African and Caribbean Literatures Pr MAOUI Hocine

Master 1 (2020-2021)

The Compromised Independence

and
the Anglophone African Novel of Disillusionment

A. The African Still-born Independence

From the 1940s, with the rise of the nationalist movement in black Africa,

people were made to believe that political independence would lead to the

millennium, solve all social problems, and create a fuller life for everyone. From the

late 1950s, formal independence was conceded by some of the imperialist powers.

The end of direct colonial rule in Ghana (l957) set the pattern of apparent imperial

retreat. Ghana was followed by Nigeria (in 1960), Tanganyika and Sierra Leone

(196l), Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), Zambia and Malawi (1964) and by the state

of Gambia (in 1965). The hopes of African freedom appeared to have been

significantly realised. The long-suppressed calls of African idealism burst out the

Africans’ hopeful message.

In the wake of the euphoria that came with independence, better prospects

were held out to the masses, and more promises were made. Post-independence

economic plans were based on broad egalitarian precepts, which were often an

extension of the nationalist rhetoric of the independence struggle. They included

commitment to equal opportunities and greater equality in the standard of living and

development of opportunities in education, health, and employment. So much was

promised and so little was to be realized-or indeed was realizable, given the

deficient vision and the immensity of the difficulties-that disillusionment was bound

to set in.

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 The promises fired the imaginations of the different sections of the African

population, especially the urban dwellers who stood directly to gain from the

transfer of power to local people. But when it came to “ keeping faith” with the

people and fulfilling the promises, it became clear that a gulf separated fulfilment

from hope. Though Pan-Africanism and African nationalism brought down

colonialism, that nationalism as earlier indicated, was unfortunately not deep-rooted.

It was ad hoc, and induced by the experience of colonialism, and not the

concretization of a consciousness of shared historical and cultural values. Within a

few years of independence, the hopes had collapsed and disillusionment had set in.

Political independence was not a panacea. A new black power elite stepped into the

place vacated by the former imperialists. The newly independent African states were

called upon to assume responsibility for the welfare of their citizens proved

problematic almost from the onset of independence. For a state to undertake such

tasks, it has to possess a control over both its political and economic resources.

Scholars of postcolonial Africa have dated the beginning of the career of

neo-colonialism to the very dawn of independence. According to the neo-colonial

thesis, there really was no independence in many so-called independent African

states. The complete withdrawal of all facets of colonialism never happened. What

was called independence, Immanuel Wallerstein asserts was fundamentally a

“ compromise between the colonial powers and the middle-class leadership of the

nationalist movements. The former turned over the political machinery of the

latter, in return for which the latter implicitly promised to hold in check the radical

tendencies of lower class protest, and to leave basically intact the overall economic

links with the former.”1This compromise or “ contract” of independence meant

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 essentially that independence in many  African countries ushered in a new phase-

neo-colonialism.

For the indigenous ruling class drawn from the educated middle class,

independence was seen first and foremost as a transfer of economic control and

patronage from a foreign power elite to an indigenous one. The creation of mass

parties gave superficial impression of a populist-based political philosophy and

organization; in reality, the dominant ideological orientation remained elitist. The

new independence regimes carried over the colonial structure of administration,

privileges, and prerequisites with as little modification as possible.

The lot of the common people did not improve as fast as they were led to

expect; in some cases, the burden of life became heavier on the poor. The peasantry

was becoming pauperized because agricultural lands were dying from exhaustion ; a

rapidly increasing population was working the arable lands to death .Young semi-

literates were deserting the dying villages and drifting into the towns to join the

thousands of unemployed people in the slums and shanty-towns. Acute poverty,

neglect and marginalization, eroded whatever feelings of patriotism African had.

The task of nation-building since independence, therefore, did not involve a

conscious and serious attempt by African leaders to redress the major problem

created by the geographical partition , and fostered by colonialism, i.e, the absence

of a consciousness of shared cultural, linguistic and historical identity. On the

contrary, African leaders exploited and strengthened existing divisions and

conflicts within their respective states. What these leaders called “ nation building”

usually took two forms. First, political and administrative reforms aimed at

experimenting with the political traditions of the Europeans. Second, they

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 strengthen the economic ties with the former colonial powers. The latter, as earlier

indicated, involved the exploitation of the domestic economy to the disregard of

the interests and needs of the African people, and also the appropriation of public

wealth, as the leaders struggled to amass as much personal fortune as possible.

