“You never really appreciated love till the second time”: Maryse Conde, ‘Segu’

The whites had come, cadged a little land to build their forts, and then because of them nothing was ever the same again. They had brought with them things never before heard of here, and people had fought over them, nation against nation, brother against brother. And now the whites’ ambition knew no bounds. Where would it end? (p. 249)

Segu is a story of first contact. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a story of many first contacts. Beginning in 1797, and spanning the first half of the 19th century, it tells of the last days of the Bambara Empire (that spanned present-day Mali), and of a West African society disintegrating under the twin forces of Islam and colonialism.

From the time that Tiekoro, the eldest son of Dousika and Nya Traore, announces his conversion to the new religion of Islam, a curse hangs over the Traore family, intent on claiming each one of their sons. From Timbucktoo to the Middle Passage, from London to plantation Brazil, and then back to the capital city of Segu, it haunts them – and through them, the Bambara Empire itself. As Islam becomes more dominant in West Africa, transforming itself into a militant and exclusionary religion, as the slave trade begins to spread its tentacles inwards from the Gold Coast, and as the French and the British begin to make the first moves in their eventual “scramble for Africa” (the book opens with Mungo Park’s arrival at the capital city), Segu must make the agonising choice between destruction as the price of maintaining the Bambara way of life, and assimilation or dissolution for survival.

Written in 1985, Segu predates by quite a few years the more recent expositions of this genre. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart remains, of course, perhaps the most well-known novel about the disruption of social structures under the pressures of colonialism; and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North continues to be the classic exploration of the ambiguous personal relationship between coloniser and colonised. The influences of these works are evident on Conde (in fact, one of her characters’ visit to London bears strong resemblances to Season of Migration to the North), but perhaps what is more interesting is how Segu has strong echoes in contemporary work. Its skilful use of the family saga to tell the story of a nation will put readers in the mind of Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014, Uganda); and its sensitive portrayal of a society that struggles to preserve itself, but knows only too well that its destruction is inevitable, foretells Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields (2017, Madagascar) and Patrice Nganang’s Mount Pleasant (2011, Cameroon) (indeed, all three novels are set in the first half of the 19th century, their events separated by a few years). More than these novels, however, Segu bears the imprints of an epic: it is concerned not merely with the breakdown of Bambara society, but with the transformation of a world, and it is that sense that gives Code’s prose an almost transcendent quality, at times:

The child pondered.  “How many languages shall I be able to speak?” Naba stroked the little head, with its knobby curls. “I hope you’ll only speak the languages of your heart,” he said. (p. 259)

Segu is also a story about motherhood. While the role of women in a patriarchal society remains circumscribed and limited, by the end of the book, Nya – the chief wife of the deceased Dousika, and (therefore) mother of the Traore children, who are doomed to wander the corners of the earth – has emerged as one of its most important characters. Her character is illumined by her bearing the loss of her children (and the eventual return of some), losses that finally become unbearable, and trigger some of the most memorable lines in the book:

And so Nya was brought low, like a tree eaten away from within by termites … ‘Nya, daughter of Fale,’ they repeated, ‘your ancestors bent the world like a bow and unbent it again like a straight road. Nya, stand erect again too.’ (p. 375)

These lines are also representative of a particular feature of Segu, which stood out for me: language that is so rich in metaphor, that it often engages multiple senses at the same time. “Her heart was bitter,” writes Conde at one point, “bitter as cahuchu, the wood that weeps, which the seringueiros, the rubber gatherers, stabbed with their knives in the forest.” (p. 204) The smell of bitterness, the taste of tears, the tactile sense of stabbing, all come together within an image of men plunging their knives into a tree, combining to create an immensely powerful sensory experience. And so it is elsewhere.  “[Is] the spirit … as bitter as the bark of mahogany?” (p. 306), it is asked on an occasion. “Why was life this swamp into which you were drawn in spite of yourself, to emerge defiled, your hands dripping?” (p. 377), it is asked on another. “There are times when a man’s life disgusts him, staring him in the face with its pitted skin and its bad teeth in their rotten gums” (p. 396), it is observed on a third. The sentiments that these lines express are simple enough, but with Conde’s use of language, they hit the reader with all the force of physical sensation.

That is not to say, of course, that reading Segu is like an extended sensory excursion. The novel carries depth and an emotional charge, and it is suffused with a sense of tragic – yet inevitable loss. This comes through in specific lines that are delivered, rapier-like, cutting into the recesses of the soul (“He suddenly felt sorry for her, and his compassion created the illusion of desire.” (p. 292), but more than that, it is present in the atmosphere of the novel. In an essay called ‘The Futurists’, the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, thus:

I remember walking with Mayakovsky, whom even now in my mind I must call Vladimir Vladimirovich, and not Volodya, along the paved streets of Petersburg, the sun-speckled avenues of the Summer Garden, the Neva embankments, the Zhukovskaya Street, where the woman lived whom the poet loved. Bits of landscape melted into – burned themselves into – Mayakovsky’s poems.  The poet was quiet, sad, ironic, calm. He was sure – he knew – that the revolution would happen soon. He looked at the things around him the way one does then the thing is about to disappear. (The Shklovsky Reader, p. 236).

 

It is a bit like this. Bits of the landscape melt into – burn themselves into – Segu. And Segu is all about looking at the things around one the way one does when they are about to disappear. And if the disappearance is of the Bambaras, of Segu itself, then it is presages in the lives of the Toure sons, who are driven from wherever they go, unable to find or make a home anywhere in the world, until driven back to Segu that itself faces the threat of extinction. Segu is a novel about leave-taking – whether one would or no – and all that that brings with it. But for all that, it is a novel that resists saying goodbye, even until the last page – and, after we have put it down, if we want to know how things really played out, we have to consult history books. Conde and Segu, however, refuse to deliver that, perhaps to affirm that as long as we have literature, there will always be another way to imagine an ending.

“If light had a sound, it would be Salia’s voice…”: A round-up of African Writing

For the last few months, I have been editing a series of interviews titled 100 African Writers of SFF,  over at the Strange Horizons magazine. While the interviewees are writers of science fiction and fantasy, the conversations have been naturally broad-ranging, involving discussions of contemporary African writing that goes much beyond SFF. Some of the references have been tantalising enough for me to track them down, and buy and read the books themselves. Quick notes follow:

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms is a sensitive, empathetic – and, ultimately – tragic novel, set in the outskirts of Abuja (and sometimes transitioning to the conflict-torn city of Jos). Binta Zubairu, the novel’s protagonist, is a fifty-five-year-old widowed grandmother, survivor of a loveless marriage and the violent loss of her oldest child, and long reconciled to a cloistered existence and a slow exit from the world. All that changes when Hassan Reza, the local gang-leader and drug-dealer, jumps the fence intending to rob her, but falls in love with her instead. Through the course of their transgressive relationship, always teetering on the edge and threatening to come undone, either through the public discovery of Binta’s defiance of social norms or through Hassan’s one-brush-too-many with the law, Ibrahim brilliantly depicts both the suffocating, one-sided sexual repression that corrodes a conservative society, and its inevitable flip side – political violence.

