Convivial Worlds

Writing Relation from Africa

Tina Steiner

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000418088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria africana

This book discovers everyday forms of conviviality in fiction and life writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It focuses on ordinary moments of recognition, of hospitality, of humour and kindness in everyday life to illuminate the significance of repertoires of repair in a world broken by relations of power. Through close readings of specific capacities of living with difference, the book excavates ideas of world-making, personhood and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries from African perspectives. It highlights evanescent and more durable attempts at building solidarity across local and translocal settings by focussing on modes of address that invite reciprocity in contexts of injustice, which include Apartheid, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and xenophobia. Putting current research on conviviality in conversation with the literary texts, the book demonstrates how conviviality emerges as an enabling ethical practice, as critique and survival strategy and as embodied lived experience.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

1

Conviviality

Practices and dreams of living with others

What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and our capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?

(Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC”, 188)

The entanglement in a manifold We, when known in an actual way, wards off the temptation of the thought of sovereignty: [we are] placed in a narrowly creaturely position. But [we are] enabled to recognize that this is [our] genuine width; for being bound means being bound up in relation.

(Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, 80)

A cup of tea

“When Mwangi presented the steaming tea in a cup and saucer on a small tray, Maaja Nai thanked him, smiling widely, ‘Asante sana! Hiyo ndiyo na chai mazuri! Hapana ya mazungu. Now that is what I call a good cup of tea. It's not like the English tea,’ and winked at Mwangi. It was a common belief that the Europeans drank their tea lukewarm and weak, and not scalding hot and milky as it should be. Mwangi gave him a broad smile and thanked him profusely, saying, ‘Asante, Bwana Kinyozi’” (Mustafa 2002: 125). This brief conversation about tea between Mwangi, the Kikuyu servant in an Asian household, and the Asian cook, Maaja Nai, when they first encounter each other, takes place in Sophia Mustafa's novel In the Shadow of Kirinyaga, set in colonial Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century. The conviviality of this quotidian moment is born out of the ordinariness of the hospitable gesture of offering a cup of tea. At the same time, it transcends the intimacy of the local by invoking the entangled history of Indian Ocean Africa, where the exchange of goods (such as tea), human encounters and the emergence of Kiswahili as a regional language form a rich archive of interconnection. Yet, the interaction between the characters also portrays the precariousness of this fleeting moment, in that Mustafa's narrative emphasises their social positioning in a colonial racial hierarchy, which continuously undercuts or negates the possibility of crafting patterns of mutuality.

The humour of this scene interrupts such negation and constructs a convivial sociality, by “making explicit the enormous commonality that is implicit in … social life” (Critchley 2002: 18) – a sociality characterised by the recognition of a shared vulnerability in a colonial context of coercion and control, but also by the simple need for a good cup of tea. In joking about the lack of taste of English tea, often seen as an expression of quintessential Englishness, Mwangi and Maaja Nai establish an affective connection. Tea was one of the key commodities of trade of the British empire, and its tea plantations in India allowed it to monopolise the global tea trade by cutting out the supply of this commodity by China (Rose 2011). Thus, the English claim to tea invoked in this scene suggests another universe of sociality in which neither Mwangi nor Maaja Nai are regarded as equal participants.

While the joke is told at the expense of the coloniser, to register the blatant exclusions present in the colonial social hierarchy, the scene suggests that the characters are neither motivated by bitterness nor by aggression, but rather by a desire to assert their own expectations of a pleasurable moment of hospitality. Presumably, though Mustafa's narrative does not comment on this, neither Mwangi nor Maaja Nai have been invited to have a cup of English tea and thus confirm the common belief about its lack of taste. They rely on hearsay; after all, they are excluded from the social sphere in Kenya which would have allowed them to come to their own firm conclusions on this matter. The difficulty of a sociality beyond hierarchies implied in this scene renders the possibility of convivial relation precarious and contingent, because its starting point requires the recognition of the full humanity of all participants. Subjugation and exclusion always refute this recognition. The temptation of sovereignty, as the epigraph to this chapter by the philosopher Martin Buber suggests, is inimical to realising “our genuine width” which lies in “being bound up in relation” (Buber 1955: 80). I use the term “relation” here and throughout the book as elaborated by the Martinican-born French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation to describe networks of interconnection “in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others” (Glissant 1997: 114). Relation understood in this way troubles narratives of cultural homogeneity and autochthonous myths of fixed identity. Rather than privileging essence and autonomy, Glissant, by drawing on the traumatic history of empire in the Caribbean, foregrounds the centrality of relation in intersubjective identity formation and in “the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures” (1997: 170). While relation can be lived in oppressive and violent ways and is in itself not a guarantee of conviviality, Glissant nonetheless suggests that it has purchase for an understanding of a politics and poetics of accommodation and hospitality, as that which “gives-on-and-with” (1997: 170).

