KATHY-ANN TAN



II. Identities

14. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (1938)

From: Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (1938; London: Heinemann, 1979), “Conclusion”, 309-318. – Jomo Kenyatta (1893 – 1978) was a nationalist politician who emerged as the figurehead of the anticolonial movement in Kenya in the 1940s and 50s. He became President of the Kenya African Union (KAU) in 1947 and was imprisoned from 1953 to 1960 by the British colonial government in Kenya who accused him of having instigated the Mau Mau War (see text 4 above). He was elected President of the newly founded Kenya African National Union (KANU) in 1960; after his release from prison he became a member of the Legislative Assembly and played a decisive role in negotiating Kenya’s independence at the Lancaster House Conference in London. In 1963, Kenyatta became the first Prime Minister of independent Kenya; from 1964 until his death in 1978 he served as his country’s first President. During his increasingly authoritarian rule, Kenyatta turned Kenya from a functioning democracy into a one-party state and suppressed all opposition to his regime. Like many nationalist politicians in Africa, Kenyatta went to Britain for further education; he studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics and graduated with a thesis on the Gikuyu in Kenya that was published as Facing Mount Kenya in 1937. Kenyatta’s pioneering book was one of the first anthropological studies authored by an African and presented a comprehensive overview of culture and social life of the Gikuyu that not only countered colonial myths of “primitive” Africa, but also challenged the legitimacy of colonial rule.

In concluding this study it cannot be too strongly emphasised that the various sides of Gikuyu life here described are the parts of an integrated culture. No single part is detachable; each has its context and is fully understandable only in relation to the whole. […]

The key to this culture is the tribal system, and the bases of the tribal system are the family group and the age-grades, which between them shape the character and determine the outlook of every man, woman, and child in Gikuyu society. According to Gikuyu ways of thinking, nobody is an isolated individual. Or rather, his uniqueness is a secondary fact about him: first and foremost he is several people’s relative and several people’s contemporary. His life is founded on this fact spiritually and economically, just as much as biologically; the work he does every day is determined by it, and it is the basis of his sense of moral responsibility and social obligation. His personal needs, physical and psychological, are satisfied incidentally while he plays his part as member of a family group, and cannot be fully satisfied in any other way. The fact that in Gikuyu language individualism is associated with black magic, and that a man or woman is honoured by being addressed as somebody’s parent, or somebody’s uncle or aunt, shows how indispensably kinship is at the root of Gikuyu ideas of good and evil.

This vital reality of the family group is an important thing for Europeans to bear in mind, since it underlies the whole social and economic organisation of the Gikuyu. It means, for instance, that the authority of the tribe is different in kind from that of the European national State. The Gikuyu does not think of his tribe as a group of individuals organised collectively, for he does not think of himself as a social unit. It is rather the widening-out of the family by a natural process of growth and division. He participates in tribal affairs through belonging to his family, and his status in the larger organisation reflects his status in the family circle. The average European observer, not being trained in comparative sociology, takes his own fundamental assumptions for granted without realising that he is doing so. He thinks of the tribe as if it must be analogous to the European Sovereign State, and draws the conclusion that the executive authority for that sovereignty must be vested in the Chief, as if he were a Prime Minister or a President. In doing so he makes a huge mistake, which makes it impossible for him to enter into intelligible relations with the Gikuyu people. They simply do not know where he gets his ideas from, since to them the family rather than the larger unit is the primary reality on which power is based.

The visible symbol of this bond of kinship is the family land, which is the source of livelihood and the field of labour. In an agricultural community the whole social organisation must derive from the land, and without understanding the system on which it is held and worked it will be impossible to see the meaning of other aspects of life. In Gikuyu society the system of land tenure can only be understood by reference to the ties of kinship. It is no more true to say that the land is collectively owned by the tribe than that it is privately owned by the individual. In relation to the tribe, a man is the owner of his land, and there is no official and no committee with authority to deprive him of it or to levy a tax on his produce. But in so far as there are other people of his own flesh and blood who depend on that land for their daily bread, he is not the owner, but a partner, or at the most a trustee for the others. Since the land is held in trust for the unborn as well as for the living, and since it represents his partnership in the common life of generations, he will not lightly take upon himself to dispose of it. But in so far as he is cultivating a field for the maintenance of himself and his wives and children, he is the undisputed owner of that field and all that grows in it. [309-311]

But a culture has no meaning apart from die social organisation of life on which it is built. When the European comes to die Gikuyu country and robs the people of their land, he is taking away not only their livelihood, but the material symbol that holds family and tribe together. In doing this he gives one blow which cuts away the foundations from the whole of Gikuyu life, social, moral, and economic. When he explains, to his own satisfaction and after the most superficial glance at the issues involved, that he is doing this for the sake of the Africans, to “civilise” them, “teach them the disciplinary value of regular work,” and “give them the benefit of European progressive ideas,” he is adding insult to injury, and need expect to convince no one but himself.

There certainly are some progressive ideas among the Europeans. They include the ideas of material prosperity, of medicine, and hygiene, and literacy which enables people to take part in world culture. But so far the Europeans who visit Africa have not been conspicuously zealous in imparting these parts of their inheritance to the Africans, and seem to think that the only way to do it is by police discipline and armed force. They speak as if it was somehow beneficial to an African to work for them instead of for himself; and to make sure that he will receive this benefit they do their best to take away his land and leave him with no alternative. Along with his land they rob him of his government, condemn his religious ideas, and ignore his fundamental conceptions of justice and morals, all in the name of civilisation and progress. [317-318]

15. Kelvin Mlenga, Hunt for a Personality (1964)

From: New Writing in Zambia, vol. 1, No. 1 (1964), 7-13. – Kelvin Mlanga was born into a migrant worker’s family from Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in a gold mining town in the Midlands province of Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe). He was educated in Southern Rhodesia where he later became a teacher and journalist. In the early 1960s he returned to Northern Rhodesia where he became deputy editor of the privately owned Central African Mail (later renamed Zambia Mail). A year after Northern Rhodesia became independent as Zambia in 1964, the government took over the Zambia Mail and Kelvin Mlenga became editor of the paper. His term of office was brief, however, since he soon resigned in protest against the government’s attempts to turn the Zambia Mail into its political mouthpiece. Mlenga subsequently took up work in the private mining sector; he died in 198l/82 in a road accident on the Lusaka-Ndola highway.

The African in Northern Rhodesia is engaged in a big hunt for a personality of his own. He is discarding “white” names he had to assume when he accepted a doctrine brought to him from foreign lands. In some instances, he is giving up dress styles copied from the West for a “national” costume of flowing robes made of multi-coloured material often bearing the image of the national leader.

Indeed, as Independence Day draws near, he is stepping up to search for something typically “his” to present to the hundreds of outsiders who are coming to watch the birth of the Republic of Zambia on October 24. He wants to give them a glimpse – if only a fleeting one – of Zambian culture.

Culture might be defined as a people’s established and accepted – I almost said “instinctive” – way of life. Only in it and through it can a nation acquire a personality.

How right was Mr. Simon Kapwepwe was when he remarked that “Culture is the backbone of a nation”.[1]

The indigenous tribes of this country had this established, time-tested mode of living when the first whiteman set foot on African soil. But, for good or bad, the advent of the man “without knees” with his Christianity and completely foreign customs brought about drastic changes in that way of life wherever he went to preach or exploit.

After all, when he left his native country for the “Dark Continent”, the whiteman’s mission was largely one of leading the, to him, lost souls he found there from the darkness of paganism to the light of Christianity. Equating the vast majority of African customs with heathenism, he ordered their prompt abandonment as the evil harbingers of a life of everlasting torment in hell.

Thus many rituals and dances held dear by tribes from time immemorial were allowed to go by the board as a price for the acceptance of a new religion.

Several of the rituals, particularly those connected with fertility, were accompanied by the display of exquisite carvings which, unfortunately, were condemned as obscene by people whose zeal for the salvation of souls rendered them completely blind to the demands of other forms of culture than Christianity.

It is largely in this way that countless articles and forms of African pre-white-era culture were lost to a posterity which for us is the present.

Happily there are some areas in the country which even in this jet age are still relatively free from the more negative effects of the influence of western civilisation. And it is to these areas that we must turn for a glimpse of Northern Rhodesia’s past cultural glory.

However, it would be a big mistake to pretend that all western influence has done is to wreak havoc on Africa’s traditions and customs and to tear the fabric of its culture.

One has only to visit African townships in Lusaka, the Copperbelt and anywhere along the line of rail to see how the meeting of the cultures of Africa and the West has resulted in the creation of a society whose carefree zest for life is like nothing which a village of old could have offered or which any European city can even attempt to offer.

Yes, ours is the new, ambivalent Africa – searching for its past: at the same time bursting to be as (?) modern as the space age.

Indeed, life in the urban African townships is in a class of its own. Life in Chilenje is anything but sumptuous; yet it enjoys a vitality which the top-grade “white” suburb of Woodlands just next door can never hope to emulate, let alone equal.[2]

It is just as the South African author and educationist, Ezekiel Mphahlele, now living the life of an exile in West Africa, puts it:

The institutions in European areas are usually geographically or economically or legally inaccessible to the African, except the elite. So the Africans are thrown on their resources: they make their own music, create their own fun, borrowing what they want from European technology and art. Life is invariably much more vibrant, robust and full of zest in these African ghettos than in the white areas, whose culture must be derivative and linked with the metropolitan centres, wriggling away without direction, like a lizard’s tail cut off from the body.[3]

And it is the culture evolved by these so-called detribalized inhabitants of the township just as much as that of the old-timers in the back-of-the-beyond villages out at Mwinilunga or Mankoya that must be exhibited for the world to see, touch, smell, hear and feel throughout the period of the independence celebrations.

