SOURCE: Lazarus, Neil. “After the Break: Trends in Radical African Literature since 1970.” In Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, pp. 185-234. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Lazarus suggests that the 1970s witnessed a collapse of the intellectual infrastructure within which much African writing was composed, creating a crisis in the intellectual community in Africa. This conflict, which Lazarus explains in the context of Ayi Kweh Armah's work, has led many African authors, writes Lazarus to re-examine their novelistic horizons by moving away from the seminal moments of past history, such as independence, and to focus increasingly on Africa's current predicament.]

I have tried to argue that Why Are We So Blest? must, by any standards, be accounted a novelistic failure. The novel's sweeping dogmatism, its manichean racial and sexual essentialism, and its conspiratorial view of African history, all combine to destroy its internal plausibility and to undermine its ideological integrity. Setting out to interrogate the limits of creative intellectualism in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, it tends increasingly to represent these contexts not only as implacable and seamless configurations but, even more disturbingly, as brilliant strategies hatched in the minds of ruthless and predatory “Westerners.” This means that even where colonialism and neocolonialism are not quite phrased as effectively indistinguishable moments in a world-historical conspiracy, they are still viewed in harshly functionalist terms as crucial planks in a world system that works perfectly. Against this “killing system,” radical intellectualism emerges axiomatically as useless. What is not part of the “solution”—and there is only one such—is part of the “problem.” As Solo comes to put it in the novel: “Only one issue is worth our time: how to end the oppression of the African, to kill the European beasts of prey, to remake ourselves, the elected servants of Europe and America. Outside that, all is useless.”¹ Casting itself, on the strength of this kind of rhetoric, as uncompromisingly radical, Why Are We So Blest? collapses instead into extremism and self-contradiction. It moves to advocate “revolution” in place of “intellectualism,” without seeing that its conception of “revolution” is itself irreducibly intellectualist.

Yet if Why Are We So Blest? fails on these grounds, it does so at least partly because it pushes a certain prevalent way of thinking about postcolonialism to its limits. The questions that govern the novel—concerning ethical intellectualism, revolution, and independence, co-opted leadership and the depoliticization of “the masses,” betrayal, marginalization, and diminishing possibilities for resistance in the neocolonial context—all issue from within the horizons of this distinctive and historically determinate way of thinking, or “problematic.”² As I demonstrated in chapter 1, this problematic is not Armah's alone but represents rather the prevailing way of thinking about postcolonialism of a generation of radical African intellectuals in the 1960s. Therefore, to the extent that Why Are We So Blest?'s extremism and contradiction ultimately testify to the inadequacy of its informing assumptions, it can be argued that its collapse into manicheism is symptomatic of a larger collapse, implicating not only Why Are We So Blest? but also The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments, and the works of a range of other African writers: the implosion of what I have spoken of as these writers' “messianic” representation of the decolonizing process.

In order to give substance to this argument, I shall examine the ideological narrative that unfolds over the course of Armah's three novels of postcolonialism. We have seen that the social ethic that informs The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is squarely messianic. The novel's organizing assumption is that the decolonizing years in Ghana were years of popular unity and uplift, and that, at independence, it would have been possible for the nation as a whole to be systematically transformed, or revolutionized. It is taken for granted in the novel, not only that Nkrumah's anticolonial radicalism during the decolonizing era was honestly maintained on his part, but also, and more significantly, that between Nkrumah and “the masses,” leader and followers, there was an exact understanding and empathy. Nkrumah is spoken of as having represented “the masses”: the words he spoke during his campaign are said to have been the words “the masses” wanted to hear. Thus, after she has been to a mass rally and listened to Nkrumah talking, Teacher's friend Maanan observes that

Today things have gone inside me, and they have brought out what I have hidden in me. He brought them up. They were not new to me. Only I have never seen anything to go and fish them up like that. He was reading me. I know he was speaking of me. To you too. But did you hear him? How can a man born of a woman tell me my thoughts even before I myself know them?³

Maanan's experience of Nkrumah is phrased as definitive of that of “the masses” in Ghana. Yet a problem presents itself here: for Maanan's class background is never clearly specified in the novel. We know, on the basis of scores of memoirs and works of literature similar in this respect to The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, that radical intellectuals in Ghana tended to interpret Nkrumah's message during the decolonizing years in a way consonant with Maanan's description. What he said was unquestionably what they wanted to hear. But the response of “the masses” to Nkrumah is more difficult to ascertain. The novel presents us with a picture of widespread mobilization and popular consensus. It attributes to the masses of the Ghanaian people—supposedly made up of such characters as Maanan—political sentiments identical with those held by radical intellectuals such as Teacher. In this attribution, however, there is the strong suggestion of an unwarranted generalization on Armah's part. His universalizing assumption seems to be that because Nkrumah's supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, they must all have had the same political ambitions and aspirations as the intellectuals among them. At the very least, the fact that Teacher, Maanan, and “the man,” who do not share the same class situation, should nevertheless share political interests, hopes, fears, and even ethical suppositions, seems suspicious. One recalls Ben Obumselu's complaint that “the man” thinks like “an American tourist” and not at all like the railway-clerk he is said to be.⁴ Certainly, it is difficult to sustain The Beautyful Ones's messianic representation of the Ghanaian “masses” in the decolonizing years as a potentially revolutionary force in the light of scholarly analyses of Nkrumahism. As early as 1966—two years before the publication of The Beautyful Ones—Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer had argued that although Nkrumah's Convention People's Party billed itself as a mass political party,

this identification was quite misleading. The CPP was a mass party only in the sense that it had a large membership. It was not a mass party in the sense of mobilizing large numbers of people and bringing them into the political arena as active and politically conscious participants. Many of the men and women who bought membership cards in the CPP did so for the same reason that citizens in the United States buy tickets to a policemen's ball. In both cases, the sale involves a tax levied on the vulnerable by the powerful.⁵

Having committed itself to a vision of revolutionary unity in the decolonizing era, however, The Beautyful Ones is obliged to represent Nkrumah's postcolonial policies as a betrayal—not merely of his promise alone, but of the African revolution in general. In the eyes of the novel, the opportunity had been there, at independence, to revolutionize Ghanaian society—but Nkrumah in power had found himself seduced by the very things that, in the decolonizing years, he had campaigned against: privilege, luxury, status, power. Having led the charge to the castle gates, he had not torn the castle down but rather installed himself in it; and with every day that had passed he had come to resemble more closely the rulers who had preceded him. The despair of such characters as Maanan and Teacher in The Beautyful Ones is a measure of the perceived treachery of Nkrumah's about-face.

In The Beautyful Ones, therefore, Ghana's independence is taken to have marked a moment in which all Africa held its breath, believing that the whole world might change forever for the better. In Fragments, independence is presented as an altogether sorrier spectacle. The full-blown messianic identification of revolution and independence is here partially retracted. Certainly, it remains appropriate, still, to speak of betrayal on the part of the postcolonial leadership. But the enormity of this betrayal seems greatly diminished. In The Beautyful Ones, Nkrumah's betrayal is seen as unassimilable, an event of massive (because unique) significance. In Fragments the betrayal of the postcolonial leadership in Ghana is viewed as predictable and unexceptional. There is nothing to distinguish it from the treacherous conduct of countless generations of previous leaders.

In The Beautyful Ones, the existential strategies elaborated by Teacher and “the man” are framed in answer to the question of how to live against the gleam. In Fragments, Armah's canvas is considerably narrower. It is above all intellectual practice that concerns him now. The objectionable universalism of The Beautyful Ones is superseded, since Fragments is fully alert to the ideological specificity of intellectual consciousness. The central dilemma confronting Baako, Juana, and Ocran is that of dissolving the socially engineered barriers between themselves, as oppositional members of a ruling elite, and the vast majority of the Ghanaian people. The poverty and dispossession of these people, both in urban Accra and in the rural hinterland, are evoked very concretely in Fragments. Unlike The Beautyful Ones, moreover, Armah's second novel insists upon the politicality of “the masses” in the postcolonial era. The mounting anger of the Ghanaian population at large is represented unambiguously in Fragments. Crucially, however, this anger is seen to be unfocused and inarticulate; the more it grows, the more inclined it becomes to turn in on itself. The general climate is seen to be dangerously volatile: what is needed is revolution, and this is also the solution toward which the unconscious social desire of “the masses” tends; but what is in all probability in the offing, at least in the forseeable future, is not revolution but the fomenting of ethnic or regional hatreds, the generation and intensification of reckless and destructive kinds of violence, vented on scapegoats and on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

Fragments differs from The Beautyful Ones, thus, in casting the Ghanaian “masses” in the postcolonial era as latently resistive. In the earlier novel, the radiance of the gleam is shown to infect the society as a whole, penetrating even to those strata whose members can never reasonably hope to accede to wealth or privilege. In Fragments, by contrast, the dispossessed implicitly recognize and rue the fact of their dispossession. Yet, lacking an understanding of its mechanics, they are unable to counteract it. Spontaneously militant, latently resistive, they nevertheless lack leadership, where leadership alone is seen to be capable of tempering their raw energy and forging it into a deliberate, purposive force. It is obvious, in these terms, that the idea of responsible intellectualism is taken very seriously in Fragments. The debate between Baako and Ocran turns, ultimately, on the question of leadership. As radical artists, visionaries on the side of “the people,” both characters take for granted their theoretical capacity to function as social therapists. Their potential social utility is grounded, they believe, in their ability to see what “the people,” by virtue of the immediacy and comprehensiveness of their deprivation, cannot: the root causes, the etiology, of their suffering. Baako and Ocran recognize, of course, that this “ability” on their part is not an inherent quality but a product of their own privilege, that is, of their own class-determined freedom from material want. Nevertheless, they aspire, in their social practice as intellectuals, to place their acquired talents at the service of “the people,” to contribute not to the mystificatory cause of “independence” but to the revolutionary cause of national liberation.

Fragments charts the difficulties that attend the exercise of radical intellectualism in the postcolonial era. Baako discovers that the “gap” between “haves” and “have-nots” in postcolonial society is not, as he had supposed, made up of empty, “neutral,” space, but is instead patrolled by an army of institutions and apparatuses functioning precisely to insure that no modern-day would-be Prometheus, like himself, is able to smuggle sparks from the cozy hearths of the “haves” to the dry and wintry grasslands of the “have-nots,” where they might be used to ignite a revolutionary fire. Baako insists that it is only in the continuing attempt to cross over from the one realm to the other with sparks in hand that the radical intellectual can hope to justify his existence. Ocran counters that to the extent that a successful crossover seems impossible under prevailing circumstances, it is perhaps necessary for the radical intellectual to rein in his Promethean aspirations and concentrate his energies on perfecting his skill as a drawer of sparks—trusting that better opportunities to use them will arise in the future.

It falls to Juana to mediate between these two intellectual positions. Juana's intellectualism, like Teacher's in The Beautyful Ones, is underpinned by a utopian remembrance of

a time when youth was not something one had lived through, not just a defeated thought, but the hope of constant regeneration, the daring to reach out toward a new world. Life then had taken its color from the brilliance of an always immanent apocalypse, and if the beautiful colors were mixed with the red of blood and the sulfurous yellow of flames, that was in no way a reason to run from the dream. The burning of old frames and the shedding of cruel blood would not be against the making of another world. Life had a charge, and every day's efforts had at their end the hope that things dreamed of had been brought closer.⁶

Since Teacher idealistically runs together the moments of revolution and independence, his revolutionism does not survived the bitter experiences of betrayal and political retrenchment in postcolonial Ghana. In Juana's case, however, the figuration of redemptive revolution is not as closely bound up with the moment of independence. Accordingly, she is able to look beyond the setbacks of postcolonialism and to confirm her commitment to revolution by adopting a very long-range perspective, much more like “the man's” than Teacher's in The Beautyful Ones. In Fragments, thus, she moves ultimately to adopt an ethico-political standpoint compatible with Baako's in its radicalism, and powered, like his, by a utopian conception of revolution, but altogether more sensitive than his to the limits of objective possibility and regulated, where his is not, by the need to think tactically. Her adoption of this standpoint is overdetermined by her clinical experience as a psychiatrist. For in this capacity she is obliged to think very pragmatically and locally, to make what interventions are possible when and where they are possible, not whenever and wherever they might be necessary.

Juana's radicalism constitutes the most realistic resistive position to be taken up in any of Armah's three novels of postcolonialism. Her intellectual practice is prototypical of that that will be advocated and exercised by a character such as Damfo in Armah's fifth novel, The Healers (1978). Fragments is thus a portentous novel; and yet its shaping assumptions are entirely different from those that underlie a novel like The Healers. The latter simply could not have been written during the 1960s, since it is literally unimaginable from within the horizons of any messianic conception of postcolonialism. Before Armah (or anybody else) would be able to write such a novel, in other words, it would be necessary for the cogency of the prevailing way of thinking about postcolonialism on the part of radical African intellectuals in the decade following independence to be shattered. Now Why Are We So Blest? cannot be represented as the work in which this shattering is effected. On the contrary, it shows itself to be as categorically limited to the terms of the prevailing way of thinking as is Fragments. Precisely because it fails so decisively, however, the novel might be interpreted as revealing the historical obsolescence and the encroaching political inutility of this way of thinking by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Why Are We So Blest? represents a dead-end rather than a new beginning in African literature. Yet it is possible to argue that had it not been written, Armah, at least, would have been unable to “think himself beyond” the labyrinth of radical 1960s African intellectualism. The argument can be stated in terms of a paradox: on the one hand, in spite of the conceptual continuities between them, Why Are We So Blest? does not pave the way toward The Healers; on the other hand, in spite of the enormous differences between them, without Why Are We So Blest?, The Healers could never have been written.

In Fragments, independence is seen to involve an orchestrated shift from colonial to neocolonial dispensations in Africa. The transition is enthusiastically heralded and lavishly celebrated by the nation's political class, but for the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population it betokens little or no change in the material circumstances of life.⁷ In the postcolonial era this majority festers in its misery, brooding, latently resistive yet lacking the theoretical wherewithal to organize its opposition to the prevailing order. On the other side of the class divide, committed intellectuals like Baako urgently seek ways of making contact with these “masses,” but typically find them elusive if not impossible to come by. Why Are We So Blest? radicalizes this analysis. In it, independence is figured entirely as mystification, as a carefully conceived imperial strategy designed to strengthen the chains binding Africa to the West. Africa becomes cast as the more or less passive victim of imperial depredation, dominated as comprehensively in independence as it had been under colonialism. The decolonizing years emerge, in these terms, as years of plaintive and unavailing yearning for change on the part of “the masses,” accompanied by cynical exploitation of this yearning on the part of the political class. Never having been satisfied, the same yearning, and the same cynical exploitation of it, are in evidence in the postcolonial era. In Why Are We So Blest? “the masses” are represented by the scores of cripples and derelicts and orphans who litter the streets of Laccryville with their emaciated and mutilated bodies and implore the passer-by for money. The activist register of Fragments, which had credited “the masses” with a degree of agency, even in the most adverse social circumstances, is here retracted: the depiction of “the masses” in Why Are We So Blest? is abstract in the extreme, even where it is graphically detailed. We are presented with numberless victims of a catastrophe, shriveled and dehumanized, more acted upon than acting, and haunted (to the residual extent that, like the onelegged man Solo encounters in hospital, they are concerned still to ask questions of life) by the past, by the need to know “what hit them.” Beyond the desperate and not always successful struggle to survive, in other words, they are portrayed as being animated only by consciousness of loss: what cannot be comprehended, above all else, is how that postcolonial future, which they had been promised and for which they had struggled in the decolonizing years, could possibly have become this postcolonial present.

The representation of “the masses” in Why Are We So Blest? returns us to the suspect universalism of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: between Solo and his one-legged interrogator there is a class distinction but not, apparently, any ideological divergence. The questions that the one-legged invalid asks are precisely those that resonate in Solo's own consciousness. Again, as in The Beautyful Ones, it is difficult not to infer from this that the consciousness attributed to “the masses” in Why Are We So Blest? corresponds to an unwarrantedly generalized intellectualism, not to any plausible peasant or proletarian disposition.

In two respects here, however, Why Are We So Blest? differs sharply from The Beautyful Ones. First, where The Beautyful Ones, in accordance with its universalism, does not address the social distance between elite and “masses” as a particular problem for radical intellectuals in the postcolonial era, Why Are We So Blest? follows Fragments in identifying this distance as a major obstacle to the exercise of radical intellectualism. Indeed, it goes further than Fragments. For between the victimized “masses” and the African intelligentsia there is, in Why Are We So Blest? not just a formidable but an insurmountable barrier. “The masses” “suffer the crudest forms of manipulation, mystification, planned ignorance.”⁸ The intellectuals, however, exist only inasmuch as and to the extent that they have been prevailed upon, for whatever reason, to climb the ladder of assimilation, to embrace the social ethic of “Westernity” and become latter-day “factors” rendering up their people for Western exploitation. They exist, in other words, only inasmuch as they come to embrace the socially induced separation between themselves and the majority of their people not as an alienation to be deplored and if possible combated, but as the saving moat that protects them in their new-found civility from being overrun by the barbarians without. The very emergence of intellectuals as a social fraction is cast, in Why Are We So Blest? as a moment within the drama of empire; it is entirely circumscribed, in all its manifestations, by imperial social logic.

A second decisive difference between Why Are We So Blest? and The Beautyful Ones (and, for that matter, Fragments) follows from this first. In Armah's third novel, the very possibility of radical or “creative” intellectualism is denied. Indeed, even the terms, “creativity” and “intellectualism,” emerge as oxymoronic. To become an intellectual is to be tamed, to become a creature of empire. Conversely, creativity can only be exercised through means of revolutionary warfare. As Solo puts it: “In the imperial situation the educational process is turned into an elitist ritual for selecting slave traders. The revolutionary ideal is an actual, working egalitarian society … War against the invader should be the educational process for creating new anti-European, anti-imperial, anti-elitist values.”⁹ Returning, thus, to the ground upon which Juana, for instance, had painstakingly constructed her ethic of resistance in Fragments, Why Are We So Blest? proceeds by turning Juana's achievement against itself. The cornerstone of Juana's position had rested in her affirmation of creative intellectualism, in her delicate but tough-minded coordination of the standpoints of utopian revolutionism, on the one hand, and therapeutic gradualism, on the other. This simultaneity is disavowed in Why Are We So Blest? In terms of the novel's manichean conceptualization, the idea of radical intellectualism as a long-viewed healing practice is condemned. “The cure for oppression [is] revolution, not therapy,” Armah had written in 1969, in his essay on Frantz Fanon;¹⁰ and this stark and antinomial judgment becomes the axis around which the presentation of intellectualism in Why Are We So Blest? turns.

As I suggested in my analysis of Why Are We So Blest? in chapter 5, the central problem with the novel's vision of intellectualism is that it is ultimately not radical but only reactively anti-intellectualist. The novel draws a categorical distinction between theory and praxis. Theory is the mode of activity of intellectuals, not of revolutionaries: however radical it might sound, or present itself as being, it is always-already recuperable by the prevailing order, whose interests it always ultimately serves. Although it constitutes a mode of activity, moreover, it does not constitute work in the sense in which the novel understands that term. As Modin puts it, with reference to the activity of writing his undergraduate thesis, “[i]t is not work. Busy work. Not necessary, but just a game to keep me occupied doing nothing real.”¹¹ Praxis, by contrast, is—or would be, since the novel's central protagonists can find no evidence of its actually being practiced anywhere—the mode of “authentic” revolution: it is effective, interventional, focused; it strikes; it is “real” work, which means that it consists in action, not words; what it means is what it does, not what it says.

It is obvious that this positioning of theory and praxis is susceptible to criticism on the grounds of its dualism and lack of reflexivity. It seems clear to me, at least, that far from contributing to the cause of revolution, Armah's presentation of intellectualism in Why Are We So Blest? serves instead to define revolutionary practice in such a way as to render its actualization impossible under any circumstances. It is not an accident that the “praxis” that Modin and Solo are looking for cannot be found. It cannot be found because it has nothing to do with revolutionary practice. What Modin and Solo are looking for is not revolution but redemption: a messianic strike against the hegemonic order (imperialism) by a united people, acting consciously and deliberately to change the world forever. This idealization is just that: a messianic idealization. It is, moreover—and, given the anti-intellectualism of Armah's text, this is densely ironical—a peculiarly intellectualist idealization: ultra-leftist, utopian, ethically voluntaristic, and not merely anti-elitist but also so virulently anti-bureaucratic that even the basic organizational structures without which there could never be a revolutionary movement are, in its terms, themselves automatically suspect.

“How to search for non-elitist methods of disseminating consciousness?”¹² Modin's question becomes the pretext for a repudiation not merely of elitism but indeed of leadership. Consider again, thus, the passage, already examined in chapter 5, in which Solo describes the photographic display in the UPC bureau in Laccryville:

The pictures are intended to show the movement as a serious, disciplined and well-organized force. In this they are successful. The first shots are historical. In them everything appears exaggeratedly rudimentary. The soldiers of the rebellion appear to be a confused crowd, wearing assorted clothes. There is then a rapid progression through stages in which only a few are in uniform, then most, until in the last pictures everyone is in uniform. Not only that. Now there are different types of uniform for different ranks, the colors getting lighter with increasing rank.¹³

The final image here, evoking an organizing philosophy in terms of which lightness is correlated with rising status, is telling; it functions perfectly to demolish the claims made by the UPC leadership that they are revolutionaries committed to the overthrow of colonial capitalism. Also present in the passage, however, is a troubling critique of organization per se. In advancing from a “rebellion” to a “movement,” the passage suggests—an advance secured by “discipline” and “organization”—the spontaneous militancy of “the masses” is co-opted by the “movement's” leaders, whose interests are not only not the same as those of “the masses” but in fact diametrically opposed to them. In terms of the official ideology of the “movement,” the early “rebels” had been spontaneously revolutionary, but, lacking leadership and organization, they had been “confused.” This, of course, is precisely the understanding arrived at in Fragments. Yet Why Are We So Blest? opposes itself explicitly to such a representation. Although it stops short of suggesting that, left to itself, the “rebellion” might have grown into an authentic revolution, it is adamant that the organization of the “rebellion” corresponds only to its domestication, and guarantees its failure. There is no role for leaders, still less for intellectuals in the revolution envisaged in Why Are We So Blest?

The novel appears to conceptualize revolution in explicitly messianic terms as a “leap in the open air of history,”¹⁴ after which everything will be different. It casts revolutionary practice as the only “real” labor, but defines this practice in terms that exclude organization, mobilization, politicization—exclude, in short, the work of forging a revolution. Of this work, painstaking, arduous, patient, flexible, governed at all times by pragmatic considerations, the novel appears to have no grasp. In 1969, Armah had documented the kinds of activity in which Frantz Fanon had engaged after he had left the employ of the French colonial administration and joined the Algerian national liberation movement:

Early in 1957 Fanon went to join the revolutionary base operating from Tunis. There he began writing for the press services of the Algerian revolutionary movement, working as a member of the Editorial Board of the soldiers' newspaper El Moudjahid (The Combatant), while continuing medical and political work with the militants. His major concern at this time was to help shape the theory and doctrine guiding the guerilla war—the kind of guiding work whose absence made other African uprisings (like Tanganyika's Maji-Maji and Kenya's Mau-Mau) such sad, blind, wasteful disasters.¹⁵

In Why Are We So Blest? the significance of this passage is entirely disavowed. Thus where Fanon, in his capacity as revolutionary intellectual, had written for an underground newspaper and served on its editorial board, Armah's third novel dismisses this kind of work as useless. Where Fanon had sought to “shape the theory and doctrine guiding the guerilla war,” the novel insists that such an ambition is intellectualist and is to be mistrusted. To the extent that radical intellectuals wish to contribute to the struggle, the novel invites them to eschew “theory” for “praxis” and join the fighters on the front line. To the extent that “intellectual work” is unavoidable, Modin suggests that it ought to be performed “by the old people, or sick people.”¹⁶

In making this suggestion, Modin mistakes self-abnegation for “class suicide.” He imagines himself to be striking a radical blow against intellectualism. Instead, he is only revealing the self-hatred of an intellectual who, “guilty” of his privilege, condemns himself and his activity by way of compensating atonement. Moreover, the content of Modin's discourse, far from gesturing toward any “authentic” revolutionism, only confirms his mandarin intellectualism. Alienated from “the masses,” knowing nothing of the material circumstances of their lives or of the way these are made sense of, adjusted to, or struggled against by them, Modin nevertheless arrogates to himself the right to characterize the unconscious will of “the masses” as a will to revolution. To this revolution, conceived in messianic terms and on the basis of his own abstractions, he commits himself unreservedly. To the extent that reality proves intractable to his conception of revolution, he tends, not to revise the theory, but to harden and extend its scope. If “the masses” are not “revolutionary,” it is because they have been “duped.” If other theories of revolution are less voluntaristic, more pragmatic and measured than Modin's own, it is because they have been “infected” by “Westernity.” At every point, Modin's intellectualism is sharpened, intensified, rendered less flexible. His view of the world becomes more and more abstract, extreme and totalizing—and more and more irretrievably intellectualist. Ultimately he drives himself to the conceptual desert of racial essentialism, upon whose quicksands he predicates his conspiracy theory of African history, and commits himself to a “practice” that, ostensibly revolutionary, is instead both entirely ineffectual and suicidally inept. When he is killed, furthermore, Solo emerges, ideologically speaking at least, to take his place. At no stage in Why Are We So Blest? is the idea of “working for the revolution,” in the sense of bending oneself to the tasks necessary to bring it about, treated with anything but contempt. In terms of the ideology of the novel, revolution is an all-or-nothing affair. It is a matter of redemption, not of objective possibility. Nor is the fact that such a representation necessarily condemns “the African revolution” and all other revolutions in history to failure viewed, in the novel, as a liability. On the contrary, it is taken to testify to the unassimilability, hence authenticity, of Modin's conception of revolution. The calcifying intellectualism of this ferociously doctrinaire self-justification apparently escapes the novel's own awareness. Since the more totalizing and extreme Modin's theorizations become, the closer to authentic revolutionism they are phrased as being, it follows that when, ultimately, he arrives at the conceptual terminus of manicheism and moves, from this purely theoretical standpoint, to repudiate theory altogether and commit his “de-intellectualized” self as a fighting machine to “the African revolution,” his decision is affirmed by the novel in spite of the fact that it leads to his death and advances the cause of the revolution not in the slightest. Solo observes, thus, that Modin had been trying “to achieve a healing juncture with his destroyed people.”¹⁷ He does not observe that this juncture could never have been achieved under the auspices of Modin's ultra-leftism. The latter observation, however, is the truer of the two.

.....

The ultimate irony of Why Are We So Blest? is that, for all its desperate anxiety to retain a commitment to the cause of “the African revolution,” it is a profoundly disenabling work, more reminiscent of the metaphysical fatalism of a writer like V. S. Naipaul than of any resistive aesthetic project. Room to maneuver is severely restricted in all three of Armah's novels of postcolonialism. As the 1960s “drag … themselves into the 1970s”¹⁸—as the setbacks of postcolonialism begin to loom not as temporary reverses but as fixtures in the landscape of “independent” African states—it becomes progressively more so, so that by the time of Why Are We So Blest? there is none. Radical intellectualism is impossible. Any attempt to justify it constitutes a cynical lie, or, at best a “justificatory hallucination.”¹⁹ Revolution is similarly impossible although only revolution can “solve” Africa's problems. In short, everything is necessary but nothing can be done. An obvious paradox reveals itself here: the world is “dying for change”;²⁰ Solo and Modin are “dying” to change it (literally in Modin's); and yet the novel ends as it had begun, with the world entirely unchanged—Modin's death is merely “a waste … useless, unregenerative destruction.”²¹ The more radically totalizing Armah's thinking becomes in the passage from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to Why Are We So Blest? the more defeated and defeating; and the more defeated, the more it tends to represent the world as unalterable.

It is precisely this configuration, however, that renders Armah's novels of postcolonialism uniquely representative in the context of their time. For the set of relations that I have just outlined between radicalism and increasingly totalizing theory at the end of the 1960s and between such theory and political paralysis are not limited to Armah's intellectual practice. On the contrary, they designate a world-historical crisis of radical intellectualism at this time. It is not an accident that the questions raised by Modin and Solo in Why Are We So Blest? should find an echo in the work of such radical Western theorists as Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in the aftermath of the events of 1968 in France, moved to describe “the classical intellectual” in quasi-Maoist terms as “objectively an enemy of the people,” and to call upon him (or her) to “negate his intellectual moment in order to try to achieve a new popular statute.”²²

Above all, this crisis of radical intellectualism can be observed in the work of various “Third World” writers and intellectuals, across the broad range of their practice: in literature, in social and cultural theory, in anthropology, psychology, and fiction, as well as in economics and political science. Consider, by way of an example, the trajectory of dependency theory.²³ Deriving initially from the analysis of Latin American societies, but, by the mid-1960s, being applied also to the ex-colonies of Africa and Asia, dependency theory set itself the task of accounting for the intensifying structural dependence—above all, and seemingly paradoxically, within the era of postcolonialism—of the “peripheral” Third World upon the “center” constituted by the capitalist First World. Faced with the evidence of this intensifying dependence, more mainstream sociologists and political scientists had tended to see it as an exclusively internal problem, which they had “explained” in broadly Weberian or Parsonian terms, through reference to the survival of “traditionalism” in Africa and the corresponding absence of an ethos of “modernity”—the latter understood to be the cultural sine qua non of national economic growth. Appropriately rejecting these conceptions as ethnocentric and unhistorical, the dependency theorists maintained that the condition of the “Third World” should be viewed not as one of undevelopment, but rather as one of underdevelopment. In a decisive turn, they sought to demonstrate an inverse and structural relationship between the situation of the “First World” and that of the “Third World.” It was not only, they showed, that the wealth produced by the “wretched of the earth” on the peripheries of the “world system” was appropriated by the capitalist nations of the center. For this process itself required the forcible “peripheralization” of the “peripheries,” the yoking of domestic and regional economies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia into the world system as subordinate instances. It required, in fact, the reconstitution of domestic economies, the destruction of their internal rationality, and the repositioning of their means and ends in accordance with the dominant interests of the world system. The dependency theorists concerned themselves less with the question of the extraction of surplus than with the dynamics through which domestic peripheral economies were undermined and, thus underdeveloped, bound more and more implacably into a world order headquartered in New York, Tokyo, and Paris.

