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Volume One, Number One.

ORAL TRADITION, EUROPEAN MODERNITY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Emevwo Biakolo, PhD

School of Media and Communication Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria

E-mail: ebiakolo@smc.edu.ng Abstract

In this paper, I engage the epistemic status of orality in culture. As part of the rationale for this engagement, I posit a close connection between technologies of communication and the epistemological and ontological status of cultural productions and subjects. The background to my argument is this: the historical reason for the European contempt for Africa and the denial of its civilization is the lack of writing and written records in most parts of the African continent at the time of the European incursion. The way in which anthropological, philosophical and historical discourses (of the Other) have shaped Western conception of African identity lends fillip to this claim. It is amply supported by a host of evidence from European and North American philosophers, historians and communication scholars, among the most recent of whom we may recall Walter Ong and Eric Havelock who indeed claimed famously that European civilization can be attributed to one principal cause, the discovery of (phonetic) writing.

But the main thrust of my paper is a critique of the discourse of oral tradition in African philosophy. I categorize the substance of African philosophy as a debate as to whether there exists at all any animal bearing that name. I argue that this identity crisis in African philosophy is traceable to only one cause: doubt regarding the status of African oral tradition. In this way, African philosophers manifest the same Eurocentric and graphocentric conception of what constitutes truth and knowledge - something that these scholars with a slave mentality have obviously learnt from their masters. This part of the argument is intended to show that the reliance by African philosophers on the Western construction of a knowledge system such as philosophical discourse impacts directly on the question of the status of indigenous knowledge systems and indirectly on the subjective identities of cultural producers. I conclude that once more we see an intimate relationship between the complex knowledge-power, and the construction of racial identity.

Introduction

I shall begin this exploration by citing statements of two pre-eminent European philosophers, Kant and Hume, on the subject of African identity. Writing in Section IV of “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime “, the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, has this to say:

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling, which rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges everybody, to produce a single example

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where a Negro has shown talents…So essential is the difference between these two races of men, [black and white] and it appears to be equally great with regard to the mental capacities, as with regard to the colour. The Fetiche-religion, so widely diffused among them is a species of idolatry, which perhaps sinks as deep into the trifling, as it seems possible for human nature to admit of…The blacks are remarkably vain, but in a negro manner, and so loquacious, that they must absolutely be separated by the cogent and conclusive argument of caning. (73ff)

Blacks, according to the German philosopher, can also be educated only by way of ‘training’. Training for Kant, Emmanuel Eze observes, consists in physical coercion, in consonance with Kant’s advice on how to flog (that is, ‘train’) an African servant. This flogging should be done using “a split bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the ‘negro’ will suffer a great deal of pains, since the Negro’s thick skin would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a whip, and because the blood needs to find a way out of this thick pigment to avoid festering” (quoted in Eze 116).

The idea of educability proper, as distinct from mere trainability, is linked in Kant, as in many other Western philosophers, with both moral and intellectual capacity. To be educable is to be capable of progress in the arts and sciences, and to possess the talents and motivation that make such progress possible. The African is excluded from this possibility by virtue of being African. To quote Kant’s well known comment on a certain statement attributed to an African person “this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid” (Eze, 119).

A quite explicit statement of the relation between educability and moral/intellectual capacity can be found in David Hume who presented proof of the congenital inferiority of the African in this way:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly. (86)

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There are two related ideas in the point Hume makes: (1) the black race has no individual genius in any realm of life; (2) nor a cultural tradition of inventiveness, creativity or accomplishments however conceived. We shall see much later on how the idea of individuality or personal subjectivity interacts with the concept of community or collectivity in the analysis of identity, in its relation to the communicative technologies of orality and writing. At the same time, it is remarkable how a philosopher renowned for his skeptical spirit regurgitates racial orthodoxies, no matter how tentatively garnished with the cheap ‘apt to suspect’. For the question ought to be raised: how much knowledge of the dark continent, beyond the fanciful travelogues that proliferated in Europe prior to colonization of Africa, did Hume, or indeed Europeans in general, possess in the eighteenth century to warrant this conclusion? It is, I believe, a relatively easy refutation of Hume, given our present state of knowledge of Africa, to cite available evidence of African writing even in European languages long before and during Hume’s time, or of the work of the empire builders in eighteenth century Africa, east, south and west.

But I shall not adopt that tack. Rather, I would like to suggest that the basis of Hume’s judgment, typical for the Europe of his time and even in our time, is simply the putative lack of written evidence (at least on a substantial or common scale) of those things that he implies confer cultural accomplishments on a nation, race or people. It is my hope that this suggestion is not controversial. At any rate, to be on the safe side, perhaps we should quickly make a logical distinction between actual lack of African writing in any language, and European (ac)knowledge(ment) of this writing. For example, a man such as David Hume whose furthest journey from his native Edinburgh was France, or a scholar like Kant who was town-bound, literally speaking, in Konigsberg, and both of whom had no personal knowledge of Africa, could have known nothing of any black writing for the simple reason that, with the state of communication at the time, none was available to them. However, precisely on this excusable ground of ignorance, the least you would expect from a man described as the ‘greatest British philosopher’, is to suspend judgment or at least temper his conclusion by adverting to the contemporary condition of knowledge. This is not a harsh judgment, as my eventual conclusion of this essay will show.

Orality, Writing and African Philosophical Thought

It is a fair guess that the general tone of smugness of European writing on non-European subjects, acutely betraying that bigotry or narrowness of vision that is euphemistically called eurocentrism, would probably have impeded any attention to writing or ideas or concerns other than European ones. Late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century European writing of the most important kind could not but focus almost exclusively on Europe, particularly as the very concept of Europe had begun then to be formalized in the wake of the French revolution and the eventual rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that European attention to non-European subjects should be limited, among philosophers and serious writers in other disciplines like history, to such ex tempore remarks as we have seen above.

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The shift from an exclusive European focus in European writing came about in the nineteenth century. This shift can be safely attributed to the development of a new science, a science whose primary concern was in fact the non-European subject or culture. I refer to the science of anthropology. The institutionalization of anthropology within the European academy, and even more importantly, in the European episteme, is significant, not because it marked any sea change in the European conception of the Other, but principally because it demonstrated that the study of other races and cultures could no longer be accommodated under the fanciful travel tales of explorers, adventurers and missionaries, tales which appeared designed to titillate the native European imagination or sell a reputation, or under the laughable speculations of armchair philosophers. Understanding the Other became politically important and the academy had to provide space for this effort.

In saying this, I have in mind also internal developments in the discipline of anthropology regarding the methods needed to investigate the new subject. Anthropology rapidly moved beyond speculations about monogenesis or polygenesis of the human species or the origins of ritual or myth (Harris 80-107; Bell 13-17; Okpewho 45-52). Special methods, eventually dubbed ethnography and participant-observation, involving the study of language and cultural behaviour in situ, soon emphasized the scientificity of the new field. Reporting and documentation became increasingly rigorous. Some of the highlights of this new situation include: (a) the idea that the societies in question merit scientific investigation, whatever the political and ideological uses to which the findings could be put; (b) the fact that many anthropologists had no obvious commitment to a political or partisan principle or program and appeared to be driven by nothing more sinister than individual ambition; (c) the global scale of this enterprise.

On the other hand, it was no accident, as hinted at above, that anthropology as an academic discipline and a section of the Western episteme, rose in tandem with colonialism. The relationship between power and the knowledge system in the European Project, as expressed in imperialism, has received some critical attention in our time (cf. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993; V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa 1988). Political power made possible and paved the way for anthropology. In some instances, for example in the British Imperial Service, there were existing bureaucratic positions for anthropologists in the colonies. This government think-tank was responsible for some of the earliest ethnographic studies carried out in Africa. Apart from the notable example of Rattray, others were otherwise contracted by the imperial bureaucracy while maintaining their positions in the academy. Anthropology was therefore a sign that Europe was serious in its political and ideological intention, namely, to conquer and dominate exteriorly and interiorly. In this sense, anthropology was thus a positive science. If in the long run the conclusions that it frequently arrived at compromised its scientific status somewhat and made it inseparable from the political and ideological motivation, in retrospect this was inevitable.

The new science was given its theoretical direction by the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, an influence immediately evident in the work of James Frazer,

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and Edward Tylor, two pioneering figures of anthropology. But it was in Henry Lewis Morgan, across the Atlantic, that this theory and its methodological form found its most rigorous expression. Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870), patient and systematic, massive in the quantitative evidence (his questionnaires were distributed globally through diplomatic channels), without ignoring the qualitative instruments of personal interviews and observations, daring and comprehensive in its conceptualization, brought to the new science the sort of scientific spirit that destined it for the commanding role it was to play in the next century. The three core stages of socio-political evolution – savagery, barbarism and civilization – corresponded to forms of marriage and kinship relations on one hand, and to forms of technology on the other. For instance, savagery corresponded to consanguine (i.e. incestuous) marriages, to non-technological subsistence on fruits and nuts; upper barbarism corresponded to patriarchal forms of marriage as well as to the technology of iron implements. At the level of civilization, the defining kinship form is monogamian marriage, while its key technology is writing, particularly the phonetic alphabet. The form of social organization of civilization is the state, just as that of the middle period, barbarism, is the clan.

The admirable symmetry of this theoretical schema was made more credible by the fact that actual, existing human societies could be seen to fit the postulates. You did not need to seek too far in order to recognize many non-Western, specifically African, tribal societies, as precise fits to the stage of barbarism, nor would anyone fail to notice that the only society that achieved the highest evolutionary stage was Western society. It is surely not at all surprising that Morgan’s unilinear evolutionism became the standard reference point for subsequent cultural explanations and critiques, commanding high praise and reliance for their own theories among such diverse Western thinkers as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (see his Totem and Taboo for example).

If the host of conceptual and material errors since noted in Morgan’s work (cf. Harris 183-187) is anything to go by, this reliance on the Systems of Consanguinity should occasion a bit of surprise. Yet more than a few of Morgan’s concepts have passed into universal currency, not only in anthropology as such, but in the recent ancillary field of cultural theory and criticism. This is amply illustrated by Morgan’s suggestion that civilization’s defining characteristic is phonetic writing. For this reason, this idea needs closer attention.

The idea that writing is the hallmark of civilization and, more specifically, that phonetic writing defines Western civilization, has usually been traced to Plato especially to the discourse on writing in the Phaedrus (cf. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 1963; Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1976; Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982). In the Phaedrus, Socrates narrates the Egyptian myth of the origin of writing, about how the god Theuth revealed the art of writing to the king, Thamus. After the revelation, the god says to the king:

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“’Here, O King, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.’ But Thamus answered: “O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.’” (Plato, Collected Dialogues, 520)

The moral of this myth, according to Derrida (1976), who examines this against the background of Plato’s metaphysics, is that speech takes precedence over writing as a vehicle or mirror of the truth. In this perspective, writing is at a second remove from truth and being, a copy of a copy (‘a brother’ Socrates calls it) as it were. The notion of logocentrism thus goes beyond the matter of the relation of speech to writing as communicative media. A critique of logocentrism is less a critique of language as such than a critique of metaphysics and the metaphysical aspirations or habits of language and culture. The idea of presence as can be elicited from Derrida’s critique is bound up with Plato’s metaphysical theory of forms and of his epistemology of knowledge as an act of memory of the (Absolute) world of forms.

But scepticism about the ability or power of language to convey or apprehend reality, is an argument that, in going beyond, actually obscures and devalues or deflects the critical question of the forms of language and their axiological relationship to power, that is, to the ways forms of language are institutionalized hierarchically as instruments of domination. In other words, the central issue of the ways in which writing became an icon and symbol of Western civilization, and the most important categorical tool in the Western construction of itself and the Other, is seriously obscured by the general postmodernist cultural critique of logocentrism, whatever merits this critique possesses in other respects.

We may note also that in some way, the Derridean critique is a continuation of a tradition begun arguably in the Enlightenment, with the positivism of August Comte, and which runs through the scepticism of Hume, down to the logical positivism of Alfred Ayer. What I mean is the rejection of metaphysics, and it is anticipated in the late medieval period by the nominalism of William Ochkam (c. 1290-1349) and his followers. By what may appear as a contradictory movement, postmodern cultural criticism also rejects logical positivism; yet this rejection does

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not necessarily entail the reinstatement of metaphysics, a situation that additionally accounts for the appeal of Derrida in contemporary theory. But to this extent, cultural theory as practiced in the West, particularly in France and the United States, is at one with positivism, in spite of its disavowal of a unitary vision, or the claims of a universalism or essentialism in positivism.

From the African point of view, or at least from the point of view of this African writer, it is important to recover the main thread of arguments on the relations of orality to writing, a thread obscured by the focus on a critique of metaphysics. To this we shall turn to take a closer look at the claims made by Eric Havelock and Walter Ong concerning this relation. Havelock says that Western civilization is attributable to (phonetic) writing and that without this technological invention, “we would not have science, philosophy, written law or literature, nor the automobile or the airplane” (Havelock, 1991, 24). This thesis has since been subjected to very rigorous criticism by several scholars (cf. Street, 1988; Finnegan, 1988; Biakolo, 1999) on different grounds, including the validity of cultural monocausality, that is, the attribution of a cultural process or order to a single cause, as also its dubious factuality and logical errors.

Yet at a deeper level, Havelock is not unique in this claim. I would suggest that in fact this claim underlies the history of thought in the West. The theory of modernity (never mind recent revisions) now recognized as identical in essential respects with the theory of Occidentalism, or what I call the European Project, is founded on the function of writing in the Western episteme. Writing, in particular, phonetic writing, according to this view, has not merely made Western civilization possible; it is at the heart of the distinction between Europe and the rest of us. Cultural hierarchies erected since the genesis of European modernity are built according to the degree of their approximation to European alphabetic civilization, that is whether or not they possess writing and of what kind. This is one result of Lewis Morgan’s work, and it is at the basis of the binaries in anthropological writing: tradition versus modernity, logical versus alogical mentalities, primitive versus civilized societies (Biakolo, 1999 and 2002). Needless to add: Africa is invariably at the bottom of the hierarchy. And for good measure, lest any misunderstanding should arise, a distinction is then made between on one hand, black, sub-Saharan Africa, and Arab Africa where writing is found; and on the other hand, between pre-writing such as hieroglyphics in Egypt and ‘true’ writing such as is found among the Greeks.

If writing is at the heart of the European Imaginary, and if it forms the foundation of European cultural discourse, it not at all obvious that it should also occupy a similar position in Africanist discourse, specifically the discourse of cultural identity. But in what follows below I shall try to show that this is precisely the case. I shall be illustrating the point with reference to what has seemed to me the discourse of African philosophy. By discourse of African philosophy, I refer to the range of academic debates and institutional practices regarding the place and identity of African philosophy. As one scholar remarked at a philosophy colloquium at St Paul, Minnesota, some ten years ago, the main theme of African philosophy seems to be whether there is African philosophy.

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Why is the question of African identity tied up with the identity of African philosophy? The answer to this question is to be found in the relations that have been established between ontology and epistemology, or to put it quite simply, between questions of identity and forms and modes of knowledge. Inevitably, so many issues are entangled here but we shall try to unpack them as much as possible. Accordingly, we must get back to Walter Ong regarding the identity of what he calls ‘primary oral cultures’, that is, cultures that are predominantly oral in their mode of communication.

Ong’s argument is that since primary oral cultures have no fixed (i.e. written) texts, they organize and transmit knowledge in ways designed to facilitate the labour of human memory. As a result of this mnemonic necessity, whatever is conceptualized tends to be formalized or institutionalized in existential terms: skills and information are acquired by personal contact and personal instruction or example. Thus oral cultures and their discourses are traditionalist, conservative (they conserve what they have) and communal (knowledge and life skills have to be shared to survive). A different situation obtains in literate cultures. Since they have no fear of losing what has been created or conceived, writing being in itself a palpable storage system, literate cultures are innovative, inventive, and individualistic (writing is a solipsistic activity and reading, even public reading is always by one person at a time).

Even more pertinent to our purpose is Ong’s analysis of the form of discourse produced in the two types of cultures. Literate discourse, Ong says, is abstract, analytical, syllogistic and definitional; it is also objective and prosaic. Oral discourse on the other hand occurs in rhythmic (poetic) patterns, it is repetitive, formulaic and lapidary in form (Ong, 1982, 34). One consequence of this difference is that the possibility of extended discourse through analysis and exposition, in short, philosophy and criticism, are excluded in oral cultures. Elsewhere (Biakolo 1999) I have noted at some length the problems with this position, but for now I would like us to reflect on how Africanist discourse of African philosophy actually repeats these errors, and how African subjective and cultural identity are implicated in it.

In two recent millennium-end reviews of African philosophic writing in the last half century, D.A. Masolo (2000 and 2003) discusses the concern of this writing with oral tradition. Oral tradition, in his analyses, is invested with cognate or alternative terms and concepts like indigenous knowledge and ethnophilosophy. According to Masolo, an important part of this concern is the need to distinguish philosophy from ethnophilosophy. Following Hountondji (original 1977), Masolo distinguishes between first order discourse, that is, ethnophilosophy, which is characterized as collective, passive and anonymous. Philosophy proper, the second order discourse, on the other hand, is a true academic discipline “born out of a deliberate reflective practice guided by specific rules of the game.” (Masolo 2000, 152ff).

But it is in the work of the Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, that the African philosopher’s attitude to ethnophilosophy is most graphically represented. I make reference to attitudinal representation, because woven intricately with the argument that Wiredu makes on the issue, is a tone and manner towards African oral

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knowledge that is nothing short of contemptuous. I shall not be dealing with this attitude however but shall concentrate on the substance of the argument. According to Wiredu, “it was a pervasive trait of this indigenous [African] culture that enabled sparse groups of Europeans to subjugate much larger numbers of Africans and keep them in colonial subjection for many years, and which even now makes them a prey to neo-colonialism. I refer to the traditional and non-literate character of the culture with its associated underdevelopment.” (40). Wiredu adds, for good measure, that “a culture cannot be both scientific and non-literate, for the scientific method can flourish only where there can be recordings of precise measurement, calculations and, generally, of observational data.” (41)

Wiredu then goes on to distinguish between folk philosophy, written traditional philosophy and modern philosophy (46). The first is called philosophy only in a loose, broad sense, since without argument and clarification, philosophy in the strict sense does not exist. Folk thought, a by far preferable term for Wiredu than philosophy, is hampered by non-discursiveness (47). In Africa, so called African philosophy (as distinguished from academic philosophy in Africa) is nothing but traditional folk thought. Thus, for Wiredu, the “African philosopher has no choice but to conduct his philosophical inquiries in relation to the philosophical writings of other peoples, for his own ancestors left him no heritage of philosophical writings” (48).

Putting together this and similar discussions in the literature, we can present the arguments against oral traditions that purport to be philosophy, that is, ethnophilosophy, including Africa’s, in the following way (cf. ’the three negative claims’ of H. Odera Oruka, xv-xvi). According to the argument, ethnophilosophy is not philosophy because:

(a) unlike philosophy which is the product of an individual mind, ethnophilosophy is basically the work of the collectivity. In this sense, we can speak of traditional African philosophy in the same way we can speak of traditional Indian philosophy and traditional European or English philosophy, with this significant difference of course, that there is a second order Indian philosophy represented by the written meditations of the gurus which a modern Indian philosopher might rely on as a foundation for a (third order) discourse. The English example is even more complicated by Wiredu’s suggestion that in truth traditional English philosophy might in fact refer to the philosophy of Hume (strangely enough a Scotsman) and the English empirical tradition. In spite of all these foreign complications, the situation regarding Africa as far as Wiredu is concerned is fairly straight forward: individuals do philosophy in the true sense, the community or tribe does not; since in Africa the traditional philosophy is the work of the collective, it does not quality as philosophy. Let us for the sake of simplicity call this the Individualist or Subjectivist argument.

(b) Another reason why ethnophilosophy is not philosophy is that the former is not analytical, or expository or discursive, these three terms

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being used rather synonymously. A collection of proverbs, sayings and other wisdom literature do not constitute philosophy. To clarify the point: Wiredu states clearly that philosophy occurs where there is a thesis or argument, and there is a discussion or clarification (47). But as I shall be arguing below, this statement is rather ambiguous. Is it the form (prose) that constitutes the defining criterion here, or is it the structure (thesis-counter thesis-conclusion or first premise-second premise or premises-conclusion), that is, the syllogistic structure? Is each of these criteria,that is form or structure, sufficient; is any necessary? We shall call this the Formal argument or argument from form.

(c) The third argument may be called the Disciplinary or Epistemic argument or thesis. According to this argument, ethnophilosophy is not philosophy because it does not follow, in the words of Masolo, the ‘rules of the game’, that is the rules of philosophic discourse. Some questions immediately arise here: (i) what are these rules of philosophic discourse; (ii) who makes them; (iii) are they the same as the formal or structural requirements of (b); (iv) are these rules universal such that anyone from any culture or language can recognize them, given an adequate translation, or are these rules culture-specific but binding on all others in as much as they come to the ‘game’ of philosophy? To come to the bald point without further equivocation: is philosophy a specifically Western discourse or discipline as indeed Hegel and Heidegger had claimed? This is for me the critical question, the very heart of the debate. But let us proceed in a more systematic manner and take each of these arguments in the order above.

The view that philosophy is not a group or collective activity but a practice of individual investigators inquiring into an aspect of truth or reality is a subjective thesis. It is subjective in the ordinary sense that philosophy is not out there, an anonymous intellectual event or process. It is the expression of the thoughts and ratiocination of a specific human subject. And because it is the subject who initiates and carries out this activity, the content of the process is the expression of the subjectivity of the inquirer. Philosophy, in this view, expresses the identity of the inquiring subject. What we call philosophy is the discourse of a particular subject who in and through this discourse expresses his or her subjective identity. The arguments and clarifications, the thesis, even when they have nothing to do with the actual workaday life of the subject as such, are nevertheless the work, the inner work of a subject, and these cannot be expropriated from him or her. The subject’s identity is embedded in the very act of thesis formulation.

This way of putting the matter naturally raises other questions. For example, does this mean that the only truth or reality that a subject can express is his or her subjectivity, or is there room for an objective or transcendent truth or reality and how does it relate to the immanence of personal subjectivity? This forum is perhaps not the most appropriate for examining these questions closely. Nevertheless, the question of subjectivity by its very nature raises the cognate issue of how this subjectivity is constituted in itself. Does a human subject have the capacity to

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constitute itself? Or is it the case that the collectivity is invariably implicated or involved in the constitution of the subject? That is to say, is it possible for a philosophical statement or thesis to be posited without reference to a social or communal context? Can a subject’s identity be constructed outside the context of a collectivity of any description? Is it not a fairer, more accurate explanation of reality to adopt the contrary view, namely, that no personal subjectivity can be constituted outside some kind of social context; that no matter how original the philosophical thesis of the subjective inquirer might be, it derives its meaning and purpose – or even its origin - from the community? This origin, meaning and purpose is articulated with and has various dimensions and ramifications in the life of the community, including the language, a social product and process which makes philosophical communication possible; including the teleology of the thesis, namely, to increase the human knowledge of the community or make receivers of the communication better citizens or human beings and so on.

Now at the basis of the subjective thesis is the implicit sub-thesis, namely, that every community or society possesses a set of principles, laws, mores and lore, which together constitute an ordinary ethos or logos of life and which the philosophic subject interrogates, challenges, and often discards in favor of his or her own inner lights. It is through this interrogation, rejection and reconstitution of truth that the subjective identity of a philosopher is expressed. That is, the subjective identity of the philosopher consists in bringing this world view to critical examination. The philosopher lives the examined life, or he/she is no philosopher.

But this sub-thesis actually commits one to the view that the origin of the content of the philosopher’s thesis is the community or society. It may well that at the end of the examination, the communal world view is replaced by a subjective view. Yet it cannot be claimed that this new view bears no relation to the communal world view. Or that any philosopher’s thoughts originate from the blank slate of personal subjectivity. Furthermore, even from the point of view of the ends of the activity, no matter how misanthropic a philosopher may be, the fact that a world view has been rigorously re-examined and thus considerably clarified for the human intellect, is itself a purposive improvement of the community and therefore teleologically the subjective philosopher’s thesis is oriented to the common good.

We might also examine the communicative tools with which the philosopher carries out the function of critiquing the communal world view. The basic tool, we remarked earlier, is language. Even if one contests an instrumental or referential theory of language, that is, if language is rejected as a direct way of naming and appropriating the world, seeing it instead as a self-reflexive, self-signifying system, we are still bound to admit that every meaningful philosophy to date has had recourse to the communal resources of natural language and is thus indebted to society. No matter how clever or creative the philosopher’s use of language, no matter how much he/she extends the boundaries of the language, this debt cannot be fully repaid. Therefore, in the same breath by which every serious philosophy contributes to the enrichment of the language resources of the community, by that

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same token, a debt is being paid and the relation of philosopher to community becomes symbiotic.

