Ño. 251
I
THE CONTRIBUTION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND WEST AFRICAN LITERATURE TO THE RISE OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN WEST AFRICA
Ernest A. Champion
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
August 1974 ABSTRACT
This study followed the literary trail of pre-colonial and post
colonial English speaking West Africa. The purpose was to determine
the contribution made by the English language to the rise of a national
consciousness in West Africa.
During the years following the colonization of West Africa, the
native peoples adopted the-mores and traditions of cultured western
society. They made the English language their own, and adopted the
legal and educational systems of England. West African scholars such
as Blyden and Africanus Horton were very pragmatic in their observation
that Africans must learn to live with the best of. two worlds, the in
herited and the acquired.
The absence of a written alphabet resulted in Africans being rele
gated to the bottom rung in the cultural ladder. Their language, customs i ■ ' ' and religion were considered primitive. The efforts of western Christian missions to bring religion, culture and education, to Africa thus had a genuine humanitarian base.
The analysis of novels written during the colonial period revealed the culture of West Africa before the advent of Europeans. Novels such as Tutuola's The Pa Im Wi ne Dri nkard and Achebe1s Th i ngs Fa I I Apart
recreated in artistic terms the historic past. No Longer At Ease by
Achebe and One Man, One Matchet by T. M. Aluko brought the reader closer to the period ending with World War II. This period was marked by the paradoxical alienation of westernized Africans from tradition concurrently with a rise in national consciousness and identity.
This study also concluded that while the English language contributed Ill greatly to a rise of national consciousness it has also been realistic in its revelations. Writers such as Soyinka, Achebe and Armah, using the same international language, portrayed the disillusionment and frustration of intellectuals disappointed with the first fruits of free dom. However, the very expression of this bitterness freely and without restriction is in itself an act of national awareness. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION 1-11
CHAPTER 1 12-37
CHAPTER II 38-70
CHAPTER III 71-95
CONCLUSION 96-100
FOOTNOTES 101-112
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 113-11 S' INTRODUCTION
The white man has detribalized me. He had better go the whole hog. He must know that I'm the personi fication of the African paradox, detribalized, west ernized, but still African - minus the conflicts.!
The African paradox that Ezekiel Mphahlele refers to in his book
The African Image is also basically the implied paradox of colonialism, made manifest by the English language and its literature in giving an
impetus and a momentum to African nationalist movements in the early.and mid twentieth century. In the very act of colonizing a whole continent and imposing an alien tongue upon diverse clans and tribes, the Eng
lishman gave to the African a lingua franca which fused a people to gether and gave them a new identity.
Ndabning Sithole, in his book African Nationalism, observes that
. . .eventually a common language, a kind of 'lingua franca' soon developed, and thus communication was facilitated among members of different tribes. . . It must be remembered that fundamentally the tribal concept arose out of a common need of a group of people who had a common, goaI. The government of the Republic of South Africa is now trying to push back the African tribes into their former tribal patterns to avert this so-called danger of African Nationalism which is an amalgamation of different tribes with a common objective.2
It was thus by means of a common language imposed by the colonizer for reasons of commerce, trade and bureaucratic efficiency that Africa became detribalized.
Moreover, England which had the biggest single share of the conti- nent, by spreading its language and literature across territorial boun- daries gave to African nationalism a continental dimension, which has made possible.the Pan African movements of the fifties and sixties.
English also served as a link between Africa and the New World. The 2
New World with its own history of slavery, was in turn a symbol of
emancipation and freedom.
Kwame Nkrumah in his autobiography wrote,
I was too stunned for emotions to play much part in the leave taking and it was not until the boat sailed out from the harbour and I saw the Statue of Liberty with her arms raised as if in a personal farewell to me that a mist covered my eyes. 'You have opened my eyes to the true meaning of liberty,' I thought. 'I shall never rest until I have carried your message to Africa.'3
However long before Nkrumah's arrival back home, the New World had
played a very significant role in forging West African nationalism.
Further development of this contribution will be examined in greater
detai I.
While colonialism was detribalizing Africa and giving its people a new identity it was also giving them a new sense of national pride.
The African was being given the opportunity to master a modern written
language which was not only going to open the Dark Continent to the world but also bring the world to Africa. Through the language of the
Master, the African was to become master of his own world, and even tually take his place as an equal in the community of nations.
Rabemananjara the Malagasy poet voiced the aggressive nationalism of
Africans when he said at the second conference of Negro writers and artists,
Truly our conference is one of language thieves. This crime at least we have committed ourselves. We have stolen from our masters this treasure of identity, the vehicle of their thought, the golden key to their soul, the magic sesame which opens wide the door of their se crets, the forbidden cave where they have hidden the loot taken from our fathers and for which we must demand reckon¡ng.4 3
At the first congress one of the participants had vigorously asserted,
"We could not tolerate the solution of an Africa shut in on itself
through teaching in the native languages. We have every faith in the
virtue of hybrid clviI¡sations."^ A far cry indeed from the views of
Mahatma Ghandi who said in reply to Mcaulay's recommendations of educa
tion in English for all Indians, "It is we the English knowing Indians
that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon
the English but upon us."^
The imposition of English on West Africa and the system of educa
tion based on the British pattern was paradoxically enough destined to
provide the African with resources far greater and far beyond what was
envisaged by the colonial masters. If the school and its medium of
instruction imposed certain hardships on the African child educated in
English, it nevertheless prepared him to meet the world that was fast
advancing upon him. The mastery of this new language gave him a dis
cipline and a sense of his own ability to move into academic and intel
lectual circles at the highest possible levels. It ultimately produced
the Chinua Achebes, the Wole Soyinkas, the Cyprian Ekwensis and the
Kwame Nkrumahs who would, as inheritors of two worlds, meet the chal
lenges of a changing West Africa.
The Achebes, the Soyinkas and Nkrumahs are in a certain sense inhe ritors of a nationalism of continental dimensions. In 1880 Edward Blyden the West Indian scholar writing from Liberia in the English language said,
But the world has yet to witness the forging of the great chain which is to bind the nations together in equal fel lowship and friendly union. I mean the mighty principle of Love, as It is taught in the New Testament. Many are of 4
opinion that this crowning work is left for the African. . . It may yet come to pass that when in Europe, 'God has gone out of date' or when the belief in. God will be as the tales with which old women frighten children, when the world will be a machine, the ether, a gas, and God will be a force, then earnest inquirers after truth, leaving the seats of science, and the highest civilisation, will betake them selves to Africa to learn lessons of faith and piety; for Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.7
Blyden with dignity and pride asserted, "I would rather be a member of this race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augus tan period or an Anglo Saxon in the Nineteenth Century."® This conti nental dimension has been an ever present factor in African nationalism, a nationalism imbued with a prophetic vision of people destined for great things in the cultural history of the world. Thus English educa ted Africans were deeply moved when Bernard Shaw the Irish Socialist, thinker and dramatist in a letter to the New York Times on the 13th of
April, 1933 said, "CiviIisations grow up and disappear, to be replaced by other and stronger civilisations. For all I know the next great civilisation may come from the negro race."9 Blyden and Shaw gave ex pression to the deepest national aspiration of Africans, not merely to claim for themselves a piece of God's little acre, but to demonstrate to the world at large that the Black Continent has been and could still be the cradle of a great civilization.
There is discrenible in the history of West African nationalism a "Journey Motif." If the Promised Land was the goal of the Jewish people, freedom from colonial rule was a major objective of the African people. But this "Journey Motif" does not end with decolonization. One of the major objectives of African and West African nationalism is the assertion that Africa was once the home of a great civilization. It is the belief of African nationalists that the Black Continent has a 5
great contribution to make to future cultural advancement. This is
the continuing Journey Motif; independence and decolonization do not
mean the Journey's end.
It is only when one understands the totality of African nationalism
that one begins to grasp the realities of a situation where a people
were prepared to subject themselves to the extent that one did not
qualify to be called an intellectual until and unless one had acquired
some fluency in the English language. "An African who was widely read
in Swahili literature, but could not speak English was likely to be
considered further from being an intellectual than a poorly read African who had acquired fluency in spoken English."10 Thus the English lan guage and the resultant status of intellectuals played an important part in the development of African consciousness. T. M. Aluko parodies this whole situation at a serious and sarcastic level in his novel
One Man, One Matchet. Udo Akpan, the Black District Officer is the
African intellectual who has finally mastered the ways of the white man to the extent that he is held in awe and respect as the Black white man.
Benjamin Benjamin is semi-Iiterate, but he is a scholar because he reads and writes in English. This fifth grade dropout proves a thorn in the flesh to the white administrators as well as to his countryman Udo Akpan the Black white man. Of Benjamin Benjamin it could truly be said the villagers ". . .gazed and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all (the English) he knew."!*
Ali Mazrui in his essay on "English Language and Political Con sciousness" notes that the word "scholar" often covered all who could speak, read and write in English, from the barely literate to the Oxford 6
graduate. There developed on the part of the colonial office a cer
tain reaction against this new breed of Africans. Mazrui refers to a
colonial office record of 1875 which reads, . .the 'educated natives'
or 'scholars'. . .have always been a thorn in the side of the government
of the Gold Coast. They have been at the bottom of most of the troubles
on the coast for some years past;"12 this Mazrui points out was the
beginning of modern politics in Africa.
The scholars in Africa forged both consciously and unconsciously
a national awareness, while also helping to create a body of militant
writers in Africa and America. The militant voices raised were heard
not merely within the confines of West Africa, but touched the hearts
and minds of those with similar aspirations. This national awareness spoke in a language that had an audience the world over. When Chief
Lithuli tells the South African government in the idiom of Moses,
"Let my people go" he transcends national and international boundaries.
The ancient Mosaic command spoken in a lingua franca still carries with equal fervour and passion the message of freedom for Jew and gentile.
English also facilitated transtribal leadership and Pan African
leadership. Kwame Nkrumah achieved the first and always' aspired for the second. In the closing pages of his autobiography Nkrumah wrote,
I have never regarded the struggle for the independence of the Gold Coast as an isolated objective but always as a part of a general world historical pattern. The African in every territory of this vast continent has been awakened and the struggle for freedom will go on. It is our duty as the vanguard force to offer what assistance we can to those now engaged in battles that we ourselves have fought and won.'3
The vanguard force which Nkrumah spoke of was nurtured by a highly 7
Anglicized and westernized system. Achimota College which Nkrumah
attended is still remembered for its first African Vice Principal
Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, who expressed this belief in a meeting of cultures
when he said "You can play a tune of sorts on the white keys, and you
can play a tune of sorts on the black keys, but for harmony you must
use both black and white."14
Among the various factors facilitating the rise of nationalism in
West Africa were the Bible, Shakespeare and the general English litera
ture of the period. The missionaires were unwittingly helpful in the
rise of West African nationalism for they reduced the percentage of
illiteracy in West Africa. The African had to be educated to read the
Bible, and
One of the teachings of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, is the worth and dignity of the individual in the sight of God, and there is a relation between this teaching and African Nationalism. . . The Bible redeemed the African individual from the power of superstition, individuality-crushing tradition, witchcraft and other reactionary forces. The same Bible helped the African in dividual to assert himself above colonial powers. *5
The Bible thus was a liberating and creative force. It did for the Afri can "what we could not do with our spears."'^
While the missionaries played an unwitting role in fostering West
African nationalism a study of general English literature also played an equally unwitting role. The nationalism that grew out of the Western
literary influences was not only political but also cultural. Shakes peare was a symbol of the master of the English language, and also a symbol of a creator of universal characters and eternal situations. To the African, as we have noted earlier, fluency in and mastery of English 8 were more than status symbols. They gave admittance to the world of the cultured, the intellectual and the elite. Hence there was a tendency toward extravagance and bombast. Benjamin Benjamin's letter to the editors of a newspaper in Aluko's One Man, One Matchet, is a good example of this kind of language extravagance.
Freedom of worship is one of the reinforced concrete columns carrying the magnificent edifice we know as democracy. Knock over that column and the whole edi fice comes tumbling down the way the Temple of Dagon, the god of the Philistines tumbled down under the superhuman strength of Sampson, as recorded in Holy Writ.'7
It was a status symbol to be able to quote freely from the Bible as we I I as from Shakespeare.
But Shakespeare also stimulated thought and opened up a whole uni verse of ideas to the African. The English teacher .in African classrooms was oblivious of the new horizons and new fervours he was helping expand and germinate.
Pertinent lines from Shakespeare and other great English writers did not pass unnoticed by budding nationalists who must have read mean ings other than originally intended. "There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken in the flood leads on to fortune," or "Men at some time are masters of their fates," or from Scott, "Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, this is my own my native land?" Professor Coleman in his Background to Nationalism notes,
In literature Shakespeare and the Bible held the stage. Even today it is not uncommon to find a semi-educated Nigerian working as a steward who can quote the Bible and recite Hamlet, but has little knowledge of the geo graphy, the proverbs and folk tales, or the prominent leaders and outstanding events in the history of his own country.'® 9
The point that Professor Coleman is making is that a study of
Shakespeare while being valuable in Its own merit was isolating and
alienating the African from his roots.
Shakespeare's two plays which have attracted the greatest atten
tion for politicaI reasons are Julius Caesar and The Tempest. Julius
Caesar has been translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere. Lyndon
Harris the critic reviewing the translation for the London Sunday Observer
remarks, "In this case Shakespeare's play will be looked into again by
some to find if there are any para IleIs between the-pol¡ties of Rome and 19 the politics of Dar-es Salaam. And they will look in vain." Parallels
there may not be, yet symbolically certain political figures and events
may bear very close resemblance to the politics and politicians of Rome
and the politics of Lagos, Accra or Freetown. Like .Caesar, Nkrumah was offered the Presidency of Ghana for life which he declined. He was on the verge of being immortalized just as Caesar was and just like
Caesar was betrayed by the very man closest to him, the very mob that
hailed his as the saviour also shouted traitor and razed his statue to the ground.
The Tempest is the Shakespearean play that sets revolutionaries on edge and also arouses a great deal of antagonism. They see in this play Shakespeare's colonial mentality, the master having set down for ali time the perfect symbols of colonialism in Prospero and Caliban.
Caliban is the hewer of wood and carrier of water and Prospero is the colonizer.
James Ngugi, the Kenyan writer makes pertinent reference to this 10
symbolic treatment in.his essay on satire in Nigeria. He says,
Often the nationalist elite demands independence in terms of the very western ideals it was taught at school and in colonial universities. 'You taught me language,' says Caliban to Prospero, 'and my profit on it is I know how to curse.' Eventually either through violence as in Kenya or through peaceful means as in Nigeria the national elite gets power, but only after it has agreed to re spect Prospero's values.20
The history of colonial revolt in West Africa.provides an easily
dIscern i bIe Iiterary trail. An analysi s wiI I be made In Chapter I of
the period of subjugation and acceptance when in the words of Julius
Nyerere, "To be known as a Black European was a status symbol."21 The
role of Sierra Leone and Liberia as states which were the haven of freed
slaves from the Old World and the New, provides important landmarks.
The contribution of Fourah Bay College and scholars such as Edward
Blyden and Africanus Horton to the spread of Eng Iish’education and the
rise of nationalism in West Africa is germane to this study.
Chapter II encompasses the period of rivalry and resentment. An articulate Caliban raising his voice in protest in the language of Pros
pero says, "Let my people go." This is the postwar period when mature and creative writers were called upon to be in the vanguard of nation al ist movements. They were called to respond to a greater commitment, a commitment to a people. Three novelists of West Africa who responded were Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and T. M. Aluko. Such novels as
Things Fa I I Apart, No Longer At Ease, The Pa Im-w i ne Dri nkard and One
Man, One Matchet clearly symbolized this voice of revolt.
In Chapter III, the post revolutionary period, one sees the artist called upon to play the role of the conscience of the nation. Novels 11 such as Achebes’, Man of the PeopIe, Armah's The BeautyfuI Ones Are
Not Yet Born and Wole Soyinka's play The Dance of the Forests in a sense represent a failure on the part of West Africans to make a success of governing themselves. They are undoubtedly severe indictments on post-independent nationalism. However, it is possible, as has been suggested, that these novels are in themselves a new kind of nationalism in which as Soyinka says the artist must function "as the voice of vision in his own time."22 Perhaps it is true as Soyinka concludes for the artist in West Africa "to respond to this essence of himself."23 The vision of African and West African nationalism has perhaps forever been the vision of Edward Blyden who prophesied in the nineteenth cen tury the return of a great civilization to the most humiliated and oppressed race of our own time.
The purpose of this study is not to examine the political and sociological implications of a knowledge of English in West Africa. It is rather to follow the literary trail of West African nationalism from the very early days to the present. Perhaps what will be found is that
English proved to be a liberating force in West African nationalism and continues to play a large role in determining the future of Africa in the cultural history of the world. 12
CHAPTER I
The gates of reed is flung open, There is silence But only a moment's silence - A silence of assessment. . . .'Mtu Mureupe Karibu' White man you are welcome. The gate of polished reed closes behind them And the West is let in. •
The history of the liberation of Africa from slavery and then from colonialism is also the history of Africa's encounter with England and the United States. Long before the African even had notions of self- determination, he had to solve the problem of not being a slave. Free dom therefore was conditioned by this minimal status which in normal circumstances is taken to be the right of any human being. The Negroes
living in British territories and in the United States were exposed to the English language which happened to be the language of the two countries. Because of the large concentration of Negroes in England and America the outcome was that almost from the beginning there has existed a large group of English speaking people of African origin.
It meant therefore that this English speaking group of Africans had a
language in which they could express their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows and perhaps even express the wish that one day they will be free men.
It is rather ironic and to a certain extent paradoxical that Eng
land and America who played such large roles in the history of slavery should also have produced some of the greatest figures in the humani tarian movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William
Wilberforce of England and Abraham Lincoln of America will perhaps be 13
forever symbols of man’s humanity to his fellow man. This seeming para
dox, this Pharoah-Moses relationship, is also seen in the manner in
which the Eng Iish.Ianguage was exploited by the colonizer and the colo
nized. A language which was used to rule a people ended up by being a
force in their drive toward decolonization and ultimate freedom.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century a book was published in
London ent¡tied Thoughts and Sentiments on the EviI and Wicked Traffic
of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. It was written by a
West African from the Gold Coast, Ottobah Cugoano. Cugoano was still
a child when he was taken to England as a slave. He was lucky because
when his master freed him in 1772 he had taught him to read and write
English. His book, which was published in 1787, gave to the English
reading public a first hand account of what it meant to be a slave. It
also brought to a European audience an African experience and generated a great deal of compassion for the African, especially among the various
humanitarian societies prevalent in England at that time. What the freed
slave did to rouse the conscience of British philanthropists was to be
repeated again by Africans educated in the English language in demanding an end to colonialism.
