Decolonial Aesthetics and the African Writer
It is now a common truism that all art is propaganda. Well, we can presume that this means all art has some ideological purpose, conscious or unconscious; that all art is in that sense programmatic. The novel, particularly, can be a very ideological form as Achebe has made clear to us from his trenchant and now all too common novelistic and essayistic critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its apparent anti-imperialist but dark, surreptitiously colonial atmosphere. Not only Conrad’s work, but the bulk of that imperialist genre of literature in the colonial library referred to as The Novel of Africa – for example, Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon Mines and so on – re-emphasise the late medieval and early-modern racist and Christianised Western misrepresentations of Africa as beastly-uncivilized, the better to legitimize the continent’s captivity in barbaric chattel slavery during Europe’s so-called age of discovery – which is an innuendo for invasion, plunder, war and mayhem.
The persistence of wounding stereotypes captured in the pun-filled and ponderous expression, the “dark continent,” later justified an equally demonic colonialism in the modern period and now stokes and fires contemporary imperialisms – military, cultural, and economic. The result is that the mineral earth and human resources extraction that caused and accompanies Western domination for 583 years since 1441 continues unabated today. Such domination persists in forms so subtle and suggestive that they are disguised in a cloud of benevolent liberal democratic principles such as – to invoke that colonial-disgraceful and triple French lie – “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) or for the American state, that often shamelessly lisped, spiteful and full-of-spit curse-word called ‘democracy.’ We know what “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” has done to and is still doing to politically and economically straitjacket and hamstring Francophone Africa; we know what a smelly cesspit American democracy has done to pollute and destroy Haiti, Libya, the Congo, Venezuela, and countless others; we know of its covert undemocratic iron regime-changes that have committed rust upon many a government across the globe for decades – in Iran, Iraq or even Saudi Arabia and so on and so forth.
Such democratic lies are cocooned in the ideological power of imperialising art and in unwitting collusion of the colonial subject or former colonial subject’s artmaking as patronised by cultural imperialisms – the case of the CIA’s moneyed infiltration of African literature during African decolonization and the cold war era has been well documented in a 2020 book, Caroline Davis’es African Literature and the CIA. Perhaps it should make sense now why the British, German, American and French were quick, post flag-independence, to install a sham literary-cum-cultural benevolence in the form of the British Council, Alliance Francaise, Goethe Institute, USIS. These cultural-imperial models are now being joined by a 21st century variation, the Confucius institute, spread out across university campuses in the global South generally and in Africa specifically. I cynically refer to this recent incarnation as “the confusion institute.” These cultural boobytraps are there to confuse you and to hoodwink. That is what the kind of self-serving ideology I am referring to does. Obvious as it might now seem and while I think we might all know what I mean by ideology, here, perhaps I need to concretize my understanding of the term.
The scholar, Peter Ekeh, considers ideologies to be “unconscious distortions or perversions of truth by intellectuals in advancing points of view that favor or benefit the interests of particular groups for which the intellectuals act as spokesmen. That is, ideologies are interest-begotten theories.” I will embellish that by nothing that ideologies can also be self-serving rhetoric, can be conscious (in the form of direct propaganda) and unconscious as I noted at the beginning. They are also not necessarily only in aid of “self-begotten interests” but can be self-deceiving, self-numbing palliatives opposed to harsh realities – such as Africa’s millennial defeat and its near hatred by the rest of the world despite (or perhaps because) that continent sustains the whole world’s economy with its stupendous mineral wealth. I am also saying that ideologies can be indulged in by any individual, group, politician or professional not just intellectuals; and that art as media representation – not just critical theories – is one powerful medium for disseminating ideologies. It then goes without saying that creative writers are well placed to spread/sustain false ideologies or counter them or to self-deceive with their own self-imposed sleeping tablet of ideologies.
It is against the foregoing interrogation of ideology, propaganda, and art that it becomes indeed curious that some contemporary African writers give up the opportunity to channel the countering ideological heft inherent in writing towards correcting or addressing a history of ancestral oppressions and domination. Instead, some of us protest, bemoan, and reject the label of “African writer” or declare with a fake confidence that there is no such thing as ‘African Literature.’ Ironically our works can only enter the global school curriculum under the rubric of African literature and not as German, British or Irish Literature. Let’s for one instant, imagine exhibiting a Benin Mask as being NOT a Benin mask or an African sculpture as NOT being an African sculpture, but just a Mask or a Sculpture, as generic artworks. For the art historian whose job it is to analyse these artefacts, what would then be the provenance of such artworks – European or Chinese antiquity?
One can only conjecture those self-denying creatives on the continent or in the diaspora, feel that an interpellation such as ‘African writer, or African literature,’ puts their professional person and art in a literary ghetto, African being the historical ghetto, disparaged, demonised, denuded. But then perhaps such a sentiment is not all that curious if we consider that it is a conscious or unconscious ideological position-taking meant directly or indirectly to properly insert the writer into the marketplace as a brand, as a commodity. And should any writer further bemoan this charge of commodity fetishism, their rejection of Africa or African roots still gestures towards a desire to gain symbolic capital by being ranged alongside the original owners of the language in which they write. In a manner of speaking, they are saying: ‘I am an African or Black Shakespeare or Voltaire or Fernando Pessoa but not an African writer. In one deft comparative move they relegate their own culture, history, subjectivity as subordinate to the European. This is inferiority complex per excellence.