We are thus forced to conclude that the subjective thesis draws a wrong emphasis concerning the philosopher’s relationship to the community. It seems to me a false conclusion that a philosopher is a philosopher because of the subjective relations that he/she bears to the community, or that philosophy is principally characterized by the unique subjective relationship that its practitioner, the philosopher, has with the community and its world view. This just does not work as a defining criterion.

We shall now proceed to the second argument, the so called Analytical thesis. Given the way this thesis is framed, analyticity is sometimes mistaken for a material value rather than a descriptive term for the formal properties of an argument. A category mistake is afoot somewhere. The analytical does not refer to concepts or judgments, as in the Kantian sense. In that sense, they have the character of substantives. But in the ordinary sense, the analytical refers to the way a thesis or argument is presented or structured. Taking the simple example of a syllogism, the analytical refers to the manner in which the premises are posited from which a certain conclusion is derived. That is, it indicates the relationship between premises and conclusion. All analysis is analogically of this type. There is really no new term or element produced or that it discovers or that can be discovered in it. All analysis does is to uncover what is hidden or embedded in concepts or terms. This is the ordinary sense of analysis, to which we must suppose our African philosophers subscribe, especially as they have not shown that they attach a special sense to the term.

So then, are we to understand that philosophy is not philosophy unless it adopts this particular way of presenting an argument? To address this question, we must go back to the example of Kwasi Wiredu and what he says in connection with analyticity. Wiredu argues that philosophical analysis of any rigorous kind is not possible without writing. Now this is a rather curious point. Are we to understand that Socrates was not in fact doing philosophy, since his arguments were orally delivered and that it was not until Plato committed these arguments to writing that a philosophical activity took place? Does this make sense?

What this position commits one to is the view that writing is a necessary means for doing philosophy, for analysis. That is, no argument can be constituted analytically without the material aid of writing. Yet this very point permits a distinction to be drawn between the term (and I hope the properties of) analysis and the means (writing). By adumbrating form (formal properties) and content (the material means), proponents of this argument make what appears to be an iron-clad case against ethnophilosophy. But in truth they merely confuse two different features of a process.

Ironically this confusion actually clears up for us a few grey areas of the debate. I refer to the relationship among the nature of analysis, prose as a form of language, and philosophy as a human activity. There is a common view, associated with Havelock and Ong on one hand, and scholars such as Ian Watt and Jack Goody

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(1963) on the other, that writing and prose are genetically connected. The suggestion is that without writing, prose would not have been possible. But this is just a dispute about language and terms. If prose is equated with prose writing, then of course the association is understandable. However, this also empties the distinction of any value.

What really ought to be done is to identify prose with prosaic language, that is, ordinary, everyday language, and thus separate it from the specialized language usage such as poetry, ritual discourse and so on. The history of writing attests to a much earlier ancestry or precedence of this specialized language in writing. It may well be that the association of priestly, scribal or clerical orders with writing in its earlier stages, explains the precedence of poetic and specialized writing. The growth of secular writing and of such forms as scientific, philosophic and historical discourse, with the power they command over the development of knowledge and the academy, may have been the main factor in shaping this association of prose and writing. The point therefore is that the postulation of some kind of genetic relationship between writing and prose is false. Prose writing is a much later development, and philosophical prose, as in Plato, even later than literary or historical prose writing. The view that philosophy is not possible without writing, or more specifically, prose writing, is a good example of how not to read the history of writing – or philosophy for that matter. It is simply a piece of professionalitis among academic philosophers. Philosophy and philosophers are most certainly not going to make themselves relevant to Africa (something Africanist academic philosophers always appear to be anxious about) or anywhere else, by this sort of misplaced intellectual smugness, a trait so characteristic of Occidentalism.

It remains to consider the thesis that philosophy is a uniquely Western discipline or activity. This view, as is widely recognized, has been explicitly formulated by Hegel and his followers. It is connected with the project of modernity or the concept of Europe. What it espouses is the cultural and ideological position that philosophy, as a critical science, not only arose or was developed in the West, but uniquely speaks to Western concerns and culture; it expresses the ‘mind’ of the West. As such, it is a thesis at one with the claim that writing, the sign of the Logos, is the spirit of the West.

Now if philosophy is a uniquely Western discourse, then all that African philosophers are trying to do is to recreate in their own environment a Western product, something analogical to creating an African Ford or African Toyota car. No serious theoretical questions of identity can be raised in a situation like that. Rather, it is a simple matter of indigenization of a foreign construct. To introduce an African motif in the conception of the body and engine parts will not obscure the fact that we have there an American or Japanese product. There can be no great shame in that. After all, as Martin Bernal (1991) showed years ago, the cultural appropriation of whatever is valuable is also a Western habit.

But pursuing that automobile analogy further, if any African manufacturer, adopting the general principles of automobile manufacturing were to create a car by

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the name of Uzo and he/she called it an African car, this would perhaps be more in the nature of an authentic African invention. Any deeper level question such as the origin of the principles of automobile making would then take us all so far back into perhaps the pristine, preliterate past that at the end we might all be content to allow each and all their cultural claims. That really would be a more satisfactory state of affairs. Unfortunately we do not have that luxury just yet and therefore we must return to the question facing us: is philosophy a European discourse?

At first sight, this appears to be a valid question; it is simply the interrogative form of the thesis: philosophy is a European discourse. However, we find that the logical obstacles to answering it are insurmountable. I refer to logic, because history itself provides no adequate proof of the case, for the reason that history itself is complicit in the case. History, which is part of the Western control and power over the global system of information, communication and education, cannot sit as impartial judge for the reason that neutral, objective history is a fiction. In this regard, if you were to contest the claim that philosophy is a European enterprise, you would be asked to provide written evidence that any other cultural group has the sort of philosophy that the Europeans possess. The onus is thus placed on other cultures to prove that their counter-claims are also valid, with the proviso that they must follow the European criteria of validity. The query goes something like this: can you provide evidence of philosophy in your culture that is written, analytical and argumentative? In this way, it becomes quite clear that there is no rational way to engage the argument. Its circularity makes it impossible to do so. For, once philosophy is defined in this culturally exclusive way, it becomes the special preserve of the one who does the defining. This is precisely the trap that African philosophers have fallen into. It is also the main reason for the backwardness of African philosophy, the lack of progress it exhibits. It is entangled in the non-issue of whether it exists and in what form and by whose doing.

Conclusion

Instead of this futile merry-go-round, African philosophy should borrow a leaf from the excellent example of other genres of humanistic studies such as literary and historical writing. The enormous strides made since the end of formal European colonialism in African literature and history, the creative and critical output in these two genres of writing, are such that even the chauvinistic West is forced to acknowledge their vitality and originality. These two disciplines were able to discover, indeed recover, their energies from a rampant colonialist obliteration of African knowledge claims because they refused to be bogged down by self-defeating arguments whether oral literature is an authentic form of literature, or whether oral history is historiographically permissible or genuine, according to some other people’s cultural lights. Cultural producers in those disciplines simply went ahead and did their thing, never bothering to look perpetually over their shoulders for approving glances from some European Master.

I shall wind up this discussion by quoting once more from that famous passage in the Phaedrus. After Socrates concludes the narrative of the origins of writing, his

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interlocutor, Phaedrus, then rebukes the philosopher for invoking a foreign origin for the art of writing. To this, in a crushing sarcasm, Socrates retorts in words that his European philosophical and cultural progenies and their African camp followers appear to have never heard:

Oh, but the authorities of the temple of Zeus at Dodona, my friend, said that the first prophetic utterances came from an oak tree. In fact the people of those days, lacking the wisdom of you young people, were content in their simplicity to listen to trees or rocks, provided these told the truth. For you apparently it makes a difference who the speaker is, and what country he comes from; you don’t merely ask whether what he says is true or false. (Plato, 520)

Works Cited

Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992

Bernal, Martin. Black Athena : The Afroasiatic Roots Of Classical Civilization . (1987)

New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Biakolo, Emevwo. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy.”

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 30, No 2 (Summer 1999): 42-65. ---------------------. “Categories of Cross-Cultural Cognition and the African

Condition.” In Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings. 2nd Edition. Eds. P. H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2002.9-19.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri G. Spivak. Baltimore and London:

The John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Eze, Emmanuel, C. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s

Anthropology”. In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Emmanuel C. Eze. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1997. 103-140.

Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Literacy in Traditional

Societies. Ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. 27-68. Harris, Marvin. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. London and Henley: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1969. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.

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-------------------. “The Oral-Literate Equation: a Formula for the Modern Mind.” In. Literacy and Orality. Eds. David Olson and Nancy Torrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.11-27.

Hountondji, Paulin J. African Philosophy : Myth And Reality . Trans Henri Evans with

the collaboration of Jonathan Rée . London : Hutchinson, 1983 Hume, David. “Of National Characters”. In David Hume: Political Essays Ed. Knud

Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 78-92. Kant, Immanuel. Essays and Treatises. Vol 11, Trans. Anon. Bristol: Thoemmes Press,

1993 (rpt 1799 ed). Masolo, D.A. “From Myth to Reality: African Philosophy at Century-End.” Research

in African Literatures Vol 31/1 (Spring 2000): 149-172. ----------------- . “Philosophy and Indigenous Knowledge: An African Perspective”

Africa Today Vol 50/2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 21-38. Morgan, Henry, Lewis. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family

(1870). Washington: Smithsonian Institute. Oruka, Odera H . Ed. Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on

African Philosophy. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990. Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen,

1982. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Street, Brian, “A Critical Look at Walter Ong and the Great Divide” Aspects 1/1

(1988). Rpt Literacy Research Center 4.1 (1988):1-5. Wiredu, Kwasi. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1980.

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MYTH, MEMORY AND THE NATION STATE: AYI KWEI ARMAH’S TWO THOUSAND SEASONS AND BEN OKRI’S THE FAMISHED ROAD

David Udoinwang

National Productivity Centre, Abuja, Nigeria

E-mail: dudoinwang@yahoo.com Abstract The cultural utilities of myths and legends in Africa interplay with history to constitute the artefact for constructing imaginaries of cultural self-assertion and retrieval politicised to counter the pervasion of hegemonic texts which came with alienation and imposition. Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road signify the interface of myth and history centralised in the memory of the African experience. By intertextualising the ancestral oral texts with the texts of emergent modernity, the two authors deepen insight into the realities of postcolonial Africa while drawing copiously on the body of myths and legends that inhere in the cultural past and situate them in the context of the chaotic nature of contemporary world order. The argument of this paper is that although the influx of modernity has revolutionised global cultural space, African cultural material retains its relevance for engaging the order of postmodernity. By bending backward to the past, the two texts represent the projectile for illuminating the veracity of the evolving disorder as it affects the postcolonial milieu. The resilience of cultural self-consciousness and historical memory has been useful in mediating the tensions of the colonial encounter with its tendencies. We explore how the utility of myths, parable, riddles, and other ancestral folk heritage are creatively woven and intricately appropriated to mediate the borders between the ancestral and the postmodern realities towards constructing new sensibilities of nationhood in Africa. Introduction The influence of folklore elements straddles aesthetic space in modern African literature. Although Ben Okri and Ayi Kwei Armah represent a generation apart in modern African literature, their creative sensibilities in the two selected texts tilt to a point of overlap when the contexts and thematic thrusts are placed in the historical perspective. The two writers draw on the ancestral cultural artefact and focus their creativity and vision in a way to re-engage and textualise the dilemma of the present realities while centralising African experience in their aesthetic endeavours. The notion of cultural self-retrieval and belonging as construct of postcolonial politics is pervasive in the literary texts that emerge out of the rupture of colonial history. Such texts, in their different genres, are essentially involved with the project of re-memorialising and deepening interests in cultural and historical self-memory and racial pride in a world of besetting prejudices. Such texts, Dasylva affirms, come from “the urge to interrogate a signifying historical fact of self-place erosion occasioned by psychological dislocation that made a condition of alienation and advancement of colonial interest inevitable” (73).

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But what is culture other than a way a people perceive who they are and what is peculiar to them or their community or group, pertaining to their origins, worldview and social organs that bind them together? Every race, therefore, lays claim in some ways to cultural ownership. This is the general medium of self-assertion, pride of personhood and rational sense of belonging. Naturally, culture is harmless and keeps evolving and mixing over time. Conflict only arises when one culture and belief system tends to contradict the other and the struggle for superimposition ensues. There, therefore, arises the need for negotiation, understanding and tolerance. African culture has suffered untold violence, rape and repudiation in the hands of others since the very first contact with outsiders. This is the point of departure of the multifarious crises that pervade contemporary existence. Let me agree with the point of view of Clifford Geertz on the way of cultural perception as a construct relevant for this occasion:

The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, constructing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication (238).

It is against this underpinning background that this paper situates the nuances of its discourse towards diversifying what myth and folklore about African encounter with the West means to the African person and to Africa as an entity with diverse cultures. In African traditional epistemology, the material world and the spirit realm cross-romance or submerge into one reality. This epistemological reality is imaginatively reworked to make statements that address the evolving social circumstances. This is the basis and foundry of myths and legends as aesthetic strategy that have been resorted to towards constructing new paradigms for the understanding of the contexts of belonging and cultural self-pride. Arising from such sensibility, the past is perused, the present brought to prognosis, and the future projected. From the narrative sweep and thematic imperatives, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road are constituted in the paradox of the postcolonial milieu. They are projected against the overawing menace of imperialism-informed cultural hegemony that tends to negate, distort or demonise Africa’s input in global civilization and culture. The texts in context are symbolic reassertions of pre-colonial communal life, mythic resources as means of entrenching social order and existential harmony, and for perpetuating tradition, envisioned to further mediate history and the heritage of the people. This assertive projectile is important to re-interrogate the repudiation and

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disruption that was brought about by colonial mercantilists and European missionaries and politicians who were bent on creating a space in all ramifications for the construction of expansionist and mercantilist platforms. This issue has been a significant concern of such African writers as the Ghanaian poet, Kofi Awoonor, the Nigerian writers, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Amos Tutuola, the author of The Palm-Wine Drunkard, whose works have had lasting influence on successive generations of African writers. The element of myths, legends and related oral texts that embed contemporary African literary texts are sustained by the creative imagination and firm grasping of the cultural order, skilfully invoked to energise the eloquence needed to articulate and engage the memory of the postcolonies. From the onset of its cultural setting, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons is enmeshed in the milieu of folk legends with the hunter’s tales, the village square meeting, the proceedings of the council of elders, rendered in typical scenery of captivating tales of the moonlight, signifying African traditional world setting. Such mythical or legendary tales, often sauced with songs and drumming or relevant performances, serve to create the right atmosphere to energise the memory of the narrators about issues of life and the great exploits of the ancestors, the warriors of the tribe, the footage of brave hunters, or the marking of special events that are of historical significance to the community. They could also serve to pay homage or tribute to ever-present ancestors who are believed to play eternal role in the affairs of the living long after they might have gone, as part of social heritage of the people. It is this cultural order that gave form and wholeness to African societies. But colonialism came with its imposition and in the process turned Africans into strangers of their own ways with the attendant lingering crisis of adjustment which left devastating and long-lasting repercussions on the consciousness of the colonised and subjugated societies. The theme of cultural alienation has been recurrent in the works of African writers including Chinua Achebe, Es’kia Mphalele and many others who envision or imagine the postcolonial milieu. Falola asserts that the colonial experience wrecked great havoc on African cultures “to the extent that some became strangers to their traditions of old, suffering alienation in the process” (4). This can be appreciated when one reasons out the manner by which European texts, in their typical sensibilities, such as in Joyce Cary’s numerous writings and Joseph Conrad’s as well, handled their African characters. These texts simply posture the African ways as uncivilised, heathenish, uncouth, primitive and crude. On the other side of the picture looms the benevolent European who has come to tame the wild beings of the Dark Continent. By this the alien civilisers justified labour exploitation, land dispossession, the numerous atrocities meted on their hosts, and the phenomenon of social exclusion of the colonial subjects even from the affairs of their own native land and labelled as misfits and foolish. The aliens even deprived them of asserting their humanity and the benefits of their natural endowments. Boehmer asserts:

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Stereotypes of the Other as indolent malingerers, shirkers, good-for- nothings, layabouts, degenerate versions of the pastoral idler, were the stock-in-trade of colonialist writing. In contrast the white man represented himself as the archetypal and provident profit-maker (39).

Many reasons attest to the colouration of the various myths woven in or about a society or even people of a given race. In Africa, what is called myth in European lexicon is more than just a past time as have been conceived in the mind of foreigners who have had to romance with the continent by one means or the other. Europeans and North Americans have developed myths about Africa, Africans and African history in the context of their enslavement of Africans, their colonization of Africa, and their promotion of racism. But that is yet another strand of what have been conceptualised as myth in European texts. It, therefore, means that what is myth in one cultural setting may be reality in another. Indeed, racism perpetuated and still perpetuates myths about Africa and peoples of African descent whose personhood and humanity were objects of racial denigration, forming the opinion which translated into the myth that was supposed to justify the point that black people have neither culture nor history. This distortion of the reality about Africa served the purpose to justify centuries of social, political, and economic subordination of African peoples both in Africa and in the diaspora. It also made an easy way for colonialism and imperialism to thrive through those turbulent ages. The primary way in which racism denigrates Africans is by creating negative images and stereotypes of Africans and their non-Europeanised ways. But myth as we use it in the context of this paper is centred on the heritage of folklore and legendary tales of African people that have been transmitted orally from generation to generation, and which became the major source of African history before the coming of European writing on a wide scale. However, as Osofisan states, the mythic personages that are drafted into African literary expression incarnate the tension between the existing and the visionary, the past and the present, the present and the future, not as deity but as metaphor for re-constructing history (99). Within the scope and context of this paper, there is an obvious interconnect in the imaginative and visionary directions of the two key African writers, Armah and Okri. The motifs they rely on are similar in their variations and aesthetic purpose, thematically devised to bend backward to the milestones of history and traditions of the old for the retrieval of the knowledge of the past which colonial forces strived to erase, dismiss or demonise. By relying heavily on oral culture that flourished in the past to address contemporary social history, the two writers try to creatively “make sense of our multiple heritage” towards shaping and reshaping the canonical imperatives of African literature (Oyedele 167). In this context, Two Thousand Seasons is concerned with “the way” that punctuates every scenario of the narrative. Similarly Ben Okri’s The Famished Road’s narrative vitality is grounded on the dilemma of the ‘Road’ constantly imagined and cast as ‘hungry’ and of which has

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been undergoing construction for epochs gone yet getting nowhere. The ‘road’ here illustrates the paradox and dilemma of Africa’s vicious history of colonialism, neo-colonialism and the chaos of contemporary dependency and socio-economic misery. In Armah’s sensibility of this mythic ‘way’ of the legendary past, which he seeks to rememorize, revise and reappraise, he summons the muse to serve as tribute to cultural self-memory. In the ‘prologue’ he calls on the ancestral memory and history’s informant to reveal the way back to the ancient path so that the path to the future may be clearly defined:

You hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers, rememberers, you prophets called to communicate truths of the living way to foretelling, to join the uncountable seasons of our flowing to unknown tomorrows even more numerous, communicators doomed to pass on truths of our origins to a people rushing deathward, grown ignorance of our source, prejudiced against our own survival, how shall your vocation’s utterance be heard?... (xi).

With this invocative elocution, the path is set for the recreation of the parable of a vicious history of alien incursion, plucked on the cultural memory and the outcomes of colonial encounter and the aftermath. The story deploys the heritage of the legendary elders to landscape the frontiers of colonial politics, the devices of usurpation and power hegemony. In the same temperament, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, with its mythical spawn, draws on the widely held traditional worldview of the spirit-child, ‘born to die’ and to be born into this other side of reality again and again, in a vicious circle of return, causing pain to the parents; neither belonging here nor in the world of the spirits. Known in Yoruba folklore as ‘abiku’, and by several other names in other African cultures, the spirit child, which Okri names as Azaro in his story, has been popularised as motif in the articulation of the dilemma of African experience. The implication of this mythical character’s ability to traverse the two worlds of reality metaphorically makes for the possibility of exhuming the relics of timeless time and for the perusal of different dimensions of history by which the connection between the past and the present is established. Through this historical re-entry into the “house of memory” which Osundare also refers to as “the backyard of time” creates the metaphoric arena upon which the origins of the present reality is re-interrogated and re-engaged. Reflecting on the enduring impetus of colonial oppression and the conglomerate of imperial powers to the subjugated peoples, Osundare then states: “for in the intricate dialectic of human living, looking back is looking forward” (xii).

The very beginning of the story in The Famished Road tilts to the mythical timeless time to announce the African sense of time, which again, Okot p’Bitek has specifically implied in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol (1984). In other words, before the European intrusion into Africa, before the history of conquest, pacification and civilising mission, there had been a beginning in the timeless past. Opening with ‘In the Beginning’, the story of The Famished Road is, therefore, a counter-theology to the Western notion of creation story, giving rise to the telling of an African version of the history of colonial imperialism and the aftermath. In the mythical beginning of

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African folk heritage, the journey builds its aesthetic and cultural impetuses on the folklore milieu, across the forests of spirits and ghosts, the ancestors, the dead whose ears and eyes are believed to attune to the activities on this side of reality; the rivers and all creation co-mingle with the conscious and the unconscious to give form and pattern of things to the sense in the pre-colonial traditional societies. The Famished Road thus opens:

IN THE BIGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, sorrowing. We feasted much because we were free (3).

Yes, the myth of the beginning that is equated with European intrusion and determination is put on the balance of epistemological cross-currents. Myths are the essential cultural material against which historical memory is animated and aesthetically tempered for creating the imaginaries for mediating contemporary discourse of nationhood. Beyond the mythical surface value of ancestral tale, the two texts are thematically grounded on the myths and realities of colonial encounter, drawing on folklore resources as utility for imaginative engagement of this history. With these resources, history can be reframed to fill up the points of the gaping silences that were the undoing of imperialism and racist mentality. In the chapter ‘making sense of the western encounter’, Toyin Falola asserts:

Modern Africa, indeed, the entire complex of modern African cultures, cannot be understood without considering the impact of the West.... In studying their people and continent, African scholars have had little or no choice other than to make sense of the Western encounter.... The so called glory of European imperialism belongs to European history.... Studies of African resistance and nationalism have empowered Africans and turned them into agents of their own history (20-21).

Among others, a few characters that are critical in drawing home the mythical motifs in the two texts are worth pointing out. In Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, the metaphorical characters of Anoa, Isanusi, Koranche and Otumfo on one hand, and the identified ‘white predators’ and ‘destroyers’ on the other hand, create a balance in the dialogic scenes. In The Famished Road, Azaro, Mum and Dad on one hand and Madame Koto, the monstrous on the other, embody the paradoxical trait of the vicious ‘road’ around which the stories evolve. With these creative devices, the screen board is put in place to project the argument of the origins and the role players of historical exigencies of our contemporary experience, bringing the antagonists into dialogues and clarification of the postmodern order.

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Anoa is the recreation of the visionary ancestors, the sages who though are dead and gone to the beyond of time, but the values they represent remain immortalised in the hall of memory, bequeathed through generations. Anoa is the haunting presence of the fathers, the seers, the ancestors who embody the past, the present and the future. They are the historical memory-the reminders and the rememberers. Anoa is the undying voice encoding and decoding the ancient path and translating the direction to the future for the present. In the present course of history, where alien invaders and usurpers, characterised as destroyers and predators, have broken the tribes from the umbilical cord of collectivism and communal order, cultural values stand bastardised and have brought division. Slavery, colonialism and imperialism have put a sharp knife between the tribes. Anoa’s voice echoes from the past:

It is a wonder we have been flung so far from the way? That our people are scattered even into the desert, across the sea, over and away from this land, and we have forgotten how to recognise ourselves?.... Killers who are from the sea came holding dead of the body in their right, the minds and annihilation in the left, shrieking fables of a white god and son unconcieved examplar of their proffered senseless suffering (2).

Anoa is cast as a force, an invocation of the legendary, the mythical personality signifying a cultural semiotic, from whose imaginative text history of the nation states can be reconstructed and reconstituted. From the oral background, the past is woven into tangible reality in which case, misconception and prejudices are re-imagined and mediated. In this regard, Okanlawon makes the following assertion:

African historiography depends on oral traditions with which it has successfully debunked the notion of the primitive African, sans history, sans past... There are some genres which are of common interest to both scholars of history and literature: there are those who contain data about personalities and events that is apart from their aesthetic content; myths, legends, proverbs, panegyrics, dirges (oral elegies!)...constitute the touchstones of oral literature, oral civilisation, as they help to interpret and lend artefact (206-207).

