980. Clark (-Bekederemo), J. P. The Example of Shakespeare. London: Longman Ltd. 1970. Elliot, Thomas Stern. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” David Lodge (ed.) 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. London. Longman Ltd., 1972. 71-6. Garuba, Harry. Voices from the Fringes: An ANA Anthology of New Nigerian Poetry. Lagos, Malthouse Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis (Jnr). “The Black of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self. New York. O.U.P., 1987. Godfrey, Sima. “The Anxiety of Anticipation” (Editorial). Yale French Studies, No 66. London. Yale University Press, 1984. Ifowodo, Ogaga. Homeland and Other Poems. Ibadan. Kraft Books, 1998. -- - Madiba. Trenton, A.W.P. Inc., 2003.Inyabri, Idom Thomas. Sons and Fathers, “The anxiety of Influence” in Three Generations of Nigerian Poets: J.P Clark ( Bekederemo ). Tamure Ojaide and Ogaga Ifowodo. (An unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Ibadan) 2003. Izevbaye, Dan. “Endless Beginnings: Motif of Creation and Creativity in Nigerian Literature.” (Ed.)Ayo Bampbose. New Englishes: A West African Perspective. Ibadan. Mosuro Publishers, 1995. Macebuh, Stanley. “Humanism in Chains: An Applied Example”. Being the 17th Alumni Annual Lecture Delivered at the Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan, 8th November, 2002. Nwosu, Maik. “Nigerian Poetry in the 21th century”. ANA Review. October - December, 1999. ---“The Literature of the Global Village”. ANA Review. October - December, 1996. 3, 31. Oditta, Maxwell: “Four Generations of Nigerian Writers.” The Guardian on Saturday. August 18, 2001. Ofeimun, Odia. The Poet Lied. London: Longman, 1980. Oha, Obododinma: “Signs, Cities and Designs of Capital Cities: The Semiotics of Road Monuments in some Nigerian Cities”. *Context: Journal of Social and Cultural Studies 3/1*, 1999. Ojaide, Tanure. Children of Iroko. New York: Green Field Review Press, 1973. Osundare, Niyi. Songs of the Market Place. Ibadan. New Horn, 1983.
The English Language And National Integration: The Challenges of the 21st Century
Inyang Udofot
Volume 4, 2006
The English Language And National Integration: The Challenges of the 21st Century
By: Inyang UdofotEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: 08128102047
Abstract
At the close of the twentieth century and in spite of its legislated position as the 'Official Language', English has metamorphosed from the official language of education, government and business to the unproclaimed lingua franca as well as the convenient language of both official and intimate 'record keeping' and communication (Udofot, 2003). And despite protests and legislations to the contrary, it is gradually being consciously and unconsciously groomed as the possible neutral language of unity in a multi-lingual setting like Nigeria which has been 'polarized along two linguistic lines - linguistic majority and linguistic minority' (Oyetade, 2003: 105). In this paper the present role of English as a consequence of the National Language policy as contained in the National Policy on Education as well as the linguistic situation in the country viv-a-vis the government policy of the "big three" languages are examined. Projections are made about the future of English in Nigeria given the present situation of multilingualism and ethnicity as well as the challenges of the twenty-first century such as globalisation , the need for a universal language and the nativisation of English in many countries of the world.
Keywords
Nativisation, Universal, Language, Multilingualism, Official language
Introduction
The language question has been a thorny and much discussed one in Nigeria. The fact that the language question has become a genuine political and linguistic problem can be seen from the attention it has received and the discussion it has generated in educational and linguistic circles. Three main areas of the language problems and prospects have been addressed: effects on education, development and national integration (See for instance Adeniran,1995, Bamgbose,1995, Essien1998, Oyetade, 1993). These studies have made various recommendations one of which is a one language option for the purpose of national integration. The languages frequently recommended have been English, Hausa, Pidgin, Swahili and even a purposely "created" artificial language' (Oyetade, 2003). Others have recommended the multilingual approach which supports the elevation of one or more Nigerian Languages to the status of National languages. However, the multi-ethnic situation in Nigeria and the consequent emotional feeling of ethnic identity and fear of marginalisation of the less populous ethnic groups have favoured the preference for English because of its neutrality, its colonial origin notwithstanding. Oyetade (2003: 107) notes that government pronouncements with regard to the status of the three major languages (Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba) have awakened the language loyalty or ethnic loyalty of Nigeria's minority language speakers. They have risen to resist what they regard as attempts to make them socially, economically and politically subservient to the speakers of the dominant languages.
Content
It is on record that when the 1979 Constitution was to be revised, the recommendation that 'the three main languages- Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba should be adopted as national languages and taught in all primary and secondary schools in the country' (Federal Republic of Nigeria 1987: 186) made speakers of the minority languages stage a 'walkout' and this led to a watering down of the recommendation to: 'Government shall promote the learning of indigenous languages' (Section19[4]). Up till now the constitutional provision of the three major languages in the National Assembly has not been implemented, which could be due to a lack of will to implement the provision...thus non implementation is a way to certify their opposition (Oyetade 2003:108). English has co-existed in Nigeria with her many indigenous languages since the nineteenth century. The many years of co-existence of English with Nigerian languages and its use for expressing Nigerian experiences and situations has resulted in English developing linguistic patterns that have identified it as a distinct variety of world English. Bamgbose (1995:26) has observed for instance that 'The English Language has undergone modifications in the Nigerian environment. It has been pidginized, nativised, acculturated and twisted to express unaccustomed concepts and modes of interaction'. Other scholars in the field of English studies in Nigeria including (Banjo 1995, 1996); Bamgbose 1995) Eka (1992, 1993), Jibril (1986), Kujore (1995), Jowitt (1991), Odumuh (1984) and Udofot (1997, 2003) also agree that the brand of English now spoken and written in Nigeria is the kind of English envisaged in Achebe (1965:216-223): 'a new English still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings'. Nigerian English has developed in Nigeria, as has been the case in other colonies of Britain in Africa and Asia, largely through the education system although the antecedent of Nigerian English the English Based Pidgin - developed through trade (Eluqbe and Omamor 1991:11). Its phonology, lexis, semantics, syntax, pragmatics and acceptability have been variously analysed (cf Banjo 1995:203-230). Certain problems, however, face the new English in Nigeria. These are: the reluctance of the average educated Nigerian to accept Nigerianisms in English as indicating differences rather than deviant usages; the reluctance of teachers of English to accept them in teaching and examinations; the future government language policies in education and their implications for the future of Nigerian English. These problems are compounded by the fact that standard reference books of what constitutes acceptable usages in Nigerian English are yet to appear and in sufficient number to measure up with research in linguistics. In this paper, the present role of English as a consequence of the National Language policy on language as contained in the National Policy on Education as well as the linguistic situation in the country viv-a-vis the government policy of the “big three” languages are examined. Projections are made about the future of English in Nigeria given the present situation of multilingualism and ethnicity as well as the challenges of the twenty-first century such as globalisation, the need for a universal language and the nativisation of English in many countries of the world. The Big Three Language Policy and the Role of English Nigeria has not had a comprehensive language policy as an organised attempt to find solutions to language problems in the country. What has emerged as a language policy came about in the context of other centrally defined national concerns such as the development of a national policy on Education and a drafting of a constitution for the country. It is in connection with the National Policy on Education and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria that we can talk about language policy and planning in Nigeria (Oyetade 2003:107). Two factors, according to Platt et al (1984:199-201), determine the development and future of the new Englishes. These are: ‘government language policies in general as well as educational policies in particular’, and ‘the attitudes which the people in the new nation have to particular policies’. In Nigeria, the National Language Policy formulated in 1977 and revised in 1981 assigns to English the role of serving as the language of instruction from the fourth year of a six-year primary course to the tertiary level. In addition, English is to be taught as a school subject right from the first year of primary education. The 1979 Constitution Sections 51 and 91, also repeated in the 1999 Constitution Sections 55 and 97 recognise one of Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba (the languages of the major ethnic groups in Nigeria) as an additional language of official proceedings in the federal legislature in addition to English as soon as the implementation is feasible (Banjo 1996:33). To this effect, secondary school students are encouraged to learn one of these three Nigerian languages in addition to their mother tongues and English, if one of the three languages is not their mother tongue. These national policies, however, cannot be said to be fully in operation. In urban primary schools, for instance, instructions are given in English right from the first year of primary education while the switch to English in the fourth year of primary education hardly operates fully in the primary schools in the rural areas. Dolphyne (1995:28) reports a similar situation in Ghana where, like Nigeria, English is the official language. Also, the learning of another Nigerian language in addition to the mother tongue hardly operates even in Federal Government schools because of the difficulties of having teachers. Moreover, the multi-ethnic situation in Nigeria and the consequent emotional feeling of ethnic identity and fear of marginalisation of the less populous ethnic groups have favoured the preference for English because of its neutrality, its colonial origin notwithstanding. Thus, although English is in theory and practice the official language in Nigeria, used in education, government, business, the mass media and literature, it is (unofficially) the neutral lingua franca for wider communication within and outside the country, as well as the language of letter writing and spoken communication among friends and even members of the same family when they find it convenient. This can be partly explained by the fact that many Nigerians cannot write their mother tongues while many of them in recent years, the 'Afro Saxons', (cf Mazrui 1975) speak English as their first language and can hardly speak their parents' mother tongues. It is for these reasons that Banjo (1996:68-70) describes English in Nigeria as the language of 'record keeping' because it is used in government offices, private organisations and international transactions for keeping records of transactions and proceedings that were spoken sometimes in an indigenous language, in the form of minutes. Recent research into the language of the open market in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State Capital, a state where Ibioto is understood by every citizen in spite of his dialectal group revealed that 76.7% of the respondents preferred to use English for business transactions because, according to them, the use of English is better for their business (Ademuluji 1998:28-29). This research also revealed that 'there is hardly anybody in the open market that cannot speak English in whatever form (p.33). The Nigerian-Based-Pidgin is, however, not a very popular language of communication in Akwa Ibom State. The above discussion shows that English has enjoyed a pride of place in the Nigerian society. The National Policy on Education has cultivated this prominence by recommending its being taught right from the first year of primary education. Literacy in English and/or oracy in it guarantees acceptance and success anywhere in the country. The result is that even the old woman in the remotest village in Nigeria who has never been to school can boast of a few English words and sentences. What then is the future of English in Nigeria? What will the situation be like in the twenty-first century given the present when even the older generations who are apparently resenting the pervasive use of English by the younger generation cannot finish a sentence in their M.T. without a word of English? English in Nigeria in the 21st century The one century's sojourn of English in Nigeria has left indelible marks prominent among which are codemixing, codeswitching, diglossia, and permanent borrowings of English words and expressions into Nigerian languages and vice-versa. Various