African Identities

Pan-Africanisms and Black Identities

Kadiatu Kanneh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134711796
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century.
Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference.
Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by:
* Toni Morrison
* Alice Walker
* Gloria Naylor
* Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
* Chinua Achebe
* and V.S. Naipaul.
For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.

1 THE MEANING OF AFRICA: Texts and histories

To know how I am and how I have fared, you must understand why I resist all kinds of domination, including that of being given something.

(Nuruddin Farah, Gifts)

The argument of this chapter is framed within a problematic that relates nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century discourses to the complicated textualities of late twentieth-century ‘African’ writing. In order to investigate the meanings of ‘African identity’ in the present, in order to examine how ‘Africa’ operates as a referent and as a politics in modern ideologies of race, culture and nation, this chapter unpacks the implicit dialogue between dispersed times and places. Revealing the links between a range of disciplines that have constructed ‘Africa’ as a discursive object invested with meanings, I argue that an analysis of how African identities are made meaningful relies on attention to the construction of Africa across and between disciplines. Discourses of Africa are significant in relation to the politics of Black identities and cultures in the African Diaspora, and any theorisation of these constructions and subjectivities needs to recognise, not only the interrelatedness of disciplines in the present, but also the ways in which the present has been constructed by its historical traces. Recognising the multivocal structure of texts and discourses, I argue that an analysis of the connections between times, places and disciplines reveals both how meaning emerges from and accrues to the discursive object, ‘Africa’, and how ‘Africa’ becomes located and defined as object of knowledge.

The chapter frames the reading of twentieth-century texts within and against histories of African knowledge that condition the discursive parameters of modern knowledge. The movement between African and European contexts reveals how Africa and its identities have been crucially informed by the impact of knowledges and interests from outside the continent. The reading of literary texts alongside and against theoretical, political and ethnographic writings is intended to emphasise, not the formal or stylistic interchangeability of genres, but the necessity of approaching literary texts as a nexus for the rearticulation of/culturally and socially mediated/ideological material.

Interrupting the interconnections between various textual histories in constructing discourses of Africa and African identity, the chapter focuses on the analysis of these active cross-references, whose conjunctions are far from innocent. These textual histories are located in the disciplines and genres of colonial anthropologies, travel narratives, ethnophilosophies and literary representations, to reveal how the histories of colonial narratives locate and imagine the concept of Africa. The use of very specific colonial ethnographies in this chapter does, for example allows numerous connections to be made with earlier or later colonial or ethnographic discourses, and clearly demonstrates how individual and localised texts inform and are informed by a network of cultural, historical and social realities.

The examination, in this chapter, of African ethnographies and literatures is taken up in the following chapter by a closer inquiry into colonial history and early pan-Africanism, laying a necessary foundation and reference point for the later analyses of race and sexuality. The symbiosis of place and time operates as a recurring motif in my argument, and serves to show how these concepts or referents have been continually mapped onto each other in colonial histories, how this ‘mapping’ constructs theories of race, nation and culture, and how late twentieth-century writing re-articulates and re-imagines these links.

Looking for Africa: ‘Cultural translation’ and African ethnographies

By way of introduction to the arguments of this chapter, I shall discuss a late twentieth-century literary text that engages with the problematics of cultural interlocution and history in relation to Africa. V.S.Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) offers an important angle of vision on the ethnographical issues which the chapter interrogates. Naipaul’s particular position vis-à-vis Africa as both a cultural other and a national from Britain’s colonial margins places him at a curious and productive intersection of historical and cultural ideas. Salim, the main character of A Bend in the River, is positioned in a similarly complicated cultural space. As a South Asian African, Salim’s consciousness as native and settler allows the novel to explore the production of cultural knowledge in a liminal space between identities. This fraught and un-settled angle of vision is peculiarly productive of the questions and insights that preoccupy ethnographic texts.

