NEGOTIATING CULTURES: MODES OF MEMORY

IN NOVELS BY AFRICAN WOMEN

Catriona Cornelissen

A Thesis submitted in confomity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto.

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by Catriona Cornelissen Graduate Deparunent of English, University of Toronto. PhD, 1997.

ABSTRACT

The dissertation examines the transmission of cultural values in a selection of African womenfs texts, written in

English and published between 1966 and 1986. Focusing on a range of works by Kenyan, Nigerian and South African women, the study explores modes of memory and examines the way writers represent, reaffirm and re-position cultural authority during post- colonialism. The dissertation examines autobiographies, histories and fictional narratives, modes by which mernories of the past are formally and consciously structured and recorded, but the study also examines the way in which language, customs and traditions convey cultural values and attitudes, often beyond the conscious control of the writer. The welter of African and

Western cultural influences of both past and present provokes an on-going interaction through which the writers in this study interrogate the contesting of cultural authorities.

Since women's roles are largely dictated by cultural expectations, the dissertation includes examination of the writers' attitudes to those customs relating to marriage, polygyny and child-rearing, and analyzes their solutions regarding these issues. The works of Charity Waciuma, Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa and Rebeka Njau, discussed in Chapter One, depict the difficult process of renegotiating the authority of cultural memories, an on-going process in any society, but one intensified by the imposition of Western colonial influences. Their works reflect and question, to varying extents, the cultural expectations imposed on wornen, while simultaneously advocating the benefits of readjusting and/or reaffirming established custorns. By contrast, the selected works by Buchi Emecheta, examined in Chapter Two, depict abrupt confrontation cultural influences, and sej ect es tablished traditional customs being stultifying women, hindering sel:-development. Chapter Three examines the challenge the works of Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head pose to the cultural authority of the apartheid system. While Tlali finds solutions in the public arena, and calls for collective, political action, Head suggests that solutions may be found on the personal level, through relationships, self-analysis and self-acceptance. The study also examines how the works of Niriam Were, Tlali and Head advocate the need for men to change their cultural attitudes towards women. TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE WORKS OF WACfUMA, OGOT, NWAPA AND NJAU

Charity Waciuma

Grace Ogot

Flora Nwapa

Rebeka Njau

CHAPTER TWO CULTURAL BONDAGE: EMECHETA CHALLENGES THE AUTHORITY OF MEMORY

Buchi Emecheta

CHAPTER THREE WERE, TLALI AND HEAD RENEGOTIATE CULTURAL LOCATIONS

Miriam Were Miriam Tlali

Bessie Head

CONCLUS ION

BIBLIOGRRAPHY INTRODUCTION

Since f 970, the production of Af rican womenr s literature writcen in English has grown rapidly. However, before 1970 few

African women had published.L Flora Nwapa' s Efuru (1966), Grace

Ogott s The Promised Land (1966), and Charity Waciuma' s Daughter of Mwnbi (1969) were the first works written in English by

African women to gain widespread recognition. These three early texts explore themes depicted by their male predecessors, themes of cultural conflict and economic change, during post- colonialism. However, Nwapa, Ogot and Waciuma extend these themes into new areas of social life, especially gender roles.

In the 1970s, writers such as Buchi Emecheta, Rebeka Njau and

Miriam Were enlarge a3d develop the themes of their African women predecessors yet further, while South African writers, such as

Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head explore these themes from the perspective of apartheid. By placing women in the centre of their texts, they are able to construct alternate versions of history.

By representing their pasts, whether in fictional, historical or autobiographical narratives, these writers create the opportunity to define themselves from their own points of view. In this work, 1 analyze how modes of memory transmit cultural values and attitudes which inevitably reflect the on-going process of self- definition.

Memory plays a crucial role in the process of self- definition. Without memory the world would be unintelligible, for to imbue any perception or any experience with meaning, we have to relate it to a prior context. While al1 consciousness is rnediated through memory, most of what we commit to memory is done so subconsciously. Language, behavioral patterns and customs are learnt and reiterated largely subconsciously, and such learning and reiteration reflects the particular culture of which we are a part. In Rernembering: A Study in Experimental and Social

Psychology, P.C. Bartlett argues that while there is no proof that the social group has a mental life over and above that of its individual members, there is no doubt that the group

functions in a particular way which directs the mental lives of the individual members (298, 300) . As a result, the individual may be seen as the product of his or her cultural history. Paul

Connerton concurs with Bartlett, stating in How Societies

Remember that "the narrative of our life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of those groups £rom which individuals derive their identity" (21) .

Personal memory and cultural memoxy are thus not clearly separated. We internalize the cultural memories of which we are a product, and our pasts, both culturally and individually, determine who and what we are. Salman Rushdie endorses this theory in Midnight's Children. Events before Saleem's birth are important factors in depicting who and what he is, and Rushdie demonstrates the irnpossibility of separating the individual and political histories. Political events have an inescapable impact on Saleem's development, and become part of his life, just as he, as an individual, has an impact on politics. Any social interaction is dependent upon social or cultural mernory. A memory can be cultural only if it is capable of being transmitted, and to be transmitted a memory must first be articulated. There are many modes of transmitting cultural memory, and its articulation may not necessarily be verbal; gestures, attitudes and stereotyped images may transmit cultural noms. Furthemore, Bartlett ' s experiments on the transmission of mernory within different cultural groups prove that not only must memory be conventionalized to be transmitted, but that different cultural groups will conventionalize in differing ways, in accordance with the conventions of their cultures. "Mernories of people in different cultures will Vary because their mental maps are different" (125). As Chandra T. Mohanty states, any

"map" is constantly being "re-drawn as Our analytic and conceptual skills and knowledge develop and transforrn the way we understand quescions of history, consciousness and agency" (Third

World Women 3). Thus the mental "maps" we draw are necessarily charted in our own discontinuous locations in time and space. At the same time, these locations depend on what and how we rernember. With new experiences and influences, the individual is constantly re-assessing the authority and location of cultural rnernory, for the contradictions and confrontations of different cultural influences of past and present create tension, and exert pressure upon the manner in which we interpret Our lives. This tension is not necessarily binary or even oppositional. It may be multifaceted. However, re-negotiation is a constant as the individual copes with these changing influences. The control of a societyls cultural memory is a means of

retaining power and authority. Connerton, in How Societies

Remernber claims :

The more total the aspirations of [a] . . .

regime, the more imperiously will it seek

to introduce an era of forced forgetting

.... the mental enslavement of the subjects

of a totalitarian regime begins when their

memories are taken away. When a large

power wants to deprive a small country of

its national consciousness it uses the

method of organized forgetting . (12

We witnessed an era of enforced forgetting in South Africa, where

writers and historians were al1 but proscribed; if their works

overstepped the limits of goverment acceptability, their works

and/or they, themselves, were banned or quietly imprisoned. In many cases, such people were in time forgotten. That Miriam

Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan and Amandla were originally banned

in South Africa is evidence of the South African goverment's

conscious attempt to suppress her recorded perspective of life in

the country at that time.

If we have no memory of ourselves, we are in fear of falling

into oblivion, or having Our identity prescribed by others.

Frantz Fanon, in his Black Skins White Masks, expresses the danger of colonized peoples losing their own sense of themselves, due to the authority of Western culture. Although Fanon, as Gwen

Berger argues, "takes the masculine for the nom", his theories delineate the control and pcï:er exerted on al1 colonized peoples by Western hegemony, and the extent to which the oppressed are detrimentally affected (76). He examines the psychological affects of the negative self-images the colonized develop, by internalizing attitudes embedded within white, euro-centric cultures, attitudes that inculcate within the colonized a sense of inferiority. He examines how language and sexuality help construct categories of race, as well as how language and sexuality are modified by race, and he explores the ways in which the colonized subject discovers that he is rejected by the very culture which he has assimilated. Fanon exhorts the colonized to resist such conditioning, claiming, "1 do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined," and argues that "the body of history does not need to decemine a single one of my actions ... 1 am my own foundation." (230-231).

To escape the determination of historical conditioning, he postulates that the colonized man must go "beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis" to initiate his "freedom"; that is, he should go beyond the groundless assurnption of the colonistsf assumed superiority and oppressive status which bas been escablished historically (231). He exhorts the colonized man to

"disalienatef' himself, and re ject the assumed, negative self- image that relegates him to the margins, even within his own consciousness (231). Homi Bhabha expounds further on Fanon's assertien explaining that the "beyond" is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past. He argues that it is these inbetween spaces that provide the "locations" in which new signs of identity can by initiated. The individual hast therefore, to proceed beyond the historical time into unknowable space. Only

£rom this transitional state is the individual able to re-situate hirn/herself in a new location which may be "the borderline engagements of cultural difference" (Bhabha 2). This transitional state in the "beyond" induces a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction. Liberation from the authority of cultural memory may, then, bring with it an insecurity and instability, for the individual is no longer embraced or dominated by any prevailing noms.

If colonized peoples, as Fanon asserts, must struggle with the effort to disalienate themselves from colonial cultural conditioning, colonized women must struggle on more than one front for their liberation and self-identification. Molara

Oqundipe-Leslie claims that "centuries of interiorization of ideologies of patriarchy and gender hierarchy" have led them to nave a "negative self image" (Recreating 30). African women have generally been irnrnersed in a traditionally male-dominated world, which dictated the role of women, consciously or otherwise, according to their sex.- Furthermore, colonialism oppressed women particularly. New socio-economic schemes subordinated women, and colonialisrn not only calcified existing sexist tendencies of pre-capitalist Africa, but introduced others.

(Recreating 30). African women have tended to live in environrnents whose public external power structures have been under the control of men and they have thus, through diifering customs and traditions, inherited and internalized, both collectively and individually, the cultural memory of a male-

dominated society. ~ikeother third world women, African women

have thus been doubly marginalized, and have the cornplex

difficulty of struggling against two forms of memory control.

Frigga Haug emphasizes the need for women to negotiate new

political identities, claiming that only through their own

hîstoricization can women retrieve £rom the dominant culture a

new image of themselves. As she explains, this is not easy.

Since we are accustomed to using rapid

repression, obliteration and f orgetfulness

to maintain Our equilibrium, this attempt

to step back into the past to make the

unconscious conscious, both calls into

question Our normal ways of working over

events in consciousness and threatens our

stability as people. (20)

While African women encode mernories in the same physiological way as men or any other social group, their

experiences differ; their "mental maps" are different. However,

since women are, as Mohanty claims, "constructed, defined within

and by the group", they are produced through their social

relations "as well as being implicated in forming them" ("Under

Western Eyes" 61, 59). Thus, while African men and women writers

create their own fictionalized African worlds, they do so from different, but not necessarily oppositional, perspectives.

The texts exarnined in this work reflect shared cornmonalities, such African women's struggles with post- colonialism and ~estern/eurocentricinfluences, and struggles with pst-iarchy and women's status as second-C~SScitizens.

However, while 1 refer to African women writers, 1 do not suggest that they form a hornogeneous, unitary group with shared monolithic histories; indeed, shared commonalities often mask important differences. The different and individual cultures and histories define how African women relate to their struggles, and their cultural and historic locations are themselves defined by time, space, and class. African patriarchy, too, is no more unitary or universal than are African women themselves. The novelists thus express differing tensions and reactions to their particular confrontations with postcolonialism and patriarchy.

African women writers tend to confront issues which relate most closely to themselves. Thus, marriage, polygyny, child- bearing and the woman's subservient status are recurrent themes in their works. While African male writers may well incorporate these same issues into their texts, seldom are they the central themes. Furthemore, in writing by African men, such gender traditions generally remain unchallenged. Much of the early literature written by African men deals with social and political implications of colonialism and men's struggles within and away from its confines. Women are generally depicted as peripheral to the struggles; they tend to function as symbols of tradition or instruments for the male hero's working out of his problems.

When African men do depict a central woman protagonist, she is likely to be mythologized or romanticized. 3 The different sexes create or record the roles of their women protagonists through their own eyes and thus, not surprisingly, depict different perspectives, perspectives developed from their inherited and personally experienced cultural and individual memories. Many African women writers articulate their struggle for equality. In this work, 1 use the word "feminist" to denote women who strive for equality in political, economic and social arenas, although 1 am cognizant of the multiple definitions of the word, and in the understanding that women of varying cultures have different approaches towards liberation. Many African women consider the term, "feminist", as applicable to the struggles of white, middle-class American women, and inappropriate for depicting the broader liberation issues confronting African women. Many view the feminist movement as hegemonic,

Western/euro-American and anti-male. African women have been challenged by more than sexual inequality; many are disadvantaged by oppression of poverty and lack of education. Some see their struggles for sexual equality as only part of a larger, wider struggle for liberation of women and of their people as a whole, and do not necessarily see themselves in an oppositional stance to their inherited culture or the men in their ethnic groups.

Nigerian feminist, Ogundipe-Leslie, advocates that tnere can be no liberation of African society without the liberation of women, arguing indeed that the two issues cannot be separated. However, she acknowledges women's different attitudes to gender issues.

Some women reject the bride price (dowry) which values women as comrnodities; others wish to retain it, valuing the respect if affords women. Some reject the practice of polygyny; other collude with or openly condone polygyny. These contradictory attitudes are evident within the texts 1 examine. Miriam Were's

The Eiqhth Wife presents a compromising stance towards polygyny; she seems to advocate that in certain situations polygyny is advantageous. Buchi Emecheta States, "In many cases polygamy can be liberating to the woman, rather than inhibiting her, especially if she is educated .... Polygamy encourages her to value herself as a person and look outside her family for friends" ("Ferninisrn" 179) . Yet, Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood clearly depicts the negative aspect of polygyny.

Ogundipe-Leslie also advocates that African women were, in a

sense, the first feminists, for they have always been

independent, and have had their own forms of resistance

(Recreating 52). In keeping with her belief that sexual

liberation is but part of a larger liberation, she clairns she is

a Stiwanist, STIWA being an acronym for Social Transformation

Including Women in Africa (Recreatinq 229). African American

AlFce Walker also rejects the term "feminist", preferring to cal1 herself a "womanist", a term for which she gives various definitions, one being a holistic "cornmitment to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and fernale" (Alice Walker xi).4

The writers, whose work 1 examine, also express alternate opinions. Flora Nwapa prefers Alice Walker's predilection for the term "wornanist", and rejects the label "feminist" as Western and anti-men (Perry 1262). Head argues that she is a writer, not a woman writer, claiming that the world of intellect is impersonal and sexless (A Woman Alone 95). Emecheta has changed her stance as her circumstances have changed- In 1975, the

~nternationalWomen's Year, Emecheta claimed she "had never heard the word ' feminism' before". In Head Above Water she writes, "1 was writing my books from experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me. 1 did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category" (89) . Despite her claims, her words may also reflect her subconscious internalizing of the current cultural trends of her British environment. In 1984, she clairns, "My novels are not feminist; they are a part of the corpus of African literature"

(Ravell-Pinto 50). However, in 1988, she States, "1 chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women 1 know.

I did not know that by doing so 1 was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then 1 am a feminist with a srna11 'f' ! " ("Ferninism", 175) . These authors may wish to evacie the feminist label to avoid accusations of serving neo- coionialisrn. On the other hand, Ogundipe-Leslie maintains that their denials may reflect patriarchal intimidation (Recreating

64. The differing forms of feminism are always fluid and changing, exacerbating the difficulty of generalizing. While some of the works exarnined voice desires for sexual equality, al1 confront the influence of Western culture, and all, with the possible exception of Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool, advocate the need for women to be educated, an important aspect of the liberation of African women. Of course, male dominance and education of women are not unrelated issues. To examine how African women assert their own cultural

authority necessitates exploring how they exploit the different modes or methods by which the cultural past is transmitted.

Therefore, 1 include a brief analysis of the various modes of

cultural memory used in the works examined. Language is perhaps

the most powerful mode of transmitting memory, for inherent in iï

are cultural and ideological values. Furthemore, the receiver

or transmitter of linguistic expression may not consciously

accept the attitudes and perceptions inherent in the language.

The power and authority of language is accentuated in a political

system where the language of dominance imposes law and order.

Like al1 modes of memory, language may be manipulated, misinterpreted or rnisunderstood; it may be used as a means of

control. Nadine Gordimer, for example, explores the fickle

nature of language and its precarious power in her novels. In

The Conservationist she explores the lack of communication

between different races and generations by demonstrating that, dependent upon individual perspectives, the signs signify

differently. In July's People, she examines what happens to the

words that gave power when that power is eroded. Maureen and

July have to learn how to read new signs and new signifiers,

which may or may not be embedded in language. Gordimer

exemplifies the need to reinterpret constantly the validity of

the signs, and she depicts, through the character of Maureen, the

sense of individual instability that such reinterpretation

brings. Embedded in language are idioms, clichés, truisms, and proverbs, al1 foms of verbalizing a consensus of behaviour.

They tend to act as unreflected dicta, condemning or guiding one to walk the well-trodden path of that which should be, according to the culture of that language. Haug goes as far as tc clairn that the cliché acts as "an obstacle to thought and understanding

. . , [that] def ines like a corset the contours of appropriate fernale feelings and desires" (62). African fernale writers have inherited oral traditions which rely heavily on proverbs, idioms, and clichés. Fixed formulaic expressions are, of course, found in any culture, but are more prolific in oral cultures (9, 22,

24). Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy opines that in oral cultures people learn a great deal and practise great wisdom by repeating what they hear; knowledge once acquired has to be constantly reiterated or it will be lost. Thus, the use of clichés and repetition, which the literate person is educated to avoid, are necessary mnemonic tools in the oral society. To the

African, proverbs are more than succinct metaphorical statements conveying basic truths. Use of proverbs implies access to ancestral wisdom and authority, a the-tested, communally accepted way of thinking. The proverb is also a rhetorical tool used in debates to bolster arguments; utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges the hearers to top it with a more apposite or contradictory one. Furthermore, law in oral cultures is enshrined in proverbs or formulaic sayings, which, in fact, constitute the law themselves (Owomoyela 16-17). In historical narratives, perhaps the most obvious fom of constructing cultural memory, important events are deliberacely emphasized or popularized and in that way the historical writer consciously or semi-consciously creates a national political identity, again giving shape to the memory of a particular culture in a particular time and place. The perspective from which the history is written affoxds an advantageous power, and as a form of memory may be untrustworthy, for history, as al1 f orms of narrative, records subjectively, using selection and distortion. While fiction makes no clairns to factual or cnronological accuracy, the truth of the writers' perceptions defy challenge. South African writers recount mornentous events such as the Sharpeville xiots, the Soweto riots, and Steve Biko's death. Nigerian writers use the setting of the Biafran war to depict the emergence of a new, non-traditional Nigeria. Kenyan writers evoke memories of the Mau Mau rebellion and the State of

Emergency. These historical events become indisputable touchstones, events which are cornmemorated in the re-telling and

i which become important in shaping the identity of the people.

However, African fernale writers relate these events from notably women's perspectives, and thus offer different versions of the events, versions told from the point of view of mothers, wives and daughters.

Customs and traditions are also modes of conveying cultural mernory. Like histories, they are concerned with the apparent preservation of certain things through time. They are means of conveying and sustaining images and recollected knowledge of the past, transmitted not only from one generation to another, but from one culture to another. As Walter Lippmann explains, customs "are the public world to which Our private worlds are joined ... the mystery by which individuals are adopted and initiated into membership with a cornmunity" (105). The appeal of custom is possibly its appearance of fixity, offering the individual a sense of belonging and meaning, a foothold in that which is timeless. Customs appear to have no conscious beginnings or ends. However, the images of unbroken, seamless continuity are usually illusions, for in order to survive, customs, as al1 other modes of memory, are subject to the laws of change and subtle reinterpretation, reemphasis and ref ocus, with every repetition or performance. These changes may be hidden from the community, and in agrarian societies such changes rnay be very slow. The oral tradition affords greater flexibility for refocusing, reordering, and reemphasis, to help individuals or groups re-situate themselves and cope with the pxesent conditions. By contrast, writing not only freezes the memory, but does so in textual forms, which evolve in ways quite unlike oral memory. However, despite the stasis of a written perspective, the reader response is not only varied according to the readers' different perspectives, but is also subject to change, as the cultural location of the reader changes. Thus the same reader may interpret the written words differently at different times.

For customs and traditions to remain alive they have to retain meaning for the cornmunity. A changing social perspective may require reinterpretation and rearranging of the original

custom. This may take the form of re-contextualization into a

new genre, and this can initiate changes within memory itself.

Oral communication is in itself social, uniting people in groups;

oral communication always requires the "other" in person. Oral rnemorization is also subject to direct social pressures:

narrators narrate what audiences cal1 for or will tolerate.

Because of the social requirements of oral communication, an oral

society, Ong postulates, values the group over the individual

(67-69) . He argues that because writing and reading, by

contrast, encourage solitary expression and solitary thought,

throwing the psyche back upon itself, literates learn to focus on

the individual.

However, oppositional positioning of orality and writing

tends to simplify the situation. Writing is a means of

communication and any written work requires the imagined presence

of one or more readers in the mind of the writer. Furthermore,

the texcs examined in this work owe their existence at least in

part to publication demands, demands which rnay well be those of a

Western market. Economics and marketing play a rofe in the route

the written work takes £rom the mind of its creator to the

published bock. As Carolyn Steedman explains in Past Tenseç:

Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History, the writer's

reliance on readers' responses may help shape the structure of

their work. The writer, she explains, may dispense with a

strictly chronological structure, relying on the reader, who,

having a developed historic consciousness, assumes and mentally provides the historical linkages. Writing is not a totally isolated activity.

Factors other than orality may also influence Africans to value the group over the individual. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis suggests that community identity allows the individual to reject negative self-images, imposed by the internalization of hegemonic cultures, and to embrace a more positive self created by the community (53). Identification with that which is larger than the individual self also offers a comforting security, a sense of belonging and meaning.

Writing offers African women a means of self-preservation and revolution, and a means of establishing their own cultural authorities and projecting their futures. Mohanty States that

"the very practice of rewriting and remembering leads to the formation of political consciousness and self-identity. Writing often becomes the context through which new political identities are forged" (34). However, as Mohanty postulates, the consciousness such as that which African women form through writing is a consciousness "born of historical collusion of ... cultures .... It is a plural consciousness in that it requires understanding of multiple, at times often opposing ideas and knowledge and negotiating these knowledges, not just taking a counterstance" (Third World 36). Self-identification, both persona1 and national, is thus a process requiring constant reaching into the beyond in order to challenge the authority of the present. Re-situating oneself is not a question of merely reaching into the past to retain a lost culture. ~t is a question of releasing oneself from the present, dominating culture and relocating oneself with the experience and perspective of past and present. This process of reviewing and renewal is what keeps cultural values and traditions growing, for change, as always, is the constant.

Because Our perception of the world is dependent upon what we remember, al1 writing involves memory. Fiction relies on memory to make itself intelligible- At the same time, memory is always fictictious to a degree. Al1 truths are inherently partial, committed and incomplete. In order to delude ourselves tnat Our lives are seamless continuities of cause and effect we create constructs and fom linkages to explain and give meaning and continuity to Our lives. We recall using selection, distortion, bias, and, most importantly, we also forget.

Examining the role memory plays in narratives, affords the reader the opportunity to examine the narrators' confrontation with the tensions and contradictions of differing cultural experiences, and their continual re-negotiating and re-positioning of the centre of their present cultural authority.

The African wornen writers examined in this work write autobiographies, histories and novels. An autobiography may be defined as the first person account of the narrator's life up until a certain the, from a particuiar cultural location. Many of the novels discussed are autobiographical in nature, although not written in the first person. Emecheta's first two novels,

Second Class Citizen and In the Ditch, Tlali's Muriel at

Metropolitan, and Head's When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and -A Question of Power, al1 drav on persona1 histories, to varying degrees, without being written in the first person. Carolyn

Steedman asserts it is "possible to tell lies in autobiography,

to bear false witness in a way that it is not possible to tell

lies in the writing of fiction" (125). She argues that in autobiography it is the author's perception from a particular time and place that is being conveyed; the veracity or chronology of events is not important, but the truth of the writer's perception remains unchallenged. Autobiography gives the

impression of being more authentic than the novel, because of the writers' persona1 experiences; however, autobiographies and histories, while recording actual happenings, are nevertheless

creative and inventive. Events and actions may be manipulated,

and time sequences confused, in the need to impose structure and meaning, and provide explanations. And, this imposition of

structure and meaning is necessary, not only for the cohesion of

the woxk as a whole, but also for the writer's sense of

individual coherence. Likewise, in novels, the narrator

selects, orders and structures in order to convey her point of

view from a particular time and place. While the writers' perception of that time and place is frozen in the text, her perception might subsequently change as she re-locates her

cultural situation at a later date.

Lewis Nkosi maintains that African novelists work within a

structure that has not evolved £rom their own literature. He postulates that the "novel form must distort the African past and tradition in order to contain it within its framework" (5). However, I would argue that the novel tradition, as with al1

other traditions, is subject to change and reassessment. Each

repetition of the novelistic form may subtly alter it, for the

novel tradition, to remain meaningful, must meet the demands of

its users. On the other hand, the psychological and individual

foci of traditional Western novels may lead the African writers

to question their inherited or assumed value of the group over

the individual. Such two-way adaptation shows how uroups corne to

terms with their traditions in changing circumstances, an3 how

the different cultures may overlap and impact, one upon the

other.

The works I examine are written by African women in English,

rather than in their mother tongues. Of interest is the extent

to which they integrate cultural mernories that may be sizil2r to

or different from their own, by writing in a second language. A

second language is possibly acquired in a more self-conscious

manner than is a mother tongue. Hence these writers'

reiterations of cultural perspectives embedded in the English

language rnay perhaps be less subconscious than with those for

whorn ~nglishis a mother tongue. On the other hand, the writers

rnay subconsciously transmit cultural values that they do not consciously accept .

In this work, 1 propose to examine the modes of memory, persona1 and social, as embedded in languages, traditions,

customs and histories, and evaluate to what extent such modes of memory illuminate and inforrn their work. 1 shall examine how

some African women writers relocate themselves culturally, re- living, re-interpreting and re-assessing their pasts within the

English linguistic medium and how they depict their growing consciousness of their own ever evolving political identities.

The women protagonists, depicted in the texts 1 examine, are invariably victims of double marginalization, that of postcolonialism and their male-dominated societies, and what they choose to remember or forget of their inheritance is of importance in establishing their stance in relation to both male and Western hegernony. Through their writing, through their mernories, and through their use of their adopted linguistic expression, African women writers are able to create their own present and hopes of future to corne. Memory is their means of going "beyond the historical", their means of constructing their own identicies. Endno tes

L The first African writers were men. Initially colonists selected males for formal Western education.

Furthemore, sex role distinctions cornmon to many African societies supported the idea that education for women was a barrier to a woman's role as wife and mother and an impedirnent to ner success in traditional modes of acquiring status. By the

1960s, however, women were generally better educated (Davies 2) .

-+ Filornina Chioma Steady points out that even in matrilineal African societies, women are still subordinate to men, the only difference being that inheritance a2d authorlty pass through the women to the male of the line (17).

2 As rny thesis deals with African women writers, it is not within its scope to examine the works of African male writers and their portrayal of women. Florence Stratton provides in- depth analysis and comparison between male and fernale writers and their depiction of women in Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. Also, Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams

Graves, eds, Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie in Recreating Ourselves, Chapters 2 and 5, provide further analysis.

4 Alice Walker defines her tenn "womanist" in a variety of ways. She States that the womanist is a "black feminist or feminist of color", a "woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually", someone who loves music, dance, the moon and spirit, "love and food and roundness"; a womanist "is to feminist as purple to lavender". For Walker's full definitions, refer to

Walker's In Search of Our MothersrGardens (xi - xii). i Miriam Tlali, Buchi Emecheta, Charity Waciuma, Zebeka

Njau and Grace Ogot record or refer to these historical events both in the novels discussed in this work as well as in a number of short stories.

bel1 hooks speaks of the "envy black people have about the way the Jewish experience of the holocaust is increasingly documented - the way folks, especialiy in films, are made mindful and aware not only of this experience, but the terrible damage to the psyches of survivors". hooks believes that black women writers through their fictions are trying to document their undocuxe.ented past to make readers aware of the damage done by vazious forms of oppression, such as apartheid and slavery (216-

Connerton stresses that it is this reenactment of custom and ritual, rather than the content that is the feature of cardinal importance in the shaping of the ever evolving communal memory. The reenactment and process of reinterpretation is the constant, and reflects real changes in interna1 and external circumstances (61). CHAPTER ONE

CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE WORKS OF WACIUMA, OGOT, NWAPA AND NJAU

Charity Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi (1969) is the first autobiography written in English by an African woman. The work is situated in Waciuma's homeland, Kenya, when under the oppressive white rule, and the state of emergency during the Mau

Mau uprisings. Waciuma draws on her persona1 past in order to write her own historical account of her life as a Kenyan woman of the Gikuyu community.'

However, as a young girl, she is so fidy embedded within her culture that the individual Waciuma is scarcely distinguishable f rom her cultural community . Most Western readers expect an autobiography to propose the individual as its centre, and to offer the reader a way of getting inside a world that is mentally different from their own. To be truly dynamic, the autobiography generally depicts some conflict between the individual and society or the environment. To the Western reader, some portions, particularly in the early part of

Waciuma's autobiography, may read like a sociological documentary of the Gikuyu customs at that tirne, rather than intimate revelations of an individual's growth and maturity. Her work is perhaps an example of work that leads Nkosi to question the "appropriateness of the novel genre in recapturing the true feeling of traditional African society" (5). However, Jomo Kenyatta claims that whereas "individuality is the ideal of life" for Western and American readers .. . for Africans, the "ideal is the right relations with, and behaviour to, other people1' (Facing

Mt. Kenya 118) . As examination of Waciuma's novel will

demonstrate, the Gikuyusl sense of self is entirely predicated on

their being part of the whole Gikuyu community, both past and

present, living in the land of their ancestors. To view herself

in conflict with her society or her environment, Waciuma would

have to deny her Gikuyu identity. This, no doubt, accounts for

the typicality of the events that Waciuma relates in the first

half of her novel. She defines herself in terms of others, and

carefully explains that this is part of Gikuyu tradition.

The novel details many language related customs such as the

naming of children, the manner in which the Gikuyu greet one

another, and the methods of telling time. By describing these

customs, Waciuma demonstrates the authority cultural memory

holds. She values her custorns as an integral part of herself,

and her inclusion of these details thus warrants further examination.

Naming a child, generally the initial act of identification, is, for the Gikuyu, linked with others, others of the past.

Waciuma explains:

In Our country names are not chosen

haphazardly; they are vitally bound up with

being the sort of person you are. Any name

includes many people who are now dead,

others who are living, and those who are

still not born. It binds its owner deep into Kikuyu history, beyond the oldest man

with the longest memory. Al1 our relatives

to che furthest extent of the family, their

actions, their lives and their children are

an intrinsic part of our being alive, of

being human, of being African, of being

Kikuyu. (8)

Rather than being an unique individual in his or her own right, the child is a reincarnation of whomever he or she is named after, and the spirit of the person after whom he or she is named is guaranteed imrnortality that way. Thus, through their naming customs, the Gikuyu always know that they are connected to people they have never seen, and these ties which were once "irnagined particularistically ... become indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship" binding the mernbers of the group by a strong sense of comrnunity (Anderson 16).

The Gikuyu method of greeting one another is also in terms of others.

In general a person is known by his or her

basic role in life. Thus a girl, being

above al1 somebody's daughter, is known as

"daughter of" her father, or sometimes her

mother; when she marries she is referred to

as "wife of" her husband; and when she has

a child she receives the respectful title

"mother of so-and-son . (8-9) ~t whatever age or stage, therefore, the woman is defined in tems of relationships. While giving this information, ~aciuma offers no personal reflections. On the one hand, the reader may deduce that a woman has little individuality in the Western sense; on the other hand, the reader may infer that the woman is always in a comforting embrace of belonging. The individual Fs so firmly situated in the entire Gikuyu history, past, present and future, that any importance given to an individual life is in terms of the history of the group as a whole. To tell her story necessitates telling the story of the Gikuyu people.

Waciuma explains the difference between English and Gikuyu rime telling methods, and again her inclusion of such information reflects her Gikuyu identification. Time for the Gikuyu has no objective numerical system, but is inextricably interwoven with the cyclical patterns of their Lives, rooting the Gikuyu firmly in the very nature of things. Waciuma lists the various times of day, written in Gikuyu, with an accompanying literal English translation. For instance, "Ngware itanagambo", very early in the morning, literally means "before the partridge calls".

