Retrieving Africa’s Order of Knowledge: Harry Garuba and Animist Epistemology
Prologue: Chanting What is Lost
After his first collection of poems, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982), it took the reluctant poet, Harry Garuba, another thirty-five years to commit the whispering of the muses to paper. Animist Chants and Memorials (2017) is the literary responses to the memory of what used to be, and what ought to be; the animist murmurs beneath the oppressive burden of modern consciousness and being. In “Naming Day,” the poet got an intimation—at birth—from the knowing mother (we presume), about the tragic trajectory from the remembrance of the being of the world, and its non-remembrance lost in the ways of the world:
This is a chant you will remember and not remember, she said, a name you will know and not know
This is the name the wind and the water will whisper to you
The name by which the tree will know
the name that will come with the night when the moon visits you
the rousing name that will stir your dreams with starsThis is the name you will recall but not remember,
Lodged in your heartbeat like a song you know and do not know
This epistemic paradox of the sense of being came to pass when, in “Leaving home at 10,” the poet was initiated into the modern educational system that instigated the trajectory of the mind’s migration into the epistemic penumbra:
On initiation night, I recited the prescribed words:
“I am a fag, a rotten green toad. I promise
to give up all my rustic and outlandish ways
and to become a true student of Government College, Ughelli.”Soon after I lost the language of guavas and spirits
And ever since I have been boarded up in a new home,
A new language with neither spice nor bite
I miss all the coarse and colourful words I can no longer use
The power and potency of the curse uttered with a gob of spittle
Let loose in the language of the body and the spiritI miss the language that once lived in my body.
This is a bit unsettling because modernity has always been read as a progressive enlightenment that keeps swallowing all vestiges and vagaries of the dark past and its traditions. And thus, the young boy at 10 was in for an excruciating initiation into the modern. Forget your old ways…you must be modern! Yet his mind kept excavating the memories of what was. And eventually when remembrance began to crawl out of the penumbra of forgetfulness, it was already a bit late to deliver the language—already deeply cooked in the cauldron of the hybridized memory—from the clutch of the mixed metaphor, or ontologies. Thus the poet, in “Equatorial farewell cake,” invoked:
and armed with the faith of my doubt, mixing stolen scriptures
of shrine and synagogue like metaphors, I repeat in remembrance:
May you never set out when the road waits famished
The Lord shall protect your going out and your coming in
The wisdom of the ancestors and the light of the angels
will guide you in all your byways and pathways
And feed you with the secret sacraments of open rivers
The rest of the chants is remembrance, borne on the vibrant vibration of embedded memory, and the angry twang of rebellious arguments, that teases the animist unconscious:
animist chant—
a chant that wakens
the souls of things
animate and inanimate
a spell that rouses the spirit
that lives in bone and stone
Animism as An African Order of Knowledge
Harry Garuba’s argument for animism as an ontological and epistemological perspective in Africa are spelt out most rigorously in two essays, among others. The first, published in 2003, is titled “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” The second, published in 2012, is “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.” These two essays address the age-old issues about the “darkness” that characterizes Africa in terms of its tradition or “re-traditionalization.” Since Hegel wrote his lectures on the philosophy of history, that traced the march of the Absolute Spirit, and Joseph Conrad the Heart of Darkness, Africa has remained the focus of unflattering Eurocentric analysis. Achille Mbembe sums up the reaction to Africa in discourse:
the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of “human nature.” Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind (2001: 1).
“Africa,” therefore is always beclouded under the sign of the strange, the monstrous and the unknowable. And so, it becomes necessary to “rationally” dig into this continental abyss where “reason is supposedly permanently at bay, and the unknown has supposedly attained its highest point…a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos” (ibid: 2).
And when Africanists take a second look, beyond the western racist ideologies, Africa becomes so many things that does not sit quite easily with their probing modern gaze. Garuba himself gives a good example in the work of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz. In Africa Works, the two authors were at pained to come to terms with the failure of Africa’s development aspiration vis-à-vis the expectations of the West. Taken in terms of rationalization demanded by modernization, Africa is a litany of woes. A representative quote, taken by Garuba (2003: 282) from Chabal and Daloz, is apposite here as an example of the angst in scholarship about the trajectory of understanding Africa, and especially its re-traditionalization:
To read about African life today is almost to be transported back a hundred years, when the newly established colonial powers “revealed” to the world how backward Africa was, how much it needed to be civilized. Today, like yesterday, our perception is that Africans continue to be singularly superstitious: the occult is alive, witchcraft is thriving, ritual ceremonies abound, the link with the ancestors is as strong as ever and African religious communities are growing in strength. Not only does it appear that African societies are failing to become more secular, as they were widely expected to do, but there is a sense in which they are “retraditionalizing”—in [sic] that realm of the “irrational” is seemingly gaining in importance.