Two years after Cugoano published his book another West African freed sIave pub 1ished a narrative autobiography. He was Olaudah Equiano.
Equiano came to be also known as Gustavus Vassa after he was baptized as a Christian. Vassa and Cugoano are the earliest literary figures known to West Africa. It is understandable that what they chose to write about in a language alien to them continues to be the commitment of West African writers and more pertinently the commitment of African 14
writers in countries with conditions near slavery such as South Africa.
Cugoano writing in 1787 said,
Are slaves more useful by being. . .humbled to the condition of brutes. . . No. When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruel ty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faith ful! You stupefy them with stripes, and think it neces sary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning. . .that they come from a climate, where nature. . .has left man alone scant and unfinished. . . An assertion at once impious and absurd.2
This cry of oppression by the Black man is still being heard. Ezekiel
Mphahlele, the South African writer, expresses the theme similar to that of Cugoano.
Having been born into the dark side of a segregated existence, I've never been encouraged to think anything except that I'm black. For three hundred years this has been drummed into our heads; first by cannon fire, then by acts of parliament, proclamations and regulations. . . Our minds have been so conditioned that, whether we like it or not, we have come to rate our qualifications lower, in terms of wages and salaries than the whites do who possess exactly the same qua Iifications.
Cugoano and Mphahlele, because of their ability to master the English
language, are able to reach an audience without territorial boundaries.
The language of freedom for the African is the language of the slave master.
The term colonization did not mean the same thing in England and in America in the nineteenth century. In America, colonization was linked to the "Back to Africa" movements. Once the slave was freed in the United States, even such a person as Abraham Lincoln who played a great role in the emancipation of slaves favored the notion of Negroes being returned to Africa. The immediate result of colonization schemes 15
such as Maryland State Colonization Society and the American Coloniza
tion Society led to the creation of a sovereign Independent African
state in West Africa. In 1838 Robert J. Breckenridge in a speech be
fore the Maryland State Colonization Society supported the notion of
nationhood for Liberia.
Liberia since its very inception has kept English as its native
language. Even though West African nationalists have been rather dis
appointed with the role of Liberia in West African nationalist movements
it has always been a symbol of freedom. Kwame Nkrumah in his autobio
graphy said, "I judged Liberia not from the heights it had reached but
from the depths whence it had come."5 Along with Liberia, Sierra Leone
also has played a great role in the history of nationalism in West
Africa. George Padmore in his book, The Coming Struggle, noted that the
colony In Freetown, Sierra Leone, had rapidly become the first West ernized community in West Africa. The repatriates adopted the English way of life and the Queen’s language quickly became the medium of com munication.
The English language in Sierra Leone underwent a process of Afri canization resulting in a kind of pidgin English called Krio. Krio became the lingua franca between the Creoles who were the descendants of freed slaves from Britain living in Freetown and the indigenous tribes living in and around the colony. Edward Blyden, the Liberian scholar and nationalist called Krio "a convenient bridge between Afri can dialects and the English language." The following is an extract of an anonymous Krio poem published in the Sierra Leone weekly news of 16
13th July 1907; the poem deplored the growing number of Yorubas infil
trating into the colony and thereby contributing to a certain moral
laxity.
Ah, me God, me Fader Jesus, Money sweet and free life sweet But ah, me God, me Fader Jesus Please to keep me near the Cross. Do! nor let are turn to Yooba.
0, de Yoobas—ah, de Yoobas, Every day the number swelI, Swell with blessed Creole girls; 18 year, 19 year, 14 year set day join; Ah me God—me Fader Jesus, Do yah sorry for dis land.6
The contribution of Sierra Leone to the rise of nationalism in West
Africa rests largely on the role it played in the spread of the English
language. In 1827 there was established in Freetown a college of higher education known as Fourah Bay College. It was initially a college for training Africans to work in the Christian Mission. It was founded by the Anglican Church and administered by the Church Missionary Society.
The first pupil was Samuel Ajai Crowther who was later ordained a clergyman of the Church of England in 1843 and in 1864 was appointed as the first African Bishop in Niger territories. An interesting jour nal entry is made by Charles L. F. Haensa I the Master of Fourah Bay
College on the 22nd March 1828,
When Samuel Crowther brought last week's journal to Master, Master desired him to put the word 'Monitor' under his name. He also told him what the word meant, namely, not one who 'rules' over others, but one who 'reminds' others. And he said, he wished that everyone in the Institution should be a Monitor to his brethren.2
This notion of brotherhood that was being imparted to theological students at Fourah Bay College along with a sound English education was 17
considered very important by the missionaries and accepted as such by
the Africans.
The study and spread of English in West Africa came to be centered
around Fourah Bay College. A liberal education coupled with theologi
cal training produced generations of westernized graduates who in turn
spread the English language in different parts of West Africa. In 1876
Fourah Bay College was affiliated to Durham University in England. From
1876 to 1969 graduates of Fourah Bay College received degrees from Dur
ham University. In April, 1969, amidst all the pomp and pageantry of
British academics, Fourah Bay Col lege finally severed its parental link
from Durham and was transformed into the University of Sierra Leone.
One of the principal speakers on that occasion was Edward Blyden III,
a direct descendant of Edward Blyden the Liberian scholar and West
African nationalist. Fourah Bay College and the University of Sierra
Leone continue to play a very important part in the development of
African literature in the English language. Fourah Bay College produced
not only ministers and teachers but also the first African medical practitioner in West Africa. He was Africanus Horton.
One of the principal figures apart from Bishop Ajai Crowther in the history of West African nationalism was Africanus Horton who entered
Fourah Bay College in 1853. Africanus Horton graduated from Fourah Bay
College, won a CMS scholarship to King's College, London and graduated as a doctor of medicine. He was the first West African to graduate with the degree M.R.C.S. (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons). He joined the Army medical service and rose to be Surgeon Major. Horton wrote a book West African Countries and Peoples British and Native and 1
18 .
the Vindication of the African Race.
Horton is important to a discussion of West African nationalism and
the English language because Horton like Blyden of Liberia conceded the
importance of a sound English education. He also was of the opinion
that English was the most suitable language for the development of Afri
ca. He was willing to even go to the extent of conceding the superiority
of that period in history of European over African civilization, but he
was not willing to concede a racial disparity in intellectual development.
He made the point in his article on West African Countries and Peoples
published in the African Times of April 1866, that the Romans found that
the Britons had painted their bodies and worshipped crude idols and made
the poorest slaves, yet nobody condemned them to eternal darkness. His
theory of history was a cyclic one in which races lead and follow in
turn. His hypothesis was that the people of Africa were once the cus
todians of the cultural treasures of the world to be replaced by other
races In this great cycle of change; he wrote,
If Europe. . .has been raised to her present pitch of civilization by progressive advancement, Africa too, with a guarantee of the civilization of the north, will rise into equal importance. . . We may well say that the present state of Western Africa is, in fact, the history of the world repeating itself.°
What Horton wrote in 1866 was re-echoed in 1933 by George Bernard Shaw
in a letter to the New York Times. Shaw with his socialist bias and his own heritage of an oppressed people speculated that there might perhaps be after all a cycle in the history of human civilization. Civiliza tions he said appear and disappear in various places in various forms only to be challenged and replaced by stronger civilizations. He mused over the possibility that the next great civilization might come from the Negro race. 19
This national assertion is related to the humiliation to which
Africa had been subjected by a relegation to the back seat in the cul
tural train of human history. The absence of a written literature during
the colonial period contributed to efforts on the part of Africans to
use the English language to vindicate Africa's claim to a great cultural
heritage. The very fact that Africans could master an alien language
was in itself acclaimed as a cultural vindication. The absence of
writing also affected Africans in an evaluation of Africa's position in
world history. Even as late as 1963 a distinguished historian, Hugh
Trevor Roper, commented that there was no African history, "only the
history of Europeans in Africa." This comment of Trevor Roper is very
important because it also throws light on the literary influences of
Europeans writing about Africa. At a time when only a handful of
Africans were still able to read and write the Continent was the sub
ject of literary ventures by many a European writer. What was produced
was the literature of Europeans in Africa. Africa itself was treated
more as. a symbol and literarily portrayed by images which cluster around
the idea of the Dark Continent, images created largely by the European
novel. The European novelist made Africa a convenient backdrop, a
scenario against which European characters played out their little lives,
searched for the 'heart of darkness' of their inner selves while the
symbol of this 'heart of darkness' remained a mere symbol. Understand
ably enough it is this very 'heart of darkness' which is now the sub
ject of African writers. Myth and ritual are not used symbolically but are used as a part of the tapestry of actual life. Chinua Achebe in an address on the RoIe of a_ Writer in a_ New Nation to the Nigerian Library
Association said it is time that the notion that African people heard 20
of culture for the first time from Europeans is ended. The myth that
they were a mindless people without a philosophy nor a system of values
was foisted during the colonial period. The African all but lost his
dignity and self respect. It is, Achebe feels, the duty of the writer
to help his people regain their dignity and self respect. The I bos he
said have a saying, "a man who can't tell where the rain began to beat
him cannot know where he dried his body."^
This cultural vindication has given to nationalism in West Africa
a continental dimension unlike European nationalism of the nineteenth
century. European nationalism was more regional and parochial. Afri
can nationalism had from its very inception a sense of mission of Africa's
role in human destiny. Edward Blyden the Liberian scholar-patriot added
a still further dimension by asserting that the Jews and the Negroes
had a primary contribution to make to world civilization and that is to
provide the spiritual element to a world immersed in materialism. He wrote, C' Each race sees from its own standpoint a different side of the Almighty. The Hebrews could not see or serve God in the land of the Egyptians; no more can the Negro under the Anglo-Saxon. . .It is by God in us. . .that we do each our several work and live out into action.10
Blyden saw a certain historical destiny in the geographical location of Liberia and Sierra Leone. He noted that for a continuous distance of over eight hundred miles, from the Sierra Leone river to the San Pedro river there was virtually an English speaking African territory. English and English laws he said assisted the intercourse of the various tribes
living in this vast region. In the course of regulating their lives by 21
laws, by education and religion the tribesmen in this area were be
ginning a transtribal communion. English made possible a meeting of the minds of the different tribes where earlier a diversity of languages and
dialects had separated and divided the people, a common language now was giving them a new identity. Blyden was far ahead of his time
because he was very shrewd in his observation that English was the most
suitable language for ’bridging over the numerous gulfs between the tribes caused by the great diversity of langagues or dialects among them
But Blyden also as President of Liberia College warned Liberians that the African must advance by methods of his own. He must possess he said
"a power distinct from that of the European.' He said that Liberians should not suppose that Anglo-Saxon methods are always the best and are final. He deplored the neglect of African studies, and condemned a history written for Africans rather than by Africans. In his commence ment address at Liberia College on 5th February 1881 he said,
We have a great work before us, a work unique in the history of the world, which others who appreciate its vastness and importance, envy us the privilege of doing. The world Is looking at this Republic to see whether 'order and law, religion and morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of prosperity' may be secured and preserved by a government administered by Negroes. Let us show ourselves equal to the task.I•
While West African nationalists were dedicated to the idea that
Africa had a large role to play in the history of the world they were also pragmatic enough as early as the nineteenth century to recognize that Africa had to become a willing captive of western education before she could become free. It is an ironic parody in political terms of the Christian hymn, 'make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free.'
It is part of a historical pattern how a people subjugated themselves 22
and adopted an alien language and alien gods and used the very same
language and notions of brotherhood and equality as tools in their
drive toward freedom. Dennis Osadebay, leader of the national council
of Nigeria and the Cameroons, has written that while the missionary who
was also the teacher made Africa the happy hunting grounds of imperial
ism, he also laid the foundations, unwittingly though, for a spirit of
nationalism. When African historians come to write their own account
he says, of the encounter of Africa with British imperialism and colonial
ism, 'they will write of the missionaries as the greatest friends the
African had' - friends who helped them shake free from the bonds of
colonialism.
Evangelism and western education were inseparable. From the very
beginning education in West Africa was a virtual monopoly of the Chris
tian Missionary societies and the village teacher was also the village
evangelist. However, a distinction can be made in analyzing the direct
contribution of western English education in West Africa and its con
tribution to the rise of nationalism as distinct from the contribution
of Christianity to West African nationalism.
The West African who acquired a knowledge of English had access to
a new world of ideas which made him conscious of notions of equality and
also gave him the opportunity to express in writing grievance against
his masters. These grievances were read by a growing body of West
Africans regardless of the area in which they lived. It was immaterial whether a Ghanian or a Nigerian or a Sierra Leonean was the victim of
discrimination. The lingua france which was English in which the grievance was spelt out drew a common audience and engendered a sense 23
of loss which cut across tribal and regional boundaries.
Education in West Africa during the colonial period meant learning
to read and write in English. It also meant learning the history of
England and Europe, the literature of England, the history of the
Empire, the history and geography of Europe along with courses in the
Scriptures.
This concentration in European education naturally led to a certain
contradiction between what was expected of a western oriented West Afri
can and a West African whose loyalties were to the indigenous group that
he represented. To the West African, the family and the tribe were more
important than the individual. European education placed emphasis on
the individual and his place in society as an autonomous being, thus
there was created a certain incompatibility between the African's loyal
ties to a tribe and his loyalties to a new dispensation. Chinua Achebe
has captured this conflict engendered by an alien system in his novel,
No Longer At Ease. Achebe places the emphasis of uneasiness not upon the indigenous African called upon to adjust to a changing world but
rather upon the westernized African who in the words of T. S. Eliot in
The Journey of the Magi is,
. .. .no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods.
The western educated West Africans while being alienated from traditional and indigenous life were being molded into a new role which they had to play for a larger and greater cause. They were the ones who in the words of Ezeulu in Achebe's Arrow of God, would be the eyes and ears of the white man's world. Ezeulu when he decided to send his son Oduche to join 24
the white missionaries and to learn their language says,
I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there Is nothing in it you will come back. But if there Is something there you will bring home my share. The world is Iike a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today wi I I be saying had we known tomorrow.'2
Ezeulu’s words epitomize the willingness of the African to recognize the dynamic nature of the historic development of which they were a part.
This western oriented elite in a large measure had to play a sacrificial role in the freedom movements because they in turn would become objects of ridicule when the pendulum swung radically in the opposite direction.
In this respect I believe westernized Asians have suffered more than westernized Africans because there was a more radical call for a return to indigenous languages in Asia. The words of Mahatma Ghandi when he said, "It is we English knowing Indians that have enslaved
India," were representative of this radical swing to the traditional and the indigenous.
In English speaking West Africa in the early twentieth century, a knowledge and mastery of English was recognized as a demonstration of the capability of Africans to be on equal terms with the master himself.
Julius Nyerere the President of Tanzania was not exaggerating when he said, "at one time it was a compliment rather than an insult to call a man who imitated the Europeans a 'Black European'."*4
The 'Black European" or the Black white man was a creation of
British colonialism in Africa and in Asia. T. M. Aluko in his novel
One Man, One Matchet has a British District Officer, Stanfield, admit 25
that ’the new race for Africa cannot be won without winning first the
mind of the African.' What is left unsaid by Stanfield is that this
mind of the African has to be conditioned into accepting the European
education and system of values while relegating everything African
to a position of inferiority. Edward Blyden writing in 1881 warned
that the African studying in Europe would find himself alienated from
himself and his countrymen. 'He is neither African in feeling nor in
aim. He does not breathe African air, the smell of African ground is
not in him.' Yet it is not with mock seriousness, though maybe with
an element of satire that Aluko has the Oba of Ipaja introduce to the
elders of Ipaja the first West African ever to qualify to hold a white
man's post. "Elders of Ipaja, I want you to listen to the words of the
Black white man. I want you to listen to him carefuIly."'This re
spect for the Black white man was due to his ability to speak, to read
and to write English. In a society where literacy was minimal this
ability conferred upon those who mastered a foreign language, in this
instance English, the title "intellectual." They were also known as
"scholars." David Kimble in his book The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism,
notes that the word "scholar" denoted a very special type of African in
the West Coast. "It aroused so much awe among illiterates."'6 There
was awe on the part of fellow West Africans and also a certain awe on the part of colonial administrators who suspected the "scholar" was
responsible for the nascent nationalism in West Africa. On the first
count a "scholar" attracted attention by proving an intellectual compe tence. He was contradicting the racial myth of the Black man's intel-O
lectual inferiority. 26
If the English language represented a higher civilization and the
African was able to absorb this language and its literature would it not be proof of his educability in Western terms and therefore a matter for national assertiveness? On the contrary the "scholar" was inter preted by the colonial office as an educated native, an agitator, troublemaker, even subversive. It is a matter of historical record that in Africa and Asia the colonial office "scholars" from Mahatma
Ghandi to Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, have all spent time as guests of Her Majesty’s Prisons. Kwame Nkrumah took great pride in having the initials P. G. inscribed on a cap when he announced to a jubilant crowd in Accra the news of self government and the birth of Ghana. P. G. simply meant Prison Graduate.
There was also on the part of the colonial office an attempt to ridicule the imitators of westernized education in West Africa. It was inevitable that the first generation of West Africans educated on British models would tend to be more royalist than the King himself. The "scho lar" manifested this attempt to exhibit his knowledge of English by extravagance and pompous oratory. Chinua Achebe in his novel No Longer at Ease, has the secretary of the Umuofia Progressive Union, welcome Obi
Okonkwo on his return from England with bombast and a show of big words, "The importance of having one of our sons in the vanguard of this march of progress is nothing short of axiomatic."17 There was also in the-early days a tendency to quote profusely from Shakespeare and other leading English novelists, dramatists and poets. This habit of quoting may have been a carryover as has been suggested by West African critics of the African disposition for proverbs and words of wisdom. Bernth
Linfors in an article on The Palm Oil with which Achebe's words are eaten 27
published In African Literature Today, draws our attention to the-proverb and similes in Achebe's novels which help 'to evoke the cultural milieu
in which the action takes place.' Here are examples of proverbs and similes drawn from his four novels which characterize his ability to use the English language to portray an African world in African terms,
". . .like a bush-fire in the harmattan." Things Fall Apart, p. I
". . .like pouring grains of corn into a bag full of holes" Things Fa I I Apart, p. 19
". . .like the snapping of a tightened bow." Th i ngs Fa I I Apart, p. 53
", . .Iike a grain of maize in an empty goatskin bag." Arrow of God, p. 100
". . .Iike a panicky fly trapped behind the windscreen" No Longer at Ease, p. 149
". . .as a dentist extracts a stinking tooth" A Man of the PeopIe, p. 4
". . .as I had been one day, watching for the first time the unveiling of the white dome of Kilimanjaro at sunset." A Man of the PeopIe, p. 45
". . .as those winged termites driven out of the earth, by late rain dance furiously around street lamps and then drop panting to the ground" A Man of the PeopIe, p. 51
In the early days of West African nationalism African politicians had limited patronage and their backing was also limited. The nationalist had to convince the colonial masters that his cause was a.just one while impressing upon his fellow Africans that he was not to be outdone by a lack of fluency in the English language. Donatres Nwoga in his article on Onitsha Market Literature, makes the observation that sometimes quo tations are used for giving the writer support from extra or higher authority. Nkrumah, when he applied for admission to Lincoln University, quoted from Tennyson's In Memoriam, ". . .so much to do, so little done."*8 28
The Dean of Lincoln University several years later in conferring the
Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws parodied Tennyson's lines and said of
Nkrumah, "so much achieved, in so short a time."'^ Nkrumah in his auto biography remembering this occasion looks back on his rise to a position of leadership in his own country and recognition by his Alma Mater and makes reference to the very early days when he was a village school master with his 'precious library of three books the Bible, Shakespeare and
Alcock's Grammar.' The Bible, a knowledge of Shakespeare and fluency in
English were three important factors for West African nationalists in the early days.