Already Mr. Yeta of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum has covered hundreds of miles on journeys to the remotest corners of the country in quest of traditional objets d’art to constitute a special independence exhibition. Latest reports say he has collected 300-plus pieces with many more expected to come.

The exhibition is expected to feature carvings, pottery and other types of traditional craftwork. It is perhaps indicative of the interdependence of the cultures of a world made small by modern means of travel and communication that concurrently with Mr. Yeta’s exhibition, another display, this time featuring works of art from different parts of the world, will be attracting the attention of Zambia’s independence guests. This particular one will be under the supervision of Mr. Frank McEwan, director of the Rhodes Art Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.

In Ghana the urban African has found musical expression in High Life; in South Africa he finds solace from the physical and mental agony imposed by apartheid in Kwela melodies; in the Congo the typically Congo cha-cha rhythm has been evolved.

The urban African in Northern Rhodesia has had his fair share of violence, rejection and frustration. There is no reason why all the emotions evoked by these experiences should not find expression in essentially Zambian music.

But perhaps what is left is to find a name for it; for people like Bartholomew Bwalya and Isaac Mapiki seem to have already succeeded to pick out of the strings of their guitars a sound that could become Zambia’s passport to recognition in the world of music.

What emerges from all this is that if we are to evolve a Zambian culture it perforce has to be a careful blending of the old and the new. Hankering for the past and wishing it was the present is a sentimental waste of time. This is no time to wallow in memories of past glories.

The past is valuable only to the extent to which it helps [to make] present-day life more meaningful. Greece had her Alexander the Great; Rome her Julius Caesar. But while both Greece and Italy are both grateful and proud for contributions made to their history by Alexander and Caesar, the Greece of today and the Italy of today are not – and, as a matter of fact, do not want to be – the Greece of Alexander and the Italy of Caesar’s days.

To quote from Mr. Mphahlele again: “An image of Africa that only glorifies our ancestors and celebrates our ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ is an image of a continent lying in state”.[4] In other words, a dead continent. And yet Africa today is a continent which is so very much alive it sometimes hurts.

By all means, let us treasure our past. At the same time, however, we have got to wake up to the present.

Fortunately, there are encouraging signs in some African countries of an awareness of the futility of looking upon African culture as an anthropological phenomenon belonging to the past and only to be preserved as a monument. In Ghana, for example, the government has set up an Institute of Art and Culture through which it channels money to regional cultural centres where traditional music and theatre are encouraged for their own sake – not the past’s.

In Nigeria a roughly similar function is performed by writers’ and artists’ clubs called Mbari. These promote music, theatre, art and creative writing with an African background.

Tanganyika-Zanzibar has a Ministry of National Culture. And in Kenya they have clubs functioning along lines very similar to Mbari.

It is interesting to note that all these countries taking positive action to promote their culture have been rewarded by “discovering” from among their own sons and daughters, writers and artists whose fame as exponents of their nations’ way of life has spread far beyond their borders.

In South Africa, non-white cultural activities are given direction by Union Artists which, with its Music and Drama Association, has sponsored highly successful indigenous musical shows such as “King Kong” and “Sponono”.[5]

Here in Zambia a National Arts Trust has just been formed under the chairmanship of Alick Nkhata. Admittedly, there is at present a dearth of writers, musicians and artists in Zambia. But there is surely no reason why through agencies like the N.A.T., this country should [not] produce her own musical to rival “King Kong”. Indeed, with some encouragement provided by groups modeled on Mbari, Zambia can within the next few years produce her own authors able to do for this country what people like Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Amos Tutuola (The Palm Wine Drinkard) are doing for Nigeria.[6]

As independence approaches Zambians are looking for a personality of their own. But they will not find it resting on the laurels of their forefathers. They can only find it – nay, create it afresh – by blending the glorious Past with the exciting Present.

16. Bessie Head, A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots

(1984)

From : M.J. Daymond, J.U. Jacobs, Margaret Lenta (ed.) Momentum: on Recent South African Writing (Durban: University of Natal Press, 1984), 278-280. – Bessie Head (1937-86) was born in South Africa, but went into exile in Botswana, then the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, in 1963. Most of her literary work, including the novels When Rainclouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1973), as well as her short story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977), is set there. Head was classified “coloured” in South Africa and suffered greatly in her personal life before leaving the country. Although her life in Botswana, where she had a mental breakdown (which forms the basis of A Question of Power), was not easy, she was fortunate in finding there a sense of belonging which she had never found in the country of her birth. The present text, which is indicative of the kind of issues which many exiles from South Africa under apartheid had to face, gives an idea of Head’s commitment to Botswana and its people and describes her successful search for identity as an African.

In March 1964, barely a day’s journey separated me from one way of life and another. Until that day in March I had been a South African citizen. A very peripheral involvement in politics resulted in a refusal of a passport and I left South Africa on an exit permit. Great events were taking place then. Most of Africa was gaining independence and I was a part of the stirring of the times. It was consciously in my mind that African independence had to be defined in the broadest possible terms. I was twenty-seven years old and had lived those years like most black South Africans, an urban slum dweller who survived precariously, without a sense of roots, without a sense of history. A short train journey and a day later I awoke to a completely new world, Botswana, (then the British Bechuanaland Protectorate)[7] and a way of life unknown and unfamiliar to me. South Africa, with its sense of ravages and horror, has lost that image of an Africa, ancient and existing since time immemorial, but in Botswana the presence of the timeless and immemorial is everywhere – in people, in animals, in everyday life and in custom and tradition.

I hope two disparate worlds could be considered to have combined harmoniously in me. I have never been able in my writing to represent South African society, but the situation of black people in South Africa, their anguish and their struggles, made its deep impress on me.

From an earlier background, I know of a deep commitment to people, an involvement in questions of poverty and exploitation and a commitment to illuminating the future for younger generations. I needed an eternal and continuous world against which to work out these preoccupations. One of my preoccupations was a search as an African for a sense of historical continuity, a sense of roots, but I remember how tentative and sketchy were my first efforts, not finding roots as such but rather putting on layer after layer of patchy clothing. This patchy clothing formed the background to most of my work.

It was my habit to walk slowly through the village and observe the flow of everyday life – newly-cut thatch glowing like a golden hay-stack on a round mud hut, children racing around, absorbed in their eternal games or a woman busy pounding corn for the evening meal. I would pause a while near a yard where a tall, slender woman pounded corn in a stamping block with a long wooden pestle, her bare feet partly buried in a growth of summer grass. It was a scene that had been a part of village life since time immemorial, but to me it was as fresh and new as creation itself. The woman’s form would sway to and fro with the rhythm of her work, her face closed and withdrawn in concentration. The warm slanting rays of the late afternoon sunlight seemed to transfix that timeless moment in my memory. I would turn and look at the distant horizon. Beyond the last hut, beyond the perimeter of Serowe,[8] the land lay in an eternal, peaceful sleep, the distant horizon hazy and shrouded in the mists of the earth.

I would reflect that the dwelling places of all the tribes had been, for ages and ages, just such small, self-contained worlds, busy with the everyday round of living.

Such peaceful rural scenes would be hastily snatched to form the backdrop to tortuous novels. Perceptive fans sensed the disparity, the disparity between the peaceful simplicity of village life and a personality more complex than village life could ever be. They would say: “I like the bits about Botswana life but I found your second/third novel difficult to read …”

But it still goes back to a question of roots rather than the small, stolen patchy scenes which would seem implicit in my early work. Later, much later, I became acquainted with the history of Botswana and it was like becoming acquainted with a way of life that was applicable to all the tribes of Africa. The high clamour and violence of South African history dominates all the southern lands so that they are written of in the history books as mere appendages of South African history. Botswana is no mere extension of South African history and the great arid wasteland the history books would have us believe. It was a British Protectorate and as such has a distinct and individual history of its own, a history whereby a colonial power was sensitive to human grandeur, even if it turned up in a black skin, and it was a country that provided one such leader at a crucial moment, Khama the Great,[9] who made known the people’s preferences as regards their independence and the ownership of the land. We have a situation where the people never lost the land to a foreign invader and in the rural areas the ancient African land tenure system of communal ownership of the land still operates. It is on this peaceful base of security of tenure that one begins to assemble the history of the land.

One has so many options and choices of study that are sure, steady and sane and simply another addition to mankind’s history. One can concentrate on the impact of Christianity on the tribes, the power and influence of the missionaries and the London Missionary Society and changing patterns of culture and learning. Thus, the refrain of recorded history begins very much the way it began in Europe: “When the Romans first took learning to Europe, the tribes there were just like the tribes of Africa, not knowing anything about learning and progress …”

We can now look back at the old men, who until the missionaries introduced a new form of learning, were the only libraries the people had and the repositories of all tribal learning and knowledge. We can look back at the earlier religions of the tribes and the persuasive voice of Christianity in modifying and transforming custom and tradition. We can look back on a history that is not sick with the need to exploit and abuse people.

