Translation in African Contexts

Postcolonial Texts, Queer Sexuality, and Cosmopolitan Fluency

Evan Maina Mwangi

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631012945
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Traduction et interprétation

Author Evan Maina Mwangi explores the intersection of translation, sexuality, and cosmopolitan ethics in African literature. Usually seen as the preserve of literature published by Euro-American metropolitan outlets for Western consumption, cultural translation is also a recurrent theme in postcolonial African texts produced primarily for local circulation and sometimes in African languages. Mwangi illustrates how such texts allude to various forms of translation to depict the ethical relations to foreigners and the powerless, including sexual minorities. He also explains the popularity of fluent models of translation in African literature, regardless of the energetic critique of such models by Western-based postcolonial theorists.

While bringing to the foreground texts that have received little critical attention in African literary studies, Translation in African Contexts engages a wide range of foundational and postcolonial translation theorists. It considers a rich variety of works, including East African translations of Shakespeare, writings by Ng?g? wa Thiong'o and Gakaara wa Wanja?, a popular novel by Charles Mangua, and a stage adaptation by the Tanzanian playwright Amandina Lihamba, among others.

CHAPTER ONE

(M)OTHERED TONGUES,
POST-AFROCENTRIC TRANSLATIONS

All culture is originally colonial.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, Monolingualism of the Other

Every great philosophy is a rebirth, a radical questioning.

—PAULIN J. HOUNTONDJI, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

■ Before the expression “decolonising the mind” entered the Anglophone post-colonial discourse with the publication of Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o’s book of the same title in 1986, one of his predecessors, Gakaara wa Wanjaũ (1921–2001), had released a small booklet in his native Gĩkũyũ with similar ideas as Ngũgĩ’s. First published in 1971 and reprinted in 1978, Gakaara’s Ũgwati wa Mũthũngũ Mũirũ (The tragedy of a black European) satirizes Kikuyu individuals who abandon their mother tongue to communicate with one another in English. Gakaara’s main argument seems to be that no language is innocent; to speak the language of colonialists is to accept the decadence of the system European imperialists represented.¹ His essay draws attention to laughable speech habits that lead newly independent African nations to what Gakaara sees as linguistic apocalypse that would turn African cultures into societies of “black Europeans.” In a similar context, Gyan Prakash sees the Indian elites in the nineteenth century as a “force that called into question the terms of colonial dominance” as they translated their society into modernity (1999, 83). But Gakaara presents the Kenyan elites as servile imitators of degenerate colonial attitudes. He seems to insist that speaking English in Africa automatically translates into arrogance and abuse of power. However, the essay is about the struggle for cosmopolitanism that does not erase marginalized cultures.

In the rest of this chapter, I argue for the need of close readings of texts in African languages, explaining why such texts and their translations are excluded in the dominant studies of world literature. I conclude by outlining a post-Afrocentric framework that would help us critique colonialism as well as moments in African texts when authors’ ethnocentric or masculinist representations of indigenous minorities fail to embrace cosmopolitan virtue. But let me propose at the outset that hegemony and cosmopolitanism cannot ideally coexist; the oft-used term “hegemonic cosmopolitanism” is therefore a misnomer, because a culture cannot claim to be fully cosmopolitan if it does not respect linguistic rights of others or does not uphold gender and ethnic diversity in its writing and translations. When theorists such as Jonathan Haslam (2002), Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2006), and Rahul Rao (2010; 2013) severally use the term “hegemonic cosmopolitanism,” it is to name an undesirable mode of practicing cosmopolitanism in which Western institutions present Euro-American cultural hegemony as cosmopolitan enlightenment. I will critique texts in which cosmopolitanism is seen as possible at the expense of minorities. I use the term “hegemony” in the Gramscian sense to designate the consolidation of intellectual and moral leadership by the dominant group to ensure coercive power over the rest of the society through the people’s consent. Although Gramsci sometimes uses the word the way Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin strategically deployed it to name positive collective alliance building in opposition to an autocratic aristocracy, I employ it here to mark a negative, coerced consent to the policies of a dominant group and its alliances.² In this sense, I will critique instances where translations try to mask the oppression of marginalized groups within the indigenous culture from which those texts come.

