The Education of a British-Protected Child (11 page)

The other event of 1962 was not as widely publicized as the Makerere Conference, but it was to prove at least as portentous. It was the decision by one farsighted London publisher to launch the African Writers Series on the basis of no more than three or four published titles. Conventional wisdom in the book business at the time was inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as a little harebrained. But in the next twenty-five years this series was to publish more than three hundred titles and establish itself without any doubt as the largest and best library of African literature in existence.

It was my good fortune to be linked closely with both events. I was present in Makerere among colleagues young, hopeful, and self-assured. I heard Christopher Okigbo, who was to die four years later fighting for Biafra, declare in his high-pitched, cracked-bell voice that he wrote his poetry only for poets. Another Nigerian poet, looking around him, pronounced East Africa a cultural desert. And I heard Wole Soyinka, sitting across the hall from me, recite lines of poetic parody he had just composed in mockery of Sedar Senghor.

But it was not all plain sailing, in spite of our youth and optimism and an altogether heady confidence in our future as creative artists and in the future of our newly independent (or about-to-become-independent) nations. We had this problem of definition. What was African literature? And it was, more than anything else, a question created by the anomaly of Africans writing in European languages, a phenomenon
imposed on us by a history which was peculiarly, and painfully, African. When people say to you, “Europeans write in European languages; why don’t Africans write in African languages?” they are indulging in perhaps well-meaning but quite ignorant and meaningless comparison.

As for the African Writers Series in that same eventful year of 1962, I was invited to be its founding editor and I was to spend a considerable part of my literary energy in the following ten years wading through a torrent of good, bad, and indifferent writing that seemed in some miraculous way to have been waiting behind the sluice gates for the trap to be released. All of this stuff was written in English. How can one explain this?

Our acts and motives as writers seem to be in need of careful, and even repeated, explanation these days. We must justify what we do over and over again—“for the avoidance of doubt,” as legal draftsmen in military regimes are fond of saying in their numerous decrees. Perhaps it is a sign of our incompetence that the case was not made clearly and unambiguously in the first instance.

The story was told me by an elder in my village about a drummer long ago who was not very competent on the drum but who managed to achieve a kind of fame by an open admission of his shortcoming. Like better drummers, he would name and salute a notable arriving at a ceremony. Having done this in drum language, our drummer would proceed, for the avoidance of doubt, to inform the person concerned by word of mouth that the drum had just saluted him.

I thought I had already spoken all the words I needed to speak on our predicament with language in African literature,
but perhaps my intentions were not well enough translated to the drumsticks. So let me try again, briefly and directly.

I write in English. English is a world language. But I do
not
write in English
because
it is a world language. My romance with the world is subsidiary to my involvement with Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria is a reality which I could not ignore. One characteristic of this reality, Nigeria, is that it transacts a considerable portion of its daily business in the English language. As long as Nigeria wishes to exist as a nation, it has no choice in the foreseeable future but to hold its more than two hundred component nationalities together through an alien language, English. I lived through a civil war in which probably two million people perished over the question of Nigerian unity. To remind me, therefore, that Nigeria’s foundation was laid only a hundred years ago, at the Berlin conference of European powers and in the total absence of any Africans, is not really useful information to me. It is precisely because the nation is so new and so fragile that we would soak the land in blood to maintain the frontiers mapped out by foreigners.

English is therefore not marginal to Nigerian affairs. It is quite central. I can only speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians in English. Of course I also have a mother tongue, which luckily for me is one of the three major languages of the country. “Luckily,” I say, because this language, Igbo, is not really in danger of extinction. I can gauge my good luck against the resentment of fellow Nigerians who oppose most vehemently the token respect accorded to the three major tongues by newscasters saying good night in them after reading a half-hour bulletin in English!

Nothing would be easier than to ridicule our predicament if one was so minded. And nothing would be more attractive than to proclaim from a safe distance that our job as writers is not to describe the predicament but to change it. But this is where the politics of language becomes
politicking
with language.

One year after the Makerere Conference, a Nigerian literary scholar, Obi Wali, published a magazine article in which he ridiculed the meeting and called on the African writers and the European “midwives” of their freak creations to stop pursuing a dead end. And he made the following important suggestion:

Having set that rather clear task before “future conferences on African literature,” Dr. Obi Wali, who was himself a teacher of literature and a close friend of the poet Christopher Okigbo, might have been expected to lead the way along the lines of his prescription. But what he did instead was abandon his academic career for politics and business.

As a leading parliamentarian in Nigeria’s Second Republic, he might have played the midwife to legislation in favor of African literature in African languages. But no: Obi Wali, having made his famous intervention, like a politician, simply dropped out of sight.

