ALT 37: African Literature Today (African Literature Today, 37) 1847012345, 9781847012340

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Obituary: Keith Sambrook 1925-2019 by James Currey
EDITORIAL ARTICLE
Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand
ARTICLES
Women Investigators Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction
Evolutionary Portrayal of Credible Characters in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction
The Concept, Challenges & Consequences of Ukhule in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift
Chimalum Nwankwo & the Poetry of the Aerial Zone
From Grace Ogot to Yvonne Owuor: Fifty Years of Depicting Kenyan Lands & Landscapes
The Writer & the Environment in Times of Crises: The Creative Talent in the Face of Boko Haram
Women & ALT: Balancing the Gender Equation in the Criticism
of African Literature
Anthroliterary Discovery of a Novel Form in Nigeria: Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi ‘Segilola, Eleyin’ju Ege’ & the
Re-Reading of Print Culture, Events & Images
in the First Nigerian Novel
Gynocritical Impulses in the Novels & Short Stories of Ifeoma Okoye
Adaptation & the Theme of Passage of Time in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka & Ola Rotimi
Contextualizing Chinua Achebe’s Revolutionary Impulses
Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré’s Le récit du cirque...de la Vallée des Morts: The Limitations of Stylistic Innovation
INTERVIEW
Fifty Years On: A Conversation with
Professor ELDRED DUROSIMI JONES,
Founding Editor, African Literature Today
LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘Placate the Lords of Darkness’ (Poem)
‘The Invitation’ (& 5 Other Poems)
‘Moribund’ (Poem)
‘Kaput to be a Cat’ / ‘Kaput to be a Rat’ (2 Poems)
‘Cactus’ (Poem)
‘Guilt’ (Short Story)
REVIEWS
Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan & Rafeeat Aliyu (eds), She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak
Atafei Pewissi, Rethinking Womanism: When Difference Maps Chaos
Isidore Diala, The Politics & New Humanism of André Brink
Chukwuemeka Ike, Toads Forever
Tomi Adeaga & Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner (eds), Payback & Other Stories: An Anthology of African
& African Diaspora Short Stories
Chielozona Eze, Race, Decolonization, & Global Citizenship in South Africa

Citation preview

ALT_37 19mm PPC_TJI v17_B+B 14/10/2019 12:43 Page 1

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 37 Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Deputy Editor: Isidore Diala Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu Associate Editors: Adélékè Adéè· kó· • Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Madhu Krishnan • Stephanie Newell • Vincent O. Odamtten Oha Obododimma • Kwawisi Tekpetey • Iniobong I. Uko Wangui wa Goro Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

FORTHCOMING ALT 38 Environmental Transformation in Literature & Criticism Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka & Stephanie Newell Cover: Featuring covers from the ALT backlist https://boydellandbrewer.com/series/african-literature-today.html

ISBN 978-1-84701-234-0

9 781847 012340 www.jamescurrey.com

Editor Ernest N Emenyonu

Articles on: Unity Dow / Chinua Achebe / Sindiwe Magona / Chimalum Nwankwo / Grace Ogot / Yvonne Owuor / Boko Haram / Gender / First Nigerian Novel / Ifeoma Okoye / Ola Rotimi / Wole Soyinka / Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré Eldred Durosimi Jones in conversation Literary Supplement Reviews

African Literature Today ALT 37

African Literature Today was established at a time of uncertainty and reconstruction but for 50 years it has played a leading role in nurturing imaginative creativity and its criticism on the African continent and beyond. The founding Editor of ALT, Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in the mid-20th century. Contributors to ALT 37 recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativity forward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity.

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 37

African Literature Today 37



Editor:  Deputy Editor:  Assistant Editor: 

Ernest N. Emenyonu Isidore Diala Patricia T. Emenyonu

       

Associate Editors:

Adélékè Adéè. kó. Madhu Krishnan Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Stephanie Newell Oha Obododimma Vincent O. Odamtten Kwawisi Tekpetey Iniobong I. Uko Wangui wa Goro



Reviews Editor:

Obi Nwakanma

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GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES The Editor invites submission of articles on the announced themes of forthcoming issues. Submissions will be acknowledged promptly and decisions communicated within six months of the receipt of the paper. Your name and institutional affiliation (with full mailing address and email) should appear on a separate sheet, plus a brief biographical profile of not more than six lines. The editor cannot undertake to return materials submitted, and contributors are advised to keep a copy of any material sent. Articles should be submitted in the English Language. Length: Articles should not exceed 5,000 words. Format: Articles should be double-spaced, and should use the same type face and size throughout. Italics are preferred to underlines for titles of books. Articles are reviewed blindly, so do not insert your name, institutional affiliation and contact information on the article itself. Instead, provide such information on a separate page. Style: UK or US spellings are acceptable, but must be used consistently. Direct quotations should retain the spellings used in the original source. Check the accuracy of citations and always give the author’s surname and page number in the text, and a full reference in the Works Cited list at the end of the article. Italicize titles of books, plays and journals. Use single inverted commas throughout except for quotes within quotes which are double. Avoid subtitles or subsection headings within the text. Citations: Limit your sources to the most recent, or the most important books and journals, in English. Cite works in foreign languages only when no English-language books are available. Cite websites only if they are relatively permanent and if they add important information unavailable elsewhere. For in-text citations, the sequence in parentheses should be (Surname: page number). No year of publication should be reflected within the text. All details should be presented in the Works Cited list at the end of the article. Consistency is advised. Examples: Githiora, Chege. Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2018. Diabate, Naminate. ‘African Queer, AfricanDigital: Reflections on Zanele Muholi’s Films4peace & other works.’ ALT 37: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction. Ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. Guest Ed. John C Hawley. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2018. Smith, Victoria Ellen, ed. Voices of Ghana: Literary Contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System, 1955-57 (Second Edition). Woodbridge: James Currey/Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana & Nigeria), 2018. Ensure that your Works Cited list is alphabetized on a word-by-word basis, whether citations begin with the author’s name or with an anonymous work’s title. Please, avoid footnotes or endnotes. Do not quote directly from the Internet without properly citing the source as you would when quoting from a book. Use substantive sources for obtaining your information and depend less on general references. Copyright: It is the responsibility of contributors to clear permissions. All articles should be sent to the editor, Ernest N. Emenyonu, as an e-mail attachment (Word) Email: [email protected] African Literature Today Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint 303 East Kearsley Street Flint MI 48502 USA Fax: 001-810-766-6719 Books for review to be sent to the Reviews Editor. Reviewers should provide full bibliographic details, including the extent, ISBN and price: Obi Nwakanma, University of Central Florida, English Department, Colburn Hall, 12790 Aquarius Agora Drive, Orlando, FL 32816, USA [email protected]

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AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY ALT 1-14 BACK IN PRINT. See www.jamescurrey.com to order copies ALT 1, 2, 3, and 4 Omnibus Edition ALT 5 The Novel in Africa ALT 6 Poetry in Africa ALT 7 Focus on Criticism ALT 8 Drama in Africa ALT 9 Africa, America & the Caribbean ALT 10 Retrospect & Prospect ALT 11 Myth & History ALT 12 New Writing, New Approaches ALT 13 Recent Trends in the Novel ALT 14 Insiders & Outsiders Backlist titles available in the US and Canada from Africa World Press and in the rest of the world from James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer ALT 15 Women in African Literature Today ALT 16 Oral & Written Poetry in African Literature Today ALT 17 The Question of Language in African Literature Today ALT 18 Orature in African Literature Today ALT 19 Critical Theory & African Literature Today ALT 20 New Trends & Generations in African Literature ALT 21 Childhood in African Literature ALT 22 Exile & African Literature ALT 23 South & Southern African Literature ALT 24 New Women’s Writing in African Literature ALT 25 New Directions in African Literature Recent and forthcoming* titles Nigeria edition (ALT 24–33): HEBN Publishers Plc African Literature Today continues to be published as an annual volume by James Currey (an imprint Boydell & Brewer since 2008). North and South American distribution: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 68 Mount Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, US UK and International distribution: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Wood­bridge IP12 3DF, GB. ALT 26 War in African Literature Today ALT 27 New Novels in African Literature Today ALT 28 Film in African Literature Today ALT 29 Teaching African Literature Today ALT 30 Reflections & Retrospectives in African Literature Today ALT 31 Writing Africa in the Short Story ALT 32 Politics & Social Justice ALT 33 Children’s Literature & Story-telling ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in Fiction ALT 35 Focus on Egypt ALT 36 Queer Theory in Film & Fiction ALT 37 ALT 38 Environmental Transformation in Literature & Criticism*

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African Literature Today 37 EDITORIAL BOARD Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu University of Michigan-Flint Deputy Editor: Isidore Diala Imo State University Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu University of Michigan-Flint

Associate Editors: Adélékè Adéè.kó. Ohio State University



Madhu Krishnan University of Bristol



Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Anglia Ruskin University Stephanie Newell Yale University Oha Obododimma University of Ibadan

 

Vincent O. Odamtten Hamilton College, New York Kwawisi Tekpetey Central State University Iniobong I. Uko University of Uyo Wangui wa Goro Independent scholar Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma University of Central Florida

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF (GB) and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

© Contributors 2019 First published 2019 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available on request ISBN 978-1-84701-234-0 (James Currey hardback) ISBN 978-1-84701-235-7 (Africa-only paperback) The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or a­ ppropriate. This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Designed and set in 10/12 pt Berkeley Book by Kate Kirkwood Publishing Services, Cumbria, UK

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Dedication

For Alan Hill, Keith Sambrook, Eldred Jones, James Currey & ’Aig Higo With our deepest gratitude & unalloyed respect

*** STOP PRESS/TRIBUTE TO GABRIEL OKARA (1921–2019) As we were going to press news came that Gabriel Okara, Africa’s oldest living poet and author of the inimitable archetypal philosophical novel, The Voice, had died on 24 March 2019. We will carry a full tribute on his life and work in the next volume of African Literature Today – ALT 38 Environmental Trans­formation in Literature & Criticism.

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Contents

Notes on Contributors Obituary: Keith Sambrook 1925-2019 by James Currey EDITORIAL ARTICLE Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand E rnest N. E menyonu ARTICLES Women Investigators Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction P auline D odgson -K atiyo

xii xvii 1

10

Evolutionary Portrayal of Credible Characters in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction K alapi S en

25

The Concept, Challenges & Consequences of  Ukhule in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift I niobong I. U ko

36

Chimalum Nwankwo & the Poetry of the Aerial Zone  M aik N wosu

48

From Grace Ogot to Yvonne Owuor: Fifty Years of Depicting Kenyan Lands & Landscapes N g ’ ang ’ a W ahu -M uchiri

64

The Writer & the Environment in Times of Crises:  The Creative Talent in the Face of Boko Haram R azinat T alatu M ohammed

77

Women & ALT:  Balancing the Gender Equation in the Criticism of African Literature A kachi E zeigbo

88

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x  Contents

Anthroliterary Discovery of a Novel Form in Nigeria:  Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi ‘Segilola, Eleyin’ju Ege’ & the Re-Reading of Print Culture, Events & Images in the First Nigerian Novel J ohn U wa

104

Gynocritical Impulses in the Novels & Short Stories  of Ifeoma Okoye M acpherson N kem . A zuike

117

Adaptation & the Theme of Passage of Time in  Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka & Ola Rotimi N orbert O yibo E ze

134

Contextualizing Chinua Achebe’s Revolutionary Impulses  P salms E. C hinaka

146

Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré’s Le récit du cirque...de la  Vallée des Morts: The Limitations of Stylistic Innovation U nionmwan E debiri

160

INTERVIEW172 Fifty Years On: A Conversation with Professor ELDRED DUROSIMI JONES, Founding Editor, African Literature Today P ede H ollist LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ‘Placate the Lords of Darkness’ (Poem)  A nya U de E gwu

183

‘The Invitation’ (& 5 Other Poems)  H odabalou A nate

187

‘Moribund’ (Poem)  C hinasa A bonyi

192

‘Kaput to be a Cat’ / ‘Kaput to be a Rat’ (2 Poems) A lexander O picho

193

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 ‘Cactus’ (Poem) O nyeukwu I funanya ‘Guilt’ (Short Story) C hioma T oni -D uruaku REVIEWS Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan & Rafeeat Aliyu  (eds), She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak I niobong I. U ko

Contents  xi

197

198

204

Atafei Pewissi, Rethinking Womanism: When Difference  Maps Chaos N onye C hinyere A humibe

207

Isidore Diala, The Politics & New Humanism of André Brink I niobong I. U ko

210

Chukwuemeka Ike, Toads Forever  O bi N wakanma

213

Tomi Adeaga & Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner (eds),  Payback & Other Stories: An Anthology of African & African Diaspora Short Stories O bi N wakanma

218

Chielozona Eze, Race, Decolonization, & Global  Citizenship in South Africa P aul U gor

226

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Notes on Contributors

Chinasa Abonyi is a young scholar of African literature at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She has BA, MA and recently, a PhD in African Literature with special interest in postcolonial gender and environmental studies. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where she doubles as a researcher / instructor with many courses including Introduction to African Literature, Modern African Literature and African poetry. Hodabalou Anate is an Assistant Professor of African Literature at the University of Lomé, Togo. He teaches English, African Literature and Civilization in the Depart­ment of English. His area of research is Intellectual Dissi­dence and Ethnicity in African Literature. His com­ pleted manuscripts for two books, Dissidence and Activism in Festus Iyayi’s Fiction and Banana Kingdom and Other Poems are awaiting publication. He is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Univer­ sity of Michigan – Flint, USA. Macpherson Nkem. Azuike is a Professor of English Language at the University of Abuja, Nigeria. He holds a PhD from the University of Exeter, UK. His area of specialization is Stylistics and Communication Skills. He is the former Head of English Departments at the University of Jos and University of Abuja, Nigeria. Psalms E. Chinaka (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is a prolific writer and critic with notable publications in Tydskrif Virletterkunde, JALA and other reputable international journals. He is also a poet – the author of Apocalyptic Gong (Kraft Books 2017) and The Art of Poetry (Pearl Publishers International 2017).

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Notes on Contributors  xiii

Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo was formerly Head of English at Newman University and Dean of the School of Arts at Anglia Ruskin Univer­ sity. Her research interests are African Literature, particularly Zimbabwean and Somali, and contemporary women’s writing. She is co-editor (with Helen Cousins) of Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera (Africa World Press 2012). Unionmwan Edebiri is a Professor of French and Barrister-at-Law. He received his doctorate in French Literature from the Sorbonne and had his legal education in University of Lagos and the Nigerian Law School. He teaches French in University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. His work has previously appeared in Research in African Literatures, World Literature Today, African Literature Today, Literary Griot, and Meta and Babel, among others. Anya Ude Egwu holds a PhD in English. He teaches Liter­a­ture in the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His research areas include Oral Literature, African Literature, Popular Culture and Perform­ance Theory. Anya has written numerous un­published poems and is working on some novels and plays. He is a Cadbury Fellow, University of Birmingham, UK. Norbert Oyibo Eze has a PhD in Dramatic Theory and Criticism and is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he won the departmental head of the year in 2016. He has published many articles and written three books, two for the National Open University of Nigeria. He contributed a chapter to The Environmental Crunch in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). Akachi Ezeigbo is a Professor of English who taught at the University of Lagos for many years, but now teaches at Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo, in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. She is a mul­ tiple award-winning writer and has authored many scholarly works, including Fact and Fiction in the Literature of the Nigerian Civil War. She was awarded Visiting Fellowships in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Pede Hollist is an Associate Professor of English at The University of Tampa where he teaches African literature and creative writing. His novel, So the Path Does Not Die, was named the 2014 African Literature Association Creative Book of the Year. He has published long and short listed stories in Ake Review and the Short Story Day Africa and Caine

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xiv  Notes on Contributors

Prize anthologies. His research interests include African trauma and transnational literatures. Onyeukwu Ifunanya graduated in English and Literary Studies at the Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria. She has attended several academic conferences, and workshops in literature. She is passionate about creative writing especially poetry and short stories, and loves teaching as a career. Razinat Talatu Mohammed is Associate Professor of Feminist Literary Criticism and Theoretical Approaches at the University of Maiduguri. She is the award-winning author of A Love Like a Woman’s and other Stories. Her first novel, Habiba, was a finalist for the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prize for prose 2014; she is also the author of The Travails of a first Wife (2015), Intra-gender Relations between Women: A Study of Nawal El-Saadawi and Buchi Emecheta’s Novel (Germany) and Female Representation in Nigerian Literature (www.africanwriter.com) among others. Maik Nwosu is Professor of English at the University of Denver, Colorado. His research areas include African, African Diaspora, post­ colonial, and world literatures; semiotics and critical theory. Nwosu has published literary as well as critical works – three novels, Invisible Chapters, Alpha Song and A Gecko’s Farewell; one poetry collection, Suns of Kush; one book of short stories, Return to Algadez; two critical studies, Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational and The Comic Imagina­tion in Modern African Literature, and Cinema: A Poetics of Laughter; and one co-edited anthology, The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael Echeruo. Alexander Opicho is a published poet, an essayist, literary critic and short story writer. He was born in Bungoma, Western Kenya, but now he lives and works in the savannah region of Lodwar, in north-western Kenya. Kalapi Sen is a part-time Lecturer in Raja Peary Mohan College, Kolkata and a guest faculty in Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata, India. She completed her PhD on the novels of Chinua Achebe. She is a member of the editorial board of International Perspectives: Journal of the Department of English, Raja Peary Mohan College. Chioma Toni-Duruaku teaches in the Department of Human­ities, Federal Polytechnic Nekede Owerri, Nigeria. Her interest in creative

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Notes on Contributors  xv

writing has brought forth many Short Stories in­cluding ‘No More Mutiny in Paradise’, ‘Miss Courtesy’, and ‘The All-Sufficient Grace’ as well as many poems, among which is ‘Ode to Chinua Achebe’ pub­ lished in the African Literature Association Publication Chinua Achebe (1930–2013): A Tribute. Chioma is also an attorney, with a specialization in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Positively guiding youths, giving hope to the less privileged and working for a better world are her interests. Iniobong I. Uko, PhD is a Professor of English in the Department of English, University of Uyo, Uyo, Nigeria. Her area of research is African Literature, specifically women’s writing, and a cross-cultural study of African and Diasporic women’s writings. She probes the diverse issues that confront black women daily in all spheres of life in different cultures. Professor Uko has participated in several women’s activities and initiatives in Nigeria and abroad. She has published extensively in learned journals and books in Nigeria, and beyond. She is the author of the seminal book Gender and Identity in the Works of Osonye Tess Onwueme. John Uwa is a Cultural Archivist and Project Researcher with Dirt­Pol – a European Research Council (ERC) (2014/15), and Yale Univer­ sity (2015/16) funded project entitled: ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa – 1880-Present’. He has academic interest in literary theories, popular culture, postcolonial and interdisciplinary studies and comparative literature; he has peer-reviewed publications in learned journals including Social Dynamics, The Routledge Handbook on Interdisciplinary Research Methods and Okike. He is presently in the Department of English, University of Lagos investigating trans­ formation and transmediation of popular drama in Nigeria. Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri is Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he designs and teaches courses in African literature, short stories, eco-criticism, and Caribbean writers. His current scholarly monograph is titled Writing Land, Righting Land: Literary Depictions of Contemporary African Landscapes. This work mines the metaphorical labour that land performs in twentieth and twenty-first-century African literature to subvert narratives that justify theft of African lands by elites and that resist postcolonial dystopian regimes.

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Obituary Keith Sambrook 1929–2019

Keith Sambrook, who died on 1 January 2019, was a trans­forming publisher in the period when the countries of the South secured their independence. He and Eldred Durosimi Jones saw the need for the journal which became African Literature Today. Keith Sambrook found the manuscript of Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child on his desk when, on 1 January 1963, he started work for Alan Hill at Heinemann Educational Books in London. A month earlier Chinua Achebe had been appointed as Editorial Adviser to the African Writers Series. The first thirty titles they selected were to lead to the launch of African Literature in English. Keith Sambrook and Chinua Achebe shared two ambitions; they wanted students in African schools and universities to be able to read imaginative work by their fellow Africans; and they were determined to introduce African writers to an international literary audience. The demand for the Series inside and outside Africa surprised everybody. Ngugi said this year, ‘I have always associated my becoming a writer with Keith. Not only me. He had similar impact on many African writers … Africa needed this literature to heal the wounds wrought on the continent by a century of colonialism. The African Writers Series contributed to the soaring of the soul of a free continent, and Keith Sambrook was part of it.’ Keith Sambrook established Heinemann companies for both distri­ bution and publishing in Nigeria under Aigboje Higo and in East Africa under Henry Chakava; they brought in new authors and contributed to the effective marketing which was needed to turn a good idea into the equivalent of a Penguin Books for Africa. At the same time he built up Heinemann companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Caribbean and the United States. He took on the first titles in the growth area of English Language Teaching (ELT). The company he established with John Watson in New Hampshire was to be crucial in continuing publishing of new titles in the Series when the sales

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xviii  Obituary

disappeared during the ‘African Book Famine’ of the late eighties and early nineties. In 1985 James Currey, who worked with him at Heinemann for seventeen years, set up his own imprint to publish academic titles on Africa. While Keith Sambrook was working out the couple of years to his retirement he made sure that remainder copies of African Literature Today were transferred to James Currey who had already promised Eldred Durosimi Jones that he would continue publication. In 1988 Keith Sambrook joined James Currey Publishers which even by then was leading the field in African Studies. In those years he also lectured on publishing and the history of the book at UCL and the Institute of English Studies (IES), University of London. The Institute now offers a funded studentship on its MA course which has been funded through its Sambrook Fund, established when Keith Sambrook, a Fellow at the IES, generously donated his teaching fees from its MA course. Keith Sambrook was born on 25 August 1925 near Leicester. He was educated at Loughborough Grammar School. A credit in Higher Certificate Mathematics equipped him to work constructively with generations of corporate accountants as Heinemann Educational Books expanded to be one of the largest companies in educational pub­lishing. In the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1947, he was on the North Atlantic and Russian convoys and was in the Mediterranean as a Lieutenant on HMS Milne. He read English as the Somerville Exhibitioner at Jesus College, Cambridge from 1947 to 1950. His first appointment in publishing was with the Manchester University Press where from 1950 he worked on the list of academic titles in the social sciences. The pioneering sociological and anthro­ pological publications of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia were among his responsibilities. In 1954 he joined the Edinburgh publishing and print­ing company of Thomas Nelson where he met Hana Bartošova whom he married in 1955. In the period of high colonialism, before, during and after the Second World War, the firm had worked with enterprising educational officers to produce textbooks which were relevant to the needs of the Caribbean and Africa. He worked on all levels of school and student textbooks for use in ‘overseas markets’. He spent the year of 1956/57 on the campus at Legon establishing The University College of the Gold Coast Press. The Suez crisis and Ghanaian independence happened while he was there. Nelson was President Nkrumah’s publisher. In

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Keith Sambrook  xix



1958 he moved to Lagos where he set up a local publishing office in Nelson’s Nigerian branch. In 1963 he moved to Heinemann and to the launch of African Literature. He is survived by his wife Hana, brother John, sister Jennifer and daughter Katie. Keith Sambrook first met Eldred Durosimi Jones at the Conference on Commonwealth Literature held in September 1964 at the University of Leeds and then they met again when Jones was Commonwealth Fellow at Leeds in 1965. The following extract from his The Freetown Bond (James Currey 2012: 140) shows how it was Keith Sambrook’s imagination which led to the start of African Literature Today: The history of the critical journal, African Literature Today which I edited for some thirty-three years should give encouragement to scholars in universities of the developing world where access to publication is often difficult and pro­ducing a journal for international circulation almost im­possible. Its story therefore, as I recounted it when I retired from the editorship, is worth repeating. The first number of the journal which came out in 1968 was the result of a confluence of enthusiasms, mine for the new literature of Africa, that of Heinemann Educational Books which had the largest list of African writers, and James Currey, Keith Sambrook and Alan Hill, who looked after that pioneering list. The journal had been preceded by a much humbler cyclostyled Bulletin of African Literature which was a direct result of an African Literature conference in 1964, held at Fourah Bay. It was this lowly mimeographed Bulletin that caught the eye of Keith Sambrook. The purpose of the journal was to provide a forum for the examination of African literature, to open the literature to both academic and general readers particularly within Africa itself. In the words of the first editorial: ‘It is the critic’s business to read discerningly and demonstrate the qualities of a work and thus (a) to make it accessible to larger readership than the absence of criticism might have opened to it and (b) by an accumulation of such examinations, to help establish literary standards.’ That editorial also cited the hope of John Povey, a pioneer critic of African literature – ‘that African critics can … play a special role in the interpretation of their own literature.’ Many African scholars had their earliest critical work published in it, and went on to higher things while the journal has gone some way to providing a body of critical opinion against which the literature can be studied. NonAfrican contributors have also enriched the critical literature by bringing new perspectives into the examination of the works of African writers. It was originally started as a journal appearing every six months with a random selection of academic articles aimed at popularizing the literature. There were heroic attempts to set up agents in the newly

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xx  Obituary

independent countries of Africa so that people could pay in their national currencies. This demanded close timing which in the days of airmail was too difficult to manage. From number five, each issue was organized around a theme by which attitudes to general issues by the creators of the literature, who so often were conscious of their role as teachers, were aired. Issues on Women, Language, Orature and Childhood, revealed both traditional attitudes to various aspects of life and the writers’ own particular reactions to such attitudes, quite purposefully intending to influence or even change them. The use of themes rather than open numbers proved to be an inspired decision as it has meant that the collections retained their interest much longer than ordinary academic journals. The volumes stayed in print, and some were even reprinted years later. As a result a valuable resource was created which charts the changing concerns and interests among academics over the years.

James Currey

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Editorial Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand ERNEST N. EMENYONU

The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this led to a series of conferences in African Literature. There was one in Dakar, one in Nairobi, and one in Freetown at Fourah Bay College. At this latter conference, talk gathered around the idea of communication between various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on. That lasted for a year or two and possibly it was that bulletin that showed the potential of the kind of communication. Heinemann, which had the largest list of African authors, took an interest in the bulletin. We talked about it and after that we started African Literature Today which was founded as a journal inviting articles on the works of African authors. (Eldred Jones, in an interview with Pede Hollist, published in this volume)

African Literature Today (ALT) was first published as a journal in 1968, making it the oldest international journal of African Literature still publishing, now annually: ALT 1-14 were published by Heinemann Educational Books; the series was then taken on by James Currey in the 1980s. In 2015 the out-of-print early volumes ALT 1-14 were made available as print-on-demand (POD) titles by James Currey /Boydell & Brewer so that the whole series is available again. ALT 15-25 were published by James Currey /Africa World Press as a series of annual volumes. ALT 26-36 were published under the James Currey imprint as part of Boydell & Brewer as a series of annual volumes. ALT 24-33 were also co-published in Nigeria by HEBN, who printed local editions. The story of its journey from conception and birth, to growth and 1

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2  Ernest N. Emenyonu

adulthood, amidst travails and triumphs, is narrated in epochal anecdotes in this volume. It took undivided dedication and unsparing loving care to sustain it to impressive maturity. That was thanks to two indefatigably committed ‘midwives’ who spared nothing in their endeavours to nurture the mustard seed that sprouted to full bloom. One of the two ‘midwives’, indeed pioneer architects, was Keith Sambrook (of the Heinemann Publishing Company) who departed this world on 1 January 2019. In his memorial tribute to Sambrook published in this volume, James Currey states: [O]n 1 January 1963, he [Sambrook] started work for Alan Hill at Heinemann Educational Books in London. A month earlier Chinua Achebe had been appointed as editorial Adviser to the African Writers Series … Keith Sambrook and Chinua Achebe shared two ambitions; they wanted students in African schools and universities to be able to read imaginative work by their fellow Africans; and they were determined to introduce African writers to an international audience … Africa needed this literature to heal the wounds wrought on the continent by a century of colonialism. The African Writers Series contributed to the soaring of the soul of a free continent, and Keith Sambrook was part of it. (Emphasis added)

The Literature was introduced to the world through the African Writers Series that increased and blossomed enormously over time. This new Literature by Africans about Africa, intended to be an essential part of World Literature, invariably needed companion literary criticism that addressed issues of standards for assessing its quality and impact at home and abroad. Eldred Jones the other ‘pioneer midwife’ founded the organ for the realization of this dream. Working side by side with Keith Sambrook, Eldred Jones saw to the fulfilment of the desire to have, for the first time ever, a journal for the criticism of African Literature. It emerged as the outcome of a series of conferences on the African soil where African scholars essentially confronted the challenges of growing and enriching the journal. The newly established journal, African Literature Today, had, according to Eldred Jones a clear-cut purpose and mandate: The purpose of the journal was to provide a forum for the examination of African literature … It is the critic’s business to read discerningly and demonstrate the qualities of a work…and African scholars (had) to … play a special role in the interpretation of their own literature. Many African scholars had their earliest critical work published in it (ALT), and went on to higher things while the journal has gone some way to

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Editorial: Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand  3



providing a body of critical opinions against which the literature can be studied. (The Freetown Bond 2012: 140)

While Keith Sambrook worked on the growth of African Writers Series (creative works), Eldred Jones worked on the nurturing of the critics and the critical standards for assessing the value and quality of the works (criticism). He proceeded as the founding editor to edit the journal, later an annual volume, for thirty years. In those three decades he established an indelible identity for the series among classic works to be reckoned with in World Literature. He equally conferred on ALT respectable dignity and reputation as an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of critical literary theories and ideologies invaluable in literature classrooms throughout the world. ALT was not only a place for the sharing of the products of research, but also a nurturing ground for emerging critics. The recent inclusion of a Literary Supplement section in the series where creative pieces such as short stories, poetry and one-act plays could be published, provides outlets for both budding as well as veteran creative writers. Thus ALT is a veritable source of knowledge about what goes on ‘today’ in African Literature as well as a platform for mentorship. African Literature Today has performed this seminal role in the Academy for half a century, with indisputably overwhelming positive outcomes. The annual publication is now distributed in Europe, United States and Africa in their respective customized editions. African literary scholars have contributed immensely towards bringing aware­ ness and enlightenment on such issues as African poetics, aesthetics, and the ever-growing unveiling of the place of Oral Literature (Oral Performance) and literature in indigenous African languages, in the formation and development of contemporary African Literature in Euro­pean and other non-African world languages. Eldred Jones has affirmed that ‘non-African contributors have also enriched the critical literature by bringing new perspectives into the examination of the works of African Writers’ (The Freetown Bond: 140). African literary scholars still have a lot to contribute in the enrichment and promotion of critical standards for the evaluation of African creative works in particular, and the study of African Literature in general. The unique accountability prescribed by Chukwuemeka Ike, one of the pioneer African novelists of the twentieth century, for Nigerian literary scholars in his 1990 masterpiece keynote address, ‘I Dream of a New Era: Nigerian Literature in the 21st Century’ is a charge applicable to all African literary scholars and critics:

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4  Ernest N. Emenyonu

Nigeria has some excellent critics, and will have many more in the new era. They must see it as a major challenge to evolve, emanating from our cultural experience rather than from foreign paradigms, parameters for evaluating Nigerian creative writing. The Nigerian society is better qualified to assess the success or failure of a Nigerian writer than any foreign organizations. The most crucial factor for evaluating a writer in the new era must be the impact of his/her works in his/her society … [Nigerian] critics must develop acceptable methods of monitoring and assessing that impact.

In this volume African and non-African contributors have assessed from various perspectives the works of African writers from different parts of the continent. In ‘Women Investigators Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction’, Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo focuses on Unity Dow’s four novels set ‘within a human rights discourse, specifically in relation to the lives of women and children in Botswana’. Dow, a lawyer-turnedwriter and human rights activist and advocate, in her novels ‘converts case histories into fiction to create another wider network of women’. Dodgson-Katiyo analyses Dow’s work from the perspective that ‘[t]his new identity politics challenges both traditional power struc­tures and the power of the postcolonial elite, revealing the contradictions in the preferred reading of Botswana as a progressive society.’ In her extensive analysis, Dodgson-Katiyo draws on ‘sociological, political and anthropological work, particularly in relation to Botswana’. She does not ‘deny the value of analysing [fiction] from a literary critical perspective’, contending rather that ‘women’s issue-based writing should be valued and analysed in terms of its content and not just its literary “merit”.’ In ‘Evolutionary Portrayal of Credible Characters in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction’, Kalapi Sen challenges the ‘general­ ized’ views of critics who label Achebe as a mis­ogynist in the way he portrays female characters in his works. Such critics conclude that women in Achebe’s fiction are ‘“voiceless” and “virtually inconsequential” … always subjugated/subordinated by their “heavy handed” masters leaving them in a tight corner without any scope of emancipation’. Some critics, Sen further maintains, conclude that the ‘androcentric’ setting of his novels and the ‘treatment of women’ in them confirm ‘the world of the male chivalry and macho heroism’ where the African woman is nothing more than ‘the weaker sex – a fragile, helpless, passive, idealized, exotic accessory’. Sen argues that Achebe portrays women in his works from an ‘inside perspective’ where, like the Nigerian

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Editorial: Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand  5

character, they start off being subjugated and then move ‘slowly but steadily towards the emancipated figures like Eunice or Beatrice, in a male-dominated society’. Analysing individual female characters in Achebe’s novels, Sen sees the character Beatrice in Anthills of the Savannah as the culmination of the slow but steady emancipation of women, maintaining that ‘by allowing Beatrice to give a boy’s name to Elewa’s daughter, Achebe not only liberates the African women from the age-old picture of the “beasts of burden” and the “hewers of wood”, but also places them on the same plane as that of the African men.’ In ‘The Concept, Challenges & Consequences of Ukhule in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift’, Iniobong Uko shifts the focus to a South African setting for the analysis of a crucial issue-based novel, by Sindiwe Magona, woven around the philosophy of Ukhule. A ‘consciousnessraising phenomenon … Ukhule, Beauty’s gift, symbolizes a spirit that instils awareness, strength, drive and resolve into women who are facing diverse forms and degrees of abuse, intimidation, cheating, etc., in any nature of relation­ship with men. It inspires women [not only] to call into question oppressive trends, practices and ideas that they had hitherto accepted, or not noticed at all’, but also to start a ‘new tradition’. At its climax, the ‘spirit of Ukhule enables women to surmount the anachronistic fixation of the female as the scum of the earth, and then to repeal that stereotype.’ Uko’s analysis of the thematic ramifications of Beauty’s Gift makes compelling reading. In those ramifications lie, ‘the validity of the woman as an effectual and independent entity that is complete, critical and able to contribute to the society and family beyond her nurturing roles’. Maik Nwosu, in ‘Chimalum Nwankwo & the Poetry of the Aerial Zone,’ switches the focus to Nigeria for a study of the poetry of Chimalum Nwankwo. Nwosu recognizes and briefly discusses the five collections of poetry in which ‘Chimalum Nwankwo charts a visionary course as he foregrounds the art of memory or the dynamic relationship between memory and renewal’, before focusing exclusively on Toward the Aerial Zone, which he says ‘particularly accentuates Nwankwo’s poetics’. Nwosu vigorously analyses the poems drawing attention to the unique features of themes, stylistic techniques and impact. The depth and vibrancy of his analysis indeed validate his major argument that in spite of describing himself as ‘an Igbo poet writing in English’, Chimalum Nwankwo’s ‘affective poetic truths are applicable beyond a specific socio-cultural context as part of a human narrative about metaphorical blindness and timeless insight.’ In his ‘From Grace Ogot to Yvonne Owuor: Fifty Years of Depicting

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Kenyan Lands & Landscapes’, Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri ‘scrutinizes the representation of land and landscapes by two Kenyan female writers [Grace Ogot and Yvonne Owuor] starting from the early years after independence to the twenty-first century’. The thrust of the discourse is a vigorous comparative analysis leading to Wahu-Muchiri’s conclusion that ‘it is in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014) that we perceive the culmination of land as not only tactile, but also animate.’ ‘What is the state of mind of a writer or an artist opera­ting in an environment circumscribed by terror?’ This is the question Razinat Mohammed explores in her article: ‘The Writer & the Environment in Times of Crises: The Creative Talent in the Face of Boko Haram.’ Mohammed ‘examines the resilience of the writer in the face of the Boko Haram (a terrorist insurgency) crisis in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital in Nigeria’. The article passionately probes the question: ‘How have academic activities and, indeed, creative writing fared during the heat of battle with faceless enemies?’ Mohammed firmly believes that the Boko Haram ‘insurgency will surely change the face of Nigerian literature if not Africa’s … indeed.’ Consequently, Nigerian writers as historical witnesses are called upon to ‘recreate for the world, some of the gruesome experiences of the [Boko Haram] atrocities in Maiduguri’. Akachi Ezeigbo’s, ‘Women & ALT: Balancing the Gender Equation in the Criticism of African Literature’, is a comprehensive historical survey and analysis of criticism published in African Literature Today (ALT) from its inception to present. Ezeigbo takes the reader on a virtual journey through five decades of different phases of the journal/ series, and concludes by setting a task for ‘publications like ALT to continue to set high standards for criticism by publishing quality articles written by high-flying scholars and critics’. John Uwa’s article is in a unique category by itself. Uwa states that ‘it is now possible to learn how the historical context of colonial literary activities can help to (re)shape “contemporary understanding” of the novel in Nigeria.’ So, using this as his model, Uwa, in ‘Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi “Segilola Emi Eleyinju Ege” & the Re-Reading of Print Culture, Events & Images in the First Nigerian Novel’, declares that ‘it is also now possible to use the initial responses of Nigerian creative writers and readers to print culture to establish newer truth about the emergence of the novel form in Nigeria’, which he believes he has successfully done in this article. Uwa asserts: While the situated understanding and histories of print culture varies from one geographical location and literary culture to another, the

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Editorial: Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand  7



credit for the origin of Nigerian novel in print, goes to I.B. Thomas’s The Life Story of Me, Segilola – a collection of fictional epistles of the life and times of a mystery character called Segilola, serialized and situated within the newspaper print culture of the 1929 to 1930 colonial Nigeria. This is contrary to popular assumptions attributing the emergence of print culture and the novel in Nigeria to D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale. (Emphasis added)

The Editor welcomes reactions from literary scholars to Uwa’s article concerning both factual substance and historical accuracy. For one thing, attributing and estab­lishing the origin and emergence of the Nigerian novel to its antecedents – oral performances such as folktales, folk songs, myths, riddles, proverbs, festivals etc., from time immemorial and to literature in Nigerian indige­nous languages which preceded it – are not based on ‘assumptions’. They are verifiable in archives and literary histories of the novel in African languages which preceded the advent of European colonizers on the continent of Africa. Contrary to Uwa’s statement, D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode ninu Irunmale was published in 1938 (see Bamgbose The Novels of D.O. Fagunwa: 131). It comes five years after the publication in 1933 of the first Igbo novel, Omenuko, so Ogboju Ode cannot be said to be the first novel in Nigeria. In ‘Gynocritical Impulses in the Novels & Short Stories of Ifeoma Okoye’, Macpherson Azuike applies Elaine Showalter’s theory of ‘gynocriticism’ in a comprehensive analysis of the Nigerian veteran feminist writer, Ifeoma Okoye’s fiction, undoubtedly, one of the most incisive and in-depth discourses on Okoye. Azuike concludes: Though Showalter is a feminist literary critic of gynocriticism persuasion, Okoye is a novelist and short story writer who has demonstrated with her works … that she harbours those gynocritical impulses and sympathies which have driven Showalter into her strand of feminist literary theory. Okoye unabashedly, and with a sincerity of purpose addresses the debasing and dehumanizing conditions to which women are exposed or subjected in an African traditional society.

Azuike makes a case to critics, teachers and literary scholars that ‘Ifeoma Okoye deserves greater literary critical acclaim than she has so far received.’ In ‘Adaptation & the Theme of Passage of Time in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka & Ola Rotimi’, Norbert Eze lucidly examines ‘how Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi handled the issue of adaptation and the people’s engagement with the colonial process’ in some of their

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8  Ernest N. Emenyonu

plays. Eze, after an engaging in-depth critical analysis, concludes that ‘Soyinka and Rotimi exploited the people’s conflictual engagement with the colonial process to buttress the idea of the passage of time.’ In ‘Contextualizing Chinua Achebe’s Revolutionary Impulses’, Psalms Chinaka’s discourse first identifies Chinua Achebe’s concept of revolution and its challenges for the African writer. Then after reviewing and analysing various perspectives of Achebe’s ‘revolutionary impulses’ by a variety of critics, Chinaka concludes that ‘Achebe’s ideal revolutionary vision is located within the subtle/moderate revolutionary tactics [which become] the groundwork that could engender, among others, a constitutional reform or political restructuring in Nigeria.’ In the last critical essay in this volume, Unionmwan Edebiri in, ‘Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré’s Le récit du cirque…de la Vallée des Morts: The Limitations of Stylistic Innovations’, focuses on ‘Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré, the Guinean exile whose real name is shrouded in secrecy, [as] one of the most politically committed and artistically innovative of the second generation of writers in Francophone Africa.’ The centre of Edebiri’s critical exploration and analysis is Fantouré’s second novel, Le récit du cirque described by Edebiri thus: Like his first novel, Le cercle des Tropiques (1972), Le récit du cirque… is a biting satire of dictatorship. But unlike the former, it does not stop at exposing and ridiculing dictatorship. Rather, it goes further to castigate the victims and observers of dictatorship whose indifference facilitates its establishment and sustainability.

Addressing the novelist’s narrative techniques and styl­is­tic innova­ tions, Edebiri states that Fantouré has produced a type of writing which, strictly speaking, is different from the novel à la Balzac … which had served as a model for French-speaking African novelists. [It] is therefore different from the novels with which most readers in Francophone Africa are familiar.

The highlight of this volume comes indeed with ‘Fifty Years On: A Conversation with Prof. Eldred Jones, Founding Editor, ALT’. In it we are privileged to hear, directly from Eldred Jones, a first-hand account of its origins in the first thirty years of its existence. We are infinitely grateful to the indefatigable Pede Hollist for the interview, a priceless gift to the reader and the literary world! In this volume too, are a beautiful array of pieces of short creative writing (poetry and prose) set in Africa. In ALT 37 we celebrate the ‘Pioneers on whose shoulders we stand’ today. Enjoy!

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Editorial: Salute to the Pioneers on Whose Shoulders We Stand  9

WORKS CITED Bamgbose, Ayo. The Novels of D.O. Fagunwa. Benin City: Ethiope Pub­lishing Corporation, 1974. Ike, Chukwuemeka. Keynote address on 5 June 1990 at the 7th Conference of the Literary Society of Nigeria held at the University of Jos 3-7 June 1990. Jones, Eldred Durosimi. The Freetown Bond, Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012.

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Women Investigators Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction PAULINE DODGSON-KATIYO

Unity Dow’s fiction is set within a human rights discourse, specifically in relation to the lives of women and children in Botswana. She has been quoted as saying that in speaking out on human rights issues, she is ‘reclaiming the voice’, particularly the voice of women (Dow in Daymond and Lenta ‘“It was like singing in the wilderness”: An Interview with Unity Dow’: 47). Dow already had a successful legal career before becoming a writer. In 1988, while a partner in a legal practice, she co-founded the Women in Law in Southern Africa Research Project (WLSA) and later became fully involved in research and advocacy work on women’s and children’s rights. In 1998, she was appointed a high court judge, a position she held until her resignation in 2009. Her four novels Far and Beyon’, The Screaming of the Innocent, Juggling Truths and The Heavens May Fall were published during this period.1 Advocacy and activism are so central in Dow’s writing that her fiction could be seen as a continuation of her career as a rights activist, providing a way for her to continue her grassroots advocacy work while sitting as a judge. In an interview, Dow suggested that writing fiction allowed her to draw on her experience as a human rights lawyer without the constraints of having to keep to the facts. In fiction she could tell the women’s stories she was unable to tell when writing legal reports: I worked for many years with women, abused women, women who had offended against the law, and I always found that they all had stories but no report could capture them. No report that was, for example, trying to get the Minister to change the legislation could attend to the finer details of their stories. I felt I could never really capture what they had said, but writing fiction allows you to take all this material and write in a way that will reach a wider audience. (Dow in Daymond and Lenta: 56)

10

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Women Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction  11

In this article, I consider two aspects of Dow’s work, firstly, the ways in which her representation of an informal network of human rights workers moves towards a grassroots politics of identity based primarily, but not exclusively, on gender; secondly, following on from Dow’s statement, I am interested in the way she converts case histories into fiction to create another wider network of women. This new identity politics challenges both traditional power structures and the power of the postcolonial elite, revealing the contradictions in the preferred reading of Botswana as a progressive society. In emphasizing Dow’s representation of human rights, I have analysed her work within a largely social paradigm, drawing on sociological, political and anthropological work, particularly in relation to Botswana. In doing this, I do not deny the value of analysing her work from a literary critical perspective; rather I suggest that the social is more than just a context in Dow’s fiction. My contention is that women’s issues-based writing (for want of a better term) should be valued and analysed in terms of its content and not just its literary ‘merit’. Dow’s career experience is, in a broad sense, at the heart of her writing. She has explained that one of the reasons she started to write was because of her awareness of the tension children experienced ‘between new Africa and old Africa’ (Dow in Daymond and Lenta: 48). Her second novel The Screaming of the Innocent was written to show how children are failed, instead of protected, by adults. Dow intends her writing ‘to kick a door open, to be “in your face”’ (50). This suggests that Dow is not as concerned with nuances, subtleties or literary tropes as writers who are more conscious of the style of their writing; rather she is interested in uncovering and revealing, in a fashion which can be easily understood, the social issues she considers to be important in Botswana and elsewhere in Africa. Before turning to Dow’s fiction, I want to provide a theoretical frame­work for understanding her work. Chandra Mohanty, writing on alliances between women and across boundaries in her essay ‘Cartographies of Struggle’, draws on the work of the feminist socio­ logist Dorothy Smith, particularly Smith’s concept of ‘relations of ruling’. Smith explains: ‘When I write of “ruling” … I am identifying a com­ plex of organized practices, including government, law, business and financial management, professional organization, and educational institutions as well as discourses in texts that inter­ penetrate the multiple sites of power’ (3). For Mohanty, what is important about this concept of relations of ruling is that it ‘posits multiple intersections of structures of power and emphasises the

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12  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

process or form of ruling, not the frozen embodiment of it’ (56). Smith argues that a feminist sociology can challenge masculine relations of ruling through putting forward the notion of ‘the everyday world as problematic’; the sociologist would begin with everyday lived experience, ‘where people are in the world’ but would also see the everyday world ‘as organized by social relations not observable within it’ (1987: 88-9). Smith writes of Western capitalist societies but the idea of ‘multiple intersections of structures of power’ and the challenge of understanding the ‘everyday world as problematic’ provide a way of understanding the Botswana that Dow describes and her own and her protagonists’ practices. The anthropologist John Comaroff describes the traditional view of gender relations within Botswana as one which emphasizes the public/ private division of male/female. Mohanty and others see this division as simplistic. Nira Yuval-Davis, for example, suggests that in analysing gender in society, it is better to think in terms of the state, civil society and the familial domain (80-81). Nevertheless, the idea that the male domain is agnatic, that it is, in Anne Griffiths’ words, ‘aggressive and conflictual associated with public activity brought about by jockeying for status and power, where men seek to “eat” each other by material and mystical means’ while the female domain is ‘supportive and sustaining’ (Griffiths In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community: 42, drawing on Comaroff ‘Sui Genderis: Feminism, Kinship Theory and Structural Domains’: 66) does apply to the representation of both sexes in Dow’s fiction in which the caring world is represented by groups of women. Writing on Botswana at the end of the twentieth century, Judith Van Allen argues that it is difficult for women to work within political structures because ‘the political culture of Botswana operates very much in terms of insider networks composed primarily of elite families’ (‘“Bad Future Things” and Liberatory Moments: Capitalism, Gender and the State in Botswana’: 152). Powerful men, whether their power is derived from traditional or modern institutions, are shown to be in alliances with each other (even though there are different degrees of power). They look to advancement in the future through solipsism and are only concerned with the past as a marker of their own grievances. The abuses they have committed in the past are not revealed. However, in contrast to these male networks – with their emphasis on the outward appearance of citizenship – groups of professional and other working women have since the late 1980s challenged the male relations of ruling. Van Allen argues that women ‘in different class and

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Women Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction  13

demographic locations are recreating themselves with new identities and new political consciousness’ (137). She puts this down, in part, to the breakup of traditional and gender relations, following the rise of capitalism in Botswana and also to the adoption of the ‘Western feminist discourse’ (138) by Batswana women. According to Van Allen, women were mobilized in the early 1990s when Unity Dow successfully argued that the Citizenship Act of 1984 discriminated against her on the grounds of sex in violation of the Botswana Constitution. Dow had three children by her American husband; the first, born before their marriage, was entitled to citizenship because Dow was an unmarried woman; the two younger children were denied citizenship because their mother was married to a foreigner. Van Allen argues that the ‘overturning’ of this act ‘enabled women to bring “silenced” issues into open public debate’ (142) and to change the attitudes of both men and women on gender issues. The protagonist in each of Dow’s four novels is someone who wants a better society in which people are treated equally. She recognizes that women and children are most vulnerable in a male-dominated society and she wants to fight to improve their social conditions and status. She is caring but not passive. She and other women who support her are prepared to be assertive in the way Van Allen suggests in order to bring about change. Therefore, they oppose those largely male-dominated institutions which would prevent that change. Annie Gagiano has described them as ‘women warriors’ ‘Getting under the Skin of Power: The Novels of Unity Dow’: 42) and, to repeat Dow’s phrase, they are ‘in your face’. In The Screaming of the Innocent, Amantle, a woman in her early twenties is working at a local clinic on the edge of the Okavango for Tirelo Sechaba, the Botswana national service for young people. In a statistical table ranking working women in Botswana (such as the ones reproduced by Van Allen), Amantle would occupy an ‘in-between’ position. She had to leave school in her early teen years when her parents could not afford the fees, finally returning to repeat Form 1 at the age of seventeen. Although she intends to win a scholarship to study medicine, Amantle, now, as a Tirelo Sechaba participant (TSP), is disliked by the nurses she works under but is not part of the poor community whom the nurses despise and mistreat. In this way too, she occupies an in-between position. It is, however, her poor treatment at the hands of the nurses that allows Amantle to become an investigator. Given the menial task of clearing out the clinic stockroom, she comes across a box containing bloodstained clothes and comes to realize that

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14  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

the clothes are evidence in the case of Neo Kakang, a twelve-year-old girl who, despite police insistence that she was killed by lions, was the victim of a ritual murder five years earlier.2 After she has won the trust of the local people, including the dead girl’s mother, Amantle becomes their spokesperson, demanding an investigation into Neo’s death and, then, when the authorities refuse this demand, carrying out an investigation herself with a network of professional and semi-professional friends. She consults her lawyer friend, Boitumelo, who had defended her when, as a student, she had been in trouble for exposing police brutality. Boitumelo is intrigued and tries to find out what she can from another friend, Naledi, a public prosecution lawyer who has been given the case to review by the Deputy Attorney General because she is junior and will probably not be able to do much with it. Naledi and Boitumelo meet, and in between gossiping, skirt around the issue, each woman trying to find out what the other knows. Boitumelo and Naledi are successful women but their reaction to Amantle’s request for help reveals the contradictions within their positions and the limitations of their roles as professional women within patriarchal society. Boitumelo agrees to help because she is ‘working on a lease agreement’ and is ‘bored stiff’ (Dow Screaming: 104). Boitumelo sees herself as a campaigner and tells Naledi that they should work together because they belong to ‘the “justice and truth” camp’ (132). Naledi appears to be less radical than Boitumelo; she believes there is no reason for secrecy and that she and Boitumelo can be open with each other because Botswana is an open society: ‘this is a democracy! We’re not in one of those sorry African countries now, are we? … We don’t participate in cover-ups! This is Botswana! We’re a democracy, the last time I checked!’ (137). However, despite her protestation about openness, Naledi does remember the case of an important man accused of rape in which the case file had gone missing and the complainant and witnesses had lost their memory. Moreover, when she is later taken by the Deputy Attorney General to a meeting at the Ministry of Safety and Security to discuss the upset caused by Amantle and the villagers, she is required to leave the meeting. The discussion then takes place within the group of men, the only woman present being the director of Tirelo Sechaba whose questions and comments are resented by the men. Naledi’s initial internalization of the preferred reading of Botswana is Dow’s satirical representation of the way her country is often seen by both insiders and outsiders. Naledi’s realization that governance is not as open as she would like to think it is undercuts

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this position and shows that the façade of democracy can successfully hide some underhand and unequal practices, particularly in relation to access to justice. Boitumelo, Naledi and an English law intern, Nancy, come surreptitiously to the region near the village and literally camp out, meeting Amantle and another TSP, Daniel. They set up a mobile minioffice so that they can pool their knowledge of the case and work on a strategy. This group forms an uneasy alliance, knowing that it is not right that a young girl should disappear because powerful men think she is of no consequence but, at the same time, being aware of the consequences of what they are doing and, in the case of the two professional women, fearing that they could be imprisoned or, at the very least, lose their careers. The group operates as multidisciplinary case workers, carrying out a secret investigation as the power relations shift among them with Amantle and Daniel demonstrating that even with their limited acquaintance with rural Botswana, they are less afraid than the lawyers. Dow has said that her representation of Amantle has been criticized because she is ‘an impossible character … too strong for “a young Motswana girl”’ and that she could not challenge the police in the way she does. Dow’s response to this criticism – ‘we can dream, can’t we?’ (Dow in Daymond and Lenta: 51) – looks towards a future in which young women like Amantle do exist and it is as if, in creating Amantle, she is making changes happen.3 In Dow’s fourth novel, The Heavens May Fall, this dream appears to have been partly realized in the protagonist, Naledi Chaba. Naledi is a lawyer who has been a public prosecutor but now works for a legal and counselling agency which mainly represents children. Despite being underpaid (and sometimes not paid at all), Naledi belongs to an elite group of professional women. Indeed, Fetson Kalua in an article in which he links Dow’s challenge to the Citizenship Act to The Heavens May Fall sees Naledi as Dow’s alter ego (‘Identities in Transition: The 1990 High Court Case and Unity Dow’s The Heavens May Fall’: 87); Dow’s comment in her interview with Daymond and Lenta that as a lawyer, she was ‘part of the chaos … picking up pieces’ does appear to fit in with the way Naledi conducts her working life. Naledi is selfreflexive, aware of her situation including what she has sacrificed in order to be the type of lawyer she is.4 As a woman who has already had an education and is using her qualifications, she has both knowledge and a developed cynicism that Amantle does not have. From the first page of the novel, she engages in mock self-criticism. She claims she asks herself:

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Why do I have to care so much? … Why can’t I watch the news of rapes by military men in the DRC, babies with distended bellies and flies eating at their eyes in the Sudan, and go back to my coffee? Why does an old woman waiting in a queue for service by a rude and incompetent clerk make me feel personally responsible? Why must I enter the fray, always … ? (Dow Heavens: 1)

It is not just that her job pays less and is more exacting than the jobs other professionals have; it is also that ideologically what she does could be seen to conflict with her desire for personal fulfilment with a husband and children, and with what she refers to as the need ‘to be female’ – as she puts it, to paint her nails, to wear pink and purple. She asks the question: why does being female conflict with ‘the need to heed a wailing in the night’? (2) In some ways, the novel attempts to answer this. To some extent, Naledi engages in a form of consciousness raising similar to that carried out by women characters in American feminist novels of the 1970s such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. This would fit in with Van Allen’s assertion that Batswana women in the 1990s followed a Western feminist agenda. However, unlike the women characters in The Women’s Room who become ‘conscientized’ as the novel develops, Naledi already understands the ways in which she and other Batswana are oppressed and, at various points, expresses dissatisfaction with Western/expatriate lifestyles, behaviour and attitudes. Her form of consciousness raising in relation to her own life (and the raising of the reader’s consciousness by Dow’s novel) acknowledges the need to put personal desire within the context of African social realities and also the difficulties involved in attempting to do so. Naledi’s rights agenda, her desire to improve society in terms of equality and justice, and her desire to have a personal fulfilling life is shared by her cousin, the hospital doctor Mmidi. The two women are personally and professionally supportive of each other, although not uncritically. Like Boitumelo and (the other) Naledi in The Screaming of the Innocent, they have a ‘girlfriend’ culture but are closer than the two lawyers in the earlier novel. When they meet and talk, they easily mix the personal, professional and political, discussing, for example, Naledi’s relationship with her boyfriend, whether or not Mmidi is a lesbian, why expatriate staff are preferred to locals, and Western ideals of beauty. The two women are atypical, each of them being an only child brought up by her father, in Mmidi’s case because her mother left the family when she was a baby, and in Naledi’s case because her

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mother died giving birth to a son who did not survive. Neither woman, therefore, fits into the traditional pattern of bonding between siblings, particularly brother-sister bonding, which Griffiths in her study In the Shadow of Marriage suggests creates a ‘set of supportive relationships’ for the brother-sister, their children and future generations (43). Naledi and Mmidi have bonded as individuals and each contributes to the identity formation of the other but they do not form a potential informal political network like the group of activists in The Screaming of the Innocent. A political network is introduced in The Heavens May Fall, though, through the stories of women and girls that Naledi tells – the fictionalization of case histories similar to those Dow would have encountered in her work. The lawyer/investigator/narrator Naledi weaves together the stories of women and girls (and, in some cases, men) who are her clients, their relatives and others involved in her legal work. These stories not only show the way lives, both male and female, intersect and how lived experience is organized by forces outside the immediate environment but they also impact on Naledi’s life, causing her to re-think some of the strident political positions she has taken on as a member of the ‘truth and justice’ camp. Griffiths, writing on the way individuals become part of networks in order to access resources, argues that life histories illustrate the ways in which power operates to produce certain forms of discourse with regard to familial relationships and property. These: inform the terms upon which parties speak and how they formulate claims in respect of one another in everyday life. Such discourses amount to law (at the very least in centralist terms) when they are located within particular institutional settings. But the power to shape such discourses is not confined to, or derived solely, from these legal settings, as it is generated within a broader arena which carries authority beyond such settings in the operation of everyday life. In other words, law is in fact reflecting and reinforcing social processes and the boundaries to which they give rise. (38)

The life histories Naledi tells – histories which focus on legal cases involving families, women’s property rights, rape, and abuse of children – go beyond the narrow con­fines of law and judgement to show how people inter­act in domestic and social settings. In analysing these life histories, I want to borrow a term and a partial method from what may seem like an unlikely source, the anthro­pologist Richard Werbner’s study of male Kalanga elites, Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana. Werbner refers to his non-linear telling of the life of a senior

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civil servant as reflexive unfolding. He describes this as ‘a tactic of argument for the sake of retrospection, of having the sense of looking backward on experiences, issues, and encounters, complexly related, from a later perspective’ (147). This phrase – reflexive unfolding – is, I would argue, what Dow does in using law, case histories and the lives of individuals as a way of framing broader life histories.5 The case which best demonstrates this within the novel is that of Nancy Badisa, a fifteen-year-old girl who is raped by her grandparents’ lodger. Naledi prosecutes the rapist but the defence counsel succeeds in confusing the girl and her grandfather, who is a witness, by suggesting that Nancy is older than her fifteen years. The rapist is acquitted but Naledi agrees to the family’s request to find a legal way of forcing him to take an HIV test and, despite anxieties expressed by the girls’ grandparents, Kereng and Gertrude, recommends taking the issue of the HIV test to the High Court. At the beginning of the High Court hearing, there is a long exchange between Naledi and the judge, William Mmung, in which he refuses to hear a request from Naledi in chambers. She then reveals to the court that the judge is Nancy’s biological grandfather, the father of her mother, Sally, and she makes an application for him to be recused. Naledi explains to the reader what the family has already told her – that Mmung, when he was a brilliant high school student had impregnated Gertrude. She had been expelled from school and had given birth to Sally. The school authorities connived to keep their star pupil, Mmung, and he won a scholarship, leaving Gertrude, having missed out on her education, to have the baby on her own. She later married Kereng who treated the child as his own and whom Nancy has always known as her grandfather. This revelation almost causes Naledi to lose her right to give a speech at the Law Society Annual Dinner because the Chief Justice wants to punish her for revealing Mmung’s past. However, this interweaving story does not finish with the consequences for Naledi. Mmung insists on Naledi driving with him to a distant village where he invites her to listen to the story of an elderly Mosarwa woman.6 This woman tells Naledi that she was her husband’s second wife and that, after she gave birth to a son, her mother-in-law forced her to leave. She gave her son, who is now the judge, to her husband’s infertile first wife so that he would have a future and not know that he was the son of a Mosarwa. The judge finishes this part of the story by explaining to Naledi that when he went to see Gertrude’s aunt, she insulted him, telling him that ‘the son of a Bushman woman’ (Dow Heavens: 184) could not

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marry into her family, and then later told him Gertrude had lost the baby. Thus, a history that began in the novel with Naledi taking on a rape case now leads back to the past when a woman believed she was abandoned and a man suffered discrimination because of his Basarwa origins. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy explains the concept of jurisfiction: the law is that which is ‘modeled or sculpted (fictum) in terms of right’ … Since the case is not only unforeseen but has to be so, and since right is given as the case of its own utterance, so judicial discourse shows itself to be the true discourse of fiction. (Nancy quoted in Fitzpatrick ‘Juris-fiction: Literature and the Law of the Law’: 221).