I have found the tensions and balances of the rural parts of Botswana, of a fine order. Enough of the ancient way of African life has survived to enable the younger generations to maintain their balance with comfort and ease, while almost daily with independence, new innovations, new concepts of government and critical, complex situations invade the life of the country. It is in such a world that one puts down some roots in the African soil and one finds a sense of peace about the future.

17. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Urban Cultures: Relevance

and Context (2005)

From: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Urban Cultures: Relevance and Context”, in: Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (eds.), Urbanization and African Cultures (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005): 17-22. – African cultural identities have often been formulated in terms of “traditional” societies. While colonial discourses routinely harped on the alleged “primitiveness” of African cultures that were inevitably identified with rural or pastoral contexts, nationalist and anticolonialist movements often emphasized “traditional” African cultures as an antidote to “Westernization”. What was habitually neglected in both scenarios was the seminal role of cities and urban populations in formulating modern cultural identities in Africa. In the following essay, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, a French specialist in African history and professor emeritus at the University of Paris Diderot, analyses the role of cities as “the privileged place of cultural invention” and highlights the importance of cities for Africa’s social development.

The City has always been an innovative space, in Africa as elsewhere, and it is right that historians of the City are fond of the phrase “urban revolution.” The first urban revolution occurred when prehistoric hunting and gathering societies became sedentary, which allowed domesticated agriculture. Thus was the City born, as Akin Mabogunje explains, from “the process whereby human beings congregate in relatively large number at one particular spot of the earth’s surface.”[10] In effect, thanks to an agricultural surplus that fed them, urbanites were able to pursue other activities: political, commercial, and religious. Cities thus became multipurpose centers from the beginning. This was the case of Jenne-Jeno in the Niger River valley, at the dawn of the first century A.D.

There were other urban revolutions in Africa’s long history. The second occurred with the influence of Muslim Arabs starting in the tenth century A.D. In East Africa, Swahili language and culture emerged and developed in cities. In the same era in western Sudan, urban Islam brought the rise of religious architecture, which was diffused according to the well-known model of the Jenne Mosque. On the Coasts and in the immediate hinterlands, the Portuguese influence emerged, beginning in the fifteenth century, as it did a little everywhere in the world, from San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil to Goa in greater India. A military civilization developed, characterized by the presence of forts, giving rise to a complex culture founded on both war and commerce, a civilization more and more warlike as the slave trade grew.

It was, however, without contest the era of Colonial imperialism that provoked the most visible urban revolution in Africa, to the point that over the years geographers, ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians made the “colonial city” the symbol of “modernization” (that is to say Westernization) of African societies.[11] […]

Urban colonial history was surely a turning point, a new beginning, no doubt, but one that built on earlier urban elements, the heritage of which it is important to understand; and from whence proceeds the importance of being sensitive to the continuities and the ruptures of the preceding eras: between the historical cities of precolonial Africa and the urban civilization developing in the Africa of today and tomorrow, how may the same concept of a city apply? How much is there a difference of degree (such as smaller versus bigger cities) or of nature (premodern towns versus modern colonial cities?)

What does “urban revolution” mean?

It is less about an unprecedented influx of migrants (a hesitating and up and down movement between rural and urban areas which did not truly become a decisive urban migration before the Great Depression of the 1930s) than about a cumulative process of cultural reversals provoked by the city. The urban way of life exerts its power and determines the transformation of values and of mentalities of the non-city dwellers, newly arrived in the city, who henceforth submitted to the sway of institutions and urban culture intensified by the growth of traffic and of access to the city.

More than a half-century ago, the archeologist V. Gordon Childe had already advanced the idea of the intrinsic connection between urban growth and civilization.[12] The city grew up under, or even despite, the received ideas, customs, and laws of the surrounding rural world: thus, it acquired its dynamic potential, in regard to which one can reasonably use the term “revolutionary.” The process touches all city dwellers, regardless of social status, due to the loss of the customary village authorities’ control, and the crowded daily cohabitation inevitable in the city. For it is in the city, really, that popular culture expresses itself, created by the mixture of diverse customs and social orders, which, in their previous, rural societies, had been much more compartmentalized, controlled, and therefore rigid. Childe focused very precisely on the birth of western Mediterranean civilization beginning with Mesopotamia. However, the process is universal: it reproduces itself each time that social and political mutations together are likely to generate new urban forms. Each time the city gives birth, not to “civilization,” but to a new form of civilization, a civilization constantly remodeled by the same process of urbanization. Because urbanization is a process and not an instantaneous creation, new ways of life that are generated do not obliterate the previously existing dominant forms; to the contrary, these new forms absorb the older ones, steering them and sometimes even reviving them. This tendency is even stronger when the urban population is more recently borrowed from the preexisting rural environment, a characteristic of African cities in the twentieth century in the era of independence. This function of cultural melting pot is thus multiplied today, intensified by the city’s role as the focal point of surrounding civilization, extending the “urban way of life” well beyond the municipal borders.

As original as it is, we must not make the African city, especially not the colonial city, an exception in history. We could argue instead that every city – whatever society, place, and historical time are ?? considered – has always and everywhere constituted a tool of colonization. Because they are necessarily places of contact between several cultures and of living organisms that are constantly in the process of becoming, cities play a major role as social melting pot and cultural diffuser by exercising their impact on all that is under their authority. They are, strictly speaking, areas of cultural crystallization. This is why, to use a vocabulary popularized for historians by Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire,[13] and adapted to Africa by Achille Mbembe,[14] we can classify cities as spaces of colonization par excellence, not so much in the political sense as in the cultural sense of the term. This was particularly the case in the time of colonial imperialism. More than ever, cities were vectors of modernization. They constituted privileged arenas of the encounters and the combination resulting in the synthesis of values called “traditional” (which is to say implanted longer ago) reshaped by the action of prevalent Western incentives. This is why the usual dichotomy between traditional and modern is irrelevant: the process consists of combining, with more or less good intentions, the old and the new while integrating the heritage acquired from the need for change. […]

Thus, as opposed as they were to a new order, people were obliged to adapt, by choice or by force. Ironically, the more they resisted, the more they changed, because the act of resisting facilitates the discovery of new ideas, new techniques, and new know-how, in brief inducing new forms of mediation. All of this is what is considered “cultural space,” being well understood that these elements develop over time. Even in the case of brutal and accelerated trauma – as was the shock of the colonial conquest – the interaction between the old and the new stayed constant and constantly dynamic. In history, we do not jump directly from one group of social structures to another, whether the domain under consideration is institutional or economic, and especially not ideological or cultural.

A testament to good sense follows. To affirm, as anthropologists did, not so long ago, that Africans felt that they were “strangers to the city,”[15] is a Eurocentric presupposition. Certainly, the suddenness of the impact of European capitalism in the years from 1890 to 1920 was a brutal break from rural tradition. The city was the white seat of power; migrants were uprooted and used as a cheap labor reserve for the mines, in railroad yards, or for road construction. Africans thus found themselves dispossessed of a part of their universe. They were strangers in a city that was thereafter divided according to a political, economic, and cultural model – the colonial and Western model – which was not their own. However, these migrants learned, very quickly, how to reinstate themselves in the urban environment, much more quickly in any case than the whites would admit. This reality was obscured at the time by the colonizers, who freely considered and treated their “subjects” like strangers in the city.[16] The colonial scheme was simple: Africans are rural emigrants to the city, lost peasants in a foreign environment they are only passing through, a useful hypothesis that avoided setting aside time and money for investments in urbanism or the organization of the job market. The process of intercultural interaction, that which we could name cultural métissage, was for a long time ignored, until recent studies began to analyze it.[17]

Relegated to the domain of the “traditional,” Africans were left to themselves to “get by” in the city, in conditions which were not at all customary: density, promiscuity, health, housing, work – all were different. Having been condemned to “invent” their city, Africans improvised and innovated new solutions, and the city thus became an incomparable arena of cultural creation. They evidently inspired, in these new conditions, systems and techniques of construction, of solidarity, of work, and of belief that they practiced before and have practiced since. Even if the French, for example, had so thoroughly refused the African urban realities that they called the “native” quarters of the city “villages” because of the similar materials and construction techniques, daily life in these urban agglomerations little resembled their rural village settlements that at most numbered five hundred inhabitants. Africans from the countryside migrating into the city were not, mutatis mutandis, more or less uprooted than the poor peasants of nineteenth century England who went to the new industrial cities. They were thus forced to adapt. However, that which is adaptation is also creation: the new city dwellers, faced with an ultimatum to conform to the imposed mold, invented new survival strategies for the city combining the old and the new. In this way, since the colonial era, they have regained the cities where Africans constitute, as a general rule, the great majority.

It was not the Africans who were strangers to the city: it was the colonizers, and later the developers who remained long-time strangers in the African cities that they were incapable of seeing and understanding. What they did not understand, they referred to as “informal,” that is to say, not subjugated, not controlled, not identified, and not quantifiable according to Western norms. Today, some 70 to 80 percent of urban activity is “informal,” a good part of urban housing is called “precarious,” and urban culture described as “popular.” These judgments all show the same reasoning and designate who in the city does not conform or assimilate to Western rules.

