THE AFRICAN WRITER AND THE POLITICS OF LIBERATION

He
was echoing the prevailing conception of the black people as ignorant, as
people with nothing worthwhile to say or contribute. Ali Mazrui did reply to
such false assertions in the 8th volume of the General History of Africa (pp
579-580) by stating that “….black Ethiopians were writing poetry before
Jefferson’s ancestors in the British Isles were taught the Latin alphabet by
Romans.”

Sadly enough, there are Africans or blacks that also think we are
worthless. In our own century, a black American called Keith Richburg, a
correspondent in Africa for the Washington Post from 1991-1994, wrote a book
called Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, a book hailed by the
Establishment as a “great work of reportage”, in which he despairs of Africa
through adjective filled pages and concludes “thank God my nameless ancestors
brought across the oceans in chains and leg irons made it out alive. Thank
God I am an American.” George Bush, who would appreciate such feelings, has
also pitched in or rather butted in by reducing Africa to a “nation with a
lot of diseases.”

Thank God I am an African. Many countries of this disparaged continent of
ours may have shared a similar past (subjugation under colonialism with just
two exceptions, Ethiopia and Liberia) but, a shared general feeling of being
African notwithstanding, Africa is not a nation or an inheritor of a common
reality. It is not homogeneous in culture, language or psychological make up.
Furthermore, we are witnessing at present the failure of the so- called
modern African Nation State as inherited from colonialism and the emergence
of ethnicity as opposed to any notion of nationality. It is proper then to
primarily deal with the literature we are going to talk about. The African
writer is a varied lot with different influences and historical reference
points. Much as we cherish the pan African concept, the writings of the
Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri is different from that of Ngugi in
Kenya, Tsegaye Gebre Medhin in Ethiopia or Dambudzo Marechera in Zimbabwe. It
may not be possible, in other words, to talk of African literature in the
singular and we are inevitably compelled to refer to African literature in
the context of different languages, cultures, history, within the reality of
an Africa that is not yet a nation but a “bazaar” as Ali Mazrui described it.

Hence, our reference to the African Writer is more functional, an attempt to
indulge in a generality to address the common concern with liberation and the
role of the writer, the African. It is not a deliberate choice to gloss over
the particularities and differences. The shared colonial experience for one
was not the same in each and every country, French and British colonialism
had their differences as were their impact on their subjects. That said I
shall proceed to deal with the main theme,as is, that is The African Writer
and the Politics of Liberation.

Some writers and historians refer to an African pre colonial Golden Age, but
I am amongst those inclined to conclude that pre-colonial Africa was no
idyllic utopia. Yet, it is not possible to deny that colonialism wrecked
Africa and was/is mainly responsible for the pitiful state it finds itself in
at the present time. In the colonial period, the aim of liberation confronted
the colonial reality, that someone described as “the vilest scramble for
loot, and as South African writer Lewis Nkosi put it during this phase, that
is to say during the struggle against colonialism, the writers “attempted to
capture in their pamphlets, poems, novels and plays, the revolutionary
impulse of which they are inalienably a part.” The evils of colonialism have
been documented by a number of writers including Walter Rodney (who wrote How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa and described colonialism as “a one armed
bandit”) and Amadou Hampat E B’, who was older than Senghor and Birago Diop,
and who wrote the classic “L’Etrange Destin de Wangrin” (“Fortunes of
Wangrin”) and the autobiographical “Amkoullel”. On the evils of the slave
trade that preceded this period, we can cite also the earliest account by
Ottobah Cuogano who wrote “thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked
traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species, humbly submitted to
the inhabitants of Great Britain, London, Hall &Mr. Philips,1787).

The colonial period and the struggle that was waged for liberation were
reflected in the works of the writers of that period. They were themselves
products of the system, an elite battered by the colonial education system or
as the Ugandan poet Okot P’Bitek put it (in Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol),
they were men “whose manhood was finished in the classrooms, their testicles
were smashed with big books”. The alienation of the elite by colonial
education has been captured by Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain, by
Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala, by Ferdinand Oyono’s The Old Man and the Medal,
by Marechera’s House of Hunger, by Achebe, Ngugi and many others. More
political and conscious is Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bit of Wood (and also The
Black Docker). A labor union activist himself, Sembene wrote on the conflict
between railroad workers and the colonial powers. In the political field, the
late Amilcar Cabral has written National Liberation and Struggle.

