Bzzlletin. Jaargang 4

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The Writer in a Modern African State
Wole Soyinka

Does he exist at all in a contemporary Africa? If it were possible to suggest an opposite background to the student of African literature or at least to create an entirely different background, would a stranger to the literary creations of African writers find any discrepancy between subject matter and environment or be any more deeply puzzled than he is today at the lack of vital relevance between the literary concerns of writers themselves in the majority of the modern African states? I do not concern myself now with the exceptions, which are in any case so few and without impact. And I certainly exclude the South African situation for the moment, since I do not, alas, possess the superior complacency of a fellow writer from Africa who uttered sentiments more or less in the following words: ‘One is tempted to ask’, he says, ‘what is the South African writer doing for himself? A little less talking and protest and a bit more action, especially from the so-called exiles, might be more to the point...’ etc. I regret very much that I have not the exact quotation here, for it is the kind of remark which proves very clearly that the easiest solution to any problem is to maintain complete ignorance of it.

One opposite temptation is to simplify the task by refusing to consider South Africa as an African state, and this certainly has some validity; for is the South African population not legitimately a white one in its entirety, since the black Africans within it have not the status of human beings? The situation in which the South African writer finds himself is quite simply out of this world, and many people who do not possess divine omniscience and do not contain in themselves a one-man verbal guerilla force, like the writer I have just quoted, are beginning to feel that the solutions are literally out of this world. The experience of the South African writer is approached by that of other Africans only remotely, that is to say, wholly inadequately.

My concern in this talk is primarily with the non-South African writer and why, before very long, he may begin to envy the South African the bleak immensity of his problems. For the South African has still the right to hope, and this prospect of a future yet uncompromised by failure on his own part, in his own right, is something which has lately ceased to exist for other African writers.

While we may debate what constitutes an African writer and what does not, one breed of humanity which we cannot comfortably deny is that of the writer. In new societies which begin the seductive experiment in authoritarianism, it has become a familiar experience to watch society crush the writer under a load of guilt for his daring to express a sensibility and an outlook apart from, and independent of, the mass direction. The revolutionary mood in society is a particularly potent tyrant in this respect, and since the writer is, at the very least, sensitive to mood, he respects the demand of the moment and effaces his definition as a writer by an act of choice. And in the modern African state especially, the position of the writer has been such that he is in fact the very prop of the state machinery. Independence in every instance has meant an emergency pooling of every mental resource. The writer must, for the moment at least (he persuades himself), postpone that unique reflection on experience and events which is what makes a writer - and constitute himself into a part of that machinery that will actually shape events. Let this impulse be clearly understood and valued for itself; the African writer found that he could not deny his society; he could, however, temporarily at least, deny himself. He therefore took his place in the new state as a privileged person, placed personally above the effects of the narrowness of vision which usually accompanies the impatience of new nations, African, European or Asian. He, the special eye and ear, the special knowledge and response, lost even his recreative consciousness, which might from time to time, left active and alert in uncreative work, have demanded a re-examination of his own position.

If he has not already arrived at this discovery, the writer from East and West African states is coming closer to the terrible understanding that it is not his South African comrade who is the object of compassion. Already he has begun to shrink from the bewildered stare of the South African, knowing that he, the supposedly free mind who once symbolised a loop-hole for the dead-end of the South African dilemma, has himself become the creature of despair. The change in circumstances is quite direct. The background starts at the united opposition by the colonised to the external tyrant. Victory, of sorts, came and the writer submitted his integrity to the monolithic stresses of the time. For this any manifesto seemed valid, any -ism could be embraced with a clear conscience.

With few exceptions the writer directed his energies to enshrining victory, to re-affirming his identification with the aspirations of nationalism and the stabilisation of society.

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The third stage, the stage at which we find ourselves, is the stage of disillusionment, and it is this which prompts an honest examination of what has been the failure of the African writer, as a writer. And this is not to say that, if the African writer had truly responded to the political moment of his society, he would not still be faced with disillusionment. For the situation in Africa today is the same as in the rest of the world; it is not one of the tragedies which come of isolated human failures, but the very collapse of humanity. Nevertheless the African writer has done nothing to vindicate his existence, nothing to indicate that he is even aware that this awful collapse has taken place. For he has been generally without vision.

