Helen Pyne Timothy

SOURCE: "V. S. Naipaul and Politics: His View of Third World Societies in Africa and the Caribbean," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, March, 1985, pp. 247-62.

[In the following essay, Timothy examines V. S. Naipaul's view, as expressed in his fiction, of Third World political attitudes and issues.]

There is a certain sense in which V. S. Naipaul is an anachronism in Third World writing: He is the writerin-exile trained in the metropole and still resident there after thirty years. He is the writer who left the West Indies at a time when the colonial system was well entrenched and who has never returned to his homeland except in fleeting visits. He has never participated in any political movement dedicated to the notion of political independence; rather he has eschewed nationalistic pronouncements. Now a citizen of Britain, he has revealed how sincerely he depends on what he calls the "literate" persuasion of that society. According to him, the Third World environment does not provide this atmosphere.

The Third World writer who has maintained this "observer status" is more usually associated with a pre-1950 era. Yet Naipaul is now regarded internationally as the foremost expositor of Third World political philosophy, attitudes, and movements. This paper attempts to set out what, according to Naipaul, these attitudes might be, what their motivations are, and how they might be evaluated. Finally, an attempt is made to assess the kinds of contributions which Naipaul makes to a larger understanding of the Third World political person.

The works which are here examined deal primarily with independent post-colonial societies in the Caribbean and in Africa. They are fictional writings. It is perhaps best, therefore, to justify the claim that the political stances which follow are in fact those of the author himself and not merely those of the characters who exist only within the counterfeit world of The Mimic Men or A Bend in the River. As this paper will show, Naipaul's perspectives on Third World development are repeated explications of a personal paradigm, an intensely private way of viewing Third World societies. Whether it be African or the Caribbean coincidence of the assessment leaves little doubt that the author's convictions are being ventilated.

Within the Naipaulian cosmos the characters are the distinct product of their environment. They can never become anything or do anything other than what the environment makes it possible for them to produce. And the Caribbean environment as depicted in The Mimic Men and in Guerrillas is appreciably unstable and insecure. Kripalsingh, the hero in The Mimic Men, is the West Indian of Hindu ancestry, a personality who is emotionally and psychologically crippled (the name is iconic) by the society in which he has been born. Kripalsingh's social environment is unstable: his father, although of middle-class origin and a teacher, is socially insecure and unhappy because his wife, through her marriage to him, becomes a poor relation of a suddenly wealthy family. The invidious comparisons which the boy and his sisters make of their own status vis-a-vis that of their in-laws is at the base of his uncertain childhood.

But a more important factor seems to be present within the structure of the society. Naipaul seems to think that it is only within a Third World country, where the society is in a state of flux, that people like Kripalsingh's grandfather can become a millionaire through the lucky purchase of the correct franchise. Similarly, in such societies, which are without tradition, the only thing respected is money. Thus, Kripalsingh's father, for all his admirable qualities, becomes acutely frustrated by his inability to obtain a position of respect or prominence within his family. Moreover, Kripalsingh's awareness of his own blemished personality is shown by Naipaul as merely a reflection of the "distress" of the whole society. It is part of Naipaul's metatheory that human beings can only be secure when they are born and nurtured within the shadow of their ancestors.

Societies in the Caribbean, then, can only breed individuals whose problems are incapable of resolution and whose impotence flows from this root cause. Naipaul carefully reinforces the message. Kripalsingh is the descendant of the uprooted Indian in the Caribbean; but the descendants of the other races fare just as badly. Hok, the representative of the Chinese races, and Browne, the African descended boy, and, by extension, all the boys of Kripalsingh's era are locked in a blemished world where they only survive by excluding the reality of their environment and their existence. They are all of high intellectual calibre, sensitivity, and astuteness. They are physically well balanced and graceful. Yet their survival depends on a denial of existence. They are refugees in the world of the intellect, in Latin books, in temperate climates. To put it tritely, only apples exist where oranges abound. Their affliction resides in the overwhelming shoddiness of their environment. Born to disgrace within a disgraceful backwater, only imaginative and emotional escape makes life bearable.

What kind of action can be expected from people like these? Where their action is political it cannot be ideological. It cannot derive out of consensus or plurality of views. It becomes rather of the nature of a howl in the dark, a desperate individual response to distress, an emotional reaching out to fellow sufferers. Thus Kripalsingh's father becomes the focus of a political movement. His own anxiety and dejection happen to coincide with that of exploited dock workers, and he becomes their leader. But a political act which surfaces from these blighted roots has no solid basis, no real direction. Singh has to fall back on the relics of his ancestral Hindu religion. He becomes a source of solace to people who have no other hope. The assessment here is clear: The Indian in these societies, although likewise uprooted, does have the possibility of drawing on his rich underlying cultural and religious heritage for philosophical direction, succor, and support. Although his understanding of its wholeness is imperfect, he nevertheless can offer the Negro (the dock workers) a glimpse of the meaningfulness of existence which they are wholly incapable of producing for themselves. But even this unsubstantial cultural link is being lost between the generations of these uprooted peoples. It is interesting to note that Singh's larger humanity can only be perceived by his son when it has been revealed to him by an English aristocrat in England. As Naipaul so clearly believes, it is the European who must reveal every aspect of his existence to the Third World persona since there is no system of value in that environment against which the individual can judge either the quality of his beliefs and existence or his environment.

The assessment of Third World political action and interaction given in The Mimic Men is a devastating one. But its outlines are very clear, and its ramifications are further explored in Guerillas. Jimmy Ahmed's irremediably blemished self is the result of the squalor of his birth: a half-caste "born in the back room of a Chinese grocery."¹ This ramshackle beginning cannot be transcended. The society which spawns births like these cannot produce men of substance. The Caribbean is therefore "a place that had exhausted its possibilities. . . . Nothing that happened here could be important."²

Like all Third World personalities, Ahmed has no real understanding of himself or his society. His image of himself is a reflection of that created by those people in England who perceived him according to their own wrong-headed predilections. Yet this deficient personality is to be expected to act, to create vital social change within the society. Like Singh he becomes the eye of an evanescent emotional expression of the frustration and impotence of the more severely disadvantaged elements of society, and for a time he is able to channel and express it. But again, like Singh, his actions end in lonely and random violence, a violence which it is suggested has some darkly ritualistic and primitive meaning, a faulty and debased attempt to recapture the ancestral past.

These dramatic politically motivated events are brief and transient, again precisely because the society is incapable of producing the intellectual depth which could encourage an ideological or philosophical response to these scintillae of pain. Browne and Kripalsingh in The Mimic Men are university trained as is Meredith in Guerrillas. But their attempts at political action are equally ineffectual, equally doomed to failure. They despise themselves and their societies. Browne is the Black Power advocate: but his newspaper 'The Socialist" is "petty and absurd," and he satirizes his people, the smell of the mob, their ignorance, the narrowness of their aims and desires. Even worse is his total lack of respect for the people whom he purports to serve: on the subject of their exclusion from jobs in the bank he says: "If I thought black people were handling my few cents I wouldn't sleep too well."³ Browne and Kripalsingh represent the new politicians of the post-colonial Caribbean world: in such hands independence can only be a farcical exercise.

