I used the words “stage” and “auditorium” to describe the mbari house; let me explain. Indeed, the two side walls and the back wall encompassed a stage of sorts, comprising sculptures and paintings as actors who, after long rehearsals, are ready to perform a new celebration of art, a command performance of the earth goddess for the people assembled. But I believe the event does invite a second way of apprehension, in which the roles of stage and audience are reversed and those still and silent dignitaries of molded earth seated on the steps, and the paintings on the walls of the royal pavilion, became the spectators, and the world below a lively stage.
The problem some of my colleagues had in Dublin with the word “celebration” may have arisen, I suspect, from too narrow a perspective on it. Mbari extends the view, opens it out to meanings beyond the mere remembering of blessings or happy events; it deliberately sets out to include other experiences—indeed, all significant encounters which man has in his journey through life, especially new, unaccustomed, and thus potentially threatening encounters.
For example, when Europe made its appearance in Igbo society out of travelers’ tales into the concrete and alarming shape of the domineering district officer, the artists of mbari quickly gave him a seat among the molded figures, complete with his peaked helmet and pipe. Sometimes, they even made room for his iron horse, or bicycle, and his native police orderly. To the Igbo mentality, art must, among other uses, provide a means to domesticate that which is wild; it must act like the lightning conductor which arrests destructive electrical potentials and channels them harmlessly to earth. The Igbo insist that any presence which is ignored, denigrated, denied acknowledgment and celebration, can become a focus for anxiety and disruption. To them, celebration is the acknowledgment, not the welcoming, of a presence. It is the courtesy of giving to everybody his due.
Therefore, the celebration of mbari was no blind adoration of a perfect world or even a good world. It was an acknowledgment of the world as these particular inhabitants perceived it in reality, in their dreams and their imagination. The white district officer was obviously not a matter for laughing or dancing. But he was not alone in that. Consider another disquieting presence: a man whose body was covered from head to toe with the spots of smallpox, a disease so dreaded that it was deified and was alluded to only in quiet, deferential tones of appeasement; it was called the Decorator of its victims, not their killer. As for the woman depicted in copulation with a dog, was there much to choose, as oddities go, between her and the white man?
I offer mbari as one illustration of my precolonial inheritance—of art as celebration of my reality; of art in its social dimension; of the creative potential in all of us; and of the need to exercise this latent energy again and again in artistic expression and communal, cooperative enterprises.
And now I come to what I have chosen to call my Middle Passage, my colonial inheritance. To call my colonial experience an inheritance may surprise some people. But everything is grist to the mill of the artist. True, one grain may differ from another in its powers of nourishment; still, we must, in the manner of those incomparable artists of mbari, accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way.
It is not my intention, however, to engage in a detailed evaluation of the colonial experience, but merely to ask what possibility, what encouragement, there could be in this episode of our history for the celebration of our own world, for the singing of the song of ourselves, in the loud, insistent world and song of others.
Colonization may indeed be a very complex affair, but one thing is certain: you do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honor. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and nobody wants to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man you dispossessed is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold or diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you prove that he doesn’t own them in the real sense of the word—that he and they just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally, if the worse should come to the worst, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. It is only a few steps from denying the presence of a man standing there before you to questioning his very humanity. Therefore the agenda of the colonist did not, could not, make provision for the celebration of the world of the colonized; not even celebratio
n of the guarded and problematic kind accorded by Africa to the white man’s presence in the art of mbari.
I have used the word “presence” quite a few times already. Now I want to suggest that in the colonial situation “presence” was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of colonialist ideology. Question: Were there people there? Answer: Well … not really, you know … people of sorts, perhaps, but not as you and I understand the word.
From the period of the slave trade, through the age of colonization to the present day, the catalogue of what Africa and Africans have been said not to have or not to be is a pretty extensive list. Churchmen at some point wondered about the soul itself. Did the black man have a soul? Popes and theologians debated that for a while. Lesser attributes such as culture and religion were debated extensively by others and generally ruled out as far as Africa was concerned. African history seemed unimaginable except, perhaps, for a few marginal places like Ethiopia, where Gibbon tells us of a short burst of activity followed from the seventh century by one thousand years in which Ethiopia fell into a deep sleep—“forgetful of the world by whom she was forgot,” to use his own famous phrase.
With Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius professor of history at Oxford in our own time, no bursts of light, no matter how brief, have ever illuminated the dark sky of the Dark Continent. A habit of generosity to Africa has not grown since Gibbon’s time; on the contrary, it seems to have diminished. If we shift our focus from history to literature, we find the same hardening of attitude.
In The Tempest, Caliban is not specifically African; but he is the quintessential colonial subject created by Shakespeare’s genius at the very onset of Europe’s age of expansion. To begin with, Caliban knew not his own meaning but “wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish.” However, Shakespeare restores humanity to him in many little ways, but especially by giving him not just speech but great poetry to speak before the play’s end. Contrast this with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness three hundred years later. His Calibans make “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” and go on making it right through the novel. Generosity has not prospered.
