New men of the Modern Africa: A comparative study of Ferdinand in A Bend in the
River and Nwoye in Things Fall Apart.
Authors:
1. Irina Ishrat
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University,
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
Corresponding Add:
C/O: Zamshedur Rahman
320/1, Avenue-2; Bloc-A
Section:13, Mirpur-1216
2. Asma Alam
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University,
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
Corresponding Add:
228-229, Malibag Bazar Road,
Biswas Malobika (Second Floor) Flat # F2
Dhaka- 1217.
New men of the Modern Africa: A comparative study of Ferdinand in A Bend in the
River and Nwoye in Things Fall Apart.
Abstract
Hybridity, mimicry and hegemony are inevitable off-springs of the process of
colonization. This paper attempts to map and analyze the process of these aspects through
the writings of two major writers on Post-colonial issues: the Nigerian writer Chinua
Achebe and the Trinidadian writer V.S.Naipaul. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
Naipaul’s A Bend in the River are unquestionably two of the greatest master pieces ever
produced. Both the novels deal with colonial, Post-colonial issues like hegemony,
hybridity, mimicry, misrepresentation, fissure, nationalism etc. The characters of these
two writers’ two novels strongly fit the present situation of the Post-colonial or Neocolonial world. Ferdinand in A Bend in the River and Nwoye in Things fall Apart
represent some themes and motifs crucial to the books that examine colonial dichotomies
of primitive vs. modern, periphery vs. centre. Both Ferdinand and Nwoye are the tools in
the process of the formation of modern African identity. While Ferdinand stands for the
Hybrid new man fit for Africa’s Post-colonial ambivalent socio-political-economicalcultural ambience, Nwoye represents an epitome of hegemony of a generation which
could not sustain its existence as it’s being hegemonized causes doom to the Igbo. The
major difference between these two young men’s circumstance is that, Ferdinand’s
mother Zabeth has dreamt of her son’s being educated and brought up in a European
manner, so that a new hybrid generation can adapt and adopt the new ways whereas,
Nwoye’s father Okonkwo hopes that his son will carry and uphold the relay-flame of his
Igbo culture. So, Nwoye’s conversion into Christianity is enough to signal the extinction
of the community. Yet Nwoye embraces the new way and definition of life, ignoring the
traditionalism and old custom of the Igbo society.
The colonial experience makes the colonized people perceive themselves as inferior to
the colonizers. Cultural hegemony presents the English world as ordered and successful.
As a result the hegemonized natives consider their own culture, customs, tradition,
religion, and race as inferior to those of their masters. This causes their attempt to
identify themselves with the empire. For instance, in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
(2000) we find Picola Breedlove, a black girl, who believes that blue eyes, blond hair and
fair complexion can change her luck and life. She yearns for blue eyes to the limit of
sanity. It reminds us of Michael Adas’ words: “The civilizing mission has been
traditionally seen as an ideology by which late nineteenth century Europeans rationalized
their colonial domination of the rest of human kind. Through it, Europeans want to
establish that, Europeans are disciplined, progressive and punctual, while Africans and
Asians were dismissed as superstitious, indolent, reactionary, out of control, and
oblivious of time.”(2004: 33).That is why Flemming Brahms thinks that the post-colonial
writers demonstrate a sense of urgency to recreate colonial and cultural selfhood. He
writes: “They have the task of rewriting culture to establish a sense of nationalism that
works against absolutist cultural hegemony. The phenomenon of re-establishing a culture
by means of literature considers negotiating cultural hybridity while establishing
selfhood.”(1995:66). Therefore, Kwaku ASANTE-DARKO is right when he says, “Postcolonial literature is a synthesis of protest and imitation” (2000:12) as it blends revolt and
conciliation. African literature reflects the African colonial experience. It is worthy of
note that: in trying to avenge or retaliate we simply imitate. Another issue of imitation
and hybridization in post-colonial African literature is that of language. Frantz Fanon had
already indicated that “The use of language as a tool of assimilation and subsequent
rebellion against linguistic integration and alienation have become familiar aspects of
colonial life.” (qtd. in Gendzier 1973: 47).