"Gwakia", meaning "when the first light appears", describes day break. "Mirugia aka" is the evening hour when women are busy getting firewood, drawing water and preparing food (178). The month is divided up according to the phases of the moon, and the decades are remernbered in terms of a small bush that flowers only every ten years, each "blossoming . . . named after an important event that occurred about the same time" (79). Seasons are noted

"according to the amount of rain each one brought and the crops ... planted" (47). Waciuma lists the months, giving the equivalent Gikuyu name and the literal translation, so that the

reader may learn, for example, that Muggaa (January) is "when the birds must be driven from the millet fields", and so forth (47).

In this manner, Waciuma incorporates the Gikuyu language

into her text. Time is measured in terms of what is occurring in

the natural world of the Kikuyu region, the positioning of the

Sun and moon, the sangs of the birds, the activities of the

animals, and of what needs to be done, milking, harvesting, and

sowing. The concept of time thus reaffirms the same cyclical

habits and experiences of the Gikuyu ancestral past; time is measured in relation to the environment, and what has always

customarily happened at any moment. Thus, according to Gikuyu methods, the concept of time has little significance outside of

the ;;ikuyu territory, for it is not easily transferred to

different locations. Their sense of time is integrated with the

lifestyle of Gikuyu people living in the Kikuyu area, and, as a

result, is linked to who and what they are. According to

Waciuma, because the Gikuyu culture places the community both

linguistically and physically in a particular geographic region,

the Gikuyu "spends his life within the boundaries of his clan

land" (20) . Waciuma explains, "Although my parents were

Christians, they could not risk moving out of Our clan land because they thought we would be persecuted by the spirits of their own place or of their ancestors" (20). The past is thus with them always, embedded in their culture, language, customs and location. Waciuma incorporates various Gikuyu terms and phrases into the text, mostly with English translations. However, she makes no attempt to syncretise the Gikuyu and English idioms as does

Flora Nwapa in Efuru, and although she informs the reader that

"proverbs contained much good sense and the accumulated knowledge of my people, so that they became a vast store of wisdom" she does not expose the reader to many (21).3 When concluding her grandfather's tale, she States, "Teasingly, 1 finished the story according to Grandfathes's custom with one of his traditional proverbs: Njamba ya ita iruga na itimu no ri ruhia - 'one goes into battle with a spear, not with a horn of beerf '' (25). The retention of the Gikuyu words perpetuates what William Ashcroft,

Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin describe as the "metonymic

function of the cross-cultural text by allowing the word co stand for tk,e latent presence" of a particular culture (62). They argue that while juxtaposing the words in this way may suggest that the meaning of a word is its referent, there is an implicit

"gap" between the putative referentiality of the words. This

"gap" is not negative but positive in its effect, for it

"presents the diff erence through which an identity (created or recovered) can be expressed" (62). However, Ashcroft, Grif fiths and Tiffin do acknowledge that cross-cultural textual glossing

"may lead to a considerably stilted movement of plot as the story is forced to drag an explanatory machinery behind it" (62).

Waciuma's literal translation of her grandfather's proverb is not fully incorporated into the text, nor validated by the story itself. Furthermore, as with the lists of time, the Gikuyu words are lost on the non-Gikuyu reader, for without the ability to

pronounce the words, they remain totally foreign, and the reader

will no doubt skip over them. However, the inclusion of her own

language with al1 its cultural significance within her

aucobiography reflects the authority it holds over her.

Waciuma's explanations and translations of the Gikuyu

language exemplify Bartlett's claims that language exerts a

mental control of the individual (298). As Moore claims in his

"Introduction" to Social Memory, memories which help us

constitute our sense of identity are not only our own. Such

memories are partly "learned, borrowed and inherited",

transmitted to us through the language of the families,

comrnunities and cultures to which we belong (Fentress viii}.

Waciuma's autobiography validates Moore's clairn, recalling the

customs and traditions upheld by her grandfather, the cuscoms

rhat her father rejected, and her unclers thoughts and opinions

on the influence of colonialism. She inherits their values,

histories and ideas, and, as a young girl taught to respect the

authority of her elders and revere the value of her people, to

question these issues possibly would be to question her very

existence. Because of her love and affection for her father,

grandfather and uncle, and the authoritative position they hold

in her life, their opinions become her own, and in this way,

Waciuma draws on her cultural, social past and the language

through which she views it. However, it is a cultural past dictated by men. In writing her autobiography, Waciuma naturally rernernbers selectively. She indirectly acknowledges her indebtedness to her grandfather for his stories of the past, devoting a chapter to his legends (16) . When reiterating her grandfather's tales, she recalls not only her own and his memories, but the medium of language as well, and that she chooses to recount these tales as part of her autobiography reflects the impact they had upon her.

James Olney writes that al1 Gikuyu autobiographers tell much the same story as one another, and the same story as told by Kenyatta

(5). Waciuma is no exception, and in recounting the legend of

Gikuyu and Mumbi as told to her by her grandfather, Waciuma draws on a double rnemory, recalling what al1 Gikuyu elders tell their

Young people.' Although Waciurna is narned after her aunt, and given the name of Wanjiku, she is addressed in terms of her rela~ionships. Therefore, Waciuma, like al1 Gikuyu women, is the daughter of Mumbi. This explains both the title of the novel and why Waciuma's autobiography, on one level, tells the story of al1

Gikuyu women of her times. The Gikuyu sense of community is thus based on rnythical fiction, one that is perpetuated by means of recali, reiteration and language. Waciuma thereby illustrates

Anderson's theory of "irnagined communities", and the loyalty such communities evoke from their rnembers.

In telling her story, Waciuma relates the daily events that cook place in her community, some of which pertain particularly to worneri,. However, Waciuma tends to offer the information about the woman's role in society with little comment or demonstration.

She refers only briefly to the bride-price paid to the father of the bride, and records without reflection that "girls were not allowed to sit near when the elders were discussing important issues" (16). She provides objective information about the relationship between the Gikuyu woman and her husband, explaining a that Gikuyu women labour on the fams and in the homes, and serve their husbands with "obedience and loyalty" ( II) . Furthemore, she states:

A woman, generally speaking, did not own or

dispose of property outside her persona1

and household effects. She did, however,

have certain rights, such as choosing her

woman friends- While the husband, by

virtue of paying the bride price,

controlled her and anything she produced, a

wife would expect his love and respect in

return. (21)

The reader is left uncertain as to Waciuma's persona1 opinion: she sirnply states the facts. However, she hints disapproval of the mannes in which her grandfather treated his two wives; she comments indirectly on the status of women when she states that

Wangu wa Makeri was the only woman to have been a chief in living memory; and her mother provides a somewhat ironic sole mode1 when she proves that "though educated she could be a good (submissive) wife" (79, 47). While she rejects poiygamy, she cioes r,~t illustrate, as does Emecheta, the practical diff iculties it brings to the individual wornan.' However she clearly states,

"For myself, 1 have decided against polygamy, but its rights and wrongs are still being argued continually and furiously in our

schools and colleges and debating clubs", adding, "~olygamyis

clearly second nature to most Gikuyu men. 1 hate it because it

hurts the position and dignity of women and exaggerates the

selfishness of men" (11). Only with this isolated outburst does

Waciuma refer directly to the male dominance embedded in her

culture. For the most part, Waciuma's memories remain loyal to

and accepting of her Gikuyu customs and expectations.

While she rejects clitoridectomies, she gives no reasons for

so doing; nor does she give the reader a first hand description

of its process and the ensuing suffering, as does Nwapa, when

describing Efuru's ceremonial bath/ She merely States that most

were "loath" to give up the traditional rites, even if they were

Christians (63) . The reader, however, learns some of the

pressures and difficulties facing both the circurncised and

uncircumcised young girls in general, and the ambivalent position

of the Christian church which exacerbated these difficulties by

rejecting those who had undergone the custom. Her uncle

criticizes the church's attitude for he believes that the

practice "is such a deeply embedded tribal custom .... it is

better not to make such an issue of it"; he is sure "even the

white people had customs which died away as ideas changed" (89,

95). For Waciuma, being uncircumcised meant she was ostracized

and taunted in the local village. Because she is considered

"unclean", she must accept that she cannot marry her first love,

Karanga, for his parents "would never, never have agreed to his marrying an uncircumcised girl" (142) . Cultural belief rnaintained that an uncircumcised woman would be barren. However,

she had the comforting example of her mother, who was living proof to the community that "an uncircumcised woman could have a

good-sized family (eleven children) " (46-7). Waciuma relates these trials and obstacles quite dispassionately. She does no=

appear to challenge her parents' authority in this regard, but indirectly offers the reader a profile of the traditional Gikuyu

customs, influenced to some extent by Western ways. In the second half of the novel, Waciuma does situate nerself, and the Gikuyu in general, in a more specific time frame by recording the clash of Gikuyu culture with colonial influences, and the impact the alarming events of the Mau Mau emergency had on her people in the face of colonial oppression.

The Mau Mau uprising coincides with Waciuma's coming of age, and with it Waciuma's individuality begins to emerge. The first half of the novel moves at a calm, quiet pace, suggesting stabiiity and hamony. The young Waciuma appears to embrace unquestionably the security of her culture and the Waciuma family manages to balance their Scottish Presbyterian faith with their support of the Gikuyu customs. By contrast, the second half of the novel reflects the unsettling, intrusive influence of colonial control during the emergency. The old stability is rocked and confused and the tone is more urgent. The state of emergency brings to a head many srnouldering conflicts between the Gikuyu culture and

Western influences, in particular those of colonial oppression,

Western medical science, religion and education. Thus Waciuma provides an historical account of the situation of the Gikuyu at that time. However, she tends to express the opinions of her family, rather than individual assessrnents: her loyalty to the

Gikuyu remains incact. Only when she voices her antagonism towards the white man does she become unequivocally personal and self -assured.

Waciuma's family, with their strong religious faith, axe naturally opposed to the violent measures taken by the Mau Mau.

However, their belief in the Gikuyu tribe leads them to sympathize with the Mau Mau desire to reclairn the land that is rightfully theirs. The extremely harsh emergency measures taken by the white government lead them to reassess the Mau Mau aggression.' In recalling her grandfather's nostalgic memories,

Waciuma "rapidly grew to dislike these White men who made people work like slaves and paid them fifty cents (half a shilling) a day for it", who sometimes struck the grown men "as if they were children" (52). Waciuma records the conflicts between traditional and Western ways as oppositional; she details the undermining of the Gikuyu laws caused by foreign influences and expresses slmpathy for al1 people caught in the confusion of the period.

The influence of Western medicine undermines the authority of the witchdoctors and the Gikuyu chiefs. Waciuma's father, a government-employed medical dispenser, accepts Western medicine and clashes with the witchdoctors. Although Waciuma follows her father's lead, she sympathizes with the witchdoctors, who struggle to hold on to their "ancient knowledge and power against the onslaught of modern scientific medicine" (30). The witchdoctors argue that the medicine of the whites causes "the new generations to turn their backs on the laws and customs of the children of Gikuyu and Mumbi" (29). The chief also clashes with the dispensers of modern medicine when advising his people against inoculation for a plaque which strikes the location, and takes many lives .

Wacivars attitude to witchcraft is similar to her attitude to modern medicine. While she and her family do not believe in the power of witchcraft in itself, they do acknowledge that the fear it can instill within individuals is a powerful way of enforcing morals. She informs the reader of magy instances of its use, thereby recording the past practices. She describes the

"very long stick surmounted by a little bunch of dry banana ieaves tightly tied to the ground with a string1'. Its power, it is believed, prevents "people from grazing over any piece of lana on which it [is] placed" (20). Although her father does not believe in witchcraft he is not deterred from putting up the sticks himself to keep away other herdsman (40). He also arranges to have a witchdoctor's spell placed on anyone who has stolen property, the threat of the spell being enough to make those guilty confess. Oaths of innocence, ""Muma wa kuringa thenge" - to swear by killing a goat", are accepted by the courts for the traditionalists believe that "the one who has sworn falsely dies, perhaps after seven days, perhaps after nine seasons" (39). However, Waciuma records changing attitudes :

The youngex educated men did not believe in

the oaths and did not fear their power. Mostly they used to take the oath to deny

their responsibility for the pregnancies of

the girls who came to accuse them in the

court. Unless they took it the elders

nearly always decided in Eavour of the

girls. (40) waciuma relates this information dispassionately, and draws no attention to the irnplicit betrayal of young women, and the young men's ability to use to abuse the alternate cultural beliefs to their advantage .

Religion also threatens the stability of the old order. The mushroorning of many new religions "was one symptom of the turmoil into which many people were thrown by the impact of Western knowledge and ideas", and while the people do not meaningfully follow Christianity, they turn their backs on their own traditional beliefs (50). "With nothing behind thern, they are an uneasy prsy to corruption" (44, sic).

Part of the Gikuyu faith is to believe that they had been granted the best land by Gikuyu, "near Nairobi, and along the railway line, with a healthy climate and rich soil" (101). To the Gikuyu, the white man's god is a "thief" who sends his missionaries "to steal" the land (93). As demonstrated by

Waciuma's literal translations of the decades, seasons and times of day, the Gikuyu bond to their land is deeply embedded in their cult~re.~The colonial disinheritance of the Gikuyu thus caused great cultural upheaval. With their sense of identity embedded in the foothills of Mt. Kenya where their ancestors, Gikuyu and ~umbi, initiated the tribe, with their sense of place and sense of routine measured in tems of the natural world and the dernands of the agriculture arcund thern, the loss of their land to the

usurping white settlers was tantamount to genocide.

Recognizing the power of education, Waciuma asserts that education is the means by which she, and hence the Gikuyu people, can prescribe their own identity. For the Gikuyu, this means reclaiming their "place", their land, with which their sense of selfhood is inseparably bound. "The white man thinks he is superior, but he is only better educated", her uncle claims. He advocates that "young people must go to school so that they can take over the jobs of Europeans, become teachers, doctors, fa-rmers. We must have skills to run the country when we overthrow the goverment" (87). Waciuma echoes her uncle's sentiments with a persona1 staternent- "1 was filled with a desire to study and become educated in the White Man's ways and in his knowledge so that 1 could help in turning him out of my country" (59). Waciuma recalls the spectacular growth of education as pqils flooded to school in thousands, claiming,

"there is no going back . . . . we have reached a critical age, waiting and hoping for a full development to the way of life the white man has taught us to want. If he tries to hold back at this point he will live to regret it" (91-92). Ironically, the very striving for the white man's way of life, to an extent, denies their own. And, while Waciuma records an oppositional clash between Western and traditional medicine and religion with apparent detached objectivity, she embraces Western eaucation as her means of liberation. However, in keeping with her strong sznse of cultural belonging, the liberation education can offer her relates to the liberation of the Gikuyu people.

Her family suffered hardship when they had to leave their cornfortable goverment home to be under protection of the home guard during the Mau Mau uprising. When her father, the family's authority figure, is removed and detained undes the supervision of the Home Guard, the family no longer retains its compromise, supporting both the Christian doctrine and Gikuyu values. With her Christian upbringing and advanced education, Waciuma still remains very mcch in tune with her Gikuyu cultural thinking. She follows her mother's advice to go back to school, for the sake of her father, and commits herself to the struggle for independence for Kenya. She concludes with an affirmation of her faith in the perpetuity and importance of the Gikuyu community. Thus, in recording her personal and cultural past, Waciuma loyally supplies a sociological record of the Gikuyu at that time. While she descriDes a blend of certain cultures and faiths amongst her own people, she indirectly depicts the overriding power of the

Gikuyu language which perpetuates the Gikuyu sense of community and identification within a particular location.

The strong cultural tie to the land is a theme explored further by Grace Ogot in her novels, The Promised Land (1966) and

The Graduate (1980). The two main protagonists in The Promised -Land, Ochola and his wife ~yapol,are LUOS, as is Ogot herself. Lue and Gikuyu Kenyans share similar traditional regional

loyalties, and Ogot suggests that wealth lies in the cultural

tradition, the ties to the families and land of the forefathers.

Although The Promised Land is written in 1966, Oqot makes no

reference to the new independence of her country. She situates

her protagonists in an agrarian society in rural Nyanza. When

Ochola turns his back on his motherland to seek wealth and

happiness in neighbouring Tanganyika, he is doomed for disaster,

for he "was going against the tradition in leaving his home", and

angering his ancestors (38). Neither Ochola nor Nyapol can free

themselves of the fear of offending the ancestors, and when

Ochola is smitten with the curse of a neighbouring witchdoctor,

they leave al1 their new found wealth and return home penniless.

Ogot maintains an ominous, foreboding tone throughouc,

keeping the reader in suspense until the climax at the end of the

novel. The plot is straightforward, and the story is related in

a chronological, simple manner . Ochola and Nyapol are rounded,

\ individual characters, and in contrast to Daughter of Mumbi, the

reader is privy to her protagonists' inner thoughts and emotions.

Ogot makes no attempt to incorporate her Luo language into her

text. Nevertheless, her protagonists use the customary method of greeting one another . Ogot also s kilfully incorporates

translated proverbs into the text. In keeping with the Luo proverb, "A man who does not love his people is an enemy of the

tribe", Okech and his wife Atiga open their home to Ochola and Nyapol. When Ochola voices the proverb, "a visitor is noble only

when he stays for two days", Okech replies:

Our home is open to you and your wife, my

brother, and you can stay as long as you

like. But 1 can read your mind. You don't

cook two cocks in one pot, and 1 can't

blame you for feeling that the pot is too

small for both of us. (75-6)

In tecording the conversation, Ogot illustrates the function of

the proverb in her mother language. To be polite, directness in

conversation is avoided. Proverbs are diplornatic because they

remind the recipient of what is recommended in the code of

behaviour chat is theoretically common knowledge. 'O Ogot thus

implies that the two men, although in Tanganyika, may respect one another for the codes of cultural behaviour they display through their language; and she simultaneously retains and integrates the

Luo verbal patterns and sayings into the English medium.

Ogot only provides information on the Luo woman's status as

is necessary to her story. Because of Ochola's belief in the power of the ancestors, his mother, although long depasted,

remains very much a controlling force. Ogot refers briefly to the dowry Ochola pays when rnarrying Nyapol and, in describing

Ochola and Nyapol's marriage and move to Tanganyika, depicts the woman's perspective as different from her husbandts. Although

Nyapol fills the role of the traditional, dutiful wife in accompanying and obeying her husband, she does so against her will. In contrast to Waciuma, Nyapol voices strong opinions of her own without hesitation; she and Ochola display a realistic marital relationship, including the occasional marital spat.

When Ochola spends tirne discussing ~anganyikawi th f riends,

Nyapol is 'furious that [he] could leave her alone for such a long time while she was still a mere bride" (11). On his return she serves hirn food, as is expected of ber, but she does so with il1 grace. She imagines he has tired of her, and threatens to return to Aer own people, "but she knew very well that she could not return to her people. Once a woman was rnarried she swore to sïay with her Ii~sb~~d'speople for better or for worse, and no one would have ner back at their home" (20). Thus the customs of the cornmunity impose an authoritative value upon the marital commitrnent. While Nyapol has little alternative but to conform ro cultural expectations, by demonstrating her inner resentment,

Ogot challenges the accepted woman' s role.

When Ochola admits to Nyapol his plans of emigration, she reacts spontaneously, claiming, "1 am not moving anywhere! Do you hear me?" (25) . In response, Ochola voices a chauvinistic, attitude to women. He reminds her that when he rnarried her she prornised to obey him, and he tells her "1 hate being interrupted when I1m talking. There cari only be one husband in the house"

(25, 26). While recognizing that Nyapol may be correct in questioning their move, Ochola wonders "how long it was taking her to learn that it was not correct to speak to a husband in that way! " (46) . Although he clearly cares for Nyapol, he also treats her as a commodity and when confirming that he will take

Nyapol with hirn, states, "1 cannot go to Tanganyika empty handed" (31). Nyapol realizes that "marriage was a form of imprisonmenc in whicn the master could lead you where he wished" (45). Thus, despite her correct intuition of impending doom, Nyapol remains the traditional, supportive, good wife. Ogot demonstrates thzt while on the one hand Nyapol is trapped by marriage into following her husband's ill-fated steps to destruction, going against the time honoured beliefs of her people, on the other hand, her fears, borne out of her cultural past, help will their destruction.

As in Daughter of Mumbi, The Promised Land depicts Western education, medical science, and religion as the enemies of, and in opposition to, the old tradition. Ogot also introduces another undermining influence, that of capitalism.

Stories went around that those who went to

school grew cunning like the white man. They were slack in daily community work and liked things done for them .... But that

was many years ago. People who were educated now were becoming richer and

richer. (84-85)

Education changed Abiero and turned him away from his community; he became hostile to singing traditional songs and dancing to African drums. In addition, he became a Christian, causing great anguish to his father; for some time Ochola had to mediate between his father and brother. Ochola, the more traditional of the two sons, did not attend school. He "loved his father and feared offending him" (84). However, Ochola marvels at the rnagic of sending messages on pieces of paper, and he recognizes that

"people who had been educated were now becoming richer and

richer; those who could read and write had advantages over their

friends who were illiterate" (85). He falls prey to the lure of

capitalistic wealth, and his "ambition in life was to be rich.

Richer than those whom he had known in his youth" (86). His

father laments his decision, saying scornfully, "Riches! 1 don't

desire riches! I'm rich as 1 am! 1 live cm our own land! But

what 1 need most is your Company. Don't deprive me of that rny

son, don't deprive me of that! lt (36) .

Nyapol clearly does not share Ochola's aspirations for

capitalistic materialism. On their journey to Tanganyika she is

distressed to see the labourers at the docks, working like

packhorses, and is not cornforted by Ochola's explaining that they

"are neither slaves nor prisoners: they are just normal men who

have corne to town to earn money to buy things for their wivest'

(52). Like her father-in-law, and as tradition demanded of a

woman, she scorns the pursuit of wealth." However, Abiero joins

Ochola in his appreciation of wealth, arguing, "Of course, itts

important to care about home ties, to want to live and to die in

the land of your forefathers, but as the world is changing so much, wealth and cornfort is becoming more and more desirable"

(117, sic). Ogot thus presents both sides of the argument.

However, like Rebeka Njau in her Ripples in the Pool, Ogot recalls the lifestyle of the traditional world as one that offers a sense of community and belonging: a wealth incomparable to

financial gain." The merits of the old rural lifestyle are exemplified in Ochola's father, Owiti, who "knew the names of al1

the clan heroes, and taught Ochola to recite them'' (33) . NY~PO~

also chides Ochola for rejecting his past, prophetically

predicting the racial prejudice that he will encounter. "The

Umuri people left their land and carne to live in your land and

now you won't even recognize them. You cal1 them names and you

look down on them. Why? Because they are foreigners who know

quite well that they have no right to our land" (46). The elders

also disapprove, telling Ochola, "You are breaking our hearts, a

well-loved son leaving his home to go and live with strangers"

(37). Ochola's deceased mother has to be appeased; he and Nyapol

visit her grave to give her offerings, for if "his dead mother

was as displeased as his relatives, God would not bless them at

ail" (38). With the entire community antagonistic towards his move, Ochola, not surprisingly, leaves with a sense of

f oreboding .

As Nyapol predicted, not everyone in the new land welcomes

Ochola. When Ochola first meets his unfriendly neighbour, he

refrains from telling Nyapol of the encounter, for fear of alarming her, while Ogot expresses Ochola's own subconscious

feus through his haunting dreams. Their delaying of the cleansing ceremony after the birth of their twins, and the fear of the "fiendish-hearted old man" cause Nyapol to cling with renewed strength to her superstitious anxiety about offending the ancestors (115). OchoLa's family and friends al1 assume that the witchdoctor's curse is the cause of his horrific affliction, and the failure of the white doctox to cure him veriiies the assumption that the affliction is spiritual. The hospital scenes depict the conflict and competition for authority between modern and traditional medicines. The black nurses show no surprise

that Western medicine fails to cure the disease, and recomrnend that Ochola return to a witchdoctor. Ogot, a trained nurse herself, States in an interview:

Today the practice of consulting African

medicine men is not endorsed by the Kenya

government, but the consultation continues

and many people are cured. It may be that

they are cured through faith but they are

cured al1 the same. (Lindfors, 61)

She thus endorses the stronghold traditional medicine maintains on the people.

Ogot uses Ochola's hospital visit to comment on the hypocrisy and inadequacy of the Christian faith, as practised by tne early missionaries. The doctor regrets his wife's initial refusal to nurse Ochola, not so much on account of Ochola's health, but for egotistical reasons. "What really bothered him was that Anabel's quick temper might one day stop her entering the Kingdom of God. He would hate to be there without her!"

166The novel's title may also reflect Ogotls antagonism towards the deception of the Western church as it appears to draw on Christian culture, suggesting that Tanganyika is the promised land, the land of milk and honey; but, it may be interpreted as ironic, for Tanganyika is in conclusion no Canaan, after a11.14 ogot does not offer a direct reason for Ochola's "punishment", but because of the great fear of moving away from

his origins, a fear expressed by his family and friends before

leaving, and a fear kept alive in the minds of Nyapol and Ochola, Ogot leads the reader to believe that Ochola is "punished" for having angered the ancestral gods by leaving his homelana. The

reader may also infer that the disease, or the inability to

recover, is psychosomatic, and that Ochola, having internalized

bis cultural beliefs, is guilt ridden and anticipates some form

of retribution. Ogot, like Flora Nwapa in Efuru and Idu, may posiï faith as a large part of any cure, but she also appears to be issuing a warning to her fellow patriots that there is wealth

and happiness in adhering to the lifestyle set up by the past, and danger in penetrating alien lands with alien customs and

neliefs. " However, Ogot of fers alternative and conflicting points of

view. When Ochola struggles with his desire to move away, leavinq his aging father, his familial inheritance, and his own

people, Ogot shows tradition as so deeply embedded that it traps and imprisons individuals in their own land. The reader may sympathize with Ochola's adventurous individualism, for he has many good reasons for leaving the homeland. He was tired of

living in Nyanza with "its unscrupulous tax collectors, its petty

tyrants and its feuds" (14). The chiefs at times recruited

forced labour and the soi1 in Nyanza was exhausted, for the land had been overworked, producing the same crops of maize and millet

since time immemorial. Ochola hungers after better pastures, where his hard labour rnight be better rewarded. While he worries about his father's well being, he argues that he will be able to make more money to send home for his welfare. Again, Ogot offers both sides of the debate. 16

Once in Tanganyika, Ochola does not forego bis Luo customs.

When he lays clairn to a piece of "no man's land", he follows the

Luo tradition of marking the land as his by placing a Stone in the centre of a ring of grass. When he builds a small structure on the land, he again follows Luo customs by sleeping there alone the first night. Nyapol questions his actions. "Now we're not in our own country, 1 thought that the customs could be waived" she says, but Ochola asks:

What makes you think that people must

abandon their traditions when they go to a

foreign land? Don't you know that our

ancestors ' eyes follow us everywhere? You

break a law today, or tomorrow, their eyes

can see you. A month rnay pass, even a full

year, but in the end you're punished

because you've gone against the taboos of

the tribe. (81)

Ochola's prophetic words indicate that he has not discarded the fear of retribution frorn the ancestral gods as taught by his traditional faith,

Significantly, it is Nyapol who first suggests to the witchdoctor that they should leave Tanganyika. The witchdoctors, although part of the old order, ironically capitalize on the situation; although it is not categorically stated, Magungu's

insistence that Ochola take nothing with him plants a suggestion

that Magungu subsequently assumes Ochola's wealth. Thus, Ochola

and Nyapol's inherited traditional beliefs may be judged the

source of their downfall- Ogot also depicts Luo marriage customs

as chauvinistic, irnprisoning Nyapol in marriage. Yet Nyapol,

although very much an individual, clearly adheres to traditionai

expectations. Thus, by drawing from her own cultural and

persona1 rnemory, and recording the problems that Nyapol and

Ochola encounter, both in their marriage and in their emigration,

Ogoï seems to advocate the need to reassess and reinterpret the

customs of the people.

In The Graduate (1980), Ogot further develops the themes of

The Promised Land and skilfully reinfoxces and xefocuses her past cultural beliefs. In this much later novel, Ogot recalls more

recent Kenyan history from a more distinctly feminist point of view. Seventeen years after Kenya's independence, Ogot's perspective has of necessity subtly changed: the tribal loyalties

Decome national loyalties. She explores Kenya's struggles te overcome a sharn form of independence, in which the whites still nold power, and she examines the problems of recruiting

indigenous manpower, in the face of the foreign conspiracy to retain control. However, most forcibly, she examines the role of women in an independent Kenya. Ogot, therefore, replaces the ambivalent depiction of Nyapol, the free thinking, independent, yet traditional woman, with an unequivocal, strong support for the empowerment of women. Her main protagonist, the Hon. Mrs Juanina Karungaru, the first female cabinet minister in the

independent Kenyan governmenc, draws from her memory the part

women played in the Freedom fight:

She vividly remembered the role women in

Kenya played to help those trapped by the

Emergency. Countrywide the Women's Wing of

the National Allied.Trade Unions,

constantly and ceaselessly, supplied food

and ammunition that were secretly passed on

to the freedorn fighters . (11)

Ogot uses Karungaru's memory to give her the opportunity to

record the fernale contribution to Kenyan history. Karungaru draws strength £rom the courage of these women of the past to help her in the present to do what she believes she must, even while cognizant of the stress and strain it places on her marriage and her children.

As Kenya ' s representative overseas , Karungaru is depicted as tne African mother figure. However, unlike Ngu Ego of Emecheta's

The Joys of Motherhood, Karungaru is a liberated, powerful "woman of her own minde' (59-60).17 She travels abroad to speak to Kenyan students, and represents the rnother country, enticing them back to the land of their birth with a figuratively motherly errtbrace.

Within the novel she functions as a call to action for al1 women, to take up their responsibilities as did their predecessors in the Freedom Fights. Furthemore, she functions as a call to al1 men abroad, to recognize their origins in African womanhood and motherland. In The Graduate, Ogot incorporates the A£ rican vernacular

into her text. Karungaru translates the inscription in her bible

for the benefit of her daughter and thus the reader. As in

Daughter of Mumbi, the use of glossing emphasizes the absence and difference of the alternate culture. At times she uses words and

phrases of her native tongue without translation. Again, the

"use of untranslated words helps convey the sense of cultural distinctiveness" (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiff in 64) . The reader gets some idea about the meaning of these words from the context, but a full understanding requires the reader's own expansion of

the cultural situation beyond the text. Ogot also incorporates appropriate Kenyan proverbs and idioms--most of which relate to womenfs issues. When appealing to the students abroad, Karungaru depicts Kenya as "Mother Africa" recalling the saying, "Your mother is your mother even if her roof is leaking", and the students recognize Karungaru as one who "had seen the eye of the

Sun well before they had" (29, 161. Karungaru repeatedly refers to the misleading myth circulating that the woman's place is in the home and in the kitchen (8, 15, 17).

However, not only does Ogot incorporate Kenyan words and phrases into her text, but also English and biblical idioms and references. In expressing his true feelings to Karungaru,

Ambassador Simiyu lets the "cat out of the bag", and having done so he "sticks to his guts" (20, sic). Biblical analogies and speech patterns occur throughout the work. The novel opens with

Karungaru's daughter inspecting her mother's bible, while

Karungaru considers a woman succeeding in politics as difficult as a came1 passing through "the eye of a needle" (9). She cites

£rom Matthew 21:1-10 the parable of the labourers in the

vineyard, who are paid equally regardless of the hours of work performed, to explain why women in Kenya have worked hard al1

their lives with little reward. When addressing the students she

awakens in them "an identity, akin to that of the prodigal son",

and she later refers to Jakoya after returning to bis welcoming

family as "the prodigal fatheri' (24, 43) . Her offers of jobs and

opportunities in the homeland also echo the reception given to

the prodigal son. Speaking with biblical echoes, she tells them,

"1 have come, that 1 may lighten your burden and return you to

the fold" (25). Karungaru's speech thus symbolizes a certain

syncretism of cultures. Her advocacy of a strong national pride

is blended with a revised role of women within the Kenyan

culture, together with a strong Christian faith. Ogot thus

reaffirms the traditional value of adhering to the land of the

forefathers, while she challenges the traditional attitudes

towards the woman's place in scciety.

