Hello and welcome back to this course on postcolonial
literature.
Now if you remember, in our previous meeting
we had tried to acquaint ourselves briefly
with the colonial and precolonial African
context and I had suggested in that lecture
that this acquaintance will help us get a
new perspective from which we will be able
to produce a contrapuntal reading of Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
Now the most important thing that we need
to remember from our previous discussion of
the African context is that unlike what the
contemporary colonial discourse kept repeating,
Africa and Africans were not a race of barbarians
who were waiting to be redeemed by the civilised
Europeans who colonised their land right,
that was far from the case.
In fact, not only did the Africans have a
long and rich cultural tradition, cultural
traditions in fact, various cultural traditions
are to be found in Africa today.
Not only did they have these cultural traditions,
they were also thriving economically, socially,
politically, they were experimenting with
constitutional forms of political governance.
And this was going on till the 1880’s, when
the European moved in and claimed the entire
continent for themselves as their colonies.
And by doing so reversed much of the gains
that the African societies had achieved in
almost every field since the abolition of
the slave trade in the early 19th century.
Now if you read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
we will see that though in the text the narrator
Marlow relates a story from a position that
is apparently sympathetic to the colonised
Africans, he never takes into account the
fact that Africans too, like the Europeans
who conquered them, are civilised and mature
human beings.
What Marlow does is therefore merely sympathise
with what he thought to be the plight of poor
native savages.
But he never seemed to question the problematic
European coloniser’s assumption that Africans
were uncivilised brutes.
In other words, though Marlow criticises the
oppressive practices that characterised European
colonialism in Africa or in Congo more specifically,
he is never really able to sort of look at
the Africans that he encounters in his journey
across Congo to meet Kurtz.
He never seems to realise that they are, the
Africans that he encounters, they are his
fellow human beings and therefore they deserve
the same dignity that any white man, any white
skinned man, would normally command.
And this line of argument that I have just
stated is perhaps most forcefully put forward
in the celebrated essay titled “Image of
Africa” written by the Nigerian novelist
Chinua Achebe.
And in today’s lecture, we will discuss
Achebe’s criticism of Conrad’s novel in
his essay “Image of Africa” before we
move on to discuss his seminal novel titled
Things Fall Apart.
And I think that this transition from the
essay to the novel would be a smooth one because
Achebe’s criticism of how Conrad portrays
Africa and Africans in his Heart of Darkness
will provide us with some very important clues
about how to read Achebe’s own novel Things
Fall Apart and its depiction of African society
and African people.
Now coming to the essay “Image of Africa”,
the fundamental argument that Achebe makes
in that essay is at the way the image of Africa
was constructed by the colonising Europeans
was guided by an important psychological need
in them.
Achebe argues that by portraying Africa and
Africans as savage, uncivilised, brutish,
barbaric, what the colonising Europeans were
actually doing was they were creating a foil
for themselves so that by contrast they could
themselves appear in a positive light.
And if the Africans were savages and barbarians,
then by contrast the Europeans started looking
like very convincingly the upholders and carriers
of the light of civilisation.
So an image of Africa was constructed through
the colonial discourse that was entirely negative
and this, according to Achebe, help create
an all positive image of Europe and Europeans.
And if you remember, when we discussed Edward
Said we saw that this same negative/positive
binary was also equally part of the Orientalist
discourse.
Now what Achebe alleges in his essay “Image
of Africa” is that Conrad too, like most
European writers writing about the parts of
the world that was colonised by them, thought
from within this negative/positive binary.
In other words, Conrad’s criticism of the
colonial discourse was at best a partial criticism.
Why?
Because Achebe argues that in spite of his
criticism, Conrad shared the most fundamental
idea which informed the colonial discourse
on Africa.
And what was that fundamental idea?
The idea was of course that Africans were
lesser human beings than Europeans.
So in spite of Conrad’s criticism, Achebe
argues, Conrad still could not jettison this
notion that Africans are lesser human beings.
And Achebe brings out this bias working within
the novel Heart of Darkness by drawing our
attention to a particular section in the novel
in which Marlow, during his journey down the
Congo river, looks out from his boat and sees
African village life unfolding in the banks
of the river.
And this is how Marlow chooses to describe
what he sees:
suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there
would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked
grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of
black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of
feet
stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling,
under the droop of heavy and motionless
foliage.
The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge
of a black and incomprehensible
frenzy.
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying
to us, welcoming us—who could
tell? […] we glided past like phantoms,
wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men
would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in
a madhouse.
Now please note here that Marlow categorises
the Africans that he sees from his boat as
prehistoric men.