In African literary studies, “cosmopolitanism” is a more contested term than “hegemony,” what with as foundational a theoretical figure as Frantz Fanon insinuating, in The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 1967), that “cosmopolitanism” is a smokescreen for “intellectual laziness of the middle-class” (149).³ In fact, most African languages do not have an easy equivalent for the term; theorists generally coin local terms from the English word. Ngũgĩ’s choice of ũkĩrĩu as the Gĩkũyũ word for cosmopolitanism indicates that, to him, “cosmopolitanism” and “modernity” are mutually defining concepts.⁴ To make matters more complicated for us regarding the term, most of the texts discussed here use translational strategies in ways that on the surface tend to negate the cosmopolitan spirit by assimilating the foreign text, instead of allowing it to retain its stylistic idiosyncrasies.

Since the Greek Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope (circa 412–323 B.C.E.), used the term “kosmopolites” to describe himself as “a citizen of the world” against the prevailing tendency for one to identify oneself with one’s city, the term “cosmopolitan” has taken many meanings, although all are related to how one views oneself in the context of planetary identifications.⁵ While Diogenes seems to at times reject his local heritage in order to embrace global citizenship, African writers constitute a marginalized group that can ill afford to beat down their own cultures in order to participate in the planetary citizenship that Diogenes stands for. I see cosmopolitanism to involve the ability to mix diverse cultural experiences through hospitality to other cultures and languages, without demanding that the foreigner should be like the host. It involves a commitment to transcend national and ethnic presuppositions and prejudices, whereby we recognize and welcome other communities, their languages and values, while at the same time working toward a common endeavor without seeking to convert other people into replica of ourselves. This does not mean absolute rejection of one’s own cultural roots. Thus, as David A. Hollinger notes, “claims to tribe and nation are not always products of hate” among cosmopolitan scholars sympathetic to marginalized groups (2001, 238). Most writers discussed in here try to forge a sense of cosmopolitanism that allows them to claim an identity threatened with erasure by colonialism. They relentlessly seek to show that the local and the national adhere to cross-cultural, cosmopolitan ethos.

With this in mind, Martha Nussbaum’s (1997) definition of a cosmopolitan is useful for our purposes. Using Immanuel Kant, Nussbaum defines a cosmopolitan as a person whose politics is based more “on reason than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that was truly universal rather than communitarian” (27). Like in the Stoic Zeno’s “cosmopolis,” a global city based on common law for all humanity and where even barbarians and slaves have equal rights, a cosmopolitan society takes it as its duty to protect the rights of national minorities.⁶ Nussbaum underscores that cosmopolitanism does not negate local interests: “Politics, like child care, will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally responsible for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings special attention and care. To give one’s own sphere special care is justifiable in universalist terms” (2002a, 13).⁷ One becomes cosmopolitan not so much by rejecting the local and translating oneself into something else as in embracing other cultures. In reading cosmopolitanism in translated postcolonial texts, the focus should be on how generously the foreign has been absorbed into the local in ways that does not disempower either of the cultures involved in the transaction.

It is in the context of unequal power relations between Europe and the Global South that Charles Mills (2005) finds Kant not to be cosmopolitan because, despite Kant’s support for recognition of other cultures, he retains discriminatory hierarchies in his thinking.⁸ In addition to his defense of racial and gender hierarchies, Kant speculates in the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” ([1784] 1991) about a time when Europe would “probably eventually legislate for all other continents” (52). Yet Kant later critiques Europe’s purported “civilizing mission” in Africa in Metaphysics of Morals ([1785] 1996) and scathingly condemns European imperialism in today’s Global South in Perpetual Peace ([1795] 2006).⁹ As Gerard Delanty reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Imagination, cosmopolitanism is a “transformative condition best seen as a process rather than a zero-sum condition in which cosmopolitanism is either present or not” (2009, 252). This implies that all the texts under analysis here have an element of cosmopolitanism. But like Delanty, I want to see cosmopolitanism as not merely accommodating one another; rather, I prefer to see it as a constructive process in which we create new ways of perceiving the world inhabited by different cultures. In reading works of art, we should be interested in this process, as the text and its characters interact with the outside world to offer new ways of thinking and acting, especially in relation to people in different social, racial, and sexual categories.