As in The Promised Land (1966), Ogot again examines the expatriate, he who has forsaken his roots. The modern day Ochola

is now the young man who seeks education abroad. Ochola, seeking

the luxury of verdant soi1 and rich harvests in Tanganyika, becomes the graduate student seeking educational rewards in the

United States. Nyapol's intuitive and tentative feminist murmurings become confident statements in the person of

Karungaru. In her powerful mother role, Karungaru becomes a leader of men. The novel depicts two different expatriot students, Ngure and Jakoyo. Ngure, married to a white American

woman, longs to return to his mother/motherland to find out where

his mother is buried. In recounting Ngure's history, Ogot

recalls the problems of the Mau Mau emergency, focusing on the

role played by Ngurets mother, the wife of a Freedom Fighter.

Ngurets mother gave him a new name and admonishes him to forget

the past. "You have a new home, remember that Ngure. Forget

that you ever had a home elsewhere, forget the past completely,

and look only to the future" she instructs him (37) . Of his

father, she says, "Let Muthoma's memory die away from your heart,

and forget that he was once your father" (38). Subsequently his mother, ever loyal to his father, is killed. Ngure's past

perhaps explains his marriage to Sedie from whom he wanted

"nothing . . . but casual friendship" (23). By relating Ngure's past history, Ogot records the suffering of the people under

colonialism and the price paid for independence as exemplified by both Ngure and his self-sacrificinq mother.

However, in depicting the meeting of Ngure and Karungaru, she courts criticisrn from Kenyan critics. The novel depicts

Ngurets father and Karungaru's father as belonging to opposing political parties during the emergency. Ngure's father is depicted as a Freedom Fighter with the Mau Mau, while Karungaru's father is depicted as an opponent of the Freedom Fighters, supporting the colonists. Karungaru's father is subsequently killed by Ngure's father's Party. Ify Achufusi, in his essay,

"The Problerns of Nationhood in Grace Ogot's Fiction" questions ogot8s wisdom in choosing a "traitor's daughter" as the main protagoni~t- He writes:

There is ... a cruel irony at the eloquent

minister's expense, in the revelation that

she cornes from a family of traitors who had

actively collaborated with the colonial

forces, and gained immense wealth from this

collaboration .... There is further irony

that among the minister's audience is the

son of one of the freedom fighters who has

killed the Honourable Minister's traitor-

Eather. (182)

Many critics of the newly independent Kenya, including Ngugi wa

Thiong'o, charge that the fruits of the struggle are enjoyed by

those who either played no positive role or had even supported

the colonial authorities during the decolonization struggle

(Achufusi, 183). Ogot's attributing such background to her main

protagonist may be confusing, but clearly she attempts to

encornpass al1 conflicting factions of the past in her quest for a

zelocation of remembered authority and authenticity. Ngure

recognizes that in the States no one thinks about tribalisrn for

there "al1 were Kenyan, under one Embassy and flag" (34) .

Furthermore, Ogot allows Ngure to feel an affinity with Karungaru because she and he are both Gikuyu. The recording of Ngure's

inner thoughts possibly reflects Ogot's atternpts to relocate the

cultural memory in a space beyond the fractious rnemory of the past, in her hopes of a reconciliation, necessary to build the future Kenya. Jakoyo, in contrast with Ngure, is rnarried to a Kenyan woman by whom he has three children. Karungaru's address to the st;udents sparks his memory of his wife, and this draws him to accept her offer of ernployment and return home. The two young men, Ngure and Jakoyo, are both governed by their memories of the pst. Ngure, whose memories are suppressed, remains in the United States; Jakoyo, significantly married to the Kenyan woman, returns with nationalist pride to help his country rather than excel in an alien land. When Jakoyo's ambitions are thwarted by Karungaru's white secretary, Jakoya suffers a Kafkaesque type of experience battling bureaucracy. While Ogot's nationalistic sense of the value of home and hearth encompasses without criticism al1 factions, ber attitude to the colonial whites is unequivocally scathing. She blames the white colonial system for perpetuating and accentuating the difference between men and women. She States: When the coloniser came, he recruited men

to help him build his towns and cities.

Contrary to Africa customs he built tiny tin huts which adult men shared, and women were forbidden [sic]. When he needed extra hands to help him impose his rule upon the

sons of the soil, he built schools for men away from women, creating a big rift between brother and sister, husband and

wife, girl and lover. (16)

Men were uprooted for forced labour, the oniy means for paying their taxes, leaving the women to serve as "custodians of the land and home" (17)- Through her protagonists, Ogot comments on nhites sitting illegally in job positions that indigenous Kenyans should hold, and condemns those who side with the white man as the "root cause of bloodshed in the land" (26, 36).

Recalling Waciuma, Karungaru cites education as the means of rectifying these wrongs, telling the students, "With al1 your academic qualifications, experience and technical know hou, we can tell the white man to go now" (26).l8 However, Jane Brown, Karungaru's immoral white secretary, thwarts Jakoyo's attempts to meet with Karungaru. Ogot's sentiments are clear; she depicts the colonial white as manipulative and self-serving, protecting their positions of power at the indigenous Kenyan's expense. AnabelL, the young black assistant to Jane Brown, succeeds in using her initiative and ensuring Jakoyo's interview and position, and when promoted, imagines herself showered with the "blessings of her ancestors" (71). Although recording contemporary issues, ~got implies that the ancestral traditions still hold significance and authority and have a positive effect on the actions of the people. The novel ends with Ogot crediting Anabell, a woman, for helping her own people "remove away the yoke of colonial domination from Our shoulders" suggesting that the role women played in the past liberation movement must and does still continue (26). The novel places Ogot in a contemporary light, for she draws

on more recent Kenyan memories and on feminist ideals as well as

eurochristian culture. She does not condemn the students for

studying abroad, but she clearly believes that they should return

home and apply their learning in their own country, for whose

independence the people fought and paid so dearly. Thus, Ogot

subtly renegotiates the past remembered traditions as explored in The Promised Land. While The Promised Land advocates the

adherence to tribe and place, The Graduate promotes a broader

nationalism and sense of responsibility, to the country at large

rather than to the more imrnediate ethnic group or family. The

role of the dutiful woman as expressed through Nyapol is expanded

in The Graduate to encompass the nurture of al1 Kenyans; the traditional mother figure becomes the symbolic mother figure

equated with the land itself, nourishing its people and embracing

them with a greater sense of responsibility. Her works also

exemplify Anderson's theories that with increased education, and lessening of traditional spiritual authority, changes take place

in modes of comprehending the world, changes which make it

possible to think in terms of nation and nationality. In this way, Ogot skilfully and loyally reaffirms and reinterprets her

inheri ted cultural and social memory, advocating adherence to

land and people. The development of her attitudes in her own work exemplifies the African's woman's ability to reinterpret and

re-state the remembered valued beliefs of the past, infusing them with new perspective and new meaning to help women meet the challenges of the present . Flora Nwapa holds the honour of being the first black

African woman to publish a novel in English. Like Waciuma, she provides a sociological record of her culture, while she simultaneously, like Ogot, recalls some negative aspects of her

inherited customs, in particular those relating to feminine

issues. Like fellow Nigerian, Chinua Achebe, Nwapa situates her early works in rural Igbo communities and provides a wealth of sociological and cultural information. Thus she draws on her

Igbo past. Her first two novels, Efuru (1966) and -Idu (1970) are set in her home town in the late 1940s and early 1950s (James, -In

Their Own Voices 115). Traditional life and its social pressures play a major role in both Achebe's and Nwapa's works and both writers weave into their writing the local proverbs, idioms, myths and clichés. They thereby introduce to the English

language the beliefs, dicta and expected noms of their native societies. They also both depict the confusion of cultures which occurred as Western imperialism helped intxoduce Western religion and technology to the indigenous, agrarian societies. Because of these sirnilarities, Nwapa is often compared with Achebe.

However, while critics acknowledge the broad similarities between the two Nigerian writers, many are sharply hostile towards Nwapa, and more often compare her with Achebe to claim her shortcomings, rather than ber remarkable and unique achievement.lg Eustace Palmer accuses her of giving too much sociological information which he finds irrelevant and boring ("Elechi Amadif' 57) . He finds Efuru lacking theme, and wonders what it is al1 intendeci to mean. In Gordimer's assessment, the "rdling details of daily life [are] mildly interesting but largely irrelevantff (Black Interpeters 20) . Adewale Maja-Pearce, however, defends Efuru as an "indisputable masterpiece" which has been badly neglected by critics (10). Lloyd Brown claims Nwapa's work as "typical of the kind of African novel that resists purely

Western-orientated approaches to the genre" (135). He argues that the issues of social realism and individualism, so long & rigueur in the study of the Western novel, may take on different perspectives or levels of importance in African writing. Nwapa rnay weLl reflect the oral cultural background of the Igbo

culture. A climactic linear plot, Ong claims, is a Western

structure, whereas the oral narrative is traditionally more episodic (141). If Nwapa, the first African woman to publish, is

to establish her identity as an African writer, or initiate an uniquely African form within the gmre, her work should not be assessed only by established noms. Nwapa's adopted use of the novel genre may also reflect her

ability to draw on the memory modes embedded in the past

established techniques of the genre, itself. Brown points out that Nwapa's two major novels, Idu and Efuru, bear superficial similarities to those of nineteenth century women novelists such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters (136). Her novels use as their titles the protagonists' names. She posits ber title characters in the confines of a limited society, and she focuses on their marriages, their education, their expectations and hopes, entrapped as they are within their enclosed societies.

She also uses parallel characterizations and plots; Efuru is neither as long suffering and self-denigrating as Ossai, nor as strong-willed and self-asserting as Anajupu. Idu and Adiewere's initially childless marriage is paralleled by Ojiugo and

Amarajeme's. However, Nwapals novels share little else wirh those of her English predecessors, for despite her imported medium and genre, she manages to infuse her work with a distinctly Nigerian, or ta be more specific, Igbo flavour.

Nwapa succeeds in presenting the oral aspect of her society in her writing. Her quiet, slow and simple style reflects the life she describes. She uses very little indirect rslaying of information, and minimal omniscient, authorial comment, but rather presents the reader with a constant flow of incessant dialogue. This dialogue fulfils many functions. It provides commentary and judgement on passing events, people and their actions; it reinforces the traditional noms of accepted and expected patterns of behaviour; and it posits the ceaseless chatter of the women as the means of perpetuating and sustaining the established values of the comrnunity. In -Idu, the reader is toldr "women's conversation never ends" (1 97) . Like a Greek chorus, the gossip circulates endlessly, constantly influencing and moulding the community, suggesting a cyclical way of life, kept in check by social pressures and constraints. The community sets the stage, and Nwapa, while avoiding authorial interference or interpretation, achieves great pathos and irony as the backdrop of commentary helps highlight both the positive and

2 O negative values of Igbo cultural noms.

While Nwapa recreates an oral society through the incessant women's commentary, she also manages to introduce the patterns and intonations of her own Igbo language into the English medium." She retains the cyclical rhythmic qualities of Igbo speech, perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the customary modes of greeting, in which the repetitiveness of the question and answer provides an echoing quality.

'fou have corne to see us today.

Yes, 1 have c0n.e to see you today.

1s it well?

It is very well . . . . it is very well. (E 173)

Nwapa's transference of this speech pattern into English is reminiscent of Alan Paton's echoing of the Zulu intonation and rhythm in his dialogues in Cry the Beloved Country. In this rnanner, Nwapa depictç a calrn, unhurried Pace of life. Frequently she includes in such rhythmic and echoing question-answer greetings an Igbo idiomatic saying. "Are you well?" Efuru's mother-in-law asks. "We are well" Efuru replies, "It is only the hunger" (42) . We learn from the repetitiveness of the phrase 'lit is only the hunger" that this statement is a forma1 convention; the phrase does not necessarily relate to inadequate food.

However, the phrase still incorporates a significant feature of the Igbo cultural background. As Ong points out, the oral utterance vanishes as soon as it is uttered. "Redundancy and repetition of the just-said keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track" (39-40). Furthemore, redundancy and repetition are more natural to thought and speech than sparse linearity, and by their use, Nwapa is able to recreate the reality of the oral comrnunity .

Nwapa also tends to include direct translations of various

Igbo proverbs and sayings. At rimes these may jar on the Western ear, and halt cornprehension momentarily, but in general, they successfully introduce the Igbo idiom and Igbo reference points to ber English expression, transporting the reader into a non-

7 - English culture." Since proverbs grant access to ancestral wisdom, passed down through the generations, by incorporating them into her writing, Nwapa reiterates the cultural rnernory of the Igbo. Many Igbo idioms use words in contexts unfamiliar to

English. In the words of Chinua Achebe, Nwapa is "able to expand the English language to bring out her message, without altering it to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange is lost" (Emenyonu 31). Nwapa uses the statement, "1 was lucky it happened in my face", meaning, "1 was lucky it happened before my eyes (E 13) . When the women tell Ossai, "Your daughter's face is good", they mean she is popular, and when they tell Efuru, "We are sorry that your husband has rubbed charcoal in your face" they express sympathy at her embarrassrnent (17,

110). Adiewere tells Idu she is "pleasing" to his eyes, referring not only to her physical appearance, but to her person as a whole (20). The statement, "1 don't want laziness to enter my eyes" is a direct translation of the Igbo expression (1 23).

The word "deep" also holds many meanings. "[Tjhe night is very deep" means "it is late", yet when the women comment, "The world

is deep", they mean "cornplex" (1 191, 213) . The reader assumes

that in the Igbo language the same word would be used to express

degree of complexity or lateness of the night. The connotations

of these translated words are always inherent in the text, yet

imbue the novel with an Igbo flavour. In this way, Nwapa

actually transliterates Igbo speech.

Nwapa also takes certain artistic license. When she writes,

"Then he broke it [the kola nut] and gave the ment', her use of

the direct instead of indirect object allows her to retain the

intonation and pattern of the Igbo language (E 4). When the

women tell of Idu's miscarriage, with a direct translation of the

fgbo expression, "Pregnancy is leaving her", they retain the music of the Igbo language and the phrase reads harmoniously

(18). Nwapa does not, however, always translate precisely, but makes subtle changes in the process of translation. These small

alterations are noted by Chidi Ikonne in his essay on "The Folk

Roots of Flora Nwapa's Early Novels". Ikonne States:

The recognition of the apparent failure to

adhere to the nom does not in any way

constitute a condemnation of Nwapa's

portrayal. It is possible that she

approaches the practice, as she does, in

the interest of her art. After all, hers

is a novel and not a socio-anthropological

study. (99-101) In this way, Nwapa manages to fuse the two languages languages syntactically, which helps her establish a cultural distinctiveness. 23 She is, in this respect, in sharp contrast with her fellow compatriot, Buchi Emecheta, who adopts so fully the British idiom in her writing. Nwapa also employs folk tales and songs, modes of reiterating established myths and legends, in a traditionally oral manner. In -Idu, she inserts the tale of the king with ten wives, highlighting the Igbo attitude towards adultery and paternity. The tale hast of course, direct bearing on the story of the impotent Amarajeme and his wife Ojiugo. When Ojiugo becomes pregnant, the "custom of the land" dictates that the impotent husband, Amarajeme, is the nominal father (67). In

Zfuru the tale of the sisters, Eke, Orie, Afo and Nkwo, demonstrates the need for sisters to help one another r~d themselves of the evil spirit. Their names are the names for days of the week, and consequently they can be interpreted as related in time, rather than by blood. Nwapa thus touches on the bonding of the traditional tribal age-groups, but her lack of further exploration perhaps evokes the criticism she receives as supplying folk lore and sociological information out of context with her story (Palmer, "Elechi Amadi" 57). Brown points out that the stories and songs relayed by the children in -Idu during th2 harvest festival, reiterate the statement-response quafity of the Igbo language, while also reflecting the birth-life-death cycle that the novel presents (141). Such modes of societal memory help link past with present, and establish an indigenous element by introducing a performative ritual. Palmer, claims that these tales do not "always emerge naturally and unobtrusively out of the living situation" ("Elechi" 58).

Perhaps Nwapa would have avoided criticism had she integrated the stories into the plots of the novels; however, Palmer's criticism assumes a sense of seamlessness as the criterion of literary noms.

By drawing on past customs, Nwapa, like Waciuma, emphasizes the right relations with other people, rather than individual growth and development, In this way, she retains the African traditional primary focus on society, rather than the individual.

However, Efuru and -Idu both depict the problerns confronting the non-conforming individual. The two novels are essentially about two exceptional women within traditional communities of the times of which she writes. Nwapa examines how these women retain their individuality while remaining within and being embraced by their communities. Her novels are thus not psychological but sociological, and by allowing her characters to re-enact the mundane cultural life patterns, to re-enact their relationships within the community, she skilfully re-tells her cultural past.

Despite Gordimer's daim that Nwapa "is not capable of dealing with theme", the distinctly female themes of childbsâriïig and barrenness predominate in both novels (Black Interpreters 21) .24

Both Efuru and Idu are near perfect women: they both possess remarkable beauty, gentle and kind personalities, and both are good, hard working traders; however, both have a problem with childbearing. Most of the sociological information relayed through Efuru and -Idu relates to customs concerning marriage, childbirth and the status of women. The reader learns that tne purpose of marriage in the traditional Igbo society is to produce children. "What we are al1 praying for is children. What else do we want if we have children?" asks Nwasobi, one of the main commentators in Idu (150). "Marriage must be fruitful", the womer. infom in Efuru, "Of what use is it if it is not fruitful?"

(171). The wornan's raison d'etre is to give birth, and her status in the community is predicated on her ability firstly to conceive, and secondly to produce sons. The inability to produce children is always blamed on the wife; a woman without a child is not considered a proper woman. When Efuru gives birth she expresses relief saying, "1 have had a baby ... 1 am a woman after all" (33). A wornan's barrenness is the business of the entire community, spoken of and analyzed by all, and the childless wife must find a second, suitable woman for her husband. Nwapa emphasizes that social pressure prompts both

Ffuru and Idu to condone polygyny. The women repeatedly inform the reader that "only a bad woman ... wants a husband al1 to hexself" (E 62, 67, 75) . Idu tells Adiewere, "1 want you to marry another wife. 1 don't want to be called a bad woman any more" (90-91). Life for the second wife is not always easy either: Adiewerefs second wife "had come to fulfil a function",

"was treated almost like a maid," and her inability to conceive causes her to leave shame-faced (1 66). Extramarital affairs are acceptable for the man only; Efuru demonstrates such a double standard, for Gilbert's illegitimate son is accepted, yet Gilbert reacts badly to rumours of Efuru's infidelity. With marriage, the wife becomes the husband's property, and if a husband dies, his spouse automatically becomes the wife of his closest male relative, a situation Idu avoids by her self-willed death.

Not only are women paid for in marriage, but young girls, such as Ogea, are sold by their parents because of financial need.15 Male babies are valued' for the status they bring the mother, and are favourably treated. Female babies are valued for the bride price they bring with marriage, and when first born considered lucky for the parents, for a girl could help with housework and babysit her younger siblings (1 79). Girls were not educated as were the boys for it was "a waste of sime sending them to school", and Nkoyenils one disadvantage as a prospective second wife for Gilbert is that "she looks like she is going to school" (E 242, 227). The husband is always "lord and master",

Eree to do as he pleases, and Adiewere tells Idu that if they disagree, even if he is wrong, she should apologize to him (E 65,

1 175).

Ironically, it is the wornen who are harshly judgemental of any of their own sex who stray beyond the laws of conformity.

They reinforce the superstitious beliefs supporting these traditional, male-chauvinistic customs. If a woman loses her children, her virtue is questioned. When Efuru's child dies, she is asked, "In what ways have you offended Our ancestors?" (87) .

Of Idu, the women comment: "A good woman like that should have a child" for they believe that "when a woman is good, God, [the] ancestors, and the Woman of the Lake al1 look at her stomach, not her head, but at her stomach" (28, 42). Onyemuru, whose many children al1 died, is judged "not a good woman" (1 30) . The women assume that her irritable, unpleasant nature is the cause rather than the effect of her children's deaths. Even a woman who has a boy after seven girls is suspected of committing adulrery. Prostitution and adultery are condemned as foreign and the women repeat phrases such as "that's not how our people behave", and it "is the custorn of the people", in both novels (1

105, 215, 127). Anajupu advises Efuru, "Don? behave in a way that will give people cause to gossip", and Idu cornplains rio her husband that, if she does not "act as everybody else does" and conform to the custom of touching a person to show sympathy, she is accused of being unsympathetic (E 198, 1 101) . The constant assessrnent and criticism £rom the wornen's community suggests that judgement that bears in on the individual from the outside has much to do with the maintenance of cultural noms (Ong 46).

Despite their ready condemnations, the women also present solidarity. Womenfs bonding and mutual support are strong feattires in both novels. Anajupu becomes a pillar of strength for Efuru; in Efuru's most acute moment of anguish, when Gilbert questions her reported adultery, Efuru appeals to Anajupu for help. Women help one another in chifdbirth and take constant interest in one another's lives. At the same time, by means of the constant dialogue, Nwapa is able to depict the petty jealousies, malice and interference of the women, as they make everyone elsers business their own. In providing so much sociological, background information about wornen's roles, Nwapa clearly focuses on women protagonists within a world of wornenfs dialogue and women's concerns, a world shared by women ana for the most part without men. She thus expresses a distinctly woman's perspective on her sociological background.

Nwapa often appears to present contradictory points of view.

~y allowing an oral mirroring of her past society to reflect itself without authorial interpretation, she is able to portray the very confusion of the society as it copes with constant reassessment of cultural values. Inconsistency and contradictions are, perhaps, the reality. Her protagonists are inconsistent in their adherence to or rebuttal of the traditional noms. The Western reader may be frustrated and confused by their apparent lack of rationality, evident in their attitude to modern medicine, education, and Western religion. In this woy,

Nwapa perhaps does conform to the genre's demands of social realism. She does not always make her own perspective clear: she simply records. For example, the reader learns that the oridegroom must pay a price for his bride, as for a piece of merchandise. While Efuru is happy to flout the bride price convention by moving in with Adizua, the community disappr~ves.'~

However, Efuru is not totally free of the superstitious threat the custom holds over her. She tells Adizua, "[you] must do something about our custom; if not, our ancestors would be angry with us and cause il1 to befall us" (21) . When she, in effect, pays her own bride price, the reader is left wondering whether to admire Efuru for initially refusing to be treated like chattel, or to condemn her for not valuing herself more highly. When the rnarriage fails, the reader may wonder whether Nwapa endorses the

value of the tradition or not, whether she believes the ancestors have taken their revenge for Efuru's flouting of the time

honoured tradition, but she makes no authorial comment, leaving

the reader free to make his or her own interpretation.

Zfuru has to undergo the painful procedure of "her bath" or

clitoridectomy, for according to the custom, a "young woman musî

have her bath before she has a baby" (6) . The dibia (or

witchdoctor) threatens that should she not have her bath, any

baby CO which she gives birth might die (6, IO). Nwapa makes no

autnorial comment while giving details of the agonizing

procedure, and Efuru' s compliance is inconsistent with her

independent non-conforming attitude towards the bride price.

Following her "bath", Efuru is subjected to the customary

"fattening up" process (12) . However, one month is enough for

Efuru, and she foregoes the required two month period. Clearly,

Efuru conforms some of the time, but not al1 of the time, and

when her baby dies, the reader is again left wondering whether

Nwapa is suggesting that Efuru is punished for not fulfilling the

customary procedure properly. Efuru's lack of conformity

apparently is not based on logical reasoning, but rather on whim.

Towards the novel's close the narrator States, "Efuru was growing

logical in her reasoning. She thought it unusual for women to be

logical. Usually intuition did their reasoning for them" (208).

The statement is in itself confusing, perhaps even contradictory,

for it is unclear whether or not Nwapa considers intuition to have an underlying or subconscious logic. In both Efuru and Idu, as in Daughter of Mumbi and The

Promised Land, Western medicine conflicts with traditional medicine. Initially, Efuru is compliant in consulting a dibia about her barrenness. Yet, when her only child ails, she is sceptical of approaching a dibia, knowing many to be "quacks", so she resorts unsuccessfully to the old wives' remedies as directed by Anajupu (80). Knowing that Efuru had grown up as sister to a doctor and was familiar with Western medicine, the reader may wonder why she did not take her daughter to the hospital. And although she uses time-honoured, home-brewed remedies on her only daughter, she does not hesitate to arrange for Nwosu and Nnona to visit her doctor friend. Idu is similarly inconsistent.

Adiewere suffers £rom what is presumably tuberculosis, and "Idu

2 7 thought of M & B and decided against giving it to Adiewere" (4).

No reason is given why, but she resorts unsuccessfully to home- made purgatives. Yet so desperate is she to have a baby, she plans to go to the hospital for its delivery. (However, the superstitious belief that the hospital produces more male babies enhances the attractiveness of a hospital delivery). The local people acknowledge the marvels of modern medicine. "These white people are great, they are deep", Nwabata raves after the success of her husband's operation. At the same tirne, Anajupu is a source of confort with her old wives' remedies. Efuru places faith in the dibia's assessrnent of her and in Anajupu's remedies, and carries out both their instructions carefully. To critic

Eustace Palmer, such details may be irrelevant and boring, but Nwapa thus demonstrates that faith in and acceptance of the traditional ways are comforting and cannot be abruptly dismissed ("Elechi", 57) .

The new methods, not always fully comprehended, are disturbing. When Ornirima's daughter-in-law understands yaws CO be contagious, Omirimi laughs at "her ignorance". "What a fool she was 1 told her. This is the time for her children to suffer

£rom yaws . . . . Our fathers suffered £rom it, so did Our father's fathers" (E 246). While ironically the reader may laugh

Omirima s ignorance, her confusion reflects her insecurity, as her sense of identity and her status of authority, based on her knowledge of the past, is eroded. By giving the details and procedures of home-brewed remedies, Nwapa, in her understated way, also advocates the importance of faith in the cure. Efuru's faith in the dibia helps her accept her role in life as worshipper of the Lady of the Lake: her faith in him helps her accept her barren situation in a society iocused on child- bearing.

Religion presents further confusion. Anyone who went to a mission school, as did Gilbert, is a Christian, in name.

However, Gilbert does not renounce his African gods. When giving thanks for not being robbed, he covers both his bases by contributing to the church and sacrificing to local gods. And, despite being a nominal Christian, he is quite happy to have more than one wife. The past, Nwapa infers, is not that easily dismissed; Gilbert may have learnt about Western faith, may be a nominal Christian, but to what extent he is able to live the

Christian faith is another matter. Because his new-found knowledge is not imbedded in his culture, it is not part of his

communal identity .

The elders instruct the young and direct, even indoctrinate,

through pressures to conform, the expected ways of behaviour.

Efuru's motivation in paying the bride price is fear of the

ancestorsf anger. With the threat of power from the supernarural

mst, the pressure to conform is al1 the greater. However, the

challenge from schools and churches to local theories and beliefs

threatens the old way of life. In a society where the prime

value is the communal identity, such changes in thought are

indeed severe: the entire community is threatened. New religion

and education are, therefore, regarded with mistrust, for they

undermine and threaten the authority and status of the elders,

who pass on the customs and values of their past.

Throughout Efuru, the women repeatedly comment on the

inability of the young to absorb the customs of their elders, and

the damaging effect of education. "What is wrong with these

children nowadays" the women ask of one another (E 63-64) . They

cornplain that "young people of this generation are different",

and "difficult", that the children "think they know better than

their parents", and are simply "no good" (1 200, E 200, 174,

229). This negative change in youth is largely attributed to the white man. "The world is changing", Omirima states. "It is now the world of the white people. We and our grandfathers don't seem to count these days" (E 246) .

In the past, the elders claim, there was little crime. As in Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi, the threat of revenge taken by t-aditional gods, or the simple retaliation of the community, was

enough to keep the inhabitants on the straight and narrow.

However, with the teaching of the church, which forbids taking the law into their own hands, and the teaching in the schools,

which proposes rational argument as opposed to superstition ana

supernatural belief, the people lose the constraints which helped

keep them moral. One of the women States:

In my youth, there was not stealing. If

you stole you were sold as a slave. If

your property was stolen, you simply went

to one of the idols and prayed him to visit

the thief [sic]. Before two or three days,

you recovered your property. But, these

Church-goers have spoilt everything. They

tell us our gods have no power, so our

people continue to steal. (E 223)

Nwashike, Efuru's father, is criticized for not being tougher on

Adizua. "In his youthful days, Nwashike would have taught that

£001 a lesson. Things are changing fast these days. These white people have imposed so much strain on our people. The least

thing you do nowadays you are put into prison" (E 7).

Of course, many such complaints about the younger generation

ring familiar for al1 tirnes and al1 societies, the elders perhaps

forgetting and idealizing the realities of their own past.

However, with the introduction of colonial and missionary education, which focus on young people, in particular young males, the conflict between generations becomes acute, a theme which Miriam Tlali explores more fully in Amandla. The rnemories of the older generation also serve as a reminder of the constancy of change which is both healthy and necessary in any comunity in order for it to temain alive. Yet, Nwapa does not show the rate of change as particularly rapid in the relatively remote Igbo village. With no formal education, Efuru and Idu exhibit non- conforming tendencies. Experience and observation draw individuals to question and reassess past customs and beliefs. In -Idu, the reader learns of the change in attitude regarding birth of twins, traditionally considered unlucky for the community. Idu gives birth to a healthy son during an eclipse, an event considered very unlucky; the consequent health of the boy surprises the community, and challenges their belief in ill- omens. Undoubtedly, changes do occur naturally, with or without outside intrusion. Yet, the sense of belonging to sornething larges than the self, so paramount in communal living, is weakened by the intervention of individualism, and the imposition of Western culture certainly accelerates the rate of change.

This conflict between the past and present creates a tension responsible for much of the apparently conflicting behaviour and confusing perspectives. And it is possible that such confusion reflects not only the protagonists' situation, but also that of the author.

By examining her protagonists' difficulties in conceiving,

Nwapa posits the individual situation against the dictates and expectations of the societal noms of that the. In this way, Nwapa challenges the customs of the past that specifically relate to women. Efuru is strong enough to demonstrate a quiet rebellion against established noms. She defies her father by going out in the moonlight; she defies the bride-price convention; she curtails her "fattening" process; she refuses to accompany Adizua up the river to the farm, preferring her own choice of work as a triider; and her patience with Adizua's absence and infidelity is not inexhaustible. Idu, too, asserts a subtle, quiet strength and sense of selfhood. She refuses to scrape her hair when Adiewere dies, and in her apparently self- willed death rejects the idea that children are al1 a woman wants in life, especially as she is pregnant at the time. Efuru's role of worshipper of the Lake and a successful trader suggests that

Efuru does have a fulfilling role in society without a husband or a child. Idu's love for Adiewere seems to challenge the traditional behaviour in a society where marriages are practical institutions for child-rearing. With her death she evades the traditional custom of marrying her deceased husband's eldest

Srother. In these respects, Nwapa's works are potentially feminist, although she rejects such a label (Ferry, 1262).

Nwapa's protagonists seem unaware of their feminist stand.

Anajupu's symbolic feminist revolt when giving Gilbert a blow to the head, is an exception, and although the men are depicted as generally weak, lazy and unreliable, for the most part, Nwapa demonstrates the impact of patriarchal norms on her female protagonists, and does not explore the psychological effects any further. At the close of both novels, male supremacy remains unaltered, and the majority of women still conform. Efuru and Idu, being exceptional women are, to a certain extent, marginalized by their individuality. The traditional status quo remains the same, while only the non-conforming individuais suffer .

In Ripples in the Pool (1975), Rebeka Njau draws on her cultural memory in an indirect manner. She does not provide a record of the past by giving sociologicai information, as does

Nwapa. Nor does she depict near perfect women; in tact, her women protagonists display decidedly negative qualities.

However, in common with her compatriots, Waciuma and Ogot, Njau places value in adhering to the spirit of the ancestors. In

Ripples in the Pool, Njau depicts a newly independent Kenya dominated by avarice. She uses the pool, the novel's central symbol, to epitomize the value of the past. The old world as symbolized by the peaceful pool with its mysterious significance is, for the most part, ignored by the local inhabitants, who, corrupted by modern ways, seek power, money and status. Njau depicts the negative qualities of city life in opposition to rural life, modern and Western customs as opposed to the old traditions. Power struggles dominate the plot, as the characters, mindless of their inherent place in the old order of things, strive for persona1 control . The pool demands humble respect, for its deep waters contain the mystery of life. The value of past traditions is not, and cannot be, fully articulated, but through the pool symbolism,

Njau evokes the atmosphere and faith maintained in the old order.

