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In 1966, Nigeria’s first military coup triggered a countercoup and then a series of horrendous massacres of Igbo people in Hausa-speaking northern Nigeria. A famous educationist well known for his opposition to the continued use of English in Nigeria wrote in a Lagos newspaper offering the incredible suggestion that if all Nigerians had spoken one language the killings would not have happened. And he went further, to ask the Nigerian army to impose Hausa on Nigeria as its lingua franca. Fortunately, people were too busy coping with the threat of disintegration facing the country to pay serious attention to his bizarre suggestion. But I could not resist writing a brief rejoinder in which I reminded him that the thousands who had been killed did in fact speak excellent Hausa.
The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.
The politics Ngugi plays with language is of a different order. It is a direct reflection of a slowly perfected Manichean vision of the world. He sees but one “great struggle between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand and a resistance tradition on the other.” Flowing nicely from this unified vision, Africa’s language problems resolve themselves into European languages, sponsored and foisted on the people by imperialism, and African languages, defended by patriotic and progressive forces of peasants and workers.
To demonstrate how this works out in practice, Ngugi gives us a moving vignette of how the enemy interfered with his mother tongue in his “Limuru peasant community”:
I was born in a large peasant family: father, four wives and about twenty-eight children… We spoke Gikuyu as we worked in the fields.2
The reader is given nearly two pages of this pastoral idyll of linguistic and social harmony in which stories are told around the fire at the end of the day. Even at school, young Ngugi is taught in Kikuyu, in which he excels to the extent of winning an infant ovation for his composition in that language. Then the imperialists struck, in 1952, and declared a state of emergency in Kenya; and Ngugi’s world is brutally shattered.
All the schools run by patriotic nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all others had to bow before it in deference.3
A really heartrending scenario, but also a scenario strewn with fatal snags for the single-minded. I had warned about this danger in one of the earliest statements I ever made in my literary career—that those who would canonize our past must serve also as the devil’s advocate, setting down beside the glories every inconvenient fact. Unfortunately, Ngugi is too good a partisan to do this double duty. So he files the totally untenable report that imperialists imposed the English language on the patriotic peasants of Kenya as recently as 1952! What about the inconvenient fact that already in the 1920s and 1930s
the Kikuyu Independent Schools, which were started by the Kikuyu after their rift with the Scottish missionaries, taught in English [my italics] instead of the vernacular even in the first grade.4
Inconvenient though it may be, the scenario before us here is of imperialist agents (in the shape of Scottish missionaries) desiring to teach Kikuyu children in their mother tongue, while the patriotic Kikuyu peasants are revolting and breaking away because they prefer English!
What happened in Kenya also happened in the rest of the empire. Neither in India nor in Africa did the English seriously desire to teach their language to the natives. When the historic and influential Phelps-Stokes Commission report in West Africa in 1922 favored the native tongue over English, its recommendations were eagerly picked up by the official British Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa.5
In Nigeria, the demand for English was already there in the coastal regions as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. A definitive study of the work of Christian missions in Nigeria from Professor J.F.A. Ajay reports that in the Niger Delta in the 1850s, the missionary teachers were already “obliged to cater for the demand … for the knowledge of the English language.”6
In Calabar by 1876, some of the chiefs were not satisfied with the amount of English their children were taught in missionary schools and were hiring private tutors at a very high fee. Nowhere in all this can we see the slightest evidence of the simple scenario painted by Ngugi of European imperialism forcing its language down the throats of unwilling natives. In fact, imperialism’s ways with language were extremely complex.
If imperialism was not to blame, or not entirely to blame, for the presence of European languages in Africa today, who, then, is the culprit? Ourselves? Our parents? Awkward as it may be, we should be bold enough to contemplate it and deal with it once and for all, if we can, and move on. We will discover, I am afraid, that the only reason these alien languages are still knocking about is that they serve an actual need.
