Knocknagow Is No More”: Some Notes on Hidden Literature by an African
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“KNOCKNAGOW IS NO MORE”: SOME NOTES ON HIDDEN LITERATURE BY AN AFRICAN 15.1.19 Robert Mshengu Kavanagh Not having taught or studied since 1976 the great novels in English of past centuries and not having made any effort to keep in touch therafter, I have no way of knowing what current syllabi in English departments in the Western World consist of. When I was academically active in the field F.R. Leavis and kindred spirits fed us on a diet of Austin, Bronte, George Eliot, Conrad, Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Henry James, Virginia Wolf, James A statue of Charles Kickham in Tipperary, Joyce and so on. Since then, for me, Marxism, Ireland African, Carribean and Indian literatures have added considerably to the canon. In recent years, not having had easy access to novels I have to buy, I have subsisted on a diet of what I can download for free from the internet and these have generally been confined to those in the public domain – mostly 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. In the process I have barked my shins on hidden gold and wondered why such a treasure trove has lain hidden from me – and I suppose others – for so many years. My most recent findings were the Irish novel, Knocknagow, by a Fenian author with the unlikely name of Charles Kickham and the Scottish novels of John Galt, Ringan Gilhaize in particular. The rush for hidden gold had begun many years ago when we socialists were all over Robert Tressell and his The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. However this was an obvious case . No-one expected bourgeois literature to go gaga over an obviously Socialist book like this. Elizabeth Gaskell however was a different kettle of fish. When, having never heard of her most of one’s life, one reads certain of Gaskell’s novels, the hackneyed contrast which always springs to mind, I suppose, is with Jane Austin. Gaskell was born in 1810 and died in 1865. Austin was born 1775 and died in 1817, a historical period which, though earlier, spanned many of the social issues raised by Gaskell’s novels, issues which Austin rarely seemed to notice. In terms of class the two of them were tolerably similar, albeit the one rural and the other largely, though by no means exclusively, urban. So why Austin and nary a word about Gaskell? Here was a question mark. Other question marks were much easier to answer. Take Jack London. Judging from the few books that were popular, especially The Call of the Wild, I took Jack London to be some kind of 1 red neck, who would have a lot in common with John Wayne. Then I read what Elizabeth Vincentelli described in a 2018 review, as ‘that leaden tome’, The Iron Heel [1908], with it’s apocalyptic portrayal of the putative great showdown between the ‘Oligarchy’ and the revolutionary working class in the United States. What a revelation! I’d heard the name, Upton Sinclair, but wasn’t expecting King Coal, an extraordinarily powerful and well-written depiction of the barbaric and inhuman foundations of capitalist wealth and power. Edward Bellamy I had never even heard of so what was my astonishment to discover the contents of his Looking Backward [1888] and Freedom. Almost impossible to read in toto, its comprehensive and detailed exposition of the lunacy of the capitalist system and the rationality of a far better one, which he spells out in great detail, is impossible not to marvel at. And then why nothing of Dalt and the subject of this review, Knocknagow? Knocknagow is a major work, reminiscent in a peculiar way of Gone with the Wind. Interesting that Scarlet O’Hara and her family were Irish descendants and that their home was called Tara, the ancient seat of the Ard Righ, the High Kings of old Celtic Ireland. It has sold over 70 000 copies since it was first published and is still seeling over 1 000 a year. As in Gaskell’s extraordinary work, North and South, Kickham views his subject, the Tipperary village of Knocknagow, from a middle class vantage point, namely the Kearneys, a family of Catholic tenant farmers. The Kearneys were truly middle class in so far as culturally they related comfortably upwards as hosts to the nephew of their landlord, the aristocratic Sir Garett Butler, who ‘owned – at least nominally – extensive landed property in the south of Ireland’, yet were tenants and cherished a mutually warm and humane relationship with the villagers. The novel describes a stage in what the Irish call the via dolorosa – a rather understated description of the tragedies and atrocities they were subjected to over a timespan of nine centuries. By then the English had grabbed most of the land. Many of them were absentee landlords, a phenomenon which the