Writing on juris-fiction, Peter Fitzpatrick further explains: Put in another perspective, if the situation of the case were entirely foreseeable or stilled, it would be given ‘fact’ and there would be no call for decision, for determination, for law. There would be no fictive making the case speak. What is always involved with law then, is the creative reaching out to a possibility beyond its determinate existence, a beyond where law ‘finds itself’ in being integrally tied to, and incipiently encompassing of, its exteriority. (221)

This extends Griffiths’ idea of law ‘reflecting and re­inforc­ing social processes and the boundaries to which they give rise’ to suggest that law is necessarily a form of fiction-making – of crafting, speaking, extending – which is always and everywhere present. The unexpected aspect of Nancy Badisa’s case is that the man making a judgement on the rights in her civil case is her blood relative although neither of them knows this. Dow’s case histories method foregrounds the fictiveness of law and the manner in which it takes everything into itself. Dow’s narrative technique consists of the telling of multiple-layered stories of individual human rights violations which fold into one another, not only in The Heavens May Fall but also in The Screaming of the Innocent. Stories previously untold, though, can be unravelled without the agency of the participants. Planning the ritual murder, none of the conspirators ‘had any way of knowing that in five years’ time, a box would be opened and out of it would spill a scream that couldn’t be ignored. They had no way of knowing that darkness isn’t always courageous enough to keep evil to itself’ (Dow Screaming: 23). Just as they do not expect that their secret story will ever be told, so Amantle does not know that she will be the conduit for the story: ‘She had no way of knowing she was soon to be instrumental in stoking

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20  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

the fire of five-year-old fears and waking up a five-year-old ghost’ (24). This implies an arbitrariness – that there is no guarantee that wrong doing will come to light, although it sometimes does; neither can one know who will be the catalyst for revealing the truth. It is also, though, akin to the dynamism suggested by juris-fiction and justification for the narration, the unfolding of stories and their folding back into each other. Kalua argues that Dow’s work is hybrid and liminal – that what she reveals is a society in a transitional stage (81, 85-8) – and there are certainly aspects of Dow’s work in which her use of fragmentation could be seen as akin to postmodern or post-structuralist practices. The outcomes of some of the cases and stories may leave the reader who is used to classic realist fiction feeling unsatisfied. Only one of the ritual murderers in The Screaming of the Innocent, the poorest of the four men and the one who was coerced, pays for the crime. It is also, in the end, his suicide note which reveals how the murder took place and not the evidence uncovered by the network of investigators. Moreover, not all of Naledi’s cases in The Heavens May Fall have a happy ending and Naledi’s belief in her own judgement comes under self-scrutiny. Examples of this are the cases of Keba and Sheila. Keba, the mute raped child for whom Naledi arranges an abortion ‘slipped into a silence that was more than just not speaking. It was as if she was trying to make herself go away’ (Dow Heavens: 29). When Naledi tells Sheila that the man who impregnated her when she was fifteen should be charged with statutory rape, Sheila tells her that she wants lawyers and social workers to listen to her because ‘that kind of justice is not going to serve me and my child when all of you have gone on to other things in your lives’ (189); if her child’s father is in jail, Sheila says, then he will not be able to support her financially. It is possible to see the disagreement between Naledi and Sheila in terms of different postmodern language games with the lawyeractivist playing the game of justice and the young victim playing the more practical game of economic survival. However, at the centre of Dow’s fiction is a belief in a progressive human rights agenda. Even if society is fragmented and even if it is desirable to make compromises (and Naledi learns that it is), nevertheless, there is a striving for a holistic society in which people celebrate their diversity but also come together with a common, forward-looking purpose. This involves challenging those who use power to oppress others. As Gagiano states in her analysis of The Screaming of the Innocent, in the novel, ‘power is itself likened to a type of bewitchment in this case because of the hold

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that superstitious fear (of the perpetrators) has on most members of this society’ (44). Set against this is Amantle’s courageous question ‘if we’re so paralysed by fear, if we don’t dare face this evil, who will heed the screams of the innocent?’ (Dow Screaming: 214). Amantle’s question draws attention to the focus of the two novels I have discussed. The story of the abduction and murder of Neo Kakang is horrifying and Naledi’s case histories describe traumatic experiences. These cases must come to light to be seen, heard and read. Yet, unlike much other Southern African fiction which concentrates on the trauma of victims, these novels focus on the investigator – her role, her motives and her determination. In their article, ‘“The Personal is Political,” or Why Women’s Rights Are Indeed Human Rights’, J. Oloka-Onyango and Sylvia Tamale argue that: Women’s human rights are not simply a private (personal) affair, but extend directly into the essential operations of the state, society and the public (political) sphere, as does any other category of human rights. Women’s human rights, more clearly than any other phenomenon, illustrate the interconnectedness of all categories of rights. (711)

Dow’s fiction intersects with her rights activism and, increasingly, that activism is set within an enlightened and universal discourse of progress in which all human rights matter.7 The Nancy Badisa criminal case centres on Nancy’s age and, if she is underage, whether the man accused of raping her should have known this. The civil case is focused on an HIV test. The identification of children’s ages and the impact of HIV/AIDS on people’s lives are issues with which Dow has been centrally concerned in her working life. She has written on birth registration as a ‘first’ right, arguing that without a birth certificate, children live on the margins without full citizenship and lose the protection that being children should give them (Dow ‘Birth Registration: The “First” Right’). Moreover, a book she wrote with Max Essex on HIV/AIDS, Saturday Is for Funerals, tells the stories of families affected by HIV/AIDS. It is not surprising that, at the end of The Heavens May Fall, Dow addresses ethnic discrimination and minority rights given that she was one of three judges who heard the case of a group of Basarwa people who were forced by the government to remove from the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve, a national park which was their ancestral home.8 Dow is unusual as a writer within the ‘social issues’ genre in that she has written four novels, each of which looks at the ‘complex of organized practices’ which Smith says constitute relations of ruling.

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22  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo

Other fiction by women writers in this genre and during the same period, particularly in Southern Africa, tend to concentrate on single or closely related issues such as marriage and inheritance, unwanted pregnancies or HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, as this genre develops, texts written within it can be elucidated by sociological, political and anthropological approaches which inform the reader about the societies the texts depict. The Screaming of the Innocent and The Heavens May Fall reveal the necessity of rights work but also the complexity and risk-taking it involves. Set loosely within the popular genre of detective fiction, Dow’s novels examine and celebrate the radical and courageous activist, who may be fallible, but nevertheless, represents the hope of a future fairer society. NOTES 1 After stepping down from the High Court, Dow worked as a lawyer and international jurist from 2009-14. She then entered politics and has held several ministerial positions in the government of Botswana. She has not published any fiction since The Heavens May Fall in 2006. 2 The reader already knows that the murder was carried out by a businessman, Disanka, and three other men including a village headman and a deputy headmaster. Dow emphasizes that Disanka is a respected member of the community working for its benefit through expanding the local school and arguing for a local hospital. When a delegation had been sent to protest to the Office of the President that the Neo Kakang investigation was too slow, Disanka, the murderer of Neo, was a member of the delegation (Dow Screaming: 3). 3 In the same interview, Dow cites the case of a young woman who was alleged to have led a group of students in burning down their school. Dow represented the student after she was expelled from school and she was allowed to sit her school-leaving examination. This, Dow suggests, proves that Amantle ‘is possible’ (Dow in Daymond and Lenta: 51). This real-life lawyer/client relationship may have been recreated in Boitumelo having legally represented Amantle when she was a student. 4 In The Screaming of the Innocent, headman Motlababusa Bokae, one of the ritual murderers and a rapist, uses his power as headman to punish people in pre-trial procedures. However, a policeman thinks that this practice will be challenged as unconstitutional because ‘these days, a growing number of lawyers were being brave enough to ask questions about procedures that no one had ever dared to challenge’ (Dow Screaming: 13). Naledi Chaba of The Heavens May Fall is this type of lawyer. 5 Werbner’s subject is a retired senior civil servant and businessman, Gobe Willie Matenge. Werbner’s method was to interview Matenge over a period

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Women Uncovering Transgression in Unity Dow’s Fiction  23

of time and to use Matenge’s own reflections on his experiences as a way of understanding the development of the ‘public man’ in Botswana. This method matches the way Dow tells the history of the judge William Mmung which I go on to discuss. In other cases, I would suggest that Dow uses a variant of reflexive unfolding in which Naledi goes back into her own and her clients’ past lives in order to comment on her current practice and to ‘unfold’ the ways in which incidents and experiences inter-relate in the operation of justice, law and human rights. 6 Dow uses the term Bushmen for the ethnic group officially called Basarwa (singular Mosarwa) in Botswana. There is disagreement among scholars as to which of these terms should be used. See Motzafi-Haller (556-7). 7 For a discussion of the vexed issue of universalism versus cultural relativism in anthropology and human rights discourses, see Ann-Belinda S. Preis, ‘Human Rights as Cultural Critique’. Preis argues that ‘human rights increasingly form a wider network of perspectives which are shared and exchanged between the North and the South, centers and peripheries, in multiple, creative, and sometimes conflict-ridden ways. Human rights have become “universalized” as values subject to interpretation, negotiation, and accom­modation’ (290). Preis analyses three case studies from Botswana including the position of the Basarwa people and Unity Dow’s challenge to the Citizenship Act. 8 The judgement presented in 2006 followed the longest running case in Botswana (Sesana and Others Versus the Attorney General). Dow’s full stand-alone judgement is more strongly in favour of the Basarwa group who brought the case than those of the other two judges. An interesting facet of her judgement is that she refers to ‘a significant inter-play and inter-connectedness between the questions’ to be resolved in the case. An example she gives is that, if services, including water services, were withdrawn, this might not in itself be unconstitutional but if it forced the group out of the reserve, then it could raise constitutional issues such as the right to movement and the right to life (Botswana High Court). ‘Inter-play and inter-connectedness’ could also describe Dow’s method of narration in her fiction.

WORKS CITED Botswana High Court. Sesana and Others Versus the Attorney General. Southern African Legal Information Institute. www.saflii.org/bw/cases.BWHC/ 2006/1.html. Comaroff, John L. ‘Sui Genderis: Feminism, Kinship Theory and Structural Domains’. In Gender and Kinship Essays toward a Unified Analysis, eds J.F. Collier and S.J. Yanagisako. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987: 53-85. Daymond, M.J. and Margaret Lenta. ‘“It was like singing in the wilder­ness”:

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24  Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo An Interview with Unity Dow’. Kunapipi Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (2004): 47-60. Dow, Unity. ‘Birth Registration: The “First” Right’. The Progress of Nations, Civil Rights: Commentary (1998). www.unicef.org/pon98/civil1.htm. ——Far and Beyon’. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2000. ——The Screaming of the Innocent. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002. ——Juggling Truths. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2003. ——The Heavens May Fall. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006. Dow, Unity and Max Essex. Saturday Is for Funerals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Fitzpatrick, Peter. 2004. ‘Juris-fiction: Literature and the Law of the Law’. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature Vol. 35, Nos. 1-2 (2004): 215-29. French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. New York: Ballantine, 1988 [1977]. Gagiano, Annie. ‘Getting under the Skin of Power: The Novels of Unity Dow’. English Academy Review Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004): 36-50. Griffiths, Anne M.O. In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Kalua, Fetson. ‘Identities in Transition: The 1990 High Court Case and Unity Dow’s The Heavens May Fall’. Journal of Literary Studies Vol. 26, No. 2 (2010): 80-89. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Motzafi-Haller, Pnina. ‘When Bushmen Are Known as Basarwa: Gender, Ethnicity, and Differentiation in Rural Botswana’. American Ethnologist Vol. 21, No. 3 (1994): 539-63. Oloka-Onyango, J. and Sylvia Tamale. ‘“The Personal Is Political”, or Why Women’s Rights Are Indeed Human Rights: An African Perspective on International Feminism’. Human Rights Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4 (1995): 691-731. Preis, Ann-Belinda S. ‘Human Rights as Cultural Critique: An Anthro­pological Critique’. Human Rights Quarterly Vol.18 (1996): 286-315. Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Socio­logy. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Van Allen, Judith. ‘“Bad Future Things” and Liberatory Moments: Capitalism, Gender and the State in Botswana’. Radical History Review Vol. 76 (2000): 136-68. Werbner, Richard. Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997.­

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Evolutionary Portrayal of Credible Characters in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction KALAPI SEN

In 1958, Chinua Achebe entered the literary scene and challenged the age-old belief that Africa is nothing more than a ‘heart of darkness’ with his ground-breaking novel, Things Fall Apart – a book which re-defined the genre of African Literature and ‘changed the global perceptions and western concepts and theories of imaginative creativity in and from Africa’ (Call For Papers: African Literature Today @ 50). But, sadly enough, even after half a century of critical readings and re-readings of Achebe’s works, for most critics Achebe is a misogynist until today. According to most of the Achebe critics, Achebe’s women are ‘voiceless’ and ‘virtually inconsequential’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works: 212), always subjugated/ subordinated by their ‘heavy handed’ masters leaving them in a tight corner, without any scope of emancipation. Challenging the view of some critics like Rose Ure Mezu or Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, to name but two, this article proposes to subvert the most popular view of the Achebe’s portrayal of the African woman as nothing more than ‘the weaker sex – a fragile, helpless, passive, idealized, exotic accessory’ (Mezu ‘Womanhood: The European Concept v. the African’) to the African male. Generally speaking, whenever critics have assessed the portrayal of women in Achebe’s works, especially in his novels, they have concluded that in an ‘androcentric’ setting of his novels, the ‘treatment of women … confirms the world of male chivalry and macho heroism’ (Kolawole Womanism and African Consciousness: 111). Another popular view is that the women in the stories are present only to ‘punctuate the men’s stories but remain in the periphery of social impact’ (112). A very interesting point regarding this generalized view against Achebe’s creation of women figures has been made by Professor Ernest N. Emenyonu in a personal interview1 where he is questioned thus: 25

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26  Kalapi Sen

K.S.: What do you think about the critics, though I shall name none, who have branded Achebe as ‘misogynist’? E.E.: You know, sometimes there are critics who want to speak to the gallery, O.K.! And they only talk about Achebe didn’t do this … Achebe didn’t do that and his treatment of women! When I hear these statements, I simply say: ‘You people do not understand the relationship between literature and history.’ Now, take Eunice. Can you think of a progressive character like Eunice in Things Fall Apart? No way! I have read many a times that Achebe wrote Anthills of the Savannah to make up for his poor treatment of women.

As a matter of fact, what Emenyonu says is quite correct if one considers Achebe’s claim that Achebe wanted to project the Nigerian character ‘from inside’ (Lindfors Conversations with Chinua Achebe: 4). And this projection of the Nigerian character, which is often synonymous with the African character, would have remained incomplete had he not begun the portrayal of the African women from a point of subjugation and then moved slowly but steadily towards the emancipated figures like Eunice or Beatrice, in a male-dominated society. It is a truism that patriarchy2 rules in most parts3 of Africa. In his pentalogy, Achebe re-presents an African society which is patriarchal in nature. It is perhaps due to this presentation of a world ruled by men in his novels, that critics have come to conclude that ‘women in Achebe’s world are voiceless’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: 211). Not only voiceless, some critics are also of the opinion that ‘African women have accepted oppression with dignity’ (Kolawole: 43). Talking about the women figures in Achebe’s novels, critics have most commonly opined that Beatrice Okoh of Anthills of the Savannah is ‘Achebe’s most fully developed female character’ (Bellalouna, LaBlanc and Milne Literature of the Developing Nations: 85). But interestingly, in one of his interviews with Rose Ure Mezu, Achebe says that the creation of Beatrice is by no means an accident. Rather, he says, ‘Beatrice has been coming in stages through all my work … All along my vision of a woman’s role has been developing, growing in intensity as the role of the Igbo woman has been growing in the Igbo society’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: 229-30). Taking the author’s own comment as the chief point of reference, his strategic pattern of evolution of the African women from the clichéd notion of the ‘subjugated creature’ to the emancipated face of Beatrice, in an ambience of patriarchy, can be traced. Hence, a reappraisal of the portrayal of some of the women figures in Achebe’s five novels seems to be quite necessary.

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‘Women in pre-colonial societies held a complementary position to men although patrilineal and patriarchal kinship structures predominated Nigerian societies’ (Rojas ‘Women in Pre-Colonial Nigeria’). Even Achebe vouches this fact when he says in one of his interviews that ‘women never saw themselves as secondary or inferior in traditional Ibo society. They were different, that is all. This did not mean a kind of masculine domination’ (Lind­fors Conversations: 49-50). But amidst this traditional Nigerian patriarchal system, the ‘[c]olonial administrators and Christian missionaries introduced assumptions of European patriarchy into Nigerian society … The colonizers expected African societies to consider women as subordinate to men because Europeans considered women subordinate to men’ (Rojas ‘Women in Colonial Nigeria’). And the defiance of the European perception of the African women as subordinate figures, who are helpless in the hands of their male counterparts, can be traced in certain actions of Ekwefi, who is beaten up by Okonkwo and is almost shot to death by him. It is true that in the world of Achebe’s novels, domestic violence and muting of the female voice exist. In Things Fall Apart, a novel set in the pre-colonial times, when Ikemefuna comes to stay in the Okonkwo household as per the decision of the clan, Okonkwo’s senior wife asks: ‘Is he staying long with us?’ She is soon silenced by Okonkwo, who says, ‘Do what you are told, woman … When did you become one of the ndichie of Umuofia?’ (Achebe Things Fall Apart: 11)4 Another example of the subordination of the womenfolk can be traced in Okonkwo’s brutal treatment meted out towards his wives. To begin with, Ojiugo, the youngest wife of Okonkwo, is beaten up severely by him during the Week of Peace, for coming home late from her friend’s house and not serving her husband with dinner, on time. Even Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s second wife, faces a similar torture when she merely cuts ‘a few leaves [from the banana tree in their compound] to wrap some food’ (27). Okonkwo gives Ekwefi ‘a sound beating’ leaving ‘her and her only daughter weeping’ (27). Nevertheless, amidst this patriarchal hegemony, women, since the pre-colonial times, have found small creeks and fissures to assert themselves in various situations. In the Igbo society, marriage is a ‘highly valued institu­tion [where] the onus of making it successful falls on the women alone’, where ‘women are expected to bear suffering and humiliation in silence’ (Isiramen ‘Women in Nigeria: Religion, Culture, and AIDS’). As far as sexual relations are concerned, Celestina Omoso Isiramen notes that ‘[w]hile for women to engage in extramarital relationship is taboo, men who do so are considered virile’ (Isiramen ‘Women in Nigeria’).

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This accepted norm, levied by patriarchy is subverted by a number of female characters in Achebe’s novels. And Ekwefi is the first woman who should be mentioned in this regard. She walks out of her first marriage and indulges in sex with her former lover, Okonkwo and lives as man and wife without ceremonial rituals. In Chapter Eleven of Things Fall Apart, the narrative states: Two years after [Ekwefi’s] marriage to Anene she could bear it no longer and she ran away to Okonkwo. It had been early in the morning. The moon was shining. She was going to the stream to fetch water. Okonkwo’s house was on the way to the stream. She went in and knocked at his door and he came out [and] carried her into his bed and in the darkness began to feel around her waist for the loose end of her cloth. (Achebe Things Fall Apart: 77)

Like Ekwefi, Mgbafo and Nneka also walk out of their respective autocratic marriages. Mgbafo is tortured regularly by her husband, Uzowulu, for nine years. And ‘[during] those years no single day passed in the sky without [Uzowulu] beating [her … and] when she was pregnant, he beat her until she miscarried. Finally, when she was recovering from an illness, he beat her again so that if the neighbours had not gone to save her she would have been killed’ (65). She, however, does not yield to this male chauvinism for her entire life. Instead, she prefers walking out of her husband’s house in order to save herself. Nneka’s abuse is somewhat different in kind. As the novel unfolds itself, one is informed that each time Nneka delivers twin babies; she is forced by her husband to throw them away in order to abide by the taboos of the Igbo culture.5 Nneka also does not accept this fate ordained to her by the tribal community, forever. She moves a step further than Ekwefi and Mgbafo, and frees herself from the clutches of the native cultural politics by embracing Christianity. This may be claimed as a step towards the African women’s liberation from the stereotyped definition of a ‘subaltern’. Cases of domestic violence against women can also be found in Arrow of God (1964), a novel set during the Nigerian colonial times, where Ezeulu’s first daughter, Akueke is shown to be a victim of physical violence in the hands of her husband, Ibe. Like her predecessors, Mgbafo and Nneka, Akueke also does not yield to the physical torture. Rather, she walks out of Ibe’s house and goes back to her father, and chooses not to return until the people from her husband’s clan agree to pay a compensation for the torture she has faced. Though, during the pre-colonial and colonial times there were certain laws of the clan, like paying a compensation to the girl and her family, as shown in Arrow

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of God, or offering sacrifices to the native gods for violating the tribal laws and beating a woman during the Week of Peace, as seen in Things Fall Apart, women since the olden times have in some way or another revolted against the violence meted out to them. In the remaining three novels, which are set in an era either when the colonizers are about to leave, or after they have left – No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah – Achebe portrays a different set of women characters. The women in the new generation are not altogether seen ‘coming and going, with mounds of foofoo, pots of water, market baskets, fetching kola, being scolded and beaten before they disappear behind the huts of their compound’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: 212). Rather, in these novels Achebe portrays a set of women who cannot be easily whipped and silenced. They are educated, financially independent, and at times also seen to steer the lives of the male protagonists to a great extent. Such characters are Hannah Okonkwo and Clara Okeke of No Longer at Ease. Hannah Okonkwo has been claimed to be the ‘first in line of [the] strong, positive female characters in Achebe’s novels with Eunice, … and Beatrice’ (Booker Achebe Encyclopedia: 204). She is the perfect successor of Ekwefi, who can defy the orders of her husband to satisfy the demands of her child. Like Ekwefi, who disobeys her husband’s orders of not treating Ezinma with eggs, secretly treats her in their bed-room; Hannah too disobeys Isaac’s orders and narrates folk stories about the ‘wicked leopardess’ to prepare Obi for his ‘Oral’ (Achebe No Longer at Ease: 53). Not only is Hannah like Ekwefi in this aspect, she also moves a step further than Ekwefi by controlling the life of the male ‘protagonist’, who is her son. She is portrayed as a devout Christian. But her religious transformation has not been able to bring her entirely out of the shackles of the traditional prejudices. Hence, she forces Obi to decline from his firm decision to marry Clara, who is an osu. By portraying Hannah in the avatar of a woman who can steer the life of the ‘protagonist’ who is ‘male’, Achebe presents the ‘dimension of the dominance and power of [the] Nigerian women’, who assert ‘their authority in spite of the hurdles erected by a patriarchal system that minimizes women’s role’ (Iyam Matriarchy and Power in Africa: Aneji Eko: 4). While Ekwefi can be said to be the predecessor of Hannah in certain aspects, the next female figure, Clara, can be referred to as the precursor of Eunice, Elewa and Beatrice of the last two novels. Clara, the ‘outcast protagonist’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: 218), is gifted with formal Western education, which has helped her to acquire the

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job of a nurse, which makes her financially independent. And it is this economic independence which makes her a strong individual who is in a position to help her male partner during his financial crisis. Thus, even after knowing the fact that Obi will eventually not marry her, because of the traditional restrictions, she enters into a sexual relation with him, which ultimately leads to her pregnancy. Yet, she does not use her vulnerable position to force Obi to get married to her, by going against his mother. But unlike Obi, she has no illusions about the future of their relation and does not hesitate to doff her engagement ring and end the relation at her own will. Clara’s acceptance of the physical intimacy without entering into a martial contract is a hint towards her liberal outlook in a society where even to ‘talk about sex is considered immoral [and] sexual issues are not open to discussion’ (Isiamen ‘Women in Nigeria’). In addition to this, she chooses to abort the foetus. In portraying Clara thus, Achebe anticipates the West’s Feminist Movement of the 1960s, ‘one of the agenda of which [is] women’s sexual freedom, right to birth control, and abortion’ (Mukherjee ‘From Subordination to Emancipation’: 98). Clara’s independent step of deciding to undergo an abortion and to break her engagement with Obi Okonkwo leads one to the next emancipated woman in Achebe’s world of novels, who also decides the course of her own life. It is the figure of Edna Odo in A Man of the People. In the first part of A Man of the People, Edna is portrayed as a submissive woman who has silently accepted her family’s decision of her getting married to ‘an ancient polygamist’ (98), Chief the Honourable M.A. Nanga, the Minister for Culture. When Odili Samalu tries to convince her to refuse her prospective marriage with the Minister, in a tone of resignation, Edna replies, ‘[t]his is the world of women’ (98). It is in her letter to Odili in Chapter Ten that she reveals the real reason for which she is bound to marry a man whose eldest son is almost of the same age of Edna. She writes: I am in a jam about the whole thing. If I develop cold feet now my father will almost kill me. Where is he going to find all the money the man has paid on my head? So it is not so much that I want to be called a minister’s wife but a matter of can’t help. What cannot be avoided must be borne. (Achebe A Man of the People: 110)

Edna’s confession obliquely refers to the crucial role that money plays in determining the fates of certain women of Nigeria in particular and Africa, in general. In fact, according to the International Humanist News, 2005:

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The proportion of the population in Nigeria living on less than $1 a day has reached 70% and is increasing. In these circumstances, women are affected the most. Family pressures are exerted on poor women to get married into rich households, not for love but for a secured financial condition of the girl’s house. The girls have no option other than obeying the decision and they readily sacrifice all their wants and desires. (Mukherjee ‘Three Faces of the “second sex”’: 104)

But Edna, like many of her forerunners, rebels against this male tyranny towards the end of the novel, where she tries to save Odili from the goons of Chief Nanga during a political meeting in the presence of her future husband. Her silent gesture is indicative of her refusal to accept her lot passively like Mrs Nanga, the first wife of the Minister. Along with it, Edna’s presence during a political meeting sheds light on another very important advancement in the position of the African women – it is the participation of the womenfolk in the political scenario of the new nation. In the figure of Mrs Eleanor John, Achebe shows how the African women of the post-independent era have made their way into the male domains of business and politics. She is introduced as a ‘merchant princess par excellence’, whose career began ‘as a street hawker, rising to a small trader, and then to a big one’, which was followed by her presiding ‘over the entire trade in imported second-hand clothing worth hundreds of thousands’ and then finally becoming ‘a member of the Library Commission, one of the statutory boards within the Minister’s portfolio’ (Achebe A Man of the People: 15). This meteoric rise in the position of Mrs John shows the steady development in the African women’s position who actively participate in business and politics along with the African men. And this progression can be perceived in greater depths in the figure of the next emancipated character – Eunice. Echoing Achebe’s comment that ‘Beatrice has been coming … through all my work [,] in A Man of the People, she is called Eunice’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: 22), Eunice may be referred to as a ‘preface’ to Beatrice. ‘Political participation is an integral facet of the public sphere’ (Nwagbara ‘Changing the Canon: Chinua Achebe’s Women in Public Sphere’: 175), and in Eunice, Achebe makes an advancement in the position of the Nigerian woman, who takes active part in politics along with the men folk. While the pre-colonial African women had the right to be involved in politics, most of them rarely exhibited this power in public. But many ‘influential women’ were ‘very [much] active in economic and socio-political sectors of the society’ (Ozo-Eson ‘Political Empowerment of Women: Prospects and Limitations’: 119). In fact,

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during the pre-colonial times, the Nigerian women ‘had much larger position in politics’ (Qualls ‘Women in Nigeria Today’) compared to those that the Nigerian Constitution of 1979 guarantees them. It was with ‘the advent of Islam and colonisation by the British’ (Uchendu Education and the Changing Economic Role of Nigerian Women: 6) that women were pushed towards the margin of politics which led to the loss of the original powers which they possessed. However, with the political freedom of the country, women once again entered into the political avenue with the men folk. And Eunice represents this face of the African woman who is no more hovering silently on the fringes of politics and public sphere; rather she takes active interest and participates in the political campaigns parallel with men. Hence, when Max and his friends reach Odili’s village for the campaign of their new political party, the C.P.C., Max says, ‘Why don’t we launch our campaign here and now?’ (Achebe A Man of the People: 123) To this question-cum-suggestion of Max about a political affair, Eunice answers ‘Why not indeed?’ (123). While Eunice’s active participation in politics at par with her fiancé marks a development in the socio-political position of the African women, it also subverts the Western image of the African woman as a ‘subaltern’ who needs a spokesperson to convey her desires or assert her rights. Rather, she is portrayed as a woman who can decide her own course even after the death of her fiancé. Thus, when Max is killed in public by the goons of Chief Koko, the narrative reports, that Eunice ‘stood like a stone figure … Then she opened her handbag as if to take out a handkerchief, took out a pistol instead and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest. Only then did she fall down on Max’s body and begin to weep like a woman’ (143). This action emancipates the lot of African women from the status of subjugated creature who are silenced now and then by the heavy handed male masters. The new African woman decides the own course of her life even without a male support. And this phenomenon is elaborated by Achebe in his acclaimed ‘most fully developed female figure’ of Beatrice Okoh of his last novel, Anthills of the Savannah. Considering the portrayal of the female figures in Anthills of the Savannah, Jennifer Bussey notes that Achebe projects a ‘female trinity in the characters of Beatrice, Elewa, and Amaechina’ (Bellalouna et al. Literature of the Developing Nations: 93). Both Beatrice and Elewa lose the men they love, due to the political broil in the country. But they both move forward in life without their male partners. Like Clara, Elewa conceives without getting married to Ikem. But unlike Clara, she does

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not abort her child and Beatrice takes over the role of taking care of Elewa until the child is born, which is again supposed to be a man’s duty. The journey of the African woman reaches the final stage in the figure of Beatrice who has moved quite forward from the imagination of the Western world regarding the African women. Like most of the women of the new nation, she is educated and financially independent. Her education has given her a ‘first-class honours from Queen Mary College, University of London’ and a job as a ‘Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance’ (Achebe Anthills of the Savannah: 70). But she refuses to become the woman who is nothing more than ‘a fragile, helpless, passive, idealized exotic accessory of the educated African male’ (Mezu ‘Womanhood’). Hence, when asked to ‘have [her] turn in the bedchamber of African polygamy’ (Achebe Anthills of the Savannah: 75) by Sam, Beatrice refuses the indecent proposal to be the good-time girl of an ‘educated African male’. Beatrice’s refusal proves that Edward William Lane’s account that ‘freedom of intercourse’ (Said Orientalism: 167) is the most dangerous thing one encounters in the Oriental lands is nothing but false.6 While Beatrice’s independent decision subverts a com­mon fantasy of the West about the African women, by replac­ing the men folk from the centre stage in the naming ceremony of Elewa’s daughter, she takes another important step to mark the emancipation of the African women. The naming ceremony among the Igbo is a ritual which is generally conducted by the father of the child or any elder male member of the family. But after Elewa’s daughter is born, Beatrice arranges for the naming ceremony, in the ‘company of a few friends’, on ‘the seventh market as tradition prescribed’ (Achebe Anthills of the Savannah: 208). And during the ritual, Beatrice, in the absence of the child’s father and any other elder male member in the family, picks up ‘the tiny bundle from its cot’ and says, ‘Name this child … We shall call this child AMAECHINA: May-the-path-never-close’ (213). To this, Elewa says, ‘[b]ut that’s a boy’s name’, Beatrice replies, ‘No matter … It’s a beautiful name. The Path of Ikem’ (213). By giving Elewa’s daughter a name which traditionally is given to a boy so that the father’s lineage continues through the new-born, Achebe reminds his readers about an important fact of the traditional culture which is beautifully put forward by Maria Rojas. She notes that the ‘absence of gender in the pronouns of many African languages and the inter-changeability of first names among females and males’ (Rojas ‘Women in Pre-Colonial Nigeria’) is quite common. Hence, by allowing Beatrice to give a boy’s name to Elewa’s daughter, Achebe

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not only liberates the African women from the age-old picture of the ‘beasts of burden’ and the ‘hewers of wood’, but also places them on the same plane as that of the African men.

NOTES 1 Emenyonu, Ernest N., personal interview, 4 June 2015. 2 In Theorizing Patriarchy, Sylvia Walby defines patriarchy as ‘a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate and exploit women’ (20). Suranjita Ray points out that ‘nature of control and subjugation of women varies from one society to other as it differs due to the differences in class, caste, religion, region, ethnicity and the socio-cultural practices’ (‘Understanding Patriarchy’). 3 ‘In Africa there are the Luapula in Zambia, the Ashanti and the Akan in Ghana, the Ila in Zimbabwe, the Yoruba and the Bidjogo in West Africa; numerous matriarchal peoples. In the north there are the Tuareg people and the Kabylei and the Sudan’ (MatriArchiv. ‘Matriarchal Societies’). 4 This and all other quotations from Things Fall Apart are from the 1996 edition of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart published by Heinemann Educational Publishers. 5 Among the various taboos discussed in Things Fall Apart, a novel set in a traditional Igbo society before the arrival of the colonizers, Achebe discusses the taboo of the twin babies who were abandoned in the Evil Forest, soon after their birth. 6 Edward Said refers to this in Orientalism (166-7).

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Pub­ lishers, 1996 [1958]. ——No Longer at Ease. South Africa: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1960. ——Arrow of God. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1974 [1964]. ——Anthills of the Savannah. London: Penguin Books, 1987. ——A Man of the People. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. Bellalouna, Elizabeth, Michael L. LaBlanc and Ira Mark Milne, eds. Literature of Developing Nations for Students. 2 vols. Detroit, MI: Gale Group, 2000. Booker, Keith M, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Bussey, Jennifer. ‘Anthills of the Savannah’. Bellalouna, et al., 2000. Emenyonu, Ernest N. Personal Interview. 4 June 2015. Isiramen, Celestina Omoso. ‘Women in Nigeria: Religion, Culture, and AIDS’.

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International Humanist News, November, 2003.4. Iyam, David Uru. Matriarchy and Power in Africa: Aneji Eko. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Klein, Herbert G. ‘A Question of Honour: De/constructing Male Identities in Chinua Achebe’s Tetralogy’. EESE No. 5 (2007). 3 September 2009. http:// webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic27/klein03/05_2007.html. Kolawole, Mary E. Modupe. Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997. Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson: MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. MatriArchiv. ‘Matriarchal Societies’. www.matriarchiv.info/?page_id=34& lang=en from Heide Göttner-Abendroth: Das Matriarchat II. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1991, 2000. Mezu, Rose Ure. ‘Womanhood: The European Concept v. the African’. Womanist Theory and Research. Summer/Spring 1995. ——Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works. London: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd., 2006. Mukherjee, Kalapi Sen. ‘Three Faces of the “Second Sex”: A Study of the Women Characters in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People’. International Perspectives Vol. 2. No. 2 (2008): 100-107. ——‘From Subordination to Emancipation: A Study of the “Second Sex” in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease’. Perspectives: An Anthology of Critical Essays on Chinua Achebe. Kolkata: The Book World, 2009. Nwagbara, Uzoechi. ‘Changing the Canon: Chinua Achebe’s Women in Public Sphere and the Politics of Inclusion in Nigeria’. Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 11. No. 2 (November 2009). Ozo-Eson, Philomena. ‘Political Empowerment of Women: Prospects and Limitations’. Journal of Women in Academics (JOWACS) Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002): 109-28. Qualls, Alyssa. ‘Women in Nigeria Today’. African Postcolonial Literature in English in the Postcolonial Web. www.postcolonialweb.org/nigeria/ contwomen.html. Ray, Suranjita. ‘Understanding Patriarchy’. Foundation Course: Human Rights, Gender & Environment, University of Delhi: . www.du.ac.in. Rojas, Maria. ‘Women in Pre-Colonial Nigeria’. English 32, 1990. African Postcolonial Literature in English in the Postcolonial Web. www.scholars. nus.edu.sg/post/nigeria/pre-colonwom.html. ——‘Women in Colonial Nigeria’. English 32, 1990. African Postcolonial Literature in English in the Postcolonial Web. www.postcolonialweb.org/ nigeria/colonwom.html. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1995. Uchendu, P.K. Education and the Changing Economic Role of Nigerian Women. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1994. Walby, Sylvia. Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

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The Concept, Challenges & Consequences of Ukhule, in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift INIOBONG I. UKO

Promise me to live … Live to a ripe old age … Don’t die a stupid death … Live till every hair on your head turns grey. Earn your wrinkles and … enjoy them! Enjoy every wrinkle and every grey on your head. Tell yourself you have survived! Survived! … Live! … Don’t die (Beauty’s Gift: 74).

Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift is a gripping story that jux­ta­poses the essence and preservation of life and the vicissitudes of life in the modern South African culture. Pub­lished in 2008, this novel expounds the tragic experiences of the people in a typical South African community that is ravaged by the dreaded Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the actual Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It highlights the seeming insensitivity of the government, the hopeless drifting of the youth, the steady elimination of people by, and the gloomy impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on families, the educational system, the church, marriages, the future of the community, etc. Through this novel, Magona responds to the very pressing problem of HIV in South Africa. For the sake of clarification, Rebecca Hodes highlights that AIDS is the term for the condition caused by the advancement of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which weakens the human immune system and harms the body’s ability to recover from illnesses. In the four decades since its emergence, science has made rapid advancement in understanding and treating HIV. By 1983, the virus had been isolated, and its modes of transmission were clearly established: principally through unprotected sex, from mother to the child in her uterus or through breastfeeding, and from needle sharing in intravenous drug use (‘HIV/AIDS in South Africa’). Kylie Thomas in ‘Photographic Images, HIV/AIDS and Shifting Subjectivities in South Africa’ explains that South Africa’s first cases of HIV were reported in 1982, at a time of increased militarization and repression by the apartheid state. It was only in 1985 that the Department of Health launched its first 36

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HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. The campaign’s use of coffins and skeletons conveyed nebulous, doom-laden messages about HIV, rather than conveying clear messages about the modes of HIV transmission, prompted panic and paranoia (356). Eleanor Preston-Whyte argues that with the ‘taboos against talking about sex … it [was] difficult for leading political figures, among them President Nelson Mandela, to address HIV in public’ (‘Contexts of Vulnerability, Sex, Secrecy and HIV/AIDS’: 90). These set the context for Magona’s novel under study. Generally, Magona places women at the epicentre of the various forms of devastation, plundering, cheating and losses in the society – women as mothers and grandmothers, wives, sisters, school girls and unmarried young ladies. Their experiences transcend educational status, exposure to modern trends, fidelity in marriage, career, loving and being loved, etc. This study examines the interface of patriarchy, the promiscuity among men and the threat on women. In other words, this paper emphasizes on the one hand, women as victims of male salaciousness, and on the other hand, women’s efforts to surmount the victimhood status, and have distinct identities from those of their men, to strive to live full rounded and credible lives with or without male partners, to accentuate and or reverse certain assumed notions of gender relations, including the following: • In the novel, as Amanda discovers that her doting hus­band, Zakes, has sired two children outside their marriage, and gets angry with him, she reminds him: A long time ago, I told you I didn’t marry you to be your slave … You understood that. But I should have told you [also] that I didn’t marry you for you to kill me. […] That thing dangling between your legs, if or when you poke it into any hole that lets you in, it may come out of there wearing death, spitting disease … Disease that could kill me. (148)

• As Zakes’ imperceptive sisters persuade Amanda to for­give Zakes and continue with the marriage, they explain to her that: Marriage is enduring … a woman sticks it out the best she knows how, that is what we do. That is what our mothers, and their mothers before them, did. Stick it out. That is tradition. (151)

The above assertions evidently reveal the dialectics of life as under­ stood by Amanda (representing her friends) on one side, and by other people, on the other. The state­ments also postulate the validity of

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Ukhule, Beauty’s birthday wish for her friend, Amanda, as well as her last wish to her friends. Though Ukhule is a single word, it offers a set of inter­con­nected and complex meanings and connotations. Ukhule is expressed by Beauty as her wish for Amanda at the latter’s thirty-fifth birthday luncheon on 3 August, 2002 at the Town House Restaurant, Cape Town in the company of all the FFF sisters. FFF is the acronym for Five Firm Friends, comprising Amanda, Beauty, Cordelia, Doris and Edith, who are in their early to mid-thirties. Each of the friends has a wish for Amanda: while Cordelia wishes Amanda happiness, Doris wishes her (good) health and wealth. Edith declares that Amanda should not take a faulty step. If she does, may she swiftly find her way back to her true path. Then Beauty captures her wish in the succinct Ukhule! … May you grow old! By implication, Ukhule implores the woman to live long and grow old, earn wrinkles and enjoy greyness, see and play with her grandchildren, and not be a victim of HIV/AIDS through the lasciviousness of her husband or male partner. The novel portrays Beauty, a high school teacher and member of the FFF, who is married to Hamilton, a well-built, wealthy and handsome womanizer, assumed to have infected Beauty with HIV. Amanda, who was the chief bridesmaid at their wedding, recounts how she loved and respected Hamilton as her best friend’s husband. But she developed a deep resentment for him when she realized he was cheating on his wife. Despite Beauty’s devotion to Hamilton as a wife, she happens to be the lamb that is sacrificed at the altar of Hamilton’s unfaithfulness to her. Thus, she suffers the triple jeopardy of not enjoying a life of comfort and affluence, suffering through a very painful and reproachful illness and then dying a scandalous death. The central irony in the concept of Ukhule is that the woman must be conscious that she has only one life, and so she must learn to value and protect it as much as possible. She must not waste her life in a bid to present a good-wife image to the world. In Beauty’s circumstance, at her death, Hamilton looks his best in a beige silk suit and brown suede shoes, and offers an affectionate funeral oration in honour of his wife, which Beauty’s friends regard as conceited and hypocritical. He also invests heavily in Beauty’s burial by providing a dazzling ivory casket with gleaming gold handles – top of the range. The hearse was a white Mercedez-Benz limousine, and behind it, family and close family friends followed in a gleaming fleet of ten white Mercedez-Benz cars. But not one of Beauty’s friends was in those cars. They remembered how tight-fisted Hamilton had been with her …

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[and] how eventually Beauty had learnt to do without his money. And so they bluntly refused to ride in the convoy. Instead, they had all piled into Cordelia’s white BMW. (19)

The rebellion by Beauty’s friends against Hamilton is significant within the purview of Ukhule. That he is Beauty’s survivor after he caused her the gruesome death is an aberration of the essence of Ukhule, which is the ideal that she hands over on her death bed to her friends. By causing Beauty’s death, he robs their son of the mother’s nurture, which no surrogate mother can provide him. Ukhule is a consciousness-raising phenomenon. It resonates in Mrs Mazwi’s speech at the funeral of Lungile Sonti, the twin who dies of AIDS the very day his twin brother, who also died of AIDS, is buried, and both of them are teachers who were taught by Mrs Mazwi, now retired. When she requires ‘hands up, all those who have no illegitimate children in their families’ (84), and there is no hand raised, it signifies the extent of depravity in the community. She compares the HIV/AIDS genocide with the debilitating apartheid system against which South Africans fought with their blood. But Mrs Mazwi laments the inattentiveness of the post-apartheid government to the dreadful HIV/AIDS scourge. Based on these, she entreats that: we are, fortunately, not doomed to die. Don’t let sex kill you. Use condoms. Stay faithful. Test and test again … early detection is the best medicine … there is no stigma to fighting to stay alive. There is no stigma to illness. If you’re ill, you’re ill, not dirty … in our homes, let us talk to our children about sex. (85)

Mrs Mazwi describes HIV/AIDS as the disease of the youth, and implores the youth to regard it as the challenge of their generation and a ‘call to higher duty’ (84). Essentially, Mrs Mazwi’s exposé emphasizes the challenge conceived in Ukhule. The concept queries the reversal of roles as Mamkwayi, Beauty’s mother is the one that nurses Beauty through the excruciating terminal stages of AIDS, dresses the sores, feeds her and generally watches her die in stages. Ukhule condemns the death of the Sonti twin brothers from AIDS, and many other deaths in the community. As a way out, Ukhule urges testing and re-testing to determine status. It discourages baseless trusting between spouses, and creates a midway platform through the use of condoms by those who are not willing to undergo tests. The four ladies, Amanda, Cordelia, Doris and Edith resolve to face the challenges of Ukhule: they plan to suspend sex with their men

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till the men get tested for HIV. This is how they would truly show appreciation to Beauty for her love for them till her very end because as Edith surmises, ‘in the midst of her own suffering, Beauty found the courage to speak up so as to save them from a similar fate. And that is grace’ (75). However, if any of their men would refuse to undergo the HIV test, then the lady involved should insist on the use of condoms. If that option is also not accepted, then sex should be suspended. The ladies disclose their knowledge of the recklessness of the men around them: Cordelia narrates, ‘one of my own brothers has thirteen children. Thirteen! From five or six different women. I lost count in the end. And this man is supposed to be happily married’ (77). Amanda notes that her two younger brothers, Mandla and Luntu have ‘twenty-one children between the two of them and only three of those with their wives’ (77). Currently, Luntu has got another girl pregnant and Silhe, his wife, informed Amanda that the girl, being a school girl who wishes to resume school, had brought the baby and dumped it at Luntu’s house and left. The baby would be a month old the next day. Silhe has had to take the baby and care for it to save her husband from the court order of child support. Cordelia admits that her husband, Vuyo, is not loyal to her. The ladies reflect on what transpired at the reading club, and Beauty’s revolt against the opinion that ‘death is the mother of beauty’ (85). They find Beauty’s revolution significant in the challenge of Ukhule because on the contrary, life should be the mother of beauty so that people may admire and appreciate it. After all, beauty in death is total futility. This is ironic because Beauty actually dies with all the virtues she epitomizes, while Hamilton remains alive. By this reversal, Cordelia explains that ‘African mothers, faithfully married women, are killed by men who will not stop sleeping around’ (70), and for African women to guard themselves from that fate, they must be conscious that only a fool goes to bed with the enemy – an armed enemy, at that. What do you think the black man’s penis is? I’ll tell you what it is. It is a deadly weapon! … And unless something drastic happened to their attitude, they were all walking corpses. (71)

These are the dynamics that underlie the challenges of Ukhule as the four friends determine to fight to stay alive till old age, for, as Amanda states, ‘Beauty would not want us to be sad, she would want us to fight to live, to fight for our lives. And I think that together, supporting each other, we can make it’ (78). Each member of FFF introduces to her man the idea of testing, and

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except for Doris, each man resists. Doris’ case is different because she and Selby have applied for a loan from the bank, and the bank requires to know their status to ensure that ‘they were lending their money to people who’d be around for a while – alive and able to pay them back’ (91). For Cordelia who asks her husband, Vuyo, to undergo the test or use condoms, Vuyo who was hardly a faithful husband, first goes to get a ‘one-night thing’ (90), and admits to it. And she recounts, ‘when I told him I was going to do the same, he threatened to kill me’ (90), and he actually batters her, leaving her with a swollen shut left eye. Vuyo ultimately leaves the marriage and moves out of the house, abandoning their children, Vuyiswa and Vuyisile, 10 and 12 years respectively. Patricia Robinson notes that abandonment is an ugly form of male oppression. When a male deserts his wife and children … the abandoned wife and children struggle through public welfare to make ends meet (‘Poor Black Women’: 209). Edith’s efforts to effectively utilize Beauty’s gift generate turmoil in her marriage with Luvo. He does not speak with her, and then accuses her of disloyalty. They both try to manage the tension between them, but it directly affects their children’s performances in school. However, Luvo can bear it no longer. He forces her, as the narrator discloses: Edith wriggled, pushing Luvo off and away. However, although seemingly the lighter of the two, he was much, much stronger … For a while, the struggle was desperate, both heaving and gasping, and hoarsely urging the other to ‘STOP!’ When she finally understood that he would not stop, she went into passive-resistance mode. She lay there like a log and let him do whatever. (171)

After Luvo succeeds in raping Edith, he indicts her of making him ‘sleep with a cold, dead fish!’ (171). Both the sexual and verbal abuses render Edith angry and humil­iated. Of all the friends’ encounters, Amanda’s experience with Zakes seems the most complex in the attempt to apply Beauty’s gift. Zakes’ refusal to go for an HIV test results in a cold war between them, but Amanda succeeds in seducing him: sets the house, particularly their room, with flowers and sweet scents, and prepares herself to capture a sexy ambience. She lures him on, but declines sex with him since the test is still outstanding. She then suggests they have a play-sex. Sadly, ‘his need was driving him out of his mind. He pleaded, he scolded, he cried. But Amanda would go only as far as Amanda would go’ (121), and Zakes promises her he would go for the test the next day. However, Amanda gets to know, rather fortuitously, from Silhe, her

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brother’s wife, that Zakes has sired two children outside their marriage. She feels shocked, disappointed, betrayed and humiliated. Zakes is too scared to return home. Amanda feels particularly hurt as she realizes that her mother and several other family members have known about Zakes’ misdemeanours. She is devastated ‘that people she loved had colluded with Zakes to make a fool of her. Protecting her, they called it, but for her this betrayal just added to her sorrow’ (135). Amanda’s puzzle is captured in questions: Why did men seem to think that telling a woman they loved her gave them the permission to do whatever they liked, irrespective of the consequences? Did they think that love miraculously protected both of them from infection? [And to Zakes] Can your love keep me safe from harm? Can your love cure me of disease, save my life, should you infect me with HIV? (147)

The above queries pitch Amanda from her mother and others who concealed that information from her. For her mother, ‘women simply endured the vagaries of married life – and did so with their mouths shut and smiles painted on their faces. Men were men and would do what men had always done, since the beginning of time’ (125). Amanda declares to Zakes’ sisters that she has forgiven Zakes, ‘but the marriage is dead’ (150). This earns her condemnation for not regarding the development as a mere mistake, to which every person is susceptible. It was apparent to Amanda that Zakes’ sisters ‘expected her, like them, to endure, to suffer, to remain married to Zakes. That was the respectable thing to do’ (151). She also perceives Zakes’ mother’s denunciation of her reaction: So what if Zakes had six children outside their marriage? Was he the first man to do that? Was he the last? Was this a story the world had not ever heard before? No. So why did she want to put his name in the history books? Aargh, these women of today … and they call themselves wives! (152)

The roles of these women generate pity from Amanda who is also sad to realize that women themselves have become members of the abusive and oppressive serfdom. She informs them that she is not looking for a man, but looking to save her life. This overt demonstration of androcentrism is what Ukhule condemns. Androcentrism, being the privileging of males, and the promotion of male interests, male perspectives, male experiences, which leads to the definition of the woman as the other (Sandra Bem The Lenses of Gender: 73), is the very principle that Ukhule seeks to reverse. Zakes stays away from Amanda

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and their home, and then takes to drinking. He must have been drunk while walking along the streets and gets knocked down by a hit-andrun driver. Of course, his family members all blame Amanda for the death, but she disregards them. Consequent upon all the developments around the four ladies, they seek to start life anew, and put behind them the weight of all their experiences of hurt, betrayal, disappointment, etc. They decide to move from Cape Town to another location for some time. Significantly, by refusing to sleep with their men except they get tested for HIV or use condoms, they demonstrate female individuality and a deep resolve to live. They recognize the authenticity of the Kantian thesis which states that ‘The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desire’ (46). Being aware of the repressive and manipulative objectives of their liaison with their men, they determine not to be subject to them, but try to evolve a redemptive template for themselves. Within this framework lies the essence of their moving to a new location to reconfigure their lives within the framework of Ukhule. The four friends rebel against marriage becoming, as Juliana Daniels describes, a clandestine cover for the exploitation of the African woman, making the scourge of oppression rather seemingly invisible, especially since the very practices in society that fan the act of female abuse are concealed under a pile of ignorance (‘Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in African Women’s Writings’: 23). Essentially, the solidarity among the four friends has endured throughout all that they have passed through individually and collectively. It has energized them to hold on to Beauty’s gift. As they go away from their men and families to have some private time, they symbolically create a pedestal to scrupulously examine the issues of female objectification that seem to confront all of them in different forms, and be wholly sensitive and committed to the cultural, historical and psychological impulses that operate tangentially to the welfare and interests of women. They also display the recognition that ‘for a woman to define her being requires an existential understanding of what she is in relation to her environment and culture which entails freedom of choice and action’ (Ogungbemi ‘African Women at the Receiving End’: 12). Ukhule, Beauty’s gift, symbolizes a spirit that instils awareness, strength, drive and resolve into women who are facing diverse forms and degrees of abuse, intimidation, cheating, etc. in any nature

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of relationship with men. It inspires women to call into question oppressive trends, practices and ideas that they had hitherto accepted, or not noticed at all. Ukhule urges women to do anything possible and necessary to live, and not die. It produces strong women who speak up, who do not fear if they violate the norm as a means of preserving their lives, who declare as Amanda does, ‘I am starting a new tradition … Children should all have fathers as well as mothers. I am angry that my husband has children he does not put to bed at night or comfort when they have a bad dream. I cannot respect a man who sows his seed as though it were not his blood, a man who sires children but is not there to father them.’ (155)

The spirit of Ukhule enables women to surmount the anachronistic fixation of the female as the scum of the earth, and then to repeal that stereotype, as does Amanda when she says ‘men who father children they fail to nurture are the scum of the earth’ (136), and in refusing to embark on a ‘mop-up operation for Zakes’ so-called mistake. By insisting on their men undergoing the HIV test or using condoms before engaging in sex, each of the FFF sisters displays the modicum of personal identity, integrity as well as desire to live long and credible lives till old age. Their actions resonate Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that nature does not define who a woman is, that ‘it is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life’ (The Second Sex: 69). Thus, it is consistent that the society criticizes their ideas as abhorrent, and denounces their actions as aberrations because the social system they belong to regards women not as subjects, but as abstractions and vignettes that attain conscientization only through their relationships with men, to whom they should be eternally grateful. Ukhule, therefore, assumes a meta-ideological status in the South African feminist discourse because feminine psycho-social re-engineering seems to be dependent on external mechanisms that appear to be far-fetched. This is truly unlike what obtained during the fight against apartheid in the same community among the same people. In conclusion, Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift is on the one hand, a subtle interpellation vituperating the reckless proclivity of men, the fatal consequences of which descend on women, and, on the other hand, a lambasting of the government for the ineffective handling of the issues of HIV/AIDS scourge in modern South Africa. The novel also addresses the socio-political and economic realities of contemporary South Africa within the context of a globalized world. It focuses on

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one major aspect of the vestiges of post-apartheid challenges of the people, especially with a government that is largely unresponsive to the daily problems of the people. As the Four Firm Friends face the challenges of making use of Beauty’s gift, they validate Rose Acholonu’s assertion that ‘a … woman abandoned by her husband cannot afford to abandon herself, because self-abandonment is the worst calamity to befall … a woman’ (‘The Loving Wives of Mariama Bâ: Victims of Doomed Illusions’: 207). Indeed, the raison d’être of Ukhule is to negate the trend of sexual objectification which intersects male domination and female acquiescence in many African cultures. The motif of Ukhule in Magona’s Beauty’s Gift, which signifies the pursuit of life, corresponds with the style used by Magona. The complexity of life is clearly reflected in the intricacy of style. The novel deploys the diary model: many of the chapters have as headings the day, date and locations of the activities portrayed. Few chapters specify the period of the day – afternoon, night – while others indicate just the location, yet few have no headings at all. These features combine to give the story a sense of immediacy and a realistic identity because people can easily relate to the designated locations. The intricate plot of Magona’s Beauty’s Gift directly signifies the complicated consequences of the ravaging HIV/AIDS plague on every facet of life in the South Africa of Magona’s novel. The novel begins with the funeral ceremony in honour of Beauty in the morning of 28 September 2002 at Cemetery NY5, Gugulethu. Chapter 3 makes use of the flashback technique to recount Amanda’s thirty-fifth birthday luncheon party on Saturday, 3 August 2002 at the Town House Restaurant, Cape Town. Beauty is depicted at that party as an active member of the FFF. The thirty-one chapters of the novel move back and forth portraying different aspects of the realities of the community, and the FFF sisters as they all interconnect with the principle of Ukhule. The convoluted plot symbolizes the diverse factors that threaten the people’s, especially the women’s, daily lives. But through Ukhule, the women are made to realize that: God knew the African woman was going to have a very very hard life. That is why He gave her skin as tough as Mother Earth herself. He gave her that tough, timeless skin so that her woes would not be written all over her face, so that her face would not be a map to her torn and tattered heart. (9)

That is the nature of the skin that Beauty’s mother, Mamkwayi has. That is the skin of any woman who can look her licentious man in the

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face and tell him that the relationship is over, instead of staying in it only to be infected and sent to an early grave, and thus render Ukhule, Beauty’s gift ineffectual. Finally, Magona’s Beauty’s Gift is a carefully crafted synthesis of the different schisms that afflict the society and generate tension, apprehension and hopelessness in the post-apartheid South African society. The language is very lyrical prose that reflects meanings – directly or implied – even where expressions are retained in the author’s native language. Margaret Daymond in ‘Sindiwe Magona: Writing Remembering, Selfhood, and Community in Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night’ explains that Magona ‘gives particular attention to the place of storytelling in her upbringing. Her delight in it, and her grasp of the underlying structures of folk tales as well as their social functioning … shape all of her own writing’ (220). The novel explicitly and polemically engages with urgent sociopolitical issues that have both local and global reverberations. It opens up a vista of curious questions about leadership, gender relations, public enlightenment, discipline, parental responsibilities/obligations and control, female solidarity and bonding, and family cohesion, as well as youth education and empowerment. It also evolves an authentic template by which women obtain the impetus to live, to seek to live, whether in marriage or not, and to make their lives meaningful to themselves, even if not to other people. This template is Beauty’s gift to her four friends, and to all women in beleaguered situations. Its essence is encapsulated in Ukhule. The four FFF sisters constitute the model of the future South African women. They are at variance with all the other faceless female characters in the novel that are cast as samples of uniformity and repression, who also represent Spivak’s subaltern subjects that cannot speak or represent themselves (‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’). Herein lies the validity of the woman as an effectual and independent entity that is complete, critical and able to contribute to the society and family beyond her nurturing roles.

