The Postcolonial Intellectual

Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context

Oliver Lovesey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317019657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey's primary focus is Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ng?g? continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey's comprehensive study concentrates on Ng?g?'s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ng?g?'s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ng?g?'s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa's holocaust to Africa's renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ng?g?'s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ng?g?'s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.

Chapter 1
The Postcolonial Intellectual

Rumors of the death of the intellectual, as Susan Sontag asserts, are greatly exaggerated (110), though the announcement of the intellectual’s demise is itself a “recurrent genre” (Collini 40).¹ The somewhat “moldy,” “elitist,” or “obsolete” air of the traditional, universal intellectual (and perhaps especially the professional, institutional, academic intellectual) remains, and there is a perennial discomfort with the term that carries the odor of the candle or the aura of the screen. Much has been written on the role and representation of intellectuals and clearly intellectuals like writing about themselves, though a species of anxiety or self-conscious hand-wringing often informs these reflections. There is a commonly expressed impatience with intellectual work’s apparent or perceived divorce from the material realities of poverty and injustice, if not an outright death wish, as in some of the work of intellectuals as different as Jean-Paul Sartre and Amílcar Cabral. One might be forgiven for thinking that times are nearly always dark for intellectuals.² For many people, and even some intellectuals, like Edward W. Said, appalled by intellectual hubris,³ the intellectual may be a useless passion.

A PMLA Roundtable on Intellectuals was convened in 1997 at a time when the humanities and academia in general were variously described as besieged or beleaguered (Perloff 1129; Miller 1137). Judith Butler, six years later in 2003, would also voice concerns about the role of the traditional intellectual, concerns that in her view are exacerbated for “politically minded intellectuals” in the academy due to anxiety about the effectiveness of their public communications amid “an upsurge of anti-intellectualism” (45)⁴ when “anti-intellectualism has become practically institutionalized” (Feal 1).⁵ The new information economy and infotainment media culture have challenged older concepts of individual intellectual expertise and of any lingering notions of a “common culture” (Miller 1138). At the same time, intellectual, knowledge capital is more marketable than ever (Graff, “Today, Tomorrow” 1133), and media exposure, particularly of African-American intellectuals (such as perhaps America’s most prominent intellectual, Cornel West), has reinvigorated the role of the public intellectual (LaCapra1134), despite Pierre Bourdieu’s cautions about media intellectuals’ “cultural ‘fast food’” (29) and Said’s warnings about media intellectuals’ compromising commodification of their own expertise (Ali, Conversations 110). In this climate, as Dominick LaCapra maintains, the postcolonial intellectual (Walter Mignolo prefers “the postoccidental intellectual” [1141]) is well-positioned to mediate the contested terrain between “specialized research” and public address (1134), though Marjorie Perloff suggests that innovative intellectual renewal may be best effected by “poet-intellectuals” (1130).

One of the often overlooked preoccupations of the postcolonial critical project, itself one of the major academic growth industries over the past two decades, is the role of the intellectual. Simultaneously, there have been persistent questions about who speaks and for whom, and from what location and to what purpose, with a recurring anxiety that such speech, however well-intentioned, performs an authoritarian act of silencing the other and particularly the subaltern. This book aims to reengage with the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as manifested in the words and practice of a number of postcolonial intellectuals and in their relationship to the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and it also aims to reexamine some of the critical, historical, and cultural sources and contexts of his thought. It calls for a reconsideration of his location as a major postcolonial theorist when he is sometimes regarded as merely a novelist or dramatist who just happens to do theory. His eight critical and theoretical works, from Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (1972) to Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012),⁶ are, moreover, sometimes perceived as being mere diagrams, keys, or tool kits (or worse, guidebooks with answers, the desire for which Chinua Achebe deplores amusingly in his famous early statement on the role of the creative intellectual in Africa, “The Novelist as Teacher”)⁷ for deciphering Ngũgĩ’s own artistic creations. This myopic interpretation is a particular danger for a theorist who, unlike Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or Homi Bhabha, is also an accomplished artist. Moreover, Ngũgĩ’s subaltern background, his upbringing in an extended family of landless, illiterate peasants, and his lived experience of colonial violence, anticolonial resistance, and neocolonial imprisonment, make him an unusual postcolonial intellectual. Ngũgĩ’s role in canon reform and educational decolonization helped to establish the discipline of postcolonial studies, even if it didn’t finally “abolish” English departments. “On the Abolition of the English Department” by Ngũgĩ, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong, a memo that launched a revolution, was issued at the University of Nairobi in October 1968, and included in Ngũgĩ’s first volume of essays Homecoming (145–50). As he recalls in his most recent collection Globalectics, “[t]he debate and the consequences went beyond Nairobi to other universities in Africa and beyond, generating disputes, some of the earliest shots in what later became postcolonial theories” (9). Ngũgĩ is routinely named as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and odds takers estimate his chances highly.⁸

