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Mwazemba got it wrong on African writers, and out of context on Conrad

Thursday December 02 2010
achebe

Above: Chinua Achebe who has mastered the English language and used it to tell African stories. Pictures: File

John Mwazemba might have been editor of Macmillan Kenya but he seems to have little idea of what the world of literature is all about. The thrust of his article (‘African Writers too Timid to Criticise’ — The EastAfrican of Nov 29-Dec 5) misses the point altogether. Writers must write about what they know. They also often require distance to get a perspective on their own countries and early lives. Thus many go on writing about Africa even when they have left it. When the great storyteller of the American South, Flannery O’Connor was asked where she got the material for her bizarre fiction, her curt answer was, “Just surviving childhood is enough.”

Setting out just to criticise the white man and his society as an object is hardly worthy of a real writer and would show artistic immaturity; plenty have written of their experience in exile like Abdulrazak Gurnah in Admiring Silences where he describes the pain and loss of his motherland, Zanzibar, in his newly adopted England — certainly not a flattering portrait of the country. The South African Bessie Head (When Rain Clouds Gather) wrote magnificently about the ambiguity of being of mixed race. A great writer like Chinua Achebe has endured because he wrote not directly about personal experience but transformed that into a narrative about the colonisation of an entire continent: though he uses the English language in all its richness, the rhythms and proverbs of his native Igbo tongue throb beneath the text.

He has turned English to his own advantage, taming it to fit the context of a distant culture. Who has more accurately depicted the absurd white man coming on his iron horse to conquer a proud and dignified nation with its age-old traditions and values? The trilogy endures also because he did not have a simple-minded grudge to bear which is more fitting for a newspaper gossip column than a work of art.

His African characters are full of human foibles: they are weak at times, foolish, lazy as well as grand, generous and noble. Okonkwo is a man challenged by his own troubles as well as his father’s and by the obligations he bears to his clan. Achebe has caught them in all their complexity. That is why he will go on being read for many years.

Mwazemba’s problem is that he views literature in an a-historical manner: colonialism and its aftermath are still very recent. Most writers still suffer its after-effects directly — even someone as young as Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie whose novel Purple Hibiscus deals with the conflict that tears generations apart when the white man comes brandishing his bible as a weapon. It shows how a family is destroyed by the larger conflict.

Where does she or Ngugi wa Thiong’o laugh at the poverty of Africans? Have I missed something? Ngugi’s best work also harks back to his youth in Kenya when the struggles of building a nation were still fresh and hopeful before pessimism set in and where moral principles are tackled head on. When you could have the daring to set up a theatre in Limuru in the face of official censorship.

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African classic

The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana is an African classic which could be nevertheless be translated to any environment in which a man with honesty and integrity finds that he cannot fight a hostile system alone. You could imagine the novel being set in New York 2010 where so many are struggling just to stay alive in a society which is in its own way deeply corrupt.

But what the author knew intimately was his native Ghana, just as Meja Mwangi knew River Road like the back of his hand and Grace Ogot knows her territory. Mwazemba perhaps does not know of the great writer and film-maker Sembene Ousmane who wrote about his experiences in France, as did the African-American James Baldwin whose homosexuality added to his skin colour made him a pariah in his homeland.

I do not agree with Mwazemba’s assessment of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I believe he reads negativity into what Conrad saw as strange, alien and unfathomable. And remember that his conclusion is that we share the same “ugly” humanity. As for despising the dialects that are put into the mouths of Africans, Mwazemba must know that at that time people from the provinces were sent to school to iron out their regional accents and turn them into citizens who spoke the Queen’s English.

Fairness

To me. anyone who writes off Conrad or Karen Blixen on the basis of those two books is unfair. I do not believe that they were racist, though some of their attitudes were born of the time they lived in. The book is about the heart of darkness in all men.

Has Mwazemba bothered to read Nostromo? Or Blixen’s marvellous letters home? Just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, don’t condemn a writer on the basis of one book.

Nuruddin Farah was driven to flee his native Somalia after one of his books caused mayhem. A writer who has been regaled in many universities and who speaks several languages still writes about his home country. Could it be because “home is where the heart is,” figuratively speaking?

And I haven’t even mentioned Nigerian born Ben Okri who has lived in England for many years and whose writing is broad enough to extend from The Famished Road to highly original essays on Shakespeare. There’s no keeping a good writer down.
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