The Christian Church has had a definite influence in the forging of
African nationalism. The missionaries carried the Bible and the gospel of Jesus Christ into the most remote corners of West Africa. The Bible had the same unifying effect that English had among the multifarious tribes of West Africa. The missionaries in a common language gave to the people a common god. Their aim was not to preserve indigenous socie ties but rather to change them. The first positive step taken by the missionaries which ultimately created a national awareness was to eradicate illiteracy to a large extent. In the bush, the school was the church and the church was the school. The teacher was the evangelist and the evangelist was the teacher. It is today estimated that twenty-five to thirty per cent of Africans can read and write with varying degrees of fluency in English. The missionaries satisfied this great desire for education on the part of West Africans. A new spirit of learning and a new sense of brotherhood was created which has helped sustain the spirit of nationalism. The unique feature of Christianity was the emphasis it 29 places on the dignity and worth of the individual in the sight of God.
Traditional African societies emphasized the group over the individual.
The actions of the. individual were subject to the approval of the group. The Bible with its emphasis on individual salvation redeemed the
African from the tyrannies of the group. It gave a new sense of asser tiveness which culminated in the challenging of colonial authority itself.
Professor Coleman in his Nigeria: Background to Nationalism quotes a spokesman for the International Missionary Council as having said,
The missionary is a revolutionary and he has to be so, for to preach and plant Christianity means to make a fron tal attack on the beliefs, the customs, the apprehensions of life and the world, and by implication (because tribal religions are primarily social realities) on the social structures and bases of primitive society. The missionary enterprise need not be ashamed of this, because colonial administrations, planters, merchants, western penetration, etc., perform a much more severe and destructive attack.20
In this discussion the assumption has to be made that Christianity was associated with western life, western values and with the English language. These three combined carried with them a certain prestige which
West Africans were taught to emufate. Not only was Christianity presented as a superior religion but it was supposed to be representative of a supe rior culture and civilization. This meant that the African was presented as having no culture and living in moral darkness. The African was believed to be in greater need of Christian salvation than all the other non-Christians. Christianity and Christian literature in English, while playing a positive role in forging West African nationaIism, have also been responsible for creating symbols and images demeaning to the Black races. Claude Wauthier, in his book The Literature and Thought of
Modern Africa, draws the reader's attention to the traditional suspicion 30 of African nationalists because of collaboration between the colonial powers and the Christian Churches. He also refers to the Vatican Council of 1870 when a group of missionary bishops presented a document to the
Pope asking him to release the Negro race from the Biblical curse of the
Sons of Ham. The African Nationalists have always been suspicious of the role of the Christian Church. The West African delegates to the sixth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, stated that organized
Christianity has been an agent of colonialism. James Baldwin was equally critical of the Christian Church in America when he wrote
I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that according to many Christians, I was a des cendant of Ham who had been cursed, and that I was there fore predestined to be a slave. . . It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being. . .must first divorce himself from all the prohi bition, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.2*
Kenneth Kaunda, himself the son of a minister of the church and a perfect example of an African nationalist who has been exposed to western education as well as the tenets of the Christian Church, wrote in his book, Zambia Shall Be Free, that although he was brought up in a Christian home and is still a practicing Christian, he sometimes seriously doubts whether God is really speaking to man in the voice of organized churches as seen- in Rhodesia today.
The skepticism of James Bladwin and Kenneth Kaunda is important to this discussion because they are both products of Christianity and west ern .education with an English background. Kaunda and Baldwin have ex ploited their European-Christian background to reach positions of excel lence in their respective fields. This is in itself proof of the ability of the African not to be a mere "tabula rasa" for Europeans to leave their stamp on. Kaunda and Baldwin demonstrate the critical ability of 31 the sons of Ham to reject or to condemn whenever it is necessary to do so. Kaunda is hostile to churches that separate blacks from whites and those that continue to treat African priests as inferior to white priests. In Zambia Shall Be Free Kaunda categorically states that be cause the Christian Church in Zanbia has so often failed to practice what it preaches, thousands of his fellow Zambians have rejected it.
Ndabning Sithole the nationalist from Rhodesia, while accepting the fact that the Bible has helped the African individual to reassert himself above coloinal powers, complains in his book, African Nationalism that some missionaires have adopted a colonial mentality. He even goes to the extent of being critical of Dr. Albert Schweitzer who, he says, adopted an elder borther attitude and reduced the adult African to a child.
West African and African nationalists have criticized the Bible for its racial imagery. Angels were always white and the devil was black. God, Jesus, the Virgin were always white. Missionary writing in the early nineteenth century was full of this black-white imagery.
Melville J. Herskovi ts quotes i n The Human Factor i n Chang i ng Africa, a passage from one of the missionaries who wrote in 1843,
Black with its primeval suggestions, the general picture turns to a muddy gray as Africa meets and clashes with the culture and ways of the West. . . Still with its sparsely populated regions and wide- open areas, it has a future. Will it remain black or an unregenerate gray? Or will the light penetrate through the darkness to give life and freedom? This is the question of Africa.22
The African nationalist was extremely sensitive to this denigration of an indigenous system of values in which there were positive qualities.
Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, draws the reader's attention rather 32
dramatically to the passing away of the ancestral beliefs which for
centuries had held a people together. When Enoch the son of the snake
priest, a convert to Christianity, unmasks one of the masked sprirts
he throws Umuofia into confusion. The masked spirit represented the
world of the dead and the living. Enoch has killed an ancestral
spirit and thereby committed a most heinous crime. Achebe in one of
the finest passages in the novel deplores the passing away of the spi
ritual values of a people which had a function in the elaborate scheme
of checks and balances in I bo I and.
That night the mother of the spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evi I that was coming, its own death.23
The purpose of Achebe's rather nostalgic lament over the passing away
of an indigenous spiritual value system is to prove to his fellow Afri
cans and to draw the attention of an outside audience to these sensi
tivities of a people to their culture. Ancestor worship has been part of
the African spiritual world for centuries. In 1957 the editors of Wor I d
Christian Handbook drew the same attention when they wrote,
The greater denominational missions were alive to the delicacy of their position in a world of growing, nationalisms. But this is of little avail.24
They point out the danger
. . .if the suspicions of rulers are aroused by the rapid entry of large numbers of men and women who although devoted have little comprehension of the sensitivities of the world to which they have gone.25
Ezekiel Mphahlele in his criticism of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved
Country, draws our attention to a stereotype image of the long suffering, 33
ever faithful servant of God, Stephen Kumalo. Kumalo Is a type who is
willing to take all the kicks, willing to bear and suffer. These a I I-
suffering Black Christians, Mphahlele says must then be absolved from
the responsibility of reacting humanly. "It makes for a tough hide that
can absorb the cruder processes of life whi le they move about on the
spiritual plane."26 Mphahlele, however, has ignored the other Black
priest, the Rev. Mrimamgu, who while expressing the hope for his country
in black and white working together for the good of all people also
sounds the gravest fear of them all. A fear that, "one day when they
are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."27 These
are hardly the words of a man who has been absolved from human indigna
tion or anger.
Claude Wauthi er in his Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, refers to problems arising from the Christian Church's attitude to Black nation
alism and to an African presence in the life of the Church. In 1963 the
Society of African Culture launched an appeal to African Catholics and
laymen for studies on the African's place within the Catholic Church.
Papers received by the society in reply to their appeal revealed that
Africans wanted a change in the language of the Church which in the past had sought to Europeanize and Anglicize the language of the church, the call went out from African clergy that, "Christian Africa is now adult 28 and must speak to God in its own language." In 1963 word went forth from the Vatican permitting the use of the vernacular in public Masses.
Pope Paul XII in an encyclical letter urged African priests to study the religions of the Black continent. As a result of the encyclical letter
African Catholic clergy and African ethnologists have delved into Africa's 34 spiritual past. This effort is a part of nationalist thinking. Wauthier concludes that the interesting thing about the Catholic Church's attitude to Black nationalism is not Only that it prepared itself for the inevi table day of independence but also, and this is important to our discus sion, that it understood that cultural needs lay behind Africa's thrust for emancipation.
Leopold Senghor in his opening address at a seminar in African lite rature held at the University of Dakar reminded his audience that the
Anglo-Saxons had repeatedly criticized him and his people for having chosen
French as the language of Negro African expression. Senghor in defense pleaded that because of their willing acceptance of French they had made a contribution to "Universal civilization." Senghor maintained that the European civilization that was presented to Asia and Africa could not be called humanistic because it excluded from participation the universal two thirds of humanity - the Third World. By writing in French,
Senghor claimed he was contributing a piece of Africa to "Universal civi lization." On the contrary when Julius Nyerere translated Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar to SwahiIi, it is claimed that he not only vindicated the ability of Africans to comprehend Shakespeare but also proved to the world that there are AFrican languages mature and developed into which this great master's works could be translated. Nyerere was making the uni versality of Shakespeare even more universal.
In the early days Shakespeare in West Africa went through several phases of acceptance. First of all he was the master of the English lan guage. All over Africa and Asia the ability to quote from Shakespeare carried with it certain status symbols. It should also be remembered 35
that the London Matriculation Examination conducted by the University
of London all over the British Empire, which was the qualifying exami
nation for.millions whose greatest aspiration was to join the ranks of
the vast bureaucracy of clerks and pen pushers and keepers of files in
English. An examination of the minimum requirements for the London
Matriculation is very revealing. Two of the compulsory subjects were
English language and English literature. In English literature an in
timate and detai led study of at least five plays of Shakespeare was
demanded. In the examination paper itself there was a favorite question which all candidates had to attempt. It was usually the very first ques tion. It read, "Answer with reference to context, 'If music be the food of love. . .'." The candidate had to know, a) the play from which the quote was taken, b) identify the speaker, c) to whom the lines were addressed, d) the context in which it appears and the-meaning. This
intimate knowledge of Shakespeare demanded by examiners across the seas naturally gave West African students a knowledge of Shakespeare almost on par with that of any student of high school level in England. Shakes peare, whose close study was demanded, also had an appeal to West Africans as a creator of universally acceptable characters and eternal situations.
Shakespeare touched the West African at a very human level and stimulated thought. D. W. Brogan in his book The Price of Revolution makes a shrewd observation that in West Africa, "the man who can keep accounts or register can also read John Stewart Mill, Macaulay and Marx."29 He might have added "and Shakespeare too."
The study of Shakespeare in schools in West Africa has to be examined from the point of view of its ultimate usefulness and also from the point 36
of view of its relevance in independent West Africa. Shakespeare had
a certain fascination for West African nationalists. Chief Awolowo, the Nigerian nationalist, confessed in his autobiography that the. mighty lines of Shakespeare did have an influence on his outlook on
life. It is also true that the curriculum of liberal arts along with encouragement given to literary associations has been a factor in the nascent nationalist movements. Many a political organization :had its
roots in literary or cultural societies.
In Julius Nyerere's translation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into
Swahili, liberty is translated as 'Uhuru.' The meaning of Uhuru is not freedom but "those who were once enslaved." Nyerere has been able in this
instance to convey to a Tanzanian audience the notion of freedom while reminding them of the fact that it is freedom from enslavement.
Julius Caesar also has relevance to the growth of nationalist move ments in West Africa when men who were once comrades in arms in the fight against colonialism became enemies in the struggle for power. Many a close friend of Nkrumah may well have said like Cassius, "and this man is now become god."30 This of course leads us into the second and third phases when West African writers who have been exposed to a process of
Europeanization attempt a return to Africa's own cultural 'heritage. Jomo
Kenyatta in his book Facing Mount Kenya says, "it is the culture which he inherits that gives a man his human dignity."31
Kenyatta's rather simple statement symbolizes the whole philosophy behind the concept of negritude which has been a part of the cultural re vival and continues to be a part of the philosophy of writers who believe 37 that if West African nationalism is to mean anything at all it must have the right to be critical of its own people. ’Pain of the wound of the soul’ which Achebe speaks of is true of not only the colonial period but also of the period after independence. This is the third phase when West African nationalist writers expose the weaknesses of their society and believe that they are being nationalistic in doing so 38
CHAPTER I I
African societies of the past, with all their imper fect ions,.were not consumers but producers of culture. . Anyone who reads Fagg's recent book Nigerian I mages will be struck by the wealth and quality of the art which our ancestors produced in the past. Some of this work played a decisive role in the history of modern art. The time has come once more for us, artists and writers of today, to take up the good work and by doing it to enrich not only our own lives but the life of the world.'
The introduction and Chapter I of this dissertation provide the socio
political framework of the colonial period which ultimately gave rise to
the African literature of the period following the second world war, and
the literature of independent West Africa.
From I 837-1957 Eng I ish speaking West Africans adopted the morals and
traditions of the European cultured society, the legal and educational
systems of England, made the English language their own and worshipped
the Christian God. However the writer in West African society during the
colonial period and even during the years following independence has
been an individual standing outside the stream of history. During the colonial period the English educated West Africans were a very small per centage. They were an alienated group, exiles in their own land. Hence the literature of this period records the trauma of West Africans making a return to native roots, to an awareness of African national conscious ness before continuing on the further quest of Africa's contribution to the literature' and culture of mankind. This quest is not necessarily final because as will be seen in Chapter III, the African intellectual
is disappointed and disenchanted, with the first fruits of freedom. This disappointment is the subject of Chapter III.
The West African novel during the period preceding independence has 39 a very prominent journey motif. The novelists of this period are haunted by a sense of the past which involves the evolution of African society and its culture through the ages. There is an attempt to come to terms with something that has been, to register with sensitivity an encounter with hsitory and to recreate in artistic terms a tradition that recalls the past and gives a vision of the future. This journey motif is expres sed by James Ngugi when he said that the African novelist must feel himself, "as I think Tolstoy did in War and Peace, swimming, struggling, defining himself in the mainstream of his people's drama."2 But in this process the writer might also feel alienated, a stranger in a world not of his making. The image of all mankind lost in the wilderness and all mankind as blackmen 'in a white world of grief,’ is rather appropriate.
One of the problems of the West African writer is that the majority of his readers were European. His manuscripts were read by European pub lishers. This has conditioned his mode of writing and made him conform to European standards. The African writers did not find this a difficult task because most of them were educated in schools established by English missionaries. The graduates among them were graduates of either Oxford,
Cambridge or London University. For a long period of time the African writers lacked an African audience for whom they claimed to be writing.
They were conscious of the dual nature of their public, European and
African, and of differing attitudes each would bring to bear on their work.
The dual audience of the African writer could not and did not react in exactly the same way to a literary work. The demands made by the Euro pean audience for example kept African writers within the mainstream of 40
literary development in Europe and helped the African writer to develop
his art against a relatively sophisticated literary background. In the
meantime the audience the African writer is supposed to be writing for
has been increasing gradually as schools and universities proliferated
all over West Africa and in due course became the reading public of the
West African novelist. The decolonization and the de-Europeanization of
the West African novel begins when this African audience becomes a reality
and demands that the writer shift his focus from an European to an Afri
can orientation. However the colonial situation, the western education
and cultural bias of the writers and the language situation all determined
the orientation of the West African novel.
This journey that the African novelist has undertaken is unique
because the journey itself is being recorded in a foreign language and in
a medium new to African literature. The novel in Africa is not an indigen ous art form. African Iiterature, being primarily oral, did not have a
place nor even a function for the novel. Drama and poetry were the two
native art forms that had a function in preliterate society. Drama and poetry were adequate to express communal feelings and emotions. The pri vate, personal, artistic view of life which the novel introduced into Africa has resulted in an elaborate experiment, to articulate an.inherent African experience in an art form imported from outside. This in itself is a journey, a journey undertaken by African novelists which is still very much
in its: initial stages.
The artist in traditional Africa has always been an anonymous figure.
The function of an artist in an oral tradition was to pour the imaginations 41 of a particular community into a vast literary reservoir. The African novelist writing in the twentieth century is hence unique because he stands very close to first sources, to the roots of his tradition and is able to draw freely from this vast source of indigenous culture for his themes. In making a journey into his past the novelist links tradition and modern experience. The values, attitudes, myths and legends of an age gone by are brought to life once again in a language more'readily understandable both inside and outside Africa. English has given a universality to African themes within Africa itself as a first step toward making a universal response possible outside of it. The search for identity, coloniaIism and black-white relationships are all themes worked into the journey of the bIackman in his search for roots which will redeem him and his people. It is in this context that Amos Tutuola's novel, The Palm Wjne Drinkard is important because Tutuola uses tradition al myths and legends to add a new dimension to the West African novel in
Eng Iish.
Tutuola was a messenger in the Labour Department in Lagos, Nigeria.
Through sheer boredom in his work he set down in writing the various folk tales from his childhood. The Palm Wine Drinkard is his first novel and it was written in the hope that the United Society for Christian Literature would help him in having it published. They did not publish it, but the distinguished house of Faber and Faber published it in 1952. From its very beginning it was a great success in England and in America. Tutuola, however, was and perhaps still is an embarassment to his African readers because of his incorrect English which is amusing and quaint to his white readers. After all, his education did not go beyond the sixth grade.
The Palm Wine Drinkard has drawn great attention from modern critics 42 because it is written in the myth tradition: Departure, Initiation and
Return. There is something of John Bunyan as well as of Franz Kafka
in Tutuola. His heroes are archetypes. They archetypal treatment has confounded some who refused to believe that he was sophisticated enough to have read Bunyan, Kafka and Jung before he sat. down to write The Palm
Wine Drinkard. What is important, however,' is not to question his cre dentials but rather to examine the work and its contribution to African
literature and to West African nationalism.