After many years, it is the Africans who made these cities what they are today, not the contrary. The “adaptation” theory, very influential in the 1960s and 1970s, was a product of the dominant current of thought, which was that of urban bias.[18] Cities have been made symbols of African poverty in which the cities do nothing but make the misery of the countryside visible: it is the poor of the countryside who come to the city searching for a solution to their poverty. It is still considered proper to blame these cities of millions as the source of all evil. People refer to the village – that paradise lost of preindustrial society already exalted in the century of the Lumières (Enlightenment Century) for the “noble savage” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – as the reservoir of forgotten ancestral virtues. Overurbanization becomes once more the chief indicator of scandal in underdeveloped countries, of the coexistence of urban misery and rural poverty: the city becomes absolute evil, and the cessation of migration the miracle cure for disaster.

If the city makes the African, the African also makes the city. As Anthony King showed, “how people build affects how people think,” at least as much as “how people think governs how people build.”[19] In other words, urban space exerts a central influence in inducing processes of social and cultural change. Urban culture does not have to be thought of only in terms of adaptation (to the Western model), but in terms of syncretism and of exchange. Remembering this simple fact could be of significant help to experts. The City is produced by society, and it also acts upon the society that produces it. City dwellers in Africa already constitute, at the dawn of the third millennium, almost half of the population of the continent, and this percentage only grows. Urbanization in Africa is neither good nor bad, but, as it is everywhere else, an irreversible fact, where the future of societies is played out: leaving behind their rural organization and social habits, city dwellers create new modes of living, whether it is a matter of regrouping themselves into classes, in associations of all kinds (dancing, religious communities, trade-unions, welfare associations), or of the building of pidgin and new languages, of the creation of mixed artistic forms, sometimes not even existing beforehand such as popular and modern painting, of the elaboration of new concepts. All this evidently connotes a Western influence, but it is softened, integrated, and re-imagined by the autochthonous people.

African cities are complex ensembles in constantly becoming places of power, of social and political elaboration. As major arenas of mediation, African cities are more than ever the privileged place of cultural invention. […]

18. Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku, The Urban Heroine in Nigerian

Female Fiction (2005)

From: Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (eds.), Urbanization and African Cultures (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005): 51-62. – Soon after the first generation of modern anglophone writers in Africa – most of them men – had powerfully raised Africa’s voice in contemporary literature, African women writers and critics began to challenge the gender bias of that voice: African identities were more complex, they argued, than the male-oriented perspectives prevalent in much earlier African writing seemed to suggest. In the following essay, Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku, an African literature scholar teaching at Federal Polytechnic, Oko, Nigeria, presents an overview of the representation of urban women in contemporary Nigerian women’s writing and highlights important transformations in the projection of women’s identities in modern Nigerian literature.

It has been pertinent to examine the issues raised in these pioneer literary texts[20] as they concern the heroine caught between the threshold of modernity and traditional values. In these texts the females had mostly migrated from the rural to the urban areas, so an apparent dislocation of traditional patterns followed by the subsequent replacement with imported values would be inevitable. At this time, too, the city symbolized for most Africans a new life, affluence, the glamour and excitement of nightlife as well as enhanced socio-economic possibilities; indeed, a new way of living whose pull and attractions neither women nor men could resist. Ironically, though, one is dismayed to discover that the fiction of this era tended to blame the female for the moral decadence that characterized the much sought-after city life. In addition, the writers generally did little to create or present successful and dynamic female protagonists in their works.

The subsequent emergence of female writers has in no small measure sought to correct this anomaly. From the pioneering works of Flora Nwapa to much more contemporary texts, there has been a significant shift in emphasis. The female writer has sought in her work to critically examine in depth the character of her female protagonists. Far from presenting them as stereotypes, a concerted effort has been made to analyze her acts and to discern or establish a basis for them. In other words, there is a reassessment of the female reality and an interrogation of her existence, first as a human creature, and then as a female within the wider framework of society. [52-53]

Buchi Emecheta is another successful Nigeria female whose fiction has predominantly created diversely interesting heroines. […] Emecheta displays a remarkable ability to make an unrestrained incursion into spheres of the female existence. This often comes across in detailed psychological probing of her very diverse female characters, a feat which provides the reader with greater insight into the basis for their actions and reactions. Noting this trait, Chukukere again asserts:

Her protagonists include the deprived, discontented and social misfits, the “second-class” citizens, the slaves, the pathetic mothers who give all to their families but reap no rewards, and the dynamic survivors in a society that brutalizes them. Through these images, which she creates with poignancy and empathy, the novelist denounces fiercely sexual inequality in tones that approximate the militant rhetoric of contemporary feminism in Europe.[21]

Emecheta grew up mostly in Lagos, Nigeria, where she was born. Although she comes from the eastern part of the country, her experiences considerably inform and shape her novelistic concerns. Having experienced firsthand the all-too-glaring disappointment that more often than not welcomes the birth of a female child in a typical Igbo family (while a boy is being hoped and waited for), Emecheta clearly appreciates the position of the female in her society. Consequently, a number of her heroines struggle very determinedly to overcome the inhibiting bonds of womanhood in order to attain and achieve some measure of self-realization and actualization. […]

In The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Emecheta’s heroine, Nnu Ego, is another female who comes to a tragic end. She is humiliated out of her marriage to Amataokwu on account of her childlessness The bid to spare her further embarrassment in the village, especially as her former husband’s new wife is having sons in quick succession, causes her father, Agbadi, to select a man residing in Lagos as her new husband. Horrified and repulsed at the appearance of Nnaife, her new husband, Nnu Ego soon reconciles herself to her fate as she has little choice in the matter. Nnu Ego’s is a society that equates a woman’s failure with barrenness. Put differently, a woman who fails to conceive and bring forth a child soon becomes a social outcast, for she has neither self worth nor value. In the face of these crises which plague our protagonist, the reader sympathizes with her as she reflects sadly on her tragic circumstances:

She would have to put up with things. She would rather die in this town called Lagos than go back home and say, “father, I just do not like the man you have chosen for me”. Another thought ran through her mind: suppose this man made her pregnant, would that not be an untold joy to her people? (44)

At this point Nnu Ego is convinced that only motherhood can redeem her and reverse her lowly status. She would, thus, endure anything in her new marriage, if only Nnaife could make her pregnant and thus establish her identity as a woman. Little wonder she attempts suicide when her first baby, the much-cherished male child, dies at four weeks. The extent of her deprivation is here summed up:

Who was going to give her the energy to tell the world that she had once been a mother, but had failed? How would people understand that she had wanted so desperately to be a woman like everybody else, but had failed again? (61)

Although Nnu Ego eventually has many more children, and in quick succession, it is her particular attitude which Emecheta condemns. As Chukukere puts it: “Buchi Emecheta challenges the popular view of the supremacy of motherhood” (1995, 192). Having become a woman many times over, for Nnu Ego is now a mother of sons and daughters, she slaves away endlessly to raise them. Without much help from her husband, Nnu Ego’s life of abysmal indigence leaves her with only one consolation, that “…her old age would be happy, that when she died there would be somebody left behind to refer to her as ‘mother’” (54).

Ironically, Nnu Ego’s expectations are not met, for her children, particularly the highly priced (surely this should be “prized”?!) males, fail to take care of her. Her inability to comprehend her lot, her loneliness, and abandonment culminate in mental degeneration and she dies quietly by the roadside, “…with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made many friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother” (224).

As an urban heroine, Nnu Ego cuts a pathetic and tragic figure. So deeply embedded in her psyche are the stultifying traditional conventions of her culture that her inability to overcome them signifies her destruction. Her co-wife, Adaku, on the other hand, survives. Arriving as well from the village to the city of Lagos, Adaku realizes quickly that her position as Nnaife’s second wife would bring her neither joy nor fulfillment, particularly when she is cruelly reminded by the men folk that she only has female children, whose little value is all too glaring. Adaku moves out of this marriage, gains economic independence and social success, is able to send her daughters to school, and indeed appears to be leading a more fulfilled and confident life.

Emecheta’s texts, however, do not always present unsuccessful heroines. On the contrary, her females – though often subjugated, exploited, mistreated, and even enslaved – manage to struggle through these oddities to emerge victorious in many ways. To an extent, Emecheta seems to suggest that the bulk of the conflict a female contends with is a reflection of the mind-set. The idea becomes fairly conspicuous when we realize that a number of her stories are set in the urban centers, possibly because she herself was born in Lagos metropolis. The point is that even when the women migrate to the city, they carry with them the totality of their traditions, and they allow tradition to perpetually make its crushing demands on them. This probably explains why we witness the intense monologue that rages on in the battlefield of the female mind. [55-57]

Our last writer, Chinyere Grace Okafor, belongs to a much younger generation of female writers; it would seem that this current group of writers is working in an era when more females have access to education. It would seem, too, that a number of our contemporary writers were born in the cities where their parents had earlier migrated and settled. For this generation of female writers, their only experience of the rural area consists perhaps of occasional visits. At this time, too, much of Nigeria’s population is concentrated in the many urban centers that have developed across the country and the continent at large, so it is hardly surprising to discover that many more texts are set in the towns. In addition, the nation has come a long way from independence, so the initial conflicts resulting from culture shock in the wake of exposure to Western civilization have given way to some adjustment to and some acquisition of foreign values.

One implication of this new development is seen in the increasingly diverse thematic preoccupations of our new female writers. Obviously this amounts to a reflection of the times and the now highly complex society in which we live. We consequently see in some of our contemporary works heroines whose complexity matches that of the society that creates them. We also witness the depiction of females who are not always content to move out of their matrimonial homes […]. Rather, these new heroines make a concerted effort to ensure the survival of their marriages, which by extension and implication symbolize the survival of the nation. This attitude might be an unconscious reaction to the criticism of female writers, who are often accused of feminist inclinations, which makes them create heroines that persistently opt out of marriages.

In Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo’s fiction, for instance, we notice a tendency to create successful heroines who thrive in their marriages. Oftentimes, the reader is made to appreciate the love, warmth, and deep friendship that exists between couples irrespective of whatever problems might be. Examples include “The Blind Man of Ekwulu,” “Inspiration Bug” and The House of Symbols (2001). Indeed, in “Agarachaa Must Come Home” the heroine leaves home under rather unpleasant circumstances to be with the man she has married without her people’s consent. She believes her happiness lies in the relationship. Perhaps Ezeigbo deliberately reverses the situation in which the female flees her husband’s home, for in this case the protagonist flees her parents’ home in pursuit of love and fulfillment. Highly successful in her own marriage and career, Ezeigbo continues to portray enlightened urban heroines who prosper as wives, mothers and career women.

[…]

One thing comes across very significantly in the contemporary female writer’s representation of the urban heroine: She is not always a glamour girl who is irresistibly drawn to the frenzy (surely: the frenzy of city experience, or frenzied?) city experience. Neither is she a prostitute if she is unmarried. We have, rather, females, young or old, who are basically human and who, like their male counterparts, are involved intensely in the struggle for survival, which life represents. Educated or illiterate, these females diversely battle the female dilemma, seeking to uncover ways in which contemporary women can flourish. The desperate need to alter negative societal attitudes can also be glimpsed from the lives of our heroines. As Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie observes, “it is within marriage, that the Nigerian woman suffers the most oppression” (75). We discover then that although even the modern woman desires to be in a marriage and struggles to make it work, she will certainly opt out when circumstances make it impossible for her to remain.

Since the writers do not always set out to present perfect images of their heroines, we usually can appreciate their strengths as well as weaknesses. Often emancipated enough to make crucial choices, the urban heroine must always face the consequences of her actions. Again the writers’ portrayals of highly educated and successful women are as realistic as their presentation of semi-literate women who live in the urban areas with their families.

While the pioneering Nwapa and Emecheta’s works principally suggest that education and economic independence will invariably enhance the status of womanhood in patriarchal Nigeria, the works of the more contemporary writers make a slight addition to this premise. We therefore discover in the newer texts that whenever a conflict arises between a male and a female, her education or wealth is often cited as the basis for her misdemeanor. So then, the educated and wealthy woman will need some tact and caution if her objectives are to be realized.

On the whole, the urban heroine has clearly become the dominant female figure in Nigerian literature, owing naturally to the increased migration within and outside the country. Consequently, as various aspects of her life continue to be interrogated from diverse perspectives, one poignant idea emanates: the urban heroine’s greatest strength lies not just in her education or wealth, but, as Ogundipe-Leslie puts it, “in (her) right and ability to work in addition to (her) resourcefulness and great capacity for emotional survival”.[22] [59-61]

19. Bernth Lindfors, The Palm Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten (1978)

From: C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1978; London: Heinemann, 1979), 47-66. – Bernth Lindfors is emeritus professor of African literature at the University of Texas at Austin, author and editor of more than 40 books on African writing and an internationally renowned expert on anglophone African literature. In the following essay, a “classic” in literary scholarship on modern anglophone African fiction, Lindfors analyses the use of traditional Ibo proverbs in the novels of Chinua Achebe and highlights the importance of oral modes of verbal art for contemporary African literature.

Chinua Achebe is a writer well known throughout Africa and even beyond. His fame rests on solid personal achievements. As a young man of twenty-eight he brought honor to his native Nigeria by writing Things Fall Apart, the first novel of unquestioned literary merit from English-speaking West Africa. Critics tend to agree that no African novelist writing in English has yet surpassed Achebe’s achievement in Things Fall Apart, except perhaps Achebe himself. It was published in 1958 and Achebe has written three novels and won several literary prizes since. During this time his reputation has grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. Today he is regarded by many as Africa’s finest novelist. [47]

It is my contention that Achebe, a skilful artist, achieves an appropriate language for each of his novels largely through the use of proverbs. Indeed, Achebe’s proverbs can serve as keys to an understanding of his novels because he uses them not merely to add touches of local color but to sound and reiterate themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the society he is portraying. Proverbs thus provide a “grammar of values” […] by which the deeds of a hero can be measured and evaluated. By studying Achebe’s proverbs we are better able to interpret his novels.

Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, a famous warrior and expert farmer who has risen from humble origins to become a wealthy and respected leader of his clan. His entire life has been a struggle to achieve status, and he has almost attained a position of preeminence when he accidentally kills a kinsman. For this crime he must leave his clan and live in exile for seven years. When he returns at the end of the seventh year, he finds that things have changed in his home village. White missionaries have established a church and have made a number of converts. White men have also set up a court where the district commissioner comes to judge cases according to a foreign code of law. Okonkwo tries to rouse his clan to take action against these foreigners and their institutions. In a rage he kills one of the district commissioner’s messengers. When his clan does not support his action, he commits suicide.

Okonkwo is pictured throughout the novel as a wrestler. It is an appropriate image not just because he is a powerful brute of a man and a renowned wrestler, not just because his life has been a ceaseless struggle for status, but because in the eyes of his people he brings about his own downfall by challenging too powerful an adversary. This adversary is not the white man, but rather Okonkwo’s chi, his personal god or guardian spirit.[23] Okonkwo is crushed because he tries to wrestle with his chi. The Ibo have a folktale about just such a wrestler.

Once there was a great wrestler whose back had never known the ground. He wrestled from village to village until he had thrown every man in the world. Then he decided that he must go and wrestle in the land of spirits, and become champion there as well. He went, and beat every spirit that came forward. Some had seven heads, some ten; but he beat them all. His companion who sang his praise on the flute begged him to come away, but he would not. He pleaded with him but his ear was nailed up. Rather than go home he gave a challenge to the spirits to bring out their best and strongest wrestler. So they sent him his personal god, a little, wiry spirit who seized him with one hand and smashed him on the stony earth.[24] [This paragraph should be indented as a quote, as in the original!]

Although this tale does not appear in Things Fall Apart, there is sufficient evidence in the novel to suggest that Okonkwo is being likened to one who dares to wrestle with a spirit. A hint is contained in the first paragraph of the opening chapter which tells how Okonkwo gained fame as a young man of eighteen by throwing an unbeaten wrestler “in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights” (p. 1). And later, when Okonkwo commits the sin of beating one of his wives during the sacred Week of Peace, “… people said he had no respect for the gods of his clan. His enemies said his good fortune had gone to his head. They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy meal that he challenged his chi” (p. 26). […]

When Okonkwo returns from exile, he makes the mistake of believing that if he says yes strongly enough, his chi and his clan will agree. No doubt he should have known better. He should have accepted his years in exile as a warning from his chi. In his first months of exile he had come close to understanding the truth:

Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true – that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation. (p. 117)

However, as the years of exile pass, Okonkwo’s fortunes improve and he begins to feel “that his chi might now be making amends for the past disaster” (p. 154). He returns to his clan rich, confident, and eager to resume his former position of leadership. When he finds his village changed, he tries to transform it into the village it had once been. But although he says yes very strongly, his chi and his clan say nay. Okonkwo the wrestler is at last defeated.

Quite a few of the proverbs that Achebe uses in Things Fall Apart are concerned with status and achievement:

… the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. (p. 5)

… if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. (p. 6)

… a man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness. (p. 16)

The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did. (p. 18)

… you can tell a ripe corn by its look. (p. 18)

I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle. (p. 148)

… as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. (p. 165)

Such proverbs tell us much about the values of Ibo society, values by which Okonkwo lives and dies. Such proverbs also serve as thematic statements reminding us of some of the major motifs in the novel – e.g., the importance of status, the value of achievement, the idea of man as shaper of his own destiny. [50-53]

Achebe’s most recent novel, A Man of the People,[25] is set in contemporary Nigeria and takes as its hero a young schoolteacher, Odili Samalu. Odili, who tells his own story, is moved to enter politics when his mistress is seduced by Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P. and Minister of Culture. Odili joins a newly-formed political party and prepares to contest Nanga’s seat in the next election. He also tries to win the affections of Nanga’s fiancée, a young girl Nanga is grooming as his “parlour wife.” In the end Odili loses the political battle but manages to win the girl. Nanga loses everything because the election is so rough and dirty and creates such chaos in the country that the Army stages a coup and imprisons every member of the Government. […]

Contemporary Nigeria is, after all, the real subject of the novel. What sort of society is it that allows men like Nanga to thrive while men like Odili suffer? Some important clues are provided in the proverbs in the novel. In contemporary Nigeria one must, for example, be circumspect:

… the proverbial traveller-to-distant-places who must not cultivate enmity on his route. (p. 1)

… when one slave sees another cast into a shallow grave he should know that when the time comes he will go the same way. (p. 40)

… if you respect today’s king, others will respect you when your turn comes. (p. 70)

… if you look only in one direction your neck will become stiff. (p. 90)

But one must not be unduly inquisitive:

… naked curiosity – the kind that they say earned Monkey a bullet in the forehead. (p. 153)

The inquisitive eye will only blind its own sight. (p. 164)

A man who insists on peeping into his neighbour’s bedroom knowing a woman to be there is only punishing himself. (p. 164)

One should take advantage of opportunities (“… if you fail to take away a strong man’s sword when he is on the ground, will you do it when he gets up …?” p. 103); capitalize on good fortune (“[would] a sensible man … spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth?” p. 2); and avoid wasting time on trivialities (“… like the man in the proverb who was carrying the carcass of an elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grasshopper” p. 80). Most important of all, one must be sure to get one’s share. Like the world of Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease,[26] this is a world in which “ours is ours but mine is mine” (p. 140).