And what this means is that Marlow as a European
considers himself to be the representative
of the modern civilised man.
And it is from that apparent vantage point
of superiority that Marlow classifies the
Africans that he sees as prehistoric who are
yet to evolve into modern human beings.
In fact, the description here doesn’t even
depict Africans as complete human beings,
rather they are depicted as physical fragments-
as black limbs, stamping feet, rolling eyes
and so on.
And we never get to see an African man or
a woman in his or her completeness, as if
an entire and complete human identity is impossible
in an African.
And this brings us back to the positive/negative,
mature/immature, civilised/barbaric binaries
which form the mainstay of the colonial discourse.
And this binary mode of thinking that the
novel inherits from the colonial discourse
is also apparent in the way Marlow portrays
normal everyday African village life.
And he does that as we have seen in this quotation,
he does that as something which is characterised
by the incomprehensible frenzy of a madhouse.
It is a mad frenzy which provides a contrast
for the sanity that Marlow as a European man
supposedly represents.
Now one controversial aspect of Achebe’s
criticism of Heart of Darkness in his essay
“Image of Africa” is that he ascribes
the colonial bias not merely to Marlow and
his narration of Africa but to Conrad himself.
In fact, Achebe argues that it is Conrad’s
inherent racism that doesn’t allow him to
see and portray Africans as his fellow human
beings even while he is arguing against the
brutalities of colonialism.
Now this argument has a problem and the problem
with this argument is that it is conflating
Marlow and Conrad together.
So what it is doing is that it is trying to
ascribe the ideological peculiarities of a
fictional character, that is Marlow, on to
the author Conrad himself.
And here a counter argument is possible and
that counter argument is that you yourself
do not need to be a racist in order to portray,
in order to create a character, who shares
a racist ideology.
In other words, Conrad himself need not have
been a racist in order to create a character
like Marlow who has a racist world view.
And you remember that it is only Marlow that
we hear, apart from another frame narrator
who introduces Marlow on board of the ship,
Nellie.
And it is only Marlow’s voice, apart from
that narrator, first narrator, whom we meet
very briefly, in the novel.
It is only Marlow’s voice that we hear and
it is Marlow’s voice that describes Africa.
And Conrad is very careful not to introduce
his authorial voice into this narrative.
But, having said this, I would also say that
Achebe does try to make a very convincing
case regarding Conrad’s racism in his essay
and I will leave it up to you to read the
essay and decide on this issue.
So I leave it as an open-ended question.
Now moving on with the essay there is one
more very interesting argument that Achebe
makes in his essay “Image of Africa” and
I will end this discussion on the essay by
referring to it.
So, while revealing the deformed image of
Africa and Africans that is presented in Heart
of Darkness, Achebe places against it a radically
opposed image, the image of a civilised Africa.
So on the one hand he brings out how Africa
is presented in Conrad’s novel as an uncivilised
space, as a space inhabited by savages and
barbarians and he then goes on to place, create
another image of Africa, which is that of
a civilised Africa.
And how does he do this?
Well he does this, Achebe does this, by talking
about how during the first decade of the 20th
century, which means barely a few years after
the publication of Heart of Darkness, the
European art world was revolutionised by the
advent of what is known as the Cubist movement
and Cubism, as Achebe shows in turn was deeply
inspired by African art especially the art
of the Fang people and the masks.
And here in the slide you can see an example
of the mask created by Fang people.
The masks made by these Africans provided
a new artistic idiom to such celebrated western
artists like Pablo Picasso for instance, or
Henri Matisse.
And ironically these Fang people who inspired
the most avant-garde art movement of modern
Europe were residents of the very Congo region
whose people are described in the novel Heart
of Darkness as brutish inhabitants of a madhouse.
And Achebe stresses on this irony.
He also points out that therefore there is
this other image of Africa that is possible.
An image of Africa that is civilised and not
only civilised but civilised enough to deeply
influence the culture of the modern western
world.
And Achebe’s basic argument therefore is
that this image of a civilised Africa is completely
missing in Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
Indeed, as Achebe argues, this image of a
civilised Africa is found missing, in not
only merely this one novel, it is found missing
in all the discourses about Africa that has
originated in the west.
And Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall
Apart was one of the first attempts to break
this stereotypical image of a sinister and
barbaric Africa, at least within the English
speaking world.
And it is to this novel that I will now turn.
But, before we start exploring Things Fall
Apart, let me properly introduce to you its
author Chinua Achebe
We have been talking about Achebe and here
is his image.
Achebe’s dates are from 1930 to 2013 and
he was born in Nigeria in a tribe called the
Igbo tribe.