Viewed retrospectively as a radical alternative to the premises of metropolitan social theory, dependency theory played an indispensable role. Not only did it succeed in articulating a devastating critique of the limitations and hidden ideological assumptions of mainstream theory, it also made possible a materialist analysis of the transition from colonial to neocolonial orders in the era of multinational capitalism. Increasingly as the 1960s unfolded, however, and a variety of different “progressive” policies in the postcolonial world foundered and collapsed, dependency theory tended to lapse into ever-more all-inclusive evocations of an imperialist world system so relentlessly powerful that resistance to it seemed futile. Not only did the “peripheralization” of domestic economies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa function to underdevelop them, but, it was now suggested, this arrangement also inevitably secured the addictive dependence of peripheral social formations upon those of the center. Not only had the periphery been shackled to the center, thus, but it was now effectively powerless to escape. It was not possible to “opt out” of the imperialist world system: one could escape it only by shattering it, and only a world-revolutionary movement—such as did not exist and was inconceivable at least in the forseeable future—could effect this kind of shattering.

Considered in these terms, dependency theory of the late 1960s and early 1970s can be seen to have possessed weaknesses very similar to those that came progressively to undermine Armah's radicalism during these years. As Peter Worsley has observed,

[p]olitically, to be told that “for the underdeveloped parts of the world to develop, the structure of the world social system must change”, seemed a profoundly demobilizing counsel of despair not only to reformers striving to improve education or health—and sometimes succeeding—but even to revolutionaries for whom the only practical possibility was not to change the entire world, but their own society.²⁴

Nor were the radical conceptualizations of dependency theory merely politically self-defeating: they gave rise also to a rampantly homogenizing kind of thinking, in terms of which specificity and particularity were swept aside in a welter of unwarranted generalizations. To speak of peripheral societies only as such was, obviously, to elide (potentially significant) political and historical distinctions between them. Similarly, to fail to differentiate concretely between colonial and neocolonial dispensations was not only to totalize, but also potentially to misrecognize the form and substance of oppositional practices within each dispensation. This point can be extended to refer not only to Armah's ideas and to dependency theory, but to almost all the thought issuing from within the problematic of radical African intellectualism of the late 1960s. The more generalizing it became, the more such thought tended, in spite of its radical intent, to cast Africa as the passive victim of imperialism, and to define local or regional social movements in advance as meaningless. Since the significance of all such movements came to be measured only in terms of their effect (if any) on the overarching world-system, it followed that to the extent that a particular movement failed to force a modification in this world-system, it remained more or less invisible to the radical theorist. Increasingly, therefore, as it hardened and became more and more totalizing in its fruitless attempts to account for the setbacks of the postcolonial era in the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical theory found itself incapable of taking adequate cognizance of a multiplicity of local, heterogeneous, particular events and developments within postcolonial societies. There was a symptomatic failure, for instance, as Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin have written (with respect not merely to Africa but to “developing societies” at large), to grapple with

[t]he effects of indigenous social forces within the developing societies themselves, the variety of strategies introduced by governments in those countries that were not necessarily dictated from the outside; industrialization in some of the “developing societies”; the influence of class struggles within some of the developing societies on the ways in which those countries actually developed; the experience of a multiplicity of roads and diversity of outcomes.²⁵

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Contemplating the alienation of radical intellectuals from the working classes that accompanied the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht once wrote that “[t]here is only one ally against growing barbarism—the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. Therefore it is obvious that one must turn to the people, and now more necessary than ever to speak their language.”²⁶ Ultimately, it proved to be through a similar “(re)turn to the people” that the crisis of radical intellectualism in postcolonial African society that we have been considering came to be resolved.

Significantly, the resolution was achieved not initially through theoretical but through political practice. Exactly at the same time as intellectuals like Armah and the dependency theorists were expressing themselves in the absolutist and defeatist language of underdevelopment, co-optation, and world-system, struggles for national liberation elsewhere in Africa—and, crucially, in the most viciously policed and administered colonies, those of Lusophone Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique—were gathering momentum. In these latter struggles, it was not only the political superstructures of colonialism that were under fire, but, very clearly and self-consciously, the economic basis upon which these superstructures rested. In the anti-imperialist movements that developed in the Lusophone African colonies, as Emmanuel Ngara has written,

[t]he question … was not just “independence” but “what form of independence?” This was the question posed by those countries which gained their freedom through protracted armed struggles in the seventies and eighties—Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Zimbabwe. When they acquired their freedom, these countries had a different concept of independence from the countries which had acceded to sovereignty in the previous two decades. Their long struggle for independence, and the experience of independent African countries now under the grip of neo-colonialism taught them to look at national independence from a radical ideological point of view, and they consequently chose the socialist path to development.²⁷

The successes of these militantly anti-imperialist movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe exploded the defeatist rhetoric that had come to characterize the discourse of radical intellectuals elsewhere in Africa. The case of Guinea-Bissau was particularly inspiring: for there the revolutionary party, the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), which by 1968 was already winning major battles against the Portuguese colonial forces, liberating and placing under its jurisdiction large sections of the interior of the colony, had been founded as late as 1956 by a group of just six radical intellectuals. The leaders of the various liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies—such as Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, and Eduardo Mondlane—were assimilados like Solo in Why Are We So Blest?; but they were altogether without either the messianism with which he had initially viewed independence or the paralyzingly intellectualist self-consciousness to which his experience of postcolonialism had driven him. Their practice demonstrated to their would-be counterparts elsewhere in Africa that it was necessary for them to commit themselves to producing the conditions of possibility of revolution, even under the most daunting and seemingly hopeless of circumstances. Where in Why Are We So Blest? Armah had addressed the alienation of intellectuals from the majority of their compatriots as not only a structural but also an insurmountable barrier, and had moved from this definition to characterize revolution as impossible, the examples of Cabral and others like him now revealed this to be an unacceptably intellectualist formulation.

The theorization of the “revolutionary politics” of the liberation movements in Lusophone Africa is to be found in such texts as Cabral's Return to the Source (1973) and Mondlane's The Struggle for Mozambique (1969). To turn from a novel like Why Are We So Blest? to either of these texts is immediately to appreciate the significance of the Lusophone developments in sparking the collapse of the way of thinking about postcolonialism represented by radical African intellectuals like Armah in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For where Armah casts intellectualism in decidedly dualistic terms as a cancer that can only be cured through an abandonment of (reactionary) theory for (revolutionary) practice, Cabral, by contrast, speaks of intellectuals not generically, but in terms of their politicality. By his reckoning, revolutionary intellectualism is not only feasible, it is indispensable. Certainly he concedes that “the majority of colonized intellectuals” accommodate themselves to “the colonizer's mentality.”²⁸ However, he avoids the pitfall of generalizing simplification here: while a majority of colonized intellectuals embrace the social ethic of assimilation, a minority resists such recuperation.

For Cabral this minority plays a decisive role. It is not enough, however, that its members should define themselves in their radicalism as anti-imperialist. In order for them to “unclass” or, in Cabral's words, to “reconvert” themselves, it is necessary for them to take their place alongside those with whom they wish to identify: “A reconversion of minds … may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle” (RS 45). In Why Are We So Blest? Modin, too, desires nothing more than to place himself among “the popular masses” in the struggle. But between Modin's understanding and Cabral's there is all the difference in the world. For Modin, the act of “reconversion” looms as a process of “de-intellectualization.” He expresses a desire not to assume a position of leadership in the struggle, but to contribute on the ground level, as it were, as a freedom fighter undifferentiated from other freedom fighters. Although this gesture is intended by Modin as a strike against elitism, it can, from Cabral's perspective, only be interpreted as an abrogation of responsibility. This is because in Cabral's work the relationship between “reconverted” radical intellectuals and “popular masses” is theorized as a properly dialectical one, whose revolutionary productivity consists precisely in its tension. Thus, Cabral insists that the liberation movement must “base its action in popular culture” (RS 47). This means that it is necessary for the leaders of the movement—“drawn generally,” as Cabral notes, “from the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ … or the urban working class” (RS 54)—not only to speak “on behalf of” and to “side with” the “popular masses” of their compatriots (most of whom are peasants), but also to commit themselves to living among these “masses,” to get to know at first hand both the material conditions under which they live and the manner in which these conditions are experienced, endured, adjusted to, and resisted by them. Simultaneously, however, he insists that the liberation movement must not simply re-present the culture of “the masses” but must strive, rather, to channel it, to shape its articulation as revolutionary national culture: “the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within [popular culture] … the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture” (RS 47-48). Living among the peasant masses, the leaders of the national liberation movement must not only “come to know the people better” (RS 54) they must also seek to change “the people,” to promote their “political and moral awareness” (RS 55) by way of reconciling “the people's” consciousness with that of the movement. As Cabral puts it in a famous passage that recalls the revolutionary optimism of Fanon's writings without, however, participating in the messianic register of the Fanonian discourse:

The leaders of the liberation movement … having to live day by day with the various peasant groups in the heart of the rural populations, come to know the people better. They discover at the grass roots the richness of their cultural values …, acquire a clearer understanding of the economic realities of the country, of the problems, sufferings and hopes of the popular masses. The leaders realize, not without a certain astonishment, the richness of spirit, the capacity for reasoned discussion and clear exposition of ideas, the facility for understanding and assimilating concepts on the part of population groups who yesterday were forgotten, if not despised, and who were considered incompetent by the colonizer and even by some nationals …

On their side, the working masses and, in particular, the peasants who are usually illiterate and never have moved beyond the boundaries of their village or region, in contact with other groups lose the complexes which constrained them in their relationships with other ethnic and social groups. They realize their crucial role in the struggle; they break the bonds of the village universe to integrate progressively into the country and the world; they acquire an infinite amount of new knowledge, useful for their immediate and future activity within the framework of the struggle, and they strengthen their political awareness by assimilating the principles of national and social revolution postulated by the struggle. They thereby become more able to play the decisive role of providing the principal force behind the liberation movement.

[RS 54]

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Throughout Africa, the remarkable success enjoyed by such liberation movements as PAIGC, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertaçaõ de Moçambique) and ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), beginning in the late 1960s and leading to independence in the 1970s, decisively undermined the prevailing defeatism of radical thought about decolonization and postcolonialism, overturning extremism and its propensity to totalize. Attention shifted from totalistic considerations of collaboration and resistance, continuity and change, to more subtle and nuanced inquiries into “the teeming and refractory particulars” of everyday life in specific and concretely defined African communities.²⁹ Of crucial importance here was the deflection of attention away from the urban elites and onto different categories of social actor: the peasantry, the proletariat, the unemployed, the hungry, the uprooted and dispossessed. The theory of neocolonialism itself came under attack; not, as had always been the case, from the political right, but from the left. Hitherto the concept of neocolonialism had been invoked to draw attention to the continuing imperial domination of Africa in the postcolonial era. Such invocations had had the effect of casting Africa (and its popular masses and radical intellectuals) in the by-now-traditional role of victim to external forces—a role that, in spite of its passivity, proved perversely attractive to African intellectuals of the 1960s, since it allowed them at least to shift the blame for Africa's continuing woes onto metropolitan and imperial agents. Now, however, a number of theorists moved to contest the authority of this understanding of neocolonialism. In an article entitled “Neo-Colonialism, State Capitalism, or Revolution?” for instance, Archie Mafeje argued that the prevailing view of neocolonialism was imprecise and unhistorical:

The term “neo-colonialism” is dangerous in its ambiguity. It suggests both change and continuity and the qualitative difference between the two is often lost in undue emphasis on the latter. While neo-colonialism can be rightly regarded as a revision of forms and methods of control to maintain the old dependency relations, it is equally important to bear in mind that it is within the competence of independent governments to counteract such manoeuvres. Wherefore, historically and qualitatively, a distinction must be made between colonialism, which was an unmitigated imposition, and neo-colonialism, which is a contractual relationship even if accompanied by very severe constraints.³⁰

The implications of Mafeje's argument were clear. Not only was it necessary to draw a distinction between colonialism and neocolonialism, but it seemed to him both inaccurate and, more importantly, politically counterproductive for intellectuals to so dwell on the enormity of imperialism as to render oppositional practice futile even in prospect. This was not to say that the palpable and damaging effects of empire ought to be ignored. Rather, it was to urge that contemplation of them not be allowed to cripple counter-hegemonic activity in advance. As Ezekiel Mphahlele argued in Voices in the Whirlwind (1967):

It is quite true that neo-colonialism is with us, full and strong. But there is a considerably large area of choice for the African. He can revolutionize his educational system, set his own standards, cut loose from Christianity and Islam altogether or liberate them in such a way that they cannot recognize themselves anymore, create a climate for the release of his cultural and creative energies … In so much of Africa the black man does not want to choose: he is afraid of seeing his real personality. He does not even realize that he can use modern technology to promote an indigenous culture.³¹

This questioning of dominant paradigms and modes of thinking also proved decisive within the field of literature, where it prompted a wholesale and fundamental reconceptualization, on the part of established and new writers alike, of cultural politics and artistic methods and priorities. The questions that had been at the heart of Armah's novels of postcolonialism, concerning betrayal and disillusionment, intellectual responsibility, and mass political demobilization, had also informed such novels as Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People (1966), Kofi Awoonor's This Earth, My Brother (1971), Gabriel Okara's The Voice (1964), Lenrie Peters's The Second Round (1965), Robert Serumaga's Return to the Shadows (1969), and Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965). In these works, and many others like them, writers had moved in expressive and sympathetic fashion to identify and deplore social injustices in postcolonial societies, and even, on occasion, to call for the revolutionary transformation of these societies. Achebe and Soyinka, the most “visible” of this group of writers during the 1960s, had also written extensively about African literature and society, calling explicitly for a literature of social engagement.

For all the manifest progressivism of this writing of the 1960s, however, it had remained caught up, in ideological terms, within the class project of the national bourgeoisies of the various postcolonial societies. It was not only that, in spite of its patent commitment to questions of intellectual accountability and social regeneration, the writing had tended to focus centrally (and often exclusively) on the situation of intellectuals and other members of the political elite in the postcolonial universe. It was also that, in the literary and critical works even of authors like Soyinka, Achebe—and Armah—no matter how admirable or ideologically progressive, it had always been possible to discern a residual strain of class arrogance.

Starting in the mid-1960s, however, this “intellectualist” address of most of the writing of the first years of independence began to be subjected to radical critique. In an important article of 1966, for instance, entitled “Wole Soyinka, T. M. Aluko and the Satiric Voice,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argued that in spite of the breadth of Soyinka's social canvas, and the integrity of its critique of political abuses, the Nigerian author's work was marred by stasis and abstraction—defects, Ngũgĩ maintained, that derived from the marginalization of “ordinary people” in Soyinka's drama and in his novel, The Interpreters:

Confronted with the impotence of the élite, the corruption of those steering the ship of State and those looking after its organs of justice, Wole Soyinka does not know where to turn … Soyinka's good man is the uncorrupted individual: his liberal humanism leads him to admire an individual's lone act of courage, and thus often he ignores the creative struggle of the masses. The ordinary people, workers and peasants, in his plays remain passive watchers on the shore or pitiful comedians on the road.

