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PRE-colonial
Africa had pre-capitalist class structures ranging from slave ownership to
feudalism. But following colonialism and the subsequent ersatz independence,
much of the continent bifurcated into two distinct worlds � the
neo-colonialist and the post-colonialist � within the same geographical
space. Neo-colonialist Africa is led by the surrogates of former colonial
masters and other foreign interests while the continent's intellectual class
leads on the post-colonialist front. Between these two �Africas� have been
socio-economic and political crises that have resulted in the stagnation of
the continent's growth and development. Using the dual perspectives of
post-colonial and neo-colonial studies, the paper portrays the traumatizing
impact of the neo-colonialist leadership on Africa's creative writers as a
strand of the continent's intellectual class striving for genuine
independence. It shows the African writer as a frequent site for the clashes
in the struggle by post-colonialist Africans to wrest true independence from
the grip of neo-colonialist leadership. It further traces this rift to the
realities of Western capitalism's predatory domination of Africa, which
began with the brutalizing commodification of Africans as slaves, was
followed by the arbitrary creation of unworkable states, and now has
reincarnated in neo-colonialism's garb and submits that the true and lasting
peace and harmony can be achieved by the human race only if western
capitalism and advances in science and technology are aligned with the
pre-industrial, pre-capitalist and pre-racialist human values.
Two Africas in One
In Africa, whether in orate pre-colonial period or after, literature has
never been a phenomenon detachable from the material realities of the
society in which it is produced. The umbilical cord between the material
world and the fictional world of literature is never severed, as the
literature continues to feed on this physical world, which it, at the same
time, interrogates, ridicules, satirizes or praises when praise is deserved.
A literary work in Africa and the realities of its concrete world are,
hence, necessarily mutually embedded in each other.
In most pre-colonial African worlds, there were folktales, legends, myths,
proverbs and various forms of the song as an important literary sub-genre.
In the traditional world of the people of the present Obudu and Obanliku
areas of Nigeria, for example, the song was a major medium of social
engineering and criticism. In this tradition, not even burial songs were
always carriers of just the usual emotion-laden words of sympathy or sorrow.
The tongue of the singer at the burial of a thief or of one who had died in
any other species of dishonourable circumstances never failed to inflict
deep wounds of shame in the deceased and, sometimes, in his/her entire
family or community as a whole. E. O. Apronti notes that in serenading the
king of the Ashanti, in Ghana, to his palace, the singer reminded him that
he was the servant of the ruled �by singing the type of text to which he
must stand at attention� and be delayed to test his �obedience� (qtd in
Ushie 22).
It was this role of the artist in his society as social critic and 'righter'
that explains the belligerence of the early modern African writer in his
anti-colonial battle. In East Africa, for instance, land as the central
issue was given its due prominence in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child,
while Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and other Anglophone West African writers
consciously glorified their African indigenous culture in the bid to help
their African readers to regain pride and confidence in their cultural
heritage. In Francophone African countries, where the French policy of
assimilation had more consciously sought to obliterate the African culture,
the African anti-colonialist writers responded with the equally more
corrosive concept of Negritude as we find in Camara Laye's The African
Child, Mongo Beti's Mission to Kala, Ferdinand Oyono's Houseboy and in the
poetry of Leopold Senghor. In South Africa, the poet, Dennis Brutus, and
novelists like Peter Abrahams and Alex La Guma tore the robes off the
apartheid policy with their literary works.
Following this role of the African writer, which effectively complemented
the political flank in the struggle for independence, ersatz freedom came
for the various African States. Most of them became independent in the 1960s
while Lusophone Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau freed themselves from
Portuguese control only in the 1970s. The apartheid regime of South Africa
also grudgingly came to an end in 1994, when the first free-for-all
elections were held. This then shows modern African literature's continuity
from, and faithfulness to, its oral antecedents in the pre-colonial era.
Africa and Neo-Colonialism
In spite of the collective struggle for independence by Africans, and the
euphoria that followed its attainment, what the vast majority of the people
did not know was that it was a mere treacherous exchange of batons between
out-going master and his few trusted heirs. In my Bendi community it was
told that when the first colonialists sought for men with whom to work they
resolved not to send any of their worthy sons to them. Instead, only men
whose identity in the community was doubtful, or who were loafers or
scoundrels, were made over to the strangers. The thinking was that whatever
the whites would do to those men would not affect the community very much.