In 1966, Nigeria’s first military coup triggered a countercoup
and then a series of horrendous massacres of Igbo people in Hausa-speaking northern Nigeria. A famous educationist well known for his opposition to the continued use of English in Nigeria wrote in a Lagos newspaper offering the incredible suggestion that if all Nigerians had spoken one language the killings would not have happened. And he went further, to ask the Nigerian army to impose Hausa on Nigeria as its lingua franca. Fortunately, people were too busy coping with the threat of disintegration facing the country to pay serious attention to his bizarre suggestion. But I could not resist writing a brief rejoinder in which I reminded him that the thousands who had been killed did in fact speak excellent Hausa.

The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.

The politics Ngũgĩ plays with language is of a different order. It is a direct reflection of a slowly perfected Manichean vision of the world. He sees but one “great struggle between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand and a resistance tradition on the other.” Flowing nicely from this unified vision, Africa’s language problems resolve themselves into European languages, sponsored and foisted on the people by imperialism, and African languages, defended by patriotic and progressive forces of peasants and workers.

To demonstrate how this works out in practice, Ngũgĩ gives
us a moving vignette of how the enemy interfered with his mother tongue in his “Limuru peasant community”:

The reader is given nearly two pages of this pastoral idyll of linguistic and social harmony in which stories are told around the fire at the end of the day. Even at school, young Ngũgĩ is taught in Kikuyu, in which he excels to the extent of winning an infant ovation for his composition in that language. Then the imperialists struck, in 1952, and declared a state of emergency in Kenya; and Ngũgĩ’s world is brutally shattered.

A really heartrending scenario, but also a scenario strewn with fatal snags for the single-minded. I had warned about this danger in one of the earliest statements I ever made in my literary career—that those who would canonize our past must serve also as the devil’s advocate, setting down beside the glories every inconvenient fact. Unfortunately, Ngũgĩ is too good a partisan to do this double duty. So he files the totally untenable report that imperialists imposed the English language on
the patriotic peasants of Kenya as recently as 1952! What about the inconvenient fact that already in the 1920s and 1930s

Inconvenient though it may be, the scenario before us here is of imperialist agents (in the shape of Scottish missionaries) desiring to teach Kikuyu children in their mother tongue, while the patriotic Kikuyu peasants are revolting and breaking away because they prefer English!

What happened in Kenya also happened in the rest of the empire. Neither in India nor in Africa did the English seriously desire to teach their language to the natives. When the historic and influential Phelps-Stokes Commission report in West Africa in 1922 favored the native tongue over English, its recommendations were eagerly picked up by the official British Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa.
⁵

In Nigeria, the demand for English was already there in the coastal regions as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. A definitive study of the work of Christian missions in Nigeria from Professor J.F.A. Ajay reports that in the Niger Delta in the 1850s, the missionary teachers were already “obliged to cater for the demand … for the knowledge of the English language.”
⁶

In Calabar by 1876, some of the chiefs were not satisfied
with the amount of English their children were taught in missionary schools and were hiring private tutors at a very high fee. Nowhere in all this can we see the slightest evidence of the simple scenario painted by Ngũgĩ of European imperialism forcing its language down the throats of unwilling natives. In fact, imperialism’s ways with language were extremely complex.

If imperialism was not to blame, or not entirely to blame, for the presence of European languages in Africa today, who, then, is the culprit? Ourselves? Our parents? Awkward as it may be, we should be bold enough to contemplate it and deal with it once and for all, if we can, and move on. We will discover, I am afraid, that the only reason these alien languages are still knocking about is that they serve an actual need.

No African in our recent history fought imperialism more doggedly or presided over a more progressive regime than Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana did. And yet we are told that

But there was a practical difficulty even more urgent than the above: the problem Ghana faced in teaching mother tongues when ethnic mixing had reached significant levels in urban and rural schools as a result of modern internal migrations. Already by 1956 the Bernard Committee had found that schools where the pupils spoke a single mother tongue
were far fewer than schools in which more than five languages were represented in fair numbers. The simple consequence of this is that if the policy of teaching in mother tongues were to be enforced, the schools concerned would have to hire more than five teachers for every class. (This was at the 1956 level of ethnic mixing in Ghana. The situation today would be considerably more difficult. Unless Ghana were to reinvent bantustans and send every child back to his homeland!)

It would seem, then, that the culprit in Africa’s language difficulties was not imperialism, as Ngũgĩ would have us believe, but the linguistic pluralism of modern African states. No doubt this will explain the strange fact that the Marxist states in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, have been the most forthright in adopting the languages of their former colonial rulers—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and most lately Burkina Faso, whose minister of culture once said with a retrospective shudder that the sixty ethnic groups in that country could mean sixty different nationalities.

This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history.

There is no cause for writers to join their ranks.

1989