In the invisible eyes of the ancestors, the narrative persona explicates memory not only of the pre-colonial social order but rememorizes the midstream of the colonial encounter. She projects the trajectory of history to underscore the wholeness of African society before the advent of European hegemony and alien usurpers. The worldview, belief system, religion, economic and social structure, culture and agricultural system are expatiated to prove and also to disprove the claims of the ‘destroyers’ and ‘predators’ either from the desert or from the sea. Their greed and footage of their bloody escapades are replayed in the picture to sensitise memory. The manner of their arrival and the devices and intrigues of their entry into the mainstream of traditional world with landmarks of forceful dispossessions also come under historical scrutiny. But what is implied by Armah’s sensibility as one of

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the most devastating of this historical onslaughts is the invasion of the mind by what he describes as “strange and shrieking theology, both of those who infiltrated from the desert and the sea shores. Their education and history glorified alien cultures and such colonial monuments as Mungo Park, and the British Empire” (Two Thousand Seasons 212). Through the agency of folklore and the words of the sages, the creative artist emerging from the postcolonial background is intricately involved with the project of re-historicising the nation states for cultural self-retrieval. By such aesthetic propensity, the roadmap to the origins of colonial presence is perused and the milestones of this epoch are landscaped for re-entry and reappraisal. This has the utility for illuminating the sites of stigmatisation and contestation meted against the heritage of the African past especially by the early European explorers. Okpewho clearly states that “myth is the intellectual or the symbolistic element in an oral narrative”, even though some of its contents simply might have been sacrificed “to new cultural imperatives” (36). In Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons, the deconstructed oral narrative is rendered with a sweeping lucidity and in the temperament of a ‘dilemma tale’, sometime mimetic and at another time dialogic, “which presents choices between alternatives and are resolved through debate” (Bascom 155). This extraction from the texts points at this sensibility as embedded in the mimetic scene which triggers a back-and-forth motion of memory in the imagined or assumed audience:

From beyond our new home, it was not too long before news came rushing from the future. The coming experts of thirtieth generation came back from the shore telling us white men from the sea had arrived at Edina, ten days off, searching for a king among the people, bringing gifts for the special enjoyment of that king, and asking him land...like other white destroyers of our remembrance they too said they were searching for a hospitable place, they too said they were searching for a home (61).

This skilful recreation and interpretation of the mythological legend underpins the framework of Two Thousand Seasons and The Famished Road at different levels within the familiar motif. Essentially the two are involved in the popular project of ‘telling the African story’. Ben Okri’s story in context meticulously experiments as a creative juxtaposition of myth and realities of African experience, drawing on the folk heritage of African traditions. There is a composite of creativity and historical memory. The fabulous streak, the inanimate but spirit-animated beings, the queer trees, the eternal river, and the huge ravished road with the gnomic characters that travel this same time-beaten road, such as witches and other elemental forces that take form in the sensibilities of the traditional folkloric societies, evoke the eerie and weird and arresting atmosphere typically devised to arouse attention for the telling enactment in the traditional folklore world. These forms are taken for granted to the African audience as a cultural norm, but in the European sensibility, they may be jarring and cast pre-logical images. But the balance is maintained by the quick

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juxtaposition of historical material articulated in the obvious symbolism in cultural trope as signifiers. Essentially, Emenyonu acknowledges this enduring trait of the postcolonial writers which he asserts is “imbued with a sense of inviolable mission” as follows:

This is essentially meant to correct the distortions of African reality imposed on the world by the forces of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism... Equally they sought to raise the levels of consciousness of their fellow Africans about the harm done by the European colonisers to African cultural values and sense of self (vii).

The dual-natured role played by the central character, Azaro in The Famished Road in his startling tale about the myth-ridden road traversing between two realities, inter-textually echoes the Bible character, Lazarus, the poor, hungry wretch who, while in this life was sore-ridden and socially ostracised, but on the other divide was someone to reckon with. In Azaro’s wretched life in this side of reality he bestrides the fringes of the material and the spiritual realms; tied down to this side of reality by mother’s love while at the same time beckoned by the spirit world and enticed to return to the other divide of reality. The story of his wondering the ‘hungry road’, the market places and the forests fringes are clearly contextualised in the traditional sensibility of beliefs and worldviews of African people. It is thus understandable that Ben Okri and Ayi Kwei Armah - like Wole Soyinka in The Road, and A Dance of the Forests and other African writers who either directly or impliedly - have had to resort to these traditionally mythological elements as motifs in addressing the cultural and historical encounters of Africans with alien powers and the processes of decolonisation and crisis of power succession in the chaotic modernity and project. Several meta-narratives are embedded in The Famished Road which further enforce the traditional cultural ferment and explicate the richness of African culture; but beyond this, this has been creatively appropriated to tell the horror story about alien incursion, slavery, colonial imperialism, and how these engendered the ‘hunger’ and confused the ‘way’, broke the cultural affinities and divided the tribes and ‘natives’ in bitter hatred one against the other, with the lingering repercussions. The state of the postcolony is symbolised in the marketplace, which in African sensibility is a melting pot for exchange and for multifarious transactions; visited by a medley of cacophonous role-players, both the seen and unseen, the queer and the real; where the dead and the living meet, trade and barter. The market is the haunt ground for wizards, witches, ghosts, the mammy waters and allied strange beings in folk imagination. It is sometimes considered the abode of the deities who watch closely the affairs of mortals. In the animist cultural sensibility, everything is capable of senses and animation. The roads can go hungry and demand blood of sacrifice and appeasement; the trees are invested with weird beings and therefore capable of some spiritual sensibility and motion. It takes people with some unusual sensitivity like Azaro and Madame Koto, who sometime is cast in the story as having extra-human abilities, to notice and translate these imperatives to the human senses. The realities

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of these senses can equally be perused when one is in dream state or goes into a trance like Dad, Azaro’s earthly father as we notice in the story. It is against this cultural notion that the escapades of Azaro the spirit-child can be put in perspective. But at the end, the metaphor is appropriated to redefine the chaotic social order and confusion that mark colonial presence, and translate the possibilities of interplay of cultures rather than hegemonic autocracy of one culture or history over the other. The crises that are pervasive in the post-colonies is given a deeper probing at the marketplace and history is exhumed to dissect the awkwardness of human experience within the milieu, where Azaro notices the proceedings and un-human activities going on in this turbulent environment. With this device the milestone of the postcolonial disorder and crisis-ridden politics is re-examined:

THAT NIGHT I slept under a lorry. In the morning I wandered up and down the streets of the city. Houses were big, vehicles thundered everywhere. I became aware of my hunger when I came to the market place...

At this market place the story now gathers momentum as a horror film, where frightful scenes rise towards the climax, causing breathtaking stirrings and unease in the audience. This sort of scenario is also common in some types of moonlight tales, rendered to arrest attention, teach hard lessons of life or warn the living of consequences of certain activities. The spirit-child continues to reel out the spin before the audience:

I watched the crowds of people pour into the market place. I watched the chaotic movements and the wild exchanges...I shut my eyes and when I opened them again I saw people who walked backwards, a dwarf who got about on two fingers, men upside-down with baskets of fish on their feet, women who had breast on their backs... and beautiful children with three arms. I saw a girl amongst them who had eyes on the side of her face.... That was the first time I realised it wasn’t just humans who came to the market places of the world. Spirits and other beings come there too. They buy and sell, browse and investigate (15).

In addressing the imperatives of the appurtenances that congregate to conjure up what he calls the “ancient mythography”, which seeks to energise memory of Africa’s past, Thompson asserts of myth and legendary tales as social history on the which the past can be translated. He asserts that such species of historiography would be valued as a storehouse of examples to be imitated or avoided by present and future generations “as source of moral instruction, and as open promoter of patriotism” (53). Uzoigwe (42-50) affirms also that the oral traditions of the African past have the potentials for “determining the study of primordial African values” while at the same time serving to perpetuate memory of the historical encounters

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with Europeans and the role these visitors/settlers played towards bringing to extinction these valuable cultures, thereby obstructing social advance. The Famished Road is therefore not to be taken as merely a fabulous tale as it may appeal in some scenes. The skilful juxtaposition of the spell-bound tales with the real life in the modern makes sense and brings relevance to bear on the myth and legendary tradition of the fathers and mothers of the timeless time. When the scene shifts to Madame Koto’s bar, a cacophony of voices breaks out again to describe the real life experience of modern politics, echoing the excruciating memory of modern myths of the market place. Azaro says it all here:

They talked in high-pitched voices and congregated round Madame Koto in the backyard as she sat on a stool preparing the evening’s pepper soup... I learned a lot about the talk about what was happening in the country through them. I learned about the talk about how the white men treated us, about political parties and tribal divisions (76).

In a related scene that has appeal to order of things in the postcolonial world of experience, Azaro finds himself in his wanderings in the house of a police officer who had taken sympathy for him and takes him home when he missed his way. Here he makes the reader to come to grips with the realities of social decadence and decay prevalent in the world of humans unknown to the average man in society. In this police officer’s house the spirit child is haunted by the spirit of other children and strange voices who have been the victims of police brutality and corruption, exposing the vulnerability of society, that has turned into a cultic system, where threat and fear rule. In the same breath, Madame Koto’s bar paints a scenario of political violence, where thugs hold swear, wrecking havoc and causing injury and inflicting pains in the game of ruthless politics and power struggle. Each time Azaro hits the ‘road’, gloom and confusion mark the way. As far as he is concerned the ‘road’ is marked “with too many signs, and no direction”; a chequered road “with no direction”, where the travellers become “aimless pilgrims” (115). The ‘road’ is thus a strange place from what it used to be in the timeless time before the advent of imperial powers with new values; that turn things upside down from their natural order; a solitary place that alienates modern travellers. In the transformational streak of the myths the notion of belonging in the modern conception is therefore fraught with confusion and contradictions that defy the natural order of things. As Azaro, the narrative node wanders again into the bizarre road, in the garage, he encounters the toiling mass of the people “carrying monstrous sacks as if they were damned”, as others are “staggered under the weight of salt bags, cement bags and garri sacks”, as “the veins of their faces were swollen to bursting point” (144). On the same streets he witnesses violent political campaigns where the emergent political leaders are engaged in power tussle where new ‘visionaries’ conjure the authority and powers of the ex-colonial master to impose themselves against the will of the people. The persona hears one of them boast: “All you have to do is press ink next to my name...My party will bring good roads and

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electricity and water supply... whether you vote for our man or not we will win” (198). The spirit child is everywhere and quite at home with the unfolding socio-political scenario in the milieu of his wandering. On this road, he hears the peasants echoing in the gossips about the new order of power-hungry rulers that whether they are called the party of the poor or of the rich, the story remains the same: that “they are all corrupt”, translating the imagery of the postcolonial world as the emergent vicious order, a circle of social reproach. In the quiet of night he tracks voices of disquiet about the “stories of recurrence told down through generations of defiant mouths... crying out in lamentation at the repetition of an old circle of ascending powers” in a vicious history (178). In this confused atmosphere, “the thugs and ordinary familiar people alike pour out on the road... wounding the night with axes rampaging our sleep, rousing the earth, attacking compounds” and this wind of recurrence continually circle the earth (183). The night of Azaro’s wandering is punctuated by gunshots, and murdering shrieking of casualties and victims of misrule that litter the world. In that same mythical tinge, along this viciously hungry and bizarre road, Azaro encounters the undercurrent tension of riotous sacked workers shouting slogans; hoard of protesters, nude women that stalk the road; and on this same road he sites ugliness and monstrous sights including dogs with tails of snakes. As night falls the world becomes benighted. At Madame Koto’s bar he sights the horrifying phenomenon of ochre palaces, cats with legs of women and spirits who mingle freely with humans. To illumine this metaphoric scenario, the dialogue between Azaro and Mum who is at the receiving end of the anguish this side of reality is inserted. She narrates her story in the extract as following:

When white people first came to our land...we had already gone to the moon and all the great stars. We gave them some of our gods. We shared our knowledge with them. We welcomed them. But they forgot all this.... They took our lands, burned our gods, and they carried away many of our people to become slaves across the sea...some of them believe they have killed God. Some of them worship machines... (282).

Such rhetorical explication that characterises the major scenes in Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Okri’s The Famished Road serve to project the interplay of communal folklore resources with the myth of modernity and ‘higher’ civilization traded in the crucible of colonial history. The tales in these instances go beyond empty fable and primitive enactment but exploited as social satire to give insight into the postmodern cultural crisis. The folk tradition of telling our story is inherent in African cultural sensibility as a “common heritage” and as a compulsion (Obiechina 21). This resource constitutes the hallmark of social imaginaries into the historical past of the narrative communities (Abarry 24-37). Awhefeada affirms that given the historical memory pertaining to the trauma of colonial presence and the background of the African past, “there is no discourse woven around the

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postcolonial that negates the imperatives of history” (172). Historical concerns then have been the potent force of the postcolonial representations in African literature. The thematic involvement with the memory of the nation-states as sited in the mainstream politics of European colonisation and neo-colonialism in Africa are brought to the open court of dialogue in the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ben Okri in this context. Thus in the aesthetic strategy in Isanusi Armah’s dilemma tale, this character plays the role of the traditional historian whose presence in the story helps to translate the traditional wisdom into the demands of the present experience in modernity. It is, therefore, the place of Isanusi to engage and appraise the rationale of lingering crisis pervading the postcolonial societies. In a typical ‘town square meeting’ with the imaginative elders of the tribes with visionary Isanusi, a dialogue concerning the way ensues:

All our conversations with Isanusi turned about a central understanding: remembering the thousands upon thousands of seasons of our people’s existence, remembering the thousands upon thousands of days spent journeying to find new resting places, remembering ancient and present assaults against the soul of our people, and remembering the harsh division - division yet to find resolution... We have been a people fleeing our true destiny (157).

In the utterance of the remnants of the sages and ancestors and forbearers of the tribe, what colonial encounter has wrought had been “scenes of carnage” and utter dissolution they have already left stretching over this land” in the “desert they once called their own” (204-205). Despite the destruction, death, “carnage of bodies and souls”, the narrative leaves a twinkle of hope and envisions “a coming together of all the people of the way” (206). In The Famished Road, Azaro’s Dad is in a similar cast made to dream up a new dawn where the people of the ‘road’ will hold common purpose of united force and collective consciousness in a culture of mutual tolerance; a new nation subsumed in a new world order. Dad is, therefore, captioned as dreaming and in the dream state conjuring up a new dawn in his thinking, whether it comes in a revolutionary sweep or in any means possible. The extract of Dad’s imagination as reported by Azaro goes thus:

He conjured an image of a country in which he was invisible ruler and in which everyone would have the highest education, in which everyone must learn music and mathematics and at least five world languages...be versed in tribal, national, continental, and international events, history, poetry and science; in which wizards, witches, herbalists and priests of secret religions would be professors at universities...In which delegation of all the poor people would have regular meetings with the Head of State... (409).

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This utopian vision may remain far-fetched, but the longing for such a world order of universal oneness of all cultures and peoples begins to prick creative imagination as long as the present reality is concerned. This creative aspiration in The Famished Road is further accentuated by Dad in another scene within the setting in which he reveals to the spirit-tormented son saying: “My son, I dreamt that I had set out to discover a new continent”, not as the first set of ‘discoverers’ did and wrote their names on the landmarks to glorify the Empire or their kings and queens back in their capitals (436), but as all-inclusive nationalities in the diversity of cultures. He states further that this transformation will definitely take place when people least expected, stating that a wonderful change is coming when “struggling people will know justice and beauty” and the hitherto victimised people will realise the great meaning of struggle and hope” (478). It is significant to note that Dad has began the experience of re-dreaming the world that is imagined to be better than the present scheme of things “in which black people always suffered” and “human beings suffered needlessly” (492). Conclusion: The concern of this paper has been to explore how myth, legends and other African folklore material have been utilised in the two selected novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ben Okri respectively, to engage the postcolonial politics of Other. It is argued in context that the ancestral mythical tales and legendry stories of the forebears have remained the rich historical resource from which successive generations have relied on to peruse the mind of the ancestral for the perpetuation of this cultural heritage and for the continuity of the memory of their societies. Nnolim rightly asserts that the colouration of African literature as “emerging from the ashes of these past experiences” arising from “a strong sense of loss: loss of our dignity; loss of our culture and tradition; loss of our religion; loss of our land; loss of our very humanity; and has been attuned to address the long history of slavery and colonialism (1). The past is represented in this argument as wholeness, and complete as a social order, like any other social setting with challenges and potentials for advancement but was violently violated by the imperial powers from the desert and by those from the seas who stormed in and imposed alien cultures and created in the process the crisis of alienation and disorder that continues to haunt the present. Myth in the postcolonial texts are involved with making meaning of this turbulent epoch, and often undertake project the past as a means to disembowelling the historical embodiment of the colonial texts. This serves to appraise the veracity of the claims in the imperial texts that were orchestrated by explorers and settlers. As a project of self-retrieval and self-renewal, we affirm Tsaaior’s assertion that “the politics of postcolonial textuality necessitates the dismantling of the architecture of imperial knowledge inscribed in the labyrinthine matrices of the master texts”, because, according to him, “this concerns the very survival of the postcolony” (6). It is affirmed further that colonial concerns were marked by subjugation, suppression and dispossession in all its ramifications, including the dispossession of the cultural knowledge and self-worth of the colonised subjects. The strategy adopted to dismember the colonialist texts had been the very myth and legends that were dismissed in the notion of the

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aliens as primitive cultures is important for the reversal of such cultural prejudices and for the renegotiation of the realities of Africa’s past from what others have reputed it to be. Works Cited Armah, Ayi Kwei. Two Thousand Seasons. London, Ibadan, Heinemann, 1973 (1987). Abarry, Abu. ‘Oral Rhetoric and Poetry: Story-Telling among the Gas of Ghana’. In S. O.

Asein (ed). Comparative Approaches in Modern African Literature Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1982.

Awhefeada, Sunny. ‘History and Politics of Representation in Postcolonial African Text:

Africa and its Diasporas’ In James Tar Tsaaior (ed). Politics of the Postcolonial Text: Africa and Its Diasporas. Muenchen: LinCom Europa Academic Publications, 2010.

Bascom, W. ‘African Dilemma Tales.’ In R. Dorsen (ed). African Folklore. New York,

Doubleday Anchor, 1972. Boehmer, Eleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dasylva, Ademola Omobewaji. ‘Playing with History, Playing with Word: Ngugi and

Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’. In Ibadan Journal of English Studies. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004: 73-87.

Emenyonu, Ernest N. Studies on the Nigerian Novel. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books,

1991. Falola, Toyin. The Power of African Cultures. U.K, University of Rochester Press, 2003. Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture”. In

Jessika Munns & Gita Rayan (eds). A Cultural Study, A Reader: History, Theory, Practice, London and New York: Longman.

Nnolim, Charles E. ‘African Literature in the 21st Century: Challenges for Writers and

Critics’. In African Literature Today, No. 25 (2006): 1-9. Obiechina, Emmanuel. ‘Common Themes in African Diasporan Literature: Something

Shored Up From History’s Monumental Wreckage’, ALA Bulletin, Vol. 26: No. 2 (Spring, 2000): 21-33.

Okri, Ben. The Famished Road, London: Vintage Books, 1992. Okanlawon, Tunde. ‘African Oral Traditions and the Research Sources’. In E. J. Alagoa (ed).

Oral Tradition and Oral History in Africa and the Diaspora: Theory and Practice, Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization & Nigerian Association for Oral History and Tradition, 1990.

Okpewho, Isidore. ‘Myth and Rationality in Africa’. In Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies,

No. 1 (April), 1981. Osofisan, Femi. The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama and Culture. Trenton NJ, and

Asmara: Africa World Press, 2001.

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Osundare, Niyi. The Eye of the Earth, Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1986. Oyedele, Wale. ‘Reflections on the Nature of Canonical Activity and its Black Paradigms’. In

Adeyemi Raji-Oyelade & Oyeniyi Okunoye (eds). The Postcolonial Lamp: Essays in Honour of Dan Izevbaye. Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2008. 155-174.

Thompson, L. A. ‘The Menace of Bogus History’. In Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies.

No.1, 1981. Tsaaior, James Tar. ‘Introduction: Of Origins, Politics and the Place of the Postcolonial Text

in African/Black History and Culture’. In James Tar Tsaaior (ed). Politics of the Postcolonial Text: Africa and Its Diasporas. Muenchen: Lincom Europa Academic Publications. 5 – 37.

Uzoigwe, G. N. ‘On Values and Oral Tradition: Towards a New Field of Oral Research’. In E.

J. Alagoa (ed). Oral Tradition and Oral History in Africa and the Diaspora: Theory and Practice, Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization & Nigerian Association for Oral History and Tradition, 1990.

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MYTHIC (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER/SEXUALITY IN AKACHI EZEIGBO’S HOUSE OF SYMBOLS

Rebecca Usoro

Department of English University of Uyo, Nigeria

E-mail: anniebeckyu@yahoo.com Abstract This paper attempts to explore the mythic representations of gender and sexuality in African writings as exemplified by Akachi Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols. Most African writings centre on the history of their societies, ranging from the pre-modern to the post-colonial. Whether in prose, poetry or drama, each writer strives to anchor his work on the issues that mirror, to a large extent, the society he situates his work. Since the work of art is mostly dialogical, characterization becomes an invaluable asset in the hands of writers. Even in non-human tales, it becomes imminent to find characters exhibiting human-defined traits. In reading human tales, one observes a direct gender defined characterization. Each gender enacts a role that the writer pre-assigns, which of course is his reflection of the society in question. Ezeigbo represents the history of her society, the Igbo, in the modern medium. She carefully assigns distinctive roles to each gender according to her perception of the pre-modern Igbo culture. Her work emphasizes a society devoid of male dominance, where the female is respected, encouraged, revered and honoured on her own merit. The concept of domination, subjugation and oppression of the female gender by the male which has resulted in tirades for “Feminism” as the solution to this age-long complexity is associated with post-colonialism, especially in sexist society. The paper concludes that sexist thoughts have not singularly provided the basis for human and social development, which is effectively enhanced by the efforts and energies of women. This oversight when corrected will raise the glory of African society above sub-development status in the 21st century.

Introduction

All literary writings aim at presenting a particular society to its audience. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex presented the myth of the gods of the Greek society; Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, Fagunwa’s A Forest of a Thousand Daemons and Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame (which borrows from the Grecian myth), portray the Yoruba cosmology, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart reflects the Igbo society. Zaynab Alkali’s The Stillborn portrays the Hausa/Fulani culture. Ime Ikiddeh’s The Vulture’s Funeral and Reincarnation and Daniel Udo’s Season of Silences also reflect the Ibibio cosmology, Clark-Bekeredemo’s Ozidi Saga reflects the Ijaw culture, among others. Akachi Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols is a reflection of her ancient Igbo culture before the invasion by the Whiteman. In this masterpiece, Ezeigbo analyzes some mythic representations of gender and sexuality that abound in African writings, using her society as a case study.

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Mythic (mis)representation in this paper is the idealized conception of the tales of the ancient Igbo society which Ezeigbo represents. In the text, House of Symbols, Ezeigbo transmutes the history of her society through her recreation of her ancestors as she reflects on their routine before the uninvited intrusion of Kosiri (as the white invaders were called in one of Ezeigbo’s novels, The Last of the Strong Ones) “contaminates” (The Last, 2) the “interesting lives of women and men born into four generations of two remarkable families” ... (House, iii). Since most African writings centre on the history of their societies, ranging from pre-modern to post colonial, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the replication of societal myths and folklores in them. Each writer strives to anchor his work on the issues that mirror, to a large extent, the society he situates his work. Ezeigbo represents the history of her society, the Igbo, in the modern medium, the novel. She carefully assigns distinctive roles to each gender according to her perception of the pre-modern Igbo culture. Her work emphasizes a society devoid of male dominance, where the female is respected, encouraged, revered and honoured on her own merit.

The concept of domination, subjugation, suppression, relegation and oppression of the female gender by the male is patriarchal which is noted to have come with colonization. This has resulted in tirades for “Feminism” as the solution to this age-long complexity which post colonialism has left in its wake. Patriarchy thrives in a male hegemonic (sexist) society. A patriarchal society is exemplified by male power while women are reduced to “second class citizens”. This attribute of insecurity for the female sex informs the belief that a woman is only “secured” in the marriage institution irrespective of her “blessings”. This paper interrogates Ezeigbo’s representation of gender and sexuality in her Igbo society. It is broken into four parts: the introduction, gender and the society as its theoretical basis, Ezeigbo’s (Mis) Representations in House of Symbols and conclusion.