One must not only get one’s share, one must also consume it. Eating is an important image in the novel. Politicians like Nanga tell their tribesmen, “Our people must press for their fair share of the national cake” (p. 13). Those who stand in the way of such hungry politicians are branded as “the hybrid class of Western-educated and snobbish intellectuals who will not hesitate to sell their mothers for a mess of pottage” (p. 6). These intellectuals, Nanga says, “have bitten the finger with which their mother fed them” (p. 6). Although some people believe that God will provide for everyone according to His will (“He holds the knife and He holds the yam,” p. 102), the politicians know that the fattest slices of the national cake together with the richest icing will go to the politicians who hold the most power. This is the reason elections are so hotly contested. In these elections people are quite willing to support a corrupt politician like Nanga in the belief that if he remains well fed, he may let a few crumbs fall to his constituents. When someone like Odili protests that such politicians are using their positions to enrich themselves, the people answer cynically, “Let them eat, … after all when white men used to do all the eating did we commit suicide?” (p. 161). Besides, who can tell what the future may bring? “… who knows? It may be your turn to eat tomorrow. Your son may bring home your share” (p. 162). It is not surprising that Odili sums up this era as a “fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime. … a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut or, in language ever more suited to the times: ‘you chop, me self I chop, palaver finish’” (p. 167).

The reason such an era comes to an end is that the politicians make the mistake of overeating, of taking more than their share. In proverbial terms, they take more than the owner can ignore. This key proverb is used four times in the novel. Twice it is applied to a miserly trader who steals a blind man’s stick: “Josiah has taken away enough for the owner to notice,” people say in disgust. “Josiah has now removed enough for the owner to see him” (p. 97). Odili later reflects on the situation and the proverb:

I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be full and none the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the will of the whole people. (p. 97)

In the middle of his campaign against Nanga, Odili wishes that “someone would get up and say: ‘No, Nanga has taken more than the owner could ignore!’” (p. 122). But it is only after much post-election violence and an army takeover that Odili’s wish comes true. Only after such upheavals result in the establishment of a new order do people openly admit that Nanga and his cohorts “had taken enough for the owner to see” (p. 166).

Thus, in A Man of the People, as in Achebe’s other novels, proverbs are used to sound and reiterate major themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the society Achebe is portraying. By studying the proverbs in a novel, we gain insight into the moral issues with which that novel deals. Because they provide a grammar of values by which the actions of characters can be measured and evaluated, proverbs help us to understand and interpret Achebe’s novels.

Achebe’s literary talents are clearly revealed in his use of proverbs. One can observe his mastery of the English language, his skill in choosing the right words to convey his ideas, his keen sense of what is in character and what is not, his instinct for appropriate metaphor and symbol, and his ability to present a thoroughly African world in thoroughly African terms. It is this last talent that enables him to convince his readers “that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”[27] [61-65]

20. Arlene A. Elder, Indian Writing in East and South Africa (1992)

From: Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 115-38. – People of South Asian origin (often generically referred to as “Indians”) have played an important role in the history, culture and literature particularly of East and Southern Africa. While many of the estimated 500,000 South Asians living in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1960s left or were expelled from East Africa in subsequent decades, South Africa has become home to some 1,300,000 people of Indian origin, one of the largest Indian diasporic communities worldwide. In her article on Indian Literature in East and South Africa, Arlene A. Elder, a specialist in African Literature and Culture currently teaching at the University of Cincinnati, provides a succinct overview of the history of Indians in Africa focussing on the economic origins of Indian migration to Africa, the social and political role of Indians in Africa, colonial “divide and rule” strategies and the role of the Indian population in anticolonial movements.

Although Indians in Africa are, typically, classed together and referred to popularly and in the general literature simply as Asians, this population is composed of many different cultural groups and is certainly aware of its own diversity. Muslims, including the Ismaili followers of the Aga Khan, Isnasheries, Bohras, Memans, and Baluchis, various castes of Hindus, and Catholic Goans have been the most numerous and influential.[28] Much of their literature reveals conflicts among them due to religious and/or cultural differences.

East Africa was the focus of Indian trade. Both in eastern and southern Africa, Britain ultimately predominated in the “European scramble,” acquiring control, first, of Zanzibar, then of what was to become Kenya and Uganda, then, after the First World War, of German East Africa, principally Tanganyika.

Three early schools of thought emerged about India’s role in Africa and the situation of the Indian immigrants there:

One can be called imperialist because of its advocation of an Indian colony to serve as an outlet for India’s surplus population. … Most of those interested in East Africa comprise a second group which stressed the Indians’ right to equality of status and treatment throughout the Empire. … For this group, which was mainly Liberal in political affiliation, the Indians’ struggle for equality in the British overseas dependencies was closely tied to the nationalist movement at home. … The third group was humanitarian in that it subordinated Indian interests in East Africa to those of the African majority.[29]

These conflicting points of view were debated throughout the colonial period in East Africa, Britain, and India alike.

For a considerable time, India’s role as a trading partner, especially with Kenya and Uganda, was extensive, greater even that that of Britain or Germany; therefore, its influence upon the situation of the immigrant Indians was also significant. However, most of its attention was commanded by the more discriminatory government in South Africa.

The first large group of Indians arrived in southern Africa in 1860, principally in the then British colony of Natal, to provide labor on the newly established European sugar plantations.[30] Primarily Hindus, these indentured workers were bound for three, and later five, years and at the end of this tenure could renew their original contract, return to India at government expense, or accept a piece of crown land equal in value to the cost of a return passage. The majority took the land, remaining in Natal as free citizens, becoming market gardeners, fishmongers, venders of fruits and vegetables, artisans of various sorts, moneylenders, small shopkeepers, and traders.[31] “Passenger” Indians followed, British subjects paying their own way, mostly Muslims who chose to emigrate to Natal for commercial purposes. In addition to agricultural work, the unskilled Indians engaged in labor in the coal mines and on the railways.

The Indian community in Natal thrived and extended to Transvaal and Cape Colony as well. Needless to say, its growth provoked resentment among the Europeans, and various discriminatory laws were passed to restrict Asian power, for instance the Indian Immigration Act of 1895 in Natal and even harsher regulations in Transvaal. Gregory reports that Indians were not attracted to the Orange Free State because of the extreme discrimination that had existed there all along against all non-Europeans: “The constitution of 1854 expressly conferred the benefits of citizenship only on ‘white persons,’ and Indians were subsequently regarded as ‘coloureds’”.[32] […]

With the exception of South Africa, it was in Kenya that the British government’s policy of favoring European interests most threatened Indian welfare and sharpened their understanding of their fortunes being linked to those of the black Africans, since both were, in reality, colonized peoples. By 1939, however, their situation throughout the region was one of relative privilege:

The Indians’ place in the Government and society of Kenya had become fairly well stabilized, somewhere in the scale of privilege, power, and prestige between the position of the European community at the top and that of the Arab and African communities at the base.[33]

Before reaching this position of segregated but comparable economic and social comfort, however, the Kenyan Indian population found itself faced with discrimination resulting, primarily, from European greed for the best land and fear of Indian/African political affiliation against them.

It is true that in both Tanganyika and Uganda, the non-European populations cooperated to resist European hegemony. In 1906 at Kilwa in Tanganyika, a number of Indians were convicted of smuggling arms and supplies to the African Maji Maji rebels attempting to overthrow the harsh German rule,[34] and in Uganda, where there was also a relatively small European population, the Indian planter class generally cooperated with the Africans, especially the Ganda.[35] It was in Kenya, however, where the imperialist tactics of the British were the keenest, that the most cohesive African and Indian political cooperation developed. The alliance between Manilal A. Desai of the Nairobi Indian Association and the Gikuyu reformer Harry Thuku resulted in the formation of the East African Association).[36]

As might be expected, European reaction to this cooperation was swift; it took two forms, direct suppression and subversion. An extremely effective tactic was Britain’s pitting of African political interests against Indian in the region. After the First World War, when both anti-European and pro-European sentiments in Kenya were speeding toward revolution, the cry for “native paramountcy” was raised repeatedly by white settlers and encouraged by Winston Churchill, who had succeeded as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921. This sudden concern with African rights was offered as a justification for denying Indians equal citizenship with whites and free entry into the colony. Clearly, it served the useful purpose of undermining the collective strength of the non-European populations.

The political wedge forced between the African and Indian communities was particularly effective, because their unity had always been primarily political, not economic. From the beginning of Indian immigration, because of the frequent use of influence by India to support its emigrants and the political use to which Indians increasingly could be put in the maintenance of British “indirect rule,” their economic situation was a privileged one.