Naipaul's further explorations of the genesis and effects of political action in the Third World are set in Africa. Within In a Free State the projections are tentatively developed: A Bend in the River examines them in greater detail. The "free state" is a newly independent African country. But independence has meant the out-break of civil war. The act of war is political: it is an attempt by the president to assert his jurisdiction over the king's people. It may be noted here that whereas in relation to the Caribbean the politicians were presented as being incapable of any real action, in the African setting real action is war. But like the violence in Guerrillas it is a negative, destructive act. Moreover, its motivation is perfectly irrational. It is based on a precolonial, preideological motive. Mysterious and primordial, it is further strengthened by the African desire to enslave. It is Naipaul's suggestion both in In a Free State and in A Bend in The River that slavery and the desire to enslave are peculiarly African conditions.⁴

The president in the African state controls the army, the helicopters, the impressive outputs of modern technology created in another civilization, that of, as Naipaul says: "the makers and doers." Their "legitimate" uses are being perverted in Africa. The president himself is a pure pragmatist. He is the accommodator who wears his hair "in the English style" and affects Western-type suits. Without the dignity of an ideological system, ennobling nationalism, or even racial pride, he imports white mercenaries to hunt down his own people. In other words, with independence in Africa the systems of modern Europe are being used to serve wholly irrational and ignoble ends.

But what of the citizen of this "free state"? Free peoples are certainly those who must enjoy the rights and privileges of citizens within the boundaries of their particular state. The important corollaries, commonplace but nevertheless true, are the commitment and the intelligence to operate the reticulated network of rights and privileges and responsibilities. It is difficult to imagine the African citizens of In a Free State as having the capability of functioning within a modern political system.

Firstly, the educated middle classes who belong to the president's people share the fruits of the president's power, as Naipaul describes them:

The Africans were young . . . could read and write, and were high civil servants, politicians or the relations of politicians, non-executive directors and managing directors of recently opened branches of big international corporations. They were the new men of the country and they saw themselves as men of power.⁵

But if the middle classes are contemptible, the masses are "pathetic." In crowds they are "blank-faced," "featureless," docilely being herded into trucks.⁶ Their clothes are cast-off European clothes, shabby, and patched. In other words, it appears that they have made some external adaptations towards European culture, but it is an imperfect accommodation, unsightly, and at variance with the indigenous sense (as symbolized by the colorful patches on their clothes). Single representatives of the common people are no more admirable. For example, the African at the Hotel, although invested with more individuality and personality (his clothes "fitted"), is equally dirty and sweaty. His face shows "age alone rather than a quality of experience. . . . His smile was fixed."⁷ The picture is a negative one: the Africans seem to understand only hate and rage. This sense of smouldering rage causes Naipaul to invest their personalities with a kind of menace which seems to emanate from the secrecy of their primitive ceremonies and the total irrationality and unpredictability of their behavior.

The king's people add further dimensions to this picture of the citizens of the modern African state. The king himself, the African version of an aristocrat, is shallow, unthinking. A "forest-person," his authority had been fraught with the same insubstantiality and impermanence which is intrinsic to a forest culture. During the period of colonialism there had been an attempt to invest him with permanence and presence in the shape of a concrete palace. But in the post-colonial era he has reverted to insubstantiality. He becomes victim to the primal disorder of his society, falls prey to the savagery of his ancient enemy. But there is no real sympathy for the "poor little king": having assumed the norms and attitudes of his colonial masters, he has lost even his native forest cunning: he attempts to escape not by disappearing into the bush, but by taking a taxi. The rest of the king's people are semi-literate forest dwellers, totally unsuited for the modern world and incapable of even the simplest manual labour which is associated with civilization: that of cleaning the windows of a car or pumping gas. They cannot even collect money or understand a monetary system.⁸

Many other motifs apparent in In a Free State are further developed in A Bend in the River. The postcolonial era has meant violence and destruction of all the permanent structures created by colonialism. The destruction has been caused by African rage at European domination:

The steamer monument had been knocked down with all the other colonial statutes and monuments. Pedestals had been defaced, protective railings flattened, floodlights smashed and left to rust. Ruins had been left as ruins; no attempt had been made to tidy up. . . . The wish had only been to get rid of the intruder. It was unnerving. The depth of the African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences. (p. 33)

Again, then, African action is imperfect; it is destructive, unthinking violence, almost a perverse and inevitable desire to revert to the bush.

Naipaul's pervasive sense of the return of Africa to a primeval state is recorded in his treatment of the environment in this novel. He compares the order, the beauty, the care given to a European city with the chaos of the African city:

I was walking on the Embankment, beside the river. . . . On the Embankment wall there are green lamp standards. I had been examining the dolphins on the standards, dolphin by dolphin, standard by standard. I was far from where I had started, and I had momentarily left the dolphins to examine the metal supports of the pavement benches. These supports . . . were in the shape of camels. .. . I stopped, stepped back mentally . . . and all at once saw the beauty in which I had been walking—the beauty of the light, the river and the sky, the soft colours of the clouds, the beauty of light on water, the beauty of the buildings, the care with which it had all been arranged. (p. 163)

This was the President's city. . . . This was where, in colonial days he had got his idea of Europe. The colonial city . . . with many residential areas rich with decorative, sheltering trees . . . was still to be seen. It was with this Europe that, in his own buildings, the President wished to compete. The city while decaying in the center, with dirt roads and rubbish mounds just at the back of the great colonial boulevards, was yet full of new public works. (p. 267)

All facilities are third class, and there is the strong sensation that the timelessness of the river and the jungle will eventually reassert itself and that the feeble efforts of the African at civilized endeavour will simply and inexorably disappear.

With this brooding sense of impending destruction, political action must be essentially meaningless. Like leaders in the Caribbean, the Big Man, a city boy and therefore a rootless person in the African context, is driven only by the psychological imperative of exorcising the frenzy caused by the humiliating circumstances of his birth; his mother had been a hotel maid during the colonial era. The Big Man is a wily politician, a soldier who at first seems to irradiate intelligence and guidance for the masses from the capital. But he soon begins to demonstrate the usual Naipaulian flaws of the Third World politician: He trusts his white advisors and mercenaries rather than his own people; he apes the mannerisms of the aristocratic European ruler. But his posturings soon become more dangerous: he becomes malin, bullying, murderous. He rules by the invocation of symbols, fetishes, dreams. He adopts some of these symbols from European civilizations but only in order to parody them. How can there be a citoyen in a state where rights, freedoms, law and order are unknown? His use of the African Madonna, his maximes and portraits are simply frauds. As he moves more and more into the shadow of his ancestral persona, even his "Window to the World," "The Domain," is revealed as a shoddy hoax which cannot be saved from destruction, even with the greatest amount of idealism and intensity.

The unhealthiness of the Big Man's psyche and system must affect the whole society and, with the deficiencies of that society, together create an irredeemable state. It is nonsense to speak of law, justice, citizenship where the people understand only exploitation:

Asians, Greeks and other Europeans remained prey, to be stalked in different ways. Some men were to be feared, and stalked cautiously: it was necessary to be servile with some. .. . It was in the history of the land: here men had always been prey. (p. 62)

Africans are malins—"not wicked," "mischievous," "badminded," but

malins the way a dog chasing a lizard was malin or a cat chasing a bird. The people were malins because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey. (p. 62)

The animal imagery is intentional here: it conveys the mindless, inhuman cruelty inherent in African personality, the lack of appreciation or understanding of other people as human beings.