They exacerbated the existing internal tensions. The challenge of resolving the

cultural differences and conflicts was not paramount in the agenda of most post-

colonial African leaders, who chose instead to build their power bases on the

foundation of existing ethnic and linguistic contradictions and differences. In other

words, they retained the divide-and-rule policy inherited from colonialism. In the

guise of “national interest”, African leaders have promoted programs that advance

their personal interests, and those of their immediate ethnic groups. The

exacerbation of ethnocentric and cultural tensions in order to perpetuate personal

power has rendered neo-Pan-Africanism inoperable. The manoeuvring of personal

influence, which today passes for ‘politics’, has been divorced from the activity of

the broad masses of the people and left to the new elite to control the state and use

it to plunder the national wealth for their own profit and their international allies.

The result is the “those at the top are merely managers of a system which has

trapped us [Kenyans] into a dependency relationship with the capitalist

wealth.”2(Independent Kenya, 85)

Therefore, the new political class proved unequal to the challenge of nation-

building and incapable of providing moral and civic leadership. As for the case of

Armah’s and Ngugi’s countries independence, respectively in 1957 and 1963, their

leaders looked forward to an era of unity, strength, and humanity. But today's

observer would be hard pressed to find much evidence of any of these qualities.

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What he or she will find in relative abundance, rather, is the exact opposite:

fragmentation, weakness, and social violence. Independence seems to have brought

neither peace nor prosperity to Africa. Instead, it has paradoxically borne witness to

stagnation, elitism, and class domination, and to the intensifying structural

dependence-- economic, political, cultural, and ideological-- of Africa upon the

imperial Western powers.

The African political machinery set up at independence broke down and there

were instabilities attended by coups and counter-coups, with extensive violence.

Between 1960 and 1968 alone, they were twenty-five unconstitutional changes of

government in Africa, of which eighteen were military coups and others were

military-inspired.3(Protest and Power in Black Africa,1043) The educated middle

class, which has inherited the privileges of the colonists, is promoting inequality in

the new states; its living standards are inflated as compared to those of the workers

and peasants ; this generates resentment among the less privileged and this, in turn,

gives rise to instability. A number of corollaries follow: the elite’s high standard of

living has a damaging effect on national life by destroying the morale of the masses,

and it puts the elite themselves on the defensive, in that they are constantly having to

defend their privileges against the pressure of the under privileged, especially as

social alignments are beginning to be defined in terms of ‘ the haves’ and the ‘have

nots’. This exacerbates existing conflicts and contradictions. Again, because the

middle classes have accepted the principle of unequal distribution of wealth implicit

in the colonial structure, they have tended to take up also the capitalist ideology that

supports inequality ; their members are instinctively averse to egalitarian social

systems. The dilemma of the elite is easy to see. The urge toward the development

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of a capitalist class is strong, yet the absence of an indigenous source of capital is a

constant worry. Given the contradictory situation, the elite’s behavior is

understandably inconsistent. Sometimes, in their attempts to gain the best of all

possible worlds, they preach socialism and practice capitalist tenets, and sometimes

they evade any ideological or intellectual position at all, hoping that the situation

will resolve itself.

The dream of independence became a nightmare in the neo-colonial state, as

the state became monstrously exploitative of its own people. No matter what form

African leadership assumed, civilian and military, the same tactics were employed in

weakening and destroying the internal strength crucial to the sustenance and defense

of national sovereignty. In the early years of independence, it was easier to

rationalize this failure as the consequence of the presence of some external forces.

Lately, this explanation has lost its steam, given the fact that the masses are the only

ones who appear to suffer from the consequences of the activities of these external

forces, while the leaders conveniently sheltered in their mansions, continued to

exhibit conspicuous and ostentatious lifestyles. Newly independent African

countries are still under foreign economic exploitation, political control and cultural

domination. The enormous hopes and expectations from independence have been

thwarted and colonialism is still taking hold of the situation . Under neo-

colonialism, it is actually the native , the black man, clad in the colonizer’s garb who

has taken control of the country and followed suit the practices of his former master.

