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Post-nation depression (Abdulrazak Gurnah - The Financial Times)
April 16, 2007 12:26 PM
Copyright The Financial Times
April 13 2007
The nation and its failures are ubiquitous subjects in African writing. In the 1950s and 1960s, the period of decolonisation witnessed both the birth and maturity of the continent’s literature, thanks to the appearance of a gifted group of writers. These included Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, Ayi Kwei Armah of Ghana, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria and the latter’s compatriot, Nobel prize-winner Wole Soyinka.
Their writing reflected on the encounter with European colonialism and the progress of the post-independence African nation. It debated the realities and the obstacles that might stand in the way of African hopes at this time: political intolerance, the authoritarian state, corruption, and the manifold oppression of women, young people and minorities. At its core, though, was a radical faith in the progress of the nation, and the role that writing could and should play in this through its critical and moral engagement with events.
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As it transpired, the retreat of European colonialism was followed by the relentless collapse of African nations. This was not only for the reasons so many of the writers had feared, but also because no one had fully realised the havoc and division that lurked behind the appearance of colonial order. Nor was the retreat as full as it had at first seemed. Numerous western institutions continued to pursue their own ends in post-colonial Africa. But the mayhem was real enough. No amount of faith could ignore the failings of the African post-independence state. So how has contemporary African fiction engaged with this disappointing reality?
One of the triumphs of the anti-colonial struggle in this dark era was the collapse of white rule in southern Africa: in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia and, most remarkably of all, apartheid South Africa.
Christopher Hope’s excellent My Mother’s Lovers takes place mostly in South Africa. The author depicts his colonial Europeans with amused disgust. They are a crowd of hunters, adventurers and chancers who move effortlessly back and forth across Africa. Their hubris enlarges their bland dramas into significance through epic gossip sessions.
Hope’s real loathing, though, is for the self-delusions and small-minded greed of white South Africa, a place ruled ”by a small bunch of demented bores who said they were the sons of God” and which is populated by descendants of gold-crazed land-grabbers.
Hope’s novel begins - as the author’s life did - in Johannesburg in 1944. As with his earlier writing, the subject of this book is the tragic absurdity of human intolerance, with South Africa’s racial fevers as the obscene example. The narrator, again like Hope himself, grew up in the years of Afrikaner-led Nationalist party governments. South Africa already had plenty of racial laws before the Nationalists came to power in 1948 - preventing blacks from owning land, voting or moving freely. But, through the introduction of a series of detailed laws, they introduced a terrifying regime based on racial segregation, which they implemented with clumsy brutality.
It is this failed state that Hope mocks with relish. The architect of modern apartheid, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, even makes an appearance - his bungling bodyguard is one of the lovers of the novel’s title. Hope depicts the Nationalists as grasping and malicious bunglers rather than God’s chosen people, never mind the clever fanatics they seemed to those who viewed them from afar.
The narrator escapes South Africa for a while. When he returns, the country is in the midst of its transition from a settler colony to a decolonised African republic. And Hope loves unsettling the self-righteous. His new South Africa turns out to be a place where callousness and violence are prevalent, where a new kind of fear menaces the prosperous, and where anxieties about personal assault are paramount. The novel’s focus on these loveless lives, HIV/Aids and deep unease about the lying state, is a protest against a rhetoric of deliverance so prevalent in the new order. Apartheid South Africa was manifestly a failed nation. Hope cautions the new South Africa lest its moral smugness leads to another failure.
Early in My Mother’s Lovers, Hope makes his narrator consider that colonial Africa, especially in its southern tip, suffered from racial fever, but independence brought a ”killer disease” called nationalism. It is only a partial explanation for the horrors that have befallen African states. And it is not one that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o shares. In his huge new novel, Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi lays the blame on the rapacity of African rulers and the west’s cynical manipulations to safeguard its prosperity and power. From his 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat onwards, Ngugi has argued that post-independence governments in Kenya have ignored the aspirations of its citizens for nothing nobler than the fraudulent enrichment of its officials.
In 1977, Ngugi was imprisoned without trial for a year for his views. The then vice-president Daniel arap Moi signed his detention order. Ngugi was released only after an international outcry, and on condition that he leave Kenya to preach his sedition elsewhere. The experience radicalised his thinking on the politics and culture of his homeland. Henceforth, his subject became the cynicism and corruption of Kenya’s government.
Wizard of the Crow is subtitled ”a translation from Gikuyu by the author”, so it pointedly requires the reader to engage with it as a narrative constructed to different linguistic and cultural conventions. Its tone is often one of exaggerated irony, reminiscent of Ngugi’s first Gikuyu novel, Shetani Msalabani (”devil on the cross”). It has a familiar biblical register, which Ngugi has found irresistible over the years. This gives his mocking metaphors of the grossness of power a mythic quality. For example, the ruler has a secret chamber of bones where he keeps the remains of his enemies and bathes in the blood of his victims. This ruler, as it happens, is unmistakably a caricature of arap Moi, Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002.