This assessment of African personality is not surprising since in the picture of Ferdinand we are presented with the modern African who has his roots in the forest village in the "real" ancestral life (his mother is a sorceress). Ferdinand is the prototype of the African civil servant who interprets and administers the desires of "the Big Man." But his limitations are severe, although his future at first seems secure: "how easy it had been made for him." But he begins as a bush African, and for Naipaul, Africans have truly dwelt for centuries in darkness where no societal organization, no cultural continuity has been etched on their minds. They know of magic, dreams, superstitions; but that is all. Ferdinand's mind is truly a tabula rasa:

You took a boy out of the bush and you taught him to read and write: you levelled the bush and built a polytechnic and you sent him there. It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at—writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge. The rest of us had to take things in stages. . . . [W]e were so clogged by what the centuries had deposited in our minds and hearts. Ferdinand, starting from nothing had with one step made himself free and was ready to race ahead of us. (p. 112; emphasis mine)

African culture and knowledge are simply of no value.

Of course, Ferdinand cannot "race ahead" of anyone: the society does not permit it. He must fall prey eventually to the madness which leads the president to victimize and annihilate everyone, even those he has created.

Politics in Africa, then, is the world of the exploiter and the exploited, the shabby and the corrupt. Blood and iron is the substitute for law and order. Viciousness, dishonesty, and trickery have replaced political philosophy. But those things are to be expected because all Third World endeavors are useless. Modern Africa, after all, is almost an unsubstantial creation, "flimsy," on the verge of returning to the bush. The root cause of the "frenzy" is the awareness of their insignificance among the creators, "the makers and the doers of the world." As Salim says; "I had just come from Europe; I had seen the real competition" (p. 266).

The sentiments which are encapsulated in the above quotation may be interpreted as the overt expression of an underlying presumption in this work, and indeed in all the novels which are being considered here. There is always the feeling that Naipaul is using Europe as the standard against which the Third World is measured. This unabashedly Euro-centered view of the world is remarkable in a writer of Third World origins and one who in fact continues to write about India, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. At the root of the comparison between Europe and the Third World is the perception that Europe represents civilization, law, order. It is seen as the repository of history, the cradle of ideas, of creative endeavour, of intellectual depth. Towards the end of A Bend in the River, where narrative voice fractures and focus moves from Salim, the major character to spotlight the long monologue of the other two Indian characters who are also born in Africa, the reader is struck by the fact that their life experiences are concerned with their relationships to Europe and European peoples and societies, their fears of the consequences of the massive intrusions of Third World peoples with their inadequate perceptions of order, and their diverse social values into these carefully developed civilizations. At this stage the authorial voice becomes extremely self-evident, and the style takes on the more realistic mode of the journalist. This stress on opinions lessens the feeling of verisimilitude and confirms that the author is in fact attempting to disseminate his opinions.

But is Europe really "the competition"? If this view is accepted, then it would entail corollaries that there is only one model for human development, that only one area of the world is worthy of emulation. This would imply a presupposition that one's historical sense must confine itself to the post-industrial sector of human history and must ignore the facts of continuous human development and the diversity of human attitudes which a wider ranging look at history and societies must surely reveal. Is the common man in any of the world's major societies which are outside the scope of European thought and endeavour really engaged in attempting to "catch-up" with European education, mores, norms, political and social organization which Naipaul seems to suggest as the only path for Africa and the Caribbean? Is there no possible awareness of self save by comparison with the European awareness of that identity as unique, and therefore the source of definition for the entire world?

Acceptance of this viewpoint must be regarded as part of the intellectual milieu of the writer who sees the act of literary creation as confined to "literate societies," and as presenting an avenue for self-awareness and self definition. The quotation:

The World is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing have no place in it.⁹

is relevant here. It expresses the strong conviction that the individual can, by his own efforts, escape the limitations of his origins. But this escape is only for those who are sensitive, talented and aware: not for the group as a whole. There exists the possibility of linking even this viewpoint to the traditionally elitist viewpoint of European societies and education, where the privileged few are accorded a higher social and intellectual value.

It could also be argued that the presentation of the Third World environment as barren not only serves to reinforce the ironic mode of these works and to transfer the modern intellectual theme of the wasteland into the Third World environment, but it also recalls the well-known, almost axiomatic European view which maintained that "nothing" existed south of the Sahara until one arrived at South Africa. This perception has been somewhat moderated through the additional knowledge of the meanings of culture and civilization, of the variety of endeavors which might be named "creative." But in a strange way, Naipaul appears to remain impervious to these more sensitive and inclusive assessments of human endeavour.

These remarks should not be taken to mean that Naipaul is always totally wedded to the European viewpoint. Indeed there are places where he condemns European hypocrisy and lies, the self-interested use of Third World situations to further individual careers or to further individual ambitions. He also marvels at the arrogance which led them to create civilized settlements in places "whose future had come and gone." Again, in A Bend in the River the European god has not approved of the mixing of peoples as the motto "Miscerique que probat populos et foedera jungi" seemed to suggest. [He approves of the mingling of peoples and their bands of union.] European arrogance has assumed that peoples could be united: but to Naipaul this is anathema. The mingling of peoples in the Third World has led to disastrously insecure individuals. In Africa it has meant loss of power, identity, and individuality for the Arabs. In modern Europe, "where hundreds of people like myself from parts of the world like mine had forced themselves in to work and live," (p. 247), the mixing of peoples is causing Europe to be "shrunken and mean and forbidding." The disorganization, the squalor of the Third World, the dishonesty in trading, and the slavery are catching up with Europe and subverting its culture.

Of course, it is difficult to speak of modern Third World societies and avoid the subject of the relationships of the races. And for Naipaul, the Third World writer, this subject is interestingly handled. In both The Mimic Men and A Bend in the River the major characters are Indians born in the Caribbean and in Africa. They are the most sensitively perceived and the most fully developed characters in these works. But they are on the fringes of their societies, not relating in any profound way to members of the other races. In The Mimic Men, as we have seen, Kripalsingh does become for a moment part of a political movement. But his involvement in the society is short-lived, and he is a withdrawn, isolated personality. The Indians here also have unsatisfactory relationships with Europeans of both sexes. With Africans they are uneasy, anxious, fearful of exploitation. The Indians, though born in Africa, have no interest in, or understanding of, African culture, societal relationships, aims, or aspirations.

In The Mimic Men and again in Guerrillas Naipaul suggests that the French Creoles, representatives of the white colonial power structure, retain prestigious positions in the Caribbean, although like the Arabs in Africa they have lost real power since "the tarbrush passed there." Their relationship with the black peoples is analyzed as being one of tolerance and understanding, best expressed by the phrase that those locked in a slave-owner-slave relationship for centuries understand each other. But the tolerance on both sides is mixed with an ironic view of the posturings of the newly powerful blacks and a desire to continually remind them of their past. Within this linked relationship of former slave-owner and slave, the Indian has no place.

The European in Africa and in the Caribbean is either a sloppily sentimental liberal without clearly defined aims and with a flawed personality such as Bobby in In a Free State or Peter in Guerrillas or a failed intellectual attempting to regain a power position in the Third World like Raymond. In any event the "mingling of races," an event brought about by European political expansion, is, in Naipaul's view, a disaster.