Ngugi sees that many other African countries have been affected by this new

phenomenon:

The trouble, of course, is that many African middle classes helped to

smother the revolutionary demands of the majority of peasants and

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 workers and negotiated a treaty of mutual trust with the white colonial
power structure.4 (Homecoming, 12)

Thus, it is the ruling power, which consists of the African middle class or ‘the

national bourgeoisie’, that has allowed imperialism to return through the back

door.5(Homecoming, 49) It is imperialism in its neo-colonial stage that exacerbates

the economic, political and cultural backwardness.

Neo-colonialism is then more dangerous than colonialism because it is

the black man who insidiously acts against his own people. Kwame Nkrumah points

it out in Consciencism when he says:

Neo-colonialism is a greater danger to independent countries than is

colonialism. Colonialism is crude, essentially overt, and apt to overcome by a
purposeful convert of national effort. In neo-colonialism, however the people
are divided from their leaders and, instead of providing true leadership and
guidance which is informed at every point by the ideal of the general welfare,
leaders come to neglect the very people who put them in power and
incautiously become instruments of suppression on behalf of the new
colonialists.6 (Consciencism,102)

Although Frantz Fanon did not live to see the phase of reconciliation after

independence in most African countries, his “phenomenological description of neo-

colonialism”7 (Frantz Fanon,101) is not to be lost sight of.

In analysing the ‘pitfalls of National Consciousness’, Fanon focuses on the

national middle class which has taken power at the end of the colonial regime. This

class-both administrative and merchant bourgeoisie- has refused to follow the path

of the revolution. It has taken over the positions abandoned by the former masters

without changing the economic structure of colonialism. It “identifies itself with the

Western bourgeoisie.”8 (W.E,123) However, it has practically no economic

power”(120) because its members are , in general, engaged in the services and not in

the productive sector. They mainly derive their profits from their ability as middle

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men between the former mother-country and the now independent colony, as well as

from taxes:

Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming
the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line
between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged,
which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism. 9 (W.E,122)

In brief, what Fanon saw when he observed this class, was a slavish imitation and a

total dependence on its European counterparts; and, though an ineffectual minority,

they display a total indifference to the needs of the mass of the population:

In under-developed countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie

exists, there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious,
with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that
the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle
class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It
remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly
it becomes not even the replica of Europe but its
caricature.10(WE,141)

In the last two decades, Africa's disillusionment with its “independences” has

set in a series of contradictions and problems. In Africa, like in many other parts of

the world, the Third World euphoria has given way to the collapse of the Soviet

communist model, the crisis of existing socialisms and the frustration of the hoped-

for revolution. Deprived of its sovereignty, governed by rulers who have mortgaged

its future to the World Bank and the IMF, ravaged by maladies ranging from malaria

to AIDS, afflicted by tyrannies , wreaked by civil wars and genocides, the great

expectations of the liberation from colonialism were rendered illusory by the neo

colonial machinations. Against the socioeconomic and political disaster brought

about by the “suns of independences”, departmentalization is presented as the path

to salvation. The hopes and aspirations were short lived and crushed as the powerful

killed the bearers and advocates of good days for Africa. Lumumba and Cabral are

among others. 11(Hama Tuma)

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 The result of all this has been the alienation of the intellectuals, especially

writers and artists, from politicians and the bureaucratic class that run the post-

independence political and administrative machinery. Within this political context, it

would seem that the African novelists could hardly camouflage their anguish at the

betrayal by politicians and a high percentage of the intelligentsia. Writers like

Ngugi, Achebe, Armah, and Soyinka, to name only a few, expose the many faces of

greed, corruption, and social , political and economic ineptitude of the society and

governments of this era. Faced with the new realities of power and politics in Africa,

writers have had to reappraise their role in society. Moreover, cultural retrieval , as

the accompanying arm of the African revolutionary struggle is emphasized with

varying degrees by the aforementioned writers. Their preoccupation with the past is

to give way to concern with the pressing problems of the present. Given the

seriousness of events in Africa since independence, the feeling of guilt and self-

reproach among writers as well as the collapse of optimism is understandable. Their

perception of the problems of their societies during the struggle for political

independence was dominated by nationalist assertiveness. At a time when the

nationalist movement called on the corporate energies of the colonized people, the

writer had to throw in his lot with the people. His/her function was to use his/her art

to advance the ‘cause,’ and this took the form of a cultural nationalism by which

he/she tried to help his people regain their lost dignity by recreating and interpreting

for them their cultural heritage.