WORKS CITED Acholonu, Rose. ‘The Loving Wives of Mariama Bâ: Victims of Doomed Illusions’. In Feminism in African Literature: Essays on Criticism, ed. Helen Chukwuma. Enugu: New Generation Books, 1994: 199-214. Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Daniels, Juliana. ‘Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in African Women’s

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Ukhule in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift  47  Writings: A Textual Study of Literary Works by Female African Writers’. In Literary Crossroads: An International Exploration of Women, Gender and Otherhood, eds Blessing Diala-Ogamba and Elaine Sykes. Maryland: Lexing­ton Books, 2015: 11-24. Daymond, Margaret J. ‘Sindiwe Magona: Writing Remembering, Selfhood, and Community in Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night’. In Twelve Best Books by African Women: Critical Readings, eds Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009: 220-44. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Penguin, 1987 edition. Hodes, Rebecca. ‘HIV/AIDS in South Africa’. Oxford Encyclopedia of African History. http://africanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/ 10.1093/acrefore/ 9780 190277734.001.0001/acrefore-97801902 77734-e-299. Accessed 10 September 2018. Magona. Sindiwe. Beauty’s Gift. Cape Town, South Africa: Kwela Books, 2008. Ogungbemi, Segun. ‘African Women at the Receiving End’. In Beyond Tradition: African Women and Cultural Spaces, eds Toyin Falola and S.U. Fwatshak. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011: 3-16. Preston-Whyte, Eleanor. ‘Contexts of Vulnerability, Sex, Secrecy and HIV/ AIDS’. African Journal of AIDS Research Vol. 2, No. 2 (2002): 89-94. Robinson, Patricia. ‘Poor Black Women’. In Masculine/Feminine Readings in Sexual Mythology and Liberation of Women, eds Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak. New York: Harper & Row, 1969: 191-218. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994: 66-111. Thomas, Kylie. ‘Photographic Images, HIV/AIDS, and Shifting Subjec­tivities’. In HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention, eds Cynthia Pope, Renée White and Robert Malow. New York: Routledge, 2009: 355-7.

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Chimalum Nwankwo & the Poetry of the Aerial Zone MAIK NWOSU

Through five poetry collections – Feet of the Limping Dancers (1987), Toward the Aerial Zone (1988), Voices from Deep Water (1997), The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems (2002) and Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire (2010) – Chimalum Nwankwo charts a visionary course as he foregrounds the art of memory or the dynamic relationship between memory and renewal. Nwankwo describes himself as ‘an Igbo poet writing in English’, but his affective poetic truths are applicable beyond a specific socio-cultural context as part of a human narrative about metaphorical blindness and timeless insight. His second poetry collection, Toward the Aerial Zone, which is the main focus of this essay, particularly accentuates Nwankwo’s poetics. The group of Nigerian poets sometimes referred to as the postCivil War poets – Pol Ndu, Niyi Osundare, Chimalum Nwankwo, Odia Ofeimun and their cohort – aspired, in different ways, to create new poetic visions for a nation (and world) troubled by human disasters caused by multiple factors including colonial reductionism and postcolonial anomie. One of the techniques of the post-Civil War poets was to heighten certain kinds of affective poetic insights. Discussing ‘the Nsukka axis’ (as distinct from ‘the Ibadan axis’) of this group, Funso Aiyejina points out that, ‘as a reaction to the orgy of blood consequent on the massacres and the Civil War’, the poetry of ‘this cluster of poets’ has been ‘threnodic both in tone and content’ (Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alter-Native Tradition’: 115). With his first poetry collection, Feet of the Limping Dancers, published in 1987, Nwankwo signalled his affinity with this group as a culturally conscious universalist who believes in affective poetic truths. Though a self-described ‘Igbo poet writing in English’ (The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems: xii), the truth that he often focuses on – the dynamic relationship between memory and renewal – is applicable beyond a specific socio-cultural context as part of a human narrative about 48

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 metaphorical blindness and timeless insight. The bridging of distance (between is and should, between worlds and temporalities, between speech and song) through memory and vision is a key aspect of Nwankwo’s poetry of the aerial zone, and almost every poem seems to trace a rhetorical path back to the first poem, ‘Bush Dirge’, in his first poetry collection, Feet of the Limping Dancers. In ‘Bush Dirge’, Chimalum Nwankwo provides what may be con­ sidered the notional coordinates for his mapping of both lived and projected experience. The geographic aesthetic implicit in the titular combination of ‘bush’ (location) and ‘dirge’ (atmosphere) gives an immediate sense of the orientation of the poem as a relatively nativist invocation of memory. Many of the thematic features of Nwankwo’s poetry – the focus on the significance of elemental forces (such as fire and thunder), memory, sacrifice or heroism, communalism, ritual, redemption or renewal (‘the aerial zone’), the profundity or mystique of being and the fluidity of existence (such as the interconnection between the living and the dead, the past and the present) – are evident in ‘Bush Dirge’. As a lament, the poem invokes a world diminished by various kinds of conflicts and conquests: ‘our quartermaster is counting our guns / why is our quartermaster counting our guns? / oh a white elephant has smashed through our homestead / ah let a black elephant smash through our homestead’ (1). But the funereal atmosphere does not dispel the boundary-crossing triumphs (physical and metaphysical) that the poem also celebrates or signposts – in such lines as ‘the thunder of the dead above the voice of death’ (1), ‘the living and the dead are sharing memories’ (1) and ‘fire in the hearts of singers fire in our hearts / let all the clan sing together now together’ (3). D.I. Nwoga describes Nwankwo’s poetic insights as tending ‘towards frustration and disillusionment’ but notes that ‘beneath all the wonder and dismay is a firm faith in the near-divine value of the human essence’ (‘Preface’, Feet of the Limping Dancers: v). That ‘essence’ is sometimes manifest in fellow­ship or heroism and the associated memory rituals (such as communal celebrations of kinship or valour). As the poet-persona muses in ‘Fragments’: ‘a poet is the oracle of his people’ (45). Besides its thematic concerns, ‘Bush Dirge’ also exem­pli­fies some of the stylistic devices that constitute Nwankwo’s poetic signature – the creative use of repetitions, questions, apostrophe, rhythm, un/ translated Igbo words and beliefs, poetic density (including metaphor and metonymy), sound-sense synthesis or the sonic amplification of meaning and the antiphonal or call-and-response structure that

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references traditional African oral poetry as an imaginative afflatus in his poetry. ‘Bush Dirge’ begins with a three-line stanza enriched by incremental repetition: ‘silence in the land of the living and dead / silence beyond the seven forests seven rivers / thunder blows from the heart of our silence’ (1). The repetition of ‘silence’ in every line furthers the idea of a particular sonic or subsonic setting, but this is a layered silence that nevertheless signposts metaphysical reality or the world beyond and also a ‘silence’ so immanent with revelation that it is capable of substantial signification (or ‘thunder’). It is a ‘silence’ notable more for its poetic density than its quotidian character. The incremental repetition also enhances musicality. While the notional conjugation of worlds (or the physical and the metaphysical) enlarges the semiotic circumference of the poem, the performative scope is highlighted by the creative use of questions and an antiphonal structure: who will remember the clan’s next hero? the people the people their memories are deathless why shall a song blow for heroes at dusk? their sinews are monuments everlasting fountains how shall we make the next lines of our song? there are no shores in the seas of the soul (2)

The question-and-response technique evokes the collective reck­ oning process being narrated as a memory ritual through which the community re-energizes itself. Nwankwo’s poetry usually ripples with energy, and heroism is an important aspect of that current – the sort of heroism capable of advancing the march toward the aerial zone by transforming lives and broadening boundaries, not the narrow-sighted cult of the individual or the mythic distance of ungrounded legends. Through the five poetry collections, Nwankwo charts a course as a visionary poet. His most recent poetry collection, Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire, furthers the idea of an inspirited universe in which presences (visible and invisible) are both ontological and phenomenological forces. This worldview is also present in some other instances of African poetry, such as Birago Diop’s ‘Breath’: Listen more to things Than to words that are said The water’s voice sings And the flame cries And the wind that brings

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 The woods to sighs Is the breathing of the dead (427)

Nwankwo explains in the preface to Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire: ‘There is a grid being firmed or firmed into place and sustained by what we cannot see and what we cannot know and do not know’ (4-5). Related to this rather panoramic concept of ‘deep shadows’ is the idea of ‘prisons of fire’ – a form of auratic energy or ‘mysterious forces, negative or positive, encasing every being or object in the respective universes of our existence’ (4). Nwankwo’s theory of being and spirit, already evident in ‘Bush Dirge’, is reaffirmed in Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire. The exposition of that theory includes pointers to the profundity of existence as well as an (implicit) interrogation of the ways in which we sometimes ponder or interpret the scope of the universe: God put his hands inside the palm leaves and waves Every day the waves but no one sees the leaves (18) Those who live beyond the deepest shadows Who do not know of the great deep dance The dance of women under the udala tree Do not know the path of sweetest milk (19) I spent one deep night there at Ibo Landing And I heard the old voice of the sea whisper Of the people wailing without graves in the sea Of memories lost over today’s empty dins (35).

The collection also incorporates poetic salutations to contextual luminaries whose lives in various ways concretize the concept of ‘deep shadows’ – such as Fidel Castro, who ‘declared the demons of the people your own demons’ (73); Samora Machel, Julius Nyerere and Thomas Sankara ‘who saw the mirrors behind the gold flakes of smoke’ (75); Christopher Okigbo, ‘[w]arrior poet! / Blessed with the power of the water of Idoto’ (79); and Chinua Achebe, whose ‘orbit is the orbit of all black souls / Scripted on diamonds with the tears of the people’ (182-3). These are some of the historical figurations of the concept of heroism signified or communally celebrated in ‘Bush Dirge’, and in this sense Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire also functions in part as a continuing invocation of memory.

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In the preceding collection, The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems, the central ritual is connected a priori to an empowering mythology. Kwame Appiah argues in In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture that ‘[t]he relation of African writers to the African past is a web of delicate ambiguities’ (76). Nwankwo’s poetic relationship to his Igbo past is often conceptually unambiguous. Nwankwo describes ‘[t]he core of the poetry of The Womb in the Heart’ as ‘an effort to come to terms with life and its unstable beauty in old and new loves, and poke at some facades of the perishable in a human environment full of illusions of an end inside a world without end’ (xiii). This endless world endures through memory – in this instance the poet’s recollection that his mother told him ‘that as teen-agers, periodically, they gathered naked in moonlight and sang and danced for many nights under the sacred udala tree. It was for the spirit children to see their beauty clearly, and choose who will be their mothers in the world’ (11). The poet-persona recalls this ritual under the udala tree not just as a significant memory but also as an absence in a contemporary modernity increasingly disconnected from spirituality or an ancestral relationship with other worlds. One result of this disconnection is the dimming or extinguishing of flames (which in Nwankwo’s poetry often signifies energy or dynamism): The believers are silent Where the moon glowed Over the gonads of gods Under the udala tree The red forge is cold And the harmattan blows Over ashes over eddies Under the udala tree (12)

In the way in which it constructs (and comments on) a ritualized mythology that provides a greater insight into Nwankwo’s poetry of the deep by its concrete conjugation of present and absent worlds, The Womb in the Heart again highlights an aspect of the poetics already evident in ‘Bush Dirge’ and further developed in Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire. This structural connection, regardless of focal differences, is another indicator that, in almost the same manner as incremental repetition is important in Nwankwo’s poetry, his five poetry collections so far function as five stanzas or

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 chapters in one fluid song-narrative that acquires greater notional density as it progresses. Voices from Deep Water, the collection before The Womb in the Heart, begins (in ‘Sounding the Deep’) with a poetic re-enactment of the Igbo creation story about when the world was new and teemed with unexplored meanings or revelations: Eri! Namaku The clouds are pregnant and black They are heavy with the heat of forges They are loaded with dreams of maces They are full with points of spears They are tethered like the millions Waiting at the gates, of spirits And the deep water is shaking With the needle-point of questions Where is the one with the bellows (11)

In recalling the first man (Eri) and the first woman (Namaku), Nwankwo goes back to the origin of human time or experience in an invocation of memory that points up not only what the world was once upon a time but also the path(s) not taken. Instead of a world rich with meaning, human history has been marked by the exaltation of materialism and mediocrity. One historical example is colonialism, which occasioned a chaotic reordering of social meaning: ‘Because of the knights of Lord Lugard / Ofeke dances inside the deep water // Ofeke who cannot read with sunlight / Ofeke is diviner under light of the moon’ (15). The legacy of the colonial administration of Lord Lugard (in Nigeria) includes the emergence of people like Ofeke (the Igbo word for ‘fool’) as knowledge-givers or intermediaries. As V.Y. Mudimbe notes in The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, ‘one could regard the social disintegration of African societies and the growing urban proletariat as results of a destabilization of customary organizations by an incoherent establishment of new social arrangements and institutions’ (4). The ironic image of a fool such as Ofeke dancing ‘inside the deep water’ signifies systemic desecration. But Ofeke is only one instance. In ‘Of the Big Market’, the focus includes market-driven but spiritually vacuous lifestyles: ‘For some who fled the deep water / Mighty gates to paradise / A paradise of blood and gold / In markets pregnant like the moon’ (72). The specific reference is to people who ‘are chieftains in their gaits / But serfs and clowns in their souls’. Voices from Deep Water

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also includes poems dedicated to Flora Nwapa (who ‘could still the water / Streaming from the lake goddess’, 85) and D.I. Nwoga (‘Master of the language of deep nights’, 87), two ‘deep water’ figurations that contrast characters like ‘the knights of Lord Lugard’ and Ofeke. As in other collections, the invocation of memory in Voices from Deep Water utilizes contrast to illustrate conflicting tendencies in an imperfect world, but the unevenness of the contrast (the point of view obviously privileges the Nwapas and the Nwogas as beacons) is in a sense a technique that provides a cognitive map for renewal or a new kind of world. Nwankwo’s poetry in Voices from Deep Water, A Womb in the Heart and Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire is a narrative reflection of ancestral sources as well as an imagistic insight into human existence. Culturally or spiritually charged locations such as ‘deep water’, ‘under the udala tree’ and ‘deepest shadows’ – all of which notably suggest a downward motion or depth – underscore both ancestral relational modes and reimagine contemporary human experience. This tendency to metaphorically emphasize sources and places of spiritual potency and ancestral or human connections is evident right from ‘Bush Dirge’/ Feet of the Limping Dancers in which the gathering at the village square to ‘remember the clan’s next hero’ is a signal bridging of time and experience. The incorporation of the Igbo worldview with regard to human relationships with other humans, the environment and the spirits is also an important part of the poetic structure (regardless of the privatist or esoteric texture of some of the poems in this collection). Some incorporated instances are more sociological or interpretively accessible. In ‘Bush Dirge’, the line ‘cowards … / [with] no plumes on red caps no gleams from golden stools’ (2) references red caps as an indicator of deservedly titled men, plumes or feathers as laurels with which heroes are decorated, and ‘golden stools’ as signifiers of the polished stools that elders sit on in conclave. ‘Blood on stone at night / and the bull-roarer’ (12) ‘dramatically recreate(s) the context of [the traditional] initiation/circumcision [rite]’ which marks the transition from boyhood to manhood – a recreation comparable to Camara Laye’s presentation of the night of Konden Diara in The African Child. Akarachuchu, the nickname of the Sunday school teacher in ‘Sunday Poem’ whose catechism is a monotonous ‘donotdonotdonotdonot’ (27), perhaps represents the village children’s creative application of a line, ‘akala [or ‘amala’] Chukwu du n’aba anyi uno’ (May God’s grace safely take us home), in the song that often signalled the end

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 of Sunday school. This technique of fashioning a character from a song is reminiscent of Okigbo’s creation of the character of Kepkanly (from the ‘kep’ and ‘kanli’ or the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the march-past) in Labyrinths. In ‘First you were Jadum/singing through the streets’ (30), the named character evokes an ubiquitous figure or mad man (whom Okigbo also references in his poem, ‘Heavensgate’, in Labyrinths & Path of Thunder). This character reappears or is named again in Nwankwo’s second poetry collection, Toward the Aerial Zone: ‘Jadum was at all the markets / but he hurt no one’ in ‘Profile’ (12), ‘Between me and Jadum / & the other lost one / So many market places teeming with spirits’ in ‘Salutation’ (2). The ‘other lost one’ possibly refers to Okigbo, who was killed in the Nigerian Civil War and with whom Nwankwo shares a poetic kinship in many of the poems in Feet of the Limping Dancers but without his voice losing its distinctive character. In Toward the Aerial Zone, memory – the remembrance of signal icons and heroes – remains a key factor, but the aspirational motion to bridge or transcend postcolonial anomie is equally important. Unlike other symbolic locations in Nwankwo’s poetry – such as ‘deep water’, ‘under the udala tree’ and ‘deepest shadows’ – the ‘aerial zone’ suggests an upward motion, a luminous zone of well-being and accomplishment that we should aspire toward. Regardless of its relatively more forward-looking perspective, traditional African oral poetry is still the imaginative afflatus in Toward the Aerial Zone. Right from the preface where the poet-persona identifies himself as a singer – ‘As a young lover sings in the morning of first love / So will I sing of you O Zinjanthropus / So will I sing of you at the gathering of all tribes’ (1) – he performs mostly like a modern-day folk minstrel. ‘The artist in the traditional African milieu spoke for and to his community’, Chinweizu and Madubuike have noted. ‘His imagery, themes, symbolisms and forms were drawn from a communally accessible pool. He was heard. He made sense’ (Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics: 241). Writing specifically about the Igbo novel, Ernest Emenyonu also says about the Igbo writer in general: ‘A major source of inspiration and a model for the modern Igbo writer is the Igbo traditional artist who was both a technician and a visionary’ (The Rise of the Igbo Novel: 2). Nwankwo himself has expressed the belief ‘that if Igbo minstrels from Aguata, Idemili, Njikoka and the riverine areas of Aguleri and so forth were to switch to writing in English, their art in their multiple or shifting tones would undoubtedly be close to the form of ‘Salutation’, ‘Profile’, ‘Song of a Thief’ … their material would evoke strange and troubling

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echoes of familiar problems without their dwelling on them, without prescriptions’ (back page). Correspondingly, despite his political and social concerns in Toward the Aerial Zone, Nwankwo often refrains from sloganeering or ideological prescriptions. Instead, the poet-persona notes that ‘[a] comrade is a man who shares my sand with me’ and cautions that there are ‘many many paths toward the aerial zone’ (26). The audience perception or immediacy of the oral performer, who usually has his audience in front of him, is discernible in Nwankwo’s poetry, for example: The petty trader is coming he has raised an army Are you in armour for the burning spear of his bills? The landlords are coming stroking their beards What giant dyke will stop their flood of thugs Turn boys have mustered a union of flames From the cold cold ashes of our dead fires Because there are no blue flames on our high brows And the love for darkness is the love for death (81)

In this excerpt, the poet uses the second person singular pronoun (subjective case) in the second line and the first person plural pronoun (possessive case) in the sixth and seventh lines to create the impression of a direct address to an audience and to identify himself as a member of the community respectively. In some other places, the address is an invitation: ‘Listen to the warriors of the prime past / They are screaming at the deep black night’ (4). Nwankwo also has a predilection for unpunctuated run-on lines that ‘flow’ into one another until the end of a stanza where we may or may not encounter a stoppage. This technique furthers the fluid quality of urgency suggested by the throbbing rhythm of the poet’s performance as a private/public voice interrogating the state of progress of the journey toward the aerial zone – ‘the zone of bright lights’ (52). The main question is: what are the factors that have hampered the march toward true national independence and development? The same question had previously been posed and answered in Nwankwo’s play, The Trumpet Parable: ‘Very well … listen’, says the Singer in that play, ‘we all know the problems: tribes, bridges, colors, shades, languages, bad roads, senility, dependence on the sky, trumpets, traitors, betrayals, generation gaps, duplicity, hunger, dogma, romanticism, catalepsis’. The inclusion of ‘dependence on the sky’ – as distinct from marching toward the aerial zone – is interesting for its modal differentiation. Toward the Aerial Zone registers as a long song in five movements

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 entitled ‘Preamble’, ‘Spur’, ‘Peak Song’, ‘Light Songs’ and ‘Final Corner’. ‘Preamble’ is a sort of prologue in which we are introduced to the dramatis personae: the gobbler-king (Obiako Nchoncho), the poetpersona’s guardian spirit, the alien king, the general and his guns, and others. In ‘Spur’, the momentum increases, reaching a climax in ‘Peak Song’ where the poet extends the horizon of his concern to include the plight and heroism of the children of Azania (South Africa). In ‘Light Songs’, the poet’s song is of exemplary zones of light – examples that indicate that the age of marvels belongs both to the past and the present. The poet-persona notes in ‘Bird Song’: ‘below the hardness / Of mountains / And beneath the tempests / Of oceans / & in the sky above us / Marvels still endure’ (65). ‘Final Corner’ is more or less a postscript. In the last segment of the last poem, the poet-persona notes some of the changes necessary before we will be able to dance at the aerial zone ‘with the crowns of fire’, one of which is the burning (by the old tapers of the ivory tower) of all the books ‘[w]here the general scored his song of manhood’ (82). The structure of Toward the Aerial Zone can thus be described as a ritual ‘triangle’ premised on the possibility of arriving at the aerial zone through vision and discipline (or sacrifice). In ‘Preamble’, we behold a land in the grip of (a) fiery native demon(s). By the time we get to the end of the second section, however, we encounter a mental attitude capable of facilitating significant changes – a prelude to a revolution. The last stanza of the last poem in this section predicts: ‘The horizon will soon break in a fanfare of plumes / After the great great noon of red red fires’ (55). In ‘Peak Song’, the poet-persona presents the examples of Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Solomon Mahlangu and others as pointers to the sort of sacrifice necessary for the cleansing of the land and eventual entrance to the age of marvels pictured in ‘Light Songs’. Toward the Aerial Zone encompasses both ‘this dirge of the season / Oh king the people famish oh king’ (29) and a summons to action: ‘Let there now be a thunder festival / When a thousand mouths overleap the rules of men’ (33). This belief in the ability of the human self or consciousness to transcend negating limitations is founded on the traditional Igbo (or African) worldview that ‘if a person says “yes,” his chi [personal god] also says “yes”’. In his study of the ‘chi’ concept, Chinua Achebe points out that Igbos ‘postulate the concept of every man as both a unique creation and the work of a unique creator … And we should naturally expect such a cosmogony to have far-reaching consequences in the psychology and institutions of the people’ (‘“Chi” in Igbo Cosmology’: 70).

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One of the problems hampering the march toward the aerial zone, Nwankwo suggests, is the loss or negation of cultural memory, poetically presented in the image of the imperilled totem (‘The totem our totem our totem is in peril’ 17) and the shameless adulation of alien gods (including the elevation of aliens to the status of gods): ‘But what could be worse than Obiako Nchoncho / Dancing naked before the alien kings / When all his citizens are wet with tears’ (16). The figure of Obiako Nchoncho precedes that of Ofeke in Voices from Deep Water, but both characters are cast in the same mold. Obiako Nchoncho is a recurring character-symbol in Toward the Aerial Zone and is identified in the footnote as ‘a great thief and glutton who pre-dated the mad Jadum in old Aguata/Awka district of Eastern Nigeria’ (12). He contrasts the heroes and visionaries that Nwankwo’s poetry often celebrates and personifies the problems subverting the march toward the aerial zone. He is part of the litany of setbacks that the energizing invocations of memory in Nwankwo’s poetry aim at transcending, the is (or present) that is continually countered with should (or a vision of what should be). Besides Obiako Nchoncho, who wants to be king at all costs so that he can ‘eat all he sees’ (16), there are other anti-heroic figures such as the general who celebrates his manhood by large-scale decimation (including dousing the flames of the ivory tower, thus invoking the poet’s lament: ‘The children laugh at our caps and gowns / Because a paper tiger has no living whiskers’ 80); the robber chieftain who became an emperor and for whom the bishop would do any manner of service (including blessing ‘the stolen gold / Stolen gold for new spires stolen gold for alchemy’ 19); and the king who possesses all shapes and sizes of war drums but beats none despite the despoliation of the land (because he has no regard for himself or the people’s welfare: ‘After the king’s palace, no other roads matter’ 23). Besides its thematic focus, Nwankwo’s stylistic devices in Toward the Aerial Zone highlight his cultural-ideological location. Besides the many incorporated translations of Igbo words and ideas (including an untranslated Igbo proverb, ‘A tuolu omala o mala/A tuolu ofeke o fejilie onu’, in ‘Salutation’ 3), Nwankwo foregrounds such semiotic and numerological indicators as ‘thunder’ and ‘fire’ and the number ‘seven’. Amadioha, the god of thunder, has a position of primacy in the Igbo worldview, including the belief ‘that thunder – egbe igwe – is the messenger of Amadioha, normally sent to destroy people or houses in which evil things are hid[den] or trees under which evil things are buried’ (Okparaocha Mbari: Art as Sacrifice: 42). Thunder in this sense

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 is not a mindlessly destructive force but a corrective one capable of affecting social dynamics. In ‘Bush Dirge’, ‘thunder’ and ‘clamour’ are sometimes used interchangeably: ‘but who can measure the clamour across the rivers? / the people can measure the thunder across the rivers’ (1). In the poem, thunder also references the manifest force or vitality of communal memory: ‘speak again memory: blow with our thunder’ (2). In Toward the Aerial Zone, thunder is similarly presented. It is the apocalyptic sign for hinderers of the march in ‘Woman of Our Dreams’: ‘Let there now be a thunder festival / For our circling vultures need their gory carnival / Lessons for loiterers & indolent wanderers / Who load their wallets with the charlatan gifts’ (33). In ‘Song for a Cenotaph’, ‘thunder[-]driven youths make storm in the streets’ (51), storm being used in this instance to signify resistance to tyranny or oppression. Contextually related to thunder, ‘fire’ symbolizes new life or its catalyst. In ‘Bush Dirge’, there is ‘fire in the hearts of singers [and] fire in our hearts’ and there is the promise or belief: ‘the people the people fire will warm our souls’ (2-3). In Toward the Aerial Zone, fire or light is a recurrent symbol. The collection is in part dedicated to Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto ‘and other fire-bearers’. The last poem in the collection (‘After: For the Burnt Out Tapers in the Ivory Tower’) is a lament for the burnt-out tapers in the ivory tower; nevertheless, these tapers are still ignitable: ‘There is darkness in the land so call the ivory tower / There is famine and drought so call the ivory tower / Our flaming tapers will find the aerial zone’ (77). Elsewhere in the poem, the question is posed: ‘The aerial zone waits with the crowns of fire / But when shall we dance with the crowns of fire’ (81). The movement the poet focuses on in this collection is the march ‘[t]oward the aerial zone the zone of bright light’ (46). And he is optimistic that ‘[w]hatever happens to the dream of the aerial zone / Bonfires will blaze for the light of new dreams’ (23). The symbol of fire contrasts that of darkness, which is associated with incomprehension or incompletion – such as in the concluding chant in ‘Valley of Lost Slaves’: ‘Gold is in darkness toward the aerial zone / Gold is in darkness Gold is in darkness / Who is afraid of memories is afraid of truth/In the restive valley of lost souls’ (45). The connection between memory and truth interpretively illumines the relationship between memory and vision or renewal. Foregrounded in Toward the Aerial Zone is also the number ‘seven’, which in Igbo numerology often signifies transcendence or super­ natural connection. This association apparently derives from the

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metaphysical geography that locates the land of the dead beyond seven lands and seven rivers. These three dominant cultural motifs – thunder, fire and seven – constitute a semiotic triad signifying or amplifying voice, energy and signal in the memory and vision ritual signposted in Toward the Aerial Zone. Nwankwo’s poetics of sound is equally significant. Sound is often consciously utilized to complement or heighten vocal power and in a musical manner that enhances memorability. Nwankwo’s poetic art thus approximates that of the traditional oral poet who had to rely on vocal power and memorability in his role as the communal memory. According to Isidore Okpewho, ‘[o]ne … way in which modern African poets have tried to return to their roots is by echoing the musical basis of the traditional poetry’ (The Heritage of African Poetry: An Anthology of Oral and Written Poetry: 24). Focusing specifically on African-American poetry, Fahamisha Brown describes the sort of poetic technique used as ‘song/talk orality’: ‘First, the poems are songs in their use of sound, language and rhythm. Secondly, song is often the subject of the poetry’ (‘Song/Talk: Orality in African-American Poetry’). As previously noted with reference to ‘Bush Dirge’, Nwankwo’s poetics of sound is manifest in the use of repetition at several levels. Words are deliberately repeated for aural effect in Toward the Aerial Zone: ‘Where the alien kings are great great allies’ in ‘Profile’ (12), ‘The totem the totem the totem is in peril’ in ‘Profile’ (15), ‘Time for the great wake the wake of seven bulls’ in ‘Obituary (For the Boots of Power)’ (72). In ‘Memoriam (For a Patriot Unnamed)’, the line ‘One hundred million loved his works’ is repeated after almost every stanza. The question is implied: Who, then, killed the patriot? Another example is the refrain ‘The general is a man he is now a man’ in ‘After: For the Burnt Out Tapers in the Ivory Tower’ (77-82), which is employed ironically to stress the fact that the socio-economic decline in the state of affairs is in inverse relation to the general’s growth from boyhood to manhood. The phrase that is repeated most is ‘toward the aerial zone’, which the poet uses to point the way forward, to introduce and sustain optimism despite the darkness in the land. Incremental repetition serves to infuse a musical quality and to underline the import of what is repeated: ‘So many market places teeming with spirits / So many market places bristling with signs’ in ‘Salutation’ (2), ‘The robbers at home are growling like lions / The robbers are growling at grumbling robbers’ in ‘The Children Sing’ (28), ‘Time for headlines the tape must roll / Time for parasites hunters of fortune / Time for enemies whom death had cheated’ in ‘Obituary (For

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 the Boots of Power’ (72-3). In ‘Profile’, where the setting is ‘the land where / The indolent neigh like horses’ (14), the coronation scene before the alien king’s banner is captured in these lines: Who does not understand that lavish coronation Impressions impressions impressions impressions The famished understand that lavish coronation Impressions impressions impressions impressions (14)

The quadruple repetition of ‘impressions’ in a single line calls attention to the showiness characteristic of that ‘lavish coronation’. The generation of melody through repetition is one of the five characteristics of Igbo oral poetry identified by R.N. Egudu in ‘The Igbo Experience’ (254). Repetition emphasizes and semiotically transfigures that which is repeated – the melodic power of words in this instance. Kofi Awoonor points out in The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara that ‘[t]he primacy of the word in magic is very much emphasized when one looks closely at [traditional African] religious poetry’ (83). In Nwankwo’s poetry, the primacy of the word (including the way in which strategic repetition boosts the aura or significance of words) is an important – and magical – dimension. As Michael Edwardes has highlighted, [t]he very act of calling a spirit was an aspect of the world-wide belief that sound is power, from the Christian logos, ‘in the beginning was the word’, to om, the Hindu ‘sound of creation’. Sound is the material of spells and incantations in rituals superficially as different as rainmaking ceremonies and the Catholic mass. (The Dark Side of History: Subversive Magic and the Occult Underground: 14)

Nwankwo’s incantatory pattern of repetition highlights the poetic performance in Toward the Aerial Zone as a psycho-spiritual invocation of memory and memory itself – that is, the right sort of memory – as an aspect of the visionary impulse. What is remembered (and how) can shape what is envisioned (and how). Each of Nwankwo’s five poetry collections, from Feet of the Limping Dancers (1987) to Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire (2010), is simultaneously distinctive and related to the other four. While the pivotal symbol in each collection may be different or differently represented, these symbols can also be interpreted as various features of a system of signs that points up Nwankwo’s theory of worlds in relation to human cognition and experience. The trajectory from the village square in ‘Bush Dirge’ / Feet of the Limping Dancers to ‘the

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aerial zone’ in Toward the Aerial Zone, to ‘deep water’ in Voices from Deep Water, to ‘under the udala tree’ in A Womb in the Heart and to ‘the deepest shadows’ in Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire is not a simple linear motion away from a point of departure or toward a destination. Nwankwo interweaves time and experience in a layered exploration of the resources as well as the potentials of memory. Toward the Aerial Zone is particularly notable in this regard as a dirge-like interrogation of the past-present that is also a nuanced projection of an alternative history or future. Thus, Nwankwo’s poetry in some respects exemplifies Abiola Irele’s broad description of the literary themes of Negritude as ‘a countermovement … a symbolic progression from subordination to independence, from alienation – through revolt – to self-affirmation’ (The Negritude Moment: Explora­tions in Francophone African and Caribbean Litera­ture and Thought: 40). The countermovement in this instance is often advanced in a mythopoeic manner, in so far as we contextualize myth as ‘an aesthetic medium for the exploration of large questions about existence’ (Okpewho Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance: 259). As in much of Nwankwo’s poetry, the invocation of a certain kind of memory is dynamically related to the projection or affirmation of vision and renewal, and the poet of the village square is evidently capable of truths that are universal.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. ‘“Chi” in Igbo Cosmology’.In African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006: 67-72. Aiyejina, Funso. ‘Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alter-Native Tradition’. In Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Vol. 1, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Guardian Books, 1988: 112-28. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Awoonor, Kofi. The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara. New York: Nok Publishers, 1975. Brown, Fahamisha Patricia. ‘Song/Talk: Orality in African-American Poetry’. Paper presented at the 9th Ibadan Annual African Literature Conference, 12-15 March 1990. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature Vol. 1: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980. Diop, Birago. ‘Breath’. In African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel

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 Chukwudi Eze. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006: 427-8. Edwardes, Michael. The Dark Side of History: Subversive Magic and the Occult Underground. London: Transworld Publishers, 1980. Egudu, R.N. ‘The Igbo Experience’. In Oral Poetry in Nigeria, eds Uchegbulam Abalogu, Garba Ashiwaju and Regina Amadi-Tshiwala. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981. Emenyonu, Ernest. The Rise of the Igbo Novel. Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1978. Irele, F. Abiola. The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1988. Nwankwo, Chimalum. Feet of the Limping Dancers. Enugu: ABIC Publishers, 1987. ——Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire. New York: African Heritage Press, 2010. ——The Trumpet Parable. Enugu: ABIC Publishers, 1987. ——The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: African Heritage Press, 2002. ——Toward the Aerial Zone. Lagos: Africa Spearpoint Publishers, 1988. ——Voices from Deep Water. Lagos: Malthouse, 1997. Nwoga, D.I. ‘Preface’. Feet of the Limping Dancers. Enugu: ABIC Publishers, 1987. Okigbo, Christopher. Labyrinths & Path of Thunder. London and Ibadan: Heinemann and Mbari Publications, 1971. Okparaocha, John. Mbari: Art as Sacrifice. Ibadan: Daystar Press, 1976. Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ——, ed. The Heritage of African Poetry: An Anthology of Oral and Written Poetry. London: Longman, 1985.

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From Grace Ogot to Yvonne Owuor Fifty Years of Depicting Kenyan Lands & Landscapes NG’ANG’A WAHU-MUCHIRI

Since the mid-1960s, women artists from Kenya have demonstrated sustained interest in depicting land and landscapes. This essay scrutinizes the representation of land and landscape by two Kenyan female writers starting from the early years after independence to the twenty-first century. I argue that, in comparison to earlier fiction, more recent publications by Kenyan female authors often portray landscapes as dynamic and embodied. Grace Ogot’s pioneer text, The Promised Land (1966), represents landscapes as deeply contested and as a communal heirloom. I propose, however, that it is in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014) that we perceive the culmination of land as not only tactile, but also animate. My article dissects Owuor’s portrayal of geographic spaces alongside depictions of terrain by Ogot. First, I stake out my use of two important terms: land and landscape. James Graham’s Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa successfully attends to the inherent tension in competing definitions of the land: land as terrain, versus metaphors of land which suggest identity, belonging and black nationalism. I will expand on his discussion of land and its role in the literary ‘symbolic economy’ (8). My use of the term ‘landscape’ emerges from the seminal essay ‘Landscape in Africa: Process and Vision’ by Ute Luig and Achim von Oppen. In Western thought, Luig and von Oppen (15) identify two primary understandings of the term, one using landscape to refer to spatial units, and the second associating landscape with ways of seeing the natural environment. Per the second definition, they further argue that landscape is best understood as an ongoing praxis – one continuously mediated aesthetically, historically, politically and imaginatively (38). In Landscape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell upends conventional readings (and sightings) of landscapes. Contrary to previous scholarship which thought of landscapes as objects, Mitchell foregrounds, instead, an understanding of landscape as a ‘process by which social and subjective 64

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identities are formed’ (1). He is particularly keen on unveiling landscape as an ‘instrument of cultural power’, especially within the rise of imperialism in the nineteenth century (2). What Mitchell and Luig and von Oppen successfully lay out is that landscape is best understood as cultural, creative and ideological labour, manifest on geographical terrains. Writing about representations of landscape in South African literary and visual arts in the long nineteenth century, J.M. Coetzee zeroes in on the elision of black labour. Afrikaner settlers hyped their husbandry over colonial spaces to justify occupation; since evidence of black labour shaping South African landscapes undermined Afrikaner claims of land ownership, Boer nationalism systematically erased this proof, preferring to highlight landscape instead of land (White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa: 3). Discussions of land and landscape in Kenyan literature are not in themselves new. For instance, Glenn Hooper invokes the colonial landscape, an accurate ‘metaphor for the regimented life of the colony’, while juxtaposing Ngugi’s Petals of Blood alongside Frantz Fanon’s criticism (‘History, Historiography and Self in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood’: 47). However, and for most of his article, Hooper’s focus is on the depiction of land as agricultural resource and land as place of residence, rather than on landscape. As Tirop Simatei cogently argues, colonial relationships to pre-colonial territories were marred by epistemic violence which required the erasure of indigenous knowledge and conceptions of landscapes (‘Colonial Violence, Postcolonial Violations: Violence, Landscape, and Memory in Kenyan Fiction’: 86). To challenge the infrastructures of oppression wrought on particular territories and their inhabitants, Kenyan authors depicted colonizers who imagined this violated land as empty landscape (86). Thus, in Ngugi’s Ilmorog (in Petals of Blood), global capital assails the land in the guise of a trans-continental highway. Local activists, however, reshape the landscape to fulfil the aspirations of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau). Similarly, Dustin Crowley foregrounds how terrains or land in Ngugi’s texts are inherently connected to the global movement of capital and culture (‘“A Universal Garden of Many-Coloured Flowers”: Place and Scale in the Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’). Land is examined here as a political, economic and cultural asset. Overall, Kenyan understandings of landscapes in Ngugi’s writing are dynamic, advancing or withdrawing in relation – or reaction – to inflows and outflows of people, finance, technology and power. In my current discussion, Owuor’s Dust represents a new kind of engagement with land and landscape on the part of Kenyan female

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writers. To investigate her representations of the land as tangible and sentient, I articulate the relative detachment between her novel’s female figures vis-à-vis Kenyan vistas and the Turkana geography. This, I argue, differentiates Owuor from other Kenyan female authors and speaks to the disparity between subordinated persons and the postcolonial African nation-state. Much of the current interest in Owuor’s Dust addresses the psychological makeup of the novel’s characters and the elements that contribute to their sense of place. To this end, Christina Kenny explores recollection, emotions and language as key motifs which underline important thematic concerns such as belonging, homecoming and nationhood. Kenny identifies a fundamental paradox: characters exhibit an ‘insatiable desire for home’ even as they consistently resist ‘borders and nationalist monoculture’ (‘“She is made of and coloured by the earth itself”: Motherhood and Nation in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust’: 4). Tension often follows after characters migrate – either far from Kenya’s metropolis, Nairobi, to Turkana or across the Atlantic to Brazil. Hence, this internal conflict can also be understood as a ‘mobility-induced anxiety about place and about self’ (Knudsen and Rahbek ‘An Afropolitan Literary Aesthetics? Afropolitan Style and Tropes in Recent Diasporic African fiction’: 118). Amy Rushton also attends to journeys away from a character’s natal location; these voyages inspire questions regarding identity, indigeneity and the importance of rigidly holding onto an immutable image of what home should be. Throughout Dust, home is indeed a problematic notion. Home is simultaneously ‘troubled and mutable’ (Rushton ‘No Place Like Home: The Anxiety of Return in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Yvonne Owuor’s Dust’: 52), and also ‘desired yet feared’ (53). Scholars have convincingly argued that Owuor’s protagonists view home from two opposing, perhaps irreconcilable, perspectives. Home is not only a refuge to escape to, but also a danger to escape from (Rushton 50, emphasis added). The inability of characters to lock home into a specific location also tends to unsettle long-held assumptions about human agency. In this respect, West-Pavlov (‘From the Spatial Turn to the Spacetime-Vitalist Turn: Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker and Owuor’s Dust’: 295) has explored the manifestation of a ‘nonhuman agency of timespace’ in Dust. What is especially fruitful in this engagement is a recognition of landscape’s power to influence and indeed manipulate human lives. For West-Pavlov, geographical terrains are not simply passive bystanders bearing the brunt of human intervention, but rather, active participants in the creation of reality. However, scholarly studies on

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Dust have yet to explore the ways in which the landscapes themselves come alive. Despite recognition of ‘elemental substances’ in the text – as for instance, in the descriptions of terrains as dust – there has been no sustained engagement with the animated nature of landscape (Kenny: 6). Before undertaking a more sustained examination of land and landscape in Owuor’s novel, I will first review the portrayal of land in The Promised Land by Grace Ogot. The Promised Land, I argue, deploys folklore to construct narratives of belonging within Kenya’s Luo community. In this novel, the male protagonist, Ochola, learns that Luo farmers are migrating to Tanganyika in search of fresh land, but his wife, Nyapol, remains sceptical. Despite Nyapol’s reluctance, and a family intervention asking him not to leave, Ochola and Nyapol make the journey – first by bus to Kisumu then via ferry across Lake Victoria. Once in Tanganyika, Ochola symbolically claims land using a traditional Luo gesture: a ring of grass with a stone placed on top of it. With time, Ochola’s relations with his Zangazi hosts sour. One villager is particularly bitter that Ochola and other Luos act as though they ‘were born to rule’ (Ogot: 93). Tragedy strikes when Ochola suffers a mental breakdown. He runs off into the bush, only to re-emerge later, his body resembling a porcupine and covered with thorns. Ochola’s mysterious illness defeats not only Magungu, a famous medicine man, but also experts at a colonial hospital. Finally, Magungu returns with oils and ointments which cure Ochola’s skin warts. The price for treatment, however, is that Ochola’s family must vacate their home before dusk. Ochola, incensed at having to leave his wealth behind, has to be physically dragged out; Nyapol is grateful to finally depart from a place harbouring much misfortune. The couple and their children return to Kenya, but without Ochola’s beloved dog. Ogot ends the story asserting that although Ochola’s body returned to his Seme home, his soul was left in Tanganyika (193). Ogot depicts and foregrounds landscapes as entities in their own right. Both men and women repeatedly stand back to admire their surrounding vistas. Luo country is ‘peaceful’, according to Nyapol, or ‘peaceful and undisturbed’, in her husband’s words (22, 42). Abroad, in Tanganyika, Ochola’s surveying eye is exceedingly satisfied by the terrain he has migrated to. The Zangazi countryside is described as fecund, hilly and ‘very beautiful’ (85). Despite these calming reassurances, however, there is something ominous in the background and the text outlines a variety of threats. For instance, there are toxic fungi that Luo toddlers are taught never to pick (22). Aside from a

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hostile ecosystem, the landscapes are steeped in a history of armed skirmishes. In other words, the investment in landscape on Ochola’s part is connected to battles over land as terrain and territory. I argue, then, that landscapes in Ogot’s The Promised Land represent conflict – at a physical and narrative level. Nyapol’s and Ochola’s Luo forefathers gave up their lives to wrestle territory from Nandi pastoralists. In Nyapol’s view, this history makes migration away from home tantamount to sacrilege. According to Luo folklore, the Nandi community was ‘driven away to the mountains’ while Luo victors took over fertile pasture and farmlands (Ogot: 22-3). That numerous war heroes were never properly laid to rest, ‘drowned by the angry river in the depth of the lake’, adds to the cultural angst (23). Evidently, there is deep attachment to the Luo ancestral home, and as the writer demonstrates, this connection has been forged by the blood of conquerors. Thus, although Nyapol sees the country as calm and serene, she also recognizes that it has been inexorably shaped by a history of war. The landscape unfolds to her gaze exactly as it does due to the lives lost, and communally honoured. Ogot recycles this motif of physical conflict, underlining the extent to which violence is a key marker of Luo landscapes. In recent memory, presumably after Ochola’s ancestors had ousted the Nandi, two Luo factions clashed. Gem wanted to ‘drive the people of Seme to the steep hills … But the Seme overpowered the people of Gem and killed many of their great warriors’ (42). Once more, this history of bloodshed is deployed to suggest deeper ties to the land. Hence, Ochola is anxious that his desire to migrate betrays his grandfathers. Eventually, his ambition for fresh farmland and great wealth wins over his cultural obligations to a Luo constellation of heroes. The text does suggest, however, that Ochola and Nyapol must return home – as indeed happens by the end of the novel. Ogot’s use of local mythology not only transmits history, but also signals how violence is embedded at the level of narrative. First, the battles that Nyapol and Ochola narrate re-victimize the Nandis and the Gem, respectively. Each time the story of Luo, and Seme, hegemony is re-told, the communities are that much further removed from peaceful reconciliation. The tales are both memory, and justification, of the wars. Second, this history of conquest fuels future Luo expansionism in Tanganyika. Luo fantasies of unoccupied Zangazi land are in direct conflict with indigenous land rights. Hence, in the last half of The Promised Land, Ogot’s portrayal of landscapes and violence serves as an indictment of settler colonialism. Using communities of Luo

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immigrants and indigenous Tanganyikans – the Zangazis – Ogot stages a conflict about settlement between black Africans that allows the reader to imagine questions of otherness outside the colonial paradigm. She does this to highlight the violence that accompanies settler colonies especially at the outset when justifications for domination are manufactured. Consider, for instance, when Ochola fantasizes about ‘Tanganyika, where the land was fertile [and immigrants] owned large farms of maize and millet, beans and vegetables and were producing quantities of milk and ghee’ (13). Luo migrants are, supposedly, better skilled, better equipped and more motivated than the Zangazi peasants they live amongst. This dichotomy, terribly familiar, is what European settlers deployed when, for instance, they carved out prime East African farmland and demarcated it the White Highlands. Thus, we have to read Ogot with much irony when she writes that Ochola was convinced when Luo migrants ‘said that wide expanses of the land were virgin territory. You could take as many acres as you could cultivate’ (14). Decades before publication of The Promised Land, similar narratives had been employed when discussing many parts of the African continent. Ogot uses disputes over ancestral land ownership – nascent colonial projects – to counter European imperial­ism on the African continent. Her text examines narrative-induced conflicts about land. Competing, and incompatible, folklore about geographical spaces – settlers view the land as empty, autochthons see the same space as their rightful home – leads to physical violence. The Promised Land interrogates contemporary understanding of land rights. On the one hand, communities produce explanations that privilege emptiness and the potential for settler occupation while simultaneously offering tales that foreground communal ownership of ancestral land. Complications arise when competing sets of narratives – from the native versus settler point of view – are applied to the same land/space. How Ochola and his community establish ownership of various spaces, both at home and abroad, invites deeper investigation of land possession. Narrative forms a core mechanism in communal and individual efforts to either disenfranchise others or safeguard one’s land rights. Nyapol, the female protagonist in The Promised Land, stands apart from the landscape; this detachment moulds her in two critical roles. First, as a transmitter of communal lore, Nyapol asks herself ‘[h]ow could anyone think of leaving this land?’ (22, emphasis added). In truth, Nyapol is questioning Ochola’s audacity displayed in his willingness to betray ethnic solidarity; she is positioned as an educator, teaching

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Ochola – and the reader – about Luo heroes. To successfully perform this task, not only must Nyapol be steeped deeply in Luo political history, she must also adopt a stance outside of this chronology. That vantage point enables her to evaluate the merits of Luo mythology – versus the Nandi’s – and the importance of preserving it. Significantly, Nyapol reconciles this pedagogical – and ideological – enigma while still a young bride, and before she becomes a mother. Presumably, what she learns from this experience will add to her repertoire as a motherteacher once she and Ochola have offspring. In the first half of The Promised Land, then, Nyapol supports the inter-generational transfer of ethnic myths. By the end of the novel, however, it is increasingly clear that Nyapol’s relationship to landscape is not merely that of chronicler, but also of dissenter. This emerges as her second posture: participant in Kenya’s post-independence democracy. In the midst of Ochola’s mysterious skin illness, Nyapol demands they move back to Seme, re-establish a home amongst their extended families, and leave a place that has caused them much trouble (175). A little later, when two babies fall ill, Nyapol admonishes Ochola that ‘[a]ll these misfortunes have befallen me because you have refused to return home. How many times have I pleaded with you to let me take the children away from this country back to the land where they belong?’ (178). In Nyapol’s critique of Ochola’s vision for their family’s future, Ogot presents the outlines of a role for female figures in shaping Kenya’s postcolonial project. I read the dissonance between women and landscapes in femaleauthored texts as a metaphor for the power gap between marginalized citizens and postcolonial African nations. In Kenya, for instance, the tastiest fruits of independence (matunda ya Uhuru) were reserved for wealthy, well-connected men who often displayed this largesse by presiding over polygamous households. Women, youths, ethnic minorities and the poor were largely sidelined in the business of running the nation. Nyapol’s actions, just three years after the advent of Kenya’s self-governance, map out future roles for women in the political sphere. Future disciples of Nyapol will not only lead the nation out of political quagmires, they will also engage in strategic thinking to determine the best policies for the nation. Although Nyapol’s character is confined to the home, the disagreement with her husband over their relationship with territory in different places has serious implications for the family’s future. While Ogot portrays Kenyan landscapes as multiply contested, in Yvonne Owuor’s novel, Dust, the landscape is embodied in the lives

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of diverse characters and this in turn serves as a metaphor for the kinds of relationship that differently positioned Kenyan subjects have with the Kenyan nation. In this novel, Owuor is representative of contemporary writers who depict Kenyan landscapes as not only animated, but also dissimilar from the women inhabiting these spaces. Dust starts off as Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda (henceforth referred to as Odidi) re-possessing a vehicle from his former business associate, is shot dead on a Nairobi street. Nyipir Oganda, Odidi’s father, and Ajany Oganda, Odidi’s sister, retrieve his body from the city morgue on the day Kenya erupts into the 2007 post-election unrest. At the same time, a British national, Isaiah Bolton sets out on a journey from England to Wuoth Ogik, the Oganda home, in search of information regarding the whereabouts of his father, Hugh Bolton, who had been a colonial settler in Kenya. Isaiah undertakes this journey even though Selene, his mother, had begged him not to. He had been summoned by Odidi who sent him a book, and a nude painting that the colonial settler Hugh Bolton had done of Akai-ma Lokorijom, Odidi’s mother. The novel ends with love. Akai-ma walks off into the Northern Kenya drylands with a longtime admirer; Nyipir, alongside a man who was once his captor and torturer, embarks on a pilgrimage to Myanmar, where his elder brother and father died in wars fought on behalf of the colonizer. Ajany and Isaiah, now openly in love, form the second generation of Oganda-Bolton family ties. Owuor’s Dust speaks poignantly against the twin shepherding of femininity and ecologies – both perceived by patriarchy as passive and pliable – into the concurrent projects of anti-colonial resistance and post-independence nation building. Dust’s East African setting in general, and Turkana in particular, is long-suffering and enduring. The Turkana vista can be either nurturing or lethal, suggesting a cyclical rhythm in how life unfolds in Northern Kenya. Owuor’s trilogy of female protagonists – Akai-ma, Ajany and Selene Bolton – are depicted as aggressive, fragile or resilient. These multi-dimensional identities are also recognizable in the geographical spaces they occupy. In significant ways, Akai-ma Lokorijom’s character is constructed as non-motherly and gender non-conforming. This is despite Akai imitating patriarchal expectations of femininity through her emotive grieving over Odidi’s death. When her son’s body is returned to Wuoth Ogik, Akai reaches into Odidi’s coffin ‘rocks her son, strokes his face, rocks her son’, mimicking motherly gestures (Owuor: 35). Dust, however, further complicates this maternal figure. Akai-ma wields an AK-47 and threatens to use it on a mourning and clingy

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Ajany – a rather unmotherly act (33). Reaching for the gun is not an impulsive reaction to her son’s tragic death. Akai has a history of carrying things socially reserved for men; previously, she was known to walk with a headrest and a club – items that are largely located within the purview of Turkana masculinity (39). At the same time, she is deeply connected to the land. Her movements seem to flow ‘from the root of the world’, and she is described as ‘made of and coloured by the earth itself’ (33). In her personality, however, she is not just connected to the land, but is, as it were, an extension of the land. Akaima is depicted as ‘ferocious’; randomly, and for no apparent reason, ‘she might erupt with molten-rock fury, belching fire that damaged everything it encountered. Akai was … dark, difficult, and dangerous’ (33). Akai’s most important relationship to the land is not that she is similar to it, but that she moves expansively across it – as a teenager, a student, a lover, a mother of twins and finally as Odidi’s bereaved parent (315, 342, 348, 362). It is meaningful that she embarks on these journeys as an unaccompanied woman, across spaces that witnessed armed violence since the late colonial period. Akai’s physical expeditions invite the reader to reflect on the nation-state’s propensity to circumscribe its subjects. By crisscrossing the landscape, Akai resists multiple borders that limit citizens: national, territorial, cultural, gender, racial or ethnic. Akai’s disregard for propriety – for instance, living as Hugh Bolton’s mistress then reacting with disdain at her parents’ horror – hints at the restrictive nature of social mores. Ajany, Akai’s sole surviving progeny, stands apart from the landscape, perhaps signifying her initial alienation from the Kenyan nation. Ajany is depicted as the prophetic voice whose visions of hope inspire salvation. Despite four live births, Akai has suffered the misfortune of burying three of her children: the twins Ewoi and Etir, while still a young mother, and now Odidi. Ajany, having witnessed her parents’ sorrow, responds to it through the creative arts. Reacting to the unbearable grief of losing Odidi, Ajany muses on how ‘she could paint this: hold the brush as a stabbing knife … Colouring in landscapes of loss. She could draw this for him, this longing to hear his particular voice’ (18). The tragic death of her elder brother, a confidante, role model and unparalleled story teller is particularly hard for Ajany to accept; transcending this sorrow can only be done through painting, paintbrushes and canvas. Growing up, her relationship with Akai-ma was strained. Ajany retrieves this emotional anxiety and channels it creatively; nostalgia for her mother’s affection re-emerges as artwork – Ajany ‘could paint this. Could even paint the nothing’ (37). Nyipir

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and Ajany, while much closer, are still plagued by her father’s lack of emotiveness. Ajany regards him variously as a ‘chiseled stone icon’, a ‘stone sculpture melting’ or as a ‘stone Nilote’ (23, 45, 290). Referring to Nyipir Oganda as rock hints at his inability to open up, be vulnerable and communicate his inner struggles. But it also represents his lack of affect in terms usually reserved for describing the physical geography of a terrain. Seemingly, while Owuor detaches her female figures from the landscape, she assimilates some of her male characters with the landscape. Ajany has previously used her artistic eye to approximate her father’s true emotions. It is not until the end of the novel that Nyipir learns to open up and rely on friends and family. The refrain ‘[s]he could paint this’, as well as allusions to Ajany’s art, are both repeated throughout the book (18, 23, 37). By the end, Ajany’s art is a harbinger of peace. Alongside a landscape in full blossom, Ajany’s canvases are a key element in the forgiveness that the Oganda and Bolton families have yearned for over many decades. Selene Bolton, an English settler largely overlooked by critical studies on Owuor’s novel, displays an antagonistic relationship towards the landscape. Against Hugh Bolton’s obsession to possess as much of Kenya as possible, Selene is more cynical. Her husband surveys his surroundings and applies the possessive ‘my’ to items – hunting trophies – places – the Kenya colony – as well as to varied persons – a hunting guide, a chef, a carpenter, a boat rower and a spouse (94). Hugh exhibits the imperialist desire to claim, own and dominate. His wife, however, is much more aware of Kenya’s resistance against this colonial gaze. Selene perceives something sinister about the landscape and she is sceptical about the merits of Britain’s East African project. Selene recognizes that the Kenya colony ‘chose its prey. Seduced them, made them believe they owned it, and then gobbled them down, often in the most tender of ways – like a python’ (100). Selene’s fear is inspired by her recognition that colonial settlement is short-lived and untenable. While Hugh and the rest of the British community revel in their version of tropical paradise, complete with innumerable domestic servants, Selene awaits the inevitable insurrection. She barely manages to escape from Kenya, saving herself and her unborn son, Isaiah (Owuor: 115). Hugh, she reluctantly acknowledges, is lost to her forever, unknowingly consumed by the same terrain he sought to dominate. In Dust, landscapes are a dynamic force, and they come alive. By demonstrating how people, and the land they live on, share a desire for longevity, Owuor anthropomorphizes the landscape and paints it

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as a living entity – articulating how ‘transient’ geographic features can ‘disappear’ or even ‘crawl back’ (364). After a sudden rainstorm in the arid Turkana lands, the soil ‘gulps down’ as much refreshment as possible, stockpiling water through underground aquifers in anticipation of another long dry spell (364). I read the earth’s reaction to blessings of rain as a survival tactic, necessitated by the extremely arid conditions of Northern Kenya. Dust illustrates a clear causal relationship between the well-replenished earth and thriving flora and fauna. After a desert storm, birdlife sings, herbivores roam freely, flowers blossom, and trees flourish into a wall of green (364-5). By framing landscapes as subjects, Owuor invites the reader’s reflection on how organisms – human and nonhuman – are interdependent. Landscapes are instrumental in rejuvenating diverse forms of life, both plants and animals. Owuor’s unique aesthetics, delivered via poetic language, foreground agency in climactic elements. For instance, the winds featured in Dust are particularly potent. Owuor’s illustration of the breeze is coached in captivating verbs: the wind roams, ambushes, flanks, blunders and swivels (365). Aside from demonstrating to the audience frequent transformations of Northern Kenya’s weather patterns, this language images how terrains are shaped and re-shaped by atmospheric conditions. Moreover, by highlighting the effect of winds, thunderstorms, flash floods and drought spells – phenomena that humans have little control over – Owuor undermines human assumptions about influence on, and ownership over, the landscape. In Owuor’s Turkana, physical and psychic landscapes are symbiotically connected – none thrives without the other. Besides landscapes’ central role in Owuor’s work, they serve as depositories for psychological suffering. For instance, Akai-ma, retrieves personal narratives she had hidden deep ‘in the earth’ (362-3). By sharing these memories with Ali Dida Hada – who in turn offers his own biography – Akai Lokorijom transcends the decades of inner turmoil she had previously endured. Both Akai and Ali move beyond their individual tragedies. As Nyipir instructed Ajany, it is vital that the Oganda family learns to re-generate hope, and how to breathe again (361). Owuor’s description of Akai-ma’s psychosomatic burdens as hidden ‘in the earth’ nudges us to the connection between a Turkana terrain that nurtures animal and plant biodiversity and its human inhabitants who have, finally, attained a semblance of inner peace. The fundamental takeaway is that Owuor’s Dust must be read alongside others – including Grace Ogot. The two writers I have discussed in my argument explore, from diverse perspectives, an

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ongoing conversation on land, landscape and women in East Africa. Owuor’s asynchronous plot timeline critiques post-independence map-making and problematizes chronological approaches to history. The novel begins with a ‘Prologue’, which relates the circumstances of Odidi’s death. Chapters 1 to 3 are chronologically arranged, but Chapter 4 shifts between funeral arrangements in the present, Ajany’s return to Nairobi a week ago, and her sojourn in Brazil over the last few years (48). Chapter 9 is similarly structured but goes farther back in time – incorporating the 1950 arrival of Hugh and Selene Bolton in Kenya (91). Overall, Dust’s reverse chronology helps to reinforce the idea that history has perceptible effects on the present. In other words, a character’s deeds in the past have a profound influence on their decisions and fate in the present – e.g. Nyipir Oganda’s role in disposing Mau Mau bodies, in relation to the extrajudicial killing of his son (47, 17). The novel successfully argues that this cause and effect is also visible in the real Kenya outside of the novel. Moreover, challenging a linear view of history also undermines the rhetorical fallacy of a centre from where history, progress, modernity and civilization radiate to the margin.

