African Literatures in English

East and West

Gareth Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317895848
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Here is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.

Part One

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PATRONAGES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF EAST AND WEST AFRICAN ENGLISH WRITING

Chapter 1

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Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives of the Black Diaspora

The earliest forms of writing in English by black Africans were the narratives of the slaves captured and transported by the European slave-traders who thronged to the West African coast in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The masters of these slaves were only rarely concerned with the welfare of their charges, and in the plantation context of much slavery during the period the relationship of slave and master involved only the most limited association and the most cursory of language exchanges. Nevertheless such exchanges formed the basis for a powerful subversive language known as ‘massa talk’. This referred to the way the black slaves hid a rebellious meaning beneath a deliberately obsequious and naive response to their ‘massa’. Whilst it would certainly be more than ironic to see these brutal exploiters as cultural patrons, it might at least be said that they provided the first forced contacts between enslaved Africans and the language of their new masters in the slave plantations.

But not all Africans sold as slaves ended up as plantation hands. Many slaves in the eighteenth century, in particular those who were sold to owners in Europe, or who ended up in the northern states of the USA, occupied a role which was as much decorative as functional. In such an environment their symbolic purpose was dominant. As David Dabydeen has argued, the African slave’s social role in eighteenth-century Britain was not unlike that of the domestic dwarf or jester of earlier periods. They offset the condition of the dominant master, and emphasised his or her privileged being. In portraits of the time black slaves often shared the same role and the same iconography as domestic pets such as dogs and parrots.¹ In this context the ability of these slaves to engage in such ‘human’ activities as speech, writing, music-making and other artistic forms functioned parodically. These transplanted and dislocated human beings, deprived of their indigenous cultural contexts, their language and even their names, were reconstituted as figures occupying a profoundly ambiguous expressive space. The ability of privileged, domestic slaves to speak and write English was seen as a charming diversion, and so tolerated. But slave-owners who used slaves as work objects and chattels perceived their ability to speak, let alone write, English as a threat to be discouraged. One of the most significant of such early African slave narratives, that of Olaudah Equiano, records how on the occasion of his sale by the ‘liberal’ Captain Pascal, who had taught him to speak and write English, his new owner’s reaction to Equiano’s vocal assertion of his rights was to tell him that he ‘talked too much English’. It is significant too that the liberal Pascal had no qualms in selling Equiano to the far less liberal Captain Doran.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, before the institution of slavery was widely or seriously questioned, the interest in African narratives was often a consequence of the wider Enlightenment interest in the beau sauvage. It was the product of the success of earlier representations of the noble savage, such as Mrs Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoka (1688). By the mid-eighteenth century this interest had led to a flourishing genre in both England and on the Continent of what the French termed romans africains.

The development of a strong emancipationist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave a fresh and different impetus to the production of such narratives. Slaves, some of whom had succeeded in obtaining their freedom by purchase, or as a gesture of liberality on the part of emancipationist owners, were frequently engaged by the anti-slavery movement to produce accounts of their travail and suffering. Some of these accounts, for example those of Briton Hammon (1760), James Gronniosaw (c. 1770), or Venture Smith (1798), are ghosted accounts, versions of their lives ‘as told to’ a literate European writer. The role of the amanuensis in such accounts, and the degree to which they intervened in the construction of the text, makes the authenticity of these texts rather questionable.² Such was the demand for such narratives in the period, however, that, as Philip D. Curtin has noted:

The nature of European curiosity has itself given a peculiar bias to the body of surviving narratives. In the eighteenth century, the romantic view of the noble savage aroused the European interest in Africans – if they were thought to have had high status in their own societies. Later, in the nineteenth century, the romantic interest in Africa was replaced by the humanitarian concern of the anti-slave movement. Both motives, however, prompted Europeans not only to record slave narratives, but also to manufacture them out of whole cloth. In all, European writers probably have set down more fictitious accounts of Africans in the slave trade than the whole body of genuine narratives.³

It is against this background that we need to consider the genuine narratives by slaves who wrote in the tongue of their new masters and mistresses. These texts are a witness to the diligence, strength of character and skill of their authors, and also to their ability to negotiate the requirements of their patrons and their audience. This negotiation with the power of existing patronage structures led to the complex rhetoric of such early writing as the letters of Philip Quaque (c. 1750–1816), the belles-lettres of Ignatius Sancho (1782), and the poetry and letters of the freed slave Phillis Wheatley (1793).⁴ The degree to which the patronage of their liberal masters exercised a controlling influence, directly or indirectly, over the content and form of these early slave narratives varies from text to text.

The Letters of Ignatius Sancho (1782), for example, contain little internal evidence of a tension between his identity as an African and the requirements of the eighteenth-century belles-lettres tradition into which he fitted with seeming ease. Many eighteenth-century slaves had left Africa at so young an age as to be effectively European in their culture. Ignatius Sancho, for example, was brought to England from the West Indies as a child, and his culture was, as a result, ‘completely Western’.⁵ Sancho’s prose is a direct imitation of the eighteenth-century style and themes he had been taught to admire and reproduce. It contains no internal evidence that it was written by an African, nor does he show any concern with recording his experiences as a transported slave.