The prevailing style is grand comic satire. The ruler and his henchmen are crass and immoral; the people are wise and resisting. The comedy is sustained and bitter, more so than in any other Ngugi novel. It is also often directive and insistent on the lesson it wants the reader to draw from it. The national problem the novel addresses, though, finds no solution. The ruler’s grossness makes him an embarrassment to his sponsors in the west. He is consequently replaced by someone more malleable to the democratic lexicon of our times. One absurdity follows another and the satire on misrule becomes a farce - a comic but predictable critique of the grossness of African governments.
If Ngugi writes about a Kenya that has repeatedly failed to behave as a nation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun describes a nation that has hardly had time to come into being. It is the story of Biafra and the years of the civil war in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. The novel rejoices in the sense of community the founding of the breakaway Republic of Biafra produced - at least in its early days, before war and its aftermath corroded its people’s humanity.
The story begins in the years before the January 1966 coup in Nigeria, with the arrival of a boy, Ugwu, on his first day as a servant to an academic, Odenigbo, at the University of Nsukka. Ugwu eavesdrops on his master’s conversations and affairs throughout the novel. He keeps the reader informed of the passionate debates about the nation that Nigerian intellectuals engaged in during these first post-independence years. Towards the end, Ugwu himself becomes a child soldier in the Biafra army. Through him and his actions we witness the dehumanisation of a people.
The other consciousness with which Adichie escorts us through these events is the beautiful Olanna. She is Odenigbo’s lover, but also the daughter of a cut-throat businessman, who in African writing has often come to symbolise corruption, the betrayer of national morality. This set type’s crassness in Adichie’s version, though, is over-staged and hard to believe. In any case, as a rich man’s daughter Olanna dramatises issues of wealth and worth in the novel. Through her, we observe the massacres of Igbos in northern Nigeria after the July counter-coup, and the persecutions that led to the secession of Biafra in 1967. The book is not a history lesson but it stays close to the events. And its sympathies with Biafra are never in doubt.
Olanna has a twin sister, Kainene, who is difficult and sullen and dates ”white men”. One of these, the Englishman Richard, provides the third route through the plot. An expatriate who falls in love with Kainene and later with Biafra, he is the outsider who endorses the justice of Biafra’s cause.
The novel’s greatest strength is its unflinching account of life behind the war: the deprivations of refugees, the swift brutalisation of ordinary people and the bullying and horror of armed lawlessness. Decency flees as Biafran soldiers murder and rape their own people. This powerful thrust of the novel, though, is dissipated by a melodramatic domestic plot of half-hearted sexual transgressions that comes to dominate sections of it. The book could have done with less souping-up in this respect. It could also have benefited from more of Kainene, whose acid tongue is often more observant than the mushiness of other voices.
Shimmer Chinodya’s Chairman of Fools is set in Zimbabwe, which, in recent years, has become a dramatic example of the African nation in the throes of self-inflicted chaos. But this novel is not about the failure of the state in the style of Hope or, more dramatically, Ngugi or Adichie. It focuses on an individual vulnerability that clearly relates to the ongoing wider social and political havoc.
For example, it contains a description of a market where stallholders wash their tomatoes in the sinks of the public toilets, which are caked in grime and overflowing. The novel’s central figure, Farai, is briefly back home from a writing fellowship in an unnamed university in the US. He is a boozer and a womaniser. Women of various ages troop in and out of the story as the novel builds up gradually to Farai’s breakdown. Misreported stories and gossip about the protagonist abound. They feed his self-pity to paranoid levels. He calls the police, runs out armed with two knives, crashes his car and sees ghosts.
This madhouse, then, is real life in Zimbabwe. The only sanity is to be found in the asylum, where most of the rest of the novel takes place. The chairman of fools of the title is the position Farai is elected to by his fellow inmates. He becomes the leader of a kind of shadowy Zimbabwe of the incarcerated. The problem is that too often the larger argument fails to materialise, or it arrives too abruptly at a banal conclusion (such as when Farai leaves to return to his writing fellowship). Despite this, some of the scenes of disorientation and violence are powerful, and the metaphor of Zimbabwe as a madhouse is deeply unsettling.
These four novels, in their very different ways, describe how African nations have failed their citizens. They do not all tell the same story. And perhaps these are not, despite appearances, uniquely African stories. The details of each are important in grasping the complexity of these disasters. But the intelligence and the courage of the writing make it clear that the betrayals and the bullying will not go on forever. African writing has not lost its critical and moral engagement with events.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is author of ”Desertion” (Bloomsbury).
Posted at 12:26 PM