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By Abba A. Abba
Abstract
Since their emergence in the early 1960s, African literary works have served as fictional trenches for interrogating diverse shades of ideological misrepresentation of identities and its discontents in the continent. By 1962 when the challenges and prospects of literature in Africa formed the focal point of African Writers conference at Makerere University, Uganda, the interest of the African writer was fundamentally focused on colonial entanglements and the battle to decolonize the continent. Today and over a time range of 60 years, increasing crisis of ethnic identity is one of many challenges that have left the continent vulnerable and all these have deepened the search for a more habitable Africa. Offering an overview of the foundation of African literary engagement with the trope of postcolonial precarity, and drawing specifically on Nigerian literary landscape, this paper examines how African literature has established itself as a potent tool for rebuilding a continent ravaged by ethnic self-interest. Specifically, it teases out the extent to which the discipline responds to the myths of ethnic mistrust and fragility of peace and how African writers deploy their texts as trenches for negotiating viable togetherness in a multi-ethnic space.
Introduction
At this critical moment in our postcolonial history, the uncontrolled wave of insecurity arising from insurgencies and economic disaster is a textbook affirmation that what our continent requires most urgently is a sudden outbreak of peace. The most fundamental role of the African literary soldiers for this purpose centres on the representation of not just the terrors that confront our world but also how to find hope in such a world. Let me proceed by quoting a renown Nigerian writer, Cyprian Ekwensi in his letter to Keith Sambrook on 7 September, 1966:
Here in Nigeria, we live in very troubled times. There is a continuous expectation of disaster which somehow seems to be postponed from minute to minute by some unseen forces. There are prayers that the disaster never comes and there is the fear that it is preordained to come somehow and that if it does not come the purification process necessary for the building of a permanent Nigeria will not be commenced.
Although Ekwensi’s observation is not unconnected with the heated political situation in Nigeria in the period preceding the Nigeria civil war, it also reflects the ethnic tensions that prevail all over Africa.
Since its emergence in the early 1960s, African literature has constructed fictional trenches for interrogating ideological misrepresentation of identities and its discontents in the continent. By 1962 when the challenges and prospects of literature in Africa formed the focal point of African Writers’ conference at Makerere University, Uganda, the interest of the African writer was fundamentally on colonial entanglements and the battle to decolonize the continent. Today and over a time range of 60 years, increasing crises and cases of human vulnerability have deepened the search for a more habitable Africa. From socio-political crises to environmental catastrophes, from religious extremism to insurgencies and terrorism, from the deafening noise of looting machines to cyber fraud, from kidnapping to ethnic mistrust and separatist agitations, our continent now sits on a time-bomb which draws attention to Edward Said’s warning that “we are bombarded by prepackaged and reified representations of the world that usurp consciousness.”
In all of these, African literature as a discipline has so far lent itself as a crucial infrastructure for prototyping better futures for the postcolonies and constructing knowledge in paradoxical circumstances. Conceived as “a technique of good trouble”, the discipline has demonstrated its power to reveal the world as it is, as it has been, and as it could be. It is in recognition of this that Achebe noted that
Art for Art’s sake is just another piece deodorized dog-shit. Art is and was in the service of man. Our ancestors created their myth and legend and told their stories for a human purpose (including, no doubt the excitation of wonder and pure delight); they made their sculptures in wood and terracotta, stone and bronze to serve the needs of their times. Their artists lived and moved and had their being in society and created their works for the good of that society (Morning Yet 19.)
Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov notes that everybody should do what he can do best for the country. The snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for the soldiers and the refugees. What I can do is write and tell things, and that is what I am doing” (p.3).
James Baldwin, in his essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” notes that the poet’s responsibility is “to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man” (in Connolly 2). Baldwin’s words capture the attentiveness of African literature to aspects of human experience that expand knowledge about humans in all their creativity and complexity. Thus African writers have sought to translate their European experience into new forms of identities and institutions as the necessary solution to the alternatives of a subaltern status for colonized cultures (Izevbaye, “Why Okigbo Matters”). The publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on 17 June 1958 was a landmark achievement for African literature (Currey 12) that was to stimulate an explosion of creative writing in Africa. The subsequent upsurge in the literary works by African writers was evident that many more Africans could exceed Achebe’s exploits.