WORKS CITED Coetzee, J.M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Crowley, Dustin. ‘“A Universal Garden of Many-Coloured Flowers”: Place and Scale in the Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’. Research in African Literatures Vol. 44, No. 3, 2013: 13-29. Graham, J. (2009). Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa. New York: Routledge. Hooper, Glenn. ‘History, Historiography and Self in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature Vol. 33, No. 1, 1998: 47-62. Kenny, Christina. ‘“She is made of and coloured by the earth itself”: Motherhood and Nation in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust’. Proceedings of the 39th African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific Annual Conference, 5-7 December 2016, at The University of Western Australia. Published 2017. Knudsen, Eva Rask and Ulla Rahbek. ‘An Afropolitan Literary Aesthetics? Afropolitan Style and Tropes in Recent Diasporic African fiction’. European Journal of English Studies Vol. 21, No. 2, 2017: 115-28. Luig, Ute, and Achim von Oppen. ‘Landscape in Africa: Process and Vision. An Introductory Essay’. Paideuma No. 43, 1997, 7-45. Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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76  Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri Ogot, Grace. The Promised Land. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966. Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo. Dust. Vintage, 2014. Rushton, Amy. ‘No Place Like Home: The Anxiety of Return in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Yvonne Owuor’s Dust’, Etudes Anglaises Vol. 70, No. 1, 2017: 45-62. Simatei, Tirop. ‘Colonial Violence, Postcolonial Violations: Violence, Land­ scape, and Memory in Kenyan Fiction’. Research in African Literatures Vol. 36, No. 2, 2005: 85-94. West-Pavlov, Russell. ‘From the Spatial Turn to the Spacetime-Vitalist Turn: Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker and Owuor’s Dust’. In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. London: Routledge, 2017: 291-302.

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The Writer & the Environment in Times of Crises The Creative Talent in the Face of Boko Haram RAZINAT TALATU MOHAMMED

This article examines the resilience of the writer in the face of the Boko Haram crisis in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital in Nigeria. Before the advent of the notorious Boko Haram (BH), Maiduguri was a peaceful cosmopolitan city that was growing steadily after its first brush over two decades earlier, with the Maitatsine Islamic sect of the early 1980s. After the Nigerian Army squelched the Maitatsine threat, Maiduguri had experienced pockets of crises linked to religious intolerance amongst its population. However, the BH insurgency, whose show of might began on 26 August 2009, has wielded powers beyond the common imagination of residents. How have academic activities and, indeed, creative writing faired during the heat of battle with faceless enemies? Using the Ecocritical Theory (see Barry ‘Ecocriticism’), this article seeks to examine the extent to which the writer/academic in the university is laden by untold difficulties as the crisis rages on. There was always the belief that any visitor who tasted the water in Maiduguri and slept for three nights in the city will always yearn to return to the place because of its hospitality, variety of people with vibrant cultures and religious freedom. The indigenes and settlers alike were simple people who lived in harmony with one another. During festive occasions, Muslims and Christians celebrated by eating and drinking together. It was indeed, the home of peace. However, the peaceful city of Maiduguri had its major brush with religious fanaticism in the early 1980s with the rise of the notorious Mohammed Marwa popularly known as Maitatsine which in Hausa means, ‘The one who damns or curses’. He was an Islamic preacher who kicked against Muslims getting comfortable with the use of technologies like watches (when they can tell the time by simply looking at the position of the sun); bicycles, radios and even cars were among things considered haram (sinful) because all of these and many more have been invented by the Western world (Adamu, ‘Maitatsine: 30 Years after Kano’s Most 77

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Deadly Violence’ and Isichei ‘The Maitatsine Risings in Nigeria 19801985’). In October 1982, in Bulumkutu, then an outskirt of Maiduguri, and a new area occupied by Yan Tatsine (disciples of Maitatsine) a riot erupted and many people lost their lives (Adesoji ‘Between Maitatsine and Boko Haram: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Response of the Nigerian State’). After the 1980s, Maiduguri enjoyed two decades of relative peace until it got caught in a new wave of crisis with a religious undertone. The story of the Maitatsine is all the more familiar today because, like them, a Salafi Muslim group that calls itself by Jama’at Ahl al-Sunna li-Da’wa wal-jihad (The Sunni Group for Preaching and Fighting Jihad), otherwise known as Boko Haram, surfaced in Maiduguri to wreak havoc on its peaceful inhabitants. Their leader, Muhammed Yusuf, learned from the Islamic fundamentalist group associated with Wahabism in Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi Muslims are a conservative group that in its radical form emphasizes strict interpretation of religious texts and opposition to non-Islamic influences. The BH movement therefore, came with all the flavours of a revivalist movement because it dissociated itself from Western cultures, technology and indeed education. However, of all these Western influences, it is the condemnation of Western education that took centre stage. At the onset, university graduates and their undergraduate counterparts openly burned their medical, law and other certificates and documents in public places and residents looked on in sheer wonder and did not take them seriously. The residents of Maiduguri were at first amused at the preposterousness of their claims and thought that, like the Maitatsine groups, BH would be summarily squelched by the Nigerian Army. To date, the hope that the Nigerian Army will check-mate the insurgency has been hopelessly dashed as one excuse after the other has overridden the perception of the Army as a body charged with the responsibility to safeguard the unity and integrity of the nation. The disappointment that has since gripped the people is equally directed to the local, State and Federal Governments who have not been open in their sincerity in this regard. The failure of the State to tackle the insurgency resulted in the latter becoming very powerful and able to capture a vast area in Borno and parts of Adamawa States. This unexpected military valour over the Nigerian army prompts Kassim and Nwankpa (The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State) to make the following observation: ‘with the collapse of the Nigerian army, especially during the first half of 2014 (when there were several mutinies), Boko Haram was able during 2014-15 to

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briefly establish an Islamic state’ (4). Therefore, due to the perceived contrivance to fool the population by those in positions of power, the University of Maiduguri – which has been in the heart of the heat – has had to pay its dues in many ways. Literary scholars and others such as environmental historians came together in 1992 and founded the Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) in the USA. Members at that conference concluded that for Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty, who is credited as the founder of the study group, the purpose for this association was the need to bring like minds to explore the relation between human beings and the natural world (in Sarver Environmentalism and Literary Studies, Reviews: 106). Although we have always known that literature relates to man and his environment, this new association draws the world to understand not just the relationships between people in any given society but importantly, what they do to the physical environment in which they find themselves. How for instance, do they relate to the land, water or air space around them? (Winkler ‘Scholars Embark on Study of Literature about the Environment’). Using Ecocritical Theory, this article examines the effects of the BH insurgency on academic activities in the University of Maiduguri and other educational facilities in Borno State. This theory insists that literature is invariably linked to the society and vice-versa. In this respect therefore, how have the BH crisis stalled academic activities in the University of Maiduguri, other schools in the state and indeed, the psyche of a creative writer living within range of BH grenades? The last three decades saw the world increasingly in favour of democratic governments and Nigeria could no longer continue under the military. For Nigeria, the return to democracy in 1997 was at a high cost for which the nation is still paying. Democratization came with the disruption of the established peace and order in many facets of the country’s nationhood. The emergence of political parties distorted the harmony enjoyed by communities in the country. Whether one was a practising politician or not, one found affiliation to a party and that meant differences had to exist between people. These differences were magnified by the politicians who wanted power at all cost and as every ‘big man’ wanted to be better than his opponent, they recruited young jobless youths who were available in abundance to carry out threats and killings in accordance with the wishes of their masters in exchange for a meal or two a day. Religious bigotry became an excuse for slight provocation by anyone whose religious affiliation was different. Considering the religiousness of

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the people living in the city of Maiduguri, troublemakers had in their hands a strong weapon whenever they needed to address issues with the government or the traditional and religious leaders. Of these three groups, the religious leaders wield more powers because, as observed by Robert Greene in his timeless publication, The 48 Laws of Power, religion is often used to create a cult-like following. This was to be the fate of the city of Maiduguri as politically motivated people began to exploit the people’s love for and commitment to religion and the innocent and sometimes naïve wish to return to heaven at the end of their sojourn here on earth (Pham ‘In Nigeria False Prophets are Real Problems’). The latter desire became a very powerful force at the hands of indigent students, jobless contractors and homeless almajirai who saw an opportunity in such recruitment and thus wanted to be ‘useful’. It all began on Sunday 26 July 2009. The city was woken to the heavy sounds of artilleries and bomb explosions. The rumours that had made the rounds days earlier had turned out to be true. The followers of Mohammed Yusuf were in battle to revenge the killings of their members by security operatives under the then state government of Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff. It is generally believed that, in the event of any form of conflict or disaster, it is always the women and children who are at a disadvantage because they do not have the kind of economic endowment that men possess to safeguard their own security from threats, whether natural or manmade (UNICEF ‘Working For An Equal Future: UNICEF Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Girls and Women’: 7). However, in the case of the BH insurgency, no one has been exempt from the pains that have come to be associated with the crisis. In this regard, the casualties cannot be truly determined simply because the world cries over women and children in the media. Even the physical landscape weeps for the destruction brought upon it. The collective lack of productivity (in farming, trading and, indeed, creative writing) makes every person bear a part in the impact of the BH crisis. J.P. Clark’s very famous poem; ‘The Casualties’ states: The casualties are not only those who are dead; They are well out of it… The casualties are not only those who started A fire and now cannot put it out. Thousands Are burning that had no say in the matter… The casualties are many, and a good number well Outside the scenes of ravage and wreck. (200)

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From the excerpt above, everybody is a casualty; even those that live in Lagos are casualties because of the assaults from the horrific news and images posted daily on the social media. In the face of such a horrendous atmosphere, how does an academic do research and teach when every second, the thoughts that anyone of his/her students could be one of them is ravaging the mind? It is important to state that the scare of terrorism is the same whether it is in New York, London, Afghanistan or Maiduguri. It is especially horrifying when you are living and teaching in an attack prone area like Maiduguri. Like Dianne Gereluk’s experience after the London attack of 7/7 2005, or even her reaction to the news immediately she was informed of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York which she claims turned her entire week into ‘a blur’, the academic staff in the University of Maiduguri were drained of the enthusiasm to teach students whose identities were not certain. Like ours, Gereluk’s University runs such courses like ‘the promotion of multiculturalism and diversity in education’ and she and her colleagues were asked ‘to watch out for extremist tendencies or unusual behavior among our students and report it to the authorities’ (Education, Extremism and Terrorism: What Should Be Taught in Citizenship Education and Why: 1). Such fears are real and a precaution such as the one given them is necessary because it is very likely that a radicalized member of any terrorist organization could be seated in disguise to hear what a lecturer and thus, a promoter of Western education, in our own case, has to say in class. The lecturer/creative writer is by far considered an enemy of BH because he/she is seen as the instrument of indoctrination of the younger generation. Academics are in fact, the first targets because they are seen to be promoting the cultures of ‘infidels’, it is even worse when one is a Muslim, female and an academic, one became the first target and seen by the sect members as the enemy because having known Islam, one was seen as choosing to imbibe ‘pagan’ doctrines over and above the Islamic teachings. The crisis gathered momentum from that fateful Sunday night. It was a battle we never imagined could happen in the country after the Nigerian Civil War of 1966-70. When the long night finally gave in to the break of day, the inhabitants in Maiduguri were glad and thought that whatever the night of Sunday concealed could not hold brief when the sun rose. In the morning of 27 July, the fighting continued unabated and the government immediately imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the land. Daily survival became a challenge as people were reduced to subsistence living. To everyone’s chagrin, the battle

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lasted five gruesome days. These were five days of severe deprivation because, prior to this, the majority of people bought food items on a daily basis not because they wanted it so but, because of the erratic power supply in the state, and indeed the nation, most people cannot store perishables in their fridges. The University of Maiduguri which is located at the southern end of the city was seen as a possible target since BH was against Western education. A large number of uniformed men were therefore deployed to protect the institution from imminent attack. As a result of this action, the University community was doused with fear and academic activities suffered a major setback because lecturers and students alike were afraid to go into the usually large halls for lectures because of the large number of students and the fear that a BH member could be amongst the bona fide students. As a creative writer, it was not possible to concentrate, first because of the lack of provisions in the home and second, the flying jets and the incessant bombing and grenade sounds posed too horrifying a challenge for creativity. In 2013, there was a major attack on Giwa Barracks, a military cantonment, situated at a distance of approximately 1000 metres from the University of Maiduguri. The BH members had stormed the barracks to free some of their detained members. The fierce fighting that resulted sent stray bullets into the University hitting two members of the University community. A housemaid was killed on the spot, and a shop owner later died from wounds he had sustained from the shelled pellets. Tension rose after this incident and lecturers began to relocate. Some went on voluntary retirement and those who were left behind only braved remaining because they could not find alternate jobs. There were calls from members of the University community and other stakeholders (parents, guardians and students) for the immediate closure of the institution but the University administration was adamant on keeping the school open. Many could not understand the reasons that were proffered and most concluded that the decision had to be politically motivated; however, it was highly dangerous because the continued non-closure of the school resulted in the fatal bombings that were later experienced on campus. As teachers of Western education and as creative writers, the trauma that some of us endured can only be imagined. Lecturers could not remain in their offices past working hours for fear of being attacked by students who had links with BH. In this regard, students who were not able to cope academically found easy escape in the conflict.

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Three instances come to mind in this regard: first, two years before the five-day BH/Army battle, I had received threats from a religious group called the Hisbullah for daring to openly write about love. I had granted an interview to a reporter from The Sun newspaper but, when the paper came out, it erroneously carried the caption ‘Sharia’h Cannot Stop Me from Writing Love Stories’. With that publication came several anonymous phone calls that were also threatening to my life. I was then advised by my Head of Department, Dr Idris Amali, to retreat underground and, after several other unknown calls, I was subdued. However, in the year 2011, one of my unknown callers was to recollect the publication and I got a reminder that my case was still fresh on their minds and, whether or not it was genuine, it affected my psyche and creativity. It is near impossible to write about the religious, social or political issues bedevilling our societies when we are afraid of possible implications in some quarters. Second, a year-group coordinator in the Faculty of Law was sent a death threat and in the envelope were two empty bullet shells. What was her offence? She had published the list of students who did not pass their final examinations that would qualify them to attend the Nigerian Law School for that year. From that point onwards, students in other Faculties took a cue. A lecturer could no longer allot a failed grade to a student for fear of threat to his/her life. And so it was that students were graduating without actually meriting their grades. Third, in the Faculty of Arts, a lecturer was sent a message on a piece of paper that was smeared in blood. The assailants stated in the message that the next time they failed his course, it would be the lecturer’s own blood that will flow. Naturally, everyone was scared for dear life and taught their lessons with a fearful wisdom because they could not be sure what side some of the ‘students’ were on. Within the state also, secondary schools remained closed in all the twenty-seven Local Government Areas. The kidnapping of over two hundred secondary school girls in Chibok became a global matter (iProject ‘Boko Haram Insurgency and Educational Development in Borno State’). The message was clear: Western education or other determining lifestyles imported from the West must be brought to an abrupt end in the region and indeed, in Nigeria, for that has always been their ambition. This being the thinking, people who worked white-collar jobs were systematically being eliminated. Also, uniformed men of any form became targets because they worked for an ‘illegal’ Western-style government. It is this perspective that somewhat legalizes the killing of Muslims because to them, a Muslim was no

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longer one if he/she obeys and practises any form of lifestyle outside of the Hadith and Shariah laws. On 16 December 2016, three bombs were detonated at fiveminute intervals in the early hours of the morning. The entire campus shook from the three impacts. It felt like an earth tremor had hit the University. The manner in which our houses trembled was so frightening that most people thought that half the campus would be gravely affected. An hour or so later, news made the rounds that the staff mosque near the main gate of the University was hit and worshippers were the target. Everyone wondered if it was a mere coincidence because 16 December happened to have been the date set for the commencement of the first semester examinations. This day was a significant point of divergence in the BH conflict because it was the very first time that BH was finally directly targeting the University of Maiduguri. Along with other victims was the dismembered body of a Professor of Veterinary Medicine, Prof. Aliyu Usman Mani. In the opinion of most, the atmosphere was no longer conducive for teaching and research. Again, everyone expected at least, a temporary closure of the institution, but NO! The examinations began the very next day in the midst of much anxiety from staff and students. No one could explain why the University that had never been directly targeted since 2009 should suffer an attack at a time that the world was thinking that the Nigerian military was gaining ground in the fight against the insurgents, according to a 2015 BBC News report (Patience ‘Boko Haram Battle: On Combat Patrol with Nigeria’s Army’). By the evening of that day, an audio message circulated and in it, the leader of BH, Abubakar Shekau, claimed responsibility for the bombings and promised the University more havoc to come. It was indeed, a gloomy period for the University community. As expected, conspiracy theories made the rounds, and some of these concluded that the attacks were masterminded by some students who were not prepared for the semester examinations. As a creative writer, it was near impossible to settle down to write about BH because they were hunting for anyone who talked about them in public places let alone wrote about their activities for publication. The rumour that they had spies everywhere was on everyone’s mind. Stories have been told of how people had been shot in their homes in the presence of their family members because they had made comments about the group earlier amongst friends in their work places or at the majalisa, a gathering of friends. So as a creative writer, although filled with ideas and stories, it became almost impossible to churn them

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out for fear that I could be one easy target. Since the threats to my colleagues, I entered my classes with caution. First, I always took extra care to scan the floors and corners of the hall with my eyes to be sure that there were no bags or parcels left around without their owners. Second, I always asked the students to identify the person he/she is sitting next to. This would take like 15 to 20 minutes of the lecture time, but it was necessary to be reassured, or so I thought until I came across a particularly dull student in class one morning. He could not speak a single straight word of English in a part-four class. I had wondered aloud and had joked about him looking unkempt like a member of BH. To the shock of all present, he said he was a dissident from the BH sect. The class was in pandemonium. I was the anchor so I called for order in spite of myself. The young man was not surprised at the reaction in the class. He stood aloof with a sly smile on his face, but when the class settled down he told us about himself and some of his gory experiences in the Sambisa forest and why he left the group and reclaimed his deferred admission. His story was nerve shattering. The Boko Haram crisis has redefined the literary production in Borno State. For literary activities in the city of Maiduguri the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Borno State Branch is responsible for organizing writers’ forums, where established and budding writers convene at regular times for readings and hosting of visiting writers. For many years, there was no mention of anything related to writing because the BH insurgency made literary activities impossible to put together. The University of Maiduguri is known to have been home to great writers in the past. World-class writers like Tanure Ojaide, Flora Nwapa, Syl Cheney Coker and, of course, Zaynab Alkali were at one time or another, among the teaching staff in the Department of English in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the University of Maiduguri can only make references to these past glories as it is submerged in a quagmire of crisis that is bent on destroying completely the favourable literary tradition of the past. In all, the environment can affect creativity positively and negatively. African literary production, like anywhere else in the world, is directly dependent on the atmosphere of the creator. Creativity and crisis are not compatible partners. Some may argue that in times of crises, writers have surplus materials to work on but when the crisis is such that one is not sure of what will happen the very next minute or where it is likely to happen, it becomes difficult to create because uncertainty makes life gloomy. However, a crisis in any given environment can indeed determine the kind of literature that is produced there. For

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example, the bulk of the works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat, Devil On the Cross, I Will Marry When I Want, etc.) are centred on the history of Kenya through the years of pre-colonial experiences to the colonial, the Mau Mau struggle for independence, and the post-independence periods. The BH insurgency will surely change the face of Nigerian literature if not Africa’s and, indeed, world literature. Therefore, like a debt that needs to be repaid, writers must recreate for the world some of the gruesome experiences of the BH atrocities in Maiduguri. In this regard, it is expected that the next decade will usher in themes of violence, deprivation and death taking centre stage in the stories that will emerge on the BH crisis in Borno State and other parts of the North East of Nigeria.

WORKS CITED Adamu, Lawan Danjuma. ‘Maitatsine: 30 Years after Kano’s Most Deadly Violence’. Sunday Trust, 26 December 2010. Adesoji, Abimbola. ‘Between Maitatsine and Boko Haram: Islamic Fundamen­ talism and the Response of the Nigerian State’. Africa Today Vol. 57, No. 4 (2011): 98-119. Barry, Peter. ‘Ecocriticism’. In Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Clark, J.P. ‘The Casualties’. In K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent A Selection of African Poetry. Harlow, UK: Longman. Gereluk, Dianne. Education, Extremism and Terrorism: What Should Be Taught in Citizenship Education and Why. London: Continuum, 2012. Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. Isichei, Elizabeth. ‘The Maitatsine Risings in Nigeria 1980-1985: A Revolt of the Disinherited’. Journal of Religion in Africa Vol. 17, No. 3 (1987). iProject. ‘Boko Haram Insurgency and Educational Development in Borno State’. Uyo, Nigeria: https://iproject.com.ng. Kassim, Abdulbasit and Michael Nwankpa. (2018) The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State. London: Hurst & Company. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Weep Not Child. London: Heinemann, 1964. ——A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967. ——Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann, 1982. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii. I Will Marry When I Want. London: Heinemann, 1982. Patience, Martin. ‘Boko Haram Battle: On Combat Patrol with Nigeria’s Army’. BBC News, 29 December 2015. Pham, J. Peter. ‘In Nigeria False Prophets are Real Problems’. World Defence Review 19 October 2006. Sarver, Stephanie. ‘Environmentalism and Literary Studies: Review of Platte

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River by Rick Bass; Nature’s Kindred Spirits by James I. McClintock; Made from This Earth by Vera Norwood; Pilgrims to the Wild by John P. O’Grady; An Unspoken Hunger by Terry Tempest Williams.’ Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature Vol. 49, No. 1 (1995): 106-12. UNICEF. ‘Working For An Equal Future: UNICEF Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Girls and Women’. New York, May 2010. Winkler, Karen. ‘Scholars Embark on Study of Literature about the Environ­ ment’. The Chronicle of Higher Education 9 August 1996: A8+. www.asle. org/wp-content/uploads/ASLE_Primer_Chronicle.pdf.

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Women & ALT Balancing the Gender Equation in the Criticism of African Literature AKACHI EZEIGBO

INTRODUCTION The work of critics is to analyse, comment on and judge works of art in relation to their contents, qualities and styles or techniques. There had always been critics to interpret and explain works of literature and there will always be critics making statements about literature – both canonical and minority cultural productions. The criticism of African literature emerged when writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Camara Laye, Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah and other renowned writers emerged, especially with the establishment of the African Writers Series (AWS) which published some of their work. When journals like African Literature Today (ALT), Research in African Literatures (RAL), Présence Africaine, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Literary Half-Yearly and World Literature Written in English (WLWE) emerged, critics began to give serious critical attention to the literature being produced by African writers. Quite a number of the critics were foreigners or Africanists, as they were called, and they include Bernth Lindfors, Charles Larson and John Povey, but there were also those who were indigenous and came from different parts of Africa, especially Nigeria, including Donatus Nwoga, Emmanuel Obiechina, Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer, Abiola Irele, Charles Nnolim, Dan Izevbaye, Ernest Emenyonu, Oyin Ogunba, Ime Ikiddeh and Romanus Egudu. The outlets for their critical essays were these new and strategic journals even though some of the critics wrote full length books on specific authors or subjects. THE CRITICISM OF AFRICAN LITERATURE: FIRST STEPS It is important to state categorically that literary criticism as practised 88

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in Europe and America has had an enduring influence on literary criticism in Africa. This is hardly surprising considering that the earliest African critics of the 1960s, especially, were educated by Europeans mostly in the language/literature departments of universities in Europe or Africa. Therefore, it was natural that the critics who began to explain, comment on or interpret African literature in the 1960s used European critical standards and tools to do their work in spite of the fact that some of them had disagreed with European critics who tried to interpret African literature at the time. Among the reactions to the ‘misinterpretations’ of African literary texts by foreign (expatriate) and even indigenous critics was Ernest Emenyonu’s article entitled ‘African Literature: What does it take to be its Critic?’ The article is one of the most unequivocal in the display of indignation against these ‘illequipped’ or ‘misinformed’ spokespersons of African literature who adventured into criticism without doing their homework – research and investigation – properly. The first phase of African literature criticism was anthropological (the type favoured by colonial critics) and sociological (the type indulged by the first indigenous critics). The sociological brand of criticism concentrated on the social relevance of texts, as it was generally held that, in Africa, art is functional; art for art’s sake has no place in Africa. This was contrary to the belief of the followers of ‘The Aesthetic Movement’ in Europe, in the late nineteenth century, that ‘art is the supreme value among the works of man because it is self-sufficient and has no claim beyond its own existence; the end of a work of art is simply to exist in its formal perfection, and to be beautiful’ (Abrams, 2). Having put the expatriate critics – Gerald Moore, author of Seven African Writers, 1962; Margaret Laurence, author of Long Drums and Cannons, 1986; Judith Gleason, author of This Africa: Novels by West Africans in English and French, 1965, etc. – in their place, the indigenous critics settled down to providing what they considered as more authentic and better researched and conceived criticism and interpretation. Critics such as Donatus Nwoga, Michael Echeruo, Emmanuel Obiechina, Abiola Irele, D.S. Izevbaye, Ernest Emenyonu, Charles Nnolim, Romanus Egudu, Ime Ikiddeh and others began to write and publish critical works or articles on the works of writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Chris Okigbo, Cyprian Ekwensi, J.P. Clark, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, John Munonye, Elechi Amadi, Timothy Aluko and others being published by Heinemann and other publishing companies based in Europe. The first generation of indigenous critics was like a midwife who ‘birthed’ the baby – modern African literature – and nurtured it to

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maturity. Abiola Irele’s comment articulates the belief of the critics of his generation, what they saw as the function of criticism and the symbiotic relationship between literature and criticism: Literature takes place within a cultural setting, and no meaningful criticism is possible without the existence of a community of values shared by the writer and the critic which the latter, can, in turn, make meaningful to the writer’s larger audience. (‘The Criticism of Modern African Literature’: 12)

Supporting Irele’s view, another distinguished first genera­tion critic, D.S. Izevbaye, in his article entitled ‘Criticism and Literature in Africa’ stresses ‘the importance of criticism in the formation of a literary tradition’ (25). Some of the critics like Charles Nnolim and Michael Echeruo were influenced by Western literary movements such as New Criticism and Formalism, in their criticism. It must be stated clearly at this juncture that the criticism provided by the expatriate critics was not altogether without value. Their effort was aimed at mainstreaming African literature within the universal rubric of literature. The main reason why their attempt did not go down well with the nationalistic/indigenous critics can be accounted for in two terms. The first was the general carry-over of nationalism from independence and the tendency to supplant everything Western and universal with the indigenous. The second has to do with the origin of the literature; namely its oral nature. Some of the first-generation indigenous critics and some of the writers whose works they were interpreting were pilloried by a group of three critics often referred to as the troika – Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike – in their ground-breaking book, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. They described the writings of most African writers as ‘the literature of imitation and adaptation, not a literature of imagination and invention’ (6). Charles Nnolim sums up the impact of the troika’s criticism thus: In what was clearly a case of overkill, the authors of Towards the Decolonization of African Literature succeeded in shocking us into an awareness of how deeply and pervasively most indigenous African critics were tied to the European literary apron strings, how they were never weaned away from the European literary breasts. This is where Towards the Decolonization of African Literature carved its niche in the annals of criticism of African literature in their efforts to finally cure African literature and its indigenous writers and critics of their colonial hangover. (Issues in African Literature: 55)

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The troika’s work introduced a new dimension in Nigerian literature criticism. Some Nigerian writers and the critics who interpreted their works – who had censured expatriate or colonial critics of African literature – found themselves at the receiving end of the troika’s censure. Wole Soyinka took up the challenge of responding to the troika, represented by their ‘leader’, Chinweizu. The write-ups that came from both, which were published in scholarly journals, were highly polemical.

MARXIST CRITICISM Meanwhile another critical movement known as socialist realism advocated by Georg Lukacs (and others), who believed that ‘a writer must depict life … in its revolutionary development’ (The Historical Novel: 76), found disciples in the African literary scene in the 1980s. Among its ardent followers were Chidi Amuta, Biodun Jeyifo, Femi Osofisan, Funso Aiyejina, Bode Sowande, Kole Omotoso, etc. According to Charles Nnolim: This group of the intelligentsia flaunted their ideological leanings insisting (vulgar Marxist style) that literature, as part of ideological superstructure, must ally itself with the Marxist dictum that art, as an instrument in the class struggle must be a reflection of the social structure. (Issues in African Literature: 59)

Some of the so-called Marxist critics were also writers – some are still writing – and they include Femi Osofisan, Kole Omotoso, Bode Sowande, Olu Obafemi, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Festus Iyayi and Tunde Fatunde. Their literary works provided the material for the critics of this ideological bent. Some of the works that received in-depth analysis are Violence (Festus Iyayi); Kolera Kolej (Femi Osofisan); The Edifice (Kole Omotoso); Our Man the President (Bode Sowande); Children of Iroko and Other Poems (Tanure Ojaide); God’s Bits of Wood (Sembene Ousmane); Petals of Blood (Ngugi wa Thiong’o), etc. The writers as well as critics were mostly influenced by social conditions – a development influenced by the Cold War. The critics began to look at capitalism and Marxism with passionate engagement. By the nature of their profession – which dealt with scientific evidence – they viewed Marxism with keen interest and appreciation and embraced the leverage it gave them to identify with popular consciousness. There was, therefore, a mass production of

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ideological literature. Thus the attitude of these critics and their responses confirm the fact that each epoch in the history of African literary criticism has been influenced by the type of literature produced at the time. Thus in the 1980s, Marxist criticism of African literature rose to prominence and, though it declined in the 1990s as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which dealt communism a crippling blow, it has survived even in contemporary times still in the writings of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Olu Obafemi. It is revealing that, like the first generation of male critics who midwifed the works of Achebe and his contemporaries, the Marxist critics discussed above paid little or no attention to the writings of African women. It was as though women had written nothing. Perhaps this should not really surprise anyone considering the fact that there were hardly any African female critics among the galaxy of male critics I had earlier mentioned in this article. In the next section, I discuss the neglect or exclusion of women’s work from the body of criticism of African literature, particularly in ALT, which is our primary focus. DEARTH OF CRITICISM OF THE WORKS OF AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS: ENTER THE JOURNAL AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY (ALT) At first, the works of the pioneer women writers such as Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, Zulu Sofola, Bessie Head, Mabel Segun, Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, etc., were hardly given any critical attention unlike their male counterparts – Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Ekwensi, Armah, Amadi, etc. This was the case not only in the studies of individual critics but also in the first issues of the journal African Literature Today (ALT) beginning in 1968. In Africa, especially in the 1970s, male critics, arts journalists, editors and publishers perpetuated patriarchal values that undermined women’s creativity. Commenting on the harm done to women writers by this class of people, Micere Mugo suggested in her 1998 article, that ‘critics at whose hands women artists suffer should be perceived as undesirable intellectual power brokers whose empires and monopoly enclaves must be challenged’ (The Woman Artist in Africa Today: a Critical Commentary’: 41). As a journal, African Literature Today’s vision or mission statement was articulated by its first editor, Eldred Durosimi Jones, in the editorial section of the first edition in 1968: ‘African Literature Today is intended to be a forum for the examination of the literature of Africa … to make

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the work accessible to a larger readership than the absence of criticism might have opened to it’ (4, 5). By the time the journal appeared, a few women writers had emerged on the literary scene. But all the articles in ALT 1 were on male writers, including Achebe, Okigbo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (then known as James Ngugi) and Camara Laye. The critics who wrote the articles were all male, including Bernth Lindfors, O.R. Darthorne and John Povey. This same scenario was duplicated in the next three volumes of ALT 2, 3 and 4. There was no full-length article on any woman writer in the four volumes. In ALT 2, published in 1969, for example, there were articles on Ngugi (by Ime Ikiddeh), on Camara Laye (by A.C. Brench) and on Soyinka (by Eldred Jones). In ALT 3, also published in 1969, the articles were on the works of Cyprian Ekwensi (by Bernth Lindfors), on Mongo Beti (by Eustace Palmer) and on Okigbo (by Edwin Thumboo). All the critics are male and all the texts analysed are authored by men. Again in ALT 4, published in 1970, the situation remains the same as the articles demonstrate. They are on Soyinka (by Oyin Ogunba), on Kwesi Brew (by Edwin Thumboo) and on Camara Laye (by Paul Edward and Kenneth Ramchand). It is important to note that each of the four volumes (1-4) had reviews of books. Interestingly, all the authors reviewed are male except Flora Nwapa whose Efuru was reviewed together with Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine by Eustace Palmer in ALT 1. For the first time, a woman writer featured in ALT, but unfortunately the review was a very negative one. Some critics took Palmer up on his criticism of Nwapa’s Efuru; in fact Nwapa herself was not happy with some of her critics. Once when I asked her in an interview how she had fared in the hands of critics, she said: I don’t bother about them at all. I don’t allow them to guide my writing … If a critic or a journalist wishes to interview me about my books, I want to find out if he or she has taken the trouble to read them … There is evidence from what they write that they have not taken the trouble to read the works they write about. (Ezeigbo Gender Issues in Nigeria: A Feminine Perspective: 91)

Perhaps it is instructive to dwell a little on the said comparative review of Efuru and The Concubine before I continue with my examination of women’s presence or absence in ALT over the years, from the birth of the journal. According to Palmer, The Concubine ‘is a novel of distinction’ while Efuru ‘leaves the reader with the impression that its author has not yet mastered her craft. It lacks the fluency, effortlessness and economy

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of The Concubine. It is too obviously a first novel’ (‘Review of Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru’: 57). The critic seems to forget that some first novels have been considered masterpieces such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and recently Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, to mention but a few. Pointing out other weaknesses he discovered in the novel, the critic continues: Certainly Miss Nwapa seems to be incapable of creating credible masculine characters. Neither of Efuru’s husbands is convincing … Flora Nwapa, moreover does not show any awareness of plot as sumtotal of events causally related to each other … Add to these deficiencies her pedestrian style and it will be seen that if Elechi Amadi’s effort is rated beta plus, Miss Nwapa’s must surely rank beta double minus. (57, 58)

However, from the interpretation given to Efuru by subsequent critics, especially feminist scholars, it could be seen that the divergence of opinion about the book is wide. Nwapa received more positive appraisal from them. Could it be because women read the text differently? But Emenyonu’s views (which I will examine later) appear to correspond with those of feminist critics. It is also noteworthy that Adeola James, a female reviewer, had given Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu negative criticism like Palmer (‘Review of Flora Nwapa’s Idu’). In ALT 5, published in 1971, Adeola James comments in her review of Idu that ‘beautiful narrative style, amusing and vividly described incidents and powerful characterization … are sadly missing in Efuru and Idu’ (153). Earlier she has made what can be considered a sweeping remark when she states: ‘Considering her performance in both Efuru and Idu one cannot help wondering what motivates Miss Nwapa beyond the elementary wish of everyone to be a writer’ (152). Adeola James’ review of Idu happens to be the only space given to the writing of African women in ALT 5 (The Novel in Africa 1971) though this time a female critic features in the journal for the first time. However, all the writers that attract critical essays are still male, including Olaudah Equiano, Onuora Nzekwu, T.M. Aluko, Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka, Armah and Laye. The situation has not changed in ALT 6 (Poetry in Africa 1973) which has essays on such poets as Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Senghor and reviews of the poetry of Jared Angira and Okot P’Bitek. However, it is right to point out that almost all published poets in Africa at this time were male and it is not a surprise that all the essays are about their work. Interestingly, three

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women critics have articles published in the volume. Though more women critics and scholars are beginning to participate in the criticism of African literature in the journal, their presence is insignificant, and women writers are still relegated to the background. ALT 7 (Focus on Criticism 1975) is devoted to essays on criticism. Ernest Emenyonu’s article entitled ‘Who does Flora Nwapa Write for?’ (28-33) is truly the first essay to discuss the work of a female writer in the journal. What appear before have been reviews. Emenyonu’s essay is partly a response to Adeola James’s review of Idu and partly a critical assessment of Nwapa’s novels Efuru and Idu. Emenyonu rehabilitates the novel Idu by showing the bias and flaws in James’s review. He concludes: ‘The realism of her themes and her ever increasing sensitive use of language are two of Nwapa’s most enduring qualities as a novelist – two aspects James roundly criticized … But when everything is considered, Idu remains a success in the Igbo literary tradition’ (32, 33). However, he admits the novel has a few weaknesses, which he says are ‘minor and depict mainly a failure of proper editorial responsibility’ (32). Emenyonu’s positive critical essay on Nwapa is ground-breaking and signifies the very first full-length article on an African female writer in ALT. And to continue the focus on women’s work, Dapo Adelugba writes an essay on Ama Ata Aidoo’s plays The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa in the next volume, ALT 8 which focuses on Drama (1976). However, the momentum is broken in ALT 10 (Retrospect and Prospect 1979) which is the tenth anniversary issue of the journal, for all the essays and reviews are on male writers (Awoonor, Ngugi, Ekwensi, Armah and Nortje) though three women critics – Juliet Okonkwo, Elizabeth Knight and Loretta Hawkins – appear among the other male critics, including Lindfors, Izevbaye, Jones, Obiechina, Nnolim, Ogunba, Emenyonu, Irele, Femi Ade-Ojo, Nwoga, Michael Etherton and Palmer. It is not possible to examine every volume of the journal, later an annual volume, but I make a random selection of the volumes that have something significant to tell us about gender balance or lack of it in the subsequent issues both in terms of the writers published and the critics who wrote the essays. ALT 11 (Myth and History 1980) surprisingly has no article on a female writer considering the fact that some women writers had explored myths in their writing, including Flora Nwapa – the myth of Ogbuide, the great goddess Uhamiri, the woman of the lake, as she is fondly called – Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta and Efua Sutherland. The writers whose works featured

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in the volume are Awoonor, Soyinka, Yambo Ouloguem, Armah and Amos Tutuola while the critics who authored the essays and reviews are Hugh Webb, Lemuel Johnson, Lindfors, Osundare, John Coates, Solomon Iyasere and the lone female scholar, Juliet Okonkwo. The next volume, ALT 12, published in 1982, is New Writing, New Approaches. One would expect to have more female writers’ works receiving attention here, but there is just one – Mariama Bâ of the So Long a Letter fame. She is the only female writer among the throng of male writers, including Gabriel Okara, Robert Serumaga, Hamidou Kane, Sembene Ousmane, Taban Lo Liyong, Ola Rotimi, John Munonye, Bode Sowande and I.N.C. Aniebo whose works were reviewed. Femi Ade-Ojo writes on Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (‘Still a Victim?’: 7187). His assessment of the work is not quite positive, hardly dwelling on the beauties of this famous work and its craft, but rather focusing on the themes and impact of freedom for the protagonists, Ramatoulaye and Aissatou. Ade-Ojo criticizes feminism in the essay and claims that ‘such “aberrations” as feminism are abhorred by many’ (72). Happily though, in the next volume, ALT 13 (1983), Recent Trends in the Novel, Buchi Emecheta joins the array of male writers featured in the journal and they include Soyinka, Achebe, Armah, Okpewho, Kole Omotoso, Meja Mwangi, Marechera, Oyono and Ngugi. Eustace Palmer’s ‘The Feminine Point of View: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood’ (3855) is a positive analysis of Emecheta’s magnum opus. The critic avers that ‘Emecheta shows great psychological insight in the penetration of her characters’ thoughts … Scarcely any other African novelist has succeeded in probing the female mind and displaying the female personality with such precision’ (53). After giving a detailed and vigorous analysis of the novel, Palmer concludes: ‘The novel must be judged as a work of art and it is difficult to deny the accomplishment of the artistry’ (55). On this positive note and painstaking examination of a female writer’s work (following Emenyonu’s example), the next volume, ALT 14, Insiders and Outsiders, published in 1984, features what must be regarded as the first truly feminist criticism of an African novel published in African Literature Today. The ground-breaking essay, authored by Katherine Frank, is entitled ‘Feminist Criticism of the African Novel’ (24-48). This is a landmark essay in the volume despite the fact that all the other essays are on the works of African male writers in comparison to male writers from outside Africa. For example, Soyinka is compared to Beckett; Laye to Lamming and Wright; Aimé Césaire to Albert Camus; J.P. Clark to Yeats, and Olaudah Equiano to

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Daniel Defoe. Katherine Frank is well aware of the exclusion of women from the critical examination of their works and regrets that, so far, feminist criticism of African literature ‘has not gained legitimacy or even visibility’ (34) in African literary studies. And this is the case in spite of the fact that Africa already has a good number of published women writers, including Flora Nwapa, Efua Sutherland, Grace Ogot, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rebecca Njau, Mariama Bâ, Ifeoma Okoye and Zaynab Alkali. Lloyd Brown underscores the absence of African women writers as the subject of critical studies when he says: ‘Women writers of Africa are the other voices, the unheard voices, rarely discussed, and seldom accorded space in the repetitive anthologies and the predictably male-oriented studies in the field’ (Women Writers in Black Africa: 3). Towards the end of her essay, in what sounds like feminist literary criticism’s manifesto, Katherine Frank captures succinctly the role of feminist critics and their responsi­bility to women writers: Feminist critics, like all critics, seek to reconstruct, analyze, account for and judge literary works. But before all this, they accept the responsi­ bility to listen attentively, to abort silence, to encourage women writers in Africa to take up their pens. Ideally, then, our task would be an unending one because in a literary realm where writing by and about women is flourishing, there will always be a great deal more to be said. (‘Feminist Criticism’: 47)

Frank’s eloquent statement quoted above seems to have paved the way for the publication in 1987, of ALT 15 which is almost entirely devoted to women writers and critics. Women in African Literature Today, as it was entitled, was published by James Currey Publishers and Africa World Press: they took over from Heinemann Educational Books which had published ALT 1-14. The issue features essays that explore the thematic and stylistic preoccupations of different African women writers. It celebrates the achievements of women writers and critics. For the first time, women writers receive the focused attention they deserve as creators of cultural productions that have contributed to the growth and development of African literature. Some of the writers given attention in the issue include Bâ, Sutherland, Head, Gordimer, Aidoo; and there are also articles on theory and criticism by women scholars. This is a good omen for inclusiveness for women in the African critical tradition. The editor Eldred Jones says as much in the editorial (1-4), admitting that women have been neglected in the largely male-authored journals, critical studies and critical anthologies and secondly the last ten years or so

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have seen a tremendous blossoming of highly accomplished works by African women writers and it would have been inexcusable to continue to ignore them … If the critical attention has been scanty, it is partly because up to the end of the 1960s the literary output of African women was also rather scanty. (1)

Later in the editorial, Jones adds that the ‘African woman writer herself has not been adequately served by male critics … there is a preponderance of female critics in this collection’ (3). Orature in African Literature Today is the title of ALT 18, published in 1992. Though male writers dominate the spread of the essays (Mazisi Kunene, Okot P’Bitek, Kofi Awoonor, Niyi Osundare, Armah and Osofisan), there is an important essay on Nwapa written by a male critic, Chidi Ikonne. In the essay ‘The Folk Roots of Flora Nwapa’s Early Novels (96-104), Ikonne remarks that ‘Flora Nwapa’s first two novels may not be masterpieces but they are deeply rooted in the soil of Igbo folklore’ (103). Another male critic, Olu Obafemi contributes an essay on the plays of Tess Onwueme in ALT 19, Critical Theory and African Literature Today (1994). The essay entitled ‘Towards Feminist Aesthetics in Nigerian Drama: The Plays of Tess Onwueme’ (84-100) touches on an interesting aspect of feminist literary criticism. There is no doubt that African female writers have started receiving critical attention in ALT. Another essay, this time by a female critic, Ify G. Achufusi, also appears in the issue. Her essay ‘Feminist Inclinations of Flora Nwapa’ (101-14) affirms that Nwapa devotes her novels to women and women-centred activities. Without doubt, many female critics of African women’s writing approach their task from a feminist/feminine perspective, just as women writers write or recreate experience from a feminist/feminine perspective. Gradually women’s presence as writers and critics has been felt in ALT. When Ernest Emenyonu took over the editorship of African Literature Today in 2004, women’s visibility became a given. ALT 24, New Women’s Writing in African Literature Today (2004) was a special issue entirely dedicated to the works of eleven African female writers, especially of the younger generation, including Ken Bugul, Promise Okekwe, Lauretta Ngcobo, Yvonne Vera, Calixthe Beyala, Akachi Ezeigbo, Buchi Emecheta, Kekelwa Nyanya, Ama Ata Aidoo, Zulu Sofola and Chinwe Okechukwu. Emenyonu’s editorial article ‘New Women’s Writing: A Phenomenal Rise’ (xi-xii) says it all. His taking up of the editorship of ALT has opened the door wider for women’s participation not only as contributors to essays for ALT, but also as members of the editorial team. In 2004, there were three women on

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the editorial board. In fact there were more people on the editorial team than in the past, underscoring the inclusiveness and openness ALT espouses. By 2006, gender balance had been achieved as witnessed in the increase in the number of women writers featured in ALT 25, New Directions in African Literature Today. Of the eleven writers whose works are analysed, seven are women, including Zoë Wicomb, Amma Darko, Ama Ata Aidoo, Leila Oboulela, Tess Onwueme, Promise Okekwe and Maraire Nozipo. It is a bountiful harvest of female creativity and assertion, as the issue tackles the new directions African literature is headed in the twenty-first century. In the twentieth century, especially the second half, African literature was a means through which myths, falsehoods and distortions about Africa by the outsider and detractors were demystified and thrown out. It was also a time when the culture and tradition of Africa regained their place and became entrenched in people’s psyche. It was the role of writers to reorient the minds of their people and restore their lost identity and dignity. Women’s collective profile has continued to rise in African Literature Today. ALT 27, New Novels in African Literature Today (2010) has eleven essays; four are on the works of women writers – Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Buchi Emecheta – while seven are on male writers. In the editorial article Emenyonu states: ‘New voices are emerging from all parts of the African continent not only to reinforce the voices of the generations before them, but also to reveal the new realities, visions and concerns of Africa and its people’ (xii). Commenting on Adichie’s concerns in the twentyfirst century, Nnolim in his essay ‘Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun’ (145-51) argues that Adichie, unlike her female predecessors of the twentieth century, ‘began this novel by leaving behind us the preoccupation of African women writers in the 20th century: Feminism’,1 and that Adichie has created female characters ‘that had been empowered by education so that at Odenigbo’s party they hold their own among world-class intellectuals … We have moved far from the inordinate quest for children by African women in the works of Nwapa and Emecheta in the 21st century’ (146). On Adichie’s mastery of her art, Nnolim has this to say: ‘Adichie’s narrative style in Half of a Yellow Sun is captivating. Before the end of each chapter, she advances her story by surprising the reader with new information … putting down nothing that does not advance the story … Chimamanda Adichie amazes’ (151). On the whole, this article is about the most positive assessment of a writer by Nnolim that I have ever read.

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ALT 33, Children’s Literature and Story-telling, published in 2015, focuses on juvenile literature, an area in which women writers have a strong presence. Predictably, the volume has a large number of female critics contributing essays. As a matter of fact, ten out of the thirteen articles are written by women. Interestingly, even the editorial team reflects the numerical strength of women in the production of ALT. Out of the seven Associate Editors, four are female while three are male. The second-most recent issue, ALT 35, Focus on Egypt, published in 2017, demonstrates that women have come to stay as writers, critics, and as members of the editorial team. Of the many offerings in this issue, ten articles and stories are by women out of a total number of eighteen. The presence of Nawal El Saadawi, the renowned Egyptian feminist writer and activist, is a colossus in the volume. The interview she had with Emenyonu, the editor, is captivating and illuminating. Women have come a long way in African Literature Today; they have taken their well-deserved position in this great series which has brought critical attention and even fame to many African writers, both the established writers and the newer ones. The quest for gender parity has been achieved and the gender gap bridged. No doubt, the emergence of some homegrown feminist theories such as Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s Womanism, Helen Chukwuma’s African Feminism, Molara Ogundipe’s Stiwanism, Obioma Nnaemeka’s Nego-Feminism, Catherine Acholonu’s Motherism, Mary Modupe Kolawole’s African Womanism and, more recently, Chioma Opara’s Femalism, Akachi Ezeigbo’s Snail-sense Feminism, Ada Azodo’s Di-Feminism and others has gone a long way in nurturing feminist literary criticism and raising a large crop of critics who are studying and interpreting the works of African women writers using the theories.

CONCLUSION African literature and its criticism are in good standing. Both are vibrant and are poised to rise even to a higher level. The fact that African authors are studied everywhere in the world today and that the criticism is growing with the literature is a confirmation of the achieve­ment and the bright prospects for the future referred to above. The remarkable thing is that women writers are receiving the critical attention they deserve from not only women critics but also from male critics. This is highly commendable. As I have underscored in this article, there is ample evidence to authenticate this claim in the works of criticism that have

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appeared in the past three or so decades, as typified by the attention women writers have received in African Literature Today, particularly since ALT 15 which was dedicated to the works of women writers. The critical attention to women writers in ALT has increased tremendously since Ernest Emenyonu assumed the editorship, and the presence of women has also increased in the editorial board. Since the 1960s, Africa has produced a galaxy of writers and critics and there is every indication that, as the old masquerades withdraw, new masquerades will take their place. It took some time for feminist literary criticism to take root in Africa. A few feminist critics from the West had written about the works of Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta, but it was not until African women critics – many of them Nigerians – entered the field of criticism that women writers received the attention they deserved in the field of criticism. With time male critics also joined in studying and analysing the works of African women writers. The task before publications like ALT is to continue to set high standards for criticism by publishing quality articles written by high-flying scholars and critics. Others would then emulate this by maintaining these standards. As ALT celebrates its golden age, all well-meaning African writers, scholars and critics should join in celebrating the long service it has rendered in the development and criticism of African literature and the sustenance of a vibrant literary culture on the continent and in the African Diaspora. Long live ALT.

NOTE 1 How wrong Charles Nnolim was, making a statement such as this about Adichie, in 2010, especially when one considers that since three years later, after her TED talk in 2013 ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, Adichie has become a strong advocate for feminism, even more committed and controversial than Nwapa and Emecheta. Her most recent publication, Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, is all about the rights of women and how they should go about getting and keeping them. In a 2018 interview with Adichie, Lisa Allardice says that Adichie has put on ‘the feminist hat’ and has become a ‘voice for feminism’ (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “This Could be the Beginning of a Revolution”’. But, what is wrong with a woman being a feminist, anyway? Perhaps Nnolim should answer this question.

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WORKS CITED Acholonu, Catherine. Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative to Femi­ nism. Owerri, Nigeria: Let’s Help Humanitarian Project, Women in Environ­men­ tal Development Series, Vol. 3. Achufusi, Ify G. ‘Feminist Inclinations of Flora Nwapa’. In ALT 19: 101-14. Ade-Ojo, Femi. ‘Still a Victim? Mariama Bâ’s So Long A Letter’. In ALT 12: 7187. Adichie, Chimamanda. Purple Hibiscus. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2003. ——Half of a Yellow Sun. Lagos: Farafina, 2006. ——Dear Ijeawele or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2018.Aidoo, Ama Ata. The Dilemma of a Ghost. Harlow: Longman African Writers, 1965. ——Anowa. Harlow: Longmans, 1970 Allardice, Lisa. ‘Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “This Could be the Beginning of a Revolution”’. The Guardian, 28 April 2018. Amadi, Elechi. The Concubine. London: Heinemann African Writers, 1966. Bâ, Mariama. So Long a Letter. Trans. Modupe Bode Thomas. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1981. Brown, Lloyd. Women Writers in Black Africa. Westmond, CT: Green­wood Press, 1981. Chinweizu, Jemie O. and I. Madubuike. Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980. Emenyonu, Ernest. ‘African Literature: What does it Take to be its Critic?’ in ALT 5: 1971. ——‘Who Does Flora Nwapa Write For?’ in ALT 7: 28-33. ——‘New Women’s Writing: A Phenomenal Rise’, in ALT 24: xi-xii. Ezeigbo, Akachi T. Gender Issues in Nigeria: A Feminine Perspective. Lagos: Vista Books, 1996. ——Snail-sense Feminism: Building on an Indigenous Model. A Monograph of the Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, 2012. Frank, Katherine. ‘Feminist Criticism of the African Novel’. In ALT 14: 34-48. Gleason, Judith. This Africa: Novels by West Africans in English and French. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Ikonne, Chidi. ‘The Folk Roots of Flora Nwapa’s Early Novels’. In ALT 18: 96-104. Irele, Abiola. ‘The Criticism of Modern African Literature’. In Chris­topher Heywood (ed.), Perspectives on African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1977. Iyayi, Festus. Violence. London: Longman Drumbeat, 1979. Izevbaye, D.S. ‘Criticism and Literature in Africa’. In Christopher Hey­wood (ed.), Perspectives on African Literature. London: Heine­mann, 1977. James, Adeola. ‘Review of Flora Nwapa’s Idu’. In ALT 5: 150-3. Laurence, Margaret. Long Drums and Cannons. London: Macmillan, 1968.

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Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962. Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Mugo, Micere. ‘The Woman Artist in Africa Today: A Critical Commentary’. In Leonard Podis and Yakubu Saaka (eds), Challenging Hierarchies. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977. Nnolim, Charles. ‘Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun’. ALT 27: 145-51. ——Issues in African Literature. Yenagoa: Treasure Resource Com­muni­ca­tions, Limited, 2009. Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966. ——Idu. London: Heinemann, 1970. Obafemi, Olu. ‘Towards Feminist Aesthetics in Nigerian Drama: The Plays of Tess Onwueme’. In ALT 19: 84-100. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Ojaide, Tanure. Children of Iroko and Other Poems. New York: Greenfield, 1973. Okoye, Ifeoma. Behind the Cloud. London: Longman, 1982. Omotoso, Kole. The Edifice. Ibadan: Onibonoje Press, 1971. Opara, Chioma. Her Mother’s Daughter: The African Writer as a Woman. Port Harcourt: University of Port Harcourt Press, 2004. Osofisan, Femi. Kolera Kolej. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1975. Ousmane, Sembene. God’s Bits of Wood. Trans. Francis Price. London: Heinemann, 1973. Palmer, Eustace. ‘Review of Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru’. In ALT 1: 56-59. ——‘The Feminine Point of View: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joy of Motherhood’. In ALT 13: 38-55. Sowande, Bode. Our Man the President. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1981.