descriptions of these phenomena in some Nigerian languages include Bamgbose (1982) and Banjo (1986) for Yoruba; Ahukhanna (1990) for Igbo, and Essien (1993) for Ibibio. Hardly can any educated Nigerian make two sentences in any Nigerian language without English words being inserted into them, or without switching from the Nigerian language into English. With the increased level of literacy in Nigeria and the increasing number of English users in the Nigerian society, it is anticipated that by the middle of the twenty-first century Nigerian-English may have two main varieties: the Standard Variety used by everybody, including the educated Nigerians, for communication outside official circles, and many Nonstandard varieties. The Nonstandard Varieties will likely reflect the language of the community where they flourish. The bulk of it would be intelligible to people who share the same language with the speaker and partly to other Nigerians who may not understand the code-mixed words from the Nigerian language. This brand of Nigerian English (NNE) will be slightly different from the present geographical language of Nigerian English for instance Esen's (1961) 'Efiglish' and Nwafor's (1971) Englibo, Engilhausa 'Engliyoruba' in the sense that the present geographical variations are largely attempts to render the Standard variety with mother tongue interferences on mainly the accent. The Nonstandard Nigerian English of the 21st century will not be Standard English but hybrids of English words and words from Nigerian vernaculars. They will constitute dialects rather than accents of Nigerian English, which in time are likely to Creolise when they are spoken as first language. The Standard Variety on the other hand may become more Nigerianised. Having been taught in the school system it will be the brand used for official purposes by all Nigerians who learn English in Nigeria. It must be noted that in spite of reactions to the contrary, Nigerian English is the brand being taught and used in secondary and tertiary institutions in Nigeria because for some decades now English teaching in most parts of the country has been done by Nigerians who were taught by other Nigerian teachers themselves. Most teachers who were taught by expatriates (mother tongue speakers of English) are now dead or retired. The point being made here is that the Nigerian (nativised) variety is now being taught in schools and used by products of the school system, and, following observable trends in language change, is likely to be sufficiently different from Standard British English to deserve the name Ninglish. Given the present situation in Nigeria where two Nigerians (husband and wife) who share a common linguistic background teach their children English as a first language and communicate with each other in their mother tongue but with the child in English, not to mention a situation where two Nigerians from different linguistic backgrounds marry and use English for communication with each other and with the children, the future of English in Nigeria is assured in spite of government policies and nationalistic feelings. This means that in the next decade or two hardly may any Nigerian family use the Nigerian languages even for unofficial purposes. The above state of affairs is perpetuated even by parents who know that English is a second language in Nigeria and should not replace the mother tongue which they would not want to exchange for Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo- the national languages. The question now is: if in the face of government policies and attempts to develop and encourage the use of the Nigerian languages (at least in the first six years of life before the learning of the second language) Nigerian babies are made to acquire English as their first language (apparently to help them do well in school and be able to communicate outside the home), is English therefore easy to replace in Nigeria in the foreseeable future? It is easy to explain this 'prestige-laden attitudinal differential in favor of English', (Ogene 1996:21). English is not just the other language available to Nigerian bilinguals but one which guarantees social advance besides being the tool of wider communication outside one's immediate community. Besides, Nigerians recognize the status of English as an international language used widely for computer programming and the internet. It is therefore dominant over the mother tongues of most Nigerians, and as we have seen earlier, it serves as the first language for many Nigerians born in the second half of the twentieth century. This dominance of English over the mother tongues of most Nigerians is such that by the twenty-first century linguistic interference, which is now often noted in connection with the Nigerian language and English, may be examined in relation to English and Nigerian languages to the extent that English-based creoles, which are likely to replace Nigerian languages, are likely to emerge by the middle of the twenty-first century (cf Essien 1998). Although Essien (1998) sees English Based Creoles as Nigerian languages and not English, since English merely provides the lexical items and not the structure, they will have sufficiently deviated from the Nigerian languages to deserve other names. English as a World Language It is undeniable that English is now an international universal language. According to Arsoba (2000). In the extent and diversity of its uses, English is matched by no other present or past language of our species. It is unparalleled in the history of the world. For the first time a language has attained the status of an international (universal) language essentially for cross cultural communication. The British Council in its English 2000 Project made some impressive discoveries about the extent of the use of English: • English is used in over 70 countries as an official or semi official language and has important status in over 20; • One out of five of the world's population speak English to some level of competence. Demand from the other four fifths is increasing; • English is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science, technology, sport, international competitions, pop music and advertising; • Over two-thirds of the world's scientists read in English. • Three quarters of the world's mail is written in English. • 80% of the world's electronically stored information is in English. • Of the estimated 40 million users of the internet, the majority communicate in English... (see Arsoba 2000) Due to the geographical spread of English, varieties known as 'the New Englishes' have sprung up in territories once controlled or greatly influenced by the U.K. and the U.S.; for instance Afrikaans English, Cameroon English, Caribbean English, Indian English, Nigerian English, Phillipine English, Singaporean English; some of them actually regarded as English-based Creoles or pidgin. Crystal (1997) assesses that a total of 670 million people use English with a native or native-like command while approximately 1,200 to 1,500 million people have reasonable competence in English. Going by the above analysis, it can be safely assumed that non natives outnumber native speakers of English. Consequently, the words of Prof. Grucza from Warsaw's Institute of Linguistics quoted in Arzoba (2000) are therefore not surprising: 'Natives say "this is our language not yours". I say it's not true. English is not the language of American or British natives only. This is our language too'. The view that the development of English is less and less determined not by the usage of the native speakers is supported by the compilers of The New Oxford Dictionary of English published in 1998; which is characterized by a large number of neologisms (e.g prozac, coolth, saddo, tehotchke) from different parts of the world. According to a British columnist, 'This isn't really an English dictionary. It is the first draft of a world language dictionary' (Arsoba 2000). Since Nigeria already has a variety of English which is recognised worldwide and a population that speaks English as a first language, the natural thing is that English is fast moving from the position of an official second language to a first language of some Nigerians. As suggested in Udofot (2003) Nigerian English should be accepted as such and consciously cultivated and loaded with Nigerian words and idioms as Nigerian writers have done in literature and christened Ninglish to make it Nigerian like the North German variety of English Minglish coined from the name of the North German language Mississippi + English' (Martens 1990:261:269). This would also provide a background and an identity for its speakers, which an alien English never could. Apparently reacting to the uneasiness surrounding the attitudes to English in Nigeria as a colonial imposition Kujore (1995:376) suggested that the 'owners' of English are as many nations or regions as can validly claim to have viable varieties of the language. Nigeria is one of such nations Summary and Conclusion An attempt has been made in this paper to describe the place English has assumed in Nigeria at the close of the twentieth century. Its place in the twenty-first century has also been projected. Clearly, English has metamorphosed from the official language of education, business and commerce to the unproclaimed lingua franca (used for inter-ethnic communication) in Nigeria as well as the convenient language of unofficial and intimate 'record keeping' and communication. It is gradually and unconsciously being groomed by both the education system and Nigerians themselves as a possible language of unity in both multi-cultural marriages and a multilingual country. The next National Policy on Language could go a step further and recognise what has been going on illegally by making English Nigeria's lingua franca for national integration while encouraging the development of the indigenous languages. If every state had its own language which is also taught in schools and used for the mass media, at least a good number of Nigeria's hundreds of languages will be developed.
Conclusion
Scholars in the field of English studies in Nigeria should also intensify efforts in the codification of aspects of Nigerian English and produce standard textbooks for use in schools as Nigerian writers (novelists and playwrights) have done to provide reference materials for teaching and examinations. This will also help to standardise certain features and usages across the country. The Standard Nigerian English or Ninglish would then be used as the official language and the lingua franca while the diatopic varieties which would have emerged are likely to replace the local languages which would be used for informal and unofficial transactions and as the language of family and friendly interactions. This is an unfortunate situation indeed but that appears to be the handwriting on the wall. The challenge for the twenty-first century is not to allow this development to happen by chance but to be directed and controlled by an appropriate language policy along the lines suggested above. ENDNOTES 1. Ademuluji (1998:28-29) :This was a final year project that I supervised in the 1997/98 session. 2. Crystal (1997) is quoted in Arsoba (2000).
References
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Nigerian Literature of the 21st Century: New Voices, New Challenges
By: Ebele EkoEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Abstract
Contrary to fears that Achebe's generation may not have worthy successors, the new millennium has revealed a resurgence of vibrant literary voices from all over Africa and especially Nigeria. Prominent among them are Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila, and Chris Abani: all young, award winning, sharply perceptive of their milieu and mostly living in Diaspora; yet like their forebears Achebe, Emecheta, Amadi, Soyinka and others, they are firmly rooted in dynamic African aesthetic values. These young writers interpret their growing-up experiences under the Babangida and Abacha military regimes in a society reflecting complex foreign influences and myriad socio-economic forces at work. The challenges of the 21st century are both for the writers and also for their Nigerian readership, since they are faced with the age-old problems of accessibility to local readers, foreign versus local reception and the economic dynamics of full time authorship as well as maintaining a balancing act while exploring a very fast changing world with their unique and varied fascinating artistic talents. Their works, taken collectively, provide great hopes for greater expectations from African literature.
Keywords
Challenges, Voices, Artistic, Africa, Writer
Introduction
The new millennium has witnessed the emergence of quite an impressive number of African writers, who have won outstanding awards and prizes, both national and international. Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2001) won the Commonwealth prize. In 2003, an older writer, J. M. Coetzee became the third African to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Zoe Wicomb's David's Story (2001) was the winner of the M-Net Book prize. Of particular interest are the young Nigerian writers, whose first novels have received prestigious awards and brought them into immediate prominence. In 2003, Helon Habila from Northern Nigeria won the Commonwealth prize for best first book with his novel, Waiting for an Angel. Chimamanda Adichie's The Purple Hibiscus was first short-listed for the prestigious Orange Award in 2004, and in 2005, it won the Commonwealth prize for the best first book in African Region. Chris Abani's novel, Graceland (2004) won the 2005 PFN Hemingway prize for fiction. This paper is looking at the “New Voices” in terms of the socio-historical setting of their novels, their attitude to culture elements, and their social commitment and concern for the survival of the artist within the society.
