The Education of a British-Protected Child (12 page)

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
.

I used the words “stage” and “auditorium” to describe the
mbari
house; let me explain. Indeed, the two side walls and the back wall encompassed a stage of sorts, comprising sculptures
and paintings as actors who, after long rehearsals, are ready to perform a new celebration of art, a command performance of the earth goddess for the people assembled. But I believe the event does invite a second way of apprehension, in which the roles of stage and audience are reversed and those still and silent dignitaries of molded earth seated on the steps, and the paintings on the walls of the royal pavilion, became the spectators, and the world below a lively stage.

The problem some of my colleagues had in Dublin with the word “celebration” may have arisen, I suspect, from too narrow a perspective on it.
Mbari
extends the view, opens it out to meanings beyond the mere remembering of blessings or happy events; it deliberately sets out to include other experiences—indeed, all significant encounters which man has in his journey through life, especially new, unaccustomed, and thus potentially threatening encounters.

For example, when Europe made its appearance in Igbo society out of travelers’ tales into the concrete and alarming shape of the domineering district officer, the artists of
mbari
quickly gave him a seat among the molded figures, complete with his peaked helmet and pipe. Sometimes, they even made room for his iron horse, or bicycle, and his native police orderly. To the Igbo mentality, art must, among other uses, provide a means to domesticate that which is wild; it must act like the lightning conductor which arrests destructive electrical potentials and channels them harmlessly to earth. The Igbo insist that any presence which is ignored, denigrated, denied acknowledgment and celebration, can become a focus for anxiety and disruption. To them, celebration is the acknowledgment,
not the welcoming, of a presence. It is the courtesy of giving to everybody his due.

Therefore, the celebration of
mbari
was no blind adoration of a perfect world or even a good world. It was an acknowledgment of the world as these particular inhabitants perceived it in reality, in their dreams and their imagination. The white district officer was obviously not a matter for laughing or dancing. But he was not alone in that. Consider another disquieting presence: a man whose body was covered from head to toe with the spots of smallpox, a disease so dreaded that it was deified and was alluded to only in quiet, deferential tones of appeasement; it was called the Decorator of its victims, not their killer. As for the woman depicted in copulation with a dog, was there much to choose, as oddities go, between her and the white man?

I offer
mbari
as one illustration of my precolonial inheritance—of art as celebration of my reality; of art in its social dimension; of the creative potential in all of us; and of the need to exercise this latent energy again and again in artistic expression and communal, cooperative enterprises.

And now I come to what I have chosen to call my Middle Passage, my colonial inheritance. To call my colonial experience an inheritance may surprise some people. But everything is grist to the mill of the artist. True, one grain may differ from another in its powers of nourishment; still, we must, in the manner of those incomparable artists of
mbari
, accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way.

It is not my intention, however, to engage in a detailed evaluation of the colonial experience, but merely to ask what possibility,
what encouragement, there could be in this episode of our history for the celebration of our own world, for the singing of the song of ourselves, in the loud, insistent world and song of others.

Colonization may indeed be a very complex affair, but one thing is certain: you do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honor. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and nobody wants to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man you dispossessed is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold or diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you prove that he doesn’t own them in the real sense of the word—that he and they just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally, if the worse should come to the worst, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. It is only a few steps from denying the presence of a man standing there before you to questioning his very humanity. Therefore the agenda of the colonist did not, could not, make provision for the celebration of the world of the colonized; not even celebration of the guarded and problematic kind accorded by Africa to the white man’s presence in the art of
mbari
.

I have used the word “presence” quite a few times already. Now I want to suggest that in the colonial situation “presence” was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the
keynote of colonialist ideology.
Question:
Were there people there?
Answer:
Well … not really, you know … people of sorts, perhaps, but not as you and I understand the word.

From the period of the slave trade, through the age of colonization to the present day, the catalogue of what Africa and Africans have been said not to have or not to be is a pretty extensive list. Churchmen at some point wondered about the soul itself. Did the black man have a soul? Popes and theologians debated that for a while. Lesser attributes such as culture and religion were debated extensively by others and generally ruled out as far as Africa was concerned. African history seemed unimaginable except, perhaps, for a few marginal places like Ethiopia, where Gibbon tells us of a short burst of activity followed from the seventh century by one thousand years in which Ethiopia fell into a deep sleep—“forgetful of the world by whom she was forgot,” to use his own famous phrase.

With Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius professor of history at Oxford in our own time, no bursts of light, no matter how brief, have ever illuminated the dark sky of the Dark Continent. A habit of generosity to Africa has not grown since Gibbon’s time; on the contrary, it seems to have diminished. If we shift our focus from history to literature, we find the same hardening of attitude.

In
The Tempest
, Caliban is not specifically African; but he is the quintessential colonial subject created by Shakespeare’s genius at the very onset of Europe’s age of expansion. To begin with, Caliban knew not his own meaning but “wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish.” However, Shakespeare restores
humanity to him in many little ways, but especially by giving him not just speech but great poetry to speak before the play’s end. Contrast this with Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
three hundred years later. His Calibans make “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” and go on making it right through the novel. Generosity has not prospered.

So these African creatures have no soul, no religion, no culture, no history, no human speech, no I.Q. Any wonder, then, that they should be subjugated by those who are endowed with these human gifts?

A character in John Buchan’s famous colonial novel
Prester John
has this to say:

John Buchan, by the way, was a very senior colonial administrator and a novelist. One suspects he knew his terrain. So let us add to our long list of absences this last item—the absence of responsibility. If we should now draw a line under this list and add up all the absences reported from Africa, our grand total would equal one great absence of the Human Mind and Spirit.

I am not quite certain whether all the field workers who
reported those absences genuinely believed their report or whether it was some kind of make-believe, the kind of desperate alibi we might expect a man of conscience arraigned for a serious crime to put together. It is significant, for example, that the moment when churchmen began to doubt the existence of the black man’s soul was the same moment the black man’s body was fetching high prices in the marketplace for their mercantilist cousins and parishioners.

But it is also possible that these reporters actually came to believe their own stories—such was the complex psychology of the imperial vocation. The picture of Africa and Africans which they carried in their minds did not grow there adventitiously, but was planted and watered by careful social, mental, and educational husbandry. In an important study of this phenomenon, Philip Curtin tells us that Europe’s image of Africa which began to emerge in the 1870s

Conrad’s famous novel
Heart of Darkness
, first published in 1899, portrays Africa as a place where the wandering European may discover that the dark impulses and unspeakable appetites he has suppressed and forgotten through ages of civilization
may spring back into life in Africa’s environment of free and triumphant savagery. In one striking passage, Conrad reveals a very interesting aspect of the question of presence. It is the scene where a French gunboat is sitting on the water and firing rockets into the mainland. Conrad’s intention, high-minded as usual, is to show the futility of Europe’s action in Africa: