Pre-Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives

From Ethiopia Unbound to Things Fall Apart, 1911–1958

Donald R. Wehrs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317076292
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.

Chapter 1

Embodied Ethical Life and the Threat of Cognitive Imperialism in African Contexts

Disruptive and Constructive Ethical Embodiment in African Discourse and Practice

In both oral African narratives and African fiction nurtured by oral traditions and indigenous values, ethical life is frequently depicted as both disruptive and constructive—challenging ossified hierarchical, traditional norms while nonetheless motivating the subject to construct a rational, coherent self capable of enacting in daily life habits of virtue, fidelity, and love. The study that follows will trace how early novelistic representations of pre-colonial history and experience move between ethical registers of disruption and construction, transcendence and immanence. Negotiating such a dialogue is not easy. Paul Ricoeur underscores the difficulty by contrasting his own neo-Aristotelian stress on constituting a self through habituated practices of aiming for the good with Emmanuel Levinas’s stress upon the disruptive, invasive character of the ethical call.1

Family resemblances between Aristotelian and African ethical reflection have long been noted. Discussing Akan moral discourse, Kwame Gyekye observes that in Twi omni suban means both “He has no character” and “He has no morals,” for suban covers a semantic range equivalent to the Greek ethos. Moreover, the term for “goodness” (papa) implies both the habituation of the self to sociable virtues (kindness, generosity: ayamyie; compassion: mmôbrôhunu; and hospitality: ahôhoye, adôe) and subordination of politics to ethics, understood as the effects of actions upon “human well-being.”2 Similarly, Kwasi Wiredu points out that the Twi word for person, onipa, has an evaluative as well as descriptive sense, so that “personhood is not something you are born with but something you may achieve, and it is subject to degrees,” a usage consistent with both Aristotelian-humanistic notions that humanity (humanitas) is an achievement, not a given, and Levinas’s insistence that ethical sensibility is not something “added on” to human subjectivity, but rather constitutive of it.3

By composing historical fictions, the colonial African writers we shall consider sought to dramatize, perhaps against colonialist discourse, the centrality of pre-colonial African conceptual frameworks and history to the lives and choices of their characters. In doing so, they stress the historical-cultural contextuality of all human understanding and interaction, but while noting the tendency of cultural discourses to lapse into totalizations akin to those Derrida characterizes as “onto-theology” and Levinas as “the Said,” they also are at pains to insist, consistent with Aristotelian thought generally, that contextuality may be conducive to both political pluralism and intersubjective revision. Thus, the pre-colonial worlds that colonial African writers from the 1930s through 1950s evoke are “historical” in ways that contest Eurocentric assumptions that Africa was without history, and are “pluralistic” in ways that contest both colonial anthropological assumptions that pre-modern societies are marked by “organic unity” and postmodern assumptions that cultural life “naturally” drives towards totalization.4

Indeed, contemporary African philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Wiredu, and Kwame Appiah warn against the dangers of “unanimism,” of taking cultures to be monolithic and self-enclosed.5 In surveying African historiography, Alan Isaacman notes that the premise of ahistorical organic unity anchored structural-functionalist anthropological writing about Africa from the 1930s to the 1950s, but recent scholarship challenges this legacy.6 Elias Mandala has shown how Mang’anja peasants in Malawi, under Kololo and Matchinjiri rule from the 1860s to 1890s, generated cultural and material resistance, including their own independent history.7 Discussing the northern Wallo territory of Ethiopia, James McCann notes, “[V]iolation of the rules of rest [free-born people’s inalienable land rights] by elites or state intervention and the commoditization of that resource raised peasants’ sense of injustice and formed the ideological basis for rebellion.”8 Pierre Bonte links the moral authority of sacred kings in pastoral cultures to their “generation” of material well-being through increasing numbers of cattle,9 while Jean and John Comaroff reveal how Tswana reflections on the similarity and distinction between cattle and money (“cattle without legs”) assisted resistance to incorporation into capitalist cultural economies.10 Steven Feierman argues that peasants in the Shambaai region of Tanzania could resist soil-erosion schemes, and so initiate anticolonialist discourse, because they drew upon and modified pre-colonial models of political legitimacy, intellectual pluralism, and justified rebellion—the people of Bondei (in eastern Shambaai) overthrew Kilindi rule sometime after 1868 on grounds that the chiefs “were ignoring the rights of peasants, treating them as though they were slaves.”11

Moreover, colonial African novelists drew self-consciously upon oral histories, myths, folktales, and proverbs that link political legitimacy to ethical practice. Behind specific contractual notions of political legitimacy lay broadly shared convictions that the propensity of cultures to totalize should be checked not just by pluralisms of competing, internally differentiated discourses and deliberations, but also by encountering culture’s own limits, by being forced to “negotiate” with a difference, an “outside,” that African cultures tend to locate in corporeality, the bush, bush-spirits, divine or spiritual forces, or nature.12 Discussing the Maka of southern Cameroon, Peter Geschiere notes that disembodying oneself, divesting oneself of natural affections inscribed within human flesh, is conceived as integral to witchcraft.13 The image of witches as “devourers” of their family’s and neighbors’ substance, as indifferent to ethical restraints understood as constitutive of embodied human subjectivity, is remarkably consistent throughout sub-Saharan Africa. R.S. Rattray, described by Kwame Gyekye as “perhaps the most perceptive and analytical researcher into Ashanti [or Asante] culture,” characterized Asante understandings of witchcraft (bayi) in these terms: “The great desire of a witch is to eat people. … [T]hey suck blood …. Witches walk about naked at night. … They eat all together, each supplying the feast in turn. A witch can only kill in her own clan.”14 The essays collected in 1993 by John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff describe the cultural discourse of witchcraft from west to central to east Africa in similar terms.15

