II. Identities
14. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (1938)
From: Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (1938; London: Heinemann, 1979), “Conclusion”, 309-318. – Jomo Kenyatta (1893 – 1978) was a nationalist politician who
emerged as the figurehead of the anticolonial movement in Kenya in the 1940s and
50s. He became President of the Kenya African Union (KAU) in 1947 and was imprisoned from 1953 to 1960 by the British colonial government in Kenya who
accused him of having instigated the Mau Mau War (see text 4 above). He was elected President of the newly founded Kenya African National Union (KANU) in 1960;
after his release from prison he became a member of the Legislative Assembly and
played a decisive role in negotiating Kenya’s independence at the Lancaster House
Conference in London. In 1963, Kenyatta became the first Prime Minister of independent Kenya; from 1964 until his death in 1978 he served as his country’s first
President. During his increasingly authoritarian rule, Kenyatta turned Kenya from a
functioning democracy into a one-party state and suppressed all opposition to his
regime. Like many nationalist politicians in Africa, Kenyatta went to Britain for further education; he studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics
and graduated with a thesis on the Gikuyu in Kenya that was published as Facing
Mount Kenya in 1937. Kenyatta’s pioneering book was one of the first anthropological
studies authored by an African and presented a comprehensive overview of culture
and social life of the Gikuyu that not only countered colonial myths of “primitive”
Africa, but also challenged the legitimacy of colonial rule.
In concluding this study it cannot be too strongly emphasised that the various
sides of Gikuyu life here described are the parts of an integrated culture. No single
part is detachable; each has its context and is fully understandable only in relation
to the whole. […]
The key to this culture is the tribal system, and the bases of the tribal system
are the family group and the age-grades, which between them shape the character
and determine the outlook of every man, woman, and child in Gikuyu society.
According to Gikuyu ways of thinking, nobody is an isolated individual. Or rather,
his uniqueness is a secondary fact about him: first and foremost he is several
people’s relative and several people’s contemporary. His life is founded on this
fact spiritually and economically, just as much as biologically; the work he does
every day is determined by it, and it is the basis of his sense of moral responsibility
and social obligation. His personal needs, physical and psychological, are satisfied
incidentally while he plays his part as member of a family group, and cannot be
fully satisfied in any other way. The fact that in Gikuyu language individualism is
associated with black magic, and that a man or woman is honoured by being ad-
54
Section II
dressed as somebody’s parent, or somebody’s uncle or aunt, shows how indispensably kinship is at the root of Gikuyu ideas of good and evil.
This vital reality of the family group is an important thing for Europeans to
bear in mind, since it underlies the whole social and economic organisation of the
Gikuyu. It means, for instance, that the authority of the tribe is different in kind
from that of the European national State. The Gikuyu does not think of his tribe
as a group of individuals organised collectively, for he does not think of himself as
a social unit. It is rather the widening-out of the family by a natural process of
growth and division. He participates in tribal affairs through belonging to his
family, and his status in the larger organisation reflects his status in the family
circle. The average European observer, not being trained in comparative sociology, takes his own fundamental assumptions for granted without realising that he
is doing so. He thinks of the tribe as if it must be analogous to the European
Sovereign State, and draws the conclusion that the executive authority for that
sovereignty must be vested in the Chief, as if he were a Prime Minister or a President. In doing so he makes a huge mistake, which makes it impossible for him to
enter into intelligible relations with the Gikuyu people. They simply do not know
where he gets his ideas from, since to them the family rather than the larger unit is
the primary reality on which power is based.
The visible symbol of this bond of kinship is the family land, which is the
source of livelihood and the field of labour. In an agricultural community the
whole social organisation must derive from the land, and without understanding
the system on which it is held and worked it will be impossible to see the meaning
of other aspects of life. In Gikuyu society the system of land tenure can only be
understood by reference to the ties of kinship. It is no more true to say that the
land is collectively owned by the tribe than that it is privately owned by the individual. In relation to the tribe, a man is the owner of his land, and there is no
official and no committee with authority to deprive him of it or to levy a tax on
his produce. But in so far as there are other people of his own flesh and blood
who depend on that land for their daily bread, he is not the owner, but a partner,
or at the most a trustee for the others. Since the land is held in trust for the unborn as well as for the living, and since it represents his partnership in the common life of generations, he will not lightly take upon himself to dispose of it. But
in so far as he is cultivating a field for the maintenance of himself and his wives
and children, he is the undisputed owner of that field and all that grows in it. [309311]
But a culture has no meaning apart from die social organisation of life on
which it is built. When the European comes to die Gikuyu country and robs the
people of their land, he is taking away not only their livelihood, but the material
symbol that holds family and tribe together. In doing this he gives one blow which
cuts away the foundations from the whole of Gikuyu life, social, moral, and economic. When he explains, to his own satisfaction and after the most superficial
glance at the issues involved, that he is doing this for the sake of the Africans, to
“civilise” them, “teach them the disciplinary value of regular work,” and “give
them the benefit of European progressive ideas,” he is adding insult to injury, and
need expect to convince no one but himself.
Identities
55
There certainly are some progressive ideas among the Europeans. They include
the ideas of material prosperity, of medicine, and hygiene, and literacy which enables people to take part in world culture. But so far the Europeans who visit Africa have not been conspicuously zealous in imparting these parts of their inheritance to the Africans, and seem to think that the only way to do it is by police discipline and armed force. They speak as if it was somehow beneficial to an African
to work for them instead of for himself; and to make sure that he will receive this
benefit they do their best to take away his land and leave him with no alternative.
Along with his land they rob him of his government, condemn his religious ideas,
and ignore his fundamental conceptions of justice and morals, all in the name of
civilisation and progress. [317-318]
15. Kelvin Mlenga, Hunt for a Personality (1964)
From: New Writing in Zambia, vol. 1, No. 1 (1964), 7-13. – Kelvin Mlanga was born into a
migrant worker’s family from Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in a gold mining
town in the Midlands province of Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe). He was
educated in Southern Rhodesia where he later became a teacher and journalist. In the
early 1960s he returned to Northern Rhodesia where he became deputy editor of the
privately owned Central African Mail (later renamed Zambia Mail). A year after Northern
Rhodesia became independent as Zambia in 1964, the government took over the
Zambia Mail and Kelvin Mlenga became editor of the paper. His term of office was
brief, however, since he soon resigned in protest against the government’s attempts to
turn the Zambia Mail into its political mouthpiece. Mlenga subsequently took up work
in the private mining sector; he died in 198l/82 in a road accident on the LusakaNdola highway.
The African in Northern Rhodesia is engaged in a big hunt for a personality of his
own. He is discarding “white” names he had to assume when he accepted a doctrine brought to him from foreign lands. In some instances, he is giving up dress
styles copied from the West for a “national” costume of flowing robes made of
multi-coloured material often bearing the image of the national leader.
Indeed, as Independence Day draws near, he is stepping up to search for
something typically “his” to present to the hundreds of outsiders who are coming
to watch the birth of the Republic of Zambia on October 24. He wants to give
them a glimpse – if only a fleeting one – of Zambian culture.
Culture might be defined as a people’s established and accepted – I almost said
“instinctive” – way of life. Only in it and through it can a nation acquire a
personality.
How right was Mr. Simon Kapwepwe was when he remarked that “Culture is
the backbone of a nation”.1
The indigenous tribes of this country had this established, time-tested mode of
living when the first whiteman set foot on African soil. But, for good or bad, the
1
Simon Kapwepwe (1922-1980), nationalist politician who became Vice-President of
Zambia after independence. [FSE]
56
Section II
advent of the man “without knees” with his Christianity and completely foreign
customs brought about drastic changes in that way of life wherever he went to
preach or exploit.
After all, when he left his native country for the “Dark Continent”, the whiteman’s mission was largely one of leading the, to him, lost souls he found there
from the darkness of paganism to the light of Christianity. Equating the vast
majority of African customs with heathenism, he ordered their prompt abandonment as the evil harbingers of a life of everlasting torment in hell.
Thus many rituals and dances held dear by tribes from time immemorial were
allowed to go by the board as a price for the acceptance of a new religion.
Several of the rituals, particularly those connected with fertility, were accompanied by the display of exquisite carvings which, unfortunately, were condemned
as obscene by people whose zeal for the salvation of souls rendered them completely blind to the demands of other forms of culture than Christianity.
It is largely in this way that countless articles and forms of African pre-whiteera culture were lost to a posterity which for us is the present.
Happily there are some areas in the country which even in this jet age are still
relatively free from the more negative effects of the influence of western civilisation. And it is to these areas that we must turn for a glimpse of Northern Rhodesia’s past cultural glory.
However, it would be a big mistake to pretend that all western influence has
done is to wreak havoc on Africa’s traditions and customs and to tear the fabric of
its culture.
One has only to visit African townships in Lusaka, the Copperbelt and anywhere along the line of rail to see how the meeting of the cultures of Africa and
the West has resulted in the creation of a society whose carefree zest for life is like
nothing which a village of old could have offered or which any European city can
even attempt to offer.
Yes, ours is the new, ambivalent Africa – searching for its past: at the same
time bursting to be as (?) modern as the space age.
Indeed, life in the urban African townships is in a class of its own. Life in
Chilenje is anything but sumptuous; yet it enjoys a vitality which the top-grade
“white” suburb of Woodlands just next door can never hope to emulate, let alone
equal.2
It is just as the South African author and educationist, Ezekiel Mphahlele, now
living the life of an exile in West Africa, puts it:
The institutions in European areas are usually geographically or economically or legally
inaccessible to the African, except the elite. So the Africans are thrown on their resources: they make their own music, create their own fun, borrowing what they want from
European technology and art. Life is invariably much more vibrant, robust and full of
zest in these African ghettos than in the white areas, whose culture must be derivative
2
Both Chilenje and Woodlands form part of Zambia’s capital Lusaka. [FSE]
Identities
57
and linked with the metropolitan centres, wriggling away without direction, like a
lizard’s tail cut off from the body.3
And it is the culture evolved by these so-called detribalized inhabitants of the
township just as much as that of the old-timers in the back-of-the-beyond villages
out at Mwinilunga or Mankoya that must be exhibited for the world to see, touch,
smell, hear and feel throughout the period of the independence celebrations.