This book also calls for a reconsideration of the role of the intellectual in global leadership in speaking truth to power in the struggle for truth, justice, and reconciliation, at a time when a Kenyan-American intellectual who carries the aura of a rock star and whose father was born 40 miles from Kisumu in Kogelo, Western Kenya, is president of the United States of America for a second term of office, after two election campaigns in which issues of race, gender, religion, nationality, and culture entered public political discourse. Moreover, Barack Hussein Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, may well have been a survivor of torture in Britain’s colonial camps for Mau Mau suspects.⁹ Ngũgĩ’s acclaimed novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), the longest of his career, appeared in 2006; it uses the technique of postmodern African folk tales (a uniquely African version of magic realism) as well as Ngũgĩ’s distinctive “Mau Mau aesthetics” (following the Mau Mau rebel fighters in transforming biblical stories, for example, into tools of liberation)¹⁰ to dream a truly independent future into being. All of Ngũgĩ’s novels present history “from below” and demonstrate that history is a contested terrain, open to challenge and transformation, and his novels from the 1960s have served witness to the brutality of colonial repression, especially during the Mau Mau period (Elkins 374–5). Wizard of the Crow appears at a time when revisionist imperial historians, particularly in Britain, are promoting portraits of benevolent empire, though other historians, like Caroline Elkins, David Anderson, and Ian Cobain are detailing the true horrors of colonialism in Kenya, and former Mau Mau detainees have been granted a voice in British courts, an action that appears set to unleash a myriad of claims from former colonies (Cobain and Hatcher 15). “[W]hat is astonishing about Kenya’s dirty war [the vicious suppression of anticolonial forces in the 1950s] is not that it remained secret at the time,” remarks Anderson, “but that it was so well known and so thoroughly documented” in Britain and Kenya (309). Wizard of the Crow tackles dictatorship in a fictional African state resembling Kenya, and its subject is particularly poignant in a period when the world lies in a state of heightened security after the bombings in Nairobi, New York, and elsewhere, followed by the “war on terror,” and the “global village,” to misapply Marshall McLuhan’s evocative phrase,¹¹ seems smaller and more fragile than before. Dictators and exporters of civil war, like Liberia’s Charles Taylor, are being brought to justice, and the first and second generation of African strong men, like Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, are being humbled at the ballot box and in some cases, like that of Kenya’s new president Uhuru Kenyatta, potentially at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. While the forces of globalization, which Ngũgĩ faces directly in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998), are as pervasive and destabilizing as ever, a more hopeful future, as he has recently argued, may be dawning with “the decolonization of modernity” (Something xi). These recent essays expand Ngũgĩ’s range of intellectual engagement, which now extends from Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Plato to popular culture. There has been renewed critical interest in Ngũgĩ’s works with at least six monographs, as well as a number of essay collections and comparative studies, in recent years.

The figure of the public intellectual has been most powerfully asserted in the cultural and political stance of the postcolonial intellectual who has become a kind of global conscience as well as an engaged social critic.¹² Critics like Said, Spivak, and Bhabha have led the Western academy to reconsider its own ideological location, but Ngũgĩ has worked in this area for five decades, and he has also directly participated in grassroots cultural renewal as playwright and novelist, and engaged in political action. Ngũgĩ’s contribution to a recent forum on “The Role of Intellectuals in the Twenty-First Century,” in conversation with Julia Kristeva, one of the leading French intellectuals today,¹³ indicates Ngũgĩ’s importance in advancing the dialogue of the Black Atlantic and shows his oppositional stance to the role of universal intellectuals. As in her call in 1977 for a new type of “dissident” intellectual, in touch with the politics of gender, power, and the unconscious,¹⁴ Kristeva, in the “dark times” of 2006, sought a “reconstructive role” for the intellectual (18; 13–21), and like Ngũgĩ, advanced the intellectual’s continuing engagement with “freedom, liberation, [and] social justice” (“For Peace” 39). In 2009’s The Incredible Need to Believe, Kristeva would call once more for a new, reformed humanism, a radical actualization of thought to confront the postmodern “empire of calculation and show business” (29) and by extension its promotion of anonymous, passive spectatorship.