Content
Every successful artist must have a solid base from which to operate. As Chinua Achebe contends in Home and Exile: “to redress the inequalities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other”. (Jacket, Home and Exile, 2000). Since in literature stories and words are sources of immense power, and since this power definitely resides in every culture, Achebe concludes that: “to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away”. In a recent online interview, one of Nigeria’s 21st century writers, Chris Abani, echoes Achebe’s tested stand. In his own words: “art is always about understanding an aesthetic tradition (and) subverting expectations of that tradition through innovation”. (2004). In essence, the worth or purpose of any literature lies first in its fidelity to creativity, to aesthetics, to craftsmanship and to innovation. The second purpose of art is in the interaction and questioning of milieu and in provoking people to think beyond their comfort zones. The ideal situation for the craftsman, according to Chris Abani, is an aesthetic field that is not limited by political, social or economic contrary forces, nor by fears of societal shame at the exposure of its dark corners (interview). After fifty years of African Literature in Nigeria, it is of great interest to know what has changed, what has remained intact, and how the artist is fairing in present day society. INTRODUCING THE NEW VOICES Helon Habila was a little boy in Gombe, Northern Nigeria, during the civil war. From an interview with Frank Bures, we learn that his two loves from childhood are reading and story telling. After dropping out of Engineering, he read English at the University of Jos, and taught for two years before becoming a journalist with Vanguard Newspapers in Lagos. According to him, his encounter with E. M. Foster’s Aspects of the Novel was a turning point in his life, setting him on the road to a writing career and multiple awards: the Musical Society of Nigeria Poetry Festival prize; Liberty Bank Prize for short story, the Caine Prize for the first chapter of his novel Waiting for an Angel, which in turn won the 2003 Commonwealth prize for the best first book, Africa Region. Habila’s sudden rise to literary fame earned him a two-year writer’s fellowship in England and opened doors to a bright future in the Diaspora. 44 Helon Habila and Chris Abani claim Achebe as their mentor and so does Chimamanda Adichie, the author of Purple Hibiscus. However, she is linked to Achebe in more ways than one. She is the daughter of Achebe's colleague at the University of Nsukka. The Adichies lived in the very university staff quarters once occupied by the Achebes. Unlike Achebe who started in Medicine and changed to English, she completed her medical studies in Nsukka before decamping to Communication and Politics in the United States. She published her first work at 16 years of age. Chris Abani's father is Ibo and his mother English. Like Chimamanda Adichie, he was also first published at age 16. Since 1991, he has been on voluntary exile, first in England and now in the United States. Like Adichie and Habila, Abani is a recipient of many awards. He too is positively influenced by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, especially in the area of culture and the significance of the kola nut. BACKGROUND SETTING: OLD AND NEW A major differentiation between the Old and New Voices of Nigerian literature is in the background focus of their first works. First generation writings were set in pre-colonial or colonial Africa rather than the actual socio-historical milieu of the writers. The New Voices on the other hand, are actually describing the world around them, the events of their growing-up years. In other words, the novels are historical in parts, fictional in parts and to some extent, autobiographical. Habila for instance, explains the content of his novel thus: “I created this character who is a journalist like me, and an aspiring writer like me • young like me” (Online interview). This is in sharp contrast with the first generation writers, who were describing a world they never really lived in. Things Fall Apart was set in much older colonial days than Achebe. Soyinka's plays reflect historical and mythical long ago times. Amadi's trilogy are all in pre-colonial Ikwereland, so are Nwapa's Efuru and Idu or Buchi Emecheta's world in Bride Price and Joys of Motherhood. The Old Voices were in fact recreating the past, and rehabilitating the culture for the express purpose of answering back foreign detractors of African culture by establishing its integrity and raison d'etre. A comparison of the backgrounds of the three novels, however confirms this definite shift in setting. Waiting for an Angel is set in Lagos under the regimes of IBB and Abacha, who are severally mentioned by name. It opens with Lomba the protagonist journalist, who is serving his second year of a brutal prison life. The novel reflects the precarious life in Lagos, a city called the most dangerous in the world on the novel's jacket. The novel reflects the menacing and overbearing presence of a highly corrupt military regime everywhere. In the words of the narrator: “It was a terrible time to be alive, especially if you were young, talented and ambitious… the weight on the psyche could be enormous, all Nigerians became stigmatized by their rulers' misdeeds” (223-4). Life is dangerous for Lomba, for the university students who rioted to force out the hated regime, and for his friends in Poverty street who demonstrated. For Alice, James, Bola and other major characters, the army domineers and stifles normal life around them. The novel ends with an Afterward where Lomba recounts the actual raw facts of Nigerian politics since independence: “But there was nothing to believe in, the only mission the military rulers had was systematically to loot the national treasury; their only morality was a vicious survivalist agenda in which any hint of disloyalty was ruthlessly crushed” (224). The immediacy of the socio-historical background is evidenced by the very familiar sights and sounds of the city and of campus life. Lomba's roommate is brutally beaten by soldiers: Alice's room is shown full of American influences. Fatal accidents very naturally occur on the Lagos-Ibadan road. Bola's family relaxes to watch CNN. A robbery suspect is doused with petrol and set ablaze: "Ole!" "Thief! Catch am O!" A mob wielding cudgels and cutlasses is hot on the heels of a youth... I hear his wailing ululating scream finally turn into a whimper. They pour petrol on him and set him ablaze. I watch the fiery figure dancing and falling until it finally subsides onto the pavement as a black, faintly glowing, twitching mass (49). Habila's details equally the miserable situation in present day Nigeria prison. He notes anti-military slogans like “IBB MUST GO! NO MORE SOJA! (58). There are references to Sunday Guardian, and other media houses. He records a change from Marian Babangida Women Centre to Marian Abacha Women Centre and reports Dele Giwa's death by a letter bomb among the myriad other current affairs details. Towards the end of the novel, a life weary Lomba laments in a taxi, very much like the average Nigerian student would: Now imagine yourself, young, talented and ambitious, living in such a dystopia: half the world has slammed all sort of sanctions on your country; you cannot listen to the radio without hearing your country vilified (224). Adichie's Purple Hibiscus on the other hand is set mainly in the quiet city of Enugu and the sleepy university town of Nsukka. The village, where papa Nnukwu lives features occasionally. Although the focus is the growing-up experiences of the young narrator and the dramas of family relationships, at the backdrop is the same military regime, but its presence is not as obvious as in Habila's novel. However, the negative effects of the military regime abound in the tense atmosphere, the dangers surrounding media houses, and fears of arrest, culminating in the shocking letter bomb that finished Ade Coker (Dele Giwa). Kambili, the fourteen-year-old narrator and her brother Jaja, are growing up in a very wealthy but religiously stifling family atmosphere. Her father, who heads the media house in Enugu, is a fanatical catholic fundamentalist. He rules his household regimentally including his wife, who he thoroughly intimidates and batters occasionally. Kambili and Jaja are like the present generation youths from wealthy families, surrounded by servants, insulated from housework, and more importantly, cut off from their cultural roots including their native languages. The saving grace for these two comes in the form of a vacation with aunt Ifeoma, their father's sister and a lecturer at the University of Nsukka. The vacation experience at the Staff Quarters of UNN provides the reader with the detailed sound and sights of a typical Nigerian university campus. REALISM AND NATURALISM The autor's fidelity to setting is remarkable. Kambili's home in Enugu is typical of present day Nigeria's wealthy suburbs: "The compound walls, topped by coiled electric wires were so high... and the frangipani trees planted next to the walls already filled the yard with sticky-sweet scent of their flowers ... (9). The writer captures vividly the natural interactions between Kambili and her cousins as they picked rice, played Whot and discussed issues in Nsukka. Very many aspects of the Catholic faith are depicted from life experiences, including pilgrimage to the recent apparition of the Blessed Virgin in Benue State. She provides vivid details of the students riot that closes down the university and leads to Aunty Ifeoma losing her job and leaving for the United States. Kambili's father suddenly dies and the children are shocked to hear a confession from their mother that she had slowly poisoned her husband to death. Tension mounts and Jaja, in order to save his mother, claims that he poisoned his father. The novel ends with Jaja in prison still awaiting trial three years after his arrest. The description of prison life is a direct echo of the opening scenes in Helon Habila's novel. Graceland by Chris Abani is a type of bridge between Purple Hibiscus and Waiting for an Angel in terms of setting. It swings between Lagos and its notorious ghetto, Maroko and through flashbacks, to Afikpo, a sleepy village in far away Ebonyi State. In both milieus, the observation of the narrator is sharp and very realistic. Afikpo in 1976 is typical with its cacophony of market place noises of "women screaming conversations above the badlam of the engine, squabbling Chickens, snorting goats and barking dogs in cages" (83). His description of the wooden lorries with elaborate motifs of flowers, and vividly colorful tailboards with hilarious murals of supermen pulling lion's jaws or mermaids with coiling snakes are all present day sights. Their slogans are familiar and brilliant: “SLOW AND STEADY; HE WHO LIVES BY THE SWORD SHALL DIE; TO BE A MAN IS NOT A DAY'S JOB; SUFFERING AND SMILING; THE WICKED SHALL NOT PROSPER; THE YOUNG SHALL GROW” (83). Abani is equally deft at capturing the sounds and sights of Lagos, where everyday and everywhere is full of violent drama. Like a true journalist he give us snapshots of this city of wickedness and the seedy underground criminal life in chaotic Maroko. The growing-up experiences of Elvis, and his reluctant but steady descent from innocence to a life of crime in Maroko parallels the steady sinking of Lagos and the nation under the weight of corruption. At the background of this high tension life of crime are vivid descriptions of rape, incest, homosexuality, hired assassination, drugs, violence, riots, robbery, prostitution and drunkenness. Abani's Lagos is under the same military terrorism of Babangida and Abacha regimes as in the other two novels under consideration. Dangers surrounding journalists and media men are dramatized in Graceland by vivid descriptions. The Colonel is described as “behind the disappearances of famous dissident writers, journalists, lawyers, musicians, teachers and thousands of nameless, faceless Nigerians” (163). In the tradition of his military mentor, Idi Amin, this Colonel is rumored to have personally supervised tortures, taking pictures for his own pleasure. So corrupt is he and the regime he represents, that rumors abound of children and youths kidnapped and butchered for the military regime to obtain human parts to sell to Americans for transplants. To further buttress the immediacy and accuracy of the social background, there are references to charlatans, who draw large followings because in the words of one of them, “only prophet fit help us now. We be like de Isarelites in the desert. No hope, no chance, no Moses” (245). Other recognizable features include mass demonstrations and student riots, which are all brutally crushed with teargas and guns. Finally, the real Maroko, the home of poverty stricken masses of Lagos, is heartlessly bulldozed as in real life. The protagonists, Elvis, drifts like thousands of other Maroko displaced people, into the jungle of the bridge city, where young and lost children sleep standing when it rains, and where young girls are raped at will. The novel ends with a disillusioned Elvis escaping to the US with a fake passport. FOREIGN INFLUENCES An important aspect of background realism in the first works of Nigeria's New Voices is recording the growing influence of American popular culture and the impact of television, movie houses and the Internet on the lifestyle of the Nigerian youth: “If it is on television, it must be good”, is the basic but wrong assumption. Imitating life as seen on television becomes the order of the day in all its ramification. In Habila's Waiting for an Angel, for example, the room of Alice, a university of student, is full of American records and stacks of soul music her father had acquired in America. In her own words, her father “was just crazy about soul music”. She, like her fellow students are imitators of the dressing and lifestyle of American youths. Even the lady painter is named Mahalia, because her parents hoped she would become a gospel artist like black American Mahalia Jackson. Another character Kela sees America as a dreamland for escape, where people go when they seek asylum. Thus, when Lomba finds himself trapped, his mind is filled with thoughts of escape to America; “passport, exile, asylum…” (185). In Purple Hibiscus, the student friends of Amaka at the University of Nigeria Nsukka wore shiny lipstick and trousers so tight” as they pored over an American Magazine (141). Students dream of American visas. Aunty Ifeoma makes negative comments about the American embassy and thus who weep tears of blood when denied a visa. Nevertheless, a time comes for her as it did nor Lomba, when America seems to be the only way out and way forward. She actually leaves for America with her children in search of a fresh beginning after the frustrations of her teaching career at Nsukka and its rude termination. Abani's Graceland is from the very title, under heavy American influence. Graceland is obviously and most ironically named after the birthplace of Elvis Presley in New Orleans, which is a spectacular tourist attraction. In Graceland, the protagonist, Elvis, is a 16-year-old chain-smoking singer dancer who impersonates Elvis Presley to make a precarious living. The young Elvis' dream is to become a famous dancer like his mentor. Other names in the novel, like