Although Soyinka exposes his society in breadth, the picture he draws is static, for he fails to see the present in the historical perspective of conflict and struggle. It is not enough for the African artist, standing aloof, to view society and highlight its weaknesses. He must try to go beyond this, to seek out the sources, the causes and the trends of a revolutionary struggle … which, though suffering temporary reaction, is continuous and is changing the face of the twentieth century.³²

The central problem with the type of postcolonial writing of which The Interpreters was such a sympathetic example, Ngũgĩ suggested (the same argument could have been made with respect to Achebe's A Man of the People), was that it was only able to pose the question of the failures of the postcolonial regimes. It was not able to suggest ways of reversing these failures.

Of great importance, in Ngũgĩ's critique, was his identification of a class distance between Soyinka as intellectual and the “ordinary people” represented not only marginally but as marginal in his work. In all of Soyinka's writing of the 1960s, fictional and nonfictional, we encounter what, following Ngũgĩ's lead, we might describe as an elitist and self-justifying conceptualization of intellectualism. Such a conceptualization received manifest formulation in 1967, when, in a celebrated address delivered at a conference in Sweden, Soyinka spoke of the historic role of the African artist as “the record of the mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time.”³³ Soyinka was immediately and appropriately criticized, at this conference, for rather grandiosely overestimating the significance of writers in society. Lewis Nkosi argued that it was quixotic in the context of postcolonial Africa to attempt to retrieve or refunction an essentially Romantic (not to say, Western) conception of artists as the “unacknowledged legislators” of the world. Writers, Nkosi mused drily, “can have a fantastic capacity both for self-deception and for sheer inability to understand what is very clear.”³⁴ To Nkosi, it seemed merely tautological to urge writers to be the bearers of a vision: “Every writer has a vision. Otherwise I do not see what he is doing writing.”³⁵

Beneath the ultimately secondary matter of Soyinka's hypostatization of cultural creation, however, lay the more weighty question of the social assumptions borne by African writers in social situations similar to Soyinka's own during the 1960s. For Soyinka was by no means alone in retaining throughout the decade an elitist presumption as to the uniquely privileged, hence uniquely portentous and significant, role of intellectuals in the postcolonial social process. Consider, for instance, the following passage, from Chinua Achebe's essay “The Novelist as Teacher,” written in 1965:

Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse—to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet. For no thinking African can escape the pain of the wound in our soul … The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front. For he is after all … the sensitive point of his community.³⁶

This is an extremely well-known passage, whose fame is at least partially a testament to its effectiveness. In it, Achebe economically and eloquently espouses a literature of commitment, one devoted to the progressive transformation of African society. Yet we should look closely at what is revealed in Achebe's rationalization of “teaching” as a fit vocation for the African novelist. The reader will have noticed that Achebe himself declares that there is a need for such “teachers”; that he determines that what is “taught” should relate to cultural retrieval; that he stipulates who stands to gain from his “lessons”; that he finds himself qualified to “teach.” His stance here is presumptuous and uncritical, even if it is not necessarily authoritarian—even, as a matter of fact, if it is actually progressive. Too much rests on his mere presumption that in what he outlines, “my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet.” When we sound these words today, it is impossible for us not to hear in them the echo of that bourgeois nationalist discourse which Frantz Fanon had criticized in The Wretched of the Earth as falsely maintaining its identity with “the innermost hopes of the whole people.”³⁷ The critical point here is not only that there is a separation between Achebe as socially conscious intellectual and “the whole people.” Also of fundamental importance is that Achebe does not seem to see this separation as an alienation, reflecting the divergence between his social aspirations and those of “the whole people,” but only as a distance, something that, with the right training, “the people” could reduce and ultimately make disappear. Achebe's assumption here, it seems, is that the substance of his progressivism does not stand in need of verification at the hands of “the people.” And it is in this assumption, ultimately, that the strain of class arrogance in his thought inheres.

It was precisely against such representations that Ngũgĩ moved to take up a revolutionary position on the place of the writer in postcolonial society. Responding to Soyinka's Swedish address, thus, Ngũgĩ spoke of the need for African writers not merely to speak on behalf of “the people” but, more concretely and decisively, “in the terms of” “the people.” As he put it:

When we, the black intellectuals, the black bourgeoisie, got the power, we never tried to bring about those policies which would be in harmony with the needs of the peasants and workers. I think that it is time that the African writers also started to talk in the terms of these workers and peasants.³⁸

This declaration proved to be of epochal significance in the development of a radical aesthetic in African literature. Well in advance of the majority of his fellow African writers, Ngũgĩ had diagnosed the crisis of consciousness in progressive African thought for what it was and moved to take the measure of liberation struggles in the Lusophone African colonies and elsewhere in the world—South East Asia, Latin America—by advocating a “(re)turn to the people” on the part of radical writers. Such a (re)turn, Ngũgĩ theorized, could not possibly be grounded on the terrain of the prevailing radical way of thinking about postcolonialism. Its radicalism notwithstanding, the latter was a terrain within the larger universe of African middle-class ideology. Instead, Ngũgĩ moved to advocate a decisive break with middle-class intellectualism. Where Chinua Achebe, thus, had spoken of the responsible writer as an educator, whose task it was to guide “the people,” Ngũgĩ now took a leaf out of Cabral's notebook and called upon writers not only to act in solidarity with “the people's” interests but to position themselves directly among these “people”—and not, as though that were an entitlement, at their head. For he argued that African writers could only truly hope to serve their greater communities if they first “unclassed” themselves. The conscious repudiation by writers of their class of ascription was an indispensable precondition of their legitimacy as representatives of “the people's” interest; only through means of such a repudiation could the forging of “a regenerative link with the people” be consolidated.³⁹

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In the search, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, for a more concretely committed, less elitist, more accessible African literature, the work of Ousmane Sembene of Senegal proved to be of pathbreaking significance. The real importance of Sembene's work lay in the daring simplicity of its overall conception. Even in his early work, dating back to the 1950s, Sembene had broken radically with the urban, intellectual biases prevailing in African literature. His most celebrated novel, God's Bits of Wood (1960), had taken as its central focus a major railroad strike that had occurred in French West Africa in the late 1940s. Scrupulously avoiding abstraction or grand theorizing, it had devoted itself to a very close and concrete exploration of the material effect of the strike on the lives of a number of people—men, women, and children, strikers and strikebreakers, beggars and small traders, and proletarian activists—living and working in various communities along the thousand-mile rail line between Bamako and Dakar. Through this means, Sembene had been able to convey immediately and compellingly a sense of the movement of ideas in time, and of the intersection between thought and action in political events. Where other African writers might have spoken about the politicization of the laboring classes, Sembene, a self-proclaimed Marxist, had made this process the very subject of his novel, addressing it not simply as a series of external events but phenomenologically, as in the following passage, with an eye to its human and conceptual implications:

And so the strike came to Thiès … The days passed, and the nights. In this country, the men often had several wives, and it was perhaps because of this that, at the beginning, they were scarcely conscious of the help the women gave them. But soon they began to understand that, here, too, the age to come would have a different countenance. When a man came back from a meeting, with bowed head and empty pockets, the first things he saw were always the unfired stove, the useless cooking vessels, the bowls and gourds ranged in a corner, empty. Then he would seek the arms of his wife, without thinking, or caring, whether she was the first or the third. And seeing the burdened shoulders, the listless walk, the women became conscious that a change was coming for them as well.

But if they were beginning to feel closer to the lives of their men, what was happening to the children? In this country, they were many, so many that they were seldom counted. But now they were there, idling in the courtyards or clinging to the women's waistcloths, their bones seeming naked, their eyes deep-sunk, and on their lips a constant, heart-bruising question: “Mother, will there be something to eat today?” … The days were mournful, and the nights were mournful, and the simple mewling of a cat set people trembling.

One morning a woman rose and wrapped her cloth firmly around her waist and said, “Today, I will bring back something to eat.”

And the men began to understand that if the times were bringing forth a new breed of men, they were also bringing forth a new breed of women.⁴⁰

In his subsequent work (he is also one of Africa's most acclaimed film directors) Sembene has continued to give prominence to the dispossessed strata of modern African society. His novels, stories, and films represent landless peasants, slum dwellers without work, beggars and aged people for whom nothing is assured, not even their own survival. By drawing attention to the daily struggles of this “invisible” multitude—invisible, that is, to the architects of African “modernization”—Sembene is able not only to show that they are casualties of the existing order, but also, subtly but unmistakably, to hint at their potential revolutionary impact on society, latent in the first instance in their sheer numbers.

In its range and orientation, much of the literature that has emerged in Africa since 1970 clearly takes the work of Sembene as its inspiration and point of departure. Three distinct though frequently overlapping strains in this “new” literature warrant specific mention here. The first of these strains consists in a naturalist idiom that might be labeled “street-wise.” Young writers such as Dambudzo Marechera of Zimbabwe, and Thomas Akare and Meja Mwangi of Kenya, characteristically write about the lives of beggars and squatters, the unemployed and underemployed members of a vast African lumpenproletariat camping in the sprawling ghettos that have mushroomed around the edges of large cities throughout the continent.⁴¹ The temper of their writing tends to be pragmatic and brutally matter-of-fact, as in this passage from Mwangi's Going Down River Road (1976):

[Ocholla] leads Ben into an alleyway, past a heap of excrement, Ben wonders who squats here and when. They emerge in a dark back street that smells of dust though it is wet. This leads into another lane that in turn vomits them into River Road. The place is crowded with its usual mass of haunted, hungry faces, poverty-hypnotised faces, hateful faces, and the fragrant stink of unwashed bodies and burst sewers. Though most shops are closed down, the ghostly wanderers are still here. This is one place where there will still be people left after doomsday. They have survived repeated police cleanups. They can take anything.⁴²

In its deliberately unromantic quality, this kind of writing is far removed from various attempts made during the 1960s to “capture” the pulse of life on the streets of Lagos, Nairobi, or Lusaka—one thinks, for example, of a novel like The Gab Boys (1967) by the Ghanaian writer Cameron Duodu. Beneath the deceptively casual register of Mwangi's prose, there is evident a sharp under-edge of anger, exploding occasionally into harshness. The particular power of Mwangi's work, like that of other writers of his idiom, lies in its understated naturalism. The sparseness of his writing is peculiarly subversive: like the characters whose lives are described in it, its lean and hungry energy threatens the established order with insurrection.

A second strain of writing to have emerged since 1970 in African fiction is social (and sometimes socialist) realist in tendency. Represented by such “new” writers as Festus Iyayi of Nigeria, Mongane Serote of South Africa, and Aminata Sow Fall of Senegal, this strain is closely related to the naturalist idiom of Mwangi and Marechera, but is more explicitly and sustainedly political in tone. Sow Fall's second novel, The Beggars' Strike (1979), is particularly interesting in this respect. Like much of Ousmane Sembene's work, it centers on the plight of the huge but marginalized and dispossessed stratum of urban postcolonial society composed of beggars, the disabled, and the unemployed. The strike referred to in the novel's title is precipitated when a government minister resolves to remove all beggars from the streets of the capital city of an unnamed African nation. The presence of these beggars, it seems, is bad for business and tourism! Like Sembene's Xala (1974), The Beggars' Strike reveals the greed and corruption of the postcolonial elite; more important than this, however, it focuses on the extent to which the political system upheld by this elite is not working. The dispossessed masses in the novel have been spawned by this system: recruited by it, used, exploited, and now neglected by it, they are its casualties. Responsibility for their immiseration therefore rests with the elite who administer this system. This point is made tellingly by Sow Fall in her novel.⁴³

A third strain in the “new” writing from Africa might, with some caution, be characterized as feminist. Composed for the most part, though by no means exclusively, by women writers, it, too, typically roots itself, in diverse ways, in the experiences of hardship and dispossession. Often it addresses itself to the lives of men and women in poor peasant communities, where its concern is to convey an impression of the felt reality of everyday life. The writing of Bessie Head is exemplary in this respect. As Lewis Nkosi has pointed out with respect to her first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Head's great achievement is to have offered a superbly focused portrait of what is involved and what it means to live at a particular time in a particular place, within the constraints of particular social relationships:

This bleak, attentive study of a small community of a mere four hundred people, situated in a dusty, arid Botswana village, a people struggling to improve its agricultural techniques in food production but mercilessly torn by petty conflict and self-seeking ambition, contains an admirable range of characters … drawn with an exquisitely sure touch and amazing self-confidence, by a novelist who is not after all a native of the country. Similarly, the evocation of the sun-parched waste of Botswana, with an occasional desert “bloom” such as the village of Golema Mmidi; the slow almost imperceptible changes of the seasons and the unhurried accumulation of the physical details of everyday life, these are just some of the achievements of this South African novelist. This materiality of everyday existence happens to be the most difficult thing to achieve in a novel; and yet recreating in fiction the microcosm of the larger social world, and breathing a new life into the harshly familiar and the unrelentingly dull, is what writing novels used to be about; Bessie Head manages her task with immense skill and sympathy.⁴⁴

Bessie Head's work is focused more on the shifting tensions between gender and culture systems than it is on the politics of postcolonialism. This has led such otherwise sympathetic critics as Nkosi to argue that she “is not a political novelist in any sense that we can recognise.”⁴⁵ The truth, however, is that the work of Head and of such feminist African writers as Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (both Nigerian), is differently political than that of their more established male counterparts, not less so. Head's writing is not unpolitical; it is fiercely committed to a politics of localism: small-scale, decentered, heterogeneous, agrarian, egalitarian, flexible, opportunistic. Such a politics, though, stands opposed to the grand récit of national liberation struggle that constitutes the dominant narrative mode of political fiction in Africa. With so many African women excluded from the arena of political power—not only before independence but equally since—we must wonder whether the specter of “national liberation” could ever have held for women the symbolic resonance that it has clearly held for men. In Head's short story “The Wind and a Boy,” independence announces itself to the rural village of Ga-Sefete-Molemo in the form of a truck belonging to a member of “the new, rich civil-servant class.” Driven too fast and without brakes, this truck runs over and kills a boy from the village. Head concludes her story: “And thus progress, development, and a pre-occupation with status and living-standards first announced themselves to the village. It looked like being an ugly story with many decapitated bodies on the main road.”⁴⁶ From the perspective of women and the lower strata of African societies, this conclusion might be taken to possess general validity.

