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Overview
Originally published in 1974.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691645698 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1389 |
| Pages: | 338 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Tell Me Africa
An Approach to African Literature
By James Olney
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06254-9
CHAPTER 1
African Autobiography and the Non-African Reader
(A) African Autobiography ...
Autobiographies from Africa are plentiful in their number, diverse in their motives, revealing in their implicit, inherent psychologies, and (if I may be allowed to define autobiography, as I intend to do in the chapters that follow, in the very general way that I believe African literature demands) very varied in the forms they assume. But they are also, all of them, African. The interesting and, I think, very important paradox about African autobiographical literature is that while it can be extremely diverse in apparent motive and in manifest form, it also displays, especially for the non-African reader, an underlying unity in the way the writers view their own experience and the African experience, in the way they conceive of human existence and human society, and in the way they transform these views and conceptions into works of literature. If we discern a philosophical or psychological unity informing African literature, however, this ought not lead to a neglect of its formal and motivational diversity, nor vice versa. The special task of the critic who approaches African literature from without is to define, simultaneously and equally, both the unity and the diversity, both the essential African one that lies beneath and the formal, cultural many that appear on the surface. Let us (without disregarding the unity) consider first the diversity of motives, points of view, and forms in African autobiographical literature, then (without disregarding the diversity) consider the unity of the African vision of human experience.
Benjamin Franklin — who was hardly an African but who nevertheless provides a model of conscientious clarity in stating the reasons for performing the autobiographical act — enumerates, in his own Autobiography, four motives: to satisfy for his descendants the same sort of curiosity he himself had about ancestors; to provide an example or a model for others; to relive an essentially enjoyable life by recreating it in narrative form; and to satisfy his vanity. To these four motives — for each of which one can find relevant examples among African autobiographies — we might add three more that, if not peculiar to African autobiography, are more likely to be found there than in the European or American practice of autobiography: to preserve a disappearing world; to describe the African milieu for outside readers; and, which is often closely related to the previous motive, to describe a representative case of a peculiarly African experience. Obviously, as is true with Franklin's autobiography also, most African autobiographies show, in one degree or another, several different motives; few of the writers had one, and only one, reason for putting on paper the record of their lives. And, to complicate the matter considerably, some of the writers (Ezekiel Mphahlele, for example, see Chapter VI) were temperamentally moved to the act of autobiography by a psychological instinct very much prior to the actual putting of characters on a page. In any case, the reasons a man has for writing about his own life will tell us a good deal about him psychologically, about his environment socially and philosophically, and about his book structurally.
Most books, and this naturally includes autobiographies, are written to an audience, whether clearly or vaguely conceived. Franklin's Autobiography, for example, is addressed to his son, who is presumed to have the same curiosity about his father as his father had about his ancestors. Thus Franklin, looking back to his own father and grandfather, is not only an ancestor of natural curiosity to the son but is also the chronological link connecting the son with more distant reaches of the ancestral past. In African autobiography, however, the ancestral-descendant motive is something infinitely deeper than curiosity — which suggests merely viewing a subject with interest but from a certain distance. It is something that points to an entirely un-Western relationship between the individual and his past. Far from being a mere link in serial time between past and future, the present, according to the assumptions of African autobiography, is a ritual repetition, or reincarnation, of the past and a precise rehearsal of the future. It may be, as Pliny reported the Greeks as saying, that there is always something new from Africa; but within Africa, and especially within any given African culture, both experience and personality tend to be conceived of as repetitive and unchanging, the same in the past, now, and (it is assumed) forever. Thus, Jomo Kenyatta can perform the unusual feat of writing the biography of Chief Wangombe, a Gikuyu predecessor of one hundred plus years ago, not by consulting any written documents (because there are none), nor by simply following the details of oral tradition (because oral tradition seldom descends to such details), but by looking to his own — Jomo Kenyatta's — life, where, the writer assumes, he will discover not only the same general pattern of a ritualized life but the same details within the pattern as well. For a Gikuyu, the writing of biography is virtually indistinguishable from writing autobiography because Gikuyu life in the present is virtually indistinguishable from Gikuyu life twenty-five years ago or one hundred years ago or five hundred years ago. Likewise, when an Ibo like Dilim Okafor-Omali writes ancestral biography — A Nigerian Villager in Two Worlds, ostensibly the biography of his father — he does the portrait of Ibo character equally from himself and from his father. Chinua Achebe, another Ibo, carries the generational merger a step further into fiction that displays Ibo personality as constant and recurrent over a period of three or four generations. The African autobiographer who satisfies his children's curiosity about their father, also tells them — and in a single portrait — about their grandfather, their great-grandfather, and the clan founder and about themselves, the children, as they live the same one life.