Muthee, the old man, also symbolizes the ofd traditional world, and is closest to understanding the mystexy of the pool. As a result, he provides a touchstone for morality and wisdorn. He grieves "to see the people scratch the surface hurriedly and think they have marked the deepest core of the earth" (84) . He is concerned about the "Lack of faith in the pool that he himself still believed in", for the "spirits of the pool cry out for vengeance" (84, 91). He tells Karuga, "Look at the pool. That is where the mystery of life is. You are at the bottom of the ladder. Dig deeper and deeper at the bottom of it. Then one day you will discover the mysteries 1 have been talking to you aboutff

(85). However, Karuga claims that he does not understand the pool. When he looks at it "no new feelings entered him, no transformation. No new strength to believe in the power of the unseen" (90).

The novel's plot is cornplex, revolving around the mismatched marriage between Selina, a prostitute, and Gikere, a hospital attendant, and the world in which the action takes place is one of torrid crime and corruption. By contrast, the lifestyle of

Muthee and Karuga, near the pool and in a rural environment, is calm and harmonious. When Karuga travels to the city on the bus,

the vices of the city were discussed until

the whole bus teemed with stories of

robberies, bag snatchings, drinking, and

prostitution in the dark lanes and lodges of the city. Men and women gossiped about

young girls who had run away from the cow

dung and smoke and were now roaming the

streets of the city. (94)

Njau depicts power, money and rnistrust as dominant evils. As

Gikere comments: "Too many people want power and they will pay and do anything to remain in power. Money means power' (99).

Almost al1 characters share the lust for power: a need to control. Selina "feared no man" (1). As long as she is in control, with men feeding her narcissistic and material needs, she is content. She States of herself, "1 love beautiful things

.... 1 like to possess them, to make them my own. It's a disease with me. But 1 make men pay for them. If they want me, they musc spend their money" (2). "Men are beasts" she tells Gaciru,

Gikere's sister. "Al1 they want is to ruin you, especially if they discover you have a brain. They want to show their power"

(111). However, she boasts: "1 have power within me, a magnetic kind of power that no other woman has" (112). When she fails to control Gikere, she exerts control over Gaciru, but when Gaciru falls in love with Karuga, Selina exercises extreme domination by killing them both. Gikere's mother, as the stereotypical mother- in-law, is also a controller. She interferes with his marriage, even choosing anothex prospective wife for him. Gikere tries to control Selina with brute force- "He had promised himself long before his marriage that if he ever married he would never beat a woman he loved", but he "felt good beating her. He was proud of himself to see her curled up on the floor under his feet like a frightened dog with al1 her conceit fallen to the ground" (50).

He also wants the use of her money and her labour to help him establish a clinic in his home village. The marriage is doomea to fail for both want to use the other as a means to an end.

When Kimani, Gikere's friend, switches his loyalties to Kefa

Munene, who wants to build a hospital in competition with

Gikere's clinic, he justifies his actions saying, "Money is a drug .... 1 know Kefa Munene is wicked. 1 know he has drugged me with money and played tricks on me but 1 need money badly" (76).

He asks Gikere, "Who listens to the truth these days?" adding ironically, "1 am not like you. You have your principles. 1 shall take money no matter where it cornes from" (82). Kefa

Munene uses money to buy his control. Everything he does is to gain influence, and he even seduces Maria for his own material advantage. Karuga, Muthee's assistant, appears to offer hope for the future, living the rural life he does, with Muthee as a parernal guide. However, even he struggles with control, control of the goat, Njeru. The trouble the goat causes leads Karuga to hate it, and, as with Selina, what he cannot control he wants to destroy. Muthee, with the wisdorn of his years and his knowledge of the past, advises, "Life that is smooth is not liie at al1

.... Where is our strength if we fail to control one helpless little creature? If we destroy Njeru, is that the end of pain?

What shall we do with al1 the other Njerus among us?" (68). The goat, Njeru, symbolizes the people at large, wayward, greedy and out of control. The old man hoped that "Karuga's hatred for

Njeru would diminish and he would accept him, just as he had taken for granted those thorny shrubs on his path in the

wilderness" (72).

Because of the people's needs to manipulate others, be it

with money or to get money, mistrust is rampant, and no one is

cornfortable. Selina tells Karuga that Gikere does not trust him;

Gikere tells Karuga that he does not trust his sister, Gaciru;

Kefa Munere ironically daims that he trusted Mugwe, a man he

knew to be a dishonest, because "he knew he was ruthless and

wouid never be kind to anybody who tried to oppose [him] " ( 98,

105) . The people are quite fickle: Kefa Munene, the "man they

spat upon a few months ago is now a man of the people" (100).

Power and greed have thus destroyed any cohesive communal

qualities or values: everyone is out for his or her own

individual gain. Gikere expresses the sense of mistrust when he

States, "1 feel pursued by some unknown danger. Therets

sornething going on behind my back" (97) . Thus, like her

compatriot, Ogot, in The Promised Land, Njau fears the pursuit of

material wealth and suggests that the disregard of the old ways

and the communal beliefs, and the loss of fear and respect of the

unknown, lead to destruction.

However, although depicting a world of manipulation, greed

and power, Njau also appears sympathetic towards her characters,

placing the blane for the loss of their stabilizing culture on

the shoulders of the white colonist. Karuga's mother, who saw no mystery in the pool, is exonerated by Muthee for she was influenced by Western religion. "Tt was not her fauft. White missionaries carne. They won her heart. She gave up all. Hex father's land, everything" (58). Karuga's mother, in losing her land, lost her cultural identity. She was no longer rooted in the soi1 of her ancestors, and subsequently denied a proper burial. Gikere, too, was influenced negatively by the white man.

Maria tells more of his past:

We have never forgotten how you refused to

help a wounded man who was bleeding to

death because Doctor Scott had said he was

a Mau Mau. You refused to help one of the

people who were fignting for our

independence! You followed the white man

and listened to his advice. That is why

you lost al1 your friends. (134-5)

However, Gikere has some redeeming qualities, which Maria acknowledges :

You did not know that you could never

achieve worldly success like Kefa Munene

had done because your innermost thoughts

and feelings kept telling you that you had

taken the wrong path, and the conflict

inside you was so intense that it put you

off balance. (135)

Selinafs past, too, although perhaps not exonerating her actions, helps cast her as a suffering victim. She is just a "city woman" whose mother died when she was six, and whose father claimed she was illegitimate and beat her repeatedly. She loses her sense of direction amongst the lues of a materialistic city life. Kefa Munene, a political activist, learnt the Western method cf politics, "[allways talking, endless talk and never doing anything for the people ! " (30) . He learns to use "people to get what he wants ... he is now out for himself and anything he does is calculated" (47) . Muthee realized that

men and women wanted to anaesthetize their

feelings and harden themselves against the

cares and worries of their lives. They

were not ready to dig deep into the soi1

and remove the worm that destroyed the seed

planted long ago by their forefathers. (83)

The imagery of the destructive wom eating through the good of the Land is reiterated when Karuga examines the caterpillars

Dusily destroying the plant outside Muthee's house. Muthee, aware of the corruption al1 around him, tells the people:

their cornplaints of bones piercing ribs, of

dark spots on their tongues and of their

aches and pains in the head, came from

their own meanness, their jealousy, their

lust, their greed and their lack of faith

in the mysteries around them. But they did

not listen to him. (83-4)

And he took them to the river, to look into its depths, to look, symbolically, into their past, He asked them "to watch and see how the river went on flowing freely, eternally without grudge or bitterness against those it served. When its way was blocked by rocks and boulders, it wound its way patiently round till a patn was clear" (83) . Muthee' s words suggest that the people should

look to the past to retrieve their lost culture, a culture lost

temporarily with the intrusion of colonialism. He suggests that

colonialism is like the blockage in the river, a period tne people must circrimnavigate, in order to resume their old direcrion. But the river and the pool mean nothing to the peopie who are too firmly distracted by the lure of capitalistic wealth

and power. Maina voices the thoughts of the people when he asks

Muthee :

What does this pool you place so much faith

in mean to the executive, to the business

man, to the office-girl, to the cook, to

the poor man in the village? ... There is

no more fear of the power of the unseen.

The past is gone and forgotten. So do not

talk of the spirits of the pool. (71)

With independence, the people nave lost something of themselves,

for as Maina tells Muthee, "We fought. We won the war. We have

Our freedom now. But where are the warrior songs? Where are the warrior dances?" (71). The novel suggests that the people, by forgoing the traditional past, have lost their way, and look for power, control and direction within themselves. With such narcissistic behaviour, self-destruction is inevitable. The white imperialist government may have departed, but its remembered power politics and dominance remain: the present and the past inform one another continually. Njau thus suggests that the people have absorbed the social, cultural past of the colonial powers, and perpetuate and continue the inherited practice of materialistic acquisition. As Maria informs Gikere, he is yet the "shadow of the white man" (135).

What the people have forgotten cannot be explained. Njau does not seem to advocate the need for warrior songs and dances, for bride dowry, and so forth. But she demonstrates the destruction resulting from the people losing a sense of their roots, their unfathomable depths, the truth of their very existence, that like the mystery of the pool cannat be explained. "It has to be felt and lived . . . . But you need to have the srrength in you that enables you to feel and believe the power of the Unseen .... You musc discover something bigger than yourself inside you" (1481 . The memory on which Njau draws is that of the sense of belonging to something bigger and beyond any individual, where the individual puts his/her faith in the unknown rather in him/herself. Only with that humble faith can the corrupt worm be eradicated, and goodness, selflessness, and integrity reassert themselves. With her use of symbolism and imagery to evoke the spirit of the ancestors and the demoralization of the present, Njau avoids detailing sociological information to depict the inexplicable value of adhering to one's own past traditions. The pool stands as an eternal touchstone against which everybody is judged.

Nobody can defy its laws with impunity, and whether for persona1 or public reasons, people suffer on account of modern, Western corruption. The symbol of the pool also stands for Njau's memory of the past, when the Kenyan peoples were humble and in awe of their ancestry, while at the same time were guided by it. Endno tes

L 1 have spelled Gikuyu/Kikuyu according to the

statement in the headnote to Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's The ~iver

Between that claims that "the form of Gikuyu is used correctly

for the people and language of the Kikuyu area".

.I Ogundipe-Leslie writes "the woman as daughter or

sister has greater status and more rights in her lineage.

Married, she becomes a possession, voiceless and often rightless

in her husbandfs farnily, except for what accrues to her through

her child~en" (''Nat Spinning on the Axis of Maleness" 500-501).

3 Nwapa's use of Igbo proverbs is discussed in this work

(62).

4 The Gikuyu and Mumbi story relates that Gikuyu is the

first man, his wife Murnbi the first woman: neither were of human

parents. Both were the creation of Mwene-Nyaga, the Creator, who

also created Kirinyaga (Mount Kenya). Gikuyu and Mumbi produced

nine daughters, Mwene-Nyaga provided husbands for these women,

and although ancestry is traced through the father's line, the

women formed the future clans of the Gikuyu tribe. Waciuma, while reiterating this tale as told by her grandfather, explains

that there were actually more than nine daughters, but that the

Gikuyu language does not count further than nine. "We cal1 any number beyond nine 'Kenda muiyuru, ' - the nine that fills

(completes)", she explains. "(It is unlucky to count people accurately ... since this may cause one of them to die)" (Daughter of Mumbi 12). 5 Emecheta's depiction of the negative aspects of polygyny in The Joys of Motherhood is discussed in this work

(117). 6 Nwapa's description of Efuru's clitoridectomy is discussed in this work (70).

Tom Mboya, Member of Parliament and Minister of

Labour, writes that "when the Mau Mau emergency began, most of the churches at first sided with the colonial power and condemned the African outright. They concentrated on the atrocities committed and the terrorism and overlooked the background to these problems and the reason for the eruption". However, around

1954, "one began to see a change in the churches". They became more concerned with social and economic problems, and the World

Council of Churches became involved. Waciuma's family's loyalties seem to follow those of the church (11).

a Olney writes "no African people identifies itself more closely with its ancestral land than the Gikuyu ... It is in

Gikuyu land that the ancestors are located, both literally and symbolically; hence it is through the earth that the present generation contacts past generations, communicates with them, and so continues their existence in present time" (111) . Abdul R.

JanMohamed reaffirms Olney's claim with his comment that "land is the most important factor in the social, political, religious and economic life of the tribe" (118). Ngotho, in Weep not Child claims that the man who is deprived of his piece of earth, his shamba, suffers "a spiritual loss" (Ngugi Wa Thiong'o 110). 9 Ochola is referred to as "son of Kisero" or "son of

Seme". Nyapol even addresses him as "son of my mother-in-law"

(124, 185, 191) - 1 C Oyekan Owomoyela writes, "In practically al1 African communities, to be able to employ proverbs aptly is to be widely respected because the ability is interpreted as a sign that the speaker has ready access to the communally sanctioned code of behaviour and can be relied upon to give the right direction to others" (17).

7 - -- Ogundipe-Leslie ~rites,"The rural woman is supposed to be satisfied with what men bring her materially .... she is not interested in money which is of the devil and the white man"

(51) . She also postulates that the myth of the unchanging, naive rural woman seems to coincide with the actual social practice and tendency of men to discourage change and innovation in women's lives (60). .. - Njau's valuing of tradition over materialistic wealth in discussed in this work (77).

13 The portrayal of Dr. Thomson's wife is similar tu that of Matron Jack in Ogot's short story, "The Old White Witch",

(Land Without Thunder 1-25) . 14 Ogot makes another brief reference to the hypocrisy of the church in recording the incident of Nyapol's sister and

Father Ellis. When Father Ellis squeezes Apiyo's breasts, Nyapol, advises ber to keep the matter a secret, for "what man would marry a girl who had been touched by a white man?" (49). "You811 never get married if the boys know that the white man has touched you" Nyapol tells her (49) .

L 5 Nwapa's Efuru demonstrates the importance of faith in the cure, as discussed in this work (72). ?a Tom Mboya writes, "The man who tries to live compietely within the confines of his tribe, not so much rovering its customs as discriminating against other tribes, represents the kind of tribalism of which Africa must beware. The Luo who thinks nothing good can corne from other tribes or continuously protects a person merely because he is a fellow Luo; the Kikuyu who thinks it suitable to meet only other Kikuyu and disregards merit and ability in other people only because they do not belong

LO his tribe - this is negative tribalism which cannot allow for unity" (65) . . -, For discussion of Nnu Ego of The Joys of Motherhood, refer to this work (119)

13 Waciurna's advocacy of the importance of education is

àiscussed in this work (38).

? 0 Eustace Palmer compares Nwapa unfavourably with both

Achebe and Elechi Amadi. He claims she "has not yet mastered her craft", that her novels lack plot, and that Efuru is made up of

"a string of episodes some of which could have been usefully omitted" ("Elechi Amadi" 57-58, and An Introduction 61). Nadine

Gordimer finds the novel lacking in plot and States that Efuru is a "woman whose bewilderment and frustration are stated and left unexplored" (The Black Interpreters 20). Adeola A. James cornments that Nwapa's "novels would be more successful if she could involve the reader by first involving herself in the deep moral problems which she mentions but leaves unquestioned"

(Review of Idu 151). Solomon Ogbede Iyasere expresses a similar

assessment when he lists Efuru with novels 'in which social and

political realities are discursively presented and obtusely

elaborated by the author" (26). -in - Carol Boyce Davies claims that Nwapa's inclusion within the narrative of small talk, often considered a weakness

in a woman writer who has not mastered form, is, however, a means

of providing a continuity between women's oral and written

literature (Ngambika 16).

'1- 3- Ernest N. Emenyonu, in "Who Does Flora Nwapa Write

For?" comrnents on the way in which Nwapa manages to include the

Igbo world view in her language- He claims Nwapa has keen ears

for village voices and knows how to transmit them (31).

--7- The Nigerian proverbs, the "son of a gorilla must

dance like the father gorilla", "[a] person who has people is

better off than a person who has money" and if "you see an in-law

too often you roast a rotten yam for him" are easily understood

(E 59, 164, 1 59).

Nwapa's two volumes of short stories, Women at War and

This is Lagos, are marred by many grammatical and typographical

errors, and the syncretism of the two languages is not always successful. That these volumes were published after -Idu and Efuru suggests that these are editing problems. " Many writers disagree with Gordimer. Ikonne, claims her theme to be childlessness ("The Society" 96). Emenyonu claims her theme to be barrenness in marriage ("Who does Floxa

Nwapa write for?" 29), while Maja-Pearce claims the theme to be fate (12).

2 S Nwapa claims in an interview with Adeola James, that the "oppression of girls starts in the home ... we treat girls differently" (In Their Own Voices 113) .

26 Nwapa cornments in her interview with James that in the

1930s and 1940s it was "very common for a young girl to elope"

(In Their Own Voices 116). ... - M & B was the trade name of a pharmaceutical Company that produced an all-purpose sulphur drug used extensively prior to penicillin. The drug was commonly referred to by the trade narne. CHAPTER TWO

CULTURAL BONDAGE: EMECHETA CHALLENGES THE AUTHORITY OF MEMORY

Like Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta is an Igbo Nigerian. She focuses on the themes of marriage, childbearing and childlessness in the

Igbo culture, and, like Nwapa, Emecheta situates her protagonists in an environment of change and cultural conflict. However, the rate of the change she depicts is far more rapid than that depicted by Nwapa, and consequently she demonstrates a more abrupt, extreme clash of cultures.

Emecheta is an expatriot, living in London, having left

Lagos at the age of twenty-two. This possibly accounts for a most notable difference from Nwapa: her linguistic expression. Emecheta does not use the cultural memory submerged in her native language, for she makes no attempt to syncretise the rhythm, music or idiom of her native tongue with her ~nglishmedium. Rather she uses the English idiom so successfully it is difficuft, if not impossible, to detect her Igbo origins from her linguistic expression. English idioms, clichés and phrases flow naturally from the mouths of her characters, in particular in her first two novels which are set in London. She reproduces the cockney slang of the London slums with convincing accuracy.

Emecheta boasts that Collins, her paperback publisher, "has now stopped putting [her] books in the African section" (James, In Their Own Voices 39). She acknowledges that by using English every day and living in the English culture her "Africanness is in a way being diluted" (James 39). Rather than using multiple background voices as does Nwapa, Emecheta uses an omniscient authorial voice, and as a result displays none of Nwapa's ambivalence: her point of view and perspective are usually clearly and forcibly transrnitted.

Ernechetar s first two novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second

Class Citizen (1974), are largely autobiographical, and her tone is bitter and acrimonious as she denounces almost everything about her cultural past. Adah, the heroine of both novels, lambastes the unequal privileging of the male sex, and denounces the cultural thinking that perpetuates such inequality.

Emecheta's persona1 experience no doubt provides much of the material for these works, for Emecheta was abandoned by her husband while living in Britain; she raised £ive children on her own within the slums of London. Adah struggles as a single mother of £ive, and manages to retain her dignity and sense of self through her education. She obtains a degree in sociology

(as did Emecheta), and while working starts to write.

Situating the protagonist of her first two novels in a foreign culture affords Emecheta the opportunity to examine the clash of cultures from the perspective of an African immigrant in a Western culture. She supplies the readex with background sociological information about the Igbo culture only as it is part of Adah's cultural memory. The information helps the reader appreciate Adah's point of view and her ability to adjust to her new environment. Because of the autobiographical nature of these first two novels, Emecheta presumably examines her own remernbered cultural past and works through her difficulties in the story of

Adah. The novels are painfully honest examinations of the problems confronting the Nigerian immigrant woman. Adah appears to be the author's spokesperson, for at times Adah's opinions and

Ernecheta's seem to merge. Through Adah, Emecheta is able to write her own story, one in which she is no longer marginalized but clearly in the centre.

Ostensibly, Adah is portrayed as a survivor who manages to escape the "ditch" through striving to becorne better educated.

Her musings selectively relate many Igbo customs that endorse the second class status afforded women, echoing much of what Nwapa relates in Efuru, and she becomes increasingly negative as her

Igbo culture places her at a disadvantageous position in her foreign environment and in relation to her husband. The reader learns of the Igbo preference for male children, the reluctance

CO educate girls, and the bride price required with marriage.

The narrator scathingly records the accepted double standards for men and women as regards marital fidelity. Adah inherits the belief that "it was ber duty to work, not her husband's" (SCC 64,

95). "[Mlen never do wrong, only the women; they have to beg forgiveness, because they are bought, paid for and must remain like that, silent, obedient slaves" (SCC 156, emphasis added).

Adah cornplains, "The only thing 1 get £rom this slavish marriage is the children" (SSC 64, emphasis added) . Her negative commefits about marriage mark the beginnings of a therne recurrent in her later works: the analogy of slavery and marriage.' By reassessing her past circumstances, Adah gains understanding of the failure of her marriage. She laments that she had rushed into an early marriage to gain respectability.

"If only her people in Lagos had been civilized enough to know that a girl who decided to live by herself and study for her degree was not necessarily a prostitute" (SCC 122, emphasis added). Her criticism of her own people suggests her sense of insecurity in her new environment, and possibly explains her rejection of her past that ill-equips her for her present circumstances. She may also scorn her own people because of her newly discovered sense of racial discrimination, for in London she learns "that her colour was sornething she was supposed to be ashamed of. She was never aware of this at home in Nigeria, even when in the midst of whites" (SCC 70). Whiie her tzaditionzl ways contribute to her marriage failure, living in London exacerbates her problerns. Paul Connerton claims:

We will experience our present differently

in accordance with the different past to

which we are able to connect that present.

Hence the difficulty of extracting our past

from Our present, not simply because

present factors tend to influence - some

might want to Say distort - Our

recollections of the past, but also because

past factors tend to influence, or distort,

our experience of the present. (2) As Connerton's words suggest, Adah's being immersed in a Western culture may distort her assessment of her own traditions which she reassesses as they clash with British ways and mannerisms.

Unlike Ochola in The Promised Land, Adah does not believe traditions are transportable to a new location. While juju had mattered to her at home in Nigeria, in England, "she felt safe to ignore the juju man and his pranks .... in England, it was out of place, on alien ground" (ITD 9). The same applies to other traditions and beliefs when assessed £rom the British point of view, and she feels safe from the goddess of the river attributed with the power of inflicting leprosy on anyone who dared flout

However, while vehemently rejecting ber own inherited beliefs, she is scathing about Western religion, and expresses scepticism as to how people twist the words of Jesus to suit their own interpretation. She scorns Francis for adopting faiths to suit his lifestyle, and questions why Jesus is called the "son of god" simply because of his unusual birth. On Christmas eve she finds England the epitome of the "silent night, holy night", in contrast with the fireworks and rejoicing of Nigeria, where palm-wine drinking in the streets marked the occasion in an audible, vibrant manner (SCC 134). Clearly homesick and lonely, she remarks: "In England she couldn't go to her neighbour and

Babble out troubles as she would have done in Lagos ... this was a society where nobody was interested in the problems of others"

(SCC 66) . Adah possibly expresses Emechetaf s own need for societal support, and her self expression in her novel writing may, in a sense, supply an alternate avenue through which to ~oiceher troubles. Her past memories actually alienate her from her present in two ways: the customs lodged in her social mernory fail to be meaningful or supportive to her when in a different culture, yet her personal memories of the warmth and camaraderie she enjoyed in Nigeria make ber feel alien in her new environment. While she rejects the traditions, customs, and beliefs of her culture as inappropriate and meaningless in Britain, she has nothing with which to replace them. She is thus isolated and alienated. Katherine Frank explains this historical catalepsy suffered by colonized wornen. She writes:

In order to be free and fulfilled as a

woman she must renounce her African

identity because of the inherent sexism of

traditional Afxican culture. Or, if she

wishes to cherish and affirm her

"Africanness" she must renomce her claims

to ferninine independence and self-

determination. Either way she stands to

lose: either way she will find herself

diminished, impoverished. (478)

The Igbo culture has not equipped Adah or Francis with the means of coping with the present or the future, which is less foreseeable in London than in the Nigerian cornmunity. In fact, their cultural and social memories impede their ability to succeed in the new environment. Francis believes in the value of procreating, for birth control is unacceptable in the Igbo culture, but the burden falls mainly to Adah, as she battles to raise children without the support of an extended family, and while holding down a job. However, although the reader learns that "Francis was not a bad man, just a nan who could no longer cope with the overdemanding saciety he found himself in", the narrator gives only Adahts perspective (SCC 101). Clearly, Adah is more capable than Francis, able to change largely by rejecting her cultural past, and adapting to the culture in which she is immersed. In this way, she demonstrates the assertions Edward

Shils writes of in his Traditions.

Traditions, to survive, must be fitting to

the circumstances in which they operate and to which they are directed .... Traditions may be adapted or discarded when their possessors move £rom countryside to town and, instead of living among plants, trees, birds and animals, live in paved spaces where none of these are present as

signif icant factors. (258)

While Shils' words clinically describe why traditions might change, Emecheta remembers and records the confusion and suffering that the process of change brings to the individual.

The confusion of cultures and the inability of Adah's husband,

Francis, to adapt to the change cause the marriage break-up and Adah's resultant uncompromising situation. Francis is depicted

âs indigent and irresponsible. Without the flexibility and hard- working attributes of Adah, he remains content and "warm in the ditch", unable and unrnotivated to improve his lot (ITD 61). The condemation of the male-chauvinistic Igbo traditions which treat women as second-class, and condemation of men in general, often seem to merge. The tone is so persona1 it is difficult to divorce the authorial comment £rom Adah's thoughts, and the works in general suggest that Emechetals persona1 memories cannot but intrude with al1 the acrimony and bitterness her remembered hardship and suffering caused. The staternent, "Al1 Francis needed to be taken for a gorilla was simply to bend his knees" seems unnecessarily bigoted (SSC 86). Adah cornplains that "Men are so blind" and asks "Why was it that men took such a long tirne to change, to adapt, to reconcile themselves to new situations?"

(SSC 125, 116) . Emecheta may imply that in general men are simply not adept at change, or she rnay well suggest that Nigerian men have more to lose by changing, for by rejecting their cultural past they would lose the privileged status dictated by their sex.

However, the reader may also infer that the Igbo cultural traditions, that privilege and pamper men and subjugate women, ironically better prepare the women for change and adaptability.'

Certainly, as Emecheta depicts the Igbo male/female traditions1 relationship, women have much to gain by adopting western ways:

Adah is able to live in London without a man and not be considered a prostitute. The reader rnay ask why Francis should not be afforded equal sympathy and understanding, for he too suffers from his inherited cultural memory, trapped as he is by his inflexible beliefs.' Adah is quick to condemn the institution of marriage in general, when her own proves unsuccessful. She comrnents that, "matrimony, apart from being a way of getting free sex when men felt like it, was also a legalized way of committing assault and getting away with it",

for "marriage was not a bed of roses but a tunnel of thorns, £ire and hot nails" (ITD 57, SCC 44).

Adah, however, like Nwapa's Efuru and Idu, is not the average Igbo woman. From early childhood, Adah indicates a

strength of will and a somewhat rebellious nature. She determines to go to school, and lies her way into being educated.

She resolved she would "never, never ... get married to any man, rich or poor, to whom she would have to serve his food on bended

knee" (SCC 19). She hates being treated like a "native woman, who was not supposed to know the important happenings in her

farnily until they had been well discussed and analyzed by the menfolk", she challenges the rinht of her illiterate in-laws to question her ambitions to follow her husband to London, and she

resents their expecting her to "bow down" to the elders (SCC 69,

27). Thus, even while in Nigeria, Adah rejects aspects of the

Igbo culture which do not suit her individually,

In the Ditch describes Adah's life of poverty in the 1960s

in London and Second Class Citizen initially returns to Nigeria, and describes Adah's adolescence and marriage in Lagos, and her move to London. Emechetar s following novels, The Bride Price

(1976) and The Slave Girl (1977) are set totally in Nigeria, The

Bride Price depicting a transition from urban to rural society,

The Slave Girl the transition from rural to urban society. In both works, the rural society is Ehecheta's home village of Ibuza. Her next novel, The Joys of Motherhood (1979), opens -in medias res in the year 1934 in Lagos and recalls, by means of flashbacks, events more than twenty years earlier, While moving progressively backwards in time, drawing more and more on her personal and historical mernories, Emecheta progressively develops her strongest metaphor, the slave analogy.

Her theme of slavery relates to the indigenous slavery in

Africa, the European slave trade and slavery as an allegory of the women's traditional status in society, irrespective of whether the wornan is technically "slave" or "free". She underscores the basic analogous similarities between al1 forms of slavery (Brown 56). Thus for her, slavery is a brutal continuity in hurnan history and persists in the subordination and powerlessness of women. In her works she demonstrates how the emotional and psychological effects impress upon these "slaves" their essentiai worthlessness and passivity, and how this sense of inferiority is unconsciously transmitted from one generation to another. At times she is somewhat equivocal, indicating that the degree to which the slaves allow themselves to accept their role contributes to their own victimization. Thus, in her use of the slave analogy, Emecheta draws on memory as recorded in history and practice, and she employs literary parallelism to underscore her theme, Slave masters rnay be slave traders, fathers, brothers, guardians, even children and traditions.

Emecheta demonstrates in The Joys of Motherhood that the love that binds a mother to her child is a form of bondage from which she cannot escape, and which can keep her in a situation which precludes any freedom or self-development. Slave masters may also take the form of customs or traditions, binding the individual to conformity and repetition, and thus restricting his or her freedom and growth. Akunna, the main protagonist of The Bride Price, is a tragic victim of the enslavement of women by traditional society, its rules and taboos. Brought up in urban Lagos, Akunna is exposed to a blend of cultures, but the traditional ways still hold authority. Ezekiel's death affords Emecheta the opportunity to depict his semi-westernized funeral in Lagos, juxtaposed with the custornary mourning Akunna and her family experience on their return to Ibuza. However, for Akunna, a young Lagos girl, ner fatherts death means more than the loss of a father. She also loses her mother, her way of "life", and her "shelter", for, in keeping with Igbo culture, her widowed mother and her father's wealth are inherited by her father's elder brother (28, 82) . The family thus have to move back to Ibuza, the father's rural home, where her mother is confined to one hut for nine months of mourning .' Because A£ rican customs were regarded as old- fashioned in Lagos, the move is, in a sense, backwaxds in tirne, although Emecheta demonstrates that whether in town or country, the force of tradition still prevails. Again, Emecheta shows that the Igbo culture privileges the male, treating her mother as her brother-in-lawts possession, and Akunna as a potential commodity for the bride price she would fetch. She is allowed to continue her schooling, however, for her uncle is persuaded that

"educated girls fetch more money" (75) . Emecheta, however, does not depict slavery as an exclusively

female bondage. Ezekiel, Akunna's father, died due to disease he

contracted while serving in the British army in Burma. He

returned to Lagos weakened by the experience. Emecheta

indirectly attributes Akunna's mother's failure to conceive after

her husband's return to his physical suffering. In this way, she

draws on the recorded past history of the Nigerian people, while

dominated and "enslavedn--in a sense "infectedt'--by the British,

and demonstrates how the brutality of slavery perpetuates itself

through time. As a result of the British "enslaving" Ezekiel, he

dies prematurely, forcing his wife and his daughter to rural

subjugation. While the active brutality of slavery is

perpetuated through subconscious memory, so is the passivity and

subordination that is unconsciously passed on from one generation

to another. Akunna's mother displays an ingrained habit of

dependency, accepting a subordinated status as she conforms to

the dictated expectations of her community. And Akunna, although

having the courage to marry the man of her choice, symbolically

submits in death to the pressures of tradition.

The theme of slavery is further developed through the

teacher Chike who "was an osu, the son of a common slave" (91).

His and Akunna's love for one another is the source of distress

for both their families, for ancient taboo forbids such a union,

Akunna is told, "No girl from a family as good as yours would

dream of marrying a slave", and that a father "would rather see his daughter dead than allow such a friendship" (134, 70).

