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Mbari is an artistic “spectacular” demanded of the community by one or other of its primary divinities, usually the Earth goddess. To execute this “command performance” the community is represented by a small group of its members selected and secluded for months or even years for the sole purpose of erecting a befitting “home of images” filled to overflowing with sculptures and paintings in homage to the presiding god or goddess.
These representatives (called ndimgbe; sing.: onyemgbe), chosen to re-enact, as it were, the miracle of creation in its extravagant profusion, are always careful to disclaim all credit for making, which rightly belongs to gods; or even for initiating homage for what is made, which is the prerogative of the community. Ndimgbe are no more than vessels in which the gods place their gifts of creativity to mankind and in which the community afterwards make their token return of sacrifice and thanksgiving. As soon as their work is done behind the fence of their seclusion and they re-emerge into secular life, ndimgbe set about putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their recently executed works of art.
As Herbert Cole tells us in his study of this profound phenomenon:
A former onyemgbe fears that he might slip up and say, “Look, I did this figure.” If he [says] that, he has killed himself. The god that owns that work will kill him.1
This may sound strange and exotic to some ears, but I believe that it dramatizes a profoundly important aspect of the truth about art without which our understanding must remain seriously limited.
I am suggesting that what is at issue here is the principle which has come to be known as individualism and which has dominated the life and the psychology of the West in its modern history. The virtues of individualism are held to be universally beneficial but particularly so to the artist. John Plamenatz in his introduction to Man and Society separates the artist from the scholar in these words: “The artist ploughs his own furrow, the scholar, even in the privacy of his study, cultivates a common field.”
It has been said that the American Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the first to use the word “individualism” in the English language, rather approvingly, as a definition for the way of life which upholds the primacy of the individual. His definition was imbued with typically American optimistic faith. Emerson’s contemporary, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, was far less enthusiastic. In his book Democracy in America he used “individualism” pejoratively—as a threat to society. As it turned out, however, it was the vision defined by Emerson that carried the day not just in America but in the Western world generally, from where it has made and continues to make serious inroads into the lives of other peoples.
The phenomenal success of the West in the mastery of the natural world is one of the dominant facts of modern history. It is only natural to attribute this dazzling achievement to the ruling values of the West, and also to hold these values up to the rest of the world not just as values but as the right values. By and large the rest of the world has been increasingly inclined to be persuaded. But from time to time, in life as in literature, voices of doubt have also been heard.
In a crucial passage in the novel Ambiguous Adventure, by the Senegalese Muslim writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane, the hero, an African student of philosophy in Paris, is asked by his dinner host how the history of Western thought strikes an African. And his reply—in my view one of the highlights of that fine novel—is as follows:
It seems to me that this history has undergone an accident which has shifted it and, finally, drawn it away from its plan. Do you understand me? Socrates’s scheme of thinking does not seem to me, at bottom, different from that of Saint Augustine though there was Christ between them. The plan is the same, as far as Pascal. It is still the plan of all the thought
which is not occidental … I do not know. But don’t you feel as if the philosophical plan were already no longer the same with Descartes as with Pascal? It is not the mystery which has changed but the questions which are asked of it and the revelations which are expected from it. Descartes is more niggardly in his quest. If, thanks to this and also to his method, he obtains a greater number of responses, what he reports also concerns us less and is of little help to us.2
It may be thought over-bold, if not downright impertinent, for anyone, but more particularly for an African student, to describe Descartes, the very father of modern Western philosophy, as the cause of a gigantic philosophical accident. But there are undoubtedly good grounds for the proposition advanced here that if they should return to the world today Socrates—or his student Plato, whom we know better—and Augustine might find African communalism more congenial than Western individualism. The Republic, “conjured out of the ruins of fourth-century Athens,”3 was after all a grand design for the ordering of men in society; and The City of God a Christian reordering of society after the destruction of the Roman Empire by pagans. In other words, philosophy for Plato and Augustine, historically equidistant from Christ, was concerned with architectural designs for a better world.
Descartes, on the other hand, would probably become an American citizen if he should return. He had rejected the traditional contemplative ideal of philosophy and put in its place a new experimental rationalism and a mechanistic view of the physical world. He regarded science as a means of acquiring mastery over nature for the benefit of mankind and led the way himself with experiments in optics and physiology. But—and this perhaps more than all else makes him a true modern, Western man—he made the foundation of his philosophical edifice, including the existence of God, contingent on his own first person singular! Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am!
Perhaps it is the triumphant, breathtaking egocentrism of that declaration that occasionally troubles the non-Western mind, conscious as it must be of hierarchies above self; and so leads it to the brazen thought of a Western ontological accident.