For all its sensitivity, there is very little of the sentimental in Ibrahim’s novel. His account of human relationships is grimly realistic. Love is portrayed in all its messiness, confusions, and petty betrayals, a distinctly earthy emotion. And yet, there is a strangely suppressed lyrical quality to the prose, that almost struggles to make itself heard:

She dreamt like sepia. Like rust-tainted water running over the snapshots of her memories, submerging her dreams in a stream of reddish-brown. (p. 76)

This is immediately followed by memories of blood and violence (recollecting the murder of her son), as though to give way to lyricism is almost to insult the reality of the world (“What poetry after Auschwitz?”). In the riven worlds of Abuja and Jos, where even bare life cannot be taken for granted, love is not – and cannot be – an exception.

Other reviews: The Guardian;  The African Writer. 

Odafe Atogun’s Taduno’s Song: Also out of Nigeria, here comes a much bleaker and darker novel. Taduno’s Song is a thinly fictionalised story about the legendary Fela Kuti, the Nigerian composer and singer who critiqued both colonialism and the post-colonial State through his music, and was violently targeted for it.  The eponymous Taduno is a dissident singer, who is exiled by the President of his  repressive one-party State. On returning from exile, he finds that his existence has been completely erased from the memories of his fellow-citizens, and even from the memory of the regime and the President – who, suspecting a trick, has decided to hold his partner in secret custody until he is found. With his vocal cords damaged in an earlier police beating, Taduno struggles to recapture his voice and regain his identity, so that he can save his partner. The quest takes him through the city of his childhood and youth, the neighbourhoods that knew and now disown him, the mansions of the rich and the squares of the homeless, and the underground prisons of “Mr. President.”

The austere, pared-back prose and imagery of Taduno’s Song, with its small cast of characters, its refusal to identify its setting in any concrete manner, and its grimly linear trajectory, is reminiscent of Kossi Efoui’s The Shadow of Things to Come, another “dictator novel” from nearby Togo. The novel’s minimalism sharpens the focus on its single, key theme – the limits of human resistance to concentrated power. Like Season of Crimson Blossoms, Taduno’s Song is also a novel tinged with tragedy – but also like Season of Crimson Blossoms, its sensitive account of how an individual struggles against power prevents it from being overwhelmed by tragedy, even if the outcome seems foreordained.

Other reviews: The Financial Times; Indirect Libre.

Out of South Africa, Nthikend Mohlele’s Rusty Bell is something altogether different. This is a coming-of-novel, whose combination of exuberance, self-deprecation, and linguistic pyrotechnics reminded me of Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place. The narrator – a young, black, South African man – takes us through noisy post-Apartheid South Africa, predominantly through a series of exchanges with his psychiatrist (no, it’s not written as a metaphor for the nation), but also through failed love-affairs, parental discord, and a surprise narrative appearance by a cat. Jagged, unorganised, and almost aphoristic at times, the prose shines brokenly like sunlight reflected off shattered glass. In the midst of which, however, you find passages like this:

Frank could have been a great banker, one of the greatest, if he hadn’t been born at the wrong time and with the wrong skin colour. His acumen with money, his softest of hearts, did not earn him a cushioned life in the South Africa of then and of now. There was a measured pride about him, though, a discreet pride in how he chose to love a world that showered him with doubt and disdain. For as long as I can remember, my father worked as a delivery man for Almond S. Spender Pharmaceuticals, criss-crossing Johannesburg’s avenues, responding to ailments of suburbs and, for extra income, weekend shifts transporting ‘Urgent Medical Samples’ for hospitals.

It was from this – what he called life’s tragic pranks – that he managed to put me through school, that chinks appeared in his quiet pride, fissures that made his thoughts drift, prompting that heavy sigh and yearning: ‘I would have loved to fly aeroplanes, Michael.’ He later joined Harmony Gas & Fuels as a man who fought to be master of his life, but who instead helplessly watched as life and history drained all that was supposed to make life pleasurable, a drop at a time. His was a life not lived, but leaked away, soundless, in the single-roomed tin shack we called home.

…

As far as love goes – untainted, ocean-current love – none comes close to the one I witnessed in our one-room shack in Alexandra. It was not the kind depicted in lifestyle magazines: of walks along sunny boulevards, boat cruises on blue oceans, nose rubbing in restaurants. It was not, though it had a poetic glow, love spoken about by forlorn poets, not one of horse riding and romantic bicycle excursions into the countryside, not burdened by visits to the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. It was a love that had learned to ridicule lack, a brazen kind of feeling, resolute, daring even, so ahead of earthly imperfections that it seemed otherworldly: that silent hand holding of theirs, that drinking from one coffee mug when sugar was in short supply…”

This is beautiful writing. It is as though every word has been strained through a sieve.

I came across an excerpt from Rusty Bell and a short story by Ihrahim in a remarkable book called Africa39, which I found lying around in Blossoms Bookshop at Bangalore, last summer. Africa39 is a 2014 collection of thirty-nine short stories or novel excerpts from African writers “South of the Sahara.” The quality is stupendously high, and the collection has a beautiful Introduction by Wole Soyinka, who refers to Mandela’s frisson-inducing line about how reading Chinua Achebe made “the prison walls fall down”, and follows it up with this lush description:

One of my favourite browsing grounds remains, unrepentantly, the garbage dump, or, to put it more elegantly – the flea market, especially of books. Those rows and jumbled stalls and trestles of broned, dog-eared second-hand books, pages frayed with age, evocative of contemplative, even escapist hours in the company of unknown faces, redolent of distant places and exotic adventures both of mind and body – such musty, unruly way stops have the edge, for me, even over the fragrance of newly-minted volumes on tidy rows of antiseptic shelves, with careful labelling under subject matter, author, geography etc. You never know what you will find in the flea market!

To an Indian, this resonates, doesn’t it?

“… like shards of water and streams of glass”: Binyavanga Wainaina’s “One Day I Will Write About This Place”

I have always enjoyed reading writers’ memoirs, writers’ diaries, and writers’ thinly-autobiographical fiction. Some of my favourites include Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, where I found acute and subtle portraits of the character of a nation; Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country, where I discovered a haunting political elegy; Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, where I met a stinging literary critique of Negritude and Ngugi wa’ Thiong’o’s idea of language and literature; and Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler, where I traveled second-hand through some of the most brilliant landscapes imaginable.

In Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place, I found all this and more.

One Day I Will Write About This Place is a story about growing up in newly-independent, post-colonial Kenya. Wainaina tells two stories: the fraught relationship between democracy and the post-colony (not just in Kenya, but in other African countries as well) through the course of the late-20th century, and his own circuitous, round-about and peril-filled journey to becoming a writer of repute and influence. “Uganda, my mum’s country, fell down and broke. Crutch!”, he writes in the opening pages; and that could be an image for the book: falling, breaking, patching up, refusing to fall, falling, breaking again. From Kenya under Daniel arap Moi to South Africa on the cusp of dismantling apartheid to Uganda recovering from the wounds of civil war to Kenya again during the pivotal elections of 2002, Wainaina moves through bits of countries and pieces of the self, “always afraid of being hijacked by patterns”, as he and his comrades seek “new ways to contort, rearrange, redesign ourselves to fit in.”