Emecheta, in relatirig Chike's history, again draws on memory as embodied in Nigerian history to illustrate the ill-founded nature of the prejudice. His mother was a captured princess who was buried alive when her master died, but not before she had borne four sons and a daughter. When it became illegal to sel1 slaves, many masters sent their slaves to the missionaries, who in turn educated them. Such was Chikels fate. However, although now a

"freed slave", Chike's father, sufficiently conditioned by subservience, tells Chike, "1 would not want a son of mine to bring shame on his [Ezekiel's] only daughter (85) . Emecheta thus again exemplifies how the remembered submission and sense of inferiority is passed £rom one generation to the next.

Chike and Akunna are drawn to one another partly because of their schooling and exposure to Western ways: both are caught in conflicting worlds. In school, Akunna learns the European ways of living and at home she learns of her Igbo cultural traditions through the experience of her father's death, the traditional mourning, her mother's rernarriage and her own emergence into adulthood, marked by traditional fertility dances and the restrictive taboos associated with rnenstrual cycles and marriage customs. Caught between two worlds, Akunna can neither relinquish her past ancestry, nox discard her European education.

In Lagos, the mixture of European and African cultures was "such an unfortunate conglomeration of both that you ended up not knowing to which you belonged" (29). Her father went to church on Sundays, yet kept behind his door a gourd containing a magical potion which served as protection for the family. His wife went to the rnedicine man in Ibuza to help with her assumed infertility, while he was buried in a conflict of two cultures. christian hws were Sung with an "Africanised beat",

"occasionally sounding completely out of tune as the effect of the palm wine took hold" (33). Akunna is thus enslaved to both discordant traditions, and her tragic death is a powerful illustration of the damaging result.

Akunna and Chike both represent groups denied full equality with "free" males: both are subjected to restrictive taboos.

Thus, their sexual union underscores Emechetals analogy between women and slaves. Although Akunna is appreciative of Chike's true worth, she is "trapped in the intricate web of Ibuza tradition" and must either "obey or bring shame and destruction on her people" (116). Her situation is brought +,O a climax when her mother conceives, and her bride price is needed to help her mother through her confinement. She resists marriage, but when kidnapped by the son of a leading Ibuza family, her own family is obliged, according to ancient custom, to agree to her marriage to her abductor. Again Akunna is treated like a commodity, possessed forcibly, for her abductor has only to cut a lock of her hair to legitimize the union.

Anyone, Akunna is told, who contravenes the taboos and customs was "better dead", for if "you tried to hang on to life, you would gradually be helped towards death by psychological pressures .... Nobody goes against the laws of the land and survives" (141). Chike and Akunna not only defy the taboo against inter-marriage with slaves, but also break the tradition of the bride price. "If the bride price is not paid, the bride will die in childbirth", is the maxim that Akunna, despite her education, cannot shrug off, and one that she repeats to Chike

(154). Her death in childbirth thus exemplifies the novel's central thesis. Brown writes: Fate or destiny in its most significant

sense is not based on the mysterious

predispositions of inscrutable supernatural

forces, but on the function of social

institutions and the shaping patterns of

cultural traditions. In the woman's

experience, fate is therefore the collective will of the community and the

roles that are prescribed by the &ommunity.

In a subjective and much more crucial

sense, the fate of each woman is ultimately

determined by the extreme to which she

accepts or rejects that collective will.

(49)

Ymecheta concludes the novel with the authorial comment, "So it was that Chike and Akunna substantiated the traditional superstition they had unknowingly set out to eradicate" (168).

Akunna's death forcibly symbolizes the couple's inability to live as individuals outside of society, and offers no solution to the effects of cultural conflict and confusion. Emecheta describes Akunna as an obanje (9). 0banje is the

Igbo tem for children believed to be destined to die and be reborn repeatedly to the same mother, the Nigerian obanje myth being one about infant rnortality (Stratton 148). In The Bride

Price Emecheta translates the word as "living dead", aptly describing Akunna's life, buried in her inherited traditions which restrict hel: freedom and self determination. The heroine of her next novel, The Slave Girl, is also an obanje. Born to her mother after the loss of many children, she is given the name of Obanje and her life, too, is one entrapped in servitude.

Emecheta zhus uses the myth to reflect the status of women living in a society which denies them any self identification.

In The Bride Price, Ezekiel's disease indirectly leads to his wife and daughterls move from Lagos to rural Ibuza and to their subsequent submergence into the traditionally male dominated life. Similarly, in The Slave Girl, Obejeta's parents succumb to influenza, introduced to Nigeria by the Europeans.

Their deaths lead to Obejeta's leaving rural Ibuza for a life of slavery in the large trading centre of Onitsha. Again, Emecheta indirectly lays the blame for the slavery of her main protagonist on the Europeans. The story of Ogbanje Obejeta appears to be a fictionalized biography of Emecheta's mother, whose name was

Alice Ogbanje Emecheta. Towards the end of the novel, Obejeta adopts the English name, Alice. In an interview with James,

Emecheta speaks of The Slave Girl, and claims:

1 had never been to Onitsha, it was my

mother's story. Every day, whenever she asked me to do sornething and I made a

mistake, she would start, "When I was in

Onitsha", and she would go on and on and on .... our mothers used to go on recalling

their own lives when we went out of step .... this is Our oral tradition. It was

from al1 that information that 1 was able

to reconstruct ber life. (In Their Own

Voices 44)

Obejeta is born in 1910, and the novel closes at the end of the

Second World War, the year after Emecheta was born. Emecheta is thus recording her mother's generation, drawing on her familial, memory for the setting both in time and place.

Although Akunna moves £rom city to country, and Obejeta the reverse, from country to city, the themes of both novels suggest that whether in city or town, there is no escaping female subservience. Okolie's cruel act of selling his sister on purely economic and frivolous grounds echoes the economic basis for the slave trade- He needs money to buy ribbons 3nd tassels with which to adorn his body at his ritual coming of age dances. When he sells Obejeta to Ma Palagada for eight pounds, his bargaining is analogous to Ma Mee's bargaining over a large fish: such is

Obejeta's marketable value. Obejeta, in vain, tries to escape, as does the struggling fish, but she is caught by Ma Mee who, with double entendre, inforrns her of the reality of her situation. "Yeu are not lost little girl with pagan charms ... you axe just a domestic slave" (59). Whether or not technically "free", as a female she is enslaved, either by the male dominant society or by the slave trade itself. Back in Ibuza, Okolie is condemned, riot for selling his sister, but ironically because he "was violating the custom. He had no right to daim any money that his sister might fetch. Now that their father was dead, her bride-price when she grew up belonged by right to his older brothert' (80). Obejeta is thus subjected to the whims of her male guardians, and such subjection is sanctioned by the traditions of her people. The individual is lost within the dictates of custom and "Obejeta's name after a while was almost forgotten, so much so that some people muddled facts and said she had died with her parents .... So short was the rnemory of people" (79).

Through Ma Palagada, Emecheta again demonstrates how the trade is learnt and perpetuated. Ma Palagada, once married to a

Portuguese slave trader, perpetuates the subservience of her own sex. The dominating mentality is passed on, Victoria, Ma

Palagada's daughter, displaying an even harsher attitude towards the slaves than her mother. Through the actions of mother and daughter, Emecheta reinforces the female complicity in and responsibility for the victimization of their own sex. As the women's chorus in Nwapa's Efuru and -Idu constantly judge and condemn any women who stray from the traditional noms, so Ma

Palagada and Victoria reinforce the second-class status of their fellow women. By focusing on the responsibility of women for their own victimization, Emecheta appears to voice an indirect cal1 for female solidarity. On Obejetals return to Ibuza, when Eze assumes guardianship of her, she leaxns that she is no more free in Ibuza than in

Onitsha. "A girl was owned ... by her fathex or someone in place of her father or her older brother, and then, in general, by her group or homestead" (157). Uteh tells ber that "No woman is ever free. To be owned by a man is a great honour" (158)- Thus, when she marries Jacob, Obejeta rationalizes that it is "better to be a slave to a master of your choice" (168). She submits voluntarily to his will and was "happy to be submissive, even to accept an occasional beating" (174). Jacob, being a "very conventional person ... would do nothing that went against custom, tradition and local mores", and happily pays back

Clifford the eight pounds that Ma Palagada had originally paid for her (168). Emecheta closes the novel with the statement, "So as Britain was emerging from war once more victorious, and clairnino to have stopped the slavery which she helped to spread in all her black colonies, Obejeta, now a woman of thirty-five, was changing masters" (179). Smecheta suggests that superstitions and tradition share the responsibility, together with European domination, for perpetuating the brutal slavery practice, by citing traditional or economic reasons fox slavery. One of Ma Palagada's slaves "was born a twin and her people ... did not accept twins. Her mother had nursed her secretly and later had sold her, simply to give her a chance in life" (63). Another slave, Chiago, was sold when her mother became il1 and the fanily hit hard times. Chiago relates the chiiling tale of the beautiful slave unwillingly buried alive with her dead mistress (61, 62) .5 Later Chiago,

herself, is symbolically "buried alive", for after Ma Palagada' s

death she has no choice but to live with Pa Palagada, to whose

child she has given birth. Just as Francis in In the Ditch was wam and content on the dole, and Adah finds camaraderie with the

poor in Pussy Mansions, so too does Obejeta find advantages in

slavery. "It at least provided them with food, clothing and

shelter" and she learns to "make the best of everything, by being

docile and trouble free" (96, 63). Lulled into a sense of

security, the "slave1' becomes more and more dependent.

Emecheta records various cultural expectations of women, providing societal information which helps situate the woman without any individual rights, enslaved by the cycles of her body

and the dictates of her male-dorninated world. When Umeadi gives

birth, the only woman available to help her, Ukabegwu's wife, was

"under nso" or menstruating, so Umeadi had to give birth in the

open, for an ""unclean" woman was never allowed into the hut of a man with the Alo title. Okwuekwu had such a title" (17). When

Okwuekwu dies, the reader learns that a woman "in mourning . . , was forbidden to visit the Stream, to bathe, to enter any hut where the man of the family had a title" (28, 29). A woman in mourning was not really expected to survive long after the death of her husband; however, when Umeadi dies while still in mourning, she is denied a proper burial, and is thrown into the

"bad bush" (82). If a woman married some one who did not speak

Igbo, she was then "regarded as lost or even sold into slaverytt

(34). Once married, the good wife should forego the gods of the huts of her own father. "From that day she shoufd be loyal to her husband, his gods and his people, in body and spirit", and use bis praise name (11). "Even slaves . . . took the greetings of

their master" (16).

Throughout the novel, Emecheta dernonstrates the resilience of cultural memory, retaining custorns and belief s, although superficially influenced by Western culture. The Western teachings of the church never completely eradicate the inherited values and beliefs of their own people, Obejeta benefits from the missionary teaching: by learning to read Igbo, she gains a

form of mental liberation. However, the slaves are also taught

to sew and cook, domestic attributes that serve to make thern more

"elite", whether in the market place or in marxiage (105). When

they Wear Western-style dresses made in Mrs Simpsons' classes,

the Igbo women still Wear their lappas over their skirts and

shoulders, symbolically syncretising both cultures. Obejeta assumes the Christian faith, but does so for the advantages it offers, comparing marriage in a church with an Igbo tradition,

claiming "it is like a man cutting a lock of d girl's hair - it makes a marriage last forever until either of them dies" (173).

The tenacity with which traditional customs persist thus

indicates the reluctance and difficulty with which they are

re jected.

Katherine Frank comments that in Emecheta' s works, her protagonists' "degree of servitude is inversely proportional to the amount of education they receive" (481) . Clearly Emecheta, like Waciuma and Ogot, depicts education as the most powerful means of women's liberation. In The Bride Price, Akunna is encouraged in her development as an independent self-determining being by Chike, her teacher. In The Slave Girl, the scanty education Cbejeta receives profoundly affects her life, and her absorption in an Igbo story book depicts her transportation away from her cramped, miserable life. Adah in Second Class Citizen and In The Ditch is better equipped to challenge her cultural upbringing and cope with change, due to her education. However,

Nnu Ego, in The Joys of Motherhood receives no forma1 education, and of al1 Emecheta's heroines, she is most firmly enslaved by her traditions. Her memcry of Igbo culture is al1 the means she has by which to identify herself, and when exposed to the life in

Lagos, during British domination and the Second World War, she

Decomes confused and hopelessly lost.

Emecheta draws again on her own persona1 memory by depicting

Nnu Ego's early life in her home town village of Ibuza. The night Nnu Ego is conceived, Agbadifs senior wife falls il1 and subsequently dies. When recording her funeral, Emecheta

reiterates the horrific tale of the mistress's slave being buried alive, thereby accentuating the role tradition plays in slavery.

Al1 the things that she would need in her

after-life were gathered and arranged in her wooden coffin .... Then her persona1 slave was ceremoniously called in a loud

voize by the medicine man: she must be laid

inside the grave first. A good slave was

supposed to jump into the grave willingly, happy to accompariy her mistress; but this

young and beautiful woman did not wish to

die yet.

She kept begging for her life, much to

the annoyance of many of the men standing

around. (23)

Agbadi's son administers a blow to her head, but as she dies, the slave claims prophetically, "1 shall come back to your household, but as a legitimate daughter. 1 shall come back" (23). When the dibia declares that Nnu Ego, born with a significant lump on the back of her head, is the slave reincarnated, Nnu Ego, like the heroines of The Slave Girl and The Bride Price, becomes another obanje. Even her name Nnu Ego (new ego) may be a pun on her reincarnation. Emecheta tnerefore parallels Nnu Ego's life with that of the slave's; she is a slave to her traditions and a slave to her children, and like Akunna and Obejeta, she is buried in traditional patriarchy and remains figuratively buried al1 her life. The superstitions associated with the slave girl have a powerful influence on Nnu Ego, who cannot shirk their influence.

Her dreams of the slave girl handing her babies suggest that she allows her traditional chi subconsciously to influence her mind.

Thus Ernecheta, while imparting great sympathy for Nnu Ego in her struggles, again suggests that her hexoine remains enslaved by virtue of her own mentality. And Ernecheta also suggests that the zubmissive and self-sacrificing characteristics are embodied in the cultural, social memory Nnü Ego inherits from the past. In this novel, Emecheta deftly works on two levels,

simultaneously on the one hand informing the reader of the Igbo

tradition that esteems motherhood as "the greatest joy" a woman

can experience, and on the other, depicting the narrative plot

largely seen through Nnu Ego's consciousness. As a result

Emecheta offers the reader a dual perspective whereby the merits of the Igbo mother tradition are tested and tried by harsh

reality. Unlike Second Class Citizen, in which Adah assesses the merits of her own culture when she is dislocated in a foreign country, in The Joys of Motherhood Emecheta leaves the assessrnent

ro the reader.

Agaic Emecheta supplies the reader with Igbo societal

information as it pertains to Nnu Ego's life, particularly the

Igbo belief that pregnancy, giving birth and raising children

affords a woman her fulfillment. "What else does a woman want?"

Nnaife asks when Nnu Ego first falls pregnant (49) . Nnu Ego

xefers to the event as "the greatest joy" of her life, and when

Agbadi and Umunna argue over the right to Onafs unborn child she begs, "Don't take my joy away . . . . the greatest joy of my life"

(50, 24). The repetition of the word "joy" recalls Akunna's child in The Bride Price, who, despite causing her motherts death, is called Joy. In the Igbo society this is not ironic,

for "the joy of being a mother was the joy of giving al1 to your children" (JM 224) . Emecheta is indebted to Nwapa's Efuru for the ironic title and theme of the novel, for in the last paragraph of Efuru, Nwapa writes that Efuru, "had never experienced the joy of motherhood" (281) . In many ways, The Joy of Motherhood is a response to Efuru, for Emecheta recounts the harsh realities of motherhood. Nnu Ego, totally bound by her cultural customs, is initially tortured by her inability to reproduce with Rmatokwu. When her first baby by Nnaife dies, she tries to commit suicide, claiming, "1 am not a woman any more".

The crowd cease to think of fier as mad when they hear the cause of her distress, for "they al1 agreed that a woman without a child for her husband was a failed woman" (62, emphasis added).

However, in time she manages to produce many healthy children including sons, but her life is far from joyous.

Emecheta records many of the women's expectations and customs recalled in Second Class Citizen, and also by Nwapa in

Efuru and K. Nnu Ego learns the traditional gender expectations from her father. "My sons, you will al1 grow to be kings among men" he tells his children, "My daughters, you will al1 grow to rock your children's children" (29). The value of a girl is largely materialistic, related to the bride price she can bring to her father with marriage. Even the name Nnu Ego, meaning twenty bags of cowries, puts a monetary value on the child. This value system reflects back upon the mothers. Adaku is made to feel inferior to Nnu Ego because she has no son and when Nnu Ego has a still born baby, "that it was a girl .... lessenec! her sense of loss" (195). Adaku tells Oshia that he is worth "more than ten times" that of her own daughter, so the boys learn early in life their presumed superiority (128)- Giving birth, especially to a son, gives a woman an identity, for she is then addressed as someone's mother. A woman who is unmaxried or childless has no status and no identity for she has no traditionally prescribed role to perform: womanhood is thus defined by the ability to bear children.

Not only is the Igbo woman treated like a commodity in marriage, but she is further humiliated by the custom of polygyny. If a woman fails to conceive, as did Nnu Ego with

Amatokwu, she is demoted beneath wives whose fertility elevates them in the polygynous hierarchy, or the bride price is returned and the bride returns to her father. The narrator reiterates the custom of widows and their families being inherited by the eldest living brother, such as when Nnaife inherits Adaku. The husband's ego is further built on the number of women he can support and when Adaku leaves him, Nnaife procures another wife.

Contrary to the impression given by many male authors, showing the traditional way of life to be a hannonious one, upset only by the intrusion Western culture, the narrator depicts,

Miriam Were in The Eighth Wife, the female point of view, relating the jealousy and discomfort polygyny causes, even in the rural setting of Ibuza. The wives' nail biting and pining when

Agbadi sleeps with his mistress indicates their concern, and the night Ona conceives Nnu Ego, Agbadi's senior wife's sudden illness reflects her suffering (22). In the city, the difficulties of polygyny are further exacerbated. Living in cramped quarters renders the polygynous way of life intolerable.

In Ibuza, Nnu Ego, as senior wife, would at least have her own hut. Apart £rom the emotional stress polygyny causes, more wives and more children present a staggering economic burden, and poverty casts a different picture of the joy an additional child may bring. As the mother of three sons, Nnu Ego "was supposed to

be happy in her poverty, in her nail biting agony, in her

churning stomach, in her rags, in her cramped room" (167). "Yes, I have many children", she acknowledges, "but what do I have to

feed them on? On my life. I have to work myself to the bone to

look after them. I have to give them my all" (186). "She was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children" (137). Bound, too, by the belief that the sons should be

privileged, Nnu Ego informs her resentful daughters that they must work to put the boys "in a good position in life, so that

they will be able to look after the farnily. When your husbands are nasty to you they will defend you" (176). Ironically, investing in her sons as her own social security fails in the

modern world. Though Oshia and Adim acquire a good education,

they leave the country and neglect their mother and siblings.

The bus driver's rernark, "It's nice to have daughters" possibly

reflects a changing attitude in Lagos toward that tradition, but

it is a change that escapes Nnu Ego. She becomes caught on a

treadmill, working not only to provide food for her children, but

schooling for her sons, too busy to dig herself out of her proverbial "ditch". Thus, the reality of Nnu Ego's circumstances

forcibly challenges the traditional belief in the joys of

motherhood.

Emecheta, as in her previous novels, rejects the Igbo

customs that trap the woman in subservience and ignorance. However, with the character of Adaku she does offer a positive alternative; that of the independent, assertive woman. By taking charge of her own life, and establishing her own identity, one that is not predicated upon any husband or son, she is able to avoid perpetuating the self-defeating subservient mentality.

Adaku acts as a foi1 to Nnu Ego. "1 want to be a dignified single woman" she daims. "1 shall work to educate my daughters, though 1 shall not do so without male companionship" (170, 171).

Her unenviable position of being without sons, of being a widow and thus the second wife, perhaps help goad her towards a new awareness. She learns from her negative experience the unjust inequalities of the tradition, and determines to give her daughters a liberating education.

In contrast to Adaku, Nnu Ego does not learn from her experiences. She clings to her status as first wife and mother of sons. Althouoh she, herself, was first sold to her first hus~and, returned like a piece of defective merchandise and later

sold to Nnaife, she nevertheless perpetuates the custom by valuing her twin daughters for their prospective worth, a price

that will help educate the boys. Her traditional way of thinking

is further exemplified by her attitude to Nnaife's working for

the Meers as a washerman, doing "woman's work", emasculated by

his subservience.' Just as womanhood is defined in terms of

child bearing, so are Igbo men defined according to their work habits. That the Igbo practice of enslaving their women is analogous to the British colonizer's exploitation of men such as

Nnaife is something Nnu Ego cannot comprehend: however, Emecheta,

through Nnu Ego's reaction, clearly equates the traditional womanrs role with that of a powerless servant. In the white- dominated economy of Lagos, the men are slaves to money, "shining white man's money", and they are forced to sel1 themselves accordingly, in a way analogous to Adaku, who sells herself as a prosritute (51). Nnaife also fails to learn £rom his own experiences. Emecheta demonstrates that racism, like the slave mentality, is perpetuated through experience. Nnaife is verbally abused by Dr. Meers's racist comments. Like many Africans, who were so "used to being told they were stupid", he started to believe in his own imperfections (83). However, Nnaife reacts to his daughter's choice of husband saying, "She is better dead" than marry a Yoruba man (209). Nnaife follows the tradition of paternal control of the choice of his daughter's husband, but he fails to learn from his analogous racist experience with the

Meers.

When innocenc Nnaife is dragged into a war he neither understancis, nor wants any part of, Nnu Ego complains that "the

British own us, just like God does" (148). Her words sugqest that God, too, is a slave master. With the confusion of

Christian faith and Igbo customs, both Nnu Ego and Nnaife tend to adhere to whatever principles suit them. Just as the cook marries his wife in church to Save his job, Nnaife assumes a superficial Christianity to protect his. He even whiçtles "Abide with me" in Mrs Meers's presence, an ironic rerninder of the colonizers' inability to live accordixg to their own faith. At times it is difficult to assess Nnu Ego's, and possibly

Emecheta's, assessment of Christianity. The narrator blames (or credits) Nnu Ego's Christian religion for teaching her "to bear her cross with fortitude. If hers was to support her family, she would do so, until her husband found a new job" (89). The narrator also denounces Christianity as a prop, a support, protecting people from facing the harshness of reality (162).

What Nnu Ego fails to recognize is that her belief in and adherence to her cultural traditions may also be a prop, distorting the reality of her own existence, and the narrator does not question how one identifies oneself without adherence to some external code.

In many ways Nnu Ego's stxuggles are similar to those of the women the world over. By demonstrating Nnu Ego's favouring of the elder son, Oshia, as a mistake, Emecheta challenges the primogeniture traditiofi in the Igbo culture. However, this custom is by no means foreign to the Western world. The works of

Jane Austen and others deal with the inequities dealt to daughters and younger sons. And, by depicting the disadvantages of women with handicaps of poverty, Emecheta places the experiences of her women within a broad context of social injustices, in the West as a whole and in the Third world. Nnu

Ego is, for the most part, a single mother, battling on her own, and, as Adah in In the Ditch, she surely speaks for al1 single, poor mothers who are handicapped in their own self-developrnent by the bcndage of child care and poverty. In depicting the slave mentalities of "dominance and subserT;ience" as continuous and part of our assumed social memoxies, she indirectly suggests that this is a general human condition. As Emecheta depicts women as those most often forced to assume subservient roles, hex indirect cornmentaries have much in common with Westerr, Lfercinist protest writing. While she draws on her social memory as embodied in her cultural past, and expresses her negative attitude towards the restrictive authority traditions hold, she manages to posit Igbo women in Nigeria as having much in common with women the world over . In Destination Biafra, through the characterization of

Debbie, Emecheta presents a solution to the perpetuating continuity of female subservience to tradition and motherhood. Debbie epitomizes a "new breed of Nigerian woman ... in the making", for while she renounces her cultural ways, she also, in her rejection of her white British lover, symbolically refutes any Western ally (43). Virginia Coulon writes that what she is searching for "is not a replica of Africa's traditional past nor a mode1 of the West, but a new, different and specifically

African way" (10). The independence Debbie embraces is analogous to the new detribalised and independent Nigeria that Emecheta optimistically envisions. In Destination Biafra, Emecheta records Nigeria ' s more recent history, from a woman's point of view. Again women are shown in a compromised situation, for the narrator claims that

"in marriage the male partner was superior and the female must be subservient, obedient, quiet to the point of passivityu (43).

However, the women are further depicted as victims of war, suffering killings, disease, malnutrition, horrific mutilations and constant, repeated rape. The enemy, per se, is not always readily recognized, for women are victims of the soldiers' anarchic bestiality, be they Biafran or Nigerian. Because many

Nigerian men reject marriage to a raped woman, for many the price of war is their womanhood, often their motherhood as well. The repeated rape of the Nigerian "mothers" is analogous to the symbolic continuous rape of the motherland, be it by the British or the new leaders of independence.

Emecheta is ambitious with this novei, trying to cover the complex details of a confusing war, portraying political corruption and manipulation, while positioning her most feminist of protagonists in the midst of the action. When she journeys with a group of women to the war front, Debbie assumes care for a new born infant, whose mother died while in premature labour, the infant symbolically named Biafra- Debbie, an Oxford educated, liberated, young woman is unaccustomed to carrying a child on her back; so far from her origins has her education led her. She finds the child onerous in her lengthy trek. The different tribes are likewise a burden to Nigeria and the baby's death foreshadows the death of the nation of Biafra, born at the wrong time. Debbie throws her lot in with Federal forces, supporting a new nation, a new Nigeria, one that supersedes tribal differences .

In recording the Biafran war, Emecheta voices more recent historical memories, events which were relayed across the world.

By charting the woman's point of view, she gives voice to those of her own sex and pays indirect tribute to the Nigerian woman's strength and endurance in the face of horrific suffering, Into the basic plot, Emecheta weaves her recurrent themes, questioning the ready subservience of traditional women through the consciousness of her protagonist, Debbie. Debbie's mother, although a woman of inner strength and wisdom, laments her daughter's non-conformity. However, Debbie realizes that her nother suppresses her own thoughts and wishes to appease her husband's ego. She realizes that for twenty-five years her mother has "been the wife of a domineering man who took it upon

himself to have the last word on everything that went on around

him, including his wife" (110) . She has different ambitions.

"She wanted to do something more than child breeding and rearing

and being a good passive wife to a man whose ego she must boost

al1 her days, while making sure to submerge every impulse that made her a full hurnan" (45) . Like Adaku in The Joys of

Motherhood, Debbie learns from her observations and experiences.

While Emecheta again infers that the wrongs were initiated with

colonization, Debbie recognizes the errors in perpetuating the

exploitation learnt from the British.

Her father was trying hard to convince

himself that the corrupt side gains he made

were his entitlement. She knew how his

argument would run: "The Europeans who

ruled us for so long did it, now itls Our

turn ...." Her mother likewise saw nothing

wrong in the proverbial ten per cent from

al1 contracts signed by the federal goverment going into the Ogedemgbes'

private purse. (49)

Debbie has the mental strength to end the pexpetuating cycles of exploitation and submission and estâblish a new role for herself and the Nigerian wornan, one in which the woman is in charge of her own life. Her challenge to male dominance and power is symbolized by her carrying her own gun. Debbie recognises that the mind of her Nigerian friend and politician, Aboshi, is still wcolonized" as is that of her white boyfriend, Alan; and she understands the need for Africans, in Ngugi wa Thiongtofswords, to "decolonize the mind" themselves. Only by consciously so doing will the assumed memories of dominance and subservience be halted, and no longer be subconsciously passed from one generation to the next. Only by taking control in their own way will they halt the rape of their own land,

While Emecheta's optimism is expressed through the character of Debbie, the placing of an assertive woman in the forefront of war, traditionally a male preserve, is not always convincinq.

She carries her own gun, negotiates with politicians, and along with other women, survives horrific war atrocities. The soldiers grant her no respect or authority: Debbie is used, raped and humiliated. While she demonstrates the ability and understanding

CO withstand such pressures, once again, Emecheta's heroine is an exceptional wornan. Emecheta is asking much of her own sex--to risk so much to readjust the traditional and inherited delineation of gender roles. Furthemore, Debbie's brutal treatment by soldiers clearly demonstrates that women cannot establish a new identity for themselves on their own, but only when men can recognize them as they wish to be perceived. Furthermore, while Debbie rejects Western culture along with Nigerian cultural traditions, she remains the product of a distinctly privileged Western education. However, whether Debbie succeeds as a convincing character or not, Emecheta certainly succeeds in her role as a historian, recording with chilling realism the remembered atrocities perpetuated towards women during the Bia£ran war. And, although she reiterates her rejection of traditional attitudes to women, in Destination

Biafra, she demonstrates the potential power a writer has to create new realities by depicting new possibilities, depicting a new role for women of the future. Endnotes

1 For further discussion on Emecheta's use of the slavery analogy, refer to this work (102).

7 & The Igbo tradition may well better prepare women for change. When a woman marries, she moves to her husband's home, and lives with his family, a move that must demand a certain arnount of flexibility and adaptation. The man traditionally remains in his home town.

3 In hex later work, Double Yoke, Emecheta gives a sympathetic depiction of the Nigerian male trapped in his cultural attitudes.

4 In her interview with James, Buchi Emecheta speaks with vehemence about the "crazyw women sticking to their mourning traditions (In Their Voices 36).

5 This tale is repeated in The Joys of Motherhood (23).

6 Arna Ata Aidoo writes in "For Whom Things Did Not

Change1', "When a black man is with his wife who cooks and chores for him, he is a man. When he is with white folks for whom he cooks and chores, he is a woman" (No Sweetness Here 17) . CHAPTER THREE

WERE, TLALI AND HEAD WNEGOTIATE CULTURAL LOCATIONS

In Destination Biafra, Emecheta depicts the need for women

to ignore cultural dictates regarding a woman's status. Debbiet s

challenge is to fulfil her own ambitions in the face of male

prejudice. Kenyan writer, Miriam Were, offers a different

solution to the problems of male chauvinism. She argues,

indirectly, that since Kenyan society is male dominated, change

can only be effective if endorsed by the rnalemL

Were's novels are simple tales which offer exemplary codes

of behaviour for young people to emulate. Because she writes for

young adults, her message is clearly stated, at times somewhat

- simplistic and didactic. However, her novels merit attention

because she reassesses her past with neither the strong

condemation of cultural ways, as voiced by Emecheta, nor the

antagonism towards Western culture, as voiced by her compatriots,

Waciuma, Ogot, and Njau. She indicates a need to moderate and

readjust attitudes, rather than cultural customs, so as to

embrace equality of opportunity for both sexes. Moreover, she

postulates the need for young men to initiate such moderation and

readj us tment .

In order to depict an improved future, Were, in The High

School Gent (1972), refers to past communal mernories in the form

of preconceived ideas handed down through the community,

attitudes towards women, rnarriage and education. Namunyu and his peers exhibit stereotyped assessments of women, attitudes which their experience at school helps readjust. Were questions the unequa1 after-effects of sexual relationships by relating how pregnant schoolgirls cease their education to mother their children, while the young boys continue their studies unaffected.- As a result, serious minded girls, such as Sarah, believe they must remain single in order to pursue a career.

Were furthermore questions the male attitude towards wornen in non-traditional careers. Women teachers are not welcorned by the boys. "They did not want a woman to teach them Biology, Women were not good at science" (102). The boys' reaction to a new

Mathematics teacher is yet more negative: not only is she a woman, but a "native" (110). "It's al1 right if they are

Europeans" protested one boy. "We don't marry Europeans. But to be taught by a woman like the one 1 will marry" (110). "Foreign women are not quite women anyway!" another student cornments

(109). The youths express their feelings about "women 'getting out of place' and thinking they were 'as important as or more important than men'" (112). The headmaster, in many instances the authorial spokesman, explains in a somewhat pedagogical manner :

You keep saying "We are men, women can't do

this and women can't do that" .... This is a century in which it is brains that count.

And anyone can get anywhere if they have the brains .... But muscle will get you

nowhere. You will be the lorry drivers while the women become Company directors.