These stances lead to a perception which is explicitly antisocialist. The mingling of peoples from the various races is after all a physical manifestation of the kind of inherent equality which socialism attempts to express in ideological terms. But this political philosophy stands in direct contrast to Naipaul's abiding faith in the elitism of the talented. Accordingly, Naipaul discusses socialism in the Third World as "a Third World socialistic pose." He makes it clear that all the new politicians mouth socialism—but necessarily meaninglessly, because where are the community, the honesty, the intellect, the belief in human endeavour which must support this political philosophy? It is interesting that in spite of his knowledge of the history within a society, he does not use his knowledge of the history of the Third World to arrive at any dialectical position which postulates the necessity for change, growth, or development. For the masses there is no hope.

It is a negative and pessimistic view, unrelieved by any positive features which may truly show an awareness of the possibility of the evolution of states in political terms, of the value of political ideology, be it socialist or nationalistic within these societies, or of the immeasurable increase in pride, self-awareness, emotional health, and material benefit which political independence brings to Third World peoples.

NOTES

¹ V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 18.

² Ibid., pp. 50-51.

³ V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Deutsch, 1967), p. 118.

⁴ V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (London: Deutsch, 1979), pp. 19, 62, 83. Hereafter cited in the text by page reference only.

⁵ V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 104.

⁶ Ibid., p. 121.

⁷ Ibid., p. 130.

⁸ Ibid., pp. 146-48.

⁹ Naipaul, A Bend in the River, p. 91.

Barbara Eckstein

SOURCE: "Pleasure and Joy: Political Activism in Nadine Gordimer's Short Stories," in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 343-46.

[In the following essay, Eckstein considers Nadine Gordimer's short stories as an attempt to break down dichotomies in South African political culture.]

I know a recent college graduate, a young white man from an ordinary, comfortable suburb of an American Midwestern city. At Kenyon College he studied Central American history and culture, and now he is a political activist, living sometimes in Central America but mostly in the city where he grew up. Not too long ago I asked him if he sees much of his parents, who still live in the suburb across town. "No, not much," he explained. "They're into pleasure and I'm into joy." When I began thinking about all the characters in Nadine Gordimer's short stories who try to be activists or try not to be, I was reminded of my friend and his parents. Because true political activism does aspire to a secularized transcendence and political passivity does seek pleasure to numb reality, his dichotomy is useful in pinpointing what distinguishes political activists from others. One would think, moreover, that in a society as compartmentalized as South Africa's, this distinction between activists and others—in fact, any self and other—would be clearcut. However, most particularly in a nation whose official governmental policy since 1948 has been to mystify the black other as enemy and so promote dichotomist, we-they thinking, no dichotomy of humanity can withstand careful scrutiny. Careful, skeptical, but compassionate scrutiny is exactly the method of Nadine Gordimer's short stories.

John Cooke, Stephen Clingman, and others who have studied Gordimer's novels see in them a general movement from personal to political interaction and, in many of the novels, a direct response to the political context of a particular phase in South African history.¹ I am persuaded that this perception of a progression in the novels is well founded. The short stories, however, are different. Because short stories, at their best, have the resonance of a lyric, they can often be prescient in a way a novel cannot. A writer may well have an inkling of a complex vision beyond social dichotomies, find an image to embody that inkling, and thus create a very provocative short story. Still, a writer needs more than an inkling and an image to sustain a fictional society for the course of a novel. Even though Gordimer's novels show a development away from compartmentalized personal lives toward a holistic social vision, from the 1950s onward her short stories have suggested the kind of ambiguities that confound one's efforts to separate self from other, hero from enemy, even pleasure from joy.

"Is There Somewhere Else Where We Can Meet?" published in 1953, is just such a story. Simply put, it seems to be the story of a young white woman who, finding herself alone in a deserted lot, encounters a ragged black man who robs her. This is the apparent action of the story, but there is no unequivocal evidence to confirm the truth of this appearance. Cooke, who does himself read the story as a robbery, nevertheless provides the terms to describe the story in another way. He suggests the terms camera-eye and painterly for two techniques Gordimer uses: the first is a detached perspective; the second, engaged.² "Somewhere Else" is a painterly story. The writer is very engaged in the fearful perception of the white woman as her eye flies past the landscape to the one use of red paint, the cap on the black man's head. Plunged into blind fear and unable to focus on anything else, the woman is thrown totally off balance as she and the red cap approach one another. The characters' movement has such a dizzying effect that after they are face to face, it is impossible to tell exactly what their ensuing actions are. Writer and reader are enveloped in the fear felt by the woman, who is the central consciousness: "Every vestige of control, of sense, of thought, went out of her as a room plunges into dark at the failure of power."³

In this dark room of fear without sense or thought, she sees what she has anticipated all her life: assault by a black man. However, in this dark room the reader cannot be certain that the character's "awful dreams came true," because the black man's movements are always a response to the white woman's; he may be steadying her, after all, and not robbing her. In her fear she is not able to consider this possibility. So when she "fumbled crazily" with her packages, and then "his hand clutched her shoulder," she is forced to interpret this as "grabbing out at her." She fights him; he responds by "jerking her back." She drops her packages; he responds—as she puts it—by "falling upon them." He may, in fact, be picking them up. In the dark room of fear one sees only the images of one's own nightmares; they may or may not truly be embodied in some external reality.

The beautifully created tension and ambiguity in this story allow for a vision beyond personal fear. Because the woman has confronted her fear of the other, she may have taken the first step toward political commitment to change herself and her society. When she first enters the barren dreamscape at the beginning of the story, her eye is riveted on the red cap. Knowing that it is what she fears, she is propelled toward it, not in a death wish, as Freud might have it, but rather in an instinctual desire for survival. The desire to know that which one fears, to imagine what is real—no matter its horror—is the raw material for the thought and action that makes personal and social survival possible.⁴ Thus the young South African woman is compelled to leave her white female isolation and confront the two-personed other she has been conditioned to fear and distrust: the black "peril" the South African Nationalist Party has created to unify white voters, and the black male with whom sexual interaction is illegal and immoral. When she does face the mythical other, she discovers that, though she cannot see clearly, she can survive.