I choose to discuss this text precisely because it demonstrates, in its own self-conscious narrative, both the difficulties of representing or defining cultural others, and the inevitable historical and textual complicities underlying the location and legitimation of otherness. What the novel manages to enact, from the site of an implicated, yet detached authority, in anxious control of a subject which keeps slipping out of sight, is a sustained grappling with the idea of Africa. From an obsessive focus on the intense physicality of an Africanlandscape, massively alive, massively secretive, to the repeated invocation of an African history without narrative structure, A Bend In the River deliberately writes itself against and alongside Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), which represents what becomes a sustained metaphorical reference in Naipaul’s text:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.¹

The perplexity of the text lies in its constant engagement with cliché—the mystery, the violence, the impenetrability of African forest and African native— and, at the same time, its insistence on re-examining and dismantling the origins and meanings of cliché away from the dominating stance of ‘foreign fantasy’, a fantasy that originates in the colonial metropolis.² What becomes clear is that the novel’s subject and project is profoundly textual. Unable to represent an Africa which recedes behind the threat of bush and river, the novel lays contesting clichés, one against another, which compete bewilderingly against a backdrop of resolute mystery. Barred from the possibility even of imagining a direct engagement with the text’s ostensible subject, the novel insistently foregrounds the monologue of its own displaced, postcolonial narrative, locked in the long history of European colonial encounter.

Exactly because the ‘lost’ and ‘hidden’ meaning of Africa is projected as lying behind the presence of African natural geography, African modernity becomes impossible to imagine. To make ‘the land’ (p. 8) ‘part of the present’ (p. 9), ‘this land of rain and heat and big-leaved trees—always visible’ (p. 42), its visibility, its offensive encroachment, must itself be annihilated. The precarious temporality of modernity in Africa relies on European order and is perpetually threatened by a violence and rage which is both historically necessitated (pp. 26, 81) and part of ‘some old law of the forest, something that came from Nature itself’ (p. 80).

The familiar colonial rhetoric of the timelessness of Africa, the emptiness of village life, locked in a fixed and lost dimension, the primitive savagery energising the episodic destruction of order, lies against another familiar rhetoric of celebration which is positioned as another object, distanced from the narrative voice. The character, Father Huismans, a Belgian priest and self-made anthropologist, and occupying the space of missionary and ethnographer, reinterprets the same Africa ‘of bush and river’ (pp. 62–3) as, ‘a wonderful place, full of new things’.

The crucial difference of Huismans’ idea of Africa lies in his particular understanding of history as a dominating narrative destiny, intent on overriding and writing over what is, for him, essentially African. His veneration of Africa is actually a veneration of his own ability to seek out, to ‘witness’ (p. 65) African cultural objects and, by placing them in his museum, locatedon the site of the European school, to interpret them. The force of European history, its power to exterminate Africa in the name of its own logic, becomes embodied by Father Huismans:

True Africa he saw as dying or about to die, that was why it was so necessary, while that Africa still lived, to understand and collect and preserve its things.

(p. 64)

The African masks in Father Huismans’ museum become the locus of a war of interpretation, staged between the intense narcissism of the novel’s own narrative and the clichéd philosophy of Father Huismans. Focusing on a carved African statue, the non-African, non-European narrator, Salim, opposes Father Huismans’ celebration of the artwork as ‘imaginative and full of meaning’, with an interpretation which insists on deeper ethnographical understanding. Salim’s recognition of the statue as ‘an exaggerated and crude piece, a carver’s joke’ (p. 61) at once underlines the text’s constantly knowing position as recogniser of clichés, and at the same time points to the subversive presence of other meanings beneath colonial discourse. These, in turn, disrupt and disturb any narrative certainty.

The previous reading of the African Ferdinand’s face by Salim, which he confidently asserts was a ‘looking…with the eyes of an African’, and which compares Ferdinand’s face with ‘the starting point of certain kinds of African masks’ (p. 37), must now be thrown under suspicion. This is a suspicion of which the narrative is very well aware and which it exploits in such a way that Africa’s power, mystery and threat alternates with the mundane and the comic. Africa as a whole, represented by postcolonial Zaire—as a continuation of Conrad’s Congo—both feared and mocked, is always superseded by the greater reality and textual order of Europe. Zaire, geographically situated in Central Africa, which, metonymically as well as spatially, represents the ‘heart’ of Africa, is used to portray an ‘essential’ Africa in both texts.

Independent, modern Africa, distanced from the hopeless, timeless secrecy of hidden forest villages, simply exists at the interchange of conflicting narratives, born of colonial discourse. Salim describes African modernity inconclusively as ‘Europe in Africa, post-colonial Africa. But it isn’t Europe or Africa’ (p. 139).

Out of the constant self-referencing self-consciousness of Salim’s narration, caught in his own idea of postcolonial displacement, and prey to his own object (p. 55), the novel identifies Africa as, inevitably, a site of its own narcissism: ‘Those faces of Africa!…They were people crazed with the idea of who they were’ (p. 269).