Already Mr. Yeta of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum has covered hundreds of
miles on journeys to the remotest corners of the country in quest of traditional
objets d’art to constitute a special independence exhibition. Latest reports say he
has collected 300-plus pieces with many more expected to come.
The exhibition is expected to feature carvings, pottery and other types of
traditional craftwork. It is perhaps indicative of the interdependence of the
cultures of a world made small by modern means of travel and communication
that concurrently with Mr. Yeta’s exhibition, another display, this time featuring
works of art from different parts of the world, will be attracting the attention of
Zambia’s independence guests. This particular one will be under the supervision
of Mr. Frank McEwan, director of the Rhodes Art Gallery in Salisbury, Southern
Rhodesia.
In Ghana the urban African has found musical expression in High Life; in
South Africa he finds solace from the physical and mental agony imposed by
apartheid in Kwela melodies; in the Congo the typically Congo cha-cha rhythm
has been evolved.
The urban African in Northern Rhodesia has had his fair share of violence,
rejection and frustration. There is no reason why all the emotions evoked by these
experiences should not find expression in essentially Zambian music.
But perhaps what is left is to find a name for it; for people like Bartholomew
Bwalya and Isaac Mapiki seem to have already succeeded to pick out of the strings
of their guitars a sound that could become Zambia’s passport to recognition in the
world of music.
What emerges from all this is that if we are to evolve a Zambian culture it perforce has to be a careful blending of the old and the new. Hankering for the past
and wishing it was the present is a sentimental waste of time. This is no time to
wallow in memories of past glories.
The past is valuable only to the extent to which it helps [to make] present-day
life more meaningful. Greece had her Alexander the Great; Rome her Julius
Caesar. But while both Greece and Italy are both grateful and proud for contributions made to their history by Alexander and Caesar, the Greece of today and the
Italy of today are not – and, as a matter of fact, do not want to be – the Greece of
Alexander and the Italy of Caesar’s days.
To quote from Mr. Mphahlele again: “An image of Africa that only glorifies
our ancestors and celebrates our ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ is an image of a continent
3
Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Fabric of African Cultures”, Foreign Affairs, 42.4 (1964), 61920. [FSE]
58
Section II
lying in state”.4 In other words, a dead continent. And yet Africa today is a continent which is so very much alive it sometimes hurts.
By all means, let us treasure our past. At the same time, however, we have got
to wake up to the present.
Fortunately, there are encouraging signs in some African countries of an
awareness of the futility of looking upon African culture as an anthropological
phenomenon belonging to the past and only to be preserved as a monument. In
Ghana, for example, the government has set up an Institute of Art and Culture
through which it channels money to regional cultural centres where traditional
music and theatre are encouraged for their own sake – not the past’s.
In Nigeria a roughly similar function is performed by writers’ and artists’ clubs
called Mbari. These promote music, theatre, art and creative writing with an
African background.
Tanganyika-Zanzibar has a Ministry of National Culture. And in Kenya they
have clubs functioning along lines very similar to Mbari.
It is interesting to note that all these countries taking positive action to
promote their culture have been rewarded by “discovering” from among their
own sons and daughters, writers and artists whose fame as exponents of their
nations’ way of life has spread far beyond their borders.
In South Africa, non-white cultural activities are given direction by Union
Artists which, with its Music and Drama Association, has sponsored highly
successful indigenous musical shows such as “King Kong” and “Sponono”.5
Here in Zambia a National Arts Trust has just been formed under the
chairmanship of Alick Nkhata. Admittedly, there is at present a dearth of writers,
musicians and artists in Zambia. But there is surely no reason why through
agencies like the N.A.T., this country should [not] produce her own musical to
rival “King Kong”. Indeed, with some encouragement provided by groups
modeled on Mbari, Zambia can within the next few years produce her own
authors able to do for this country what people like Chinua Achebe (Things Fall
Apart) and Amos Tutuola (The Palm Wine Drinkard) are doing for Nigeria.6
As independence approaches Zambians are looking for a personality of their
own. But they will not find it resting on the laurels of their forefathers. They can
only find it – nay, create it afresh – by blending the glorious Past with the exciting
Present.
4
5
6
Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Fabric of African Cultures”, Foreign Affairs, 42.4 (1964), 625.
[FSE]
“King Kong”, written by Todd Matshikiza and others, premiered with an all-black cast
in Johannesburg in 1959 and soon won international acclaim; “Sponono”, written by
Alan Paton and Gideon Nxumalo, was the first South African musical to be staged on
Broadway in 1964. [FSE]
Chinua Achebe (see text 8 above) and Amos Tutuola were among the best-known
Nigerian writers in the 1960s. Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart was published in 1958;
Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952. [FSE]???
Identities
59
16. Bessie Head, A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots
(1984)
From : M.J. Daymond, J.U. Jacobs, Margaret Lenta (ed.) Momentum: on Recent South African
Writing (Durban: University of Natal Press, 1984), 278-280. – Bessie Head (1937-86)
was born in South Africa, but went into exile in Botswana, then the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, in 1963. Most of her literary work, including the novels When Rainclouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1973), as well as her short
story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977), is set there. Head was classified “coloured” in South Africa and suffered greatly in her personal life before leaving the
country. Although her life in Botswana, where she had a mental breakdown (which
forms the basis of A Question of Power), was not easy, she was fortunate in finding there
a sense of belonging which she had never found in the country of her birth. The present text, which is indicative of the kind of issues which many exiles from South Africa
under apartheid had to face, gives an idea of Head’s commitment to Botswana and its
people and describes her successful search for identity as an African.
In March 1964, barely a day’s journey separated me from one way of life and another. Until that day in March I had been a South African citizen. A very peripheral involvement in politics resulted in a refusal of a passport and I left South
Africa on an exit permit. Great events were taking place then. Most of Africa was
gaining independence and I was a part of the stirring of the times. It was consciously in my mind that African independence had to be defined in the broadest
possible terms. I was twenty-seven years old and had lived those years like most
black South Africans, an urban slum dweller who survived precariously, without a
sense of roots, without a sense of history. A short train journey and a day later I
awoke to a completely new world, Botswana, (then the British Bechuanaland Protectorate)7 and a way of life unknown and unfamiliar to me. South Africa, with its
sense of ravages and horror, has lost that image of an Africa, ancient and existing
since time immemorial, but in Botswana the presence of the timeless and immemorial is everywhere – in people, in animals, in everyday life and in custom and
tradition.
I hope two disparate worlds could be considered to have combined harmoniously in me. I have never been able in my writing to represent South African
society, but the situation of black people in South Africa, their anguish and their
struggles, made its deep impress on me.
From an earlier background, I know of a deep commitment to people, an involvement in questions of poverty and exploitation and a commitment to illuminating the future for younger generations. I needed an eternal and continuous
world against which to work out these preoccupations. One of my preoccupations
was a search as an African for a sense of historical continuity, a sense of roots, but
I remember how tentative and sketchy were my first efforts, not finding roots as
7
Botswana gained its independence from Britain in 1966. The country had become a
British Protectorate (rather than a colony) in 1894, a move which prevented it being
absorbed into South Africa. [GVD]
60
Section II
such but rather putting on layer after layer of patchy clothing. This patchy clothing
formed the background to most of my work.
It was my habit to walk slowly through the village and observe the flow of
everyday life – newly-cut thatch glowing like a golden hay-stack on a round mud
hut, children racing around, absorbed in their eternal games or a woman busy
pounding corn for the evening meal. I would pause a while near a yard where a
tall, slender woman pounded corn in a stamping block with a long wooden pestle,
her bare feet partly buried in a growth of summer grass. It was a scene that had
been a part of village life since time immemorial, but to me it was as fresh and
new as creation itself. The woman’s form would sway to and fro with the rhythm
of her work, her face closed and withdrawn in concentration. The warm slanting
rays of the late afternoon sunlight seemed to transfix that timeless moment in my
memory. I would turn and look at the distant horizon. Beyond the last hut, beyond the perimeter of Serowe,8 the land lay in an eternal, peaceful sleep, the distant horizon hazy and shrouded in the mists of the earth.
I would reflect that the dwelling places of all the tribes had been, for ages and
ages, just such small, self-contained worlds, busy with the everyday round of living.
Such peaceful rural scenes would be hastily snatched to form the backdrop to
tortuous novels. Perceptive fans sensed the disparity, the disparity between the
peaceful simplicity of village life and a personality more complex than village life
could ever be. They would say: “I like the bits about Botswana life but I found
your second/third novel difficult to read …”
But it still goes back to a question of roots rather than the small, stolen patchy
scenes which would seem implicit in my early work. Later, much later, I became
acquainted with the history of Botswana and it was like becoming acquainted with
a way of life that was applicable to all the tribes of Africa. The high clamour and
violence of South African history dominates all the southern lands so that they are
written of in the history books as mere appendages of South African history.
Botswana is no mere extension of South African history and the great arid wasteland the history books would have us believe. It was a British Protectorate and as
such has a distinct and individual history of its own, a history whereby a colonial
power was sensitive to human grandeur, even if it turned up in a black skin, and it
was a country that provided one such leader at a crucial moment, Khama the
Great,9 who made known the people’s preferences as regards their independence
and the ownership of the land. We have a situation where the people never lost
the land to a foreign invader and in the rural areas the ancient African land tenure
system of communal ownership of the land still operates. It is on this peaceful
base of security of tenure that one begins to assemble the history of the land.