So these African creatures have no soul, no religion, no culture, no history, no human speech, no I.Q. Any wonder, then, that they should be subjugated by those who are endowed with these human gifts?
A character in John Buchan’s famous colonial novel Prester John has this to say:
I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all the risks… That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king, and so long as we know and practice it we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for their bellies.1
John Buchan, by the way, was a very senior colonial administrator and a novelist. One suspects he knew his terrain. So let us add to our long list of absences this last item—the absence of responsibility. If we should now draw a line under this list and add up all the absences reported from Africa, our grand total would equal one great absence of the Human Mind and Spirit.
I am not quite certain whether all the field workers who reported those absences genuinely believed their report or whether it was some kind of make-believe, the kind of desperate alibi we might expect a man of conscience arraigned for a serious crime to put together. It is significant, for example, that the moment when churchmen began to doubt the existence of the black man’s soul was the same moment the black man’s body was fetching high prices in the marketplace for their mercantilist cousins and parishioners.
But it is also possible that these reporters actually came to believe their own stories—such was the complex psychology of the imperial vocation. The picture of Africa and Africans which they carried in their minds did not grow there adventitiously, but was planted and watered by careful social, mental, and educational husbandry. In an important study of this phenomenon, Philip Curtin tells us that Europe’s image of Africa which began to emerge in the 1870s
was found in children’s books, in Sunday school tracts, in the popular press. Its major affirmations were the “common knowledge” of the educated classes. Thereafter, when new generations of explorers and administrators went to Africa, they went with a prior impression of what they would find. Most often, they found it.2
Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899, portrays Africa as a place where the wandering European may discover that the dark impulses and unspeakable appetites he has suppressed and forgotten through ages of civilization may spring back into life in Africa’s environment of free and triumphant savagery. In one striking passage, Conrad reveals a very interesting aspect of the question of presence. It is the scene where a French gunboat is sitting on the water and firing rockets into the mainland. Conrad’s intention, high-minded as usual, is to show the futility of Europe’s action in Africa:
Pop would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding.3
About sanity I cannot speak. But futility, good heavens, no! By that apparently crazy act of shelling the bush, France, at the end of the day, acquired an empire in West and equatorial Africa nine to ten times its own size. So whether there was madness in the method or method in the madness, there was profit quite definitely.
In this episode, Conrad was giving vent to one peculiar and very popular conceit: that Europe’s devastation of Africa left no mark on the victim. Africa is presumed to pursue its dark, mysterious ways and destiny largely untouched by Europe’s explorations and expeditions. But to deepen the mystery, Africa will sometimes assume an anthropomorphic persona, step out of the shadows, and physically annihilate the invasion—which of course adds a touch of suspense and even tragedy to Europe’s enterprise. One of the best images in Heart of Darkness is of a boat going upstream and the forest stepping across the water to bar its return. We should note, however, that it is the African forest that takes action: the Africans themselves were absent.
It is instructive to contrast Conrad’s episode of the French gunboat with the rendering of an analogous incident in Ambiguous Adventure, a powerful novel of colonization by the Muslim writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane, from Senegal, a West African country colonized by the French. Conrad, as we have seen, insists on the futility of the bombardment but also implies the absence of human response to it. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, standing as it were at the explosive end of the trajectory, tells a different story. The words are those of one of his main characters, the Most Royal Lady, a member of the Diallobe aristocracy:
A hundred years ago our grandfather, along with all the inhabitants of this countryside, was awakened one morning by an uproar arising from the river. He took his gun and, followed by all the elite of the region, he flung himself upon the newcomers. His heart was intrepid and to him the value of liberty was greater than the value of life. Our grandfather, and the elite of the country with him, was defeated. Why? How? Only the newcomers know. We must ask them: we must go to learn from them the art of conquering without being in the right.4
Conrad portrays a void; Hamidou Kane celebrates a human presence and a heroic if doomed struggle.
The difference between the two stories is very clear. You might say that difference was the very reason the African writer came into being. His story had been told for him, and he had found the telling quite unsatisfactory.
I went to a school modeled on British public schools. I read lots of English books there: Treasure Island and Gulliver’s Travels and Prisoner of Zenda, and Oliver Twist and Tom Brown’s School Days and such books in their dozens. But I also encountered Rider Haggard and John Buchan and the rest, and their “African” books. Africa was an enigma to me. I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces. Or, if I insisted on the boat ride, then I had to settle perhaps for that “improved specimen,” as Conrad sarcastically calls him, more absurd, he tells us, than a dog in a pair of breeches, trying to make out the witchcraft behind the ship’s water gauge. The day I figured this out was when I said no, when I realized that stories are not always innocent; that they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.