Right from the first scene – a recollection of a backyard football game from childhood – we are put on notice that this will be something out of the ordinary:

She twists past Jimmy, the ball ahead of her feet, heading for me. I am ready. I am sharp, and springy. I am waiting for the ball. Jimmy runs to intercept her; they tangle and pant. A few moments ago the sun was one single white beam. Now it has fallen into the trees. All over the garden there are a thousand tiny suns, poking through gaps, all of them spherical, all of them shooting thousands of beams. The beams fall onto branches and leaves and splinter into thousands of smaller perfect suns.

Wainaina’s memoir bursts at the seams with such rich, exultant, and alive use of language. You rarely feel as if you’re merely reading; rather, it is as though all five senses are activated: you can taste the writing when you read “there is an ache in my chest today, sweet, searching, and painful, like a tongue that is cut and tingles with sweetness and pain after eating a strong pineapple”; you can hear it when you read “his voice carrying Yemeni monsoons and bolts of cloth“; you can smell it when he writes, “life has urgency when it stands around death. There is no grass as beautiful as the blades that stick out after the first rain”; you can see it with all the clarity of a vision when he writes “street upon street of Kenyan shops and textile factories stand disemboweled by the death of faith in a common future“; you can feel your skin in this remarkable passage:

She pours me a drink, she laughs, and I find myself laughing too, like we did when we were young. Twin Salvation Army marching bands on a hot dry Sunday in my hometown, Nakuru, Kenya. They bang their way up the sides of my head and meet at some crossroads in my temple, now out of rhythm with each other. I am thirsty with the effort of them, but my body is an accordion, and can’t find the resolution to stand.”

And sometimes, when the prose has a peculiar quality of motion, you can feel more than one thing: “Russet is an emotion inside me that comes from reading things about horses and manes, and many hairs tossing, and autumn, a set of impressions, movements, lights. These are my concerns.” Wainaina recalls, as a child, contemplating his own thirst after the game of football, and being unable to match the word (“thirst”) to something concrete. “Words, I think, must be concrete things. Surely they cannot be suggestions of things, vague pictures: scattered, shifting sensations?” This brings to mind Italo Calvino’s observation about words as “foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed.” Just as that is an apt account of Calvino’s writing, so is it of Wainaina’s: his language s never descriptive, but always suggestive, possessing a movement that never allows you to see a thing clearly and see it whole, but rather, as an ensemble of “scattered, shifting sensations.” Or, in his own words, when talking about the landscape from a car window:

I am disappointed that all the distant scenery, blue and misty, becomes more and more real as I come closer: there is no vague place, where clarity blurs, where certainty has no force, and dreams are real.

In Wainaina’s writing, you always remain in that vague place – and delightfully so. The writing is not only suggestive, but atmospheric, almost physical in its suggestiveness:

The song comes to a full stop. A full three seconds of silence as rumba momentum builds. The choral voices are now a sheet of frenzied rubber, Kenya streeeeectches and bleats, held together by the military trumpets and cash crop exports, the future, only the future, laboring bodies, a railway, a mpresident.

The result is that even the darkest of themes (and darkness is inevitably, given the subject matter) are handled with the lightness of what Colm Toibin would call “breath on glass.” The style is a complete contrast from, for example, Chinua Achebe’s elegy to Biafra in There Was A Country, even though both writers are talking about similar issues, at times: betrayed democracy, political violence, widespread dehumanisation in the post-colony. If sadness is the defining quality of Achebe’s work, it is wryness that characterises Wainaina’s. There is a refusal to take anything too seriously – neither the self, not politics, nor the nation. What we get, then, is a treatment that is almost savage in its mockery:

Moi and his cronies are on the radio daily. It is in the papers every day. These are dark days, we are told. There are dissidents everywhere. We have to all unite and silence the dissidents. From the radio, we know that foreign influenzes are invecting us, secret foreign influenzes are infringing us, invincing us, perferting our gildren, preaking our gultural moralities, our ancient filosofies, the dissidents are bushing and bulling, pringing segret Kurly Marxes and Michael Jagsons, making us backsliding robots, and our land is becoming moonar handscapes. They took the rain away, the Maxists, the Ugandans, wearing Western mini sguirts and makeup, they are importing them, inserting invected people, these dissidents, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and that man called Raila Oginga Odinga.

There is a similarity here with Emile Habiby’s The Adventures of Saeed the Pessoptimist. Habiby’s chosen mode of dealing with the dispossession of the Palestinian people is not grim realism, an elegiac lament, or even satire; but it is a wry, mild, almost gentle self-effacement that, in its deconstruction of the senselessness of violence and cruelty, is no less sharp:

The big man sent his own men to surprise me at my stall one noon. They led me off to prison after charging me publicly with having disobeyed the compulsory stay order. My going to Shafa Amr to buy melons, they said, had threatened the integrity of the state. Whoever, as they put it, transported red melons in secret could also carry radishes secretly and there was, after all, only a difference in colour between red radishes and hand grenades! And red was not, under any circumstances, the same as blue and white. With a watermelon, moreover, one could blow up a whole regiment if grenades were hidden inside it. “Don’t you see that, you mule?”

“But I cut the melons open with a knife so the buyer can see,” the “mule” responded.

“Oh! Knives too, eh?” they exclaimed.

But just like Habiby, there are moments when Wainaina abandons the self-effacing, almost playful tone, and essays a sudden foray into seriousness. These moments occur when he talks about the IMF-mandated dismantling of Kenya’s public education system, about the tribalism that dominates politics, and about how Kenyans – especially Kenyan artists – are forced to represent themselves to the Western world (a subject that he has also dealt with in this wildly famous essay). Their rarity invests them with a moral force, a gravity that compels the reader to pause, think, and then read again. And then Wainaina goes back to image, metaphor, and suggestion, reminding us that even the deepest of wounds can be written about without anger, without mourning, without even irony, but something else altogether:

Wood rots. Wood will not bend in heat. Wood burns and crumbles. Early this century. The searing heat of Belgium’s lust in the Congo insists on new metallic people. We, in Kenya, don’t understand the lyrics – we don’t speak Lingala – but this music, this style, this metallic sound has become the sound of our times.

Or:

Our schooling machine – nationwide, merit-based, proud, and competitive – Kenya’s single biggest investment – is falling apart, and the new season sounds like Band Aid. It’s all over CNN. Open mouths and music, thousands and thousands of white people throwing food and tears and happiness to naked, writhing Africans who can’t speak, don’t have dreams, and share leftovers with vultures.

This should not give the impression, however, that One Day I Will Write About This Place is limited to the troubles of the post-colonial era. Many of the books best moments are celebratory – whether it is celebrating a South African singer, the instant of hope in South Africa ’94, Wainaina’s winning the Caine Prize, or the optimism that seeps through even during factionalised Kenyan elections. Indeed, as Wainaina writes, “if there is a miracle in the idea of life, it is this: that we are able to exist for a time, in defiance of chaos.”

But above all else, what makes this book is its use of language, the wizardry that Wainaina has in putting words together in an assemblage that make them feel more real than life itself. “None of us has her voice,” he writes about his mother. “It tingles.  If crystal were water made solid, her voice would be the last splash of water before it set.” He might well have been describing his own writing.