My choice of Tutuola as the first of the West African novelists who have used the English language to bring back an awareness of the rich cul tural tradition as seen in the West African mythology and folklore is deli berate. The journey though more primitive is closer to the mythic roots of oral and traditional African Iiterature. It is simple and devoid of any pretense or sophistication. Tutuola's use of the English language is even incorrect at times.
The theme of The Palm Wine Drinkard is a quest theme. The 'Drinkard' sets out to seek his dead tapster io the 'Dead's' Town.
. . .old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world did not go to heaven directly, but were living in one place somewhere in this world. So that I said that I would find lout where my palm-wine tapster who had died was.5
The book is a story of the 'Drinkard''s' search for his dead palm- wine tapster and the trials, tribulations and experiences he has during the search.
The first trial in his journey is his encounter with death. This encounter is narrated with a great deal of directness and simplicity. But the journey in search is not a journey into the African 'heart of darkness 43
The Drinkard joins a host of literary figures from Aeneas to Orpheus who have made the same journey into the underworld, to be faced with death
itself and to return to the world of the living with some evidence of their triumph over death. The theme is universal in its mythic struc ture. The imagery is African. The idiom is English.
When I reached his (Death's) house, he was not at home by that time, he was in his yam garden which was very close to his house, and I met a small rolling drum on his verandah, then I beat it to Death as a sign of sal vation.4
In the 'Drinkard's' journey to Death's world he meets heroic and mythic figures familiar to world mythology. There are the task masters who impose certain tasks in return for information about the dead tap ster's whereabouts. There is the faithful female companion in the form of his wife whom he rescues from a terrible man before marrying her.
There is the monster that must be slain to save a community from the an nual human sacrifice. The 'Drinkard' himself is protected from all dan gers because of the great "ju-ju" powers he has. Because of this he calls himself "Father of gods" who can do everything in this world.
Onecof the most nightmarish episodes is the episode that describes the birth of a half-bodied baby from the swollen left thumb of the 'Drink- ard's' wife. The baby in the swollen left thumb is so big that the Drink ard thinks it must weight 280 pounds. The Drinkard's meeting with Faith- rul-Mother is thought to be a parallel to the universal Mother Goddess.
The white tree has a parallel to the Bo tree in Buddhist philosophy, the golden apple tree in Greek mythology and the Tree of Knowledge in the
Garden of Eden. The Drinkard's captivity from the whale's belly is again reminiscent of Jonah and the whale, a myth motif where the hero has to 44
emerge from the dark recesses reborn.
When the Drinkard reaches Dead’s Town his dead tapster sadly ex
plains to him that the "deads" cannot return with the "alives." The
"deads" he reminds the Drinkard would be most conspicuous in the world
of the living because they are all in the habit of walking backwards.
The Drinkard has been initiated into the true meaning of life.and death.
He knows that the tapster's world has the same finality as the world he
has left behind. The cycle of birth, life and death is made clear to
him.
The Drinkard's return is made terrible by an unending line of "deads."
The most terrible of all are the dead babies who attack him continuously.
The Drinkard escapes by turning himself into a pebble and hurling himself
across the river which separates them from the world of the "alives."
Even though the Drinkard cannot bring back his tapster with him, he
is given a magic egg by his tapster which will perform anything he asks of it. On his return to his own town he finds the people suffering from
a severe famine and he uses the power of the egg to help them for awhile.
The cause of the famine is that Earth and Heaven are locked in an unending quarrel over seniority. Heaven to prove his great powers has withdrawn
all rain and dew from the Earth. The Drinkard advises his people that the only way in which heaven can be appeased is by sending a slave to heaven
in the form of a human sacrifice, an acknowledgement of male superiority over the traditional female Earth goddess. The famine is ended. Tutuola gives a twist to the ending by working out a resolution to this eternal struggle and also restoring the harmony between man and his gods. When the slave who is sacrificed to heaven goes half way, he is beaten back by 45
a heavy rain which prevents him from reaching heaven. The slave cannot
return to his people because they are afraid to let him in. However, when rain continues for three months there is no famine. The harmony of the universe is restored, the Drinkard’s
. . .individual development as hero is linked with the restoration of harmony between man and his gods, for it is the Drinkard's new understanding, won by the hard way of adventure, which enables: him to settle the cosmic quarrel through which man is suffering.
Amos Tutuola was not received with a great deal of enthusiasm in
Nigeria because a mastery of the English language was always considered to be important and carried with it a status symbol. The mistakes in
English are viewed differently by Europeans and Africans. Where the
European might be willing to overlook a language deficiency, the African audience is painfully conscious of this drawback.
Amos Tutuola has been an embarassment to African nationaIists because of his rather awkward treatment of the "Queen's English." For a long time West African critics were apologetic and would have preferred to forget this messenger from the Labour department for his presumptuous entry into the literary world, but Tutuola and his achievements are too important to be disposed of in this manner. His works are today being assessed as belonging to the romance genre which has been.given added in terest because of Northropfrye's Anatomy of Criticism. Harold R. Collins places Tutuola's romances within the myth tradition of the romance as defined by Frye.
. . .The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended; prodigies of courage and endurance unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power 46
violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established.^
What Tutuola has done is to accept the old Africa and has rendered
it with emphasis on folklore, myth and magic. He has conveyed in artistic terms the cliche-ridden vision of the "heart of darkness" in a dreamlike fantasy. Tutuola is so unseIfconscious in his treatment of the past that
West African critics such as Adrian Roscoe most readily admit that he in his own way is so nationalistic that he is almost a writer in isolation.
Roscoe is perhaps right in his assessment that Tutuola has opened the window "onto a part of the African soul, which for the moment most of his westernized compatriots prefer to keep hidden." Roscoe and several West
African writers and critics are confident that "Tutuola's star will rise and the forces which shaped his work will be more freely acknowledged and harnessed."7
Tutuola's use of non-standard English and the first person narrator has a parallel in Mark Twain's use of the same.in Huckleberry Finn. Huck
Finn and the Drinkard are both on a quest; the quest for both is freedom.
In this quest for freedom Twain to a lesser degree than Tutuola has his protagonist shed all sophistication. There is something of the "naive" in Huck and the Drinkard. This naive quality comes through very strongly, especially when the first person narrator slips into non-standard English.
It has been suggested that Tutuola's English has a humanizing effect upon the.strictly formal, grammarian's English of the westernized Africans.
Wole Soyinka the Nigerian poet and playwright, even suggests that Tutuola's
"wildly spontaneous kind of English hit the European critics at their weak est point - boredom with their own language and the usual quest for new titiIlatlons."® But Tutuola is one of a kind who has revealed to the 47
non-Africans the values of an ancient African world, unembarassed with
his limited education, though unique in his contribution to West African
nationaIi sm.
African nationalists have begun to take a deeper and more profound
interest in Amos Tutuola. The myths and tales of the Yoruba people are
found to be similar to those in other parts of Africa such as Kenya and
Uganda. Tutuola not only has archetypes within the framework of African
folklore but also archetypes from world mythology. Adrian Roscoe ob serves that Tutuola's achievement because of these shared archetypes cor-- responds to what Jung described as "primordial /images formed by repeated experience in the lives of our ancestors, inherited in the collective unconscious of the human race, and often expressed in myths and dreams as well as in I¡terature."9 Tutuola's Yoruba folk tales on which The Palm
Wine Drinkard is based are linked to material that has its roots "deep in the human psyche."
This journey motif can be seen in varying and different dimensions.
First of all there is the journey of the novelist himself. He searches for his own identity as the hybrid product of two cultures. Added to this is the journey of the novelist from the traditional to the modern in his own art form,' experiment to fuse an oral indigenous tradition into the aesthetic of a modern written,form.
Tutuola's journey is in the dimension of the world of fantasy. Using the Yoruba folk tales for his myth structure, Tutuola in very simple terms recreates a world in which people lived close to first sources, primitive, superstitions and spirit hampered perhaps, but still imbued with a certain reality of its own. Achebe takes the journey a step further 48
and adds another dimension. He recreates a realistic world. A world that his European and African audience can each understand without great difficulty. The European audience is comfortable because the novel follows a known form, the African audience is pleased because it
is able to identify itself with the characters that people his novels.
Aluko adds a further dimension. Aluko in his novel mirrors the tensions of a people struggling to shed the European consciousness for an African consciousness. He creates the archetypes who be I¡eve that they are the ones chosen to lead a people to the promised land, the Benjamin Benjamins and Udo Akpans. Aluko takes the journey to the point where western education produces an African capable of occupying a high administrative position and also produces the semi-educated politician into whose hands the fortune of a nation would be entrusted. The disillusion that Soyinka,
Achebe and Armah record in the third chapter of this study, follows a pattern when the quest is usually unfulfilled, or even turns into a chi- mere. The national consciousness and national pride that was hoped for, turns into a disenchantment, even a feeling of betrayal.
The writers that have come after Tutuola have not dealt with myth and fantasy, mostly because they are the products of the westernized education of colonial Africa. They are the ones who are acutely self conscious of a past they were asked to exorcise from their psyche. Ghosts, human sacrifice and initiation rites have no place in the Christianized, ghost free world of westernized Africa..
The commitment of the better educated artist was to present the real
Africa to the world outside, to recreate traditional Africa and to endow it with reality, with people who think and move and speak as' human beings, 49
not as demons and ghosts. One of the leaders of this realist school of West African writers is Chinua Achebe. Achebe and his novels are central to a discussion of the contribution of English to West African nationalism because like Blyden of Liberia and Africanus Horton of
Sierra Leone, Achebe has been very pragmatic in his assessment of the function of English in West Africa. In an article on Eng Ii sh and the
African Writer Achebe wrote,
A national literature is one that takes the whole nation for its province and has a realised or potential audience throughout its territory. In other words a literature that is written in the national language. An ethnic literature is one that is available only to one ethnic group within the nation. If you take Nigeria as an ex ample, the national literature, as I see it, is the literature written in English, and the ethnic litera tures are in Hausa, I bo, Yoruba, Effick, Edo, I jaw, etc., etc. ...*0
Having said this, Achebe does not lose sight of the fact that the artist in West Africa has definite nationalistic functions. To Achebe the functions are three in number. The first is to help his society regain its belief in itself and "put away the years of denigration and self denigration," secondly along with nationalistic writers such as
Leopold Senghor and Wole Soyinka, Achebe believes in the intrinsic value of native African indigenous patterns of life. Thirdly Achebe makes a plea, and a very important plea, to black writers to forget the racial issue and accept the real challenge of independent Africa.
The 'bitter fruits of liberty' that the Carribean poet David Diop spoke of in his poem Africa, is the focus of Achebe's attention when he says that writers should turn their attention to expose and attack injus tice whenever it occurs, but particularly in their own African society. 50
"We must," he wrote, "seek the freedom to express our thoughts and feel
ings even against ourselves, without anxiety that what we say might be
taken as evidence against our race. We have stood in the dock too long,
pleading and protesting before ruffians and frauds masquerading as dis
interested judges."!I West African nationalism comes of age when one of
its foremost leaders prefers to look objectively at his own society and
exposes to the international community in an international language the
shortcomings of his own people. But that is not the end of the story,
nor is it the end of the journey. The artist takes his place alongside
African historians, anthropologists and political scientists in the task of rehabilitating and placing in perspective Africa's contribution in the past and her role in the future.
Chinua Achebe's two novels, Things FalI Apart and No Longer At Ease, follow an archetypal pattern in the movement of individual from tribal
life into a modern urban society. These are the poles between which the characters fluctuate. On the one hand there is the traditional community
in which the individual is subservient to the tribe; escape from that leads to a new urbanized identity with emphasis on the individual. The central character in the two novels has to cope with and come to terms with the contradictory values that the two worlds represent. This same theme is common to the nineteenth century English novel such as in Dickens and Hardy.
One of the reasons for the success of Achebe's novels as texts in schools and universities has been because his novels conformed to the genre known in western Europe. Although the novels are written by a West
African they lend themselves for examination according to standards of
European literary criticism. However, Achebe is extremely individualistic 51 because he satisfies an international audience at a thematic level while remaining close to his first source. He has used the English language to convey a particular African experience without sacrificing the internation al standards of English which is important if his works are to be anything more than local or parochial in their effect.
In 1972 Achebe visited the University of Texas in Austin as part of a month-long American tour arranged by the committee for Biafran Writers . and Artists. Interviewed on that occasion on the function of the writer in a new nation, Achebe made a statement which has a direct bearing on the role of the writer and West African nationalism.
When people talk about African culture they quite often mean an assortment of old customs. The reason for this is quite clear. When Europe came to Africa and said, 'You have no culture, no civilization, no religion, no history,' Africa was bound sooner or later to reply by displaying her accomplishments. To do this, her spokes men - her writers and intellectuals - stepped back into the past into what you might call the 'era of purity' before the coming of Europe. What they uncovered there they put into their books and poems and this became known as their culture, their answer to Europe's arrogance. They spoke of gods with whom they were at ease, they wept over the death of these gods, over the destruction of these civiIizations.12
This dialogue with the forgotten gods of ancient Africa is basically the theme of Th i ngs Fa I I Apart. In Th i ngs Fa I I Apart Achebe makes a nos talgic journey into an Africa that has long ceased to exist. He recreates for the reader a social, political and economic structure still untouched by the West. In so doing he views objectively the forces that gave strength to this structure, the "things" that held this society together.
Achebe also examines in this novel the forces that inevitably destroyed traditional I bo life regardless of the white man. It is this honesty and detachment with which he views the passing away of an older order that 52
lend credibility to his work as an artist and also credibility to his
nationalistic point of view. This honesty and detachment that Achebe
displays in his first novel are repeated in his final novel which foretold
almost to a letter the collapse of a society leading to the a I I-too-fami Iiar
military takeover. In A Man of the People Achebe exposes for all the world
to see, the "bitter fruits of liberty." In the same interview at Austin,
Texas, Achebe said, "I think our most meaningful job today should be to
determine what kind of society we want, how we are going to get there,
what values we can take from the past if we can, as we move along."*3
The central character in Th i ngs Fa I I Apart is Okonkwo, an energetic
and intense individual with a passionate belief In all the values and
traditions of his people, and that of Umuofia, a clan of nine villages
that lies deep in Iboland. Okonkwo is driven by an obsession to uphold
a way of life in which he has an abiding faith. His stature is that of
a heroic figure whose flaws if any are those beyond his ability to resist,
the result of a preordained sequence, the workings of a Chi or a personal
god.
Okonkwo for all his manly virtues, his driving ambition and his
heroic stature has certain basic flaws. The greatest of these is the
fear of being called weak. Because his father was lazy and improvident,
Okonkwo rejects anything that faintly resembles his father. He rejects
consistently family and tribal relations based on love and affection be-
. cause they are feminine virtues and bring him memories of his father.
This fatal flaw in his character is dramatized later in the novel in the
killing of Ikemefuna, the boy who lived in his household and began to
call him father. This conflict between strength and gentleness is to 53 prove a dominant factor in the ultimate tragedy of Okonkwo, and in the
life of his son Nwoye.
The killing of Ikemefuna is central to the major theme in this novel.
This boy is a hostage from an adjoining village entrusted by the elders of the clan to the care of Okonkwo. He becomes an accepted member of
Okonkwo's household and an inseparable companion of his son Nwoye. The
Oracle of the Hills and the Caves announces one day that the boy must be killed. Achebe here uses this incident to examine the individual and communal values of the society he has created.
The loyalties to the oracle that has decreed the boy must be killed is set in opposition to the tribal loyalties of home, hearth and kinship.
Ezeudu, the oldest man in the vilJage warns Okonkwo, "that boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death."!4 Achebe dramatizes the event by the effective use of symbolism presented to the reader at two levels of meaning. The killing of Ikemefuna is preceded by the coming of locusts.
Achebe, aware of the westernized, literate reading public, presents them an ironic paradox. Locusts, the symbol of destruction and ruin, are received by the pre I iterate Umuofians with shouts of glee. To these simple people locusts mean only one thing, food. To the literate reader the symbol is one of a dark shadow. "And then quite suddenly a shadow fell on the world and the sun seemed hidden behind a thick cloud."The arrival of the locusts symbolizes the arrival of colonial powers. The dark cloud is suggestive of colonialism which would throw a cloud over Africa for years to come. It is also suggestive of the innocence of a people, unaware of the impending alien intervention. The symbolism is cleverly worked in, and is in tune with Achebe’s commitment to stand back and recreate in artistic terms the story of Africa’s encounter with Europe. 54
In Things Fall Apart Achebe has recreated an ideal society with which his African audience can identify itself. This primitive paradise helps to nurture African national consciousness which suffered a setback during the colonial era. This recreation also corresponds to other arche typal patterns dealing with the loss of innocence as a result of the complexities of a new order gradually replacing the warm tribal rela tionships. In Th ings Fa I I Apart, Achebe shows the tensions inherent in this fall from innocence and the movement toward national consciousness and nationhood.
The killing of Ikemefuna marks a growing rift between father and son.
Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, finds it difficult to accept implicitly the customs and traditions of a tribe that can lead to the killing of an innocent boy.
Ikemefuna had become to him a brother, a member of his household; a part of him seemed to die with the boy, a part his father could never understand.
Ikemefuna by his sacrifice sets in motion a sequence from which Umuofia would never recover. It is the sequence of change, arising not as a result of alien intervention, but a sequence set in motion from within.
Nwoye represents this change which was to lead him beyond the boundaries of his father’s household.
as soon as his father walked in, that night, Nwoye knew Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry. He just hung limp.'6
Later in the novel Nwoye rejects his father and all that he stands for, when he tells Obierika with a certain finality, "he is not my father."
The killing of Ikemefuna is as old as the story of Abraham and Isaac, but a divine providence was not there to save the boy. Achebe very subtly 55
poses to his readers the whole problem of unquestioned obedience to
a deity by which men have sought to live. Whether it was necessary to
kill the boy to prove allegiance to a deity is perhaps debatable. But what is not debatable is Achebe's portrayal of a man whose allegiance to the Oracle of the Hills and Caves is as old as Abraham's allegiance to the God of IsraeI.
Achebe in Things Fall Apart attempts to describe life inside Africa, to penetrate into the very heart of the 'heart of darkness.' He finds that living there are people who lead well ordered., unfrenzied lives. It
is a society that has positive qualities of its own. The coherence, order and warm personal relationships reveal the author's nostalgic attachment to an age that might remain only in the creative imagination of writers of Achebe's quality. However this need to recreate a literary fantasia fulfills not only a need for creative literary pursuits on the part of African writers, but also challenges the whole notion that Afri cans had no culture nor civilization of their own, or at best one inferior to western culture and civilization.