Gender and Society

Gender, as Roger Webster defines it, is a “socially constructed difference which forms the basis of inequality, oppression and exploitation between the sexes … (72). This means that the patterns to which the individuals are expected to conform are designed and determined from societal unwritten cultural laws for the purpose of apportioning different kinds of roles and responses to the two sexes. It is this sex differential role within the society that is referred to as gender. The drama of gender is scripted by the society; each society decides what the two sexes should do and how they should behave. The aspiration and yearning of people are influenced by the “expectations or constraints which the society designs for the two sexes” (Emenyi, 56).

African society in general is a patriarchal one which promotes gender structures. Every aspect of human life is determined along this sexist line. Patriarchy is a sexist system and it recognizes only the male as the authority in the family and society. Ownership of possessions is relegated to the male only while exercise of power is male-centred. Imoh Emenyi in her article, “Women as symbol of Patriarchal Capitalism in ‘Dark Goddess and True Confession’ ” asserts that:

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[...] negative gender roles have been exploited to mythify feminine issues; and in the process women’s humanity is subjected to the forces of expediency and power distribution – two features patriarchy shares with capitalism as ideologies which uphold the suppression and exploitation of women ... (34)

From childhood to death, the African society has different traits that each sex must exhibit; otherwise names are tagged to their violations which are assumed as taboos.

Mary Kolawole upholds that the issue of “gender has become a major canon of modern scholarship … there is hardly any society, past or contemporary, that upholds absolute gender equality”. She adds that distinct gender differentiation often creates women marginalization in any society that it is celebrated (108). This statement confirms that most societies, especially in modern times, perpetuate these gender roles in different categories and the recipients of the negative effects of this gender distinction are usually the woman.

Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn opine that “inequality of the sexes is neither a biological given nor divine mandate, but a cultural construct” aimed at limiting the supposed weaker gender (cited in Ezeigbo’s Gender Issues, 3). Ezeigbo avers that “the activities of feminist and the women’s movement have given many women self-confidence and respect” as their potentials are justly articulated (Ezeigbo Gender Issues, 3). She adds:

It is important to put, in the right perspective, the make-up and attributes of a true feminist. She is not a colourless, passive, ignorant and inert doormat of a woman. Neither is she a termagant nor a hater of men she relates well to all human beings and is cheerful, friendly but restrained. As a wife or a mother, she is dutiful, responsible but not aggressive; self-confident but not arrogant ... (3).

In their research into sex role stereotypes, Paul Rosenkrantz et al reveal that the male is “readily accepted as being active, aggressive, ambitious, dominant and independent while the female is expected to be gentle, emotional, quiet or talkative, caring but insecure” (291). One at this juncture wonders if Rosenkrantz et al’s raw materials contained inputs from African society as Africa’s patrilineal status readily accepts and promotes male dominance and female subjugation.

The gender dichotomy spans every aspect of life so much that some societies do not believe that a woman has sense enough to think about her situation. She is rather to “accept” her status without questioning, after all “a woman is only seen, not heard” (Things Fall Apart). Today’s Igbo society being a patrilineal one like most African societies, instruments this distinction effectively. It projects the invisibility status of the female sex where “power” to act must be obtained from the man of the house. Chinua Achebe further underscores this distinctive role of the female in Igbo society when the protagonist, Okonkwo, queries one of his wives, Nwoye’s mother: “when did you become the ndiche of Umuofia?” simply because the former dared to ask if

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the oracle has decided to kill Ikemefuna whom she was asked to have in custody (TFA, 11).

Emenyi remarks that “what each society prescribes as the appropriate role for the sexes becomes the cultural theory of gender and the female child in particular is expected to learn them from birth …” (38). In confirming the African position on male superiority, supremacy and dominance, Emenyi further asserts that

…the male and female children are socialized differently; the former is groomed to be a conqueror while the later is trained to meet his needs. The prominence given to male traits as attributes that are positively valued has culminated in the institutionalization of male dominance. The female is planted in domestic space as a wife and mother … (38).

The institutionalization of the male thus impact negatively on the absence of a male child in family. In African society, a man without a male child is seen as one that has no child at all. In this instance, it is the woman that bears the brunt of the insufficiency. For instance, Emecheta’s Nnu Ego and Adaku are harassed in marriage because Adaku has only two female children and Nnu Ego has one only in her second marriage. On the tenets of patriarchy, a male child who does not possess the desired or expected aggressive fearless and bold traits is seen as effeminate, a disgrace, a defeat and a failure. Achebe reflected this when he echoes through his protagonist, Okonkwo: “I will not have a son who cannot hold his head in the gathering of the clan …” (24). He states further: “I am worried about Nwoye. A bowl of pounded yam can throw him in a wrestling match….Where is the young sucker that will grow when the old banana tree dies? … (46).

Even within the patrilineal set up, high class distinction is maintained as powers are conceded to the strong, mighty and the royalty in the society. In Igbo land, ofu and ozo titles mark out the elite who administer power in the society. The obuofu is the highest judicial body reserved for the highly achieved and mighty of the land. In this light, patriarchy victimizes the weak male as it does to women (a weak man is viewed as effeminate). The patrilineal African society expects a woman to be gentle, meek, submissive, receptive, and they are not expected to display emotions. That is why Zaynab Alkali’s Li is disregarded in the society for daring to flout the tradition of her people, the Hausa.

The extent to which masculinity is cherished in patriarchy is exhibited by Achebe’s Okonkwo when he regrets Ezinma’s femaleness and wishes she were a man because she possesses those qualities that Nwoye, his first son does not (TFA, 45). These gender differential roles assigned to the sexes in each patriarchal culture are expressed clearly in the literary culture, whether written or oral. Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols is however a negation of the male hegemonic spirit as she presents her ancient society in its purity.

Hess et al observe that the culture that we live in helps us to “become gendered person living in a gendered world, thinking gendered thoughts … (193). The efforts

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of women at breaking the barrier of the male literary monopoly in writing are not taken lightly by the authoritative society. Even in contemporary civilization, such moves at a conscious exposition of the female literary capabilities are branded as “feminism” and most men are bitter at this awareness that female writers have brought to the experiences of female oppression. Feminism in its extreme, although dangerous and most often misunderstood especially in a patrilineal set up, is a direct reaction to the level of male subjugation, oppression and relegation of the female species. Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols is, however, not a feministic degradation of the male hegemony as she presents her ancient society in its original, undiluted state.

Ezeigbo’s (Mis)Representations in House of Symbols

Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols presents inter/intra societal conflict in Africa. However, it is noticed that these inter/intra conflicts are humane in nature; they are not caused by role distinctions of the characters but are generated by human jealousies and hatred. In accordance with the tradition of patriarchy and in the African patriarchal system, representation should uphold the male gender. Zulu Sofola tends to sympathize with the loss of centrality for the African woman. She says that in African society, the conceptualization of the psyche reflects genderlessness. Her assertion implies that the traditional African society conditions the male and female to be complementary to each other. She further says that it is the English language that appends “fe” to male or “wo” to man to form “female and woman” (52). These distinctions discriminate between the sexes thereby reflecting specified role function which conditions the male to be the leader while the female is the underdog.

In patriarchy, only the success of the male gender and its prowess would be lauded. All sexist writers enjoy the mortification of the female gender by succinctly magnifying the suppressed, battered and subjugated female. In Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols however, the reverse is the case. To laud the female gender will amount to misrepresentation in a patriarchal society such as ours but this is exactly what Akachi Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols sets out to achieve. This writer infers that the author is however not confrontational to the status quo but rather represents her pre-modern society ante- status quo which seems to emphasize the female.

Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols rather mirrors the author’s mythic reflection of ancient African life where patriarchy had not held sway. She cautiously highlights the pre-modern Igbo society which reflects the opposite of the modern patriarchal hegemony. Gender roles are meticulously evaluated in this pre-literate culture. The male and female genders are extolled for their level of achievements. The highlight shows that women were given free hand to belong to the society, not as appendages of the male, but in their own right. Her language reveals that the women were the mouthpiece of the gods and goddesses. As priestesses and prophetesses, their authorities were not questioned neither were they undermined in any way. Powers and authorities flowed from them without the least feeling of variance. For instance, in the statement, “Ezenwayi wishes to see you, your husband and the child you are nursing”, misrepresentation is implied in the patriarchal provisions (4). The fact that the husband is the head of the family is not the question here. He is not addressed

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directly neither is he the first to be mentioned in the deliverance of the message. This in the pre-modern society does not undermine the husband neither does it diminish his authority as the head of the family, but the emphasis of the message is on the woman, the wife.

Similarly, Ezeigbo represents the female gender as an epitome of purity whom the gods speak through. Ezenwayi is the prophetess of Umuga. There are many males in the society who would have been used as the mouthpiece of the gods, but the gods chose her. She ministers to male and female alike, from far and from within without any hard feelings of usurpation of power as would have been the case in today’s patriarchal society.

In representing the female role in this ancient society, Okwudibia, is the (rememberer) of the society. The history of the clan rests in her good memory capacity as she recalls the history and genealogy of the tribe beyond four generations. Ejimnaka, the lioness (also the grandmother of the Eaglewoman), is also a woman that Ezeigbo recalls as she represents cherishable values in the ancient Umuga society. Ejimnaka’s prowess is the centre story of The Last of the Strong Ones which the present novel follows.

Eaglewoman (Ugonwayi), one of the major characters in the novel, is equally a woman represented as an epitome of success, good nature and perfection. The Umulobia people (the village they have lived in and made impact for many years) and the entire Atagu community refer to her as “the tree that grows money”... (121). Although Osai (Obidiegwu), is equally noted as the best husband, good natured to all and a very successful civil servant (the first black man to be made Assistant District Officer (ADO) in the whole of Atagu county community), his is not the emphasis of the author. Even Ezeogu, the seer (one of the twelve carried away by the invaders, (who) saw ahead of time and warned that the coming of the strangers would upturn our world and rend the fabric of Umuga tradition ...) is a revered son of the land who is merely mentioned, not emphasized (2-3).

Eaglewoman’s success in business and domestic sphere occupies the author’s concern in the novel. It is to her that families bring their children for training in both job opportunities and morals. Many desperate people look up to her for succour and are never disappointed: “‘They say you are a wizard of medicine and a godfather to the poor’ ... the sick man said ‘you can see I have a disease that needs cure and I have come to you receive it’” (248). The eulogy given to Eaglewoman tends to diminish the virtues of Osai and Ezeogu. This is Ezeigbo’s conscious effort at misrepresentation.

Nnenne, the baby is another representation of the female gender copiously portrayed by the author. Nnenne is the baby (Mmirimma – Spring of Beauty) of the house, Eaglewoman’s and Osai’s second daughter and the protagonist of the novel. She is claimed to be the reincarnated Ejimnaka, the lioness of Umuga, who, with Okwudibia, Chieme, Onyekozuru and Ezenwayi, were the Oluada (the representative voice of women) of Umuga in The Last of the Strong Ones. Nnenne, the

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reincarnated Ejimnaka is acknowledged as “one who left in anger in a period of transition and returned in peace in the time of transformation”(152-3). In Okwudibia’s words, her reincarnation is confirmed:

What news do you bring me from the ancestors? .... Ezeukwu’s daughter, welcome to my house. You who return on purpose to weave a new destiny. You come to speed me on my way, to send me to the place where I should have gone before now. Ndewo! (90).

Her past virtues such as pride, self confidence, firmness and resolute spirit are recalled. Even in her reincarnated life, she is unique; her pride makes her defy Joseph’s seeming authority over okosa game’s victory. She taunts and challenges him to do his worse rather than beg for mercy “Did I beg you to stop? ... I did not beg you as you wanted me to”(179). Her enigmatic character is observed by her mother, Eaglewoman: “What shall we do with a child like Nnenne? ... She is too precocious, too intense. Too passionate” (199). The entire novel revolves around her present and past life.

Ezeigbo does not end her positive representations of the female gender on her major characters alone. For instance, “the messenger, a sturdy, healthy-looking and attractive young woman” (5) is Ezenwayi’s mouthpiece to the Osai family. Although Ezenwayi has male attendants, it is a woman that she uses at this crucial moment, having sent a similar message twice in the last nine months. The male attendants serve to guard the female in the face of danger. Another woman, Anuli, is a prophetess in Umukwulu, another stretch of villages away from Umuga. She used her female attendants in delivering her messages even when she had male attendants too. Men were however recognized as the ones “to give protection” whenever necessary (26).

Her representation also favours some male characters that are minor in the action of the novel. Chiedoche and Nnamdi, Aziagba’s twins, are represented as reincarnated strong men of Umuga – Okoroji the war commander, the father of the twins and Obiatu, Aziagba’s father who was one of the respected obuofu of Umuga in The Last of the Strong Ones.

In her representation of the pre-modern Igbo culture, Ezeigbo highlights some aspects of the Igbo culture too which impact the overall life pattern of the society. Her representation of the way in which the myth of idegbe serves as a vital ingredient in the construction of the pre-modern Africa is accentuated too. Idegbe is a system whereby an only child of the family, a female, legally perpetuates the family name in the Igbo culture. Aziagba, Eaglewoman’s mother, is an idegbe. Her society “socially constructs” that the family name be perpetuated in cases such as hers where there is no other child for her parents. In the modern society, multiple marriage or adoption would have been the solution to the absence of a male child or another child where it is desired. Even the most conspicuous object of the author’s imagination is feminized:

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Painted conspicuously on the front wall of the building is a life-size image of a female, full-bodied, with the wings of an Angel...this is the first time she has ever seen an Angel imaged in the form of a woman ... 21.

Ezeigbo reflects a society that thrives on healthy competition. The citizens are not out to flex their muscles on why the “weaker” sex should she be the mouthpiece of the gods at all times. There is no feeling of conflict, contention or competition rather each person is respected on his or her merit. The author does not cite arrogance as a characteristic of these women in recognized positions.

Her opinion corroborates Zulu Sofola’s claims that the African society should see the human society as organic, holistic reality whose existence and survival can be achieved through a positive harmonious social organisation in which all the members are relevant (53). This claim does not encourage contention, conflict or competition rather it promotes peaceful coexistence among all contending factions. Ini Uko adds that women are endowed with strength and potential and that many of the negative, derogatory portrayals of women have been guided by prejudice, ignorance and or sexism, which characterize patriarchy (191). In all, these negative portraitures and representations of the female gender in literary works which exemplify real life do not provide the basis for human and social development that we earnestly desire. The efforts and energies of women in the development of human and social progress in African society over the centuries cannot be enumerated on a few pages of wtiting. Yet, male chauvinism, patriarchal hegemony and prejudice rob patriarchal societies of clear-mindedness to the truth of human fallibility wherefore the female is constantly adjudged.

Conclusion

Most African writings centre on the history of their societies, ranging from pre-modern to post colonial. Whether in prose, poetry or drama, each writer strives to anchor his work on the issues that mirror, to a large extent, the society he situates his work. Since the work of art is mostly dialogical, characterization becomes vital resources for writers. Moreso, since literature comprises both human and non-human tales, it becomes imminent to find characters exhibiting human defined traits. In reading a human tales, one observes a direct gender defined characterization. Ezeigbo painstakingly select her characters to buttress her imaginative prowess. Her text, House of Symbols, is ensconced in the middle of her conceived trilogy. It continues the saga that began in The Last of the Strong Ones. The Umuga genealogy is assiduously scrutinized and the virtues of these remarkable characters are reflected as a measure to inculcate positive assets among posterity. Each gender in this novel enacts a role that the writer pre-assigns, which of course is her reflection of her society as she seeks to epitomize.

Thus the modern Igbo patrilineal society, unlike the pre-modern Igbo, does not bequeath equal opportunities to women and men. In the pre-modern era, women were wealthy and famous. Quite a number of the hardworking women owned

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landed properties that did not interfere with the functionality of the society. However, today’s society has robbed the woman of her God-given potentials as she “has been stripped bare” of her central relevance in the traditional society due to years of psychological, intellectual, material and cultural subversion by foreign powers. To this Sofola tends to sympathize as the loss of centrality for the African woman has appended the woman to the male in such a way that her relevance is subsumed under the shadow of the male (52). For this she rejects the Western concept of feminism, which refuses any association to the male and the double standard syndrome. Sofola tends to rather join forces with the likes of Buchi Emecheta, Alice Walker and Clenora Hudson-Weems who prefer to call their gender projection Womanism. They argue that Womanism does not present a “man-hating ideology but upholds respect for the family unit (Kolawole, 109). The sensitivity in gender discourse has polarized attitudes to its discussions because in most cases, the discussion “involves a war of the sexes …” (109).

However, some female writers refuse to be apologetic in their expression of the female situation. Flora Nwapa is one of such who elicits an overt unapologetic concern for the sex differential in patriarchal society. Her works attest to the celebration of female excellence and recommends a total rejection of unhealthy male dominance and subjugation in marriage for the female sex which the men so much enjoy. In recent times however, male writers like Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe and Femi Osofisan have also joined to project women in more role-fulfilling positions. Still in projecting womanhood against feminism, Zulu Sofola’s assertion that “the African perception of gender question is thus healthier, positive and allows for a wholesome development of the human society” is only practicable in few matrilineal cultures of Africa like Ghana (especially in Akan), Efiks and some parts of Delta State in Nigeria.

Even in the concept of reincarnation which African society is well known for, Aziagba's twins, Nnamdi and Chiedochie are said to be Obiatu and Okoroji (Aziagba's father and the father of the twins who lost their lives in the transition period of old Umuga society). The Igbo modern society, like her other patrilineal counterparts in Africa, signifies gender relations in all human endeavours. There are specified things that men must do and others for women. Some days are set aside in which women are not allowed free movement like the male, some crops are left for the women to plant and own while ownership of some are for the men. In polygamous families, there are days for “husband” allotted to each woman. In the gathering of the clan for example, there are issues that women are not expected to be a part of, the classified male-exclusive issues. In the novel under review, Ezeigbo projects the true undiluted Igbo society where the female gender was given free access to flutter her wings. In the understudied society, patriarchy which seems to relegate the women to the background was unknown as everyone had a free space to display his or her potentials.

Ezeigbo copiously presents the pre-modern gender structure of that society in its true light. The points of success for the male are indicated as well as the areas of strength for the female gender. Virtues are highlighted for their true value. The issue

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of patriarchal appropriation of power was not too pronounced in the pre-modern Africa.

In spite of modern civilization which is supposed to broaden the minds of the people, men in patriarchal societies today still demonstrate a fit of pique at the notion of a woman excelling in a presumed male exclusive domain such as medicine, academics, political arena, to mention a few. Some men cannot imagine a woman who is sensible enough to break barriers honourably without a taint of immorality, whereas research and observation have proved these insinuations wrong. To such minds, therefore, Ezeigbo’s representations in the novel, House of Symbols, would certainly be misrepresentations. Her representations infer that women are honourable and brilliant enough to excel in all aspects of life. They contribute immensely to the progress of the society and will always be willing to do more if patriarchy will give them the chance. Ezeigbo’s deployment of oral tradition embed in her imaginary prowess which she captures in the historical artefact, anchors her texts within an appropriate African community. This in essence has allowed her (and other writers) to negotiate their places within a nascent African modernity.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York. George Braziller, 1979. Emenyi, Imoh Abang. “Women as symbol of Patriarchal Capitalism in ‘Dark

Goddess and True Confession”. (Ed). Akorede, Yetunde. Gender Issues and National Development. Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001. 33-42.

___________. Intersection of Gendered Voices. Lagos: Concept Publishers, 2005. Ezeigbo, Akachi Adimora. House of Symbols. Lagos: Vista Books, 2001. ___________. Gender Issues in Nigeria: A Feminine Perspective. Lagos: Vista Books, 1996. ___________. The Last of the Strong Ones. Lagos: Vista Books, 1996.

Hess, Beth B., Elizabeth W. Markson and Peter J. Stein. Sociology. New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Kolawole, Mary Ebun Modupe. “Gender Myths, Self Image and Metaphor in Flora

Nwapa’s One is Enough and Women are Different”. Flora Nwapa: Critical Perspectives. (Ed) Eko, Ebele, Julius Ogu and Emelia Oko. Calabar: University of Calabar Press, 1997. 107-123.

Rosenkrantz, Paul et al. “See Role Stereotypes and Self Concepts in College

Students”. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 32, 1968. 287-295.

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Sofola, Zulu. “Feminism and African Womanhood”. Sisterhood: Feminism and Power from Africa to the Diaspora (ed). Obioma Nnaemeka. New Jersey: African World Press, 1998. 51-64.

Uko, Iniobong Idungafa. Gender and Identity on the Works of Osonye Tess Onwueme.

Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2004.

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THE DRAMATIST AND THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD: THE CONCEPT OF ‘DEATH’ IN WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN AND

HOPE EGHAGHA’S DEATH, NOT A REDEEMER

Remi Akujobi, PhD

Department of Languages Covenant University

Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria E-mail: drakujobi2006@yahoo.com

Abstract Death has been said to be the leveller in that it does not recognize one’s class, race, ethnicity or nationality. Death does not look at the face before it strikes; it pays no attention to one’s beliefs or outlook to issues in life. Death has often been said to be inevitable. So it is glaring that for as long as people are born, people are bound to die someday but how man dies is a huge mystery. This paper examines the issue of death vis-a-vis man especially as documented in the works of two prominent writers in Nigeria. Wole Soyinka and Hope Eghagha present the issue of death in similar manner in their works, Death and the King’s Horseman and Death not a Redeemer respectively. The two plays examine the psychology of man in the face of death; it also looks at culture as a determinant of man’s destiny. The paper takes a closer look at the role played by religion and emphasizes that death very much like ‘change’ is constant in every religion and culture. For this reason man must constantly live in anticipation of the inevitable-death. The paper pays close attention to myth as a given in traditional societies as well as in the contemporary world where one often sees the relatedness of old forms with new insights into what is obscure and hidden and what is visible. The playing field as one sees it is the consciousness of the individual in the society. The question is: how does man adapt to this inter-relatedness? Since it is in the nature of man to wonder and investigate the unknown, this paper seeks answers especially from Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World. If one accepts myth as not just history recounted, then one has to take into account the issue of death as presented in the two plays under discussion. Introduction Art is said to be a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe. The artist does this by holding a mirror (to appropriate Matthew Arnold) to every aspect of human endeavour. By so doing, he tries to hold the fragment that he feels he can rescue possibly from its original oral form and through its movement, forms and colour, he is able to divulge the very essence and substance of its truth to first the reader/listener, to the generality of the public and then he leaves it for posterity. The contemporary dramatist, therefore, is saddled with the complex task of disclosing and interrogating what is unknown or hidden to the public. He is given

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the responsibility of making known what is dark and obscure; he is to pierce through the darkest part of things to reveal their underlying truth. This paper tries to highlight these realities vis-à-vis their relation to the larger society and see the role of the dramatist in the scheme of things. Particularly the paper will be viewing these realities from the point of view of two very important dramatists from Nigeria. They are Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate and Hope Eghagha. These playwrights in their unique ways are compared here because of the relatedness of subject matter which is death, its impact on the psyche of man and perhaps its influences which may be found in oral tradition. Comparison in this case is an attempt to distinguish the two plays in order to prevent confusion probably dancing to the tune of Remak (1981) who sees comparative literature as an integrated single body of knowledge transcending the frontiers of national literature and traditional subject areas, such as the study of literary phenomenon (e.g. symbols, themes, setting and style) which are beyond the confines of one’s own culture. The idea of keeping the traditional subject area, according to Remark (221), is primarily “to make the literary phenomenon more understandable, more significant, more authentic”. Arguments for traditional approaches continue with prominent scholars of the discipline lending their voices to it. To Gillespie (137-42) “The consequences of the altered cultural climate have been devastating for Comparative Literature”.

But beyond altering and adhering to the definition of comparative literature, this paper is trying to understand the reason why oral forms find their ways into modern literary compositions and in spite of modernization, hybridity and technology, and how they still survive. It was Plato according to Kaviratna (1971) who explained how writing tends to diminish the power of recollection saying that truth should find lodging in the soul of a learner, not by literary composition, but by oral transmission. He equally believes that the written word can give only an idea of the fact, but the word is not the fact itself. But in our world, one has come to realize that through learning by memory and oral transmission, writers imply oral forms in their literary works and this is what Soyinka and Eghagha confront in their analysis of death in their plays.

The particular texts for comparative analysis are Wole Soyinka’s Death and the king’s Horseman and Hope Eghagha’s Death, not a Redeemer. The focus will be on the influences of the western world (the written) and the African tradition (the oral) which could be traced back to the colonial era especially with the European incursion into African soil. It is no longer news that this incursion has interfered with the day-to-day life of the African, particularly his culture, belief system, custom, tradition and his world view.

