Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

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Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 24

by J. M. Coetzee


  The dismay of the NEH administrators was not without cause. There is a certain self-righteousness, a certain relentlessly needling tone to Mazrui’s presentation. On the other hand, perhaps it is time for the West to accept that almost any African intellectual, asked to speak about Africa, will speak about a continent abused, exploited and patronised by foreigners, an Africa still living in the aftershock of colonialism, bitter, angry and suspicious. If Africa is the most peripheral of the continents to the interests of the West (save Antarctica, perhaps), the West is not at all peripheral to Africa and has not been for centuries. What the West has thought of Africa has had a great deal to do with how Africans have lived their lives and died their deaths. This situation did not end when the British and French and Portuguese pulled out, or when the last colonies – the internal colonies run by the whites of southern Africa – fell. So Mazrui’s The Africans may usefully be seen as another shot in the continuing anti-colonial war, a shot for which (in an irony Africans will appreciate) the colonialists have this time footed the bill.

  One of the aspects of the series about which NEH expressed its displeasure is the absence of any voice to gainsay Mazrui’s. Of the nine hours’ worth of Africa we see, every minute is interpreted to us by a single commentator. Other Africans certainly get a chance to talk, but they talk only to exhibit how they talk in their everyday lives. They are simply characters in a story Mazrui is telling; they are not permitted to address the greater issues.

  What might a counter-voice to Mazrui’s say, if there were true dialogue in this production? The sequence on the Ivory Coast will provide a good example. Mazrui takes us on a tour of the new, modernistic capital city. No human face is to be seen: against a background of soft, eerie music, the camera tracks across empty streets from one stark building to another. The message: President Houphuet-Boigny has been overtaken by delusions of grandeur, he is squandering his nation’s resources, his mind has been colonised by mechanical Western fantasies, what he has built is not an authentic African city but a façade, an illusion, even a nightmare.

  It is easy enough to imagine an entirely different narrative, backed by different images – jets taking off and landing at Abidjan airport, a busy dockside, the bustle of commerce in the streets, well-fed, lively children saying their lessons, smiling workers assembling consumer goods, farmers hoeing their fields – while a smooth voice-over coaxes us along with facts and figures – rising GNP, rising literacy, declining infant mortality – all of which would ‘prove’ (is seeing not believing?) that the Ivory Coast is a haven of stability and prosperity on a continent elsewhere collapsing into chaos.

  Which is the true story: the official one, or Mazrui’s story that the Ivory Coast is a mere French outpost run by a black puppet and a clique of cronies for their personal aggrandisement? History – to which Mazrui, in his writings and in this film, will have made a contribution – will decide. All I point to here is that the Ivory Coast and Africa in general, including those countries like Tanzania and Zimbabwe of whose political direction Mazrui approves, will provide a veritable treasure hoard of images to support either political position. The camera has no ideology: it will lie on behalf of whoever points it and presses the button; it will lie even more persuasively when there is the right music in the background.

  What we mean when we say that Africa is a continent of contrasts is in fact that Africa is particularly rich in contradictory images: images of joy, images of woe. Mazrui picks and chooses his images to suit his case. His case is that behind the smart neo-colonialist façade created by Africa’s strongmen lies another Africa of potholed roads, derelict factories, empty schools, rundown clinics, decayed buildings, gutted cars, dead radios, dry taps; but that behind this moribund Africa there lies yet another Africa, the old Africa of sturdy, self-reliant peasants, respected elders, tight family ties, deeply ingrained myths and observances, out of which, one day, the true Africa of the future will be born.

  This faith in old Africa marks Mazrui as receptive to the school of thought known once as Négritude and later as Black Consciousness, a school of thought that urges people of African descent to rediscover their ancestral origins and build upon their authentic African foundations, rather than give themselves to Western-style individualism and materialism. The Black Consciousness critique is directed not only at an exploitative outside world but at the prevailing order in Africa itself, starting at the top: at politicians who have lost touch with the forces of tradition and rely for support on a rootless, demoralised, urban lumpen populace; at ambitious military men in love with their Western toys of destruction; but also, further down the social scale, at hunters who have lost touch with the old feelings of reciprocity toward animals and who slaughter Africa’s wild life for profit; at woodcutters to whom destroying the forest is no longer sacrilege; at women who ape Western standards of beauty.

  In the strictest sense of the word, this is a conservative critique. It rests on a belief that, before the catastrophic impact of colonialism in the nineteenth century, African societies functioned well, relying, behind the institution of chieftainship, on a uniquely African system of checks and balances which the West has never taken the trouble to understand; and that the great task now facing Africa is, first, to weather the last shock-waves of the colonial onslaught, and then slowly to begin rebuilding on the foundations of the old heritage, until Africa is at last restored as the one truly humanistic society on earth. ‘You are not a country, Africa, you are a glimpse of infinity,’ says Mazrui; Africans are ‘people of the day before yesterday, potentially people of the day after tomorrow’.

