The Education of a British-Protected Child (10 page)

Conrad devised a simple hierarchical order of souls for the characters in
Heart of Darkness
. At the bottom are the Africans, whom he calls “rudimentary souls.” Above them are the defective Europeans, obsessed with ivory, petty, vicious, morally obtuse; he calls them “tainted souls” or “small souls.” At the top are regular Europeans, and their souls don’t seem to have the need for an adjective. The gauge for measuring a soul turns out to be the evil character Mr. Kurtz:

The alleged tendency of Africans to offer worship to any European who comes along is another favorite theme in European writing about Africa. Variations on it include the veneration
by Africans of an empty Coca-Cola bottle that falls out of an airplane. Even children’s stories are not free of this insult, as I once learned from foolishly buying an expensive, colorful book for my little girl without first checking it out.

The aggravated witch-dance for a mad white man by hordes of African natives may accord with the needs and desires of the fabulists of the Africa that never was, but the experience of Congo was different. Far from falling over themselves to worship their invaders, the people of this region of Africa have a long history of resistance to European control. In 1687, an exasperated Italian priest, Father Cavazzi, complained:

Between Father Cavazzi’s words and Joseph Conrad’s images of gyrating and babbling savages there was indeed a hiatus of two harsh centuries. But that would not explain the difference.

People are wrong when they tell you that Conrad was on the side of the Africans because his story showed great compassion towards them. Africans are not really served by his compassion, whatever it means; they ask for one thing alone—to be seen for what they are: human beings. Conrad pulls back from granting them this favor in
Heart of Darkness
. Apparently,
some people can read it without seeing any problem. We simply have to be patient. But a word may be in order for those last-ditch defenders who fall back on the excuse that the racial insensitivity of Conrad was normal in his time. Even if that were so, it would still be a flaw in a serious writer—a flaw which responsible criticism today could not gloss over. But it is not even true that everybody in Conrad’s day was like him. David Livingstone, an older contemporary and by no means a saint, was different. Ironically, he was also Conrad’s great hero, whom he placed

And yet his hero’s wise, inclusive humanity eluded Conrad. What did he think of Livingstone’s famous judgment of Africans?

Joseph Conrad was forty-four years
younger
than David Livingstone. If his times were responsible for his racial attitude, we should expect him to be more advanced than Livingstone, not more backward. Without doubt, the times in which we live influence our behavior, but the best or merely the better
among us, like Livingstone, are never held hostage by their times.

An interesting analogy may be drawn here with the visual arts imagery of Africans in eighteenth-century Britain. I refer to a 1997 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London on the subject of Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century African man of letters, and his contemporaries. The centerpiece of the exhibition was the famous painting of Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough in 1786. The art historian Reyahn King describes the painting in these words:

Evidently Gainsborough put care and respect into his painting; and he produced a magnificent portrait of an African who had been born on a slave ship and, at the time of his sitting, was still a servant in an English aristocratic household. But neither of these facts was allowed to take away from him his human dignity in Gainsborough’s portrait.

There were other portraits of Africans in Britain painted at the same time. One of them provides a study in contrasts with Gainsborough’s rendering of Ignatius Sancho. The African portrayed in this other picture was one Francis Williams, a graduate of Cambridge, a poet, and a founder of a school in Jamaica: an amazing phenomenon in those days.
¹⁷
A portrait of Williams by an anonymous artist shows a man with a big, flat face lacking any distinctiveness, standing in a cluttered library on tiny broomstick legs. It was clearly an exercise in mockery. Perhaps Francis Williams aroused resentment because of his rare accomplishments. Certainly the anonymous scarecrow portrait was intended to put him in his place, in much the same way as the philosopher David Hume was said to have dismissed Williams’s accomplishments by comparing the admiration people had for him to the praise they might give “a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” It is clear, then, that in eighteenth-century Britain there were Britons, like the painter Gainsborough, who were ready to accord respect to an African, even an African who was a servant; and there were other Britons, like the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, or the eminent philosopher Hume, who would sneer at a black man’s achievement. And it was not so much a question of the times in which they lived as the kind of people they were. It was the same in the times of Joseph Conrad a century later, and it is the same today!