Through its rituals, ceremonies and communal drama, the author reveals those qualities which wove the individual and his community into a vibrant and cohesive living texture. The arrival of the ancestral spirits or
Egwugu is an example of this communal drama and gives the reader an insight into the tribal law and custom which bind the people together. The spirits parading in the masks of dead ancestors command absolute respect and obe dience,
and then the Egwugu appeared. The women and children set a great shout and took to their heels. It was Instinctive. A woman fled as soon as an Egwugu came in sight. And when on that day nine of the greatest masked spirits in the clan 56
came together it was a terrifying spectacle.17
The masked spirits held the power of life and death. The harmony of tribal life depended on the manner in which they reconciled communal and individual conflicts. Without a written code of conduct or a system of laws, the tribe was held together by these spirits through whom the dead ancestors walked the earth again. The Egwugu are in one instance called upon to settle a marriage dispute. The husband blames the wife’s family for undue interference; the wife’s brothers accuse the husband of cruelty. Evil Forest uses his power and authority to ensure the con tinuance of peace and harmony.
To the husband the judgment is ’go to your in-laws with a pot of wine and beg your wife to return to you. It is not bravery when a man fights with a woman.’ With equal authority the in-laws are told,
I am Evil Forest, I am Dry-meat-that-fiI Is-the-mouth, I am Fire-burns-without-faggots. If your in-law brings wine to you, let your sister go with him. I salute you.18
Earlier in the novel Achebe in describing the village wrestling con test captures the mood of a society self-contained, unruffled and totally preoccupied with its simple pleasures, unaware of the dramatic changes that are soon to overtake them.
The wrestling match is more than a mere test of strength between two individuals. It is a part of a social event to the accompaniment of drums and music.
The drummers took up their sticks and the air shivered like a tightened bow. . . Ikezu held out his right hand. Okago seized it, and they closed in. It was a fierce contest. Ikezu strove to dig in his right heel behind Okago so as to pitch him backwards in the clever ege style. But the one knew what the other was thinking. The crowd had surrounded and swallowed up the drummers, whose frantic rhythm was no longer a mere disembodied 57
sound, but the very heartbeat of the people.'9
The drums, wrestlers and people respond to one beat, the heartbeat
of a people. In the Arrow of God Achebe rather deliberately inverts
this image and presents the traditional European image. Captain Winter-
bottom, the English District Officer in Umuaro is still the unwary Euro
pean who stands alienated unable to make meaningful contact with the
African world around him.
After the first stretch of unrestful sleep he would lie awake, tossing about until he was caught in the distant throb of drums. He would wonder what unspeak able rites went on in the forests at night, or was it the heart of the African darkness.20
He does not realize that the heartbeat of African darkness is only the
heartbeat of a people.
It is into this world that the first white missionaries arrive.
A world in spite of its shortcomings, its conlficts and tensions, lies
protected by the spirits of the dead in harmony with itself and in tune with the seasonal cycles of rain and drought, death and disease.
The arrival of the missionaries is presented by Achebe with subtlety,
detachment and honesty. There is no dramatic confrontation, no mass con version, no appeal to emotionalism. Rather the new religion is presented as appealing to individuals and groups within the clan who are in rebel
lion against the harshness of the tribal law and custom. It is this . ' ability on the part of Chinua Achebe to record realistically that change was perhaps inevitable even before the arrival of white missionaries which
is also demonstrated later in his ability to record the weaknesses of post-independent West Africa. The ultimate failure of Okonkwo was be cause of his inability to see that changes in society are inevitable;, that 58 one generation does not have inalienable rights to protect and guard forever a structure of their own making. Achebe in the interview given
in Austin, Texas, admits that between Ezeulu of Arrow of God and Okonkwo of Things Fa I I Apart, Ezeulu was the greater because he saw that change was inevitable. Okonkwo saw only his duty to protect his own and fight change. In Ezeulu's own words ". . .the world is like a mask dancing.
If you want to see it well you do not stand in one pi ace."21 :
Nwoye seeks for answers to the contradictions in his society even if his search would lead him beyond the boundaries of his father's house hold. The new religion has a vague attraction for him; something more felt than understood. With the killing of Ikemefuna he had felt something snapping within him and now he was moving toward this strange band of men who spoke in English of the brotherhood of al I men.
It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers, who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and per sistent question that haunted his young soul.22
A few days later Nwoye leaves his father's household. His defection from his father's household and his conversion to Christianity focuses the reader's attention on the wider sociaI conf Iict between two different ways of life at a personal level. His defection to Christianity has a double significance. It is a revolt against his father as well as a rejection of all the values that his father's world stands for. Okonkwo's bitter ness at this betrayal of his son is the bitterness of one generation as it helplessly watches another destroying the values by which that genera tion had lived. In this context Okonkwo's lament is timeless.
Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods 59
of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abo mination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye's steps and abandon their ances tors. Akonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation.23
The journey motif becomes clear as one realizes that it is at this point that a connection is made with Achebe's third novel No Longer At
Ease. When Nwoye, Okonkwo's son in Th i ngs Fa I I Apart, moved away from the tribal vaIues of his father's world, he started the first stage of the journey for the English educated Nigerians of Achebe’s own generation.
Obi Okonkwo, the son of Nwoye Okonkwo is the inheritor of Nwoye's revolt.
Isaac Okonkwo of No Longer At Ease is the Nwoye Okonkwo of Th i ngs Fa I I
Apart. Obi Okonkwo bears the marks of the changes wrought by colonial
ism to the West African' psyche. He is Obi Okonkwo, E5.A. Oxford, Secre tary of the Public Service Commission. Physically the action moves from rural Umuofia to urban Lagos.
While taking a nostaligc look at an older dispensation, Achebe ends
Th i ngs Fa I I Apart on a note which has provided West African nationalism with a theme of alienation and loss of identity. Okonkwo who has been presented in such heroic proportions throughout the novel is finally the victim of his own inflexibility. He is a lonely, misunderstood figure as he attempts almost singlehandedly to stop the inevitable processes of history. Achebe, while accepting Okonkwo's action, takes exception to the attitude of the white District Commissioner to whom the cutting down of the body of this Umuofian was an undignified detail in the larger scheme of bringing civilization to the tribes of Lower Niger. The final blow comes when the Commissioner decides, more as an afterthought, on the 60
paragraph he would devote to this man who killed a messenger and hanged
himself. Achebe stresses the indifference-of the District Commissioner and brings into sharp focus, by literary means, the human aspect which had long been blurred by the image of a continent of lush vegetation, mystery and darkness. It has also led directly to the ’pain of the wound in the soul' and is symbolic of the change that inevitably touched the mute figures waiting for the new day that was to bring Africa into dramatic encounter with the world outside.
In No Longer At Ease, Achebe shows the new middle class of Africa in conlfict with the values of the past which they are being told to reject.
An urban civilization makes inroads into the rural, causing a conflict and tension in the African persona Iity. No Longer At Ease is not the story of a col lapse of a society as Things Fa I I Apart, but about a new society that is in the process of being erected alongside the old. The old society however is not a dying society either. It is very much alive but for the time being is relegated to an inferior status. The hero of
No Longer At Ease, Obi Okonkwo, is the grandson of Okonkwo of Things Fa I I
Apart.
Obi Okonkwo’s society is the society for whose culture and dignity his grandfather Okonkwo fought and died. This same society has been transformed. They have come to believe that England and English education hold the key to the advancement of their society. A knowledge of the
English language becomes extremely important because all over the continent during the nineteen-fifties there was a feeling that educated Africans should move into responsible positions in the political, social and econo mic life of the country. The West African educated in British universities 61
began to feel a sense of alienation, he was being made to think and act
Ii ke a European.
The people taxed themselves and collected money to send the bright est among them to study in England. The journey toward the search for the treasures is set in motion. Obi is symbolic of generations of Afri cans who have made this journey, to examine for themselves the claim that
Europe represented a culture superior to their own.
Achebe in his description of the prayer meeting in Obi's home be fore his departure to England attempts something similar to what Tutuola did in The Palm Wine Drinkard. He has Mary, a convert to Christi antiy, pray for God’s blessing on Obi, using African imagery in the English
idiom. Mary prayed,
Oh God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob, the Beginning and the End. Without you we can do nothing. The great river is not big enough for you to wash your hands in. You have the yam and you have the knife, we cannot eat unless you cut us a piece.24
Christianity and English education have been absorbed and the synthesis r- of the Europeanized African is what Obi represents. This is the status quo and this status quo represents power, prestige and culture. The
Umuofia Progressive Society is making of Obi a sacrificial lamb. They want him to return with a-degree from an English university, preferably
Oxford or Cambridge and thus qualify to hold a European post in the
Nigerian Civil Service. Obi is told,
In times past Umuofia would have required of you to fight her wars, and bring home human heads. But those . were the days of darkness from which we have been de livered by the blood of the Lamb of God. Today we send you to bring know I edge.25 62
The journey has a specific mission. But what the Umuofians do not realize is that knowledge and education in European terms will lead to alienation. Ob i' s. educat ion will not preserve the world of his grand father nor will he be accepted wholly by the white world into which they have sent him.
When Obi returns from England he returns not to Umuofia but to
Lagos which is neither African nor European. The city represents the alienation and loss of identity as a result of this clash of cultures.
To Obi when he was in London, Lagos was a symbol of the new Africa. But A on his return from London he sees Lagos for what it is; rising skyscrapers, air-conditioned offices, dead dogs, piled garbage and bad smells.
The full extent of Obi's alienation becomes evident to the Umuofia
Progressive Union when he returns from England and is welcomed by them.
To the Union he is an investment that must pay dividends. He must play the role of the Black White man. He must dress, speak and act like a white man. Obi however turns up at the reception in shirt sleeves. He does not even wear a tie. The Union makes it plain that loyalty to the tribe is of paramount importance even if it means sacrificing principles and scruples and ultimately leads to bribery and corruption.
When Obi is interviewed for the post of Secretary to the Public Ser vice Commission, the African member of the interview board asks Obi a direct question, "Why do you want a job in the Civil Service? So that you can take bribes?"26 Later, on his journey to his village Umuofia,
Obi sees as a Black White man for the first time the corruption that has permeated all levels of life.
What an Augean Stables, he muttered to himself. Where does 63
one begin? With the masses? He shook his head. Not a chance there. It would take centuries. A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with vision - an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays.- But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?27
The novel begins with a question from the judge as to how a man like
Obi could have accepted a bribe. . "I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and briI Iiant promise could have done this."26 Obi's im mediate superior, Mr. Green, has the answer. He tells his fellow club members that the African is corrupt through and through because he has been for centuries the victim of the worst climate in the world and of every imaginable disease. That is why, Mr. Green says, the African is mentally and physicaI Iy weak. That is why he remains decadent despite the benefits of western education. The Umuofia Progressive Union is not concerned that Obi was guilty of bribery. They are only concerned that he was stupid enough to get caught. They decide to support him because he is a precious investment. It would be foolish to allow 'an only palm fruit to get lost in the fire.'
It is within this framework of incomprehension and perplexity caused by the clash of two cultures of which Obi is the hybrid product that
Achebe plots the progress of his hero in this novel. Obi-'s journey from
Umuofia to London to Lagos and ultimately prison has a certain tragic inevitability. In Things Fall Apart there is no doubt in the reader's mind that Achebe, while not condoning the inflexibility of Okonkwo, does however use him as a foil to recreate a past with values that had an intrinsic worth in the context of pre-European Africa. There is a deep sense of something lost forever. In No Longer At Ease, Obi Okonkwo does 64
not possess the heroic stature of his grandfather. He has only a veneer
of greatness. His downfall does not have the tragic stature of that of
his grandfather Okonkwo.
When Obi returns from London and goes to his village in Umuofia, he
is given a hero's welcome. He is a successor in modern terms of Okonkwo,
Ezeudu and a host of other great Umuofians. He has been to the land of
the Great White spirits and returned. When Obi tells the curious villagers
that his ship did not see land for seven days the villagers are truly im
pressed. An old man reaching from his ancient wisdom says, ". . .in our
folk stories a man gets to the land of spirits when he has passed seven
rivers, seven forests and seven hills. Without doubt you have visited
the land of spirits."29
However, for all the simplicity and.naivity with which the villagers
greet Obi there is also an acceptance of the changing patterns of life.
Odoguwu, an elder of the clan, clearly defines that phase in West African
history when nationalists realized that they must submit to historical
changes in order to achieve a greater goat. This little speech of
Odoguwu expresses clearly the thesis central to this discussion when he
says,
today greatness has changed its tune. Titles are no longer great, neither are barns or a large number of wives and children. Greatness is now in the things of the white man. And so we too have changed our tune. We are the first in all the nine villages to send our son to the white man's land. Greatness has belonged to Igüedo from ancient times. It is not made by man. You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Whoever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men.30 65
However realistic and pragmatic Odoguwu’s statement may appear,
Achebe also dramatizes the trauma of those actually placed in the posi
tion of coming to terms with a new world while living with the actual
ities of the old. The journey from one to the other is not made without
sacrifices, without conflicts and tensions at a personal and communal
level.
Obi while returning to Nigeria from England meets Clara on board
ship. He falls deeply in love with her. What he does not know on board
ship is that Clara is an Osu. The Osus are the untouchables of Nigeria.
On board ship she is a Nigerian. In Lagos she is an Osu. In London as
students they are beyond the fears and tyrannies of tribal life. When
they return home however, they are heirs to a dual heritage.
This dual heritage, this clash of western ideologies and African
actuality is seen clearly when Obi returns a second time to Umuofia con
vinced that his father Isaac Okonkwo the pious Christian will permit him
to marry Clara. But Obi finds that his father, for all his piety, is at
heart an Umuofian. The long arm of the tribe has still a hold on him.
Achebe rolls back the years and Okonkwo’s fears for his son are now seen
in the fears of Isaac Okonkwo for his son Obi Okonkwo. With a voice almost
from the past Isaac Okonkwo pleads,
Osu is like leprosy in the minds of the people. I beg of you my son not to bring the mark of shame and of leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children's children unto the third and fourth gene rations wiI I curse your memory. Who wi I I marry your daughter? Think of that my son. We are Christians but we cannot marry our own daughters.31
He finds even less comfort from his mother. She does not plead with her son. She tells him very plainly, "If you do this thing while I am still alive, you will have my blood on your head because I shall kill 66 myself."32 Obi realizes that he cannot please his parents nor can he
completely accept the values they represent. Europe will not allow
him to come to terms with his origins nor will Umuofia free him completely
from the shackles of a tribal ethic which extends even into the middle of the twentieth century.
This conflict between ideals and actualities is developed by Achebe on another level. It is the stereotyping of people, attitudes and values, based upon their background which has been done by Europeans about Africa and also by Africans about Europe. Thinking of Mr. Green, the British
Civil Servant, Obi decides he must one day write a novel about the Greens of this century. Achebe with a measure of satire observes that the Greens
loved Africa, but only Africa of a kind - the Africa of houseboys, servants, and cooks - people to whom the Greens of Europe bring a light to brighten the 'heart of darkness.' However, when the Greens of the nineteen-fifties
arrived Africa played them false. Where was his beloved bush of human sacrifice? There was St. George horsed and caprisoned, but where was the dragon? In 1900, Mr. Green would have ranked among the greatest missionaries. In 1935 he would have made do with slapping headmasters in the presence of their pupils, but in 1957 he could only curse and swear.33
It is in this context of the actual and the ideal that Obi Okonkwo's reference to Joseph Conrad is pertinent. He remembers the words of Kurtz,
". . .by the simple ^exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." That was Mr. Kurtz before 'the heart of darkness' got to him. Afterwards he had written, "Exterminate all the brutes."
Obi's comment that follows is a summation in symbolic terms of the decline of colonialism as a result of their own efforts to colonize and civilize in West Africa. Obi muses, ". . .Kurtz had succumbed to the darkness. 67
Green to the Incipient dawn. But their beginning and their end were a I I ke. "34
The gradual decline and fall of Obi Okonkwo as he tries desperately to come to terms with a new dispensation while being loyal to the old, is presented rather realistically by Achebe. The success of the novel and its relevance to a discussion on the rise of nationalism is that it portrays clearly the loss of Identity and alienation of Nigeria's elite and their failure to measure up to the demands of an emergent nation. The damage wrought to the African psyche in its search for new gods to re place the old is Achebe's main contribution to this novel.
The damage wrought to the African psyche in its search for new gods is also the theme of T. M. Aluko's novel One Man, One Matchet. One Man,
One Matchet is important because Aluko presents two characters who answer to the description of the "scholar" referred to in Chapter I. Benjamin
Benjamin and Udo Akpan are both "scholars" in the colonial interpretation of that word. Benjamin Benjamin is the educated native, Udo Akpan is the
Black White man. He is the African that Stanfield, the White District
Officer is talking about when he says, ". . .we must realize that the new race for Africa cannot be won, without winning first the mind of the Afri can. "35
Udo Akpan is an idealistic African District Officer who, like Obi
Okonkwo of No Longer At Ease, studied on a scholarship in England from pennies contributed by half a million tribesmen and women. He is an upper second in Classics from Cambridge, and what's more is a Cambridge blue in cricket. In colonial circles in Asia and Africa of the thirties and forties winning a Cambridge blue in cricket carried a high status symbol. 68
For all his Cambridge education and his Cambridge blue in cricket,
Udo Akpan quickly gains a reputation as a Black White man who sides with a colonial government rather than with his own people. Aluko has given a new twist to an old theme. Obi Okonkwo and other westernized heroes suffer because they want to break away from the tribe and its traditions.
Udo Akpan on the contrary wants to gain acceptance into his traditional society. He had decided that he was going to approach his new duties of
African administration in an essentially African way in his attempt to establish good relations with the people of his district. The first
African he visits is the Reverend Josiah Olaiyah, the minister of the local parish. The culture conflict is reversed by Aluko. Udo Akpan in all sincerity informs the Reverend Josiah Olaiyah, that he is aware that his appointment as a District Officer is only an experiment but he wants it to succeed for the sake of the Black man, and the priest replies,
Praise to the Lord God of Hosts who has made me live to see this day, when I a lowly, parish priest, have been considered worthy to be paid a visit by the first African District Officer in the land - I Josiah Olaiyah, without a university degree, neither a doctor, nor a lawyer.36
The journey has come its full cycle in terms of West African national ism when a westernized African understands that he can perform his duties only if and when he comes to terms with his own culture and his own people.
Kenyatta's dictum that it is the culture that he inherits that gives a man his dignity is what Akpan sets out to prove in his dealings with his people.
Benjamin Benjamin is also a scholar, but he is not a scholar in the sense that Udo Akpan is. He is the semi-educated native whose only pretense 69
to scholarship is that he knows how to speak, read and write English. He
is a truly pathetic figure, a caricature of the real Black White man.
Udo Akpan and Benjamin Benjamin might be characters that Aluko has created
but the fact remains that there were Udo Akpans and Benjamin Benjamins
in the West Africa of the thirties and forties.