History of colonialism cuts across the socio-economy, political, religion and other issues in Africa. Two distinctive conditions can be said to have truly influenced the

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contemporary African dramatist. They include: colonialism, that is, the encounter with Europe, and then the traditional African culture, which is indigenous. The marriage between the two points to the hybridity of the African consciousness today and this is where identity comes in, what the true African represents, identity of themes, of forms, of audience, of content, of what is truly African. What is a hybrid? It was J.P.Clark who refers to the typical African as a cultural mulatto in the sense that we have two cultures and one cannot forget DuBois’ double consciousness or two souls in one body. According to Ilo (2006) the worst assault on a people's consciousness is their linguistic colonisation which is what Africa is experiencing today. Fanon (1967) notes that the issue of language is important because speaking a colonizer's language means existing absolutely for the colonizer:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but also to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation.... Every colonised people -- in order words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality -- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation: that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonised is elevated above the jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards (17-18).

Thus, Fanon rejects the colonizer-colonized relationship and advocates a total rejection of the standards of the colonizing culture including its language.

Wali and Ngugi rising from the 1963 conference at Makarere are in agreement with Fanon especially the adoption of English and French as media for literary creation by African writers and they see it as an aberration which could not advance African literature and culture. For Ngugi, therefore, Africa is in need of healing from the longstanding injuries that colonialism has wrought on the indigenous languages and cultures, and this healing can only come through cultural autonomy and self-determination which is what the two dramatists tried to do with their plays. Irele (2001) applauds the total appropriation in order to bring African expression into a living relationship with the tradition of literature in English. Soyinka equally subscribes to the method of indigenising the colonial language in African literature.

Hybridisation of the African is where the crack on the tradition is well evidenced, for there is now adulteration and contamination of the original culture. There is an incursion into the African mythology. Africans are known for their rich culture and traditions; they are known for their traditional beliefs which are well rooted in folktales, oral traditions, masquerades, hunting, festivals, etc. But with the contact of African tradition with the western tradition, one sees that the story has changed drastically. Soyinka recognizes the colonial factor in Africa when he states that the Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. Possibly this is the reason why the contemporary African dramatist has always sought to promote the cultural values of his people, making sure that these values do not disappear completely even while using the colonial language.

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It is in this vein that the comparison of the primary texts can be analysed. The texts dwell so much on the issues relevant to the burial of a king which African tradition places emphasis on because it believes that the king has a rite of passage that is required to be done in a ritualistic manner as a way of accompanying the king to the land of the ancestors. One must remember the ancient Bini and Oyo kingdoms and many others and the kind of rituals that accompany the burial of kings in these lands. In looking at the key terms or concepts in this paper, it is pertinent to pay special attention to death. One has constantly been reminded that God never assigned immortality to any human being; hence the saying that ‘no man is immortal’ and the saying that every soul shall taste Death

The Concept of Death in African Literature

Generally speaking, Africans seem to have a common concept of life, death and the hereafter and this concept has come to influence their lives and character in a number of ways. Idowu (187) points to the Yoruba belief that death is a creation of ‘Olodumare’ the creator. He is of the opinion that Olodumare (God) made man for the purpose of recalling any person whose time on earth is fulfilled. The bible says that ‘the soul that sins shall die’ but the reality is whether man is a sinner or not, same fate befalls him. For this reason, no man should claim immortality because death is the inevitable lot of every person who comes into the world. Mbiti (25) looks at death as a process which removes a person gradually from the ‘Sasa’ period to the ‘Zamani’. The Sasa period simply means the time of physical existence on earth and the period after death within which the departed is remembered by family members and friends who knew him. From the above analysis, one may say that both critics share the same view particularly on the inevitability of death. They agree that death removes people from the world after a specific time. But Opoku (133) says that death is not the end of life, but a transition from this world to the land of the spirits. To him, death does not sever family connections, but the dead become ancestors and this should be considered an honour. Death as viewed by the two dramatists under consideration is a creation of God emphasized by tradition because the African concept of death is well played out in the two plays under discussion.

Africans tend to believe that the dead go to the land of the spirits or ancestors which may not be visible to the human eye but some people do not visualize any physical or geographical separation between the physical and spiritual world. It is believed that the dead simply goes ‘home in his spirit form (Mbiti160). According to Opoku (137) the afterlife portends that the dead are not cut off from the living, for they may reveal themselves in dreams or appear to their living relations to give instructions, warnings or information. Some actually come back to be born in the same family or another family. This is well documented in the ‘abiku’ saga. However, some people believe that the dead return to their creator, and the final destiny of man depends on how he lived on earth. Judgment is rolled out to man immediately after death.

Death is a recurring theme in African literary works. In some works, one sees death as an experience that is unknown to man until it is time for him to experience it. In some still, the persons involved can easily say when their time is up very much like

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the two protagonists in the two plays under discussion. Wole Soyinka and Hope Eghagha use the phenomenon as a theme in their plays. Their purpose is to show or express their own ideas or views of death, and some of the reasons for dying. Suicide as pointed out by these writers is uncommon to the African. Africans love life and no matter the travails and hardship, no African will want to willingly submit to death.

In Death and the King's Horseman one sees Wole Soyinka as a dramatist whose work can hardly be exhausted largely because themes of his works are potent and have a universal appeal. Though many critical works have been written on Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, debates on it are a conclusion where nothing is concluded. The work has remained open in that he, like Shakespeare in his time, has been able to assert the uniqueness of African culture and literature and their roles in society. He has been able to build a connection between the dead, the living and the unborn, an association he terms “the cosmic totality”. In his works, he is able to elicit from ritual, mythology, history and contemporary literature, the self -appreciation of the African world as a cultural entity by observing that “myths arise from man’s attempt to externalize and communicate his inner intuitions”.

Concept of Death in Death and the King’s Horseman and Death, Not a Redeemer:

The play, Death and the King’s Horseman is set in Oyo, a centre of Yoruba civilization, a place where other cities in the Western part of the country look up to, a place where tradition is viewed as vital to the survival of the community. Oyo at the time the play was set was a constitutional monarchy. The king, that is, the Alaafin was elected from several candidates within the ruling dynasty with the help of the oracle. The then Oyo had military powers and controlled trade routes particularly during the pre-colonial era. The confrontation in the play as Soyinka points out is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle; one sees how man confronts forces beyond him but struggles to avoid his destiny. To confront one’s fate of course may be impossible as the school of fatalism believes that what will be must be, no matter how hard man tries to fight it. So Elesin confronts his fate head-on and therefore fights the Yoruba world-view - the world of the living, the dead, and the unborn. Soyinka uses examples taken from Yoruba mythology and cosmogony to provide glimpses into the African “inner world”. But Elesin in Death and the King’s Horseman tries to cheat death by committing sacrilege. He goes into a young lady on the day he is supposed to tackle the inevitable - death. Elesin avoids what he is expected to embrace with pride. To Soyinka, man has always been preoccupied with the task of mastering the metaphysical world with a view to explaining his being and its cosmic location. But for Elesin to want to change the course of his destiny is considered unpardonable, a sacrilege, an act of cowardice and this is unacceptable.

Elesin knows that death is a “debt of birth”; he is aware of the inevitability of death whether it is done willingly or not. He knows that it is what man must encounter as he journeys on earth. He equally knows what man is aware of which is that death is

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an end to physical life; an end to all that man holds dear, all that is important and endearing, so he tries to avoid it anyhow. But man also tries to make his time of existence on earth meaningful by rendering good service to God and to man. His contribution to life before the final day of reckoning is a necessity, since one does not have his/her eternal abode here on earth; one definitely sojourns on the earth, and eventually leaves it to an eternal abode. The rite of passage for the king and his horseman is essential in a ritual drama. It is usually a rite of the gods (hero) and is usually in form of passage – rites of hero-gods. As Hepburn (1988) suggests, the issue of ritual is crucial; it is an age-old thing and it involves human sacrifice. To Hepburn, rituals have phases and they usually end with the re-integration of a scape-goat into or separation from his community.

To exist in this world means that man wants to live his life to the desired end and the role of the gods in this case to Soyinka is that of an enhancer of man’s existence within the cyclic consciousness of time. In exposing oneself to being, deciding one’s destiny, projecting oneself to that which is ahead of one, one is invariably anticipating and acknowledging that death is the end of human life; it is an ultimate and essential project for man’s existence.

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marcel and Sartre would have one belief that death is part of the existence of man. Meanwhile, whether or not one lives or dies is not a decision one makes willingly (not even those who commit suicide); it is rather determined by the forces man confronts daily.

One cannot say when he/she is to be born; neither does he/she know when he/she leaves the world, at least naturally. However, he has to embrace all the dictates of life without questioning the reason behind his coming to the world. Again, man has no pre-knowledge of where, how and when he will be born, neither can he determine who gives birth to him. He has no say in the rights and privileges he is to enjoy and he cannot challenge his creator, whoever the creator is. Can one say in this case that man is helpless? Existence therefore is paramount, a meaningful existence; that is on average man has to try and escape the reality of death to live as if there is no such thing as final end as it is the case of the Elesin. With his fear of death, man tries to live beyond what is comprehensible. Afterall death is inevitable. But anxiety sets in when he remembers this inevitability of death. So, anticipation makes man extremely conscious of the presence of death. Religion teaches us to aspire to make heaven at all cost, but making entails dying first but no one wants to die.

Man and death generally are mortal enemies, they would rather not meet; they would rather not co-habit because man knows unequivocally that the day he sees death, he is no longer the man he was or is. Death puts an end to life, to everything that is precious and beautiful to man. Death is the end of all the vital functions without the possibility of recovery. With death, one remembers that all one treasures will come to an end. The kings, the queens, the lords, the significant and insignificant will all die; this may be the reason why people say it is an inevitable phenomenon. All human value, beauty, love, friendship and all the worldly

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achievements (except time) will give in to death hence Shakespeare implores death to do whatever pleases it but that death should not touch his love (work) and in spite of all the troubles and triumphs in the world, nobody wants to die.

Death which destroys anxiety, fears, oppression, poverty and man’s inhumanity to man is regarded as a leveler because both great and small, rich and poor, all inevitably bow to the clutches and cruel hand of death and this issue is adequately addressed in the two plays under discussion. The two plays with almost similar titles dwell on the issue of death particularly and then the culture of regency.

Death is a problem, a challenge to mankind; it is hostile very much like time as documented by Shakespeare. Man runs from death, he searches for ways to defeat death. Surprisingly, all efforts made by researchers, scientists even technologists over the years to end or at least curtail the excesses of death have not yielded much results. They have only succeeded in postponing death which even in some situations ironically leads to an unexpected death. For instance, Professor in Soyinka’s The Road, meets his untimely death while engaged in a research. Had professor succeeded, he would have unwittingly put an end to death at all levels: death by motor accident, war, industrial accidents, diseases, crime, technological disasters and probably natural disasters.

Writing on Soyinka’s exploration of the theme of death, Ogunba (1975) remarks that all quest after the meaning of life or the essence of death is futile; its apparent partial success is a mere dream. Ogunba is of the opinion that searching or looking for solution to death is an effort in futility and anybody who does so is not only wasting his time but rather moving closer to death. Death has been classified as the consequence of sin. The first sin was that of disobedience, that is, the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and man’s punishment as far as this sin goes is death. The sin in the Garden of Eden is what man is still confronted with today. In the beginning of things, God had no intention that man should die, but the sin of man brought about death. Death is seen as the final solution for which man searches and what this entails is that man’s search for life through the knowledge of death has brought nothing but pain and death.

Scientific research brought electricity to humanity. Ironically, this invention also claims lives. To move faster and cover a wide range of distance over a very short period of time man invented the motor-car and the airplane. These also have their disadvantages. Technology is helping the world move faster, making the earth flat but in doing this, it is also reducing the life-span of the earth and the people who live in it through a number of activities - global warming, gas emissions and the rest of them.

Death is a common denominator in all societies and hence a trans-class phenomenon. It does not matter whether one is white or black or socialist or capitalist. It is the same death that kills all. John Donne (1572-1631) meditates on the issue of death. In Death Be Not Proud, he ruminates on both the physical and spiritual need for death saying that death provides "rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery."

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Donne is convinced both death and sleep are the same type of action, and for this reason, he makes no distinction between them. At the of the poem, Donne remarks that after the resting period that death constitutes, humans will enter the afterlife, a period in which death itself will cease to exist. This is a paradox because Donne is of the opinion that death itself shall be no more, ‘Death thou shalt die’. John Keats (1795-1821) all his life confronted death but could not defeat it. He talks about it in his poem “When I have fears that I may cease to be”. Keats’s poem has often been read as a poem about the poet and his fear of mortality. In this poem, he paints a clear picture of death and the root of this anxiety is obviously death as he sees death as the problematic cure. He reflects on life and mellows down on the thought of death.

It is in this stead that the two plays under consideration, Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka and Death, Not a Redeemer by Hope Eghagha give panoramic insights into the issue of death in African literature and society. For Soyinka, the issue of transition is not always a very smooth one hence Jeyifo (31) feels that The play presents a moment of negativity when the contradictions in our societies, at the level of psychic and spiritual disjuncture, are revealed and probed and Soyinka’s major aim in the play is to dramatize, through Elesin, the common fear of and unpleasantness of death, which brings people together irrespective of their socioeconomic status.

Soyinka's purpose in using mythic figures is not to evoke a perfect past but rather to fashion them for the modern world and enable them to speak to present-day humanity. This is not unconnected with Soyinka’s obsession with the tripartite nature of existence and because man is constantly aware of the inevitability of death, he dabbles in and out of existence whether consciously or unconsciously and so, death announces the relationship of the finite nature of existence. Chief Karia in Eghagha’s Death, Not a Redeemer is aware that death is staring him in the face so he tries to cheat death by moving closer to Christianity for explanation:

Chief Karia:

But the people, some people expect me to terminate my life. Death to redeem death!” Servant in this world…Servant forever. Three months more and they will all expect me to cut short this sweet life which is just beginning. God forbid! I shall die only when HE says so. Not before, not after. But I admit my faith wobbles sometimes. I must pray now... (p.1)

The reality and fear of death makes Chief Karia to violate the tradition of his people and laws of the land. He is so scared of death that he begs his wife, Avbero, to accompany him to be of service when in heaven. Of course Avbero’s reaction is not unexpected:

Avbero: Taboo! Taboo!! Such tasks are meant for men. Not women. Besides, no Woman has ever done it. (p.6)

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Her reaction here shows the fear death evokes in the individual. As a dutiful wife, she is expected to be there for her husband at all times but she declines this traditional role of the woman as a helpmate.

Elesin, in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, too manifests this fear. It is worthy of note and emphasis here that the two plays under consideration share the same storyline. The fear of death makes Elesin recoil even though he knows that this death will bring fame and honour to his family. Elesin is conscious of what will come to him as an individual so he does not think of the collective gain but his personal fear/pain. Soyinka, through Elesin, has been able to contrast the ‘pleasure concept’ with the ‘reality concept’. Without work, life would be unpalatable. Work helps man gain pleasure. So, man has to sacrifice pleasure, temporarily, to work in order to get pleasure. In this case, sacrifice life for the benefit of the generality of the people as demanded by tradition. After all Christ did it for humanity; he was made a sinner for man, made a criminal for the redemption of mankind. Elesin and chief Keira are mere mortals perhaps the reason why they are unwilling to be made sacrificial lambs like Christ. Christ however defeated death in His resurrection after three days.

Both Elesin and Chief Karia do not see the supreme sacrifice that is expected of them to make for the peace, progress, and continuity of their communities as a necessity. To them, it should be a matter of choice. “Death” in the hands of the playwrights is subjected to rationalization, to be or not to be but the question here is the value placed on life. Is it worth it to die because of the promise of heavenly honour and respect in the community? In the hands of the two playwrights also, death is made uncertain; it becomes a matter of choice. Elesin, in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, would love to demonstrate rare courage in the face of death. The praise-singer and Iyaloja remind him that it is time for him to dance to the tune of his ancestors. Elesin is at all pleased with reminder and so he fights on. He would have loved to win a battle which no human being has ever won but Iyaloja knows he is fighting a lost battle when she says ‘How boldly the lizard struts before the pigeon’. (p.67)

The psychological battle points to the fact that Elesin is not prepared to die. His lengthy proverbial story of the “Not­I-Bird’ points to his unpreparedness. The African believes that there is honour in man joining the ancestors after death but this does not excite Elesin hence he talks about the ‘Not I Bird’ and the problem of dancing the dance. To approach one’s duty with dignified readiness and willingness especially when it has to do with loosing something as precious as one’s life is usually not an easy thing to do, so Elesin avoids death with terror but the same time he boastfully and proudly narrates the story of ‘Not-I-Bird.’

Ah, companions of this living world. What a thing this is, that even those we call immortal should fear to die. ( p.13)

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Elesin talks about the importance of honour but is he ready to embrace it? Life is honour. It ends where honour ends (p.15). Elesin talks about courage

Elesin: You all know What I am.

Praise-singer: That rock which turns its open lodes Into the path of lightning. A gay Thoroughbred whose stride disdains To falter though an adder reared Suddenly in his path.

Elesin: My rein is loosened I am master of my Fate. When the hour comes Watch me dance along the narrowing path Glazed by the soles of my great precursors. My sole is eager. I shall not turn aside. (pp. 152-153)

The Elesin who rendered these beautiful words is not the Elesin one sees later in the end because he falters at the end of the day, trying so to say, to cheat death.

The idea of death as a passage to the ancestral realm is not in any way pleasant to Elesin and this shows in whatever he does. As one finds out, to whole-heartedly embrace death requires an ideal Elesin but the Elesin in this play is a mere mortal, a fearful one at that, who knows the tradition but does not embrace it wholly hence he chooses to be wiser than the society by challenging the age-long tradition. With this act, one is not wrong to say that he, is as Ibitokun (42) says, creates his own system of values and rejects the stock morality of his group. And if this is true of Elesin, critics feel that he is blind to the reality of his society, his culture, his gods, and his own sacred position because designing counter-tradition will only bring chaos to the community.

One sees this idea clearly demonstrated by the Elesin in Chief Karia created by Eghagha in his Death, Not A Redeemer. Elesin does not see any reason why one should fear death as he believes that he does not fear death. However, he could be likened to the ‘Not-I-bird’ who refuses to go and see the Chief Tax Officer, a metaphor for death, and sends his friends:

All dressed she was To call upon your friend the Chief Tax Officer But not she sends her go-between instead: Tell him I’m ill: my period has come suddenly (p.9)

And when Iyaloja mentions the word ‘shroud’, Elesin is scared. He immediately remembers that the time has finally arrived, the time he dreads most.

Iyaloja: Now, we must go prepare your bridal chamber. Then these same hands will lay your shrouds. Elesin: (exasperated): Must you be so blunt? (p.20)

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No matter how courageous one may be before death, one will falter when one is face to face with it. Elesin forgets, also, that the sacrificial chicken must be paid back, as an adage says. How he gets out of his predicament of the horror of ritual suicide is another thing altogether. Soyinka and Eghagha are saying invariably that there is an Elesin in everyman; no man readily embraces death, not even those who commit suicide.

While deliberating (very much like Hamlet) on whether to commit ritual suicide or not, both Elesin’s (Chief Karia’s) sons surface from abroad but with different approach to the fundamental issues on ground. While Sankaria, the son of Chief Karia, in Eghagha’s Death, Not A Redeemer, backs up his father’s stand, Olunde in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman sees his father’s procrastinatory tactics as unwarranted. His sudden appearance, though, surprising is predicted by a woman:

Woman: Is it not the same ocean that washes this land and the white man’s land? Tell your white man he can hide our son away as long as he likes.

When the time comes for him, the same ocean will bring him back. (p. 35)

The metaphysical power behind the community is seen in Olunde; the zeal to enforce that which is pertinent is what critics find outstanding. He arrives with western education but is not ready to give up his indigenous culture. Elesin’s son looks very much like a possessed man, probably possessed by the gods of the land. So instead of paying attention to the negative aspect of his culture, he sees and rationalizes its significance. He is supposed to hate his so-called barbaric culture but he rises to be a competent spokesperson for the same culture. Olunde is seen in the play to be transformed by his culture and he does all he can to embrace it whole-heartedly. He is eager to show off his knowledge of this culture and equally shows that there is nothing barbaric about it. The hand of the gods is glaringly visible in his transfiguration. Unlike his weak father who rejects the culture of his people, Olunde, very much like Achebe’s Okonkwo manifests courage and a sense of understanding of his culture and community with all that they represent.

When Olunde decides to commit suicide in place of his father, the general view is: how can a man well educated in a western sense do such a thing? But Olunde is a believer in his culture and tradition and will do everything in his power to preserve it. He has learnt from other cultures to strengthen his own but will never change his culture for anything. For this reason one sees why in spite of his education, Olunde believes strongly that his father has a major responsibility and that he needs to maintain his family's honour and keep the sanity of his people. His death in place of his father is said to mark a cultural change in Yoruba ritual practices because he willingly surrenders himself to death not only to earn that enviable position for himself but for harmonious existence of his community. He surrenders himself for the preservation of peace and stability in his community. He knows that not

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complying with tradition will definitely have a negative effect on society even up to the fourth generation. So his act of sacrifice helps to tranquilize and stabilize the society. It also ignites a sense of belonging in the people. The cord linking the community with the gods, the other world, that is, the world of the dead is preserved, but regrettably, it is a promising young tree (the young tree that Diop so much relies on for transformation in his poem ‘Africa’) that pays the price as Iyaloja explains:

Iyaloja: The gods demanded only the old expired plantain but You cut down the sap-laden shoot... (p.16) Meanwhile, Olunde’s death is a challenge to the human race. His self-sacrifice is what every society needs for progress and smooth transition from one age or generation to the other. Self-sacrifice is quite easy for Olunde because he has been anticipating death as an heir to Elesin. He is not keen about earthly or ephemeral things like wealth, position and honour, and he cares about the peace of the community. One may at this juncture submit that it is these mundane things that attract Sankaria (the other Olunde in Death not a Redeemer) as he supports his father’ bid to subvert tradition. For firm believers in tradition and culture of the people, Olunde, unlike Sankaria, has lived a life worthy of emulation. He stamps an indelible footprint for the unborn generations to follow which is not what one would say of Sankaria who subverts tradition in order to keep his earthly possessions. Sacrifice, integrity and responsibility are key words in Olunde’s action which is what every society needs today for preservation and sanity of the society.

Conclusion:

This paper in so many ways has tried to peep into an African concept of life, death and the hereafter paying attention to the ways and manners different people view death and how they receive it knowing that it is inevitable. The paper also recognizes man’s outlook to life and God as the originator of life and death which is seen as a transition and transformation from the physical into the spiritual world. The paper also pays attention to why Africans holds on to these beliefs. This strong attachment is hinged on tradition and culture of the people. But as one sees in one of the plays, western education, globalization, urbanization, foreign religions and modernization are fast modifying and affecting the African belief systems.

But Olunde teaches a lesson that with selfishness, the human race will definitely be plagued by problems, dangers, chaos and oppression. Olunde also teaches that there is beauty in tradition and culture. He teaches the need to hold onto what is truly African even in the face of westernization. So Nigeria needs the Olundes of our time to redeem the battered image of the country. The society needs the Olundes who are selfless and responsible, people who are willing to break inhumanity, oppression, poverty amidst affluence and restore Nigeria’s lost honour and glory.

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Works Cited

Eghagha, Hope. Death, Not a Redeemer. Lagos: Ababa Press Limited, 2005. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Charles Markmann (trans). New York:

Grove Press, 1967. Gillespie, G. "The Internationalization of Comparative Literature in the Second Half

of the Twentieth Century." In Virgil Nemoianu (ed). Multi-comparative Theory, Definitions, Realities. Whitestone: Council of National Literatures World Report, 1996. 13-42.

Hepburn, J. ‘’Mediators as Ritual Closure’’ Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22,

No. 3 (Fall 1988): 577. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1975. Idowu, E. B. Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. London: Longman Group, 1975. Ibitokun, B M. African Drama and Yoruba World-View. Ibadan: Ibadan University

Press. 1975. Ilo, I. "Language in Modern African Drama" CLC Web Vol. 8, Issue 4 (December

2006). Irele, Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora. New

York: Oxford UP, 2001. Jeyifo, B. The Truthful Lie: Essays in Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon

Books Limited, 1985. Jones, E D. The Writings of Wole Soyinka. London: Heinemann. 1981. Keat, J. Complete Poems. England: Penguin Classics, 1988. Kaviratna, H. ‘’Unbroken Chain of Oral Tradition’’. Sunrise magazine Theosophical

University Press, 1971. Mbiti, J.S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1980. Ogunba, O. The Movement of Transition. Ibadan: University Press, 1975. Opoku, K. A. West African Traditional Religion. Lagos: F.E. P. 1978. Remark H H. ‘’ Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function’’ Comparative

Literature: Method and Perspective. Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (eds). Carbondale. Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. 1-55.