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Anthroliterary Discovery of a Novel Form in Nigeria Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi ‘Segilola, Eleyin’ju Ege’ & the Re-Reading of Print Culture, Events & Images in the First Nigerian Novel JOHN UWA

BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION Empirical inquiries into situated texts and readerships can help scholars to comprehend the variety of relationships between readers and printed texts in different global locations. Through such situated histories of reading and literary production, we can start to build comparisons between print cultures in different regions of the world and to understand the historical contexts that inform contemporary understandings of literacy. (Stephanie Newell The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa: 6)

With contemporary scholarship providing platforms for inter­ disciplinary exchange of empirical knowledge; and newer investigation of (pre)colonial histories prying into popular experiences situated within colonial newspapers, it is now possible to learn how the historical context of colonial literary activities can help to (re)shape ‘contemporary understandings’ of the novel in Nigeria. It is also now possible to use the initial responses of Nigerian creative writers and readers to print culture to establish newer truth about the emergence of the novel form in Nigeria. While the situated understanding and histories of print culture varies from one geographical location and literary culture to another, the credit for the origin of Nigerian novel in print, goes to I.B. Thomas’s The Life Story of Me, Segilola – a collection of fictional epistles of the life and times of a mystery character called Segilola, serialized and situated within the newspaper print culture of the 1929 to 1930 colonial Nigeria. This is contrary to popular assumptions attributing the emergence of print culture and the novel in Nigeria to D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale. Therefore, re-imagining the emergence of the novel form in Nigeria is most likely if we take Newell’s conception of ‘situated text’, to mean that the 104

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printed texts (novel genre) are not only situated in books that have come to be canonized, but also in the newspaper medium. In Newell’s opinion, to understand the origin of Nigerian literary print culture, we must return to the situated ‘history of reading and literary production in Nigeria’ (5) – which precedes English-language literature in Nigeria by fifteen to twenty years (Barber Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: 7). Most histories and studies on colonial Lagos are based on the colonial activities of Lagos; ranging from the intense political atmos­ phere, active economic environment, rural-urban migration, crossborder exchange, transport, housing, kinship, etc. Historians were more concerned with recording these activities than they were with recording everyday popular life and culture. However, creative writers interacted with this aspect of Nigerian life through newspaper print culture – documenting popular stories songs and events of the time in the newspaper medium. Newell tells us that the emergence of newspaper print culture between 1880 and the 1940s transformed the area known as British West Africa into a ‘dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation’, such that ‘African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute materials for publication’ (2). And beyond just communicating news and editorial commentaries, the editors at that time used the newspaper medium to generate inclusive public debate, and literate Nigerians responded with great optimism – sending in letters, articles, fictions and poetry for publication. The fallout of this development in print culture birthed the first Nigerian novel between 1929 and 1930 by I.B. Thomas who was also the editor of the weekly newspaper Akede Eko, and the series of letters which followed the serialized account of the fictional character Segilola. Surprisingly, this advent was about twenty years before the birth of other canonized literary texts – either in English or Yoruba. This discovery, which interrogates known knowledge on the emergence of the novel form in Nigeria, would take the effort of Karin Barber’s compilation, translation and introduction of the original version of Thomas’s fiction from Yoruba to English. The result is a combined effort of anthropology and literature, experimented through ethnographic research method. Her anthropological translation validates literature as an historical source which records real life experience to account for anthropological truth. Therefore, for us to have the full knowledge of Thomas’s The Life Story of Me, Segilola as the first Nigerian novel, Karin Barber’s translation (Print Culture and the

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First Yoruba Novel: I.B. Thomas’s ‘Life Story of Me, Segilola’) provides two important lenses for the text to be viewed as a literary form within the novel genre. The first is that she situates the text within the tradition of realism and the epistolary novel – identifying marked literary elements like style, technique, time, setting, probable characters and sequential arrangement of events. And in the second instance, she deploys the events of the text as documentary of everyday popular life and culture of colonial Lagos, which accounts for anthropological evidence of truth in the Nigerian novel. When Akinwumi Isola, an astute writer and researcher of Yoruba literary tradition, studied in depth the development of the modern Yoruba novel and foregrounded this within the tradition of realism – classifying realism into types based on notions of reality – he made no serious mention of Thomas’s The Life Story of Me, Segilola. Some reasons I am thinking may be responsible for his refusal to critically engage the text, could be that Isola did not consider the collection of fictional epistles as a serious novel in the tradition of realism – even though the novel is reputed as the first Yoruba novel in print; or simply because Thomas concealed his authorial identity; and it is possible that he didn’t quite appreciate the epistolary nature of the novel and the medium (popular newspaper) where it was first serialized. For whatever reason, this is not unexpected as popular art forms are usually downplayed in serious literary discourses, even when such popular forms play vital roles in the build-up of mainstream forms. In other words, the enormous energies of the writers of popular fiction and the potential contributions of their texts to Nigerian literary discourse are lost to ‘close reading’ and canonical restrictions, or completely ignored by critics as non-elitist. Notwithstanding, Barber argues that ‘any Yoruba literary history that omits this work is incomplete’, and any critical account of Nigerian fiction which excludes the ‘remarkable parallels and resonances between’ Thomas’s Segilola and the eponymous female characters in modern Nigerian novels neglects the opportunity to comprehensively account for the novel form in Nigeria (10). So, apart from the adequacy of using the ‘anthropological novel’ (Didier Fassin ‘True Life and Real Life: Revisiting the Boundaries Between Ethnography and Literature’: 42) to account for the life of a people and anthropological truth, Barber situates the development of the Nigerian novel within the emergence of newspaper print media of the 1920s – a medium that has been largely ignored in accounting for that development. How she achieves this will be the concern in the proceeding argument.

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ETHNO-LITERARY APPROACHES TO THE NOVEL Over a period of time, anthropological inquiries into human existence gave rise to cultural relativism – that is, under­ standing people’s beliefs and values based on their culture, for example Jaret Kanarek (‘Critiquing Cultural Relativism’), Jack Donnelly (‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’) and Elizabeth Zechenter (‘In the Name of Culture: Cultural Relativism and the Abuse of the Individual’). Cultural relativism has been applied to works of literature (oral and written) by anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. It is within this approach to culture that anthropologists have developed the concept of ethnography – the study of cultural groups through observation of their socio-cultural practices without imposing any deductive framework or methodology resulting from such observation. Boas and Malinowski are known to favour two different approaches to ethnography. Boas recommends that documents and informants are valid means of data collection and evaluation (Race, Language, and Culture: 1940a, 1940b, 1940c, 1943); Malinowski holds that researchers should have first-hand information and close observation of their data by visiting and living at the site and experiencing the way of life of their host (Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea). Barber, as in most of her masterpieces on African literature, finds a niche for herself by combining the literary and the anthropological – the Boasian and Malinoskian in translating the story of Segilola. Barber tells us that her introduction to the translation of the text from Yoruba to English will not only ‘set the text in its social context’ (13) but will also show how the text emerged from everyday life of ‘Lagosian, Yoruba and Nigerian History’ (13). Barber’s submission shows the importance of cultural histories, as represented in literature, to anthropological investigations; and her translation of the cultural histories of Lagos as narrated by Segilola, together with her objective study of the situation in the text, proves that she is conversant with realist ethnography – the same that was popularized by Van Maanen (Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography). In a style which ostensibly shows a high level of neutrality in the sociopolitical life of colonial Lagos, Barber reports that city’s urban history, referencing the life story of Segilola. The translation, ancillary notes of the text and the life of Segilola give a detailed report of everyday sexual activities of women in 1920s colonial Lagos as reported in print media (newspapers) and the socio-economic factors that may

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have fertilized ground for sexual immorality to sprout in Lagos. Barber ties these factors to depravation of 1920s and 30s, which saw ‘newspaper articles denouncing sexual immorality’ (19). She tells us: ‘Some commentators made an explicit link between soaring inflation, joblessness and prostitution’ (19). She alludes to the socio-economic historical condi­tion of Lagos at the time to locate factors that may have influenced Thomas in the making of the hyper-realist character, Segilola, and how culture and cultural histories should be interpreted. A re-reading of the text creates an implicit assumption suggesting that, with anthropological inquiries, or an ethnographical account of the work of literature, writers cannot dissociate themselves from the socio-cultural phenomenon of society (into which Thomas must have consciously or unconsciously tapped) when they write. Presumably, considering historical evidences of everyday life in colonial Lagos, Thomas employs the life of Segilola to account for the constantly emerging culture of colonial Lagos, ranging from prostitution, to marvellous realism (black magic), marriage, (un)employment, housing, transportation, migration and – unconsciously – print culture. Barber’s translation of the main text, her introduction, the notes on the text and translation, and her references, now and again tell us that the text can help in the construction of society in the same way that society helps in the creation of the text. This is most probable since the novel is informed by the cultural context of 1920s Lagos and the individual situations of Segilola and the archetypes within the society Thomas mirrors. To that extent, Thomas could be said to have unknowingly undertaken the exercise of literature and ethnography in one creative work. While it is possible that most of the readers of the text could have read for the sake of entertainment and possibly to learn some moral lessons; Barber’s experiment with the text takes our understanding of the it, and indeed literature in general a step further by shifting our focus from representational art – represented in the text by realistic characters, dialogue, events and places – to anthropological truth. By using the work of literature to validate the colonial histories of everyday life situated within the text as truth, and at the same time pointing at literary metaphors and cultural elements within the text, she creates equal and opposite space for the understanding of human relations through literature and anthropology. This space may be referred to as the anthroliterary space for understanding human relations, behaviour and culture – see Goodman and Melcher (‘Culture at a Distance: An Anthroliterary Approach to Cross-Cultural Education’). In creating this interpretive space, Barber identifies the literary metaphors within

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the text, and transports the same to her readers as cultural metaphors by tagging the places, events and imageries of the text to historical events of 1920s colonial histories of Lagos and Gold Coast (Ghana). Margarida Martins brilliantly captures the relationship between literature and anthropology in the following way: In character description, the re-creation of dialogue, the construction of social interaction, and the depiction of cultural environments it is hard to separate literature from social experience and theory. Anthropology which is a study that aims at reconstructing the daily practices of cultural groups through writing inevitably relies on literary strategies. Literature and anthropology are indissociable in that they provide each other with the essential ingredients for the practice of both disciplines. (‘Bridging Anthropology and Literature through Indian Writing in English’: 179)

By using the literary text to validate the cultural histories of colonial Lagos, and vice-versa, Barber is pointing to the inevitable connect­ ion between literature and anthropology. This is illustrated in her work, as there are visible co­ordinates between literature, history and anthropology in her translation, interpretation and introduction of Life Story of Me, Segilola, and, in the process, strengthening a newer discipline, popular culture, from within the fields of anthropology and literature. Barber elucidates the importance of cultural histories, as mirrored in the works of literature, to anthropologists in the following way: ‘it should be interesting to historians and anthropologists because of the glimpses it offers of how a specific social process of invention, in concrete historical circumstances, actually happened’ (12). The uniqueness of Barber’s translation of and intro­ duction to Thomas’s Life Story of Me, Segilola in Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel inheres in the way she recaptures and reinterprets the events of the text to remind us that reality and the fictional portrayal of it, which has been subject of intense critical interrogation are in the long run the story or representation of our existence. To do this Barber would rely on her vast knowledge in cultural anthropology to show that literature is not the only domain in which human life can be captured. While it may not be strange to assert that there are other disciplines where life can be vividly captured, it is certainly interesting to see crossdisciplinary interpretation of reality; that is, presenting reality through the standpoints of ethnography and realism. This is exactly what Barber has done with her editing, translation and introduction of Thomas’s ‘Life Story of Me, Segilola’ in Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel. Barber’s anthropological inquiries of a literary text not only ex­

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pound the horizon for understanding the text, and show the extent to which the reality of life and truth can be represented, but also redirect to the emergence of the novel form in Nigeria. It shows that realistic representation of life is not exclusive to literature, but that anthropology can also find a way of dealing with the life and human culture even from creative representation in the works of literature. Usually, anthropological exploration of truth from within the literary text is in the hope that reality and truth are to some degree contrived within the works of literature. But literature in itself is not particularly concerned with the pursuance of truth, than it is concerned with reality; this is holding to the elusive nature of truth. However, Barber’s anthropological inquest into the world of the text is not in any way a questioning of literary reality, or realism in literature, but a way of arriving at a more general truth through the elusiveness of truth present in the works of literature. The combination of literary and anthropological tools – ethnography and realism, is an effort by Barber to present her readers with something related to what Gilles Deleuze refers to as ‘liveable or lived experience’ (Essays: Critical and Clinical: 1). What Barber does with her translation is to render two perspectives to the work of Thomas’s; one as ‘real life’ (Proust ‘Notebook’: 298), and the other as ‘true life’. The ‘real’ is presented to us through the prism of realism, and the ‘truth’ by the concept of ethnography. Through the exploration of realism she is able to establish the real (reality) by presenting a picture of that which is not far removed from what has happened – and by so doing providing the readers of Thomas’s text with more precise experience of what has happened in real life. By the same token, she articulates the truth – scientific inquiry into the urban culture of colonial Lagos through ethnographical probing of the characters, places, dates and events of the text. Even though Didier Fassin contends ‘that anthropology is fundamentally an attempt to articulate the real and the true’ (‘True Life and Real Life’: 41), I argue that Karin Barber is able to achieve the depth of investigation present in her book by her blend of realism and ethnography. Even Fassin’s acceptance of the fact of the capacity of anthropology to capture both the real and the true ‘may have been partially lost at times in the course of the history of the discipline, when imitation of the natural sciences led to somewhat rigid paradigms’ (‘True Life and Real Life’: 41), gives some support to my claim that what Barber presents to us is a blend of realism and ethnography. By interpreting and translating the text in terms of realism and

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ethnography, Barber diverges a little away from the core literary tradition for evaluating, judging, analysing and interpreting the literary text, to create equal and opposite space for anthroliterary interpretation:. she interprets and analyses the events and characters of the text as though they were true, but yet tells us that it is a work of fiction. This duality in analysing the text is what Goodman and Melcher (‘Culture at a Distance’) refer to as the anthroliterary approach to cross-culture, while applying Margaret Mead’s and Rhoda Métraux’s anthropological theory of cross-culture to the pedagogy of child education (The Study of Culture at a Distance). In their work, Mead and Métraux argue that a study of oral tradition and written literature of a cultural group can help acquaint the anthropologist with insights into the way of life of people which is not available to close scientific observation. This approach of Barber has obviously fertilized methodology for evaluating and appreciating the Yoruba culture, as duplicated in the Yoruba novel, and impressively transforming the orientation of literary anthropology in the Nigerian novel. In spite of this welcome innovation, this approach also comes with its own challenges for both literature and anthropology, especially when we consider the fact that literature is simply the work of fiction before anything else. So on the one hand, the anthropologist may be tempted to convert realistic portrayals in creative literature into ‘truth’. (It should be noted that my assumption about anthropological pursuit of ‘truth’ suggests in no way that anthropology is not responding to post-modernist recourse to culture and tradition – especially when traditional materials are in abundance in Africa. Rather, it speaks of the temptation to ignore the fictional undertone of literature.) On the other hand, the creative writer may be under pressure to write history instead of literature, and readers may be led into seeing fiction as truth rather than a representation of the real. One of the feedbacks on Segilola’s narrative is a clear indication of how works of literature may be received if treated as truth more than as works of fiction: I myself once went in for promiscuity or harlotry as a young girl in Lagos; and though I quickly turned away from this evil path, my experience means that I can say with certainty that every detail of Segilola’s life story is absolutely true. (‘Jumoke’, a reader, as translated in Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: 277)

The above contributor would even go on to make a donation of a ‘ten-shilling note’ (277) to Segilola. My question would be – why would Thomas want to receive ten shillings on behalf of a fictional

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character? Was Thomas set to present a real life event or a fictional story? I reckon that Thomas presented a story to an audience who were unable to make a demarcation between the fact and fiction Barber is able to discern – digging the anthropological truth from within the field of literature. Even those who see themselves as critical of fact and fiction, like our next example, often fall preys to this trap: When your story first began to appear, I thought that the editor of Akede Eko was just joking or was on a fool’s errand, but when I began to pay attention to the names, neighbourhoods, times and all kinds of other things, this banished all my doubts, and I became convinced that all of it is true, and that the story of your life is full of lessons. (‘D.A.L’, a reader, as translated, 279)

For Barber, the thin line between fact and fiction is not a problem; once Thomas’s narrative of Segilola’s life is presented as a story within the culture of print, albeit through a local newspaper, it became easy for her to decorate it with all the paraphernalia of the novel genre, and as the first Nigerian novel. Barber is aware that the text passes more clearly as a novel, more by its epistolary nature and the print culture than as a novel in the European sense. In this regard, she opines that the text only became a novel after a retrospective evaluation; but more important, especially to the anthropologist, are ‘the incremental steps by which a new genre was established by diverse contributors’ (12) and the convergence of a new kind of audience. The convergence of ethnography and literature is not any­thing new in anthropological/literary criticism; in fact, Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ collaboration on Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet is a classic example (‘Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”’: 125). But when such convergence begins to tell us about an ignored aspect in the emergence or development of the novel genre in Nigeria, then such convergence should hold legitimate claim to serious critical attention. Barber could be said to have been influenced by her literary background in her analysis of Segilola’s narrative; in so doing, reaffirms her kindred ties with literary criticism through her interpretation of the narrative which projects the popular culture of 1920s Lagos by means common to literary structuralism. Besides seeing I.B. Thomas’s novel as an anthropological documentation of everyday popular life in colonial Lagos, it may not be out of place to see the series of letters as novel. This will mean situating the collection within the genre of epistolary novels, and locating incidents within the text that resonate with the tradition

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of historical realism. In her depiction of the text as a novel, Barber points to the use of the first person narrative point of view, ‘datable temporality’ (50), real names and places in colonial Lagos, stories within the story which ‘leads out into a hinterland of shared historical memory’ (57). However, she is careful not situate the novel within nineteenth-century European tradition of the novel; doing so would certainly expose the text to the kind of criticism realist novels and writers were subjected in the wake of modernism. Therefore, she argues that by contrast, the novel ‘is more like an extended proverb’ whose narrative verisimilitude makes it incontrovertibly a lesson to others. (60) By first situating the texts within the tradition of historical realism and then identifying its marked boundaries from its European counterparts – ‘everyday experience for its own sake’, we are moved back and forth using textual reality, date, historical events and places to validate the historical context of the novel. For example, Segilola’s insistence on ordinance marriage (95) is employed by Barber in her introductory footnote to evaluate the tension and dichotomy resulting from the introduction of British ordinance marriage in colonial society, as against the traditional form (4); the novel also explores the strong belief in African magic (60), and the themes of joblessness, inflation, prostitution and depravation (19) in colonial Lagos. These representations in the work of Thomas bring to our notice the response of creative writers to the emergence of print media, even before publishing companies started publishing the works of art in single books as novels and plays. A re-reading of the response of creative writers to print culture, and the situated texts within the print media of 1920s colonial Nigeria, through the spectacle of postcolonial literary studies will certainly take us back to the ancient question of ‘what is literature?’, a question renowned scholars and critics are still struggling to answer. While the responses rage on, Eddie Tafoya argues that ‘the core of the problem is not the lack of answers but the inadequacy of the question’ (The Legacy of the Wisecrack: 22). In his opinion, it will be more productive to explore the things literature does than what literature is; in that way, we may be able to explore the huge possibilities of literature which exist outside restrictive semantics and ‘heavy-duty literary theory’ (22). One way of exploring such huge possibilities is to account for Nigerian literary heritage through the exploration of colonial Nigerian newspaper fiction which has received little-to-no previous critical attention. Accordingly, Newell argues that newspapers are not

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just research resources into reader reception and cultural production, they are also ‘productive literary forms with the power to generate … particular types of discourse. They form a vital part of the continent’s literary heritage, and they represent a literary field in which readers’ are active participants (The Power to Name 5).

CONCLUSION Without doubt, the depth of meaning derived from Karin Barber’s translation and interpretation of The Life Story of Me, Segilola, hinges on the interpretive space created by the meeting point between literature and anthropology. This fusion speaks to us of the changes contemporary society is undergoing resulting from (inter)cultural encounters, urbanization and postcolonial activities. It shows that contemporary scholarship must develop new ways of looking at or comprehending reality and truth in contemporary society. It brings to mind, Jean-Paul Sartre’s prediction that a literature of praxis, which everyone must find a way to handle, is coming into being in the age of the ‘unfindable public’ (What is Literature?: 219-20); it reminds us of literary structuralism, which holds that the special functions linguistic materials (like metaphors and cultural codes) acquire when they are organized as literature must be considered when ascribing meaning to the works of literature. As we come to terms with the changing culture, we must find a way of mediating these cultural forms by establishing ‘truth’ from the portrayal of the ‘real’. In other words, the inevitable relationship between literature and anthropology must be explored to produce scientific truth; and, perhaps, it is possible to use such collaboration to locate the scientific within the art discipline. The implication of this for literature would be a little rethinking of the Aristotelean notion of the ‘purity of forms’ to contamination of forms. For anthropology, it will mean fraternizing with perceptual impulses of literature without losing its scientific status. In fact, the idea of the anthroliterary approach is automatically established and affirmed the moment certain creative writing is referred to as an ‘anthropological novel’ by Fassin. To distinguish anthropology from literature is to actually establish their relationship. On the one hand, literature deals with the (re)presentation of social reality and experiences in a manner that the unacceptable is made acceptable through modes of mediation and other literary devices. On the other hand, anthropology investigates social experiences

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in order to account for the changing and emerging culture of any particular society. Where these experiences are not available in history or through informants, it turns to literature as critical source – validating social experiences within the literary text as accounts of truth by tagging some to historical events in which the literary text is situated. This is exactly what Barber did by using the social experiences within the text of I.B. Thomas to account for the social experiences of 1920s colonial Lagos. This kind of anthropological excursion into the literary text in search of truth, or the intersection between literature and anthropology, encourages literature, most especially African literature, to move further away from the art-forart’s-sake orthodoxy into a more pragmatic representation of culture and social experiences. In this regard, I envisage a new discipline evolving in the near future from this interaction between literature and anthropology (if it has not already evolved).

WORKS CITED Barber, Karin, ed., trans. and Introduction. Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: I.B. Thomas’s ‘Life Story of Me, Segilola’ and Other Texts. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Boas, Franz. ‘The Study of Geography’ [1887]. In Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1940a: 639-47. ——‘The Limitations of the Comparative Method in Anthropology’ [1896]. In Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1940b: 270-80. ——‘The Aims of Ethnology’ [1898]. In Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1940c: 626-38. Deleuze, Gilles 1997[1993] Essays: Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press. Donnelly, Jack. ‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’. Human Rights Quarterly Vol. 6, No. 4 (November 1984): 400-419 Fagunwa, D.O. Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole. Ibadan: Nelson and Evans Brothers, 2005 [1949]. Fassin, Didier. ‘True Life and Real Life: Revisiting the Boundaries Between Ethnography and Literature’. Journal of the American Ethnological Society Vol. 41, No. 1 (February 2014): 40-55. Goodman, Jesse and Kate Melcher. ‘Culture at a Distance: An Anthroliterary Approach to Cross-Cultural Education’. Journal of Reading No. 28 (December 1984): 200-206. Jakobson, Roman and Claude Lévi-Strauss. ‘Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”’. In The Structuralists from Marx to Lévi-Strauss, eds R. and F. DeGeorge. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1972: 124-46.

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116  John Uwa Kanarek, Jaret. ‘Critiquing Cultural Relativism’. The Intellectual Standard Vol. 2, No. 2, 2013. Lévi-Strauss, C., C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Malinowski, B. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Benediction Classics, 2010 [1922]. Martins, Margarida. ‘Bridging Anthropology and Literature through Indian Writing in English’. Revista Anglo Saxonica. Vol. III, No. 8 (2014): 171-82. Mead, Margaret and Rhoda Métraux. The Study of Culture at a Distance. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1953. Newell, Stephanie. The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013. Proust, Marcel. ‘Notebook’. La Table Ronde. 2, 1945: 30-31. In In Search of Lost Time. D. Emright, trans. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Bernard Frechtman, trans. Northampton, UK: Methuen, 1967 [1950]. Tafoya, Eddie. The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form. Boca Raton, FL: BrownWalker Press, 2009.Van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Zechenter, Elizabeth. ‘In the Name of Culture: Cultural Relativism and the Abuse of the Individual’. Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 53, No. 3 (Autumn 1997): 319-47.

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Gynocritical Impulses in the Novels & Short Stories of Ifeoma Okoye MACPHERSON NKEM. AZUIKE

INTRODUCTION The operational concept in the title of this article, gyno­ criticism, demands some urgency of description if not outright definition. So we shall describe the term gyno­criticism which is the major plank that underpins the framework of this article. But definitions bring their own challenges especially for a concept dredged up from the critical core of a larger and equally problematic literary superordinate, feminism, whose outlines are complex and extremely jagged depending on the practitioner’s perspective. Elaine Showalter, an American feminist literary critic coined the term gynocriticism in 1979 to describe the strand of feminist literary criticism devoted essentially to the study of women’s issues by women and devoid of male-induced distractions, prejudices, patronage and pretensions: ‘a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature’ (‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’: 131) ‘By expanding the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace male models of literary creation, and so, “map the territory” left unexplored in earlier criticism’ (Wikipedia ‘Gynocriticism’). Showalter originally drew the term from French ‘la gynocritique’ because she believed it encapsulated the brand of feminism she envisioned and desired to espouse (Dahiya ‘ELAINE SHOWALTER: Towards a Feminist Poetics’). This was obviously her reaction to what she considered to be the inadequate and the unsatisfactory maleorchestrated kind of feminist literary criticism that still pandered to phallocentric methods, assumptions, values and directions of female literary criticism by both male and female writers. For her, the new design and interest of feminist literary criticism should be one by a woman championing a new literary template for the study of the 117

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woman, fully equipped with its own literary canons, analytical methods and temperaments. Showalter distinguishes her gynocriticism from the works of other feminist critics who include and analyse the works of male authors, even when they do so from a feminist perspective. She believes in the purity of her brand because it captures authentic female experience, history, psychology, and sociology of the woman without the woman needing to look over her shoulders for male approval, excuses or legitimacy. Since gynocriticism is an aspect of feminist literary criticism, the reader may be expecting a full exegesis of the feminist theory in this article. This is a huge responsibility that this article does not pretend it can accommodate, nor is it adequately equipped to handle. Feminism is a loaded weapon and it is equally difficult to pin it down to a fixed meaning. This is why practitioners approach it from a myriad of perspectives. However, its general, commonplace discursive outlines are fairly obvious. As Beasley observes, ‘Feminism is a troublesome term’ (What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory: ix). He explains: Feminists themselves often indicate considerable reluctance to engage in the task of definition … feminists are inclined – frequently deliberately – not to define what they mean by feminism, sensing dangers such as internal policing of both the field and of feminists by those who might like to determine what is to be included (or not), as well as the potential danger of constricting the unstable vitality of its meaning. (xii)

Beasley argues that it is the seductive simplicity of the term feminism that lures many to express opinions on it; even while they grope helplessly in the labyrinth of its vast implications. It is for this reason that we have restricted our attention and interest in this article to gynocriticism, which on its own, is a critical handful. Showalter contends that even where a man is a feminist suffused with the highest doses of feminine sympathy or empathy for the female, he still cannot boast of the natural experience and feeling of the female no matter his benevolence. He is simply not a female! She identifies the term the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which characterizes texts written by males because they have inherent ‘contradictions and conflicts as well as absences and silences’ (Moi Sexual/Textual Politics: 8) which do not properly define the female text: [O]ne of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what

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women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be. (quoted in Moi: 75)

Similarly, Adichie, in her Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifestation in Fifteen Suggestions, rejects vehemently, the idea of ‘conditional female equality’. She enthuses: ‘it is a hollow, appeasing and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not.’ And with a tone of finality she declares: ‘You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not’ (16). She reminds the reader that even where for whatever reason, a woman claims not to be a feminist, the necessity of feminism is not diminished; rather, such denial is a sorry product and evidence of the successful corrosive pervasiveness of patriarchy (51). Showalter believes that the psychodynamics of feminist creative impulse is far beyond what male creativity can adequately represent. Another source of bother is whether the male is even genuinely willing to embrace such effort. Feminist literary critics insist on a female identity, and rightly so, especially one devoid of the patronizing manacles of male assumptions, stereotypes and female-stunting characterizations. What is sought for the female is what I like to describe here, as ‘freeto-air identity’ devoid of patriarchal meddlesomeness. In her essay ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, Showalter outlined five major strands of the field of feminist criticism, including gynocriticism. They are a) Woman as Reader; b) Woman as Writer; c) The Problems of Feminist Critique; d) Programme of Gynocritics; and, e) Feminine, Feminist, Female Stages (Dahiya ‘ELAINE SHOWALTER’: 4). Of the five, our main interest is in the second which is devoted to ‘woman as writer’ which is gynocriticism. And this is also where we introduce Ifeoma Okoye, the author chosen for study in this article. Okoye is chosen because she has been able to address with uncommon clarity of thought, and unshakeable commitment, the socio-cultural, political and economic vicissitudes which afflict women in the patriarchal Nigerian society. She writes with the same gynocritical impulse that concentrates attention on the lot and plight of the woman, whether the subject matter is childlessness, voicelessness, child illegitimacy, social humiliation, dehumanization and, generally, man’s inhumanity to woman in all its ramifications: all these and more, regardless of whether they are products of patriarchal conditioning or self-amused overzealousness. When Showalter talks about the female natural feeling and experience which the male writer is incapable of recreating, she may definitely be referring to an experience like childbirth. This is an

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example only a woman that has experienced maternity or childlessness can capture satisfactorily. No male writer, we believe, can capture the excruciating pangs of joy or the forlornness of hope and hurt like a woman when both genders write about the subject, no matter the attempt at cross-gender simulations of the twenty-first century.

BEHIND THE CLOUDS (1982) In Behind the Clouds, Ifeoma Okoye relives the life of Mrs Ije Apia, Dozie’s wife who is barren, or so the doctors, charlatans and crystalball gazers believed. The excruciating experience Mrs Ije Apia was subjected to while she diligently searched for a solution to what befell her is better imagined than expressed. Only a woman writing about this, like Ifeoma Okoye does, can truly represent the authentic character-role translation in the mild drama below, especially if you are childless like Ije, and a female visitor arrives at your home in your husband’s absence: Ije: ‘I understand you want to see Mr. Apia. I am sorry he’s out of town and won’t be back in time.’ ‘By the way, I’m Mrs. Apia,’ Ije introduced herself. ‘I don’t think we‘ve met before?’ Visitor: ‘I’m Mrs. Apia too. I’m carrying Mr. Apia’s baby and I’ve come to take my rightful place in his house.’(75)

This is not an experience a man can relate to or recreate with conviction, no matter how much he tries. Try reversing the scenario to appreciate fully the impact of the encounter. A quest that has been a life-long interest and preoccupation of one woman shattered with epiphanic brashness and impudence. Only a woman can understand the full import and impact of the solemnity of this drama. Ije had undergone uncountable tests and treatments for what was assumed to be her condition of childlessness, because of her overriding desire to cuddle a baby, one she would call hers, a bundle of joy and evidence of maternity. All her efforts were futile. Interestingly, Apostle Joseph, one of the charlatans she was taken to for solution by Beatrice, had prophetically hinted in a moment of frenzy, divination or perhaps, pure male heat, that Ije might not be responsible for her predicament, an angle to the matter that so far, no one had contemplated. This is absolutely normal in a patriarchal society where unfortunately the woman is always held responsible for childlessness in a marriage. Apostle Joseph had announced to Ije with apocalyptic frankness that,

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‘Some men, for some reason, are unable to father children’ (55). He then added the selfish distraction which may have made Ije listless and dismissive of the import of the prophet’s assertion about men, some men. The prophet presses his prey: Wise women who are married to such men tactfully find other men to give them what they so much desire. This is not adultery in the eyes of men. It is not adultery in the eyes of God. Think about this, Mrs. Apia. (Gilbert and Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, quoted in Moi: 55)

Mrs Apia did not have to go far for a confirmatory assurance of the prophet’s alchemy as he unguardedly and boastfully reveals: ‘I have gladly done it for some women. I can do it for you too’ (55). The magnetism in his voice and the apparent inviolability of the prophet’s revelation that he has kindly and happily farmed out this conjugal service to the female needy, perplexed Mrs Apia the more, especially, with her friend Beatrice being an example of where ‘terms and conditions’ applied. Beatrice: ‘You’ve not been attending Apostle Joseph’s church for some time now, Ije … ‘Are you ill?’ (61). Ije had not gone to the Apostle’s church because of his advances to her, believing that her friend Beatrice had been luckier not to have been subjected to such an indignity by a so-called man of God. At this juncture, Beatrice released the shocker to Ije. Beatrice: ‘I’ll confide in you, Ije, for two reasons. You‘re so good that I’ m sure you’ll keep my secret. Moreover, if I confide in you, the guilt will be lifted off my chest and I’ll feel better’ (61). Then she released the bombshell about her pregnancy with cold stone finality. ‘This baby is Apostle Joseph’s’ (61). There is no doubt that the ‘life that has no story … is really a life of death, a death-in-life’, as Gilbert and Gubar declare (57). The lives of Ije and Beatrice have stories – abundant stories and indeed stories only women can tell with experiential conviction arising from a gynocritical impulse as Ifeoma Okoye has done in Behind the Clouds. At the end of the novel, Ije’s husband voluntarily submitted himself for a series of tests and examinations in a London clinic, where it was discovered that he had a minor blockage which could be corrected by a simple operation (119). Dozie the man, and not Ije the wife, was after all responsible for their childless marriage; a condition for which Ije was subjected to life-sapping humiliation and odious social opprobrium. However, in a rare instance of male confession, Dozie apologized and admitted to Ije: ‘I’m sorry that you’ve subjected yourself to all kinds of treatment, unpleasant ones and dangerous ones, when

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I have all along been the cause of our childlessness’ (118). And one might ask: Why allow Ije to go through this harrowing experience in the first place? Couldn’t Dozie have surrendered himself earlier than now for medical tests and examinations? Of course, in a traditional patriarchal society the obvious answer is that male ego has asserted its accustomed obduracy.

CHIMERE (1992) Chimere is the name of the protagonist of Okoye’s next novel selected for study in this article. The novel is also titled Chimere, and it addresses the subject of the illegitimate child syndrome. Chimere is declared illegitimate on account of her father, who abandoned her mother, after their brief moment of youthful indiscretion that led to an unwanted pregnancy. Chimere’s mother Fidelia Ato was at her wit’s end when no one came to her rescue or succour during her pregnancy. The culprit-in-chief, Enuma Eze was too young to assume the responsibility of fatherhood. He even denied responsibility, leaving Fidelia hopeless, and helpless. Her aunt was so disgusted with her and ashamed to be associated with a teenage girl carrying an unwanted pregnancy that she threw Fidelia out of her house in Lagos. Thus, Fidelia was abandoned to a capricious fate in a mean and harsh environment where her condition was considered a sociocultural and religious taboo. Chimere’s life story is the account of how an illegitimate girl child spent her adult life searching for a father figure who would unlatch the illegitimate shackle from her neck. The tragedy, however, was that, when she succeeded eventually in this search, the man she found, and actually her biological father, refused to accept her on account of the cantankerous new wife he lived with. The reader immediately recalls that Chimere’s boyfriend in the university, Jide, also jilted her because of her predicament. This heart-wrenching story could only have been conjured up with the kind of eerie and chilly soul-trauma and tremor it carries, by a woman who has experienced maternity or a committed female writer with heightened gynocritical impulse and consciousness. There is no doubt that a male can tell this kind of story and many must have already done so, but certainly not with the poignancy and pungency Ifeoma Okoye has done here. She does not call Ezuma the culpritin-chief, a devil, a renegade, a philanderer, but the circumstances paint him as such. Yet, the young girl’s experience throughout this

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odyssey leaves the reader deeply breathless and aghast especially after Chimere found her father who for the second time rejected her. It was Bernadette Mosala, the South African feminist who quipped rather wittily: ‘When men are oppressed, it’s tragedy. When women are oppressed, it’s tradition’ (6). But in the case of the young girl, Chimere, what we have is certainly double tragedy.

THE TRIAL AND OTHER STORIES (2005); THE PAY PACKET (1993); THE POWER OF A PLATE OF RICE (1999) Ifeoma Okoye’s The Trial and Other Stories provides us with a com­ pendium of male-designed indignities that women are subjected to in patriarchal societies as found in Nigeria, especially the eastern part, and in many parts of Africa. In the text, Ifeoma Okoye warns the reader with an opening letter of the impending torrid and unsavoury account of female experiences she plans to unleash in the text and which also serve as her reasons for writing the stories. And they are indeed, the kind of stories which inspire feminist and gynocritical impulses among different groups of feminist literary critics. First, Okoye lists the inhuman treatment women, especially widows, are subjected to in a traditional patriarchal society. Widows often lose their inheritance to their in-laws because of discriminatory laws and customs. Sometimes they are forced to marry their husband’s brother. They are prevented from remarrying because of the fear of losing their children to their husband’s relations if they remarried outside his extended family. They lose their property or suffer sheer neglect which can turn them to begging, prostitution or to poorly paid jobs in order to survive. Some are forced to withdraw their children from school because they cannot afford to pay the school fees. (The Trial and Other Stories:1-2) Ifeoma Okoye provides explanations for these five practices: These problems arise mostly because of gender bias and inequality. In these areas where widows are subjugated, discriminated against and denied their fundamental human rights, the general belief is that women are inferior to men and under them, and that men should decide what is good or not for women. It is discriminatory that widowers don’t go through dehumanizing rites and rituals. They don’t lose their property or children when their wives die. They easily acquire their deceased wives’ property. They remarry without losing their children to anyone. (2)

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Okoye says that part of the reason she wrote the stories is to encourage widows ‘to do something by themselves to solve some of their problems … as this will boost their self-confidence, self-esteem and … maintain their dignity’ (2). This reason underscores the independent, can-do spirit by women for women, and aligns critically with the gynocritical impulse. From Stories 1 to 9 (‘Soul Healers’, ‘Between Women’, ‘A Strange Disease’, ‘The Voiceless Victim’, ‘The Trial’, ‘The New Business Woman’, ‘From Wife to Concubine’, ‘Second Chance’ and ‘Daughters for Sale’), Okoye chronicles the travails of women, essentially, widows in a patriarchal society. In some of these stories widows have been disinherited and dispossessed of their children and family property. In others, they have been dehumanized and subjected to bare-faced ridiculous trials on the presumption that they killed their husbands. In this kind of society, you are guilty until you prove your innocence in the contrived court of local opinion constituted by the ‘Umuokpu – Daughters of the Lineage’. Similarly, daughters are practically sold in the name of bride price and widows are acquired by brothers-in-law. These are a few of the unconscionable traditional practices in the stories, unleashed on hapless and helpless widows as dictated by the tradition and customs into which they were born. The Trial is indeed a bumper harvest of everything that is bad that has been thrown at women in a traditional society. There is also evidence of the result of socio-cultural conditioning which makes women to accept with incriminating docility, some of the practices outlined above. And where this conditioning process has been most effective, it is the women who terrorize and even surpass in the agonizing exposure to ridicule and dehumanization of their fellow women. Story 5, also titled ‘The Trial’ documents this terrible experience at Anayo’s inquisition in the false accusation by her brotherin-law, Ezeji, who claims that she killed her husband, Zimuzo. These and more, constitute what we have described in this article as the gynocritical impulse which prompted Showalter to insist on women writing their own history, narrating their experiences to the total exclusion of how the male writer feels about such issues. Could a male writer have exposed the issues treated by Okoye in The Trial with the microscopic tenacity she has deployed in the narration of the stories? I doubt. Surely, some form of self-guilt or righteousness would have crept unobtrusively into a male writer’s narration to colour or rub off the honest integrity of the stories. Okoye’s gynocritical impulses have preserved for the reader the full weight of the obnoxious

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traditional practices that dehumanize and weigh down the woman in a traditional African society. In Ifeoma Okoye’s The Pay Packet and The Power of a Plate of Rice, she narrates in graphic details other humilia­ting and disempowering conditions women face, no matter their age. Husbands dispossess wives of their salaries, sometimes in a bid to recover the bride price they paid to marry them. Those who refuse to surrender their salaries to their husbands are battered mercilessly. In The Pay Packet, Bertrand gives his wife, Iba, a thorough beating for spending some portion of her salary on the pay day. Immediately Iba returns home on the pay day, Bertrand bellows: ‘Where is the money?’ And this was followed with hot, disorienting and numbing slaps. This man’s inhumanity to his wife happened because, as Bertrand, Iba’s husband reveals: ‘Your father secretly made me promise to give him your salary every month for three years in spite of the huge sum he took from me as your bride price’ (25). Mrs Cheta Adu, a widow, is owed four month’s salary by Mr Aziza, her school Principal in The Power of a Plate of Rice. This was at a time her daughter was ill and the fear of hospitalization hovered menacingly. Her January rent was due for payment and there were her two sons and mother-in-law to feed. Mr Aziza discriminated against female teachers whom he described as ‘a lazy lot’: ‘You always find excuses to be away from school’ (95). That Ifeoma Okoye is able to sustain the revelation of the horror women undergo in traditional patriarchal society is evidence of the gynocritical impulses that propel her to capture the unflattering details of what women experience in this part of the world. It must be footnoted that, though Ifeoma Okoye is a widow, she refused with uncommon stoicism, and with the help of her children, to be subjected to the widowhood practices presented in these texts selected for our study.

MEN WITHOUT EARS (1984) Although Ifeoma Okoye’s Men Without Ears parodies the vainglorious and ostentatious life style of the men in the novel, it is obvious that the women encountered in the novel have also been thoroughly sucked into, through a helpless socio-cultural conditioning, the mannerisms that complement their male counterparts. The desire and struggle for the acquisition of filthy lucre and obscene wealth have become an obsession for the men, while all noble virtues and traditional sense

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of decency have been jettisoned. This can be seen in the outlandish names the men have assumed. Examples like these abound: ‘Orimili – the sea that never dries!’ (21); ‘Aka-Ji-Aku – the hand that makes money!’ (22); ‘Osisi na ami ego – the tree that bears money as its fruit!’ (22). Other epithets include: ‘Young Millionaire’, ‘Money Maker’, ‘Ichie Gold’ and ‘Swiss Bank’, this last one with implications beyond the shores of Nigeria. Ifeoma Okoye also presents the titles the women assumed as mark of entitlement that complements whatever titles their husbands and male counterparts advertised. So, among the women there are: ‘Odoziaku’ – custodian of wealth, ‘Cash Madam’, ‘Madam True Money’ and, audaciously ‘Bank’. These titles for the male and female attest to the solid personal achievements of each of them and, in others, the aura of the assured propensities of the individuals concerned. This is a serious reminder of the epithets adopted by the Umuokpu – Daughters of the Lineage in The Trial and Other Stories. The central character of this novel is Chigo who has been summoned home from Tanzania by the father who is disappointed by the unhealthy tendencies and practices he has observed in Uloko, his first son, Chigo’s brother. Uloko is consumed by the rat race and unhealthy competition for personal wealth, power and position which have become the order of the day. This has turned to an obsession for both the men and the women in the novel. It is this scenario that Chigo discovered when he stepped into Nigeria, to his chagrin and bewilderment. The epithets adopted by the men and women in the novel underscore their preponderant tendencies and serve as the social gauge that calibrates the social and political stations they occupy as well as the rapidity of their social mobility in the society. It must be noted at this juncture that Uloko, the narrator’s elder brother lived and died in his struggle to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. Ifeoma Okoye is certainly mindful of the temperaments of the female characters who assumed the epithets listed above. It can be said that they are also ‘Women Without Ears’ as Chigo and his father labelled their male counterparts: a sad commentary and metaphor for a socio-culturally derailed lot. Interestingly, it is not only the affluent crust of the society that is afflicted with this malaise of self or group aggrandizement. Some members of the regular citizenry are also enmeshed in the economic rat race. Chigo’s father’s second wife bears the name Adaego, which literally translates to ‘Daughter of money’. It would seem that she literally lives her life chasing after money daily, to the total neglect of her matrimonial duties. It is this apparent

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abandonment of her essential home front that draws the ire of Ogoji, her sister-in-law as seen in the altercation below. Chigo has gone to the village to see his father. Ogoji, Chigo’s widowed sister, who lives in a nearby village, is one of the first callers who gather excitedly to welcome him. Adaego, Chigo’s step mother who was away when he arrived, has just returned. Ogoji engages her: ‘Adaego, are you just coming back?’ Ogoji rebuked her… Adaego retorted, ‘I am, Ogoji. What else have you got to say?’ Ogoji scowled at her. ‘Incorrigible woman! Go on with your bad ways. Keep on neglecting father. Keep on running after money. You’ll learn your lesson one day, the hard way.’ ‘Go to your husband’s house,’ Adaego taunted her. ‘I am not allowing you to come here and dictate to me.’

At this point Chigo tries to stop his sister from launching more attacks, but she rebuffs him. ‘Leave me to tell this stupid woman a few home truths,’ she growled. ‘She hasn’t seen you for years and yet she couldn’t forgo her many outings today and stay home to welcome you, to stay at home to prepare something for you to eat. Ask her how many times she gives father food. She won’t even feed her own children. Money-maker!’ She hissed contemptuously. ‘You’re just plain jealous of me, that’s all,’ Adaego sneered. ‘If you think I am not looking after your father well, why don’t you come and live with him? After all he is your father.’

The encounter above is more than the fabled case of women being their own worst enemies as some people may claim. Something more fundamental is involved. The encounter is instructive in many respects and at different levels. Though married but widowed, Ogoji has her unwavering gaze on the goings-on in her father’s house, her filial responsibility which she is not ready to surrender. For many sons, this may not be the case. For the female child, it is an unspoken bond and responsibility that activates automatically and hovers imperiously and sometimes, menacingly in defence of her maiden name. At another level, the issue of a second wife and step mother creeps in. Where the adult children of a man believe that their father is being ill-treated by a second wife and he has shown obvious signs of helplessness, guardedly or unguardedly, it is usually the female children who declare war spiritually and sometimes, physically, on the errant step mother. This is what the encounter between Adaego the second wife, and Ogoji the daughter, signifies. And it typifies more of the Electra complex, which

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binds a daughter more to her father and less to her mother, than the Oedipus complex. The gynocritical impulse in Ifeoma Okoye enables her to capture the eccentricities of the two women involved. It is only a woman who can understand the inner recesses of a woman’s mind, not a male. Chigo who witnesses the encounter has been taciturn, and even when he tries to calm his sister Ogoji, down, he doesn’t succeed. So, it must be said that Ifeoma Okoye is not only eagle-eyed about the circumstances of male domination of women in the society, she is also conscious of their actions and reactions that derive from male-inspired norms and mores in a patriarchal environment; for instance, the craze for titles and ostentatious life style. One can now ask these questions: Will this breed of men and women ever grow ears? If and when they do, will they use them for aural functions and services? Or will such ears serve only decorative purposes?

THE FOURTH WORLD (2013) In this novel, Ifeoma Okoye focuses attention on the desperately poor in the society that are found in all the continents of the world but who are represented by the inhabitants of Kasanga Avenue, a slum settlement in Enugu, the capital of the old Eastern region of Nigeria. Ifeoma Okoye draws her heroine Chiralum, or Chira for short, from this infamous Avenue, which the author describes as ‘the most squalid part of town’. This story revolves around this girl child whose world is further blighted by the unflattering environment and circumstances she finds herself in. Her life’s odyssey is one long tale of struggle to overcome the limits contrived against her by man and the elements, a daunting task indeed. It is therefore not surprising that this is the story Okoye presents in her latest novel, The Fourth World. The story addresses the issues of inheritance and girl-child education in a traditional male-dominated Nigerian society. Kasanga Avenue epitomizes deprivation, bad govern­ance, irredeemable lack, disease and squalor, all of which ferment excruciating poverty for the inhabitants of the Avenue. As Emenyonu quips with instinctive pro­ fundity in the foreword of the novel: ‘They did not choose their world, their world chose them!’ Membership of the Avenue is populated by people who seem to have ineluctably made peace with debilitating poverty. The author clearly states that ‘Kasanga Avenue was a maximum security prison for people who had committed the

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crime of allowing themselves to be born into poverty’ (95). It is also ‘a destroyer of people’s bodies and minds’ (95). With this type of background, any flicker of optimism for the heroine sounds more like a compromised lottery, a forlorn hope. It is therefore not surprising that Chira and her mother are compelled by circumstances to wear poverty like a priestly cassock. The conditions in Kasanga pit Chira against time and fortune, and the otherwise ambitious and precocious young girl watches her future dissolve into a chimera. In this novel Ifeoma Okoye’s gyno­critical impulses are awakened and she tracks Chira’s development and the circumstances that threaten to truncate her dreams of secondary school and university education. On his sickbed, which turns out to be his deathbed, Chira’s father, Akalaka informs her of the plans he has for the completion of her secondary school education, even if he doesn’t recover from his illness. The plan is to mortgage one of his portions of the family land to raise money for her school fees. On that fateful day, Akalaka clairvoyantly expresses gnawing fears that his brother Amos will likely constitute the only obstacle to the fructification of this noble dream and proposal for Chira’s future. Akalaka says: ‘If I die, your uncle Amos won’t let you have access to my portions of family land. He won’t let you mortgage any because you’re a woman’ (12). So, Chira’s future, sadly, rests outside her control and competence ‘because she is a woman’. When finally, Akalaka passes on, and Chira presents the proposal to her uncle Amos, there is no surprise in his attitude and reaction as he responds with disdainful predictability: ‘“Shaa-rr-up!” Amos shouted … “I said shut up before you make our ancestors turn in their grave!” Amos screamed’ (83). He considers Chira’s proposal impudent and the height of effrontery. The reason uncle Amos advances for his stand must have riled the author and triggered her gynocritical impulses. Amos flatly refuses to grant his brother Akalaka a loan for Chira’s school fees. Instead, he encourages his brother to ‘marry her off’ (82): ‘Women don’t have any say in family land matters. They are not even allowed to be present when land matters are discussed. Because you’re at secondary school, you think you can meddle in men’s affairs. With my brother gone, I will hold his share of the family land in trust for your brother, Nodu, until he becomes a man. Nobody else has a right to those portions of land. I will do whatever I want to do with them until it is time for me to hand them over to your brother. Have I made myself clear?’ (83)

It is this type of discrimination and unconscionable deep hurt inflicted on Chira on account of her gender that elicits and validates

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an appropriate gynocritical response. What is most obvious here is that the female child is not entitled to any inheritance from her father’s estate for no other justifiable reason than her gender. In telling her story, Ifeoma Okoye does not obtrusively condemn the perpetrators of this type of objectionable male-ordained social and trado-cultural dehumanization of women but, by describing the matter with graphic exhaustiveness that pricks the conscience, she allows the readers to make up their minds one way or another. A female writer, no doubt, is best suited to assume the character of Chira who is at the receiving end, and is definitely able to process the hurt with greater solemnity and empathy. The male writer will try but a female writer is more likely to do a better job of it because as it is said, ‘he who wears the shoe knows where it pinches’. The flood that claims the lives of a little girl and an elderly woman at Kasanga Avenue should not be explained away as force majeure but a deliberate and contrived consequence of corruption and wanton negligence of the Avenue by the authorities. An accident contrived either by omission or commission cannot be blamed on the elements but on the political leaders whose activities and misrule created Kasanga Avenue in the first place. These are political leaders who have abandoned their social responsibilities to their citizenry. The dedication page captures the enormity of this negligence. It simply says: ‘To the deprived people who are victims of greed, injustice, corruption, exploita­tion, discrimination, and bad government’. Chira and her mother are certainly victims as inhabitants of the Kasanga Avenue. Sadly, the deaths reinforce the fact that it is the vulnerable female that first suffers the collateral damage of official negligence and misrule. For many male writers, the loss here translates to hard statistics while for the gynocritic, it is a decimation of the female population and Ifeoma Okoye is neither restrained nor shy in pointing this out. Again, since Chira cannot raise money to continue her education, she has been encouraged by her mother Kodili and her best friend, Ogom to consider the marriage proposal by Maks, a secondary school dropout, ostensibly to ensure that their material needs are taken care of. Although the same fate befalls Chira, her reaction to this is instructive: ‘I can’t marry a man without knowing a lot about him, Mama’ (54). This is uncommon maturity exhibited by a young girl. But her mother’s riposte is evidence of a classic generational gap and social and patriarchal conditioning. ‘I didn’t know what your father looked like before I agreed to marry him. I met him for the first time when he came back from Kafanchan to arrange the traditional wedding ceremony’ (54).

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When Akalaka dies, his church in the village denies him the services of an officiating priest because he was not a ‘current financial member of the church’ (78). The poverty-stricken daughter and mother cannot elicit the sympathy of the church officials or secure the services of the village church priest. If this sternness is applied across board perhaps, it will be understandable. But it is not, because Obaego, an affluent member of the same Umuba community who lost his son secures the services of the same priest while in default of church dues payment. To rub the injustice in, the priest invites two other priests from outside the community to help him conduct the boy’s funeral service. When Chira protests against this injustice and favouritism, the priest becomes acerbic and callous in his response: ‘Was your father starving before he died? Was his family starving? I hear you’re at secondary school. From where does he get money to pay your school fess?’ … ‘Couldn’t he have used some of the money to pay his church dues? Was sending you to the secondary more important than saving his soul?’ (78)

Not done with the spiritual injury and blackmail, the priest pursues his quarry further: ‘Must your father be buried by a priest?’ … ‘All you need to do is put his body in the grave and cover it’ (79). Unable to secure the services of a priest, Amos orders his undergraduate son, Dike who came in from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU) to perform the funeral obsequies. Chira is not happy with this turn of event because Dike ‘had no training in theology and what he was doing didn’t carry the solemnity that the occasion required’ (77). So, Kasanga Avenue breeds poverty whose entrapping effects dog the footsteps of all its inhabitants, call them victims. It keeps them perpetually in poor health, denies them education, alienates them from their religion and its benefits and in the end guarantees them, if they are lucky, a miserable burial. When a woman is caught in the vice grip of this monster, she suffers multiple social dislocations. Ifeoma Okoye is only too well aware of these multiple consequences, which she addresses with gynocritical seriousness and control in this novel. A careful consideration of the characters of Chimere and Chira in Chimera and The Fourth World respectively, reveals an admirable inner personality strength which Ifeoma Okoye uses to portray their resilience in the face of oppression and patriarchal shackles. Chimere remains undaunted by all the challenges and discouragements she encounters while searching for her mystery father. Jide’s taunting does not deter her. Chira on her part, constantly contests all the

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unpalatable and unjust treatments she encounters, for instance with her uncle Amos and the village priest who refuses to officiate at her father’s funeral service. Ifeoma Okoye’s gynocritical impulses enable her to identify this strength of character in the girls and to stress that they are not just victims of hopeless cultural docility. Though the odds are stacked against them, at least, they threw their enfeebled rabbit punches of self-determination and self-expression.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This article has examined what we consider to be the gyno­critical impulses in Ifeoma Okoye’s novels and short stories. The pursuit of Showalter’s gynocritical theory has been credited with rescuing several female writers from obscurity and nondescript status. This is considered as one of her major contributions to literary history especially in the Anglo-American Literary firmament. On the Nigerian and African literary canvas, Ifeoma Okoye is known as her books have won awards, especially in Nigeria. But she is often not on the literary radar of many literary critics and this denies her the well-appointed position she deserves. Though Showalter is a feminist literary critic of gyno­ criticism persuasion, Okoye is a novelist and short story writer who has demonstrated with her works examined in this article, that she harbours those gynocritical impulses and sympathies which have driven Showalter into her strand of feminist literary theory. Okoye unabashedly, and with a sincerity of purpose, addresses the debasing and dehumanizing conditions to which women are exposed or subjected in an African traditional society. And, like Showalter, she does this unapologetically, to the exclusion of men or how and what they feel about her stories. Ifeoma Okoye deserves greater literary critical acclaim than she has so far received because she is an inimitable and a quintessential writer and story teller. WORKS CITED Beasley, Chris. What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory. London: SAGE, 1999. Dahiya, Anuj. ‘ELAINE SHOWALTER: Towards a Feminist Poetics’. UCG NET English, 5 April 2016. http://ugcenglish.com/literary-theory/elaineshowalter-towards-feminist-poetics/1003.

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Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002. Okoye, Ifeoma. Behind the Clouds. Essex: Longman, 1982. ——Men Without Ears. Essex: Longman, 1984. ——Chimere. Lagos: Longman, 1992. ——The Trial and Other Stories. Lagos: African Heritage Press, 2005. ——The Fourth World. Enugu: The Rising People’s Press, 2013. Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’. In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986: 125-43. (Available at https://historiacultural.mpbnet.com. br/feminismo/Toward_a_Feminist_Poetics.htm.) Wikipedia. ‘Gynocriticism’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynocriti­cism.

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Adaptation & the Theme of Passage of Time in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka & Ola Rotimi NORBERT OYIBO EZE

INTRODUCTION Two factors common to the dramaturgy of Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi are experimentation with adaptation, which is a fact of life and valid artistic practice, and attrac­tion to the people’s conflictual engagement with the colonial process. These factors, which are aspects of com­positional elements in literary productions, enable these two playwrights not only to celebrate and promote inter­textuality, but also to illustrate how certain universal beliefs and consciousness such as fate, free will and the consequences of human choices, can be given local flavour, and how the idea of the passage of time can be mediated through cultural contact. It is pertinent to state that, apart from using their adapted plays The Bacchae of Euripides and The Gods Are Not to Blame to establish the nexus between imperial Greece and Yoruba culture, Soyinka and Rotimi employed these texts and those that examined conflictual engage­ment with the colonial history namely Death and the King’s Horse­man, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi and Kurunmi to reflect on the postcolonial Nigerian political landscape marked by oppressive regimes, violence and instability. Absolutism and ethnicism, which underscore the characters of Pentheus, Odewale, Oba Ovonramwen and Kurunmi, also undermine Nigerian postcolonial his­tory. The Nigerian political environ­ ment from 1960-65 was marred by intolerable ethnic senti­ments, which led to the 1966 military coups, the Civil War and military take over. Nevertheless, the leadership tussle within the military itself and the several democratic experiments that followed remind one of the Homeric battlefield as captured in the The Bacchae of Euripides.