While Udo Akpan is visiting the Reverend Josian Olaiyah seeking a genuine rapport with his people, Benjamin Benjamin has prostrated all six feet of him coat, trousers and all before the Oba Apaja of Ipaja. He prostrated himself before ". . .the Descendant of the Founder of the most ancient dynasty on earth, and declares, 'I worship you.'"37 He had be come the self styled political adviser to the Apaja-in-counci I.
The careers of these two Black White men are indicative of dilemmas that colonialism created. The danger was that when the British left Africa the political kingdom was delivered to the Benjamin Benjamins rather than to the Akpans. Aluko's contribution to West African nationalism lies in the fact that he fills in this gap that writers like Achebe failed to do.
Achebe's chief, the Honorable Nanga of A Man of the People has his roots in the Benjamin Benjamins of One Man, One Matchet. If colonialism gave birth to Udo Akpan it also gave birth to Benjamin Benjamins. Only when one reads Achebe along with Aluko will one get a total picture. Achebe undoubtedly is a superior technician. His understanding of the art of fiction is infinitely superior to Aluko. But Aluko deserves recognition for.defining in clear terms a phenomenon of British colonialism in West
Africa which sometimes West African nationalists would rather forget ever existed, just as some would even forget Tutuola and his Palm Wine Drinkard.
Tutuola, Achebe and Aluko, by their deliberate choice to record in 70
English a segment in the history of West Africa, have found new roots.
Tutuola’s success lies in his ability to re-order the Yoruba folk-tales in a foreign language and still keep alive the imaginative appeal.
Tutuola has reduced the living oral world of West Africa and particularly of the Yorubas to a series of words and images intelIigible to the ave rage English reader. He thus sets in motion a very important function, the function of the artist to give a view of Africa from inside. No longer is it necessary for the world outside to depend on a view of A- frica as seen by non-African eyes.
Achebe’s autobiographical novels take the journey a step further.
For him writing is almost an act of self discovery. in a colonial and post-colonial situation this re-defining and re-discovery is done in a world language and performs the dual function of helping in the rehabili tation of a society and in reordering its own values in the light of what has been and what is to be. Achebe can "celebrate the depth -and value and beauty of tribal Ibo life and culture, but he must do so with tools gained in the act of destroying it." These same tools are employed by the artist in the continuing process of recording the past and the pre sent as Aluko does in One Man, One Matchet. A vision of the future arises from the dedication not to blur the truth, however painful the truth may be.
In the next chapter Wole Soyinka, Achebe and Armah pursue this cal ling of West African nationalists by using the same tools to record the spi ritual and moral blight that are the first fruits of liberty. It Is a sad tale, perhaps even sadder than Th i ngs Fa I I Apart, but one that has to be told if the artist is to be a nationalist in the truest and broadest sense. 71
CHAPTER III
I know who the Dead ones are. They are the guests of the Human Community who are neighbours to us of the Forest. It is their feast, the Gathering of the Tribes. Their councillors met and said, our forefathers must be present at this Feast. They asked us for ancestors, for i I Iustrious ancestors, and I said to Forest Head, let me answer their request1; ^nd I sent two spirits of the rest less dead. ...
The Dance of the Forests by Wole Soy inka, f\ Man of the Peop Ie
by Achebe and The Beautiful Ones Are not yet Born by Armah, reveal the basic ambivalence that is a part of the African consciousness. The writers in this section raise issues that go beyond dignity, se I f- respect and national consciousness. The focus appears to be on the darkening horizon, of what it means to be an African- in the twentieth century. The rosy picture of the past and the optimistic view of the present do not detract from the dark images that appear ahead. In 1960 on the occasion of Nigeria's independence Wole Soyinka, presented The
Dance of the Forests for the first time. This play is his most imagi native and nationalistic work. The theme of this play encompasses the past and the present with a vision of the future. While Soyinka has given expression to a totality of African experience the play's great est success lies in "making the rest of the world see humanity through 2 African eyes." Using an African background Soyinka explores the depths of the human condition. The gathering of the tribes of Nigeria, is symbolic of the gathering of the people of the world to witness a great occasion such as the birth of a nation.
In h Dance of the Forests, /\ Man of the PeopIe and The Beauti ful
Ones are not yet Born, there is an unwillingness on the part of the 72 artist to fall back on the past as a solution to present day ills.
In a play supposed to celebrate the birth of a nation, Soyinka
speaks of death, delusion and betrayal. Instead of being grandiose,
Soyinka is sombre to the point of being grim. Instead of romanti
cizing a past, Soyinka de-romanticizes a people and their history.
Soyinka’s purpose is the purpose of dedicated West African national
istic writers to tell the truth even at the risk of being misunderstood by others. If the past was inglorious it must be recorded as having
been inglorious; if the present is a betrayal let the betrayal go on
record, for only then can a vision of the future have any meaning.
Soyinka feels that when this is done Africans will see some of the abiding truths of the human condition, one of which is that we've all been dying since the very beginning! For Soyinka the ancients are no better than the moderns. Even the gods with whom his contempo rary writers and artists resume a dialogue, are themselves guilty of callousness in their dealings with men. Both gods and men are under examination. The Dance of.,the Forests presented at the Nigerian Inde dependence celebrations denigrated Africa's glorious past.
Although the play has a particular geographical setting and is written for a Nigerian audience, what is under examination is an
African consciousness and by a further extension human consciousness.
The use of spirits and gods to take a backward look at history before
looking into the future gives the play its archetypal pattern.
Man is the central figure in the play. There is first of a I I man's nature being essentially evil. This may vary from single man as it varies from man to man. Then there is man in relation not only to other 73
men, but also In relation to his environment, of the trees and the
rivers, of the mountains and the forests. There is also man in rela
tion to the dead ones, the spirits of the ancestors. The African
consciousness of the artist is quite marked in Soyinka's treatment of
this section. The Dead Man and Woman represent man as victim, of
other men, and of history as a record of man's inhumanity to his
fellow man. The ants represent the masses, the exploited masses of
the world. The half child is the grim vision of a future that can
only be partially told. The half child that searches in vain for
another womb cries, "I'll be born dead, I'll be born dead."
It is within this framework of man, his environment and his
relationships to the past and the present that Soyinka portrays other
themes and symbols. The court of Mata Kharibus's mythical kingdom,
Africa's legendary past provides the setting for an 'examination of
what went on in Africa's past, before they are all brought before
Forest Head. There is the theme of political corruption in Mata
Kharibus's court; there is discussed the nature and function of art;
there is a knowledge of the destruction of the natural environment,
along with discussions of war and peace.
Wole Soyinka interviewed by Lewis Nkosi in Lagos Nigeria in
August 1962 said in reply to the question about hidden meanings or
symbols the play carried, that his prime duty was to provide excellent theatre. His commitment, he said, was to his audience not to leave the theatre bored. In A Dance of the Forests, he said his main theme is the realization that human beings are just destructive all over the world, they are simply cannibals wherever they may be. This he said 74 is the main theme and was in the back of his mind when he wrote it.
The notion of a world of conscious evil, whether it be African,
European or Asian, with man at the very centre, is what Soyinka pre sented to the Nigerians on independence day.
The tribes are gathered and the living are anxious to call up the dead to testify to the great and glorious past. In a clearing in the forest suddenly the head of the Dead Woman pushes its way up. An other head appears, that of a man. Two pathetic figures—from the past, hardly in keeping with the mood of the occasion. The Dead Man cries,
"I am so ashamed, so ashamed," for behind him is a history of misery, betrayal and death. The Dead Woman is so ashamed, because she has been pregnant for a ’hundred generations,' a half child she would soon deliver, is a symbol of the future.
The Gathering of the Tribes has a dual function in the play.
Symbolically it represents the various tribes of Nigeria who are sup posedly present to witness the birth of a nation. On another level, the level of the play, the Gathering of the Tribes represents the ancestors whose spirits are being summoned to be present on this great occasion. They are the ones who will talk about the ancient and glor ious past. They symbolize all that is noble and from the historical link for this season of rejoicing. There are kings, sages, warriors, philosophers and workers. For every one of them summoned from the past there is a corresponding representative in the present.
This is also why the Gathering of the Tribes is celebrated in town and forest. The celebration in the town represents the actual independence celebrations. The celebration in the forest represents 75 the celebration of the spirits. It is this celebration that the celebrants in the town watch, for it represents for Soyinka the deep spiritual concerns that the townspeople have lost.
The details of the past are recreated by Soyinka in the Court of
Mata Kharibu. Mata Kharibu has been resurrected by Africa's writers to represent Africa's glorious past. But Soyinka sees, the past as inglorious as that of any other race. Mata Kharibu's Queen is pre sented as a whore and Mata Kharibu himself as a king who is ruthless, self serving and brutal. He is a king who will not brook opposition or criticism of any sort. The man Mata Kharibu fears most is the man with the independent mind. Mata Kharibu's court is surrounded by learned men but they do not have the courage to speak the truth. The warrior, who is also the Dead Man, is marked by Mata Kharibu for death when he says to his soothsayer,
Mata Kharibu: I could understand if he aimed at my throne. But he is not even man for that. What does it mean? What do you see for the future? Will there be more like him with this thought cancer in their heart?
Soothsayer: Mata Kharibu, have you ever seen a smudge on the face of the moon?
Mata Kharibu: What do you mean?
Soothsayer: Have you?
Mata Kharibu: No.
Soothsayer: And yet it happens. Once in every million years, one of the sheep that trai I the moon in its wanderings does dare to wipe its smutty nose on the moon. Once in a million years. But the moon is there still. And who remem bers the envy ridden sheep?
Mata Kharibu: So the future holds nothing for men like him. 76
Soothsayer: Nothing, nothing at a I I.
The intellectual is dangerous, he must never be allowed to
’wipe his smutty nose on the face of the moon,’ if he is allowed to do this the world after all may have a future.
This section of theplay when read in the context of what happened in West Africa since 1960 is more than prophetic- it is chilling. Wole
Soyinka along with several writers were the first casualties of dic tatorial governments. The court of Mata Kharibu may have its origins in fiction but that it flourishes all over the world cannot be doubted.
Soyinka's latest book, ironically enough, was written from prison. The title of the book is The Man Died, Pr i son Notes of Wo Ie Soy i n ka, pub-
Iished in 1972.
In the Dance of the Forests, Soyinka takes a new look at the his tory of slavery, the most traumatic of all historical experiences for the African. Soyinka presents to the Gathering of the Tribes a dif ferent picture of the slave trade. The Dead Man's history includes involvement with the slave trade. The Tribes are told that the KharibuS of the past also had a role, a rather sinister role in the history of slave trade. There is as much blood on the hands of Mata Kharibu as on the hands of the white slavers. This interpretation by Wole Soyinka has several subtle shades of meaning. There is the possible meaning that Africa was placed in the chains of slavery not only by the strangers but also by their own brothers. The larger theme is that man has sur vived only by enslaving his fellow man. Soyinka's vision of the past, the present and the future is of a vast slave galley in which all man kind has been sailing from the past down to the present and into the 77
unforseeable future.
The African side of the history of slavery is revealed to the
Gathering of the Tribes as the slave dealer prostrates himself . . .
Slave Dealer: Your majesty!
Mata Kharibu: 1 will hear no petitions today.
Slave Dealer: (throwing himself forward) 1 am no petitioner Mata Kharibu. 1 merely place my vessel at the disposal of your . August Majesty.
Mata Kharibu: Oh! You. Are you not the slave dealer? Slave Dealer: Your humble servant is amply rewarded. Your highness has deigned before to use me as an agent and hearing that there was to be another war, 1 came to offer my services. However if there are slaves even before the battle has begun. .... Mata Kharibu: They are yours. If they are out of my kingdom before an hour, 1 shall not forget you.
Slave Dealer: Mata Kharibu most humane of monarchs, the crime of your soldiers is a terrible one, but do not place men who once served faithfully in the hands of the merchant.
Mata Kharibu: Why? What is this?
Phys ici an : Sir, 1 know the man of old, and 1 know the slight coffin in which he stuffs his victims. He knows how to get them down alive; it is his trade. But until he is near the slave market, the wretches have gone through twenty torments of he 11.4
The whole play moves towards a welcome of the dead arranged by
Aroni, the lame one, who acts on behalf of Forest Head. Forest Head is the supreme deity, the creator who has in this act of creation given to man a "free will." Now he has to watch and endure the pain of seeing his creation using this free will not always for good but rather
in a recurring pattern of evil. What is most appalling to Forest
Head is the spectacle of misery, betrayal and death. 78
orest Head: The fooleries of beings whom 1 have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet 1 must persist knowing that nothing is ever altered—my secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of origi nal nakedness—knowing full well it is all futility.5
The sequence wi+h the an+s has a special significance in this play.
The ants represent the vast and anonymous mass of humanity. They are
the workers on whom rest the physical burdens of the world. The an+s
are symbolic not only of the African masses but also of the masses at
large, as they take their place in this 'Dance of’'the 'Fords+£.1 Theirs
is the voice of the mi 1 lions /who have ■ to+be ppoken for
Forest Head: Are you my sons?
Ant Leader: We are the blazers of the trail. If you are Forest Father we think we are your sons.
Forest Head: But who are you?
Ant Leader: We take our color from the fer+i le loam. Our numbers from the roots of the earth. And terror blinds them. They know we are the children of earth. They break our skin upon the ground fearful. That we guard the wisdom of the Earth, our Mother.
Forest Head: Have you a grievance?
Ant Leader: None Father, except great clods of earth. Pressed on our feet. The world is old, But the rust of a million years have left the chai ns unloosed. •
Forest Head: Are you not free?
Ant Leader: Freedom we have like the hunter on a preci pice. And the horns of a rhinocerous nuzzling his buttocks.6
The play moves towards the chorus of the spirits, who symbolize
Africa and her physical resources. The question that Soyinka appears / to ask is for what purpose and for whose benefits will the vast resources 79 of this continent be used? Will they be used wisely to serve the people or will they be used against the people themselves?
As each spirit is called up it dances agitatedly and prophesies.
The first spirit called up is the Spirit of the Palm. The Palm tree and its sap is a life-giving symbol all over Africa. It has suckled its people and nourished them over the centuries but this spirit prophesies,
White skeins wove me. I spirit of the Palm. Now course I red. I who suckle blackened hearts know Heads will fall down Crimson in their bed.7
The imagery is suggestive of the violence that has been done to the physical resources and death and contamination is clearly portrayed in the dance of the waters,
Let no man lave his feet In any stream, in any lake In rapids or in cataracts Let no woman think to bake Her cornmeal wrapped in leaves With water gathered of the rain He'll think his eye deceives Who treds the ripples where I run In shallows.8
The spirits that dance in turn are the Spirit of Darkness, the
Spirit of Precious Stones, Spirit of the Rivers and the Spirit of the
Sun. At this point the half child who has just been born symbolizing the future, joins the rising crescendo of voices as the prophesies come one after another.
. . .Half child: I who yet await a mother Feel this dread Feel this dread I who flee from womb To branded womb, cry it now I'll be born dead I'll be born dead.^ 80
Spirit of the Dark : More have I seen I spirit of the dark Naked they breathe within me fore telling now How by the dark of peat and forest They'II be misIed.'
Spirit of Precious Stones: Still I draw them down Into the pit that glitters, I Spirit of gold and diamonds Mine is the vain light courting death.''
This was Soyinka's offerina to the Gatherina of the tribes of
Nigeria, as they celebrated the birth of a new nation. It is a reminder
that the truths of mankind and the history of mankind in general is also
the history of Africa. Soyinka in a paper on the writer in Modern Africa
at a conference of African writers held in Upsala in 1968 said,
It seems the time has now come when the African writer must have the courage to determine what alone can be salvaged from the recurrent cycle of human stupidity. The myth of irrational nobility of a racial essence that must come to the rescue of white depravity, has run its full course. It never in fact existed, for this was not the problem but the camoufI age.'2
A Dance of the Forests is proof of West African nationalism that
is ready to be self critical if self criticism will serve a purpose. It is also the supreme proof of the ability of West Africans to produce great works of art in an alien language they have made their own.
In the context of the contribution of English to the rise of West
African nationalism, Wole Soyinka's Dance of the Forests answers to the wish of early West African nationalists such as Blyden, Africanus
Horton and Ajai Crowther—a wish that one day Africa would make its own contribution to the world of art and this in the English language. 81
Wole Soyinka and Achebe and also Armah working in the framework
of an African consciousness use a literary and Iinguistic mode which
in itself may appear contradictory. It is on this very contradiction that a basis for modern African literature is founded. It is out of this linguistic situation that West African novelists are wresting their greatest triumphs. However this does not mean that modern
African Iiterature will remain as a mere appendage to Western liter ature. Soyinka answers to this problem by his use of the full African
landscape while keeping man central to his works. Soyinka’s protag onist may be black and live in tropical Africa, but being essentially human he is recognizable wherever he may choose to appear. The artist in Soyinka responds to the need as in all other artists to create with out making any special justification for doing so. However African writers such as Soyinka have felt a special obligati'on to interpret and educate society. The African writer thus speaks primarily for and to the people of his own society. He reasserts the dignity and worth of their culture, while he seeks to identify those things of real value to contemporary society.
Soyinka in deliberately denigrating Africa's past, in A Dance of the Forests repudiates the whole philosophy of Negritude propounded by Cesaire and given world-wide currency by its greatest apostle Leopold
Senghor. Negritude, Soyinka feels, is the African version of the colonial camouflage which African writers and artists have used for too long a time. Negritude is taking pride in being a Negro and all things that give meaning to Negro life and culture. People of African descent are asked to declare their African identity. Soyinka is one of the first to' 82
voice a protest against this kind of glorification. He ridicules the
entire idea by saying, "Surely a tiger does not go about declaring
its tigritude." For him the old is no better than the new. His view
of life and history is a cyclic one, the endless round of suffering,
deceit and corruption.
Six years after the Dance of the Forests was staged Chinua Achebe
published his novel A Man of the People. All the terrible prophesies
of the spirits that Soyinka paraded before a euphoric Nigerian audience
on independence day appear to find fulfillment in Achebe's novel.
In A Man of the People, Forest Head is the nation itself, the
, forest clearing, somewhere in Nigeria. Just as Soyinka before the
gathering of the tribes prophesied the depth of the human condition,
in A Man of the People Achebe sets out a sequence of events. The cast,
so to speak, was provided two years later when similar events recorded
in the novel were played out with grim reality leading to near anarchy
and military dictatorship.
The novel was published within a month of military take over of
Nigeria. Readers were amazed at the close resemblance to contemporary
events and speculated that Achebe either anticipated or had some inside
knowledge of the events recorded. But as has been quite rightly said
by 0. R. Dathorne, one did not have to be a political genius to specu
late, because speculation as to matters coming to a head in Nigeria
. was rather commonplace.