Remak, Henry H.H. "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages:

The Bellagio Report. Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 8 (1981): 119-228.

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Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen Press. . 1975 ___________. Myth, Literature and the African World London:, Cambridge University

Press, 1976. wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.

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CULTURAL RESPONSES IN GASTON-PAUL EFFA’S NOUS, ENFANTS DE LA TRADITION

Kelvin Ngong Toh, PhD

Department of English University of Buea, Cameroon E-mail: keblessed@yahoo.co.uk

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the desire to belong as quest motif on the characters in Gaston Paul Effa’s narrative and to explore Effa’s position on issues of identity, hybridity, alienation and difference that informs the globalizing world. Here, I have discussed the characters’ response to cultural contact which either creates or destroys the character as he/she struggles between them. This essay foregrounds the contention that Gaston-Paul Effa in Nous, Enfants de la Tradition presents characters that are caught in the web of varying cultures. These characters, faced with a plurality of cultures and migrant experiences are struggling to grapple with their new environment. Furthermore, the migrant ends up in a state of cultural alienation or becomes a hybrid. The paper has as theoretical tool the blend of postmodernist and postcolonial theories. Both axiology deconstruct the dominate “self” and lends voices to the dominated, oppressed and repressed “other”.

Introduction

Culture is the sum-total of the values that make up the worldview of a particular group of people. According to Emily A. Schultz and Robert H. Lavenda in Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition, culture is a “set[s] of learned behavior and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society. Human beings use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which they live. Culture makes us unique among living creatures” (3). Schultz’s and Lavenda’s view is very vital in this study given its insistence on the fact that culture is learned and acquired. Therefore, culture is not innate. It is not natural but a human creation and therefore it should evolve and be dynamic as its creator – the human being. Also worthy of note is the view that cultural practices are geared towards the transformation of the human being to “fit” in a particular place and at a particular time. This is important because the different cultures of the world have in many ways been at the source of human joy and distress (competing for strength, knowledge and superiority) to humankind. This becomes the locus for the “self”/“other” divide which is enshrined in the concept of “difference”.

The fact that culture reveals identity is the cause of “difference” and “otherness” in the human world. This “difference” is so strongly essentialist that the different cultural values are protected and jealously guarded to be able to pass from generation to generation. It is these values that make up the people’s culture. According to Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, “Culture is a concept that

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includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought” (1994: xiii). Said’s definition leaves us with some key issues worthy of closer attention: first, culture has to do with refine and elevated values of a people. This means that it is not just the best conclusions but also what a people find as sublime and trustworthy. Secondly, culture has to do with the be-all and the end-all of a people no matter who they are. It is for this reason that men of all times have fought seriously to protect and to teach their cultures to others. The desire to protect culture makes it aggressive. This view is sustained by Edward Said who argues that cultures are barbaric. This is because, as Said holds, culture “is a protective enclosure” (1994: xiv). This means that people of all cultures hold firm to their values and are ready to protect it even to the point of shading blood.

Gaston Paul Effa’s Nous, Enfants de la Tradition presents Third World migrants living in the metropolis – France – attempting to construct an identity for themselves. How effective this desire to “be” is, raises some ambivalence in the response by the different characters. My main focus in this paper is to assess the impact of this existential quest on the characters in this narrative and to explore Effa’s position on issues of identity, hybridity, alienation and difference that inform a globalizing world. Thus, I am looking at cultures – what the migrants brought and what they have to live with – and the result of its different shades of manifestation on the characters in Effa’s narrative. A cultural response is to me the by-product of the characters’ absorption and abjuring of cultures in a particular context.

The main thrust of my essay is the contention that Gaston-Paul Effa in Nous, Enfants de la Tradition presents characters that are caught in the web of varying cultures. These characters, faced with a plurality of cultures and migrant experiences are struggling to grapple with their new environment. Furthermore, in the cause of this, the migrant ends up in a state of cultural alienation or becomes a hybrid. Effa’s narrative has been artistically crafted to reveal this ambivalence seen in the African diaspora.

The paper has as theoretical tool the blend of postmodernist and postcolonial theories. Both axiology deconstruct the dominate “self” and lends voices to the dominated, oppressed and repressed “other”. Homi Bhabha’s views in The Location of Culture will greatly guide in this study. Bhabha argues for multiculturalism and the opening up to pluralism and tolerance among cultures. He, therefore, upholds ‘cultural diversity’ against absolutism (34).

As an artistic representation of society, African literature in particular, borrows and projects African culture. Oladele Taiwo, in Social Experience in African Literature, opines and rightly too that:

No Nigerian [African] novelist is not in one way or another, and sometimes in several ways at once, preoccupied with his country’s indigenous culture. From author to author, however, the directions and emphases which this preoccupation involves vary in important respects (47).

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According to Taiwo, the uniqueness of the African novelist is his/her preoccupation of culture and tradition which is not just a romanticization of culture but also a critique of its excesses. It seems clear that the African artist has not been bias in his presentation of African spaces and cultural values. It also seems to me that though the writer projects his/her culture, the perspective of looking at culture is not at all homogeneous. It is a call for the respect of other cultures and the learning to appropriate the “other”.

A close reading of Effa’s narrative reveals that there are two cultures that dominate and influence the characters’ behaviour. The first is the African culture where Osele, the main character in the story, appears to be a faithful follower as he appreciates some of the values that African tradition such as solidarity. Osele says that “Les africains aiment la famille. Ils sont généreux, souffrent en silence et dansent avec la mort. Facile à dire quand on n’est pas africain” (25)1. From this statement, one has the impression that Osele is using the African culture to justify a deed that is not understood by Hélène, his wife, who represents European values in the narrative. He first of all appreciates the fact that Africans live in a family and it is difficult to separate an African from his family. This statement shows how attached Osele is to his family because of such cultural values. Osele’s view of the family is to explain an opposite view that comes from Hélène, who thinks that

Ta famille africaine ne te fait miroiter que ton droit d’aînesse et la tradtion lorsqu’elle a besoin d’argent pour payer un mariage, un enterrement de plus. Mais qu’est-ce qu’ils crioent là-bas, qu’il suffit de 2iramasser l’argent dans les caniveaux et de l’envover par Western Union (10) ?

Your African family can only project your rights to the law of primogeniture of tradition when they need money to pay for a marriage, a burial ceremony and so on. But what do they think there, that it suffices to pick money from gutters and send by Western Union?

From the passage one realizes that there is cultural conflict between the two characters. Note should be taken that Osele and Hélène are living in France. Osele is the migrant and having his wife as host. This means that Osele’s territorial and cultural space should be alien to him as he is a Fang from Africa. In other words, Osele is a Caliban figure in Prospero’s land struggling to challenge Prospero. This conflict comes because of their way of seeing and viewing the “other”. Otherness comes because of the way the family should be handled. To Hélène, Osele is wasting resources to take care of his family while Osele sees his gesture just as appropriate as any true African child will do for his people and family. Homi Bhabha argues that

The awkward division that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects Black/White, Self/Other - is disturbed with one brief pause and traditional

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grounds of racial identity dispersed, whenever they are found to rest in the narcissistic myths of negritude or white cultural supremacy. (40)

Homi Bhabha’s declaration is revealing in that the conflict between Osele and Hélène is focused more to the fact that Hélène continues to feel the “master” space as far as her relationship with her husband is concerned. In this connection, her husband in his negritudist discourse all through the novel evokes some kind of resistance to the oppressive and supremacist discourse of his wife. The quarrel between these two characters arises from their inability to understand one another and to accept one another even though coupled. They have constructed stereotypic views about the “other”. According to Hélène, the culture or tradition that Osele seeks to protect has no sense. This ties with what Homi Bhabha says that “the black presence runs the representative narrative of Western personhood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism” (42). This means that white people like Hélène are born and prone to think that everything African is out of standard and primitive. This justifies why she adopts a ranting tune accusing not only her husband but all of Africa. From her tone, it seems evident that the African, in the continent, is exploiting those of the diaspora by always demanding from them. This reading, by Hélène, misconstrues the African communality and the fact that the child in the community is the community’s child. Hélène’s gaze of Osele is purely from how she sees herself which symbolizes Europe. From the two standpoints, it seems clear that there is a plurality of voices in the text and this deconstructs the meta-text construction the modernist and colonial discourse will advocate. This plurality of voices heightens the tension and the suspense in the narrative as the reader would want to see which side of the divide is going to be victorious at the end. But as a postcolonial and post modern text, I want to underscore the fact that the different cultures seem to have almost very important narrative duration and frequency in the narrative. Effa’s construction, almost equally of European and African values in constant conflict in the mind of Osele should the inevitability of cultural contact and thus, suggests that even in the inner self, different cultures should co-exists by learning to depend on one another and not fight with one another. Osele’s relationship with Hélène is an extended metaphor to the relationship between Africa and Europe. Osele’s inclination to his culture is therefore a kind of resistance to the dominant culture that is incarnated in his wife.

In most postcolonial writings by Third World writers in Europe, Europe is often represented by female characters. Interestingly, this white female image is very active and still is at the centre as the black man entirely lives under her subjugation. This puts to question the grand theory of patriarchy and its domination of the globe. The “feminity” of Europe in this text illustrates the power and control of the white-female “self” as against the male-black “other”. This as we will see later is so complex for Osele to the point that the conflict will be built of two “feminities” with the strong influence of Osele’s mother who stands for Africa. Osele is lured at first by the pressure from his wife and we see him caught up between two worlds. « Je pensais aux remèdes à employer et, bein vite, je me rendis compte que deux choses seulement pouvait me suaver: l’abnegation d’Hélène ou le renoncement à ma famille

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africaine » (10).3 From what the narrator says, any reader will pity him for he stand at the centre of this conflict. He really finds it hard to take a decision. This already helps us to see Osele as someone without a root as his legs are standing on two dominant forces that seem not to pity him but are ready to alienate and destroy him.

Osele’s conflicts and confusion reveals the true mind set of modern Africans – victims of European colonialism and advocates of a rich and almost forgotten African culture – who in the conflict of belonging ends up being in the impasse. If Osele chooses to listen to his wife, he will be alienated by his family and if he chooses his family, he will be alienated by his wife and children who belong to a different culture – the diaspora culture. Effa does not seem to pay emphases on this other tradition as it seems evident to me that he, in this novel, attempts to awaken the African/Westerner to learn how to blend the traditions that entangle him and not to be alienated. This gives rise to what will be called the African diaspora culture. That is where Osele seems to have failed in the novel. His action of alternating from one culture to another is childish as he becomes a baby looking for whom to take care of him.

As mentioned earlier, the African culture and the Western culture in the novel is represented by women – Osele’s mother on the one hand and Hélène, Osele’s wife, on the other hand. What is interesting is that the narrative programming that Effa presents makes Osele divided by the pressures that come from these women. He says Hélène and him share a lot in common: « Hélène avait à peu près mon âge et, sous bien des aspects, ma vie ressemblait à la sienne” (10).4 The narrator is the homodiegetic one. According to Jahn Manfred, in A Guide to the Theory of Narrative, homodiegetic narrative is told “by a (homodiegetic) narrator who is also one of the story’s acting character (N1.10). From this point of view, one sees the voice of the narrator more from an autobiographical perspective. It also shows that he and his wife truly are not different though he is black and his wife is white. Effa seems to advocate the fact that the black man and the white woman are not different as all of them are human beings.

Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is right when he traces the origin of man to come from the Greek word zoē “which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods) and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group (1995: 4). This etymology stress that humans have the same characteristics and attributes and therefore, the inscriptions otherness and “difference” are artificial creations or social constructions that have been taught and learnt for a long time. Osele’s comparison with his wife brings us to Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask where he says that: “There is this fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all cost, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. How do we extricate ourselves?” (10) In

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the first place, Fanon shows that the black man like Osele, the narrator of the text has for a long time had the project of accepting the white man as a fellow human.

Fanon’s words also show that the contact between African and Western cultures is based on binaries and each wanting to prove itself either as superior or as equal. This kind of war, Effa seems to denounce as baseless and having no positive impact in the world’s progress. This, unfortunately, seems to be the base on which the marriage between Osele and his wife Hélèlne are built. The novel opens with dramatic action which in a narrative enforces reality and makes us believe the plausibility of the events. In terms of discourse, one finds Hélène quarrelling with Osele as to how money must be used in the house not only as an economic issue but as a quarrel built on cultural differences. Osele sees Africa and its values as an aspect to sustain and honour which his wife sees as waste. For him to go close to his African root, he makes himself an alien to Hélène with whom he shares every thing in common and even his children.

Here, one African culture, for which Osele belongs, alienates him because he embraces the other. There arises a kind of narcissism among these two people – different in race and culture that may or seem to put the world in a permanent state of divide. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic ends the book with this strong claim

The conclusion of this book is that this ought to be in order to recover hermetically sealed and culturally absolute traditions that would be content forever to invoke the premodern as well as anti-modern. It is proposed here above all as a means to figure the inescapability and legitimate value of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture en route to better theories of racism and black political culture than those so far offered by cultural absolutists of various phenotypical hues. (223)

The quest for a race –free and post modern society that ascribe importance to all and deconstructs “difference” seems to be the major point of the culturalist critic. This cry is far from being understood by Osele who is caught up in battle of two women which as I mentioned earlier represents two “feminitys” based on subjugation of the black-male “other”.

Osele’s acceptance of the African culture is thanks to another female voice which like the white voice of Hélène, is very influential to him. This is the voice of his mother. Talking about the great role his mother plays in his life, he says “elle ne me quitterait plus”. (28)5. This shows the strong attachment that Osele has for his mother. It also reveals an aspect of African culture where the child remains loyal to his or her parents and has the responsibility to take care of them during their later years. This is what Hélène can hardly understand for it seems not part of the responsibility of the Western child to take care of aging people talk less of the fact that they are his or her parents. The mother symbol is also very strong because Effa does not only use it in terms of biological representation but symbolically raises the contemporary issue of African diaspora and the duties to the mother continent. Here, he seems to remind

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Africans of the need to take care of the mother – biological and the continent. Through Osele, we read: “Que j’en parlerais en souriant ou en pleurant, lorsque je serais reconnu comme un veritable Fang, celui qui ne garde plus rien pour lui, qui donne tout, tourterelle et ses petit” (2008 :28).6 This shows Osele’s commitment to serve the African tradition. From his tone, one finds sarcasm as he satirizes Western tradition for greed and individualism. This is enforced through the image of the turtle-dove and her children which also enhances African folk tale tradition. However, this intimacy with the African tradition is just an episode in his process of traditional alienation. This is because he will no sooner return to European culture (his reconciliation with his wife) and will sever all relations with Africa.

Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask has argued that for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. Fanon means that black people are aliens to themselves and their cultures and are struggling to live and do the things that whites do. This is not surprising that when faced with difficulties, Osele will abandon his African roots to cling with his European wife for support. Effa here is satirical in that he seems not to appreciate the Third World’s continuous dependence on the colonialist any time these countries are faced with difficulties. Osele’s rejection of a tradition he has so much romanticized in Negritude-style comes as surprising to any reader of this narrative. It also enforces the ironic twist that Effa generates in the narrative programme which is supposed to be that of the protagonist liberating himself from all sorts of entanglement, yet still attaching himself to other forms of entanglements. Osele turns his back from Africa and at this point suffers alienation from a different perspective which is abandoning his roots.

J’aurais aimé naître ailleurs, loin de cette afrique et de ses traditions. Je m’égare, j’oublie. La tradition, cette ombre où j’ai si longtemps pataugé, ce n’est pas à la surface qu’elle est, c’est à l’interieur : elle est l’interieur même. Nous vivons avecs elle comme avec les larmes, la sueur et le sang. (2008:97)

I would have loved to be born elsewhere, far from this Africa and its traditions. I will separate, I forget. Tradition, this shade where I have for so long time floundered about, it is found not at the outside, it is even inside. We live with it like with tears, sweat and blood.

Though Osele wants to escape his African roots, they are haunting him. He is seen desperately in need to liberate himself. It is unfortunate that his desire to free himself from African mores will only be to entangle himself into the western culture, seen through his reconciliation with his wife. From this point, Osele falls short of creating an identity for himself which further makes him an alien as he fluctuates between cultures; accepting one at a time and rejecting the other and vice versa. Culturally, he becomes a neither-nor figure. This kind of personality is not much appreciated by the advocates of the global dispensation and cultural theorists who hold that the global

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is born from the local. However, Gaston-Paul Effa ridicules Osele’s way as he advocates traditional hybrids that will be my next point of focus.

Gaston-Paul Effa’s ideological vision in Nous, Enfants de la Tradition is not incarnated in his principal character, Osele. His ideology in the narrative seems to be that people like Osele should not be aliens to culture but to appropriate the different cultures that have come to be theirs. This means every man is born into some values and instead of being an alien to these values it is good to blend all of them to be a better person. This position rejects the modernist hermetic seal to cultures and announces the post modernist view of recognizing “difference”. Homi Bhabha has dwelt much on the issue of blending cultures and advocates hybridity as a solution to the divided world that is incarnated in the person of Osele. Homi Bhabha says that “the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of the past and the present (7). He further holds that to be a hybrid is creating a new being in one that is a mixture of the past and the present. This past and present does not only measure in the intrinsic personality of the individual but has to do with the socio-cultural environment where “instead of living within the bounds created by a linear view of history and society, we become free to interact on an equal footing with all the traditions that determine our present predicament” (Lionnet 7). Osele fails in this. He keeps rejecting one and allying with the other. This is because at no one point in the narrative do we find him celebrating his “twoness” to borrow from WEB DuBois. By “twoness” Du Bois meant that

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach the Negro soul in the flood of white Americanism. (45)

Though in the African American sense, WEB Du Bois statement hold true to any one faced with different cultures and Osele fails in this case to blend his Africanness or to be specific his “Fangness” and his “Frenchness”. Osele’s attitude reveals that he is a child growing up and that seems to be at the centre of Effa’s narrative programme. This is because we see the child growing up and making decisions about himself accepting and rejecting some. But what becomes very ironic about Osele is that he does not evolve but turns around. He is like the dog that, from time to time, will return to its vomit. This demonstrates his childishness what is in sharp contrast with Cisse and Daniel.

Daniel is a Caribbean and specifically from Guadeloupe. Like Osele, Daniel lives in France. This Caribbean is a black. Osele describes him in these words:

Daniel était noir. Un nèg-noir brûlé par le soleil, un Guadeloupéen. Il prenait lui aussi la parole. Un de ses sujets de prédilection était la recherche d’une terre oubliée, la lointain Afrique. Il s’appliquait à

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traduire sa pensée en de longues phrases sinueses. Il parlait mieux que les noirs, ses mot donnaient l’impression d’un texte elaboré. (92)

Daniel was black. A black-negro burnt by the sun, from Guadeloupe. He took the floor himself. One of his topics of predilection was the search for a forgotten home, far in Africa. He tried to put through his thoughts by using long meandering sentences. He spoke better than blacks; his words gave the impression of an elaborate text.

From the homodeigetic narrator’s voice, Daniel happens to be presented in the image of one living in pain and suffering. This suffering can be expressed in the passage at two levels: the skin, burnt blackness of his skin relates back to the period of slavery which enforces the theme of lost, alienation and suffering in Daniels personality. The next level has to do with his rootlessness which gives the pain of the psyche that he does not belong. On like Osele, Daniel attempts to identify himself by appropriating the traditions that have come to be part of him. First the French culture exemplified in the language he speaks which Osele confirms that it is better that what other blacks speak. He uses this language to tell people about himself. This is one of the characters that we seem to see selling his culture in Europe. He contrasts with Osele who does not even succeed to convince his wife and children to accept where he comes from.

Daniel’s mission is not only talking about his past but he makes an effort to link this past to his present so as to give him the ‘newness’ that Homi Bhabha’s talks about. Daniel introduction of what the Creole is seems to me the ideology of Effa that characters like Osele need to learn. He says:

Nous avons rejeté notre nature de nègre d’Afrique et la fierté de nos corps, nous avons inventé le créole pour avoir une langue à nous, nous ne sommes plus assez nèg-noir, on nous a fait rentrer la révolte dans la tête à grand coups de fouet. (92)

We have rejected our nature of black Africans and the pride of our bodies, we have created the Creole to have a language that is ours, we are no longer fairly black, and they made us enter revolt in our head with heavy lashes.

The acceptance and the creation of the Creole which is a blend of what was African, European and Caribbean serves as a good lesson to Osele who does not invent a culture or tradition from the Western, African and Catholic traditions that he is born and introduced to. In the course of talking about this invention of a hybrid language, Daniel revisits the period of slavery and the floggings of black people in the plantations which shows that for one to invent and to create ‘newness’ one cannot forget the past.

All in all, I set out to show that tradition like culture is one of the best values that a people agree to adopt. But again, the coming of cultures together put the individual under pressure and as Effa reveals, there are two responses to it – being in a cultural impasse like Osele or being a hybrid like Daniel. With the guidance of assumptions

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from postcolonialism and post modernism, my stand seems to share with Effa that at a time when the world is a migrant one, it should also be a hybrid world built on tolerance and the acceptance of the other.

Notes 1 Africans love the family. They are generous; suffer in silence and dance with the dead. It is easy to say when one is not African. (All translations in this work are mine). 2 I was thinking about what to do and fast. I realized that only two thinks could save me: avoiding Hélène or renounce my African family. Hélène and I were about age mates. In many aspects, my life was like hers. 4 She will not leave me. 5 That I will speak laughing or crying, when I will be recognized like true Fang, he who does not keep things for himself. He who gives all, turtle dove and its young.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Rome: Giulio Einaudi Editore S.P.A, 1995. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folks. New York: A Signet Classic, 1982. Effa, Gaston-Paul. Nous, Enfants de la Tradition. Paris :Anne Carrier, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask. New York: Grove, 1967.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self –Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Manfred, Jahn. A Guide to the Theory of Narratives. Oct 2010, 2005,

www.uni-koel.de/~ameo2/ppp.htm. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Schultz, Emily A., and Robert H. Lavenda. Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition. London: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998.

Taiwo, Oladele. Social Experience in African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1986.

MYTH AND MODERNITY IN AFRICAN LITERATURE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC IN ADEBAYO WILLIAMS’ THE REMAINS

OF THE LAST EMPEROR

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Tayo ogunlewe, PhD Department of English

Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos E-mail: tayo_ogunlewe@yahoo.com

Abstract

Adebayo Williams’ novel, The Remains of the Last Emperor represents a committed writer’s engagement with the political contradictions which define his beleaguered milieu under the savage sway of dictators or despots. How productive and rewarding this engagement turns out is the governing concern of this paper. Williams, therefore, sets out to expose the shenanigans of political rascality on the African continent with an uncanny insight and unsparing virulence to underscore the fact that a progressive artistic commitment must take sides with the people as the true makers of history as against their oppressors. Without a doubt, The Remains of the Last Emperor is a text that is complex, not only in its plot structure, but also in its narrative technique. It might as well be described as featuring a macabre blend of the marvellous and the real. To be sure, the novel meshes myths, legends, and other forms of the African oral tradition with a Euro-American narrative style. The paper submits that through the deployment of a unique stylistic choice, Williams’ succeeds in executing a powerful rendition of the warped postcolonial African condition where maximum ruler ship has become the norm rather than the exception.

Introduction

According to modern literary theory, one of the tasks of serious literature is to de-familiarise and not to reassure us of the established conventions, not to present us with the recognizable and the often written, but to lead towards a new perception of experience, narrative order, and aesthetic wholeness. Like a good deal of newer writing, Adebayo Williams uses the anxious, compromised instrument of language, the prime object of modern critical speculation (in deconstructive criticism, for example which has made a paradox out of the idea of rhetorical authenticity) as a means of questing through the interlocking worlds of the familiar and the unfamiliar, awe and atrocity – in the hope or belief that we can find depths below the surface, and so accept moral responsibility for our utterances and actions.

The Remains of the Last Emperor (1994) is an aesthetic and sociologically erotic novel, a flamboyant and indeed brilliant display of a busy and inventive author’s repertoire. The novel has many postmodern habits: the characters are voices and so virtually, in a manner of speaking, characterless, and voices and bodies change into other clothes or even other bodies in a continuous metamorphosis. There is a great deal of redundancy, or excess noise and action, which could be annoying to some of the inmates and neighbours in the fictional world of the novel. It is hard to find critical words to describe Williams’ distinctive style, with its learning, its elaborate

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ciphering, its proliferation of text for its own sake, its awareness of producing writing in a world that has tipped over into the supernatural, magical realism, political consciousness and entropic decline.

