The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

321 Pages·2001·16.14 MB·English

by  F. Abiola Irele

THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION
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THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION
Literature in
Africa & the Black Diaspora
F. Abiola Irele

OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2001
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
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Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2001 by F. Abiola Irele
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Irele, Abiola.
The African imagination : literature in Africa and the black diaspora /
F. Abiola Irele.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508618-X; ISBN 0-19-508619-8 (paper)
1. African literature—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—Africa.
3. African diaspora. I. Title.
PL8010 .174 2001
809'.896—dc21 00-052417

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
Mma Ette
and the girls
Tinu, Aya, & Idia
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Preface
During my undergraduate days in the late 1950s at University College,
Ibadan (as it was then known), a major annual event on campus was the
performance of a musical work in the Western repertoire, in a production
that was undertaken as a collaborative effort by students, faculty, and
other amateur musicians recruited from the city, the latter often provid-
ing a crucial component of the cast. Indeed, the choice of Mozart's The
Magic Flute for 1958 was determined by the happy fact that the wife of
an English officer in the military garrison stationed at Ibadan during that
year—Nigeria was still a colony of Britain at the time—was a trained so-
prano with the vocal capability to take on the demanding role of Queen
of the Night. As it happened, I was assigned the role of Monostatos, the

lascivious Moor in her service who torments the hapless heroine, Pamina,
until he is finally cast off with his evil mistress into the night by Sarastro,
the high priest of Osiris.
It appears that, from comments by friends and other observers who
saw the production over the three nights that it ran, I played Monostatos
with considerable relish. It certainly did not occur to me at the time to
approach the role with any kind of circumspection, for it was not until
years afterward that I came to be fully aware of the stereotyped and de-
meaning image of the black man that the role represented. So essential
is this image to the Western imagination as it informs the simple mor-
alism of the libretto for which Mozart supplied the music—a feature that
also subserves in a curious way what we must now recognize as a fascist
ethos—that even the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has his ac-
tor/singer play the lurid element of the role to the hilt, as it were, in the
famous film he made of Mozart's opera.
I have recalled here the peculiar circumstances of my ambiguous in-
volvement with Mozart's masterpiece because the episode seems to me
significant in at least two ways. The first and immediate point has to do
with the fact that the less appealing aspects of Mozart's opera reveal
themselves only after reflection, for the overwhelming impression the
work conveys is that of a profound aesthetic experience, sustained by the
incomparable beauty of the music, its sublimity even, in terms of the
Western convention of which it is of course one of the greatest instances.
It thus illustrates the insidious and sometimes terrifying power of certain
works of art to obscure with their very brilliance the moral zones they
impinge upon. The outstanding example of this phenomenon in litera-
ture is perhaps Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit, in which the aesthetic
value generated by the sheer virtuosity of the writing becomes insepa-
rable from the nature and extratextual import of the vituperations the
work proffers. Second, and to be more particular, the episode places in
sharp relief the fundamental irony of colonial education, whose ideolog-
ical premises obliged its agents to have recourse to texts, images, and
other modes of discourse and representation that devalue the humanity
of their dark-skinned wards, as part of the effort to establish the cultural
and moral authority of the colonizing race. But, as Albert Memmi has
pointed out, the initial phase of submission and acquiescence on the part
of the colonial subject who undergoes this form of education is invariably
succeeded by a violent reaction against the systematic assault upon con-
sciousness and sensibility that it is ultimately recognized to entail
(Memmi, 1957).
The problematic relation between the aesthetic and the ethical sug-

gested by these remarks has been examined by Michael Echeruo in the
African context, with specific reference to Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of
the Narcissus. If I have read him properly, Echeruo clearly identifies the
bigotry behind Conrad's shadowy and ultimately sinister depiction of the
black character in his tale as a shaping element of the work, but he goes
on to interpret this factor as the driving force of a creative impetus con-
ducive to the production of great art (Echeruo, 1978). Chinua Achebe for
his part is less accommodating, for he finds Conrad's other tale, Heart of
Darkness, so offensive that he is unable to concede the aesthetic and
moral significance claimed for it by its numerous advocates. We know
viii PREFACE
that he was stirred to literary creation himself by the realization that his
own humanity as an individual was called into question by the negative
representation of Africa that he encountered in Conrad's novella and in
the work of other European writers who have located their imaginings
in his continent of origin. For him, these works provide the clearest in-
dication of the compelling need for Europe to cast Africa as the polar
opposite of itself, in order to enforce its self-affirmation as the unique
source of human and spiritual values. Africa has thus been projected in
the West both imaginatively and conceptually as what he calls "the place
of negation" (Achebe, 1988).1
Achebe's imaginative and ideological challenge of Western represen-
tations of Africa in his own work clarifies admirably the mental process
that has attended the emergence of African literature in modern times.
African responses to the pressures of colonial domination have found a
privileged mode of expression in imaginative literature, which has not
only registered the epochal significance of the encounter with Europe and
its objective implications for African societies and cultures, but even more
important, the complex relation of African experience to the norms and
precepts commonly associated with the modern West, and ultimately
their determination of the directions of African thought and expression.
In this respect, African literature may be said to derive an immediate
interest from the testimony it offers of the preoccupation of our writers
with the conflicts and dilemmas involved in the tradition/modernity di-
alectic. This observation is based on the simple premise that, as with
many other societies and cultures in the so-called third world, the impact
of Western civilization on Africa has occasioned a discontinuity in forms
of life throughout the continent. It points to the observation that the
African experience of a modernity associated with a Western paradigm is
fraught with tensions at every level of the communal existence and in-

dividual apprehension (Poirier, 1994; Gyekye, 1997). Modern African lit-
erature, in particular the literature expressed in the European languages,
can be interpreted as a dramatization of and meditation upon the prob-
lems of existence posed by this situation.
The historical experience in all its ramifications thus serves as a con-
stant reference for the African imagination; this has a consequence for
any form of criticism concerned with our literature. It is impossible, in
the particular circumstances of its development, to ignore the specific
historical and sociological references of African imaginative expression in
the European languages, for these references have determined the genesis
PREFACE ix