By Rosemary E. Ekosso
“The question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.”
Chinua Achebe in An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
When I was trembling on the cusp of adolescence, one of my sisters procured a dog-eared copy of John Buchan’s Prester John. I loved the entire adventure and quite naturally wanted the protagonist, David Crawfurd to beat the black preacher, Laputa. But we were more interested in the funny bits we could find in the book. For several weeks, to our father’s bemusement, we went around quoting Crawfurd pretending to be drunk.
“Awfly shorry, old man, but I've f'nish'd th' whisky. The bo-o-ottle shempty”.
Recently, I read the book again and I was surprised at the earnestness with which I wished Crawfurd had failed.
Buchan depicted Laputa as a sort of “noble savage”, a man with a basic instinct for leadership who does not succeed because he is wrong to want “Africa for the Africans,” and who, despite his leadership skills and his dream of freedom, will never prevail. Says one character of him:
“I said he was an educated man, but he is also a Kaffir. He can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more. That is the native mind.”
Achebe says in his essay from which the above above quote is culled that, “travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.”
Prester John says much more about John Buchan than it does about Laputa and the limitations of even the best kind of black people that he symbolises, people to whom John Buchan could only relate from within the confines of his stunted Victorian imagination, informed as it was by the delusions of grandeur and the mistaken sense of purpose that seized Europe and propelled it to its largely disastrous (for the subjects of this European largesse, at least) “civilizing mission”.
To those who, predictably, say that we have gained much from our contact with Europe, I reply that there is nothing Europe has given us that we have not paid for a hundredfold in blood and sweat.
The dangers of Mr Buchan’s “adventure” story are obvious. Think of a young colonial functionary in the 1930s, who is sent to Southern Africa and who has read this book. How will he see the “Kaffirs”? To what extent did opinions like Buchan’s influence the tortuous and bloody history of Africa’s interaction with Europe? If they did, how can men of his ilk be absolved of responsibility on the ground that they were “of their time.” Were abolitionists not of their time too?
Of course nowadays, amongst all but the most rabid racialists, there is a somewhat more sanitized approach of Africans. There is now a convention that one must not say bad things about Africans. But the old prejudices linger on. That is why I am writing back. I want it to be known that I am aware of what is said about me and I don’t like it. It is easier to malign people behind their backs.
In Ben Elton’s novel, Blind Faith, a particularly unattractive character, Princess Lovebud, uses the phrase “deal with it” to support the view that people have a right to believe or be what suits them and other have to adjust. But anyone who has read the book will remember the Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish twilight of bigotry, groupthink and the total deliquescence of humanity and personal freedom in which Lovebud thrives.
It is in the “deal with it” spirit that people with latent prejudices or a sense of guilt often say that black people have a chip on their shoulder. One feels they want us to “deal with it” and get on with life instead of feeling inferior and put upon. But, as I have said elsewhere, if I have a chip on my shoulder, it is because I have been carrying your wood. You deal with that. I’m done.
The chip on the shoulder is the construct that allows some people to shift the blame for what happened to black people onto black people themselves. Guilt is a heavy load, I know, especially for people who were not there when the travesty happened. But there is more to it than guilt avoidance. In Achebe’s essay, he refers to
“…the desire -- one might indeed say the need--in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.”
This is why Conrad’s Kurtz degenerates into savagery only in deep in the heart of the Dark Continent. That is why even an excellent writer like William Boyd in his book A Good Man in Africa, set in Nigeria, is able to skip nimbly across the Nigerian border and penetrate deep into Cameroon to set in Nkongsamba his story of the pathetic non-person who inexplicably inhabits most of its pages.
It does not matter, really. Perhaps Mr Boyd liked the sound of Nkongsamba. Perhaps it resonates with his Western readers in ways that escape me. Perhaps he harbours a strange abhorrence of Nigerian place names. Or perhaps he finds the name Nkongsamba as amusingly alien as I find Northumberland, for instance. To Mr Boyd, Nkongsamba is a cipher for Africa, where people lose that which is noble in them and sink into (in his man character’s case) rather ineffectual savagery.
