topics: |  literature | postcolonial | africa | nigeria | english | fiction

Excerpts

1 Colonialist Criticism 3

[paper read at the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language studies, Makerere U, Uganda, Jan 1974.]

a specious criticism which flourishes in African literature [derives from] the attitude and assumption crystallized in Albert Schweitzer's immortal dictum in the heyday of colonialism: The African is indeed my brother, but my junior brother. The latter-day colonialist critic, equally given to big-brother arrogance, sees the African writer as a somewhat unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European, but meanwhile must be humble, must lear all he can and while at it give due credit to his teachers in the form of direct praise or, even better since praise sometimes goes bad and becomes embarrassing, manifest self-contempt. 3

[Review of Things fall Apart by a British woman, Honor Tracy ] not so much a critic as a literary journalist. Headlined [perhaps] "Three cheers for mere Anarchy!", the burden of the review was: These bright negro barristers [why "barristers" is a mystery to Achebe] who talk so glibly about African culture, how would they like to return to wearing raffia skirts. How would novelist Achebe like to go back to the mindless times of his grandfather instead of holding a modern broadcasting job in Lagos? 4

Another example, which because of its recentness, surprised me:
    [The British] safe-guarded women, enabled them to make long journeys to
    farm or market... Nigerian novelists writing charming and bucolic
    accounts of domestic harmony are the sons of such women; the peaceful
    village of their childhood was one which had been purged of bloodshed and
    alcoholism by an ague-ridden district officer and a Scottish mission
    lassie whose years were cut short by every kind of parasite.
        from Iris Andreski's Old Wives Tales, 1971, p.26.  4

To the colonialist mind it was always of the utmost importance to be able to
say: I know my natives, a claim which implied a) the native was really
quite simple, and b) understanding him and controlling him went hand in
hand.  How often one heard:  "I know my natives; they are delighted with
the way things are.  It's
only these half-educated ruffians who don't even know their own people..."  5

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Homecoming, 1972, on western "Africa experts":
    Some of these people, once described by Jomo Kenyatta as professional
    friends and interpreters of the African, have the arrogance of assuming
    that they have more and closer ties to Africa than Africans... [They]
    acquire a proprietoral air when talking of the part of Africa they happen
    to visit; they carve a personal sphere of influence and champion the most
    reactinary and the most separatist cause of whichever group among whome
    they happen to live. 6

[Includes incident with diplomat's wife, who loves Nigeria so much that she
cannot bear Achebe's criticisms of the country.] 7

For the African writer, destiny does not include a future European identity
for which the present is but an apprenticeship.  And let no one be fooled by
thee fact that we may write in English for we intende to do unheard of things
with it.

An Australian student who had taken a course in African Lit, asked me if the
time had not come for African writers to write about 'people in general'
instead of just Africans.  I asked her if by people in general she meant
like Australians, and gave her the sad news that such a time would never
come.  She was only a brash sophomore.  8

Critic Charles Larson, praising Lenrie Peters' novel's "universality, its
very limited concerns with Africa itself" -
    That it is set in Africa appears to be accidental... [might as well be]
    southern USA.  If a few names ... were changed, would feel this was an
    American novel.  In short, Peters' story is universal.

Does it ever occur to the Larsons to change the names of characters and
places in an American novel, say a Philip Roth or an Updike, and slotting in
African names?  9

Philip M Allen's Review of Ouologuem's Bound to Violence:
	The novel has [to do] with the forcing of moral universality on
	African civilization.  ... The morality is not only 'un-African' --
	denying the standards set by omnipresent ancestors, the solidarity of
	communities, the legitimacy of social contract: it is a Hobbesian
	universe that extendds beyond the wilderness, beyond the white man's
	myths of Africa, into all civilizations, theirs and ours. 12

8: The African Writer and the English Language 55

					(originally a speech, 1964)

The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but
whether they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother
tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a
guilty feeling.
     But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language
and I intend to use it.  

Writing in the London Observer recently, James Baldwin said: 
	My quarrel with the English language has been that the language
	reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter
	another way.... Perhaps the language was not my own because I had
	never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this
	were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if
	I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.  

I recognize, of course, that Baldwin's problem is not exactly mine, but I
feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African
experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion
with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.

Contents

Part one: Essays
	1 Colonialist Criticism 3
	2 Africa and Her Writers 19
	3 Language and the Destiny of Man 30
	4 What Do African Intellectuals Read? 38
	5 The Novelist as Teacher 42
	6 Where Angels fear to Tread 42
	7 Thoughts on the African Novel 49
	8 The African Writer and the English Language 55

Part two: Autobiography
	1 Named for Victoria, Queen of England  65
	2 Tanganyika - jottings of a tourist 71
	3 The African writer and the Biafran cause 78
	4 In reply to Margery Perham 85
	5 In defence of English? An open letter to Tai Solarin 87
	6 Onitsha, Gift of the Niger 90
	7 Chi in Igbo cosmology 93