On the contrary, these men, whose exit from the community was a symbolic
emptying of the community's garbage bin into the white man's travel bag,
returned to the community as overlords. They returned as tax agents and
court messengers, and, armoured by the new laws and authority, they treated
the community without the usual African fellow feeling: their powers and
positions had come from elsewhere outside the clan, not from within it.
This, perhaps, explains why even today the loyalty of their neo-colonialist
heirs remains to this external authority in Europe and America and not to
the African community. It was these men or their children, who had come to
constitute the first harvest of Africans into western ways � ways that
dominated the African political and economic leadership class of the
colonial days. Examples of fictional representations of these men in
anti-colonial African literature are Lakunle in Wole Soyinka's play, The
Lion and the Jewel, whose ways are plastic and his language flowery but
without effect, compared to warm, old Baroka, the typical African whose
actions are result-oriented. In Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Weep Not , Child there
is Jacobo, who treats other Kenyans with disdain and takes sides with the
white settlers against the rest of Kenyans during the Mau Mau struggle for
independence. Obi Okonkwo, who becomes baptized as Isaac in Chinua Achebe's
novel, No Longer at Ease, is another example. And in apartheid South Africa,
the black African policeman is, of course, on the side of the whites, under
whose command and power he brutalizes his fellow Africans in various South
African novels. These early converts into western ways thus became the
colonialists' arsenal in the war against African culture and religion, which
they worked assiduously to replace with Christianity and foreign culture.
In some cases the gulf between this early elite class and the rest of the
Africans was blurred during the struggle for independence and immediately
after. This, for instance, explains why post-independence rulers, such as
Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta in Ngugi's Weep Not, Child, were the people's heroes.
Sartre summarizes the situation most aptly:
The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out
promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the
principles of western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with
high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After
a short stay in the mother's country they were sent home, white-washed.
These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only
echoed. (Fanon 7)
Indeed, soon after Gabon's flag independence, a former president of the
country, Monsieur M'ba, assured his former French masters, �Gabon is
independent, but between Gabon and France nothing has changed; everything
goes on as before� (Fanon 52). Symbolically, the experiences of Kenya's
writer, Gakaara wa Wanjau, also tie Africa's colonial period to the
neo-colonial: he was imprisoned in both eras, thus showing the continuity of
both colonialism and the African writer's resistance to it even in the
period following flag independence. Nothing has changed indeed in most
African countries after foreign domination except the skin colour of the
exploiter. The African leaders who took over the reins of power have thus
been nothing but mere reincarnations of the African middlemen of the slave
trade era, and crude surrogates of the former colonizers, whose primary goal
in politics has been the prebendal lucre.
This failure of Africa's former colonies to sever their umbilical cords with
the erstwhile mother countries and reposition themselves towards autarky is
what defines a neo-colonial state. A post-colonial state, on the contrary,
may have scars to show from erstwhile domination, but would have a visible
path towards self-reliance as an independent state. Neo-colonial states such
as we have in Africa, have only reeking and profusely bleeding wounds to
show for their freedom, not yet scars. Africa was therefore directly bled to
the marrow by the colonial masters in the heydays of colonialism, and
lavishly infested with visionless and maniacal thieves for political leaders
in the neo-colonial days. Taking both the first-tier of civilian dictators
and their subsequent military counterparts together, as in some cases, we
have the representative examples of Francisco Macias Nguema, who ruled
Equatorial Guinea for eleven years, and thereafter declared himself �Life
President�, �Leader of Steel� and the �Unique Miracle of Africa�. There was
Central African Republic's Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who was said to have fed
dissidents to lions and, in 1979, killed some 100 school children for
protesting against a certain school uniform. Indeed, on one occasion, he was
reported to have stated:
I am the head and ruler of a nation of thieves. To keep them in check I
sometimes flog them. Somebody dies as a result. Yes, that's true. But the
number of the dead is only one-tenth of that killed in road accidents in
France on an Easter day. What connection is there between these things?
Well, in France there will be more victims on the road next Sunday, whereas
here, in my country, there will be fewer thieves�.(www.newtimes.ru)
Former President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo died only in February 2005. He
had seized power in a military coup in 1967, and for 20 years he banned
political parties in the country until 1991 when he arranged a flawed
election that re-consolidated his stay in power. There were also the duo of
Milton Obote and Idi Amin, both of who ruled Uganda consecutively and are
believed to have been responsible for the deaths of about one million
Ugandans. In addition to his murderous instincts, Idi Amin had a ridiculous
and ludicrous obsession for titles, as it is often the case with dictators.
He asked to be addressed as �His Excellency, the President for life, Field
Marshal, Al Hadji, Dr Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire in
Africa�. Another dictator was the Democratic Republic of Congo's (former
Zaire) President Mobutu Sese Seko, whose personal wealth over-reached that
of his country, and he remained in power until he was ousted in 1997. Two
other notorious ones have been Ethiopia's Haile Mariam Mengistu, who is said
to have been responsible for about 1,500,000 deaths between 1975 and 1979,
and Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who had followed the
footsteps of his predecessor, Francisco Macias Nguema, in human rights
abuses and manipulation of the electoral process to favour his continuation
in office.
Since her independence in 1960 Nigeria has passed through the jackboots of
eight military dictators: Major General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, General Yakubu
Gowon, General Murtala Ramat Mohammed, General Olusegun Obasanjo,
Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim B. Babangida, Generals Sani
Abacha and Abdusalami Abubakar. While human rights abuses was a feature of
all these regimes, the peak of horror was reached during the reign of
General Sani Abacha, a murderous paranoid who blocked his ears against all
reasoning. Besides the numerous state-organized bombings and killings,
including the horrendous hanging of Nigeria's environmentalist and writer,
Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight of his Ogoni ethnic members on November 10, 1995,
it was widely reported that he kept a pond of crocodiles into which he fed
some of his perceived opponents. In a characteristic African dictator
culture, he was working towards transforming himself into a civilian head of
state when he died suddenly in June 1998. Like him, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Kwame
Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Kenneth Kaunda and Milton Obote either died or were
overthrown. Three dictators now remain in Francophone Africa. They are Omar
Bongo Ondimba of Gabon (now Africa's longest-ruling president), Denis Sassou
Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Paul Biya of Cameroon who must only die in
office if left alone or be ousted by some violent action.
This criminal betrayal of the African people's pre-independence expectations
and the euphoria at independence naturally resulted in the bifurcation of
the continent into two. There is the Africa that profits by neo-colonialism
and the Africa that struggles to emerge into a free and truly independent
post-colonial world. There has also been the Africa of the predator and the
Africa of the prey; Africa of the hunter and Africa of the hunted; Africa of
the rich and Africa of the poor; Africa of the oppressor and Africa of the
oppressed; Africa that is material-driven and Africa that is
conscience-governed; and, finally, there is Africa of the farm and Africa of
the town. In the last case the farm is his land of birth from which the
African empties material resources into the town, the town being his home in
Europe or the United States. He flies out from the farm in Africa to a
foreign country for the treatment of every headache, and his children must
all attend schools abroad. Neo-colonial Africans are usually those who
preserve, protect and project the erstwhile colonial master's languages,
cultures and literatures. For instance, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o reports that in
1976 he and Seth Adagala, the then director of his play, The Trial of Dedan
Kimathi, were summoned to Kenya's CID headquarters and warned no longer to
interfere with European Theatre [Kenya's National Theatre] (92). Another
example is Nigeria's recent addition of French, another European language,
to English as a second official language when the nation's indigenous
languages are fast losing speakers, especially among the young. Among
Nigerian youths today, a disdainful attitude to one's African cultural ways
has become a status symbol signifying that one or one's parents have
successfully crossed the border from the Africa of the poor to the Africa of
the rich. In typical Nigerian lingo, the one �has arrived�.
Africa today is therefore one continent only in the physical geographical
sense of space. It is, in reality, two continents in one in the sense of its
freedom from foreign control, in the standard of living of its peoples, in
the physical and social security of its peoples and in the attachment to the
continent as a home. The predator-Africa is only physically present on the
continent; it is materially, mentally and emotionally in the Diaspora.
Neo-Colonialism and the African Writer
Of the two Africas in this neo-colonial era, the predatory Africa controls
most of the media. Hence, much of the time, it is the African rulers' own
assessments of their performance that the media would beam to the world
irrespective of what numbers succumb daily to poverty, disease, famine and
crime; irrespective of the level of insecurity, unemployment and illiteracy
in their lands. This partly explains why in Africa the members of the
prey-Africa prefer listening to the foreign media because, at least, these
ones would report on their condition, although with their usual mockery.
Yet, the foreign media are accomplices in this domestication of Western
capitalism in Africa, which has left the continent in this laughable stage.
