Writers must rise above parochial biases to tackle African issues

By Henry Munene

African writers have, over the years, explored major issues in their societies in a disciplined, bold, sometimes dangerous eloquence that saw some of them either hunted down like prey or shunted into exile.

First, there was colonialism and contact between the aboriginal communities and the western world, which gave rise to books such as Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile, and earlier works of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (A Grain of Wheat).

In the diaspora, America and the West Indies, where racism was the main issue of the day, we had the bare-knuckled protest writings of policeman-poet Claude MacKay, Harlem Rennaisance poets such as Langstone Hughes and Countee Cullen.

In the Carribean Islands, there was V S Reid (New Day) and George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin), and much earlier works such as Aime Casaire’s Return to My Native Land.  Down in South Africa, the fight against apartheid gave us Nadine Gordimer, Mary Benson, Andre Brink, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Peter Abrahams, Dan Jacobson and JM Coatzee whose works were even banned.

Others, like Eskia Mphalele, had to go to exile.

Thus, from Cape to Cairo, writers stood up in one accord to say the unsayable because they believed these things threatened their societies, and not to advance unfounded biases. They never even once got subsumed into the nonsense that their tribesman was in power and so they should go easy on his excesses; neither did they stand up against another simply because (s)he was from the another ridge.

Shortly after independence, many African leaders fell to the temptation of using the newly acquired powerful offices as a vehicle for self-enrichment. This era of greed also saw many of them rally around their cronies, mainly from their ethnic regions, giving rise to divisions along tribal lines.

This formed a thematic base for many writings from the continent. Ngugi’s Petals of Blood metaphorically shows how the beautiful petals of independence turned out to be dripping with blood, under his own tribesman.

Achebe satirises the greed among fellow educated Igbo intellectuals and their corrupt ways in works like No Longer At Ease.

Simply put, many African writers even marshalled Marxist structures to protest the ugly edifice that independence ushered, with Derek Walcott’s poem, The Swamp, giving us — in the epigram to Petals of Blood — how the ‘healthy mangrove sapling’ of independence turned out to have been concealing within its clutch ‘the moss-backed toad’ of corruption, civil tensions and negative ethnicity.

Strikes like the ones seen in Sembene Ousmane God’s Bits of Wood and folk heroes like Ngugi’s Matigari emerged. This literature of (near) violence may well have been influenced by works such as Wretched of the Earth (1961), where Franz Fanon argued that since colonialists used violence to suppress their subjects, only violence could help Africans fight back the vice.

Today, looking at Kenya, and the kind of ethnic chasm that is discernible even in scholars’ dissertations, my worry is not whether we are capable of producing writers who are committed to the issues affecting our people.

The greatest worry is whether these ethnic tensions will swallow our creative writers to lend their pen to the hate-mongering efforts of politicians.

For whereas African literature, up to the 1980s, was largely defined by what Achebe would call ‘moving history’ of thematic concerns on the continent, in Kenya, negative ethnicity is one of the greatest challenges even to good writing.

Khaemba Ongeti, in Visiki, a Swahili play where politicians incite the people into a war that destroys them all, politicians are likened to visiki (tree stumps or obstacles).

By choosing fictional names, Prof Ongeti, being well grounded in philosophy and theory, wades into an explosive thematic area and is able to explore the issue of ethnicity without appearing to be advancing the same ills that he purports to be fighting.

Compared to a play like Shackles of Doom, which, in my considered view, is predicated on an excellent theme but excels only at stereotyping, Khaemba’s work conforms to the definition of literature as a form of creative writing that presents ‘probable’ truths.

For if we were to defend ethnic stereotyping by arguing that ‘that is what is happening in this country’, what will prevent hatemongers from avoiding political rallies — where they risk being arrested — to switch to incitement through plays, novels and short stories?

By rising above parochial partisanship, Ongeti invites the reader to decide which community in the play behaves like which tribe in the Kenyan reality. So much so that should another tribe emerge tomorrow and behave like the ‘Wavirindwa’ in Visiki, the reader can also relate accordingly.

By rising above the negative ethnicity that threatens to tear us apart, Ongeti minces no words in his play. He warns us on the dangers of the vice without appearing be subsumed in it.