Knocknagow Is No More”: Some Notes on Hidden Literature by an African

“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

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. Motherhood and grandparenthood are particularly respected– as are children.

Added to this is a love of music, song, dance and laughter.

This is all a far cry from contemporary culture in much of Europe and North America. Yet if we were to take this description of African Ubuntu and temper it with Catholicism, as has happened in parts of Africa too, it in many ways describes the inhabitants of Knocknagow and their lives and actions. It is therefore easy to see how a Western critic might dismiss Kickham’s novel as sentimental while an African critic might instead admire and enjoy his depiction of the village and its people and mourn and rage at their destruction.

But there is another reason why an African critic might warm to this novel where a Western critic might not, namely Africa and Ireland’s shared experience of colonial conquest. This is not the time or place to spell out the commonality of our experience. It is possible that many Africans themselves are not aware of it. That is why one of my current projects is writing a history of Ireland for African children. There is little Africa has been through which Ireland has not. The Ireland experience of slavery, real as it was, cannot be compared to the Atlantic Slave Trade, it is true, but when it comes to conquest, dispossession, discrimination, racism, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the experiences of Africa and Ireland are probably on a par – except for the signicant fact that the trauma of Africa lasted for roughly three hundred years at most, that of Ireland nearly a millenium.

Charles Kickham was a Fenian. The Fenian Brotherhood, named after the ancient Irish heroes, the Fianna, was a nationalist movement founded in the wake of the great potato famine that led to mass deaths and migrations in the 1840s, which were a direct result of the pauperisation and dispossession of the native Irish. He was born in a small town in Tipperary in southern Ireland. His fate is in itself a chrystalised expression of the cruelty and injustice which characterised the history of English colonialism in Ireland. Kickham wrote for the Fenian publication, The Irish People. He was betrayed by an informer and brought to trial. The judge found him guilty and after ‘expressing his sympathy for the prisoner and respect for his intellectual attainments, sentenced him to penal servitude for fourteen years’ in England! An African critic will surely identify with Kickham’s fate, so reminiscent is it of what happened to those who opposed colonialism and apartheid and were sent to that other island, Robben Island, and to other inhuman institutions all over Africa.

In Kickham’s book, the clear racial divide which underlies the processes of dispossession and ruin which destroy the village of Knocknagow, certainly ring a doleful bell for the victims of European colonialism in Africa. The downtrodden and eventually ruined villagers were Gaels and Catholics, the inhabitants of the land before the English dispossessed them and forced them to pay rent for it. In the Irish case when it suited the Protestand English descendants of the conquerors to throw their tenants out onto the roads, into the ditches, the bogs or the

4 wilderness, they did so with not a twinge of conscience. The people of South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya and Algeria don’t need to be reminded about their own forced removals. At least in South Africa there were the ‘homelands’ or what came to be called ‘the dumping grounds’ to which they could be transported in trucks with their meagre possessions at the point of the gun. Though many of them would die there too – at least there was somewhere to go. Kickham shows how for the villagers of Knockmagow there wasn’t even that.

The Europeans even today do not like to read the truth about their shameful past. Instead they shower accolades on the writers of formerly colonised or conquered countries who assist them to salve their consciences by describing the stupidity and venality of their modern day rulers or amuse them with obliging stereotypes of the naivete, gullibility or lack of sophistication of their own people. When the conquerors were still in charge, writers, who like Kickham, confronted them with their barbarism, were sent to waste their lives away in jail. And when this no longer happened, they found ways to dismiss their work or simply ignore it – and the critics and academics of their own people, to please their patrons and get invited to their conferences, apologise for them and castigate them as being ‘inartistic’ and certainly not up to the standard of the great Europeans.

The Fenian, Charles Kickam’s, book ends with the words, “Knocknagow is no more”. Charles Kickham is no more – as are many great writers whom those who write the history of literature, do not bother to remember. As with everything, it’s no good complaining. We must write our own history.