Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing

The Postcolony Revisited

Minna Johanna Niemi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429639272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period.Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer's novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts' representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership's consumption of narratives of African "suffering." The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility. Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.

1 Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

Hannah Arendt’s unique elaborations on imperialism and totalitarianism have given rise to many polemics during the last few decades.¹ In particular, her views on imperialism as a test laboratory for emerging European totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism have been seen as an important early contribution to the corpus of postcolonial theory (Grosse 36). Yet, at the same time, scholars have clearly shown that Arendt was not straightforwardly an anti-imperialist thinker, and too often implicitly aligned herself with the viewpoints of colonizers confronted by unknown and “uncivilized” cultures in Africa, and thus, unfortunately, maintained a Eurocentric approach to African cultures (Gines, “Race Thinking” 42–44; Bernasconi 61–64).² The work in question, particularly in its historical details, often remains vague, but the strength of The Origins, as with her whole oeuvre, lies not in its historical exactness, but rather in its bold attempt to create connections and to think anew; thus, I claim that it is particularly Arendt’s idea of radical thinking that we need again in our globalized world defined by its structural inequalities. I maintain further that regardless of her unfortunate Eurocentric remarks, the theoretical tools that she provided concerning political philosophy, totalitarianism, and imperialism remain vitally important for researchers focusing on African cultures and their current political problems.

In order to defend my claim, I shift attention away from Arendt’s realizations concerning the continuity between imperialism and forms of European totalitarianism, and toward her analysis of totalitarianism itself. This shift of attention enables me to propose that violent political orders were not merely “imported” to Europe, but instead, that power structures derived from imperial practices and the nondemocratic forms of government to which they lead rooted themselves firmly on the African continent as well. As Christopher J. Lee argues, it is pivotal that some scholars have “returned her concern toward the legacies of imperialism to the continent of Africa, not Europe, thus conveying a means for thinking through and applying her ideas to postcolonial politics more generally” (“Locating” 103).³ Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism provides us with an important analytical approach when we scrutinize the aftermath of decolonization processes in Africa, where earlier imperial rule gave space to emerging forms of pernicious power regimes. Such regimes are often grouped under the heading of “postcolony,” which can be understood as “the effective continuation of the authority structures of the colony in the post-imperial nation despite ‘flag independence’” (Boehmer and Morton 7). The connections between European totalitarianism and the African postcolony have been made apparent by scholars including Mahmood Mamdani, who, for instance, examined the connections between the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide:

there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.

(When Victims 13)⁴

In his earlier work too, namely, in Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (1983), Mamdani has drawn “parallels between European fascism and the Idi Amin regime in Uganda, a strategy of comparison that also echoes Arendt’” (Lee, “‘Causes’” 138).

Mamdani has done important work in continuing Arendt’s analysis in the context of contemporary political problems in Africa. My interest here, however, is not in the postcolony as a violent political power structure per se, but rather in the ways in which it plagues its citizens and pushes them into difficult moral situations. This is where I find Arendt’s work crucial: in highlighting the idea of individual responsibility in situations in which the democratic public sphere has failed, Arendt provides a useful means for thinking about abuses of power occurring in the African postcolony as well. In connection with this, Arendt’s later writings concerning thinking and individual responsibility under totalitarianism, particularly her essays in Crises of the Republic and Responsibility and Judgment, can serve a compelling function. In these texts, Arendt pays careful attention to the need for moral judgment and independent thinking during times of moral collapse.⁵ She emphasizes the ideal of good citizenship in nondemocratic situations and illuminates the notion of the banality of evil by suggesting that people become too accustomed to malignant political systems and stop short of analyzing their own roles within such systems.⁶ While Arendt is best known for bringing these ideas into the discussion concerning Nazi Germany, her model of the thinking individual who refuses to conform is derived from Socrates, and hence Arendt’s ideas should not be too hastily equated with modern, Western totalitarianism, but should instead be seen as offering a method that applies in any situation in which democracy has collapsed. This aspect of Arendt’s work has attracted attention among scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, who are concerned with the myriad forms of the banality of evil in our contemporary world.⁷

Far from being limited to contexts of European totalitarianism, then, the tools Arendt’s body of thought offers can help us to consider anew the problems confronting the individual in the postcolony. I claim that her thoughts on the lack of political responsibility resonate interestingly with Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the intimacy of tyranny in the realm of the postcolony.⁸ Mbembe’s work helps us to shift attention away from the context of European power hierarchies, and toward the African postcolony. Mbembe’s reading of the intimacy of tyranny, the ways in which power hierarchies are internalized and repeated in the everyday lives of the “postcolonized people,” helps not only to deepen my analysis of the functioning of power in the postcolony per se, but also, and more particularly, can aid us in scrutinizing the lack of interest in political resistance in those nondemocratic settings prevailing in many African countries. Mbembe thus widens Arendt’s theoretical notion of the banality of evil as he discusses similar problems in the context of the postcolony. Although they arise from different political contexts, Mbembe’s theorizations, like Arendt’s, call attention to the ways in which nondemocratic rule prevailing in unhealthy political realms becomes “normalized” for desensitized citizens who are willing to play along with such nondemocratic constructions, rather than rising against them. This problem is severe, as it deprives people of the chance to criticize the postcolony’s perpetuation of colonial abuses. Noting the acuteness of this issue, Mbembe concludes that “it is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Africa must be studied” (133).