Apart from the consistently negative and, perhaps, self-consoling reports
showing the poverty of the people and the occasional references to the
corruption among the predatory class, these foreign media are elegantly
silent about the collusion of western finance institutions and transnational
corporations with African dictators to keep the Africans below the economic
survival line. While they show on their TV the usual images of sickly and
malnourished African children with their distended bellies, of men and women
infected with AIDS, and of squalor, they remain calculatingly silent about
the poor wages fixed for the African workers by the foreign agencies, about
the vaults of western banks distended with the loot from the sweat and blood
of African peasants without linking these images to the poor wages, nor the
�kwashiokored� children's distended bellies to the distended vaults. As such
the localization in Africa of the present economic terrorism goes largely
unchecked, is under-reported and hence, under-exposed to the rest of the
world.
In the Nigerian situation, for example, this leaves these silent majority
with a section of the private press, which often exposes their plight, the
Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), which often protests the frequent increases
in the pump price of fuel, and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU),
which has been fighting for the survival of education for even the poor in
the country. In the continent as a whole, writers have been in the forefront
among cultural producers in the fight for the survival and well being of the
prey-Africa. They have fought consistently on the side of the oppressed
right from colonial days through the early neo-colonial period till these
years of economic globalization. This is a basic role of the modern African
writer as it was of his singer-predecessor in the pre-colonial days. This is
the role that all major writers and critics in Africa expect of their
literature. The slain Ken Saro-Wiwa, perhaps put it most forcefully:
�literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by
intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a
bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role�
(81). Similarly, Niyi Osundare maintains that a writer in African �is a
person that people look up to, in whose work people are trying to see how
they relate to the social, cultural and political problems that we are
facing in Africa� (Na Allah, 470). The same opinion is articulated by almost
every major African writer since Achebe, all of who see the writer as a
warrior who should �have an opinion on everything from geography, history,
physics, chemistry to the fate of humankind� (Ngugi, 154). Incidentally,
even one of Africa's neo-colonial dictators, Guinea's former president Sekou
Toure, also stressed this role:
there is no place outside that fight [African revolution] for the artist or
for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with and completely at one
with the people in the great battle of Africa and of suffering humanity.
(Fanon 166)
This role of being the voice of the voiceless in society has therefore
naturally pitted the modern African writer against, first the colonial
masters, and now the African proxies of these erstwhile colonialists and,
always, with very grave consequences for the writer since, by often
suggesting a revolutionary path out of preydom, dictatorial leaders consider
literature and its producers a threat. In today's Africa, writers are
killed, incarcerated, forced into exile or their works are banned or
censored. Above all, there is the inclement publishing climate partly
occasioned by the sickly economies and the shift of multinational
publishers' interest to the faster-selling school texts. This becomes
African governments' 'divine' sluice gate controlling the flow of otherwise
�poisonous� material into the public. And, so in the end, African writers
have ended up suffering �more indignities, threats, humiliations and genuine
terror than their counterparts in the rest of the non-western world �(Larson
144).
The frequent incarcerations have resulted in the emergence of a sub-genre of
literature on the continent, commonly christened �prison notes�. Among those
who have contributed to the genre are Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ken
Saro-Wiwa, Lewis Nkosi, Bessie Head, Wahome Murahi, Dennis Brutus, Molefe
Pheto, Kofi Awoonor, James Matthews, Todd Matshikiza, Micere Mugo, Percy
Mtwa, Luis Bernado Hibwaba and Rene Philombe (Larson 127-128). It is
therefore no exaggeration when Josaphat Kubayanda considers African writers
as �the new 'nation' of desaparecidos in Africa today� (6), or when Niyi
Osundare observes that �Africa today is a dangerous place to think, a risky
place to argue� (Omuabor 1). It needs to be stressed, however, that not only
writers have been so killed, imprisoned tortured or forced into exile in
Africa. In Nigeria, for example, the nation's foremost journalist, Dele Giwa,
was killed by a letter bomb on October 19, 1986 while non-writers like Pa
Alfred Rewane, Kudirat Abiola, M.K.O. Abiola, Emmanuel Omotehinwa, Shehu
Musa Yar' Adua and Obi Wali were also killed during the dark nights of
Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha.