Only after literally grappling with the black man does she realize, first, that she is relieved when she stops fighting and, second, that whether or not he was robbing her, it was silly to fight for her money, which she needs so much less than he. She uncovers at least this much reality by jeopardizing her security. At the end of the story she is described as an "invalid" picking burrs from her stockings. No longer protected and imprisoned by the pleasures and forces of isolation, she is vulnerable. Transcendent joy is hardly at hand, but it is now a possibility for this survivor. Her meeting with the black man has not been pleasant, but for a moment she and the African did stand on the common ground of Africa, which runs from under one prison to under another.⁵

In "The Smell of Death and Flowers," a more discursive story published in 1956, a young white woman takes her first overt political action. Having just returned to Africa after five years in England, she is very correct and bored with her prettiness. At a party given by white liberals she "feels nothing," she thinks, and so it is only whimsy that makes her decide to join the white activists on a protest march into the black quarter. Her participation at the march is like her attendance at the party: unfeeling politeness. Only her sense of etiquette prevents her from leaving. Even after the marchers are arrested, she again thinks, "I feel nothing"; but in the police station her "psychic numbing"⁶ constitutes an even more emphatic defense against seeing what is real than it did at the party. Not until she is being booked and thereby becoming the victim whom others, including blacks, observe does she recognize the observer she has been and so see the arbitrary will of white supremacy which they have felt. Gordimer writes, "And she felt suddenly, not nothing."⁷

Not nothing" is something, but it is not much. Unlike the young woman in the earlier story who enters the dark room alone, this woman moves disinterestedly into an established society of activists. Her transformation is sudden and guarded. Unable to feel pleasure at the party, she also stands at a great distance from any joyful release that follows political engagement. She does not grapple with her fear in pursuit of knowledge that will free her from an isolated, inherited point of view. Her vision of herself as a victim of the white god, as the blacks have been victims, and the feeling that attends this vision may be a genuine epiphany, but the vision may also be a sentimental one which cannot break down the barriers of dichotomies. This pretty protagonist may be like some of the American activists in the sixties whom Christopher Lasch describes: young people from the suburbs who demonstrated not out of commitment or even fear, but because demonstrations suddenly produced a feeling that broke through numbness like a hallucinogen or amphetamine.⁸ Because "The Smell of Death and Flowers" is a camera-eye account and not a painterly story, and because its protagonist is more thoroughly numbed, it is less successful in complicating dichotomies than is "Somewhere Else." It does clearly show, however, that all the folks on one side of the police barriers are not of the same self. It also suggests that the distance between liberalism and political activism is no shorter than that between conservatism and political change.⁹

Even armed with awareness and feeling, those who take action to alleviate injustice so as to break out of the isolation into which they were born cannot suffer the exact fate of those without choice. In South Africa this means no white activist, no matter how often she is jailed, will ever be black. After the heyday of interracial political action in the fifties, then the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the African National Congress, this fact came home to South Africa's black activists. Forced to go underground, they chose to work alone. The white activists were left to wonder if they would ever be able to struggle with or know the Africans.

Never sanguine about the possibilities of interracialism, Gordimer most explicitly shows this skepticism in several stories from the sixties and seventies, particularly "Not for Publication," "Open House," and "A Soldier's Embrace." Of these, "A Soldier's Embrace" is the most confounding, for it shows that even when black and white activists work together and succeed, their success inexplicably segregates them. In this story a white woman is caught up in a street party celebrating the liberation of an African state from a white-minority government. The woman and her husband, a lawyer who has defended black activists, have worked with the blacks for just such a liberation. So when, simultaneously, she is hugged in the street by both a white soldier (a European mercenary) and a black soldier, the visceral experience seems the perfect image of the new state. After the liberation, however, their black friends are, in fact, cool; they are engrossed in the task of setting up a government independent of any whites' advice. Sadly, with or without whites' advice, the likelihood is that independence will not be freedom for the new state, because all southern Africa is economically dependent upon South African white-supremacist capitalism.¹⁰ So this new state is destined to flounder and suffer, and even the most well-meaning whites are destined to move elsewhere to a stable economy, where they can practice their professions and run their businesses. Still, when the white couple in the story finally do decide to move, their African friend, earlier businesslike and cool, now cries. There is some genuine feeling embedded in their history of struggle together, however separate that togetherness has been, yet their success confounds everyone's identity. As they drive away, the woman thinks, "The right words would not come again."¹¹ The woman's pleasure in the soldiers' embraces might have been joy, since they have all worked for such liberation; but it is not.

Gordimer has stated several times that in South Africa no division is more absolute than that between the races.¹² In her short stories, however, she does not always accept the inevitability of this division. In a number of stories about activism and marriage, she explores all the permutations and combinations of connection and disjunction: is the most pronounced difference between activists and nonactivists (regardless of race and sex), between men and women (regardless of political commitment and race), or between blacks and whites (regardless of sex and political commitment)? Gordimer's stories of marriage, like Chaucer's "Marriage Group," come up with every possible answer to the questions they raise. Though others might well be added, the stories to which I am referring are "Six Feet of the Country" (1956), "Something for the Time Being" (1960), "A Chip of Glass Ruby" (1965), "Some Monday for Sure" (1965), and "A Soldier's Embrace" (1975). The complexities of the connections in these stories make them some of Gordimer's best.

"A Chip of Glass Ruby" must be singled out because it contains an Indian heroine with a true Gandhian heart. She succeeds if not in all her political goals, at least in being thoroughly alive by remembering and attending to the myriad details of political commitment and family. When her surly husband is both annoyed and awed by his wife's ability to remember his birthday even when she is in prison, his daughter explains her mother to him: "'It's because she doesn't want anybody to be left out [that] she always remembers.'"¹³ Even the husband comes to realize he desires his wife because she not only survives, she lives. She has the very rare ability to sustain joy.

Due to the limits of space, I will have to leave the intricacies of the "Marriage Group" for another essay. Instead I would like to look at Gordimer's most recent work, the novella Something Out There, in which the dichotomies of activists and others, men and women, and blacks and whites all have an opportunity to complicate one another. At the beginning of the story, what is "out there" is some sort of wild primate which is terrorizing the white suburb, an obvious invasion of Africa into the isolated white enclave. Fear prohibits even those who see the primate from describing it with any accuracy, and fear feeds on itself until all the self-involved insecurities of the white suburbanites are externalized in the body of the primate "out there." The great irony of the novella is that while the newspapers and neighbors are obsessed with the ape, four human terrorists establish themselves on the edge of the suburb and, after careful planning, blow up the power station. This irony works nicely, but it is not what most interests me about the novella.

What interests me is that the terrorists enter the area and rent a house without fuss because the white man and woman terrorist pose as a young married couple soon to have a baby. Of course, the suburbanites are taken in by the disguise, but it is the meaning of the sham marriage and sham pregnancy for the terrorists that is intriguing. Once lovers, the young couple, Charles and Joy, continue to pursue their radical political action despite the dissolution of their personal relationship. This is admirable enough in light of several of the marriage stories in which characters refuse to see their compromised ideals in order to maintain a marriage. The novella certainly too gives ample evidence of joyless married suburbanites assuaged by pleasure. Nevertheless, Charles and Joy's ability to feign marriage and pregnancy without any notable second thoughts is a numbness of its own. Joy, in particular, can play the game of the young pregnant wife at the suburban grocery store with aplomb but is never shown making any connections with this life from which she originated.¹⁴ For her, the white suburbanites are as other and "out there" as the ape is to the suburbanites. They are simplified, externalized evil. Because she does not feel the loss of what she has left or the viability of others' lives—however narrowly lived—her political commitment is its own ideological, walled garden. Joy does not live up to her name. That she would be only feigning pregnancy seems appropriate.

Still, I am not sure that this failure is entirely to be blamed on the character. Gordimer's portraits of the Afrikaners who rent Charles and Joy the house and of the other nouveau-riche whites terrorized by the ape are stinging portrayals of the pettiness of the bourgeoisie. So when we are told that Joy has come from such a home, it is not surprising that she thoroughly rejects it; but neither is her decision as human or as interesting as it could be. Despite the novella's being a satire, it is in other regards realistic enough to incorporate less exaggerated, more complex portraits of the rising white middle class.