8
9
Serowe lies 250 km north of the capital, Gaborone. Bessie Head has painted a portrait
of the village in her book Serowe: Village of the Rainwind (1981), which essentially is a
communal oral history based on almost one hundred interviews with villagers of all
ages and occupations. [GVD]
Khama the Great (1875-1923) was the Chief of the Bamangwato, whose capital was at
Serowe. Head greatly admired his achievements as a reformer and negotiator with the
British and devoted a chapter of her book on Serowe to him. [GVD]
Identities
61
One has so many options and choices of study that are sure, steady and sane
and simply another addition to mankind’s history. One can concentrate on the impact of Christianity on the tribes, the power and influence of the missionaries and
the London Missionary Society and changing patterns of culture and learning.
Thus, the refrain of recorded history begins very much the way it began in Europe: “When the Romans first took learning to Europe, the tribes there were just
like the tribes of Africa, not knowing anything about learning and progress …”
We can now look back at the old men, who until the missionaries introduced a
new form of learning, were the only libraries the people had and the repositories
of all tribal learning and knowledge. We can look back at the earlier religions of
the tribes and the persuasive voice of Christianity in modifying and transforming
custom and tradition. We can look back on a history that is not sick with the need
to exploit and abuse people.
I have found the tensions and balances of the rural parts of Botswana, of a fine
order. Enough of the ancient way of African life has survived to enable the younger generations to maintain their balance with comfort and ease, while almost daily
with independence, new innovations, new concepts of government and critical,
complex situations invade the life of the country. It is in such a world that one
puts down some roots in the African soil and one finds a sense of peace about the
future.
17. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Urban Cultures: Relevance
and Context (2005)
From: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Urban Cultures: Relevance and Context”, in: Toyin
Falola and Steven J. Salm (eds.), Urbanization and African Cultures (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005): 17-22. – African cultural identities have often been formulated in terms of “traditional” societies. While colonial discourses routinely harped on
the alleged “primitiveness” of African cultures that were inevitably identified with rural
or pastoral contexts, nationalist and anticolonialist movements often emphasized “traditional” African cultures as an antidote to “Westernization”. What was habitually neglected in both scenarios was the seminal role of cities and urban populations in formulating modern cultural identities in Africa. In the following essay, Catherine CoqueryVidrovitch, a French specialist in African history and professor emeritus at the University of Paris Diderot, analyses the role of cities as “the privileged place of cultural
invention” and highlights the importance of cities for Africa’s social development.
The City has always been an innovative space, in Africa as elsewhere, and it is
right that historians of the City are fond of the phrase “urban revolution.” The
first urban revolution occurred when prehistoric hunting and gathering societies
became sedentary, which allowed domesticated agriculture. Thus was the City
born, as Akin Mabogunje explains, from “the process whereby human beings con-
62
Section II
gregate in relatively large number at one particular spot of the earth’s surface.”10
In effect, thanks to an agricultural surplus that fed them, urbanites were able to
pursue other activities: political, commercial, and religious. Cities thus became
multipurpose centers from the beginning. This was the case of Jenne-Jeno in the
Niger River valley, at the dawn of the first century A.D.
There were other urban revolutions in Africa’s long history. The second occurred with the influence of Muslim Arabs starting in the tenth century A.D. In
East Africa, Swahili language and culture emerged and developed in cities. In the
same era in western Sudan, urban Islam brought the rise of religious architecture,
which was diffused according to the well-known model of the Jenne Mosque. On
the Coasts and in the immediate hinterlands, the Portuguese influence emerged,
beginning in the fifteenth century, as it did a little everywhere in the world, from
San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil to Goa in greater India. A military civilization
developed, characterized by the presence of forts, giving rise to a complex culture
founded on both war and commerce, a civilization more and more warlike as the
slave trade grew.
It was, however, without contest the era of Colonial imperialism that provoked
the most visible urban revolution in Africa, to the point that over the years geographers, ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians made the “colonial city” the
symbol of “modernization” (that is to say Westernization) of African societies.11
[…]
Urban colonial history was surely a turning point, a new beginning, no doubt,
but one that built on earlier urban elements, the heritage of which it is important
to understand; and from whence proceeds the importance of being sensitive to
the continuities and the ruptures of the preceding eras: between the historical
cities of precolonial Africa and the urban civilization developing in the Africa of
today and tomorrow, how may the same concept of a city apply? How much is
there a difference of degree (such as smaller versus bigger cities) or of nature (premodern towns versus modern colonial cities?)
What does “urban revolution” mean?
It is less about an unprecedented influx of migrants (a hesitating and up and down
movement between rural and urban areas which did not truly become a decisive
urban migration before the Great Depression of the 1930s) than about a cumulative process of cultural reversals provoked by the city. The urban way of life exerts
its power and determines the transformation of values and of mentalities of the
non-city dwellers, newly arrived in the city, who henceforth submitted to the sway
of institutions and urban culture intensified by the growth of traffic and of access
to the city.
More than a half-century ago, the archeologist V. Gordon Childe had already
advanced the idea of the intrinsic connection between urban growth and civiliza10
11
Akin Mabogunje, Urbanisation in Nigeria (London: Africana Publishing Company,
1968), 33.
A.M. O’Connor, The African City (London: Hutchinson University Library for Africa,
1983).
Identities
63
tion.12 The city grew up under, or even despite, the received ideas, customs, and
laws of the surrounding rural world: thus, it acquired its dynamic potential, in
regard to which one can reasonably use the term “revolutionary.” The process
touches all city dwellers, regardless of social status, due to the loss of the customary village authorities’ control, and the crowded daily cohabitation inevitable in the
city. For it is in the city, really, that popular culture expresses itself, created by the
mixture of diverse customs and social orders, which, in their previous, rural societies, had been much more compartmentalized, controlled, and therefore rigid.
Childe focused very precisely on the birth of western Mediterranean civilization
beginning with Mesopotamia. However, the process is universal: it reproduces
itself each time that social and political mutations together are likely to generate
new urban forms. Each time the city gives birth, not to “civilization,” but to a new
form of civilization, a civilization constantly remodeled by the same process of
urbanization. Because urbanization is a process and not an instantaneous creation,
new ways of life that are generated do not obliterate the previously existing dominant forms; to the contrary, these new forms absorb the older ones, steering them
and sometimes even reviving them. This tendency is even stronger when the urban population is more recently borrowed from the preexisting rural environment,
a characteristic of African cities in the twentieth century in the era of independence. This function of cultural melting pot is thus multiplied today, intensified by
the city’s role as the focal point of surrounding civilization, extending the “urban
way of life” well beyond the municipal borders.
As original as it is, we must not make the African city, especially not the colonial city, an exception in history. We could argue instead that every city – whatever
society, place, and historical time are ?? considered – has always and everywhere
constituted a tool of colonization. Because they are necessarily places of contact
between several cultures and of living organisms that are constantly in the process
of becoming, cities play a major role as social melting pot and cultural diffuser by
exercising their impact on all that is under their authority. They are, strictly speaking, areas of cultural crystallization. This is why, to use a vocabulary popularized
for historians by Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire,13 and adapted to Africa by Achille
Mbembe,14 we can classify cities as spaces of colonization par excellence, not so
much in the political sense as in the cultural sense of the term. This was particularly the case in the time of colonial imperialism. More than ever, cities were vectors
of modernization. They constituted privileged arenas of the encounters and the
combination resulting in the synthesis of values called “traditional” (which is to
say implanted longer ago) reshaped by the action of prevalent Western incentives.
This is why the usual dichotomy between traditional and modern is irrelevant: the
process consists of combining, with more or less good intentions, the old and the
new while integrating the heritage acquired from the need for change. […]
12
13
14
V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21.1(1950): 3-17.
Pierre Nora (under the direction of), Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Achille Mbembe, La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-1960, l'histoire des
usages de la raison en colonie (Paris, Éditions Karthala, 1996).
64
Section II
Thus, as opposed as they were to a new order, people were obliged to adapt,
by choice or by force. Ironically, the more they resisted, the more they changed,
because the act of resisting facilitates the discovery of new ideas, new techniques,
and new know-how, in brief inducing new forms of mediation. All of this is what
is considered “cultural space,” being well understood that these elements develop
over time. Even in the case of brutal and accelerated trauma – as was the shock of
the colonial conquest – the interaction between the old and the new stayed constant and constantly dynamic. In history, we do not jump directly from one group
of social structures to another, whether the domain under consideration is institutional or economic, and especially not ideological or cultural.
A testament to good sense follows. To affirm, as anthropologists did, not so
long ago, that Africans felt that they were “strangers to the city,”15 is a Eurocentric
presupposition. Certainly, the suddenness of the impact of European capitalism in
the years from 1890 to 1920 was a brutal break from rural tradition. The city was
the white seat of power; migrants were uprooted and used as a cheap labor reserve
for the mines, in railroad yards, or for road construction. Africans thus found
themselves dispossessed of a part of their universe. They were strangers in a city
that was thereafter divided according to a political, economic, and cultural model
– the colonial and Western model – which was not their own. However, these migrants learned, very quickly, how to reinstate themselves in the urban environment, much more quickly in any case than the whites would admit. This reality
was obscured at the time by the colonizers, who freely considered and treated
their “subjects” like strangers in the city.16 The colonial scheme was simple: Africans are rural emigrants to the city, lost peasants in a foreign environment they are
only passing through, a useful hypothesis that avoided setting aside time and
money for investments in urbanism or the organization of the job market. The
process of intercultural interaction, that which we could name cultural métissage,
was for a long time ignored, until recent studies began to analyze it.17
Relegated to the domain of the “traditional,” Africans were left to themselves
to “get by” in the city, in conditions which were not at all customary: density, promiscuity, health, housing, work – all were different. Having been condemned to
“invent” their city, Africans improvised and innovated new solutions, and the city
thus became an incomparable arena of cultural creation. They evidently inspired,
in these new conditions, systems and techniques of construction, of solidarity, of
work, and of belief that they practiced before and have practiced since. Even if the
French, for example, had so thoroughly refused the African urban realities that
they called the “native” quarters of the city “villages” because of the similar materials and construction techniques, daily life in these urban agglomerations little
resembled their rural village settlements that at most numbered five hundred inhabitants. Africans from the countryside migrating into the city were not, mutatis
15
16
17
Leonard Plotnikov, Strangers to the City: Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).