Achebe was asked in the interview at Austin, Texas, whether in
addition to recording the past and cultural revolutions and changes that
are going on, whether African writers have any influence in determining 83
Africa’s future. His answer on that occasion is worth quoting in
fulI because it goes to the core of this examination.
Yes, I think by recording what had gone on before, they were in a way helping to set the tone of what was going to happen. And this is important because at this stage, it seems to me that the writer's role is more in determining than merely in reporting. In other words, his role is to act rather than to react. Today we are saying, 'well let's not waste too much time explaining what we were and pleading with some people and calling them also human. Let us forget that, let us map out what we are going to be tomorrow. I think our most meaningful job today should be to determine what kind of society we want, how we are going to get there, what values we can take from the past if we can, as we move along.'3
This statement coming from one of West Africa's leading novelists after he has personally witnessed the trauma of the military coup in
1966 and the long night of Biafra is indicative of the kind of national
istic thinking of leading West Africans. Independence is not the end of the journey but only the beginning. The writer cannot excuse himself from the task of re-education and regeneration of a people. The writer's place, Achebe asserts, should be in front. In his essay on The NoveIi st r • as Teacher, Achebe agrees with the Ghanian professor of Philosophy,
William Abraham, that, just as African scientists, African historians and African political scientists concern themselves with the truths of
Africa, so literary artists also should make their services available to a cause that is recognized as geniune.
In A Man of the People, Achebe combines the roles of teacher and satirist and joins ranks with historians, anthropologists and others in the task of the rehabilitation of a society. The novel differs in theme and treatment from his earlier novels and marks a definite departure in technique. The nostalgia with which he portrays the strength and order 84
of a vanished world, and the dilemmas of a changing society are
replaced by savage satiric attacks on the self-inflicted ills of his own generation.
He singles out for his severest censure, the educated and half- educated to whom independence has been a boon. He exposes how patently false the cry for Africanization has been.
Jobs in the Civil Service; directorates in corporations; top posts in the mining companies; houses, cars and television sets are the be-all and end-all of the elite clamoring for Africanization. Free dom is nothing more than a transfer of power from a white elite to a black elite. The novel portrays the dying stages of a democratic pro cess which has been foisted from above on the masses who were for the most part illiterate. Years of exploitation by both black and white pave the way for the ultimate collapse of a society powerless to con trol the circumstances of change over which it had no control. Where as his earlier novels explore the confrontation of Africa and Europe and the consequences of such a confrontation, A Man of the People presents a contemporary situation peculiar to the writer's own time.
A Man of the People is not simple confrontation between good and evil, with Chief Nanga as the villainand OdiIi as the hero. The opening chapters reveal that Odili is contemptuous of the Chief and also of the electorate that he represents. He is scornful of the illiterate masses
'who dance themselves lame' in honor of a man who is fleecing them daily.
Here were silly ignorant villagers waiting to blow off gunpowder in honor of one of those who had started the country down the slopes of inflation.*^
Odili is representative of that generation of Nigerians who are 85
products of Nigeria's first university, the University College of
Ibadan. Filled with idealism they watch with feelings of frustration
the "smart and lucky, but hardly the best" inheriting power from the
British. Odili in spite of his contempt for Nanga confesses,
I had gone to the university with the clear inten tion of coming out again after three years a full member of the privileged class whose symbol was the car. So much did I think of it in fact, that as early as my second year I had gone out and taken a driver's license, and even made a mental note of the make of car I would buy.16
Odili thus is as much a target for satire as those he himself sets up as objects of ridicule. A mixture of the traditional and the modern
is by no means the instrument by which national consciousness is to be forged. Because unwilling as he is to 'lick any big man's boots' Odili secretly aspires to read for a post-graduate diploma in London and be accepted in European society. Odili is as much removed from the com mon people as Nanga himself, thus in his own way Odili is as much re sponsible for the ultimate breakdown as Chief Nanga.
Odili meets Chief Nanga for the first time when Odili visits Anata
Grammar School where Odili is a teacher. Odili keeps aloof; he has nothing in common with this man, a symbol of opportunism and corruption.
The Chief, however, recognizes him and invites him to the capital with a hint of a scholarship abroad thrown in. A small piece of the vast 'national cake' is thrown his way, and Odili begins to wonder whether he hadn't been applying to politics stringerrt standards that didn't belong to it.
Odili accepts Nanga's invitation and spends a few days in the minister's house in Lagos. It is at this stage that Achebe reveals to 86 the reader the temptations that the Black bourgeoisie of West Africa had to face^ Amid the luxury of seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms,
Odi I i begins to grasp the realities of power which surrounds men who know how to secure it. As he lies in bed and turns on the lights in the beautifuI Iy furnished room, he confesses, "If I were at that mo ment made a minister, I would be most anxious to remain one forever.
Under the influence of Nanga, Odili begins to examine systematically the rationale behind the makings of men like Nanga. His earlier dis approval of the 'smart and lucky' is now tempered by an effort to probe the mysteries of power which his idealism and western standards had prevented him doing thus far. He arrives at the conclusion that . . .
the trouble with our new nation . . . was that none of us had been indoors long enough to say to hell with it. We had all been in the rain until yesterday. Then a handful of us, the 'smart and lucky' and hardly the best, had scrambled for the one shelter our rulers had left, and had taken it over and barricaded them- seIves.■
However, when Chief Nanga steals his mistress, Odili reacts on a personal and ideological level. He seeks revenge on the man for what he has done to hurt him as an individual and also revenge for distract ing him at least temporarily from the idealism of his university days.
Odili joins hands with a rival political party founded by his friend
Maxwell Kumalo.
Odili is chosen by the new party to contest the seat held by
Nanga. Odili has little hope of winning but pursues the eIectton.with complete honesty and integrity. Achebe at this stage of the novel also places on record the part played by sources and agencies outside the country that have huge vested interest in it. Nanga even boasts openly to Odili: 87
Do you know, Odili, that British Amalgamated has paid out four hundred thousand pounds to P.O.P. to forget this election. Yes and we also know that the Americans have been even more generous although we don't have the figures as yet.*9
Odili realizes only after he has entered into the hustings that the idealism of his university days is an illusion that has no place
in the realities of running for public office. He soon realizes that bribery, corruption, and even thuggery have become a part of the politi cal process. Chief Nanga even goes to the extent of offering 250 pounds to Odili's father in order to influence him to get his son to withdraw.
Nanga tells Odili, "Take your money and take your scholarship and go learn more book; the country needs experts like you. - And leave the 20 dirty game of politics to us who know how to play it."
Odili however, refuses to be dragged down to the level of Nanga.
He sees fear in Nanga's eyes, decides to fight him. • Odili is also aware that he can no longer play the role of an idealist. Any detachment by the intellectuals from the social and political forces at work would be a tacit approval of the Nangas who were leading the country to ruin.
The novel ends on a melodramatic note with physical violence as thugs and hood I urns are let loose on the electorate. A near state of anarchy sets in as the military intervenes and mercifully restores order. Nanga is arrested with a host of other politicians and Odili returns to private life himself.
Odili realizes that the political evolution of Africa has not been consonant with its social and cultural evolutions. The political phi losophies of the new nation have never been fused into the mainstream of traditional values and social patterns of life, the political belongs 88
to one world while the social and spiritual belongs to another.
Achebe’s satire is directed mainly against Nanga and his like who
have played one world against another and exploited both.
If Soyinka prophesies in the Dance of the Forests the impending
calamities of West Africa, and Achebe holds up for ridicule and con
tempt the ’smart and lucky' and the corrupt, Ayi Kwei Armah "has
taken the predicament of Africa in general, Ghana in particular and
distilled its despair and hopelessness in a very powerful, harsh, de
liberately 'unbeatyful' novel."2J
Armah's novel The Beautyful ones Are Not Yet Born, is chosen
deliberately as proof of the assertion that West African writers were
quite prepared to stand exposed with their people, and write about
their failures, for only by doing so can a people's self respect be
restored. In the case of The BeautyfuI ones are Not Yet Born, the
journey motif is a return of man to the cave; it is a philosophical
view of Africa's predicament even though a deeply pessimistic one.
The. /novel opens with a solitary passenger in a bus with a driver
and conductor. The mood of the novel is one of deep despair. This is emphasized by portrayal of filth, decay and. plain defecation. The bus
itself is almost ready to fall apart; '.held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart.' The conductor of the bus spits all around him giving vent to the frustration of people who can do little < else. The physical decay that Armah describes in the opening chapter mirrors the spiritual rott4ness and decay which is at the heart of this novel. The garbage disposal pails which had been, "gleaming white when first installed are now covered with every imaginable kind 89
of waste." Written on these pails in bold letters is the message,
’Keep Your Country Clean."
The only passenger seated in the rear of the bus is the main
character of the novel. He is not even given a name, being referred to throughout the novel as ’the man.' 'The man' in the anonymity in which he is presented is symbolic of the millions who have been the victims of corruption and also the victims of deceit, for they are the ones to whom so much was promised but so little given. Even before they have had thei»r little share anarchy sets in.'The.: man' as such is presented as totally frustrated and without any glimmer of hope at the far end of a dark tunnel. Even the conductor dismisses him contemptuously calling him 'moron of a frog.'
The life of 'the man' is an illustration of the'1tfe.of,the .people back in their caves. 'The man' in his own partiof the cave is married has children and must work all day to go back to them at night. He must drive himself, and as alI other men in Ghana live in the hope that perhaps some day his children will find the way out of the cave. In the cave they are all trapped and the appeal for material possessions is great. Thus, their lives are constantly circumscribed by a world of money, corruption and vague notions of power.
Home itself is the darkest part of the cave for 'the man.' It is so because of his inability to provide adequately for his wife and children, which hurts him deeply. "'The man’ walks into the hall, meeting they eyes of his waiting wife . . . eyes totally accepting and unquestioning in the way only a thing from which nothing is ever expected 22 can be accepted and not questioned." 'The man's' wife murmurs, "you 90
are the chi chi dodo itself." The chi chi dodo is a bird that eats mag
gots but hates shit.
In the background there is always Koomson, a man turned politician
To 'the man's wife, Estella, Koomson and the perfume that lingers on
her hands brings associations of the good Iife but 'the man' and his
wife know that Koomson takes bribes and participates in shady activi
ties. Still the perfume on Estella's hand is so strong that 'the man’s
wife with excitement in her voice cries, "Everybody is swimming toward
what he wants. Who wants to remain on the beach asking the wind, 23 How . . . How . . . How?" 'The man’ because of this anonymity is
able to say that he does not 'eat' bribes nor does he desire what the
new rich enjoy. Koomson can keep his power and his money.
When his wife accuses him of being a 'chi chi dodo' he goes out .
into the night because he is a lonely and totally alineated figure.
As he walks through the night he hears the words of a song,
Those who are blessed with the power And the soaring swiftness of the eagle And have flown before. Let them go. I will travel slowly, And I too will arriv7 e’ . 74
The words of the song are significant because Armah's novel is an
indication of the journey the second generation of African writers are making; a journey which will give an inside view of the realities of
African life and culture in the second half of the twentieth century
recorded by an African himself.
'The man's' steps lead him towards the house of his friend the
Teacher. The Teacher is more of a philosopher. To him life is 'change and endless flux.' The only salvation, he says, for man is within, the cycle of change ending is damnation. The Teacher is also a drug addict 91
but to him smoking the drug ’wee’ and its effects opens his eyes to
some kind of reality. He sits on the beach and smokes 'wee' with
Kofi Billy the soldier and Maanan, the prostitute. 'The man' listens
to the Teacher who tells him there is no more beauty in the world
when power corrupts the leaders of vision and ideals. The Teacher
does not believe in a dream of a better world. Endemic corruption, as
was being witnessed, is, he said, in itself a new vision and a new
reality; that is why he tells 'the man' he lives alone outside his
cave completely naked.
The man returns to his family and accepts their involvement in
the business venture with Koomson's boat. The boat 'the man' knows
has been bought from funds embezzled by Koomson. He knows no good
can ever come out of this.
When the coup comes, Koomson comes in panic to the man, begging
for help to flee the country. The scenes describing Koomson's escape
are some of the most nauseating. The man hides Koomson in the lava
tory, and pulls him through the hole in the lavatory covered with
excrement. The words of his wife when she called him a chichidodo has
an ironic twist, for she had truly failed to see a chichidodo when she
saw one—Koomson.
Having delivered Koomson to freedom .the man has to immerse him
self in the sea to be purged and cleansed by the salt water. He comes
up with a vague sense of freedom like the untroubled lonliness he had come to like these days.
The final downfall of Koomson and his party men is sudden. But this sudden downfall has a timelessness about it. It is the kind of story that will be told over andover again about Ghana today or some 92
other country tomorrow. The endless cycle of suffering, deception
and corruption is repeated and men return to their caves not knowing
what light really is, until one of them escapes again and returns to
tell the tale; the journey then begins again.
The last chapter begins rather deceptively. The sun is high, the
sea is blue and little boys play with pebbles as all little boys do.
But then he comes to a barrier erected across the road with soldiers
with guns standing around. Policemen with guns are checking or exam
ining vehicles one at a time. Buses are delayed longer than cars
because each passenger has to be checked individually. The man squats
on the grass by the road and this is what he sees: a neat little
bus approaches the barrier. The driver complains to the policeman
that his passengers are in a hurry. The policeman smiles and taps
his teeth. The driver understands and gives him his license folder
with money stuck inside. In a moment he is cleared and the little bus
disappears round the bend and the man sees written in light green paint
in its .rear "The BeautyfuI - Ones Are Not Yet Born." However this time
in the centre of the oval ’was a single flower, solitary, unexplainable
and very beautiful.' As he neared home there was that bright little
bird again strangely happy as it dived low and settled on the roof of
the latrine—the chi chi dodo.
Soyinka, Achebe and Armah represent the African artist concerned
with the problem of the committed writer in an independent African
nation, the artist who wants to be an individual and not a mere appen
dage to the government of the day. An awareness of national conscious
ness turns into frustration, the frustration of the artist whose com mitment is more to the needs of a new society than to the utilitarian 93 gods. Soyinka, Achebe and Armah, though essentially African in their point of view, have taken African writers to the stage where an African writer may regard himself as a writer first and as an African second.
Armah’s characters particularly are less and less African. They tend to become more and more lonely and alienated men. The African novel thus returns to the mainstream of Western tradition as African heroes take their place alongside Western literary heroes such as
Twain’s Huck Finn and Ralph Ellison's, Invisible Man..
Like the unnamed protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Armah's protagonist is also unnamed. As in Ellison's Invisible Man,
Armah's world has lost its values and the man is a lonely figure, the one person who has refused to trade his soul to the devil.
Armah's pessimism has been very depressing and distasteful to several readers. Christiana Aidoo in her introduction to the novel
(Col Iier edition) says,
What is clear then is that whatever is beautiful and genuinely pleasing in Ghana or about Ghanians seems to have gone unmentioned in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Yet, what kind of beauty is that which is represented by a human being like that avaricious tinsel of an Estella? Or what could be pleasing in the heartless betrayal of a people's hopes? And can there be anything beautiful at a I I about the generation doing this betraying.23
Others however have seen a cleansing effect. The cleansing begins with the refusal of Africans to romanticize their past, or sentimentalize over the present. It is cleansing when the artist is courageous enough to look at life as it is observed at its worst, before it is presented in a new mantle. The BeautyfuI Ones Are Not Yet Born a long wi th The
Dance of -the Forests and A_ Man of the Peop Ie set in motion the decolon iza 94 tion of African literature. Europeans hardly if ever appear in the novels. As Soyinka has observed, it is no longer even a camouflage.
Armah appears to say that he is first of all a writer, that he is
African is only incidental. To him corruption and decay have no color, they are interchangeable; he sees the new African leaders only as darker shadows of former white rulers.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, coming as it does at the very end of this study completes the cycle begun with Tutuola and his 'Land of the Deads.' Most of the characters in Armah's novel move about like dead people in a land which is morally and spiritually dead. Armah wants the reader to see the blight that has settled on the land. The nauseous odors which rise from every section of the novel are the odors of death and decay. Putrefaction is the central symbol.
The Teacher's story of what he calls the myth of Plato's cave forms thelink from Tutuola to Soyinka, from Soyinka to Achebe and Armah.
The Teacher's story is of people in a deep cavernous hole who had seen nothing outside the darkness of their own forms and had no way of be lieving there was anything else. Out of these, one breaks free into the blinding beauty of light and the world outside, and then "... with the eagerness of the first bringer, the wanderer returns into the cave and its eternal darkness, and in there he shares what he has, the ideas and the words and the images of light and the colors of the world beyond. But to those inside the cave he came as someone driven i II with the breaking of eternal boundaries, and the truth he sought to tell was nothing but the proof of his long delusion, and the words he had to give were the pitiful cries of a madman lost in the mazes of a mind pushed too far out and away from the everlasting way of darkness and 95 26 reasoning charms."
The final message of West African nationalistic writers to their own people and to the rest of mankind may well be the one and only grievance of And Leader to Forest Head in Soyinka’s The Dance of the
Forests.
Forest Head: Have you a grievance?
Ant Leader: None, Father, except great clods of earth, pressed on our feet, The world is old But the rust of a million years Has left the chains unloosened.27
In the final analysis the journey of West African writers has been a journey of themind. In trying to discover their identity as a people, writers inevitably begin to explore their own identities as individuals.
The search for national consciousness which begins as an answer to colonialism, leads the writers on to the greater realization that in a larger sense they are part of a human consciousness which links the art ist to the community of world literature.
Writing in a language..that has meaningful links with a large body of world Iiterature the West African artist finds that he writes not only for his own people but also for mankind in general. Even though his journey moves from the hopeful to the pessimistic, he sees that he is not alone in this journey that pessimism, disillusionment and despair are part of the: modern i.'dioro. 96
CONCLUSION
The development of the West African novel in English has been
fairly recent. It was only after the Second World War when colonialism
was being challenged at a political level that writers of African des
cent began to make a positive contribution to an awakening of a nation
al consciousness. A national awareness at a political level along with
the development of literary independence is not an accident of history.
It is on the contrary a natural result of the colonial encounter.
The direct result of the European colonization was the imposition
of Anglo-Saxon morals and traditions attendant upon a knowledge of the
English language. The loss of political freedom also led to a conscious
devaluation of African culture. A people who did not have a written vo
cabulary were relegated to the bottom rung of the cultural ladder and were regarded as a primitive people with primitive institutions.
The climate was thereby created for European missionary enterprises to engage in what they believed to be a civilizing mission. The intro duction of English as the medium of instruction and as the language of government resulted in the westernization of West Africa. However this very humanitarian motive along with the spread of IiberaI•ideas through a knowledge of English has ultimately resulted in an awakening on the part of the African to his own culture, his dignity and his worth in the cultural scheme of things.