Kansas, Redemption, Bazooka Joe and Jagua Rigogo seem taken out of wild wild west movies. Friends of Elvis who watch all sorts of sex pervasions on the screen introduce Elvis to homosexuality without hesitation. They simple believe that whatever is shown on movies must be good and can be safely imitated. Much later in the novel, Elvis' aunt, Felicia, flies to America to marry a Nigerian with American citizenship and at the end of the novel, when all hope is gone for Elvis, he finds redemption in his escape to America. NEW VOICES AND CULTURE A second major area of comparison between Old and New Voices is in their attitude to culture and the integration of proverbs, myths, folktales and transliterations. Helon Habila's work is the least inclined to reflecting traditional African culture, partly because the setting is Lagos, which he describes in his interview as a place people see as “Devil's City”. From the times of Jagua Nana in the 50s, No Longer at Ease in the 60s and Ben Okri's Lagos of the 80s and 90s, Lagos is seen as a place where people lose their innocence, where families disintegrate and a place “almost like a living thing” like some wild animal that devours. Again because of its setting in Lagos city, Helen Habila's characters speak standard English. There is no evocation whatsoever of the village and he makes no apologies for it. Even Pidgin English is only used rarely by a few uneducated men. For example, Brother remarks: “make you go laugh at all the big big Generals who de steal our country money every day de send am to foreign banks, while their country de die of poverty and disease”. (136). Habila's attitude is that of let's move on with the times in reflecting current realities, with no mention of colonial days. Chimamanda Adichie, an Ibo like Achebe, is most closely affiliated to Achebe the culture guru, through language use and characterization. But unlike Achebe and his generation who felt obliged to provide glossary for Ibo words, phrases and concepts, Adichie provides none and uses many more Ibo expressions with ease and pride. Except for Kambili's father, other characters have no qualms with what we may call Engligbo’ the mixture of English and Igbo, reflecting the reality of present generation Ibos who can scarcely speak pure Ibo. Grandfather is call Papa Nnukwu, very naturally and Jaja's mother calls him affectionately “Nna”. At the sound of a strong knock on her door, Aunty Ifeoma flies off her chair crying “Onyezi? Who wants to break my door, eh?” (230), and Amaka says to her mom, “O zugo, let's go” (129). Jaja exclaims “Omaka, so beautiful!” and his cousin gets a correction from her mom: “Amaka, o gini? I don't like that tone!.” Very many sentences are spiced with Ibo words like “biko”, “nno” “gbo”, “amarom”. The effect created is one of greater intimacy, warmth and down-to-earthiness, simply being oneself. It is as if Adichie is saying in essence the mixture is very legitimate because both languages are of equal importance. Chris Abani on the other hand, cleverly and uniquely introduces elements of African culture by opening the chapters with the following: (a) progressive aspects of the intricate traditions of the kola nut, (b) different recipes of mouth-watering African dishes; and (c) herbal concoctions for traditional healing. He does not integrate elements like proverbs and tales in his Lagos setting, however, in the Afikpo village setting, he vividly describes traditional rites and customs. COMMITMENT Literary commitment is a clearer meeting ground between Nigeria's New Voices and all those before them. Helen Chukwuma states that the writer in Africa does more than a simple story telling in a beautiful manner, he arouses in the reader a true sense of himself, evoking his past and linking it to the present" (2003:vi). The vocation of the cultural past is used in the words of Obiechina: "to correct imperialist impression on Africa and Africans and to educate the Africans to be more realistic about themselves, their cultures and religions" (1975:81). Commitment is an old African value, which the New Voices have embraced with new emphasis. The three novels are to varying degrees concerned with the exposure of myriad problematic issues of the days, exacerbated by the corrupt and tyrannical military regimes. Within that premise, they are especially concerned with the fate of the writer within that system where everything smacks of dangerous politics. Waiting for an Angel is in itself a window on Lagos, through the eyes of a journalist/protagonist, Lomba. The novel opens with Lomba in prison, denied of his greatest need as a writer paper and pen. Before then, a fortuneteller at Badagry had prophesied prison ahead for Lomba. He promised him that he would know when the Angel of Death comes for him. To further buttress the fears and dangers, there are series of bloody encounters between different groups of demonstrators, women, students, petty traders or Poverty Street, and the army punctuate the novel. Each demonstration starts peacefully, but ends in confusion and death. Media coverage becomes progressively more dangerous. Lomba is arrested and imprisoned. The death of Dele Giwa by a letter bomb announces the end of freedom of speech under the military. Even in the essentially domestic novel of Adichie, the dangerous political background that causes petrol queues, skyrocketing food prizes and a general malaise is clearly described. The narrator supplies a detailed description of the demise of Dele Giwa the head of Newswatch, under the fictional name, Ade Coker: Ade Coker was at breakfast with his family when a courier delivered a package to him. His daughter in her primary school uniform was sitting across the table from him. The baby was nearby, in high chair. His wife was spooning cerelac unto the baby's mouth. Ade Coker was blown up when he opened the package (206). Chris Abani captures in Graceland, life in sprawling noisy Lagos. It is a frightening world, extremely dangerous for journalists, and then also for men, women, children, petty traders, and everyone else outside the military. The 16-year-old narrator is no doubt the moral voice of the writer as he challenges his father uncompromisingly over his involvement with crime. He questions his friend, Redemption closely as to the nature of the secret job to be done for the colonel. His sensitive nose smells a rat and he is always bold to stick out for the right, until circumstances force down his guards. Although Elvis is not a journalist, but as Elvis the impersonator, he is an artist and one quite well versed in Western and African literature from Dickens, Dostoyevsky and James Baldwin to Onitsha Market Literature and other works by African writers. Elvis is equally the author's moral voice. In Afikpo, when Obed suggests to the boys that they experiment with sex as seen at the movies, Elvis, interjects in alarm, though weakly: "Dat is homo. It is taboo, forbidden" (196). His presence at different scenes of crime is like the author exposing to the reader the complex relationships of city and village lives. His close brushes with the military reveals their dangerous and murderous attitude: "shall we take care of dis dog, sir?", the leader, a sergeant barked, eyes ahead Turning back to Elvis the Colonel asked him "Do you think I should let my men handle you, dog?". Elvis narrowly escapes being shot. His final escape to USA at the end of the novel is a clear commentary on the dangers confronting artists in general. This is a serious challenge in view of increased violence and threats against all those who oppose military rule, all the Dele Giwas, the Lombas, the Ade Cokers and the Elvises. African writers are united in their commitment, be it Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'O of earlier generation who suffered arrests and imprisonments, or Ken Saro Wiwa who paid with his life, or dozens from apartheid South Africa, who lived and died in exile. The New Voices of Nigeria have by their first novels heightened awareness concerning the precarious situation of university education, mass unemployment, poverty, crime, chaotic housing and above all the brutality of the military against media houses. CONCLUSION AND CHALLENGES In conclusion, one may ask: "what are the lessons learnt from these first Nigerian novels of this new millennium? In the writers' quest for balance, there is a recognition that change is inevitable and therefore one must learn to cope with the times and move on. It is obvious that foreign influences cannot be avoided, but there is definite need for control, they seem to say. They also point out the danger of extremes, be it religious or political. Their works confirm that art must reflect societal realities and that one cannot get stuck to pristine African, nor pretend that cultural taboos like incest, homosexuality, rape and trade in human parts are none existent, neither can they be blamed on colonialism any longer. The challenges facing the artist personally and squarely are many. For example, the three writers under study are all living in Diaspora presently, with little hope that they 52 will come back to Nigeria soon. The reasons are obvious. The average writer in Nigeria lacks basic amenities and more likely than not is struggling to make ends meet. Writing is relegated to when one can afford the time. On the other hand, for those who like our three writers have own prizes and recognition, open doors to European and American fellowships and grants abound. Ironically, the pattern of reception for African writers has not changed. Western publishers, Western reviewers and Western prizes ushered the first generation African writers into prominence. Thanks to a few serious African publishing houses like Heinemann, large number of works got published later, under Heinemann African writers series. Mr. Aig Higo and his team deserve great praise for a job well done in this regard. But African literature prizes are extremely rare and wealthy Nigerians banking in Europe and America must be sensitized into endowing cash prizes and awards for budding writers. Yet, another challenge is one of availability. Books published abroad are either too scarce in Nigeria or too expensive to be affordable. Even English lecturers are often unaware of new books. There must be greater use of the Internet to search out reviews on new books, and introduce them to students. At the same time, it is imperative that English Departments should nurture workshops and courses on creative writing. Finally, for writers still in Nigeria, the challenge is not to join the mass exodus of young writers to America and Europe. Eiochi Amadi in his article on “The Writer and Human Rights” states that a writer has no special rights apart from those he is writing for. His consolation lies in the fact that the world at large is his audience (Speaking and Singing, 81). That is the reality in Nigeria and Africa because there may not be a significant change in attitude to critical writers in the foreseeable future by those in authority. Nonetheless, hope can never die. Literature must continue to play its crucial parts in the survival, and development of our nation.
Conclusion
The article concludes that the new generation of Nigerian writers, while embracing the social commitment of their predecessors, has shifted focus to autobiographical settings under military rule, capturing the pervasive influence of American culture. Their works offer a realistic, often grim, portrayal of contemporary Nigeria. However, significant challenges persist, primarily the economic viability of writing in Nigeria, which drives talent into diaspora, and the limited local accessibility of their internationally published works. For Nigerian literature to thrive domestically, greater local support through prizes, publishing opportunities, and academic engagement is essential to nurture writers and ensure their work reaches a home audience.
References
Abani, Chris. Graceland. New York: farrar, straus and Giroux, 2004. Achebe, Chinua, Home and Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Adichie, Chimamanda. Purple Hibiscus, New York: Chapel Hill: Algonquin Bks, 2003. Elechi, Amadi. Speaking and Singing. (Papers and Poems). Port Harcourt: University of Port Harcourt Press, 2003. Chukwuma, Helen. “Conflict and Idealism in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born” in Accents in the African Novel. Lagos: Pearl Publishers, 2003. Habila, Helen. Waiting for an Angel. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2003, American Edition. July, Robert W. An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. www.nigeriavillagesquare1.coms “Nigerian Identity is Burdensome”. The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interview by Wale Adebanwi. www.poetix.net Poetry Matters: An Interview with Chris Abani by Cerlyle Archbique Poetry & Spoken Work Gateway, Volume 4, Issue 4, March 2005. www.poetix.net. www.pw.org Everything Follows: An interview with Helon Habila by Frank Bures.
Globalization, Literature and Languages: The All-Knowing Subject and the Insentient Object
Chimalum Nwankwo
Volume 4, 2006
Globalization, Literature and Languages: The All-Knowing Subject and the Insentient Object
By: Chimalum NwankwoEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Tel: +2348034567890
Abstract
This article critiques the concept of globalization, arguing it often masks a Western-centric monologue rather than a true multicultural dialogue. Examining literature, language, and power, it contends authentic global culture emerges not from imposed homogeneity but from the unfettered expression of diverse national experiences, whose intrinsic artistic merit allows them to resonate universally on their own terms, beyond economic or political coercion.
Keywords
Modernism, Insentient, Globalism, colonization, Globalization
Introduction
One of modernism's premier antecedent questions and its propositions in developmental studies and issues relating to the psychology of culture and the production of culture used to be universalism. It was an omnibus word with pretensions, which supposedly fixed all human bridges if they were broken, and erected new bridges where there were none. It was something agreed upon as the standard, the representative best, the acceptable to all nations and peoples and cultures. The things or issues involved were associated to verities which could not be questioned. Their logic and reason and utility were beyond question. Application was without fail, as was any danger of miscarriage across the board. The danger in the agreement was that the parties involved were nebulous, yet all items were supposed to be binding. As an African undergraduate and graduate student, I always winced under the torment of being lectured to by my teachers about the problems of the modern man. The torment became most intellectually excruciating during readings of T.S. Eliots "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Prufrock's multi-foliate ennui represented a universal crisis. I did not find myself in any of the many precincts of those crises. Whether I did or not, the understanding was a given, if Prufrock was suffering or not suffering, as different as we are, I must also be suffering or not suffering. The spurious umbrella of modernism has since been suspended or abandoned. It seems that the post-modern sensibility and the propensity for a world of multi-vocalities and multi-perspectives have buried all that and resurrected this new and convenient replacement called globalism.
Content
Globalism makes a lot of sense only as a pragmatic geography with implications that cover a spectrum stretching from the quotidian to the eschatological. The original cartography upon which nations and their various histories were founded is now clearly decidedly flawed. Like its philosophical predecessors, it carries the germ of the Prufrockian binary. It was an aggressive conquistadorial geography which devolved on the cartography of internecine cultural cannibalism. It is conquered me if I cannot resist or until I am able to re-conquer you. Today, there is no one else to conquer, at least not in the old manner. And even when we do talk of conquest, we often forget the interior violent re-mapping or resisted mapping which creates problems for those involved in the psychoanalytical reading of the human condition and its inscrutable destiny. The nature of the planet we live on is such that we have all realized that things could have been, and could still be better. The history of humanity could have been different if the conduct of nations toward each other had been a hypothetical give and take. This is what I have. Let me see what you have, and see if business could be done with what we both have. It was not so, and the price for that error is still being paid. If it is not being paid, devouring each other needlessly has remained chronic and recidivistic. I have half facetiously and half seriously challenged my students, my friends, and my colleagues to ponder over the alternative trajectory of humanity. Would global circumstances not be near utopia today if there had not been wars for territory and wars for colonization. Suspend the notion of wars and simply contemplate the total character and destiny of the so-called New World and the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Africa, the Middle East and so forth. Aboriginal, native, other, and all jargons of alterity and subalternism would not exist. Unfortunately, and sadly for us all, the whole complex of the politics of nations, the apparatus of international business, the epistemologies beneath the formations of cultures and their productions, and the psychologists and ontologies defining the patterns of life and death of everybody return to the foundational errors of our collective histories. We seem today to believe or at least play with the idea that if we could all globalize, that is, act in a certain kind of concert based on the fact that since the planet belongs to all of us, all our sorrows could be reduced to one sorrow and all our joys would translate into one joy. That way all the problems suggested above and others unmentioned will be blown away with great ease. This we all know is a very grand illusion . It is a grand illusion behind which lurks the old monocular visions of Aristotle ; his notion of God as active reason powers the West's notion of history as some sort of unfolding of a deistic fiat. Heraclitean flux in combination with the projects of Kant and Hegel and Marx bolster a singular ontological reading of human destiny. Philosophically, the Christological vision which was exploited by colonialism and imperialism survives blemishes and hiccups with Kiekergard's self-serving leap of faith. When God dies for Frederick Nietzsche, everybody is supposed to buy into that nihilism and all those contested visions of the relationship between the nature and the actions of God and man and their bearings on human destiny. It is thus easy to see how my hotel room in the Third World easily gives me CNN as it gives everybody else in the so-called Third World. The news from that source is according to how America and probably the Western world see and read the world. If the vision of CNN includes other visions and voices, nobody knows. It is still me, watching Alfred J.Prufrock with the same old presumption that the interior territory which marks all consciousness obey the same signs and rules or operate in the same way. The assumption is that everybody is pleased with that arrangement. The other programs are not beamed into America. The other countries cannot beam back. Prufrock never needs to know what I feel. This is the general pattern of affairs in the relationship between the Western powers and the rest of us, if I may paraphrase the title of one of Chinweizu's books and thoughts. Globalization has become like the sun, powered by one source and shining down on the world from one fixed spot in the heavens. Whenever I cultivate the inclination to join in the dream of Globalization, I am imagining the contrary. I am thinking of the possibility of a sun powered from a universal collectivity, and shining down on everybody with equal light and use. Globalization will become real if we had a world in which for a start, the deliberations of the United Nations and the decisions of the United Nations evolve into more serious things than they are presently. This means that global attention will be dictated by the egalitarian principle of each nation always receiving according to the urgency of the need of that nation and in reasonable proportion to the population of that nation. It means that in the issues of resources, the principles of equity will be driven by the desire for justice and fairness. This means that we will be living in a world of a politics driven by a global caretaker instinct with rewards and punishment now appropriately handed down according to how faithful each nation is to the old golden rule principle of reciprocal accommodation. Here are a few elementary examples of what all this implies. If nuclear armament is good or bad in one country, it must certainly be found same for the rest of the world. Globalization should be extended to the decisions of the International Criminal Court for Justice. Its rulings must be good enough for everybody or be relegated as sham. Globalization must be extended to the efforts by nations to protect the environment. If the Kyoto Accord is designed to serve the world, then the signatories must sign and execute their commitment in the belief that it really serves the world, especially when the countries involved accept responsibility for the damage of the global environment by their chemically related industrial activities . If the flouting of democratic processes generate so-called global outcries in Ukraine, such transgressions in Nigeria should generate equivalent outcries. Compare the dollar to individual ratio in the West's aid to Israel and the Middle East with the aid given to Africa. Look more carefully at the whole complex of the geo-politics of strategic interest and explain how anybody could sign up credibly for delicate nurturing notions like the global desire for human rights. Compare the robust reaction of the western powers to the death of ex-Lebanese minister, Rafik Hariri with that of the assassination of Nigeria's sitting Attorney-General,Bola Ige. While Hariri's death was elevated to cosmo-historical proportions, the death of Ige was a nondescript parochial Nigerian little noise. If the pollution from oil spills in Alaska or Norway attract instant condemnation and punishment, such spoilage in the South Pacific or littoral Nigeria should be treated with equivalent gravity. The pandemic devastation of HIV/AIDS, some countries are better equipped to battle the scourge better than others. Why is it so difficult to extend a saving hand to the weaker, poorer nations in terms of the permission for the production of desperately needed generic retrovirals in those benighted nations? Recently, political pundits have been compelled to compare the devastation of Europe by the Second World War and the present nightmarish circumstances of life in many African countries. European reaction followed the passion of the speech by United States Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall at Harvard University at the end of the Second World War. “Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products principally from America” are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of very grave character. The world is still waiting for Africa to receive the same kind of rapid and concerted response later dubbed the “Marshall Plan” which Europe got from that impassioned plea. While that wait is on, South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki’s question when he addressed the European Union Parliament on November 17, 2004 remains a haunting and nagging question dredging up the detritus of past attitudes to Africa: “Why can’t we have the same aid and generous loans?” If the United Nations resolutions aimed at global disasters and order and peace, are designed to enforce order in the world, and if the various financial clubs run by the West are there for fiscal balances and measures to nurture growth and stability, then those organs must be seen to be doing exactly that for all nations and circumstances instead of the present situation where their activities are merely part of an elaborate tapestry of benign rituals and perfunctory gestures only malignantly potent when the big powers need is the issue. Clearly, the median of race and power remain dichotomous. We cannot afford to manage a world in which the issues of justice and societal good are accidental. It is now a global gathering of shifting identities. The characterization of angel or rogue nation is generally protean and unstable, arbitrary and accidental. It depends on where each nation sits, at the right or left hand of the global powers. We have essentially fashioned out a new world order of surreal amorality in which you are amazingly cleansed or sullied, blighted or redeemed based on the expediency of loyalty and alignment and the pragmatism of national survival. The consequence of all this is that for every nation, no move in politics and business and culture is deemed innocuous. Every move is a quest for advantage. Because everybody is looking for advantage our notion of equity is Orwellian, and every single move is hedged with suspicion. How does a writer function in this kind of global environment? In the argots of current criticism of cultural productions, one encounters expressions which hack back to the so-called “great tradition” related to a unitary knowing and living and being, a pseudo-ontological ecumenism which masks so much about difference without speaking to its necessary mediations. In one extreme in literary criticism, we have propositions of some sort of “grand narrative” at the polar opposite of which are the other minor national allegories. The originators of such notions and opinions fail to see or understand that there cannot be any mode of transcendentalism without the mediation of difference. Even in technological terms, it is clear that systemic harmony cannot be without the recognition of the role of every constituent part, from the little bolts to the great engine block. There are so many reckless fallacies about nations and national identities out there, morally stupid books by very good brilliant men about this kind of subject. In the American scene, there are books which come to mind such as William Bennett’s hypocritical Book of Virtues, Justice Bork’s insensitive Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Robert Hughes chauvinistic Culture of Complaints: The Praying of America and Allan Bloom’s grain-and-chaff The Closing of the American Mind. In some of their rather unsympathetic dimensions, such books make it into my list of stupid books by very intelligent men. The main thrust of such books is the wishing away of discontent with the necessity for the rejection of differences without comprehensively and satisfactorily proposing how to make people in the system comfortable and willing to abandon their discontent and differences. It seems that in the imagination or understanding of such people, subcultures perpetuating or protecting their heritages amounts to journeys toward Gomorrah and destruction. The fact remains that if in the world, we do not need marginalized and hyphenated nationalities, the only solution is to literarily dissolve all margins and national boundaries. How we get about that and the prognostications of success or advocacy is anybody’s guess. For now we must stay with a fact that is insistent in its evidence. And that is that if such tall talk is part of the process of globalization, we all have a very long way to go. It is a good ruse to obviate it all with our ingenious hunts for accommodating tropes and periodic paradigmatic palliatives. Even without the wool of jargon from practicing coteries of this strange trickery, it is clear that if such shifts are good enough, there would have been no more. Tired of the dignified and pretentious posturings of a universal modernity at a hallucinated endpoint of a universal history, we have shifted uncomfortably to a post-modern discourse, and then of course, to that of post-coloniality. By “we”, I am referring to those of us working in the academe of the West either by ideational inclusion or via the exigency of exile, in the great metropolis from where all theories emanate or originate. It is either that sort of affiliation or trapped in what I call the anxiety to name, we are constantly looking for what to so-called contribute to the stream of world theories and methodologies. The point about the unconscious nature of most human creativity is all lost to us. Nobody ever sets out announcing that today he or she is going to write a globally acceptable piece or classic for all humanity. From the Greeks through Shakespeare to Soyinka or Achebe, artists or writers just write or create. African writers and thinkers had better just write and think volitionally in whatever language or form they are moved or inclined to and let history sort out the rest. The verdict of humanity comes much later. One wishes that all so-called Third World writers involved in cultural production of all kinds would bear that point in mind. A new mode is already probably in the offing or gestating in the rarified hallways of Western academe awaiting the opportune moment for birthing like a most certain prophecy. Some anxious producers are waiting to goble up what is coming, afraid of being left behind, afraid of being out of date, as if cultural production is the same thing with technological production. Let me risk the charge of cynical negativist by suggesting that the fate of something like a qualitative globalization in cultural productions hangs on this realistic classic Latin fragment addressing the nature of all art. That ancient verdict rules that art is id quod visum placet, that which pleases to be seen. If art is that which pleases to be seen, globalists can all look anew at the great wisdom of the truism about beauty being in the beholder's eye. If beauty is in the beholders eye, certainly, you can see there the logic and the illogic in the numerous prize-backed fists of either approbation or condemnation initiating from alien arbiters from various stations on our globe. If beauty is in the beholder's eye, you can appreciate the rectitude of the Nobel Prize committee in insisting that in their eyes Wole Soyinka deserved their prize and not Chinua Achebe. If beauty is in the beholder's eye, you can also appreciate the angry contrarily and rectitude of Chinweizu's dismissive and disdainful reference to the eminent Nobel Prize committee as a gaggle of Swedes. There is indeed no greater rectitude in the organizers of the Commonwealth Prize for Literature proceeding in their own arbitration in regional formations, fully aware of the fact that the beholders of beauty from Asia, and Europe and Africa and so forth are quite likely to differ in their perspectives and qualitative judgments. There should be more of such cautious approaches in dealing with difference in the cultural and political in the world. You would find instant ready answers to dreadful questions such as what religion is the best? Which ideology is better? And so forth...? For with our answers, we are all bound to begin to meddle with the so-called internal affairs of other peoples. Perhaps we probably all have one choice with such questions. Leave people alone with their national quirks or idiosyncracies and abide with the proverbial Igbo vision which insists that the fire wood of any people is always good enough to cook their foods. It is either that or parallax suspicion about our various motives in international relations. Permit me to suggest that the international fiery crises generated by the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses fed on the flames of such inescapable suspicion. The Satanic Verses celebrate a reckless mongrelization of identities. Its narratology suggests that the globe is now a cosmopolis of trans-national and trans-cultural agents, and that the character of the emerging mongrels from the new demography is transcendental. Every being has a share of the warp and purity of that composite new whole. All the impulses and actuations of laughter and tears are the same as are the capacities to accept praise and insult. Hence the erroneous presumption that to lampoon what is regarded as sacred by one faith or sect would be seen in the context of the fallibility of all. In coming to this kind of rather hasty conclusion, the Rushdie's kind of vision skips the implication of the fact