Africans became increasingly aware over time that the proposition that at least a portion of East Africa become a colony of India was being seriously entertained; that Indian/European political equality was slowly being approached; and, especially, that the Indian merchants with whom Africans dealt were sometimes almost as unscrupulous as the European settlers and bureaucrats in their dealings with them. In both Uganda and Kenya, instances of Indians taking advantage of Africans in business transactions occurred, and local clashes resulted. Some Indians, too, were attacked during the Tanganyika Maji Maji rebellion.[37] On a larger scale, friction developed between the two communities throughout East Africa because legal restrictions on landholding and farming practices guaranteed the Indians’ dominant economic position.[38] Rumors of extensive areas in the lowlands being set aside exclusively for Indian colonization as well as what appeared to be plans gradually to decrease differences between the legal status of the Indian and European communities, but not the African, despite Churchill’s pronouncement, exacerbated this resentment.

It is predictable, however, that the main opposition to Indian advancement came not from the Africans but from the Europeans, who saw their own place of privilege threatened.[39] Ironically, this European recalcitrance and greed fueled the fires of independence movements in both East Africa and India and has led to longstanding, outspoken Indian opposition, like that of Mahatma Gandhi, to apartheid in South Africa. In East African countries after independence, Uganda being the most noticeable example with its expulsion of Asians in 1973, efforts to Africanize the economies have led to sometimes violent, always destabilizing effects upon the Asian communities. [116-118]

21. Preben Kaarsholm, Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe (2005)

From: Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac (ed.), Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005), 16-23. – Preben Kaarsholm is Associate Professor in International Development Studies at the Department of Society and Globalisation of Roskilde University, Denmark and is a well-known specialist on Southern Africa. The following extract provides an overview of the relationship between recent political developments and contemporary literature and media in Zimbabwe.

Democracy vs. ‘the Third Chimurenga’

In a recent article, Christine Sylvester has argued that political development in Zimbabwe after independence can be divided into three phases – 1980 to 1990, 1990 to 1997, and 1997 onwards.[40] ‘Unity’ in 1987-8, the establishment of the Executive Presidency, and the 1990 elections mark the divide between the first two periods, while the challenges for compensation presented to the ZANU-PF[41] government in 1997 and the concessions made to war veterans[42] – and the break with structural adjustment[43] – signal the transition into a third period. A second wave of challenges came with the establishment of the National Constitutional Assembly and – in September 1999 – with the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change,[44] leading up to the defeat of Mugabe and ZANU-PF in the constitutional referendum of February 2000. This was followed by the parliamentary elections of June 2000, which the Movement for Democratic Change nearly won, and which established a pluralism and balance of forces between two parliamentary parties that had never been political realities in Zimbabwe before.

Coinciding with – and accelerating in response to – this development, was the government’s encouragement of land invasions and of campaigns against white farmers and their farm-workers of ‘alien’ origin, followed by new land laws and the confiscations of large numbers of commercial farms. Many of these farms were appropriated by ZANU-PF dignitaries and allies, though land reform was clearly also being re-launched as a populist political resource which had been kept on reserve to bolster challenges to the one-party regime. It was an attempt to set the rural masses against an urban population, which was voting against and being increasingly critical of ZANU-PF governance, and protesting against unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, and declining living standards. Also – both during election campaigns and in the wake of the MDC’s strong performance – there were increasing attempts to discourage opposition through violence and intimidation, with war veterans, ZANU-PF village committees, and youth militias […] tracking down and punishing initiatives in dispute of the ruling party, thus reintroducing high levels of violence to the politics of both township and countryside in Zimbabwe.

In this way, the ‘Third Chimurenga’[45] was unleashed – following those of the 1890s and 1970s – to keep the ruling party in power and undermine the new forces of opposition. […]

The recent history of Zimbabwean literature should be seen in the context of this political development, and of the emergence of new forms of democratic opposition. The debates undertaken in literature – and within other cultural genres and institutions in Zimbabwe – have helped to develop elements of a Zimbabwean public sphere – or, perhaps more accurately, of interacting local public spheres in different parts of the country. And these have helped to move political differentiations and disagreements from centering on issues of nationalism, identity politics and post-colonial rivalry or unity to matters of accountability, democracy and the problems involved in reconciling priorities of redistribution and of rights. […]

A growth in outspokenness and critical confidence […] can be found in other types of literary expression in Zimbabwe from the mid-1980s onward. In poetry examples can be found in the bitter expressions of post-war disillusion by ex-guerrilla writers like Ducas Fambai or Freedom Nyamubaya.[46] The poetry aims itself at the continuation of inequality and injustices after independence (as in Nyamubaya’s Mount Pleasant poem, ‘They Live Up There’),[47] or criticizes the betrayal of the ‘real’ revolution that politicians have been guilty of and their giving up of any pretence at more fundamental social transformation. Like other writings by former guerrillas, this poetry is critical of the post-independence state, but can also be seen as foreshadowing resentments that could be mobilized at the end of the 1990s, when war veterans were called upon by Robert Mugabe and a ZANU-PF government under pressure to help invade and expropriate white-owned farms.

Critical confidence is powerfully present in the post-independence publications of Dambudzo Marechera, first and foremost in his Mindblast, or The Definitive Buddy from 1984 – an energetic and irreverent mixture of poetry, prose and drama fragments, which became a cult book among young readers in Zimbabwe, was withdrawn from circulation, but kept re-surfacing. After his death in 1987, there were further publications of Marechera poetry (Cemetery of the Mind, 1992) and of his early novel The Black Insider (1990) – books, however, which lacked the Allen Ginsberg-like[48] freshness and audacity of Mindblast, and never had anything like its provocative appeal within Zimbabwe.

Even more directly than in print literature, the development of freedom and confidence of expression has been found in some of the abundant township theatre which came into being also from the mid-1980s, and which represented a much more direct way of interacting with audiences than written literature. At the same time, theatre practitioners performed to much broader publics – both in township community halls and in the rural areas, often using schools as venues for plays and discussions and liaising with school teachers as influential, ‘organic’ local intellectuals, and go-betweens between town and country.

Some of this theatre – like the productions of Cont Mhlanga and the Amakhosi group, or of Andrew Whaley and Meridian Theatre Company – was of a very high quality and belongs to the most exciting specimens of popular culture in post-independence Zimbabwe. Such writers and dramatists represented new and different types of intellectuals – relating to society, to the state and to readers in new ways which were a far cry from both the moralizing and the existentialist focus on alienation of some of the colonial-era writers. The repercussions of radical theatre have been felt also in the production of television and radio serials – thus in mid-2003, a very popular radio soap series, Mopani Junction, was closed down by the Ministry of Information. The series had had American funding to disseminate information about the background and consequences of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, but had also taken on the epidemic’s political and social context in a sophisticated and critical way. Both Amakhosi Studios and former Meridian theatre activists were involved in the production of the series, which was broadcast in Shona, Ndebele and English.[49]

The removal of Mopani Junction from the airwaves coincided with the banning of the independent newspaper The Daily News, which since 1999 had been the most critical public media outlet in Zimbabwe.[50] Under new media laws – introduced by a Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, who had posed as a major spokesman for democracy in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s – this was not the first attempt at the life of The Daily News. Neither was it the first Government strike-out at critical cultural voices. Since 1999, for example, the band which more than anybody in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to culturally embody Zimbabwe’s revolution – Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited – have had three albums banned: Chimurenga Explosion, Chimurenga Rebel, and Toyi-Toyi. All contain songs critical of government corruption and the increasing misery of living conditions. In this way Mapfumo’s career as a performer was brought full circle – in 1977, he was imprisoned by the Rhodesian authorities for ninety days because of his song ‘Hokoyo’ (Watch out!).[51]

Critical media have played a leading part in the battle for ‘openliness’ in Zimbabwe. […]

Literature and media have […] interacted: novels in English, Shona and Ndebele have been reviewed at length, and the monthlies have carried short stories and poems. Literary writers have also crossed over into journalism and political commentary – as in Stanley Nyamfukudza’s powerful article on “Zimbabwe’s Political Culture Today”, published in Moto in 1988, which heralded the democratic challenges and changes in opposition under way. More recently satire and critical analysis have been brought together in Chenjerai Hove’s weekly columns in The Standard; they were collected as Palaver Finish in 2002.[52]

Palaver Finish provides insights into the ways in which local public spheres are unfolding in rural buses and around school teachers traveling between town and countryside – carrying loads of old newspapers with them to satisfy the reading hunger of villagers. Which, again, is why

Teacher is the first target of violence by ZANU-PF. The ruling party wishes it could post a few youths at every growth point, with tins of paint so that they repaint all those buses with horrible slogans deriding the new political parties. But they cannot afford it. They send youths with boxes of matches to burn the buses that bring such wrong ideas to the villagers. They also wish roads had not been constructed to some parts of the country so that everyone would stay where they have always been, without having Teacher travelling to and from the city conveying dangerous new ideas (Hove, 2002: 50).

Hove also writes of what is happening to reading in Zimbabwe in the political and economic crisis of the new millennium – how Zimbabweans are “a nation of talkers” who “prefer to borrow the book rather than buy it,” and therefore the libraries – now, like schools, without money to buy books – have much greater significance than they do in e.g. Europe:

The European book is meant for the shelf. The African book is meant for circulation. When I sell ten thousand copies of one of my titles in Europe, I know it means about five thousand readers. If I sell the same number of books in Africa, I know it means at least fifty thousand readers: the book circulates until it falls apart. In Europe, the book is arrested on the bookshelf (Hove, 2002: 84f).

