The Education of a British-Protected Child (6 page)

2008

In October 1960, I enjoyed the first important perk of my writing career: I was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to travel for six months anywhere I chose in Africa. I decided to go to east, central, and southern Africa.

I set out with high hopes and very little knowledge of the real Africa. I visited Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, and then Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. I had had vague notions of going to South-West Africa as well, and even South Africa itself. But Southern Rhodesia proved more than enough for me on that journey and I turned around after a little more than a week there.

The chief problem was racism. The only African country I had visited before was Ghana, the flagship of Africa’s independence movement. Ghana had been independent for a few years and was justly the pride of emergent Africa. Nigeria had won her own freedom from Britain just before my journey, on
October 1, 1960, and I set forth with one month’s worth of ex-colonial confidence—the wind of change, as it were, behind my sails.

The first shock came when we were about to land in Nairobi, and we were handed immigration forms to fill out. After your name, you had to define yourself more fully by filling in one of four boxes: European, Asiatic, Arab, Other! At the airport there were more of the same forms and I took one as a souvenir. I was finding the experience almost funny.

There were other minor incidents, as when the nice matronly British receptionist at the second-class hotel I checked in to in Dar es Salaam told me she didn’t mind having Africans in her hotel and remembered a young West African woman who had stayed there a year or so ago and had “behaved perfectly” all the time she was there and spoke such beautiful English.

I read in the papers that a European Club in Dar was at that time debating whether it ought to amend its rules so that Julius Nyerere, who was then chief minister, might be able to accept the invitation of a member to drink there.

But as the weeks passed, my encounters became less and less amusing. I shall recount just two more, which happened in Rhodesia (modern Zambia and Zimbabwe).

I was met at Salisbury Airport by two young white academics and a black postgraduate student from the new University of Rhodesia. The Rockefeller Foundation, apparently knowing the terrain better than I did, had taken the precaution of enlisting the assistance of these literature teachers to meet me and generally keep an eye on my program. The first item on
the agenda was to check in to my hotel. It turned out to be the new five-star Jameson Hotel, which had just been opened in order to avoid such international incidents as the refusal of accommodation to a distinguished countryman of mine, Sir Francis Ibiam, governor of Eastern Nigeria, president of the World Council of Churches, and a British knight!

I was neither a knight, a governor, nor president of any council, but a poor, unknown writer, traveling on the generosity of an enlightened American foundation. This generosity did not, however, stretch so far as to accommodate the kind of bills the Jameson Hotel would present.

But that was another story, which would unfold to me later. For the moment, my three escorts took me to my hotel, where I checked in and then blithely offered them a drink. It was the longest order I had or have ever made. The waiter kept going and then returning with an empty tray and more questions, the long and short of which was that the two bwanas could have their beer and so could I because I was staying in the hotel but the other black fellow could only have coffee. So I called the entire thing off. Southern Rhodesia was simply awful.

Those were not jet days, and my journey home entailed an overnight stop in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The manager of the rather nice hotel where I stayed spotted me at dinner, came over and introduced himself, and sat at my table for a chat. It was a surprise; I thought he was coming to eject me. He had been manager of the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, Ghana. From him I learnt that Victoria Falls was only twenty-odd
miles away and that a bus went there regularly from the hotel.

So the next morning I boarded the bus. From where I sat—next to the driver’s seat—I missed what was going on in the vehicle. When finally I turned around, probably because of a certain unnatural silence, I saw with horror that everyone around me was white. As I had turned round they had averted their stony gazes, whose hostility I had felt so palpably at the back of my head. What had become of all the black people at the bus stop? Why had no one told me? I looked back again and only then took in the detail of a partition and a door.

I have often asked myself what I might have done if I had noticed the separate entrances before I boarded; and I am not sure.

Anyhow, there I was sitting next to the driver’s seat in a Jim Crow bus in Her Majesty’s colony of Northern Rhodesia, later to be known as Zambia. The driver (black) came aboard, looked at me with great surprise, but said nothing.

The ticket collector appeared as soon as the journey got under way. I did not have to look back anymore: my ears were now like two antennae on each side of my head. I heard a bolt move and the man stood before me. Our conversation went something like this:

He fled from me as from a man with the plague. My European co-travelers remained as silent as the grave. The journey continued without further incident until we got to the falls. Then a strange thing happened. The black travelers in the back rushed out in one huge stampede to wait for me at the door and to cheer and sing my praises.

I was not elated. A monumental sadness descended on me. I could be a hero because I was in transit, and these unfortunate people, more brave by far than I, had formed a guard of honor for me!

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

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 spirit 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.