BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Since independence from colonialism, Africa has been speaking with different voices at different stages of its modern history. The voices may be varied bit they all speak for the continent’s political and economic emancipation. Africa’s voices were articulated either through its political leaders or its artists and writers. The colonial era is best articulated with the publication of Things Fall Apart, Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s maiden novel that vividly portrays the fate of Africa and Africans under colonialism that subverted their lives and their future. In brief, Things Fall Apart is about a kind of culture clash or culture shock resulting from the encounter between European colonialism and Africa’s quest to maintain its original cultures and traditions.
During this period, there were other African voices that were heard from Senegal with poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor who was the most important voice in favor of African independence. There was also Franz Fanon from Algeria who spoke on behalf of the African ‘wretched of the earth’ and dissected the psychological or psychiatric conditions that gave rise to what he called “black skin, white mask”. Black Skin White why European colonialism forced Africans into a kind of split personality or political schizophrenia. Africans are black but think the way of the white colonialists. His is the voice of the entire black race, although he largely dealt with the factors that hindered the complete emancipation of Africans from colonialism.
The post-independence period saw Africa’s blooming of its authentic culture as writers and poets in many African countries started to articulate the post-independence experiences. This generation of artists and poets was born during the colonial era but came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them returned from Europe well-educated and with firsthand experience of racism in Europe or America and thus used their knowledge in order to articulate a unique African cultural perspective. One of the members of this generation is Kenyan author Ngugi wa Tiongo whose criticism of the post-independence generation of Kenyan leaders was a thorn in the side of the post-colonial political establishment.
Ngugi vehemently criticized the politics of post-independence Kenya, from the leftist anti-colonial and revolutionary perspective. Ngugi was deeply influence by his experiences in the former Soviet Union while he was studying there and his readings of revolutionary literature. He tried to look at Kenya through the reading glasses of class struggle and socialist experience and lashed out at the political elites that came to power in the name of the people to only prove later to be worse than the white colonialists.
Works like Weep not Child, The River Between and Devil on the Cross reflected the rising voice against neocolonialism that was threatening to tear Kenyan society apart with its tribal politics. Ngugi’s critical voice culminated in his relatively recent novel Wizard of the Crow that can be taken as his magnum opus. Ngugi mixed myths, magic and modernity to explore the politics of contemporary Kenya although his voice reflected the condition of African societies everywhere across the continent.
Africa’s and/or Nigeria’s post-independence voice was nowhere better articulated than in Wole Soyinka’s poems, plays and the novel, entitled The Interpreters. Soyinka used authentically African, i.e. Nigerian, voices in his poems and plays and their originality is evident in the technical and thematic innovations the author has introduced to reflect an African voice that speaks for all of Africa.
He may even be taken as a pioneering writer who used African materials and techniques to tell African stories. This search for true ‘Africaness’ was later on imitated by diverse and younger writers who spoke in the language akin to that of Soyinka and his contemporaries. Younger writers like Ben Okri have continued along this post- colonial Nigerian/African tradition of storytelling and narration showing along the way how African culture could be emancipated from the elites’ political and economic oppression.
Nigerian author Ben Okri is perhaps one of the best known African writers of this younger generation. He is not only a novelist, poet and non-fiction writer. He is also a well-established political essayist. As an African with a deep, although indirect reading of life under colonialism and neo-colonialism, Ben Okri could not surprise us for being the modern mouthpiece of African Renaissance. He was born in Nigeria and grew up in Britain. His writings, both fiction and non-fiction not only denounce Africa’s mistreatment and abuse by colonialists, local politicians as well as multinational companies, but also exposes the military dictatorships that have done as much damage to Africa as forces from outside the continent.
This is nowhere more evident than in his award-winning novel entitled, The Famished Land. In this novel, Ben Okri not only changes gear in his narrative techniques from realism to African version of magic realism or mythical realism. He speaks on behalf of millions of Africans brutalized by the political elites after independence and how the same elites used their political and financial powers to make their compatriots victims of political deception and corruption.
The setting of The Famished Land is Nigeria. It is a more than 500 pages verdict on the details of how Nigerians, by implications, Africans, have been impoverished and left to their own devices by abusive, brutal and selfish politicians and their hirelings whose sole interest is to sit on the back of the poor and make more money while the common men go down the drain. It is in fact a Nigerian story told in English. It is also an African novel or an African voice as the characters, the issues and myths and legends are all African. The book depicted the struggle between tradition and modernity in Nigeria where the white rulers are not visible and act indirectly through the rich elites who try to dominate with corruption and brute force perpetrated by thugs they hire to do their dirty jobs.
At one time in the past, there was talk here in Ethiopia about the possibility of poet-laureate Tsegaye G/Meskel could be a candidate for the Nobel prize in literature because he has, in his own way, articulated Africa’s voice from an Ethiopian perspective. Tsegaye has written a great deal in his native Amahric and a couple of poems Ode of the Oda Oak Oracle in English celebrating Ethiopianess and Africanness at the same time. Yet, through his poems, Tsegaye tried to highlight Ethiopia’s past glories that are also the glories of Africa because Ethiopia is the oldest African country with an advanced civilization, a written culture and a history of fighting and defeating colonialism. His long epic poem is a kind of Ode to the Battle of Adwa, written in Amharic and can be taken as a celebratory epic about the historic Battle of Adwa whose victory remains not only Africa’s victory but also the victory of the black race in general.
The young Nigerian female writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of the latest novel on the African immigrant experience is one among many aspiring writers who might win the Nobel prize one day in the future. Her recent novel entitled Americanha has won her fame and followers making her one of the few upcoming writers on the African continent. In her novels Chimamanda deals with members of the new generation of contemporary Africa whose identities is split between Africa and the Diaspora and the dramatic and tragic lives they are forced to endure as a result. Their fate are similar to the characters in Franz Fanon’s split characters but the setting is modern America, Britain and Nigeria.
Africa is a vast continent of more than a billion people whose diverse cultures and languages form a huge mosaic of ethnicity and traditions. Together, these people and traditions form the loudest cultural voice that speak in the name of the commonness of the Africans’ identities and their shared history and common future. No writer from one country, however talented they might be, cannot grasp the entire scope of Africa’s voices both from the past and form the present. It would therefore be legitimate to pay tribute to those artists and writers who forged an African collective voice that has already found expression in the African Union, an organization devoted to the political, economic and cultural emancipation and the formation or emergence of one, strong and united Africa.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD JANUARY 15/2021