(104 1 The reader may q-iestion the headmaster's heirarchical assessrnent of careers, but his exhortation to strive for educational equality is clear. By giving these opinions ta the headmaster to articulate, Were relies on the traditionally accepted authority of a white male to give weight to her words. However, the black teacher also appears to take up the authorial comment when she

States :

1 think it's a waste of time to argue that

we are equal or unequal to white people. 1 find it equally a waste of time to talk of

whether women and men are equal. What 1

think is essential is that everyone be

encouraged to explore their possibilities

to the lirnit. (112)

While the teacher refuses to be drawn into a debate about equality of the sexes or of races, Were nevertheless challenges the time-honoured, communal thinking.

The story of Namunyu's brother's inability to pay his bride price informs the reader of marriage customs, and while Were clearly condones the bride price tradition, she places prime importance on the strength of the relationship. She indirectly applauds the young couple who have the love and cornitment to wait with restraint until they can make the bride price payment, rather than break off their relationship. Namunyu and Sarah are in a parallel predicament; while Namunyu's friend, Ginendwa, marries straight after school, Namunyu and Sarah pursue their

studies and place their faith in one another. Namunyu's

headmaster and Sarah's headmistress do marry; the headmistress

thereby diffuses Sarah's belief that she must remain single to

achieve her goals, and the headmaster demonstrates that a man may

, be happily married to someone of equal status. The two thus

offer an example of mutual respect, both with fulfilling careers.

The mentors Were offers her two young protagonists are,

however, both white, possibly reflecting the author's acceptance

of Westerners, and, like many of her peers, Were advocates the

advantages of a Western education. She records Namunyu's

fascination with European literature, and his enjoyment of the

different genres. He delights in books by Dickens, Dumas, Hope,

Paton, and Douglas and is fascinated by the lives of Roosevelt

and Helen Keller. So taken is he with The Prisoner of Zenda that

ne calls Sarah his "Flavia". Ginendwa likewise, captivated by

Blackrnoore ' s Lorna Doone, searches for his "Lorna" - That Flavia

and Lorna and their settings are a far cry £rom the realities of

Kenya is not an issue. When the boys ask why they do not read

books written by Africans, the headmaster points out that Cry the

Beloved Country is written by a South African. He does not

comment that Alan Paton is white. Through the person of Miss

Livingstone, who assumes a European name, and wears her hair long

and straight, Were appears to challenge a strong African

identity. While such a challenge may be somewhat puzzling, at no

time does Were directly reject past customs in the manner of

Emecheta. The signif icance of Miss Livingstone ' s name is unclear, although possibly Were depicts her as an explorer of a new frontier, that of non-traditional careers for black women.

Were seems to postulate the need to accept a blending of cultures. Sarah's surname is George and Namunyu's first name is

Washington; hence, the prospective union of the two suggests an optirnistic future for Kenya, a strong leadership, but one with a decidedly Western influence. However that leadership clearly involves a partnership of both sexes.

In The High School Gent, Were skilfully uses the male protagonist's point of view to voice her most feminist arguments and seems to place the responsibility for the equality of sexes on the shoulders of the young men. She does not show, as do

Nwapa and Emecheta, how women may participate in their own victimization, o£ten judging one another harshly for not conforming with their expected roles. In contrast, Were's attitude to the past is positive, advocating that young Kenyans should make the most of whatever opportunities they have, build on those opportunities, and develop their own destinies. When

Namunyx returns from school in the holidays, he participates in the wrestling traditions of his people. He works hard to build up his strength and experience, but his courage and determination win hirn respect from his peers. When Namunyu's mother dies,

Namunyu does not neglect his family duties. At the same time,

Were depicts Namunyu's growing consciousness as he learns through his edacation of the achievements of famous women, and through his relationship with Sarah, that women are of equal intelligence, demanding equal respect. Were thus offers a happy, somewhat idealistic blend of cultures, and her novel reads as a moral code for young people, guiding them to rnake the best of both their various cultural influences and develop themselves to

the full, individual men and wornen alike.

Were's later novel, Your Heart is my Altar is a delightful

romantic tale, also suitable for young people. Chirnolo, the young protagonist, through whose eyes the tale is told, falls in

love with a young Moslem man from an "enemy" clan. The novel

unfolds with echoes of the Romeo and Juliet plot, for when

Chimolo's Christian father is killed by the enemy clan, her brother takes his own life. Clearly, Were abhors the religious

and clan prejudices, and through Chimolo and Aluvisia offers an

optimistic, harmonious alternative- Chimolo struggles to

identify herself as a Christian girl in a traditional community.

Her growing attachment to Moslem Aluvisia provides the plot, and

the novel closes with a sense of hope as to the future of the

young couple. They offer a high standard of behaviour for others

to emulate for they show, by their love for each other, that

religious and ethnic hatred need not be passed from one

generation to another and that no child is obliged to inherit his parents ' or clan's pre judices. Alusivia, like Namunyu, is

another mode1 of young manhood; sensitive to Chimolo, he appreciates her thoughts and feelings, and respects her opinions.

For this rural tale, Were draws more heavily on her cultural memory as embodied in custom than she does in The Hiqh School

Gent; she examines the blends of traditional and Western customs,

traditional faiths and other religions, and she once more advocates non-traditional careers for women promoting the advantages of equal education for both sexes. Chimolo hoped she would stay at school until the end of primary school, "but there was too much talk these days about girls wasting time in school" and she is grateful to Aluvisia for realizing that she is not

"stupid" sim~lybecause she has little education (16, 27).

Ligami and Limwenyi, who do receive further education, fa11 into conflict with the chief who opposes women having careers and young men f ollowing non-traditional occupations. Ambitious for her future, Limwenyi claims, "1 don't intend to get married for a long time .... I want to prove the chief wrong for not allowing us girls to train for a career. We'll teach him to understand that there are more things to life than home-making" (25) ,

Chimolols parents are staunch Christians, and, in this respect, the novel provides an interesting contrast with

Waciuma's Daughter of Mumbi. Unlike Waciuma, who seldom voices her inner feelings about Christianity, and never questions her parents' faith, Chimolo expresses the inner struggles and doubts of a young woman coping with the divergent pulls of her traditional background and her Christian upbringing, demonstrating that the pull of traditional lifestyles cannot be swept away in a single generation. Because Chimolo belongs to a community that retains its cultural ways, she feels rnarginalized by her different faith. She States, "We had grown up strangers in Our land, always trying to figure out how a Christian should act but never quite sure. The girls from the traditional villages seemed to know so much more than we did" (86). She is confused by the Christian attitude towards sexuality, for to talk to boys, she has been told, is lust, and she wonders "how these potential evils in the form of boys were supposed to turn into respected husbandst' (86). Naturally drawn to the culture of her ancestral past, Chimolo feels guilt for abandoning her customs, and when she goes to visit the traditional soothsayer, her

Christian faith deserts her. "1 began to address the ancestral spirits asking them for pardon on behalf of those of us who have deserted them by taking on other religions" (62). When thinking about death, she claims:

1 began to realize how hard it was to get

into the Christian paradise .... being a

paradise of strangers, they could easily

shut you out without too much remorse, 1

felt. At that moment 1 cast my lot with

the ancestors. 1 could not imagine them

shutting me out .... They couldn't possibly

disown me as a member of the clan. (64)

The sense of belonging to her own people is so strong that her clan culture remains her means of identification: she simply cannot deny, or be denied, her own origins. Ligami and Limwenyi are more adversely disadvantaged by the strictures of their faith; they are targets for ridicule and tonnent by the other young people. The two get caught up in an attempt of the Moslems and Christians to eradicate ancestral worship, and are, unknowingly, traitors to their own clan, causing of death of their chief and also, most tragically, their own father. Were uses Chimolo's family as a synecdochal symbol; the rifts they enCounter due to the influence of modern ideas reflect what is happening in the community at large, and their final destruction poses a salutary warning. However, Were appears to blame prejudice and inflexibility as the cause of the rifts, rather than the influences themselves. Chimolo's mother and father corne £rom antagonistic clans, and her paternal aunt has not always been welcome in their home. Chimolors father's conversation with his daughterts father-in-law reflects differing points of view.

"God is merciful," Father said to Mukwana's father-

in-law when he came to visit our home.

"Our ancestors are kind to us," he said.

"They wouldn't let us perish".

"Christ certainly works wonders in response to Our

prayers," Father continued.

"Our ancestors always bow to our needs, once we

remember them" . ( 99)

Their conversation illustrates, in a manner suitable for young people to follow, that although the two men talk on different wave lengths, neither one listening to the other, their sentiments are similar. Were suggests an open-minded approach to the influence of foreign cultures. The danger, she poçits, is the people's intolerance to and lack of understanding of difference, rather than the different cultures themselves.

Were introduces the reader to the Kenyan culture by exposing

Chimolo to time-honoured customs practised from birth through puberty to marriage. Were thus records customs and provides a certain amount of sociological information. However, as with -The

High School Gent, such information is carefully blended into the story and always plays into the plot. Most of the customs she describes pertain to women, their activities and ways of behaviour. Chimolo's sister's giving birth affords Were the opportunity to expose Chimolo to some cultural customs surrounding childbirth. The baby is announced by using a symbolic "secret language", "a ring in front of the door-step if it's a girl and a panga if it's a boy" (42) .3 Chimolo learns of the custom practised if a woman loses many babies; when eventually the woman does give birth to a healthy child, other women take the child and let the mother find it on a path. In this way the women intervene the forces which are responsîble for the womanrs repeated loss. Were also records difficulties facing uncircumcised girls. Chimolo's "greatest regrets came in the circwncision season when [she] rnissed al1 the joyous ceremonies of those entering manhood" (87). She and her siblings are denied participation in traditional practices. "To dance was sin, and to watch drum-beaters was an even worse sin" (87). She finds the custom of sleeping with boys as practised under the watchful eye of her grandmother strange; she does not know what is required of her, and the other young girls mock her sense of alam.

Were also exposes Chimolo to the kidnapping custom, a custom which belittles Akunna in Emecheta's The Bride Price. Ligami kidnaps a girl, but only to prove his manliness to others; he is not interested in marrying the girl, but she is shrewd enough to mark bis fatherfsprize bu11 with her blood and hence the f-11~ have to forfeit their beast. ' Chimolo' s elder sister, LiItkwenyi, is also kidnapped, and she too rejects the custom. She did net assume the role of wife but merely returned to her home. The villagers are not happy to see her back without any discussions as to a marriage settlernent, but Limwenyi has the strength to ignore them. "No one is going to trick me, not even into marriage" (83). Limwenyi suffers with admirable silence, and

Chimolo's father is deeply distressed by Ligamifs behaviour. By presenting these cultural customs, particularly those pertaining to women, Were records a difficult transitional period, and demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages in both traditional and Western ways. Unlike Emecheta, she does not appear to reject these customs, but remains optimistic, offering as a solution, mutual understanding, tolerance and respect at the individual level.

In The Eighth Wife, another short novel, Were examines the issues of polygyny. The story opens with the male circumcision ceremcnies of particular importance to the clan she depicts, for the eldest living son of the chief, Shalimba, has corne of age. The circumcision ceremony inducts young men into manhood. However, subsequent infection is common, and Shalimba, although succumbing to the knife in a manly fashion, subsequently battles for his life. Although Were demonstrates the anxiety of the mothers as their sons are removed from their care, and subjugated to a process inherent with physical dangers, she does not question the pxactice. According to custom, the parents of the newly initiated man then select a daughter-in-law from another clan. When the aging chief selects Kalimonje for Shalimba, he, himself, falls in love with the young girl. Thus father and son both vie for the same woman. Unaware that the chief is contemplating her as his eighth wife, Kalimonje speaks to Shalimba of her dislike of polygyny. She would prefer to rnarry a poor man, rather than the chief's son, because a poor man would be unable to afford many wives,

She has experienced the suffering, fighting and jealousy within such polygynous families. She notes the example of the rich, old man in her clan who refuses to take on more than one wife as he wishes to avoid the expense and conflict that inevitably arise, and as a result his harmonious home is wealthy and happy. Shalimba, however, puts forth arguments supporting polygyny, arguments which Kalimonje appears to accept. Polygyny, Were seems to postulate, may be supported if no children are forthcoming £rom the first marriage, to ensure that a man's seed be fruitful. Were appears to suggest that, in certain circurrstances only, polygyny might be condoned. She also seems to adhere to the custom of attributing blame for an infertile marxiage on the woman. Happily the young couple in her tale do prevail over the chief, and do marry, much to the approval of the clan elders. Were's criticism is clearly focused on the chief, who acquires younger and younger women to bolster his failing libido, without any concern given to the feelings of his wives. He also displays resentment towards his son, his future heir, a threat to his dominance. The elders and the community at large disapprove of the chief's behaviour. And again, through the character of ~halimba,Were depicts a young man capable of reassessing the attitudes of his past. He is sensitive and careful in his handling of Kalimonje. His arguments for polygyny are put forward rationally and seem to imply that should he and Kalimcnje have a fruitful marriage, he would have no need for more than one wife. Through the contrasting portraits of Shalimba and his father, Were posits the need for the young male to change his attitude rather than his custorns. He needs to listen to women with understanding, and treat them with the respect they deserve.

Were's works clearly place faith in the younger generation, and her solutions, albeit somewhat idealistic, are appropriate goals for young people. With more education, she seems to believe, they will slough off inherited prejudices. Through mutual understanding and greater awareness they will reinforce

Fanon's theory that the individual should not allow him or herself to be "mired in what the past has determinedw, and through her acceptance of foreign influences, she supports the benefits of a broader perspective leading to greater tolerance and understanding of the other (230-231).

South African, Miriam Tlali's memories of her past experiences lead her, in her novel Amandla (1980), also to place hope for the future in the younger generation, particularly young men, However, in her earlier work, Muriel at Metropolitan

(1975), she focuses on the political conditions of a city woman, Muriel, who has to devise her own means of coping with her circuiiistances in Jcrk~nesburg,for she finds no solutions offered her through the lives of those with whom she works.' In her later work, Amandla, she no longer advocates a personal, individual response to the black South Africans' circumstances, but a collective response and it is in this later work that she demonstrates the abilities of the younger generation to forge a new future, one which includes sexual equality. Like Were, Tlali rejects neither Western nor traditional influences; in the time and place in which her novels are set, tribalism is al1 but lost. Muriel at Metropolitan and Amandla both focus on conditions of city people who face challenges different £rom those in rural areas. In her works, her short scories included, she explores the plight of blacks living in poverty, yet surrounded by affluence, She records their struggles to survive while maintaining their own sense of worth, with a focus on the lives of women in particular.

Muriel at Metropolitan records the daily trials and happenings at the Metropolitan Radio and Furniture Store in Johannesburg. The novel recounts conversations, debates and small episodes that take place at the store, while Muriel, the protagonist, works there. Tlali writes the novel in the first person, frorn Muriel's point of view. The Metropolitan Radio Store is a microcosm of the larger metropolitan Johannesburg, in which people of al1 South African cultures, races and linguistic backgrounds work and interact together in the business world.

~urielhelps with clerical duties working side by side with her white Jewish boss, Mr. Bloch, his sister and nephew, and other white women both English and Afrikaans speaking. Also working for Mr. Bloch are black and white male mechanics, black and coloured drivers and office helpers. The system by which the store operates mirrors that of the larger South African world.

Customerst cards are fi-led according to race and township, rather than alphabetically, and a "Whites Only" coathanger holds only the jackets of the whites (162). While the "boss", Mr. Bloch, is white, most of the employees are black men. Muriel, as a well educated black woman, is the minority; the only other women workers are white. Thus, by remembering her experience, Tlali records the particular issues confronting black women as they work within an apartheid system. Although confined to a narrow tirne frame, the work is autobiographical; Tlali draws on her own persona1 past for she worked as a clerk-typist in a Johannesburg shop, selling electrical wares. Like Muriel, Tlali attended university and business school. In Muriel at Metropolitan, by depicting the daily happenings at work, the customary repartee between the different sexual and racial groups, and the various problems they encounter, Tlali provides a portrayal of city and political life in South Africa and under apartheid in the 1960s.

Although the tone of the novel is subdued and controlled, the work is, nevertheless, protest writing, for in it Tlali systematically delineates the atrocities of the apartheid çystem, and through the words of Muriel, calls for a national strike. Shortly after publication, the South frica an ~ensorship~oard deemed the work necessitated banning.6 Because the community of workers at the store reflects society at large, ~laliis able to voice the opinions of al1 racial, sexual and cultural groups, as they debate political issues, both past and present. But, most of all, through the mouth-piece of Muriel, Tlali is able to voice her own view of the political situation, particularly as it pertains to black women. While Muriel, through various discussions, criticizes many aspects of the apartheid system, she also quietfy assesses her own compromised situation, as a black woman working for the aggrandizement of the whites who condone and perpetuate the very policies she denounces.

The novel is filled with dialogue, and can be compared with

Nwapa's Efuru and Idu. However, whereas Nwapa records the gossip of the women of the Igbo tribe, the constant chatter, repartee and debate of Tlali's novel provide a babble of voices reflecting the multi-lingual, multi-racial and multi-cultural world in which

Muriel works, each voice using distinctive linguistic idioms,

Phrases of Afrikaans, Fanagalo, Zulu, Tswana, even Yiddish proliferate the novel. At times Tlali provides translations, at others sne does not. By recording accurately the language used,

Tlali posits language as a predominant theme. The racial hierarchy of apartheid is reinforced by the terminology employer and employee use to address one another, Al1 employees address

Mr. Bloch as "baas", the Afrikaans word for "boss"; he is the authority to whom they must pay due respect. Employees and customers alike strive to speak and write English, the language of commerce and power. Mr. Bloch and the white women, on the other hand, have a repertoire of demeaning names with which to address the black employees and customers, names such as "boys", "nannies", "muntus", "baboons", and "soggensv'. ' The blacks tend to address one another with their traditional greeting, "brother" or "sister"; they address the white women formally, as Mrs. Green, Mrs. Singham, Mrs. Kuhn and Mrs. Stein. Muriel, however, is simply known and addressed by her first name, by blacks and whi tes alike - The store is a noisy place, full of voices shouting, yelling, insulting, demanding and ordering. Requests and demands lack any pleasantries or courtesies. No one says "please" or "thank you", no one apologizes for a wrongful accusation. The women constantly tell Adam to "shut up", "tula wena" [a Zulu term meaning "shut up"] or "voetsak" [an Afrikaans term meaning "get lost"]. They give Johannes endless orders to get this or that for them. Afrikaans-speaking Mrs. Stein's voice was "normally harsh, offensive and guttural when speaking to Africans"; however, when speaking to a European custorner on the telephone her voice "transformed into smooth beautiful tones" (175). Without considering the blacks' linguistic challenges, the white women repeatedly refer to them as "stupid". The errors and faulty expression in the customers' letters are the source of amusement, and al1 laugh delightedly at the strange names of some of their customers. However, the joke proves to be on the white women, when Miriarn explains that some of the strnage names are, in fact, acronyms for powerful, political movements (130). Muriel, proficient in the African vernacular as well as

Afrikaans and English, is a tremendous asset to Mr. Bloch. As she understands al1 racial groups, she interprets for Mr. Bloch and deals with customers herself, either in person or on the telephone. At one point she even explains to him the Afrikaans pronunciation. However, more importantly, since cultural memory

1s e&&ded in language, Muriel's linguistic ability gives her an inner understanding of the cultures and "world views" transmitted through those lang~ages.~She can communicate with and relate to al1 language groups; consequently, in time she is accepted and respected by all. Although Mr. Bloch's business profits from black patronage, he speaks only a few phrases in Fanagalo. He therefore depends on black employees, such as Adam and Muriel, to conduct his negotiations. However, Muriel, in helping her employer, is cognizant that she is helping a system that uses the labour of the black, in this case her own, for the material advancement of the white.

Muriel's linguistic ability contrasts with the linguistic inability of the other white women. Mrs. Singham is English speaking, but like Mrs. Kuhn, "could speak almost no Afrikaans at all" (174) . Mrs. Green and Lennie, the white mechanic, are both

Afrikaans speaking, but speak virtually no English. As Lambert mentions, "there are greater differences between the English- speaking and Afrikaans-speaking groups than there are among the

African tribes" and Muriel remarks that "the whites of the

Republic of South Africa can be so segregated in the imaginary oneness" (44-45, 174). Being limited to only their mother tongues limits their exposure to other cultures. As a result their perspective is of necessity narrow, placing themselves in the centre, while marginalizing those whom they neither know nor understand. The white women speak to the Africans in whatever language is their own, either English of Afrikaans, and expect to be understood. The onus is, therefore, on the blacks to understand the white languages. As a result Muriel may be justified in her clairn that "The whites, with a few exceptions, are ignorant of the Africans' living conditions. The Africans

... know more about the whites because they have to know them in order to survive . . , ." (11). Ironically, in a cultural sense, the whites are maxginalized by their linguistic inabilities, and

Muriel is the one in the centre.

Tlali records the most practical and also most distasteful problems confronting the black woman in the work place. The first is the problem of washroom facilities. Mr. Bloch does not have a separate toilet for a black woman: legally she is not allowed to share that provided for the white women at work.

Secondly, although she works with the white women, because of her race, she requires a segregated area in which to sit- Initially she sits "below the stairs ...- separated from the rest of the white staff by the cabinets and steel mesh wires", but this is awkward because she has to use the sarne large heavy ledgers as the other women, and these cannot be easily moved (15). Because of the cost of conforming with the law, these practical problems deter employers from employing qualified black women. Jews, like Mr. Bloch, "bribe these Boers, not to charge thern" when they

break the law (189). Mr. Bloch, certainly, is prepared to defy the law, for

employing Muriel is very much to his advantage. She is competent

and capable, in many ways more efficient than her white

colleagues, and most importantly he can employ her at a far lower

salary than he could a white woman. However, the white women in

the office are antagonistic towards ber, clearly threatened by

her: her very presence creates tension. They resent her being

given anything but menial work. Although Mr. Bloch is happy to

overlook the legal requirements for his economic gain, the white

female employees are anxious to maintain their artificially

created superior status, and they cornplain when Muriel, on Adam's

instructions, uses their toilet facility. Tlali's authorial voice and Muriel's thoughts and perspective at tirne= tend to merge. Early in the novel the authorial voice explains the basic political background in broad,

generalized terms.

In the white world there are two main

groups with two distinct cultures - the English-speaking and the Afrikaans-speaking

groups. The former are aloof, indifferent,

in favour of white domination. The

Afrikaans-speaking groups are composed of

whites of Dutch origin, who prefer to be called Afrikaners .... They are despised by the English-speaking groups as well as by the other non-whites and Africans. In

fact, al1 non-white groups look upon them

as proud, arrogant, aggressive,

ethnocentric and hypocritical. (11) possibly Tlali was conscious of writing for a foreign audience which requires what Dan Jacobson has termed "that wearisome explaining of local conditions" (162). The danger of providing background information is that it is not always properly integrated with the rest of the novel; it may clog the narrative

line or be didactic in tone. However, Tlali is c1earl.y anxious

to inform the reader of the underlying racial issues of that

time, from her point of view- Again and again Muriel muses on

the dependence of the entire economy on the backs of the blacks,

her point of view often merging with the authorial commentary.

The sunny Republic of South Africa - the white man's paradise - would never tick without them- To their labour the Republic

owes her phenomenal industrial development .... a sit-down strike throughout the

country lasting only two weeks would bring the whole paradise crumbling down! (111)

However, Tlali does manage to incorporate most skilfully a

great deal of background information through the dialogue between

workers and customers- In this way, she provides an historical

account of the political issues of the time, and the

stereotypical attitudes to such issues. Mrs. Stein, the "typical

Boer" with an "insatiable lust for persecuting blâcks", speaks for the Afrikaans right, the government policy (38) . Mrs.

Singham speaks for the slightly more moderate English speaking groups . Muriel, of course, is spokesperson for the undertrodden "voiceless" black. Tlali structures Muriel's memory to select those issues that concern her specifically, and the use and abuse of black women by the white population is a theme throughout the novel. Agrippa's caustic comment to a black customer carrying a white child on her back draws attention to the role black women play in raising white children, as well as Agrippa's attitude towards this custom. While many black women work as nannies, their own children suffer neglect in the townships. A customer complains that the blacks "are the ones who do everything for chem [the whites]. Even in their homes 3 cook for them and clean .... It is our women folk who nurse their babies and give them food" (90) . Through Lennie and Ben, the reader learns of the hypocrisy of the Immorality Act forbidding interracial intercourse. Lennie, a white mechanic, openly supports apartheid, but secretly enjoys intimate relationships with black women. Ben, a black employee, runs a thriving business leasing out his room to couples of mixed race, at times finding black women for white men. The reader learns the situation of the migrant labourer, who cornes to Johannesburg usually to work on the mines, leaving a wife and children in the homeland to fend for themselves, dependent upon any money they may be sent. Once in Johannesburg the worker inevitabfy finds another "common law" wife and has another family, which stretches his meagre resources yet further. Tlali thus refers to the effect of male migration on black women; it often inevitably leads to the breakdown of the

family or household unit-10

A conversation between Adam and the black drivers records

the attitudes towards the establishment of these homelands-

Lambert coments, "The Nats divide us up into pieces for their own gain" ( 4 5) ." But Mrs. Stein defends the government policy of the Bantustans as providing the Blacks with their own area,

"where they can Say what they like and have their own cabinet ministers." However, Muriel's retort voices the opposition of

the times. "But there are more Africans in the cities, living

with the whites, than there are in the Bantustans .... These

Bantustans are the poorest areas that able-bodied men and women

are only happy to flee from" (178-79). Mrs. Stein and Mrs. Kuhn make many coments about granting black independence. While Mrs.

Stein recounts the lavish spending of one of the black leaders in

a newly independent state, Mrs. Kuhn cites the Congo as an

example of the inability of blacks to govern themselves (29).

Again Muriel enters into the debate. She asks:

Why did the Belgians keep al1 doors closed

to the Africans for al1 those years until

the eleventh hour? Why did they not train

the Africans in local administration first

and give them responsible positions

gradually, why did they wait until the

people demanded rights? (180)

The recorded chit-chat also informs the reader of many of the most despised apartheid policies, such as the hated pass laws and the necessity of carrying the pass book at al1 times. Even when making a purchase at the store, a black customer must produce his or her passbook for verification. Muriel, herself, often checks the customers' legitimacy by examining their passbooks, a task which gives her a feeling of discornfort.

The women discuss at length the absurdities of coloux classification in relation to Chris Barnard's first epic heart transplant. English-speaking Mrs. Singham comrnents, "They put a Coloured's heart into a white man. How can they do that when they believe in apartheid?" She concludes that "The whole thing is ridiculous .... It just goes to show that al1 people are the same" (176-77). Afrikaans-speaking Mrs. Stein argues for the extreme right: the heart is "merely a muscle. It merely pumps blood" she claims (177). When Mrs. Kuhn voices concern that "South Africals enemies will howl" with scorn, Mrs. Stein defends

South Africa, offering a popular white attitude of that tirne.

"The critics overseas are ill-informed about the true situation-

They only receive false information. South Africa is a most peaceful country. People are free to go where they like, and say what they feel" (177).

In describing the comings and goings in the store, Tlali depicts most successfully the daily patience required of the blacks. Always considered inferior, secondaxy to the white population, the blacks are treated with no respect, either for their time or persons. Constantly the blacks are kept waiting, employees waiting for their pay packets, customers "'waiting for the master' as patiently as only an African can wait" (43). "European customers never stood in a queue. As a rule, they were served immediately they entered the shop and not with other, black customers" (113). While customers wait, the white women,

Mrs. Stein in particular, make scathing comments about black employees and customers alike. "You see", Mrs. Stein claims,

"they do not think like us", and she and Mr Bloch repeatedly refer to them as "stupid" (99, 163) .

The whole Western concept of customer service is thus reversed when the clientele is primarily the black population.

Ironically, the customer regards the shopkeeper as "the Master" or "Baas", while the customer is insulted, abused, and kept waiting on the store ownerts convenience. Despite their humble means, however, the blacks constitute a huge potential economic market, tapped by white businessmen. "There was keen cornpetition to exploit the African buying power whose potential the rnanufacturers as well as the retailers were well aware of and could not ignoreff (116). Mrs. Kuhn, while happily exploiting her impoverished customers, comments cynically, "They'll give you anything for a radio. They would rather go hungry and naked. As long as they have an F.M. they are satisfied" (31-32). Her comments demonstrate the tension caused by the huge gap between the haves and have-nots. Surrounded by materialisitc luxury, the poorer African is easily ternpted to spend beyond his or her means. At times a very small cash deposit or a trade in is al1 that Mr. Bloch requires. Ironically, "[slome are so grateful to the kind baas - who makes it possible for even the poorest to own something - that they never fail to pay the monthly instalment" (37). Mr. Bloch even plays on the Africans' supernatural fears,

implying that he can control the functioning of their radios if

they do not pay on time. However, not al1 white people are

comfortable exploiting the blacks for profit, and ~lalidoes

record the concern some white people have about the hire purchase

system (installrnent plans). Selling to the black population on

hire purchase is clearly not an admirable way to make a living,

and Muriel has to question her participation in such a practice.

That Mr. Bloch is Jewish possibly reflects Tlali's own, or

assumed, racial prejudice, as she falls into stereotyping of

roles, depicting him as a money grabbing Jew."

The world Tlali depicts is a city world and her black

characters are second and third generation Johannesburg dwellers.

While working in the city, they commute daily from Soweto, a city

in itself. She informs the reader:

The Republic of South Africa is a country

divided into two worlds. The one, a white

world - rich, cornfortable, for al1

practical purposes organized - a world in

fear, armed to the teeth. The other, a

black world; poor, pathetically neglected

and disorganized - voiceless, oppressed,

restless, confused and unarmed - a world in

transition, irrevocably weaned from al1

tribal ties. (Il, emphasis added)

While Tlali does not distinguish the two main racial groups in

terms of western and tribal ways, she does make brief indirect reference to past customs. When Johannes complains of the white women in the store, he refers to the African custom of paying a marriage dowry. The white women, he claims, "are al1 so spoilt.

Sit on their backsides the whole day and cal1 Johannes, Johannes.

No wonder their husbands don't pay any lobola for them. They're worth nothing . Lazy" (26-27) .'' Muriel, by contrast, is conf used when Johannes asks hex if she would like him to get her anything

£rom the shops. "1 was reluctant to send him. How could I? He was a man and 1 was a woman. According to our custom a woman does not send a man. We reserve a place, an elevated place, for

Our men" (27). Despite Tlali's clah that the African is "weaned from al1 tribal ties", Johannes's and Muriel's comments suggest a residue of tribal thinking as regards the status of women. The woman, according to Johannes, still should be judged as a useful comrnodity valuod in materialistic terms, and Muriel is in an awkward position working side by side with men, when traditional thinking places the man in a superior position. Not only is she a threat to the white women, but also possibly the black men.

With the black men constantly made to feel inferior to whites, men and women, the black woman is clearly at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder.

The drivers and Muriel discuss their traditional past and the days when Shaka was the chief of the Zulus. Simon and

Lambert were born and bred in Johannesburg, "children of houses with the numbers" (42). They know nothing of their past traditions. Lambert asks : Who needs a chie£? If people want to have

leaders or people who make regulations for them, then the people must choose those

leaders. Besides, we are detribalised. Our fathers and our grandfathers had no

links with their chiefs. Most of them

don1t even know where they came from. (44)

Again, Muriel appears to speak for the author.

As different tribes in the past we had a

few cultural differences, but these minor

distinctions are a thing of the past. They

may be put down on record and preserved,

stored away in the museums and archives so

that coming generations may read about them

and know them, but they now belong to an

age we shall never go back to, an age we cannot go back to whether we like it or

not. (44)

Muriel's words acknowledge the impossiblity of retrieving the past £rom the perspective of the present- The community at

Metropolitan is made up of disparate individuals from many tribal origins, each one struggling in his or her own way to improve his or her self-esteem. Yet strangely the community of the store reflects a unique type of social relationship which perhaps only existed under the structure of a system as iniquitous as apartheid. Despite the appalling disparity between the races, the at tintes open hostility, the arrogance of the white workers, and the defiance and dishonesty of the blacks, the store community does offer a form of bonding. There is a strange acceptance of one another, perhaps aided by Tlalits ability to reproduce the humorous repartee in which races of South ~frica are able to indulge. The ability to work and perhaps more importantly laugh together is perhaps what will pave the way for the future. Mr. Bloch depicts an equivocal way of dealing with his employees and customers. At times he is a hard-nosed, penny- pinching business man; at others, he is humorous, and good- natured, happy to give money to the odd beggar, happy to throw in a free battery here and there, and often with a ready joke. As time passes, Muriel is clearly respected and valued at work, by black and white colleagues alike, and she reaches a greater understanding of her white colleagues, realizing that they "had the same problems". She comments:

We were al1 under the thumb of a demanding

boss, who was unyielding in many ways,

giving little consideration to the fact

that we had privace lives of our own, homes

and dependants to look after . . . .