“My body is an archive”: Patrice Nganang’s “Mount Pleasant”

“If the invention of a writing system was due to his will to give form to the world’s multiple voices – much as he had done with the Shumum language, drawing on the other languages spoken around him – his grudging memory, his trembling hands, and his feeble body had taught him that now, in his chambers in Mount Pleasant, he had reached the end of a long path.”

In his memoir, There was a Country, Chinua Achebe writes about Amos Tutuela’s famous novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard: “there is no attempt to draw a line between what is permissible and what is not, what is possible and what is not possible, what is new and what is old.” This sense – that the borders of what constitutes reality are simply more fluid and permeable than we are trained to imagine – is at the heart of Patrice Nganang’s sprawling novel about colonialism and nationalism in early-20th century Cameroon, Mount Pleasant. Anchored around two real-life characters in Cameroonian history – King Ibrahim Njoya and Paramount Chief Charles Atangana – and a series of real-life events, such as the successive colonisation of Cameroon by the Germans, the British, and the French – Mount Pleasant is nonetheless far more imaginative than historical, and bordering – on occasion – magical realism.

Mount Pleasant is woven out of multiple storylines, framed within a dialogue between the narrator, young, American-born Cameroonian-descended anthropologist, and Sara, one of the last living links between the present, and the late-colonial history of Cameroon in the 1930s. The narrator’s fragmented academic knowledge of Cameroonian history runs up against Sara’s living memory (“Archive? My body is an archive…”), throwing up all those eternal questions about the nature of historical truth, the distortion of the colonial lens, the (un)equal and opposite distortion of nationalism, and the insufficiency of language (“Where should I put my trust? In the capricious memory of an old lady or in the colonial archives?)

Within the dialogue itself, numerous themes emerge, composed out of the combined and sometimes contradictory knowledge of the two interlocutors: there is the eponymous Mount Pleasant, built into a “house of words” and a house of stories by King Njoya, who was exiled there by the French (“Njoya’s home became a compendium of humorous and serious tales, the site of a storytelling competition that went on from morning to night…”); there is Njoya’s prior time in his capital at Foumban, attempting to negotiate his way through successive colonial powers while maintaining a precarious hold on his waning authority – even to the extent of selling out an incipient nationalist movement, and seeing its leaders put to death; and there is Joseph Ngono, brought up and educated abroad in Germany to be a good native middleman, but who is transformed into a rebel and a nationalist after a chance encounter with German racists. Anchoring the novel is Nebu, a brilliant and troubled sculptor who, we are told right at the beginning of the book, dies in painful circumstances. Nebu’s talent is shaped around the trauma of his early childhood, where art is the only means of escape:

“Nebu learnt a lot by listening when he couldn’t respond. It taught him to control his rage. Taught him to keep it, like burning metal, at a safe distance from his body and his eyes. Taught him to strike it with a hammer, striking, striking, and striking again until it grew malleable, until it took on the shape he wanted to give it: flat like a knife, oval like a bird’s body, triangular like a lion’s head. It taught him to heat up his rage, to dilute his rage, to polish his rage, to file it yes, to file it down and wipe it clean, like the metals he worked with. And Nebu polished his rage, blowing on his overheated fingers, blowing on his heart to keep it from exploding, blowing on the embers of his incandescent soul. Art is an antidote to madness.”

In a certain sense, the blocked avenues and barricaded paths that consistently prevent Nebu from realising his potential – and which ultimately lead to his death – seem like a metaphor for the soul of the individual under the suffocating grip of colonialism. Nebu’s struggle is mirrored by the struggle of King Njoya, of whom we are told – in perhaps the closest direct indictment of colonialism that Nganang allows himself the indulgence of:

“He wanted to own the world… without being owned by it?”

“To speak of the world…”

“… without being spoken for by it.”

Njoya himself is the other anchor of Mount Pleasant. His endeavour to create a written script out of oral language becomes his one chance at retaining control, his one sphere of influence into which the colonisers have not and cannot penetrate:

“Njoya realized that his experiments with pictograms and phonemes, with syllabograms and words, with tales and histories, with lives and dreams – all those experiments that had led him from anecdotes to a printing press had been possible only because, from the very start, he had given up when confronted by History’s forces.”

Writing about the Indian colonial experience, historians have observed how the home came to be seen as a realm of spiritual retreat, the one space in which the militarily and politically conquered Indians remained sovereign and self-determining (with all its attendant problems). For Njoya, that sovereign space is language, especially in the moment of his final, physical decline:

“If writing reinscribes life on earth in furtive blots of ink, Njoya’s battle against the forces that had defeated his body was waged primarily on the surface of a slate, by means of pictograms he hoped would bear fruit… If the invention of a writing system was due to his will to give form to the world’s multiple voices – much as he had done with the Shumum language, drawing on the other languages spoken around him – his grudging memory, his trembling hands, and his feeble body had taught him that now, in his chambers in Mount Pleasant, he had reached the end of a long path.”

History tells us, though, that Njoya’s efforts were doomed to failure, especially after the French invalidated the curriculum in all his schools (an incident briefly adverted to in the novel); his language died along with him, until efforts in the mid-2000s to resurrect it (although perhaps as no more than a museum piece). And it is that death that is, in turn, mirrored in the death of Nebu, who cannot – despite all his efforts – breathe life into the sculpture of his lost love:

“For death is the limit of art, isn’t it? Yet how could people have thought about suicide? And why should they have? After all, and here the French officials and their adversaries in Foumban would certainly agree, a Bamum man simply couldn’t kill himself for a reason like that.”

The characters in Mount Pleasant, ultimately, realise that happiness is open to them only if they narrow their aspirations and their world, if – in the words of Ghassan Kanafani – they make their worlds smaller “to fill it with happiness“. And it is Joseph Ngono who realises that “it is impossible to know the actual price of happiness and to remain happy” – or at least, in a land where every attempt at self-assertion faces the barrel of a gun.

Haunted by the physical, mental, and moral shackles of colonial rule, and searching for a liberation that yet has no vocabulary to speak its name (only at the end of the novel do we see a crowd “demanding nothing less than equality and freedom“), the characters of Mount Pleasant are suffocated in by a world that will soon die, before they can be rescued by another that is struggling to be born. The historical moment that Nganang captures is similar (or just prior to) the historical moment of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk or Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door (Egypt), Aamin Maalouf’s Samarkand (Iran), and Yuri Trifonov’s The Impatient Ones (Russia). The voice and setting, of course, is Nganang’s own.