The Poetry and Prose of Phillis Wheatley (1773), on the other hand, poses a more complex case. Like Sancho she was born in Africa in or about 1753, and arrived in America as a child of about seven years old in 1761. Unlike him she appears to have retained a conscious memory of her place of origin, though she refers to it only infrequently in her poetry:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway.⁶

Despite the kind of passage quoted above, earlier critics, operating with the purity of criteria which perhaps only hindsight can provide, have seen her work as lacking sympathy with her people’s struggle for freedom. It has also been criticised for being over-dependent in style and subject matter on conventional eighteenth-century American and English literary texts. However, modern editors have argued that she retains, through her imagery, links with the religious and cultural practices of her African origins and that her poetry contains powerful images of freedom.⁷

More convincing is the argument that Wheatley’s conscious choice of the elegiac form and the strong emphasis in her poetry on the pleasures of the after-life are a poetic means of ‘escaping an unsatisfactory, temporal world’, in line with the long religious tradition of black American writing and of the Negro spiritual.⁸ The Christian elegy, with its conventional themes of the after-life as a freedom attained by the Christian soul after earthly suffering, offers the chance for an imagery of spiritual freedom, earthly enslavement, and metaphorical chains and fetters which incorporates the deeper longings of the young African poetess:

He sought the paths of piety and truth,

By these made happy from his early youth!

In blooming years that grace divine he felt,

Which rescues sinners from the chains of guilt. (231)

No doubt the expectations of the liberal slave-owners, among whom she lived and died, prevented any more explicit exploration of these themes. The texts produced under such controlling patronages frequently contain a potential for subversive themes which cannot fully be realised, and the temporary privilege which literature affords such figures is frequently a fleeting one, as it was for Wheatley, who died in poverty and neglect, despite the international acclaim which had followed the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral in London in 1773.

The authorship and authenticity of Ottobah Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery (1787) has been the subject of considerable controversy since it is written in two quite obviously distinctive styles. It has been suggested that only the sections which recount the capture of the young Cuguano were written by him. It has also been suggested that Olaudah Equiano, a close friend of Cuguano, read the text very closely, and may have had a hand in re-writing parts of it. The most likely case is that Cuguano wrote the whole account, and that, like Sancho, when he writes in ‘high style’, to present his historical and theological case against slavery, he is simply demonstrating his mastery of the appropriate style for such a subject within eighteenth-century conventions of decorum.⁹ There is little doubt, though, that it is the more personal sections that a modern reader finds most attractive and informative:

I was early snatched away from my native country, with about eighteen or twenty more boys and girls, as we were playing in a field. We lived but a few days journey from the coast where we were kidnapped, and as we were decoyed and drove along, we were soon conducted to a factory, and from thence, in the fashionable way of traffic, consigned to Grenada.¹⁰

He also provides a number of accounts of life in the village from which he had been snatched. The details he gives suggest that he was older than some of the other slaves, and able to recall his early experiences in ways which they do not. For this reason it is to be greatly regretted that the bulk of his work is a long treatise against slavery, and that even the short accounts he offers of his life before capture are prefaced by an apology: ‘perhaps it may not be amiss to give a few remarks, as some account of myself, in this transposition of captivity’ (48). The primary concern of his anti-slavery patrons was, of course, with his arguments against emancipation. However conventional these were, the very fact that they had been written by an African was itself a proof of the wrongness of the treatment of slaves as not human. Understandable as this is, it is still a matter of regret that the patronage systems which encouraged and published such accounts were not more interested in the recording of the details of African life for their own sake. It is yet another example of the ways in which the goals of patronage shaped and dictated the contents of so much African English writing. What account we do have is both interesting and precise.

I was born in the city of Agimaque, on the coast of Fantyn; my father was a companion to the chief in that part of the country of Fantee, and when the old king died I was left in his house with his family; soon after I was sent for by his nephew, Ambro Accasa, who succeeded the old king in the chiefdom of that part of Fantee known by the name of Agimaque and Affinee. I lived with his children, enjoying peace and tranquillity, about twenty moons, which, according to their way of reckoning time, is two years. (48)

There follows a description of how Cuguano is invited to live with his uncle for a while, and how a group of young men taunt him to accompany them on a trip ‘into the woods to gather fruit and catch birds, and such amusements as pleased us’ (48). Accosted by Africans searching for strays to sell as slaves, they are captured and taken to another village. After a scene in which it is suggested that he may be sent back to his uncle after the rest of the captives have already gone (presumably sent to the coast), he is sent after them and is sold to the white slavers. The treatment he receives then is recorded in graphic detail:

After I was ordered out the horrors I soon saw and felt, cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, hand-cuffed and some with their hands tied behind. We were conducted along by a guard, and when we arrived at the castle, I asked my guide what I was brought there for, he told me to learn the ways of the browsow, that is the white-faced people … and then he told me that he must now leave me there, and went off. This made me cry bitterly, but I was soon conducted to a prison, for three days, where I heard the groans and cries of many, and saw some of my fellow captives … From the time that I was kid-napped and conducted to a factory, and thence in the brutish, base but fashionable way of traffic, consigned to Grenada, the grievous thoughts which I then felt, still pant in my heart; though my fears and tears have long since subsided. And yet it is still grievous to think that thousands more have suffered in similar and greater distress under the hands of barbarous robbers, and merciless task-masters; and that many even now are suffering in all the extreme bitterness of grief and woe, that no language can describe. (50–1)

Such accounts had considerable force and circulation in the period, designed as they were to drive home the horrors of the slave trade and to help the emancipationist cause. This external project accounts for the much larger part of the work which details and refutes the justifications offered for the slave trade in scriptural authority and in economic and other arguments. Cuguano’s text is, in large part, a tract outlining the false evidence of these arguments. It shows its author had a firm grasp of contemporary theological and scriptural scholarship and knew the economic arguments advanced ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Map of Africa
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Patronages and the Development of East and West African English Writing
• Part Two Dominant Themes and Patterns in East and West African English Writing
• Part Three Alternative Voices in East and West African English Writing
• Part Four Further References
• Index