that the mongrels still have parents in abandoned homesteads with their sturdy foundations still intact. What we indeed have in such visions in literature should clearly be seen as futuristic fallacy. In addition to that, one is perhaps rather unkindly inclined to suspect that the reception of the West to such texts is because the deconstructive ire and barb of such criticism favor the human condition in the West than it does other cultural stations and targets. If those stations and targets are destabilized as a result of the criticism, the West stands to gain in many ways, especially economic with its strategic implications for global politics. That no station is perfect finds evidence in the number of fugitives, discontents, and dissidents from every nation. The complex character of places like Iraq after Sadam Hussein appears to be the best lesson in that regard for everybody. I am inclined to believe that the literature which serves the world better is the literature which opens windows into different pockets of the world in a way that reveals for better understanding the uniqueness or particularity of that pocket. Before the mongrel, there were animals which mated to produce that new hybrid that fascinates us all. To overly celebrate the mongrel as if it is some ultimate find is like pretending that the branches of a tree contain the whole story of the tree. The mongrel is only a new identity that is part of an existing multiplicity of identities. Not to see it that way is to sell short the ideal of globalism. When you look carefully at writings which hold our imaginations and intrigue or inform us specially, there is no question about their special services to that multiplicity of identities. Things Fall Apart is a story of Igbo land as it collides traumatically with colonialism. It tells us the story of the Igbo spirit and will, and about the European incursion, but the artistic fulcrum is Igbo. That fulcrum raises other things to view, and in the end, we have the story morphing into an African experience in colonialism. The total experience then becomes a human story applicable beyond its original encasing pocket. In the best of Wole Soyinka's works such as The Road and Dance of the Forests, we have the same kind of process with the Yoruba world and experience. That experience, through its fulcrum of Ogun-ism rises beyond the African toward what I have characterized elsewhere as a confluence of ontologies with the West. Those two examples should suffice in fortifying my point. That point is that from the best literature of every nation or ethnicity, we can extract the telling lineaments which easily fit into the transcendental fabric of what we call the global family. That is, I believe, the foundation of the term we all regard as the classic, if we would willingly and apolitically collapse all national canons into one global canon. The classic comes from the forge of the national spirit. It pulses with the sacred and the totemic. The mythic foundations of the polity draw from the national classic, and not even the polity can stop it. The load of national culture is heavy but the classic always vehicles it lightly beyond those national boundaries. The fine literature of all nations, in the end, will become part of global literature. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, racism or invidious parochialism, cannot stop it. The power of polity or the arrogance of despotism cannot stop it. Such forces might delay it. I make this point here because of a revealing little drama when I was a keynote guest at a reading somewhere in Nigeria with a good gathering of ambitious, young, and aspiring Nigerian writers. During the discussion and question time, a German "friend" of Nigerian writers began lecturing the audience of young writers on what to write to make their works marketable in Germany. I listened intently in some kind of shock and surprise, saddened by the implications of what I was hearing. Inadvertent or fortuitous or deliberate counsel, this is, as clearly and innocuous and well-meaning as the speaker sounded or intended, cultural imperialism masquerading as friendly globalism. I wondered whether any Nigerian dared go to Germany to tell young German writers what to write for the Nigerian reader... No good national literature hits other shores by invitation. Perhaps it could happen as part of an imperial imposition, a time-bound phenomenon whose ashen end is always predictable. No good national literature strains its voice for a foreign audience. The power of the work does the straining. If there is any existing organ out there preparing to orchestrate a globalization of literature, that organ will work when it allows, apolitically, each literature to express and assert itself through its own intrinsic coercive aesthetic power rather than gimmickry. Again, in the end, the wings of good literature could be clipped nowadays by the ignorance of readers, a lack of visibility, or indeed by a slightly sluggish sense of aesthetics in the readership. Sooner or later, however, after the paid and organized town-criers of undeserved praise have gone home, the good work will cry itself into the hearts of peoples around the globe. A good work of art will, in the end, globalize itself. Culture wars have remained unending in the battle over the use and preservation of languages, and their roles as vehicles of culture and in cultural imperialism. The fact of the matter is that a language is always as powerful as those who use it. Language may be an ontological vehicle assisting in the fortification of the myths undergirding a cosmology, but invariably, it cannot be wished in and out of any cultural space. To wish it toward either direction, its holy alliance with economic and political power must be firm and unshakeable. The people must also be comfortable and confident with their culture and nationalism to keep them stubborn, resolute, and willing to persevere whether they are for or against. Whichever way the war over languages goes, to whatever pitch it rages, the ghost of the great seminal debate on African Literature at Makerere in 1962 will remain difficult to pacify. That was the conference in which Obi Wali argued that authentic African literatures must be written in African languages. That is a truth too potent for dismissal or silence. Theoretically that is excellent and unimpugnable perspicacity. Practically, at east for most African countries, it is as actionable as holidaying on the moon. The economic, political, and cultural difficulties for Africa are immense. There are lessons about this from other times and circumstances. For example, the relationship between language, literature and national or international politics was the focal point of the battle between the troika of Chinweizu, Ihechukwu Madubuike, and Jennie Onwuchekwa and their more liberal antagonists in the fight for the soul and direction of African literatures in the 1970s. In the end, the battle died a natural death. The troika pursued their foes with ideas which were powerful and relevant as centerpieces in the politics of decolonization of African literatures, but clearly the project foundered on the overkill of its ambition and its untenable and somewhat flawed pragmatic. Their ideological adversaries, with the growing culturally recursive character of the globe had time on their side, bolstered by the perennial crises in African politics whose chronic peonage remains a baggage too heavy to be logged on to the puniest of battles against dependency. Certainly, that is what it is all about, a battle against dependency. In the 1980s, celebrated Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, revived the battle. That it was hitched rather awkwardly to his Afro-Marxism did and will not produce a different result. The fact remains for African leaders, thinkers, and countries that want to re-tread that route is that the battle will always be doomed even before it takes off. To ever succeed, economic independence will always be first. Otherwise, exercises in the preservation and use of specific languages will remain palliative psycho-cultural games, distractions from the main game against dependencies of all kinds. Let us draw lessons from other histories. Shakespeare wrote for Elizabethan England. Despite imperial baggage from France and Rome and old vandalistic challenges, there was no recorded Shakespearean grandstanding on behalf of the English language or culture and England. What should be the attitude of African countries to the threat posed by globalization to indigenous African languages? Like technology, language should be approached by selective application; it should be used like cars or antibiotics and other technological productions from other countries that have become inescapable commodities for a normal day-to-day living. In deed, instead of looking at it from the negativity of a deleterious globalization or from the dangerous perspective of its being a weapon for cultural imperialism, languages and literature should simply be seen as instruments for positive social change. If for no other reason, the attitude should be the attitude applied to the pragmatics of only choosing to fight winnable battles. The acceptance or rejection of Foreign Languages should depend on both utility and not simply the politics of implementation. While encouraging or promoting their own indigenous languages as internal conditions permit, African countries should also be looking at the foreign language through the selective prisms of language planning organs. There are countries whose language policies are clearly part of their international diplomatic initiatives. Such countries and their programs should be welcome and encouraged as part of clearly thought out culturally symbiotic relationships. The principles of international business should be there to guide decisions for participation. In all spheres, what to gain should always be in the fore of such arrangements and should of course prevail over what to lose. There is an untapped and abiding lesson in the best systems of education in the African continent. Globalization of any language may well come to Africa with the same unintended benefit with which colonization and Westernization hit many African countries. The destruction of weakened autochthonous foundations gave way to new epistemological structures which combined into hybrids stronger than both old and new. These were clearly reflected in the character of the best African secondary schools and universities and the stamina of the new breed of African minds, post-independence, before the present rot and atrophy. Products from African schools knew not just their own world very well but also the world beyond them. They competed abroad against the best and held their own, successfully and triumphantly. The testimony is there in the works and legacy of pioneers in all fields and areas of human endeavor from governance to education. It is possible for what we call globalization to affect Africa the same way. If what happened in the past was fortuitous or inadvertent sans any sense of equity, what should happen today should be more deliberate and programmatic, mutually satisfactory. Care should be taken to make sure that globalization is proceeding as the march of civilization ought to have proceeded. Whether it is in the sharing of literature from other places or in the use of languages, the principle should always be guided by the abiding cliché of give and take, the golden rule principle of reciprocal accommodation. It is either that or the grave and ominous amorality of one presumably all-knowing subject giving and taking at will to and from a presumably insancient object. When, therefore, we hear or teach students about the Purfrockian invitation “let us go then you and I...”, the honest teacher of that deceptive coaxing for commiseration must situate the detangling hermeneutic in its appropriate alien universe with its differences in the experience of history and ontology and the total pedigree of thought. It is still too soon to presume a leveling unity of subject and object on one global platform.
Conclusion
The article concludes that true cultural globalization cannot be an imposed, Western-centric monologue but must emerge from a respectful, equitable dialogue among diverse national literatures and languages. Authentic global culture is built when unique national experiences, expressed through their own intrinsic aesthetic power, resonate universally on their own merit. For Africa, this means writers should create from their volition and cultural contexts, not tailor work for foreign markets. Ultimately, good literature transcends borders itself. Real globalism requires reciprocity and justice in political and economic spheres first, rejecting the paradigm of an "all-knowing" Western subject acting upon an "insentient" non-Western object.
References
Achebe, C. (1983). The trouble with Nigeria. Heinemann. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey. Appiah, K. A. (1992). In my father's house: Africa in the philosophy of culture. Oxford University Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. Routledge. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books. Soyinka, W. (1976). Myth, literature and the African world. Cambridge University Press. Chinweizu, Jemie, O., & Madubuike, I. (1983). Toward the decolonization of African literature. Howard University Press. Gikandi, S. (2000). Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Cambridge University Press. Quayson, A. (2000). Postcolonialism: Theory, practice or process?. Polity Press. Lazarus, N. (1999). Nationalism and cultural practice in the postcolonial world. Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak?. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). University of Illinois Press. Mazrui, A. A. (1986). The Africans: A triple heritage. Little, Brown and Company. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. Wa Mutahi, K. (2005). Writing in English and the future of African languages. In M. J. Daymond et al. (Eds.), African literatures and cultures (pp. 112-125). Routledge.
Constraints on the Globalization of African Literature
By: Bernth LindforsEmail: info@caleljournal.com
Abstract
In the fifty years since Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard first introduced Nigerian narrative to a global readership, African literature has achieved remarkable international visibility through landmark works, prestigious prizes, and expanded academic curricula. Yet this success is shadowed by persistent structural constraints. The decline of multinational publishing outlets such as Heinemann’s African Writers Series, combined with the limited reach of local presses, has narrowed transcontinental circulation for emerging authors. Similarly, scholarship on African literature remains skewed toward Western institutions, with African critics often isolated from one another and from local readerships. The global reception of African drama, from Soyinka’s complex poetics to Ngugi’s militant theatre and Ngema’s commercial musicals, further highlights tensions between authenticity and accessibility. This article interrogates these dynamics to reveal the paradox of African literature’s simultaneous globalization and marginalization.
Keywords
African literature, globalization, publishing, cultural identity, literary criticism
Introduction
A few years ago, Nigeria celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952. In the half-century since that historic first splash of a Nigerian narrative on the international literary scene, much has happened to bring outstanding works of African verbal art to the attention of the world community. Major literary prizes such as the Nobel, the Booker, the Neustadt, the Caine, and the Commonwealth have been won by African authors, earning them widespread recognition, substantial rewards and a vastly expanded leadership. One of the earliest classics - Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart - has been translated into many languages and in English language editions alone has sold in the millions. The Africanization of the literature curriculum in African schools and universities and the concomitant canon-busting internationalization of literature studies in the West have put more African literary works into the hands of more students worldwide. So in less than a single lifetime Africa has been converted from a mute bystander in the global literary marketplace to one of its noisiest members with products for sale everywhere. But before we celebrate too enthusiastically the achievement of this remarkable transformation, we may do well to remind ourselves of some of the lingering constraints on the globalization of African literature for there has been a noticeable shrinkage of opportunities for African authors running concurrently with expanded exposure of a limited number of their masterpieces. African literature appears to be headed in the direction of greater cosmopolitanism and greater insularity at the same time. Both trends are discernible in publishing, in scholarship and in the reception abroad of new works by African writers. There may be local and foreign constraints on the extent to which African literature can be globalized.