William’s style could be called a “paranoid” style. This is a style of writing of a world so made up of plots, conspiracies, codes and systems that the individual character within it is necessarily swamped by overwhelming exterior discourse and even the literary language itself becomes a part of it. If we work outwards from the language of a novel we are likely to arrive at a sense of how it expresses the deepest contradictions of the period of its production. Traditional criticism favoured steady novels expressing central truths about human experience. Recent criticism is engaged with showing that these steady novels are not as coherent as might appear to be the case. If one alters the position from which criticism operates, one gains a different sense of what is involved in any particular text. A critical approach in which the key terms are theme, plot, character and point of view, may have little to say about a text, but a critical approach which places language at the centre of the discussion has a lot to say. Rather than just focusing on ideas, critics now look at how the writer constructs a narrative and how language functions in that narrative. If one focuses on the language one tends to become absorbed with how the novelist confirms or challenges the discourse of his day. The problem of the novelist is not what to write, but how to write. The Remains of the Last Emperor makes it clear that Williams is one of the remarkable figures of the contemporary Nigerian novel, though his works seem largely to have remained the interest of a narrow readership. He manifests a prodigious talent for constructing labyrinthine plots and large conspiracies. This novel is a contemporary one in the way it attempts to explore individual states of mind against the background of a society that has been fractured almost beyond repair. However, we need to examine very closely the master-slave dialectic as an issue in Marxist literary discourse within which ideological and theoretical framework the novel is written.

To do some justice to this issue we may first need to examine some of Williams’ thoughts on the relationship that subsists in nations between the dominating and dominated classes. In doing this, the study shall explore Williams’ essay entitled “Madunagwu and the End of These Times” (2000). Here, Williams describes Edwin Madunagwu as an “irrepressible Nigerian Marxist”. As the title of the essay suggests the article represents its author’s rejoinder or contribution to that Marxist’s mathematician discourse in a newspaper article. What Williams is concerned with is to show how, in spite of the rigour of his joyless prose, the indefatigable Marxist had been unwittingly “privileging clan politics over ethnic contentions.” Williams, with specific reference to the Nigerian situation, submits that “ethnic, religious and other primordial identities tend to take primacy over class identity,” when Marxists theorise and analyse the nationalist dialectic of the socio-economic relationship existing between the people and their visionless leaders in “mere artificial” nations like Nigeria, it is against this background that the study attempts a critique of the master-slave dialectic in The Remains of the Last Emperor. And this is as it should be because quite often extra-textual knowledge is deployable in the deconstruction of

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literary creations. Thus, the paper intends to show how much Williams’ artistic vision approximates his real life consciousness.

Without a doubt The Remains of the Last Emperor is a text that is complex, not only in its plot structure, but also in its narrative technique. It might as well be described as featuring a macabre blend of the marvelous and the real. To be sure the novel meshes myths, legends, and other forms of the African oral tradition with a euro-American narrative style.

And still on the narrative technique employed in the novel, we note that there is a mixture of points of view as the author uses the third person omniscient point of view to present the story’s outline and thereafter transfers the narrative responsibility to one of his characters variously called “Old Man” and “Sir Dandy”, who relates most of the story in the first person point of view.

Thematically, The Remains of the Last Emperor is a powerful metaphor of the ultimate futility of absolute power. Indeed, we may call it a kind of introspective analysis of the psychology of power. This is very much so when we consider the motivations that impel its protagonist to the inordinate pursuit of power as an end in itself. However, what the author preoccupies himself with is to show how debasing it eventually becomes for someone who wields absolute power over not only a fellow human being, but in fact over a people who had looked up to him as a deliverer. The novel, therefore, convincingly demonstrates how a totalitarian and autocratic demagogue must perpetually subject himself to grave personal indignities to keep his people down. In the final instance, the novel is a testimony to Williams’ assertion that “history does not end with the triumph of the slave-master over the slave” (20), but that, as with epochs, history only ends “when the slave defeats his master” (22).

The study also examines how Williams constructs the socio-cultural and political-economic dynamics of the novel’s fictive space. While one agrees that Williams’ ideological bias is in favour of the people as is obvious in the stylistic construct of reflecting the tyrant Samusangudu’s cruelty in the parlous condition of the people, we must, nevertheless, note that he does not idealise all of the people as he shows clearly that tyrants only draw their vitality from the collaborative acts of some of the masses.

About an hour ago some of the security people came to inform His Majesty that there had been a serious mutiny in the army. I suspect it must be a very serious revolt because the old man started whimpering and cursing… what shall we do? The ruthless double screamed…

What do you mean nothing?... I think I’m going to make my peace with the new people!

They won’t need your services… How do you know.

All rulers need duplications and masters of duplicity. Without us the Emperor would long have been torn apart by the vultures he is ruling

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over… We must disappear with him, his companion said in grim reflection (TRLE, 206).

Thus the writer spares the reader the gory details of Samusangudu’s horror chamber until the final moments of the narration. Returning now to the novelist’s essay mentioned earlier, one observed that in Williams’ reading of the Nigerian Marxist barometer the operating variables are issues of ethnicity and religion. What this means is that in the struggle between the masses and the propertied class, that is the master-slave dichotomy, the actual factors at play are ethnic affiliations coupled with religious sentiments – not yet the existence of a peasantry that has no such divisive elements that prevent the people from presenting a united front against the dominating class.

Having said this, the study now proceeds to show how Williams successfully aggregates populist characters in a metaphorical medical ward called “The Ward of the Damned”… so that they can realize its ideological vision for society by rejecting the balkanizing tendency of ethnicity and in fact using their ethno-cultural diversity to advantage. One observes at the outset that it does great credit to the narrative format of the novel that Williams uses this self enclosed outpost of “madmen”, to explore his theme. While the occupants of this asylum are nominally mad, we, nevertheless, know that it is actually the novelist’s intention to show us that there can indeed be a great deal of method in the “madmen”, of those who have set out to assist their society to be liberated from the stronghold of annihilating forces. Though a minority, these annihilating forces are diametrically opposed to the people’s survival. What the ward together with its leadership, provided by the doctor and the leader, Oriade, typify, is the need for a focused group of people to be committed to the effort of social conscientisation which eventually leads to social change. Symbolically enough, each inmate of this suspiciously utopian ward had experienced one form of disillusionment or the other with the “real” world (of sane people) before seeking solace in the intellectually challenging climate of this “ward of ideas.” In one particularly brilliant scene, the author shows how the inmates provide the ideological basis of their significance vis-à-vis the rest of the society and the government of the day.

I see, the doctor said rather sorrowful and began to walk away. But I still believe till date that I could see a strange smile dance around his oblong intense face. A few moments later, Lamidi emerged, groaning and giggling at the same time. There as a thunderous applause for him. The rowdy celebration continued far into the night with none of the officials daring to stop us. This was another important victory in our war of independence. Infact, I can say with authority that it was that night that the ward crossed the Rubicon, as they say. (TRLE,6).

Some of the more notable inmates are Lamidi, Jerry, Oseni, Suara, Alamu, Burma Cobra, Soroye, Mr. Aboaba and including, of course, Sir Dandy (who also doubles as the old man who narrates much of the story to the young editor) and the pre-destined leader in the person of Oriade a.k.a “Were Pataki.” All these characters

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contribute one perspective or the other to the discourse that eventually culminates in the overthrow of the tyrant. Certainly, it is Williams’ intention to show how much Samusangudu, the last Emperor succeeds in wasting the human resources of his country on account of his morbid fear of opposition. Indeed, Samusangudu does not mind subjecting himself to a sub-human form of existence if only that will ensure his subjugation of a thoroughly harassed and impoverished people. However, in line with materialist dialectic, such a situation cannot persist for too long provided that, as one witnesses in the unity of goal displayed by, not only the inmates of the ward of the damned, but also the totality of the peasantry as reflected in their climatic uprising – the actual ideological conflict is identified as strictly being between the oppressing class and the oppressed one. Thus, for Williams it will not do to have a peasantry that is bedeviled by schisms brought about by ethnic and religious sentiments. In the light of this therefore one may conclude that the fictive world of The Remains of the Last Emperor clearly aligns with the viewpoint offered by its author in the essay referred to earlier.

What Williams has, therefore, done is to make powerful contributions to various debates on issues in philosophy, economy, religion, psychology, sociology and of course, literature. In the novel we are suffused with evidence of the role of propaganda in politics and how it can at once enslave and endear an undiscerning people to their tormentors. One can also see that dictators do not emerge suddenly but that they develop insidiously and as such can only be uprooted with the right combination of strategy and determination. This much is obvious in one of the leader’s deeply philosophical statements:

By the time you are talking about tyrants, you are talking about an individual or a group of individuals who have unleashed a reign of terror on the whole society. They do not normally get there by accident. So, you cannot remove them by one grand gesture of defiance, but by careful planning and timing. (TRLE, 90).

Indeed, the argument seems to be that in every man dictatorial instincts exist, but that it behoves society to provide appropriate control mechanisms to prevent one man from wielding absolute power over another, especially political power. If one regards the artist as a visionary and a democrat, one may say that The Remains of the Last Emperor qualifies as a topical commentary on contemporary Nigeria socio political reality, even if the author calls it “Gbitiland.”

It may be added that Williams’ aim is to direct society’s attention to the need to struggle for social change the moment the conditions for such are available. In such a situation, all arms of government will have become grossly culpable and the people will no doubt face a herculean task in their quest to restore order and sanity. In Williams’ fictive Gbitiland, the people, under a visionary and selfless leadership, ultimately overthrow Samusangudu’s tyranny at huge costs of life and property. It is the view in this study, however, that this new order may eventually revert to the earlier one, lending credence to the possibly pessimistic posture of Williams when he observes that:

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Indeed, epochs end when the slave defeats its master, and history, in its own version of the resurrection, begins all over again like the frozen carcass of a Siberian beat after the winter of hibernation (TRLE, 21).

One may consider also Soyinka’s view in his philosophical treatise, The Credo of Being and Nothingness:

Let those who wish, celebrate the present blunting of the Marxist tool; the battle to eliminate that distinction (the schism between affluent being and impoverished nothingness) will continue to occupy societies as long as social inequality is manifested or enthroned as a principle of social ordering (30).

Conclusion

Williams’ novels are a convulsive reaction to the degrading government pervading the nation. In TRLE the use of aesthetic device mingle together to present a formidable story of mysticism and social decadence under a tyrant. His characters are essentially painted to present his story as a unique one. In the light of societal prominence where the human rights activists are those who carry the cross of the society, Williams brings out their sanity. They converge under the influence of the ‘doctor’ in an asylum.

The symbolic representation of each of these characters as a ‘Crusader for Justice’ with unique characteristics keeps them ready for the event.

Can there ever be an end to injustice? I asked with a deep sigh. It seems to be that as long as there are lice in the clothes, there will be blood on the fingers.

He looked at me with admiration.

There are some old versions of injustice which make new version of injustice appear like some form of justice. What is important is to move humanity and history forward to new ideals of justice, he said (TRLE, 152).

The ‘Emperor Samusangudu’ whose rebellion against his society, even with a change of name from Samson to Samusangudu, is basically a means of representing societies under the rule of tyrants, and the awe in which the people they govern hold them. They are societal twists on which resistance are carried out through the character of the leader, who is appointed by the doctor and several inmates of the asylum. The waste of society’s brilliant young minds is reflected in Ade who finds an accomplice in Lamidi (or vice versa). These are the people society hinges its hopes on, yet which it destroys: the educationist, the religious stalwart, the agriculturist, and the human rights activist. The need for a rebellion was necessary when the leader, Ori-Ade found out that “The law-givers had become the greatest law breakers.”

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He must have been eyeing the leader for a long time, seeing him as an emblem of docility before authority that he so much detested. He grabbed his chance once it presented itself on a farm near the school and gave the leader the thrashing of his life… he did not deem it fit to defend himself… it was against the school’s regulation to engage in a fight.

You mean if somebody wants to kill you, you will say it is against the school’s regulation to defend yourself? I asked in alarm.

Yes, he began with supreme conviction, because a law is a law, a sacred order. Look, elder, we either have a law-abiding society or we have anarchy and chaos. My crisis began when I discovered that people were inventing their own rules for the game. The law-givers had become the greatest law-breakers (TRLE, 46 – 47).

He goes further to elaborate that “when the entire society suffers a nervous breakdown then there are no longer available criteria for determining the good or great citizen” (47). The doctor, who eventually dies in the course of the struggle, like the others, is a people mover, a motivator. He prevents the emperor from condemning the intellectuals in the society to a total demise of their physical and mental states. In the words of the old man the doctor is “the greatest revolutionary in the annals of the nation, a man who rejected compromise and fought for justice, an orphan by choice, who in turn became the guardian of orphans without choice (12).

He is the one who sees the viscous quality of the leader, and chooses him in that respect, rather than Sir Dandy, the social entertainer-turned-crusader. He is not only a healer of “madmen” but he is also the “healer” of the future. The essence of deliberation on social vices and handled as relevant features in the progression of any nation. He (the doctor), is depicted in his eventual demise as a burnt, scarred body. Sir Dandy sees him as one of the nation’s “redeemers.”

He was a great lover of humanity who believed that human beings had the capacity to organize their society along the lines of justice and fairplay (TRLE, 79).

If Williams produces nothing else aside this novel he would still be assured of a place in the annals of contemporary Nigerian, and even African literature, for this work reveals him as a mature stylist with a razor-sharp perception and an ability to reflect contemporary Nigerian society under the yoke of the military dictatorship of yore.

Works Cited

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Ofeimun, Odia. “Forty Years of Nigeria and the State of Literature” in The Guardian, 2 October 2000.

Ogundele, Wole. “Contemporary Nigerian Literature in English: 1970 to the Present” in Adeleke Fakoya and Steve Ogunpitan (Eds.) The English Compendium. Lagos: LASU Press. 2001.

Soyinka, Wole. Credo of Being and Nothingness. Ibadan: University Press. 1991.

Williams, Adebayo. The Remains of the Last Emperor. Ibadan: Spectrum Books. 1994.

_____________. “Madunagwu and the End of these Times” in The Guardian, 9 July, 2000.

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OF NATIONAL MYTHS, MYTHICAL NATIONS AND THE

NARRATIVISATION OF NIGERIA AS A POSTCOLONIAL STATE

James Tar Tsaaior, PhD

Department of Mass Media and Writing School of Media and Communication

Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria E-mail: jtsaaior@smc.edu.ng

Abstract

As an oral form of cultural expression, myth occupies a contested and contestable site in cultural studies. Dominant and totalizing epistemes whose derivation is from the Western philosophical and scribal tradition have sought to locate myth and the mythic in the archives of prehistoric memory. The usual, received argument has been that myth issues from, and goes into, an oral, pre-scientific culture. In this regard, conscious, ideological efforts have always been made, especially by some in the Western academy, to constitute myth as a fixed, monumentalised cultural event without apportioning to it any agency in contemporaneity. In this paper, I engage myth as a dynamic, living tissue which participates in the contingencies and currents of modernity. I argue that myth even anticipates or prefigures the future. In this regard, I avow that it is rewarding to appropriate the avian trope of the ageless eagle which constantly renews its youth and strength as a fitting metaphor for myth. This is significant because though with its provenance deeply rooted in ancient tradition, myth constantly rediscovers and renews itself in concert with the motions of culture and post/modernity. Allied to this concern is my intention to negotiate myth as an oral form which intersects with, and enriches, writing. Myth, therefore, enjoys an enduring life-span whose diachronic possibilities necessitates its immanent presence and cultural energies in time past, time present and time future. It is, therefore, not merely incidental that myths are implicated in national formation and invention as they are constitutive sites for social, cultural, and political becoming. Nations weave themselves into existence through myths just like myths also weave nations into being. But the paper problematises the issue of nationhood as myth. Even though it recognizes myth as critical to the fabrication of nationhood, it enters a caveat that the myth-nation dialectic can only be necessitated by cultures and peoples and their shared experiences since myth is culture-specific and species-particular. In this case, the paper examines the representations of Nigeria in the national media and observes that more than anything, Nigeria emerges as an allegory, a mythical creation more than a cohesive, united entity thus making the very idea of her nationhood mythical.

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The idea that nations are invented has become more widely recognised…literary myth too has been complicit in the creation of nations-above all, through the genre that accompanied the rise of the European vernaculars, their institution as language of state after 1820 and the separation of literature into various ‘national’ literatures by the German Romantics at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Nations, then, are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role (Brennan 49).

It is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy-and an apparatus of power-that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories, like the people, minorities or 'cultural difference' that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity (Bhabha 292).

Introduction

In negotiating Nigeria as a nation, a mythical nation which has been constituted in turn by national myths, it is compelling to begin with two defining anecdotes. These anecdotes definitively underwrite her contingent and uncertain destiny as an imagined community, as a myth. The first anecdote relives a seemingly ambiguous dialogic encounter between Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first president and Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the Northern Region during the London constitutional talks leading to independence in 1960. Zik was believed to have, in a conciliatory and states-manly manner, appealed to the Sardauna to forget the inherent differences that threatened to pull them apart as nationalist leaders and founding fathers of the nation. He rationalised that the congealed differences in turn had spiralling, untoward repercussions on Nigeria and her national cohesion. As such, they should rather focus on those things that possessed the potentials to foster mutual understanding and unity rather than those that pulled them apart.1

The Sardauna, in a measured response to Zik’s perspective, told his interlocutor that it was imperative for them to understand their differences rather than forget them. In his estimation, Bello argued that to understand would be a more efficacious and productive way to build a nation-state with a heterogeneous character like Nigeria. To forget would be convenient but only for a moment. Sooner than later, the limits of the forgetfulness would manifest and call for a rethink on the political expedience of remembrance. On the other hand, to remember and understand would not necessarily and mechanically translate to a harmony of positions on how best to steer the imagined community called Nigeria to the desired destination. Indeed, to remember could also invite discomfiting and divisive tendencies with disastrous

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repercussions. The two perspectives were simultaneously persuasive and repellent, constituting an oppositional discursive binary.

Superficially, what can be gleaned from this encounter gestures towards the politics of convenient forgetfulness, on the one hand, and the politics of uncomfortable remembering, on the other. While Zik chose the option of cautiously picking the way strewn with thorns and thistles towards coherent nationhood, Bello advocated an energetic discursive passage through the weeds. However, lurking beyond the surface can be identified the tensions resident in the political perspectives nourished by the two politicians as to how to engineer the Nigerian polity at that moment in history. The national imperative to forget or to remember, to be silent or to discuss with all its political significations still haunts the nation more than half a century after its incarnation as a postcolonial nation-state. The current debate on the desirability or otherwise of a national conference, sovereign or not, is reminiscent of the discursive skirmish between Zik and Bello.

It will seem that relationally, the pendulum of native wisdom swings in both directions and this perhaps resolves the paradox which settles in the positions by the two nationalist politicians. Zik was obviously involved in a political discourse whose narrative centre congealed around the well-known centrifugal tendencies which haunted the young Nigeria still ensconced in politically vulnerable swaddling clothes. These ruinous tendencies ranged from ethnic loyalties, regional affiliations, religious/cultural differences and political allegiances. Added to these were the pathological fears and animosities nursed by each of the so-called nationalist leaders against one another based on their political ambitions and the spectre of hegemonic domination by their respective ethnic configurations: the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba.

While Zik was willing to tactically avoid treading the political landscape cleverly planted with landmines and other dangerous explosives by the retreating British colonialists, the Sardauna felt that walking gingerly on the terrain was a wise lesson in statecraft and national definition. To forget, therefore, suggested that the portents would be silently contained. To remember meant to get to the core of the national conundrum and impose convenient limits to potential crevices that could threaten the national boulder. A more philosophical turn would have been to remember the not-too-uncomfortable and to conveniently forget the too uncomfortable. But as it was to be, the differences of the two leading ‘founding fathers’ became foregrounded sooner than expected.

But let me also focus on the second anecdote which is no less gripping and perhaps richly portentous too. In an apparent reflection on the contingent condition of Nigeria’s imperial invention as a nation by the British, Obafemi Awolowo, the premier of the Western Region was believed to have announced that Nigeria was not a nation but a mere geographic expression and that he was first a Yoruba before a Nigerian.2 Awo was merely expressing his fundamental freedom and right to comment with courageous conviction on the nation’s state of affairs at that moment

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in history, an opinion he was entitled to as his inalienable right to free expression. And he did it with forthrightness and sincerity.

This, however, instituted a national discourse whose politics of signification resonated widely. The pronouncement lent itself to a plethora of interpretive possibilities in a politically signifying sense. The main interpretation gravitated to what was perceived to be the subversive content and character of the words. To many observers, these positions gave him out as an ethnic jingoist, a defender of his Yoruba nation against national interests, and a purported nationalist who never nursed any pan-Nigerian feelings. These interpretations were largely uncharitable and as ethnocentric as any other in themselves. To profess fidelity to one’s ethnicity as a marker of primary cultural identity does not putatively translate to an undermining one’s faith in one’s nation. It is, I should think, to be realistic and down-to-earth. And for this Awo can be spared the charge of national betrayal.

By referring to Nigeria as a mere cartographic manipulation, Awo was also underscoring the imperial cobbling of Nigeria by the British through the wilful construction of artificial and mechanical boundaries which failed to recognise the cultural peculiarities and social sensibilities of the disparate peoples. Geography and colonial fiat more than mutual consent and the will to coexist as a united entity dictated the imperial need for Nigerianness. This in itself negated one of the cardinal verities for national invention: communal consent, mutual willingness. In the end the politics of national resistance and the liberationist ethos it hoped to foster became undermined by the politics of ethnicity and regionalism which frustrated the aspirations for national cohesion and coherence. Indeed, he was to also comment on the notoriety of forging a united nationhood when he observed that “West and East Nigeria are as different as Ireland from Germany. The North is as different from either as China.” (Quoted in Gunther, 773) These thoughts may well represent the opinion of a credible nationalist ruminating on the true state of a nation-state like Nigeria.

Theorising Nationhood

Theoretical elaborations on the notion of the nation are variegated and sometimes contentious. Etymologically, the word ‘’nation’’ is a derivative of the Latin “natio’’ and the French ‘’nacion’’ which signifies what has been born (Harper online). The idea of ‘’birth’’ or being ‘’born’’ is of symbolic significance to the nation. It constitutes the nation, in an ontological sense, as a living cell, a soul with a lived experience which is specific to it. If a nation is a soul because it is a living cell, it also implies that it possesses a spiritual dimension to its essence. This is in radical contradistinction to a soulless, cadaverous entity which lacks an animating presence. It also foregrounds the necessarily contingent, historically particular and culturally specific nature of the nation. In other words, nations are born in history, are products of history and have a cultural quality and value to them.

Teleologically, therefore, if nations are born, it translates that they possess the capacity to exist like human beings. Like human beings, they enjoy their youth, reach their majority and perhaps cease to exist by disintegrating in the ashes of

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history or rising from the ashes to be born again like the proverbial phoenix. This much has received historical validation from the disintegration of many city states in Europe and empires/kingdoms in Africa and Asia. Many of these city states, empires and kingdoms have undergone the alchemic process of transformation through the kiln of history to become modern ‘’nations’’ or ‘’nation-states’’ today. What, however, remains intrinsic to them are that their births have been over-determined by the exigencies of particular histories within particular cultures and particular geographies.

But to return to the idea of the nation as a living soul which is crucial to our understanding of it, Ernest Renan corroborates this knowledge schema by postulating that the nation houses a spiritual principle, a sacred lever thereby underscoring the sacred quality with which nations are endowed. As he contemplates,

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are one, constitute this spiritual soul. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form… (19)

More valuable by far than common customs, posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage of regrets and of having in the future, (a shared) programme to put into effect or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together. These are the kinds of things that can be understood in spite of differences of race and language… Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of the more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort (19).

Resident in Renan’s crystallisation of nationhood is its spirituality which is moored in its past historicity and present reality both pointing determinedly to future un/certainty. The soulfulness and spirituality of the nation assumes concrete materiality in its fusion in the temporalities of the past and present based on the fecund fund of memories and re-memories, and the sense of urgency to transmit the memories to engage the present realities and challenges posed by modernity and the voluntary commitment to a communal existence. All of these memories of the past and the willingness of the present to consensually perpetuate the values and heritages of the past converge to invent the nation.

In coming to terms with the presence of the past and the present as well as the future as complementarities rather than oppositional binaries in the fabrication of nationhood, Brennan initiates a discourse concerning the distinction between the nation as a product of (post)modernity and ancientness. He states with a definite sense of historicity:

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As for the ‘nation’, it is both historically determined and general. As a term, it refers both to the modern nation-state and to something more ancient and nebulous – the ‘natio’ – a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging. The distinction is often obscured by nationalists who seek to place their own country in an ‘immemorial past’ where its arbitrariness cannot be questioned (45).