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ADAPTATIONS OF GREEK TRAGEDIES Adaptation is one way in which new texts can benefit from old ones and in which creative norms transcend historical boundaries. It is not merely a translation or reproduction of an existing work, but a creative act of borrowing some bones and flesh of an old text and mixing them in the crucible of art, in such a way that what is produced bears the signature of the artistic vision of the new author, as well as experience that is meaningful to the new audience or reader. Romanus Muoneke posits that ‘[t]he reader or audience of any adapted work should not only get a feel of the old story but must also recognize a new orientation and insight’ (‘Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: The Gods Are Not to Blame and The Bacchae of Euripides’: 3). This suggests that an adapted work should possess a timely spirit by addressing issue(s) relevant to the contemporary reader or audience. Antonin Artaud says that we have the right to say what has been said earlier but ‘in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to the present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone’ (The Theatre and its Double: 13). In The Bacchae and The Gods, Soyinka and Rotimi respectively seek to make connection between the ancient Greek and the Yoruba worlds. The Bacchae is adapted from Euripides’ play of the same title. In the play, Pentheus, the Theban king attempted to stop the worship of Dionysos in his territory, but the god used his mother, Agave to kill and dismember his body in a wild worship of the god. Similitude of temperament and artistic sensibility drew Soyinka to Euripides and not to Aeschylus and Sophocles who preceded him. Maduako observes: If Aeschylus and Sophocles are to be regarded as Apollonian dramatists, Euripides proves himself to have been the one spokesman for Dionysian contradictions. Also, the character of the god celebrated in The Bacchae, Dionysus – the ritual agonies he suffered, Nietzsche’s later effort to link him with the birth of tragedy, his role as an embodiment of contradictions, and as a vegetation deity – all these are some of the traits that link the Greek god with Soyinka’s patron deity, Ogun. (Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writing: 243)

The issue of communal renewal associated with Dionysos has to do with an aspect of Ogun, which Soyinka has made the backbone of his dramaturgy. In some of Soyinka’s plays, Ogun plunges into the abyss of transition for the purposes of expiating the sins of the people and to ensure the community’s regeneration. Soyinka’s The Bacchae takes the

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bones and some flesh of Euripides’ play. It features the arrival of the god in Thebes, the opposition mounted by King Pentheus, the god’s arrest and imprisonment as well as his rage for revenge and his miraculous escape from the prison. Soyinka equally recaptures Pentheus’ hypnotic surrender, his trip to the mountain as well as his death at the hands of his mother, Agave, and brings the reader or audience ‘closer to the meaning of Dionysus’ role as a ritual archetype … who suffered physical disintegration so that nature may be renewed’ (253). James Gibbs posits that Soyinka’s most striking alterations to the sources are found towards the end of his play. For the mother’s sense of self-inflicted loss and harsh punishments of Euripides, Soyinka substituted a powerful image of the regenerative power of revolution and of sacrifice – even of unwilling sacrifice. The final tableau is a wine-spouting head, surrounded by wineswilling celebrants and, as the lights fade, there is a glow around the heads of Pentheus and Agave. (Modern Dramatists: Wole Soyinka: 115)

In The Gods Rotimi is drawn to Sophocles because of his interest in heroism, tragic flaw, moral law and responsibility. However, Rotimi seems to use his play to explore the qualities of a true hero as well as such excesses that mar his personality. In his adaptation, Rotimi takes some bones and flesh of the Theban tragedy by retaining the basic structural elements of Oedipus Rex, including the prophecy that the child will kill his father and marry his mother, the two oracular pronouncements at Delphi, the child having foster parents, the grown Oedipus having issues and killing his father at a crossroads, the messenger’s involvement, the young man’s inadvertent return to his original home to become king and to marry his mother and have children with her and the King’s self-inflicted blindness and going into exile with his ill-fated children. Rotimi’s innovations include giving his play an early point of attack by bringing in the birth of the child and the celebration that goes with it, as well as the divination of the fate of the child. The old king is seen in flesh and blood. Rotimi gives King Odewale a royal bard and a second wife, introduces a mad woman Iya Aburo, and begins his play with a narrator who gives the missing background information. Past events reported in the Greek original are rendered by means of flashback. In Oedipus Rex, the right of way is what brings Oedipus into collision with his father, but in The Gods, the conflict is caused by land dispute and ethnicism. A major theme elaborated in the two texts is fate, which is used to highlight the universality of human limitations. The Bacchae and The

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Gods seem, like their Attic Greek counterparts, significant for their existential conception of man and his situation. In The Bacchae, King Pentheus attempts to subdue Dionysos as he subdues men and women and to abolish his worship in Thebes, ignorant that the ‘mysterious operation of Time’ (Vellacott Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning: 125), had turned the tide against him. In his reckless pursuit to destroy the god and his own mother, who leads the w ­ or­ shippers, Pentheus in a foreshadowing statement swears to dismember the god and behead his own mother. However, as King Pentheus plans to deal with the Baachantes, Dionysos brings him under a spell through strong drink, robes him in a Baachantic dress and causes him to behave as a Bacchant. In this state, Pentheus is driven to the mountain where he is killed and dismembered by Agave. This play suggests that the gods’ commands are irresistible and that man’s efforts to challenge them are often responsible for human crisis and death. Pentheus is shown in sundry places in the play to lack wisdom as to what factors compose the limits of man. He lacks self-control that is built upon self-knowledge. Lack of moderation which is profusely harped on in the play, makes Pentheus’ suffering inevitable for, as Philip Vellacott posits, ‘[a]t the end of The Bacchae, Dionysos states unequivocally that Fate and the universe know neither pity nor pardon: Cadmus pleading for pardon, speaks of a moral world to which the gods are blind’ (Ironic Drama: 21). In The Gods, human existence is reduced to riddle. In the play, Odewale pursues the killer(s) of King Adetusa – a crime which brings pestilence to Kutuje. He swears to find the culprit(s) and gets him or them blinded and banished from the land before the end of the festival of Ogun. The short time frame he sets for himself to realize this, spells the urgency in which he assists fate in fulfilling itself. A prophecy had gone that he would kill his father and marry his mother. All efforts from parents and Odewale to stop the prophecy from coming to pass proved abortive. Etherton opines that: The gods are indeed the cause of Odewale’s downfall, for his particular crimes would not have been committed if there had been no prophecy. He would have grown up in his family, hot-tempered perhaps, but there is nothing in his character to suggest that he could ever commit patricide or incest. (‘Tribute to Wole Soyinka’: 127)

The above points to the dark impulses of life which suggest that certain situations of life are not controllable, no matter man’s ingenuity or intellectual depth. Here is Odewale whose control of the state is

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admirable, but who hardly knows where he comes from or who he is. His suffering alludes to the inexplicable reason the innocent suffer, for his fate has been sealed before his hot-temper and ethnic sentiment become manifest. However, the two plays show that man’s lack of self-knowledge often makes him to overreach himself. Pentheus’ impatience to criticism pushes him to command his servants to demolish Tiresias’ house and to personally hit the old man down. His attitude towards Dionysos is corrosive and this makes everyone to shudder. He threatens to cut off the tongue of anyone who mentions the name of the god and to sell him or her into slavery to ‘work at the looms or carry water for the troops, day and night’ (The Bacchae: 270-71). In The Gods, Baba Fakunle’s smelling of rot in Odewale’s presence made the King to accuse Aderopo of political manipulation, and from this moment, everyone becomes a suspect. He becomes impatient with time and with everyone, rough-handling Gbonka and Alaka for prevaricating with information regarding Odewale’s identity. The idea of meeting a deadline propels Odewale to walk in a fast lane, which unexpectedly brings him to the knowledge of who he actually is, his crimes and his downfall. As we noted earlier, an adapted work must handle at least an issue pertinent to its contemporary reader and audience. Beyond the universal theme of fate, the texts share the trait of being a political statement. The Bacchae is one of the plays Soyinka wrote during his 1971-75 self-exile and it may not be out of place to argue that it is written ‘partly from an anxiety to make a political comment’ (Gibbs Modern Dramatists: 107) on the idea of power drunkenness and political overreaching. Like the late Sani Abacha, leader of the former Nigerian military junta, Soyinka associates Pentheus ‘very strongly with death, repression and megalomania’ (Modern Dramatists: 114) in his handling of opposition. At the beginning of the play we find slaves in chains lamenting their dehumanizing condition, which throws light on the class and social formation inherent in Pentheus’ Thebes. In fact, the first stage direction of the play exemplifies this: To one side, a road dips steeply into the lower background lined by the bodies of crucified slaves mostly in skeletal stage. The procession that comes later along this road appears to rise almost from the bowels of earth … In the foreground the main gate to the palace of Pentheus. Farther down and into the wings, of a lean-to built against the wall, a threshing-floor. A cloud of chaff, and through it, dim figures of slaves flailing and treading. A smell and sweat of harvest. (235)

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The above reveals the root of social injustice and indigna­tion in human civilization which is the conscious reduction of human beings into two mutually exclusive groups – the exploiter and the exploited – which appear fundamental to much of the hostility that characterizes human society. At the base of the exploited group are the slaves reduced to mere objects to be used and discarded at will by their bourgeois owners. Soyinka shows the slaves’ condition as intolerable because it presents man in an absolutely conquered state. Slavery is portrayed as an existential condition created by man to demonstrate power and superiority over his kind – which violates the rights to live and freely make choices. It is repugnant to reason and individual selfinterest and this is why, wherever slavery exists, those involved wear themselves out with soul and physical forces to set themselves free. The Bacchae is full of opinions that show that the slaves seek to rebuff this inhuman condition from time to time. As the play progresses, a lot of energy is released from both King Pentheus and the masses. Etherton observes that ‘the more repressive Pentheus becomes … the more violent becomes the reaction against him’ (‘Tribute to Wole Soyinka’: 132). At the beginning of the play, the charged atmosphere had constrained Tiresias to fear for ‘an uprising’ and ‘bloodshed’. Talking about the slaves’ growing political awareness Muoneke posits that Soyinka portrays the slaves as moving ‘gradually from a cautious subservience to Pentheus to an open allegiance to Dionysos’ (‘Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: 25). This new sense of political consciousness compels the slaves to destroy their prison and chains and to mount hostility towards the authoritarian regime, which, with Dionysos’ help, eventually comes crashing down at the end of the play. Ikenna Dieke articulates the significance of Dionysos in ‘four symbolic frames: the nihilistic, the tragic, the Dionysian and finally the frame of the heroic individual’ (Allegory and Meaning: 81). For him, the nihilistic is the frame of despair and anxiety which emerges from what Chaix-Ruy refers to as the ‘decomposition of culture’ (The Superman: From Nietzsche to Teilhard de Chardin: 96). Dionysos vents this nihilistic anger on Pentheus by burning down his palace and influencing his brutal destruction. Nihilism for Dieke is ‘not destructive but tragic, for it contains within its negative ideology and rhetoric the very basis for regenerative growth’ (81) as it paves way for the emergence of a new culture where freedom exists for all. Dieke argues that the nihilistic and tragic visions are linked by a certain ineffable complementarity, which Nietzsche finds Dionysos to symbolize. Dionysos is posited in the play as a repository of diverse and contradictory passions and as

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a reconciler of all kinds of antimonies that have come to characterize the modern Nigerian state. In bringing him to bear in the text; the playwright suggests that, in a greatly troubled country like ours, there is need for a uniting force of harmony and the necessity for change. Dionysos comes to break the spell of absolutism that had enabled Pentheus to bestride the Theban world like a colossus. The Gods is a political allusion which sheds light on the qualities of a good democratic leader and the problem of land dispute as well as ethnicism, which indisputably were major national questions foregrounding the Nigerian Civil War, during which the play was written. The play’s prologue indicates that Odewale ascends the throne of Kutuje out of popular choice, for there is no single voice of opposition, even when tradition is broken to make him King. During crisis, he makes genuine effort to heal the land in addition to helping Kutuje to emerge from the bondage of slavery and to experience prosperity. Rotimi uses land dispute and ethnicism to bring in the idea of absolutism – which has been the bane of African politics. He shows in Odewale how the issue of ethnicism can turn a leader into a tyrant. Odewale’s feeling as a stranger in Kutuje forces him to view everyone with distrust, and to rampage with power. In spite of their commonality as political comment, Soyinka’s Pentheus differs tremendously from Rotimi’s Odewale. Pentheus is shown throughout to be bloodthirsty, ruthless and too impatient with criticism. His transgression of the moral codes is an action of a sane mind, an overreacher, and this is why his death is a form of nemesis that hardly draws pity. Contrarily, if the pronouncements of the oracles are anything to go by, Odewale is not totally to blame for his transgression of the moral codes because, as the oracles state, his destiny has been sealed before his birth. The question of predestination seems to make any idea of total responsibility to hang in the balance. This is the reason his misfortune draws pity from the people and not celebration as is the case with Pentheus’ death.

CONFLICTUAL ENGAGEMENT WITH THE COLONIAL PROCESS Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Rotimi’s Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi are event-specific in their derivation. The three plays explore the Yoruba and Benin people’s conflictual engagement with the process of colonialism. Kurunmi and Death and the King’s

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Horseman dramatized Yoruba history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, as they relate to the issue of ritual suicide. An aspect of the Yoruba worldview is that the aide to a ruling king must commit ritual suicide on the demise of the king, in order to pave way for the king’s smooth transition to the world of the dead. The belief is that the door to the passage of transition, which is ‘a narrow pathway, a channel that permits intercosmic contact’ (Maduako Wole Soyinka: 272-3) between the dead, the living and the unborn can only be opened by this all-important ritual sacrifice, and on this too depends the well-being of the people and the community’s continual existence. Any mistake will cause a problem in the spirit realm and disaster for the living. This ritual has never failed in the past, but now colonialism appears to truncate it. Death and the King’s Horseman draws on the 1946 incident, where the British colonial administrator disrupted an attempt by the aide to the dead Alafin of Oyo, Olori Elesin, to commit ritual suicide following the death of his master. Kurunmi, on the other hand, is derived from an attempt by a ruling King, Alafin Atiba, to foil this tradition in 1858 by crowning his first son alive as his successor. The consternation this caused the Army Chief of the empire, Kurunmi, compelled him to pull out his people Ijaiye from the empire and to go to war to challenge it. In Ovoramwen Nogbaisi, Rotimi examines the Oba of Benin’s struggle and his eventual surrender to the British forces of occupation in 1897. A common theme, dramatized by the playwrights in diverse ways, is the issue of the passage of time. The role of the colonial process in the plays is to demonstrate that nothing can stand the pull and push of time. Although in Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka brings Olunde, the enlightened son of Elesin Oba home from overseas to complete the ritual by committing suicide in place of his father, the text suggests that time is no longer what it used to be. Olunde’s overseas trip is the first disruptive factor in the shaking of the ideological foundation of his people’s traditional worldview. Although he seems compelled by necessity to act where his father has failed in order not to ‘allow honour fly out of doors’ (218), Chii Akporji argues that ‘his ritual suicide hardly guarantees the spiritual safety of the community’ (Figures in a Dance: The Theatre of W.B. Yeats and Wole Soyinka: 142). His action is an abnormal occurrence in the history of the people, and this is the reason the Praise-Singer laments: Elesin, we placed the reins of the world in your hand yet you watched it plunge over the edge of the bitter precipice. You sat with folded

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arms while evil strangers tilted the world from its course and crashed it beyond the edge of emptiness. (218)

The idea of things falling apart echoed in the above state­ment reveals the pain and melancholy in the hearts of the people as they recognize the passage of time, the destruction of the fabric and ideological foundation of their society. It is only the ‘consciousness of the magnitude of’ Elesin’s ‘betrayal forcefully brought to bear by Olunde’s suicide, the vituperations of Iyaloja and the Praise-Singer’ that ‘induce Elesin to strangle himself, in one decisive moment’ (Akporji Figures in a Dance: 143). The process of change and passage of time is apprehended in Ovonramwen Nogbaisi through Oba Ovonramwen’s futile effort to curtail the encroaching activities of the white men in Benin. He is pensive to see an age-long kingdom handed over to him by his fathers dissolve like a mist before his very eyes. This pensive state attains a crescendo when the ritualistic climax of the Ague festival is interrupted for the first time in the history of the empire by strange drumming and the landing of the white men in Benin. Ohansa of Akpakpava articulates this in his address to the monarch: Your Majesty, it is the custom that for seven days while this ceremony of Ague goes on, there must be no drumming, no visits to Benin by strangers. For two hundred years my fathers before me led this ceremony of Ague without trouble! Why, I ask your Majesty is it in my lifetime that the madness of drumming and strange visits should break this solemn worship? (28)

Ohansa’s address signifies that an irremediable abomina­tion has been committed; that the cherished Benin monarchy is over, and that Benin history must begin anew and on a fresh pathway. The Oba’s melancholy deepens when his soldiers decapitate the white men without his authorization. In anguish he tells the elders: ‘Children of our fathers, Benin I fear, has this day swallowed a long pestle; now we shall have to sleep standing upright’ (37). The significance of the Oba’s statement is that Benin has unwittingly thrown itself into a precarious existence and must face the consequence of its action. The Oba is not in doubt that the white men will overrun Benin with their superior forces. He is fully aware that, as Odewale in The Gods would say: ‘He who pelts another with pebbles asks for rocks in return’ (7). As a safety measure, he sends his wives away from the palace, and when the reports of his soldiers’ inability to contain the white men reached him, he heeds Uzazakpo’s advice to leave the palace for the first time in the

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history of the empire. The Oba’s sorrow attains a climax, not when he finally and slowly lifts his crown off his head in obeisance to the Acting Resident Officer’s order to ‘pay him homage in native fashion’ (53), nor in his deportation to Calabar, but when the circumstance of the bitter war against the British forces, compels him to abandon his throne and its royal patronage, to live like a rodent in the bush, drinking begged water in ‘cupped hands’ (70). In Kurunmi, Alafin Atiba, due to the influence of the growing Christian religion, jettisons the age-long tradition and requests that his son be crowned while alive instead of his aide committing ritual suicide on his departure from Mother Earth; but Kurunmi, the Commanderin-Chief vows to defend their tradition against Atiba’s unorthodox political arrangement. In the play ‘we become aware of the contrast between the traditional and the new ways of life as each of them tends to become a system of indoctrination’ (Ogunba The Movement of Transition: A Study of the Plays of Wole Soyinka: 32). The protagonist of this play positions himself as an arch-conservative, resisting the wind of change with all his might. Kurunmi sees the emerging order being championed by Alafin Atiba as pervasive. He regards Timi Ede’s view that tradition adapts to change as ‘the words of the corrupt in the face of truth’ (Act 1, Scene 1). His option of war is based on the presumption that Adelu’s coronation is a ‘rude spit in the aged face of tradition’ (Act 1, Scene 3). But his revenge appears to be a veneer for his expansionist goal. Etherton’s observation that, in Soyinka’s plays, ‘the poetic vision embraces the contradictions within the ideal, within the social constraints and within our passion’ (34) applies equally to Rotimi’s Kurunmi. The protagonist of this play hides his burning desire to carve out an empire for himself under the façade of cultural patriotism. Though he claims to dare Alafin Atiba’s action on behalf of the community, Kurunmi’s belligerence is obviously a means of having his own kingdom come and the text seems to support this copiously. A common idea notwithstanding, Soyinka and Rotimi follow different routes in re-enacting Yoruba and Benin colonial history. In Death and the King’s Horseman the burden of change is not placed squarely on the shoulders of the colonial authority as is the case with Rotimi’s Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, where the impact of Christianity and economic activities of the colonial people become the vectors of change. Alafin Atiba’s action is informed by his acceptance of the new religion while Kurunmi’s action of protecting tradition has an economic undertone as our analysis has shown. He, like the British forces in Benin, is dominated by expansionist spirit. In Soyinka’s play,

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premium value is placed on the lust of the flesh introduced to reveal the internal factor that can motivate change. Moore observes that Elesin’s romance with the young bride is, ‘A pure invention; whose function is perhaps to motivate Elesin’s failure of resolve in a more complex way than mere yielding to an official prohibition by the District officer’ (Wole Soyinka: 205). In Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka states that The climactic moment of tragic ritual obliterates within the hero all the traces of his link with the living. It is at such moments that transitional memory takes over, and intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his … transition, of the dissolution of his self and his struggle and triumph over sublimation through the agency of will. (149)

At the crucial moment, Elesin’s memory, which ought to be saturated with the odour of death, remains filled with the smell of his affair with the bride and this saps his will power for action. The torment of his will may be akin to Ogun’s suffering at the passage of transition, but his over-indulgence of the body weakens his resolve and, though he plants a seed in the bride, his ignoble death turns what could have passed for a celebration of rebirth, according to Maduako, into ‘an elegy for the death of the community’ (276). Emeka Nwabueze argues that there are sufficient mystical efforts by the elders and even the dead king to propel Elesin into transition but his soul refuses to ‘desert his temporal body’ (Visions and Revisions: Selected Discourses on Literary Criticism: 160). Nwabueze’s statement illustrates the reason Soyinka sees the role of the District Officer as catalytic and not the root cause of Elesin’s failure. Nwabueze even expresses the feeling that Pilkings, as a stranger element, is a symbol of the spirit coming to punish Elesin for transgressing the moral code by forcefully having sex with a woman betrothed to a fellow tribesman.

CONCLUSION This article has examined in some of their plays how Wole Soyinka and Rotimi handled the issue of adaptation and the people’s engagement with the colonial process. On the issue of adaptation, the playwrights, apart from using The Bacchae of Euripides and The Gods Are Not to Blame to localize the question of fate, equally used the texts respectively to explain the implications of Ogun’s rite of passage, fate and the consequences of land dispute and ethnic jingoism, which are factors

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that still hinder development in Africa generally. Also, the study shows that Soyinka and Rotimi exploited the people’s conflictual engagement with the colonial process to buttress the idea of passage of time.

WORKS CITED Akporji, Chii. Figures in a Dance: The Theatre of W.B. Yeats and Wole Soyinka. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2003. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Chaix-Ruy, Jules. The Superman: From Nietzsche to Teilhard de Chardin. Trans. Marina Smyth-Kok. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Dieke, Ikenna. Allegory and Meaning. Lanham: Univer­sity Press of America, 2010. Editorial. ‘CJN’s Suspension: A Dictator Bares His Fangs’. Punch (Nigeria), 26 January 2019. Etherton, Michael. ‘Tribute to Wole Soyinka’. In Before Our Very Eyes, ed. Dapo Adelugba. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1997.Gibbs, James. Modern Dramatists: Wole Soyinka. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Maduako, Obi. Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writing. Ibadan: Heine­ mann, 1991. Moore, Gerald. Wole Soyinka. London: Evans Brothers, 1971. Muoneke, Romanus. ‘Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: The Gods Are Not to Blame (Rotimi) and The Bacchae of Euripides (Soyinka)’. BA Project submitted to the Department of English, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 1981. Ndukwe, Jude. ‘2023 Presidency and the North’. The Sun, 10 April 2019. Nwabueze, Emeka. Visions and Revisions: Selected Discourses on Literary Criticism. Enugu: Abic Books, 2003. Ogunba, Oyin. The Movement of Transition: A Study of the Plays of Wole Soyinka. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975. Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not to Blame. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, [1971] 2003. ——Kurunmi. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, [1971] 1998. ——Ovonramwen Nogbaisi. Benin City: Ethiope Publishing Corpora­===tion 1974.Soyinka, Wole. ‘The Bacchae of Euripides’. Collected Plays 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ——‘Death and the King’s Horseman’. Six Plays. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1988. ——Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Vellacott, Philip. Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

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Contextualizing Chinua Achebe’s Revolutionary Impulses PSALMS EMEKA CHINAKA

Enterprising research areas about Chinua Achebe’s writings are inexhaustible. The reason for the inexhaustibility can partly be deduced from Chris Searle’s assertion that Achebe’s ‘whole life of writing is really one novel that includes [many] perspectives’ (‘Achebe and the Bruised Heart of Africa’: 156). In other words, many critics see him as a prolific writer and this has necessitated different perspectives to his works. C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors have noted examples of these perspectives, stating that some writers have focused on Achebe’s ‘narrative technique (Iyasere, Carroll), some on particular images and symbols (Jabbi, Ramadan and Weinstock), some on the historical and cultural context (Brown, Obiechina, Wren, Lindfors), some on the comparisons with English poets suggested by the titles (Stock, Wilson)’ (Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, 7). To say the least, these are but few perspectives that have not included the two seminal volumes of Ernest Emenyonu’s sixty-eight critical essays that produced Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; Vol I, OMENKA: The Master Artist, and Vol. II, ISINKA, The Artistic Purpose: Chinua Achebe and the Theory of African Literature. These perspectives, to borrow Umelo Ojinmah’s assertion, are presented ‘with the intention of eliciting certain fundamental messages embedded in Achebe’s works’ (‘Introduction’: viii). It is equally interesting to observe that those same subjects Achebe once raised in his lifetime are still actively conversed to date. However, none of these perspectives comprehensively understudied his general revolutionary temperament, which kept gaining momentum in both the fictional works and critical commentaries of his later years. Elements of his revolutionary temperament manifested in protest forms in some of his earlier fictional works. In fact, even his oldest novel Things Fall Apart, as a foundational text for postcolonial studies, according to Chima Anyadike and Kehinde Ayoola, has the potential 146

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to attract ‘Marxist and feminist readings’ (‘Preface’: xi). In other words, Achebe’s career as a writer can be adjudged as one very long protest and emancipatory task of educating, sensitizing and revolutionizing his people’s mind about the notion that ‘there was no African history before colonialism, no African literature until of course Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in African literature’ (Nwodo Philosophical Perspective on Chinua Achebe: ix). He makes no pretence about this ideological posture as a protest writer, thus he affirms: ‘I am a protest writer, with restraint. Even those early novels that look like very gentle recreations of the past – what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past’ (There was a Country 58). His conclusion in the discussion of protest is that ‘the need for protesting will never end’ (Ogbaa ‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’: 72). One can effectively explore Achebe’s protest and revolutionary temperament from a sociological perspective. In other words, the sociological template can be a useful instrument in examining his socio-political views. According to Wilbur Scott: Sociological criticism starts with a conviction that art’s relations to the society are vitally important, and that the investigation of these relationships may organize and deepen one’s aesthetic response to a work of art … The sociological critic, therefore, is interested in understanding the social milieu and the extent to which and manner in which the artist responds to it. (Five Approaches of Literary Criticism: 123)

A practical example of the above assertion can be drawn from the experience of the Nigerian critic who is in most instances engaged in a sociological investigation and evaluation of the social forces responsible for Nigeria’s backlash of a higher percentage of poverty amidst the abundance of wealth and very slow development. Achebe himself is preoccupied with what he conceives as ‘the African revolution’ (Lindfors, Munroe, Priebe and Sander ‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’: 28), prompting M.A.E. Okolie to assert that Achebe’s revolutionary vision is ‘targeted at colonialism, to the liberation of the African and a re-discovery of African identity’ (‘The Eagle with Velvet Claws: Issues in the Social Essays of Chinua Achebe’: 56). In other words, Achebe’s revolutionary ideology is bracketed within the purview of African literature which he terms revolutionary literature. For him, African literature is revolutionary by nature due to its confrontational posture towards colonialism. He is also concerned with the socio-political condition of the Nigerian society and the existential dynamics of his Igbo race. In his words, the African revolution is,

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a revolution that aims toward true independence, that moves toward the creation of modern states in place of the new colonial enclaves we have today, a revolution that is informed with African ideologies. What is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it. (Lindfors et al.: 28)

Achebe’s purview of revolution hinges on the commitment of the African writer to use his art in bringing about positive changes to the African society. He thus declares to Ernest and Pat Emenyonu: ‘I have come to the view that you can’t separate the creativity from the revolution that is inevitable in Africa’ (‘Achebe: Accountable to our Society’: 39). Irrespective of the criticisms of critics like Margaret Turner who feels that ‘it is very easy, however, to move from necessary education to propaganda and parochialism thereby failing the universality test’ (‘Achebe, Hegel, and the New Colonialism’: 33), his vision has continued to gather an amazing measure of support, reinforcing the spirit of the African renaissance among African critics. Apart from his preoccupation on the colonial conditions that had entrapped Africans since independence, Achebe has equally criticized Nigerian leaders, referring to them as ‘local jokers’ (Searle: 158). Elsewhere, he describes their poor leadership role as an ‘endless cycle’ (Okpewho ‘Introduction’: 24). He has successfully conveyed this notion by portraying all his major characters with leadership roles, from Things Fall Apart to Anthills of the Savannah, as failures. Charles Nnolim puts it succinctly: ‘The leader that fails his people – what else is Okonkwo or Ezeulu or Obi Okonkwo or Chief Nanga or His Excellency, Sam all about? All else, for Achebe, are in the periphery not the dead centre’ (‘The Artist in Search of the Right Leadership: Achebe as a Social Critic’: 225). However, Achebe admits to Nwachukwu-Agbada that the purpose for this pattern of characterization is to serve as ‘cautionary tales’ (‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’: 136) for Nigerians, so as not to repeat the same mistake twice. Achebe used the term ‘revolution’ quite a number of times in both his non-fictional and fictional publications, including interviews. The term is from the Latin word revolutio, which means ‘a turnaround’. It implies change. Udenta Udenta traces the concept to Marxism in spite of multiplicity of definitions and views of the concept. His explanation is that, ‘revolutionary aesthetics – derived from Marxian artistic methodology – is indeed a term shrouded in controversy and open to diverse and contradictory interpretations’ (Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process: xv). Marxists believe that

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a real revolution is one in which the lower class will seize power from the upper class. Over time, the popularity of Marxism has made the concept a common paradigm of revolutionary aesthetics, almost limiting the meaning of revolution to the act of violence. However, Kizito Osudibia has an expanded interpretation: Revolution is the exercise of the people’s inherent right of self-defense and meaningful development. Day by day, we manifest this faculty, sometimes consciously and at other times impulsively. Striving to change any particular state of affairs, be it religion, economic or sociopolitical; even in one’s personal life, strikes the note of revolution. (Revolution: A Dangerous Option (for Nigeria): viii)

In other words, Osudibia sees revolutionary qualities as instinctual in individuals. This means that man’s effort to search and attain freedom is a process of conscious and innate programming of the individual to reject any internal or external oppressive force. This assertion helps to clarify Jane Wilkinson’s statement that genuine commitment of a writer is an instinctive or natural process ‘to specific social or political causes’ (Talking with African Writers: 91). Osudibia explores three types of revolution: the Active (Extreme) revolution; characterized by violence and bloodbath, the Silent (Subtle) revolution and the Constitutional (Moderate) revolution, which reflects Aristotle’s concept of constitutional revolution. Wikipedia cites Aristotle’s Politics (350 B.C.E.), where he ‘described two types of political revolution. 1. Complete change from one constitution to another. 2. Modification of an existing constitution.’ The second method keeps revolution within the constitutional limits, while in the first the people could exercise their constitutional right by withdrawing their mandate given to a leader. The Silent (Subtle) revolution is one that totally excludes any use of force, arms or violence, either in words or in deeds. This type of revolution refers to the genuine struggle to effect change in a deplorable or rather unwarranted state of affairs in a way that is sometimes difficult to detect by the leaders at the helm of affairs. It is important to note how these interpretations and categorization of revolution as the outcome of this study help in defining Achebe’s revolutionary standpoint against the background of the aforementioned revolutionary classifications. The Trouble with Nigeria partly reflects Achebe’s revolu­ tionary tempera­ ment even as he tells Wilkinson how he considers it an ‘angry essay’ (‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’: 145). While Kolawole

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Ogungbesan describes Achebe’s tone in the book as ‘an avowedly militant tone’ (‘Politics and the African Writer’: 39), Ezenwa Ohaeto refers to it as ‘a bombshell’ (Chinua Achebe: A Biography: 229). The book came with a lot of vivacity. In other words, it is without Achebe’s usual language finesse, infused metaphors, incantatory expressions, anecdotal crafts and proverbial aesthetics. Achebe’s ultimate message in the book is that ‘the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership’ (11). He incisively employs very strong adjectives to describe Nigeria as ‘disorderly’, ‘corrupt’, ‘insensitive’, ‘dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar’ (11). His vivid description of the Nigerian masses in the book is in itself thought provoking and inciting. According to him, these people are ‘the peasant scratching out a living in the deteriorating rural environment … the beggar under the fly-over and millions and millions that you cannot even categorize … These are the real victims of our callous system … largely silent and invisible’ (29). Nnolim explains Achebe’s purpose for the publication: Achebe the novelist, finally drops his mask and comes out in propria persona to address readers who, over the years, while correctly appreciating the felicities embedded in his story-telling techniques have failed to grasp his message; readers who seem to have come to a packed theatre in which great drama is being enacted, and decided only to watch the audience. (225)

The work exemplifies Achebe’s radical temperament, adding to the corpus of radical works that prompt critics to describe Achebe’s revolutionary posture from various perspectives. Lindfors sees Achebe as ‘an angry reformer crusading against the immorality and injustices of the African present’ (Conversations: xi). Kez Okafor portrays him as a reformist too. In substantiating his position, Okafor makes a distinction between reformism and revolution, stating that while ‘reform aims to remove ills, and, probably, realize something new, perhaps, different … revolution, on the other hand, is applied to great social change, complete, sudden and perhaps, violent in nature’ (‘The Quest for Social Change: Reformation or Revolution?’: 226). He attempts to substantiate his argument by citing Ikem Osodi’s statement in Anthills: ‘Revolution may be necessary for taking a society out of an intractable stretch of quagmire, but it does not confer freedom, and may hinder it. Bloody reformist? … Reform may be a dirty word then but it begins to look more and more like the most promising route to success in the real world.’ (225)

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For Okafor, the word ‘revolution’ is more like a violent means of overhauling a system, such that aligns with Karl Marx’s concept of change. However, towards the end of his essay, he attempts to strike a synergy between both concepts, thus: Achebe’s reformation in Anthills identifies closely with our understanding of revolution … Pointedly put, the social change heralded by Achebe takes the form of a revolution but is garbed as ‘reformation.’ With Anthills of the Savannah, therefore, Achebe’s revolutionary perspectivity ranks in contemporary significance with the overtly revolutionary works of writers like Sembene Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (232)

Chima Anyadike has a similar interpretation based on the same passage. In his opinion, ‘Ikem believed in reform, but lived and died as a revolutionary, if we accept as a revolutionary one who actively engages in acts that will lead to the overthrow of an unpopular government’ (‘The Tortoise and the Lion: Achebe and Ngugi on the Struggles of Africa’: 40). Anyadike’s assertion on Ikem appears to reflect David Maughan-Brown’s analysis that the key to the ideological thrust of the novel lies in the use Achebe makes of Ikem as the primary vehicle for his message, and thereby in the ideology of leadership and reform, rather than revolution, in whose service Ikem lives and dies as a fictional character. (‘Anthills of the Savannah and the Ideology of Leadership’: 141)

Christopher Nwodo is more interested in the outcome of a successful revolution. He argues that Ikem needed to straighten a few aspects of the agitation with the Marxist intellectuals before addressing the issue of who actually the peasants in Kagan, a microcosm of Nigeria, are. His explanation is that Ikem perceives these intellectuals as individuals who are myopic in vision, since they are preoccupied with an immediate revolution. He concludes that such Marxist means will be dangerously convenient since these intellectuals may themselves create obstructions to genuine solutions to the Kagan or Nigerian situation. His concluding statement is that ‘international capitalism is there and poses serious problems. However, the real enemy to social progress is within Kagan itself, among the intellectual theoreticians, the civil servants and workers and among the university students’ (131-2). Nwodo’s argument closely evokes the story of the despot in Adebayo Williams’ The Remains of the Last Emperor, where the masses successfully destroy the oppressor, but fail to see what the narrator saw. Thus, the narrator explains:

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What I saw shocked me out of my numbness. Dangling from an iron lamp-post … was the body of the boa-constrictor. The soldiers were cutting into the roasted flesh with their bayonets and passing the barbecue round. They munched noisily and greedily … they were actually eating the remains of the Emperor. (218)

The above metaphor explains that if the new revolu­tionaries have then eaten the boa-constrictor, which unknown to them contains the remains of the emperor, it implies that the nation has only removed one monster by violent means and ended up with another monstrosity. In other words, both Nwodo and Williams are simply echoing the popular Nigerian pidgin parlance, soldier-go-soldier-come. The duo’s view is in line with that of Ikem in Anthills: The sweeping, majestic visions of people rising victorious like a tidal wave against their oppressors and transforming their world … are at best grand illusions. The rising, conquering tide, yes; but the millennium afterwards, no! New oppressors will have been readying themselves secretly. (99)

Jennifer Wenzel’s analysis of Achebe’s Anthills reveals, in part, Maughan-Brown’s criticism of Achebe’s quasi Marxist proposals. According to Wenzel, Maughan-Brown rejects Achebe’s ‘use of terms such as “society,” “class,” and even “leadership” [which] raises questions about the desirability of the rather undemocratic solutions vaguely proposed’ (‘The Trouble with Narrators: The Role of Chinua Achebe in Anthills of the Savannah’: 319). Maughan-Brown’s essay begins with a mild tone of sarcasm in its introduction in an almost sneering paragraph. In the second paragraph, MaughanBrown tells his readers that the novel is only but Achebe’s quest for ‘radical populism’, and then adds almost jeeringly: ‘and unswerving conviction about the necessity for “commitment” on the part of writers of fiction’ (139). He tacitly berates Achebe for using the novel to make ‘large claims for the authority of story-tellers in so doing’ (141). Perhaps, in response to Maughan-Brown’s criticism, Achebe jibes back, thus: ‘before I am accused of prescribing a way in which a writer should write, let me say that I do think that decency and civilization would insist that the writer takes sides with the powerless’ (There was a Country: 58). Until his demise, Achebe had already become very familiar with different critical reactions to his works, prompting G.D. Killam to state that ‘Achebe’s work has undergone rigorous examination by a variety of critics and scholars since 1968’ (The Writings of Chinua Achebe: vii).

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Ernest and Pat Emenyonu’s interview with Achebe gives one insight into Achebe’s broad and unbiased view on the concept of radical revolutionary approach: Very often people object to foreign ideologies, not because they are genuinely concerned about local and indigenous ideologies but because they resent any type of change. If someone comes here and says that Marxism is the only form of economic system that will work here, we ought to look at it and not reject it just because its origin is foreign to us. (36)

The above statement is in response to how some critics reacted to some of the suggestive socialist messages infused in Anthills of the Savannah. Obviously, the statement helps to explain Achebe’s unrestricted disposition to the array of ideological views, considered by some intellectuals for the African political climate. As at the time of its publication, the anxiety that awaited the novel was not only triggered by the time gap between its date of publication (1987) and that of A Man of the People (1966), but also by the reason for its publication. Maughan-Brown explains that ‘Achebe made it clear that one of his intentions in the novel had been to take up issues raised in The Trouble with Nigeria and to use his novel to propose solutions’ (140). The anxiety of critics that awaited this publication is understandable. It was weaved around three of Achebe’s most incisive works: A Man of the People, which is Achebe’s very first direct attack on the local leadership caucus, The Trouble with Nigeria, which is ranked as Achebe’s most indicting non-fictional work, and Anthills of the Savannah, which is expected to reconcile and summarize Achebe’s leadership thesis. In the end, some critics were unable to reconcile what appeared as Achebe’s strange socialist mask in Anthills and was absent in Things Fall Apart. The outcome of this situation is that it eventually created room for varieties of notions. Nevertheless, while some critics like MaughanBrown criticized Achebe for his vague Marxist undertone, others like Ben Okri would insist that Anthills is Achebe’s ‘most complex and his wisest book to date’ (quoted in Boehmer ‘Of Goddesses and Stories: Gender and a New Politics in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah’: 102). Emmanuel Ngara’s assessment, by this publication, is that, ‘Achebe has risen to new heights in both artistic excellence and social vision’ (‘Achebe as Artist: The Place and Significance of Anthills of the Savannah’: 118). He lauds Achebe for engaging in ‘issues relating to class struggle and theories of revolution’ (124). For Chidi Maduka, Achebe in Anthills was able to express his ‘revolutionary stance on the question of political leadership

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of the military in Nigeria’ (‘Chinua Achebe and Military Dictatorship in Nigeria: A Study of Anthills of the Savannah’: 377). Therefore, the reply to the question of class struggle in Achebe’s interview with Ernest and Pat Emenyonu was simply a follow-up to the same point portrayed in A Man of the People through Joe: I think our trouble in this country is that we are too nervous. We say we are neutral but as soon as we hear communist we begin de shake and piss for trouser … The other day somebody asked me why did I go to Russia last January. I told him it was because if you look only in one direction your neck will become stiff. (79)

Achebe’s proposition in the above statement is clear; allow an open mind to any intellectual political proposal. It is not out of sheer coincidence, one may presume, that Achebe would name one of his main characters, Max, bearing similar phonetic paraphernalia with the historical Marx. Exemplifying this notion in the novel, Max makes it clear to Odili that: ‘What you see here is only the vanguard, the planning stage. Once we are ready we shall draw in the worker, the farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter’ (78). The interrupted statement is completed by Eunice who is noted by her revolutionary temperament too, thus: ‘and the unemployed, of course … The great revolutions of history were started by intellectuals, not the common people. Karl Marx was not a common man; he wasn’t even a Russian’ (78). Achebe continues this same argument elsewhere with the short fable in Hausa, revealing the revolutionary tactics of the griot, in other words, the writer. In this particular Hausa fable, the snake, which represents the aristocratic class, is not bothered by its incompetence as long as the masses stay where they have been made to stay. The whole sense in the Hausa fable is summarily made clearer to readers when Achebe makes the following statement in an interview with Charles Rowell: Why is it that a snake is entitled to a horse? Why is it that the man who knows how to ride does not have a horse to ride? You see. This questioning will come in a revolutionary time, and when it comes you don’t need another story. It is this same story that will stand to be used; and this to me is the excellence of the griot in creating laughter and hiding what you might call the glint of steel. (‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’: 170)

Achebe, no doubt, appears to be signalling a new revolutionary spirit beyond the one in his earlier works, which exemplifies the Igbo adage: anu gba ajo oso, agba ya ajo egbe – loosely translated to mean

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‘the bush meat that desperately tries to escape requires a desperate gunshot’. Put otherwise, desperate situations require desperate measures. However, this disposition must be carefully contextualized within the social temperament of the period he responded to, against the general background of his revolutionary proposal. By Isidore Okpewho’s explanation, one gets to understand that Achebe was only responding to the temper of the age in which these books were published. According to Okpewho, ‘there was also a growing vogue of Marxist-socialist praxis among writers and scholars on the continent that Achebe could hardly ignore’ (22). Okpewho’s observation in Anthills equally reflects the prominence of pidgin as a language technique, interpreting it as ‘the proletarian elements’ (24) which Achebe invokes in the reader’s mind. Ultimately, Achebe is simply confronting the political problem of Kagan, ‘a thinly veiled Nigeria’ (24) with a radical political approach. In his own words, these are ‘all props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again’ (Morning Yet 44). Irrespective of approach, the basic element in revolu­ tionary aesthetics underscores change. For change to occur there has to be a means or process of tactics. Achebe makes this point in his interview with Ernest and Pat Emenyonu, thus, ‘What we are striving for is human equality … even in fighting revolutions, the particular place where you are fighting your particular revolution is going to a large extent to determine tactics’ (38). Though he would not recommend revolutionary violence, he has also not condemned it in the absence of a realistic political alternative. He cites the genocidal experience the Igbo society experienced in his memoir as an example of a political situation that can determine one’s instinctual response to existential social threats. In Ohaeto’s words, Achebe, emphasizes that, Biafra ‘stands in opposition to the murder and rape of Africa by whites and blacks alike’ and that it also ‘stands for true independence in Africa’… Biafran writers are committed to the revolutionary struggle of their people for justice and true independence’ [and the] cause is right and just’ … this is what literature in Africa should be about today – right and just causes. (Chinua Achebe: A Biography: 138)

In fact, when confronted with the question of possible regrets for his role during the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War, Achebe declares he would take a similar revolutionary posture as he did in the past because of the inevitability of the cause. Nevertheless, he refuses to admonish violence, indirectly referring to its implications. His words:

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And if it happened again, I would not behave differently … The writer has to keep reminding all the time that even where you think violence is inevitable, you still should realize what it is; you do not pretend that violence is good. It may be inevitable but it’s not good. So when I see people talk about revolutionary violence, I think the artist has to be very careful. There is revolutionary violence. (Ogbaa: 70)

He cautions the writer to abstain from eulogizing ‘revolutionary violence’ since, in his words, ‘bullets do not flower’ (71). Ultimately, he envisions an intellectual revolutionary posture for himself, pledging thus: ‘Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse – to help society regain belief in itself’ (Morning Yet 44). As Maughan-Brown rightly observes, ‘Ikem’s credentials as an authorial voice are established so clearly’ (142) in Anthills. He also believes that ‘the main burden of Ikem’s political message in the novel lies with his elevation of reform over revolution’ (142). Nevertheless, it is also important to note that there is a synergetic relationship between reformation and revolution. The basic characteristic is change, which under Achebe’s ideological proposal gears towards a new socio-political system for the African society. Ideally, his revolutionary perception suggests a subtle and moderate revolutionary approach, which he has exemplified both as a storyteller, social critic and as a member of the elitist class. In an attempt to put to rest the controversy surrounding his indeterminate Marxist proposals in Anthills, Achebe explains his ultimate goal in the work: Anthills goes into more detail about the kind of people involved in leadership and I go from that to consider the kind of education for leadership such people need to acquire in order to be fit for its tasks. This education has to do with our leaders re-connecting themselves with the people and not living up there, unaware of their reality … So I’m making this point specifically. That this leadership has to connect itself with the source of its legitimacy: the peasantry, the workers, the women – the people. At the end of Anthills of the Savannah there is a kind of groping towards this reality. (Searle: 156)

Thus, for a reformatory political system to take place successfully in Kagan or Nigeria, Achebe is insisting that the intellectual class, in which the writer plays a major role, should lead the way. This particular ‘way’ comes with the writer’s ‘story’ (his responsibility) which is meant, in the first place, to ‘cause headaches’ (Palmer Of War and Women, Oppression and Optimism: 219). The ‘headaches’ syndrome is only but a pullback mechanism that will compel leaders return to the right political path.

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Maughan-Brown alludes that for Achebe, leadership is exclusively ‘the preserve of the elite’ (145). However, Ngara’s interpretation is that ‘the two major classes of oppressed and deprived people, the peasants and the workers, are given a place in the world of Anthills, but they are given minor roles to play in the drama of that world’ (122). Similarly, Eustace Palmer also notes that the ‘lower classes or the masses play an apparently peripheral role’ (220). In other words, there are roles for the masses that are only but minor ones. Palmer describes Ikem as a ‘radical revolutionary who would like to see a complete transformation in the society … by his pen, by changing people’s hearts’ (221). In other words, Palmer’s presentation of Ikem as both Achebe’s mouthpiece and revolutionary character whose weapon is his ‘pen’ is suggestive that the ‘story’ which is a form of protest in itself is expected to engender a reformatory process. Achebe’s ideal revolutionary vision is thus located within the subtle/moderate revolutionary tactics. It is a revolutionary approach practically typified in his ‘Open Letter’ to Nigeria’s ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo on October 15, 2004, whereby he turned down the offer of a national award. In the letter, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of the nation under Obasanjo’s administration. Achebe expects that this subtle revolutionary model becomes the groundwork that could engender, among others, a constitutional reform or political restructuring in Nigeria. His idea of revolution is that the Nigerian/ African writers should attempt to domesticate their writings, which should bear the hallmark of African cultural values. The content should explore African sensibilities in order to preserve the African identity in a fast-moving globalized universe.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. ——A Man of the People. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1966. ——Anthills of the Savannah. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1988. ——Morning yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975. ——The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension: 1983. ——There was a Country. London: Penguin, 2012. Anyadike, Chima. ‘The Tortoise and the Lion: Achebe and Ngugi on the Struggles of Africa’. In The Eagle in Ascendance, ed. Damian Opata. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 2005: 37-46. Anyadike, Chima and Kehinde Ayoola, ‘Preface’. In Blazing the Path: Fifty Years

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158  Psalms Emeka Chinaka of Things Fall Apart, eds Chima Anyadike and Kehinde Ayoola. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 2012: x-xvi. Boehmer, Elleke. ‘Of Goddesses and Stories: Gender and a New Politics in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah’. In Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, eds Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990: 102-12. Emenyonu, Ernest and Pat Emenyonu. ‘Achebe: Accountable to our Society’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 35-44. Innes, C.L. and Bernth Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978. Lindfors, Bernth, Ian Munroe, Richard Priebe and Reinhard Sander. ‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’ [1969]. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 27-34. Killam, G.D. The Writings of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969. Maduka, Chidi. ‘Chinua Achebe and Military Dictatorship in Nigeria: A Study of Anthills of the Savannah’. In Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Vol. I Omenka: The Master Artist, ed. Ernest Emenyonu. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004: 367-82. Maughan-Brown, David. ‘Anthills of the Savannah and the Ideology of Leader­ ship’. In Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, eds Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990: 139-48. Ngara, Emmanuel. ‘Achebe as Artist: The Place and Significance of Anthills of the Savannah’. In Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, eds Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990: 11329. Nnolim, Charles. ‘The Artist in Search of the Right Leadership: Achebe as a Social Critic’. In Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe Vol. II Isinka: The Artistic Purpose, ed. Ernest Emenyonu. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004: 225-35. Nwachukwu-Agbada, J.O.J. ‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 130-40. Nwodo, Christopher. Philosophical Perspective on Chinua Achebe. University of Port Harcourt Press, 2004. Ogbaa, Kalu. ‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 64-75. Ogungbesan, Kolawole. ‘Politics and the African Writer’. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Innes and Lindfors: 37-46. Ohaeto, Ezenwa. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 2000. Ojinmah, Umelo. ‘Introduction.’ In Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives. Ibadan: Spectrum Books. 1991.

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Okafor, Kez. ‘The Quest for Social Change: Reformation or Revolution?’ In Eagle on Iroko: Selected Papers from the Chinua Achebe International Symposium 1990, ed. Edith Ihekweazu. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1996: 224-33. Okolie, M.A.E. ‘The Eagle with Velvet Claws: Issues in the Social Essays of Chinua Achebe’. In The Eagle in Ascendance, ed. Damian Opata. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 2005: 55-65. Okpewho, Isidore. ‘Introduction.’ In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, ed. Isidore Opkewho. Oxford University Press, 2003: 3-53. Osudibia, Kizito. Revolution: A Dangerous Option (for Nigeria). Enugu: Snaap Press, 2004. Palmer, Eustace. Of War and Women, Oppression and Optimism. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008. Rowell, Charles. ‘An Interview with Chinua Achebe’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 165-84. Scott, Wilbur. Five Approaches of Literary Criticism. New York: Collier/ Macmillan, 1962. Searle, Chris. ‘Achebe and the Bruised Heart of Africa’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 155-64. Turner, Margaret. ‘Achebe, Hegel, and the New Colonialism’. In Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, eds Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990: 31-40. Udenta, Udenta. Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1993. Wenzel, Jennifer. ‘The Trouble with Narrators: The Role of Chinua Achebe in Anthills of the Savannah’. In Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe vol. 1 Omenka. The Master Artist, ed. Ernest Emenyonu. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004: 319-32. Wikipedia. ‘Revolutions of 1848’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of _1848. Retrieved 2 May 2016. —— ‘Revolution’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution. Retrieved 10 March 2019. Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1992. ——‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’. In Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 141-54. Williams, Adebayo. The Remains of the Last Emperor. Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1994.

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Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré’s Le Récit du Cirque…de la Vallée des Morts The Limitations of Stylistic Innovation UNIONMWAN EDEBIRI 1

Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré, the Guinean exile whose real name is shrouded in secrecy, is one of the most politically committed and artistically innovative of the second generation of writers in Francophone Africa. This essay focuses on his second novel, Le récit du cirque…de la Vallée des Morts (The Tale of the Circus…of the Valley of Death), which reveals his political stance and also demonstrates his stylistic originality. However, it should be noted that even though our main concern here is with the limitation of the author’s stylistic innovations, it is necessary to dwell very briefly on the theme of the novel in order to give better attention to the primary focus of our essay. Like his first novel, Le cercle des Tropiques (1972), Le récit du cirque… is a biting satire of dictatorship. But unlike the former, it does not stop at exposing and ridiculing dictatorship. Rather, it goes further to castigate the victims and observers of dictatorship whose indifference facilitates its establishment and sustainability. The novelist’s strictures against them stem from his conviction that timely resistance can stifle the growth of an incipient dictatorship. As he puts it: ‘En vérité, ce ne sont pas les injustices dans les sociétés de notre époque qu’on doit combattre, c’est l’indifférence qu’on devrait attaquer’ (25) (‘In truth, it is not injustice of our time that we must fight against, it is indifference that we should attack’). This observation brings back to mind part of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reminiscences of his country’s invasion and occupation by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini from 1936 to 1941, in his address to the League of Nations, here reproduced from the website en.wikisource. org: Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph. (Translated by the Haile Selassie I Press)

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Equally, ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’ (attributed to Edmund Burke). In Le récit du cirque…, a country simply named Ce-pays (This Country) is ruled by a ruthless dictator – Rhinocéros-Tâcheté. The members of the ruling class have created around him the myth of invincibility which they exploit to discourage social groups or individual citizens from challenging the excesses of the regime. The dictator’s ideal for his country and people is strange and horrifying. Instead of aspiring to transform his country into an Eldorado, an earthly paradise, a prosperous nation, or at least to raise the standard of living of its citizens, he lords it completely over them, arrogating to himself the right to dispose of their lives and properties according to his whims and caprices. As he declares conceitedly: Moi assis sur Mon Peuple, le piétinant comme un vieux tapis, le traînant comme une vieille savate, le torturant comme un ennemi mortel, le détruisant comme une vieille ruine frappée, violée par le temps et les intempéries, en en profitant comme une maîtresse sexuellement asservie par la soif du plaisir, exploitant comme un esclave, vendant son patrimoine aux plus offrants. (17) [I, seated on my people, trampling them underfoot as though they were like an old carpet, dragging them like worn out old slippers, torturing them like a deadly enemy, destroying them like a total ruin, violated by time and bad weather, taking advantage of them like a sexually subjugated mistress by the thirst of pleasure, exploiting them like slaves, selling their patrimony to the highest bidder.]

Indeed, he dreams of a citizenry which is deprived of the most basic civil rights. Strangely enough, he is able to transform this bizarre dream into a reality. Consequently, he organizes annually a bloody ritual which consists of subjecting people to moral and physical ordeals, torture, forced labour and endless interrogations. Thus, actual and imaginary enemies of the regime are routinely eliminated by atrocious methods. For instance, some of them are simply thrown to carnivorous animals which devour them while others are forced down to an underground dungeon from which they can never resurface. Several others are simply declared missing. Ironically, a high percentage of these victims is not guilty of any crime – ‘Les coupables du crime de rien’ (97). The regime is so thoroughly callous and murderous that even persons unjustly condemned to death dare not cry out against the injustice of which they are victims in order not to expose their surviving relatives and friends to the same fate: ‘Il ne s’agit plus pour un condamné de mourir en criant la vérité tant étouffée, mais de s’en

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aller en bénissant le culte pour sauver les proches qui restent’ (35). The dictator’s agents earn promotion by carrying out his murderous orders promptly and dispassionately: Gravir les échelons de la hiérarchie du Culte Rhinocéros-Tâcheté … C’est se montrer capable de faire couler, sans sourciller, le sang d’un innocent choisi au hazard dans Ce-pays. (33) [To get promotion in the service of the Rhinéceros-Tâcheté cult … one must show oneself capable of shedding the blood of an innocent person chosen at random in Ce-pays without batting an eyelid.]

The executioners exhibit such zeal and ruthlessness that there is a widespread belief among the citizens that they will not hesitate to assassinate God if He opposes the dictator: ‘Ces conseillers assassin­ eraient Dieu s’il se manifestait contre le Culte’ (45). In fact, there is a general impression that the regime is bent on committing genocide: ‘On a l‘impression que pour quelques êtres, diriger un pays c’est d’abord organiser l‘assassinat d’un peuple’ (97). Fantouré seems to have taken delight in painting the regime in a darker colour than the most critical report on Sekou Touré’s regime in Guinea, his own country which, in all probability, served as his model. From the stylistic point of view, Le récit du cirque… is one of the most original of the African novels written in French. In it, Fantouré breaks completely from the traditional form of the novel as exemplified by Balzac and, in many instances, from the norms of prose-writing. Balzac’s novels are straightforward and easy to comprehend. The narrative point of view adopted is usually the omniscient narrator, who engages the reader through a simple linear plot. Thus, Balzac’s messages are very clear and uncomplicated. But Fantouré’s work is a clear departure from the Balzac tradition. This departure from convention is evident right from the title of the novel. The novel’s title on the cover page is Le récit du cirque…de la Vallée des Morts. Without the ellipses, the reader would take this as the full title. But since ellipses still form part of this title, the reader is also at a loss to determine what the author has left out. Thus, he is not sure of the exact title of the novel. Moreover, the difference between the title on the cover page and the one given two pages inside the novel raises some doubt in the mind of the reader as to which of them is the correct or real title of the work. Of course, from the beginning of this novel the reader is unable to say exactly which is the title of the novel he is about to read. Needless to point out, this is unusual as the titles of most other novels are hardly ever problematic.