The quest for an identity rooted in the past paved the way for a broader

comprehension of the bleak realities which the newly independent nations would

encounter in the future. The clash of cultures during the colonial period, the quest

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for self-government in the fifties, conflict among ethnic groups, and exacerbating

friction between the rural and urban societies revealed that post-independence

African nations would be plunged in a far deeper despair than that they faced during

colonialism.

B. The Anglophone African Novel : An Expression of Thwarted Aspirations

The 1950s was the decade of hope during which most Anglophone sub-

Saharan African countries started gaining independence as anti-imperialist

movements triumphed. In this decade, African writers had an anti-colonial, anti-

imperialist, yet hopeful mood, which explains the assertive and optimistic nature of

the writing of the period. Colonialism had tried to justify its oppression and

exploitation by resorting to claims of racial superiority. The quest for a new African

identity which became apparent with the demand for independence was synonymous

with dislike for the alien colonial structures. Paradoxically , because of the British

indirect rule system and the acculturation process they were subjected to, Africans

have suffered a continual crisis in the quest for identity both during and after the

colonial period. The new African writer countered such claims by producing artistic

works that showed excitedly that Africa had its own history, culture, and civilization

that were equal if not superior to that of the imperialists. The writers saw their

societies put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self abasement

imposed on them by colonialism. The most representative works of this period

include Achebe's Things Fall Apart12 set in Umuofia, an independent and

"progressive" society before the intrusion and entrenchment of colonialism.

However, while reshaping Africa's distorted history, Achebe does not idealize it. He

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shows that African society had its own contradictions and spiritual crises before the

intrusion of colonialism. Achebe's approach sharply contrasts to the negritude 13

writers of the same period, such as Senghor, Laye and others, whose artistic works

idealize Africa.

In this decade, the ideological concerns of the African writer reflected the

general mood of African nationalism. These writers erroneously analyzed

imperialism and social situations from the standpoint of racial instead of class

conflict. African writers remolded the English language to suit their subversive

purposes. Thus, Achebe in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God 14 used Ibo modes of

expression to reflect Ibo culture. The development of the novel in Africa was also

due to the rise of a class – most of the authors, Achebe, Laye, Ngugi, and Armah,

were members of an emerging educated African elite, and their works were directed

at foreign audiences and local audiences who belonged to their own socio-economic

classes.

With the coming of independence, it became quite obvious that the regaining

of beliefs in themselves and the rejection of the accumulated complexes of decades

of self-degradation were only temporary. It would soon be obvious that defining

identity and cultural self-esteem was a passing obsession, even when that obsession

was termed negritude. The quest for an identity rooted in the past paved the way for

a broader comprehension of the bleak realities which the newly independent nations

would encounter in the future. The clash of cultures during the colonial period, the

quest for self-government in the fifties, conflict among ethnic groups, and

exacerbating friction between the rural and urban societies revealed that post-

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independence African nations would be plunged in a far deeper despair than that

they faced during colonialism,. As Clive Wake observes :

independence enormous social and economic problems associated

with underdeveloped countries has brought with it new problems
which the writer, the intellectual, the commentator must concern
himself—the need to build nations that are  one and indivisible .15
(“African Literary Criticisim”,197/98)

It is equally true that the conflict between the rural and urban sectors, and tension

between the communal and individual ethic are the dominant areas of strain for both

the individual and the society. The politicians, the military, the literati, and the

ordinary individual in the street constitute the major dramatis personae of post-

independence African nations. Of all these social actors, the politicians have been

the most vocal, visible, and dominant group in the post-independence political

arena . Thus, the long-run effect of this dominance is alienation of the other actors

from participation in the social system. The individual is denied the ability to

express and realize the social and political aspirations he had before independence.

In the immediate post-colonial era, the rise of government by dictatorship

throughout Africa perpetuated the political, economic, and social practices of

colonialism. African radical writers, in common with other progressive intellectuals

tended to overvalue the emancipatory significance of independence. The ceremony

of independence which celebrated the end of colonialism and the movement

towards liberation transformed the harsh memories of struggle- memories of

violence, degradation, and hardship- into memories of heroism. Before

independence, losses could only be experienced as losses; after independence, they

could be viewed as sacrifices precisely because they had proved not to be in vain.