By characterizing witchcraft as a deformation or divestiture of human nature, African cultures stress the centrality of ethical sensibility to human embodiment. Indeed, the natural affections that mark a properly “human” being are exemplified in the devotion of mothers to children, understood as a transcendence of egotism that, while certainly open to exploitation,16 was also subject to reverence. The same Fulani or Fulbe traditions that ascribe to women a direct relation to nature through yurmeende, the “compassion” that binds them to their children, also viewed such direct access to nature as potentially challenging and superseding social conventions.17

While ethical embodiment may breach the totalities that cultural-historical contexts tend to solidify, it also focuses attention on what humans need—materially, but also emotionally and intellectually—to flourish. The social theorist Anthony Giddens argues that “[p]ractical consciousness is the cognitive and emotive anchor of the feelings of ontological security characteristic of large segments of human activity in all cultures;” in order for the “chaos that threatens on the other side of the ordinariness of everyday conventions” not to plunge us into dread or despair, “[p]ractical consciousness, together with the day-to-day routines reproduced by it, help bracket such anxieties not only, or even primarily, because of the social stability that they imply, but because of their constitutive role in organising … modes of orientation which, on the level of practice, ‘answer’ the questions which could be raised about the frameworks of existence.”18 Giddens notes that while “far different cultural settings allow a ‘faith’ in the coherence of everyday life to be achieved through providing symbolic interpretations,” such interpretations do not in themselves sustain ontological security: “[C]ognitive frames of meaning will not generate that faith without a corresponding level of underlying emotional commitment—whose origins, I shall argue, are largely unconscious. Trust, hope, and courage are all relevant to such commitment.”19 Answering the child’s call for ontological security is at once a transcultural ethical imperative and a crucial test of a particular culture’s ability to reproduce itself.20 Just as cultures reveal themselves to be ethically deficient to the extent that they commonly disregard human needs for routinized love (for instance, through patriarchal and colonialist repression), so societies that fail to sustain structures of meaning within which consistency of character might be elaborated neglect the hunger for significance integral to human embodiment.21

While the oral storytelling, rituals, and moral reflection upon which colonial African prose writers draw articulate contexts that anchor significance and enable ontological security, they also direct attention to situations that resist simplified choices or unequivocal judgments.22 Both folktales and oral histories legitimate resistance to oppression, and, like mythic cosmology, often encourage the acculturation of flexibility, skepticism, and resistance to hegemonic power. Chinua Achebe draws connections between Igbo mythology and the types of ethical subjectivity it encourages: one “must placate all the gods all the time! For there is a cautionary proverb which states that even when a person has satisfied the deity Udo completely he may yet be killed by Ogwugwu.” Thus, in Igbo political, ethical, and aesthetic reflection, “all extremism is abhorrent.”23 African cultures embrace enriching commerce with exteriority or difference to the extent that they celebrate possibilities of an ethical transcendence, and to the extent that they seek to make acculturation ever more receptive to ambiguous “powers” encountered beyond the sphere of the familiar—in the bush, in the realm of spirits, or in the conceptual and imaginative spaces opened by the culturally other.

Since cultural discourse, in Africa as elsewhere, commonly speaks to disruptive and constructive dimensions of human ethical embodiment, what accounts for the cognitive imperialism that underwrites colonialism, ethnic hatred, and dogmatism? Cognitive imperialism issues from cognitive violence in Levinas’s sense (absorbing the Other into pre-established categories) and manifests itself most obviously by refusing to take the Other seriously as an interlocutor. Foucault’s power/knowledge formations and “regimes of truth” constitute discursive technologies that both naturalize and disseminate cognitive imperialism, while V.Y. Mubimbe’s “colonial library” describes an archive of writings about Africa shaped by cognitive imperialism:

Exploiting travelers’ and explorers’ writings at the end of the nineteenth century a “colonial library” begins to take shape. It represents a body of knowledge constructed with the explicit purpose of faithfully translating and deciphering the African object. Indeed, it fulfille...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Embodied Ethical Life and the Threat of Cognitive Imperialism in African Contexts
• 2 Hayford, Balewa, and the Representation of African Culture and Society
• 3 Articulations of Empire and Hatred of the Other Man in Hazoumé’s Doguicimi
• 4 History, Fable, and Syncretism in Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons
• 5 The Ordeal of Cognitive Imperialism in Tutuola’s Early Fiction
• 6 Pre-Colonial History and Anticolonial Politics in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index