But what is obvious to me is that Boyd is not writing for the people of Nkongsamba. I do not think he expects that Nkongsambans, or indeed most Nigerians, will ever read what he wrote.
That is why I am writing this article. It is important to write back so that it is known in certain circles that we read what s written about us.
Buchan’s Crawfurd is a conquering hero; an implausibly young one too at nineteen, but then Africans are like children, aren’t they? Why should not a white child put a huge army of Africans to rout? But that is a minor point. The interesting point is that this impoverished young fellow comes in as a trader, and then makes the transition to fervent nationalist. The problem with his nationalism is that it is not about his country. It is about Africa.
Naturally, the old defence about Buchan being a “man of his time” will have been trotted out by now. This is what Achebe says of this with reference to Conrad:
“It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing[.]”
Equally revealing is Buchan’s. When Crawfurd is a young boy, one of his earliest views of Laputa is when the latter is performing some evil rite, some sort of devil worship, in some ghostly part of Scotland. As this rite turns out to have a particular significance in the story when it moves to Africa, one wonders at the purpose of its performance in Scotland. Its only purpose is to air Buchan’s comfortable prejudices and to leave his readers in no doubt as to where their sympathies should lie.
Mr Buchan’s book is a clear case of demeaning the enemy in order to exploit him. I shall pass over the preposterousness of co-opting the Prester John legend, a figment of the white man’s imagination in so far as the real Prester John appears to have lived somewhere in Asia, the cackhanded references to the Queen of Sheba and Ethiopia, the reference to African “dialects” rather than languages, and so on, with which Prester John is peppered.
The following quotation from Chirere Kangira’s article in the Nawa Journal of Language and Communication (Volume 2: Number 2, December 2008) is informative:
“It is important to note that the European writer is not only bent on undercutting the subject people’s religiosity, but, where necessary even to appropriate to European and Asian history, everything complex about African religious practices. That refusal to acknowledge any depth and meaning in the African religions is very evident. For instance, when the cave priest in Prester John speaks, in a trance to Laputa, David, with Buchan’s insight, thinks the language used is not African:
‘The tongue I did not know, and I doubt if my neighbours (the Africans in the cave) were in a better case. It must have been some old sacred language – Phoenician, Sabaean, I know not what – which has survived in the rite of the snake.’”
These are old beefs I raise. Is this outdated criticism on my part? Should I “deal with it”? On the surface, yes, as we now have a part-black president in America and except in some Eastern European countries, lynching of black people is now rare. But the answer for me is no.
Buchan’s image of blacks persists either overtly, or subtly, so that even those who support us only either pity us or give in to sorrow and exasperation at our “childlike antics”. Also, people can portray us as they wish and displace our towns to other countries because we are not in a position to protest.
That is why Mr Boyd can with impunity extricate his unprepossessing non-hero from the West to plant him like a painful excrescence upon the landscape of Nkongsamba, where he will stand out against a dark background, so to speak.
That is why NGOs love those black poster mamas and their rousing stories of survival, women who convey the impression that African women are hardworking self-sacrificing goddesses and African men are lazy predators. This fills me with anger because when these people think they are empowering me as a woman and glorifying my mother, they are insulting my father. But who cares what I think?
Accusations of harking back to the past or airing old grievances and exhortations to “move on”, other than typifying the willful amnesia of those who do not wish to wake up to the hard reality of the pernicious effects of racism and prejudice, are a feature of homo modernus, who does not want to face anything that he cannot fit into a commercial break and who does not – as he would be forced if he really considered the truth abut global warming, for instance – wish to face the truth that the provision of his minor material comforts have cost lives and continue to do so, and will eventually cost him a planet. But of course he’ll move to Mars, won’t he?
Because of the politics (and economics) of one people feeling superior to another, we may not be able to influence what is thought about us just now, but we can certainly make sure that our children are not tainted with the misinformation that makes people say we Africans are cursed, and that makes some of us Africans believe this to be true.
We should tell our children. And when Mr Boyd takes our town and moves it to another country, we should write back and tell him to leave it where it belongs.
Rosemary E. Ekosso, author of The House of Falling Women (Langaa RPCIG 2008), is a court interpreter and translator. She lives and works in Cambodia.
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