The awesome waterfall did not revive my spirits. I walked about wrapped in my raincoat and saw the legendary sight and went back to the terminal and deliberately walked into the front of another bus. And such is the speed of hopeful news in oppressed places that nobody challenged me. And I paid my fare!
And so I never did go to South-West Africa (Namibia) in 1961. And neither did Wolfgang Zeidler twenty-five years later, for very different reasons. It is a curious little story, which came my way in 1988 when I went to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley.
A librarian there showed me a letter she had received from a friend of hers in Germany to whom she had once introduced my book Things Fall Apart. This friend, according to the letter, had then loaned the book to his neighbor, who was a distinguished judge. The reason for the loan was that the judge was planning with much enthusiasm to immigrate to Namibia after his retirement and accept the offer made to him to become a constitutional consultant to the Namibian regime. He planned to buy a big farm out there and spend his retirement in the open and pleasant air of the African veldt.
His neighbor, no doubt considering the judge’s enthusiasm and optimism rather excessive, if not downright unhealthy, asked him to read Things Fall Apart on his flight to or from Namibia. Which he apparently did. The result was dramatic. In the words of the letter shown to me, the judge said that “he had never seen Africa in that way and that after having read that book he was no more innocent.” And he closed the Namibia chapter.
Elsewhere in the letter, the judge was described as a leading constitutional judge in Germany; as a man with “the sharpest intelligence.” For about twelve years he had been president of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the highest constitutional court in Germany. In short, he was the kind of person the South Africans would have done much to have in their corner, a man whose presence in Namibia would give considerable comfort to the regime there. His decision not to go was obviously a triumph of common sense and humanity over stupidity and racial bigotry.
But how was it that this prominent German jurist carried such a blind spot about Africa all his life? Did he never read the papers? Why did he need an African novel to open his eyes? My own theory is that he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.
I offer the story of the judge, Wolfgang Zeidler, as a companion piece to the fashionable claim made even by writers that literature can do nothing to alter our social and political condition. Of course it can!
1989
Spelling Our Proper Name
In the year 1962, even as gale-force winds of decolonization were sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa, a truly extraordinary meeting convened at Makerere University, Uganda, in East Africa.
No such conference had ever happened before; nor will its like happen again. Young African writers from newly independent nations and from countries yet to achieve freedom gathered together to discuss the goals of literature in the beautiful city of Kampala. We were all so young, so new to our task, so full of zeal and optimism.
An American visitor walked into our deliberations—venerable, even avuncular. The better informed amongst us said he was a famous writer, but just how famous we had no way really of knowing; our education had not run along those lines. His name was Langston Hughes. Without saying much, he seemed to preside naturally over our debate and bless our youthful zealousness with a wise benevolence. Actually, there were two visitors; the other was the tall, scholarly Saunders Redding.
A couple of years after the historic Makerere University meeting, I was awarded an open travel fellowship by UNESCO and I elected to go to the United States and Brazil. I think that the strong impression made on me by Langston Hughes—his deus ex machina appearance at that critical moment in the intellectual and literary history of modern Africa, and that unspoken message of support and solidarity after three hundred years of brutal expatriation—I think all that played a part in my choice of countries to visit. I wanted to see something of the situation of the African diaspora in its two major concentrations in the New World.
Langston Hughes showed me one more benign gesture of friendship when he heard I was in New York and invited me, a completely unknown apprentice writer, to a meal and a seat of honor beside himself at a performance of the opera Street Scene, for which he had written the lyrics.
There is a thread running through these introductory, anecdotal ramblings. That thread is the African/American connection. I mean “African/American” in two senses: first, as a definition of a peculiar intercontinental relationship between Africans and Americans, and second, and more importantly, as the current appellation for that person created out of mankind’s greatest crime against humanity—the slave trade. There is no scale for weighing human suffering, but in sheer horror of size and scope, in its duration and the continuity of its consequence, the transatlantic slave trade was “as infinite as man may undergo.” The victims of this catastrophe have been struggling for centuries now against their cruel fate on both sides of the Atlantic: on one side, scratching the soil of ruined farms in a devastated continent; on the other, toiling in the sweltering aftermath of captivity.
The nightmare lasted so long and the distances traversed were so vast that communication was breached between home and diaspora; even memory lapsed, and the two sides lost each other; they forgot who they were, their proper name. One side earned the name of slaves, and the other of savages. Oppression renames its victims, brands them as a farmer brands his cattle with a common signature. It always aims to subvert the individual spiri
t and the humanity of the victim; and the victim will more or less struggle to remove oppression and be free.
Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman’s bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means an awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!
I should like at this point to refer to two stories told by the ancestors of two different peoples in two widely separated parts of the world, perhaps more widely separated in contemporary imagination than in reality.
You remember that episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus tricks the Cyclops Polyphemus into calling him Noman, and how that mistake costs Polyphemus the help he might have received from his neighbors when he raises “a great and terrible cry.” Of course we are not expected to shed tears for Polyphemus, for he is after all a horrible, disgusting cannibal. Nevertheless the story does make the point that in any contest—leaving aside who is right or who is wrong—an adversary who fails to recognize his opponent by his proper name puts himself at risk.
From Homer and the Greeks to the Igbo of Nigeria. There is a remarkable little story which I took the liberty of adapting to my use in Things Fall Apart, and which I am going to go on and adapt still further here. It is the story of Tortoise and the Birds. I will summarize it for those not familiar with my novel. The birds have been invited to a great feast in the sky, and Tortoise is pleading with them to take him along. At first they are skeptical, because they know how greedy and unreliable he is. But Tortoise manages to convince them that he is now a changed person, a born-again Tortoise, no less. So the birds agree and donate a feather each to make him a pair of wings. Not only that, they let themselves fall for Tortoise’s story that it is customary on such an important outing for people to take new names. The birds have, of course, never heard of this custom but consider it rather charming and adopt it. They all take fanciful, boastful praise-names like Master of the Sky, Queen of the Earth, Streak of Lightning, Daughter of the Rainbow, and so on. The Tortoise then announces his own choice. It is very strange indeed; he is to be called You All. The birds shriek with laughter and congratulate themselves on having such a funny man on their trip.
When they arrive in the Sky and the Sky people set a great feast before them, Tortoise jumps up and asks: “Who is this feast intended for?”
“You All, of course,” reply the hosts. “You heard them,” says Tortoise to the birds. “The feast is for me. My name is You All.”
The birds do take their revenge by repossessing their feathers and leaving Tortoise high and dry in the Sky. But that does nothing to assuage their hunger as they fly all the way back to earth on growling empty stomachs.
So the message is clear: we must not let an adversary, real or potential, assume a false name even in playfulness. It makes little difference to the victim whether the trickster calls himself Nobody, as in the Greek story, or Everybody, as in the Igbo.
Few writers have understood the ways of oppression or written more memorably about them than James Baldwin. “If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go,” he tells his nephew.1An Igbo elder in Nigeria, using different words, might have said exactly the same thing to the youngster: “If you can’t tell where the rain began to beat you, you will not know where the sun dried your body.”
Literal-minded, one-track-mind people have always been exasperated by the language of prophets, as when Baldwin says to his nephew:
You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said: The very time I thought I was lost my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
A bitter critic of Baldwin, Stanley Crouch, writing in The Village Voice, accused Baldwin of