See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996).
See Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).
Identities
65
mutandis, more or less uprooted than the poor peasants of nineteenth century England who went to the new industrial cities. They were thus forced to adapt. However, that which is adaptation is also creation: the new city dwellers, faced with an
ultimatum to conform to the imposed mold, invented new survival strategies for
the city combining the old and the new. In this way, since the colonial era, they
have regained the cities where Africans constitute, as a general rule, the great majority.
It was not the Africans who were strangers to the city: it was the colonizers,
and later the developers who remained long-time strangers in the African cities
that they were incapable of seeing and understanding. What they did not understand, they referred to as “informal,” that is to say, not subjugated, not controlled,
not identified, and not quantifiable according to Western norms. Today, some 70
to 80 percent of urban activity is “informal,” a good part of urban housing is
called “precarious,” and urban culture described as “popular.” These judgments all
show the same reasoning and designate who in the city does not conform or assimilate to Western rules.
After many years, it is the Africans who made these cities what they are today,
not the contrary. The “adaptation” theory, very influential in the 1960s and 1970s,
was a product of the dominant current of thought, which was that of urban bias.18
Cities have been made symbols of African poverty in which the cities do nothing
but make the misery of the countryside visible: it is the poor of the countryside
who come to the city searching for a solution to their poverty. It is still considered
proper to blame these cities of millions as the source of all evil. People refer to the
village – that paradise lost of preindustrial society already exalted in the century of
the Lumières (Enlightenment Century) for the “noble savage” of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau – as the reservoir of forgotten ancestral virtues. Overurbanization becomes once more the chief indicator of scandal in underdeveloped countries, of
the coexistence of urban misery and rural poverty: the city becomes absolute evil,
and the cessation of migration the miracle cure for disaster.
If the city makes the African, the African also makes the city. As Anthony
King showed, “how people build affects how people think,” at least as much as
“how people think governs how people build.”19 In other words, urban space
exerts a central influence in inducing processes of social and cultural change. Urban culture does not have to be thought of only in terms of adaptation (to the
Western model), but in terms of syncretism and of exchange. Remembering this
18
19
Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development, (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). About the concept of overurbanization, see
among others: N. V. Sovani, “The Analysis of Overurbanization,” Economic Development
and Cultural Change, 2 (1964): 113-122; Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization Reconsidered,”
Economic Development and Cultural Change, 30 (1982): 173-189.
Anthony D. King, “Colonial Architecture Re-visited: Some Issues for Further Debate,” in Changing South Asia: City and Culture, ed. Kenneth Ballhatchet and David
Taylor (London, Asia Research Service, University of London), 1984: 99; already
quoted by C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “The Process of Urbanization in Africa, from the
Origins to the Beginnings of Independence, An Overview Paper,” African Studies Review
34.1 (1991): 1-98.
66
Section II
simple fact could be of significant help to experts. The City is produced by society, and it also acts upon the society that produces it. City dwellers in Africa already
constitute, at the dawn of the third millennium, almost half of the population of
the continent, and this percentage only grows. Urbanization in Africa is neither
good nor bad, but, as it is everywhere else, an irreversible fact, where the future of
societies is played out: leaving behind their rural organization and social habits,
city dwellers create new modes of living, whether it is a matter of regrouping
themselves into classes, in associations of all kinds (dancing, religious communities, trade-unions, welfare associations), or of the building of pidgin and new
languages, of the creation of mixed artistic forms, sometimes not even existing
beforehand such as popular and modern painting, of the elaboration of new concepts. All this evidently connotes a Western influence, but it is softened, integrated, and re-imagined by the autochthonous people.
African cities are complex ensembles in constantly becoming places of power,
of social and political elaboration. As major arenas of mediation, African cities are
more than ever the privileged place of cultural invention. […]
18. Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku, The Urban Heroine in Nigerian
Female Fiction (2005)
From: Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (eds.), Urbanization and African Cultures (Durham,
NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005): 51-62. – Soon after the first generation of
modern anglophone writers in Africa – most of them men – had powerfully raised
Africa’s voice in contemporary literature, African women writers and critics began to
challenge the gender bias of that voice: African identities were more complex, they
argued, than the male-oriented perspectives prevalent in much earlier African writing
seemed to suggest. In the following essay, Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku, an African literature
scholar teaching at Federal Polytechnic, Oko, Nigeria, presents an overview of the
representation of urban women in contemporary Nigerian women’s writing and highlights important transformations in the projection of women’s identities in modern
Nigerian literature.
It has been pertinent to examine the issues raised in these pioneer literary texts20
as they concern the heroine caught between the threshold of modernity and traditional values. In these texts the females had mostly migrated from the rural to the
urban areas, so an apparent dislocation of traditional patterns followed by the subsequent replacement with imported values would be inevitable. At this time, too,
the city symbolized for most Africans a new life, affluence, the glamour and excitement of nightlife as well as enhanced socio-economic possibilities; indeed, a
new way of living whose pull and attractions neither women nor men could resist.
Ironically, though, one is dismayed to discover that the fiction of this era tended
20
The author refers to a previous part of her essay where she discusses representations
of women in earlier anglophone African popular fiction written mainly by male
authors. [FSE]
Identities
67
to blame the female for the moral decadence that characterized the much soughtafter city life. In addition, the writers generally did little to create or present successful and dynamic female protagonists in their works.
The subsequent emergence of female writers has in no small measure sought
to correct this anomaly. From the pioneering works of Flora Nwapa to much
more contemporary texts, there has been a significant shift in emphasis. The
female writer has sought in her work to critically examine in depth the character
of her female protagonists. Far from presenting them as stereotypes, a concerted
effort has been made to analyze her acts and to discern or establish a basis for
them. In other words, there is a reassessment of the female reality and an interrogation of her existence, first as a human creature, and then as a female within
the wider framework of society. [52-53]
Buchi Emecheta is another successful Nigeria female whose fiction has predominantly created diversely interesting heroines. […] Emecheta displays a remarkable ability to make an unrestrained incursion into spheres of the female
existence. This often comes across in detailed psychological probing of her very
diverse female characters, a feat which provides the reader with greater insight
into the basis for their actions and reactions. Noting this trait, Chukukere again
asserts:
Her protagonists include the deprived, discontented and social misfits, the “secondclass” citizens, the slaves, the pathetic mothers who give all to their families but reap
no rewards, and the dynamic survivors in a society that brutalizes them. Through these
images, which she creates with poignancy and empathy, the novelist denounces fiercely
sexual inequality in tones that approximate the militant rhetoric of contemporary
feminism in Europe.21
Emecheta grew up mostly in Lagos, Nigeria, where she was born. Although she
comes from the eastern part of the country, her experiences considerably inform
and shape her novelistic concerns. Having experienced firsthand the all-too-glaring disappointment that more often than not welcomes the birth of a female child
in a typical Igbo family (while a boy is being hoped and waited for), Emecheta
clearly appreciates the position of the female in her society. Consequently, a number of her heroines struggle very determinedly to overcome the inhibiting bonds
of womanhood in order to attain and achieve some measure of self-realization and
actualization. […]
In The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Emecheta’s heroine, Nnu Ego, is another female who comes to a tragic end. She is humiliated out of her marriage to Amataokwu on account of her childlessness The bid to spare her further embarrassment
in the village, especially as her former husband’s new wife is having sons in quick
succession, causes her father, Agbadi, to select a man residing in Lagos as her new
husband. Horrified and repulsed at the appearance of Nnaife, her new husband,
Nnu Ego soon reconciles herself to her fate as she has little choice in the matter.
Nnu Ego’s is a society that equates a woman’s failure with barrenness. Put differently, a woman who fails to conceive and bring forth a child soon becomes a so21
Gloria Chukukere, Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African
Fiction (Enungu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1995), 165.
68
Section II
cial outcast, for she has neither self worth nor value. In the face of these crises
which plague our protagonist, the reader sympathizes with her as she reflects sadly
on her tragic circumstances:
She would have to put up with things. She would rather die in this town called Lagos
than go back home and say, “father, I just do not like the man you have chosen for
me”. Another thought ran through her mind: suppose this man made her pregnant,
would that not be an untold joy to her people? (44)
At this point Nnu Ego is convinced that only motherhood can redeem her and
reverse her lowly status. She would, thus, endure anything in her new marriage, if
only Nnaife could make her pregnant and thus establish her identity as a woman.
Little wonder she attempts suicide when her first baby, the much-cherished male
child, dies at four weeks. The extent of her deprivation is here summed up:
Who was going to give her the energy to tell the world that she had once been a
mother, but had failed? How would people understand that she had wanted so
desperately to be a woman like everybody else, but had failed again? (61)
Although Nnu Ego eventually has many more children, and in quick succession, it
is her particular attitude which Emecheta condemns. As Chukukere puts it:
“Buchi Emecheta challenges the popular view of the supremacy of motherhood”
(1995, 192). Having become a woman many times over, for Nnu Ego is now a
mother of sons and daughters, she slaves away endlessly to raise them. Without
much help from her husband, Nnu Ego’s life of abysmal indigence leaves her with
only one consolation, that “…her old age would be happy, that when she died
there would be somebody left behind to refer to her as ‘mother’” (54).