Other African writers in the “feminist” idiom concern themselves not with peasant or proletarian communities, but with the contradictory status of middle-class women, simultaneously privileged (by virtue of their class position) and subordinated (by virtue of their-gender). In Nuruddin Farah's Sardines (1981) and Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1980), we are shown the huge discrepancy that exists between the protagonists' relative social mobility as middle-class and as female subjects. As middle-class subject in Bâ's novel, for instance, Ramatoulaye is able to write that

It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We remained young and efficient, for we were the messengers of a new design. With independence achieved, we witnessed the birth of a republic, the birth of an anthem and the implantation of a flag.⁴⁷

Ramatoulaye's political position here is squarely that of bourgeois nationalism. In this respect it is fundamentally different from that of the altogether more radical and theoretically sophisticated Medina in Farah's novel. Yet both positions are reflective of intellectual mobility, a function of the middle-class status of their exponents. This mobility contrasts with the constraints under which Ramatoulaye and Medina are both obliged to labor as women in their respective societies. As female subject, thus, Ramatoulaye is repeatedly made aware of “the slender liberty granted to women.”⁴⁸ As middle-class subject she had experienced independence as a time of emancipation and achievement; as female subject, she is obliged to recognize, upon her husband's death, that for women nothing has changed:

This is the moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law; and, worse still, beyond her possessions she gives up her personality, her dignity, becoming a thing in the service of the man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, his male and female cousins, his friends.⁴⁹

For all the power of their work, however, writers such as Mwangi, Sow Fall, and Farah have not been the major strategists of the “new” writing that has come to the fore in Africa since 1970. This role has fallen to writers like Sembene and Ngũgĩ who were already active during the 1960s, and to other well-established writers, like the radical Cameroonian Mongo Beti, who, having stopped writing in the late 1950s, took up the pen again in 1972, publishing three novels in the period between 1974 and 1979.⁵⁰ But it was not simply the fact that these authors continued to publish in the 1970s that was important; rather, it was that between their work of the 1960s and their work of the 1970s, a fundamental revaluation of formal and artistic priorities and political tactics seemed to have taken place.

It was in the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o that these changes in the fields of vision of African writing in the 1960s and the 1970s were most obviously apparent. In some respects, it is useful to compare Ngũgĩ with Sembene, at least to the extent that of all the African writers writing in English during the 1960s, Ngũgĩ showed the greatest sensitivity to and awareness of the plight of the peasantry and laboring classes. Even in his early work—in such novels as Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965)—he focused not on the activity of urban elites but on local, rural responses to colonialism in Kenya. In his third novel, A Grain of Wheat, published in 1967, he painted an unforgettable picture of the depredations and hardships endured by the rural population during the years of the Emergency in Kenya, between 1952 and 1956, when thousands of Kenyan men and women took to the forests to join the “Land and Freedom” armies fighting against the British colonial government.

Yet although in A Grain of Wheat Ngũgĩ was writing about the Kenyan peasantry and about peasant experience during the Emergency, it can be seen in retrospect that the novel was very much a work of the “break” between one determinate way of thinking about postcolonialism and another. A Grain of Wheat is situated on the border between a messianic and intellectualist field of vision, by the late 1960s representing decolonization as a failure, and a more concretely committed socialism, casting the decolonizing process in similarly radical but more soberly material and historical terms. The novel leaves the reader with an image of hope, embodied in Gikonyo's carving of a stool in the shape of a pregnant woman, but also with the fear that, as represented, the victory of British colonialism will prove to have been a Pyrrhic one. It would only be in his fourth novel, Petals of Blood (1977)—a novel that it would take him seven full years to write—that Ngũgĩ would be able to find a less intellectualist register for his new political sensibility. And even here, in the formulaic quality of the final pages, in which the specter of proletarian internationalism is rather implausibly seen to be arising in the collective political imagination of Kenyan workers and peasants, there is the suggestion of a residual intellectualism.

Nevertheless, in several respects, Petals of Blood is definitive of the new politically committed writing that has emerged in Africa since 1970. Set mostly in the countryside, it portrays a community struggling against an environment that a combination of factors have contrived to render sterile and harsh: drought and desertification, colonial neglect and despoiliation, postcolonial mismanagement and venality. To the members of this community, independence is only a word: its substantive impact on their lives has been virtually nonexistent. Between these villagers and an authentic independence there stand daunting obstacles—economic, historical, political psychological. Yet through the whole novel there is Ngũgĩ's insistence upon the transformability of existing conditions. Meaningful social change will come, he suggests: perhaps not tomorrow nor the next day, nor even the day after that, but still it will come, for “the peasants, aided by the workers, small traders and small landowners … ha[ve] mapped out the path” for themselves to follow.⁵¹

Ngũgĩ has, of course, not only declared his commitment to a revolutionary conception of intellectualism; he has attempted to put it into practice. Increasingly convinced of the need to address the failures of postcolonial government in Kenya in terms of a class struggle between an indigenous bourgeoisie buttressed by and representing the interests of metropolitan capitalism, on the one hand, and the masses of the peasant and working classes, on the other, he has sought to forge and institutionalize alliances between workers, peasants, and radical intellectuals in the general cause of anti-imperialism. While still teaching at the University of Nairobi in the early 1970s, he helped to found the Kamiriithu Educational, Cultural and Community Centre, which devoted itself to programs of community development, adult literacy, and the like. Gearing his literary production to the needs of the Centre's membership, Ngũgĩ resolved to write not in English but in Gikuyu, and to turn his hand from the form of the novel to that of workshop theater.

Since this move was designed precisely to combat the prevailing Romantic conceptions of the writer as a privileged and uniquely sensitive member of society—since, in fact, it sought to demolish the ideologically constructed gaps, not only between “critical” and “creative” labor, but, even more ambitiously, between mental and manual labor—it is perhaps not surprising that Ngũgĩ should have incurred the wrath of the postcolonial authorities in Kenya. Ngũgĩ was imprisoned without charge for almost a year in 1978, stripped of his position as Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi, and has subsequently been obliged to seek exile in Britain. With grim irony, he has pointed out that it is today dangerous for African writers to attempt to represent the realities they daily encounter. From the point of view of officialdom, it would seem that what is required of African writers is that they continue to hurl abuse at colonialism while euphemizing the authoritarianism of different postcolonial regimes under the rubric of “nation building”:

When I myself used to write plays and novels that were only critical of the racism in the colonial system, I was praised. I was awarded prizes, and my novels were in the syllabus. But when toward the seventies I started writing in a language understood by peasants, and in an idiom understood by them and I started questioning the very foundations of imperialism and of foreign domination of Kenyan economy and culture, I was sent to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.⁵²

Since the late 1960s, Ngũgĩ has moved to redefine the situation of writers along the axis of class solidarity rather than, romantically, through reference to the mysteries of “vision” or “imagination.” He insists that the responsibility of African writers cannot be assessed separately from that of other categories of intellectual; and that the responsibility of intellectuals cannot be assessed without addressing the larger and more embracing questions of national culture and political justice.

In these terms it seems obvious that the attempt to silence such writers as Ngũgĩ (or Sembene, or Beti, or Farah, or Jack Mapanje) must be understood as one strand within a wider crisis of legitimacy in the era of postcolonialism, and that, in spite of the brutal tactics employed by such states as Kenya and Somalia, and such rulers as Ahmadou Ahidjo and Hastings Banda, this crisis not only cannot be “done away with” through repressive state measures, no matter how terroristic, but is actually intensifying through every resort to such measures. As Ngũgĩ notes,

Today questioning the presence of foreign military bases and personnel … on Kenyan soil is disloyalty. Questioning colonialism is sedition. Teaching the history of the Kenyan people's resistance to colonialism is sedition. Theatrical exposure of colonial culture is sedition. Questioning the exploitation and oppression of peasants and workers is Marxism and hence treason. Questioning corruption in high places is sedition.⁵³

Ngũgĩ is exemplary of the new generation of African writers because he has, characteristically, been able to draw defiant lessons from his persecution at the hands of the Kenyan state. It is not, as he has repeatedly pointed out since his detention, that he would “wish the experience of prison” on any other writer. And yet, “To be arrested for the power of your writing is one of the highest compliments an author can be paid.”⁵⁴ The point is that, in a neocolonial state such as Kenya, it is often only through persecution or imprisonment that a writer can indeed forge a “regenerative link with the people.” In his prison memoir, Detained, Ngũgĩ recalls that in the first week of his incarceration in 1978, he encountered Wasonga Sijeyo, a fellow inmate at Kamiti Prison, who told him: “It may sound a strange thing to say to you, but in a sense I am glad they brought you here. The other day … we were saying that it would be a good thing for Kenya if more intellectuals were imprisoned. First, it would wake most of them from their illusions. And some of them might outlive jail to tell the world.”⁵⁵ Certainly, Ngũgĩ has lived to “tell the world.” And, as he would be the first to acknowledge, he is less and less alone.

.....

What, then, of Ayi Kwei Armah? I have said that Why Are We So Blest? represented a dead end in African literature, but that, precisely because of its extremism, it helped to throw into clear relief the overwhelmingly defeatist quality of progressive thought in Africa at the end of the 1960s. How did Armah respond to the renewal of the discourse of national liberation in the early 1970s? To what extent has his subsequent writing worked itself free of the cannibalistic intellectualism of Why Are We So Blest? Has his subsequent writing retained the pertinence and thrust of his first three novels?

Armah's fourth novel, Two Thousand Seasons, was published just one year after Why Are We So Blest? Merely to open it, however, is immediately to appreciate the distance that separates it not only from Why Are We So Blest? but from all three of Armah's novels of postcolonialism. It is clear that the fundamental revaluation of formal priorities and artistic goals that had been preoccupying writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Sembene Ousmane in the late 1960s and early 1970s had been preoccupying Armah as well. Here is how the narrative of Two Thousand Seasons opens:

We are not a people of yesterday. Do they ask how many single seasons we have flowed from our beginnings till now? We shall point them to the proper beginning of their counting. On a clear night when the light of the moon has blighted the ancient woman and her seven children, on such a night tell them to go alone into the world. There, have them count first the one, then the seven, and after the seven all the other stars visible to their eyes alone.

After that beginning they will be ready for the sand. Let them seek the sealine. They will not have to ponder where to start. Have them count the sand. Let them count it grain from single grain.

And after they have reached the end of that counting we shall not ask them to number the raindrops in the ocean. But with the wisdom of the aftermath have them ask us again how many seasons have flowed by since our people were unborn.⁵⁶

Armah's style here is designed to approximate the oral delivery of ancestral community poets, and the new style serves a new substance. For in Two Thousand Seasons the novelist attempts nothing less than a remythologization of African history. This exercise in myth making is no longer grounded in bitter reflection on the betrayal of “the African revolution” after independence. It is aimed, rather, toward restoring to Africans the right to construct their own truths in accordance with their own needs. In Two Thousand Seasons, as in The Healers, the question of postcolonialism is eschewed in favor of the larger question of African responses to all forms of alien domination, historically and in the conjuncture of the present.

In his critical study Myth, Literature and the African World, Wole Soyinka addresses the project of Two Thousand Seasons under the rubric of “racial retrieval.” In Soyinka's reading, Armah's novel emerges as a rejoinder and companion piece to Yambo Ouologuem's controversial Bound to Violence (1968). Ouologuem's novel, according to Soyinka, had derived its inspiration from the premise, developed in the writings of such African historians as Cheikh Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams, that the ruinous “exocentricity” of modern African culture—its ideological dependence upon outside standards and referents—had been enforced not by European penetration and subsequent colonialism alone, but also by the “Arab colonialism” that had preceded the European invasion of Africa by several centuries. In Bound to Violence, the collison between “African” and “Arab”, cultures had been represented as quite as brutal and devastating in its effects as that later enacted between “Africa” and “Europe.” Islam had figured in Bound to Violence not as an ethic inherently attuned to the temper of black African sociality—as it had, for example, in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure (1962)—but as a barbaric code forcibly visited upon defeated African communities by an alien conquering force. Any lingering supposition that Africa's embrace of Islam had amounted to a fluid indigenization had not so much been questioned as demolished by Ouologuem. As Soyinka notes:

Ouologuem pronounces the Moslem incursion into black Africa to be corrupt, vicious, decadent, elitist and insensitive. At the least such a work functions as a wide swab in the deck-clearing operation for the commencement of racial retrieval. The thoroughness of its approach—total and uncompromising rejection—can only lead to the question … what was the authentic genius of the African world before the destructive alien intrusion?⁵⁷

Bound to Violence had not concerned itself overmuch with this latter question. Because it had been devoted largely to a contestation—indeed, a deconstruction—of colonialist history (whether Arabo- or Euro-centric), it had been pre-eminently a negative text. And it is precisely this negativity, in Soyinka's view, that Armah attempts to invert in Two Thousand Seasons:

Ouologuem takes no interest in presenting to the reader the values destroyed in this process [Arab colonialism]. The positive does not engage his re-creative attention, and what glimpse we obtain of the indigenous reality is presented within the undifferentiated context of the oppressed and the oppressor, the feudal overlord and slave … A social condition in which Semites (though black and pre-Islamic) are overlords and negro-Africans the slaves still leaves the basic curiosity about black historic reality unsatisfied. Not until Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons … is this aspect attempted; but even there its validity is not predicated on objective truths so much as on the fulfilment of one of the social functions of literature: the visionary reconstruction of the past for the purposes of a social direction.⁵⁸

Building upon Soyinka's groundwork, Robert Fraser and Derek Wright have moved to explore the implications of the dissimilarities—ideological and stylistic—between Bound to Violence and Two Thousand Seasons. Ouologuem's text is mannered and multiply mediated: self-conscious and willfully provocative, it revels in its status as the work of an évolué even as it professes its loathing for the racist paternalism of white society toward the integrant. Two Thousand Seasons, by contrast, eschews dilettantism for thrust. It is “deeply committed to its subject matter,” representing “an instance of littérature engagée at its most earnest.”⁵⁹ As such it embodies an active, purposive component altogether beyond the reach of Bound to Violence. It is true that its modality—a visionary one—is still abstract. But this is not necessarily to the novel's discredit. For if it be granted, as we have seen not only Armah but also Soyinka and Achebe arguing, that among the ideological constraints to anti-imperial action are those pertaining to a “massive communal inferiority complex,”⁶⁰ on the part of huge sectors of African populations—an inferiority complex embedded in the psyche of such populations over the violent course of the last millennium—then the restorative value of a coherent, Afrocentric mythology of the past, such as Two Thousand Seasons sets out to construct, might be considerable. As Armah himself has written, in a recent poem entitled “Seed time”:

… but
what are myths and
paradigms
but psychic feet and hands projected
through the universe
to help us move
from what happened to us
to what we need to be?(61)

Read in this light, Two Thousand Seasons might be represented as embodying one projected “solution,” on Armah's part, to the crisis of intellectualism sparked by the collapse of the prevailing radical way of thinking about postcolonialism in Africa and elsewhere at the end of the 1960s, a crisis that had itself been both reflected and compounded in Why Are We So Blest? In considering the substance of this projected solution, it is not necessary to analyze Two Thousand Seasons in any great detail, for I am concerned here only with its difference from Armah's novels of postcolonialism, and with the implications of this difference.

The work opens with a prologue that serves to introduce its sustaining motifs:

Springwater flowing to the desert, where you flow there is no regeneration. The desert takes. The desert knows no giving. To the giving water of your flowing it is not in the nature of the desert to return anything but destruction. Springwater flowing to the desert, your future is extinction.