“They were eyes that stung you to tears…”: Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘The House of Hunger’

In the prefatory essay to The House of Hunger – a collection including the eponymous novella and eleven other aphoristic, semi-autobiographical sketches – the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera sets out his relationship with the English language. “I took to the English language as a duck takes to water,” he writes:

“I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonization. At the same time of course there was the unease, the shock of being suddenly struck by stuttering, of being deserted by the very medium I was to use in all my art. This perhaps is in the undergrowth of my experimental use of English, standing it on its head, brutalizing it into a more malleable shape for my own purposes. For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do. It is so for the feminists. English is very male. Hence feminist writers also adopt the same tactics. This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm , gas ovens of limitless black resonance.” (p. 7)

This is an interesting paragraph, because it calls to mind an old debate over whether there can be – in the words of Colm Toibin – a “language that is free and untouched by occupation.” Toibin certainly believed so when, in Love in a Dark Time, he wrote of “independent writer[s] whose true home, as I have said, is the language.” Seamus Heaney believed so, when in The Redress of Poetry he wrote of “language pure as air or water, a language which carries the reader (as the truest poetry always does) into the sensation of walking on air or swimming free.” Marechera clearly doesn’t. And his indictment of English as both racist and misogynist recalls the feminist critic Marina Warner, who wrote that “the speaking woman, her tongue freed by the ability to write as well as read, found that the emblem books were still filled with the iconology of female wantonness and frailty and their contradictory companions, fatality and power… women often had to work with the grain of misogyny, and then found the timber broke their tools.” The tools of language – image, metaphor, even words – are deeply political; and therefore, for Marechera, the choice of using a language – and then, how you use it – are political choices.

In fact, the sentence “a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation” brings to mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memorable indictment of “European tongues”. In Secure the Base, wa Thiong’o wrote that “within the African nations, European tongues continue to be what they were during the colonial period: the languages of power, conception and articulation of the worlds of science, technology, politics, law, commerce, administration, and even culture… every educated African who remains doggedly locked within the linguistic walls of European languages, irrespective of his avowed social vision… is part of the problem and not the solution.” However, while Thiong’o’s response to this was to stop writing in English altogether, and write in his indigenous Gikuyu language (he would then translate it himself into English), Marechera, instead, sought to engage in “discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance…”

This shows in The House of Hunger, Marechera’s haunting, broken, almost-surrealistic narrative about growing up in pre-Independence Zimbabwe, where English becomes an instrument of distilled violence. If Robert Bridges once wrote that English civilisation “is in great measure founded upon wrecking“, Marechera employs metaphor, image, and word to show how the English language might be founded upon violence. For instance, in simultaneously describing the death of the narrator’s father in a railway accident, and his mother’s verbal violence upon him, Marechera writes:

“Drinking always made her smash up her words at one particular rail-crossing which – as had really happened with the old man – effectively crunched all meaning or significance which might be lying in ambush… the expletives of her train of invective smashed my body in the same way as that twentieth-century train crunched the old man into a stain.” (p. 20)

Smashed-up words, where “meaning” and “significance” are crunched: this is The House of Hunger, where “the tinfoil of my soul crinkled” (p. 28), where “the pain was the sound of slivers of glass being methodically crushed in a steel vice by a fiend whose face was like that of my old carpentry master who is now in a madhouse” (p. 37), and where “the flood of political rhetoric escaped like a cloud of steam out of my crater of a mouth, leaving me dry and without words” (p. 38).

Marechera’s themes are themes of violence – the violence of a broken, colonial society in the process of violently struggling to free itself (“I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch…” (p. 29)), violence both political and personal; this, in itself, is not unusual. Violence has been depicted to great effect in books as diverse as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathiser. However, what is unusual about The House of Hunger is violence is not merely extra-linguistic, in the content of the description, but linguistic. Even the brief moments of joy are described in metaphors of violence: “And now here he was already gripping my arm with a tongue-scalding coffee joy…” (p. 21); “I smiled, crumpling up the tinfoil of my delight” (p. 40); “the rain came down in little liquid rocks which broke on their heads with a gentleness too rapid to be anything other than overpowering. She laughed a laugh that had little sharp teeth in it and it warmed them, this biting intimacy with the rain…” (p. 118); and: “My dreams still clung defiantly to the steel wire of old memories which I no longer had the power to arrange clearly in my mind.” (p. 124)

One should not think, however, that The House of Hunger is limited to stylistic virtuosity (although, as exhibited above, Marechera’s use of language is brilliant). The underlying theme – the critique of the broken colonial society, and the broken individuals it rears – risks being submerged by Marechera’s linguistic fireworks, but there are times when it emerges forcefully, reminding us that what is at stake, beyond violence, is an indictment of an entire political, economic, and social system of oppression. For instance, at the beginning of the novella, the narrator describes the process of growing up, which can be taken to be purely an instance of existentialist doubt, but in the broader context, is clearly a comment on the manner in which the colonial regime systematically denied fulfilment to its “children of a lesser God”:

“There was however an excitement of the spirit which made us all wander about in search of that unattainable elixir which our restlessness presaged. But the search was doomed from the start because the elixir seemed to be right under our noses and yet not really there. The freedom that we craved for – as one craves for dagga or beer or cigarettes or the after-life – this was so alive in our breath and in our fingers that one became intoxicated even before one had actually found it. It was like the way a man licks his lips in his dream of a feast; the way a woman dances in her dream of a carnival; the way the old man ran like a gazelle in his yearning for the funeral games of his youth. Yet the feast, the carnival and the games were not there at all. This was the paradox whose discovery left us uneasy, sly and at best with the ache of knowing that one would never feel that way again. There were no conscious farewells to adolescence for the emptiness was deep-seated in the gut. We knew that before us lay another vast emptiness whose appetite for things living was at best wolfish.” (p. 13)

The “House of Hunger“, therefore, refers not simply to the literal hunger that colonial poverty brought with it (the narrator mentions staying in the “house of hunger”a few times in the novella, making it clear that its use is both literal and metaphorical), but a different kind of hunger, and a different kind of thirst, that social structures were designed to leave un-sated:

“All the black youth was thirsty. There was not an oasis of thought which we did not lick dry; apart from those which had been banned, whose drinking led to arrests and suchlike flea-scratchings.” (p. 12)

The distilled intensity of The House of Hunger might speak for Marechera’s short life: an education at Oxford University was cut short when, on being offered a choice between a psychiatric examination and being sent down for trying to burn down the college, he chose the latter; The House of Hunger was composed while sleeping penniless, rough and rootless in different parts of England and Wales; when it won the Guardian First Book Award, Marechera celebrated by throwing plates at the chandeliers during the award ceremony; on his return to (independent) Zimbabwe, he lived homeless and died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 35. This life of restless – and often violence – discontent – is summed up by Marechera himself, in Thought Tracks in the Snow, one of the autobiographical essays that comes at the end of The House of Hunger:

“As the plane burred into the night, leaving the Angolan coast and heading out into the void above the Atlantic, I suddenly remembered that I had, in the rude hurry of it all, left my spectacles behind. I was coming to England literally blind. The blurred shape of the other passengers was grimly glued to the screen where Clint Eastwood was once again shooting the shit out of his troubles. I was on my own, sipping a whisky, and my head was roaring with a strange emptiness. What was it really that I had left behind me? My youth was a headache burring with the engines of a great hunger that was eating up the huge chunks of empty air. I think I knew then that before me were years of desperate loneliness, and the whisky would be followed by other whiskies, other self-destructive poisons; I had nothing but books inside my head, and they were burning me, burring with the engines of hope and illusion into the endless expanse of air. Who was I leaving behind? My own prematurely grey had still sat stubbornly upon my shoulders; my family did not know where I was or whether I was alive or dead. I do not think they would have cared one way or the other had they known at that moment I was thousands of feet above the earth, hanging as it were in the emptiness which my dabbling with politics had created for me. I felt sick with everything, sick with the self-pity, sick with the Rhodesian crisis, sick! – and the whisky was followed by other whiskies and my old young man’s face stared back at me from the little window. Would Oxford University be any different – was I so sure of myself then? Dawn broke as we flew over the Bay of Biscay; and the fresh white dove’s down of breast-clouds looked from above like another revelation that would turn out, when eaten, to be stone rather than bread.” (p. 140)

Even here, at the very end, in the throes of seriousness, Marechera cannot avoid just that little dose of linguistic pyrotechnics!