The colour of our skins did not come

into it - there was work tc bc Uzx, and

the boss had equal confidence in al1 of us.

When there was an error in the office

records, he did not care what colour the

hand was that made the error, only whose

handwriting it was. When a radio or motor was damaged in the workshop, it did not

mattex if the mechanic responsible was

white or black. (163)

Muriel acknowledges that "These people were not inhuman nor were they downright cruel, as 1 used to brand them all. 1 had learned that they could be kind and gentle" (174). Yet Muriel feels the need to leave this community, which she has learnt to understand, and which offers her some form of security. In depicting the lives and habits of the different employees, Tfali indirectly presents the reader with the alternatives open to Muriel at that time. Clearly, Muriel has no fenale role model. Mrs. Stein ironically speaks the truth when she claims that blacks do not chink like whites. Each black man, however, represents a different political attitude and presents a possible alternative course for her to follow. The men also depict the different ways blacks coped with the apartheid system in the 1960s.

Adam and William No. 2 accept the system. Adam, subservient and submissive, is the "only one Mr. Bloch trusted, a little, thai is" (19) . "The long painful years of contact with the whites had developed within him a hard protective core of indifference to al1 their constant abusive reprimands. He was dead inside" (106). One of the black customers accuses him angrily of being "one of the old people who are scared of

Europeans", of being "white" himself (141). William No.2 wcirks hard for his family, and insists upon maintaining his honesty, believing that "you must show the white man that he can trust you" (48). He optirnistically believes that by doing his best he will receive greater rewards- "The white man is the boss in this land, -he is the one holding the gun. You must listen to him" he infoms Muriel (49). Ben sirnply exploits the system by making money out of harbouring those breaking the lmmorality Act.

However, in so doing, he also exploits the women of his race-

Douglas, on the other hand, tries to outwit the system. He outlines a plan whereby he and Muriel could work as a team cheating Mr. Bloch: Muriel tactfully rejects his offer. He goes ahead without her and ultimately loses his job. Though he maintains he is happy to be free of working for Mr. Bloch, his quality of life suffers. He does nothing but "sit and drink", and Muriel senses that part of him would like to be back with the Metropolitan community (143). Agrippa presents a di£ferent alternative. Mr. Bloch puts up with his many inconsistencies, his swindling and unreliabiiity, because Agrippa performs the unpopular and dangerous task of repossessing merchandise from

Soweto homes. Agrippa is confident of his value to Mr. Bloch for other drivers feel fearful for their safety and their consciences, taking goods away from their own people. Like Adam,

Agrippa is "a dead thing", caring for nothing but money which he squanders on drink (52). Thus, the black men at the Metropolitan Radio Store, and by analogy in the city at large, offer no dignified solution for Miriam. She, as a black woman, has to find her own way of dealing with the systern and forging her own future.

Muriel's reasons for leaving the store appear to be threefold. Firstly, she concludes that she cannot continue being Party to the system, working in a role that exploits the blacks, and condones and perpetuates their inferior treatment. She feels like "a traitor" helping customers purchase goods they cannot afford, and like a policeman inspecting their passes (100). A customer's remarks, "You work nicely here, my sister. Like a white person", equate her with Adam and make her "feel like screaming" (91). Being "loyal to the firm -.-.created a gnawing feeling of guilt" within her (117). Secondly, Muriel's work places her in a vulnerable position- When she sends out demand notices she worries for her own safety. "1 dreaded to think what would happen to me and my family in Soweto (where taking life means nothing), if it were to be known that I was responsible for the letters" (137) . Like Agrippa, she helps the whites in the process of depossessing from the blacks, a process which is not only dangerous but also analogous to colonization. Thirdly, working with white women places a invisible ceiling above her.

Because of her colour, she will only progress so far. She States

"1 would have to remain static, junior, for the rest of rny working life, irrespective of my experience and my proficiency", and her mother's comrnents that she is wasting her education echo in her ears like the voice of her own conscience (140, 139) .

However, her new job offer confronts the same old problems, problems which ML. Bloch managed to overlook, but which her new employer, as a new immigrant to the country, cannot evade, The new employer has no separate toilet facility for a black woman, and no separate working area. Muriel finds herself back where she began, only now her very livelihood is in jeopardy. Unlike her male colleagues, she chooses to live according to her conscience, maintaining her dignity and her-self respect, as an honest, lawful woman, but she faces a future fraught with insecurities. However, Muriel clearly refuses to play a part in supporting an economy which not only relies on the exploitation of blacks, but also strengthens apartheid. By resigning, she is able to reject and challenge the cultural authority embedded in the iniquitous apartheid system. Tlali thus vividly and accurately depicts the practical and ethical problems confronting the black woman entering the work force in the early 1960s. She also records the main political issues of those years, and the differing racial attitudes to them.

In Muriel at Metropolitan, much of the store's profit is based on repossession. If a customer fails to make payments his white creditor repossesses. In Tlali's next novel, Amandla, the repossession theme is reversed. It is the young Africans who strive to repossess from the whites the country which, as Silas in Muriel in Metropolitan claims, was "black man's country" from

"Cape to Cairo" (169). The seeds of protest sown in Muriel in

Metropolitan are further and more forcibly developed in Amandla.

Based on the Soweto Uprising in 1976, and events that followed, the novel records the perspectives of the blacks in the late seventies. In this novel, Tlali is again preoccupied with city dwellers, but this time the setting is within the al1 black township of Soweto, and the protest voices are much more strident, with none of the mitigating humour deployed in Muriel at Metropolitan. From a literary standpoint, Amandla possibly suffers from being propaganda. The debates Tlali depicts incorporate much

past history as if forcibly to educate and inform the reader.

Signi£icantly, the title is in the African vernacular, "Amandla" meaning "Power", and the cry "Amandla Ngawethu" meaning "Power is

OU~S",or "Power to the People" reverberates throughout the work.

The cry is usually associated with an accompanying raised

clenched fist, although Tlali does not mention this action.

While Muriel in Muriel at Metropolitan ultimately makes a

private, personal choice of total non-collaboration with the

dominant powers in the apartheid system, in Amandla, Tlali

advocates a public, collective, conscious goal of non- collaboration as being the only way to effect change. Her novel

reads like a political cal1 to action. The title sets the tone

which is urgent and forceful, and not surprisingly the South

African Censorship Board banned the work six weeks after

publication. Again, Tlali depicts many perspectives through conversation,

discussion and debate, and she successfully portrays the

conflicting attitudes among her own people. In this novel, Tlali

appears to voice her own opinions through three young male

leaders, Pholoso, Muntu, and Kifler. The men of the older

generation, as those depicted in Muriel at Metropolitan, offer no

workable solutions, but in Amandla Tlali suggests that the

idealistic and courageous young men and women offer hope for the

future. While she glories in the courage and achievement of the

youth who organize the uprisings, she depicts the role of the women, as mothers, wives and girlf riends, as supportive and long suffering, Such roles, she demonstrates, are as heroic and as courageous as those of the young, black, political leaders*

Although the novel is set in the al1 black township of

Soweto, Tlali demonstrates the township's multilingual character by again reflecting the mixture of tongues and cultures- In the opening passages, the young black hero, Pholoso, speaks in

Afrikaans to his friend Sipho, while on the cinema screen before them Cecil B. de Mille speaks of the coming attraction, The Ten

Cornmanciment S.

The Soweto riots of June 16, 1976 were initiated in protest against the enforced use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools. The students boycotted their schools and subsequently set them on fire. The language issue is thus the basis of the unrest, pivotal to the protest and central to the novel. The students at the time wished to be taught in

English, a language they recognized as of greater international and business value, but Tlali makes no direct mention of their preferred choice. The school boards had "been battling to have this Afrikaans removed for ages" (27). Their efforts were frustrated, for school board members who spoke against the

Afrikaans medium of instruction were fired (25). Enforcing

Afrikaans in the schools is indicative of the goverment's forcing of their culture upon the blacks, and Tlali even reflects the resistance to the imposition of Afrikaner country folk music.

"They force too much of this "tikkie draai" music down Our eustachian tubestf a young Black lawyer cornplains of the radio

(137).L5

Tlali shows Afrikaans to be the language of dominance, the language of the officiais, policemen, prison guards, those of authority, who treat the blacks with inhumane indifference. The teachers, therefore, object to using Afrikaans, for then

"teaching would be like adrninistering poison" (22). They would be "virtual policemen" if they enticed students back to school

(116). The new Bantu Education system tried to exert pressure on the teachers with the lure of large pay packages. Students, however, decide to exert pressure on these "paid slaves" to resist the goverment (137). In recording these events, Tlali not only voices her own contempt of assuming the language of oppression, but also clarifies and justifies why students rejected their education and burnt their schools. Therefore, she provides an important African perspective on the political turbulence in the 1970s.

Throughout the text of Amandla, Tlali inserts phrases of

African, Afrikaans and English languages. English idioms proliferate the novel. Afrikaans, she claims, had long been a

"bone of contention" (24). She refers to an empty, unwanted bus as a "white elephant" (121). The black people cornplain that it is "easier for a came1 to go through a needle's eye" than to become a doctor or an engineer 1124)- However, when an English official cornments on the school children refusing education, saying, "You can take a horse to the river, but you canvt make him drink", the people laugh asking, "What are we now, horses?" (119). Tlali selects from the languages she uses, and the cultures embodied in them, what to criticize, what to jettison and what to retain or adopt. When Zwane, one of the older generation, advocates working with the system in order to undemine it, he claims, "It is the cow which tries to rise that gets assistance", but Killer questions the wisdom of this traditional proverb by arguing that people should not expect any assistance (253). The way to overthrow the system, Killer implies, is to be fully responsible for their own uprising. Only then can they control their own future without compromise.

However, some African proverbs Tlali chooses to xetain. When the elders daim the "the wisdom of a whistle cornes £rom the "young" whistle", the relevance of the proverb to the political actions of the students is implicit (209) . Proverbs relating to female experience axe also retained. The truth of "a female child says:

Mother is no witch, whilst a son does not say that" is verified in the reference to the care the women of the family give Gramsy in her dying days (268). And the proverb that claims it is the wornan who "grabs the sharp end of the knife" is one Tlali endorses and re-uses in later short stories (2681'~

Thus, Tlali consciously selects what she chooses to adopt from the European cultural past and remember £rom her own cultural past by reassessing the values and meanings incorporated in these dicta. Those th~tspeak to her personally, she retains.

Furthermore, she substantiates within the text the validity of the woman grabbing the "sharp end of the knife" by her portrayal of strong and suffering female protagonists, such as Gramsy, pholoso's traditionally-minded grandmother. Pholoso, her favorite grandchild, takes "the place of his father in [her] hearttl (39) . He also takes the place of his father in his political cornmitment, and as a result, he cannot be with Gramsy when she dies. At her death her daughter

thought of the suffering her mother had to

endure. She thought of how her mother had

stood by them and heiped them when they had

borne illegitimate babies, when the men who

had pretended to love them had turned their

backs on them, and their mother had been

their sole support. (272-73)

Before her stroke Gramsy operated a small creche, taking in children of working mothers. "Some of these poor girls were orphans and the boys just dumped them" she relates (41). Even after her stroke Gramsy helped with looking after her grandchildren, filling the traditional mother role. Pholoso is special to her, for he is her only legitimate grandchild, for the family paid lobola for his mother. She consults a witch doctor to help release Pholoso frorn prison, who comforts her by saying, "These are different, troubled times .... The gods of our forefathers must indeed be angry with ust1 (113).

Gramsy is cared for by her two nieces, Agnes and Nana.

Agnes' life, too, is one of pain and suffering; her husband,

Joseph, is a drunkard, who abuses and beats her, even before their children, forcing her to move away. Her problems are clearly commonplace, for in her short stories, Tlali reiterates the difficulties a woman has when leaving her husband.17 Nana and her husband strive hard to live well within the system.

After years of saving they buy their first car, only to have it stolen, and their son is killed by totsis [ruffians] on the train commuting to Johannesburg. Tlali describes the callous indifference with which the police handle these incidents, and thereby explains the young people's hostility towards the municipal authorities and the police. Pholoso's young girl friend is also depicted as a woman who must suffer. She must selflessly relinquish al1 clairns to Pholoso, whose child she carries. Pholoso tells her:

We have to do what is best for al1 of us,

for the people. In our position we may not

think of ourselves only .... There are

certain things which are greater than our

individual fancies, .... We must never let

our selfish personal feelings drown the

greater aspirations in life. (72)

Pholoso calls Felleng the "mother of Africa" and as such she must, like Gramsy before her, nurture the young of the future.

However, on a personal level, she may well have to be a sole bread winner, and face many difficulties: she will have to be prepared to "grab the sharp end of the knife".

The youth of Soweto advocate change within their own community, change that could improve the lives of women such as

Agnes, Nana, and Felleng. The older, less educated people work diligently within the system, striving to educate their young, clinging to the hope that better education will bring them better living standards. However, what the young learn is that the education they receive is sub-standard. They therefore reject their education altogether, advocating the need to educate themselves. But, as Killer in his debate with the older T points out, "the education branch is not isolated £rom the others ...-

The thing is, the whole structure, the society itself, is unacceptable and abnormal" (213) . Tlali, like Nwapa, records the generation gap that develops. However, in South Africa, rather than education causing the gap as it does in Nwapa's Igbo world, it is the rejection of education which drives the generations apart. Furthemore, the young leaders oppose their parents' desire to effect change peaceably. They are critical of their parents' passive acquiescence and inaction; they do not excuse

Qrinking as the effect of oppression, but advocate that people should assume responsibility for themselves, take control of themselves and their future. The generation gap is illustrated when Killer criticizes T's accommodating complacency as a "threat to humanity", accusing him of putting up with any kind of "sugar- coated poison" (221). When the students organize themselves to march in protest, only to be gunned down mercilessly during the

Soweto riot of 1976, their parents shake their heads in a mixture of admiration for their youthful courage, and a feax for their safety.

While rejecting the government's sanctioned forma1 education, Pholoso exhorts the people to "read, read, read" and strongly advocates change in the cultural chauvinistic attitude towards women :

Our women can accomplish a lot if we let

them. Let us avoid the pitfalls of the

past when women were confined to the

kitchen, and were never allowed to read.

Literature is for everybody, not for men

only, When you go to the library, take

your sister, your aunt, even your mother

with you .... encourage them. The wornen

were brainwashed into believing that the

only thing they could do was to wait on us

and be at Our disposa1 ..-.Let us remember

that if you keep a person down, you remain

down with him. (89)

Fslleng is depicted as a modern woman, shown reading the newspaper and acting as a spokeperson for the young women who support the FIYOH project, Freedom in Your Own Hand (5, 70, 256) .

If the systern is to change, so too must the traditional attitude towards women, which is, in itself, a fom of dominance and suppression as oppressive as apartheid. However, like Were,

Tlali claims that since the African culture is male-dominated, the males need to alter their thinking as regards women, to make change possible. When Killer, Moremi and T debate the best course of action to free themselves, a young woman comments: "If you cannot corne to an agreement, ... why not leave it to us the women?" Men laugh: "They considered her remark a mere joke" (254) . However, one of the young students asks the woman for her ideas. Strong, free thinking young men such as Pholoso and

Killer offer hope for the future as does Namunyu in The High

School Gent.

The youth of Soweto are, thus, the heroes and heroines of the novel, The novel opens with Pholoso and Felleng in the cinema about to watch the Ten Commandments. The novel closes with Killer expounding his Ten Point Programme, for a just and free society. As leader of the people, and possibly their saviour, Pholoso assumes the name and role of Moses. Thus the biblical commandments and biblical Moses are replaced with

African ones. The different cultures in a sense blend, for with selective memory, Tlali demonstrates that traditional or Western social memories rnay be refocused, according to the needs of the future. In this way, tradition is not totally lost, merely reassessed with a new perspective. Then the generation gap between the traditionalists and the rebellious youth is, perhaps, not as great as it seems. When Ramoine cornplains that the older generotion must have angered the ancestors there is the implicit suggestion that he may be correct. The young people certainly feel that their parents are too passive. When Pholosu's aunt bids him farewell with the words, "May the spirits of your ancestors go with you and lead your way", her faith is not so very different from Pholoso ' s daim:

If we ever forget those who laid down their

lives, then they will have done so in vain

.... The events of the past year--1ike others in our centuries-old history of struggle for liberation--should be and will

be a part of us for a long time to corne.

(283, 290)

In Muriel at Metropolitan, Muriel disregards her persona1 economic security when choosing a way of life that will not help perpetuate a system that inflicts hardship on her own people. In

Arnandla, Pholoso insists that he and Felleng must think of the needs of the black society at large, rather than their persona1 desires. Thus, Tlali's protagonists both appear to adher to the

African tradition of valuing the group over the individual.

However, with the depiction of her protagonists, Tlali clearly also values strong, individual leaders.

In her novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) and Maru

(1971), Bessie Head, like her compatriot, Tlali, also depicts strong, individual male protagonists who challenge traditional attitudes to women. Although al1 Head's works are set in

Botswana, her persona1 South African past inforrns her novels, for, like Tlali, she examines the negative attitudes inherited from living in an apartheid system. As a South African of mixed blood, the daughter of a white woman and a black father, Bessie

Head herself embodies conflicting cultures, and in her writing she voices the inequities of the past in a particularly persona1 way. Her persona1 history has a strong and direct bearing on her work, and therefore necessitates recounting. She daims that

"her mother was .... from a Scottish family but born in South Africa" . The family owned race horses .... My mother ..,. was attracted to one of the grooms who

looked after race horses and in that way

she acquired me. After she had taken up an

association with him her family had her

committed. 1 was initially handed over to

a white fmily for adoption, that is, an

Afrikaner boer family. After a week 1 was

returned since they said the baby appeared

to be black and they could not accept a

baby like this. (Marquard 49)

She was then given to a coloured fostex parent, later deemed unfit to look after her, whereupon she was placed in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. There she completed a high school diploma and took a teacher's training course.

Head was reputedly born in the insane asylum, whexe her mother committed suicide when Head was barely one year old.

Although falling under the South African classification of

"coloured", she did not speak Afrikaans, the customary mother tongue for coloureds, so she thus felt alienated from all three of the classified colour groups, white, black and c~loured.~'She was further marginalized not only by being a woman, but also by carrying the fear and stigma of potential hereditary insanity.

In 1963, after a short unhappy marriage and the birth of her one son, she removed herself to Botswana where she lived for many years as a stateless person. There she worked as a primary school teacher and as a gardener in a village co-operative. In

1969 she suifered a nervous breakdown, possibly congenitally

induced. At one point she is said to have accused "Sir Seretse

Khama of ritual cannibalism and incest", an accusation she posted outside a post office (A Woman Alone xi). Thereafter she was

taken into psychiatric custody .

Head draws on her persona1 past in al1 of her novels. Her dilemma as a South African coloured woman accounts for the

intense sense of isolation not found in other authors. Not only

is she unclassifiable in racial terms, but she is stateless in

Botswana, uprooted fxom her materna1 place, a suprernely alienated

individual. Her novels, themselves, defy falling into the

categories of others and she is unable to write £rom a situation

of belonging integrated within either racial society. Nor is she

able to share the cornfort Emecheta seerns to find in her adopted

Western culture. Rather than identifying with the problems of

the world from the perspective of one coloux group, Head examines

the shortcomings of both groups. As a South African coloured,

she is the archetypal outsider, and as such is the first non- white South African woman writing in English to deal with racial

identity.

Her three novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru

(IWl), and A Question of Power (1973) al1 deal with the journey towards self determination, each successive novel becoming more and more autobiographical. The more autobiographical the work, the more internalized her writing becomes, as she takes her reader into the inner confusion of her characters' minds- As

Arthur Ravenscroft comments : Each novel both strikes out anew, and also

reshoulders the same burden. It is as if

one were obscuring a process that involves

simultaneously progression, introgression and circumgression, but also .... organic growth in both her art and her central

concerns . ( 175) The main protagonists in these three novels, like Head herself, feel they have no choice but physically to escape their past and to subject thernselves voluntarily to a self-imposed exile, which brings with it inevitable loneliness, isolation and alienation.

The political exiles she depicts cannot, however, jettison their past emotionally, but must learn to recognize and accept it.

Ezekiel Mphahlele, a fellow South African exile, explains the inability to cast away the South African reality. He claims that the "tyranny of the place" he left still courts him; it gives him

"the base to write, the very reason to write . . . . It still remains his place" (81). Head's protagonists are similarly shaped internally by the tyranny of their past experiences, and their futures are directed by it.

While Head's works share the familiar South African themes of political and spiritual exile, racial hatred, corrupt power and oppression, they differ from other writersl works because she provides such an intensely internalized, individualized and subjective perspective. The reader experiences first hand the inner struggles of self-identification. As a result her works may be at times confusing and/or harrowing for the reader, but the very intensity of the experiences depicted suggests an authenticity that can only result £rom the author's first hand experience. Because of this more emotional and persona1 perspective, some critics judge her as non-political . l4 However, Head refuses, as does fellow South African, Nadine Gordimer, to separate the political from the per~onal.'~ An examination of her novels will show that the inner and outer worlds are inseparable, for the one informs the other. As Paul Connerton explains, "the world of the percipient, defined in tems of temporal experience, is an organised body of expectations based on recoliections" (1).

The settings and plots of al1 three of Head's novels bear striking parallels with her own circumstances. The main protagonist, Makhaya, in When Rain Clouds Gather, like Head, herself, is a voluntary exile from South Africa, who flees the iniquitous apartheid system.-*-# 1 Although Makhaya is male, and is not of mixed race, he is the embodiment of another duality; he is both tribal, being a Zulu, and urban, coming £rom the inner city.

Head claims, "Makhaya was a blending of me and of what 1 needed from someone else. I needed in a sense to be very African and

Makhaya is". In A Woman Alone she writes of Makhaya as follows: The central character ... is almost insipid, a guileless, simple-hearted simpleton. But that is a true reflection

of the black South African personality. We are an oppressed people who have been stripped bare of every hurnan right. We do

not know what it is like to have Our

ambitions aroused, nor do we see liberation

on an immediate horizon. (68)

These words of Head's recall her cynical authorial comment in When Rain Clouds Gather, for she describes the emotional and spiritual conditioning Makhaya received in South Africa. Makhaya comes to Botswana believing that he does not care for people or anything else (10). He hated the white man in a strange way, It was not anything subtle or sly or mean,

but a powerful accumulation of years and

years and centuries and centuries of

silence. It was as though, in al1 this silence, black men had not lived nor allowed themselves an expression of feeling. But they had watched their lives

overrun and everything taken away. They

were like Frankenstein monsters, only

animated by the white man for his own

needs. Otherwise they had no life apart

from being servants and slaves. (133)

Makhaya symbolizes the black South African man in general, bearing the internalized scars of oppression in his ingrained sense of inferiority and his deep seated hatred of the white man.

Head thus examines the emotional and psychological effects of subordination and oppression in a manner similar to that which Emecheta depicts through her slave analogies. When Head moved to Botswana she "encountered human ambition and greed ... in a black fomW for the first time (A Woman Alone 68) . Likewise, Makhaya did not know "there was such a thing as an African oppressor" until his experience in Botswana (183). He learns that corruption and oppression are not monopolies of the white but the destructive forces of power. "People in southern Africa were still oppressed" and he sees himself as part of the mass of suffering mankind (80).

While he fiercely opposes the white oppression he suffered under the white Afrikaner rule, so does Makhaya resist the restrictions and narrowness of tribal constraints. The narrator relates : He had been born into one of the most

custom-bound and conservative tribes in the

whole African continent, where half the men and women still walked around in skins and

beads and even those who moved to the

cities moved with their traditions too.

There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines

drawn around the African man which defined

his loyalties, responsibilities, and even

the duration of his smile. (124)

Mahkaya's Zulu name, ironically meaning "he who stays at home" is almost an embarrassrnent to him. "It's just a tribal name" he claims and suggests to Gilbert, "You can cal1 me Mack" (29). in contrast, the corrupt chief, Matenge, "understood tribalism" and

"comanded the largest diehard traditionalists" (44, 45). Head claims that tribalism was encouraged by colonists because it kept the people subdued (58). She thus equates colonial and tribal oppression. But Head does not simply condemn tribalisrn; she indicates that traditions must be flexible and reassessed in order to maintain their validity. Accordingly, Makhaya learns the validity of his own Zulu name by finding his home in Golerna Mmidi . Head appears to work through her own persona1 conflicting "blends"--racial, social, and nationab-through Makhaya . Like Head, Makhaya is trying to escape his past. The village of

"Golema Mmidi consists of individuals who had fled there to escape the tragedies of life" (22, emphasis added) . The main protagonists do not conform with societal noms and expectations. Gilbert is "running away £rom England", where he "had not felt free"; Paulina Sebosa arrives as a fugitive from Northern

Botswana, a single mother of two children; Mma Millipede "was one of those rare individuals with a distinct personality at birthw

(31, 102, 68). Head posits that it is in the cooperative organization, where various cultures and personalities blend successfully, that individualism can flourish, while the traditional African way of life is as chilling as the draconian apartheid systern. "It was as though people looked at each other al1 the time, questioning themselves: Am 1 exactly the same as my neighbour? The fear was to differ from the next man ..." (100). Head argues that the conforming strictures of traditional ways trap and imprison the people in outdated customs and conventions that stunt not only progress and growth of the comunity, but the development of the individual. In this way Head's major protagonists reflect her own dilemma of non-confomity; to be truly liberated, one must be individualistic. But the more individualistic the protagonist, the greater his or her sense of isolation and marginalization- The most evident confrontation with cultural custorns concerns scientific and agricultural innovations, Gilbert did not fully understand the "complexity of the land tenure system" which was a hindrance to agricultural progress (38). Golema

Mmidi is established in defiance of custorns. For the first time, people are able to live permanently in one place and have fences to control anirnals. As +hey are situated in a drought stricken land, Gilbert strives to introduce drought resistant grasses.

Sorghum and maize were eaten as a daily staple: millet was more drought resistant. However, certain minority groups

"traditionally considered inferior, had long had a liking for millet and had always grown it as part of the season's crop.

Therefore, other tribes who considered themselves superior would not grow or eat it" (41). The agricultural authorities had decided it was not their policy to interfere with the traditional prejudices of the Batswana people. "Year in and year out people had grown the exact same crops. Somewhere along the line they had become mixed up with tribal tradition" (42).

Head thus skilfully provides the reader with the cultural and sociological background while depicting the stultifying effect adherence to customs has on its people. Within the context of the cooperative, she also gives the reader information on the customs as regards women's labour. "The women were the traditional tillers of the earth, not the men" for "women were on the land 365 days of the year while the men shuttled to and fro with the cattle" (34, 43). "No men ever worked harder than Botswana women for the whole burden of providing food for the families rested with them" (104). The authorial voice blends with Gilbert's as he thinks that "perhaps al1 change in the long run would depend on the women of the country" (43).

Once again, as with Nwapa and Emecheta, education leads to breaks with tradition. The old man on the border tells Makhaya,

"They should not have given you an education. It's only the education that turns a man away from his tribe" (9). Yet Head, like Emecheta, shows education as the means of liberation.

However, unlike higher learning as advocated by Emecheta, Head's education is of a practical kind, one that will directly challenge the inbred habits and customs and decrease hunger and poverty. Gilbert proceeds to educate women in astute agricultural practices, employing Makhaya to instruct the women, and they learn to grow millet as a cash crop.'2 Makhaya, in his dealings with women, also breaks with custom and acts as a spokesperson for the author's feminist views. His attitude suggests his awareness of the analogy between racial and - sexual domination. Both entrap the victim and stunt progression.

The women he instructs are initially puzzled by him, for they "were unaccustomed to a man speaking to them as an equal .... but once it struck them that he paid no attention to them as women they also forgot he was a man and became absorbed in following his explanations" (106). Makhaya had long believed in the equality of women. On his father's death he had reorganized the household, insisting that his sisters address him by his first name, rather than Buti (meaning elder brother), and associate with him as equals and friends. On his early arriva1 into

Botswana, the old woman, who offers him her daughter as a means of making money, is astounded that Makhaya pays the child for no favour given. "1 have not yet known a man who d3d not regard a woman as a gift from God! He must be mad!" she exclaims (15)-

Paulina is amazed when he offers to help her. "When had anyone helped another, free of charge? It wasn't a custom" (142). When Paulina tells him "don't touch the fire. It's a womants work",

Makhaya voices equality directly (139). "It's time you learned that men live on this earth too- If 1 want to make tea, 1'11 make it and if I want to sweep the floor, 1'11 sweep itu (139).

Through Makhaya, Head describes the ideal man, respectful of women as equals. Like Were, by attributing the authoxity of

Makhaya, a man, with statements affirming sexual equality, she

implies that the breaking down of traditional chauvinistic attitudes must begin with the male. Change cannot be imposed externally upon a people, but must corne from within, from strong, liberated individuals.

In every aspect of living as described in Golema Mmidi, the past informs the present, whether embedded in customs and traditions or as experienced personally by the individuals. From Mma Millipede, Makhaya learns that his brother is "each person who 1s alive on the earth" and that "everything in life depended on generosityt' (130, 132). Through his love for Paulina he recognizes that his feeling of discontent was caused by his need to love, and through Gilbert he "discovered in himself a compassion for the whole great drama of human history. Only

Gilbert admitted the mutual interdependence of al1 men" (134).

However, while Makhaya works through his past experiences to reach a new peace with himself, Head takes the opportunity to nake some strong prophetic commmts on the South African system.

"Violence breeds hatred, and hatred breeds violence" (134) she warns, and when cornmenting on Makhaya's dislike of the white man's guns she states:

They must know what would happen one day in

southern Africa. They must know, somewhere

deep down, that one day al1 those millions

of unarmed people would pitch themselves

bodily on the bullets, if this was the only

way of ridding themselves of an oppressor.

(133)

Her words, written seven years before the Soweto riots, today speak a prophetic truth, and reaffirm the maxim that the past informs the future. While Makhaya achieves a liberating peace within himself, the authorial comment remains bitter.

Head, like so many other African writers, touches on the impact of Western religions on traditional societies. She denounces the missionaries, clairning that "there was no greater crime as yet than al1 the lies Western civilkation had told in the nme of Jesus Christ" and that the missionaries "tainted the bible by not making the words they preached out of it match their de=&" (134, 131). Yet her own Western past, as embodied in her own religious upbringing, is evident. The Batswana tribes she compares with the wandering tribes of Israel, Paulinals son, sacrificed to the drought, is named Isaac, and she uses a comparison with two types of Solomon, one who decks himself in gold and builds an impressive house and the other who walks barefoot, to depict the two destinies which face Africa (127,

185). Golema Mmidi is a fictive metaphor for the garden of Eden, also likened to Utopia (31)- However, the analogy is ironic.

This garden of Eden is one beset with harsh realities, and Head offers the reader some graphic geographical and sociological information about ~hevillage. Cattle disease, prejudice, and corruption of tribal leaders hinder any progress. However, the greatest obstacle is that over which man has least control: lack of rain. Botswana is a semi-desert country, where the rain clouds tease and taunt, often leading the people to false hopes.

Rain equates with wealth, well being, and pro gr es^.'^ The almost constant drought creates a harsh, colourless and barren "garden", in which survival is against extreme odds. The landscape serves as a metaphor for the moral wasteland of the world. The chiefs' insistence on adhering to cultural tradition and opposing beneficial progress reinforces the corruption of those in power.

In a manner analogous to those wielding power in the apartheid system, the chiefs maintain their hold over their people by maintaining their subsistence living standard.

The positive note in this novel is that survival does take place in this hostile environment. Makhaya finds he can put down his roots and flourish, for he learns to jettison the evil of both cultures and absorb the good of both. He learns that:

Gilbert's culture ... had catalogued every single detail on earth with curiosity ....