novelist, Maria Edgeworth, focusses on in her book, The Absentee. With some exceptions, the orginal Irish inhabitants, where they were lucky, lingered on as small tenant farmers – until such time as it became more profitable to evict them in favour of consolidating the land for greater profit. Knocknagow first of all creates a warm-blooded and sympathetic picture of the life and people of the village and then shows how the small Catholic farmers who had inhabited the land for centuries, were summarily and brutally evicted in a process as traumatic and murderous as the Highland Clearances. The loves and lives of the Kearneys are pale ale in comparison with the full-blooded joys and miseries of the villagers – and it is here where Kickham excels. He captures to a T their values, attitudes, entertainments and relationships in the dialect and turns of phrase of Tipperary, in 2 the process creating characters so real and so lifelike that they linger on long after one has closed the book. Yet the novel is hardly known in our time outside of Ireland and the author of a recent history of Ireland, Richard Killen, dismisses Kickham’s portrayal as ‘sentimentalisation’. Many African writers have written of the pre-colonial past or even of contemporary villagers and town-dwellers in such a way as to be likewise accused of sentimentalisation. Yet what they are trying to describe is a fundamental African philosophy and set of values, which they see and remember as having characterised African society before colonial capitalism and subjugation threatened it with extinction and which they see as lingering on even now, though much betrayed, diluted and distorted. This philosophy is called Hunhu, Ubuntu or Botho – depending on the language of the caller. In my book on the work of the great South African genius of the theatre, Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente, I describe Ubuntu in this way: Its essence is to be found in the meaning of the word itself. ‘Umuntu’ or ‘motho’ is a human being, a person. The ‘ubu’ or ‘bo’ prefix denotes the abstract noun or, as in this case, the ‘quality’ of being something. Thus, literally, ‘ubuntu’ [‘botho’ in Sotho] means ‘the quality of being human’ or ‘the quality of being a human being’ – in essence, the quality of humankind-ness. The fact is that in most pre-capitalist societies both in Africa and elsewhere there existed ways of life which in many ways resemble the African concept of Ubuntu. An African reading accounts of life in Celtic Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland, even quite recently, is immediately struck by this. Citing again my passage on Ubuntu, the following are some of the concepts which characterise the philosophy. A proverb which is increasingly quoted with reference to Ubuntu is: “Motho ke motho ka batho” or “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, translated as ‘a human being is a human being by virtue of belonging to a community of human beings or by virtue of other human beings’…Thus two fundamental characteristics of the philosophy are its communality and spirituality. Many of its values derive from the sense of a community and a belief in a spirit world. Though the individual is recognised and important, it is the community and its interests that are vital for the individual’s life. The microcosm of the community – whether it be nation, society, clan or village – is mirrored in the family…The family or the community embrace not only the living but also the dead. The happiness and health – the interests – of an individual are served by ensuring the well- being and prosperity of the family, alive or dead, and the community in which the family is esconced. It stands to reason then that individualistic ideas, patterns of behaviour and decision- making can be disruptive and offend against these precepts. Thus people tend to act according to communal traditions and move forward on the basis of consensus. …the pre-eminent value in the Ubuntu society of community and family is ‘respect’. Its fundamental element is respect for humanity and for human beings – all those of that ‘kind’ – in other words, humankind [mankind]. This entails a respectful way of relating to all people – as people. Then there are gradations, where certain relationships are specially honoured and 3 require special respect – a child for his or her parents, the young for the elderly and the living for the dead. Respect takes many forms – keeping ones private parts private, not indulging in public sex play, not using particular words or language which is rude, lewd or insulting, not interrupting people when they are talking, not telling other people they are stupid, not losing your temper whenever you feel like it, not shouting at your employees or your social inferiors, attending wakes and funerals and so on.