  The position Mazrui takes here clearly lays him open to the charge that he romanticises old Africa, claiming for the continent a cultural unity that has no basis in reality (‘Before slavery we were all one huge village called Africa,’ he says) and espousing policies that will simply delay Africa’s economic take-off even further. But Black Consciousness has a great deal to do with black pride; and it is a moot point whether Africa can be a serious participant in world affairs as long as African self-esteem remains low. To this extent the Black Consciousness project – of which I take Mazrui’s The Africans, in its general thrust, to be representative – may in fact have a quite pragmatic purpose.

  Black Consciousness rejects as a vicious caricature the picture of Africa in the old Tarzan movies: childish and superstitious jungle folk in the thrall of bloodthirsty chiefs and sly witchdoctors, people with no arts or crafts worth mentioning, ignorant of the simplest science. It justifiably calls this caricature part of a colonialist plot to show that colonialism liberated the natives from forces of benightedness. In Mazrui’s series we see instead many of the technological and artistic achievements of precolonial Africa: iron-smelting and forging, architecture, masks and statuary. But the real emphasis falls on Africa’s resilient social substructure, on the bonds which hold people together and have held them together through generations of adversity.

  The case that Mazrui makes against mere imitation of the West, the case for a uniquely African road to the future, is an appealing one. It has appealed particularly to intellectuals in Africa and the African diaspora. But there are some hard questions it has to face. One is this: unless it imports Western technology on a large scale, and along with Western technology the problem-solving Western outlook, Western materialism and Western values, can Africa hope for anything but economic stagnation, which, coupled with a fast-rising birth rate, will mean that the future promises not a return to Eden but to a hell of disease and starvation?

  Mazrui’s answer is that Africa must import wisely, adapting Western techniques and values so that they become authentically African. As examples, he points to what Africa has done with Islam and to a lesser extent with Christianity. He does not face up to the likelihood that Western science and technology may unavoidably come in a package with rationalism, materialism, Western-style economics, the profit motive, the cult of the individual, the nuclear family and much else un-African.
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  Mazrui himself was brought up in the Islamic tradition. One of the facts he stresses (to the surprise of most Westerners, I would guess) is that Islam is Africa’s principal religion. In the scenes he gives from Islamic societies, we see religion closely woven into the texture of daily life. In scenes of Christian worship, on the contrary, what we see seem to be European rather than African ceremonies, stiff and dour, performed by black men in European costume. We also see one abandoned, dilapidated Christian church after another. If Christianity is not to die out in Africa, warns Mazrui, it must identify with African aspirations, as churchmen in South Africa did in identifying with the liberation struggle, or as independent African sects have done in breaking free of European control and developing their own syncretic rituals.

  Upsetting though the news may be to the West that Christianity in Africa is on the decline, it is news that ought to be heard. What may make the news doubly hard to stomach is that the messenger who brings it has little good to say about the entire mission enterprise. The West remembers its missionaries as, by and large, selfless men and women who did their quiet bit for brotherhood and light. To Mazrui, on the contrary, missionaries, whatever their personal qualities, simply acted as the propaganda wing of the colonial army of occupation, undermining the ancestral religions which held societies together, admonishing Africans to turn the other cheek whenever they were struck, providing the kind of rudimentary education that fitted African children for lives as clerks and underlings. From the film archives he unearths an old clip showing teenage African girls, clad from neck to knee in drab, shapeless smocks, dancing a Scottish reel. That, suggests Mazrui, was mission education: at its best absurd, at its worst viciously anti-African.

  No doubt the image of the Victorian missionary in his black serge suit toiling under the African sun to turn his African charges into stiff, repressed imitation Westerners has a ludicrous side to it. But were the missionaries not achieving much that they and their political masters never intended? Those parents who decided to take what the mission schools had to offer saw their children advance fastest and furthest under the colonial system, while those with the independence of mind to remain on the outside often got left behind. Mazrui’s sympathies clearly lie with the latter: he devotes a long sequence to the Ashanti of Ghana, who tenaciously resisted cultural penetration and as a result preserved their traditional forms of government to an unusual degree. But the Ashanti have as a result been marginalised in the politics of modern Ghana; while the young men who received their first education in the mission schools went on to create the instruments (the political parties and trade unions) which expelled the colonialists.

  There are moments when Mazrui comes close to rejecting an educational policy whose broad purpose would be to bring the young African into world culture (which, the distribution of power being what it is, is inescapably Western culture), endorsing instead the criterion that all education must be relevant to the problems of present-day Africa. There is even a moment when he seems to advocate for young people the kind of training in practical skills that, under the name Bantu Education, was foisted on to Africans – and rejected by Africans – in South Africa in the 1950s.

  Though a great deal of Mazrui’s time is devoted to the past, and to an exposé of what colonialism actually did to Africa, the question at the heart of the series is: what should Africa do now? What distinguishes Mazrui’s answers from those of other commentators is the time perspective he grants himself. Africa will certainly have to adapt, he says, but we cannot even imagine what form the adaptations will take, so long and complex will the process be. Africans have a genius for adaptation, so we can be optimistic; but Africa must beware of taking any short cuts that will entail the loss of its essence; for Africa without its African essence will be no more than a lifeless, inauthentic parody of the West.