Relatedly, I am aware that as an approach to cultural studies, cosmopolitanism derives mainly from the Western academy. It therefore can be elitist and patronizing when it purports to defend non-Western cultures from the ravages of Western influences. It can also be a code word for liberal globalization and the westernization of non-Western subjects. In my readings, I show that even though cosmopolitan African writers may be opposed to liberal globalization, cosmopolitanism is not a preserve of Western cultures. Like Appiah, I believe opposition to colonialism and other forms of Western domination in African culture does not negate cosmopolitanism because, as seen in the study of particular African writers, cosmopolitanism and universalism are not synonymous with westernization. In an African context, cosmopolitanism does not involve allowing the West to legislate for the rest of the world. Local interests are not substituted for grand liberal practices from the West. It is when local interests go against the welfare of other people that they become antagonistic to the cosmopolitan ideal. Nussbaum emphasizes that, to a cosmopolitan, “it is right to give the local an additional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan should have for this is not that the local is better per se, but rather that this is the only sensible way to do good” (2002b, 135). However, cosmopolitanism is not a quality or condition that a text or culture simply either has or does not have; it is a process to be appreciated in postcolonial texts in foreign and indigenous languages that present the struggles of a society coming to terms with the inevitable interaction with other cultures. Translation is often one of the markers of this process.

CULTURAL TRANSLATION OR THE TRAGEDY OF BLACK WHITENESS?

Let me return briefly to Gakaara’s polemical essay, Ũgwati wa Mũthũngũ Mũirũ (The tragedy of a black European), to offer a corrective to the tendency to give priority to a natural language in the African debates on language and translation at the expense of the social context of language use. On the surface, Gakaara’s pamphlet seems a nationalist defense of a natural language (his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ), but at its core is a call to readers to evaluate utterances in the milieu of the political and cultural context in which those utterances are made, not the natural language the speaker uses. On the surface, the essay directs its anger at the degenerate bourgeois culture taking root in post-independence Kenya and expressing itself through the use of the English language. Ethnic Kikuyu individuals who use English are presented as vain. The essay paints them as psychologically sick people, individuals who have a “colonial cockerel” in their minds. According to the persona, they are in urgent need of liberation from their self-imposed psychological illness. These abject Africans are equated to drunkards who go around the streets hurling such English insults as “mbathitandi” (bastard) at passersby. The booklet discusses in strongly rhetorical language the foolish causes and adverse consequences of using English in Kenyan homes, schools, and offices. Further, it offers solutions to what Gakaara presents as the pathology of speaking a foreign language in one’s own country. Yet I want to suggest that we should not see the speaker in the pamphlet as the same as Gakaara himself, a cosmopolitan individual who fluently translated texts into different languages, including English and Kiswahili.

Despite his essay’s overt disavowal of Western lifestyle and foreign influence, as a modern author and publisher Gakaara is intractably immersed in inevitable cultural mixing. On the surface Gakaara might come across as a writer completely opposed to cosmopolitanism, in favor of nativist retention of precolonial traditions. Yet as Tejumola Olaniyan reminds us in Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance (1995), African cultures are not as immutable as they may appear in an indigenous writer’s performative stratagems to humanize Africa against a background of colonial domination: “Cultural identity could not be closed and positive but necessarily alterable: a conception of otherness in flux. The performative is the principle of transgressive and transitional truth” (36). Although Olaniyan makes this argument in relation to the obviously much more improvisational dramatic arts of the African diaspora, this property is found in prose work by local artists like Gakaara wa Wanjaũ. The writers suggest that although there are indispensable elements that a culture cannot do without unless it intends to annihilate itself, cultural identity cannot be unchangeable. Translational elements in a language at the contact zone are some of the factors that showcase the dynamic nature of that language and culture. Indeed, the heteroglossia and “deliberate use of multiple languages within the same discourse” that Paul F. Bandia notes to be a marker of African European–language (2008, 136) is also present in Gakaara’s text. Gakaara’s narrator disavows Western practices and foreign influences, but his language is marked by the very hybridity he derides. His Gĩkũyũ language and culture indicate inevitable imbrication with other cultures, including English, to such an extent that an easy indigenous/foreign dichotomy that his persona advocates is untenable.