The colonization of Africa was made on the assumption that there existed a cultural superiority on the part of the colonizers. This assumption contributed directly to a dearth of creative impulses within 97
the indigenous cultural patterns. National movements both political
and literary therefore were aimed at ending political domination and
at rehabilitating and restoring the creative impulses of the people of
West Africa.
In West Africa the creative impulse which had been smothered by
colonialism began to reawaken along with political consciousness. The
West African novel in English which is a recent phenomenon has been gaining momentum ever since. This literary nationalism is not a pecu
liarly West African movement; it has its manifestation all over Africa, the Caribbean and today has its parallel in America and connects all people of African descent.
There is a continuous pattern of pragmatism in the thinking of
African nationaIists such as Edward Blyden and Africanus Horton and the contemporary creative writers of West Africa such as Achebe and
Soyinka. Achebe and Soyinka in their West African novels, plays and poems in English have vindicated the dreams and aspirations of nation alists in the middle nineteenth century. The link that binds genera tions of West Africans regardless of their tribal affiliations is the
language in which these aspirations have been recorded and are continuing to be recorded.
Political independence brought along with it an awareness of the cultural values of a people, which in turn inspired a generation of writers equipped with the international language, English, to tell the story of Africa's past and present.
The West African novel in English is the result of this upsurge in 98
creative writing. The novelists appear to step back as Achebe says
into that ’era of purity’ to restore the dignity and intrinsic beauty
of traditional Africa, traditional themes and motifs from indigenous
West African life. There is a certain compulsion on the part of the
artist to satisfy the growing national aspirations of a people.
The West African novelist however is writing in a language which
did not necessarily guarantee him a very large audience in West Africa
itself. The novels of Tutuola, Achege and Aluko had a much larger
audience abroad, than in West Africa itself. But the role of the artist
in West Africa has been crucial in the drive toward political and liter
ary national consciousness. His contribution is a cultural contribu
tion. He gives the people a vision of life as it was, mirrors the cul
tural confusions of a bygone age and, hopefully, provides new values
and new bearings. His role is essentially the role of the writer-patriot.
West African writers are in the forefrontof a mission to lead
Africans from the old to a new way of life. In this journey from the old to the new there is on the part of West African novelists an acute
awareness of the sharp differences that exist between what was inherited and what was acquired. The African novelist is aware that in acquiring a foreign language he also adopts the thought processes and value systems of an alien people, for a language Is a carrier of national values and attitudes acquired over a long period of time.
The values and attitudes of colonialism are some of the persistent themes in the West African novel. They are there and will continue to be there because of the historical necessity to record the deep effects colonial status has had on a people. The "falling apart" of things seen 99
in the conflict between individuals and tribal societies leading to
a climax is all recreated for the reader.
The West African novelists seek to restore dignity and a sense of national awareness to a people who have been subjugated and alienated.
By restoring dignity and a faith and belief in their past, a new iden tity and national consciousness is established. The journey motif however runs parallel to archetypal patterns. The protagonist, in this case the novelist, is taken through a cycle of endless deception, suffering and corruption. By making a journey into the past the novelist sees that he is still linked to his first sources and he can establish a dialogue with the forgotten gods of historic and mythic time in Africa. In so doing, the artist, because of his use of a lan guage which connects, him with a large portion of mankind, sees himself and his people as a part of larger forces. The destiny of his people is somehow linked to this cyclical motion of deception, suffering and corruption.
In his journey through time the novelist pauses to record a period when native traditions and values have all been broken and a new system imposed. There is a deep sense of loss. The writers with a great deal of reatism portray the harm done to the African psyche. The environment and the characters reflect the de-Africanization of a continent and its inhabitants. The alienation and the journey into exile begin. The journey is made into a larger world, a commercial and urbanized white world. The African is portrayed as the "eternal alien between two worlds."
The last chapter of this dissertation might appear contradictory 100 to known cannons of nationalism or national consciousness. Soyinka,
Achebe and Armah have created a West African wasteland. There is cynicism, bitterness and frustration in their works. However, as they have themselves repeatedly stressed a national I iterature which for all intents and purposes in English speaking West Africa is the literature written in the English language must be faithful and play a significant role in creating a national consciousness. This national consciousness does not consist in mere glorification but is the voice of the conscience of the people. The quest may be unfulfilled, it may have ended in dis illusionment but it presents the historical relationships that link
West Africans themselves together as a people and it also evokes their historic role while challenging them with a vision of the future. 101
FOOTNOTES: INTRODUCTION
Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber,
1962), p. 66.
2 Ndabning Si thole, African Nationalism (London: Oxford University
Press, 1968), p. 98.
^Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: '
Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957), p. 48.
4 Y Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 3L.
5 Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 43.
^Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 32.
^Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York:
Praeger, 1967), p. 219. c'
8 Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York:
Praeger, 1967), p. 218.
9 Ali Mazrui, "The English Language and the Origins of African
Nationalism," Mawazo, I, June 1967, pp. 14-22.
'^AIi Mazrui, "The English Language and Political Consciousness,"
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 4, No. 3 (1966), p. 298.
^Ali Mazrui, "The English Language and Political Consciousness,"
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 4, No. 3 (1966), p. 299. 102
12 Ali Mazrui, "The English Language and Political Consciousness,"
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 4, No. 3 (1966), p. 300.
'^Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburg:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1957), p. 290.
14 AyodeIe Lang Iey, Pan African i sm and NationaIi sm i n West Africa .
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 364.
Ndabning Sithole, African Nationa1 ism (London : Oxford Un i versi ty
Press, 1968), p. 86.
'^Ndabning Sithole, African Nationa1 i sm (London : Oxford Un i vers i ty
Press, 1968), p. 86.
'^Ndabning Sithole, African Nationa1 i sm (London : Oxford Un i versi ty
Press, 1968), p. 87.
'^Ndabning Sithole, African Nationa1 i sm (London : Oxford Un i vers i ty
Press, 1968), p. 87.
19 T. M. Aluko, One Man,.One Matchet (London: Heinemann Educational
Books, 1964), p. 91.
20 James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (California:
University of California Press, 1963), p. III.
21 Ali Mazrui, The Anglo African Commonwealth (New York: Pergamon
Press, 1967), p. 128.
22 Pieterse and Munro, ed., Protest and Conflict in African Literature
(New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969), p. 57.
23 Ali Mazrui, "The English Language and the Origins of African
Nationalism," Mawazo, I, June 1967, p. 17. 103
24 Al i Mazrui, Cultural Engineering and Nation BuiIdìng î n East
Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I972), p. 36.
2^aii Mazrui, Cu I tura I Eng i neeri ng and Nation Bui Id i ng i n East
Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I972), p. 36
C' 104 FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER I
*John Reed and Wake Clive, A Book of African Verse (London:
Heinemann, 1964), p. 70.
2 Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 42.
^Ezekiel Mphahlele, The.African Image (London: Faber and Faber,
1962), p. 68.
4 Henry S. Wilson, Origins of West African Nationalism (London:
Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1969), p. 47.
5 Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957), p. 184.
^Christopher Fyfe, Sierra Leone 1nheritance (London : Oxford
University Press, 1964) , p. 310.
7 Christopher Fyfe, Sierra Leone 1nheri tance (London : Oxford
University Press, 1964) , p.''3IO.
8 Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 116. q Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 148.
'^Robert W. July, "Nineteenth Century Negritude," Journal of African
History, I, 1964, p. 77.
''hoII is R. Lynch, Edward WiI mot Blyden (London: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 152. 105
12 Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 51.
'3CIaude Waufh i er, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 32.
14 Ali Mazrui, "Some Socio-Political Functions of English Literature
in Africa," Archives Europeenes De Sociologie, 9, No. 2 (1968), p. 296.
15 T. M. Aluko, One Man, One Matchet (London: Heinemann, 1964), p. 38
'^Ali Mazrui, "The English Language and Political Consciousness,"
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 4, No. 3 (1966), p. 299.
'^Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, I960), p. 32.
IO Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957), p. 163.
19 Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957), p. 163.
20 James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1958), p. 97.
21 Claude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 208.
22 Melville J. Herskovits, The Human Factor în Changing Africa
. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 210.
23 Chinua Achebe, Th i ngs Fa I I Apart (Conn: Fawcett Publications, Inc.
1959), p. 171.
^Melville J. Herskovits, The Human Factor in Changing Africa
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 210. 106 .
25 Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber,
I962), p. 131.
26 Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948), p. 40.
27 CIaude Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 228.
oo D. W. Brogan, Price of Revolution (London: Hamilton, 1951), p. 139.
29 William Shakespeare, J uIi us Caesar (Mass: ed Ribner and Kettridge,
1971), Act I, Sc. I I, Lines I 16-117.
30Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London: The Hollen St. Press,
1959), p. 317.
C" 107
FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER I I
'g. D. Killam, Ed., African Writers and African Writing (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 13.
2 Christopher Heywood, Perspectives of African Literature (New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1968), p. 4.
Gerald Moore, Seven African Writers (London : Oxford University
Press, 1962), p. 41.
4 Gerald Moore, Seven African Writers (London: Oxford Un i vers i ty
Press, 1962), p. 44.
5 Gerald Moore, Seven Afri can Wri ters (London : Oxford University
Press, 1962), p. 49.
^Harold R. Coll ins, Amos Tutuola (New York: Twayne Pubiishers
Incorporated, 1969), p. 44
^Adrian A. Roscoe, Mother is Gold (Cambridge: University Press,
1971), p. I 13. o Harold R. Collins, Amos Tutuola (New York: Twayne Publishers
Incorporated, 1969), p. 113.
9 Adrian A. Roscoe, Mother is Gold (Cambridge: University Press,
1971), p. I I I.
'^Chinua Achebe, "English and the African Writer," Transition, 4,
Nol 18 ( 1965), pp. 27-30.
^Adrian A. Roscoe, Mother is Gold (Cambridge: University Press,
1971), p. 122. 10#
I2 . Bernth Lindfors, ed., Pa Iavar (Austin: The University at Austin
Press, Texas, I972), p. 5.
'^Bernth Lindfors, ed., Pa lavar (Austin: The University at Austin
Press, Texas, 1972), p. 12.
14 Chinua Achebe. Things Fai 1 Apart (Conn: Fawcett Pubi ications, Inc.,
1959), p. 55.
15 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn: Fawcett Pubi ications, Inc.,
I959), p. 54.
I6_. . Ch 1nua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn: Fawcett Pub 1¡cations, 1 nc.,
1959), p. 59.
I7r. . Ch 1nua Achebe, Th i ngs Fall Apart (Conn: Fawcett Pubiications, Inc.,
1959), p. 85.
I8~, . Ch 1nua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn: Fawcett Pub 1i cations, 1 nc.,
1959), p. 89.
I9n.. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn : Fawcett Publications, 1 nc.,
1959), p. 49. S' 20r. . Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God1 (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 32.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God1 (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 50
22 Ch i nua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn: Fawcett Publications, Inc.,
1959), p. 137.
23C~h .1nua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Conn : Fawcett Publications, Inc.,
1959), p. 142.
24 Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, I960), p. 9. 10$.
25 Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London : Heinemann, I960), p. 10.
26n.. Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, I960), p. 40.
27p. . Chinua Achebe:, No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, I960), p. 43.
28Cphm inua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London : Heinemann, I960), p. 2.
29 Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: He i nemann, I960), p. 51.
30_. . Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: Heinemann, I960), p. 54.
3I_, . Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London : He i nemann, I960), p. 133.
32CPKh'inua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: He i nemann, I960), p. 136.
33.. . Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London: Hei nemann, I960), p. 106.
34n. . Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London : Heinemann, I960), p. 106
35 T. M. Aluko, One Man, One Matchet (London : Heinemann, 1964), p. 13.
36T. M. Aluko, One Man, One Matchet (London : Hei nemann, 1964), p. 31.
37t. m. a.luko, One Man, One Matchet (London : Heinemann, 1964), p. 17. 110
FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER I I I
Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. I.
2 Bruce King, ed., Introduction to Nigerian Literature (New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), p. 113.
\ole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 60.
4 Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 59.
5 Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 82.
S/ole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 77.
Afole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 73.
8 Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 75.
9 Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 74.
I^Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 74.
II Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 74. 11T
12. 'Wole Soyinka, The Writer in a Modern African State, ed. Peter
Wastberg (Upasala: I968), p. 20.
*3Bernth Lindfors, ed., Pa I aver (Austin: University of Texas at
Austin Press, I972), pp. II-I2.
I4 Bernth Lindfors, ed.. Pa I aver (Austin: University of Texas at
Austin Press, I972), pp. I2-I3.
I5~. . Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967)
p. 2.
'^Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967),
p. 104.
'^Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967),
p. 34.
I8„.. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 34.
19 Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 112.
20 Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 112.
21 Eldred Jones, Ed., African Literature Today, No. 3, (Freetown:
Sierra Leone Press, 1969), p. 55.
22 Ayi K. Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York:
Collier Books, 1968), p. 41.
23 Ayi K. Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York:
Collier Books, 1968), p. 44 1 i a 2g Ayi K. Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York:
Collier Books, 1968), p. 79.
27 Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 1.
28wn I¡am Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Ribner and Kettridge
(New York: Gin and Company, 1971), Hamlet Act III Sc. II, Iines 21-24.
r' 113
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham , W. E. The Mind of Africa.
Press, 1962
Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. New
Achebe, Chinua. No Longer At Ease.
Achebe, Ch i nua. Th i ngs Fa 11 Apart.
Achebe, Ch i nua. A Man of the Peopli
Ajayi, J. F. Ade. A Thousand Years of West African History. Ibadan:
Ibadan University Press, 1965
Aluko, T. M. Chief, The Honourable Minister. London: Heinemann, I970
Aluko, T. M. One Man, One Matchet. London: Heinemann, 1964
Armah, Ayi, Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. New York: Collier
Books, 1968 r
Azikiwe, Nnamdi. Zik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961
Beier, Ulli. Introduction to African Literature. London: Longmans, 1967
Bown, La I age. Two Centuries of African English. London: Heinemann, 1973
Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970
Cartey, Wilfred. Whispers from a Continent. New York: Random House, 1969
Church, R. J. Harrison. Environment and Policies in West Africa.
Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1963 114:
Co I eman, J âmes, S. Education and Poli t i caI Development. P r i n ceton:
Princeton University Press, 1965
Collins, Harold R. Amos Tutuola. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969
Crowder, Michael. Pagans and Politicians. London: Hutchinson, 1959
Crowder, Michael. The Story of Nigeria. London: Faber and Faber, 1962
Crowder, Michael. West Africa Under Colonial Rule. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968
Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa. Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964
Davidson, Basil. Black Star. London: Clark, Doble and Brendon Ltd.
Drachler, Jacob. African Heritage. New York: Crowe I I-Co I Iier Press,
1963
Duerden, Dennis. African Writers Talking. New York: Africana Pub
lishing Corporation, 1972
Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1962
Fyfe, Christopher. Sierra Leone Inheritance. London: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1964
Herskovits, Melville J. The Human Factor in Changing Africa. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962 116
Heywood, Christopher. Perspectives of African Literature. New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, I97I
Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu. New York: Grove Press, 1961
Jones, Eldred, Durosimi. Afri can Literature Today 5. London:
Heinemann, 1971
Jones, Eldred, Durosimi. African Literature Today 6. London:
Heinemann, 1973
Jones, Eldred, Durosimi. Wo Ie Soy i n ka. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973
Jordan, A. C. Towards an African Literature. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973
July, Robert W. The Origins of Modern African Thought. New York:
Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967
Killam, G. D. African Writers on African Writing. Evanston: North- C" western University Press, 1973
Killam, G. D. The Novels of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1969
Kimble, George H. T. Tropical Africa Volume One. New York: The
Twentieth Century Fund, I960
King, Bruce. Introduction to Nigerian Literature. New York: Africana
Publishing Corporation, 1972
Lang ley, J. AyodeIeIe. Pan-African i sm and National ism i n West Africa.
London: Oxford University Press, 1973 116.
Larson, R. Charles. The Emergence of African Fiction. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1971
Lindfors, Bernth ed. Palaver. Austin: The University of Texas at
Austin Press, 1972
Lindfors, Bernth ed. Research in African Literatures Volume Three, Numbe
Two. Austin: The University of Texas at Austin Press, 1972
Lynch, Hollis R. Edward WiImot Blyden. London: Oxford University
Press, 1967
Marais, Genoveve. Kwame Nkrumah: As I Knew Him. Sussex: Janay Pub
lishing Company, 1972
Mazrui, Ali A. Cultura I Eng i neeri ng and Nation Bu?Id i ng i n West Africa.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972
Mazrui, Ali A. Towards a Pax Africana. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1967 c-
McCall, Daniel F. Africa in Time-Perspective. Boston: Boston Univer
sity Press, 1964
Moore, Gerald. African Literature and the Un i vers i ties. Ibadan:
Ibadan University Press, 1965
Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. London: Oxford University
Press, 1962
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. The African Image. London: Faber and Faber, 1962 117; Munro, Ian. Kas-Kas. Austin: The University of Texas at Austin Press
1972
Ngugi, James. Homecomi ng. New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1972
Nicol, Davidson. Black Nationalism in Africa 1867. New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969
Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1957
Obi echina, Emmanuel N. Onitsha Market Literature. London: Heinemann,
1972
Olney, James. Tell Me Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1973
Lhonbamu, Obarogie. The Psychology of the Nigerian Revolution. Bristol
Bristol Typesetting Company Ltd., 1969
Palmer, Eustace. An Introduction to the African Novel. New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972
Patton, Alan. Cry the Beloved Country. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1948
Perham, Margery. The Colonial Reckoning. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1962
Peterson, John. Province of Freedom. Evanston: Northwestern Univer
sity Press, 1969 118
Ple+erse, Cosmo. Protest and Conflict in African Literature. New York:
Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969
Reed, John. A Book of African Verse. London: Heinemann, 1964
Roscoe, Adrian A. Mother is Gold. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971
Rotberg, Robert I. Protest and Power in Black Africa. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1970
Shelton, Austin J. The African Assertion. New York: The Odyssey Press,
1968
Sithole, Ndabning. African Nationalism. London: Oxford University
Press, 1968
Smythe, Hugh. The New Nigerian Elite. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, I960
Soyinka, Wole. Five Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1964
Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. London: RexCollings, 1972
Spiro, Herbert J. Patterns of African Development. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall Inc., 1967
Spiro, Herbert J. Politics in Africa. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall Inc., 1962
Tibble, Anne. African-English Literature. London: Peter Owen, 1965 119
Wauthier, Claude. The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1967
WiI son, Henry. Origins of West African NationaIi sm. London: MacmiI Ian
& Company Ltd., 1969