The repression has certainly been fossilized in the African literature of
the neo-colonial period. While a few of the writers surrendered to the
predator African world by either self-censorship or giving up writing
altogether (especially in Sierra Leone, Liberia Rwanda, the Congo), others
who continued writing have had to inscribe certain strategies into their
style. They have had to prefer the passive voice for their sentences, which
facilitates the dropping of the actor element (logical subject or agent of
the sentence). They also have had to resort to the use of certain symbols:
wolves, hyenas, jackals, hangman, bayonets, lions, vultures to represent the
predator Africans; and lambs, sheep, skull for the prey (Ushie 355). This,
then replicates and reflects the bifurcated structure of the material world
of the continent as two Africas in one � the Africa of the predators and the
Africa of the prey. This mutual embedding of the realities of the concrete
physical world of Africa and the continent's literature into each other also
explains the striking similarities in the works of most modern African
writers. They all have a common monster to confront: neo-colonialism and
Western capitalism. Furthermore, this situation also manifests in literary
theorizing in Africa. The material realities of the continent are yet
without those features that could be described as �modern�; therefore,
�modernism� as a literary theory is not a first-hand experience of the
African writer or critique, let alone its successor, �post-Modernism�. Since
our colonialism is yet to be �posted� anywhere at all, we have reversed from
our post-colonial literary journey of the nineteen fifties and the sixties
to neo-colonial criticism, which is the major preoccupation of our writers
today. The brilliant post-colonialist efforts of the early modern African
writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'O, Kofi Awoonor, Wole Soyinka,
Leopold Senghor, Ferdinand Oyono, Mongo Beti, which began with the fictional
ridiculing of early converts to western ways, and the work of their coeval
critics, were made to reach their menopause soon after their first birth,
just like the continent's stillbirth independence. In Africa and elsewhere
in our modern world, the brawn of the transnational corporations and
international finance institutions as manifesting in the security personnel
of the neo-colonialist nations, their negatively utilized super-brain, which
invents ceaselessly more and more confounding economic and financial
jargons, and their sheer wealth have combined to dwarf the stature and
policing role of the United Nations. The UN has, hence, become nothing more
than a Red Cross Society offering first aid to the wounded at the various
financial and economic battlefields officially labelled as developing or
underdeveloped nations and regions of our worlds. These aids come for the
victims of crises and upheavals in Africa, wars and conflicts in Asia's
Middle East, terrorism and labour unrests in various parts of the world, and
in the form of hunger, disease, illiteracy, poverty and unemployment in many
countries.
Conclusion
It is necessary to end this long jeremiad on a note of hope for Africa and
humanity by suggesting that African leaders work in close cooperation with
their co-wayfarers in the so-called �Third World,� and, especially realize
that the human resources of any nation are its greatest assets. They must
therefore build a bridge between themselves and their intellectuals and
cultural producers for the overall health of their countries. No nation
rises above the level of its educational development, it is often asserted.
Writers and other cultural producers from all over the world must also
continue to use their craft for the good of the oppressed peoples of the
various lands as their African counterparts have been doing.
Secondly, neo-liberal capitalism, rather than terrorism or racism or
religion, constitutes the greatest threat to humankind. Yet, it is a mistake
for anyone to think that the brawn and brains and gold of the advanced
economies will continue to keep the rest of the world down; or that the
ignorance being cultivated in the helpless nations of the world will thrive
infinitely; or that their doubles-speak and 'double acts' will continue to
be masked to the rest of the world. To think so is to be ignorant of the
history of humankind. The only solution is therefore a relatively fair
redistribution of wealth such that the poor will not have to be kept awake
by hunger, as their being awake will not allow the rich to sleep.
Thirdly the concept of globalization that fosters inter-racial,
international, inter-regional and inter-religious understanding and harmony
is not evil if it is made to function as a vehicle for spreading the
cherished pre-industrial and pre-racialist human values of love, compassion,
human solidarity and fellow feeling instead of individualism and
cannibalistic materialism. To realize these noble aims of globalization, it
would be necessary that an international code of conduct for economic
relations among the nations of the world be provided. This should, for
example, make it possible and easy for nations to retrieve and return to the
source- country all wealth stolen from any part of the world and stored in
another. If this were done, it would help Africans much more than the
present culture of stuffing the mouths of its dictators with economically
poisonous loans. A happy illustration of the operation of economic
globalization is the current fight against corruption in Nigeria, which is
being dictated by the nation's creditor-institutions and nations. The need
for this humanistic and healthy form of global co-operation and harmony
cannot be more necessary, urgent and crucial than at this time in human
history when the human family is being daily faced with natural disasters of
all kinds. All these ideas and many other similar positive ones are
necessary at this time of our history so that we can return our two Africas
to one continent, so that we can return our two worlds to one world, so that
we can rehumanise our commodified world by making it conscience-driven
rather than gold-governed.
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