No African in our recent history fought imperialism more doggedly or presided over a more progressive regime than Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana did. And yet we are told that
during the Nkrumah era, political leaders demonstrated considerable concern over the possible divisive impact of a mother tongue policy. Although English is a language alien to Ghana they saw it as the best vehicle for achieving national communication and social and political unification.7
But there was a practical difficulty even more urgent than the above: the problem Ghana faced in teaching mother tongues when ethnic mixing had reached significant levels in urban and rural schools as a result of modern internal migrations. Already by 1956 the Bernard Committee had found that schools where the pupils spoke a single mother tongue were far fewer than schools in which more than five languages were represented in fair numbers. The simple consequence of this is that if the policy of teaching in mother tongues were to be enforced, the schools concerned would have to hire more than five teachers for every class. (This was at the 1956 level of ethnic mixing in Ghana. The situation today would be considerably more difficult. Unless Ghana were to reinvent bantustans and send every child back to his homeland!)
It would seem, then, that the culprit in Africa’s language difficulties was not imperialism, as Ngugi would have us believe, but the linguistic pluralism of modern African states. No doubt this will explain the strange fact that the Marxist states in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, have been the most forthright in adopting the languages of their former colonial rulers—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and most lately Burkina Faso, whose minister of culture once said with a retrospective shudder that the sixty ethnic groups in that country could mean sixty different nationalities.
This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history.
There is no cause for writers to join their ranks.
1989
African Literature as Restoration of Celebration
Many years ago, I was one of a dozen or so foreign guests at a symposium organized by the Irish Arts Council to commemorate one millennium of the City of Dublin. The general theme of that event was “literature as celebration.”
Some of my colleagues, as I well recall, appeared to have difficulty with that proposition. But I, for my part
, found it almost perfect for my own use; it rendered in a simple form of words a truth about art which resonated with my traditional inheritance and at the same time satisfied my personal taste in the matter. The brief paper I presented on that occasion was the germ of these reflections on African literature, a body of writing which in our lifetime has added an important dimension to world literature.
But before I start on that new literary phenomenon, I should like to repeat a disclaimer I made in Dublin. On the morning of my presentation, The Irish Times carried a prominent story in which a very kind columnist referred to me as the man who invented African literature. So I took the opportunity of the forum given me at the symposium to dissociate myself from that well-meant but blasphemous characterization. Now, before anyone runs away with the idea that my disavowal was due to modesty on my part, I should declare right away that I am actually not a very modest man (a fact which probably would have become transparent before very long). No, my disclaimer was an instinctive genuflection to an artistic taboo among my people, a prohibition—on pain of being finished off rather quickly by the gods—from laying proprietary hands on even the smallest item in that communal enterprise in creativity which my people, the Igbo of Nigeria, undertook from time to time, and to which they gave the name mbari. Mbari was a celebration, through art, of the world and of the life lived in it. It was performed by the community on command by its presiding deity, usually the earth goddess, Ala or Ana. Ala combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of the moral order in human society. An abominable act is called nso-ana, “taboo to earth.”
Once every so often, and in her absolute discretion, this goddess would instruct the community through divination to build a home of images in her honor. The diviner would travel through the village and knock on the doors of those chosen by Ana for her work. These chosen people were then blessed and separated from the larger community in a ritual with more than a passing resemblance to their own death and funeral. Thereafter, they moved into the forest and, behind a high fence and under the instruction and supervision of master artists and craftsmen, they constructed a temple of art.
Architecturally, it was a simple structure, a stage formed by three high walls supporting a peaked roof; but in place of a flat floor you had a deck of steps running from one side wall to the other and rising almost to the roof at the back wall. This auditorium was then filled to the brim with sculptures in molded earth and clay, and the walls painted with murals in white, black, yellow, and green. The sculptures were arranged in appropriate postures on the steps. At the center of the front row sat the earth goddess herself, a child on her left knee and a raised sword in her right hand. She is mother and judge.
To her right and left, other deities took their places. Human figures were also there, as were animals (perhaps a leopard dragging the carcass of a goat); figures from folklore, history, or pure fantasy; forest scenes, scenes of village and domestic life; everyday events, abnormal scandals; set pieces from past displays of mbari, new images making their debut—everything jostled together for space in that extraordinary convocation of the entire kingdom of human experience and imagination.
When all was ready, after months, or sometimes even years, of preparation, the makers of mbari, who had been working in complete seclusion, sent word to the larger community. A day was chosen for the unveiling and celebration of the work with music and dancing and feasting in front of the house of mbari.