Ironically, Nnu Ego’s expectations are not met, for her children, particularly
the highly priced (surely this should be “prized”?!) males, fail to take care of her.
Her inability to comprehend her lot, her loneliness, and abandonment culminate
in mental degeneration and she dies quietly by the roadside, “…with no child to
hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made many
friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother” (224).
As an urban heroine, Nnu Ego cuts a pathetic and tragic figure. So deeply embedded in her psyche are the stultifying traditional conventions of her culture that
her inability to overcome them signifies her destruction. Her co-wife, Adaku, on
the other hand, survives. Arriving as well from the village to the city of Lagos,
Adaku realizes quickly that her position as Nnaife’s second wife would bring her
neither joy nor fulfillment, particularly when she is cruelly reminded by the men
folk that she only has female children, whose little value is all too glaring. Adaku
moves out of this marriage, gains economic independence and social success, is
able to send her daughters to school, and indeed appears to be leading a more
fulfilled and confident life.
Emecheta’s texts, however, do not always present unsuccessful heroines. On
the contrary, her females – though often subjugated, exploited, mistreated, and
even enslaved – manage to struggle through these oddities to emerge victorious in
many ways. To an extent, Emecheta seems to suggest that the bulk of the conflict
a female contends with is a reflection of the mind-set. The idea becomes fairly
conspicuous when we realize that a number of her stories are set in the urban cen-
Identities
69
ters, possibly because she herself was born in Lagos metropolis. The point is that
even when the women migrate to the city, they carry with them the totality of
their traditions, and they allow tradition to perpetually make its crushing demands
on them. This probably explains why we witness the intense monologue that rages
on in the battlefield of the female mind. [55-57]
Our last writer, Chinyere Grace Okafor, belongs to a much younger generation
of female writers; it would seem that this current group of writers is working in an
era when more females have access to education. It would seem, too, that a number of our contemporary writers were born in the cities where their parents had
earlier migrated and settled. For this generation of female writers, their only experience of the rural area consists perhaps of occasional visits. At this time, too,
much of Nigeria’s population is concentrated in the many urban centers that have
developed across the country and the continent at large, so it is hardly surprising
to discover that many more texts are set in the towns. In addition, the nation has
come a long way from independence, so the initial conflicts resulting from culture
shock in the wake of exposure to Western civilization have given way to some
adjustment to and some acquisition of foreign values.
One implication of this new development is seen in the increasingly diverse
thematic preoccupations of our new female writers. Obviously this amounts to a
reflection of the times and the now highly complex society in which we live. We
consequently see in some of our contemporary works heroines whose complexity
matches that of the society that creates them. We also witness the depiction of
females who are not always content to move out of their matrimonial homes […].
Rather, these new heroines make a concerted effort to ensure the survival of their
marriages, which by extension and implication symbolize the survival of the
nation. This attitude might be an unconscious reaction to the criticism of female
writers, who are often accused of feminist inclinations, which makes them create
heroines that persistently opt out of marriages.
In Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo’s fiction, for instance, we notice a tendency to create successful heroines who thrive in their marriages. Oftentimes, the reader is
made to appreciate the love, warmth, and deep friendship that exists between
couples irrespective of whatever problems might be. Examples include “The Blind
Man of Ekwulu,” “Inspiration Bug” and The House of Symbols (2001). Indeed, in
“Agarachaa Must Come Home” the heroine leaves home under rather unpleasant
circumstances to be with the man she has married without her people’s consent.
She believes her happiness lies in the relationship. Perhaps Ezeigbo deliberately
reverses the situation in which the female flees her husband’s home, for in this
case the protagonist flees her parents’ home in pursuit of love and fulfillment.
Highly successful in her own marriage and career, Ezeigbo continues to portray
enlightened urban heroines who prosper as wives, mothers and career women.
[…]
One thing comes across very significantly in the contemporary female writer’s
representation of the urban heroine: She is not always a glamour girl who is irresistibly drawn to the frenzy (surely: the frenzy of city experience, or frenzied?) city
experience. Neither is she a prostitute if she is unmarried. We have, rather,
females, young or old, who are basically human and who, like their male
70
Section II
counterparts, are involved intensely in the struggle for survival, which life
represents. Educated or illiterate, these females diversely battle the female
dilemma, seeking to uncover ways in which contemporary women can flourish.
The desperate need to alter negative societal attitudes can also be glimpsed from
the lives of our heroines. As Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie observes, “it is within
marriage, that the Nigerian woman suffers the most oppression” (75). We
discover then that although even the modern woman desires to be in a marriage
and struggles to make it work, she will certainly opt out when circumstances make
it impossible for her to remain.
Since the writers do not always set out to present perfect images of their heroines, we usually can appreciate their strengths as well as weaknesses. Often emancipated enough to make crucial choices, the urban heroine must always face the
consequences of her actions. Again the writers’ portrayals of highly educated and
successful women are as realistic as their presentation of semi-literate women who
live in the urban areas with their families.
While the pioneering Nwapa and Emecheta’s works principally suggest that
education and economic independence will invariably enhance the status of
womanhood in patriarchal Nigeria, the works of the more contemporary writers
make a slight addition to this premise. We therefore discover in the newer texts
that whenever a conflict arises between a male and a female, her education or
wealth is often cited as the basis for her misdemeanor. So then, the educated and
wealthy woman will need some tact and caution if her objectives are to be realized.
On the whole, the urban heroine has clearly become the dominant female
figure in Nigerian literature, owing naturally to the increased migration within and
outside the country. Consequently, as various aspects of her life continue to be
interrogated from diverse perspectives, one poignant idea emanates: the urban
heroine’s greatest strength lies not just in her education or wealth, but, as Ogundipe-Leslie puts it, “in (her) right and ability to work in addition to (her) resourcefulness and great capacity for emotional survival”.22 [59-61]
19. Bernth Lindfors, The Palm Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten
(1978)
From: C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1978; London:
Heinemann, 1979), 47-66. – Bernth Lindfors is emeritus professor of African literature
at the University of Texas at Austin, author and editor of more than 40 books on African writing and an internationally renowned expert on anglophone African literature.
In the following essay, a “classic” in literary scholarship on modern anglophone African fiction, Lindfors analyses the use of traditional Ibo proverbs in the novels of
Chinua Achebe and highlights the importance of oral modes of verbal art for contemporary African literature.
22
Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994), 77.
Identities
71
Chinua Achebe is a writer well known throughout Africa and even beyond. His
fame rests on solid personal achievements. As a young man of twenty-eight he
brought honor to his native Nigeria by writing Things Fall Apart, the first novel of
unquestioned literary merit from English-speaking West Africa. Critics tend to
agree that no African novelist writing in English has yet surpassed Achebe’s
achievement in Things Fall Apart, except perhaps Achebe himself. It was published
in 1958 and Achebe has written three novels and won several literary prizes since.
During this time his reputation has grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. Today
he is regarded by many as Africa’s finest novelist. [47]
It is my contention that Achebe, a skilful artist, achieves an appropriate language for each of his novels largely through the use of proverbs. Indeed, Achebe’s
proverbs can serve as keys to an understanding of his novels because he uses
them not merely to add touches of local color but to sound and reiterate themes,
to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the
society he is portraying. Proverbs thus provide a “grammar of values” […] by
which the deeds of a hero can be measured and evaluated. By studying Achebe’s
proverbs we are better able to interpret his novels.
Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, a famous warrior and expert farmer
who has risen from humble origins to become a wealthy and respected leader of
his clan. His entire life has been a struggle to achieve status, and he has almost
attained a position of preeminence when he accidentally kills a kinsman. For this
crime he must leave his clan and live in exile for seven years. When he returns at
the end of the seventh year, he finds that things have changed in his home village.
White missionaries have established a church and have made a number of converts. White men have also set up a court where the district commissioner comes
to judge cases according to a foreign code of law. Okonkwo tries to rouse his clan
to take action against these foreigners and their institutions. In a rage he kills one
of the district commissioner’s messengers. When his clan does not support his
action, he commits suicide.
Okonkwo is pictured throughout the novel as a wrestler. It is an appropriate
image not just because he is a powerful brute of a man and a renowned wrestler,
not just because his life has been a ceaseless struggle for status, but because in the
eyes of his people he brings about his own downfall by challenging too powerful
an adversary. This adversary is not the white man, but rather Okonkwo’s chi, his
personal god or guardian spirit.23 Okonkwo is crushed because he tries to wrestle
with his chi. The Ibo have a folktale about just such a wrestler.
Once there was a great wrestler whose back had never known the ground. He
wrestled from village to village until he had thrown every man in the world. Then
he decided that he must go and wrestle in the land of spirits, and become champion there as well. He went, and beat every spirit that came forward. Some had
seven heads, some ten; but he beat them all. His companion who sang his praise
23
There has been some controversy about the meaning of “chi”. See Austin J. Shelton,
“The Offended Chi in Achebe’s Novels”, Transition, 13 (1964), pp. 36-37, and Donatus
Nwoga, “The chi Offended”, Transition, 15 (1964), p. 5. Shelton prefers to translate it as
“God Within”, but Nwoga, an Ibo, supports Achebe’s translation of it as “personal
god”. […]
72
Section II
on the flute begged him to come away, but he would not. He pleaded with him
but his ear was nailed up. Rather than go home he gave a challenge to the spirits
to bring out their best and strongest wrestler. So they sent him his personal god, a
little, wiry spirit who seized him with one hand and smashed him on the stony
earth.24 [This paragraph should be indented as a quote, as in the original!]
