FIRST, THE QUESTIONS
There is a need for Africans to talk about the production of knowledge beyond the expression of grief and what Pius Adesanmi calls Afro-pessimism. Creative writing played a pivotal role in the “decolonisation” of African image in the 60s. But beyond the criticism of these creative writings, the theoretical approach to them is the vehicles that govern the texts and the changing cultural milieu they confront. When Achebe laments the “basic issues raised by a certain specious criticism which flourishes in African literature today and which derives from same basic attitudes and symptoms as colonialism itself,” it’s to state the politics of control that the external cultural knowledge imposes on our literature.
But the anguish against “colonialist criticism” as Achebe puts it has taken a new phase in the African academia with the application of foreign theories to our mode of production. I think with all these leaps and hops on theories from the West, our literature begins to bend towards the cultural expression of the West, and not just the cultural but also the social.
Critical theories are mostly cultural theories which find their boom inside the classroom to acknowledge or evaluate what is happening in society. But when we apply postcolonialism in its pretentious garb in the epoch after colonialism, does it take into consideration that the “post” in itself is a fraud? The spirit of revolutionary aura that instigated movements and concepts such as Pan Africanism and Negritude movement was doused by the emergence of postcolonialism which is seen “at best as tactless, or at worst, a conservative surrender to the illusory seductiveness of teleology, more condemnable given the fact of what is really a cessation of empire, but the consolidation of what Harry Magdiff calls ‘informal empires’ ” (Tejumola Olaniyan, 639).
It is Anne McClintock in her “The Angels of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘postcolonialism’ ” that better situates what I believe is—to use Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s word—”more dangerous cancer” of postcolonialism and other theories that favour Euro-American imposing epistemology. McClintock notes that:
The “post-colonial scene” occurs in an entranced suspension of history, as if the definitive historical events have preceded us, and are not now in the making. If the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism, multi-dimensional time. and so forth, the singularity of the term effects a re-centering of global history around the single rubric of European time. Colonialism returns at the moment of its disappearance. (629) (Emphasis added)
The return of colonialism this time around is even more complex and worrisome because it is not a physical case of oppression but a mental empire that grows within the knowledge of Euro-American cultural production.
Before the claims that postcolonialism is not a Western construct comes as a counter-argument, it is better to note that Adesanmi’s view of postcolonialism and postmodernism as “the suffocating influence of North American high theory over the global production of meaning and identity” (74) is in tandem with what Udenta O. Udenta calls the “subsumption of postcolonial discourse strategy to the invasion of commanding poststructuralist and postmodernist mode of reasoning and critical narrations” which result “is the inherent loss of the putative solidarity it previously enacted with Marxism and other liberationist paradigm” (28). The reason for this shift in the revolutionary zeal of postcolonialism to Euro-American blah blah grammar is elaborated in a conversation with Udenta (a recorded conversation I had with him, which I hope to transcribe soonest). He notes that the shift is not unconnected to the flourishing of “postcolonial” scholars finding legitimacy in the polis.
This is further buttressed by Adesanmi when he notes an African absence in the production or legitimation of the postcolonial discourse. When postcolonial scholarship is mentioned, we hear names like Homi Bhabha, Gyatri Spivak, Edward Said, etc., and the reason for this is the “infliction” of Indian scholars as opposed to their African counterparts. Adesanmi, using Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us and Said’s Orientalism notes that:
Published in 1975, The West and the Rest of Us had a three-year head start to Orientalism whose first edition appeared in 1978. Yet the institution trajectories of both volumes are so asymmetrically different… Orientalism has become an institution while Chinweizu’s text can now be most generously described as an important contribution to African scholarship at a given point in time.
One of the factors that could account for the marked difference in the institutional fortunes of the two books lies in the fact that Orientalism speaks the language of discourse while The West and the Rest of Us speaks what I call the language of concrete historical materiality. (46) (Emphasis mine).
This goes to show that one of the most popular theories in African institutions does not take into consideration works that are based on African concrete historical materiality.
THE FUTURE FOR PAN-AFRICANISM, AFRICAN EPISTEMOLOGY, AND AN AFRO-CENTRED PRODUCTION OF IDENTITY
African universities must be deliberate in their handling of discourses, theories, and texts. Over the years, we have heard “reviewing of curriculum” and other such political terms. But, as we say in the street, “It’s not that deep”. There is a course called “Critical Theory” that students of English study in the university: what kind of theories are they exposed to? In B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. research, what texts and theories are being researched? We must also make the deliberate effort of privileging critical materials from our immediate society.
For instance, Udenta O. Udenta’s Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature and the Possibilities of New Materialist Direction explores an idea that is crucial to the immediate African society. Speaking on the idea of “concrete universality,” he explores what I believe is a reconfiguration of the African metaphysical realm into a more material use that attempts to resolve the age-long issues of Euro-American totalising claims of rationality.
Over three years, there is a booklet, Literature, Nationalism and the Poetics of Integration by Egya E. Sule that I carry in the course of every journey. He states that “social and cultural life in Nigeria [Africa]” is “a mishmash of failed modernity and hasty postmodernity” (21). The keynote which was presented at the Association of Nigerian Authors’ convention in 2019 raises the issues of the theoretical hastiness in our analysis. These are the sort of materials that we need in our institution, not always “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
I understand the pitfall of the two materials that I mentioned, it shows my limitation of the critical materials published in other African countries. But that also takes us to the questions of book publishing and marketing in Africa. Again, I will resort to Adesanmi who notes that “…I am no longer allowed to be African for more than five minutes in a single day just because I move in the discursive circuits of the postcolonial and the postmodern. With their excessive fear of any form of stability, these discourses traffic in such keywords as contingency, shifts, flux, and tentativeness” (77). Western conception of ideas and thinking has disrupted our being, and gradually as we study and embrace these ideas, our African identity is gradually erased. Otherwise, why can’t we have awareness of publications and texts being published and discussed within the African continent?
We cannot deny the general crisis of consciousness which plagues our continent today. In the 60s and 70s, we had a clear direction of where we were headed ideologically. But what do we have today? Importantly, there is a need for dialogues and conversations where, outside the academic-bourgeois languages of our institution, these conversations must be raised. African teachers and lecturers must understand that Fanonism, Cabralism, and Nkrumahism are stronger equivalent considerations in postcolonial theorising. A future with no direction is no future at all.♦
Oko Owi Ocho has a BA English. He is the founder and team lead of Afrika-Writes, the Creative Director for Benue Poetry Troupe, and Programmes Manager, SEVHAGE. He is an award-winning poet, performance artist, and scholar. He was longlisted for the Nigerian Student Poetry Prize (2017), earned an NSPP Award of Excellence (2018) for his poem “Zeyani,” and was the second prize winner of the Korea Nigeria Poetry Prize (2018). He is currently researching fourth-generation Nigerian poets.