—

Other reviews of The House of Hunger: The Guardian; The Rumpus.

On Marechera more generally: The Life and Times of an African Writer (VQR).

“You just gave yourself to the dream in the rhythm…”: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ‘The River Between’

“And she seemed to hold him still. Not with her hands. Not with anything visible. It was something inside her. What was it? He could not divine what it was. Perhaps her laughter. He thought there was magic in it because it rang into his heart, arousing things he had never felt before. And what was that shining in her eyes? Was there a streak of sadness in them? For a time Waiyaki was afraid and looked around. His mother was watching them. He turned to Muthoni. The magic was not there any more; it had gone. In the next moment Waiyaki found himself wandering alone, blindly away from the crowd, wrestling with a hollowness inside his stomach.”

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart occupies pride of place as the post-colonial African novel dealing with the theme of the first contact between indigenous communities and colonial power, and the social disintegration that inevitably follows. But only seven years after Things Fall Apart, a young Ngugi wa Thiong’o published The River Between, his own novel dealing with similar themes. The River Between was Thiong’o’s first written novel (composed at university), and the second that he published. It is not as well-known as The Wizard of the Crow or Petals of Blood, and certainly not a novel that comes to mind when thinking of books that deal with the initial relationship between colonialism and community. This is a pity: in some ways, The River Between is an even more ambitious novel than Things Fall Apart, because it deals with an issue where the moral lines seem to be as clear as anything could be in our compromised world: female circumcision – or, as we know it, female genital mutilation.

The book begins like this:

“The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their creator.”

Between Kameno and Makuyu, both home to the Gikuyu people, there is an ancient rivalry, which is now exacerbated by the advent of colonialism, and the Christian religion that the colonisers bring with them. In Makuyu, Christianity has found a believer in Joshua, who has all the zeal of the convert. His proselytisation, however, creates as many enemies as it does followers; and rebellion, at last, reaches his own home. When female circumcision is banned as contrary to the Christian faith, Joshua’s daugther, Muthoni, refuses to abide by the decree, which goes to the heart of how the Gikuyu culture and way of life.

Into this milieu comes Waiyaki, the book’s ambiguous and conflicted protagonist. Waiyaki has been brought up to be the prophetic “saviour” of the people from the increasingly frequent depredations of the colonisers. Sent to be educated at the nearest missionary school – to learn the master’s tools to break down the master’s house – while retaining a firm foothold among his people, Waiyaki is the man marked to reconcile and unify the warring factions, and take on the colonisers. His chosen weapon is that of education.

However, Waiyaki will come to realise that reconciliation is not so easy. As Uzodinma Iweala remarks in his excellent introduction, while dealing with Muthoni’s own decision to undertake circumcision while remaining faithful to her father, “most utopias can accommodate only one grand vision.” Those who seek to expand them must either end in compromising, or in tragedy. And that is at the heart of The River Between.

The ambition of The River Between – as I mentioned above – is that Ngugi wa Thiong’o chooses as his site of conflict between colonial “modernity” and indigenous belief a practice that almost all of us would condemn unreservedly, both intuitively, and on careful reflection. What do the defenders of circumcision have to say for themselves? What can they possibly have to say for themselves? In Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta (independent Kenya’s first President) might have written that “this operation is still regarded as the very essence of an institution which has enormous educational, social, moral and religious implications… for the present it is impossible for a member of the tribe to imagine an initiation without clitoridectomy” – but surely that is no justification for something that is so obviously oppressive.

In The River Between, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s answer is to remove the authorial voice almost entirely from the novel. Female circumcision relies entirely upon its novelistic advocates for its justification, and one of those advocates is Muthoni as well. Echoing Kenyatta, Thiong’o describes how, for Muthoni, circumcision is what gives her membership in the tribe any meaning at all; without it, she is bereft, like an atrophied limb, cut off from its body. Now, we may dismiss this as false consciousness, as internalised oppression; but Thiong’o’s Muthoni is too fiercely intelligent, too reflective, and too human for any such easy resolution. And this is the singular achievement of The River Between: Thiong’o gives us a character whom we must take seriously, whose choices we must evaluate as choices. This is particularly important because, as recent scholarship has shown, the conflict over the abolition of oppressive gender-practices between the colonisers and indigenous societies was conducted on a terrain in which any kind of agency or voice was entirely denied to those whom it was ostensibly for: women. As an Indian scholar writes, the conflict “was not so much about the specific condition of women within a definite set of social relations as it was about the political encounter between a colonial state and a supposed ‘tradition’ of a conquered people.” In this context, Muthoni’s is the absent voice, now foregrounded front and centre.

Muthoni’s certainty and strength of will is a stark contrast with the ambivalent and unsure Waiyaki. Primed to belong to both worlds, he too falls victim to the totalitarianism of utopias, and finds himself struggling to belong to either:

“Again he was restless and the yearning came back to him. It filled him and shook his whole being so that he felt something in him would burst. Yearning. Yearning. Was life all a yearning and no satisfaction? Was one to live, a strange hollowness pursuing one like a malignant beast that would not let one rest? Waiyaki could not know. Perhaps nobody could ever know. You had just to be…”

Waiyaki is a neat inversion of the familiar fictional trope, the “half-blood” who, straddling two worlds, emerges as an unlikely saviour. Through Waiyaki – who, again, like Muthoni, is too human to simply reduce to a type – Thiong’o demonstrates just how difficult a task that is in moments of extreme flux, where one order, backed by raw power, clashes with another, supported on nothing but memories and dreams. And it is only towards the end of the novel that we get a sense of where Thiong’o himself stands on the issue:

“A religion that took no count of people’s way of life, a religion that did not recognize spots of beauty and truths in their way of life, was useless. It would not satisfy. It would not be a living experience, a source of life and vitality. It would only maim a man’s soul, making him fanatically cling to whatever promised security, otherwise he would be lost. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Joshua. He had clothed himself with a religion decorated and smeared with everything white. He renounced his past and cut himself away from those life-giving traditions of the tribe. And because he had nothing to rest upon, something rich and firm on which to stand and grow, he had to cling with his hands to whatever the missionaries taught him promised future… if the white man’s religion made you abandon a custom and then did not give you something of equal value, you became lost.”

Here we have that flash of insight, delivered in spare, clean prose, that is such a staple of the later Thiong’o. The River Between shows us a young Thiong’o, still honing and polishing his craft, the craft that would reach its peak in a novel like The Wizard of the Crow. But for a first novel, it is still an astonishingly accomplished work, subtle, complex, and above all, humane and empathetic.