The care that Mwangi extends to Maaja Nai in presenting him with a “perfect” cup of tea creates conviviality and simultaneously affirms relation, by drawing on the history of connection between the eastern half of Africa and several elsewheres across the Indian Ocean. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reflects on such intermingling of material lives in his essay “Asia in my Life” (Ngũgĩ 2012), where he writes that “daily hospitality in every Kenyan home means being treated to a mug of tea, literally a brew of tea leaves, tanmgawizi, and milk and sugar, made together, really a massala tea … So African it all seemed to me that when I saw Indians drinking tea or making curry, I thought it the result of African influence”. Ngũgĩ here refers to the long histories of connectivity that define this transoceanic region, and it is the cognisance of such histories that informs the narratives to be examined in this book. What is significant about Ngũgĩ's memories and Mustafa's joke about tea is that they invite us to think more carefully about the enlivening force of conviviality, and about the patterns of enabling sociality it can generate.

***

The simple everyday moment of sharing a cup of tea expresses something about the mundane conviviality that will be the focus of my exploration, in the chapters that follow, of narratives by four authors: the South African public intellectual and first black professor at the South African Native College (popularly known as Fort Hare), Davidson Don Tengo (D.D.T.) Jabavu (1885–1959); the South Asian Tanganyikan/Tanzanian parliamentarian and writer Sophia Mustafa (1922–2005); the Anglo-Sudanese writer, journalist and translator Jamal Mahjoub (1967) and the Zanzibari-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah (1949). The selected narratives allow me to explore the conditions of possibility of everyday forms of conviviality and the alternative humanisms that could sustain them. But I could have begun to tell the story of this book differently. On arriving in South Africa in 1995 on a study permit, not knowing that I would never leave and thus would become one of the many migrants in this country, one aspect of daily life struck me immediately as very different to what I had experienced in Germany, where I grew up: I found myself in conversations, unintentionally and without any effort on my part, with random strangers – cashiers, petrol attendants, car guards, commuters in taxis and trains, people in the park and those who stood in line with me at the Department of Home Affairs, at the post office, at the supermarket.

This South African capacity to stand patiently in line, exemplified so poignantly in the queues that formed outside voting booths in the first democratic elections of 1994, is captured amusingly by the Liberian writer Hawa Jande Golakai, in her crime novel The Lazarus Effect:

After three years in Cape Town, the policy of lines was still beyond Vee. Queues as they were otherwise affectionately known. Everyone always stood patiently awaiting their turn, admired the ceiling, took obedient half-steps forward when someone was served and left. With the exception of a passport office, this would cause a bust-up in West Africa.

(Golakai 2011: 24)

What her description omits, though, is that, more often than not, one will be roped into some conversation, even if brief, with the person in front or behind oneself in the queue, whoever they might be. Such encounters, which cut across all sorts of perceived and actual social categories of difference, where the self is a stranger among strangers, nevertheless establish relation in Glissant's sense. They invite the interlocutors to experience the “generosity disposing [them] to accept the principle of alterity” not as a threat but as the grounds for interest and connection (Glissant 1997: 154). What Glissant means by the principle of alterity is that rather than encountering others as transparent and knowable, a more circumspect stance might be to remind oneself of the irreducible opacity and multifaceted complexity of every person (1997: 190).

That demand for sociality, initially puzzling to me and at times uncomfortable, is something I have come to value deeply. Of course, when looked at cynically, these small, evanescent interactions mean little: they do not dismantle systems of injustice; they do not put an end to pervasive racism or alleviate poverty; they do not necessarily create lasting relation. But – and this is an important but – they do achieve something, namely affirmation of the presence and the humanity of the interlocutors at that specific moment in time. And they nurture dreams of building more sustained forms of convivial solidarity. It is this mutual recognition across difference that seems to me a skill and an achievement of conviviality worth investigating. It speaks to the question of what becoming human might mean.