But, as Neil Lazarus observes, it did not take long for these writers to realize that

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something had gone terribly wrong in Africa. They had experienced decolonisation

as a time for massive transformation. Yet, looking around them in the aftermath,

they quickly began to perceive that their “revolution” had been “ derailed”. As a

result, their hopes were “punctured” (18), to borrow Lazarus’s terminology, and “ a

rhetoric of disillusion began to (replace the earlier utopian rhetoric in their work.”
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(Resistance, p.i) They confronted these harsh realities with a mixture of guilt and a

sense of betrayal. These novels are pervaded by a mood of disillusionment. 17 The

African novelists could hardly hide their anguish at the betrayal by politicians and a

high percentage of the intelligentsia, of the trust bestowed on them by the masses

who stood by them in the struggle for independence. They came to realize that

independence meant just the satisfaction of the interests of the literate petty-

bourgeois class and not those of the population at large. The writers were

ambiguously inserted as members of this petty-bourgeois system- they were neither

local nor comprador capitalists, nor were they part of the oppressed from whom they

were separated by , among other things, a Western education, language and good

jobs.

Thus, a plethora of critical African novels appeared during the early years of

independence in response to the new "threat from within." Such works include Ayi

Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Ngugi’s A Grain of

Wheat (1967), Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters(1967), Timothy Aluko's Chief the

Honorable Minister(1970), Kofi Awoonor's This Earth, My Brother(1971),and

Achebe's A Man of the People (1966). It was among these writings that the category

of neocolonialism came to be taken up. Independence was a fraud. It signified a

refinement of the colonial system, not its abolition. Armah described independence

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as an “ equilibrating political arrangement;”18  (“African Independence Revalued”,

150) Achebe called it a  “great collusive swindle;” 19 (Morning Yet,15) Ama Ata

Aidoo referred –through the medium of Sissie, the central character in her novel Our

Sister Killjoy- to “ a dance of the masquerades called Independence”; 20 (Killijoy, 95)

and Ngugi spoke of “flag independence,” which meant

a situation where a client indigenous government is ruling and pressing people on

behalf of American, European and Japanese capital. Such a regime acts as a

policeman of international capital and often mortgages a whole country of arms and

crumbs from the master’s table. It never changes the colonial economy of

development and uneven development.21(Writers in Politics, 119/20)

African novelists were among the first intellectuals to bring before a wide

public profound questions about the corruption within postcolonial governments and

the extent to which external domination persisted. As the historian Frederick Cooper

observes:

Growing disillusionment made increasingly attractive the theories of

‘underdevelopment’, which located the poverty and weaknesses of
‘peripheral’ societies not in the colonial situation but in the more long-term
process of domination within a capitalist world system. 22 (“Rethinking
Colonial African History,”1524)

Moreover, as Joe E, Obi in “ A Critical Reading of the Disillusionment Novel “

declares that these writers situate the problem in the failure and misrule of the

African elite. He says:

Although the novels of disillusion seek to force society into shedding its
hypocritical and historic blinkers, they lead us into an ideological cu-de-sac.
These works locate the problem not so much in the material character of
African politico-economic systems and the historical framework of their
evolution as in the personnel of these systems ; socio-political maladies are
reduced to functions of a “pathological” elite, hence the writers deal with a
symptom only.(“ A Critical Reading”, 412)23

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 These African writers, among others, see the post-independence leaders as

betraying the pledges they had made in the nationalist days to create just,

egalitarian, and contented new states out of the colonial societies. They, at varying

degree, attack the elite most sharply for creating a standard of living for themselves

out of proportion to the national level of economic production, and in fact higher

than that of the rest of the society. These writers recognize both the dilemma and

the ways adopted by the elite to get round it. But they do not approve. The most

outstanding feature of their novels is the uncompromising way with which they

attack the post-independence elite of Africa. The latter’s members are accused of

expropriating from the masses the fruits of independence, and, more specifically, of

being venal, corrupt, irresponsible, hypocritical, and without vision and common

sense. The failure of independence is regarded as evidence of the failure of the elite

to justify themselves to the masses and validate their claim to leadership. The

African corrupt society abounds with thieves, big and small, professional and

amateur . Some writers satirize the corrupt methods used by many people to amass

wealth. While others cry out openly and more straightforwardly the embezzlement

of public funds, appropriation of public resources, diversion of public facilities to

private use, and the use of bribery and corruption for personal enrichment.