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The ‘table of contents’ of Le récit du cirque… is no less enigmatic than its title. In novels generally, the table of contents is sparingly used. In the few narratives which have them, their use falls into two broad categories. Firstly, they are used simply to indicate the component parts or chapters of the novel. In them the chapters or component parts are numbered but do not have titles. This category is illustrated by novels like Ferdinand Oyono’s Le vieux nègre et la médaille and Sylvain Bemba’s Le dernier des cargonautes. In the other category, each chapter of the novel has a title which reflects its contents. Examples of this type are found in Olympe Bhely-Quenum’s Initié and Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard’s Le récit de la mort. But Fantouré has not used the traditional appellation of ‘chapter’ to describe the divisions of his novel; instead he has chosen to call them ‘chapelets’. Equally worthy of observation is that all the ‘chapelets’ have titles and sub-titles. It is no less remarkable in addition that the ‘chapelets’ have the same heading – Le récit du cirque… – but different sub-titles. As we have noted earlier, Le récit du cirque… is the title on the cover page of this novel and one of its two possible titles. By using this title for the headings, the author seems to want to emphasize the coherence of his subject matter. The need to do this may have arisen from the borrowings from the other arts and genres and the reader cannot help wondering why the novelist is eager to have a heading for each chapter. This purpose could equally have been served if he had omitted from the other parts the heading of each ‘chapelet’. However, Fantouré amplifies some of the sub-headings inside the body of the novel itself. For instance, in his table of contents, he gives ‘cinquième chapelet. Le récit du cirque… Film Voyage’ as the subheading. Inside the novel, we have successively, in addition to this sub-heading, the following four sub-headings: ‘FILM. VOYAGE. HORIZON. INACCESSIBLE OU RÊVE DE SURVIE (97); ‘FILM. VOYAGE. VALLÉE (103); ‘FILM. VOYAGE. VALLÉE MOUCHES UN SOSIE (106); ‘FILM, FIN DU VOYAGE VALLÉE COLLINE. UNE VOIX’ (114).

Similarly, ‘Chapelet’ Seven, whose heading in the table of contents is ‘RÉCIT DU CIRQUE … FILM, UN JOUR COMME UN AUTRE’ (127), has the following two sub-headings in the body of the novel. THÉÂTRE – FILM … UN JOUR COMME UN AUTRE … ULTIME APPROCHE … (134). ‘RÉCIT DU CIRQUE FILM THÉÂTRE UN JOUR COMME UN AUTRE. L’ÊTRE INTERROMPU (142). Thus, while ‘Chapelet’ Six has four sub-titles and ‘Chapelet’ Seven has two,

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the other ‘Chapelets’ have none at all. This inconsistency defies any logical explanation, especially as all the ‘Chapelets’ which do not have sub-headings are long enough to have been divided into small parts with sub-headings, if the author had so desired. It is also important to note that although an epilogue does not feature in the table of contents, the novel contains what can approximately be regarded as such: RÉCIT DU CIRQUE… SALLE DE SPECTACLE. RIDEAU NOUVELLE ISSUE DE SECOURS du personnage Saibel-Ti sortie. (145). On the whole, it is difficult to explain why this novel’s table of contents does not reflect totally its contents as is normally the practice. Furthermore, Fantouré’s strange and unorthodox use of capital letters cannot escape the reader’s attention. Ordinarily, only the first letter of the word which begins a sentence, a proper noun or a national adjective is written in a capital letter. But Fantouré writes in capital letters ordinary single words, phrases in any part of the sentence (beginning, middle or end) as can be seen in this example: ‘Car on dit toujours – MORT – quand il y a une tombe, un cimetière ou des fosses communes … DISPARU – Drôle de mot qui ne définit aucun état précis, sinon que l’homme n’est ni MORT ni VIVANT’ (34). (‘For they always say – DEAD – when there are a grave, a cemetery or communal graves … DISAPPEARED – What a funny word which does not define any specific status except that the man is neither DEAD nor ALIVE’.) In this passage, a few of the words are written in capital letters while the others are written in small letters. This is by no means an isolated example. Indeed, in some other passages, whole sentences are written in capital letters as in this example: ‘C’EST DANS LA FORÊT SACRÉE QUE BAT LE COEUR DE CE-PAYS’ (64). It is not even uncommon to find a whole paragraph written in capital letters in the novel: IL PORTAIT EN LUI QUELQUES SIGNES MORTELS CELEBRÉS DANS CE-PAYS – LA VÉRITÉ ET LE COURAGE DE LA CLAMER … DEUX DE CES CHOSES INDÉCENTES A NE PAS NOURRIR AU SEIN DE L’UNIVERS DU CULTE RHINOCÉROS-TÂCHETÉ. (31)

The plausible reason for Fantouré’s use of capital letters in the manner illustrated so far is that he wishes to stress the words, sentences and paragraphs in capital letters. Indeed, it is difficult to say to what thematic end, to what interpretative end or to what end of the overall design of the novel, he uses them. In any case, whatever the correct explanation for it may be, it is evident that this style produces a visual

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effect on the reader, for the words, sentences and paragraphs written in capital letters quickly attract attention. Another device employed by Fantouré to arrest the reader’s attention consists in lumping together several words which ordinarily should be written separately: Demainnousvivronscommedes hommeslibresauxrisquesdefaire éclaterlesprivilègessouslepoids desinjusticesquenousnevoudrons plusnepourronsplussupporter (40)

Ordinarily, this sentence should be written as follows: Demain nous vivrons comme des hommes libres aux risques de faire éclater les privilèges sous le poids des injustices que nous ne voudrons plus ne pourrons plus supporter.

The reader cannot but be surprised at the lumping together of the words in this sentence. After his initial surprise, he may try to separate the words in his mind in order to understand the sentence. Thus, he has to read more slowly and more carefully than he does normally. To put it another way, the grouping together of the words in the sentence compels him to reduce his reading speed. This is a subtle way of controlling the reader’s response to the text. Another remarkable feature of Fantouré’s style in this novel is his peculiar use of punctuation marks, particularly ellipses and strokes. We have earlier commented on the ellipses which form part of one of this novel’s possible titles. Most strikingly, the novel begins with fiftyone ellipses which cover the first line and about three quarters of the second line (10); while the next page ends with seventeen ellipses. In several other pages, ellipses of varying lengths appear at different places within sentences (16, 17, 25, 67, 70, 79). In some cases, the ellipses which come up at the end of a sentence are preceded by exclamation marks: Je ne veux plus de chrétiens … mahométans … de juifs … de païens … de marxistes et de tous les autres! … Je veux la bêtise – reine – mère! … la lâcheté – sœur – supérieure! … L’ignorance – cousine – germaine! … (17)

The combined use of ellipses and exclamation marks seems whimsi­ cal as it does not conform to any recog­nizable pattern of style and does not lend itself to any straight­forward explanation.

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However, as we have earlier observed, the ellipses suggest some gaps which the reader must consciously or unconsciously try to fill up. In this way, the ellipses become an invitation to the reader to participate in the author’s creative process. This exercise invariably slows down his reading speed although it may not produce any satisfactory result as regards the author’s omission. It seems obvious that even if it were meant to yield any result, this would differ from one reader to the other. In the end, each reader is at liberty to judge and interpret the novel as he pleases, which makes the novel a kind of puzzle. Also, it is interesting to note Fantouré’s use of strokes as well as commas, colons or even periods. In the passage below, he uses strokes to separate the multiple items enumerated whereas commas should have been more commonly and appropriately used for this purpose. Dans Ce-pays le Culte est en lui- même un SIGNE MORTEL, comme sont devenus SIGNES MORTELS, les mots/voir/penseé/personnnalité/ refus/liberté/droits/loi/fraternité /religion/morale/intelligence/courage/ pitié/solidarité/amitié … et tant d’autres mots qui sont devenus des SIGNES MORTELS dans Ce-pays. (34-5)

The reader observes a dissimilar use of strokes in this passage: Il faut que/les choses /changent/ Le combat / contre / le danger / d’aliénation / doit/grandir/ se répandre/ s’étaler / envahir / Ce-pays/pour faire/éclater/les injustices/ les intolérances / les intérêts / particuliers / exacerbés. (39-40)

But in another instance, he uses strokes to separate the items enumerated in a passage written vertically: …animaux / Rhinocéros-Tâcheté / Bêtes / Termites …hommes / Afrikou / Saibel – Ti / Autres … décor / Forêt Sacrée / Termitière / Brousse / Territoire / Maisons / Ruines / Filet / Marécages … (79)

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This is another setting where colons could have served the same end. Apart from their strange function as replacements for commas and colons, the strokes in the example given serve as a graphological device which helps to arrest the reader’s attention and compels him or her to read more carefully the passages where they occur than s/he would otherwise have done. Fantouré exploits graphology for yet another purpose in the novel. Passages written in verse form are interspersed with prosaic ones throughout the book. At the opening of the book, we have: Il y a toujours dans un espoir un cri un appel une main qui frappe à une porte un regard qui cherche une lueur à l’horizon un œil qui fouille dans les ténèbres de la nuit une peur de l’abandon une désespérance de la solitude car si aucune main ne se tend aucune oreille n’entend aucun nez ne sent aucun œil ne voit aucune bouche ne s’ouvre si l’indifférence devient maîtresse alors naît doucement rapidement sûrement cyniquement férocement négativement LE CIRQUE … DE LA VALLÉE DES MORTS (7) The book ends with a poem: … Dans la salle de spectacles Il n’y a plus de JOUR plus de NUIT Il y a des ténèbres Alors les spectateurs ont crié au secours Une grande porte au fond du plateau s’est ouverte

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La lumière d’une belle journée ensoleillée éclabousse les spectateurs Qui passent entre deux haies d’honneur formées par les acteurs du spectacle du Cirque de la Vallée des Morts A chaque spectateur, une enveloppe est remise…(150) In-between, there are several poetic passages. As it will obviously be tedious to reproduce all of them here, we merely shorten two of such poems, as seen below: The first is as follows: Je voudrais être le chef des libertés individuelles des droits de l’homme de la liberté d’opinion du pouvoir législative du pouvoir judiciaire neutre du pouvoir exécutif de l’éducation libre de l’information libre de la prospérité (27) The other runs thus: Et les termitières s’ouvrent se sont ouvertes ………….. Pendant que des milliards d’ailés minuscules anges de l’espérance combattante inondent l’espace prennent de l’altitude cherchent leur voie tournent au-dessus de la Forêt Sacrée dessinent des arabesques forment un tourbillon Et le tourbillon se fait démesuré constitue une tête des bras un nez

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des jambes une bouche des oreilles un tronc des yeux

Et le tourbillon se fait spectre Et le spectre se conçoit géant se déplace laisse derrière lui un immense passage. (81-2) Significantly, the poetic passages have different designs which are reminiscent of Mallarme’s, Apollinaire’s and Dadie’s works. The varied and numerous patterns in which they feature in the book may not shock the reader much, but they compel him to take special notice of them. It needs to be pointed out that although the passages in prose predominate, those in poetic forms are sufficiently many as to make the reader wonder whether or not he is reading a work of prose or something else which is an admixture of prose and poetry. A possible explanation, however, of Fantouré’s stylistic deviation can be said to be a graphological representation of disorderliness and senselessness in the universe of his renditions. The combination of capital letters and small letters, apart from highlighting the words capitalized represents disorder. The lumping together of words, which thus creates unreadable and meaningless texts is a reflection of the theme of his novel, where tyranny and dictatorship have taken meaning out of the lives of the traumatized subjects. Fantouré’s use of ellipses of various lengths and hyphens are stylistic attempts to represent a world that is largely absurd. This is the hallmark of the modernist world view, where reality is nothing but absurdity. So far, we have referred to Le récit du cirque… as a novel. We have done so because the author, Fantouré and his publisher, Julliard, describe it as such on the title page. But we have already shown that the text is a hybrid of prose and verse. Also, as its title and sub-titles indicate, it contains borrowings from other arts and genres – circus, theatre, film, fable, legend, etc. – which Fantouré fuses together. These borrowings and the mixture of prose and poetry raise doubts about the appropriateness of the description of the text as a novel. Moreover, unlike the Balzacian novel, which had long been the model for Francophone African writers and which is characterized by a hero or principal protagonist and subsidiary protagonists who are

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analysed in detail, and a third person omnipresent and omniscient narrator who tells the story in a chronological order, none of the characters in Le récit du cirque… (Rhinocéros-Tâcheté, Saibel-Ti, Vice-IMille, Fahati, Afrikou and Mihi-Moho) can be said to be truly the hero or principal protagonist, nor are any of them presented in detail. In addition, the narration is not chronological as the author has recourse to many flashbacks and multiple narrators to present the events. Thus, in the end, Fantouré has produced a type of writing which, strictly speaking, is different from the novel à la Balzac, the type which until the publication of Le récit du cirque… had served as a model for French-speaking African novelists. Le récit du cirque… is therefore different from the novels with which most readers in Francophone Africa are familiar. It is important to recall here that in Africa, where illiteracy is still high, the reading culture among the population remains underdeveloped. Citing the case of Nigeria, O.J. Kalejaiye (2008) wrote: According to Tiamiyu (2005), a good book reading culture is required to sustain the growth and diversification of a book industry. He argues that there is a subsisting national poor reading culture in Nigeria. Corroborating him, Kalejaiye and Akangbe (2007) point out that the market for book publishing in Nigeria is limited as Nigerians are yet to cultivate the habit of reading for pleasure. They are of the view that though the reading population is growing as a result of educational expansion at all levels, a lot of reading is still for examinations or certificate oriented.

It follows that only a small fraction of Francophone Africans is literate enough to read novels. Thus, the limitation of Fantouré’s stylistic innovations in Le récit du cirque… is that in the final analysis, only the very few professional literary scholars or critics may read and enjoy this text. Fantouré’s stylistic innovations will make such serious intellectual demands on the majority of Francophone Africans who read novels as a leisure activity, and for pleasure, that they will not read it. Consequently, its impact will most certainly be minimal. NOTE 1 I am grateful to Kunle Mamudu of University of Benin and Babatunde Ayeleru of University of Ibadan who read the draft of this article for their useful suggestions.

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WORKS CITED Bemba, Sylvain. Le dernier des cargonautes, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979. Bhely-Quenum, Olympe. Initié. Paris : Présence Africaine, 1979. Fantouré, Mohamed-Alioum. Le cercle des Tropiques. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972. ——Le récit du cirque…de la Vallée des Morts. Paris: Julliard, 1975. Kalejaiye O.J. ‘Problems, Opportunities and Prospects of Book Publishing in Nigeria’. In Lai Oso, Bidemi Osunbiyi and Lanre Biobaku (eds), Book Publishing: A Practical Guide. London: African Resources, 2008. Kalejaiye, O.J. and Akangbe, C.A. ‘Book Publishing and Its Challenges: The Nigeria Experience’. International Journal of Communication, No. 7 (2007): 423-33. Oyono, Ferdinand. Le vieux nègre et la médaille. Paris: Julliard, 1956. Tati-Loutard, Jean-Baptiste. Le récit de la mort. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1987. Tiamiyu, Muta. ‘Prospects of Nigerian Book Publishing in the Elec­tronic Age’. In F.A. Adesnoye and A. Ojeniyi (eds), Issues in Book Pub­lishing in Nigeria. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria), 2005: 143-57.

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Fifty Years On A Conversation with Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, Founding Editor, African Literature Today PEDE HOLLIST

I talked with Prof. Jones at his residence atop the Leicester Hills overlooking Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In 2016, a few short months after his beloved Marjorie (co-editor ALT 15-24) died, a partial house fire engulfed their library, and with it a lifetime collection of African literary classics, including copies of the Bulletin of African Literature, which preceded ALT, and a copy of  Polyglotta Africana, Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle’s comparative study of over 156 West African languages. Despite these two life-changing events, Prof. Jones, 93, is remarkably present, as alert, witty, and charming as I remember him when I was a student in his class. Our conversation took place in the reconstructed library, now pared down to a cloth upholstered chair, a bookshelf on top of which sat a combination radio and audio cassette player (to listen to classical music), a few paintings, framed newspaper cuttings hanging on the walls, and a desk in front of which he sat in a black high-back office chair on a swivel. On the morning I walked into the library, Prof. Jones (henceforth EDJ) had been reading Shakespeare, in Braille, ‘to keep my mind sharp’, he explains, after which he told me he had voted in Sierra Leone’s March 2018 presidential elections. PH:  How did ALT come about? Take us through the steps that led to the inaugural edition. EDJ:  The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this led to a series of conferences in African Literature. There was one in Dakar, one in Nairobi, and one in Freetown at Fourah Bay College. At this latter conference, talk gathered around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on. That lasted for a year or two and possibly it was that bulletin that 172

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showed the potential of this kind of communication. Heinemann, which had the largest list of African authors, took an interest in the bulletin. We talked about it and after that we started African Literature Today which was founded as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers. PH:  Was there a set of scholars that made up this ‘we’? EDJ:  Not a group of scholars. This was communication between my­ self and the proprietors of Heinemann. PH:  This was your initiative then? EDJ:  Yes. Heinemann was part of the various conferences, so it knew what was going on, and Tom Creighton, my Head of Department, was quite interested in the Bulletin of African Literature. It ran for a couple of issues and that was what stimulated Heinemann to undertake discussions which led to the foundation of African Literature Today. PH: These Bulletin issues – are they archived anywhere that you know? EDJ:  They were archived in this room, so they were destroyed in the fire, but with some luck Heinemann may have copies and possibly the Fourah Bay College archives. They are also probably to be found in the libraries of the universities which participated in the conferences. PH: You are the editor; you had an editorial board; you picked a theme for an issue; take us through the process from making the call to publication. How did it work? EDJ: Okay, but I must acknowledge the advantage of having first started with the bulletin. It gave me my initial circulation list. I also put out the call to people who attended the Nairobi, Dakar, and Freetown conferences, and other parts of the world. From England, America and I think – it’s a pity that my memory has gone – but there was a very enthusiastic journal in Texas, which sprang up about the same time as ALT. I’m afraid it didn’t last very long but there was enthusiastic support and there were exchanges so that occasionally articles that were not accepted by one journal were passed on to the other. So I began to get submissions. Once again I pay tribute to the conferences that stimulated interest in African Literature. PH:  What were the early academic and logistical issues and problems that you faced? EDJ:  The first was communication between countries within Africa. Airmail, where it existed, was irregular. Another problem was that many lecturers had difficulty getting their works typed. Writing and transmission of articles. It’s almost impossible to imagine that

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state of affairs now, but then many scholars did not have access to typewriters and the means of getting articles typed in the required format. Some very enthusiastic scholars hand-wrote their articles and sent them via whatever means possible. PH:  You actually received handwritten articles? EDJ:  Plenty of them. But that’s one side of the story. Some departments were fortunate. Copies arrived from them perfectly well typed. PH:  But what did you do about the ones that came to you handwritten? EDJ:  My wife was a martyr to this cause. She typed many of them. She had always been my typist; she just added these documents to her workload. Our operation was not as you might think it today a professional one. We worked from a sense of commitment to the cause. Incidentally, most departments at that time were not particularly interested in supporting this part of their lecturers’ work. Now let me clarify. Departments did expect lecturers to do more than pass on information to students, but they did not provide support for lecturers to publish their work. So the lecturers had to be enterprising. You know, at the very beginning, Heinemann paid a small fee to contributors to encourage submissions, but this did not last long because we were overwhelmed with submissions. PH:  At what point did the journal become established as an inter­ nationally recognized scholarly publication? EDJ:  I can’t give you a particular issue number or date. Recognition of ALT’s importance must have differed from department to department, depending on the emphasis on scholarship and support for it that was provided. Some departments required research and the products of research. To that extent, ALT would have become a venue for such materials. Journals were not available at all in many countries. ALT existed, and lecturers from all over tropical Africa quickly recognized it provided a means of placing their work at the international level. Its reputation gradually established itself. PH:  Describe the evaluation process. Was it by peer review or were you the sole reviewer and decider? EDJ:  At the beginning I was the editor and sole evaluator, but gradually I got together a team of advisers – but understand the difficulty of transmission of material between countries played a major role in how evaluation was done. Quite often I referred material to advisers when I was not familiar with certain kinds of materials or could not make a decision on a particular article. PH:  When did the assessment and evaluation process shift primarily from editor to peer review?

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EDJ:  Well, first let me say that to start with the idea was that this journal was to be produced every six months. At that stage practically all the reading was done by the editor and some members of the English Department at Fourah Bay College who were willing to lend their services. After about two or three years, I think at about issue number 4 or 5, we settled on an annual issue and the idea of themes. Now at that point it became easier to identify readers of particular offerings. I did not have a regular team. When an article came that needed external help, I sought someone who would be able to give the kind of advice I wanted. Later I developed a team of advisers. PH:  Any other problems and issues that you can remember, big or small? EDJ:  One of the regular problems was that of transmission of material. Heinemann for instance used operators from wherever they could afford to get them to send materials to various parts of the world for the various stages in the process of publication. There was a great deal of posting and with that the attendant risk of damage to and loss of individual. And, as you know, political life in some parts of Africa at that time was unstable so that the business of getting manuscripts to and from was quite often problematical. Materials were held up in post offices and arrived very late. But, miraculously, only once do I remember a whole edited manuscript being totally lost – just disappeared without trace. PH: When you say a whole edited manuscript, do you mean the entire issue? PH:  The entire issue, edited, ready for the process of printing was lost in transit. PH:  In transit from Sierra Leone to the United Kingdom. EDJ:  Indeed! In one instance, it was even more local than that. We lost a manuscript unedited manuscript within the country. PH:  In Sierra Leone EDJ:  Yes, now when that happens, there is the risk of a total loss of will. How do you start all over again? PH:  How do you explain it to the contributors? EDJ:  There is only one way. Write and make an admission. It was not easy, but there was so little opportunity for publication that people were very stoic about this. They said, okay, we will try again; we’ll send you another copy or something. PH:  Looking back to the start or since you stepped down as editor, how was ALT changed?

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EDJ:  I find it very difficult to make an evaluation because I did not receive regular copies of ALT once I stopped editing it. Let me just say, and this is not an answer to your question, ALT started as a free-for-all; anybody could send you an article on anything. Then we moved, probably after about number 6, or 7, to themes, and I thought that the idea of themes continued after I gave up the editorship, but I understand there have been changes. PH:  Can you talk a little bit about the stepping down process? Did you just get tired? Were you forced out? How did the change happen? EDJ  It looked at one stage as if I would go on till the end of my days, but at a certain point I began to get difficulty with my vision. It was discovered that I had glaucoma, and reading became difficult, but let me admit something that so far this interview has not revealed: the help I had both from my wife and members of the English Department at Fourah Bay College, particularly from Prof. Eustace Palmer who was on the staff, and who for a number of issues was co-editor, and my wife who was mostly anonymous in the help she gave ALT but became officially co-editor of the journal. So when my vision started going, I began to make plans for my withdrawal but because of the kind of help that I had, I went on for perhaps longer than I would normally have gone. PH:  How did Ernest get to become the editor? Was he handpicked by you, that kind of thing happens in African politics, or was there a more formal process? EDJ:  Ernest will tell you that he was one of my contributors to start with. I did not select him. I was consulted on my succession. I was very happy that he was finally chosen as the editor. PH:  That means a group of people chose him? EDJ: Yes, the proprietors, but I had a kind of rather personal connection with some of my contributors while I was editor, and we exchanged correspondence sometimes beyond the purely professional, and Ernest was one of the ones that had more than mere professional correspondence, so I came to know him very well on paper. I was very pleased when his name came up, and happy that he was chosen. PH:  Many contemporary African writers say they do not want to be limited by identity tags that pin them down to one race, gender, continent or country. How do you react to that, especially as you were the founder of a publication that had an identity badge? Is it time for a name change given that writers from Africa don’t want to be pegged necessarily or exclusively to the label Africa?

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EDJ:  Yes, at the time ALT was founded, Achebe was writing, Wole Soyinka was writing, and so was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, but there seemed to be a lot more engagement with the genre outside Africa than within Africa. The reading lists of schools in Africa very rarely included African writers so there was a need to direct the interest of African readers to the work of African writers and that was particularly the function of ALT – to bring the work of African writers to the notice of Africans. The question of African writers being pegged to the adjective African is a much wider issue. Jane Austen is an English writer. English was her nationality and England her subject. But that should not necessarily mean a limitation in the range or subject of writers born in Africa. Looking at the output of Achebe and Soyinka, their interest is mainly Africa because Africa had the material which seemed to be unused, at least by Africans. And the resentment, for instance, on the part of some Africans on the use of Africa by Conrad in the Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary in Mister Johnson. There was a kind of missionary zeal in correcting the presentation, the image, of Africa being put out for consumption. Now whether that task has been managed or fulfilled is a question that might create some debate. But I think there should be no limitation to the freedom of African writers to use the world as their oyster. It is an interesting question as to how far and how much the earlier writers in both England and America, of which I had some experience, France and Germany, directed their attention outside their own country – but there should be no theoretical limitation. I must say I found the work of Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man very interesting, and at the first go, a bit of a surprise. PH: Pleasant? EDJ:  Very pleasant, because it was mainly admiration at the way she had penetrated a completely different setting, a completely different civilization and educated me so thoroughly in that new sphere. She shows that the writer has every right if she has the ability to go where she feels able. PH:  But don’t we have a litany of issues and problems that need to be brought and African writers, to paraphrase Achebe, have an obligation to write penetratingly on them? EDJ: We will never arrive at a time when you can say African writers have now sufficiently written about their environment and performed their moral duty and now are free to look at other areas. No, I don’t think there is an answer to that question; I think writers

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will express themselves about and in terms of the environment in which they feel comfortable. PH: What then do you see in the future for African Literature, especially with Internet technology, new platforms for disseminating material, and new genres of writing? What would you like to see? How would you like to see African Literature develop? EDJ: I would like to see African writers develop as citizens of the world and, as a vignette of that vision, I would for instance point to Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’, a short poem written by an African, looking at race prejudice in a London situation; or Adichie looking at America. I want African writers to turn their gaze on the world in the same way as Europeans gazed on the African continent. PH:  Could you give us some examples? EDJ: I am reading one by a young Sierra Leonean writer, Farouk Oumar Sesay. It is called Landscapes of Memory. He writes not just about Sierra Leone but about West Africa and the question of African migration, of people born in Cameroon, who find their way to Sierra Leone and become a part of its environment. He is looking at problems which were not problems fifty years ago; he is looking at the changes made by the discovery of diamonds, for instance, in Sierra Leone, the way it has drawn populations from outside Sierra Leone and the way it has changed life within the country. There will always be new phenomena, which in turn bring new problems, and they will always supply the food for the African writer, so the future is always expanding; it’s always changing. New forms of telecommunication are influencing life within Africa; changing the whole environment of African writing. When you look at the environment around Things Fall Apart and put it besides Landscapes of Memory, you see that they are different. There will never be a time when Africa writers can sit back and say now we have done our duty to our environment. Information technology makes it possible for writers to see what is happening to the rest of the word, and they must grapple with the world either as part of their environment as Aminatta does in The Hired Man. PH:  So the future is bright and African writers are going to step into it. EDJ: Yes, I’m sure. Americanah, for instance, shows an African occupied with what I will call the larger world in which Africa has become an important part, co-adjunct. Africans move in this wider world, and this has become part of their environment.

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Fifty Years On: A Conversation with Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones  179

PH:  Talk briefly about what retirement has been like for you; has it really been retirement? EDJ: I have retired from formal teaching and interested myself in various things like bringing technology into the schools. I founded Knowledge Aid for Sierra Leone with the help of my friends. I wanted to introduce computers into the school system, which had no connection with them at all. In attempts to modernize their curriculum, some schools offered computer technology as a subject without even a computer in their facilities. Because of this, we started centres at which pupils from different schools could enrol and learn to use a computer. That is still going on. PH:  How many centres are there? Are there centres all over Freetown or Sierra Leone? EDJ: The idea was to have them all over Sierra Leone and some attempt was made to start outside Freetown. Right now there are three centres in Freetown. PH:  Up and running right now? EDJ:  Yes, yes, yes. Maybe you should look at the one at Government Secondary Technical at Congo Cross. I have also been influential in the founding of Sierra Leone Union on Disability issues. This has led, for instance, to the formulation of an Act to govern the care of the disabled. I’m of course retired from active membership of both institutions. For my sins, I was invited to come out of retirement of to chair the National Policy Advisory Committee (NPAC), whose main function turned out to be to advise the president then, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, on cabinet papers. Submissions of cabinet’s ministries were given to my committee before cabinet meetings to provide confidential advice to the president. But, in fact, the president just started reading my memos out in cabinet meetings. On one occasion when there was a difference of opinion between himself and a cabinet minister, the matter became a public issue and to back up his position my signed memo was published in the local papers, which was very embarrassing, not to speak of the cabinet minister who did not particularly like me after that. PH:  Treat the questions that follow like the hot mental quizzes of your primary school days. I will mention a name and you tell me what comes to mind. Donald Trump. EDJ: An extraordinary man by whatever standard. The last man I thought will ever end up as President of America. PH:  Chimamanda Adichie. EDJ:  One of my favourite writers. I fell in love with Purple Hibiscus

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180  Pede Hollist

from the first page. I have also read one or two of her short stories and at the moment I am reading Americanah. PH:  Aminatta Forna. EDJ:  My country woman. I think like most people the first thing I ever read of hers was The Devil That Danced on Water: A Daughter’s Quest. I have also read The Hired Man and Memory of Love. Each time she has fascinated me with her penetration of events and ability to reveal the inside of things. I am particularly impressed with The Hired Man, which for me, and for her I assume, is a completely alien civilization. PH:  Teju Cole. EDJ:  I confess I have never heard of him PH:  You have some catching up to do. Afropolitans. EDJ:  Never heard that term in my life. PH:  Jacob Zuma. EDJ:  The word that comes to my mind is unspeakable. PH:  Nelson Mandela. EDJ:  Ah, a man who is really difficult to talk about because he is so extraordinary. I’m going to say something wrong. First of all in his ability to forgive such an enormity of wrong – so enormous in his capacity to forgive – one is almost tempted to begin to find fault with it. PH: Shakespeare. EDJ:   I find something special in almost any of his plays I pick up. I recently reread King John. Not sure people are familiar with it. Very seldom read and does not appear in college syllabuses; it has wry humour, outrage and history. Such a refreshing read. PH:  Favourite work. EDJ:  The Freetown Bond: A Life Under Two Flags. It is a review of my life. It is as much about Freetown as it is about me. I hope that’s how it comes out. PH:  How would you like to be remembered? EDJ:  As the man who lived in his time, used his oppor­tunities and made his contribution to the life of his people. I take pride in the fact that many of my students remain friends; that people from whom I went merely to collect items of vocabulary as we worked on the Krio-English dictionary, left a lasting impression on me.

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Literary Supplement

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Placate the Lords of Darkness (The Songs of Darkness II) Poem

ANYA UDE EGWU

The jungle of darkness is walled tall And the irons barred fast; Helpless, we stare As the warders of darkness, The lords of darkness Wall in their prisoners and stride away Clasping fast the keys Waiting to be placated. We are the prisoners, We are the besieged; We are held back in the jungle of darkness, And fettered by the cords of darkness. And so, helpless, we stare As the warders of darkness, The lords of darkness Now belching with the debauchery of shame And self-congratulatory shamelessness Wait, confident, to share their booties For soon they shall be placated. Truces are reached Promises are made, and Soon the billions will be shared – The booties of shame. And we stare, held down and helpless But the warders of darkness, The lords of darkness Are in the chambers of debauchery Clinking their glasses, certain that soon They shall be placated. 183

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184  Anya Ude Egwu

Are they comrades Who fasten the bars of darkness? Co-conspirators in the chambers of debauchery Over the tables of robberies of darkness Are they? The warders of darkness, the toads of darkness; They are here They are there They are among us But they are with them: The lords of darkness The toads of darkness Who, satisfied, are glad of heart And are clinking their glasses For the booties ready to be garnered home, As soon they shall be placated. Hurray! Their harvest is here; It has always been here. But they gather into famished barns; Who is it that takes a basket to the river And comes home with water? They have taken a basket to the river, Their barns will be hollow, Hollow as their souls are hollow. So will they still wallow in hollowness, The lords of darkness with their warders of darkness, Even after they have been placated. Placate the lords of darkness With their warders of darkness, The toads of darkness, That they may decree that there may be light. May they? The pampered by the booties of shame; May they? Who are belly-swollen with our blood of travail May they? Who feed that we, carbon-choked, may die. May they?

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Placate the Lords of Darkness  185

Who feed that we, flame-devoured, may die. May they? For we are choked when they are choked, And devoured when they are devoured, And their death our death. But the lords of darkness, The toads of darkness Are meeting at the chambers of debauchery, clinking their glasses Because soon they shall be placated. Placate the lords of darkness, The toads of darkness, That they may decree that there may be light. May they? Whose fatness is grown by our darkness, May they? Whose thickness looks unto the thickening of our darkness. May they? Who are accustomed to the ease of the booties of darkness? May they? Does left-handedness suddenly visit at old age? And shall the toads of darkness, The Lords of darkness, Grown thick by the thickening of our darkness Bend and decree that there may be light? Shall they? Who are in the chambers of debauchery, clinking their glasses Certain that soon they shall be placated? Placate the lords of darkness, The toads of darkness, That they pampered and thickened By the reward of shame, Exacted from the altar, Our altar of unacknowledged sweat, Our altar of unacknowledged pain, May well invent unfamiliar stratagems While we wait on them with wearied eyes And hanging lips, like our withered feet, To be suffused yet again with the strangest agonies.

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186  Anya Ude Egwu

But now they, the lords of darkness With their warders of darkness revel in the chambers of debauchery Clinking their glasses, for soon they shall be placated.

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The Invitation & 5 Other Poems HODABALOU ANATE

Go and tell the termites At Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah That in this land, they will have might. They will be kings and queens overnight. They will not live in the savannah anymore. They will live in castles and palaces. Go and tell them that food will be no issue. Tell them that they shall not feed On the sickly slender blades of grass in the savannah And risk their lives When Makaya comes with his hoe and army of chicks. Tell them to sharpen their teeth. Here they will eat like kings and queens. And indeed, they will eat for free. They will have huge wood houses for food. And the squirrel, The poor bony African squirrel Weary of countless near escapes, Tell him that this land is his To get his papers ready. Tell him this land is a land of promise That in this land he is a pet Tell him he will need no diversity immigrant visa This invitation is enough. But please forget not to tell him To get a copy of What Every Pedestrian Must Know Then and only then will he make sure Ford and Chevrolet will not eat him raw. 187

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188  Hodabalou Anate

THE WEATHER Like life, like weather Cold Chilly Frozen As the life around Life without Colors Rhythm Laughter Dance Life that freezes out of lack of Love Solidarity This weather could not survive Under the cheerful warm African sky Where the black color gives warmth And human warmth Is enough to melt a two feet deep snow.

LOOK Look! If you cannot see, my brother You might surely have opened your eyes too wide. Try closing your eyes And look at your fellow brother With your heart’s eyes. Shut your ears And listen to his heartbeat With your heart. Let your dungeon shake Dare give it a thought And you will feel the pain Your brother felt when The other day you told him MOCKINGLY that

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The Invitation & 5 Other Poems  189

Ten PERSONS and three Blacks died in the accident. Look, my brother! Humanity is far beyond what our own blind eyes can see.

RESURRECTION The other day I met the ghost of my deceased love At the Applewood. I saw her but she did not see me. I looked at her two dangling apples And water came in my mouth. I heard her speak that language Only the people in trance could understand. I waved I breathed loudly I coughed I smiled She was motionless as a grave. She walked away Moving her pair of swollen flesh to the rhythm of my heartbeat Toward the museum Where that lost love belongs But that long blown off candle has now been lit.

THE LAST HYMN OF A PRINCE The other day, my father told me never to quit power when he dies And I told him I won’t He told me to lean on the army and the judges if people start murmuring And I promised him I will He told me not to trust anybody And I told him I won’t He told me to accumulate wealth, for money does everything

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190  Hodabalou Anate

It can buy easy journalists, professors, religious leaders and opposition leaders And I promised him I will He told me not to unite the people if I want to be life president And I told him I won’t He told me to divide my people along ethnic lines and if It does not work, along religious differences And I promised him I will He told me to be ready not to feel any pity For pity is weakness And I told him I won’t He told me to be talker not doer And I promised him I will He told me not to have a regular family but an army of concubines For fear I might be human And I told him I won’t He told me to mind collaborators who plunder the nations’ coffers the least But those who eye my throne enviously I must send them to jail or shoot them dead if need be And I promised him I will. He told me never to turn my back to the grandchildren of de Gaulle And I told him I won’t He told me to profess democracy and live by the precepts of tyranny And say my father’s ways are not my ways and yet be worse than him And I promised him I will But poor me! My father forgot to tell me that time changes and so do people He did not tell me that there would come a time When the rank and file would refuse to shoot He did not tell me that the judges would refuse to be traitors anymore They would refuse to respond to my call The generals would scatter And the professors and the religious leaders Would stop being my accomplices They would join the people to sing the song of freedom

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The Invitation & 5 Other Poems  191

And the sergeants, the sergeants who were ready to make widows and orphans When I ordered would turn their barrels on me And make my army of children orphans.

THE TRIAL Way there, he stood a trial He was accused for the cracks on the skin of the ground And the heat that nearly choked one And the oven-like atmosphere that sucked all the liquid from the earth And burnt the once clapping leaves of the green corn. Way here, he is accused of complicity And non-assistance and neglect. That buried grass is waiting for him To melt that liquid made solid Standing defiantly, mockingly like Jerry in the absence of Tom But when he was tired and decided to come out of his hiding place He was cold, timid, lifeless and weary of accusations.

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Moribund Poem CHINASA ABONYI Is kindness wickedness to oneself? I thought we were taught to love But not more than ourselves Why then, Why then did you give up yourself Your beauty; Blossoming hibiscus of the sub-Sahara Black like ebony Pine with avid curves for your love for another? Mama! Great twine of the forest Akiri that brings the trees in the forest together Lend tomorrow eyes that it may see clearly Infiltrators! Be human again To see the squeezed, exhausted face of the monkey And hear the shrewd cry of the antelope For the pains on the donkey’s back is obvious. Palms can never cover pregnancy Devourers of nature for culture! The earth mourns in silence The tree twists and twitches And the eye of the earth is epileptic already How unfathomable you have become Oh loving seasons! For desires insatiably sought Moribund 192

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Kaput to be a Cat/ Kaput to be a Rat 2 Poems ALEXANDER OPICHO

KAPUT TO BE A CAT I am a black cat, kept as a rat-catcher, Supposed to eat small rats and mouse,  But of the giant rats I catch, I am robbed By my duena and her dueno, they Loot me off my blunder, they plunder,  Eating off my dear sweat like panjandrums,  Imagine I often get sick, but they give no care,  I sneeze and mew in the chilly darkness, having Been curtly scolded for my fecal stuff on the old couch,  Most of them use me as voodoo stuff, secret arts,  They night-run with me as their work device For their outrageous venture in the wee of hour of the night,  They want to mew out sound of terror into the hearts  And black peace of the unlighted innocent sleepers,  Uff; I tell you; you are kaput to be a cat In a place called rural Africa!

KAPUT TO BE A RAT Once upon a time in the city of Omurate In the southern part of Ethiopia On Ethiopian boundary with Kenya Hailed two prosperous animal families Living side by side as good neighbours In glory and pomp of riches Each was ostensibly rich And rambunctious in social styles 193

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194  Alexander Opicho

They were the families of a rat family And a cat family; the city belonged to them They all enjoyed stocks of desert scorpions From the savanna desert of Northern Kenya, The families also enjoyed to feed on desert locusts On which they regularly fed without food based squabbles Locust joust flew in by themselves From Lowarang to the city of Omurate Though cat family enjoyed an extra dish Puff adder flesh, the steak of the puff adder muscle Were cheaply available in plenty at the lakeshore, The Lakeshores of Lake Turkana Where river Oromo enters into Lake Turkana So the cat was happy and relaxed Hence it rarely mewed, Neighbours never heard its mewing sound The rat enjoyed plenty of milk with no strain Easily gotten from the rustled cattle by the Merilee; a warrior tribe in Omurate. There was a day the cat had gulped milk since morning Even its stomach was bulging, Like that of Kenyan state officer The rat had milk all over the house In the kitchen and all over In the sitting room was milk in abundance In the wash room milk guttering about, On the bed milk and stuffs of milk The rat was bored, nothing was enticing Sometimes plenty of milk can become a bother The rat mused to itself in vermin’s empathy That may be the cat is starving in pangs of hunger With nothing to drink, or may be it has no milk When the milk is rotting here in my house It is un-rat like for food to rot in your house When the neighbour’s belly is not full, On these thoughts the rat washed its legs, and hands Finished up with its face, Put on its white short trouser and a green top It stuffed its tail inside its white short trouser, Then the rat poured milk into two pots, Each pot was full to the brim

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Kaput to be a Cat / Kaput to be a Rat   195

It carried one in its left hand And balance another on its head In its right hand was a walking stick For the elders, the walking sticks known as Pakora The rat took off to the home of the cat In full feat of animal love Whistling its favourite poem; An Ode to a good neighbour, Walking carefully lest it spills milk, It entered into the house of the cat without haste Neither knocking nor waiting to be told ‘come in’ In the spectacle of the charisma of a good neighbour, When the cat saw the rat; it giggled two short impish giggles The Cat almost got choked by indecision For it had been long since this happened, For the cat to dine on milk leave spiced with rat meat The rat said to the cat; my brother, Have milk I have brought for you Have it and sip here it is; the real milk.’ In devilish calmness the cat told the rat; ‘Put it for me on the table, thank you.’ ‘But my friend Mr. Rat don’t go away; there is more More for you to help me in addition to milk,’ ‘Continue my brother Mr. Cat, how can I help you?’ ‘Don’t call me your brother,’ bursted the cat, ‘It is long since I ate the rat meat, You know rat meat is our stable food,’ In a frenetic feat of powerlessness the rat was confused, In attempt to save itself It pleaded that, ‘my dear elder, I was Only having plenty of milk in my house And to us rats, it is a taboo To have a lot of food in your house When the neighbour’s belly is not full So I only brought you the present of Milk Please have it and drink,’ Without taciturnity the Cat retorted in persistence; ‘I know and I am thankful for your good manners But remember with us cats it is heinous sin Forget of a taboo, it is blasphemy against the living

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196  Alexander Opicho

Cat god for one of us to leave the rat free from our house For you rats are the only stable and kosher Victuals and food the cat-god blessed us with So shut up your mandibles, I am to eat you first Then I will take milk later as a relish.’ With its herculean paw the cat crushed the rat In one mighty blow of the leopard culture Throwing away the white trouser And green top from the torso of the rat, The cat ate the rat in a style of the day But with voracity of the starving carnivore, After which it punctuated its mid-day appetite With slow and relaxed sipping of milk Slowly and slowly as it felt its internal greatness And hence the African proverbial that; Behold foolish angst kills the lucky rat! It is kaput to be a rat.

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Cactus Poem ONYEUKWU IFUNANYA

Unflinching cactus; Though in thy springless abode Amidst thy penury glee Unflinching, Dotting on life’s crossroads. Erudite cactus; Thy umbilical cords Embosomed in mother earth Fill thee with fresh vine From her bosom. Circuitous cactus; Thy doggedness adorn the shadows of death You make her ululate at dawn Spiny smooth cactus; Prudence is thy parlance And thy grace is thy beauty.

197

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Guilt Short Story CHIOMA TONI-DURUAKU

Dear Mukaosolu, I write to admit that I am guilty of a heinous crime and hope that you would find it in your heart to forgive me. I didn’t ask for this, yet I found myself living with this deep guilt of losing what I have with you, which I cannot shake off. You care for me like your life depends on it but I let you go. I cannot shout about it but I know that everything within me yearns for you. My heart is shattered, but I shall always tell our story. When matters of the heart are involved, people would believe what they want. They blame you here or there for sharing your problems with them oblivious of the facts, or the thought that that they too, could be in a bigger mess, faced with the same scenarios. They all come to judgment. But they do not always know the story. Okwuchi, my childhood friend, is one of such people and so ‘nwanne m’, listen to her own story. It all began when we both attended a Multidisciplinary Conference at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA ten years ago. Mmh … I recall that it was her first time of leaving the shores of Nigeria. She was so nervous that almost everyone in attendance, noticed. I was like her guardian angel, always at hand to rescue her. Hey! Did you just laugh? ‘Bia, enyi’, this ain’t funny - like the Americans would say. Now you know, in those two weeks of our sojourn, I was able to pick up that expression – “this ain’t funny”. It has since stuck in my head. These days I blurt it out with the heaviness of my Igbo accent. Lol! But I was telling about Okwy. After a few days in Nevada, she finally was able to relax. That was when she caught the attention of a very tall handsome young man, who had also come for the same Conference from Nigeria. We had all been aboard the same Delta flight from the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja, en route to the Maynard Hartsfield Jackson’s International Airport, Atlanta. That was our first port of arrival before boarding the 198

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Guilt  199

domestic flight for Las Vegas. But we didn’t notice one another till our arrival two days later, at the Conference registration venue and what followed, felt like the usual chit chat one sees in Nollywood movies. I remember the first time he came over to us, and introduced himself, all full of the Nigerian male ego. ‘Hello beautiful, I am Nnalota. What is your name?’ truth is, I prayed silently fervently that Okwuchi’s “shakingmania” as we always referred to her discomfort amidst the opposite sex, would not erupt like a volcano. But that was not to be. She stumbled on the chair in front of her and tripped over. Nnalota, was alert; he quickly dashed to her before she could reach the floor. It felt awkward. For me, that was really the height of the embarrassment! What flew into my head was ‘Chai! Upon the many miles we flew from Nigeria to ‘obodo oyibo’. But one look at the concerned face of this guy, who caught her before the crash, made me swallow the words. Looks were not the only interesting and adorable thing about Nnalota. When his eyes full of care and his mouth uttered the words ‘are you okay angel?’ with his deep baritone voice, those were enough reasons for any girl to jettison good home training and follow him home. Okwy and I, melted away like butter in contact with a hot knife, but quickly regained our composure. We sat down afterwards and ordered coffee and croissants. I am not a coffee person, so asked for tea, the dude serving at the Starbucks asked, ‘Green or black?’ Okwy did not know what he meant, Nnalota again came to the rescue. ‘Black tea, I think …’ he said, ‘make Earl Grey’. We all laughed at that moment. We shattered the glass of difference and estrangement, and soon, sat to easy conversation. There was a quick bond, the sort that happens when Nigerians meet themselves in strange countries and felt alone, and have to depend on each other for social contact. In that mood, Okwuchi rose from her shell. ‘My name is Okwuchi Dimezue, but I can allow you call me Okwy, like my friends do… Just because you didn’t let me hit the floor.’ The three of us again burst into a hearty laughter. I had never seen Okwy that free with a man. From our teenage to adult lives, she was always a little shy with men. Which was always surprising because Okwuchi sometimes was the boldest and the most rebellious of all of us her friends – at other times. Soon, we were all beginning to feel a little adventurous. In one instant, all that intrinsic rebellion she would ordinarily exude in the face of such challenges, gradually came to fore. She seemed to have found her voice. That was the beginning of her romantic escapades with Nnalota, but it seemed

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200  Chioma Toni-Duruaku

to be an answer to Okwuchi’s many years of prayers for a life partner. She had never had a serious relationship. She promised herself that nothing and no one would come between her and this bliss. It was quick. We thought love at first sight. It is now many years since that acquaintance was made. Her heartthrob – Nnalota, whom she gave ‘Lota Nke M’ (my own Lota) in endearment, had been true to their union. His heart, body and soul have been completely bequeathed to Okwy. No day passed without his reassuring her of his faithfulness. They had two children Afamefuna and Nmasinachi, who lacked neither for love nor for store. Their Daddy made sure their needs were met. Okwy’s beauty radiated so much so that she became the envy of her friends and other women in her work place. But the saying that ‘they whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad’ best describes what Okwy – our friend; the mess she made of her life and marriage. She has refused to see things from any other person’s perspective. But Okwy was also a drifter. That’s her great flaw: restlessness. While we were at university she drifted from one fellowship to another. She was always searching for something. She was a regular face in every campus fellowship and if one ever admonished her for that, her readymade answer would be ‘the scriptures says, test every spirit…’ I am very sure your eyes lit up in reminiscence of her favourite reply. I can almost hear you chuckle now. The way she now lives, is as if she has been placed on a self-destruct button. It began not too long after she had her second child. For a while, we thought it was a long postnatal fog. Okwy just simply changed. She began to nag her husband at every point and ‘Nwanne m’, she became suspicious of his every move; she monitored his mobile phone daily, looking to find texts a woman may have sent him, or whose name is on his call log. It was all so messy. Onetime, she sent a long trail abusive texts to Nnalota’s new partner, Ogechi Ekpo, who Okwy thought was a woman. It was the year Nnalota moved from the firm where he worked, to the new Architectural firm where he had been made partner, and he was involved in the design of the new offices of the Regional Board of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His very first week of orientation. That evening he returned from work, and not long after got a text, saying, ‘Nnaa, you must come back to look this thing over again. I’m waiting in the office, Ogechi.’ Okwy saw the text message, and flew into a rage, and rushed off a broadside and sent a series of abusive texts to Ogechi, even when Nnalota kept trying to tell her that Ogechi was a man that he was not in a same-sex

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Guilt  201

relationship, and that it was his new partner asking him to correct or verify some numbers on a file they’d been working on together for a client’s meeting the next morning. I was there visiting them and it was all so embarrassing. I felt deep sympathy for Nnalota that moment. I have warned Okwy many times that fighting for a man’s love, is the easiest way of losing it. She should ask no questions so she would be told no hurting lies. But not Okwy. All she heeds, is that first idea that ignites in her spirit, be it true or false. Then, not too long after, she found a common cause with a group of ‘Oku-enu’ women – by day, self-righteous and deeply religious, and by night, fire. They would always go with their Bibles in hand for their fellowships. Every other person not a member of their insider group, they looked upon on with the fierce disdain of the zealot. This went on for about four years but no one realized that under this Christian fellowship, were women, who have proclaimed their ‘holiness’ in the profanity of lesbianism. It was all a mask for all kinds of perversion. They are bi-sexual but would make the world believe theirs, is a call to the service of the Lord. The Priests have become an endangered species to Okwy and her group. The young girls in the various Secondary and Tertiary institutions they work in are not spared either. I do not know exactly what it was with Okwy. It may have been an early onset of midlife crisis, or a sudden awareness of mortality, and the futility of it all, as she grew suddenly, a wild craze for immorality that I never knew she had! She was completely ensnared by this raging societal wild fire. She was sleeping around with fellow women – some of her ‘sisters’ – in the cover of their Christian fellowship. She slept with men too, some of whom she met online. She had no boundaries. Her marriage was by this time on a spin. She would not allow Nnalota peace in their home. Yet she was the one who bore the looks of a much-suffering wife. You know how it is with our society – the men are always believed to be the ones cheating on the women yet women are busy frolicking around as they pleased. Some women believe now is their time. They put on a holy front. It is a question of the more you look… But back to my story. This would shock you. Okwy received a text message that their next ‘fellowship’ would be in Port Harcourt in exactly one week and so made up her mind that she would attend it before their Summer vacation billed to commence Friday of the same week. All was set for that fellowship trip. Lota’s plea for her to rest since they would soon travel, fell on deaf ears. I sat down with my friend Okwy, and tried to warn her about

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the dangerous game she was playing and the consequence of it. We did not resolve anything. ‘Mind your business!’ She snapped at me. ‘in short, stay away from my business from now on. You do not think I see the way you look at my husband?’ She accused me. ‘Stay away if you know what’s good for you.’ That was my first row with Okwy since our years growing up, and meeting in the same university. I knew what this trip was all about. It was an ‘all-girls’ affair. But it was not in Port Harcourt as things turned out. New members were going to be initiated and she didn’t want to miss out on it. She had an already scheduled appointment at hotel D’ Exquisite, in the New-Found-Land Estate, where her private business office was located and so hurried off to keep it. Nnalota, incidentally was sitting at a remote corner of the same hotel’s reception area. From which vantage point he could see anybody that walked in. He had scheduled a meeting to sign a Memorandum of Understanding between his firm and the group of Architects that arrived the country from Dubai, for which he and his partner Ogechi, had worked tirelessly the day before. He was shocked to see Okwy gaily walk in and without any enquiries from the lady at the reception, she made for the room where her partners were waiting. Lota felt large beads of sweat drop from his head to his face. The air suddenly felt hot to his body. His well tailored suit, soaked in sweat. He stayed calm so as to watch this unfolding drama. He gave his wife close to twenty minutes before he inquired of the pretty receptionist, which room the beautiful dark complexioned lady in a skimpy red gown had gone into. Trust hotel workers with information at the right smile and doling out of some currency notes. He immediately got answers. He is a known freak for getting to a meeting well ahead of time so this day was no different. He had some time to toy with and inquisitiveness took the better part of him. The unsuspecting occupants of the room, who had ordered some meals and drinks, gladly had one of them go for the door when Lota knocked and declared ‘room service’ in a truly peasant voice. Okwy was half-clad in her appealing lingerie and frolicking with her own partner and there, stood her loving husband, staring her in the face in apparent disbelief. The years of taunting, nagging and falsely accusing him of infidelity while he worked assiduously to give his family a good life, all flashed at him. Without a word, he left the room and comported himself to attend the meeting for which he had gone to the hotel in the first place.

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Okwy and her dishonourable friends, dressed up and disappeared from the scene. All the torture, and torrents of abusive words she rained on her husband plummeted her head. She drove off the hotel premises with unseeing eyes, into the ever busy avenue and ran under a truck... Over and over, I have wondered why I couldn’t see beneath the mask all our self-righteous friends wore. I have forever played that song you taught me… ‘Really thought that I could do without you, Really thought that I could make it on my own, Sent you away, yea I said I didn’t need you, I let you go, I let you go, I let you gooooooo, Now am so lost without you, Now you’re not here and now I know, Lonely is the night when am not with you…’ They were impatient with you for loving me that way, and I was utterly stupid not to realise that you were and still are the only man for me. Though I let you go, but I want you to know that my life has been a nightmare ever since. I really want to wake up from it. Please don’t stay away any longer, I truly and really want you to bring back your love to me. I hope you will remember that you light up my world and in that unconditional love you once gave me, that you will make me whole again. I shall forever be guilty of losing the noblest of men-you. Please love me again, because you are my Mukaosolu. Yours in complete obedience to love, Elozona.

* The short story Guilt is being reprinted here from ALT 36 but in its correct form as submitted to us by the author. [Ed.]