The distractions away from vision were, of course, enormous, the distractions away from vision clarified in human terms and not in dogma. And they were such as gave full scope to the exploitation by demagogic opportunists of the new aggressive national consciousness. Reality, the ever-present fertile reality, was ignored by the writer and resigned to the new visionary - the politician. Since the phase of anti-colonialist tracts, poetry and general inspiration was clearly over and that rendered redundant, a new distraction must be created for the aggressive demands of the writer's restless mind. And the publishers were at hand, waiting. Cultural definitions became a new source of literature - not so new, in fact, but they acquired a new significance in the context of political independence. The curiosity of the outside world far exceeded its critical faculties and publishers hovered like benevolent vultures over the still-born foetus of the African Muse. At a given signal they tore off bits and pieces, fanned up with powerful wings delusions of significance in commonness and banality. The average published writer in the first few years of the post-colonial era was the most celebrated skin of inconsequence to obscure the true flesh of the African dilemma.

This was the beginning of the abdication of the African writer, and the deception which he caused by fabricating a magnitude of unfelt abstractions. Isolated by his very position in society, he mistook his own personal and temporary cultural predicament for the predicament of his entire society and turned attention from what was really happening to that society. He even tried to give society something that the society had never lost - its identity. Now identity is a much-abused word, and perhaps the African writer is a much-abused person in this respect, for, poet, novelist or sculptor, the artist labours from an inbuilt, intuitive responsibility, not only to himself but to his roots. The test of the narrowness or the breadth of his vision, however, is whether it is his accidental situations which he tries to stretch to embrace his society and race or the fundamental truths of his community which inform his vision and enable him to acquire even a prophetic insight into the evolution of that society.

In the movement towards chaos in modern Africa, the writer did not anticipate. The understanding language of the outside world, ‘birth pains’, that near-fatal euphemism for death throes, absolved him from responsibility. He

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was content to turn his eye backwards in time and prospect in archaic fields for forgotten gems which would dazzle and distract the present. But never inwards, never truly into the present, never into the obvious symptoms of the niggling, warning, predictable present, from which alone lay the salvation of ideals.

I do not suggest that nothing of this literature was valid nor that there was not to be found in it genuine literary value. Only that the present philosophy, the present direction of modern Africa, was created by politicians, not writers. Is this not a contradiction in a society whose great declaration of uniqueness to the outside world is that of a superabundant humanism? In pre-colonial days there was no real collaboration between the creative mind and the political; there was hardly the practical, fruitful acknowledgement of the existence of the one by the other. The seeming exception of the French colonial territories had in fact the most disastrous effect of all, for there, more determinedly than in other examples, the articulate élite became in fact the ruling class - and here incidentally we may refute the literary historic sense of many observers who insist that African writing was in fact a product of political freedom. To take the obvious example, one may as well suggest that the négritude movement and its literature did not exist before Kwame Nkrumah set the precedent in independence for other African states. The French case was, only slightly more so than the British colonial, the crystallisation of the writer's image in Africa in the character of the Establishment. When the writer woke from his opium dream of metaphysical abstractions, he found that the politician had used his absence from earth to consolidate his position; more often than not the writer, who in any case belonged to the same or a superior intellectual class, rationalised the situation and refused to deny himself the rewards of joining the writers in safety and comfort. He was in any case still blinded to the present by the resuscitated splendours of the past. When he is purged from the long deception and has begun to express new wisdoms, the gates of the preventive-detention fortresses open up and close on him. He becomes an exile, impeccable in his dark suit in the offices of the UNC or UNESCO, or resorts to new weapons of violence. Poets have lately taken to gun-running and writers are heard of holding up radio stations. In several independent states the writer is part of some underground movement; one coup at least in Africa is reputed to have involved a novelist and a poet.