Things have not gone well in Africa for quite a while. The era of colonial freedom which began so optimistically with Ghana in 1957 would soon be captured by Cold War manipulators and skewed into a deadly season of ostensible ideological
conflicts which encouraged the emergence of all kinds of evil rulers able to count on limitless supplies of military hardware from their overseas patrons, no matter how atrociously they ruled their peoples.

With the sudden end of the Cold War, these rulers or their successor regimes lost their value to their sponsors and were cast on the rubbish heap and forgotten, along with their nations. Disaster parades today with impunity through the length and breadth of much of Africa: war, genocide, military and civilian dictatorships, corruption, collapsed economies, poverty, disease, and every ill attendant upon political and social chaos! It is necessary for these sad conditions to be reported, because evil thrives best in quiet, untidy corners. In many African countries, however, the local news media cannot report these events without unleashing serious and even deadly consequences. And so the foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world’s attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from an anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.

In a 1997 calendar issued by Amnesty International USA in a joint effort with the International Center of Photography, a brief but important editorial message criticizes some current journalistic practices:

And the text goes on to set down the principles which guided the selection of the twelve photographs in the calendar, as follows:

There is a documentary film which I have seen more than once on PBS which is not troubled by Amnesty’s concern. It is about sex and reproduction through the entire range of living things, from the simplest single-cell creatures in the water to complex organisms like fishes and birds and mammals. It is a very skillful, scientific production that pulls no punches with respect to where babies come from. It is all there in its starkness. Was it necessary to conclude this graphic reproductive odyssey with man (or rather woman)? I did not think so. The point had already been more than well made with
apes, including, I believe, those that invented the “missionary position.”

But the producers of the documentary were quite uncompromising in their exhaustiveness. And so a woman in labor
was
exposed to show the baby coming out of her. But the real shock for me was that everybody in that labor room was white except the Ghanaian (by her accent) mother in childbirth. Why were all the rest white? you may ask. Because this was all happening in a hospital in London, not in Accra.

I am sure that the producers of that program would reject with indignation any suggestion that their choice of candidate was influenced in any way by race. And they might even be right, to the extent that they would not have had a meeting of their production team to decide that a white woman would not be an appropriate subject. But then, such deliberations do not happen except perhaps in the crude caucuses of the lunatic fringe. Race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom. But it may lie, unseen, in our subconscious. The lesson for that production team, for those who broadcast their product, and for the rest of us is that when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.

1998

Of all the explosions that have rocked the African continent in recent decades, few have been more spectacular, and hardly any more beneficial, than the eruption of African literature, shedding a little light here and there on what had been an area of darkness.

So dramatic has been the change that I am even presuming that a few of my readers may recognize my title as a somewhat mischievous rendering of the subtitle of the book
Decolonising the Mind
, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The mischief lies in my inserting after the word “politics” the two words “and politicians,” like dropping a pair of cats among Ngũgĩ’s pigeons.

Ngũgĩ’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak of African literature in European languages is not only an absurdity but also part of the scheme of Western imperialism to hold Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a writer in English and decides that he can no
longer continue in the treachery. So he makes a public renunciation of English in a short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say, Ngũgĩ applies the most severe censure to those African writers who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no longer threatens anybody!

Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngũgĩ and myself on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writers is that while Ngũgĩ
now
believes it is
either/or
, I have always thought it was
both
.

I took my stand on this from the very beginning of my literary career, and have enunciated the position at different times and in varying forms of words. No serious writer can possibly be indifferent to the fate of any language, let alone his own mother tongue. For most writers in the world, there is never any conflict—the mother tongue and the writing language are one and the same. But from time to time, and as a result of grave historical reasons, a writer may be trapped unhappily and invidiously between two imperatives. This is not new in the world. Even in the British Isles, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots may suffer anguish in using English, as James Joyce so memorably reminds us. Perhaps the real difference with Africa is the sheer size, the continental scale of the problem, and also—let’s face it—we look quite different from the English, the French, or the Portuguese!

In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically evaluated in many parts of the world.
It was an enormously important moment, and year, in the history of modern African literature. The gathering took place at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.