Although this tale does not appear in Things Fall Apart, there is sufficient evidence in the novel to suggest that Okonkwo is being likened to one who dares to
wrestle with a spirit. A hint is contained in the first paragraph of the opening
chapter which tells how Okonkwo gained fame as a young man of eighteen by
throwing an unbeaten wrestler “in a fight which the old men agreed was one of
the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven
days and seven nights” (p. 1). And later, when Okonkwo commits the sin of beating one of his wives during the sacred Week of Peace, “… people said he had no
respect for the gods of his clan. His enemies said his good fortune had gone to his
head. They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy
meal that he challenged his chi” (p. 26). […]
When Okonkwo returns from exile, he makes the mistake of believing that if
he says yes strongly enough, his chi and his clan will agree. No doubt he should
have known better. He should have accepted his years in exile as a warning from
his chi. In his first months of exile he had come close to understanding the truth:
Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise
beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true – that if a man said
yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own
affirmation. (p. 117)
However, as the years of exile pass, Okonkwo’s fortunes improve and he begins
to feel “that his chi might now be making amends for the past disaster” (p. 154).
He returns to his clan rich, confident, and eager to resume his former position of
leadership. When he finds his village changed, he tries to transform it into the village it had once been. But although he says yes very strongly, his chi and his clan
say nay. Okonkwo the wrestler is at last defeated.
Quite a few of the proverbs that Achebe uses in Things Fall Apart are
concerned with status and achievement:
… the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under
them. (p. 5)
… if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. (p. 6)
… a man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness. (p. 16)
The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise
himself if no one else did. (p. 18)
… you can tell a ripe corn by its look. (p. 18)
I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle. (p. 148)
… as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. (p. 165)
Such proverbs tell us much about the values of Ibo society, values by which
Okonkwo lives and dies. Such proverbs also serve as thematic statements remind24
Quoted from Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964), pp. 31-32.
[…]
Identities
73
ing us of some of the major motifs in the novel – e.g., the importance of status,
the value of achievement, the idea of man as shaper of his own destiny. [50-53]
Achebe’s most recent novel, A Man of the People,25 is set in contemporary Nigeria and takes as its hero a young schoolteacher, Odili Samalu. Odili, who tells his
own story, is moved to enter politics when his mistress is seduced by Chief the
Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P. and Minister of Culture. Odili joins a newlyformed political party and prepares to contest Nanga’s seat in the next election.
He also tries to win the affections of Nanga’s fiancée, a young girl Nanga is
grooming as his “parlour wife.” In the end Odili loses the political battle but
manages to win the girl. Nanga loses everything because the election is so rough
and dirty and creates such chaos in the country that the Army stages a coup and
imprisons every member of the Government. […]
Contemporary Nigeria is, after all, the real subject of the novel. What sort of
society is it that allows men like Nanga to thrive while men like Odili suffer? Some
important clues are provided in the proverbs in the novel. In contemporary Nigeria one must, for example, be circumspect:
… the proverbial traveller-to-distant-places who must not cultivate enmity on his
route. (p. 1)
… when one slave sees another cast into a shallow grave he should know that when
the time comes he will go the same way. (p. 40)
… if you respect today’s king, others will respect you when your turn comes. (p. 70)
… if you look only in one direction your neck will become stiff. (p. 90)
But one must not be unduly inquisitive:
… naked curiosity – the kind that they say earned Monkey a bullet in the forehead. (p.
153)
The inquisitive eye will only blind its own sight. (p. 164)
A man who insists on peeping into his neighbour’s bedroom knowing a woman to be
there is only punishing himself. (p. 164)
One should take advantage of opportunities (“… if you fail to take away a strong
man’s sword when he is on the ground, will you do it when he gets up …?” p.
103); capitalize on good fortune (“[would] a sensible man … spit out the juicy
morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth?” p. 2); and avoid wasting time on
trivialities (“… like the man in the proverb who was carrying the carcass of an
elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grasshopper” p. 80). Most
important of all, one must be sure to get one’s share. Like the world of Obi
Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease,26 this is a world in which “ours is ours but mine is
mine” (p. 140).
One must not only get one’s share, one must also consume it. Eating is an important image in the novel. Politicians like Nanga tell their tribesmen, “Our people
must press for their fair share of the national cake” (p. 13). Those who stand in
25
26
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (London: Heinemann, 1966). More than twenty
years later, Achebe published a fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1987). [FSE]
Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1960).
74
Section II
the way of such hungry politicians are branded as “the hybrid class of Westerneducated and snobbish intellectuals who will not hesitate to sell their mothers for
a mess of pottage” (p. 6). These intellectuals, Nanga says, “have bitten the finger
with which their mother fed them” (p. 6). Although some people believe that God
will provide for everyone according to His will (“He holds the knife and He holds
the yam,” p. 102), the politicians know that the fattest slices of the national cake
together with the richest icing will go to the politicians who hold the most power.
This is the reason elections are so hotly contested. In these elections people are
quite willing to support a corrupt politician like Nanga in the belief that if he remains well fed, he may let a few crumbs fall to his constituents. When someone
like Odili protests that such politicians are using their positions to enrich themselves, the people answer cynically, “Let them eat, … after all when white men
used to do all the eating did we commit suicide?” (p. 161). Besides, who can tell
what the future may bring? “… who knows? It may be your turn to eat tomorrow.
Your son may bring home your share” (p. 162). It is not surprising that Odili sums
up this era as a “fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime. … a regime which
inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put
away safely in his gut or, in language ever more suited to the times: ‘you chop, me
self I chop, palaver finish’” (p. 167).
The reason such an era comes to an end is that the politicians make the mistake of overeating, of taking more than their share. In proverbial terms, they take
more than the owner can ignore. This key proverb is used four times in the novel.
Twice it is applied to a miserly trader who steals a blind man’s stick: “Josiah has
taken away enough for the owner to notice,” people say in disgust. “Josiah has
now removed enough for the owner to see him” (p. 97). Odili later reflects on the
situation and the proverb:
I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until
the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be
full and none the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the
will of the whole people. (p. 97)
In the middle of his campaign against Nanga, Odili wishes that “someone would
get up and say: ‘No, Nanga has taken more than the owner could ignore!’” (p.
122). But it is only after much post-election violence and an army takeover that
Odili’s wish comes true. Only after such upheavals result in the establishment of a
new order do people openly admit that Nanga and his cohorts “had taken enough
for the owner to see” (p. 166).
Thus, in A Man of the People, as in Achebe’s other novels, proverbs are used to
sound and reiterate major themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict,
and to focus on the values of the society Achebe is portraying. By studying the
proverbs in a novel, we gain insight into the moral issues with which that novel
deals. Because they provide a grammar of values by which the actions of characters can be measured and evaluated, proverbs help us to understand and interpret
Achebe’s novels.
Achebe’s literary talents are clearly revealed in his use of proverbs. One can
observe his mastery of the English language, his skill in choosing the right words
Identities
75
to convey his ideas, his keen sense of what is in character and what is not, his
instinct for appropriate metaphor and symbol, and his ability to present a thoroughly African world in thoroughly African terms. It is this last talent that enables
him to convince his readers “that African peoples did not hear of culture for the
first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently
had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and,
above all, they had dignity.”27 [61-65]
20. Arlene A. Elder, Indian Writing in East and South Africa (1992)
From: Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (New York:
Greenwood, 1992), 115-38. – People of South Asian origin (often generically referred
to as “Indians”) have played an important role in the history, culture and literature
particularly of East and Southern Africa. While many of the estimated 500,000 South
Asians living in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1960s left or were expelled
from East Africa in subsequent decades, South Africa has become home to some
1,300,000 people of Indian origin, one of the largest Indian diasporic communities
worldwide. In her article on Indian Literature in East and South Africa, Arlene A.
Elder, a specialist in African Literature and Culture currently teaching at the University
of Cincinnati, provides a succinct overview of the history of Indians in Africa
focussing on the economic origins of Indian migration to Africa, the social and
political role of Indians in Africa, colonial “divide and rule” strategies and the role of
the Indian population in anticolonial movements.
Although Indians in Africa are, typically, classed together and referred to popularly and in the general literature simply as Asians, this population is composed of
many different cultural groups and is certainly aware of its own diversity. Muslims,
including the Ismaili followers of the Aga Khan, Isnasheries, Bohras, Memans,
and Baluchis, various castes of Hindus, and Catholic Goans have been the most
numerous and influential.28 Much of their literature reveals conflicts among them
due to religious and/or cultural differences.
East Africa was the focus of Indian trade. Both in eastern and southern Africa,
Britain ultimately predominated in the “European scramble,” acquiring control,
first, of Zanzibar, then of what was to become Kenya and Uganda, then, after the
First World War, of German East Africa, principally Tanganyika.
Three early schools of thought emerged about India’s role in Africa and the
situation of the Indian immigrants there:
27
28
Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation”, Nigeria Magazine, 81 (June
1964), p. 157.
Isnasheries: a branch of the Ismailite faith in Zanzibar; Bohras: another branch of the
Ismailite faith centred in Gujarat (India) and Yemen with followers also in East Africa;
Memans: East African branch of the Ismailite faith based on Indian caste divisions;
Baluchis: ethnic group descended from Medians and Persians, today mainly located in
Pakistan and Iran as well as numerous neighbouring countries and diasporic locations
such as East Africa. [FSE]
76
Section II
One can be called imperialist because of its advocation of an Indian colony to serve as
an outlet for India’s surplus population. … Most of those interested in East Africa
comprise a second group which stressed the Indians’ right to equality of status and
treatment throughout the Empire. … For this group, which was mainly Liberal in political affiliation, the Indians’ struggle for equality in the British overseas dependencies
was closely tied to the nationalist movement at home. … The third group was humanitarian in that it subordinated Indian interests in East Africa to those of the African
majority.29
These conflicting points of view were debated throughout the colonial period
in East Africa, Britain, and India alike.