In some of the above mentioned novels, embezzlement of public resources

by the post-independence rulers of the African states has been the central focus of

the writers’ attack ; the biggest public officials, according to them, are the biggest

thieves. For example, in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, leading

the line of embezzlers is the corrupt politician His Excellency Joseph Koomson,

Minister Plenipotentiary , Member of the Presidential Commission, Hero of Socialist

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Labor. With all these titles, Koomson is a master of the art of corruption, who

exploits his public office to enrich himself and destroy the promise of independence

and trample down socialism. The most glaring example of Koomson’s dishonesty is

when, in spite of his ministerial appointment, he borrows state credit under aliases to

invest in fishing boats :

I had asked Oyo’s mother who would pay for the boats, and with a great
deal of pride she said the Minister would. . … .So I got angry enough to tell
her I had seen corruption , public theft.( 67)

Some writers responded to these harsh truths of independent society with

disillusionment and a weary , ‘post-political’ cynicism. This literature of

disillusionment grew out of a feeling , experienced by many radical intellectuals,

that they were becoming more and more marginalized as the drama of

postcolonialism unfolded. They felt isolated and ineffectual, stranded between the

masses of the population on their left and the “political class” on their right.

Eventually a position was reached from which politics itself came to be mistrusted

and despised. It is from just such a position that the Ghanaian writer Kofi Awoonor

evidently wrote his novel, This Earth, My Brother24(1971). To Awoonor, it would

seem, the African revolution had failed because it had to fail, because no revolution

was ever successful. Politics always promised more than it could deliver. There

would always be victims, and they would always outnumber the lucky few who

succeeded. Between the fortunate few and the unfortunate many there would always

be the sad intellectuals, sensitive and compassionate like Amamu in This Earth, My

Brother.

Other writers , with less cynicism than This Earth, My Brother, still felt

themselves crippled by their isolation and lack of social utility. The emergence of

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social and class contradictions in the age of independence disappointed and shocked

many African writers, who created works expressing disillusionment with

postcolonial African society. Achebe's A Man of the People25 and Armah's The

Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born -- the novels most representative of this period

did not fully grasp the source of the manifest contradictions. They mistakenly

argued that the cause of Africa's problems lay in the new leaders' lack of moral

direction. At this time, writers therefore saw their role as that of transforming

society (and its leaders) by means of moral enlightenment. Thus, the works of this

period subscribed to a liberal humanist ideology that pleaded with the oppressed.

In A Man of the People , for instance, Achebe draws a very dark picture of

Nigeria. Moreover, a bleak vision as ‘leaderless’ and more than this, as ‘unleadable’

was offered. In this satirical farce, as Ngugi points out, “ the teacher talks to his

pupils directly . . . he retains self-control in that he does not let his anger drive him

into incoherent rage and wild lashing. Instead, he takes his satirical whip and raps

his pupils.”26 (Homecoming,268). His pupils are both the corrupt politicians and the

populace. On the one hand, there are the politicians, whose representative is Nanga,

Minister of culture though uncultured man; on the other hand, the intellectual elite

represented by Odili, the supposedly sensitive and conscientious class who falls

victim of illiterate politicians. Moreover, the populace are not exempted from

criticism. The book insists that the existing state of affairs which is caused by the

corrupt politicians has driven people into despairing cynicism and resignation:

As he [Max] gave instance after instance of how some of our elders who
were ash-mouthed paupers five years ago had become near millionaires
under our very eyes, may in the audience laughed. But it was the laughter
of resignation to misfortune. No one among them swore vengeance; no one
shook his rage or showed any of flight. They understood what was being

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 said, they had seen it with their own eyes. But what did anyone expect them
to do?27( A Man of The People,123/4)

Therefore, Achebe as a social critic, does not only deal with the outmanoeuvring of

people like Nanga but also shows the people’s cynicism and indifference to the

world around them. He accuses them of complicity that has beset their society

because their cynicism indirectly encourages corrupt people in their ill-doings. 28(A