  What is the essence of Africa? It is to be found, first, says Mazrui, in a certain anti-metaphysical body of thought and feeling that he calls ‘the theology of nearness’, in which gods, ancestors, living creatures and the great earth itself are all bound together in the same realm of being; and, second, in social structures based on the family (‘We in Africa invented the family’). This essence will be betrayed if Africa gives in to the ‘culture of violence’ that its armies have picked up from the West, or if its soul is colonised by Western-style consumerism, or if the family itself breaks down under the pressures of urbanisation, loss of parental authority, easy morals, crime, drugs and alcohol, or perhaps even if African women allow themselves to be drawn away from their traditional role to become typists in the cities (though Mazrui acknowledges sexism to be ‘a problem engulfing the whole of Africa’, there is a degree of veiled sexism in his glorification of African woman as ‘custodian of fire, protector of the fertility of the earth’, that is, as the person who must fetch firewood and take care of the garden).

  All in all, The Africans presents a picture of a turbulent, confused, but exciting Africa, facing material and spiritual problems compared with which the problems of the West pale into insignificance. Because of the range of its coverage and because of its trenchancy (what NEH might call its dogmatism), the picture captures and holds our attention.

  What must be said as well, however, is that The Africans is clearly the brainchild of a social scientist, not a poet. There is an all-important facet of Africa that is entirely missing from it. I refer neither to what is called the romance of Africa (tall Masai leaning on their spears, staring into the distance), nor to the mystery of Africa, but to the experience of African personality. In nine hours of film I can recollect no moment of intimacy with any of the thousands of people who pass before our eyes. Starving children are seen by the camera simply as examples of starving children, market-sellers as examples of market-sellers, and so forth. The camera never lingers, never explores, seems utterly uninquisitive about the unique personal identity behind the exterior. It is as though the series were telling us that Africans have no souls, or that their souls are unimportant. The only African we truly meet is Ali Mazrui himself, and then only Mazrui the public man.

  A final observation. From Africa came the music of the New World; and the music of the New World has, in the twentieth century, conquered the rest of the world. Why, in a series devoted to Africa, is the background music not African but European? Would the Mau-Mau ever have believed that one day a Kenyan would be telling their story to the accompaniment of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings?

  21 The Poems of Thomas Pringle

  THOMAS PRINGLE WAS born in 1789 into a family of Scottish farmers. An admirer of Burns and an enthusiastic participant in the Scottish literary revival, he tried but failed to find a niche for himself in the small Edinburgh literary world. When in 1819 the British government announced an aid scheme for emigrants to the Cape Colony, he, together with most of the Pringle family, enlisted; a year later they were settled on the Colony’s inhospitable eastern frontier.

  Dismayed by conditions on the frontier, Pringle did not remain a farmer for long. Through the intervention of patrons he found a position as librarian in the colonial administration in Cape Town, and there started the colony’s first newspaper. His activities soon brought him into conflict with the authoritarian Governor, Sir Charles Somerset: at issue was his right to publish information embarrassing to the administration. Though he eventually won his case, he lost his job. In 1826 he returned to Britain. There, till his death in 1834, he was a prominent figure in the anti-slavery movement.

  Pringle holds an honourable if minor place in South African history as proponent of a free press and as part of a pressure group in Britain which prodded a series of unwilling colonial administrations towards accepting the principle of broad legal rights for the Crown’s African subjects. He also has a minor reputation as a Scottish literary figure, the author of a body of sweetly flowing but rather facile nature poetry.

  His main claim to fame, however, is as the founding father of English language poetry in South Afri
ca. It is a claim based on his Poems illustrative of South Africa, which was published in more or less final form in 1834 (versions had appeared earlier). Some of these poems – for instance, ‘Afar in the Desert’ – soon became popular anthology pieces.

  Can this Scot who spent a bare six years in Africa be considered a South African poet? Yes, say Pringle’s most recent editors, Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman, and give their edition the bold title African Poems of Thomas Pringle.1 The poems they reproduce consist of the forty-odd poems of Poems Illustrative of South Africa, plus miscellaneous verses composed in South Africa and some rhymes for children written as anti-slavery propaganda. But their case for an African identity for Pringle is not based solely on the African content of these poems. Pringle’s poetry should be read, they argue, not in isolation but as part of a larger text including his prose writings (of which his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa [1834] is the most substantial) and even the historical text constituted by his life. ‘It is our knowledge of Pringle and his situation,’ they write, ‘of the historical and physical setting, of the particular circumstances or events which inform and prompt his responses, that gives his poems significance.’ (p. xxi) ‘It is the consistency of his engagement with real concerns in this country [i.e., South Africa] that lends substance to his writing.’ (p. xxiii)

  We are not suggesting that Pringle simply transcends his time, but that his poems offer loci of interest, experience and debate that continue to have currency in South African social and literary life. Instead of measuring his style against the ‘invention’ of his great Romantic contemporaries and finding him wanting, we may begin to see Pringle’s shifts between the indigenous phrase and the Augustan poeticism, between the exile’s lament and the local commitment, as part of his valid attempt to find his own voice in utterly strange surroundings. (p. xxiv)

 

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