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Reviews

Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan & Rafeeat Aliyu (eds) She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak Abuja and London: Cassava Republic Press, 2018, 357 pp. ISBN: 978-1-9111115-59-5, paperback

She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak is a collection of twenty-five stories by different Nigerian women and trans-women from different locations in Nigeria as well as a few Nigerian women raised in the United States of America and Spain. The stories are accounts of their various experiences as trans-women and women with alternate sexual orientations. The writers, whose ages range between 20 and 43, are located at different geographical regions of Nigeria. Twelve of the twenty-five authors are located in Lagos or Abuja, four are in Plateau State, and one each is located in Zamfara, Kwara, Imo, Kaduna, Oyo and Ondo States; two are in the United States of America, and one is in Spain. As a way of protecting the interests and images of the authors, their names are not disclosed, but they are identified by initials such as JP, TQ, OF, QM, HK, FR, DK, etc. The stories reveal the authors’ diverse backgrounds, interests, challenges and expectations, as well as perceptions of themselves. The titles of the stories offer significant clues to the concerns of most of the writers. Such titles are ‘I Only Admire Girls’, ‘That is What I Have Been Missing’, ‘I am a Proud Lesbian’, ‘Living a Double Life’, ‘I Want to be Myself Around People I Care About’, ‘To Anyone Hated, Be Strong’, ‘Your Sexuality Does Not Define Who You Are’, ‘Same-Sex Relationships are a Choice’, ‘This is not our World’ and ‘Why Do I Have to Ask You to Consider Me Human?’ and more. The different sentiments expressed in the titles highlight the authors’ attitudes towards being a lesbian or a bisexual or a transgender person, all of whom are often described as queer women. The stories add to the 204

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 corpus of expressions of the LGBT community members. It is significant that many of the stories indicate religion as the prime factor that conditions the minds of the people who unleash on the queer women indictment, then isolation and then rejection. Having been raised in families that observed strict religious principles, the differences between the expectations of the religions and the queerness of the writers often generate the tensions that are portrayed in ‘I Can Still Live More’, ‘I Pray that Everyone has Forgotten’ and ‘If you Want Lesbian, Go to Room 24’. Evidently, as the Nigerian culture makes no provision for alternate sexual choices, the people are naturally conditioned to reject queerness. This background explains the reactions that often follow the suspicion or realization of a person’s queerness. The prominence and active role of religion in the Nigerian socio-cultural realities affect some of the narrators in the course of their adjusting of their sexual dispositions to being queer. UE, who lives and writes from Maryland in the United States of America, regards religion as awkward, and feels that the Bible is against her; thus she cannot relate faith with sexual distinctiveness. JS in ‘Some Things You do for Your Heart’ explains that she is an ardent Christian, prays effectively and goes to church regularly. Since she knows that the Bible does not support queerness, she constantly prays for divine forgiveness, while continuing in queerness to satisfy her heart. In ‘I Pray that Everyone has Forgotten’, TQ describes herself as a devout Christian, who takes prayers seriously, and gives God a prime place in her activities, yet she resents the usual preaching in church against queerness, which hardly has any impact on her. In the course of pursuing their sexual options, the narrators identify silence as a major factor that they often have to deal with. Some are silent during the period they observe queerness among other people, or while they are being introduced to queerness, or when they are persecuted because they are identified as queer, or while they are in queer relationships. Queerness seems to be one status that is not made public in the family and the society. In ‘Why Do I have to Ask You to Consider me Human?’ DK remains silent while observing queer attitudes in people around her. She is aware that many of the girls in the boarding house are lesbians. And in her grandmother’s house, she witnesses her aunt kissing another girl, but she keeps silent. Silence is also visible among the narrators who experience persecution and rejection because of their becoming queer. JP in ‘She Called Me Woman’ narrates the experiences of a trans-woman, and all the battering she receives from her brothers, the rejection and

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ostracism she suffers from her mother, the shame she feels from the thing between her legs because she has not transitioned, and the efforts of men to lure her into sex, etc. JP endures all of these silently perhaps because the society does not offer any support to justify her protests for her queerness. Many of the stories signify secrecy as a norm among queer people. In their attempts to understand themselves and evolve an identity within their family and or society, the queer people find the need to keep their feelings and expectations secret. In ‘Some Things You do for Your Heart’, JS highlights that, in her secondary school, many girls, including herself, are having intimate relationships with girls, but they neither would talk about it nor admit that it is true. In the story ‘I Pray that Everyone has Forgotten’, TQ notes that her relationship with her girlfriend has been effectively concealed for four or five years before the girlfriend’s uncle sees them together and reacts violently by beating up his niece. Being caught by the girlfriend’s uncle and the events it generates cause TQ to relocate from Jos to Abuja, while the girlfriend is rejected and chased away from the house. A dominant motif in the stories is identity, which the narrators seem to portray overtly/consciously or covertly/unconsciously. They try to develop an identity that enables them to be impactful within the family and or society. TP, a trans-woman in ‘She Called Me Woman’ explains that at a point in his life, he begins to ask himself some questions, then his body and himself begin to go through diverse procedures and, at age 16, he finds himself battling with depression. He also intensely wishes he could become female. He confesses that he is fighting with external pressures while also trying to know who he really is, what is happening to him, and how he could deal with the conflicting sexual instincts in him. NS in ‘Focusing on Joy’ holds that even though she relates intimately with both men and women, she is still struggling to establish a balance in her personality so as to accept herself as a credible and complete individual. Generally, She Called Me Woman offers a platform for queer women’s voices, and an outlet for them to make statements about themselves, their sexual choices, and the challenging stages of their evolution in families and societies that hardly understand or appreciate the rights of individuals to true sources of happiness. Consequently, the stories reveal the queer women’s experiences of dilemmas, discrimination, denunciation, fights, harassments and flights. They constitute subtle protests against the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act which was enacted by the National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria

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 in 2014. The Act indicates a 14-year jail term on a person who enters into a same sex marriage contract in Nigeria. While it offers credence to the negative reactions of people to queerness, it imposes dilemmas on the queer people and raises questions of rights and wrongs, acceptability and rejection, virtue and evil on their personalities, and compels them to resolve the dilemmas as a prelude to making progress and fitting into the social structures of their families and communities. This collection serves as a metaphorical demurral to the 2014 Act by members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities in Nigeria. It paves the way for a hopeful future of recognition and acceptance for queer women in Nigeria. That the narrators are located in every geographical zone in Nigeria shows the rapid spread of the queer culture in spite of the prohibition Act, and depicts the prospects of continued tensions from the principle and practice of queerness in Nigeria. She Called Me Woman is a book of special interest to all queer people everywhere in general, but indeed a must-read for all Nigerians in particular. INIOBONG I. UKO University of Uyo Nigeria

Atafei Pewissi, Rethinking Womanism: When Difference Maps Chaos Accra North: Yamens Press, 2017, 264 pp. ISBN 978-9988-2687-1-8, paperback

Atafei Pewissi’s text is a critique of the theories of both Western and African Feminism, an agitation for a humanist view of life, and the proposal of Womanism as an alternative to the divisive and conspira­ torial theories that impede the proper growth and development of human societies. The text argues that both Western and African Feminism originated as political reactions against the institution of patriarchy and, since all brands of Feminism are basically focused on liberating the female gender, their motivations are one-dimensional and cater just for the needs of one gender to the detriment of the other half of humanity – the male gender. It is equally observed that Feminism does not accommodate all women since the birthing of

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African Feminism is as a result of the discriminatory racist nature of Western Feminism which does not account for the needs and experiences of women of colour. African feminists, in turn, responded with the same racist attitude by looking to their own needs alone. Thus we have such titles as: ‘African Feminism’, ‘Black Feminisms’, etc. The radical feminist solution of lesbianism is cited as an attitude that undermines collaboration and in fact breeds hatred for men and sets the stage for the extermination of the human species if greatly embraced. As such, from whichever angle these theories are looked at, it is seen that the divisive, discriminatory element is paramount. It either discriminates against women or men. This discrimination breeds rancour and violence. Pewissi uses ample examples from the fictional creations of African authors to illustrate his view that Feminism is similar to patriarchy. He juxtaposes Achebe’s early novels and his poor portrayal of female characters with Nwapa’s and Emecheta’s novels that portray men as irresponsible and total failures. So if patriarchy is male-dominated rule, Feminism represents female dominance. Pewissi insists that ‘to empower the victim of yesterday to fight back to disarm the powerful is a perpetual way of raising violence’ (71). Second, Pewissi views Humanism as synonymous with Woman­ ism. Humanism is a non-religious, non-superstitious ethical view of life where the welfare of all is made the priority. This is the expansive and reconsidered view that Pewissi identifies with Womanism. According to him Womanism, as propounded by Alice Walker, is a blending of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and this blending attests to the colla­­­bora­tive meaning intended by its creator when she defines a Womanist thus: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non­ sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility … and women’s strength … Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health … Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit … Loves struggle. Loves the folk. Loves herself. Regardless. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. (Emphasis added)

A Womanist does not endorse division but rather insists on collaboration to establish wholeness. Pewissi describes this wholeness thus: ‘it is rather the box in which each people, each culture, each tradition and identity delivers their share for the making of the whole: male, female and children’ (213). The text argues that without this blending, the human society can never attain its highest potentials. For Pewissi the creation of opposites or differences is not to facilitate

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 discrimination but to ensure strength through complementary attitudes. Opposites are meant to blend to create a whole. The fact that there are differences means that one person or a homogenous group is limited since it does not possess what the other group has. The text illustrates how the endorsement of differences militates against development with various examples. One of the examples is drawn from the lesbian and gay movement which endorses homogenous companionship through marriage. Pewissi argues that since (in his view) gay and lesbian couples attempt to achieve virtual heterogeneous sexual relationship by turning one of the couple into either a woman or man for gay male and lesbian relationships respectively, it stands to reason that they indirectly accept what they deny. He argues that the gay male couple needs one of the couple to act like a woman for there to be real satisfaction in their intimate relationship. What then is the essence of remaining gay and shunning real heterogeneous relationships? Pewissi again sees wholeness as captured by Womanism as the relationship that exists between parts of the human body. Every part performs a function and is important in relationship with the remaining parts. When one part wears out and is sick, it affects the overall health and essence of the whole. Just as nature has endowed the female human with certain characteristics that the male human can never possess, so also has the male human features that the female human can never have. In order for both species then to benefit from each other for better improvement and development, they must accept each other and work together. The combination of their strength breeds balance and wholeness. Pewissi argues that Womanism is a post-modernist, non-feminist theory because it shares features such as decentral­ization, balancing of binary opposites, the inclusionary rather than the exclusionary outlook, and meaning as a hetero­geneous whole. The text therefore is timely and timeless as it provides a conflict resolution theory that addresses the outbursts of conflict emerging from issues of race, ethnic, religious, gender, class, etc. in the world. It speaks of wholeness and balance in terms of heterogeneity, thus agitating for the creation of equal opportunities for all in education, leadership and all spheres of human endeavours, and with heavy insistence on competence rather than a quota system in leadership responsibilities. Pewissi sums up his argument thus: ‘My contention is that it is unnecessary and even counterproductive to raise one people against themselves, one continent against another, one race against another race when life challenges demand collaboration of the opposites’ (197).

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Rethinking Womanism is divided into three parts with each part consisting of two chapters. Apart from some grammatical errors and minor challenges of paragraph organization, it is an exciting read that proposes a workable conflict resolution tool for all. NONYE CHINYERE AHUMIBE Imo State University Owerri, Nigeria

Isidore Diala The Politics & New Humanism of André Brink Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018, 222 pp. ISBN: 978-1-5275-1627-4, hardback

The Politics and New Humanism of André Brink constitutes Isidore Diala’s appraisal of the oeuvre of André Brink, and a significant contribution to the literature of protest in South Africa. Emerging from a Calvinist Afrikaner background, with his father as a magistrate and his mother a teacher, Brink obtained early exposure to Afrikaner values and the support of the Apartheid policy. His background exposed him to blacks who were largely domestic servants and menial workers in the South African environment. However, Diala notes that between 1959 and 1961 when Brink under­took a postgraduate programme in Com­parative Literature at the Sorbonne, University of Paris, he confronted profound and dynamic experiences and values about life, race, socialism, etc. He explains that during that period, Brink had opportunities to meet with black intellectuals who he dealt with as equals. He was in France when the Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960. That incident was a result of protests by about 5,000 to 7,000 people against the Pass laws in the South African town of Sharpeville, Transvaal, on whom the police opened fire, leaving 69 people dead, and about 180 wounded. From Diala’s account, these two events in Brink’s life introduced to Brink deep insights and configured his psyche such that, though he is Afrikaans, he easily relates to the sentiments of the deprived and traumatized black people in South Africa. Diala avers that consequent upon Brink’s exposure to the racial realities in France during his postgraduate studies, Brink began to

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 question Apartheid and the veracity of its twin values of religion and language. His dissatisfaction with European ideals as expressed in South Africa compelled him to repudiate Christianity and become an atheist. His atheistic orientation is prevalent in his writings, which are classified into five sets. The central notion of Brink’s writings is the retrieval of global humanistic values. His human-centred orientation finds relevance in his existentialist thought which portrays an individual in a precarious world, saddled with diverse consistent vicissitudes that are beyond his/her control. This is captured in his depiction of Camus’ mythical character, Sisyphus, and the Fanonian ‘wretched of the earth’. His conflation of the concept of political freedom with the existentialist value of authentic choice reveals an ascetic nature of humanity and the vulnerability of the human personality, and manifests in his projection of a person who is scruffy, bedraggled, distressed and helplessly besieged by ubiquitous factors. Yet, from that personality emerges a stoic image that is persistent in suffering, and irrepressibly rebellious in servitude. Herein lies Diala’s portrayal of Brink’s interpretation of Apartheid and its implications on the human mind and spirit. According to Diala, Brink is largely concerned with the destructive tendencies of Apartheid, apparent in his novel Kennis van die Aand (1973) translated into English as Looking on Darkness in 1974. The novel earned the reputation of being the first Afrikaans writing to be proscribed in South Africa. Evidently, his travails of writing what is easily described as protest literature in a non-liberal, stiffly Apartheid environment motivated him to write even more scathingly against the marginalization of the poor blacks in South Africa. In his The Wall of the Plague, he highlights the roles of the responsible artist in an embattled and restricted society like Apartheid South Africa. Diala highlights the corpus of Brink’s writings as an acrid critique of Apartheid, as well as the repugnant and condescending attitude of the Afrikaners and the other Europeans. He highlights the dominant falsehood in the Afrikaners’ claim that South Africa was first inhabited by the Khoisan and Boers, which often attempts to justify regarding the blacks as sub-human, constituting a mythical other, steeped in heathen practices. He depicts the condemnation of the Afrikaner’s evolution of biblical hermeneutics to generate the myth of Afrikaners as superior to the blacks. This myth explains and validates the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in South African schools, to which school children reacted by going to the streets of Soweto in June 1976, and being shot at by South

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African police with no less than 176 left dead. That was a shocking aftermath to the 21 March 1960 protest against Pass laws. These events – the disregard for the humanity and wanton killings of the blacks by the Afrikaners, and the efforts of the Apartheid government to constantly repress the blacks and keep them muffled – got Brink to recant his initial reasoning that racial differences were dictated by God through the myth of the Tower of Babel and the biblical curse on the children of Canaan. In consequence, Diala establishes that Brink’s rebirth, i.e. his surmounting the Apartheid racial strictures in 1960 while in Paris, instigates other forms of birth – awareness, realization, rebellion, etc. – as the pedestal on which he addresses the issue of truth and freedom, the truth and the place of the writer, the dynamics of word and action to the writer, the relationship between politics and art. The rebirth motivates Brink to strive to extenuate the conditions of the blacks and, as an Afrikaner writer, he stresses that his roles are to represent non-whites, give them a voice and validate parallel narratives of the survival and equality of human beings. His rebirth endows him with the psychology that writers and their writings operate symbiotically in the world. Thus, if the writing is not utilized by readers, then it is of no value. Diala evaluates Brink’s writings as essential in the postcolonial context because of their scathing critique of Apartheid and all forms of repression and segregation, as well as their acknowledgement of the humanity of all peoples. Brink envisions cordiality among the different peoples in South Africa. Metaphorically, the cordiality will nullify Apartheid and reverse the reality of the constricted horizon of the writer’s imagination and art. Isidore Diala’s The Politics and New Humanism of André Brink, as a comprehensive critique of André Brink’s writings, is a recommended companion in the study of South African history. It highlights events and concepts that concerned black people during the Apartheid period, and the social interactions among the races. These include the Sharpeville killings of 21 March 1960, Dr Daniel Francois Malan’s National Party victory in 1948 and the enforcement of Apartheid policies, the notion of the apocalypse, the biblical curse on the children of Canaan and its signification among the South African blacks, the myth of the Tower of Babel and its symbolic relevance among the blacks in South Africa, the 1955 eviction at gunpoint of 60,000 blacks from Sophia town Area Group Act, Mandela and the Rivonia Trial, the June 1976 killing of protesting school children, the Boipatong massacre, anti-miscegenation laws, and the Group Areas Act.

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 Brink thereby imposes reality and immediacy on his writings, and Diala portrays them in his appraisal. INIOBONG I. UKO University of Uyo Nigeria

Chukwuemeka Ike, Toads Forever Lagos: Longman, 2007, 211 pp. ISBN 978-02-6448-5, paperback

At the end of Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike’s 1965 novel, Toads for Supper, one of the key characters, Aduke Olowu, lover and fiancé of the central protagonist, Amadi Chukwuka, had suffered a mental crisis for which she is taken to the Aro Psychiatric hospital in Abeokuta. The cause is heartbreak. She had received a letter from Amadi which seemed to have broken off their engagement, already under severe pressure, from the tension of ethnic and identity politics, the undercurrent of both the novel, and its imaginary site, the University of Southern Nigeria. In a sense, Ike is an intellectual flâneur, a traveller through the landscape of Nigeria’s pioneer centres of knowledge-making, the universities, in a critical era of late colonial and early postcolonial nation-building. His novels thus constitute a formidable archaeology of nationness. That is why they are such vital sources of the modern national cultural memory and its historical narrative. Through such novels as Toads for Supper and the Naked Gods, for instance, we get a sense of the contradictions, and the emergent ‘Crises in the Temple’ as the famous Nigerian intellectual Dr Pius Okigbo once later described them, in Nigeria’s modern universities, actually mirroring the crisis of the modern Nigerian state. This crisis is reflected in the inter-ethnic wrangling between the Igbo and the Yoruba ethnic groups in their quest to inherit the leadership of postcolonial Nigeria. The conflict is telegraphed powerfully in Toads for Supper. So then comes Toads Forever, and Aduke Olowu is still in the psychiatric hospital under the strict care of the Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Modupe Aina, and the hovering scrutiny of Aduke’s room-mate in Oliaku Hall at the University, Bisi, whose guardianship is as fervent as it is suspect. From the opening pages, the situation

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of the novel is confined to the exact place of its last action, the very ambiguity of it, which many critics have already pointed out, insisting that Toads for Supper ended unsatisfactorily, without resolving the moral contradictions that it had erected. Perhaps that too is the power of Toads for Supper, that it chose to end as a tragedy because of the unanswered questions it left about Aduke’s fate – this young, beautiful idealistic undergraduate, who chose to fall in love outside of the strictures of Nigeria’s ethnic confinements and expectations; and the end of whose love also ironically seemed prescient at the time of the novel with later events, just one year following the publication of Toads for Supper, presaging the collapse of Nigeria’s first republic, and its slide into a civil war. In that sense, we could read the tragedy of Toads for Supper as basically synecdochic, reflective of the spiritual collapse of a nation from the unresolved ethnic politics that continues to plague and shape its affairs. Toads Forever is set within the same time, in the late colonial period. It did not shift focus. Its intention – well, the intention of the novelist – seems here to be to answer the questions about Aduke’s fate. What happened thereafter? At the beginning of the novel, we see Amadi Chukwuka, the cause of her mental breakdown, hovering around the hospital at Abeokuta, prowling, and distraught. He wants to see Aduke, and resolve things. He is clearly still in love. And there is a misreading of his innocent letter to Aduke from his village, where his father had forced a last pledge from him to marry Nwakaego, a village beauty, with whom marriage had been prearranged for him. So Amadi travels from his lodgings at the University to Abeokuta. But his mission in Abeokuta is undermined by his encounter with Bisi. Aduke’s self-appointed ethnic guardian has much animus, not so much against Amadi as an individual, but against his entire Igbo ethnicity, who in this case must be stopped from further crossing the lines and endangering the heart and love life of vulnerable Yoruba women. Inter-ethnic relations are dangerous. And Amadi embodies all Bisi’s anxieties, and a historic, unresolved anger from an unrequited love which she transfers to her sworn duties to protect Aduke and subvert every romantic border crossing between the Igbo and the Yoruba. She goes to whisper to the gatekeepers at the hospital not to permit Amadi, that ‘kobokobo’ to see Aduke under any circumstances. Amadi’s luck changes however with the intervention of Mr Ladele, a male nurse at the hospital, who overhears the talk, and goes to Amadi. ‘Dem say you be Igbo man’. Ladele says to Amadi. And takes him in, and lodges him for the night. As it turns out, Ladele too is Igbo,

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 although he has a Yoruba mother, whose surname he bears, because his Igbo father died too early to normalize things culturally. This is an interesting aside in the novel, because it seems that Ike attempts a very subtle, suggestive philosophical intervention in Ladele’s rather episodic character, about the Igbo idea of ‘Nwanne di na Mba’ – basically, the idea of the universality of kinship. One’s kin might just be a stranger who provides succour. It might also be that dispersal of ethnic seeds that fall in unknown and unusual places where they germinate, makes it possible that one may have a kinsman, unknown to them, abroad. And it seems therefore that, to the Igbo, a man’s kin may not necessarily be by blood, or may not necessarily be direct. It is the axiomatic fount of Igbo humanism. It undergirds the Kola ritual. It provides the grounds for the code that protects visitors to strange lands, and it is Ike’s very subtle critic of ethnic particularism. There is also that dimension, as he clearly suggests in Ladele’s character of the contingency and slipperiness of identity. One may be Igbo or Yoruba today, and another tomorrow. Although this part of the story yields in the simple, direct, realistic style for which Chukwuemeka Ike is known, a pregnant analogy that helps the reader begin to comprehend the novelist’s own ideological agenda in the story, it does not feel intrusive or pedantic at this point. Because, indeed, Toads is not just a simple love story. It is the story of the conflicts regnant in the modern nation, Nigeria, and the complexities of its powerful ethnic chemistry which have also complicated its development as a modern nation. Ladele helps introduce Amadi to the Consultant managing Aduke’s case, Dr Aina, who ultimately arranges, after interviewing Amadi, for him to meet his patient. That meeting, through which Amadi declares his love again for Aduke heals her. But the story only begins from there. The entire body of Toads Forever replays the ethnic tension that characterizes the first novel, Toads for Supper, and only elaborates on the difficult choices and pathways both Amadi and Aduke had to navigate in order to reclaim their love, and to fulfil their longings to marry and be a couple. In spite of the ways in which their love and commitment is often seen, including by highly educated members of the university community, as a form ethnic betrayal and ‘disease’, they triumph in the end. It is almost too predictable. The novelist, Chukwuemeka Ike, who himself married across Nigeria’s tense ethnic lines may indeed have encoded significant autobiographical details in this sequel, as indeed in its prequel. The reader familiar with the details are in fact compelled to recognize the grounds of the novelist’s imaginative exploration of the highly

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elitist space of the University College, Ibadan of the 1950s: the petty squabbles, the material conditions and desires, and now in hindsight, meaningless expectations of those who positioned themselves, and were naturally positioned by the pioneering conditions of Nigeria’s first national univer­sity at Ibadan, as the inheritors of postcolonial power and privilege: we this in the character Chima, the careerist, and narcissistic Assistant District Officer, who seduces Nwakaego, the young woman affianced to Amadi in Ezinkwo; the politics and ‘scandal’ of Dr Ikejiani’s ‘DSc’, which also became the casus belli of Yoruba-Igbo intellectual warfare – and claims and counter claims – in the 1950s colonial university, is replayed in the story of Dr Uchendu’s disputed professorship in Toads Forever, and in some very important fashion, the tragic Benedict Obumselu / Bisi Fagbenle affair as undergraduates at Ibadan, which made quite a splash in the courts and in the Lagos newspapers in 1958 may indeed have been the subtle model, aside from Ike’s own experience also at this time in Ibadan, with his own relationship with the Yoruba ‘girl’ who later became his wife, are all echoed in the novels, and especially so in Toads Forever. Anyone who reads Pierre L. van den Berghe’s Power and Privilege in an African University, gets the drift too. The difference is the fecund human drama, and the immediacy of the narrative event which gives Ike’s work its piquancy and power. But there are also significant failures, both of craft, and of vision. The Amadi Chukwuka of Toads Forever is less formidable – a little too ponderous and shallow – than the Amadi of Toads for Supper, who almost embodied a kind of tragic will. Wherever stories of interracial and inter-ethnic love are told, it is staged primarily as forbidden and tragic. That is what makes them powerful and memorable. There is often no salvation. It is a shattering of the world, and its moral basis. Ike avoids all that. Perhaps this is what weakens the total effect of this sequel. It feels a bit too sentimental. The healing is far too clinical, and there is no pun intended here. ‘The kingdom of London’ – the quest for a university degree – is elevated, and seems more the goal than the power of true human experience. ‘The Kingdom’ is at the centre of the value of this novel: an adoration of the kind of ‘careerism’ that defined Ike’s generation of Nigerian university graduates, particularly those from University College, Ibadan – earning degrees of the University of London – the model for the fictional university of Southern Nigeria in Ike’s novel. Redemption in this sequel novel, although long drawn out and circular, feels too easy, didactic, and artificial. If redemption must take place, it must be without artifice as in, to use an example, Chinua

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 Achebe’s story, ‘Love is a Private Affair’, between the Igbo Nnaemeka, and the Ibibio, Nene. There is as a calm satisfying end to Achebe’s story, and we are drawn to participate in it. Ike’s end feels preachy and almost antiseptic in my view. Or take the missed opportunity in the catalytic love story of Dr Shade Adetunji in the novel, whose father ‘exiles’ her to medical school in England, away from her young true love, who nonetheless waits for her. They are unaware of each other for a while; however, on account of a single lost letter she had written years earlier to him, the young Igbo boy at Kings College whom she meets while at Queens College waits for her, vowing never to love another. In spite of his accomplishments as a doctor, and the many opportunities attendant to his achievements, he he keeps to this vow. Shade Adetunji too waits, but is forced in the end to make a different choice after medical school. She returns and marries another man, and begins to raise a family. Then they meet again years later at the University’s Medical College, and here we have Ike accomplish the most anticlimactic, most predictable end of this sub-plot. It should be a roaring, possibly tragic love, or better still, resolved like the love between Ifemelu and Obinze in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, who both escape each other’s entanglements to return to themselves in spite of the social odds, and moral codes and expectations – a far more interesting story in terms of the dimensions their action brings to the complexity of our true human experience; and because the power of love is its messiness. Ike’s characters feel like monastic and highly idealized figures of a moral fable, whose goal is to further the orthodoxies of Christian moral virtues rather than convey that unsettling nature of desire which drives our incessant quest for another. The love scenes are unconvincing. Even the copulation when it happens sticks in the throat. The emotion is stilted. Perhaps Chukwuemeka Ike can be forgiven for a certain kind of didacticism in this novel, but what should not be forgiven or overlooked is the flatness – the one dimensionality of his characters in Toads Forever. I think that story properly ended in Toads for Supper. Yet still, there is much in the sequel that would recommend itself to the readers of the earlier novel. OBI NWAKANMA English Department, University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida

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Tomi Adeaga & Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner (eds), Payback & Other Stories: An Anthology of African & African Diaspora Short Stories Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH, 2018, 168 pp. ISBN 978-3-6439-1054-7, paperback

This collection travels the world and covers a wide spectrum, from a mother who ends up on death row, to a mother whose breast refuses her newborn milk, until the death takes the child from her breasts. It is a remarkable collection of short fiction by a contemporary generation of African writers living across the world. It has a fascinating polyvocality that far more than anything else demonstrates the varieties of new, compelling experiences that define the new utterance of African literature in new and interesting ways too. Raphael D’Abdon’s story, ‘An Easy Sunday Morning’, is truly short and ruminating. A woman sits one lazy Sunday morning – never ‘been church people’ – in her home; the ‘gentle Merlot and sweet reefer … smoothly topping my weary body’, when she hears squabbles outside her window. It is her son who had gone off to play basketball returning, and is being beaten by two white cops who hold him down in spite of his protestations of innocence. In the haze, the narrator comes out, and without question shoots the two cops. At the end of this story, we learn that she is the mother, and though her son is free, she is in jail, awaiting execution for killing the policemen who were brutalizing her son. We have a sense that she has no regrets, and that is the unsettling fact of the story – a willing, almost fatalistic acceptance of her action as a form of maternal duty, a necessary martyrdom to save the new generation of black men represented by her son. The story more than makes a hint at the situation of the killings of African-American men, and it is interesting that Rasheed, the young man in this story bridges that world, because the writer here plays with transnational identity, both in the way he names the man, and in the veil around the mother. We do not know whether she is an immigrant African mother or an African-American mother. We are not permitted to know. All we know is that she is flawed in other human ways, but she is oddly redeemed by her willingness for self-sacrifice. It is just the lot or burden of the black mother unwilling finally to watch her son be killed for being ‘black’. It is the unsaid things in this compact and powerful story that makes it intriguing and remorseless. Tom Adeaga’s ‘The Letter’ engages the African immigrant experience more directly in this story of Dr Femi Badmos, a Nigerian neurosurgeon

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 in Germany. Badmos’ application for German citizenship has been rejected. He and his family are about to be deported. This event provokes a series of public action and emotion that soon turns the Badmos family into national television sensations overnight. This story goes to the question of the nature, and even condition of the dispersal, settlement and assimilation of new African immigrants particularly in monocultural European societies such as Germany, where the idea of nation and national belonging is still connected to the ‘volk’. Adeaga’s story engages this question in a very unsubtle, almost literal, and one might even dare to say charmless manner. The reader is left wondering about the arc of the story. It presets none. It operates on an uncomplicated lineation that leaves us unsurprised and perhaps a little dissatisfied by the end of the story. There certainly has to be something else to this story; a dramatic moment that lifts the action of a story in ways that should surprise a reader. ‘The Letter’ offers us none of this. Just a plain, straightforward story of all that ends well through the support of the community. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo’s story, ‘The Prodigal Son Shall not Return’, is a replay of the ‘Lucian parable’ of the prodigal son. Again, it takes an aspect of the African immigrant experience and riffs at it. In this case, Igbo parents whose eldest son chooses to disavow his past and cut all filial connections, to ‘discover’ himself in America. He begins to date a white American girl. His distraught parents try all they could to make him return. But just as they are about giving up, their son has a change of circumstances, and a change of heart, and returns to their embrace, much to the resentment of his other siblings who feel the attention to him unjustified. The prodigal’s father, Osadebe, now elated, but normally taciturn, shares his joy at his church meeting. Azodo’s story seems like a straightforward story, and could even at face value be possibly dismissed as clichéd. But it has a powerful story inside this rather obvious, overwrought parable: it is the story of the condition of exile, and the fear of disappearing in an alien land. It is not a simple story of the return of the prodigal son, but about the increasingly disturbing reality and question that now confront first-generation immigrant families about the meaning of home, the loss of a homeland, and that imponderable situation of being at the crossroads. The wind that plays back at the narrator is the powerful wind not of the river Galilee or the Mississippi, but ‘the cool water of the Agulu lake … over the hot faces of the faithful’ who are trying futilely, almost comically, to recapture ‘home’ in their Igbo Catholic Community, ‘jabbering and eating doughnuts’ in the basement of the

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St Saviour church. There are too many interrelated symbols to unpack here. One is forced to read this story in the very suggestive hints it makes about a people enduring restless and futile exile: ‘a thickness enveloped us as a people under a shroud’. There is a dimension to the rhetoric of this story that forces the reader to step under its veils, and hear its true cries. Ernest Emenyonu’s ‘A Rigid Code of Silence’, is a con­fessional, and equally straightforward story, recalling sexual abuse, first as a five-year-old boy, by his family’s teenage maid, and at twelve by the Assistant Bishop of his church. It is a weighty and timely story, by the subject it addresses, which is tabooed, and often buried under the silence of male shame and inadequacy by the victim. But in this story, Emenyonu gives the narrator a voice willing to confront this abuse in a very honest way. Again, for such a weighty issue at the roots even of sacramental life, for the highly Christianized African, one should expect the writer to plumb the psychological depths of this experience. But we do not feel it. The story just simply declares its intention, and goes straight to a very obvious, and linear, uncomplicated telling of what should be a most heart-breaking story. The effect is that we stay only at the surface of the story, aching for greater development of the central character. Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner’s story, ‘Madam Shopkeeper’, is almost certainly a gesture to an old story, and it uses an equally very familiar trope: the evil stepmother, and the put-upon girl, Bibiana, who is the Cinderella of this story. In vain does the reader look for a hidden meaning; something that can shift the essential ground of this story, and turn it from the story of the dashing ‘prince paramour’, who rescues the virtuous girl, and shames the stepmother. The reader aches for something more devastating and perilous. A true story, Bibiana’s travails are even not powerful enough to give the story its sex-appeal. Worse still, one is unable to leap through the rather easy resolution of the story. How did Bibiana and Christopher Samson first meet? Have they been communicating since his time in America? What does he do in America that would give him such alluring wealth, so much indeed that he builds a great, opulent house and, with little prompting, just on seeing Bibiana at the opening ceremony, hands the key of the house to her, and whisks her off, soon after to America? Naana Banyiwa Horne’s story, ‘Payback’, which provides the lead title of this collection is also a very familiar story of the difficult mother-in-law and the long suffering daughter-in-law. But the story begins in Ghana, and moves on to the United States, where

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 its true action develops. The narrator, a Ga woman, is close to her mother-in-law all the while in Ghana; they forge a mother-daughter relationship, and things go smoothly. Then her husband, Taki goes to Stanford, gets a job at the World Bank soon after his MBA, settles to a comfortable, international expatriate life in America. The narrator soon follows, and they start a family which quickly grows, and it is all exhausting, as anybody who knows the routine knows it would be for a busy, professional African woman who combines duties at home with expectations at work. Six years later, Naana, her motherin-law comes to America. All is well at first. But soon, inevitably, as such stories go, things also soon slowly fall part between the once loving mother-in-law, and her daughter- in law. Naana Banyiwa Horne’s narrator, her mother-in-law now calls her, ‘Araba’, stages her defiant act of freedom at the birthday party for her mother-in-law, who had become so dissatisfied with everything she does, including the food she makes for her. Food is important in this story. It frames the meaning of domesticity and acceptance. Relationships are forged between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law on how well she learns to cook; relationships are forged on how well she feeds those who come to her; to the daughter-in-law, it seems the most important relationship with Naana is forged around food. Rejection of her food is also emblematic. Here again, the key to this story is not in its obvious narrative frame, it is in the subtle inversion of the telling – the averted gaze of the narrator to the real, for, while it seems she is talking about her long suffering self, Naana Horne actually compels us to pay attention to ‘sorrowful’ Naana, the mother-in-law. It is her story of displacement; the old woman’s discontent is not a loss of affection for her daughter-in-law, it is a loss of interest in America and the excesses emblematized in the posh world that seems so unfamiliar to her. Thus the narrator’s defiant song at the end of the story, though staged as a song of freedom, is in fact laced with profound irony, for its deep quality of frustration and sorrow about the disintegration of the relation of between the mother and her daughter-in-law as a result of alienation felt under the distractions of a restless, self-imposed exile. For, while living in Ghana nurtures them, life in America estranges. Busi Jonathan’s story ‘Granted Wish of the Dead’, is a different kind of story; it is very interesting, and quirky story of a dead narrator, Sifelani, who had been raped and murdered by her lover, Lonely Macheka, but who reclaims her voice even from the dead, and uses Lonely Macheka’s daughter, Flora as her medium to tell her own story

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and exact a blinding justice a decade after her death. Busi Jonathan pulls this off splendidly, for, although the narrator is dead, we could still believe her, because she feels present and alive – and immortal. ‘We never really die’, she says at the end of her story. And that seems the point, that the past rises from its grave, to haunt the present. Sifelani circles that zone between the dead and the unborn, and she sees everything, hears everything, and acts even from the dead. This story appropriates an old African idea about death as a mere relocation of agency. Neema Komba writes in ‘Mother’s Shop’ about another exaction of justice. Jeni and Prosper steal from Mama’s shop, and Jeni is discovered, and sent away. Prosper later starts his own shop from what he has stolen, thinking he has escaped retribution. But one day, his shop burns down mysteriously, and he loses everything. We get a hint that Mama has a hand at it, at the end of the story. Mama is a powerful figure who dominates the story. She seems all powerful and omniscient, like a female god, who exacts firm justice, and from whom nothing escapes. Sindiwe Magona’s ‘The Most Unidentical Identical Twins’, is the story of how two identical twins, Zondwa and his brother Zola, follow two different moral paths: the narrator watches his identical twin brother choose the path of darkness, and this darkness haunts the story. One twin operates in the light of day, the other operates in the cloak of the darkness. One night, his twin Zola returns all bloody. The next morning at school, there is talk of the murder of the brother of one of the teachers, and Zondwa knows immediately that it has to do with Zola. The story is about his anguish; how to come to terms with his twin brother’s evil, and report it. How does one betray the self, for in his twin, Zondwa sees himself reflected back; and yet he feels the moral dread of losing his own true self subsumed under his twin identity. Setty Mhandu’s ‘The Anointing Softener’ is an amused, satirical story about a feckless young man who doesn’t seem able to make up his mind between two women about whom to love: his best friend’s fiancée Charlene’s sister, Loveness, and the pastor’s wife’s sister, Rose. The narrator secretly lusts after both Charlene, and his pastor’s beautiful wife. His best friend, Taku invites him to accompany him to visit his fiancée Charlene’s family. He is overjoyed because he has secret plans to seduce Charlene. Then he meets Charlene’s sister, Loveness – she’s not quite as beautiful, but she is equally remarkable for her genuineness and intelligence, and our narrator, who had obtained a love talisman,

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 an ‘anointing softener’, from a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor to help him seduce women, proceeds to woo Loveness, declaring his undying love. Secretly for him, Loveness was his own way of staying close to the beautiful and highly idealized Charlene. Then again, a chance meeting with the pastor’s beautiful sister, Roselyn, turns his head and attention, and again, he woos her with his talisman. In the end, he is trapped between two women and indistinguishable desires. While Setty Mhandu’s story uses satire to question notions of certainty and desire, Eric Mwathi’s story, ‘America II’, feels a little out of place in this collection. It is the story of a draft dodger who escapes from the USA rather than fight the war in Vietnam. One struggles to find its centre, and its connection to the singular motive of this anthology: to reflect the ways that African writers deal with contemporary black or African reality, either at home or in the Diaspora. Mwathi’s story might be an afterthought to this project. It could have been rescued from abstraction only if the subject of the story had a little of Africa in him. But his grandfather was Austria’s former Ambassador to the United States, who takes American citizenship following the war in Europe. He returns in the end to Europe many years later, leaving only a daughter in San Francisco. Could Mwathi’s story be mirroring the implications of the increasing dispersal of Africans from their continent, increasingly to America, whose long hands might reach you, especially to fight its wars, even after you no longer identify with it? Perhaps if the former ambassador’s daughter had married an immigrant African in Europe, and their bi-racial, son is now visiting America, and is being forced on some abstract, memoried sense of an American citizenship, through his grandfather, the former Ambassador, to fight for America, the story would have been more grounded and meaningful. But here, in this collection, it feels arbitrary and out of place. Famia Nkasa’s ‘The Unqualified Saviors’, on the other hand, like Emenyonu’s story, returns to a colonial ground. While Emenyonu reveals the sober truth about the missionary’s sexual abuse of African children, which has been covered in the thick cloth of historical silence, Nkasa’s story details, using the story of the narrator’s father, the abuse of the African child in the colonial school system, where he is indoctrinated to sing ‘Rule Britannia’. This story is set in 1952, towards the dying days of British colonialism in West Africa – a few years before Ghana’s independence – when the young Queen Elizabeth ascends the English throne at the death of her father. The confused African child, long used to singing, ‘God save the King’, is now forced at school Assemblies to sing, ‘God save the Queen’. It is confusing, but

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the writer’s gaze is, not only on the abuse of his father, that generation of the African child, through the intense indoctrination of the enforcers of British mores in Africa, but he also looks at the colonial teacher, who ventriloquizes colonial desires. Tanure Ojaide’s story ‘When Pastors took the HIV/AIDS Test’, is the least successful story in this collection because of its distracting clichés. It brings no innovation to the short story form, and it has no visible arc that lifts the action of the story. It is the story of Onome Efeludu, a single mother and pastor, whose past sexual life and ‘bornagain’ Christian conversion is the catalyst of the story. But it is also the predictable story of the ‘all that glitters’ not being gold variety, because although Onome Efeludu passes her HIV test, the unfortunate pastor James Igho does not, and it puts a sheen on Onome’s conviction not to yield ‘to any man who is not her husband after being ‘born again, and more so after her ordination as pastor’. Is this story therefore a shot for celibacy and abstinence? A call for monasticism? It does not feel weighty or significant. Tanure Ojaide does not even write here, with the poet’s sense of language, and he is a poet. Chinyere Okafor brings a different, more complex, and a little more compelling story about disease and addiction – the AIDS story – in her story, ‘Dropped Doreen Rides High with Jabulani’. I think the title of this story meaningless and misleading, but if we get past that, we encounter a very humane, and sensitive story, about Jabulani coming to terms with her life, after becoming accidentally addicted to meth, and running away from home. Jabulani’s life is meant to be cautionary tale about the pandemic of drug addiction and disease in the AfricanAmerican community. Chinyere Okafor adopts a very sociological view in this story about how, and why African-American kids are drawn to drugs; about the unending cycle of addiction and disease; the loss of family; and the repetition of the industrial prison system that feeds African-Americans as though it were feeding a hungry and insatiable monster with black bodies through the dark gullet of the beast. Jabulani wants to tell her story as an act of expiation and, as her means of witnessing, and thus through documenting her experience, save black youth. It is a formidable story. Chika Unigwe’s story, ‘Bethlehem’, is slow in lifting, but when it does, we immediately are drawn to it. Set in Enugu, Chimelunma finds it difficult to conceive a child. When she does, no pregnancy stays, until she eventually arrives at full term with her child, Bethlehem. Beth is born, but Chimelunma’s body rejects her. Her breast refuses to produce milk. And this becomes the source of great anxiety in the

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 story. At the end of this tragic story about motherhood, the child dies with her mother’s milkless breast in its mouth. It is a very dark story. But Unigwe does two things with it: first, she draws a connection between post-partum anxieties and neo-natal pathologies and death, and second, she takes a contemporary look at the Igbo phenomenon of the ‘Ogbanje’, and this is very subtly done. Of the stories in this collection, three stand out as most accomplished, in terms both of craft, and significance: Ire Iyioha’s story, ‘Brave’, a touching account of a mother’s abandonment of her daughter in pursuit of what turns out to be, what the poet Okigbo might call a ‘white elephant’, in Canada; Mfilinge Nyalusi’s ‘The Old Monkey’, which tells about the relationship between a young man and his very old, sagely grandfather, who fills the space of his absent father, who is lost also in pursuit of an illusion in Europe; and Tendai Huchu’s ‘The Prestige’, a satirical, very surprising story roaring with self-deprecatory laughter. Easily the best story in this collection, Huchu makes mincemeat of the powerful African tyrant whose sense of importance is charged only by symbols of that self-importance. And thus, Pizza Face, is recruited by a former school mate, Monya, the tyrant’s cousin, to build Zimbabwe’s Space programme, and launch its first astronauts – well ‘afronauts’ – to the moon. It is a scam. Everybody knows it is impossible. But under threat of death, Pizza Face stages a farcical launch on 18 April, Zimbabwe’s Independence Day. The launch is of course a flop, as even he knew it would be. But it sets off a chain of worldwide reaction that draws attention to Zimbabwe. Not even Pizza Face, at the end of the story can escape from his own success. On the other hand, Dennis Walder’s ‘The Climb’ does demonstrate a fine control of language in this story about old white South Africans reliving with painful nostalgia a disappearing world years after the end of apartheid. This story is hobbled by its own ambivalence. Tomi Adeaga and Sara Udoh-Grossfurthner have put together a varied and substantial collection of stories in Payback and Other Stories. Substantial, not so much for the weight of many of the stories, some of which indeed feel a little too brittle, but purely in the sense it demonstrates of the contemporary status of the African imagination. One significant failure of this collection is in the titling of the stories. Story titles are often half the stories, but in this anthology they feel like slapstick! A fine copy-editing could have done greater justice to this collection, in that regard. But in general Payback and Other Stories is a timely addition to the pool of the African and diasporic

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store of stories and should appeal to an audience as broad as teenage readers and more experienced readers and interlocutors of the African story. OBI NWAKANMA English Department, University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida

Chielozona Eze, Race, Decolonization, & Global Citizenship in South Africa New York: University of Rochester Press, 2018, 240 pp. ISBN 978-1-5804-6933-3, hardback

Contemporary global political-economic events in the past two years suggests that we are at a very crucial juncture in our postmodern history in which the inevitable reality of globalization, i.e. political-economic and cultural integration, is being powerfully contested. The new cultural reality of global entanglements is being vehemently rejected by the proud promoters of singular Euro-American nationalism and nativist ideologies. Although we are now confronted daily by a global post­ modernity marked by intense political-economic and cultural interconnectivities fostered by innovations in communication and transportation technologies, these new impulses of cultural singularity and intolerance signal a vigorous resistance to notions of a shared humanity, of economic interdependence, cultural cross-fertilization, global citizenship, transnational morality, and all of the cherished values of humanism associated with modern European civilization. What we are witnessing is a relentless reversion by the heirs of the pioneers and frontrunners of Euro-American modernity – who once emphasized internationalization, humanism and cosmopolitanism – into the unenviable and detested culture of selfishness and intolerance of pre-modern civilization. Chielozona Eze’s recent book, Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa (2018) could not have emerged at a more opportune moment in contemporary global history. And its real intellectual purchase is revealed in the extraordinary ways in which it functions as a powerful manifesto of philosophical ideas and cultural

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 values about how to live together as global citizens at a moment of intense existential anxiety about difference and the now popular obsession with cultural singularity and familiarity. Drawing heavily on South African history and cultural representations, especially in literary narratives, Prof. Eze argues that ‘Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s emphases on empathy, forgiveness, Ubuntu, and other virtues that actively bind people, rather than divide them, define the difference between the responses of South Africa and those of other African countries to the colonial experience’ (7). Bypassing the liberal condescension often associated with elitist cosmopolitanism, Eze argues that in a new world order marked by new moral challenges, what he calls ‘empathetic cosmopolitanism’ might offer a new way forward as a meaningful political tool and existential resource to foster integration, mutual recognition and unity in the face of the rude realities of diversity and difference. He insists that ‘as a humanizing principle, empathetic cosmopolitanism enables us to embrace the humanity of others by putting ourselves in their position, and we do so without messianic assumptions’ (7). Chielozona Eze embraces and recommends the ethics of global citizenship as a powerful elixir for a convulsive global modernity that now rejects itself; that is hell-bent on spitting out aspects of its own history and reality. According to him, ‘[g]lobal citizenship does not require a world state, but it does involve conceiving of the world as a community, a space in which no one is disadvantaged on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other markers of difference. It is an ethical stance of openness toward the world’s people and environments; it is characterized by acceptance of the humanity of others at all times and in any place’ (8). Although South Africa (SA) is still plagued by the rude realities of structural or systemic violence, especially the continuing lack of access to social and economic services by a majority of black South Africans, Eze argues that there is no question that the acts of forgiveness [fostered by Mandela and Bishop Tutu] made a profound humanist statement about South Africans and the future of their society. The peaceful transition that the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] brought about, and that was characterized by the ritual of forgiveness, established a moral framework of belongingness and care in post-apartheid South Africa. (11) Although the work draws its historical and cultural archives from SA, its penetrating analysis of the moral fortitude and political foresight of the country’s leaders, intellectuals, wo/men of letters, and ordinary

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people (like Mrs Ngewu, 15), only serve to formulate a humanist ethos, a global cultural agenda and moral framework on how we can transcend the current crisis of co-existence. And the manifesto Prof. Eze offers is philosophically profound: ‘I am proposing a way of living and self-expression that is informed by an awareness of our dependency on others. I am envisioning a world that is anchored in profound con­ sidera­tion for the humanity of others regardless of backgrounds.’ (28)

What the world is in dire need of, however, are political leaders who also double as moral icons. In chapter two Eze elaborates on how Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu assumed the role of moral compasses for SA at an historic moment of great national transformation. And for him, the crucial role both men played can be found in the unexpected ways in which they worked consciously and persistently to nurture a civil society that values human rights and dignity, irrespective of race/ethnicity, sexuality, gender and religion (37). In a nation that had lost its humanity and moral fibre, both men worked tirelessly, and against all odds, to reinvent and restore it to health by vigorously insisting that there is a place for everyone to thrive. Prof. Eze agues not so much for the phenomenal work they did to bring about peace and reconciliation in South Africa as for its profound and politically nuanced interpretation of democracy that they brought to bear on the new nation, which ought to be copied by the entire world. While the initial political activism and post/colonial resistance of both men was rooted in their belief in the rule of the majority, under post-apartheid, they insisted that the rule by the black majority must not demean the white minority, even if they were responsible for the centuries of misery experienced by the majority. This was a unique and powerful understanding of democracy founded not just on the common humanity of people, but also an openness rooted in tolerance, forgiveness and equanimity (46). In his now famous essay, ‘What is a Nation?’ the French cultural theorist Ernest Renan argued that a nation is not so much a collective of people with a shared history and culture who inhabit the same sovereign boundaries. He posited that a nation is actually held together by what he called a ‘soul’ which gets tested in a periodic referendum. In a sense, a nation is a cultural object; it is deliberately and systematically constructed through all kinds of narratives, representations, and symbols. Prof. Eze addresses this question in chapter three of his book. And I think the case he makes is that intellectuals have the greatest burden of crafting the ‘soul’ of

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 a nation, which he calls a ‘national consciousness’. Focusing on the work of two black South African intellectuals, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda, he demonstrates how these cultural mediators ‘imagine the future of their society, especially within the social and moral contexts of forgiveness and reconciliation’ (54). The interpretation of the past and the ‘national consciousness’ that they formulate for South Africa is one that rejects a national past that is stuck in colonial violence. Ndebele, for example, denounces the politics of ‘the spectacular’ that seeks to exaggerate and weaponize a violent past in the pursuit of blind vengeance. In his scintillating analyses of Ndebele’s, The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Eze shows how both Ndebele and Mda turn their creative lenses away from white violence against blacks to black-on-black violence. What both texts alert us to, Eze argues, is the ‘fact that oppressors often co-opt the oppressed into their ideology’ (60). In The Cry of Winnie Mandela, for example, the protagonist, supposedly Winnie Mandela, bitter about a violent colonial past, descends into the pit of hell to seek vengeance. What both Ndebele and Mda warn against, then, is a past that demeans us rather than restore our collective humanity after centuries of dehumanization. What Ndebele particularly proposes is for cultural workers to turn their creative energies to the ordinary lives of common people as a useful site of thoughtful introspection and reflection about South Africa’s collective vulnerabilities, humanity and their hopes and dreams for the future. By formulating what Eze calls ‘a moral topography’ that insists on forgiveness, he argues that these two black South African intellectuals do not necessarily imply a trivialization of the injustices of the past. ‘Nor does it mean abandoning the quest for fairness. Rather, their efforts are some of the preliminary, albeit most defining, steps in establishing a truly democratic society’ (54). Through a thoughtful exegesis of the works of Ndebele and Mda, Eze demonstrates astutely how both writers ‘urge the black population of South Africa to move beyond their justified anger about past oppression in order to build a society superior to apartheid’ (102). Now, while I find the critique that denounces Winnie’s romance with unproductive violence during the anti-apartheid years fascinating, I am sceptical and perhaps unsettled by the ways in which that critical reading whitewashes Mandela’s own violent anti-apartheid past; after all, he was the commander-in-chief of Umkhontho we Sizwe, the now famous military wing of the ANC. How is it that Mandela’s own violent past is purified, and his political persona reinvented and sanctified

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to the status of a moral icon, while Winnie’s own violence is vilified and pathologized, her moral status and phenomenal work of political resistance undermined and reduced to the dustbin of history? If, in chapter two, Chielozona Eze’s work addresses the chronic lack of moral leadership facing the world, chapter four takes on the chronic dearth of empathy and the ethics of care in a postmodern world obsessed with self-interests, self-preservation, and the denial of ordinary people’s humanity. Here, he demonstrates how two white SA writers, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, foster a ‘moral imagination’ that emphasizes ‘empathy as an essential element of open society’ (77). And by empathy or co-feeling, he means ‘a concept that captures not only the affinity between one person and another, but also all forms of solidarity and human rights’ (77). Recognizing that we now live in a world of increasing politicaleconomic and cultural integration, the vision of a new and open society that both writers envision for SA is one in which ‘there are no rubbish people. We are all people together’ (82). In his readings of Gordimer’s Pickup and Coetzee’s Disgrace, both writers offer cultural representations of protagonists that make crucial decisions that ‘suggests that solidarity implies engagement with others; it means that we can no longer look the other way when someone is in distress. Responsibility for others begins when their suffering becomes ours. We respond to their humanity’ (93). Julie in Pickup falls in love with a total stranger she meets on a roadside under conditions of helplessness. But the affinity that builds between Julie and Abdu, which takes them all the way to Abdu’s desert village in North Africa, is one that transcends sheer romance. As Eze argues, for Julie, ‘It is not adventure in foreign cultures; it is encounter’ (91). It is a particular brand of cosmopolitan sensibility that ‘demands responsibility for the others; it is the acceptances of the humanity of the other without condition’ (91). I think it is this recognition of the humanity of others and the marks that history has left on them that defines Lucy’s unprecedented atonement in Coetzee’s Disgrace, an act that reinvents a brutal history of colonial violence into remarkable moral strength. For Gordimer and Coetzee, then, given our entangled fates as a globalized world, the new moral order they prescribe is one in which we see ourselves in others, not others as separate or distinct from us. The social challenges or inequities faced by others, irrespective of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, region and other social markers, should remind us not of the difference of victims of social injustices, but of our own vulnerabilities in the face of a world

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 political-economic and cultural order driven mainly by self-interests and the indifference to the pain of others. Chapter five is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this work for me because it addresses a highly combustible topic that is at the heart of America’s contemporary political and cultural imagination. While writing this review, a caravan of about 5,000 men, women, youth, and children walked for thousands of miles and stationed itself at the US-Mexico border. These are not enemy combatants ‘invading’ the USA as the American president Donald Trump and other right-wing groups claim, but the most vulnerable of humanity knocking on the doors of an affluent nation and seeking for the crumbs from lavish tables. It is the technologies of irrational fear and how they function to impede empathetic cosmopolitanism that Chielozona Eze addresses in chapter five. Focusing on the work of three post-apartheid generation writers – Phaswane Mpe, Ivan Vladislavic, and K. Sello Duiker – the chapter reveals how this new breed of South African cultural producers creatively interrogates, challenges and abrogates the simplistic dualisms that often make irrational fear of others possible and, in the process, impedes humanistic trans-culturalism. In Phaswane Mpe’s Hillbrow, for example, as if mirroring the nasty and horrific regime of racism and xenophobia in the United States, migrants are a constant source of worry and anxiety among locals. According to Eze, the ‘migrants are seen as the cause of nearly all the social and moral malaise in Hillbrow’ (102). Mirroring the narrative tropes used by J.M. Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians, the chapter demonstrates how the othering of non-South Africans is achieved through a dubious process of doubling or binarization – insider/ outsider, indigene/foreigner, pure/impure, civilized/uncivilized, us/ them, sinners/saints, victors/victims, landowner/squatter, etc. But the barbarians in Hillbrow are other Africans – migrants from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Congo, and other African countries – that supported South Africa at a grave historical moment when they were considered and treated as barbarians in their own land. The position Chielozona Eze takes is that Mpe ‘suggests that South Africans seek to build a fortress to hold off imaginary invaders, those who are “coming to take [their] jobs in the new democratic rainbowism of African Renaissance that threatened the future of the locals”’ (104). What Chielozona Eze reveals in his insightful analyses of both Hillbrow and Waiting for the Barbarians is that the mythification of imaginary enemies in popular political discourses is a powerful form of bio-politics whose main function is to misdirect the people’s

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attention away from the true sources of the political-economic crises and the attendant miseries that have engulfed them. What Eze demonstrates with the three post-apartheid generation of writers he so thoughtfully examines in his work is how they engage in a different process of politically sensitive mythification that overcomes fear through gestures of empathetic cosmopolitanism. Characters in their texts boldly embrace otherness, not so much as people devoid of the anxieties about difference, but instead as a productive avenue to engage outsideness and the alien in such an open-minded manner that ultimately leads to self-growth and communal wholeness and social health. In Race, Decolonization and Global Citizenship, Chielozona Eze brilliantly illustrates the extraordinary ways in which ‘Ubuntu as a register of universal affinity’ (160) is creatively enunciated in the mythopoetic oeuvre of two white South African writers – Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok. His main argument in the chapter is that ‘Krog and de Kok operate within the moral premise of Ubuntu’ because both writers, although white and part of the privileged white apartheid minority, ‘have embraced the ancient black African [cosmopolitanist] concept as their own’ (138). Focusing on Krog’s Country of the Skull, for example, Eze unearths the astonishing ways in which she mounts a critique of national reconciliation as a state-led exercise that seeks to revisit the past as a way of attaining collective closure and forgiveness. Combining several genres – journalistic reportage, prose, semi-autobiography, and poetry – Krog memorializes a dark South African past that connects it to the broader history of the barbarity of the project of western civilization in Africa. Through this imaginative creation and interpretation of apartheid’s murky past, Eze argues that Krog’s poetics ‘suggests that reconciliation is impossible without a radical re-examination of the past coupled with a willingness to forge affinity, which is primarily an individual act. That act requires a radical repositioning of one’s moral and philosophical compass, one that amounts to a total transformation of the self’ (146). What will bring about forgiveness and reconciliation is not just the ritual of an open public inquiry, but also very conscious acts that signify a systematic recognition of the pain of those traumatized by the dastardly deeds of the past. In this regard, Chielozona Eze notes that Ingrid de Kok’s Seasonal Fire: New and Selected Poems (2006) presents another imaginative template in which an artist philosophizes on possibilities of national reconciliation in the face of collective self-

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 appraisal. Through his close reading of de Kok’s poetry, he argues that her poems about Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa function as a prolegomenon to a truly new society, one that calls for individual and communal responsibility for all, especially the vulnerable members of society. This responsibility begins with our openness to the experiences of those who have suffered unspeakable pain; we owe them our moral attention. (155)

If the process of democratization, racial reconciliation and inte­gra­ tion, and national healing must happen, the least the nation can do is acknowledged the trauma of those dehumanized by a brutal past. Both in terms of its breadth and quality of scholarship, Race, Decolonization and Global Citizenship in South Africa is undoubtedly one of the most profound and audacious works on contemporary culture and society in Africa that I have read in recent years. Its greatest intellectual force is the extraordinary way in which it astutely combines high-power Euro-American theory with oldstyle British empiricism. Prof. Eze is as at home with flamboyant conti­nental European philosophy as he is with the webs of Africa’s fraught history and its aftermath. But the particular usages to which he invokes and applies philosophy/theory and history are what distinguish his work as a consummate scholar of the first order. While his scholarship is robust, sophisticated and rigorous, it is the humanitarian essence to which he puts all of these theoretical, historical and textual resources that marks him out as a humanist. Prof. Eze’s work represents a strong example of the early stirrings in the second-wave of redisciplinarization in the humanities in which the field is now being called upon to account for what is happening to ordinary people; to respond to the cries of those who are being preyed upon by the forces of neoliberal capitalism and crude power. But a note of caution: while postcolonialism as a cultural and critical enterprise may have its intrinsic weaknesses, just as every sub-discipline, it would be reckless to ignore the initial heavy lifting that it did as an intellectual movement and philosophical weapon to open up discursive spaces for other theoretical fads that might sound more appealing at the moment. If postcolonialism was obsessed with identity politics and the construction of difference, as Prof. Eze and other critics have implied, it did so at a historical moment in which a totalizing imperial and colonial modernity insisted on the singularity of colonial identity without due respect to the ways in which our

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collective humanity is marked by cultural variations. Postcolonialism’s pursuit of cultural invest­ment in difference was not difference merely for its own sake, but difference as an integral part of a varied global humanity. Any kind of philosophical movement, including cosmo­ politanism, that operates on the foundational assump­tion or notion that humanity is uniform, is mis­directed. Postcolonialism’s pursuit of difference was not an opposition to the universality of humanity, but an apposi­tional politics against a totalizing ideology that ignored the reality of difference as an integral part of the human condi­tion. To ignore this pioneering intellectual work that sought to vigorously register difference when Euro-American modernity bracketed all human and cultural identities into one cultural umbrella, is to do a disservice to a powerful cultural and intellectual endeavour that made the writing of Race, Decolonization and Global Citizenship itself possible. PAUL UGOR Associate Professor, Department of English Illinois State University

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AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 37 Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Deputy Editor: Isidore Diala Assistant Editor: Patricia T. Emenyonu Associate Editors: Adélékè Adéè· kó· • Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo Madhu Krishnan • Stephanie Newell • Vincent O. Odamtten Oha Obododimma • Kwawisi Tekpetey • Iniobong I. Uko Wangui wa Goro Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

FORTHCOMING ALT 38 Environmental Transformation in Literature & Criticism Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka & Stephanie Newell Cover: Featuring covers from the ALT backlist https://boydellandbrewer.com/series/african-literature-today.html

ISBN 978-1-84701-234-0

9 781847 012340 www.jamescurrey.com

Editor Ernest N Emenyonu

Articles on: Unity Dow / Chinua Achebe / Sindiwe Magona / Chimalum Nwankwo / Grace Ogot / Yvonne Owuor / Boko Haram / Gender / First Nigerian Novel / Ifeoma Okoye / Ola Rotimi / Wole Soyinka / Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré Eldred Durosimi Jones in conversation Literary Supplement Reviews

African Literature Today ALT 37

African Literature Today was established at a time of uncertainty and reconstruction but for 50 years it has played a leading role in nurturing imaginative creativity and its criticism on the African continent and beyond. The founding Editor of ALT, Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in the mid-20th century. Contributors to ALT 37 recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativity forward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity.

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 37