In connection with these questions, I turn to Ayi Kwei Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Beginning from the standpoint of ordinary citizens’ lack of political resistance as both Arendt and Mbembe have discussed it in connection with crisis situations, I argue that this novel features a protagonist engaged in a type of political thinking similar to the one Arendt advocated: he is capable of active moral resistance to corruption and individual thinking. In contexts like the postcolony, where political resistance is scarce and difficult to envision, it is all the more important to analyze the ways in which Armah describes a protagonist outside the structures of polite society that seem to hold captive most of the other characters, rendering them incapable and unwilling to change the political situation in the novel.

Armah’s first novel, like Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) and Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), expresses frustration concerning discouraging postcolonial letdowns in West Africa in the mid to late 1960s. Emmanuel Obiechina observes that “[t]he most outstanding feature of these novels is the uncompromising way their authors attack the post-independence elite of Africa” (123). I argue, however, that more than his contemporaries, Armah gives meticulous attention to individual attempts to devise a way out of the disillusionment that results when a united effort against corrupted power, in the style of the decolonization movement, has lost its effectiveness. Armah’s novel puts an emphasis on individual ethics as the nameless main character, unlike most of the other characters in the novel, persistently resists totalitarian rule and moral collapse by refusing to accept bribes. I further argue that through this concentration on individual morality during the darkest of times, Armah can actually imagine a way forward; it is only through the main character’s ethical actions that any light is brought into the novel. In this fashion, he also manages to eschew postcolonial disillusionment more effectively than other West African writers at the time.

I juxtapose Arendt’s analysis of the phenomenon of living with one’s inner conscience during times of corruption and moral decay with Armah’s representation of his courageous main character, who remains capable of moral judgment, and hence of confronting postcolonial disillusionment. In the novel, the hope that challenges the darkness comes from the idea that democracy can still be saved, even when the rules of democracy have been destroyed. Armah’s nameless man nourishes the seeds of a democratic future-to-come through his commitment to rebuilding a public realm in which people can once again interact in their plurality. This ideal of the democratic regime was crucial to Arendt’s thinking as well. By reading Armah’s novel in close connection with Arendt’s political thinking, I hope to suggest a new approach to Armah’s and Arendt’s work and their unique views on the problems of moral collapse in the postcolonial world. Through my analysis of Arendt’s ideas concerning political responsibility—vis à vis Armah’s novel and its representation of a model citizen living with his conscience—I raise the question of our responsibilities today as global citizens who tend to become “desensitized to the banal, thoughtless, ‘ordinary’ origins [of violence]” directed at people in the Global South (Hayden 33). In the case of Armah’s man, he fights against uneven power structures within the postcolony by exposing the latter’s naturalized and banalized logic of inevitability. By reading his actions in connection to Arendt’s radical thought, we as postcolonial scholars can become reminded of these questions of responsibility, resistance, and living with one’s conscience in this world in which we are implicated in ways we often tend to forget.

Failed democracy in Armah’s fictional postcolony and the hope for future regeneration

In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the author provides a dark image of post-independence Ghana in which hopes for a revolution liberating the whole country from the dark times of colonialism have given way to a postcolonial disillusionment created by the national elite’s power abuses. It is, more precisely, Armah’s disappointment in Kwame Nkrumah’s regime in the late 1960s that darkens the picture of the country in the novel. Nkrumah, who has become a greatly debated African figure, initially emerged as a young, promising leader who wanted to show the world how the transition from colonial rule to independence could take a peaceful route. His attempt to transfer from colonialism to democracy failed, nevertheless, as in 1964 he “instituted a one-party state in the face of the challenge of building a nation-state,” and Nkrumah’s later regime has been accused of turning into a more totalitarian system (Biney 140).⁹ Armah’s first novel, in its representation of a particularly strong sense of discouragement concerning the ethically compromised actions of the elite, parallels Frantz Fanon’s ideas as he expresses them in his 1961 essay “The Trials and Trinbulations of National Consciousness,” in which he claims that “[t]he national bourgeoisie replaces the former European settlers” because “[f]or the bourgeoisie, nationalization signifies very precisely the transfer into indigineous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period” (Wretched 100).¹⁰ Similarly to Fanon’s ideas, Armah’s harsh criticism is directed at the men in power, including Nkrumah, who, as false Messiahs, come to power only to improve their own situations in postcolonial Africa. A former activist, the Teacher, contemplates the outcome of independence: “How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders? … We were ready here for big and beautiful things, but what we had was our own black men hugging new paunches scrambling to ask the white man to welcome them onto our backs” (The Beautyful Ones 80–81). The disappointment in independence is real; instead of being a genuine revolution, the post-independence transfer of power merely enables a new form of colonial exploitation to emerge, aided by corrupted African leaders, while, at the same time, people’s...