Kristeva’s and Ngũgĩ’s positions are indebted to the radical intellectual politics of Sartre, who had a sustained if sometimes adversarial influence on the work of postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon. In “A Plea for Intellectuals” (1965) and “A Friend of the People” (1970), the latter produced two years after May 1968, Sartre launched a harsh critique of the role of the “classical,” universal intellectual that he had earlier exemplified as shown in What Is Literature (1948), despite his wartime adoption of the stance of the engaged Resistance writer who voices subaltern positions as in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946). Sartre’s autobiography, The Words (1964), is partly a rigorous debunking of the illusions and delusions to which intellectuals appear surprisingly vulnerable. Sartre’s was an education in disillusionment. As a gifted child who was regarded as a prodigy and who saw himself as one of the “elect” (252), Sartre entertained a view of the writer’s role as a heroic, romantic, priestly, quasi-mystical vocation. He writes that “[f]or a long time, I took my pen for a sword; I now know we’re powerless” (253–4). In his later works, however, Sartre advances the radical model of the “combat[ant]” intellectual, one of whose roles is to accept that he is “the monstrous product of a monstrous society” (“Plea” 249, 247), living amid instability and contradiction. He must engage in perpetual self-criticism and even “suppress himself as an intellectual” (“Friend” 293).

“[I]ntellectuals have chosen unhappiness by wanting to be intellectuals,” remarked Jean Baudrillard in 1985, noting that this unhappiness results from vocational critical detachment as well as internal division (72), qualities of Sartre’s “classical” intellectual. In the aftermath of the heady late 1960s when French intellectuals, like Sartre, Foucault, and Baudrillard himself stood at the epicenter of volcanic social and political battles, intellectuals often appear uneasily poised between grandiosity and despair. Their self-perception is a species of grandiose delusion about being in the vanguard of meaningful social change and a simultaneous, despairing recognition of impotence, intellectuals’ having “never changed anything much” (Baudrillard 76). While admiring intellectuals’ utopian imaginings, Baudrillard insists, “I wouldn’t be against envisaging a world without intellectuals” (79). The year following Baudrillard’s statements, one of the most prominent of America’s radical, oppositional intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Managua, Nicaragua, would echo a similar fatigue and also a certain contempt for “classical” intellectuals’ apparent vocational inclination to delusional arrogance in a characteristic diatribe:

What we often find is that the intellectuals, the educated classes, are the most indoctrinated, most ignorant, most stupid part of the population, and there are very good reasons for that. Basically two reasons. First of all, as the literate part of the population, they are subjected to the mass of propaganda. There is a second, more important and more subtle reason. Namely, they are the ideological managers. Therefore, they must internalize the propaganda and believe it. And part of the propaganda they have developed is that they are the natural leaders of the masses. (quoted in Ross, “Defenders of the Faith” 101)

In the context of this despair at intellectuals’ self-delusion and anxiety of impotence, there was also a certain naïve envy of postcolonial intellectuals’ importance, and an apparent disregard for the very real personal danger they faced. Baudrillard, for example, juxtaposes the vacillation of post-1968 French intellectuals with the position of “[i]ntellectuals of the Third World [who] have the privilege of holding a clear critical position and of having the possibility of struggle, which is also totally clear. Confusion, in their case, is not possible” (73).

Paris provided an important nexus for Pan-African colonial intellectuals, such as Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, in the period leading to independence, as would London, explored in Chapter 3. The intellectuals’ location informs both their role and their function. The postwar elite in France—what Claude Lanzmann, Resistance fighter, Shoah director, and Le Temps Modernes editor, called the mandarins, a term Simone de Beauvoir, France’s foremost feminist intellectual, used as the title of her roman á clef Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins) (Lanzmann 235)—was preoccupied with the aftermath of the outbreak of peace in Europe and its consequences for the role of intellectuals, while rumors circulated about Soviet labor camps and the ongoing “enslavement of colonial peoples” particularly in Algeria (Beauvoir, Mandarins 430). As Beauvoir makes clear, French left-wing intellectuals had to decide whether to continue the struggle of the Resistance elsewhere in Europe, in countries such as Portugal, with its own African empire, and even more generally how to accommodate their personal and collective, historical and political pasts.¹⁵ More specifically, they wondered if an art of individual solace, reflection, and entertainment—Beauvoir, Sartre, Albert Camus, and Arthur Koestler were all novelists as well as philosophers—was desirable or even morally permissible at what might be a moment of great crisis and opportunity. This is a question that would also trouble Ngũgĩ in the late 1960s. Should intellectuals be activists, and if so should they act up within political parties and political periodicals or maintain an independent detachment? Such questions had vital significance, and their discussion was of widespread interest because in France, as Nobel laureate Doris Lessing notes: “intellectuals generally, were glamorous in a way they never have been” in Britain (“Introduction” 7); Richard Wolin maintains that within France, they “have enjoyed the status of a lay aristocracy” (19). Baudrillard would concur in the mid-1980s, reflecting on the heady days of 1968 when intellectuals were in the thick of a struggle that appeared to have profound social significance: “[p]eople like technicians, who use their brain but do so through technical means, are not, for us, intellectuals. Even scholars and scientists are not, in France, intellectuals. We have more restricted and more élitist positio...