“Such a meaningless thing as the judgment of history…”: Ahmadou Kourouma’s ‘Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote’

“You are now considered to be the breakwater on which founder the waves of international communism surging towards Africa. The media and public opinion in the Free World no longer have the right to criticize you. One does not demoralize a solder fighting at the front by criticizing the way he handles his rifle.”

—

There is a point in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote when the first elected President of the newly-independent Republique du Golfe is attempting to resist the coup that will soon cost him his position and his life. If he is killed, he says to his advisers, “it would mean that everything I have learned is sham, lies, that all my spiritual leaders have lied to me. It would mean that Africa is a sham, a lie; that talismans and sacrifices are worthless. It is unthinkable, impossible. It cannot be true.” There is something particularly poignant about “it would mean that Africa is a sham” at the moment of the strangulation of a fledgeling African democracy, a collateral casualty in Cold War politics, and a moment that occurs and recurs in the actual late-20th century history of the continent. If Africa, at that point, symbolises a long history of colonialism, resistance, and (ultimately) liberation, then the guns and soldiers that surround the Presidential Palace represent the “sham” that liberation ultimately turns out to be.

Waiting for the Wild Beasts is a story of that sham. It is narrated over six nights – “six vigils” – by Bingo, a griot and his “responder”, Tiecoura, in the presence of Koyaga, ‘President-Dictator’ of the Republique du Golfe, his ‘Minister of Orientation’, and seven most celebrated hunters of the Republic. Tiecoura, like the court jesters of the medieval European kings, “can do as he wishes, everything is permitted him, and nothing that he does goes unpardoned.” Through the course of the six vigils, then, the griot and his responder (with various interjections by the Minister) recount the personal history of Koyaga in the form of a donsomana (a performed epic) which, inevitably, becomes the history of the Republique du Golfe, and a searing indictment both of colonialism and of the betrayal of the post-colonial promise.

In his essay on Virgil’s Aeneid, Adam Parry highlights the “two voices” of the Roman epic: the dominant register, which celebrates conquest and imperium, linking Aeneas to Augustus, but also a counterpoint, a submerged register that questions and undermines that narrative. In Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, there are not two, but three voices that complicate the narrative. The dominant register is the griot’s donsomana, which is essentially a praise-song. Its form requires vaulting hyperbole and exaggeration, (deliberately) performed to such an extent that it overleaps itself and falls upon the side of disbelief. Koyaga is made out to be a man with superhuman powers, protected by the magic of his mother and a seer; his exploits while serving in the French army in Indochina, his violently successful ascent to the Presidency of the Republique du Golfe, and his surviving multiple assassination attempts, are all attributed to magic. The coup that ends with the murder of the elected President Santos is depicted as a clash between two powerful shamans, hurling magic at each other. But even as these stories are told, the griot also provides his audience the other, more prosaic explanations (political intrigue, betrayal, outright violence, chance), while ostensibly debunking them as the invention of bitter and jealous political opponents. And even beyond these two voices contained within the donsomana, Tiecoura takes advantage of the latitude offered him to – occasionally – disrupt the praise-song by speaking some blunt home-truths to power:

“Koyaga, you have many faults, grave faults. You were, you are as tyrannous as a savage beast, as untruthful as an echo, as brutal as a lightning strike, as murderous as a lycaon, as emasculating as a castrator, as populist as a griot, as corrupt as a louse, as libidinous as a pair of ducks. You are… You are… You have many other faults which if one were to try to expound them all, catalogue each one at a stroke, it would surely tear one’s mouth at the corners. So specifies the responder, redoubling his jeers, which draw a good-natured smile from him they appear to insult.”

These three registers mingle, alternate and disrupt each other, never quite allowing the reader to settle. What emerges from them is a highly effective – and unsparing – critique of mid-20th century African history. Like Ngugi wa Thiong’o in The Wizard of the Crow (which was written ten years after Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote), Kourouma is painfully aware of the ‘Free World’s’ Cold War-induced complicity in creating and propping up African dictatorships:

“De Gaulle succeeded in granting independence without decolonizing. He succeeded in this by inventing and supporting presidents of republics who referred to themselves as fathers of the nation, architects of the independence of their countries, when in fact they had done nothing to win independence for their republics and were not the real masters, the true leaders of their peoples.”

This is a familiar theme, described eloquently by Chinua Achebe’s memoir of the Biafran War, There Was a Country. Recounting the manner in which the elections leading up to the independence of Nigeria were rigged by the outgoing British colonialists, Achebe writes that “In a sense, Nigerian independence came with a British governor general in command, and, one might say, popular faith in genuine democracy was compromised from birth.”

And yet, Kourouma is also keenly aware of the risks in letting this origin story become determinative of the future, and of reducing causality to a linear sequence in a manner that absolves the leaders of post-colonial African nations from the burdens of moral judgment. This comes through with particular brilliance in the griot‘s account of Koyaga’s visit to four other African dictators, who have devised various stratagems for staying in power. In particular, this is how one of them deals with an alleged communist plot against his government:

“Remembering the precepts of the Qur’an, the Emperor ordered the regiment to beat them to death before cutting off their hands, as the Belgians had routinely done in Congo, and their ears, as the French had done in Oubangui-Chari…”

In one sentence, the griot locates the origins of this particularly brutal kind of political violence in colonialism, while making it clear that the moral culpability of the doer is in no way mitigated by this history. Not only that, there is also an equally keen awareness of how that history is invoked in discourse to at least attempt to hide, or distract from, that moral culpability. While maintaining a brutally repressive regime, Koyaga memorialises the day of his father’s death as “the Feast of the Victims of Colonialism“, a moment of heavy irony where historical trauma is pressed into service for propping up a social order that exhibits many of the same tendencies that it claims to repudiate.

There is a very similar moment in The Wizard of the Crow, where a regime member’s response to external criticism is to say “Racists… putting as much hatred as he could into his voice”. The transition from reckoning with colonialism and racism for emancipatory purposes to a veil for hiding oppression is brutal and unforgiving, made all the more starker by the wry, self-aware, bleakly humorous tone that characterises both Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote and The Wizard of the Crow.

The story of the Republique du Golfe is a thinly-fictionalised history of post-Independence Togo, although Togo is never mentioned. And yet, lest the fiction appear too remote, from time to time Kourouma drops in real countries and real people, as if just to remind us that this is real, this actually happened. French political interference, American and British Cold War machinations, Gaddafi and Idi Amin’s ‘African solidarity’, all play walk-on roles, and even the IMF’s notorious ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ enter an appearance, making it all too clear that despite its allegorical style, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is anything but an allegory. It is the true story of an imagined future that turned out to be – in one of the many acute proverbs that line the tale –  “as untruthful as an echo.”