And his father was a teacher at a Christian
missionary school.
Achebe was himself a product of this very
same school and this is an important fact
to remember.
Why?
Because the particular kind of education to
which Achebe was exposed to as a child in
a missionary school gave him access to the
classics of British literature.
And later on, when he would write his novels
about the African people and though he was
writing about Africa and Africans, his novels
would be shot through, would be pervaded with
references to British texts and Western classics
in general.
And this is evident even in Things Fall Apart
if you just notice the title Things Fall Apart.
The title refers to a poem, a very famous
poem, titled “The Second Coming” written
by William Butler Yeats and Things Fall Apart
is a reference to a particular line in the
poem.
And we will have to return back to this reference
later on.
But now I would just like to point out that
Things Fall Apart was published in 1958.
A very influential novel.
And it was published by a London based firm
called Heinemann.
And this is again important because Heinemann
would later on go on to publish a very influential
series called the African Writers series,
in which they would publish and therefore
sort of circulate within the English speaking
world a number of post-independence African
writers.
And Chinua Achebe acted as a first advisory
editor of this African Writers series.
And incidentally Things Fall Apart was also
the first book to be published in that African
Writers series.
So apart from his first novel, Achebe is also
known for these other works of fiction.
So Things Fall Apart was published in 1958.
Then there was No Longer at Ease, which was
published in 1960, Arrow of God, 1964, A Man
of the People, published in 1966, and Anthills
of the Savannah, which was published in 1987.
Now let us turn to the novel Things Fall Apart
and see how it approaches the project of writing
the colonial history of Africa from an African
perspective and how it presents an image of
a civilised Africa in contrast with the image
of an uncivilised Africa that we have already
encountered in the British novel Heart of
Darkness.
Now a good way to understand this project
would be to go back to the scene in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, where Marlow describes
from his boat the frenzied activities of the
Africans in the bank.
And he of course thinks of it as a madhouse
that is incomprehensible to a sane man like
him, a sane European like him.
Now, because Marlow is narrating this scene,
we immediately situate ourselves on the boat
along his side and we start looking at the
scene from his perspective, which is European.
But what if we switch our position?
What if we look at it from an African perspective,
that is to say from the bank of the river
itself, where the frenzied activities are
going on?
Will it give us a different insight into the
colonial encounter altogether?
Now Achebe’s novel helps us do just that,
helps us switch our position, vis-à-vis,
Heart of Darkness, because it takes us directly
inside an African village.
Though this village in Achebe’s novel titled
or rather known as Umofia is located in Nigeria
and not in Congo.
And here you can see the shaded area represents
the modern-day country of Nigeria.
Now the first thing that we feel when we look
from inside the African village is that even
the most frenzied activities of the villagers
neither looked like savagery nor does it look
like incoherent madness.
And the reason for this is that unlike Marlow
who looks at a similar scene of the African
village as an outsider, we are presented in
Achebe’s novel with a wholly coherent African
world view and we see therefore the village
activities as an insider.
Thus for the first five chapters or so for
instance of Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart,
he painstakingly details the various rituals
and actions that hold a precolonial Igbo village
society together.
We come to know from these chapters the hierarchical
structure of the Igbo village.
Umuofia is an Igbo village.
We come to know of its hierarchical structure.
We come to know the importance that this society
attaches to physical prowess of men and how
that progress is tested through regular wrestling
matches between the people of the community.
We also come to know of the importance of
the yam crop whose harvesting cycle plays
an essential role in organising the annual
life of the villagers.
Thus, after these five chapters when chapter
six opens with a scene where three drummers
are seen working feverishly on their drums
and a huge gathering of people roaring and
clapping, it no longer appears to us as the
mass of clapping hands and stamping feets
of savages that Marlow claims to have witnessed
from his boat.
Because Achebe’s novel places this frenzy
of the drummers and of the crowd in a context.
And by the time we reach this scene we know
that these are all part of the festivities
that are associated with the harvesting of
the yam.
And the crowds are roaring and clapping not
as mad people but rather they are cheering
the wrestlers who are about to participate
in the annual wrestling match which again
is associated with the yam harvest.
Now it is this insider’s view which Achebe’s
novel provides that helps us really to break
free from the bias and the prejudice of the
colonial discourse about Africa and align
ourselves with the African perspective.
In the following lecture we will explore Things
Fall Apart in further details, we’ll look
into this African perspective that the novel
helps us align with.
We will also talk about characters and plot
structures of the novel and see how the colonial
encounter looks when it is viewed from the
African perspective that is presented in the
novel.
Thank you.