For Cabral, culture was based on the socioeconomic realities of the given
country, on the level of development of what he termed “productive forces”.
This class conscious view of the question has been echoed by Ngugi (in
Homecoming, Heinemann,1972) when he defined literature as something that does
not develop in a vacuum but “..is given impetus, shape, direction and even an
area of concern by the social, political and economic forces in a a
particular society.” Ngugi goes on to assert “that the relationship between
creative literature and these other forces cannot be ignored, especially in
Africa, where modern literature has grown against the gory background of
European imperialism and its changing manifestations: slavery, colonialism
and neo-colonialism.”. Achebe, Cabral, Ngugi and the others were of course
part of the elite and products of the education labeled “modern”, actually
western, even missionary and colonial. Colonialism did destroy indigenous
cultures but at the same time it needed, to practice what Mahmoud Mamdani
called (in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism, Princeton Univ. Press,1996,p.49) “decentralized despotism”, a
“mode of incorporation “of the colonized into “the arena of colonial power”.
That is to say rule through “the native authority” and the local chiefs, a
rule from a distance falsely presented by colonialism as “respect for
customary law or native institutions”.

Achebe and others had a field time ridiculing the native authority and the
local chief working under and for colonialism. The writers of the time took
it upon themselves to denounce the colonial system, the emphasis was more on
race and identity, the African pre colonial reality seen in exclusive bright
and positive light. The writers’ task was to recover the lost identity and
sovereignty and this necessitated a strike at the colonial system and its
supports (religion and the missionaries, the educational system, etc..). The
classic book of the time, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, had little to say about
the class nature of the problems as opposed to the essays of Cabral and
Semebene Ousmane (in Man Is Culture) in which national liberation and even
the very act of culture is equated with armed struggle. It is perhaps
symptomatic of the times that there were, to my knowledge, no female writers.

The writers who took to task the evils of colonialism through their novels,
plays and poems (Senghor, Camara Laye, Achebe, Peter Abraham, Eskia Mphahlele
etc..) resorted to the heritage of African “Orature” or oral literature to
give form and style to their books. They did write for the elite like them,
the ones who could read and understand the language (be it French or English)
but they did try to ”do many unexpected things to the language” and to make
it serve their purpose. The earliest English novel at that time, in 1952, was
Amos Tutola’s internationally acclaimed The Palm Wine Drinkard that relied on
oral literature and folk tales even though Nigerian critics denounce it as a
work that panders to the prejudiced and exotic vision of the Europeans and as
one written in semi literate English. There were very few works in the
African languages at least to my knowledge. The writer’s audience was
restricted- it was European or the local modern and educated elite, the same
class like the writers themselves. The millions referred to as the masses
were away from it all and reached later on only through the armed anti
colonial struggle, via the political pamphlet and the agitational leaflets of
the struggling nationalist organizations.

With formal independence and the replacement of the foreign chief by the
local one, the role and focus of the African writer also changed. The writer
became more a critique than a teacher. There was disillusionment that
affected the writers who had hope that with independence Africa would enter a
new era. This, as we know, was not to be. Even nationalist leaders like
Nkrumah and Sekou Toure were authoritarian, Ben Bella was replaced by the
dour and sour Boumedienne, Lumumba was murdered as were many nationalist
leaders ranging from Moumie to Cabral to Mondlane and so forth. The post-
colonial period (which continued colonialism in a new form) put to test the
earliest idealized conception of Africa and its past. Achebe’s A Man of the
People and Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born are the typical novels
of this period of disillusion in the new African “bourgeoisie” denounced by
Frantz Fanon (in Black Skin, White Masks) as “brothel keepers for Europe” who
are not “engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor; it
is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type. Its
innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and be part of the
racket”. The struggle for liberation, that is to say for full emancipation,
had failed.

This was time for the writers, in the words of Lewis Nkosi, “to register not
only the pains and joys of national rebirth, but (to) begin to constitute an
important source of critical consciousness for the nation.” If Achebe and
Armah failed to grasp the importance of class contradictions and if many
writers preferred to plead with the rulers and to espouse what many had
called a “liberal humanist” world view, the reality of neo colonialism was
bound to and did push many authors to view the question of liberation in
class terms. The African writer started to understand the class basis of the
material conflict. The Native President and ruling elite was now denounced as
an “imperialist puppet”, “brothel keeper”, “comprador” and, in general, as
part of the problem. The writer of the post independence period is best
characterized by the writings of Sembene Ousmane, Ngugi’s Petals of Blood and
Devil on the Cross, Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood, Xala, The Last of
the Empire, Ethiopia’s Sahle Sellasie’ s Firebrands, and to an extent by
Malian writer Yambo Oulologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence or Bound to Violence
and also by Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain. These and other writers not only
castigated the ruling elite but also tried to have a class struggle view of
the existing problems, they tried to address the “masses” or the peasantry,
they pointed to a direction of revolutionary or radical change. Some called
for Revolution, others (like Sembene in L’Harmattan and Ngugi in Petals)
advocated for socialism outright.