Mixture of languages is largely seen in postcolonial studies as an anticolonial strategy. For example, Prakash (1999) sees hybridization in colonial India as serving “a counter-hegemonic ground upon which the elites pressed their entitlement to modernity even as they recognized their aspirations for power and loyalism” (84), Gakaara’s persona sees the African in post-independence Kenya as merely mimicking European culture without gaining any form of agency. However, it is good to remember that the mixture with other cultures even in what looks like unpolluted native culture is an inevitable result of contacts between a culture and other local and foreign traditions. In an exquisite reading of Wole Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman, Olaniyan (1995) observes the disorder, ruptures, and disruptions that constitute what may appear on the surface as “a solid, self-assured auto-dynamic organic community, a community that holds tightly to its essence of itself and whose authentic values survive the ravages of temporality” (43). Like Soyinka’s eloquent Praise-Singer in Death and King’s Horseman, the narrator in Gakaara’s pamphlet evokes with nostalgia an immutable traditional world outside of colonial and English influence. But at the same time, he indicates that Gĩkũyũ cannot be a static, auto-dynamic language. For instance, it is hard to think of the Gĩkũyũ words for “hangover” (the unwelcome effects of drinking excess alcohol) or “lift” (ride in a vehicle given to help someone reach a destination), English words that Gakaara’s persona deploys to satirize people for using in their Gĩkũyũ conversations.

It is also notable that the theme of Gakaara’s essay turns out not to be the natural language that one uses but the use of any language in an arrogant way. In most of the hypothetical statements Gakaara’s speaker makes about language, what seems to be under attack, despite the stated intention of the narrative, is not the mixing of languages but the haughtiness the westernized African displays. There is a chance that translation and mixing of languages can be done for regenerative purposes. At the heart of Gakaara’s essay, then, is the tension within an indigenous society grappling with the need to be local and global at once, avoiding the temptation to dichotomize the universal from the particular.¹⁰

Contrary to Gakaara’s persona, Andreas Huyssen captures the inevitable mixing in today’s world in the magnificent introduction to his edited volume Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (2008). Huyssen accurately observes that, in the wake of planetary interactions among societies, a global culture should be studied using a methodology that “embraces and maintains the tension between the universal and the particular rather than opting for one against the other” (4). Here Huyssen has in mind an urban imaginary in the Global South, but similar imperatives obtain in rural areas in the region, as colonial and global capital has spread to these local cultures as well. Although when analyzing cosmopolitanism we tend to use as our jumping-off point those postcolonial texts that are written in English and published by multinational firms for metropolitan consumption and circulation, African-language texts published by small firms and for local audiences grapple with the issues of cosmopolitanism and hospitality to the foreign, especially borrowing metaphors from translation practices. Because indigenous texts express the differences and affinities among cultures, we should use a methodology like the one Huyssen encourages: one that neither denies nor exaggerates the impact of colonialism and globalization on rural cultures.

Therefore, shunning both relativist and universalist paradigms of translation, I follow the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in seeking an ontology of reconciliation between the translatability and untranslatability of African texts. In my analysis, I admire those translators, narrators, and characters displaying a capacity to move from one language to another despite the difficulties involved in translation, and in particular those translators who do not force the translation to be exactly like the original. This is even when the translators use a domesticating model that presents the foreign text fluently. I must state that, unlike Ricoeur in Critique and Conviction, (1998, 139), I am not afraid of “mixing genres.” Indeed, when he used this expression to argue that methodologically he would not discuss politics and philosophy together, Ricoeur did not mean we should only work in one genre or discipline. Rather, it is to be attentive to the disciplinary boundaries in order to appreciate how fields of knowledge and practice differ from and resemble one another. In this book, I highlight the innovative use of literary language without excluding sociological and political content and implications of texts. Despite his claim that it would not be sound to mix domains, Ricoeur was a keen mediator between differing schools of philosophical thought. In this spirit of a mediatory role in criticism and artistic production (a practice so central to African literature), I enjoy African artists who mix forms in their presentation of cultural conflicts, emergence of a more a protean world in the wake of...