[TTS ix]

The vatic quality of the prologue's prose reminds the reader of Naana's meditations in Fragments. Here, however, the sustaining register is neither melancholic nor resigned, but, on the contrary, purposive and self-assured. The narrative voice speaks not from a position of powerlessness or isolation, but from within a definite community. Its social groundedness is never in question. This marks a decisive break from Armah's three novels of postcolonialism: whereas they had been obsessed with the irremediable isolation of African intellectuals, Two Thousand Seasons explicitly repudiates the premise of this irremediability. It insists that what it calls “our way”—the “African way”—has not been obliterated by the centuries of foreign domination but only repressed. The narrative voice of the prologue represents itself as belonging integrally to two concentric populations: that of the African people at large and that of the artist-visionaries who bear the historical wisdom of these African people. The latter category is specifically invoked in its relation to the former:

You hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers, rememberers, you prophets called to communicate truths of the living way to a people fascinated unto death, you called to link memory with forelistening, to join the uncountable seasons of our flowing to unknown tomorrows even more numerous, communicators doomed to pass on truths of our origins to a people rushing deathward, grown contemptuous in our ignorance of our source, prejudiced against our own survival, how shall your vocation's utterance be heard?

This is life's race, but how shall we remind a people hypnotized by death? We have been so long following the falling sun, flowing to the desert, moving to our burial.

[TTS ix-x]

Two Thousand Seasons keeps faith with Armah's three novels of postcolonialism by portraying the vast majority of the African population as in thrall to “alien” ideologies: “All around us the world is drugged white in a deathly happiness while from under the falling sun powerful engines of noise and havoc emerge to swell the cacaphony. Against their crashing riot nothing whispered can be heard, nothing said” (TTS x). Similarly, as in the novels of postcolonialism, the reformist argument is dismissed. It is not possible to exercise creativity from within the “desert” of “alien” sociality, for the desert remains an elemental and essentially destructive agent:

No spring changes the desert. The desert remains; the spring runs dry. Not one spring, not thirty, not a thousand springs will change the desert. For that change floods, the waters of the universe in unison, flowing not to coax the desert but to overwhelm it, ending its regime of death, that, not a single perishable spring, is the necessity.

[TTS xi]

The essentialist language, in terms of which ideologies and social tendencies are cast as natural and viewed, accordingly, as unalterable, is reminiscent of that in Why Are We So Blest?; and, as in that novel, it is not only reformism that is rejected, but also integration. The “African way” is a vibrant, life-supporting ethic, embodying the social principles of reciprocity; “alien” ideologies, by contrast, embody the principle of taking only, unmatched by giving:

It is for the spring to give. It is for springwater to flow. But if the spring would continue to give and the springwater continue flowing, the desert is no direction. Along the desert road springwater is the sap of young wood prematurely blazing, meant to carry life quietly, darkly from roots to farthest veins but abruptly betrayed into devouring light, converted to scalding pus hissing its own vessel's destruction. Along the desert road springwater is blood of a murdered woman when the sun leaves no shadow.

[TTS xi]

Two Thousand Seasons does not, in short, differ from Armah's novels of postcolonialism insofar as its diagnosis of imperial hegemony is concerned. Nor does it underestimate the difficulties of challenging, still less of destroying, the established order. Its separation from the novels of postcolonialism stems, rather, from its conception of resistance as a shared activity. In The Beautyful Ones, Fragments, and Why Are We So Blest? resistance had been phrased as a last-ditch and largely unavailing act of defiance on the part of lonely and despairing intellectuals. In Two Thousand Seasons (as in The Healers), by contrast, it is viewed as communitarian not only in tendency and prospect, but also in process. The subject of resistance to imperialism in Armah's fourth novel is not individual but plural, a “we-subject,” reminiscent of that to be found in the verse of the black American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.⁶² And, as Peter Nazareth has argued, the novel “not only shows us a people being exploited but also a people resisting exploitation and surviving, a few making sacrifices for the survival of the race and being remembered by the people.”⁶³

In Armah's first three novels, the burden of resistance to the established order had been impossibly heavy because it had had to be borne by solitary individuals, in isolation from one another, and constantly subject to self-doubt and social obloquy. Invariably alone, they had often found themselves incapable of withstanding despair. In Two Thousand Seasons, despair is viewed as a selfish and ultimately indulgent frame of mind, deriving from a loss of historical perspective. The despairing individual is felt to have become alienated from his or her community. But this alienation is not, as in Why Are We So Blest?, held to be inescapable. Instead, it is registered as a mark of intellectual weakness. There is an antidote to the “poison” of assimilation: it is the practice of “remembrance,” which consists in the attempt to construct the present as a gateway between the future and the past, to direct future action in terms of traditionally derived principles of social integrity:

The linking of those gone, ourselves here, those coming; our continuation, our flowing not along any meretricious channel but along our living way, the way: it is that remembrance that calls us. The eyes of seers should range far into purposes. The ears of hearers should listen far toward origins. The utterers' voice should make knowledge of the way, of heard sounds and visions seen, the voice of the utterers should make this knowledge inevitable, impossible to lose.

[TTS xiii]

The relationship between the “hearers, seers, utterers” and the great majority of the African people thus begins to be framed. It is a relationship of some tension, between what Armah calls “creators” or “makers,” on the one hand, and “finders,” on the other. Without the “finders”, the “creators” are powerless; without the “creators,” the “finders” cannot hope to escape their servitude. Only through a symbiotic alliance between “creators” and “finders” can the prevailing hegemony be challenged. So entrenched has the imperial order become, that such an alliance appears, in the immediate future, to be unrealizable. But the fact that “[t]he reign of the destroyers has been long” (TTS xv), coupled with the fact that even during the harshest days of slavery and colonization “some yet remained among us unforgetful of origins, dreaming of secret dreams, seeing secret visions, hearing secret voices of our purpose” (TTS xv), contains within it the seeds of a permissible hope for a future collective emancipation. Courage can be drawn from those who, going before, resisted the institution of slavery and the consolidation of colonialism. Moreover, implicit in the idea of the continuity of resistance is the idea of a liberation eventually achieved. Hence not only the value, but the indispensability, of community. Nor is it simply a matter of waiting passively until the time comes that “the people” are ready to listen to “the voice informed with knowledge of the way, that voice whose utterance is inseparable from life” (TTS xvii). For in Two Thousand Seasons, “seeing,” “hearing,” and “uttering” are themselves phrased as contributions to the task of liberation. As the narrator puts it in the prologue:

Would you lock your gift away in pallid silence? Know then that in the absence of the utterers' work the carnage will be long and pure, and not the wisest mind can in the absence of the utterers' work trace in all our flowing blood even one broken ring of meaning. For those returning, salvaging blistered selves from death, and those advancing all hypnotised by death, in the absence of the utterers' work what will they be but beasts devouring beasts, zombis fighting zombis, a continuation along the road of death in place of regeneration, the rediscovery of our way, the way?

[TTS xvii-xviii]

Measured against Armah's first three novels, thus, the central achievements of Two Thousand Seasons might be said to consist formally in its embrace of the idiom of orature and, at the level of textual ideology, in its formulation of resistance as a collective practice. Two Thousand Seasons overcomes the bitter defeatism of Why Are We So Blest? and retrieves the resistive ethic of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments without inscribing itself, as they necessarily had, within the horizons of a messianic conception of postcolonialism: where the framing assumptions of the early novels had been messianic, those of Two Thousand Seasons are more defensibly utopian—oriented, still, toward a revolutionary vision of social collectivity, but no longer fixated upon independence (or any other single historical event) as the moment of this vision's realization.

In spite of this significant theoretical advance, Two Thousand Seasons is still manifestly limited by its retention of certain ideological premises deriving from Armah's earlier novels, and, above all, from the third of these, Why Are We So Blest? Two of these premises are worth mentioning briefly here. First, there is the matter of racial essentialism. Fraser has argued that because Two Thousand Seasons is not a realist novel, its evident “racialism” does not constitute an artistic liability:

It will be said that this novel is evidently racialist, and therefore, as art, invalid. The first part of that claim strikes me as true; the rest here not to follow from it. That … Armah's point is a racial one there can be no doubt. In the context of a naturalistic narrative, such divisiveness is evidently a decisive flaw, and hence must be criticized. … In Two Thousand Seasons … these objections do not apply, for the paradoxical reason that Armah carries his condemnation that little bit further, so that it no longer occupies the domain of realist art. We are in an altogether different terrain now, that appropriate to myth, legend, and racial memory. Ambivalence is not to be expected because we have transcended it, have either surmounted or side-stepped its possibilities in the necessary effort to provide a strong, healing mythology.⁶⁴

The distinction that Fraser draws here is not very helpful. So concerned is he to argue for the potential acceptability of “racialist” views in nonrealist works of literature, that he neglects to examine the political and theoretical consequences of Armah's racial essentialism. Although it is certainly true that Armah is engaged in the “effort to provide a strong, healing mythology,” it is important not to mistake his project for his achievement.⁶⁵ “Armah's concern,” Fraser writers,

is to provide an overwhelming counteraction to the colonialist distortion of history. If, in the process, individuals other than the patients themselves are slighted, this has to be accepted: indeed, the wholesale condemnation of certain groups or classes is clearly permissible if from it there results an access of health or hope for those languishing under such a corrosive misunderstanding and mistrust of their own past.⁶⁶

“If from it there results” is a big “if,” to whose conditional nature Fraser does not do justice. It seems to me that he is insufficiently alert to the reactionary implications—theoretical and practical—of essentialism as a mode of fictional discourse. Fraser suggests that these reactionary implications derive only from realist fiction. I disagree. Against this view, I would argue that the critique of racial essentialism that I brought to bear against Why Are We So Blest?, an ostensibly realist novel, in chapter 5, is equally applicable to the “mythological” Two Thousand Seasons. In both texts, Armah's racial essentialism is not clarifying, but instead simplifying and distorting, and not a spur to radicalism, but instead a soporific, whose ideological consequences are extremism, fatalism, and compounded mystification.

A second problematical residue from Armah's first three novels that we find still in Two Thousand Seasons is a species of elitism, in terms of which a small cadre of politico-intellectuals (“creators” or “makers”) are represented as a resistive force and the overwhelming majority of the African population are cast as the duped (if unwitting and ultimately unwilling) subjects of alien designs. Certainly, Two Thousand Seasons's resurrection of the question of responsible intellectualism—the question that had been central to Fragments—is noteworthy, especially after the false turn of Why Are We So Blest?. And yet, in representing the dynamics of subjection and resistance as one-dimensionally as he does, Armah not only renders his position unambiguous, he also renders it unreflexive and intellectualist. Crediting the “creators” and “makers” with an exclusive monopoly on truth and social justice, he drastically undervalues the significance of the experience and historical consciousness of the mass of “finders.” Elsewhere, Armah has heaped scorn on Marx's characterization of the peasantry as a “sack of potatoes.”⁶⁷ Yet if his own representation of the mass of “finders” in Two Thousand Seasons does not quite approach the tenor of Marx's dismissal of the peasantry, it is certainly reminiscent of Lenin's categorical theorization of trade unionists as forever incapable of generating their own solutions to the problems that beset them. For that, they needed the Party, just as Armah's “finders” need the “makers” and “creators.” The trouble with this “Partyist” schema is not only that it tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) denigrates the substance of popular culture, but also that, in its lack of reflexivity, it is blind to the extent to which hegemonic ideologies are, in fact, actively being resisted by those dominated by them.⁶⁸ In an article on Armah's social and cultural criticism, Kelwyn Sole has argued that the Ghanaian writer tends to “stop at a discussion of the cultural level of society and not probe the material conditions which inform and change that culture.”⁶⁹ The charge can also be leveled at Armah in his fictional writings. In Two Thousand Seasons, thus, “resistance” is framed as an all-or-nothing affair, which is why only the “makers” and “creators”—those engaged in outright and uncompromising defiance of the hegemonic order—are spoken of as resisting. To be positioned anywhere else, as the mass of “finders” are, is to be assigned a value outside of “resistance”—that is, within the orbit of “domination.” From the point of view of material life, however, this is not a plausible scenario. As James Scott, Terence Ranger, Eric Hobsbawm, and a number of other social historians have convincingly demonstrated, to identify classes and populations as dominated is not to suggest that they do not (continue to) resist their domination. Scott, for instance, writes of contemporary South-East Asia:

It [is] … important to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance—the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most of the forms this struggle takes stop well short of collective outright defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth. These Brechtian forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand what much of the peasantry does “between revolts” to defend its interests as best it can.⁷⁰

Since Two Thousand Seasons pitches its diagnosis of African subjection only at the level of ideology, and since, in its drive for thrust and cogency, it sharpens its formulation to the point of essentialism, it fails to recognize the manifold “Brechtian forms of class struggle” specified by Scott as modes of resistance. The failure is a weighty one: on the one hand, propelled by its racial essentialism, the force of Armah's argument in Two Thousand Seasons tends toward abstraction and schematization; on the other hand, propelled by its crude (not to say, latently authoritarian) rendition of the dynamics of subordination and resistance, it tends toward idealism. In Two Thousand Seasons the price of allegory is dematerialization; and, for all the novel's intelligence and originality, this is too high a price to pay.

It is conceivable that Armah sensed this, for in The Healers (published in 1978, but bearing the deliberate dateline “Dar es Salaam, Saturday 13 December, 1975”), his fifth and still, over a decade later, his latest novel, he moved to invert the idealist sweep of the historical gaze of Two Thousand Seasons. Where Two Thousand Seasons had taken as its subject the broad expanse of a thousand years of African history, The Healers is focused upon a quite specific and narrowly defined set of events, that leading to the collapse of the Ashanti empire and the fall of the city of Kumasi in the 1860s and 1870s.⁷¹ The historical consciousness of The Healers is thus distinctly different from that of Two Thousand Seasons, being, as Fraser has helpfully observed, inductive where in the earlier work it had been deductive:

Starting from certain clearly defined tenets or premises, [Two Thousand Seasons] set out to establish their relevance, taking the entire span of the racial memory as its example. The Healers, on the other hand, may be viewed as an inductive work. Taking as its field of inquiry a particular moment when the stresses to which one society was habitually subject arose to overwhelm it, it sets out to demonstrate the reasons for this failure and hence to illustrate something about the nature, not only of this culture, but perhaps also of all comparable societies which succumb to external pressure in this way. It thus tells us something important about the whole colonial experience.⁷²

The Healers differs fundamentally from Two Thousand Seasons in its particularity. It is as though the grandly schematic arguments that Armah presumably felt he had had to deliver with unambiguous finality in his fourth novel could subsequently be taken by him as satisfactorily absorbed by his readership. For the most part, The Healers eschews the technique of the hammer for that of the dagger in its polemical dimension. Narratively, it centers on the situation of its major protagonist, a young man named Densu. Yet it does so not primarily to capture a character in growth, but to provide us, as readers, with a lens onto the wider Akan society in the years of crisis and colonial conquest.

The novels opens, arrestingly, in medias res:

In the twentieth year of his life, a young man found himself at the centre of strange, extraordinary events. Someone was murdered—a youth exactly the same age as himself. The killing was done in a particularly bloody, brutal way. Those who saw the victim's butchered body agreed on one thing: the murderer acted from a fierce, passionate motive, the kind of violent motive springing out of jealousy made hotter by pure, vindictive hate.