Where there exists a spiritual identity between generations, it may be supposed that the autobiographer who offers his own life as an example or a model will do so in a larger, more symbolic sense than the literal way suggested by Franklin to his son. Boubou Hama, always very conscious of his representative status, suggests that his African readers could do much worse than to emulate his own efforts in mediation between Africa and Europe: "Et je propose," he says, "une autre route, celle de la synthèse entre FAfrique Noire et l'Europe, c'est-à-dire, celle qui découlera de la mentalité de l'humanité la plus attardée techniquement, mais aussi peut-être la plus au centre de la réalité de l'homme vivant en harmonie avec la nature, et, c'est le cas de l'Europe, la plus avancée dans le domaine du progrès matériel." Boubou Hama proceeds to present his own life as typical and his own conclusions as exemplary so that in his marriage, for example — he the évolué, knowledgeable in European ways; his wife, ignorant of the West but closely tied to the harmonies of nature — the desired synthesis of European and African worlds stands both as a symbol and as a model for imitation. Clarence Simpson of Liberia also finds a symbol and a model in marriage, though for him the example worthy of imitation was, significantly, not his own but his parents' union. Simpson's father, an "Americo-Liberian," came to Liberia from the United States with his father, and, when he grew up, married a Vai girl; as Clarence Simpson points out in his Memoirs, "the Liberian tradition is essentially based on a combination or assimilation of these two elements" — i.e., "new-comers from America ... with knowledge and experience of Western civilization" and "the tribal people" who "had deep-rooted traditions and customs of their own which they had acquired throughout the ages." Simpson goes on to say, "It can, therefore, be seen that a marriage like that of my parents was to some extent symbolic of the pattern of the country itself." As Simpson saw it, the marriage was not only a small symbol of the history of Liberia but an indication as well of how things ought to go in her future: "Born of the unity of the two elements of our country, I was confronted each day of my childhood with a living example of how these elements could work side by side, without conflict, to their mutual unity and enrichment" (p. 77).
Davidson Nicol, the Sierra Leonean physician, educator, and writer, has more than once emphasized the significance of autobiographical literature for the student of African civilization and writing. "This nostalgic literature," as he calls writings about childhood, "is most revealing, not only to the non-African reading public but also to Africans themselves." Nicol's point is that Africans come from many different cultural backgrounds, and if they are to find a pan-African literary or political unity they must be aware of the diverse strands that are woven together to form the African experience — and autobiography, he says, is the way Africans can become aware of their differences and their similarities. The classic instance of "African writing ... that ... describes childhood memories" (ibid.) is no doubt Camara Laye's L'enfant noir, a book in which the author relives the joys of his childhood by recreating that childhood in narrative form. Indeed, for a number of other African writers who remembered their own childhood experience differently, Camara Laye's account is a little too classic, a little too nostalgic, a little too good to be true. On the other hand, a few African autobiographers share Camara Laye's delight in recalling a time that was better, more coherent and unified, than the present. Robert Wellesley Cole (like Nicol a Sierra Leonean and a physician) concludes his account of an essentially happy, normal childhood — a childhood abnormal only in the social position of the parents, in the psychological balance of the mother and father, and in the extraordinary intelligence of the writer — by saying, "I must bring to an end what after all is a story about a boy. As to when I ceased to be a boy, and became a young man, I do not know. ... All I know is that one day I woke up to find that that cocoon of a boy with which we started at Kossoh Town was gone. When it happened I do not know. But I am glad to have been that boy." Camara Laye would willingly echo Cole's last sentence, as would Joseph Seid, who tells of his happy childhood, youth, and early maturing in Un enfant du Tchad; all three would agree with Franklin that no man, no matter how much he wishes it, can have his childhood back, but "that which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing." Unable to live their lives again, Camara Laye, Robert Wellesley Cole, and Joseph Seid do the next best thing in recalling the circumstances of life in Kouroussa, Freetown, and Fort Lamy and recording them in writing.