The period also saw the portrayal of women in the various novels as exploited
beings who deserve to have their rights (Houseboy, Devil on the Cross,
etc..). Perhaps one of the very few male writers who write with sensitivity
about women is Somalia’s Nureddin Farah who also denounced the Siad Barre
dictatorship in his many novels. Women writers also emerged and one good
example is Buchi Emecheta, who has not only written on themes of Women
Liberation but is reportedly one of the rare breeds of African writers who
support themselves through writing books. As one reviewer put it Emecheta
wrote of women’s life stories “to draw attention to the inegalitarian gender
and class relations that cut across racial and geographical boundaries”.
There were also Bessie Head and Flora Nwapa.

It was also during this period that the neo- colonial State showed its
repressive fangs. Censorship and repression went hand in hand. The writers
were thrown into prisons, tortured even and also forced into exile with all
its travails and difficulties. Expectedly, the fundamental question of
language and audience also reared its head. If liberation meant the
emancipation of the vast majority, how can the writer continue to write in a
language the majority of people failed to understand? The oral part, of
course, songs, parables, proverbs, tales and the like, directly addressed
itself and was accessible to the vast majority. Can the same be said of books
written in English or French? Senghor insists that he wrote for the
Senegalese people primarily though he wrote in a sophisticated French that
made him a member of the snobbish and elitist Academie Francaise. He said my
people “know that a Kora is not a harp, just as a balafon is not a piano.
Moreover, it is by appealing to French-speaking Africans that we will best
appeal to the French and, beyond the seas and frontiers, to other people”.
But he also had to admit that there was not much choice: “I repeat, we did
not choose. It was our situation as a colonized people which imposed the
language of the colonizers upon us.” Some consider Achebe’s claim that
African writers like him will subvert the English language to serve their
ends as just a convenient justification but the writer himself has later
stated in his Morning Yet on Creation Day that the whole unresolved debate on
the position of the English language left him cold. Ngugi and others
certainly disagreed and forcefully called for writing in one’s own mother
tongue on the basis of a conviction that language and Empire are fused and
that the use by African writers of the English language to write books, for
example, should be categorized as Euro- African literature and not as African
literature.

The jury is still out on the controversial debate but the focus
on the “people or the masses” is justified since the aim of the writer is to
reach as many people as possible and the role of the writer should be viewed
within the exigencies of social realism (not Zhdanov-type Stalinist
“socialist realism”), not only to denounce but to question, beyond the
slogans and the rhetoric, the system and life as a whole.

In Ethiopia, where
most books are written in the Amharic and other local languages, the issue of
a few writers like me also writing in English has not been controversial
though major Ethiopian writers like Laureate Tsegaye Gebre Medhin (who has
written in English) and the late Mengistu Lemma support the views of Ngugi.
My own latest book in English, African Absurdities, will not be read by the
millions of Ethiopian s who do not speak English but then again my Amharic
novel Kedada Chereka has not been read by all those who do not read Amharic.

Yet, it seems proper to me to cite Ngugi who wrote:

“African writer of the 80s has no choice but to join the people’s
struggle for survival. In that situation, he will have to confront the
languages spoken by the people in whose service he has put his pen. Such a
writer will have to rediscover the real language of the struggle in the
actions and speeches of his people, learn from their great optimism and faith
in the capacity of human beings to remake their world and renew themselves.
He must be part of the song of the people.”

The writer should of course be part of the song of the people, should be the
songwriter even and should sing along with the people. The writer should be
aligned with people no matter the cost. Yet, the problems confronting the
African writer should not be ignored as we strive to emphasize his or her
contribution to liberation. Language problem raises the problem of audience.
Translation from one African language into another is almost non existent (no
one has translated Ngugi’s Petals of Blood into Amharic while the novels of
Jeffrey Archer and Daniel Steele, for example, have been translated), there
are few publishing houses (in Ethiopia, for example, the State owns the main
publishing house), Africans cannot afford to buy books, many of them are
illiterate anyway. The radio is the better medium to pass the message across
but in most countries too there is censorship and the radio or the media is
under State control. African writer Jean Roger Essomba (in his “Of
Recognition” article) takes the bull by the horn and poses the question as
follows:

“The African writer’s recognition by Africans and the rest of the world is
still to often solely related to his/her overseas reputation. Which, in other
words, means that to be recognized in Africa, you first of all need to be
plebiscited by Paris, London or New York. This approbation will come all the
more easily if the writer chooses to live in the West and/or is published by
a major Western publishing house. One is thus, in most cases, forced to
leave.”