It seemed there were no living witnesses to the murder. The victim was the heir in the house of power at Esuano, a prince named Appia. Those in a position to know said he was destined to inherit not only old power but, far more important, the possibility of fantastic wealth … In the absence of real knowledge suspicion became the guide to thought. Strange rumours flew fast and free … turning round and round within easy reach. Speculation churned them into a circling whirlpool; and skilful insinuation found a quiet, unsuspecting youth, and placed him at the exact centre of the dangerous, speeding vortex of suspicion. His name was Densu.

So in the twentieth year of his life, just when he saw the time perfect for planning how he would live his life, Densu was forced instead to open his mind to thoughts of death: the death of the prince Appia; the presumed death of the prince's mother Araba Jesiwa; and the impending death—if he found no way to fly free of the whirlpool of suspicion so inexorably trapping him—the impending death of his own self.

[H 1-2]

Rhetorically, this opening has nothing in common with the vatic quality of Two Thousand Seasons' prose. The Healers is self-consciously subtitled “an historical novel.” Plainly, it is also in the nature of a thriller and adventure story. Since we know from the outset that Densu had had nothing to do with Appia's death, we remain curious as to the identity of the murderer. Moreover, much of the interest of the novel hinges upon the predicament of young Densu: as we watch him first being entrapped by the manipulative Ababio, then escaping this villain's clutches, then undertaking the arduous apprenticeship under Damfo's tutelage to become a healer, we are led to sympathize with and fear for him, to exult at his escape, and to identify with him in his creativity and perseverence.

Crucially, however, Armah does not allow us as readers to become entranced by the narrative quality of his novel. Before its breathless opening can beguile us into imagining that The Healers is a picaresque fiction that “tells itself,” the author intrudes to dis-illusion us:

But now this tongue of the story-teller, descendent of masters in the arts of eloquence, this tongue flies too fast for the listener. It flies faster than the story-telling mind itself. Pride in its own telling skill has made it light, more than merely light. Pride has made this tongue giddy with joy. So the story-teller now forgets this rule of masters in the arts of eloquence: the tongue alone, unrestrained, unconnected to the remembering mind, can carry only a staggering, spastic, drooling, idiot tale. In such a story, told by an unconnected tongue, the middle hurls itself at the astonished ear before the beginning has even had time to be mentioned. The end itself is battered into pieces. The fragments are smashed against the surprised listener's ear, without connections, without meaning, without sense.

[H 2]

Thematically, with its evocation of the centrality of “the remembering mind” in the process of cultural (re)production, this disruptive passage is reminiscent of Two Thousand Seasons. Similarly, in its representation of the adverse consequences stemming from a precipitous break with traditional protocols, it puts us in mind of Naana's meditations in Fragments. Yet it is with respect to formal considerations that the true significance of the passage can be appreciated. By disrupting the narrative flow of his text as he does, Armah makes us aware that The Healers' fluency, its air of sureness in the articulation of detail, is neither a natural nor an incidental phenomenon, but a much wrought one, the product of creative labor. The Healers does not, in other words, come by its concreteness casually, but forges it, deliberately and laboriously, from the metal of language upon the anvil of narrative. For in fiction, as in thought in general—to borrow Marx's celebrated observation—the concrete “appears … as a summing up, a result, and not as the starting-point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination.”⁷³ The interruptive passage thus functions as an alienation effect, stripping away the illusions that simultaneously obscure the practical involvement of the artist in his art and hold the reader in thrall to this art itself. This explains why Armah elects to follow his dis-illusioning intervention not by returning the reader immediately to the scene of his novel's action, but by grounding its contingency. He has his narrative voice remind itself of how tales ought to be told, and then take appropriate steps to locate its narrative in time and place:

Let the error raise its own correction. The speeding tongue forgets connections. Let the deliberate mind restore them. Proud tongue, child of the Anona masters of eloquence, before you leap so fast to speak, listen first to the mind's remembrance.

Did you remember to tell your listeners of what time, what age you rushed so fast to speak? Or did you leave the listener floundering in endless time, abandoned to suppose your story belonged to any confusing age? Is it from the time of the poet Nyankoman Dua, seven centuries ago? Or did it take place ten centuries ago, when Ghana was not just a memory, and the eloquent ones before you still sang praises to the spirit holding our people together? Is it of that marvellous black time before the desert was turned desert, thirty centuries and more ago? Or have you let the listener know the truth: that this story now is not so old—just over a century old?

[H 3]

As this further citation demonstrates, Armah's interruption of the storyline in The Healers also serves to introduce his narrator in the assumed guise of storyteller in the traditional idiom. It becomes evident that in The Healers, Armah advances his project—embarked upon in Two Thousand Seasons—of “Africanizing” the formal as well as the content-related aspects of his art. Specifically, he breaks with the conventions of bourgeois realist fiction by rejecting the modalities of authorial identity typically represented in it. Since the relationship that he aspires to between himself as “storyteller” and his readers as “listeners” is a direct one, he attempts to subvert the distancings and objectifications of fiction—a preeminently ironic medium—through means of the sustained conceit that his text constitutes an instance of spoken discourse. The novel paradoxically sets itself within the creative tradition of orature. Explicit allusion is made to a pan-African and pan-historical variety of “masters in the arts of eloquence,” upon whom the novelist-storyteller calls for guidance and inspiration in practicing his craft. Perhaps the most suggestive of these apostrophes is to a “master” who was not an oral poet at all, but rather a writer like Armah himself: the Sesotho writer Thomas Mokopu Mofolo. In The Healers, as in Two Thousand Seasons, Armah seeks to recuperate, publicize and, above all, “traditionalize” Mofolo's work:

Send me words, Mokopu Mofolo. Send me words of eloquence. Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence. Give me strength for this work, and give your own wounded soul reason to smile, seeing in the work of one who came after you a small, quick sign that your long, silent suffering was not meant, after all, to be in vain.

[H 63]

The appeal to Mofolo is more than incidental. I would argue, in fact, that to a certain extent—and above all with regard to the characterization of Densu—Armah's technique in The Healers is consciously modeled on that of the Sesotho author in his great historical novel, Chaka.⁷⁴ In 1976 Armah wrote an article on Chaka for the African journal Transition. In the course of this article he said of Mofolo's distinctive presentation of the formative processes of his protagonist's (Chaka's) development,

[there is] an admirable, stark clarity in the way Mofolo presents Chaka's childhood and growth. He shows his childhood as the crucial formative period, the seedtime for all the crises of his adult life. As for the process of Chaka's growth, Mofolo shows it to us as a difficult, complex progression, but so sure is his technique, so masterly his grasp of psychological details, that the result has that clear, hyaline quality that often marks the most profound works of genius. Growth becomes a series of crises, in each of which Chaka moves an inexorable step forward to his chosen destiny.⁷⁵

This passage seems to me to shed considerable light on Armah's portrayal of Densu in The Healers. For just as, according to Armah, Mofolo presents Chaka's childhood as the “seedtime” for his bearing in adulthood, so, arguably, Armah himself presents Densu's childhood experiences—his conversations with Araba Jesiwa, his friendship with Anan, his admiration and implicit respect for Damfo and his corresponding mistrust and progressive contempt for Ababio—as means of understanding his sensibility as a young adult. Just as, according to Armah, Mofolo stages Chaka's growth as a series of crises, the negotiation of each of which results in the individual Chaka's being somewhat changed, so too Armah himself presents Densu's growth to maturity as a cumulative sequence of key moments.

Where Armah's text differs fundamentally from Mofolo's in this regard is in its eschewal of the Sesotho work's ideology of African history. Although, by humanizing Chaka in his novel, Mofolo had attempted to subvert the colonialist representations of the Zulu ruler as a murderous, not to say insane, despot, and of the Zulu people as a savage horde, he had left unreconstructed the idealism implicit in colonialist historians' treatment of the history of the Zulu people as synonymous with the biography of Chaka. A consequence of this is that Zulu history is personalized in Chaka. The private destiny of Chaka is phrased very largely as being coincidental with the public fate of his people. The individual Chaka is cast as metonymic. He represents the Zulu “nation” in a sense that transcends the boundaries of leadership—even poetically conceived—and is ontological. It is symptomatic that he gives his people the name (Amazulu) by which they come to know themselves.⁷⁶

The ideological thrust of The Healers is quite different from that of Chaka because Armah's informing understanding of African history is at a vast remove from Mofolo's. Densu's biography bears upon Ashanti society not as metonym nor even as allegory,⁷⁷ but rather in the manner of a searchlight, probing into the darkness beneath and beyond the apparent and illuminating much that a lived ideology has contrived to conceal. Far from being representative of Ashanti society, Densu's character constitutes a critique of it. It exposes rather than encapsulates it. The distinction crystallizes in the fact that whereas in Chaka the protagonist's alienation from conventionality is thrust upon him from without (against his will, he is driven out of his community of origin and left to fend for himself), in The Healers Densu actively chooses distance from the prevailing social principles of instrumentality and manipulativeness. During the course of the rituals of remembrance, for instance, he defaults from the wrestling and shooting competitions quite intentionally, out of a conviction that what the rituals have come to stand for as fetishized trials of individual masculine athleticism is positively disintegrative of the unity of the African people in diaspora that they were originally designed to invoke and celebrate:

The celebrations and festivals, as he searched for their meaning, struck Densu as merely the customs and morals of the court being imposed on life outside the court. Competitions, struggles of individual against individual, faction against faction, the sharpening of knives, the search for allies, the deception of bystanders and enemies, the readiness of professed friends to betray those already used in the unending search for more power—from all this Densu desired only distance, a great distance.

Fortunately, the feeling did not end there. The sense of repulsion was strong. But beyond it there was a desire that was infinitely stronger. It was a potent urge to seek people whose ways were an antidote to all the petty poisons which were food to the men of power he had known. Densu desired a life lived with people who did not see other human beings only as material they could use and handle.

[H 49]

As this passage suggests, The Healers is hinged upon a dialectical schema of integrity and disintegration, creativity and destructiveness, belonging and loneliness—what it calls “inspiration,” on the one hand, and “manipulation,” on the other. The manipulative ethic is embodied above all by Ababio, a man whose life is governed exclusively by greed and hunger for power. Everything that Ababio does is calculating, instrumental, acquisitive: “A human being was to him nothing better than an obstacle to be tricked, lied to, manipulated and shaped by force or guile into becoming a usable ally in spite of himself. And if that failed, then a human being became simply an object to be destroyed” (H 49-50). In The Healers, the social ethic of manipulation is seen to have sedimented itself within the body politic at large. It is not simply that there are many Ababios. Rather, it is that manipulation has become a material force, institutionalized and routinized in the state apparatuses and in civil society alike. What “fast driving” was in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, manipulation is in The Healers: not only a way of getting ahead, of gaining access to the “gleam,” but the only readily visible means of doing so.

The “antidote to all the petty poisons” of manipulation is inspiration, Damfo's way and the way of the healers who live against the prevailing convention in the eastern forest beyond Esuano. The community of healers in Armah's fifth novel is obviously structurally identical to that of “creators” and “makers” in Two Thousand Seasons. Again, it is noteworthy that the healing enterprise is envisaged as necessarily a collective—not to say collectivistic—one. There is no retreat, in The Healers, to that conception of creative intellectualism as a solitary endeavor that had marked Armah's three novels of postcolonialism.

Inspiration is phrased as a way of living centered on wholeness, and grounded, as was the integrative “African way” in Two Thousand Seasons, on the principles of unity and reciprocity. Damfo explains to the young Densu that although much of the healers' time is devoted to the care of individuals who are unwell, the healing vocation extends far beyond mere doctoring:

We heal people, individuals. That's part of our work. But it isn't all. It isn't even the greater part of it. It's just a part. The whole of it concerns … wholeness … [T]here are two forces, unity and division. The first creates. The second destroys; it's a disease, disintegration.

It is the first, unity, that gives healing work its strength. Think of it. Healing an individual person—what is that but restoring a lost unity to that individual's body and spirit?

A people can be diseased the same way. Those who need naturally to be together but are not, are they not a people sicker than the individual body disintegrated from its soul? Sometimes a whole people needs healing work. Not a tribe, not a nation. Tribes and nations are just signs that the whole is diseased. The healing work that cures a whole people is the highest work, far higher than the cure of single individuals.

[H 81-82]

We glimpse, in a passage such as this, one of the strains running continuously through all of Armah's work. The identification of health and unity is central to the ideological program of Two Thousand Seasons as well as The Healers; but it is also at the heart of Juana's conception of salvation in Fragments. Damfo is perfectly frank about the utopianism of his project. The healers' dream, he informs Densu, is of a communitarian social order without internal divisions and free of exploitative or dominative intersubjective relations. It is not power as such that the healers oppose, but its asymmetrical distribution in the existing society. Densu asks whether a more equitable arrangement of power can be found anywhere:

“It may not exist,” [Damfo] said, “but it should be possible.”

“What kind of power would that be?” Densu asked.

“A power based on respect. Royal power grows from contempt. The kind of power we see now grows from contempt. It comes from the abuse of human beings and things.”

“It will take ages for the kind of power healers want to grow against what is there now,” Densu said.

“Yes,” Damfo agreed. “The worst kinds of power grow most easily.”

“Meanwhile, isn't it advisable to work with royal power?” Densu asked. “It's all there is.”

“Healers have tried that before. But it's never been fruitful,” said Damfo. “Healers will find their true support only from a healthier source of power.”

“But you say that's a matter of the future,” Densu said.

“The distant future even.”

“Meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile the healer heals the individual sick,” Damfo said.

“That is all?”

“Healers work to create a power based on respect.”

“Where?” Densu asked.

“Wherever they see possibilities.”

[H 94-95]

Risks attend many of these “possibilities,” of course. Indeed, much of the interest in the latter pages of The Healers centers on the precarious relationship between Damfo and Asamoa Nkwantwa, the great Ashanti general who, confused and tortured by dreams, has sought the therapeutic counsel of the healer. An opening presents itself for Damfo to use his influence with the general to advance the cause of “the unity of all the earth's black people” (H 84), the highest vocation for healers. And yet the danger exists that in seeking to do so, he, Damfo himself, will unwittingly subordinate himself and his ideas to the general's distinctly secular and statist aspirations.

Because he remains steadily cognizant of the fact that the healers' goal of unity will not easily or quickly be realized, Damfo manages to negotiate the corridors of political power without compromise. He remarks that the “disease” of African fragmentation

has run unchecked through centuries. Yet sometimes we dream of ending it in our little lifetimes, and despair seizes us if we do not see the end in sight … A healer needs to see beyond the present and tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead. Because healers work for results so firm they may not be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work, they are the healers of our people.

[H 84]

This is a definitive statement of the long-viewed utopian radicalism that, in the novels of postcolonialism, had characterized the resistive ethics of Juana and “the man.” Here, however, not only is the implication of The Beautyful Ones' “not yet” borne by a community of activists rather than by a solitary intellectual, but it is taken up in a context quite free of the messianism that had marked The Beautyful Ones and Fragments as novels of postcolonialism. The question of postcolonialism as it had been framed in these early novels is irrelevent to The Healers, which views nationalism and, indeed, colonialism in the light of consequences of an underlying disease of African disintegration.