 

“Queues were a Marxist invention…”: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

In his Introduction to Little Mountain, Elias Khoury’s surrealistic novel about the Lebanese Civil War, Edward Said observes that the Arab novel has responded to the post-colonial world in two ways: through the dense realism of Naguib Mahfouz, with its focus on place and time; and the anti-realism of Emile Habibi’s Saeed the Pessoptimist, and Khoury’s Little Mountain. Moving down South, my experience with African novels (if we can bracket the problem of the term “African” novel) has fallen into the former category. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah, Ousman Sembene’s Gods Bits of Wood, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Alan Paton’s Cry The Beloved Country, and the short stories of Nadine Gordimer, have all had a powerful impact upon me, because of the sense in which they seem to be capturing something very real.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow is a novel of the second kind. It reads like a cross between Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist, and Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound. With the former, it shares a keen sense of the absurd in the political, as well as the use of satire that spares no side. And like the latter, it almost seamlessly mingles political history with magic realism, clearly drawing upon oral and folk traditions to do so.

Set in the fictional, post-colonial African dictatorship of Abruria, The Wizard of the Crow is a 768-page long mock epic, featuring a sprawling cast of characters: the unnamed “Ruler”, his coterie of ministers, a real estate agent with pretensions to power, apparatchiks and functionaries, bystanders, an opposition movement called The Voice of the People, a radical feminist activist, and of course, the eponymous “Wizard of the Crow”, an unemployed man who becomes a famous witch-doctor in a fit of absent-mindedness. The Ruler has grand plans of embarking upon a (literal) Tower-of-Babel project called “Marching to Heaven”. Abruria is not Babylon, however, and funding for the project must come in the form of loans from the (unsubtly named) Global Bank. And so the scene is set: even as the Ruler and his Ministers attempt to show to the Global Bank Mission (and its unsubtly named “Missionaries”) that Abruria is a stable and peaceful country and an attractive investment destination, chaos begins to spread around the country, with the Wizard of the Crow and the mysterious Voice of the People at the heart of everything.

The Wizard of the Crow is an unapologetically political novel. The very choice of theme reflects the inevitability of political engagement: a post-colonial dictator embarking upon a vanity project with the aid of global capital must necessarily involve complex and fraught questions of the role and responsibility of the “West” in colonialism and the post-colony, its complicity with dictatorial “anti-communist” regimes, the relationship between colonial elites and their own constituents as well as their relationship with the (former) colonisers, the reality of geopolitics, international debt traps, and of course, the ubiquity of violence. Thiong’o’s treatment of these questions is through savage, biting satire, that spares no one. In fact, at times, his voice is so direct, that it’s hardly even satire anymore. The American Ambassador tells the Ruler (while suggesting that he step down in favour of someone younger and less erratic):

“You are very wise, your Excellency, and the West will make sure that you retire with all your wealth and that of your family and friends completely intact. We can even help it to multiple. And also, we can make sure that your successor passes a law to ensure that you are never brought to court on charges involving any of your actions during your tenure as the head of the state. And of course if you feel that you have to move to another country, that, too, can be arranged.”

There are two things, I think, that save this from descending into the realm of (uninteresting) polemic. For one, passages of this sort do not occur too frequently. In the vast canvas of the novel, they are scattered enough to be forgiven. Secondly – and perhaps more importantly – they actually serve to remind us of the political truths underlying what is, for the most part, a surreal romp that involves an epidemic of “queuing” throughout the country, the prevalence of a strange disease that traps words within the speaker’s throat and renders him powerless of speech, the hostile takeover of a prison with no weapon but a bucket of excrement, and a hilariously abortive trip to the United States. This does not mean, however, that these incidents are absent of political implications themselves. The “queuing mania” has its origins in two lines that form outside the office of a real-estate agent who will potentially be given the Marching to Heaven contract: one is a line of job-seekers, and the other is of favour-seekers. The implications are obvious. And the first outbreak of the mysterious disease is when the real-estate agent tries to express a desire to become “white”, but is simply unable to bring himself to say it. Once again, the implications ought not to be spelt out, but left to the imagination.

It is here that the resemblances with Habibi are particularly stark. In The Pessoptimist, there is laughter, but the laughter barely conceals the darkness within the lines – in fact, it makes us even more aware of the darkness. So it is with The Wizard of the Crow, in moments like these, when the Ruler’s Minister address the Global Bank Missionaries:

“We swear by the children of the children of the children of the children of our children to the end of the world – yes, we swear even by the generations that may be born after the end of the world – that we shall pay back every cent of the principle along with interest on interests ad infinitum.”

One does not need to mention Argentina, and Greece, and Puerto Rico, for the first shiver to run down the spine at this enthusiastic declamation, and what it entails.

The selection of quotes might give the impression that Thiong’o is particularly critical of colonialism and its successor, that much-contested term, “neoliberalism”. This is not so, however: Thiong’o does not fall into the easy trap of laying all the blame at the feet of any one entity or group, and effectively denying the other of agency. His satire spares none. After a reversal with the Global Bank, for instance, the Ruler decides to ban all queues of more than five people, with the following public justification:

“Queues were a Marxist invention, according to the Ruler, having nothing to do with African culture, which is characterized by the spirit of spontaneity. Mass disorganization – pushing and shoving – was to be the order of the day…”

With one arrow, Thiong’o pierces the conceit of political nativists, of ardent nationalists, of academic romanticisers of indigenous cultures, of the Orientalists as well as (some of) their opponents. The “derivative discourse” that is nationalism (what the historian Partha Chatterjee needs a complex, book-length work to explain) is sparely, starkly, stripped to its essentials and laid bare for all to see. Later in the book, again responding to the denial of the Global Bank to provide the funds for Marching to Heaven, Thiong’o has one of his characters declare “”Racists!”… putting as much hatred as he could into his voice.” It is strikingly accurate how this sums up a particularly complex moment of political discourse, when one mode of argumentation is an almost-reflective invocation of racism (or another similar word) to delegitimise an opponent’s position by denying them the moral right to take any position on the issue. It is an argument that must be made on occasion, but is dangerous when it begins to be made on a majority of occasions. Thiong’o understands both aspects, and that is part of what makes this not simply a work of fierce satire, but also one of a certain kind of hard-earned wisdom.

At the same time, it should not be assumed that the book is only about politics. Apart from satire being a valuable form of writing in itself (and not necessarily by reference to its subject matter), it is also fascinating to try and trace the folk influences (to the limited extent that a non-African can). In one fascinating scene, for instance, The Wizard of the Crow goes to a restaurant, and hears his own story being told back to him, in a highly garbled form. I recently came across the same trope in Nalo Hopkinson’s disturbing SF novel, The Midnight Robber, as well as seeing it in Indian folktales. It seems to be a staple!  

Appropriately, perhaps, the ending of the book is utterly ambiguous, leaving (almost) all possibilities open. Almost as if Thiong’o is holding up a mirror to life. But to end with a personal observation: I was struck by the extent to which Thiong’o characters invoke and use Indian mythos and mythology in their conversation (the protagonist, the Wizard of the Crow, has been educated in India). When the story of Drona and Eklavya is used as a parable for exploitation not by a Dalit activist in India, but by a fictional character in a novel set in post-colonial Africa, it is quite a moment of surprise. I used to think that the influence of India upon Africa is a hypothetical scenario of the future (for instance, a “scramble for Africa between China and India is imagined by Monica Byrne in her The Girl in the Road) – but if The Wizard of the Crow is anything to go by, then there is already more influence than I imagined!