I use the term “human” with caution, but advisedly. While the narratives that this book discusses reveal their authors’ awareness of the long chauvinist and racist history of the production of “human” subjects at the expense of rendering non-human, or not-quite-human, persons and populations to be dominated, depending on the differential lines of race, culture, geography and gender, they offer twentieth-century articulations of new humanisms that draw variously on histories of resistance to colonial oppression, rooted in antiracist, socialist, feminist and pacifist traditions to reshape the world. W.E.B. Du Bois's words at the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 give expression to the challenge to Western colonial thinking in order to pave the way for a new understanding of the human:

The congress is the meeting of the World on a broad plane of human respect and equality. In no other way is human understanding and world peace … possible … Only then in a world-wide contact … in which the voices of all races are heard shall we begin that contact and sympathy which in God's time will bring out of war and hatred and prejudice a real democracy of races of nations … We may sympathize with world-wide efforts for moral reform and social uplift, but before them all we must place those efforts which aim to make humanity not the attribute of the arrogant and the exclusive, but the heritage of all … in the world where most … are colored.

(Du Bois cited in Gilroy 2005a: 37–38, emphasis added)

These words express the dream of a world-wide common humanity, one that is just as relevant today as it was then, and that goes to the heart of what conviviality means. It is thus important to wrest “the human” away from its Western employment in the definition of some categories of persons as less than fully human that has underwritten slavery, colonisation and various forms of exploitation and violence (Mwangi 2019: 5–6). Because of this history, the South African sociologist Zimitri Erasmus suggests the need to “shatter the … connection between race and the human in Western notions of human difference” (Erasmus 2017: xxiv); instead she proposes a “conception of the human … located in words and meanings that emerge from tangled, circuitous relations, not through sequential lines of ancestral, cultural, genetic or bureaucratic transmission” (2017: xxiv–xxv). She draws on Tim Ingold's work to suggest that becoming human is a verb, “humaning”, which she describes as a process of “life-in-the-making with others” not to be confused with “humanising”, which is “to impose upon the world a preconceived meaning of the human” (2017: xxii). It is the futurity of humaning that I think Achille Mbembe means when he declares that “the ‘human’ is another name for the future” (Mbembe 2011: 193). This attachment to human becoming is particularly evident in African conceptions of personhood that are not inevitably linked to hierarchies of power, and that extend to include the non-human realm; I explore these conceptions further in a later section of this chapter.

Conviviality as a form of agency

The word “convivial” is derived from the Latin word convivalis, which means “pertaining to a feast or guest”, and from convivere, to live together (com- “with, together” + vivere “to live”) (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.). The Latin term developed in the Spanish language into “convivencia”, which according to Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez lays less emphasis on the “joyful coming together” invoked by the English translation but rather stresses “a communal being in the world that is tied to a respectful and caring living together” (2020: 105). This coinage described “the pluri-cultural and pluri-confessional ‘living together’ in medieval Spain (al-Andalus)” (Hemer et al. 2020: 2; see also Masood 2017: 70), where “Jews, Christians and Muslims built intellectual circles to exchange and translate ideas in the Mediterranean region” (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2020: 108). What this etymological thread traces is that conviviality invokes a psycho-affective modality in that it suggests “living with” another peacefully, hospitably, extending kindness towards the guest who more often than not may be a stranger (Joanna Overing and Alan Passes cited in Wessendorf 2014: 393). It also suggests debate, engagement with and interchange across different backgrounds, religions and intellectual traditions.

As a descriptive category, conviviality allows me to read the texts I examine in this book for signs of concrete practices of relation, and specific capacities of living with alterity. This reading asks: how and under what conditions do people create patterns of human flourishing that privilege mutuality and interconnectedness? Alongside this reading, in which the concept of conviviality emerges as an ethical value that directly shapes everyday praxis, it also has a utopian, future-oriented dimension: it invokes ideas of world-making and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries. Here I ask what the narrative strategies are that encode such an aspirational dimension, that is, in what ways do the narratives challenge and invite the reader to imagine enabling ways of being in relation with others? The texts thus speak to both the realities and dreams of modes of togetherness. Ben Okri, the Nigerian writer, suggests that these two dimensions are inextricably linked. In his view, to imagine and dream the future translates in...