Essomba is trying here to give one more reasons to why African writers are in
exile aside from political repression. Many African writers, including
myself, have not been able to find a publisher other than our own
“ghettos” – say Heinemann books in London/New York and L’Harmattan in
Paris/France. I am not trying to minimize or denigrate the role of these
publishing houses, no, but the fact remains that they are already categorized
and tagged as “Third world” or “African” and have limited space, sales or
capacity. Worse still, at present, even Heinemann’s African Writer’s Series
has been stopped as the company has been taken over by Harcourt books which
has told us authors that it has no interest in our works. Some honest editors
of mainstream publishing houses continue to tell us bluntly that African
stories with strange names do not sell well and advice us to inject a foreign
(of course white) hero into the stories. There were African writers who have
made it, to use a common saying, but many are marginalized and left in the
wilderness.

Essombo clearly indicates the problems and dilemma posed by the situation. He
wrote:

” This situation is not free from the risks of perversion as the
writer ultimately finds him/herself in a situation where the publishers,
critics, prize-givers, media and the target readership, all the people who
are determinant in the launching of a work, are foreigners. In this context,
isn’t the African writer, to a certain extent, forced to adapt his/her
discourse to smooth of the rough edges, to avoid shocking those likely to
publish his/her work and who are afraid of mirrors, to reassure those who
want to read but who tremble at the thought of meeting their bad consciences
at the turn of the page?”

The price to pay to get published and recognition is indeed very high. Many
writers in exile cannot be published in their own countries, their books,
when published abroad, are often banned back home. The regime in Addis for
example is about to decree a press law that is aimed at banning Ethiopian
newspapers and magazines published abroad so long as they carry critical
articles. The African writer is bound to confront many more obstacles and
impediments as he/she seeks to get published. The so- called New World order
and globalization do not augur well. The post colonial period has come to an
end, the world is presently under the domination of one super power and the
African renaissance that was prophesied has turned an illusion. Evidently,
Africa cannot ignore the implications of globalization and all of us must
realize that, nostalgia aside, we cannot go , even if we wished to, back to
the imagined idyllic pre colonial times. As Africa enters the new century,
more fragmented, fragile, and more vulnerable, African writers must confront
the complexities, persevering as writers in touch with the common people, in
touch with the present without losing sight of the fact that the seeds of
tomorrow are in today.

The failure of the nation-state and the assault of ethnicity on the unity
aspirations of Africa force us to re-question facile theories and
conclusions. Colonialism itself laid the mines against successful
democratization. The politics of liberation should reject the imported
paradigms and seek, beyond the errors of the ruling elites, the structural
problems. Democracy and the aspiration for it must be put on African
pedestals and in this context the writer must dig deep into Africa’s oral and
written literature and culture in order to play the prominent role in
informing, criticizing and mobilizing the people for change. It is necessary
to put in a word of caution at this juncture. The writer can and should play
a role in Africa’s quest for liberation and in ending the crisis that grips
the continent but this role should neither be minimized (by severing the
writer from his/her social role) or exaggerated (by imagining the African
writer as the one to change the reality). In the end, the politics of
liberation now, for this period, differs from the past and is yet connected
to it. The class-conscious writings of Ngugi and Ousmane contrast with the
less innocuous and narrowly nationalist stories of Nureddin Farah for
example. The darlings of the West may not necessarily be Africa’s best
writers and notice should be taken of the fact that when they picked up 100
of the best books for the last century there was not one written by Africans.
The double standard and prejudices live on…and the African writer continues
to be confronted by the dilemma: to write captivating stories that gloss over
or ignore the reality or to transcend the limitation of language and material
considerations and to pen stories and plays of value and meaning, to be
modern griots with stories that reveal the soul and hopes of Africa.

So, what is the task, what is the priority of the African writer at the
present time? It is to write stories that expose and shame the real enemies
of Africa, to pen stories against the tyrants and their systems, against the
machete wielders, the plunderers of our riches, the spoilers of our heritage
and the fanatics of hate. It is not only to chronicle the the despair and
suffering of the people but to write stories that fire the spirit of
resistance, that champion hope and belief in the power of the people to
liberate the continent. A Swahili proverb says: “words are silver, answers
are gold”. The African writer should strive to provide some gold to the
people who are yearning to be citizens with full rights and opportunities in
their own countries, in their own continent.