For a considerable time, India’s role as a trading partner, especially with Kenya
and Uganda, was extensive, greater even that that of Britain or Germany; therefore, its influence upon the situation of the immigrant Indians was also significant.
However, most of its attention was commanded by the more discriminatory government in South Africa.
The first large group of Indians arrived in southern Africa in 1860, principally
in the then British colony of Natal, to provide labor on the newly established European sugar plantations.30 Primarily Hindus, these indentured workers were
bound for three, and later five, years and at the end of this tenure could renew
their original contract, return to India at government expense, or accept a piece of
crown land equal in value to the cost of a return passage. The majority took the
land, remaining in Natal as free citizens, becoming market gardeners, fishmongers,
venders of fruits and vegetables, artisans of various sorts, moneylenders, small
shopkeepers, and traders.31 “Passenger” Indians followed, British subjects paying
their own way, mostly Muslims who chose to emigrate to Natal for commercial
purposes. In addition to agricultural work, the unskilled Indians engaged in labor
in the coal mines and on the railways.
The Indian community in Natal thrived and extended to Transvaal and Cape
Colony as well. Needless to say, its growth provoked resentment among the Europeans, and various discriminatory laws were passed to restrict Asian power, for instance the Indian Immigration Act of 1895 in Natal and even harsher regulations
in Transvaal. Gregory reports that Indians were not attracted to the Orange Free
State because of the extreme discrimination that had existed there all along against
all non-Europeans: “The constitution of 1854 expressly conferred the benefits of
citizenship only on ‘white persons,’ and Indians were subsequently regarded as
‘coloureds’”.32 […]
With the exception of South Africa, it was in Kenya that the British government’s policy of favoring European interests most threatened Indian welfare and
sharpened their understanding of their fortunes being linked to those of the black
29
30
31
32
Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British
Empire 1890-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 503.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 128.
Identities
77
Africans, since both were, in reality, colonized peoples. By 1939, however, their
situation throughout the region was one of relative privilege:
The Indians’ place in the Government and society of Kenya had become fairly well
stabilized, somewhere in the scale of privilege, power, and prestige between the position of the European community at the top and that of the Arab and African communities at the base.33
Before reaching this position of segregated but comparable economic and social
comfort, however, the Kenyan Indian population found itself faced with discrimination resulting, primarily, from European greed for the best land and fear of Indian/African political affiliation against them.
It is true that in both Tanganyika and Uganda, the non-European populations
cooperated to resist European hegemony. In 1906 at Kilwa in Tanganyika, a number of Indians were convicted of smuggling arms and supplies to the African Maji
Maji rebels attempting to overthrow the harsh German rule,34 and in Uganda,
where there was also a relatively small European population, the Indian planter
class generally cooperated with the Africans, especially the Ganda.35 It was in
Kenya, however, where the imperialist tactics of the British were the keenest, that
the most cohesive African and Indian political cooperation developed. The alliance between Manilal A. Desai of the Nairobi Indian Association and the Gikuyu
reformer Harry Thuku resulted in the formation of the East African Association).36
As might be expected, European reaction to this cooperation was swift; it took
two forms, direct suppression and subversion. An extremely effective tactic was
Britain’s pitting of African political interests against Indian in the region. After the
First World War, when both anti-European and pro-European sentiments in
Kenya were speeding toward revolution, the cry for “native paramountcy” was
raised repeatedly by white settlers and encouraged by Winston Churchill, who had
succeeded as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921. This sudden concern
with African rights was offered as a justification for denying Indians equal citizenship with whites and free entry into the colony. Clearly, it served the useful purpose of undermining the collective strength of the non-European populations.
The political wedge forced between the African and Indian communities was
particularly effective, because their unity had always been primarily political, not
economic. From the beginning of Indian immigration, because of the frequent use
of influence by India to support its emigrants and the political use to which Indians increasingly could be put in the maintenance of British “indirect rule,” their
economic situation was a privileged one.
Africans became increasingly aware over time that the proposition that at least
a portion of East Africa become a colony of India was being seriously entertained;
that Indian/European political equality was slowly being approached; and, especially, that the Indian merchants with whom Africans dealt were sometimes almost
33
34
35
36
Gregory, India and East Africa, 455.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 400.
Ibid., 205.
78
Section II
as unscrupulous as the European settlers and bureaucrats in their dealings with
them. In both Uganda and Kenya, instances of Indians taking advantage of Africans in business transactions occurred, and local clashes resulted. Some Indians,
too, were attacked during the Tanganyika Maji Maji rebellion.37 On a larger scale,
friction developed between the two communities throughout East Africa because
legal restrictions on landholding and farming practices guaranteed the Indians’
dominant economic position.38 Rumors of extensive areas in the lowlands being
set aside exclusively for Indian colonization as well as what appeared to be plans
gradually to decrease differences between the legal status of the Indian and European communities, but not the African, despite Churchill’s pronouncement, exacerbated this resentment.
It is predictable, however, that the main opposition to Indian advancement
came not from the Africans but from the Europeans, who saw their own place of
privilege threatened.39 Ironically, this European recalcitrance and greed fueled the
fires of independence movements in both East Africa and India and has led to
longstanding, outspoken Indian opposition, like that of Mahatma Gandhi, to
apartheid in South Africa. In East African countries after independence, Uganda
being the most noticeable example with its expulsion of Asians in 1973, efforts to
Africanize the economies have led to sometimes violent, always destabilizing effects upon the Asian communities. [116-118]
21. Preben Kaarsholm, Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the
Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe (2005)
From: Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac (ed.), Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to
Literature and Culture (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005), 16-23. – Preben Kaarsholm is
Associate Professor in International Development Studies at the Department of
Society and Globalisation of Roskilde University, Denmark and is a well-known
specialist on Southern Africa. The following extract provides an overview of the
relationship between recent political developments and contemporary literature and
media in Zimbabwe.
Democracy vs. ‘the Third Chimurenga’
In a recent article, Christine Sylvester has argued that political development in
Zimbabwe after independence can be divided into three phases – 1980 to 1990,
1990 to 1997, and 1997 onwards.40 ‘Unity’ in 1987-8, the establishment of the
Executive Presidency, and the 1990 elections mark the divide between the first
37
38
39
40
Gregory, India and East Africa, 104.
Ibid., 401.
Ibid., 494.
Christine Sylvester, “Remembering and Forgetting ‘Zimbabwe’: Towards a Third
Transition”, in Paul Gready (ed.), Political Transition: Politics and Cultures (London: Pluto
Press, 2003). [GVD]
Identities
79
two periods, while the challenges for compensation presented to the ZANU-PF41
government in 1997 and the concessions made to war veterans42 – and the break
with structural adjustment43 – signal the transition into a third period. A second
wave of challenges came with the establishment of the National Constitutional
Assembly and – in September 1999 – with the formation of the Movement for
Democratic Change,44 leading up to the defeat of Mugabe and ZANU-PF in the
constitutional referendum of February 2000. This was followed by the parliamentary elections of June 2000, which the Movement for Democratic Change nearly
won, and which established a pluralism and balance of forces between two parliamentary parties that had never been political realities in Zimbabwe before.
Coinciding with – and accelerating in response to – this development, was the
government’s encouragement of land invasions and of campaigns against white
farmers and their farm-workers of ‘alien’ origin, followed by new land laws and
the confiscations of large numbers of commercial farms. Many of these farms
were appropriated by ZANU-PF dignitaries and allies, though land reform was
clearly also being re-launched as a populist political resource which had been kept
on reserve to bolster challenges to the one-party regime. It was an attempt to set
the rural masses against an urban population, which was voting against and being
increasingly critical of ZANU-PF governance, and protesting against unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, and declining living standards. Also – both during
election campaigns and in the wake of the MDC’s strong performance – there
were increasing attempts to discourage opposition through violence and intimidation, with war veterans, ZANU-PF village committees, and youth militias […]
tracking down and punishing initiatives in dispute of the ruling party, thus reintroducing high levels of violence to the politics of both township and countryside in
Zimbabwe.
In this way, the ‘Third Chimurenga’45 was unleashed – following those of the
1890s and 1970s – to keep the ruling party in power and undermine the new
forces of opposition. […]
The recent history of Zimbabwean literature should be seen in the context of
this political development, and of the emergence of new forms of democratic
opposition. The debates undertaken in literature – and within other cultural genres
and institutions in Zimbabwe – have helped to develop elements of a Zimbab41
42
43
44
45
The acronym ZANU-PF stands for the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic
Front. [GVD]
The term “war veterans” refers to those who took part in the liberation struggle and
subsequently led the farm invasions. [GVD]
The term “structural adjustment” refers to a programme of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) implemented in Zimbabwe in 1991.[GVD]
In terms of the so-called “Global Political Agreement” (GPA) the party currently
forms part of a coalition government with ZANU-PF. The leader of the MDC,
Morgan Tsvangirai, is Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. [GVD]
The first Chimurenga was the uprising against the incoming white settlers in 1896, the
second was the guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front government in 19721979, which led to liberation in 1980. The word chimurenga means to fight or to struggle
in Shona, the language of Zimbabwe’s largest ethnic group. [GVD]
80
Section II
wean public sphere – or, perhaps more accurately, of interacting local public
spheres in different parts of the country. And these have helped to move political
differentiations and disagreements from centering on issues of nationalism, identity politics and post-colonial rivalry or unity to matters of accountability, democracy and the problems involved in reconciling priorities of redistribution and of
rights. […]
A growth in outspokenness and critical confidence […] can be found in other
types of literary expression in Zimbabwe from the mid-1980s onward. In poetry
examples can be found in the bitter expressions of post-war disillusion by ex-guerrilla writers like Ducas Fambai or Freedom Nyamubaya.46 The poetry aims itself at
the continuation of inequality and injustices after independence (as in Nyamubaya’s Mount Pleasant poem, ‘They Live Up There’),47 or criticizes the betrayal of
the ‘real’ revolution that politicians have been guilty of and their giving up of any
pretence at more fundamental social transformation. Like other writings by former guerrillas, this poetry is critical of the post-independence state, but can also be
seen as foreshadowing resentments that could be mobilized at the end of the
1990s, when war veterans were called upon by Robert Mugabe and a ZANU-PF
government under pressure to help invade and expropriate white-owned farms.