I am not defending the values of the white middle class—let alone white supremacy—or even any intrinsic worth of marriage and pregnancy. However, when individuals born into this system of being leave it without any apparent struggle, I am skeptical of their ability to become truly engaged in any other struggle. Nonetheless, I should also say that Gordimer's novels demonstrate that she has been very aware of the struggle to leave home, however distasteful its values.¹⁵

The novella does present one character who ventures out to connect with the society that the radicals seek to change. Eddie, a young black activist, risks going into Johannesburg, the core of apartheid. Like the white woman in "Somewhere Else," he seems compelled to do the thing which most jeopardizes him. In the daytime the city is teeming with the lives of all races, and Eddie becomes a part of that life. He wanders the grocery-store aisles as though at a "vast exhibition," window-shops along busy streets, buys himself some curried chicken, and is propositioned by a prostitute. South African society has treated him far worse than it has Joy, but he feels the necessity to remind himself of concrete lives and a bustling economy. Contrasting alienated, white, Western antiheroes to African heroes, Gordimer has explained that African heroes, like Eddie, say yes, yes, yes by saying no; they suffer but are not sick at heart.¹⁶ Eddie derives pleasure from what he must destroy, and so he knows the price not only of his failure—death or imprisonment or exile—but of his success. Knowledge does not change his commitment; it keeps that commitment human.

When Eddie returns to the hideout, he and Joy dance while Vusi plays his homemade saxophone and Charles looks on.¹⁷ Eddie again connects. In their isolated activist community, the white woman can approach the black man without fear and the black man can approach the white woman without rags. They all know, however, that the connection they make will soon be lost. After the power station is blown, one may be killed, all will be scattered, most will be in exile. It will be a long time before the filaments Eddie noiselessly and patiently sends out can stick and permanently hold. Perhaps that time will never come. In the meantime there is the possibility of joy for those who will risk it.

At their engaged and engaging best, Gordimer's short stories offer the reader not just "the pleasure of the text," but the joy of the text as well. We do not just luxuriate in the language; we rejoice in the commitment that confounds all dichotomies.

NOTES

¹ See Stephen Clingman, "Multi-Racialism, or A World of Strangers," Salmagundi, 62 (Winter 1984), pp. 32-61; John Cooke, Only Pursue: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985 (forthcoming); and John Cooke, "African Landscapes: The World of Nadine Gordimer," WLT 52:4 (Autumn 1978), pp. 533-38.

² Cooke, Only Pursue, p. 154.

³ Nadine Gordimer, "Is There Somewhere Else Where We Can Meet?" in her Selected Stories, New York, Penguin, 1976 (rpt. 1983), pp. 17-20.

⁴ Robert Jay Lifton, The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, New York, Basic Books, 1976 (rpt. 1983), pp. 129-30.

⁵ In "The Novel and the Nation in South Africa" (TLS, 11 August 1961, pp. 520-23), Gordimer writes: "It is unlikely that while you are within the stockade thrown up around your mind by the situation about which you are reading, you will be aware that a common ground runs beneath your feet to beneath the stockade of another particular situation, and another."

⁶ Lifton replaces the Freudian term denial with psychic numbing, because denial focuses on individual, infantile repression, and Lifton wants to emphasize the individual affecting and affected by society.

⁷ Nadine Gordimer, "The Smell of Death and Flowers," in her Selected Stories, pp. 122-44.

⁸ Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York, Warner, 1979, pp. 57-70.

⁹ For more on the limitations of liberalism, see Kenneth Parker on A World of Strangers in "Nadine Gordimer and the Pitfalls of Liberalism," in The South African Novel in English: Essays in Criticism and Society, Kenneth Parker, ed., New York, Africana, 1978, pp. 114-30.

¹⁰ Donald Denoon, with Balam Nyeko and J. B. Webster, "Nationalisms" in Southern Africa since 1800, Washington, D.C., Praeger, 1973, pp. 214-29. More recently, Claude Robinson has demonstrated this same fact in his discussion of a Mozambique—South African pact in "Delicate Peace with Apartheid," The Nation, 22 September 1984, pp. 235-36.

¹¹ Nadine Gordimer, "A Soldier's Embrace," in her collection A Soldier's Embrace, New York, Viking, 1980, pp. 7-22.

¹² Nadine Gordimer, in "A Conversation with Nadine Gordimer" [interviews with Robert Boyers, Clark Blaise, Terence Diggory, and Jordan Elgrably], Salmagundi, 62 (Winter 1984), pp. 3-31.

¹³ Nadine Gordimer, "A Chip of Glass Ruby," in her Selected Stories, pp. 264-74.

¹⁴ Elizabeth Gerver notes the importance of Lukács's emphasis on connections ("Everything is linked to everything else") in her consideration of some of the women in Gordimer's novels, "Women Revolutionaries in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing," World Literature Written in English, 17 (1978), pp. 38-50.

¹⁵ Cooke, "Leaving the Mother's House," in his Only Pursue, pp. 59-117, provides a great deal of evidence to support Gordimer on this point.

¹⁶ Nadine Gordimer, The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1973, p. 9.

¹⁷ Nadine Gordimer, Something Out There, Salmagundi, 62 (Winter 1984), pp. 118-92. See particularly pp. 165-72.

Charles R. Larson

SOURCE: "The Precarious State of the African Writer," in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 409-13.

[In the following essay, Larson examines the effects of governmental corruption on African writers.]

These are not good times for African writers—or Third World writers almost anywhere, for that matter. Political and economic factors (determinants even in the best of times) have become so unstable in recent years that the African literary scene has begun to resemble a barren wasteland, unprecedented at any time since the early 1960s, the era of independence. What can be more ironic than to glance back to the final days of colonialism and regard them nostalgically as the golden days of African literature—stifled by the increasing political instability across the continent once Africans shook off their colonial shackles? African writers, it appears, have paid for their independence with their creativity.

Before I begin my tale of woe, however, let me illustrate with one lengthy example the economic obstacles operating against African writers even in the best of times (those infrequent periods when publishers are receptive to creativity and the books they publish are widely read, if not sold). For this hypothetical example, I shall use Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, since this work has probably been the most popular African novel of all time. (My students are convinced that Achebe is getting rich.)

To follow the course of Achebe's riches, we have to begin with the original edition of the work, since that is where much of the problem begins for any writer, William Heinemann published the English hardback edition in 1958. Assuming a standard contract between publisher and author, Achebe would have received a 10 percent royalty on all copies of his novel sold within England. Copies sold overseas—and that would include Nigeria, Achebe's homeland—would have earned him half-royalties or 5 percent. African writers have often been shocked to discover that copies of their books sold within their own country earn them reduced royalties, yet this is only one of the prices Third World writers pay for publishing "overseas."

When paperback rights are sold to another publisher, the royalty is traditionally split fifty-fifty between the author and the hardback publisher of the work. No doubt such an arrangement existed between Achebe and the African Writers Series, in 1962, when Things Fall Apart first appeared in a paperback edition. It is possible that those terms were subsequently renegotiated when Achebe became the editor of the series, but if they were not, all those copies of his first novel (said to be in the hundreds of thousands) have earned him half-royalties. (This, one hopes, was not a case of a double jeopardy: half-royalties for "overseas" sales and then half-royalties again for the paperback edition.)