By the time the Makerere conference held in 1962, some of the participants at the conference included Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Grace Ogot, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Lewis Nkosi, and many more, including Ngugi who as a student at Makerere then brought two manuscripts of his two novels The River Between and Weep Not Child and handed them over to Achebe, the then Editorial Adviser to AWS. Today, with genuine humility, we celebrate these individuals, both dead and alive, as literary deities whose insights and voices have continued to shape contemporary Africa literary engagements.
African Literature and Ethnic Tension
How do we locate ethnicity which has been seen as a powerful colonial ideology deployed for identity formation. Sutton notes that while ethnic group is not a natural outcome of cultural beliefs and practices, myths about ethnic identity are its supporting infrastructure. So much of colonially constructed ideological narratives of ethnicity have been foregrounded in African historical discourse as if they were ontological truths and this unfortunately, has continued to fan the embers of ethnic tension in the region. Granted that ethnic grouping has now been established for creating distinctions among different cultural and linguistic stocks within a country, it is curious that Africans would condemn colonial racial practices like Apartheid but condone indigenously created xenophobia and ethnic segregation. Thus, among the major task confronting African literature is, therefore not only to rewrite the false history which western discourse had made of the continent but also to draw on traditional African past and modern quest for equality and freedom to explore the neo-colonial contradictions, especially ethnic tensions that have made our earth vulnerable. For instance, exploring the schizophrenia of the colonized condition of Zimbabwe after gaining her independence, Danbuzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger (1978) articulates a sense of disenchantment and pessimism about the ethnic polarization of Zimbabwean liberation struggle and the violence of the guerrillas against civilians. Marechera’s experimental deconstruction of African and Western epistemologies as systems of power, his unceasing insistence on the role of the writer as intellectual anarchist, and his attack on the emergent Zimbabwean national identity lead to his remarks: “I don’t hate Black. I’m just tired of saying it’s beautiful (Shade, 2).
Ethnic Mistrust and Subversion in Postwar Nigerian Literature
Ethnic mistrust— a sense of suspicion of one ethnic stock against the other— and its contribution to the disintegration of Nigeria is a common trope which has dominated the Nigerian literary space since the 1960s. It is considered a top factor in the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 -70 as well as the emergence of countless insurgent groups in different parts of Nigeria. The incurable resistance of the Igbo, including the dangerous metamorphosis of Biafra’s resistance movements (for instance, from the non-violent Mass Mobilization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) to the semi- violent Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) to the fully violent Eastern Security Network(ESN) and to the present dreaded Unknown Gun Men (UGM) fertilized the seeds of other more dangerous ethnic-militias across the country. The war and its aftermaths have generated more narrative responses as writers attempt not only to interrogate the implication of ethnic mistrust and the fragility of peace it conditions but also to demonstrate how literary texts are deployed as trenches for negotiating viable togetherness in Nigeria’s multi-ethnic space.
Postwar Nigerian literature engage with the claim of some pro-Biafran narratives that non-Igbo Nigerian discourse attempts to foreground the colonially constructed ethnic myth of “Igbo untrustworthiness”, an identity that has continued to deny the Igbo access to the mainstream socio-political structure of the country (Jeff 282). They argue that colonial history constructed this myth in an attempt to punish them for challenging the colonial project of domination (Barnes 413). And in a counter mythology, the Igbo in turn claim that the Hausa-Fulani have “an anarchic love for power,” that the Yoruba are irremediably “hypocritical”, and that both resent the Igbo because the latter are historically destined to conquer and lead (Jeff 299). These ethnic myths and counter-mythological recuperations notwithstanding, Chinua Achebe observes that “Igbo-Biafrans’ rise to prominence in post-independence Nigeria led to acts of exhibitionist arrogance among some Igbo that attracted deep resentment among some non-Igbo” (2012: 233). And the position of the young Igbo novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun is that there is general ethnic mistrust among all the ethnic groups in Nigeria.
In different ways, Nigerian writers have sought to represent this sense of ethnic mistrust as being responsible for postcolonial precarity in Nigeria as evident in Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra (1973), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985), Ayuba Mshelia’s Araba Let’s Separate (2011) and Achebe’s There Was a Country (2012). Similarly, ethnic mistrust is also the motive that explains the crises in Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), J. P. Clark’s Casualties (1970), Mamman Vatsa’s Voices from the Trench (1978) and Adichie’s play For the Love of Biafra (1998). The questions they raise include whether issues of untrustworthiness, hypocrisy and anarchic quest for power have any tribal affiliation or are tribeless individual traits. Ethnicity thus is recast in postwar Nigerian literature as an ideological and political weapon wielded by all against all, an idea that seems to have motivated Cathy Caruth argument that history is precisely the way we are involved in each other’s trauma, a suggestion that there is a compelling need to look at each other’s memory as if through each other’s eyes (1). The implication is that all Nigerian ethnic groups are trapped together within the precarious matrix of a national identity as a people connected to each other as victims, villains and collaborators.
Recognising the disconnect in the sociocultural body parts of the nation, there is an attempt by postwar Nigerian literary works to bridge the gulf through the reconciliatory voices that sound so clearly in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) and Dul Johnson’s Across the Gulf (2017). These narratives deploy their bridge building thesis in connecting the accommodationist ideal to Foucault’s third principle of heterotopia, a hybrid border-land of resistance and freedom where “incompatible” voices co-exist (46). They articulate the urgency for viable togetherness and inter-ethnic reconnection in the multi-ethnic nation where peace has become fragile. In the face of Nigeria’s current battles against ethnic-based insurgencies, these texts show the role of literature in understanding the influence of myths in a more comprehensive postcolonial context. They suggest that the Igbo’s inability to access mainstream political power in Nigeria is due to the postcolonial attempt to construct modern African state within a neo-colonialist framework rather than due to their precarious identity. But they also reveal that the problems of tribal sentiments are generated and manipulated by a class of kleptocrats, an odious group of career politicians who are now dressed in beautiful term known as “the political elites” whose corrupt endeavours make African economies precarious. These figures of the rough-beast manipulate ethnicity, calibrate religious tensions to divert attention of the masses and then mount their looting machines, siphon our resources and yet deceive us into believing that our problems are ethnic and religious. They leverage on ethnic dichotomy to activate the now lucrative activities of the insurgent monsters in different parts of the country. African literature, and Nigerian postcolonial literary engagement specifically responds to these crises by seeking to broaden perspectives in re-reading ethnicity and rethinking the timeless value of intercultural communion, re-echoing Ernest Emenyonu’s call for shaping “a new world of understanding” by reconciling the realities we know and the awareness we need to know (1).
Conclusion
The contributions of the ancestors and living legends, as well as emerging scholars of the African literary tradition shape the consciousness of our people. But it seems, unfortunately, that the audience of the African writer are like the people who attend a theatre where an important play is being enacted, abandon the play to watch the audience (Nnolim). With this I would like to mention one serious challenge facing African literature today. In August 2021, Nigeria stopped TETFunding foreign postgraduate researches for academics in the arts, social and management sciences to concentrate on strengthening its science and technology education. This also follows the unpopular removal of History as a subject in the primary and secondary school curricular in Nigeria in 2009. Although the removal has been reversed, it shows that African humanities scholarship, to which African literature belongs, has become endangered in the midst of other disciplines as the policy makers fail to realise that while science builds the house, arts build the man. It is my thinking that this undermining of humanistic disciplines is a threat not only to our discipline but also to the construction of that knowledge which is necessary for nation building. I would like to call on Ndichies, chief priests and scholars of African literature to confront this disciplinary tribalism by foregrounding the role of literature as an indispensable weapon that helps our people, including the scientists and technologists, to make sense of their world through its emphasis on the organic relationship between us and our realities. African literature must continue to build consciences that can tame the activities of the rough beast, whether this rough beast is a clueless leader, a shamelessly egoistic politician, a religious extremist, a corrupt civil servant, a wicked businessman, a terrorprenuer or an ethnic bigot. And this can be achieved through the harvests of fruitful conversations, storytelling and sharing of values by which African literature is known and understood. It must continue to demonstrate that the world it creates is the world we all live in and repeatedly call attention to the urgency to reimagine a nation built on the ethics of common humanity. Such gestures should point to the future because by reimagining, by renegotiating our precarious places in the present, we create the potential for a better future.
Being a lead paper presented at the PAWA-NAL-ANA Conference and General Assemb at the Conference Centre, university of Ibadan, Nigeria, June – to 25 June 2022.
Dr Abba A. Abba is with the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Lokoja, Kogi State.
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