Yet, the strengths of The Healers should not blind us to its weaknesses. The “Partyist” strain that had damaged the political credibility of Two Thousand Seasons haunts the pages of Armah's fifth novel as well. The asymmetrical and idealist distinction between “makers” and “finders” is replicated in the relationship between the healers and the mass of the African population, those who, while not themselves “manipulators,” are nevertheless subject to the hegemony of manipulation. Ironically, the historical particularity of The Healers fails altogether to refigure this structural relationship between “mass” and “elite.” The problem, arguably, is rooted in the fact that the concreteness of the presentation in The Healers, though an improvement over the abstraction of that in Two Thousand Seasons, is still insufficiently attentive to the materiality of life as it is lived at the level of the everyday. It is, indeed, remarkable that we never see ordinary men and women—those who live in Esuano, for instance—working in The Healers. The material production and reproduction of life is effaced entirely by the novel. As in Why Are We So Blest? and Two Thousand Seasons, Armah demonstrates an apparent ignorance of the styles of life of the majority of African populations; and he is again led, in consequence, to underestimate the degree to which this majority is actively engaged in resisting their exploitation.

Related to this is the continuing problem of racial essentialism. In The Healers, Armah dismisses as sophistical and socially divisive all forms of identity politics except one, and that one—race—he elevates to the level of a natural law. Quite appropriately, The Healers identifies various historical criteria of political identity—class, ethnicity, nationality, linguistic chauvinism—as socially instituted and “otherizing.” These criteria have functioned primarily to legitimize privilege and exclusivity, to ground specific groups as groups-against-others. Race, however, is credited as being an essential, ahistorical, natural criterion of identity. Damfo speaks, as we have seen, of black people as a “natural community,” one of which he is entitled to say without fear of meaningful criticism that they “need” and “ought” to be united.

Against such a view—asserted with all the solemn authority that the text can muster—it is important to note that the idea of the black or any other race as a “natural community” has no historical referent. The “marvellous black time” to which the narrator alludes in The Healers never existed. It is strictly a mythological construction—and, as I argued above with respect to Two Thousand Seasons, its ideological thrust seems to me more serviceable to the cause of chauvinism than to any campaign for African cultural retrieval.

When The Healers came out in 1978, the fifth novel by Armah to be published in the ten years that had begun with the 1968 publication of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the novelist was approaching forty years of age. One of the most tellingly representative of the African writers active in the first decade of independence, he had begun, in his fourth and fifth novels, to explore wider horizons and to de-emphasize the significance of the moment of independence in African history in favor of a more broadly framed interrogation of Africa's modern predicament as a theater of imperial domination. Problems remained, certainly, both in his diagnosis of the African “disease” and in his stridently proposed “cure”; and yet it seemed unimaginable that Armah would not continue to flesh out his ideas in the ensuing years through his chosen medium of fiction.

This has not happened. In spite of the proliferation of rumors to the effect that he has completed another two, or even three novels, the fact remains that the publication of a sixth novel does not, as of this writing, seem to be in the offing. It is not that Armah has fallen silent. Paradoxically, the situation would seem to be worse than this. For in the numerous, if intermittent, articles, stories, and poems that he has continued to publish in such journals and magazines as Présence Africaine and West Africa since 1978, there is little evidence of new ideas. His various recent writings all seem to tread the same paths as Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, and to stumble against the same pitfalls: racial essentialism, conspiracy theory, manicheism, inflexibility, idealism, ignorance of the materiality of peasant and proletarian existence in Africa. Even the metaphors and linguistic registers of the recent writing seem bloodless and derivative; they appear not to draw any sustenance at all from the explosion of new thinking that has come to animate radical writing generally in the postcolonial world of late. One is obliged to consider the possibility that Armah has become “stuck” in his thinking. Should this indeed be true, African literature would have lost one of its more distinctive voices. On the strengths (and weaknesses) of his first three novels, as I have tried to show in this book, Armah's significance as a representative writer of the immediate postcolonial generation in Africa is unassailable. Until or unless a sixth novel is published, however, more than this cannot be claimed.

Notes

1. Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974), 230.

2. The concept of “problematic” is given its most celebrated deployment in the work of the French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. Althusser defines a problematic as a semiotic field of concepts, or horizon, which serves to delimit the contours and parameters of thought. Thinking “can only pose problems on the terrain and within the horizon of a definite theoretical structure, its problematic, which constitutes its absolute and definite condition of possibility, and hence the absolute determination of the forms in which all problems must be posed, at any given moment” (Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster [London: Verso, 1979], 25). In these terms, I take a problematic to be a sort of discursive matrix on the basis of which ideas are generated and through which they are mediated in representation. A problematic must be grasped as existing in a determinate relationship with its total social universe, of which it is an index and to which, at the same time, it constitutes a response.

3. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), 87.

4. Ben Obumselu, “Marx, Politics and the African Novel.” Twentieth Century Studies 10 (Dec. 1973): 116. But see also Derek Wright's rebuttal of this critique in his “Saviours and Survivors: The Disappearing Community in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” Ufahamu 14, no. 2 (1985): 137: “The anonymity of the man, who seems remote from class identity, has little to do with any generic or allegoric significance as “working man” or “everyman”—in fact he is atypical of his society and class of railway-clerks—and has much more to do with the existing order's refusal of an identity to one estranged from its values and its sheer incapacity for recognizing value beyond its own narrow definitions.”

5. Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana: End of an Illusion (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 107.

6. Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979), 45.

7. Compare, here, Ama Ata Aidoo's short story, “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” in her collection No Sweetness Here (London: Longman, 1979). The literary relationship between Aidoo and Armah, both Ghanaians, was particularly close in the 1960s. Aidoo drew the title of No Sweetness Here from a phrase in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. She also wrote an introduction to the American edition of Armah's first novel. Armah dedicated Fragments to Aidoo.

8. Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, 33.

9. Ibid., 222.

10. Ayi Kwei Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” Negro Digest, 18, no. 12 (Oct. 1969): 34.

11. Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, 221.

12. Ibid., 223.

13. Ibid., 49.

14. The phrase is Walter Benjamin's. See his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261.

15. Armah, “Fanon: The Awakener,” 34.

16. Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, 225.

17. Ibid., 232.

18. Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 6.

19. Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, 84.

20. Ayi Kwei Armah, “One Writer's Education,” West Africa, 26 Aug. 1985, 1753.

21. Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, 263.

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 227.

23. The “classic” texts of dependency theory include the following: Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974); André Gunder Frank, “The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology,” in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution? Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 21-94; André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971); and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

24. Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22.

25. Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin, Editors' Introduction to Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies” (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982), 4.

26. Bertolt Brecht, “Popularity and Realism,” trans. Stuart Hood, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1986), 80.

27. Emmanuel Ngara, Art and Ideology in the African Novel: A Study of the Influence of Marxism on African Writing (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985), 36. See also John Saul, “Ideology in Africa: Decomposition and Recomposition,” in Gwendolyn M. Carter and Patrick O'Meara, eds., African Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: Hutchinson, 1985), 301-29. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare the poetry emerging out of the struggle for national liberation in Lusophone Africa with that of the anticolonial Francophone writers of the 1950s, like David Diop, whose work I discussed briefly in chapter 1, above. In the work of such Lusophone poets as Costa Andrade, Antonio Jacinto, and Agostinho Neto of Angola, and José Craveirinha of Mozambique, we encounter a discourse of anticolonialism impressively sensitive—where Diop's had not been—to the pragmatics of political power, and emphatic in its socialist commitment. Translation of the work of Lusophone African poets into English has been belated and slow. A volume of Agostinho Neto's poetry, Sagrada Esperança, was published under the title Sacred Hope, trans. Marga Holness (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1974). A selection of Lusophone African poetry in English translation is to be found in Frank Mkalawile Chipasula, ed., When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).

28. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 45. Further references to this work (hereafter RS) will be given parenthetically in the text. See also Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). For a discussion of the “theoretical-historical context” of revolutionary discourses of national liberation, see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 1-30.

29. Obumselu, “Marx, Politics and the African Novel,” 111.

30. Archie Mafeje, “Neo-Colonialism, State Capitalism, or Revolution?” in Peter C. W. Gutkind and Peter Waterman, eds., African Social Studies: A Radical Reader (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 412. See here also John Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 350: “It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the postcolonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world scale’ within the colonial social formation. The postcolonial state, while prone to play a similar role to that played by its predecessor, is something more of an unpredictable quantity in this regard. Unpredictable because of the greater scope for expression given to indigenous elements who now find in the ‘independent’ state a much more apt target for their activities and a potential instrument for the advancement of their own interests and concerns.”

31. Ezekiel Mphahlele, Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15.

32. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, “Wole Soyinka, T. M. Aluko and the Satiric Voice,” in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 65-66.

33. Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in a Modern African State,” in Per Wästberg, ed., The Writer in Modern Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969), 21.

34. Lewis Nkosi, response to Soyinka's “The Writer in a Modern African State,” in Wästberg, The Writer in Modern Africa, 56.

35. Ibid., 57.

36. Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann Educational Books), 1977, 44-45.

37. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 148.

38. James Ngũgĩ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o), response to Wole Soyinka's “The Writer in a Modern African State,” in Wästberg, The Writer in Modern Africa, 25.

39. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), 160.

40. Ousmane Sembene, God's Bits of Wood, trans. Francis Price (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976), 32-34.

41. See for example Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978); Thomas Akare, The Slums (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981); Meja Mwangi, Kill Me Quick (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973). Marechera died in 1987, at the age of 32.

42. Meja Mwangi, Going Down River Road (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 57.

43. See Aminata Sow Fall, The Beggars' Strike, trans. Dorothy s. Blair (London: Longman, 1981); and Ousmane Sembene, Xala, trans. Clive Wake (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976). See also Festus Iyayi, Violence (London: Longman, 1979) and Mongane Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983).

44. Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (London: Longman, 1981), 100. See also Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972).

45. Nkosi, Tasks and Masks, 102.

46. Bessie Head, “The Wind and a Boy,” in The Collector of Treasures (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977), 75. See also Flora Nwapa, This is Lagos and Other Stories (Enugu, Nigeria: Nwamife Publishers, 1971); and Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (New York: George Braziller, 1979).

47. Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter, trans. Modupé Bodé-Thomas (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), 25. See also Nuruddin Farah, Sardines (London: Allison and Busby, 1981); and Buchi Emecheta, The Double Yoke (London: Ogwugwu Afor Company, 1982).

48. Bâ, So Long a Letter, 51.

49. Ibid., 4.

50. All three of these novels have been translated into English. They are: Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness, trans. John Reed and Clive Wake (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978); Remember Ruben, trans. Gerald Moore (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980); and Lament for an African Pol, trans. Richard Bjornson (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985).

51. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977), 344.

52. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1983), 65.

53. Ibid., 2. All of Mongo Beti's works written since 1972 have been banned in his native Cameroon, and Beti himself has been obliged to live in exile since 1959. Similarly, Nuruddin Farah's work has been suppressed in his native Somalia, and he too has been driven into exile. Camara Laye, a Guinean, died in exile in Senegal. But Senegalese writers have themselves not been immune to persecution: Ousmane Sembene's film version of Xala was cut without his knowledge before being distributed in 1977, and all of his more recent films have been censored or banned outright. The Malawian poet Jack Mapanje was arrested on 25 September 1987. As of this writing (December 1988), he has still not been charged or released.

54. Quoted in Sasha Moorsom, “No Bars to Expression,” New Society, 19 Feb. 1981, 334.

55. Ngũgĩ, Detained, 8-9.

56. Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), 1. Further references to this work (hereafter TTS) will be given parenthetically in the text.

57. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 105. See also Yambo Ouologuem, Bound to Violence, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977); and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983).

58. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 106.

59. Fraser, Novels, 70. See also Derek Wright, “Orality in the African Historical Novel: Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Season,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23, no. 1 (1988): 91-101.

60. Fraser, Novels, 73.

61. Ayi Kwei Armah, “Seed time,” West Africa, 23 May 1988, 926.

62. The affinity between Brooks's poetry and Armah's narrative technique in Two Thousand Seasons has been commented upon by Peter Nazareth, in his article, “Africa Under Neo-Colonialism: New East African Writing,” Busara 6, no. 1 (1974): 19-31. Nazareth writes of a meeting between the American poet and himself in the mid- 1970s, in which he “told her that I thought that Armah had written his new novel very much in the style in which she wrote her poems: in her poems, the personal voice is not the voice of the poet but that of a whole people, the Black people in diaspora. She told me that she was very pleased to hear me say so because she had met Armah in Tanzania two years ago and he had told her he was trying to write in just the way she wrote her poems” (30).

63. Ibid., 21.

64. Fraser, Novels, 72-73.

65. Fraser speaks of this effort as socially “necessary.” It is worth noting in passing that this assessment seems to me eminently disputable.

66. Fraser, Novels, 73.

67. See Ayi Kwei Armah, “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis,” Présence Africaine 131, 3d quarterly (1984): 43-44.

68. See here Stuart Hall's argument, in his recent essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” that “we … have to rethink and finally reject strategies based on the assumption that the great mass of people live permanently in false consciousness. I do not think it is possible to argue that a small number of people, who are themselves, of course, not in false consciousness … should address and mobilize large numbers of people who are. I don't think you will convince anyone by saying, ‘I'm sorry. I can see through you, but you can't see through yourself.’” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 66. Much the same argument is made by Zygmunt Bauman in his recent book, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Noting the uniformity with which intellectuals tend to distinguish between themselves as “thinkers” and the mass of “ordinary people” who, by implication, do not (and cannot) “think,” Bauman suggests that this distinction “leads to altogether formidable consequences. It engenders an acute asymmetry in the deployment of social power. Not only does it promote sharp polarization of status, influence, and access to the socially produced surplus, but it also (and perhaps most importantly) builds upon the opposition of temperaments a relationship of dependency. The doers now become dependent upon the thinkers; the ordinary people cannot conduct their life business without asking for, and receiving, the [thinkers'] assistance. As members of society, the ordinary people are now incomplete, imperfect, wanting. There is no clear way in which their morbid flaws can be permanently repaired. Burdened with their flaws forever, they need the constant presence and ongoing intervention of the shamans, magicians, priests, theologians” (11-12).

69. Kelwyn Sole, “Criticism, Activism and Rhetoric (or: Armah and the White Pumpkin),” Inspan 1, no. 1 (1978): 131.

70. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 29.

71. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979). Further references to this work (hereafter H) will be given parenthetically in the text.

72. Fraser, Novels, 84.

73. Karl Marx, “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy.” Included in The German Ideology, C. J. Arthur, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1981), 141.

74. Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, trans. Daniel P. Kunene (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981). Chaka was written in 1909 or 1910, but was first published only in 1925.

75. Ayi Kwei Armah, “The Definitive Chaka,” Transition 9, no. 50 (Oct. 1975-March 1976): 11.

76. For more on the social assumptions that frame Chaka as a novel, see my “The Logic of Equivocation in Thomas Mofolo's Chaka,” English in Africa 13, no. 1 (May 1986): 41-60.

77. I have in mind here Fredric Jameson's recent contention, in an essay on “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” that “All third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories … Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (Social Text 15 [Fall 1986]: 69). This is not the place to develop a critique of Jameson's argument, which seems to me surprisingly and distressingly supremacist in its assumptions, and subject to criticism on a multiplicity of grounds, not least the conspicuous selectivity of its examples. However, for a vigorous rebuttal of Jameson's argument, see Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 3-25.