Brennan implicates history in the idea of the nation but also gestures specifically at its ancient character as something consistent with immemorialness and as quintessential of modernity. It is this same idea of the ‘natio’ that Raymond Williams (1983) mobilises in his reification of the nation:

‘Nation’ as a term is radically connected with ‘native’. We are born into relationships which are typically settled in a place. This form of primary and ‘placeable’ bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial (12, original emphasis).

Though Raymond’s perspective on the original beingness of the nation gravitates precariously to what can be said to be its folk character, it teleologically establishes and accentuates the tension between the negotiation of the nation in its historical sense and the artificial fabrication of modern nations contemporaneous with eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe which also impacted positively or negatively on other marginal spaces during the defining moment of the colonialist and imperialist encounter. According to Paul Ricouer (1965), indigenous colonised peoples massed in the ‘natio’ need to “forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revendication before the colonialist’s personality”. He further observes: “But in order to take part in modern civilisation, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandonment of a whole cultural past” (276-277). In the formerly colonised world, this appears to be the grand paradox of nationhood and national becoming, particularly in Africa.

Attempts at figuring out what a nation is and is not will continue to structure academic researches. But from the discursive trajectory above, a rhizome of ideas about the nation have been identified as important coefficients of a nation. These include the corporeality of a people, community life and participation, culture, historical legacies and the elemental will to live together, amongst others. We can, therefore, extrapolate a definition or a set of definitions. A nation may be a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, ancestry, or history and who see or imagine themselves as such. This idea of the nation is voluntaristic: without any form of violence, imposition or coercion. A nation in this perspective need not have any physical borders or defined, sacrosanct boundaries.

On the other hand, a nation can also refer to people who share a common, defined territory and sovereign government irrespective of their ethnic or racial configuration. This definition is closely allied to idea of the modern nation better understood as the ‘’nation-state’’ as opposed to the more traditional and ancient

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‘’natio’’. Benedict Anderson’s theorisation of the nation as an ‘’imagined community’’ (Anderson 11) finds clear attributions in this concept of the nation. An imagined community may be seen as a nation because it is historically constituted, it is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture, and those who belong to it politically imagine themselves as one people. But lurking beneath this seeming homogeneity can be found an arrangement which is a product of hegemonic fiat, imperial domination, political violence, economic exploitation and social oppression. In many situations, these are the conditions that define the modern nation-state. For the avoidance of contradiction, it does not mean that the “nation” as an ancient arrangement is immune to such contradictions but these are minimal. It is, therefore, difficult to contemplate the nation in present history without thinking of modernity, particularly Euro-American modernity, with its political, economic, social and cultural institutions like govermentality, the law, the military and police, a civil service, diplomatic corps, an official language, amongst others.

Many African states - certainly not nations - lack this spiritual principle, the desire, the consent and the will to co-exist as Renan prescribes. And this explains why they are perpetually enmeshed in a sticky and inextricable web as they continue in an ever-receding, never-ending journey in the political wilderness in search of a centre and true nationhood. The result is that they continue to sink in the ever-deepening quagmire of the realities of their postcolonial existential vagaries. But this is not inexplicable. The idea of the nation largely hardly exists in modern Africa in a conventional sense. The mass of nations that populate the continent are historical mishaps and testaments of rites of violence. They are products of the vast, internal, external and, perhaps, eternal conspiracies of History all of which found eruption in the colonialist and imperialist project of Europe.

When the pure idea of a nation is applied to Africa, it is almost impossible to find a nation in its purity in modern Africa. Nationhood in Africa is as such notoriously difficult to define. It makes meaning only when sieved through the perfidies of history and narratives of violence scripted in monuments of blood by the colonising enterprise and empire-building project of European nations. Through this violence of history and history of violence, what has been aptly called the “curse of Berlin” (Adekeye 3 ), Europe erected artificial borders on the continent through its mindless and brutal scramble for and partition of Africa. Through the instrumentality of fraudulent treaties, treachery and what Fanon calls an array of bayonets and gunpowder,

Nigeria as Myth

One persistent substrating myth which defines Nigeria as a British creation is that it is a nation. Clearly, Nigeria’s nationhood is a myth when subjected to the normative principles and definitional proprieties of the nation. A nation is a group, community or people with a common genealogical line, cultural belonging, shared experiences, linguistic affinities and national aspirations and interests. Indeed, a nation is a soul

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with a spiritual principle which animates it, endows it with cultural energies and galvanises it on the path of social and political be/longing. One propelling force in the constitution of nations is the capacity to weave myths and other narratives which mediate the nation and bring it into concrete existence. These myths become veritable communal property shared by the people as a unified cultural category. Usually, there is a central, exemplary figure who embodies the social, political and cultural institutions which bind together the people as a group or nation.

Nigeria clearly lacks the soul, the spiritual principle which should qualify it as a nation. As an imperial creation of the British, Nigeria lacks some of the constitutive habits of nations. It is rather a nation of nations with a complex of heterogeneous cultures, ethnic diversities, linguistic and ethnic identities. Thus, where a nation should install homogeneity in its cultural and social frontiers, Nigeria constitutes itself as a mosaic of cultures and ethnicities and linguistic backgrounds, something synonymous with a carnivalesque spectacle, the plural, multi-colouredness of the rainbow. Each of the over 200 ethnicities with different identities is from a different cultural background with hardly any similitude in institutional realities. Though in some exceptional cases like the United States America where such hybrid origins have become an asset and an elemental energy for national becoming, in Nigeria, such hybrid origins have become a disabling liability, a nightmare the country is struggling to wake from and transcend.

Against this trajectory of a multiple heritage which renders nationhood notoriously difficult to achieve, Nigeria also presents another mythic quality which is the absence of a coherent, determinate and stable national ethos which should define and give it a concrete and distinct identity. Rather, what Nigeria radiates is a contradictory, chaotic and nondescript ethos which is characteristically at variance with a national community. This absence is necessitated largely by another absence: the lack of a rich legacy of shared historical and cultural experiences which should serve as the cultural morphology and the grammar of values that inspire communal sentiments and the urgent aspirations for be/longing. The absence of such historical nodes and social networks which should constitute the dynamic for meaningful cultural transactions and strengthen the bonds of nationhood compromise the willingness to yield loyalty to the nation and encourage ethnic zealotry.

Naming strategies are critical to national formation. In Africa, the politics of national naming has become central to postcolonial engineering as many African countries asserted their political autonomy from their metropolitan overlords by renewing themselves through the symbolic process of self-renaming. Gold Coast, for instance, became Ghana. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Upper Volta, became Burkina Faso, Tanganyika was christened Tanzania, etc. Curiously, Nigeria was to be named Songhai in the tradition of the earliest Western Sudanese empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai as two modern nation-states, Ghana and Mali took the names of the other empires leaving Songhai to be appropriated by Nigeria (Achebe 7). These were not empty political mantras or cultural rituals. The renaming processes were rites of self-initiation announcing the arrival of the countries on the global map as independent and autonomous players in world politics. This conferred on them the

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requisite political capital, the agency and subjectivity to determine their future destinies away from the colonial hegemony of Europe.

The case of Nigeria is somewhat difficult to discern in the political economy of naming on the continent. The myth in Nigeria’s naming inheres in the fact that the country is believed to have been named by Flora Shaw, mistress and later wife of the first Governor-general, Lord Frederick Lugard. The name is believed to be a conflation or blending of the two words, “Niger Area”, a fusion which produced Nigeria. It will seem these words were reposing peacefully somewhere, waiting to be roused from their somnolence or hibernation so that they can be affixed to the country following the ceremonial rites by Flora. This argument derives its assumed strength and cogency from the historical reality of the presence of the Niger River, one of the main reliefs that define the country’s geography. But where is the Benue? This is another river which is also central to the divination and definition of the fate and making of the country. It spatially also forms a quintessential aspect of its relief and cartography.

Indeed, in the schematic reality of this myth is embedded the politics of European selective glamorisation of particular geographies, spaces and cultures as an insidious process of divide and rule. After all, the official British colonial administrative policy in Africa was the indirect rule system. The myth in this British naming system is that it never captured the topographical essence of the country in the first place and succeeded in creating an absence. The Niger and Benue Rivers are both locked together as they form a confluence in Lokoja after following their lone, snaky ways. It is little wonder that this city was once a capital of Nigeria. The Y-shaped confluence represents in masterful watery strokes the intended unity of the nation by Nature’s design and any British permutation or manipulation to ignore one of them through wilful imperial arrogance is but a mythical contraption. Symbolically, however, this initial deliberate rite of omission through the imperial design of Britain laid the rubric for future omissions which have proved destabilising and centrifugal in the country’s struggles to achieve authentic nationhood.

There is also another myth which shares kinship with the immediate preceding one. This is the myth of the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 by the same Lord Lugard, the lone antelope with a thousand footprints. Historiographical sources impress on us that the Northern and Southern protectorates were amalgamated to form a united nation in 1914 and Lugard presided over the rites. Native wisdom articulates that the efficacy of the ritual as a therapy can only be enforced by the purity of the votive intention and the sacrificial victim. In the case of the amalgamation, what constituted the intention and who was the victim? Was the amalgamation an act of altruism, political expediency or cultural convenience, or some or all or none of these reasons? How nationally rewarding has this colonial fiat of violently yoking together the heterogeneous peoples of Nigeria been? In other words, how has Nigeria fared since the amalgamation? The deficit in forging a national union appears to be the testament to our reality as a nation of nations. Consequently, the imperatives of British colonial administrative convenience, the mercantilist interests which superficially lurked beneath, profitable markets and investments and cultural

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arrogance, not unifying the nation, were the impetus or propelling forces behind the political gerrymandering of the coloniser. The truth is, and still remains, that Nigeria has never been a nation and may never be a nation. This is not a curse. It is partly because of the nature of the nation and the willingness on the part of the constituents units to forge a nation of their dreams. That willingness, in the Nigerian experiment does not exist, at least in present history.

Amalgamation, by its very nature, is an administrative cause sufficient to unify and present a common front. In our case, it was meant to further divide us which is why united nationhood has been illusory and unmaterialistic even since the British departed. The questions which bear testimony to this unrealistic and self-serving amalgamation include the following: was the amalgamation an act of colonial benevolence or an ideological process of deepening British stranglehold on the conquered territory? Why were the “natives” and “heathens” not consulted? Agreed, colonialism imposes on its subjects a culture of silence and subordination but why were some parts of the amalgamated nation privileged over others and accorded greater political valence and voice in the running of the nation? And most crucially, why has the nation refused to cohere since the amalgamation if it was actually intended to unify the component parts?

Perhaps, the most ruinous and deceptive of all the national myths is that of the founding fathers of the nation as if there were no founding mothers. Nigerians are routinely subjected to epistemic assault as codified even in the two stanzas of the national anthem as part of our communal canon that the country had founding fathers. It is, therefore, possible to identify the gaps and absences inherent in the anthem and pledge as markers of our quasi-national identity. A careful negotiation of the anthem and pledge “locates the ambiguities, ambivalences and contradictions within the Nigerian nation-state...which privilege masculinity over femininity” (Tsaaior 36). This engendered political project is executed through the recognition of a patriarchal order and the masculinist politics it espouses to. For after all, Nigeria is a patriarchal society and the patrilineal principle should and must take precedence over the matriarchal in the construction of national symbols, the weaving of myths and the celebration of its iconic figures. Only patriarchs, not matriarchs, exist here. Only heroes, not heroines, have attained canonical status in the narrative tradition of nationalism and patriotism.

The personages - mainly men - identified as our heroes fought for independence and preserved our honour and pride as a people with a history and culture. These founders/heroes are Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo, Herbert Macaulay, etc. The towering stature and courage of these figures during the nationalist struggle and the politics of resistance against British colonialism and oppression cannot be reasonably denied. There is a consistent myth implied in this selective glorification and deification of old men as fathers of Nigeria. Where are the women who became co-creators of history with their rich legacies of courageous resistance against imperial hegemony? What about the legendary contributions of women like Margaret Ekpo, Fumilayo Kuti, Hajia Sawaba, etc. who were also actively engaged in the anti-colonial resistance movement?

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One phallic idea which sticks out is that the nation is almost always constituted as a male creation. This is the reason why in “nationalist discourses, especially in patriarchal discourses, the mother-nation dialectic has been opportunistically employed by the founding fathers of nations to include women as part of the nationalist vanguard only to exclude them soon after freedom has been won (Tsaaior 51). As one critic insightfully posits, bodily fluids like blood, sweat and semen are used as metaphors for masculinity and as markers for national re/invention” (de Almeida 11). In attempting to inscribe Nigerian women into the scroll of the nationalist struggle and thereafter, the commitment of the patriarchal lot to the national aspirations of the anti-colonial ferment needs to be interrogated. For instance, whose particular interests were they protecting: theirs or their ethnicities or the country’s? When subjected to this intense evaluation of their roles as founding fathers, some of these nationalists emerge as pitiable ethnic jingoists, political opportunists, cultural demagogues and religious bigots whose interests in Nigeria were merely selfish, egocentric and self-aggrandising.

It is my reasoned opinion that though these so-called founding fathers mobilised their intellectual and political energies in the anti-colonial struggle to transcend the British, their sense of nationalism/patriotism was waylaid by personal and ethnocentric concerns. Nigeria meant so much to them in deficit, not in reality as the overriding ambition of some of them was to own the country as a personal/regional estate, not in trust for the rest of the component parts. This much became clear when political independence was won and the British retreated. The process of internal colonialism became instituted and entrenched. Regional domination of the country by some of the heroes became a deft political calculation, not the ideals of national becoming and belonging. As Ngugi wa Thiongó, the Kenyan writer aptly argues, many of the nationalists who rod to power following the political independence of their countries were infected with the imperial germ of the big man as their minds were corroded by colonial ideology. What was needed was to decolonise their consciousness so that they would have a progressive vision for their countries as a viable alternative for development (Decolonising the Mind 1).

Nigeria’s national situation fell into formulaic streak. Many of the nationalists and founding fathers became overly and inordinately ambitious for the soul of the fledgling country and soon the founding fathers became floundering fathers. They became intent on plunging the nation into a waiting precipice after conducting it like a locomotive without a rudder. Perhaps, they really meant well except that their patriotic energies were not productive enough. Or they walked into the landmines dutifully planted by the British. Or both. But one thing remains obvious. At the centre of Nigeria’s founding was an unarticulated, chaotic and confused mass of interests, ambitions and strategies which produced a tissue of paradoxes that lacked a meaningful and stable national agenda. The fractious character of this hotch potch of ideas about the new nation and what should constitute its soul became obvious when the true interests became manifest.

Conclusion

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It is fascinating how these national myths are constructed, how they in turn construct the Nigerian nation and how they circulate freely within national discourses thus validating the crisis of nationhood Nigeria is enmeshed in. In this paper, I have restricted my attention to historiographical sources, autobiographical narratives and other modes of self-telling in their oral and scribal manifestations. But Nigeria’s mythical and problematic nationhood is not restricted to these narrative arenas and events alone. The myth of the Nigerian nation can be encountered in the print and electronic media. In particular, national newspapers constitute a viable paradigmatic and analytic category in this regard. National newspapers, it must be stressed, are discursive and representational sites which institute modes of knowledge and interpretive grids which are central to the mythic construction of Nigerian nationhood. Media ownership and the ethnic origin/background of the owners in Nigeria, for instance, is a foremost index of how not to engineer nationhood.

Almost every media organisation in the country springs from an ethnic /regional threshold even though it announces itself as a national publication. Quite often, they nourish vested divisive interests which are sometimes antithetical to the aspirations of the nation. Beginning with Iwe Iroyin in the Western Region and The West African Pilot, all other succeeding publications have almost always followed the familiar path of championing sectional interests. An average Nigerian newspaper, and by extension, television or radio house, will always purvey a particular ethnic or geo-political partisanship. In many situations, this partisanship is not progressive in temperament. This in itself would not have been a problematic thing. After all, everything in life is defined by politics and ideology. Indeed, not to have a political position or ideological interest is itself a politics. However, in the Nigerian context, national cohesion is not always the galvanising force in the narrativisation of the nation whether it is in the realms of oral/written accounts, popular cultural expressions or media representations. If anything, in many contexts, our sense of nationhood is actively negated or undermined and subsidiarised to personal, ethnic and religious interests. This throws into relief the idea of a nation whose claims to nationhood is at best a myth, and nothing more than a myth.

Notes 1 One of the defining discourses on the founding of Nigeria as a nation and its future direction after political independence in 1960 is this encounter between these two leading nationalists and politicians. The discourse was to structure and define Nigeria’s future destiny as a nation-state in a state of becoming. For more on this see Ahmadu Bello, My Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962 and Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1994. 2 Much of the political thoughts of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, foremost Nigerian nationalist and politician, can be found in his Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

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Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation” in G.D. Killam (ed.). African Writers on African Writing. London: Heinemann Books Limited, 1973.

Adekeye, Adebajo. The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War. London: Hurst and

Company, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Awolowo, Obafemi. Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1960. Azikiwe, Nnamdi. My Odyssey: An Autobiography. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1994. Bello, Ahmadu. My Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Bhabha, Homi. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”. In Homi Bhabha (ed.). Nation

and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 1-9. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form”. In Homi K. Bhabha (ed.).

Nation and Narration. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. 44-70. de Almeida, Miguel Vale. The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town.

Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996. Gunther, John. Inside Africa. New York: HarperCollins, 1955. Harper, Douglas. ‘’Nation’’. Online Etymology Dictionary.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=n&p=3&allowed_in_frame=0. Retrieved 4-4- 2012.

Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” In Homi Bhabha (ed.). Nation and Narration.

London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 8-22. Ricouer, Paul. “Civilisation and National Culture”. In History and Truth. Evanston,

Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1965. 276-277. Tsaaior, James Tar. “In the Name of the Father…Masculinity, Gender Politics and

National Identity Formation in Postcolonial Nigeria” in Le Simplegadi, 8: 8 (2010), 36 – 47. http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi

_____________. “Introduction: Of Origins, Politics and the Place of the Postcolonial Text in Black History/Culture” in James Tar Tsaaior (ed). Politics of the Postcolonial Text: Africa and Its Diasporas. Muenchen: Lincom Europa Academic Publications, 2010. 5 – 37. wa Thiongó, Ngugi. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature. London: James Currey, Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986. Williams, Raymond. The Year 2000. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

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A REVIEW OF KUNLE AFOLAYAN’S THE FIGURINE (2010), 122 MINS.

GOLDEN EFFECTS/HIBUZZ

Añuli Agina

Department of Mass Media and Writing School of Media and Communication

Pan-African University, Lagos E-mail: aagina@smc.edu.ng

Multiple award-winning Nigerian film, The Figurine (2010) poses a question to the viewer before the closing credits: “What do you believe?” But the answer to that question is the ideology on which the film rests i.e. Araromire is responsible for the tragic end in Sola (Kunle Afolayan) and Femi’s (Ramsey Nouah) lives. Although the question invites the viewer’s analysis soon after Femi’s confessions, much of what is portrayed in The Figurine casts a glaring dominance of the goddess’ powers. The closing riddle is a camouflage of the film’s real ideology. Featuring brilliant storytelling with the technical elements of filmmaking deployed to a more or less successful degree, The Figurine towers above numerous Nollywood productions. The manipulation of the wooden image and the acting are especially commendable, thus making the viewer quick to overlook the occasional drag, sound and lighting problems in Afolayan’s second directorial attempt.

At their National Youth Service Commission (NYSC) orientation camp, an endurance trek through the village, Araromire, finds Sola and Femi lagging, the former to accompany his ailing friend. Seeking shelter from an unexpected downpour, they scurry to a previously unidentified hut. There, Sola finds and keeps a wooden sculpture which purportedly alters their lives in a conflict drawn from folklore, education and reality. The outcome jolts the viewer, and remarkably underlines the opening voice-over in which the catastrophic end was foreshadowed. In the beginning, the film appears to have two protagonists – the one who seems to be a hero, Femi, saving Mona (Omoni Oboli) from her troubles and health hazards, but is actually an obsessed lover and the other, Sola, who is an unrepentant playboy and chronic adulterer. It can also be argued that the real protagonist is Sola whereas the antagonist is Femi, but this is a point the viewer arrives at only at the end of the film.

Set in rural and urban areas of Western Nigeria, the two-hour narrative has four acts. The first is the NYSC posting, camp orientation and primary assignment (and perhaps Femi’s travel). This segment is significant because the discovery of the image which informs the direction of the narrative is made here. The second is the seven year prosperity period. This act is characterized by business promotions, restoration to health and financial boom. Here also, we encounter Lara’s relocation to Sola’s house for academic reasons – a major plot point in the story. The third segment deals with the losses and a series of catastrophes, the last of which results in

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a journey to return the image. In the final segment or what is more appropriately called the unraveling, revelations of character traits, deeper motivations and confessions occur. The initial and painfully slow pace of the film picks up after half an hour to a faster pace. The camera movements, however, is prolonged for seconds after the point of a scene has been made – a hallmark of Nigerian video films. Although a unique story, The Figurine does not build up to suspenseful moments. The only attempt at suspense which occurred when Lara was looking for Junior did not have a corresponding audio effect. Rather, surprises are used to effect significant dramatic moments such as the announcement of the wedding, Sola’s murder and Femi’s death. Thematic orientation border on betrayals and more importantly, the tradition/modernity dialectics play up too.

The viewer is driven to believe in Araromire’s powers. Merely mentioning the name ‘Araromire’ evoked fear (Femi’s father), curiosity (lecturer), obsession (Femi) and indifference, reluctance even conflict (Sola). Several strands of storytelling point to the supposed power of the goddess Araromire and her presence in the lives of three friends. Four instances will suffice. 1) The eerie sound heard on the parade ground. That sound mysteriously led Sola and Femi closer to the image. 2) The repetition of swift turns on the parade ground, in the bush (Femi) and by Lara in the search for Junior. 3) The heavy rain when Araromire’s shrine was burnt, when Sola found the image and when both friends went to return it. 4) The parade commander’s refusal to help the men return the image and the conversation that ensued. With deliberate or inadvertent camera movements, the film compels the belief that Araromire the goddess is not only powerful, but also present in the lives of those who touch her image. There is a conflict of opposing forces, but clearly, one is the more powerful or the film director chose to make it so. The only incident that discredits Araromire’s powers is that Femi does not have the woman of his dreams. There would be no story if he did! But the triple cure of his health problems plus his father’s ‘miraculous’ turn-around from cancer as well as the four points above suppress the lone ‘episode’ of unrequited love.

Further, Femi’s confessions do not provide explanations for their quick rise to success, the loss of a son, material wealth and miscarriage. My arguments do not deny that Sola and Femi could have been lucky or perhaps hardworking. But the fact that Sola was set up as a reckless persona do not support the assumption that, without a change of character, he rose to success. Rather, a more plausible explanation for his 7-year successful career is Araromire. Besides, after Sola receives notices of tax evasion and financial loss, the camera pans to the figurine and back to him. That was a powerful statement on Araromire’s invasion. Afolayan himself believes he gave viewers options. Ironically, the unfolding events suggest the opposite.

However, the use of the figurine as prop is the most outstanding quality of the film. The image was worshipped, spoken about, revered, ridiculed, lost, discovered, re-sculpted, shown in a book, thrown away, burnt, hidden, multiplied, used by one character to frighten another, and it was given ‘power’ to frighten those who came in

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contact with it. And arguably, this is yet unmatched in the collection of Nollywood films available, perhaps a pointer to the direction of the new Nollywood. Incidentally, this further lends credence to my argument on the film’s ideology. Afolayan skillfully presents two options – tradition and modernity – but makes one less plausible. His projection of paranoia, and at the same time, the reference to education subjugating superstitious beliefs (which is embodied in Sola) is seen as an unusual technique. Mona’s paranoia escalates when Junior passes away. This forces Sola to reconsider his position on Araromire’s involvement in the orchestration of events in his life, and so agrees to return the image. From this point, one tragic event leads to another.

Paradoxically, Sola who is the voice of education and modernity (he lives in a beach house, has a swimming pool, plays golf) is always attired in traditional outfits. Femi’s inclination to tradition and belief in the folklore is not reflected in his outfit or manners. Mona takes a mid-point with respect to costume. It is from her POV that the viewer’s imagination progressively ascribes supernatural powers to tradition wherein education protests, is challenged and finally overthrown. Afolayan brings the education principle back in Femi’s confessions and the inexplicable (raised by Linda) is labeled ‘coincidence’. After viewing the film with a teenage audience and a graduate class, the consensus reached reflected variations of magical realism. The interest and reception of the film was heightened by its combination of the Yoruba language, Nigerian Pidgin and English language.

Without doubt, The Figurine is a delight. Its awards and official selections at international film festivals did not come as a surprise. The film will impress an indigenous or foreign audience because of the visually appealing sites of Osun State, its elevation of art and culture. But filmmakers need to take cognizance of as well as ownership of the subtle and more pronounced ideology of their productions.