Since this was written, Chenjerai Hove has gone into exile, joining Thomas Mapfumo and a growing diaspora of intellectuals and other Zimbabweans for whom life inside the country has become difficult or intolerable. Following the new media laws, the closure of The Daily News, and the charges being laid against its editorial staff, fears were expressed that this would now be followed by a more general clamp-down on civil society organizations. In many ways the prospects for democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe – as well as for redistributive growth – look gloomy, and it might seem that the political development process, which was gaining momentum internally in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, has now been reversed. […]

On the other hand, the Zimbabwean contestation has become a broader battle between different political cultures, and for or against a new democratic agenda which has grown out of the nation’s post-independence history and a process of learning from experiences of violence and abuses of power. From this point of view, the political development of Zimbabwe has been a progressive one, in which the quality of opposition has increased, as the nationalist agenda coming to power at independence has become outdated. There are reasons to believe that this learning process will be difficult to reverse: the memory of struggles for democracy from the late 1990s onwards will prove to be as difficult to erase as those of the violence of 1980s, or of the liberation war.

In this process of development and remembering, Zimbabwean literature and authors have had a prominent part to play: they have contributed to the critical dialogues which laid the foundations for the emergence of locally based democratic demands. In spite of external pressures, intimidation, and circumstances conducive to self-censorship, writers have taken on the understandings of history and the myths of the birth of the nation, sanctioned by the powers that be in order to keep themselves in place. Authors have questioned and analysed the contradictions of the liberation war, whose brutality outlived it and influenced politics and social interaction in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly at a certain remove and with delays, literature has tried to come to terms with the unfolding of post-independence violence, with dissident threats and violent government reprisals, and has been part of the debates which carried forward the movement for democracy and a revised constitution from the late 1990s. This movement for pluralism involved not only the Movement for Democratic Change but also an array of other parties and mobilizations for political and cultural recognition.

At the same time, as was pointed out above, there are also elements in the critical discourse of post-independence literature – and in the writings of ex- guerrillas in particular – which emphasize the incompleteness of the Zimbabwean revolution after 1980, and can be seen as pointing forward to the ‘Third Chimurenga’ at the turn of the millennium, when Robert Mugabe and the ZANU PF government were able very skillfully to deflect social resentment from anti-government criticism and re-direct it into mobilization for ‘accelerated’ populist land reform. It will be interesting to study the songs and writings forthcoming in support and criticism of this belated resumption of the liberation war.

In their debating of violence, Zimbabwean literary writers have fulfilled a function of social conscience, and have shown a passion of commitment unparalleled in neighbouring national literatures. […]

Together with other cultural forms – magazines, theatre groups, churches, newspaper-carrying teachers, country buses, musicians, story-tellers, n’angas[53] – literature in post-independence Zimbabwe is part of a landscape of voices, genres and institutions that make out the contours of a public sphere. This has been a landscape full of breaks and ruptures, but one also entailing much movement towards overcoming these breaks; and much intellectual noise and music, made in order to be heard and understood, not silenced. The dynamics of this landscape […] would make it difficult to maintain that a notion of civil society as organized public life, providing a counterpoint to that of the state, has no serious meaning in a country like Zimbabwe – or that democracy is not an African or locally rooted project.

-----------------------

[1] Simon Kapwepwe (1922-1980), nationalist politician who became Vice-President of Zambia after independence. [FSE]

[2] Both Chilenje and Woodlands form part of Zambia’s capital Lusaka. [FSE]

[3] Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Fabric of African Cultures”, Foreign Affairs, 42.4 (1964), 619-20. [FSE]

[4] Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Fabric of African Cultures”, Foreign Affairs, 42.4 (1964), 625. [FSE]

[5] “King Kong”, written by Todd Matshikiza and others, premiered with an all-black cast in Johannesburg in 1959 and soon won international acclaim; “Sponono”, written by Alan Paton and Gideon Nxumalo, was the first South African musical to be staged on Broadway in 1964. [FSE]

[6] Chinua Achebe (see text 8 above) and Amos Tutuola were among the best-known Nigerian writers in the 1960s. Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart was published in 1958; Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952. [FSE]???

[7] Botswana gained its independence from Britain in 1966. The country had become a British Protectorate (rather than a colony) in 1894, a move which prevented it being absorbed into South Africa. [GVD]

[8] Serowe lies 250 km north of the capital, Gaborone. Bessie Head has painted a portrait of the village in her book Serowe: Village of the Rainwind (1981), which essentially is a communal oral history based on almost one hundred interviews with villagers of all ages and occupations. [GVD]

[9] Khama the Great (1875-1923) was the Chief of the Bamangwato, whose capital was at Serowe. Head greatly admired his achievements as a reformer and negotiator with the British and devoted a chapter of her book on Serowe to him. [GVD]

[10] Akin Mabogunje, Urbanisation in Nigeria (London: Africana Publishing Company, 1968), 33.

[11] A.M. O’Connor, The African City (London: Hutchinson University Library for Africa, 1983).

[12] V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21.1(1950): 3-17.

[13] Pierre Nora (under the direction of), Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

[14] Achille Mbembe, La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-1960, l'histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (Paris, Éditions Karthala, 1996).

[15] Leonard Plotnikov, Strangers to the City: Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).

[16] See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996).

[17] See Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).

[18] Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). About the concept of overurbanization, see among others: N. V. Sovani, “The Analysis of Overurbanization,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2 (1964): 113-122; Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization Reconsidered,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 30 (1982): 173-189.

[19] Anthony D. King, “Colonial Architecture Re-visited: Some Issues for Further Debate,” in Changing South Asia: City and Culture, ed. Kenneth Ballhatchet and David Taylor (London, Asia Research Service, University of London), 1984: 99; already quoted by C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “The Process of Urbanization in Africa, from the Origins to the Beginnings of Independence, An Overview Paper,” African Studies Review 34.1 (1991): 1-98.

[20] The author refers to a previous part of her essay where she discusses representations of women in earlier anglophone African popular fiction written mainly by male authors. [FSE]

[21] Gloria Chukukere, Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction (Enungu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1995), 165.

[22] Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994), 77.

[23] There has been some controversy about the meaning of “chi”. See Austin J. Shelton, “The Offended Chi in Achebe’s Novels”, Transition, 13 (1964), pp. 36-37, and Donatus Nwoga, “The chi Offended”, Transition, 15 (1964), p. 5. Shelton prefers to translate it as “God Within”, but Nwoga, an Ibo, supports Achebe’s translation of it as “personal god”. […]

[24] Quoted from Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964), pp. 31-32. […]

[25] Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (London: Heinemann, 1966). More than twenty years later, Achebe published a fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1987). [FSE]

[26] Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1960).

[27] Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation”, Nigeria Magazine, 81 (June 1964), p. 157.

[28] Isnasheries: a branch of the Ismailite faith in Zanzibar; Bohras: another branch of the Ismailite faith centred in Gujarat (India) and Yemen with followers also in East Africa; Memans: East African branch of the Ismailite faith based on Indian caste divisions; Baluchis: ethnic group descended from Medians and Persians, today mainly located in Pakistan and Iran as well as numerous neighbouring countries and diasporic locations such as East Africa. [FSE]

[29] Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire 1890-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 503.

[30] Ibid., 81.

[31] Ibid., 126.

[32] Ibid., 128.

[33] Gregory, India and East Africa, 455.

[34] Ibid., 103.

[35] Ibid., 400.

[36] Ibid., 205.

[37] Gregory, India and East Africa, 104.

[38] Ibid., 401.

[39] Ibid., 494.

[40] Christine Sylvester, “Remembering and Forgetting ‘Zimbabwe’: Towards a Third Transition”, in Paul Gready (ed.), Political Transition: Politics and Cultures (London: Pluto Press, 2003). [GVD]

[41] The acronym ZANU-PF stands for the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front. [GVD]

[42] The term “war veterans” refers to those who took part in the liberation struggle and subsequently led the farm invasions. [GVD]

[43] The term “structural adjustment” refers to a programme of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) implemented in Zimbabwe in 1991.[GVD]

[44] In terms of the so-called “Global Political Agreement” (GPA) the party currently forms part of a coalition government with ZANU-PF. The leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, is Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. [GVD]

[45] The first Chimurenga was the uprising against the incoming white settlers in 1896, the second was the guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front government in 1972-1979, which led to liberation in 1980. The word chimurenga means to fight or to struggle in Shona, the language of the majority of Zimbabwe’s largest ethnic groupans. [GVD]

[46] Ducas Fambai’s poetry was published in the 1980s in the trade union periodical Vanguard, as well as in the anthology Another Battle Begun (Zimbabwe Project, 1985). Freedom Nyamubaya later co-authored a collection of poetry and short stories in Shona with Irene Mahamba – also a former guerrilla.

[47] Mount Pleasant is an upmarket suburb of Harare. [GVD]

[48] Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was perhaps the best known American Beat poet. [GVD]

[49] Shona, Ndebele and English are the major languages spoken in Zimbabwe. [GVD]

[50] In 2010 it was announced that three independent newspapers, including the Daily News, would be allowed. [GVD]

[51] Rhodesia was the colonial name of present-day Zimbabwe. [GVD]

[52] Chenjerai Hove, Palaver Finish (Harare: Weaver Press, 2002). [GVD]

[53] In Ndebele the term designates a traditional healer or diviner. [GVD]

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download