Critical confidence is powerfully present in the post-independence publications
of Dambudzo Marechera, first and foremost in his Mindblast, or The Definitive
Buddy from 1984 – an energetic and irreverent mixture of poetry, prose and drama
fragments, which became a cult book among young readers in Zimbabwe, was
withdrawn from circulation, but kept re-surfacing. After his death in 1987, there
were further publications of Marechera poetry (Cemetery of the Mind, 1992) and of
his early novel The Black Insider (1990) – books, however, which lacked the Allen
Ginsberg-like48 freshness and audacity of Mindblast, and never had anything like its
provocative appeal within Zimbabwe.
Even more directly than in print literature, the development of freedom and
confidence of expression has been found in some of the abundant township
theatre which came into being also from the mid-1980s, and which represented a
much more direct way of interacting with audiences than written literature. At the
same time, theatre practitioners performed to much broader publics – both in
township community halls and in the rural areas, often using schools as venues for
plays and discussions and liaising with school teachers as influential, ‘organic’ local
intellectuals, and go-betweens between town and country.
Some of this theatre – like the productions of Cont Mhlanga and the Amakhosi group, or of Andrew Whaley and Meridian Theatre Company – was of a very
high quality and belongs to the most exciting specimens of popular culture in
post-independence Zimbabwe. Such writers and dramatists represented new and
46
47
48
Ducas Fambai’s poetry was published in the 1980s in the trade union periodical
Vanguard, as well as in the anthology Another Battle Begun (Zimbabwe Project, 1985).
Freedom Nyamubaya later co-authored a collection of poetry and short stories in
Shona with Irene Mahamba – also a former guerrilla.
Mount Pleasant is an upmarket suburb of Harare. [GVD]
Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was perhaps the best known American Beat poet. [GVD]
Identities
81
different types of intellectuals – relating to society, to the state and to readers in
new ways which were a far cry from both the moralizing and the existentialist
focus on alienation of some of the colonial-era writers. The repercussions of
radical theatre have been felt also in the production of television and radio serials
– thus in mid-2003, a very popular radio soap series, Mopani Junction, was closed
down by the Ministry of Information. The series had had American funding to
disseminate information about the background and consequences of the HIV/
AIDS epidemic, but had also taken on the epidemic’s political and social context
in a sophisticated and critical way. Both Amakhosi Studios and former Meridian
theatre activists were involved in the production of the series, which was broadcast in Shona, Ndebele and English.49
The removal of Mopani Junction from the airwaves coincided with the banning
of the independent newspaper The Daily News, which since 1999 had been the
most critical public media outlet in Zimbabwe.50 Under new media laws – introduced by a Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, who had posed as a major
spokesman for democracy in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s – this was not the first
attempt at the life of The Daily News. Neither was it the first Government strikeout at critical cultural voices. Since 1999, for example, the band which more than
anybody in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to culturally embody Zimbabwe’s revolution – Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited – have had three albums
banned: Chimurenga Explosion, Chimurenga Rebel, and Toyi-Toyi. All contain songs
critical of government corruption and the increasing misery of living conditions.
In this way Mapfumo’s career as a performer was brought full circle – in 1977, he
was imprisoned by the Rhodesian authorities for ninety days because of his song
‘Hokoyo’ (Watch out!).51
Critical media have played a leading part in the battle for ‘openliness’ in Zimbabwe. […]
Literature and media have […] interacted: novels in English, Shona and Ndebele have been reviewed at length, and the monthlies have carried short stories
and poems. Literary writers have also crossed over into journalism and political
commentary – as in Stanley Nyamfukudza’s powerful article on “Zimbabwe’s
Political Culture Today”, published in Moto in 1988, which heralded the
democratic challenges and changes in opposition under way. More recently satire
and critical analysis have been brought together in Chenjerai Hove’s weekly
columns in The Standard; they were collected as Palaver Finish in 2002.52
Palaver Finish provides insights into the ways in which local public spheres are
unfolding in rural buses and around school teachers traveling between town and
countryside – carrying loads of old newspapers with them to satisfy the reading
hunger of villagers. Which, again, is why
49
50
51
52
Shona, Ndebele and English are the major languages spoken in Zimbabwe. [GVD]
In 2010 it was announced that three independent newspapers, including the Daily
News, would be allowed. [GVD]
Rhodesia was the colonial name of present-day Zimbabwe. [GVD]
Chenjerai Hove, Palaver Finish (Harare: Weaver Press, 2002). [GVD]
82
Section II
Teacher is the first target of violence by ZANU-PF. The ruling party wishes it
could post a few youths at every growth point, with tins of paint so that they
repaint all those buses with horrible slogans deriding the new political parties.
But they cannot afford it. They send youths with boxes of matches to burn the
buses that bring such wrong ideas to the villagers. They also wish roads had
not been constructed to some parts of the country so that everyone would stay
where they have always been, without having Teacher travelling to and from
the city conveying dangerous new ideas (Hove, 2002: 50).
Hove also writes of what is happening to reading in Zimbabwe in the political
and economic crisis of the new millennium – how Zimbabweans are “a nation of
talkers” who “prefer to borrow the book rather than buy it,” and therefore the
libraries – now, like schools, without money to buy books – have much greater
significance than they do in e.g. Europe:
The European book is meant for the shelf. The African book is meant for circulation.
When I sell ten thousand copies of one of my titles in Europe, I know it means about
five thousand readers. If I sell the same number of books in Africa, I know it means at
least fifty thousand readers: the book circulates until it falls apart. In Europe, the book
is arrested on the bookshelf (Hove, 2002: 84f).
Since this was written, Chenjerai Hove has gone into exile, joining Thomas
Mapfumo and a growing diaspora of intellectuals and other Zimbabweans for
whom life inside the country has become difficult or intolerable. Following the
new media laws, the closure of The Daily News, and the charges being laid against
its editorial staff, fears were expressed that this would now be followed by a more
general clamp-down on civil society organizations. In many ways the prospects for
democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe – as well as for redistributive growth –
look gloomy, and it might seem that the political development process, which was
gaining momentum internally in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, has now been reversed. […]
On the other hand, the Zimbabwean contestation has become a broader battle
between different political cultures, and for or against a new democratic agenda
which has grown out of the nation’s post-independence history and a process of
learning from experiences of violence and abuses of power. From this point of
view, the political development of Zimbabwe has been a progressive one, in
which the quality of opposition has increased, as the nationalist agenda coming to
power at independence has become outdated. There are reasons to believe that
this learning process will be difficult to reverse: the memory of struggles for
democracy from the late 1990s onwards will prove to be as difficult to erase as
those of the violence of 1980s, or of the liberation war.
In this process of development and remembering, Zimbabwean literature and
authors have had a prominent part to play: they have contributed to the critical
dialogues which laid the foundations for the emergence of locally based democratic demands. In spite of external pressures, intimidation, and circumstances
conducive to self-censorship, writers have taken on the understandings of history
and the myths of the birth of the nation, sanctioned by the powers that be in order to keep themselves in place. Authors have questioned and analysed the contra-
Identities
83
dictions of the liberation war, whose brutality outlived it and influenced politics
and social interaction in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly at a certain remove and
with delays, literature has tried to come to terms with the unfolding of post-independence violence, with dissident threats and violent government reprisals, and
has been part of the debates which carried forward the movement for democracy
and a revised constitution from the late 1990s. This movement for pluralism involved not only the Movement for Democratic Change but also an array of other
parties and mobilizations for political and cultural recognition.
At the same time, as was pointed out above, there are also elements in the critical discourse of post-independence literature – and in the writings of ex- guerrillas
in particular – which emphasize the incompleteness of the Zimbabwean revolution after 1980, and can be seen as pointing forward to the ‘Third Chimurenga’ at
the turn of the millennium, when Robert Mugabe and the ZANU PF government
were able very skillfully to deflect social resentment from anti-government criticism and re-direct it into mobilization for ‘accelerated’ populist land reform. It will
be interesting to study the songs and writings forthcoming in support and criticism of this belated resumption of the liberation war.
In their debating of violence, Zimbabwean literary writers have fulfilled a function of social conscience, and have shown a passion of commitment unparalleled
in neighbouring national literatures. […]
Together with other cultural forms – magazines, theatre groups, churches,
newspaper-carrying teachers, country buses, musicians, story-tellers, n’angas53 –
literature in post-independence Zimbabwe is part of a landscape of voices, genres
and institutions that make out the contours of a public sphere. This has been a
landscape full of breaks and ruptures, but one also entailing much movement
towards overcoming these breaks; and much intellectual noise and music, made in
order to be heard and understood, not silenced. The dynamics of this landscape
[…] would make it difficult to maintain that a notion of civil society as organized
public life, providing a counterpoint to that of the state, has no serious meaning in
a country like Zimbabwe – or that democracy is not an African or locally rooted
project.
53
In Ndebele the term designates a traditional healer or diviner. [GVD]