Ferdinand in V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) is the new man of modern Africa
who grows with time and accepts all he is offered on his way of the world. His great boon
is his mother Zabeth who possesses uninhabited primitivism while strikingly aware of
modern cosmopolitanism. She has sent Ferdinand to the lycee in the town. When he first
comes to Salim’s shop, he wears the lycee white blazer which has the Simper Aliquid
Novi motto (emphasis mine) in a scroll on the breast pocket. Though she has lived a
purely African life for her son she wants something better. “This better life lay outside
the timeless ways of village and river. It lay in education and the acquiring of new skills;
and for Zabeth, as for many Africans of her generation; education was something only
foreigners could give” (BR 41). She brings Ferdinand to Salim as the latter is a foreigner,
and English speaking as well, someone who possesses in Shelly Walia’s words: “… the
migrant sensibility struggling to find accommodation and alteration.”(20001: 6). Zabeth
considers him someone from whom Ferdinand can learn manners and the ways of the
outside world. Later, he begins to go down on one knee to show a traditional reverence.
Children of the bush do it to show respect to older persons. But he does not complete it as
“It could not transfer to the town and for someone like Ferdinand, especially after his
time in the southern mining town, the child’s gesture of respect would have seemed oldfashioned and subservient.” (BR 42) After his stiff conversation in English or French
with Salim, Ferdinand would use local patois with Metty with the intonations of the local
language and the mannerism that goes with the language. He chats with Metty in the
Patois making a contented, rippling, high-pitched sound. Actually, Colonial empires
engender biological as well as intellectual hybridity. Colonial educational policies aim at
creating Europeanized natives, or to use Thomas B. Macaulay’s 1835 infamous ‘Minute
on Education’, the motto behind the civilizing mission was “to from a class who may be
interpreter between us (the Europeans / colonialists) and the millions whom we govern; a
class of persons, Indian in bold and color, but English is taste, in opinions, in manners,
and in intellect”. (quoted in O’Reilly 2001:17)
A point to be noted is that natives can mimic but never exactly reproduce English values.
As a result the perpetual gap between the subject and object of mimicry ensures the
subjection of the mimic man. Ferdinand goes through a problematic experience of a
hybridized reality adopting the new rules he finds available, following whatever
European character he sees rather than trying to defy colonial constructs by establishing a
new ideology. Ferdinand has picked up some mannerisms from his European teachers
like a mimic man. But his mimicry does not take him too far rather it renders him with
hollow knowledge. Ferdinand is not the only one to whom this is happening. An instance
can be Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men (1967) by V.S. Naipaul, who suffers from
dislocation, placeless ness, fragmentation, and loss of identity. He represents displaced
and disillusioned colonial individuals. Here colonization is depicted as a process that
takes away their identity, culture, history, and sense of home / Place. Cudjoe says, “The
novel presents Singh’s desire to learn what it means to be a colonial subject in a
postcolonial society” (1988: 99). We find that The Big Man exhibits the mimicry of the
very culture, they aspire to subvert, and the Domain proves to be the mimicry of the very
colonial state it aims to dismiss. Salim observes that Ferdinand takes a discussion up to a
certain point but drops it without embarrassment. He can see through his ‘mask like face’,
his fluid personality. At the same time he knows, as does Zabeth, that Ferdinand is a
lycee boy with a future. In a seminar Indar addresses the lycee boys including Ferdinand
as men of the modern world”. (BR 141). Indar’s words are not false. At the lycee
Ferdinand learns things Salim knows nothing about. There the latter fails to talk about his
school work which puts the advantage on the former’s side. As a hybrid man, who still,
after all, goes home to the bush on occasions, Ferdinand is bound to race ahead of Salim
in knowledge, therefore power. Salim realizes “Yet to him [Ferdinand] the world was
new and getting newer. For me that same world was drab, without possibilities.” (BR
119). Ferdinand is of mixed tribal heritage having no group to be ‘really his own’ and ‘no
one to model himself on’ (BR 53). Ferdinand can be read as a ‘miscegenetic’. According
to the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, the term was coined by journalist David
Croly in his 1864 pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races,
Applied to the American White Men and Negro. He asserted that “… the miscegenetic or
mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically and morally, to those pure or
unmixed” (2004: 298).