But troubled though he may be, non-Western man is also, in spite of himself, dazzled by the technological marvels created by the West; by its ability to provide better than anybody else for man’s material needs. And so we find him going out to meet the West in a bid to find out the secret of its astonishing success or, if that proves too rigorous, then simply to taste its fruits.
The philosophical dialogue between the West and Africa has rarely been better presented than in Ambiguous Adventure. In the first part of the story the proud rulers of the Diallobe people—bearers of the crescent of Islam in the West African savannah for close upon a thousand years—are suffering the traumatic anguish of defeat by French imperial arms, and pondering what the future course of their life should be. Should they send their children to the new French school or not? After a long and anguished debate they finally opt for the school but not on the admission that their own institutions are in any way inferior to those of the French, nor on the aspiration that they should become like the French in due course, but rather on the tactical grounds only that they must learn from their new masters “the art of conquering without being in the right.”
The trouble with their decision, however, is that the children, these “wanderers on delicate feet” as the poet Senghor might have called them, these infant magi launched into an ambiguous journey with an ambivalent mandate to experience but not to become, are doomed from the start to distress and failure.
The hero of the novel, the deliverer-to-be and paragon of the new generation, returns from France a total spiritual wreck, his once vibrant sense of community hopelessly shattered. Summoned to assume the mantle of leadership, his tortured soul begs to be excused, to be left alone. “What have their problems to do with me?” he asks. “I am only myself. I have only me.” Poor fellow; the West has got him!
Western literature played a central role in promoting the ideal of individual autonomy. As Lionel Trilling pointed out, this literature has, in the last one hundred and fifty years, held “an intense and adverse imagination of the culture in which it has its being.” It promoted the view of society and of culture as a prisonhouse from which the individual must escape in order to find space and fulfilment.
But fulfilment is not, as people often think, uncluttered space or an absence of controls, obligations, painstaking exertion. No! It is actually a presence—a powerful demanding presence limiting the space in which the self can roam uninhibited; it is an aspiration by the self to achieve spiritual congruence with the other.
When people speak glibly of fulfilment they often mean self-gratification, which is easy, short-lived and self-centred. Like drugs, it has to be experienced frequently, preferably in increasing doses.
Fulfilment is other-centred, a giving or subduing of the self, perhaps to somebody, perhaps to a cause; in any event to something external to it. Those who have experienced fulfilment all attest to the reality of this otherness. For religious people the soul of man aspires to God for fulfilment. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and one of the greatest fathers of the early Christian Church, understood this very well, having led a life of self-centred pleasure in his youth. He found fulfilment and left his great prayer in testimony: “For thyself hast thou made us, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” Artists, scientists and scholars may find fulfilment in their creative work, humanitarians in their service. But even more important, ordinary men and women have found fulfilment in their closeness to others—to children, to parents, to wife or husband, to lover—and in social work of all kinds.
The French anthropologist O. Manoni wrote as follows about the Merina of Malagasy:
We do not find in him that disharmony almost amounting to conflict between the social being and the inner personality which is so frequently met with among the civilized.4
We must note in passing, but not be diverted by, Manoni’s typically occidentalist notion of civilization. The valuable part of his observation is that there is “disharmony almost amounting to conflict between the social being and the inner personality” in Western culture and, we may add, increasingly among its newly “civilized” and “civilizing” surrogates.
It was widely believed that this psychological disharmony, if not exactly desirable, was the inevitable price to be paid for the enormous advances made by the West in material wealth, in technology, in medicine, etc. Consequently the possibility that non-Western values might have insights to contribute to the process of modernization around the world was hardly even considered—until Japan.
In the area of literature, I recall that we have sometimes been informed by the West and its local zealots that the African novels we write are not novels at all because they do not quite fit the specifications of that literary form which came into being at a particular time in specific response to the new spirit of individual freedom set off by the decay of feudal Europe and the rise of capitalism. This form, we were told, was designed to explore individual rather than social predicaments.
As it happens the novel, even in its home of origin, has not behaved very well; it has always resisted the strait-jacket. What is more, being a robust art form, it has travelled indefatigably and picked up all kinds of strange habits!
Not so long ago the Czech writer Milan Kundera was reported as follows:
The novel is an investigation into human existence … [It] proclaims no truth, no morality … That is a job for others: leaders of political parties, presidents, terrorists, priests, revolutionaries and editorial writers. The novel came about at the beginning of modern times when man was discovering how hard it is to get at the truth and how relative human affairs really are.5