Sara Suleri’s reading of Naipaul’s novels and texts as indicative of a profound anxiety around the authority of seeing—of interpretation and judgement—is significant. She claims (to quote from her reading of An Area of Darkness) that ‘the text begins to acknowledge the narrator’s bodily availability to interpretation, making it increasingly unclear whether the perceived or perceiving body is the greater redundancy on the narrative scene’.³ The narrative of A Bend in the River returns obsessively to the narrator’s position on the scene, constantly reiterating the priority of Salim’s vision. What is perceived outside Salim’s own body is repeatedly interpreted by and in connection with it, until (like Heart of Darkness) the landscape itself achieves the drama of consciousness:

You heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you.

(p. 8)

This was how the place worked on you: you never knew what to think or feel. Fear or shame—there seemed to be nothing in between.

(p. 76)

This presentation of the narrator as interpreter and the victim of interpretation, where the text’s object insidiously returns in control of the narrative, foregrounds the impossibility of ‘knowing’ otherness before its reduction to the Same. The recognition of anxiety haunting the rhetoric of discourses which are invested in colonial values is a familiar one, and introduces a profound difficulty. A Bend in the River approaches the problem of representing otherness, both by entrenching the notion of absolute difference, impenetrable to the possibility of dialogue, and by claiming its purely textual or romantic existence against the reality of the banal. This constant engagement with the self, emphasising the limits of ethnology, exposes the necessary gap between mysterious difference and the knowable familiar. The predication of mystery allows the obliteration of dialogue, placing interpretation only within the narcissism of authority. Suleri’s insistence that ‘otherness as an intransigence…further serves as an excuse for the failure of reading’ (p. 12) points suggestively to those moments in the text where forest and river present a wall beyond which life without rationality or self-expression (the requisite of mystery) will be superseded by modernity.

To begin with this reading of A Bend in the River is to introduce a literary presentation of the issues which coalesce around discussions of African identity or African culture. The temptation to continually move from an examination of the particular, the local, to an obsession with the whole, the continent, is prevalent in texts about Africa. What makes ‘Africa’ different from the ‘West’? How, or can we discuss an African modernity? How have colonial discourses impinged on, or created, a modern understanding of African reality?

Naipaul’s novel positions these issues as a problem of cultural interpretation, with a narrator who occupies the space of cultural interlocutor, orethnographer. In this way, a deliberate disjunction is made between interpretation and what is seen:

So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance.

(p. 15)

This distancing presents itself as a kind of privileged observation through Salim’s own radical cultural displacement as an East Indian in exile in Zaire. Situated precariously on the edges of European colonial civilisation, trading European goods with the African interior, Salim is able to comment on the gaps between colonising and colonised cultures. What emerges, however, is not a transcendent narrative penetrating knowingly into pre-colonial African societies, but a mystified gaze remaining transfixed on the mystery of a doomed, deep forest. Repeatedly, the narrative revisits questions of time, the writing of history and the problems of modernity from a standpoint which recognises the permanence and ultimate authority of the written text, and the inevitable obliteration of local intransigence. Travel and displacement become the focus for a modernity which insists on a perpetual and unsentimental present, unstuck from the particularity of geographical place. Having travelled from the east coast of Africa to its centre, in an ironic reversal of Marlow’s journey from the west up the Congo in Heart of Darkness, and from Zaire to Europe, Salim’s view of an unknowable African specificity gives way to an undifferentiated modern world:

I was homesick, had been homesick for months. But home was hardly a place I could return to. Home was something in my head. It was something I had lost. And in that I was like the ragged Africans who were so abject in the town we serviced.

(p. 107)

‘Africa’ becomes split between a dying, traditional past which is at once hugely intrusive and obsolete, and a banal modernity which is obsessed with interpreting an ‘idea’ of African identity. Salim’s own preoccupations, yearnings and exclusions decide and shape the nature of what he sees, until interpretation can only remain halted at the borders of a revelation which is ultimately both elusive and illusive. This entrenched self-reflexivity opposes itself to Father Huismans’ enterprise of entering and preserving a ‘true’ Africa by creating a museum of African masks. Rescued from the suffocating ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• AFRICAN IDENTITIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTROUCTION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 THE MEANING OF AFRICA: TEXTS AND HISTORIES
• 2 ‘COMING HOME’: PAN-AFRICANISMS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES
• 3 REMEMBERED LANDSCAPES: AFRICAN-AMERICAN APPROPRIATIONS OF AFRICA
• 4 CROSSING BORDERS: RACE, SEXUALITY AND THE BODY
• AFTERWORD
• BIBLIOGRAPHY