It is for the opposite reason – self-assertion as well as cultural and historical pride – that Achebe insisted on domesticating English. He did not want to be ranged alongside the owners of the language; he wanted to ideologically separate himself and, in that way, be unique and have voice. He did not want to be an African Shakespeare. To merge his views and voice with that of the colonizing host language or rather ‘hostage’ language, is to become voiceless. The uniqueness of his art is in its being African and reflecting an African ethos and worldview. And especially, providing a countering ideology to the discourse of an Africa-civilizing mission and condescension that underlies European literary works and other letters in the colonial library. Moreover, Achebe notes that the African writer cannot afford the petit-bourgeoisies’ affectation of an art-for-arts sake aesthetics. Those whose histories proceed from point A to point B, C, D in a straight line, can luxuriate in those Saturday distractions. Achebe saw, the novelist – and by extension the African creative writer in any genre – as a teacher.
Achebe mined his powerlessness and colonial objecthood to become a subject of his own history, while today, some of us run away from our powerlessness. We want to belong to the powerful group, we want to fake our accents, we want so badly to be European that we would bleach our skins, wear synthetic hair, refuse to speak our own languages, reject our culture, borrow our names from Europe; borrow our political systems, borrow our economic system, borrow our religion. In fact, we are shadows emptied out and without substance. We become Mimic men and mimic women; Now if I were a European, I would totally detest such an inauthentic animal.
That desire to belong, to be recognized by the master is co-terminus with a desperate desire for literary universality. It is a desire to merge into the body of the master, it is unconscious slave-complex promoted by a rather convenient historical amnesia. It is a rejection of an unpleasant history, a desire to be with the winner – but in the process becoming a true loser, disrespected, despised, and disgusting. The panacea for such delusional post-race, ideological self-hypnosis for these kinds of writers is for them to perhaps go on a reading tour in the deep south of the USA, or some obscure village anywhere in Europe. Even if you have the highest Western literary prize based on your self-rejecting universalising aesthetics, what a backwoods white fellow in the American deep south or a village in Europe sees when their sight fall on you is just a pitiful N-word. The historical battle of self-reclamation is not over simply because of a sham post-colonialism; the moral fight has only been postponed. The African or Black writer cannot pretend that because this is the 21st century the oppressive past is not present anymore. The contemporary writer must bring their art to bear on a past and still present continuous racial, economic, and political injustices through their work.
This is especially because – beyond the commonplace general view of writers as conscience of society, the African writer carries the weight of his people’s history upon his frail shoulders. Frail it is indeed only because he is unwilling to bear that weight. Here is the Malagasy, Jean Luc V. Raharimanana complaining from the Afropean comfort of Paris:
w]e were only promising young authors […] filled with revolt, with a desire to abscond from the legacies of our elders, a legacy that was hard to bear, the whole continent’s pain in fact. Our only wish was to write, to be good writers, to play with aesthetics or just tell a story, and here we were, twenty years old, and summoned to save Africa! (Cazenave and Célérier 2011, 97).
Who are the elders Raharimanana is referring to? Foundational African writers like Achebe, Ferdinand Oyono, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Augustino Neto, Mongo Beti, Tati Loutard, and many more: Anglophone, Francophone and lusophone African writers who used their art to witness against colonisation, and apartheid, who fought for the freedoms that this new generation enjoys. Clearly some third generation African and African diasporic writers are merely enamoured with literary glamour but not with its burdens, the burden of bearing witness.
That glamour is symbolized in the many literary prizes with which the imperialist hoodwink our writers – Caine prize, Nobel Prize, the Prix Goncourt, and sundry fellowships that are mere bribes and distractions to keep us away from criticising our oppression. These prizes are the equivalents of those aid package given to African governments and which disappears into greedy bottomless pockets. Suddenly the writer and the politician are both justling for dribbles from the master’s table. When writers fail in bearing witness or sensitizing the people, the political and economic chaos now prevalent on the continent is the result. It to be expected that Achebe did not get a Nobel prize despite may rumours of his possible investiture during his lifetime. You do not get prizes when your work upset the status-quo. Prizes are for those writings that continues to project the Image of an Africa of ravages redolent in the Western imaginary since the 13th century.
Thankfully where many contemporary African writers seems to be failing a new brand of thought leaders are waking up to the task of social engineering. I refer to the Sahel region – Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Gabon, to some extent, are liberating themselves through conscious political acts. They are setting the moral and practical examples that the writer usually provides. Hopefully we, as writers, will be able to borrow a sober thoughtful leaf from those soldiers and join in the good fight to free our continent from 500 years of humiliation.