Reprint rights in other countries are more complicated. The royalties paid on the American hardback edition of Things Fall Apart were probably split in the traditional manner: half to the author and half to William Heinemann. The American publisher was McDowell, Obolensky (1959), which had its own trade paperback in print for a number of years; but then in 1969 the mass-market paperback rights were sold to Fawcett Books, and the novel suddenly became much more widely available.

The explosion in black studies in the United States in the early 1970s undoubtedly helped increase the sales of Achebe's book. It is possible that Things Fall Apart sold twenty-five or thirty thousand copies yearly for a while, until black-studies courses experienced declining enrollments. The original Fawcett edition of the novel sold for seventy-five cents, though several years later the price had escalated to $1.95—the figure we can use to demonstrate why Chinua Achebe (or any African writer) will never get rich from American readers.

By rounding off the price to two dollars, increasing the yearly sales to fifty thousand copies, and assuming a 10 percent royalty base (unlikely for a paperback contract negotiated in 1969), the figures look like this: 50,000 copies at $2 = $100,000 gross X 10% royalties = $10,000. That $10,000 in royalties looks quite respectable until one remembers that half of it has to go to Obolensky (the American hardback publisher). That immediately cuts Achebe's potential share to $5,000, a figure that has its own set of restrictions.

Once we earmark $5,000 for Achebe at this stage, we have to figure out the portion that will go to the Internal Revenue Service. I mention this fact because it is inescapable. Just as the United States designates certain countries as most-favored nations and exempts businesses from paying dual income taxes, the United States—and many European countries—offers similar reciprocity to writers within those countries. Thus, when Graham Greene publishes a novel in the United States, he pays income taxes on his American royalties only in England and not in both countries. Norman Mailer pays income taxes to the American government on his English royalties and not both. That reciprocity does not exist with African nations, however, so the IRS takes a 30 percent cut (or $1,500) out of Achebe's American royalties. That reduces the figure to $3,500, which must be split equally between Heinemann and the author, further decreasing Achebe's royalties to $1,750. Since Nigeria and England do have a tax agreement, Achebe gets to keep the full $1,750—except, of course, for that portion he has to pay in tax to his own government.

African writers who publish outside the continent have the economic cards stacked against them. They'll never get wealthy under these conditions, which give no indication of changing. Pity the poor writer who experiences only modest sales in the United States or any other Western country. For the most part, however, the options for publishing in Africa are still greatly limited. Worse, several African writers have said that when they have chosen to publish on the continent, the publishers have paid them no royalties at all.

Economically, the African writer is hardly better off today than he was during colonial times. Though literacy has improved greatly across the continent in the last twenty-five years, the situation for most writers has barely altered. African governments are so economically strapped that very little money can be spent on the arts. Even funds for education (the most logical area for a trickle-down effect to reach the writer) have been cut because of the servicing of national debts, the financing of defense, and so on. Can one imagine, for example, Samuel Doe or Idi Amin showing much interest in the state of their respective countries' literatures?

There are probably only two writers in all of tropical Africa who can live by their royalties: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.¹ That in itself belies the pathetic situation for most African writers. They are forced to support themselves by other means—an affinity they share with many writers throughout the world. Few writers anywhere take up the pen expecting to become rich by their efforts. But let's consider what many writers in the West do to supplement their serious writing. They free-lance; they write articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines to help earn their bread and butter. Those outlets do not really exist for the writer in tropical Africa. Economically, almost everything is against him.

Let's be optimistic about this and assume that good writing will always survive and that the writer who struggles hard enough will find a publisher for his work. Thus, the African writer—like his counterpart anywhere else—will find his readers. He may not become wealthy or famous, but he will see his work in print and derive comfort from that. Naively, I used to believe that the African writer could overcome all these factors and find his niche in world literature. Lately, however, I've begun to feel differently, as I've looked at what can only be called a decline in African literature—both in quality and quantity. (The former is more upsetting than the latter.)

What's happened to Chinua Achebe, who must be Africa's most famous novelist yet hasn't published a novel since A Man of the People (1966)—twenty years ago? What about Ayi Kwei Armah, who looked for a while as if he might become Africa's most prolific novelist? His last novel, The Healers, was published in 1978. What about Kofi Awoonor? Bessie Head? Cyprian Ekwensi? Amos Tutuola? Mongo Beti? Cheikh Hamidou Kane? J. P. Clark? Richard Rive? Gabriel Okara? Yambo Ouologuem? Ferdinand Oyono? Lenrie Peters? Taban lo Liyong? Charles Mangua?

The list could go on, but I've tried to name only those writers who demonstrated major talent and then—for the most part—fell silent. Out of fairness, this roster should be balanced with the names of those writers who have continued to be visible; yet that list is much, much shorter: Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah. There are also a number of popular writers (such as Buchi Emecheta) whose visibility has increased, but it is difficult to treat their work seriously. More significant, it seems, is the situation in which so many of these writers have found themselves caught during the last few years.

Chinua Achebe is again the best example. After A Man of the People, he published other works: a volume of short stories and a collection of poems. Achebe's poems are minor works, however, and even his collection of short stories contains substantial material written prior to his last published novel. Turning instead to his last published bock, The Trouble with Nigeria (1983),² the dilemma becomes immediately apparent. If the continent's major novelist has been reduced to publishing a treatise such as this, the intellectual climate for the African writer has become appalling. One quotation from this work will suffice.

Nigeria is not a great country. It is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that give least value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth!

Great writers have always been social critics. The Trouble with Nigeria belongs to a distinguished list of polemics written by major writers through the years. Still, shouldn't the Nigerian government be embarrassed by this latest publication by its major writer? And shouldn't those of us who admire Achebe for his creative brilliance be enraged that he's felt compelled to publish a work such as this instead of his long-promised fifth novel? To what extremes will African governments drive their artists?

That is the rub, of course: the African governments, the powers that be, the politicians in charge. Achebe had fun with this years ago in A Man of the People. In that novel he satirically described Chief Nanga (the Minister of Culture of an unnamed African country, though clearly Nigeria) as a man who "announced in public that he had never heard of his country's most famous novel," presumably Things Fall Apart, though "he prophesied that before long our great country would produce great writers like Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, Bernard Shaw, and—raising his eyes off the script—Michael West and Dudley Stamp."

Has Achebe lost his sense of humor? Probably not. Rather, it looks as though he has concluded that satire is meaningless if the objects of that satire no longer realize that they are being attacked. Only a frontal approach will be noticed; hence The Trouble with Nigeria. Yet the trouble with Nigeria is the trouble with African governments in general. They will apparently do anything to silence their writers. African governments have a) imprisoned their writers (Soyinka, Ngugi, Awoonor, René Philombe, and too many South African writers to list here); b) censored their writers' works (Ngugi, Philombe, Legson Kayira, Camara Laye, Nuruddin Farah, plus dozens of South African writers); c) forced their writers into exile (Laye, Kayira, Farah, S. Henry Cordor, Solomon Deressa, Achebe [after the civil war], Oswald Mtshali, Dennis Brutus, Bessie Head, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Peter Abrahams, and numerous other South African writers); and d) pushed their writers to the brink of insanity (Head, Laye, Yambo Ouologuem). When all these tactics have failed, African governments have silenced their writers with one of the most effective muzzles: assimilating them into the government bureaucracy or, worse, the diplomatic corps (Laye, Awoonor, Cyprian Ekwensi, Amos Tutuola, Wilton Sankawulo, Abioseh Nicol, Syl Cheyney-Coker).