No doubt the very act of writing an autobiography implies a certain vanity on the author's part, but there is one variety of African autobiography — viz., political autobiography — in which the authors high opinion of himself and his achievements is not merely implicit or discreetly veiled but is spread broadcast across the page in accounts of heroic martyrdom and marvellous accomplishments, in stirring descriptions of lonelv grandeur, faulty friends, and villainous opponents. No one, I imagine, would confuse Kwame Nkrumah (or "Osagyefo," as he liked to be called) with a shrinking violet in Ghana: The Autobiography of Kioame Nkrumah and in Dark Days in Ghana; indeed, in the titles and in the attitudes of both those books, Nkrumah seems rather to fail to distinguish between himself and his fate and Ghana and her fate, and many of Nkrumah's critics maintained that his ego was capable of devouring not only the whole of Ghana but all of Africa as well. If he was vain, however, Nkrumah had no corner on that special human quality, not even within the struggle for political power in Ghana. In Dark Days in Ghana Nkrumah almost disdains to speak of a certain military leader, instrumental in the coup of 1966, whom the Osagyefo, one gathers, considered to be a snot-nosed brat unworthy of his lofty attention from exile in Guinée. Ironically one has only to read The Ghana Coup by Colonel Afrifa (the military man in question) to see that Nkrumah was pretty much right in his estimate of Afrifa if not, perhaps, in his estimate of himself. Or to take the several cases of politicians in Nigeria, we get fascinating but (to say the least) contradictory estimates of personal worth in a number of autobiographies, all of which are more or less vainglorious and each of which manages to savage one or more of the others: the Sardauna of Sokoto's My Life, Chief Anthony Enahoro's Fugitive Offender, Chief Obafemi Awolowo's Awo, and Nnamdi Azikiwe's My Odyssey. Even Aderogba Ajao, who would seem to have little political authority to pronounce but considerable daring and vanity, hazards a few firm opinions about Nigerian politics in On the Tiger's Back. If we skip over to Kenya, we see that few people would accuse Jomo Kenyatta of undue reticence in proclaiming his own virtues, but even fewer readers of Not Yet Uhuru would make that mistake about Kenyatta's erstwhile friend and sometime enemy Oginga Odinga. Seldom has so much been done by so few — and with so little gratitude to show for it as a reward — as in these political autobiographies. Even the politically feckless Kabaka of Buganda — Mutesa II to his subjects, "King Freddie" to his chums in England — hapless and unfortunate as his kabakaship eventually proved to be, is not, in his autobiography," given to hiding the light of his elephant-hunting achievements or his man-of-the-world accomplishments under a basket; and he treats his opponents, whether English or Ugandan, with a regal contempt. African politics, as African political autobiographies demonstrate, is not the ground on which to cultivate humility. Speculating on the larger implications of this fact, one might imagine that the special egocentricity of political autobiographies is very likely an accurate reflection of the personality that naturally gravitates to politics.
The expressions of concern of African politicians may be no more than lip service, but many of them have emphasized the need to respect and preserve, at least in record, a fast-disappearing past of unique glory. This reverential attitude toward the past, whether it be an individual, an ethnic, or the African past, motivates not only historians and anthropologists but also autobiographers whose work, depending on which past they choose to embrace (some, like Boubou Hama, embrace all three), will issue in personal, cultural, or symbolic autobiography. Bokar N'Diayé, an anthropologist and historian from Mali, sets the tone in the conclusion to Les castes au Mali, which is an exercise in recording and preserving a social structure now passing: "En tout état de cause, devant la transformation profonde que subit l'Afrique, qui, en moins dun demi siècle, est passé avec une rapidité surprenante de l'état statique à l'état dynamique, il nest que temps de recueillir tous Ies renseignements utiles sur son passé auprès des derniers survivants d'une époque qui sera bientôt totalement révolue." This is the motive for African autobiographies, from Camara Laye (whose world is mostly the world of family and village) to Jomo Kenyatta and from Benjamin Akiga to Mbonu Ojike to Joseph Seid. "It is not every elder who is well versed in Tiv lore," Akiga, the anthropological autobiographer, tells us. "Some know, others do not. It is the men of mature years who know best...." Men of mature years, as Akiga goes on to say, will not be available to the inquirer forever, and the knowledge they possess, heretofore transmitted only orally, if not set down in more permanent records, is in danger of being totally lost because of the tremendous social changes current in Africa. Adding social change to the inherent weakness of oral transmission is like the introduction of foreign ideals and techniques in the making of African masks: what humidity and termites have not caused to be lost in the case of masks, or oral transmission in the case of cultural lore, foreign ideals and social change respectively will soon destroy. "Sous l'apport d'idées nouvelles, des chocs de civilisations diverses, du progrès intellectuel et technique, la vieille espérance théologique des ancêtres s'amenuise de jour en jour, devient de moins en moins ferme, appréhensible et cède peu à peu la place à une éthique nouvelle, à un nouveau mode de vie sociale, à une nouvelle croyance dont on ne sait où elle debouchera. Déclin, catastrophe, régénération, destinée éminemment épanouie et sereine?" Joseph Seid asks his question of the future to which no man has the answer, but, turning to the past, he does what is possible by way of recreation and preservation: "De cette transmutation qui s'accomplit, Abakar [i.e., the autobiographical hero] a pris profondément conscience. Sans vouloir pourtant la déplorer, il voudrait simplement faire revivre ici des temps qui ne sont plus!" (p. 15). From historian to anthropologist to autobiographical romancer, the desire to preserve the times that are no more — to preserve them by recreating, recording, and transmitting them to future generations — is a great and durable motive for going back and bringing forward, for recapitulating the past in a present act of memory, for, in short, writing autobiography.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tell Me Africa by James Olney. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Preface, pg. vii
- Table of Contents, pg. xi
- Introduction and Methodology, pg. 1
- 1. African Autobiography and the Non-African Reader, pg. 26
- 2. Children of Gikuyu and Mumbi, pg. 79
- 3. "Ces pays lointains", pg. 124
- 4. Love, Sex, and Procreation, pg. 157
- 5. Pornography, Philosophy, and African History, pg. 204
- 6. Politics, Creativity, and Exile, pg. 248
- Anti-Conclusion, pg. 283
- Bibliography, pg. 297
- Index, pg. 319