So he tries on various characters, attempting different kinds of manners. “Copying one
teacher, he might, in the flat, stand with crossed legs against the white studio wall and
fixed in that position, attempt to conduct a whole conversation. Or, copying another
teacher, he might walk around the trestle table, lifting things, looking at them, and then
dropping them, while he talked.” (BR 53)
Sometimes he pretends to be Salim’s business associate, his equal, or the young African
on the way up, the lycee student, and modern go ahead. The image of the water hyacinth
symbolizes Ferdinand’s condition very well as he has come floating from the South. We
are told, “Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it
traveled” (BR 52). Starting from nothing, Ferdinand as a hybrid man progresses through
the world accepting all his roles and living them out: “lycee boy, polytechnic student,
new man of Africa, first class passenger on the steamer”. (BR 317). He tells Salim “the
world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising” (BR 54) and takes the
polytechnic seriously as it assures to lead him to an administrative cadetship and
eventually to a position of authority.
Confronted by the overwhelming hegemony of colonialist rhetoric of Africa, Achebe
feels the need to invent a new African narrative and thereby to write back and de-center.
Things Fall Apart (1958) portrays a social condition in flux where the intrusion of a
foreign culture has disfigured the meaning and value of African traditional experience. In
Things Fall Apart hegemony is exercised by the white man through various ideologies
that lie behind consciousness. Religion, trade, culture, brotherhood-different ideological
stands have been taken by the colonialists to achieve power over the colonized. As
ideology is crucial in creating consent it is achieved not merely by direct manipulation or
indoctrination, but by playing on the common sense and values of people. Here Antonio
Gramsci’s idea of hegemony can be mentioned which “… links the spontaneous consent
of the masses to the maintenance of power by a minority class, through the use of
persuasion and collaboration. ( quoted in Walia 2001 : 31)
Nwoye in Things Fall Apart is also the new man of Africa accepting newness, exploring
the unknown. But his main hindrance is his father Okonkwo, who does not accept any
change in the normal course of his life as an Igbo man. Nwoye portrays the hegemonic
depiction through conversion of religion, accepting new mode of life and ultimately
abandoning his own family ties. He can be signified as a hegemone. He has a definite
strain of anti-traditionalism in him. He continually feels alienated from the Ibo
community. He himself has made him as the other and become a created body of the
white men. At the age of twelve, Nwoye began “causing his father great anxiety for his
incipient laziness” (TFA 10). Hence, he fails to fulfill his father’s dream “to be a great
farmer and a great man” (TFA 24). At the very outset of his upcoming maturity, he began
feeling distracted at his father’s clan and community. Nwoye’s sad-faced youth got
lightened at the arrival of Ikemefuna. He accepts the friendship of this newcomer and
develops a good relation. This is like accepting newness of idealism. Although Nwoye
belongs to Igbo clan, he is in fact unable to understand the spirit of his clan and thus
when Ikemefuna is killed, the ideals and beliefs collapse in the face of concrete
experience. He cannot accept it and it imprints a remarkable change in him.
Nwoye closely feels attracted to the new faith from the very beginning. He is found
present whenever they preach in the open market place. Since Ibo is a community where
mastery of figurative language is the core to social survival and control, the poetry of
Christianity is bound to attract Nwoye’s poetic disposition. He resembles his grandfather
Unoka, a man shown to have a sense of the dramatic and to be a verbal virtuoso. It is to
be remembered that, in Walia’s words, “language, literature and history play a significant
role in setting up the systems” (2001:32)
What draws him to the Christians is the poetry he perceives in their preachments and
songs: “It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow” (TFA 106)
Nwoye with some of the clansmen was convinced that the missionaries were doing the
right thing. The white men are prudent, forward-looking. They have come to Umuofia to
teach the clansmen common sense. He, like them, fails to understand that the white men
have used religion as an excuse for power: “the white man had not only brought a
religion but also a government” (TFA 110)
The Christians have strengthened themselves by giving shelter to the outcasts. They have
played humanitarian mission. They call every body brother. This draws the clansmen
closer to the missionaries. They are tactful enough to win the consent of the simple living
clansmen through different manipulations. Influenced, Nwoye’s name has been changed
to “Isaac”. He has become an epitome among the converts, well-known in the clan. He
has found something sympathetic, soft and humanitarian in the new religion. The liking
for the new missionary comes from the disliking of the traditional religion. He is moved
deeply by the new way of life that entirely goes against the norm of the ongoing extinct
custom and tradition. As a result Nwoye is both physically and mentally convert. He
failed to recognize the hidden agenda of the Enlightenment ideas of Reason and Progress:
that of creating a successful imperial practice.