What impresses one most about African writers' responses to these intrusions on their corporeal and intellectual existence is that so few of them have compromised their positions. Rather, they have met the enemy (the state) with silence, which of course is the reason why so many of the writers mentioned here have apparently stopped publishing. They have seen what has happened to a writer like Ngugi, who has continued publishing. They have fully understood why a novel that satirized the colonial government is acceptable (even de rigueur), whereas one criticizing the postindependent political situation can only get them into trouble.

It is fear of reprisals, then, that has led to the steady decline of African writing during the last twenty-five years. The older generation of writers (those who began publishing in the 1950s and the early 1960s) have been silenced, and the younger ones have quickly followed suit, though some of the latter have chosen another route and written fluff, devoid of any artistic merit or meaningful social context. Still, these are difficult times, no matter what road taken.

Several years ago I was asked to write an article about younger African writers—those who had begun publishing during the 1970s. The intent of the essay (which was to be published in a United States government publication widely distributed in Africa) was to describe as many writers as possible and thereby increase their exposure among African readers. It was only after I agreed to write the piece that I began to reflect upon the sorry state of African writing and realize that there were only a few writers who had demonstrated great promise (comparable to those who had begun writing earlier).

I picked three writers: Nuruddin Farah of Somalia, S. Henry Cordor of Liberia, and T. Obinkaram Eschewa of Nigeria. The article I subsequently wrote was never published but was censored instead, because authorities in the State Department—I was told—decided that the praise I had lavished on Farah would offend officials in Somalia, where he had been declared persona non grata. I was appalled that the censorship of African writers had reached American soil, though I have never had any illusions about Ronald Reagan's political myopia. Examining the careers of these three writers, we can observe a kind of pattern typical of the situation in general.

Of the three, Nuruddin Farah has been the most visible, though he has had to remain in exile for most of his career. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, published in 1970, was written while he was a student in India. It identified Farah immediately as one of his continent's most sensitive and understanding writers about African women. Elba, the young woman in the story, runs away from her village in order to avoid an arranged marriage with an older man. She tells a friend, "That is what we women are—just like cattle, properties of someone or other, either your parents or your husband." What she ponders is why a man can have four wives but a woman only one husband.

Farah's championing of women's rights has been unacceptable to some of his African readers, though it has not been the reason for his exile. That problem has been political, the subject of all his recent novels: A Naked Needle (1976), Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983). The last three (powerful and disturbing works) constitute a trilogy with the overall theme of African dictatorship. The pathway of his fiction, then, has been overtly political, with only one possible escape route: exile. His books are not available in Somalia, where they have been banned, and Farah himself—determined to continue writing—has become a kind of cosmopolite, picking up teaching and journalistic assignments wherever possible to supplement the meager income from his novels.

S. Henry Cordor's situation parallels Farah's. He too has been trapped by politics, though ironically by the regime he initially chose to embrace. The body of his creative work is still quite small because so much of it has never been published. As Liberians often say, they never enjoyed the benefits of being a colony. That has posed special problems for the country's writers, who find it almost impossible to publish overseas. Self-publication tends to be the norm.

Cordor's stories demonstrate a rare sensibility. In a few brief paragraphs he is able to size up character and situation, often with a subtle wit and a polished manner far beyond that of his most daring contemporaries. "In the Hospital," for instance, is an almost perfect example of what can be done with the short-story form. Sadly, however, Cordor has found himself in recent years becoming a spokesman for Liberian intellectuals and compelled to abandon fiction for political commentary. When Doe became president of Liberia, Cordor was enthusiastic, but he quickly soured when he witnessed the president's intolerance of free speech (especially among students). Today Cordor lives in exile in the United States, waiting for the day when politics back home will change.

In contrast to the works by Farah and Cordor, T. Obinkaram Echewa's novel The Land's Lord is much more traditional and free of contemporary commentary. The three principal characters (Father Higler, a Catholic priest; his African acolyte, Philip; and a juju priest called Ahamba) are engaged in a kind of philosophic dialogue about good and evil and, by extension, about Christianity and animism, Africa and the West. When The Land's Lord was published by Heinemann in 1976, comparisons were made between Echewa and Achebe and Ngugi, largely because of the novel's traditional setting, though Echewa has also said of his writing: "I expect to go over the social and historical terrain that has been traversed by Achebe and others and till it more deeply. I am interested right now in the problem of 'evii' in African societies without reference to colonialism or the white man."

Although Echewa's novel has been widely praised, it has been followed by a ten-year silence. A second novel, called The Crippled Dancer and announced for publication in 1982, has never appeared. It is probable that Echewa's writing career has been stifled by Heinemann's decision to curtail drastically the scope of its African Writers Series, the major publishing outlet for the continent's writers during the last twenty years. At the moment many publishers in the West are interested in publishing only those African writers whose work is already widely known and deemed profitable.

The fact is that Africa cannot afford its writers today—and neither can the West, though their reasons are somewhat different. As long as African governments regard their writers as threats to their longevity, most of the continent's serious writers will be forced to remain silent and the decline of African writing will continue. One has only to think of the career of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the continual harassment he has experienced both in and out of prison at the hands of the Kenyan government. A lesser man would have caved in long ago.

The West, of course, could help the situation, particularly in the area of publishing, but the indications are that that will not happen. Why is it, for example, that South Africa's white writers are embraced by American publishers (and readers) while the country's black writers still remain virtually unknown? Years ago there was a rumor going around that an African writer who tried to get published in the United States was told that his book wasn't African enough. A similar myopia about Africa on the part of Western publishers still exists, in spite of the commercial success of books about Africa by writers who are not African (Isak Dinesen and Alice Walker, to mention two current favorites).

For years the literary image of Africa in the West was largely controlled by writers who were not African. In the late 1950s and early 1960s it looked as if that were about to change. A dozen or so writers achieved international recognition, though only one of them (Wole Soyinka, the continent's major writer) has enhanced his visibility in the West. Politics and economics have pushed most of the others to the side. If the situation does improve, it will not be the result of worldwide political and economic fluctuations but rather because of the resilience of the writers themselves.

NOTES

¹ On the various authors discussed or referred to in this essay, see the following articles in BA/WLT: Chinua Achebe, 48:1 (Winter 1974), p. 74; Wole Soyinka, 60:1 (Winter 1986), pp. 31-32; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 59:1 (Winter 1985), pp. 26-30; Nuruddin Farah, 58:2, (Spring 1984), pp. 215-21; Ayi Kwei Armah, 59:3 (Summer 1985), pp. 337-42; Ferdinand Oyono, 59:3 (Summer 1985), pp. 333-37; Buchi Emecheta, 59:1 (Winter 1985;, pp. 9-13; J. P. Clark, 52:2 (Spring 1978), pp. 216-23; Dennis Brutus, 55:1 (Winter 1981), pp. 32-40; Bessie Head, 57:3 (Summer 1983), pp. 414-16; Camara Laye, 54:3 (Summer 1980), pp. 392-95.

² For a review of Achebe's book The Trouble with Nigeria, see WLT 59:3 (Summer 1985), p. 478.