His own culture lacked, almost entirely,

this love and care for the earth, but had

al1 its interest directed towards people

. . . . People were the central part of the

universe of Africa and the world stood

still because of this. (135)

In When Rain Clouds Gather, the reader is made aware of the unremitting Sun, with its destructive quality as it bakes the land, dries up the little water, and causes death and hunger.

Nature expresses a duality, for the nurturing, life giving qualities of the Sun are only positive when tempered with relief in the Eorm of darkness, clouds and most irnportantly, rain.

The notion of good and evil present in al1 things is repeated and developed further in Head's later work, -Maru. In this second novel, the situation of the main protagonist, a woman named Margaret, closely resembles that of Head. Although

Margaret is not a coloured, she is an outsider, for she is a

Masarwa, a "bushman", and as such is despised and scorned by the local people." Like Head, she loses her mother very early in her life, and was "never able to Say: 1 am this or that. My parencs are this or that" (15). Margaret, like Head, was mission educated; she was raised by a British missionary's wife, Margaret Cadmore ." From her she receives a special education. Her mind and heart were composed of a

little bit of everything she had absorbed

from Margaret Cadmore. It was hardly

African or anything but something new and universal, a type of personality that would

be unable to fit into a definition of

something as narrow as tribe or race or

nation. (16)

Margaret, again like Head, defies classification and as such endures alienation and isolation; as a result of her enforced marginalizztion she is extremely individualistic. "Her brilliance [was] based entirely on social isolation and lack of communication with others, except through books" (18). Like

Head, Margaret travels to Botswana to take up a teaching position, in which she suffers from racism and male chauvinism; the teachers could tolerate her were she a coloured, but a bushman is unacceptable. "She can be shoved out1' the principal concludes. "It ' s easy. She ' s a woman" (41). And Head adds an authorial comment.

How universal was the language of oppression! They had said of the Masarwa

what every white man had said of every

black man: They can't think for themselves . They don ' t know anything" .

The matter never rested there. The

stronger man caught hold of the weaker man

and made a circus animal out of him,

reducing him to the state of misery and

subjection and non-humanity. The

combinations were the same, first conquest,

then abhorrence at the looks of the

conquered and, from there onwards, al1

forms of horror and evil practices. (109)

Although not a writer, Margaret has strong creative powers, producing paintings that depict not only physical subjects, but

the inner workings of the mind. Clearly, Head imbues Margaret with much of her own persona1 past, and the role of painter

ascribed to Margaret is paralleled by the role of the novelist

concentrating on the inner awareness of the individual woman,

Margaret, through her paintings, is able to "write" her own

"text". This is ber means of identifying herself, self-contained

and i~dividual,while simultaneously communicating through her

art with others.

The two male protagonists, Maru and Moleka, both fa11 in

love with Margaret, yet the two are very different in

personality. Although characterized by his thundercloud eyes and

brow, Moleka is generally likened to the Sun. "Moleka was a Sun

around which spun a billion satellites. Al1 the Sun had to do

was radiate force, energy and light" (58). This leadç Maru to

wonder; "Did the Sun have compassion and good sense? It had only the ego of the brightest light in the heavens .... Not in any way did he desire Molekars kingdom or its dizzy, revolving energy"

(58) . In many ways, Moleka is the forerunner of Dan in

Question of Power, for his "dizzying energy" serves to seduce one woman after another. Moleka has a string of illegitimate children and takes pride in knowing everything about a woman's anatomy which makes him arrogant and violent (35). His exploitative power, located in the male ego, is paralleled with feudal privilege, racism and tribalism, and both Dikeledi and

Margaret succumb to his physical attractions. Brown States:

Margaret's experience suggests that the

woman needs to confront the issue of male

power, not only as it has been embodied, by

the man hirnself, but more insidiously, as

it exists in her own psyche in modes she

has accepted, unwittingly, from the male-

oriented conventions of her society. (174-

75)

The two women provide a contrast; Dikeledi has a suggestive walk that is physically seductive to Moleka, whereas Margaret is more self protective, revealing little of her inner emotions, except through her art. Head's indirect suggestion is that Dikeledi, despite her intelligence, plays into the conve~tionalfemale role and encourages Moleka to exert his power over her.

Maru, in contrast with Moleka, "always fell in love with his women" yet he found a "tender smile and a scheming mind went hand in hand, a beautiful voice turned into a dominating viper" (35). "Maru had no equivalent of [Moleka1s sun] in his own kingdom. He had no Sun like that, only an eternal and gentle interplay of shadows and light and peace", for "Maru preferred to be the moon"; his very name, Maru, means the moon, and "his methods were cold, calculating and ruthless" (58, 73) .26 He acknowledges

"Moleka was greater than him in power" but realized that Moleka had an overabundance of power. Margaret, with her self protective ways, is able to mollify this power, while Dikeledi, with her blatant femininity, provokes it (58) . Maru, too, is influenced by Margaret, but in a positive way. She indirectly encourages his idealism, his efforts to attack tribalism, social privilege and the limiting of sexual roles. He appears, like

Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather, to be able to perceive the analogy between corrupt forms of social power and the hand of exploitative masculinity that marks Moleka. In defiance of tradition, he treats his slaves as equals, and recognizing that his was not the kind of personality to rule the masses, renounces his claims to the chieftainship. He organizes his sister's rnarriage to Moleka, and takes Margaret, of the shunned bushman tribe, to be his wife. Maru, like Makhaya, is the type of hero

Head set out deliberately to create. She claims, "1 would deliberately create heroes and show their extreme willingness to abdicate £rom positions of power and absorb themselves in activities which would be of immense benefit to people" (Bruner,

263)-

However, Maru's rnanipulative means of achieving his idealistic ends remain troublesome. Margaret remains a passive symbol, used to voice the need to embrace individualism at the expense of tradition, for "the conditions which surrounded him at the time forced him to think of hcr as a symbol of her tribe and through her he sought to gain an understanding of the eventual liberation of an oppressed people" (108) . Although he thinks to himself, "You could not marry a tribe or a race", it appears in many ways that he does exactly that (109) . Margaret, although the "sun" of Maru1s love, ends up living a somewhat fairy-tale existence, in a house surrounded by yellow Sun loving daisies,

"Elowers which resembled the face of his wife and the sun of his love", but far removed from the community (5). She is still isolated and still keeps in her house a room in which "she totally loved Moleka" (8).

Maru, although idealistically hmanist in his acceptance of

Margaret, is associated with Tladi, the evil spirit. "The people, while fearing Tladi, knew it had a real, living source.

Even then, they could not bring themselves to utter the name,

Maru" (92). The Sun and moon imagery predominates the novel, and

Margaretls inner awareness of the necessary balance of the two is evident in her paintings. While the balance of light and dark, sun and moon, black and white, suggests the interdependence of racial groups, this idea is not developed: Head resists facile polarities. Likewise, while Moleka and Maru provide a balance to one another, Maru exerting pressures upon and manipulating

Moleka, within each man exists the conflicting tension between good and evil. While Moleka and Maru are identified with the Sun and moon respectively, both share good and evil qualities. In a sense they are different aspects of the same person exerting different forces of power over Margaret. Head thus develops her theory of duality voiced in When Rain Clouds Gather, advocating the coexistence of good and evil within all. Head's philosophic themes suggest that the friction between the dualities is necessary, for the existence of good necessitates the contrasting evil. Just as Moleka's radiant sun-like energy without the relieving darkness is destructive, so is unrelenting darkness without life renewing light. Thus, in -Maru there is an implicit suggestion that the one group can nourish the other; that mutual interdependence is a benefit to all.

Head's theme of reconciling the duality within human nature is taken yet further in her third novel, A Question of Power.

The story of Elizabeth, the main protagonist, is clearly autobiographical. Head claims of the work, "There's no way in which 1 can deny that that was a completely autobiographical novel taking a slice of my life, my experience and transcribing it verbatim into novel form" (Bruner, 267). Elizabeth, like Head herself, moves to Botswana with her small son, after an unsuccessful marriage. She settles in the srna11 town of

Motabeng, where she initially finds work as a teacher, but subsequently loses her job and is temporarily institutionalized.

With the help of a school principal, Eugene, she finds work in a cooperative garden. Eugene is most likely a fictionalized portrayal of Patrick Van Rensburg, of whom Head writes most admiringly in Serowe." The work in the garden growing vegetables successfully in the semi desert, arid country of Botswana, and working with individuals from many parts of the world, helps

Elizabeth restore her health. In the garden she befriends workers like Kenosi, Birgette and Tom, who treat her with genuine affection and humaneness. The story line follows that of Head's own life. However, Head does more than record past events. She voices the inner struggles of her protagonist, and demonstrates the ever present influence the past has on the ever evolving present.

Elizabeth's story is one predominantly of the mind. The story line remains a background, providing a cornforting touchstone with the outer world, while the main focus of the novel is Elizabeth's mental state and her inner turmoil as she suffers two mental breakdowns. Elizabeth searches for a self-inscribed personal identity, one in which she can reconcile the two races of which she is a blend, as well as reconcile herself in relation to male domination.

Elizabeth is tormented by mental visions, dreams and fantasies, fragments of her imagination that take the form, in particular, of two black men, Sello and Dan. The work is dif ficult reading, for Elizabeth drifts in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and envisioning, taking the reader with her through her confusing labyrinth of tho~ght.~' The background of the harsh landscape as demonstrated in When Rain

Clouds Gather is again used to mirror the barren moral landscape of her world. The outer world, with its inhospitable, arid environment intrudes upon her inner world: the two are inseparable. The exterior political landscape is ever present within her inner world. Head gives an analogous description of the merging of the physical inner and outer worlds when recording

Elizabeth's adaptation to life in the Botswana bush.

The slowly drifting closeness to the soil

was increased by living in a mud hut. It

was like living with the trees and insects

right indoors because there was no sharp

distinction between the circling mud walls

of a hut and the earth outside. (60)

Sirnilarly there is, Head demonstrates, no sharp distinction between public, political life and private life. Elizabeth's mental anguish is a result of the environment in which she has lived and is still living, and her mental breakdowns occur when she voices her inner tonnent publicly. Head does, however, offer optimism. Just as Makhaya of When Rain Clouds Gather finds his home in Golema midi, so does Elizabeth find she can put down roots in Botswana. As with the Cape Gooseberry that symbolically manages to grow and thrive in alien and barren soil, so does

Elizabeth discover she too can survive and prosper."

Not only are the outer and inner worlds, public and private, inextricably intertwined, but so too are the past and present.

Elizabeth's past experiences provide the challenge of ber inner journey. The visions she experiences are projections of her own mind, and are, as such, reflections of her own internalized view of the world. Having been born and educated in South Africa, where the system segregated by law the two races of which she is a blend, she has absorbed the attitudes prescribed by the state, internalized and accepted negative attitudes about herself as a coloured person and as a woman. Thus her past experiences have given her a belief in her inferiority. She has also internalized a dislike of the black man. As a result, Elizabeth, half black, cannot love herself, let alone others, and hence she tells the doctor "1 don't like people" (51). Her words echo those of

Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather, who, upon arriving in

Botswana claims "1 don' t care about people" (10) . That past experience has an impact upon the present is made evident by the very structure of the novel; it opens with the ending and ends with the beginning, suggesting that the end is implicit in what has gone before.

Some critics have interpreted the two men, Sello and Dan, as depicting good and evil, but again, Head is more cornplex. As with Moleka and Maru, the two men depict powerful influences over

Elizabeth. That they are projections of her own mind forces her

to acknowledge the good and evil within herself. The men remind

Elizabeth of men in the village, men she knows only by sight.

The two sections into which the novel is divided deal predominantly with the visitations of Sello and Dan respectively.

Head leads the reades skilfully through smooth transitions from one world to another, that of the dark confusion of Elizabeth's mind into the outer world of the relentless Motabeng Sun.

Sello appears before Elizabeth as a vision, a God-like

figure, who advocates universal rather than individual love. "He prefers an identification with mankind to an identification with a particular environment" and states "1 am just anyone" (11). ïie hungers 'after things of the soul, in which other preoccupations were submerged" (11). Initially Elizabeth wants to identify with him, and "she too rapidly accepted Sello as a cornfortable prop against which to lean" (29). As Sello takes on many different guises, Elizabeth and the reader have to work through her confusion. "He had an almighty air of calm and assurance about him. He wore the soft, white flowing robes of a rnonk" (22). His

"favorite hunting ground had been India", and he frequently appears as Buddha. At the same time he presents her with "a spectacular array of personalities ... crowded with memories of the past. They were al1 Sello in his work, as the prophet of mankind" (24-25) . He thus appears to be al1 prophets in one,

" [dl ominating and directing the whole drama . . . " (29) .

While Elizabeth is attracted to him, she is cautioned by him to "retain her own mental independence" (29) . Furthermore, the omnipotence and masculinity of these prophet figures seem to trouble Eli~abeth.~'She sees gods as "terrible monstrosities who had nurled themselves around with so little regard for the welfare of others", and she resists their presumption of being

"greater" than the ordinary man, because of their greater power

(41). "God was no security for the soul", but rather "God is the totality of al1 great souls and their achievements: the achievements are not that of one single, individual soul but of many souls who al1 worked to make up the soul of God, and this might be called God or the Gods" (65, 54 ) . She advocates "Be ordinary. Any assumption of greatness leads to dog-eat-dog fight and incurs massive suffering" and she tells Sello, at one point, "Yeu are making a mistake, Sello. I'm God tool' (39, 38) . Sellols guise as a man in a brown suit seems more acceptable to

Elizabeth, for it is in the ordinary man that she ultimately finds God. Thus Sello also represents "people who had been killed and killed and killed again in one cause after another for the liberation of mankind. She thought at the time: why, an absolute title has been shared. There are several hundred people who are God" (31). Her experience with Seflo leads Elizabeth to conclude that "Christianity and God were courteous formalities people had learned to enjoy with mental and emotional detachment-

-the real battlefront was living people, their personalities, their treatrnent of each other" (66). She also recognizes that the base of her relationship with

Sello was "masculine" (24). Thus Sello is more complex than rnerely representing the good. He forces Elizabeth to question religion as a "comfortable prop" and a male-dominated institution

(29). He also introduces Elizabeth to Medusa, who flaunrs her sexuality bef ore Elizabeth making her feel inferior and inadequate. She hurls accusations at Elizabeth, accusing her of not being a true African. "You'll only drown here. Youqre not linked to the people. You don't know any African languages"

(44). She challenges Elizabeth by claiming, "You never really liked Africans. You only pretended to" (51). Medusa ultimately brings Elizabeth to a state collapse, with her asserting, "You are inferior. You are filth", and repeating, "Dog, filth, the Africans will eat you to death" (47, 45). Her words echo in

Elizabeth's head, forcing her to reflect upon herself, but the words are, of course, her own. Subsequent to her encounter with Medusa she verbally abuses a Batswana man in a store; in the public present the private torments of the past bring on her collapse.

Dan in many ways is quite different from Sello. "Once you stared the importanr power maniac in the face you saw that he never saw people, humanity, compassion, tenderneçs. It was as though he had a total blank spot and only saw his own power, his influence, his self" (19) . However, "more than anything, the extreme masculinity of the man instantly attracted her" (105).

Like Moleka, Dan is a womanizer, and he taunts Elizabeth with his sexuality, and parades women before her. He claims "1 go with al1 these women because you are inferior" (147). On the one hand

Elizabeth is forced to acknowledge her basic and natural attraction to his rnasculinity. On the other hand, she appears to have internalized the myth regarding the black man's sexual superiority, thus increasing her own sense of inferiority. Dan is presented as a powex maniac. "In some way he had gained directorship of the universe since 1910. He had a staccato way of putting it. 'Directorship since 1910'" (25). The date 1910 marks the creation of the Union of South Africa. Again, Head implies an analogous domination, that of male sexuality and political, racial domination.

Dan, like Medusa, forces Elizabeth to face the less noble aspects of her personality. In this sense, Dan is as much of a teacher as is Sello. Both exert attractions to Elizabeth, and yet both trouble her with their superiority and masculinity. By facing the image of herself as presented negatively by ~edusa,

Elizabeth is forced to recognize the good and bad within herself, and she subsequently asks Tom, "What would you do if you were both God and Satan at the same time?" (161). Unable to corne to tems with this recognition, she projects ont0 Sel10 the label of

God and Satan in one, and, subsequent to posting a notice on the post office door accusing him of incest, breaks down for the second tirne." Elizabeth's tragedy is that the "evil" she perceives is a reflection of her adoption of opinions and prejudices given to her by the South African systern. Elizabeth's internalization and acceptance of the alleged superior sexuality of the black man contributes to her feeling of being sexually inferior, and her distaste for sexual habits. She needs to redefine her own codes of morality. In her turmoil, Elizabeth is forced to recognize her own responsibility for her oppression.

Just as Head, herself, in this novel is able to write her own text, describing most personally her own inner tonnent, so too must Elizabeth write herself. In the cooperative garden her notebook becomes important to her, and at the time of her recovery, her son finds her writing poetry. Elizabeth finally does find her own voice.

Unlike other African women writers, Head, belonging to neither major racial group, cannot look for an identity prescribed for her by a culture or tradition and is thus forced to confront her own pysche. Without a cultural backing with which to be integrated, Head, as Elizabeth, needs to find an individual self-acceptance and self-reliance. She iç, as a result, more individualistic than her African peers. She is also, it appears, more confused and troubled. As a blend of two cultures, she appears to reject both and live according to her own dictates: she is the truly liberated individual. However, the reader ni11 appreciate the individual agony Elizabeth endures by her very liberation. By not being part of a particular group, she lives on the edge, "for a few years she lived on the edge of

South Africa's life", and she lives on the edge physically in

Motabeng, a place of sand, "a village remotely inland, perched on the edge of the Kalahari desert" (18, 19). She also lives on the edge of sanity; at times "she slipped over the edge, [and] clung to its periphery with both hands" (97). Elizabeth's young son voices Elizabeth's fears, when he claims: "I'm afraid of the edge

... I think a lot of things have fallen off the edge" (94-5).

She cannot afford, for the sake of her sanity, to retain the notion of being relegated to the margin, as dictated by the white and black groups in Southern Africa. Elizabeth has to rewrite the script, with herself placed securely in the centre. The novel significantly ends with Head's statement, "As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her land. It was a gesture of belonging" (206). True liberation requires tremendous self- assurance and self-reliance, almost impossible to achieve in an environment of racial domination and inequality. For the sake of sanity, Elizabeth, as al1 individuals, needs to belong. Endno tes

1 This theme is expressed somewhat differently in Buchi

Emecheta's later work, Double Yoke, (London: Allison and Busby,

1979) . Her male protagonist, Ete Kamba learns during the course of the novel to change his preconceptions about women. However,

the role of the female lecturer, Miss Bulewayo, has much to do with his change in attitude.

Ci Emecheta confronts this issue in Double Yoke.

3 A panga is a large, long, vide bladed knife.

4 Were writes: "Girls who were kidnapped assumed the

status of a wife and came to help with household choses the next morning . . . . When a girl bled form her first experience with sex, she could claim anything with that blood (95).

5 Tlali finished writing the novel in 1969, and it was

first published in 1975 by Ravan Press in a very much expurgated

form. Tlali claims that a "lot of material was removed from it

to make it acceptable to the white reader". The Longman version,

Tlali claims, is hou she had written the book (Craig MacKenzie

and Cherry Clayton 71-72).

a The banning was lifted in 1985.

7 Fanagalo is a simplified, artificial mixture of words from various Bantu languages, widely employed as a medium of communication in many parts of Southern Africa. Its use was officially encouraged by the Transvaal and Orange Free

State Chamber of Mines and other authorities.

8 'tMuntus", an African tem, and "soggens", a Yiddish term both signify "blacks" .

4 Chinua Achebe states that "no man can understand another whose language he does not speak", and adds "and

"language" here does not mean simply words, but a man's world view" (Emenyonu 31) .

?O Elizabeth Thaele Rivkin and Richard E. Lapchick write of the iniquitous Bantustan policy which did not allow men working in the cities to bring their wives with them. The policy thus prevented the men from fulfilling their traditional marital duties (18-19, 219-223, 239) .

il "Nats" is an abbreviation for the right wing

Nationalist Party.

7 -3 Tlali relates a conversation she had when she was invited by some Jewish women to their homes. "[A] wornan asked,

'How can you write about Jews that way? How can you make your main character a Jew?' And 1 replied 'Look around, and go to

Jo'burg. Go to al1 the shops, al1 the furniture shops. Who do you find there? It's Jews. Why should 1 go and create somebody from Mars when we have these people?' The Jews are very, very strong economically and they own almost everything - it was worse in the sixties" (MacKenzie and Clayton 78) .

? 3 Lobola is an African word signifying bride price.

14 The ban was lifted in 1989.

l5 Tikki draai music accompanies an energetic Afrikaans style of dancing. A "tikki" is an obsolete small unit of South

African currency (the size of a dime), and "draai" is Afrikaans for "turn". Tikki draai thus means, to "turn on a tikki", to

"turn on a dime".

16 Tlali reiterates this proverb in her short story

("Detour into Detention", Mihloti 35) .

1-7 Tlali depicts the difficulties for the black woman leaving an abusive husband more fully in her short story, "ma--

Lithoto", (Footprints in the Quaq 12-26) .

18 Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, a province of predominantly English-speaking whites and Zulu blacks. The majority of coloureds live in the Cape Province, and although they speak a blend of many tongues, the Cape coloureds are predominantly Afrikaans speaking.

19 Nkosi writes, "Bessie Head is not a political novelist in any sense we can recognize; indeed, there is ample evidence that she is generally hostile to politics" (102).

-"-9 l- Nadine Gordimer claims that "a writer uses the substance of the life around him - that's al1 he has - and if he does so truthfully then of course political things come into it, especially in South Af rica. Politics, the effects of politics, permeate even the most private sector of people's lives and this cornes into your writing" (Interview, Salkey 184-85).

-7 -1 When Head £irst arrived in Botswana, she stayed in a refugee camp in Francistown, where she met a Zimbabwean man who became her mode1 for Makhaya (Marquard 53).

1 - - Despite the apparent advantages of cash crops, as put forward by Head, both Ogundipe-Leslie and Steady advocate that the growing of cash crops had a negative impact on women

(~gundipe-Leslie28-29, Steady 12).

2 3 In Botswana, the staple currency is the pula, a

Tswana word rneaning rain .

5 4 1 refer to Margaret as a "bushman" and not "bushwoman"

as this is the term used by Head to describe Margaret.

? C - A Head claims that what she "simply offered to the

Masarwa girl, Margaret, was [her] own background - the early life in the mission .... The woman Margaret Cadmore ... was one of

[her] teachers in the mission". Head relates how a British woman

doctor, upon reading the novel, recognized the name Margaret

Cadmore, and identified the woman who had taught Head £rom Head's

portrayal of her in Maru.

2 O Maru is Tswana word signifying rain cloud (Johnson,

"Proper Names" 132) . - - - Head gives a brief history of the work Patrick Van

Rensburg did in Serowe, establishing a secondary school, and the

Swaneng Project, a village developrnent workshop, ernbracing the

whole community and its needs (Serowe 135-38).

2 9 Nkosi judges the novel as "a disastrous failure" in

which "the mental breakdown of the heroine is accompanied by a

parallel breakdown in communication, with an increasing loss of

this power to instruct or arouse sympathy" (101-02).

-7 G- The name "Cape Gooseberry" and the term "Cape

coloured", the commonly used term in South Africa for al1

coloureds, be they from the Cape or elsewhere, are analogous.

Head indirectly suggests that the word "gooseberry", which suggests an unnatural combination, echoes the South African official attitude to mixed race. The Immorality Act forbade

interracial propagation,

30 Ogundipe-Leslie advocates that both Islam and

Christianity are male-dominated and hold patriarchal values. She claims that these religions affected the status of African women, causing greater subordination.

3 1 Elizabeth's accusations of Sello are clearly based on

Head's own accusations made against Sir Seretse Khama. She reputedly accused him of ritual cannibalism and incest, and posted her accusations on the door to the post office in Serowe

(A Woman Alone xi). CONCLUSION

In A Question of Power, Elizabeth is forced by Medusa to

confront her own reflection and recognize the latent power and

passive self-victimization within herself. Only by her interna1

self-reflection is she able to take responsibility for her own person. Head, through Elizabeth, presumably works through her

own painful self-examination and is in Helene Cixous's words,

finally able to "write her self .... put herself into the text--

as into the world and into history--by her own movement" (245).

Since who we perceive ourselves to be depends on what we remember

and the authority that cornes with memory, self-analysis and

reflection force Elizabeth, within her present context, to

confront her past, and to examine to what extent she has

internalized social memory. Likewise, al1 African women writers,

by recording their own perspectives of their changing worlds, are

reflecting upon themselves through memory and the authority that

accompanies it. When cultural memory, itself, alienates or rnarginalizes the individual, self-analysis of necessity becomes

the process of disalienation, of which Fanon writes, and which,

as Head demonstrates, may threaten individual stability; it is

this process that I have tried to trace.

Since to take on a language is to assume that language's cultural memory and authority, the methods employed by the

African women writers 1 examine, when using the English language, reflect their attitudes towards their own cultures and histories, as well as their adopted language with its inherent social cultures. The more they retain and incorporate their own language idioms into their English expression, the more they appear to remain embraced within their cultural memory. It is difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate whether the retention of their own idioms is by choice or whether it reflects the strength of dictating customs. Through memory and language, Waciumals Daugher of Mumbi demonstrates that in the Gikuyu oral culture, the world, the place of culture does not exist outside of the Gikuyu language in the way it does in a dernotic language like English. Thus Waciuma, in recalling her past, incorporates her Gikuyu language with its inherent customs into her text to reaffirm her very existence. Nwapa, likewise, incorporates the idioms and intonation of her Igbo language to re-create the reality of her oral society. In this manner, Waciuma and Nwapa are able to convey in a language not their own the spirit and culture that is their own, and thus they "adopt strategies of appropriation .... which maintain the integrity of ... Otherness (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire 71). Their works demonstrate how language does not express memory in any simply ostensive way, but contributes to its formation. On the other hand, the works of Emecheta reflect both a total rejection of her Igbo language with its inherent cultural memories, and an adoption a new language together with its inherent culture.

Waciuma and Nwapa differ, however, in their depiction of the individual, for despite Waciuma's writing of her own history, she appears to conform with Kenyan cultural beliefs, and clearly values the group over the individual. Nwapa, on the other hand, recalls dignified, individual women characters, who suffer the fate of non-conf orming . Emecheta ' s works, perhaps inevitably, reflect her adoption of the individual focus inherent in her adopted Western culture. Openly hostile towards ber Igbo Past, she offers no solutions for her individual protagonists, enslaved and trapped by elements of their Igbo customs. However, for those who reject the past customs, strong individuals like Adah,

Adaku and Debbie, she offers new non-traditional roles .

Other authors, such as Ogot, Were and Tlali, offer a more compromising blend of cultures, as demonstrated by their written expression. Again the use of language both expresses mernory and also contributes to its formation. By drawing on elements of cultural memory of both Western and African cultures, and as embedded in language, they are able to offer solutions that demand neither an abrupt or total rejection of their African cultural traditions, nor a complete immersion in a foreign culture. Furthemore, these authors recognize the value of strong individuals to lead the community or nation, and they thus achieve a compromise in valuing both the individual and the group, hence both cultural ideologies. In this way, they indicate that, through accommodation, aspects of the Western cultural memory have become part of their own.

Ong claims that Western narrative has become more and more preoccupied with and articulate about inner, persona1 crises, a stage of reflection which would never have been reached without the conscious raising attributes of writing (178). If one accepts his assertion, one could argue that African women will become more and more focused on the individual, the further they are in time from their oral backgrounds. Head, so particularly personal and introspective, is unique in having only the assumed social memory of her Western, English, missionary schooling.

However, Njau's Ripples in the Pool is also preoccupied with inner persona1 crises. Njau's and Headts mind-bending works both recall confusion and trauma of the mind and illustrate the psychic horrors and turbulent histories of their protagonists.

In contrast, the narrative realism of Nwapa and Emechetals novels, which depict the more mundane experiences of courtship, marriage and childbearing in rural comunities, helps record objectively their unhurried, cultural worlds.

Ogot also explores the inner confusion of the mind, ilthough she uses a chronological narrative structure. Ochola's "disease"

Fs, in a sense, one of the mind. His near loss of life suggests the near loss of his identifying culture, his past roots. The loss of either is synonymous. On one level, Emechetafs rejection of her Igbo past suggests she began to lose her Igbo identity when emigrating to London and she rnay be seen to exernplify Ogotts fear. However, Emecheta's drawing so heavily on her Nigerian background in so many of her works suggests that, as with Ezekiel

Mphahlele, the "tyranny of place" still courts her. While

Emecheta rnay chocse to differ from her inherited past, she still needs to defer to it. The past cannot be cut off: al1 experiences and ail moments of the past impact upon the present. Emecheta may in fact need to 'reject" her past in order to cope with the physical disassociation from it. The reassessing of the remembered authority by women writers leads naturally to feminist issues because the writers are dealing predominantly with women's concerns. While there is no continuous pattern to trace in these early women's novels, most depict the inequities and injustices of women's subservience, polygyny and bride-price traditions. However, just as one cannot totally remove the effects of the past and its authority, one can never forget enough of the familiar present to rernember the past without the present's influence. Thus, the remembered past, as presented to the reader in the novels of these writers, of necessity is tainted by the present when transmitted through their perspectives. Their assessment of African customs may well be subtly and subconsciously influenced by other present factors. Without exception, these women take advantage of the educational and attitudinal opportunities offered by Western modernization and in so doing, accept the difficulties of a multifaceted identity, which combines elements of old and new. Katherine Frank argues that feminism is an "individualistic ideology in contrast to the communal nature of African society"

(15). 1 hope that my examination of the burden of mernory suggests an alternative explanation. Most African women writers do focus on individual protagonists, but 1 would argue that the desired liberation of al1 women is implicit. The writers find the solutions for liberation from the authority of imposed memory through different avenues. Nwapa appears to advocate the advantages of economic power. Efuru and Idu, by being excellent traders, attain an economic independence. In particular, Efuru's good money management allows her to achieve a status within the community as a benevolent money lender. Emecheta, Were, Ogot and

Waciuma advocate education as their liberating means, in some cases, education being a means to economic independence. Through her schooling, Adah becomes independent of the dole. Education also offers the woman a vision of human experience beyond the narrow confines of her own life and a breadth of perspective, no doubt necessary to instigate any change. Even Obejeta in -The Slave Girl, when reading an Igbo book, can temporarily and imaginatively escape her life of entrapment. Others, like

Karungaru in The Graduate, and Debbie in Destination Biafra are empowered by means of their education and able to prescribe new roles for themselves.

Tlali and Head confront the more extreme complexity of apartheid, although both also posit education as a means of liberating women from their past subservience to authority. The women in When Rain Clouds Gather are taught the modern agricultural techniques, and Pholoso in Amandla speaks passionately and persuasively of the importance for women to educate themselves. However, Head's and Tlali's prime concern confronting the deeper ramifications of apartheid. In Amandla

Tlali places emphasis on the need for collective solidarity, men and women together, as necessary for the liberation of the people. In Muriel at Metropolitan, Muriel, through self-analysis of her own physical entrapment in apartheid, tries to liberate herself by refusing to ccntribute to it any longer. Xowever, in resigning from her job, she risks a different fom of oppression, economic oppression. That Tlali's works were banned illustrates the government's attempt to suppress and control memory and preserve its own authority, and makes Tlali' recorded memory al1 the more valuable, Head takes the personai self-analysis yet further, analyzing the internalization and psychological damage of her social memory formed in South Africa, and finds freedom through self-acceptance. Tlali, Were and Head also advocate that no solution to the subservient status of women will be found in their male dominated worlds unless the men, themselves, change their attitudes towards women and traditional authority.

Njau, too, depicts the psychological damage resulting from

Western capitalisrn and materialism. None of the women in her novel work out any kind of integration as being women and women workers in the modern economy. Nevertheless, Njau seems to hold out the hope that her people might restore the old way of life, and take up where they were, before colonization. As Muthee, in

Ripples in the Pool suggests, the river, when meeting an obstacle, merely winds around it and proceeds on its course.

Njau implies by analogy that the past colonial intrusion is merely a temporary obstacle, easily circumnavigated or forgotten.

However, as Waciuma states, "there is no going back", and the post-colonial experience, of necessity, becomes part of the

African histories, and hence part of African cultural mernories

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