The white men made the Clansmen understood that they worshipped false gods, gods of
wood and stone. The missionaries’ song was meaningful. “It was a story of brothers who
lived in darkness and in fear ignorant of the love of God”. (TFA 103). The Son of God
JesuKristi was introduced among the clansmen. Kenyan scholar Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a
forceful critique of imperialism in Africa, firmly declares: “colonialism imposed its
control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent
political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe
of the colonized”. (1986:16)
In Umuofia, the white missionary had set up a school to teach young Christians to read,
to write and common sense, in Rudyard Kipling’s rhetoric to unburden the ‘Whiteman’s
burden’. Nwoye being a young lad did not fully understand the aim of the school. Yet he
feels happy to leave his father and his clansmen. He is flying towards a good civilization.
The power of hegemony is so widespread that there is no organized resistance against the
overwhelming colonialist even though the people are aware of his coming much earlier.
Njeng rightly states: “News of the violent annihilation of all these who resist the
colonialist paralyze the people and they surrender long before the white man arrives”.
(2008:6). When Okonkwo returns from exile, he finds his people already submitted to the
white man without any formed resistance. Walia writes: “It (Hegemony) tends to make
the subaltern accept inequality and oppression as natural and unchangeable” (2001:32-33)
In No Longer at Ease (1960) Obi returns to the country from London where he had gone
to study. He has completely been changed by the Western culture just as the community
prepares to make him their ambassador in the government.
At the end, the hybrid Ferdinand survives when Salim leaves the scene. In the same way,
the hegemonized Nwoye lives while Okonkwo dies with all his antiquity. Both of the
young men go ahead to carry the relay-flame of the new world-order Modern Africa must
maintain for its survival. Frantz Fanon writes “the colonized is either doomed to be a
mere reflection of his master (located in the Imaginary) or he must fight his master
through active struggle”. (quoted in Gendzier 1973: 62). Nwoye falls victim to the first
category while Okonkwo follows the second. Finally Okonkwo commits suicide. The old
custom dies with the death of Okonkwo. Likewise, when Salim asks Fardinand on their
last meeting “what are you going to do” (BR 320), he simply replies: “I don’t know. I
will do what I have to do” (BR 320) showing an utter indignation to ‘origin’, ‘centre’ and
‘end’. In the end, Ferdinand survives as the man of the modern world while Salim leaves
the town.
Works Cited
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Declaration for Banglavision:
Date: November 18, 2012
1
Name of the title: New men of the Modern Africa: A comparative study of
Ferdinand in A Bend in the River and Nwoye in Things Fall Apart.
2
Name of the first author : Irina Ishrat
3.
Profession & Designation: Teaching at Private university and working as Senior
Lecturer
4
Organization: Daffodil International University
5
Address:
i)Irina Ishrat.
Corresponding Add:
C/O: Zamshedur Rahman
320/1, Avenue-2; Bloc-A
Section:13, Mirpur-1216
ii) Asma Alam
Corresponding Add:
228-229, Malibag Bazar Road,
Biswas Malobika (Second Floor) Flat # F2
Dhaka- 1217. Mob: 01711909727.
6
Email: irinaishrat@gmail.com. alamasma@ymail.com
7
Co-author: Asma Alam
Senior Lecturer,
Daffodil International University.
This is to declare that the above mentioned information is correct and valid. We also
declare that the research article (mentioned in point) was carried out by us and the
content of the paper was not published/submitted for publication anywhere before.
Irina Ishrat
Asma Alam