Content
Let's look at publishing first. When books by African writers first became available in the West, they were brought out by European and American publishers, some of whom had little or no foothold in the African continent. At that time, with the possible exception of South Africa, there were no local publishing outlets of any international standing, so there were no indigenous competitors for the early works of such pioneers as Abrahams, Tutuola, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi and Armah. British firms with a longstanding stake in African educational publishing therefore stepped into the vacuum and established series that could feed into the new curriculum in schools and universities. The major players were Oxford University Press, Longman and Macmillan, but the giant among the majors was Heinemann Educational Books with its enormously successful African Writers Series all decked out in orange and white covers. With Achebe as its principal adviser, Heinemann cornered much of the best writing and became the equivalent of an imperialistic oil, mining or agricultural corporation, extracting raw materials from the Third World, processing and refining them somewhere else, and then selling them back to the Third World as finished products, all the while becoming the arbiter of what was fit to be marketed to consumers in a culture decidedly different from their own. Contrast that with the situation today where local publishing is booming and the multinational companies have been forced to set up indigenous branches to market their wares. Meanwhile the foreign-based series - even the venerable Heinemann one - have gone defunct, depriving African writers of the international and transcontinental audiences they used to enjoy. Few local publishers in Africa have the means to market their books extensively abroad except through the African Books Collective in Oxford, and those books don't usually make their way back into other parts of Africa because they must be paid for in dollars or pounds or euros and at First World prices. The writer is thus cut off from readers elsewhere in Africa, even if they happen to live in a nation next-door. The famous writers of the first generation who made a name for themselves in the heyday of the multinational publishers usually have no difficulty in maintaining their relationship with their original house or in switching to another foreign firm if they wish to do so, but new and younger African writers seldom get a chance to sign a contract with a publisher overseas unless they have had the good fortune to win a major international award. These neophytes and middle-aged lesser lights can still address their own people, but it is unlikely that they would be able to support themselves, much less a family, on their domestic earnings. So, while the older established fat cats are getting fatter off their foreign feed, the undernourished kittens back home who must rely on local sources of sustenance are getting visibly thinner. A similar problem exists in the scholarship published on African literature. African writers used to complain that much of the critical commentary on their works was being produced by foreigners who did not understand them and who tended to judge them by alien and irrelevant criteria. In an essay entitled "Counting Caliban's Curses: A Statistical Inventory" I described the situation this way: The complaint everywhere seems to be that there are still too many Prosperos and Mirandas calling the critical shots, that the little islanders are being crowded out of their own domain by uncouth continentals, that careerist Northerners with easier access to money, machines, and magazines are monopolizing discussion of literary works by Southerners, that First Worlders and Third Worlders are not engaged in any sort of dialogue but are speaking only to their own kind, the First Worlders through electronically amplified megaphones, the Third Worlders through baffles and mufflers. Furthermore, in the West the language of literary criticism has itself changed, moving toward higher and higher levels of abstraction and self-reflexivity, leaving many non-Westerners speaking in a quaint, old-fashioned hermeneutic dialect, if they are allowed to speak at all. In short, Africa, a silent partner in its own intellectual marginalization, may be losing control of its own anglophone literature. (106-107) The conclusion I came to, based on bibliographical data, was that African critic, nowadays busier than ever before, were gradually gaining better interpretive control of their literature but that they seemed to prefer to speak to their countrymen or to audiences in the West rather than to fellow Africans on their own continent. Few of them published in media aimed at their immediate national neighbours. This led me to surmise that they were suffering from an interiority complex. The Westerners were even worse, for they overwhelmingly preferred to publish their works in the West rather than engage with African colleagues by publishing in African media. They were interested in African writers but not in African readers. This lack of reciprocity on their part, and the lack of any significant transcontinental dialogue within Africa among indigenous critics was leading to a situation perhaps best characterized as heedless homegrown hermeneutics, in which each interpretive culture, spinning on its own axis, follows its own narrow trajectory without acknowledging or interacting with other self-contained planets revolving in the same galaxy of critical concerns. This is not globalization but only an exaggerated form of exegetical chauvinism. To document my third point about the reception of African cultural artifacts abroad, allow me to comment at length on three concrete examples of the transportation of African dramatic productions to the West by the playwrights themselves. In an interesting recent article entitled "Whose Theatre, Whose Africa? Wole Soyinka's The Road on the Road" Biodun Jeyifo asserts that like the dramatic and literary texts of every cultural region of the world, African literary and dramatic texts necessarily and inevitably change when they travel. Like people, commodities, services, and the forces of nature—the winds and the waters of the oceans--texts, when they travel, are subject to the contingencies of travel. In new contexts, they have to adapt to the exigencies of "local conditions," such as hospitable and inhospitable norms and customs, and they are brushed against the grain of both fervently desired and quite unanticipated transformative encounters. (449-50) To illustrate this point, Jeyifo examines the staging of one of Soyinka's most challenging plays, The Road, in three venues outside Africa: namely, Port of Spain in Trinidad, as staged by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop Company in 1966 under the direction of its resident playwright and artistic director, Derek Walcott; a production in 1980 in Mysore, India, in a Kan[n]ada translation directed by Professor Anniah Gowda, who was also responsible for the translation; and, finally, a production in London in 1992 by the Talawa Theatre Company under the direction of its artistic director, Yvonne Brewster. (450) In each of these productions there was a creative "misreading" of the text in the sense of that term as elaborated in Harold Bloam's A Map of Misreading: that is, "by imposing her or his own strong creative sensibilities and predispositions on the original work, the appropriating [director] 'miserads' the original work but, paradoxically, brings out features and qualities that either were latent or were obscured by 'weaker' readings" (453). What was strategically "misread" in all three of these foreign productions, Jeyifo argues, were "the indices and markers of the 'Africanness' of The Road, "specifically "the strong embeddedness of its action, language, and central symbols and tropes in the myths and ritual traditions of the Yoruba god of war, metallurgy, and lyric poetry, Ogun, together with the popular religious cults associated with this deity" (453-54). In other words, each director was faced with the daunting challenge of making an esoteric Yoruba theological concept comprehensible to a non-Yoruba audience, and this led to productive and unproductive "misreadings" or detours from The Road as laid out by Soyinka. But what happens to a play deeply embedded in an African culture when its performance before a foreign audience is directed by its own author? What kind of compromises are deemed necessary to translate the indices and markers of its Africanness to non-Africans? Placed in an altogether different world, must the author/director modify, mutilate or in some other way deliberately misread his own text? One way to address such questions is to look at a few examples, beginning with a production of The Road that Soyinka himself directed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1984. This was not the first time that he had been associated with a production of this play abroad. Nearly twenty years earlier he had served as an "adviser" (Gibbs 1982: 184) to David Thompson who had directed it at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, during the Commonwealth Arts Festival in London in September 1965. According to James Gibbs, who has studied British and African responses to this production, the play "bewildered many of the critics," though "some recognised its vitality" (1986: 85). For instance, Penelope Gilliat, writing enthusiastically for the Observer, went so far as to praise Soyinka for having "done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for centuries: booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week," but she had to admit that "The Road in performance is tough work for local hearing" and only became clearer for her after she had had a chance to read the script (23). The Road is a difficult play for any audience to follow not only because it is strikingly original in language and action but also because it shares many of the baffling nonsequiturs of theatre of the absurd. The main character, called Professor, is a half-mad proprietor of a "Aksident Store" selling spare parts in a run-down car park inhabited by illiterate lorry drivers, touts and layabouts. To earn a living Professor uproots road signs so that there will be more motor accidents and forges drivers' licenses, but his main occupation is a Faust-like quest for forbidden knowledge. He seeks to understand the mystery of death by deciphering secrets buried in "the Word," a cabalistic concept that he defines ambiguously as "companion not to life, but Death" (11), "a golden nugget on the tongue" (44), "that elusive kernel...the Key, the moment of my rehabilitation" (63), and "a terrible fire" (68). It is not difficult to see why this giddy kind of wordplay left audiences scratching their heads. Even an awareness that the god Ogun lurked somewhere in the epistemological backdrop of the play didn't help informed theatregoers very much. The Chicago production was, in Soyinka's words, "a traumatic experience" (Mike 25), "a harrowing, painful experience" for him (Mike 49), due largely to the incompetence of the lead actor who had been cast as Professor. Soyinka nicknamed him "the black hole from [outer] space" because "all he did was suck in energy, everybody's energies including his fellow actors[1], but gave forth no light whatever, thereby creating a huge hole right in the middle of the play" (Mike 25). Because this actor didn't understand his role and "could not enter the language of the play" (Mike 25), Soyinka felt it necessary to cut more and more of his lines: And of course the more you chop the Professor, the more you have to chop the others because it becomes totally unbalanced...I hadn't realized how lopsided it had become...I had to take the play and slash all over again...I think we got down to about ninety-five minutes nonstop to mixed reactions, general bafflement and so on. (Mike 50-51) Despite these draconian cuts, or perhaps because of them, a reviewer for Chicago's Sunday Times described The Road as "a long, bumpy ride" (Saunders). In this production Soyinka was working with African-American actors, many of whom had adopted a style of rhetoric he thought had been influenced either by black preaching or by the fiery slang of the Black Power Movement. Soyinka tried to train them to speak in a different register, a playful poetic idiom more akin to vernacular expression in Nigerian lorry parks, but the result was far from satisfactory. Alisa Solomon reported that "it didn't help that the audience resisted the play's abundant humor" (14). Apparently, they, like the actor playing Professor, couldn't comprehend the indigenous markers in Soyinka's theatrical language. Colin Taylor believes that in North America Soyinka's dense and poetic language...is of a kind seldom heard in our theatres. Outside of Nigeria, Soyinka's work has been most popular in England, where poetry with a capital "P" still has something of a fighting chance on the stage. The notorious difficulty of Soyinka's works derives principally from the kind of language found in these...plays - a language of mordant music and concrete cadences, of rolling verbal thunder and chiseled imagery, that demands to be met halfway by an audience sensitive to verbal nuances and word pictures, if the core of mystery at the center of each work is to be fully unravelled. (36) Taylor goes on to argue that one consequence of such stylistic brilliance is that: Soyinka, more than other playwrights, suffers dreadfully from an indifferent production. Any production that fails to appreciate, in equal measure, Soyinka's profundity, humour, vivid characterization, roughness, and willingness to entertain runs the risk of being, at best "masterpiecey," and at worst, a crashing bore.... To paraphrase Peter Brook, if a play is a violin awaiting its violinist for its expression, then a Soyinka text requires a Rostropovich or a Menuhin to make it sing upon the stage. The problem for Soyinka so far has been a string of Jack Bennys playing his music. There are those who believe that Soyinka, who frequently directs both his and other people's plays, may be one of them. (37-38) What this last remark fails to take adequately into account is that Soyinka has occasionally directed successful productions abroad of some of his plays, the most notable example being the equally "difficult" Death and the King's Horseman, which got generally good reviews when performed at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 1979 but which was received less favourably when revived at Lincoln Center in New York City in 1987. (For Soyinka's reaction to bad press reviews of the latter, see the interview he gave to L. Jones and Gates.) Several of his satirical plays and farces have also appealed to international audiences, in particular his latest published play, King Baabu, which toured Europe, America, Southern Africa and Australia. However, Taylor may be right about North American audiences being turned off by the rich verbal texture of Soyinka's more philosophical plays. Such audiences may not go to the theatre expecting to hear poetry. African playwrights who have attempted to speak more directly to foreign audiences have had other obstacles to overcome. A case in point is Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer whose dramatic works never leave any doubt about what he wants to say. His most famous plays are didactic agit-prop musicals espousing Marxist ideas about imperialism and neocolonialism. One of these, Ngaahika Ndeenda I Will Marry When I Want, written and performed in Kenya in the Gikuyu language, led to his detention for a year in a maximum-security prison. Another, Maui Nyugira [Mother, Sing for Me], composed after his release, was banned by the Kenya Government a few days before it was due to open at the National Theatre in Nairobi in February 1982. Ngugi was expressing blunt political ideas that the authorities evidently didn't want people to hear. A few months later, while he was in London for the launch of a novel he had written in prison, an attempted coup was suppressed in Kenya, and Ngugi could not return home without being vulnerable to arrest. During his early years in exile, he attempted to resume his theatrical activities by mounting a London production of Mother, Sing for Me in English translation, but he couldn't find adequate funding to support a proposed cast of thirty-five people. The Arts Council England was interested in the project but wanted to assume a measure of artistic control, including selection of a veteran director (Owusu 152). The company that had been assembled and was already busy rehearsing the show decided to abandon their plans to stage Mother, Sing for Me, but, wishing to continue their collaboration with Ngugi, they agreed to attempt to revive another play that Ngugi had co-authored in English with Micere Mugo and had published in 1976 under the title The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. Dealing with the trial and execution of a heroic Mau Mau general who had led the struggle against British colonial rule in Kenya, this anti-imperialist melodrama had been performed at a Nigerian cultural festival and in other venues at home and abroad