Perhaps it is time to move away from generalities and remark briefly on one situation with which I am at least familiar and in whose details I have naturally been involved, since it happens to be in my own country. Details are, when we look at them, quite pointless, for I am certain that, whatever developments of the situation are as yet unechoed by other African states, will, before long, be duplicated in the same disheartening details and senselessness. I say this with the sense of obviousness with which I am able, for instance. to look at America today and understand very clearly that here is one society which is on the very edge of collapse. Now, Nigeria was at least one African state where, from the beginning, the writers made an effort to protect their own existence by remaining articulately watchful. At no stage was a level of suppression reached comparable to what existed in Ghana before Nkrumah's fall or exists now in Malawi, where a paranoid has successfully muzzled any hope of free expression. Yet, in spite of this, irrational events have so far deranged the course of basic human intercourse that it is impossible, physically impossible, at the moment for the writers of the country even to come together. And a pattern of this appears to me to be establishing itself over the continent. The African writer needs an urgent release from the fascination of the past. Of course, the past exists, the real African consciousness establishes this - the past exists now, this moment, it is co-existent in present awareness. It clarifies the present and explains the future, but is is not a fleshpot for escapist indulgence, and it is vitally dependent on the sensibility that recalls it. This is not to deny the dangers which attend the development of this historic vision - a convenient term for the total acceptance of the human heritage. A historic vision is of necessity universal and any pretence to it must first accept the demand for a total re-examination of the whole phenomenon of humanity. I regard it as dangerous, because to what else can it lead but to the destruction of the will to action? What we are observing in our own time is the total collapse of ideals, the collapse of humanity itself. Action therefore becomes meaningless, the writer is pushed deeper and deeper into self-insulation and withdrawal; his commitment accepts its own hopelessness from the very beginning.

The consideration which brings me, personally, down to earth is the thought of the Angolan or South African writer writer, either in exile or making his last feeble twitches before the inexorable maul of a desperate regime ends him. It is the exercise of trying to read his mind when he is confronted by the operation of the human factor in black states in which he had fixed his rights and which always represented, at the very least, a temporary haven. And he sees, and he understands for the first time that, given equal opportunity, the black tin god a few thousand miles north of him would degrade and dehumanise his victim as capably as Vorster of Governor Wallace. This fact has been ever-present, this knowledge is not new, and the only wonder is that the romancer, the intellectual myth-maker, has successfully deleted this black portion of a common human equation. And the intermittent European exercises in genocide have been duplicated on the African continent admittedly on a lower scale, but only because of the temporary lack of scientific organisation. We, whose humanity the poets celebrated before the proof, whose lyric innocence was daily questioned by the very pages of the newspapers, are now being forced by disaster, not foresight, to a reconsideration of our relationship to the outer world. It seems to me that the time has now come when the African writer must have the courage to determine what alone can be salvaged from the recurrent cycle of human stupidity.

The myth of irrational nobility, of a racial essence that must come to the rescue of the

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white depravity, has run its full course. It never in fact existed, for this was not the problem but the camouflage. And it has become because the old camouflage has begun lately to take on a new camouflage of fresh understanding. The movement which began with the war-cry of cultural separatism, modified itself with an acknowledgement of the historical expediency of the revolt - I refer, of course, to négritude - has found a latter-day succession in a call to be the bridge, to bring about the salvation of the world by a marriage of abstractions. It is a remarkable fact that the European writer, who had both the leisure and the long history of introspection to ascertain his spiritual needs, has not yet sent out a call to the black writer for rescue. Surely the game has become transparent by now; the writer's philosophy does not prescribe for his own society, his enlargement of commitment conveniently ignores his own inadequacies, overlooking the well-tried adage which cautions very simply, ‘Physician, heal thyself’.

This reconciliation of cultures, this leaven of black contribution to the metallic loaf of European culture, is only another evasion of the inward eye. The despair and anguish which is spreading a miasma over the continent must sooner or later engage the attention of the writer in his own society or else be boldly ignored. For both attitudes are equally valid; only let there be no pretence to a concern which fulfils itself in the undeclared, unproved privations of the European world. When the writer in his own society can no longer function as conscience, he must recognise that his choice lies between denying himself totally or withdrawing to the position of chronicler and post-mortem surgeon. But there can be no further distractions with universal concerns whose balm is spread on abstract wounds, not on the gaping yaws of black humanity. A concern with mythology. The artist has always functioned in African society as the record of mores and experience of his society and as the voice in his own time. It is time for him to respond to this essence of himself.

uit: The Writer in Modern Africa, Per Wästberg, Uppsala, 1968