by groups working from the printed text, but for the London production by the Wazalendo [Progressive] Players, a troupe of mostly amateur performers drawn from fifteen different nations, "new songs, dances, and whole scenes and sequences were introduced by cast members or generated in rehearsals. This new material reflected the diverse cultural backgrounds of Wazalendo players and the vibrant aesthetic influences which ultimately transformed the original production" (Owusu 153). A similar collaborative technique had served Ngugi well when he directed, I Will Marry When I Want and Mother, Sing for Me in Kenya, and he had continued using a version of it with the group that had been rehearsing with him earlier in London. It was a style of direction that demanded and capitalized upon input from the performers, who were frequently called upon to contribute in other ways as well. Members of the cast doubled as secretaries, advance booking agents, publicists, creche workers, finance people, tour organisers and negotiators, blurring the distinctions between "actors" and "administrators," "foot soldiers" and "generals." Everyone in the cast, including those who had scripted the original production, shared in these tasks. Sub-committees were formed to co-ordinate the new structure of work and to establish a system of information and accountability. (Owusu 152). This style of communal collaboration made the Wazalendo Players less dependent on state funding and actually brought in a greater number of small donations from community groups, organizations and individuals who sympathized with what the troupe was trying to achieve. The play was staged in small venues, first at the Africa Centre in London and then in community halls in provincial cities and towns. The entire run in London, Oxford, Manchester and Leeds was sold out (Owusu 158). One review spoke of the performers taking the play out into the community, both in rehearsal and in final production. They aim, by going to "politically targeted" communities - areas with high concentrations of industrial workers, unemployed or black people-to allow those who do not usually have access to theatre a chance to take part....The play calls for discussion of Britain's historical and contemporary role in Kenya and performances will be accompanied by discussion papers and a photo exhibition designed to promote debate. (Kitchener) The play also encouraged various forms of audience participation, including dialogue with the performers. The basic strategy was to get people thinking and talking about issues that were related to their own lives. Unlike Soyinka's The Road, Ngugi's The Trial of Dedan Kimathi had a clear message, and Ngugi wanted audiences to grasp its wider implications. In an interview he said: What the play is really about is imperialist domination and imperialist systems. We have the imperialist system led by the U.S. and the antiimperialist movement worldwide, and the play is really about those contending forces. It would be wrong to see it merely as something from the past because the same struggles are still going on in Nicaragua, South Africa and, indeed, here on the miners' picket lines. (Green) The story of Dedan Kimathi was thus envisioned as part of a much larger drama that was being played out all over the globe. In speaking of his working methods, Ngugi stated that he didn't see himself in the traditional role of director: “It is a struggle between two different forms of theatre. One assumes that the director knows everything, the other that some people know, and that others who don't know exchange knowledge through discussion and debate.” (Green) Ngugi wanted his cast as well as his audience to shape the final message. Performances were merely works in progress directed toward a common goal of fuller understanding of ongoing political struggles. Though this collaborative amateur production of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was criticized for various shortcomings, reviews in the African press in London were generally favourable (see, e.g., Perry, Kitchener and Green), and the play managed to run for four months in Britain, albeit sporadically and in small venues. There came a point, however, when it had to stop because, as one participant put it: it was impossible to sustain a cast of more than 35 people over a long period of time. Our financial position made it impossible to pay each member more than £20per week. Sometimes a week included a number of ten-hour days. In very simple terms, Wazalenda was starved out. (Owusu 158) One wonders, of course, if such a play, performed in such a manner, would have been successful in larger theatres. Perhaps it was a more engaging theatrical experience in smaller spaces. By way of contrast to the cerebral Soyinka and the communal Ngugi, it may be instructive to examine the extraordinary commercial success of another African director who communicates with Western audiences in an entirely different way. Mbongeni Ngema, the South African impresario who directed the smash-hit Sarafina! and other musical blockbusters on Broadway and in the West End, started out as a guitarist who accidentally became an actor in popular township plays written and directed by the legendary Gibson Kente. He and a fellow actor, Percy Miwa, eventually broke off from Kente and in collaboration with a white director, Barney Simon, created a rollicking two-hander called Waza Albert! which told of the second coming of Jesus Christ, this time to apartheid South Africa. This broad, bold satire, created initially for domestic consumption, was an instant success not only in South Africa but also during nearly three years on tour in Britain, Germany and America where it won many awards. In the intervals between tours Ngema returned to South Africa and formed his own small theatre company. He has said In 1983 I established Committed Artists with the sole aim of training young, disadvantaged South Africans. My methodology entailed a combination of western and African theatrical techniques. Grotowsky, Stanislavsky and Peter Brook were the main western influences on my method, particularly with their experimental theatre (what Peter Brook called the immediate theatre). The African sphere was the most accented, especially the Zulu culture. This is what made this method unique, for African life and movement has a rhythm of its own. (Ngema vii) In 1985 Committed Artists launched their first production, Asinamali! (We have no money!), in a cinema in Soweto, then moved it downtown to the Market Theatre before embarking on very successful national and international tours. Asinamali! had the same kind of intense energy that distinguished Waza Albert! but it made much greater use of song, dance and tightly organized ensemble work. It also dealt in an unusual manner with the tragic lives of five men imprisoned after the assassination of a prominent strike leader. Peter Brook saw the production in Harlem and was struck by its dynamism, noting that "this horrifying situation was being presented, pitilessly, through a joie de vivre. The events were not softened by it, but heightened to the last degree because they were presented, not through a sentimentality, but through a vitality" (L. Jones 115). Ngema was not one of the performers in this play, but he had trained all the actors, written the script, composed the songs, and choreographed the dances. Asinamali! was his first great success as a director-producer, and he often traveled with the company when they performed in America, Europe, Japan and Australia, a tour that lasted more than two years. Whenever he returned to South Africa, he went out and searched for fresh talent, simultaneously recruiting experienced theatre professionals to help him with his next show, which he decided would celebrate South Africa's black schoolchildren who were then leading the struggle against apartheid. After auditioning "some 750 kids, all Zulus from the Durban area" (W. Jones), he rounded up twenty teenagers, "moved them into a four-room house in Daveytown, near Johannesburg, lived with them, and trained them vocally, mentally and physically" (L. Jones 124). At the same time he developed a script, composing music in the popular mbaqanga style and writing lyrics as he went along. After fourteen months of hard work and fine tuning, the result was Sarafina! his most ambitious undertaking and by far his most remunerative. After opening to great applause at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, Ngema in 1987 took his cast of twenty-three youngsters to Lincoln Center in New York where their engagement was extended repeatedly until they moved to Broadway and played to capacity audiences at the Cort Theatre for the next eighteen months (L. Jones 129). "Sarafina! was probably the highlight of my career," Ngema has said, adding, "Ironically, it was the least sophisticated of all my work" (Lee 34). The story-line, he admitted, "is not strong. It's very simplistic...[But] I did it deliberately. I was telling it through the eyes of the kids. And those kids, wearing those uniforms...people just loved them. It's easier to love young people than adults on stage...For the first time in South Africa, we saw a young professional cast. We saw a Broadway musical played by kids, who, even though they were young, were highly professional. You, see, it's not so much the story but how it's done!" (Berman 32) It could be said that at that point in his career, Ngema seemed to be doing everything right - at least commercially. He was offered recording contracts, an Academy-Award winning director made a full-length documentary about Sarafina! and then came the Hollywood version of the musical with megastar Whoopi Goldberg in a leading role. This feature film, shot in the environs of Soweto, employed about 100 actors and up to 5000 extras (Makgabutlane 1992: 40). By the time it hit the big screen in 1992, Sarafina! had been running continuously on the stage for five years. Not everyone was entirely pleased with what Ngema had managed to achieve. Some critics in South Africa regarded him as a sellout to commercial interests in the West. Jeanne Colleran pointed out that: “Sarafina! drew on no specific, historical incident, in the fashion of Asinamali, nor was it intended, like Woza Albert!, for a township audience...As a pseudo-township musical...Sarafina! grafts some features of a theatrical form born in resistance and struggle to one born of profit and apolitically, and becomes in the process the worst-case scenario of cultural syncretism (232-33). Mark Gevisser expressed a similar opinion, claiming that Sarafina's spectacular success had left a negative legacy: Its pastiche of political anger and Broadway-style musical fused into a form of struggle-minstrelsy that has proven to be immensely lucrative and has become the almost inescapable model for how black South African theatre should be made. (11, quoted by Colleran 229) Ngema may have been right to single out Sarafina! as the highlight of his career. His later musicals have been less successful, and a 1995 sequel called Sarafina 2, which was meant to address the AIDS crisis in South Africa, turned out to be a fiasco as well as a major political embarrassment to the ANC-led Government that had lavishly sponsored it with funds donated by the European Union to the South African Health Department to improve public health (Lindfors). Since that time - indeed, since the demise of apartheid - few of Ngema's musicals have traveled abroad, and not one has been made into a Hollywood film. Yet Ngema's earlier commercial successes suggest that he knew how to adapt his works so that they would strike a chord - a rich chord - with Western audiences. He once said: I think it is because I am a musician that I tend to have the kind of approach I have. When theatre does not have a beat, it does not have a rhythm, then theatre tends to bore. Theatre must be like a piece of music which has a beat that people can sit and listen to...or dance to. (Makgabutlane 1990: 20) In another interview he reiterated this self-assessment, stating: First and foremost, I'm an entertainer...I direct as a musician. I see my theatre pieces as one song, as a whole, as a piece of jazz which changes beat, changes colours....What excites me is when the script and music become one, when a performance comes together....People must walk out and say "WOW!" (Mendel 19) Soyinka and Ngugi have not been able to WOW! their Western audiences to the same degree, even though they too have included songs and dances in their productions. Perhaps in the West myth and militancy do not sell as well as mbaqanga music. To bridge the cultural divide between Africa and the rest of the Anglophone world, sheer entertainment may speak much louder than words, words, words. So there are limits to the globalization of African literature. The publishers, the scholars and the writers themselves have had to come to terms with constraints on their activities and ambitions. Though African literature has earned a place of honor in the pantheon of world literature in the past half-century, it is not yet and may never be wholly assimilable internationally. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. It happens to every literature, young and old, that has a distinctive identity of its own, a personality that makes it unique. African literature appears destined to remain obdurately and spectacularly African.
Conclusion
African literature stands at a crossroads of visibility and vulnerability. While its global recognition affirms the richness of African voices, unequal publishing structures and limited intra-African dialogue continue to restrict its full potential. The decline of supportive outlets like the African Writers Series underscores the need for renewed investment in local publishing and criticism that speaks to African audiences as well as global ones. By embracing both indigenous and international readerships, African literature can transform its paradox of marginalization into a platform for empowerment, continuity, and cultural self-definition.
References
Berman, Kathy. "Ngema and SA's Musical Mousetrap." Weekly Mail (Johannesburg) 16-23 April 1992: 32. Colleran, Jeanne. "South African Theatre in the United States: The Allure of the Familiar and of the Exotic." Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970-1995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 221-36. Gevisser, Mark. "Truth and Consequences in Post-Apartheid Theatre." Theater 25.3 (1995): 9-18. Gibbs, James. "The Masks Hatched Out." Theatre Research International 7 (1982): 180-206. ______. Wole Soyinka. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986. Gilliat, Penelope. "A Nigerian Original." Observer (London) 19 September 1965: 23. Okon, E. A. (2023). Mfịna Ukpeeb ikọ Ibibio ke Ikpeghe Yuniọ Sekọndri ke Akwa Ibom Sted. University of Uyo Journal of Humanities, 27(2), 88 Retrieved from University of Uyo Journal of Humanities (https://www.uujh.org/rdc_1?article=mfina-ukpeeb-iko-ibibio-ke-ikpeghe-yunio-sekondri-ke-akwa-ibom-sted) Green, John. "Past Tale and Present Reality of the Struggle Against Imperialism." Morning Star (London) 18 October 1984: 2. Jeyifo, Biodun. "Whose Theatre, Whose Africa? Wole Soyinka's The Road on the Road." Modern Drama 45.3 (2002): 449-65. Jones, Laura. Nothing Except Ourselves: The Harsh Times and Bold Theater of South Africa's Mbongeni Ngema. New York: Penguin, 1994. ---, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Postmortem for a Death..." Black American Literature Forum 22 (1988): 787-803. Jones, Woody. "Sarafinal: A Glimpse at South Africa's Youth." Black Masks 4.3 (1987): 6. Kitchener, Julie. "Keeping Kimathi Alive." New African October 1984: 49 Lee, Peta. "The Only Ngema in Town." Sunday Times Magazine (Johannesburg) 26 February 1995: 34. Lindfors, Bernth. "The Rise and Fall of Mbongeni Ngema: The AIDS Play." South African Theatre as/and Intervention. Ed. Marcia Blumberg and Dennis Walder. Cross/Cultures, 38. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. 181-91. ______ "Counting Caliban's Curses: A Statistical Inventory." Recovering Letters, Discovering Numbers: Literary and Statistical Studies. Trenton, New Jersey, and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2004. 105-23. Makgabutlane, Sol. "Into the Mainstream." Tribute April 1990: 20-24. "Sarafina! Five Years of Success." Tribute February 1992: 38-40. Mendel, Delores. "Mbongeni Ngema." Club April 1990: 18-19. Mike, Chuck. Soyinka as Director. Ife Monographs on Literature and Criticism, 4'" Series, No. 4. Ile-Ife: Department of Literature in English, University of lfe. 1986. Ngema, Mbongeni. The Best of Mbongeni Ngema. Braamfontein: Skotaville Publishers, 1995. Owusu, Kwest. The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain. London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1986. Perry, Alison. "Whose Country is it Anyway?" West Africa 29 October 1984: 2193. Saunders, Dick. "The Road Provides a Long, Bumpy Ride." Sunday Times (Chicago) 1 May 1984: 47. Solomon, Alisa. "The Road from Nigeria." American Theatre 1.8 (1984): 10-14. Soyinka, Wole. The Road. London and Ibadan: Oxford UP, 1965. Taylor, Colin. "Seeing Soyinka." Theatrum 10 (1988): 35-38.
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