Man of The People,143/4)

By the close of Achebe’s novel, the army has restored temporary order, but

the power conflict is still unresolved and we are left within a dim prospect of proper

order being restored. In this novel, Achebe does not comment. Instead, he places

Odili on the stage and leaves him to perform in and to comment on the action, so

that everything is filtered through his consciousness. Still, like Odili, the writer’s

disillusionment or rather cynicism is felt by the end. As Ravenscroft argues: “So

disillusioned is the exposé that the author would hardly seem to escape charge of

personal cynicism.”29(Chinua Achebe, 31/2)

True, the action against corrupt politicians, taken by the intellectual

socialists, such as Max, will serve as a lesson for similar excesses in the future. This

new patriotic group which has begun to arise in the society is a sign for a better

future and a dawning of fresh awareness. Nevertheless, the end leaves the reader

with a big dilemma because the problems remain unresolved. For Thomas Melone,

this is a positive attitude, as he says:

Achebe ne juge jamais pour nous. S’il nous suggère des idées pour
stimuler notre jugement il ne pense jamais pour nous, il n’explique, ne
conclut jamais. Notre liberté est une valeur avec laquelle il ne se permet
aucun jeu, aucun viol et nous lui en savons gré. 30(Chinua Achebe et la
Tragédie de l’histoire, 11)

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For Ngugi, A Man of the People is a novel of disillusionment because, as he says,

“we have scorched[sic] the snake of colonialism, not killed it.” 31(Homecoming,45).

“Achebe-cum-teacher” has left too many questions unanswered.(Homecoming, 53)

When Achebe includes a military coup as the climax to the present political chaos,

he does not seem to suggest a political remedy. This is because:

He treats it [military coup] simply as another self-interested action in the

larger ‘national game’. The coup happens because there was ‘so much
unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity
to take over’. The people remain lethargic and cynical. 32(C.Achebe, ,36/7)

Achebe could imagine no solution to the growing ‘lawlessness’ of civil society in

postcolonial Nigeria because it was beyond his understanding. At the end of the

novel, he was only able to sound a highly dubious call to moral decency.

Still, other radical African writers of the 1960s tended to reach more militant

conclusions than Achebe or Awoonor . The more these writers thought about the

implications of their situation, the more they began to feel that they had been

betrayed. As disseminated by the African political elite, the ideology of

independence trumpeted that with the passing of colonialism everything had been

restored to its proper place. But some writers were drawn increasingly to a very

different conclusion. To them, it began to seem as though, from the perspective of

the society at large, independence had altered very little and represented therefore

only what “the man”, the central protagonist in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are

Not yet Born, thought of as “a change of embezzlers”. The net effect of

independence, Armah’s echoing Fanon’s reflections, had merely been to substitute

a black top for a white one on the colonial bottle. The shape and contents of the

bottle itself had remained intact during the transition.

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 This was a rich crowd of guests, too, sitting at first like a picture already
taken. Woolen suits, flashing shoes, important crossed legs, bright rings
showing on intertwined fingers held in front of restful bellies, an authentic
cold-climate overcoat from Europe or America held traveler-fashion over
an atm, five or six waistcoats, silken ties and silver clasps, and a
magnificent sane man in a university grown reigning over four admiring
women in white lace covershirts on new dumas cloth ; long , twinkling
earrings, gold necklaces, quick-shining wristwatches, a great rich splendor
stifling all these people in the warmth of a beautiful day-but that was only
an addition to the wonder :the sweat called forth new white handkerchiefs
brought out with a happy flourish, spreading perfume underneath the
mango trees. (Fragments, 181)

Taken together, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments, and

Armah’s third novel, Why re We So Blest?36 (1972) offer a scalding critique of the

irresponsibility of postcolonial leadership in Africa. They are all directed against the

philistinism and ideological bankruptcy of the postcolonial elite. They all portray

this elite as murderously hypocritical social fraction, living not only beyond their

own means but beyond the means of their societies as a whole. They show us the

elite whose continuing wealth and power imply the continuing poverty and

powerlessness of the peasants, proletarians, and marginals toiling below them.

The characteristic disappointment of post-independence African literature is

well expressed by the unnamed "Man" of Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet

Born:

So this was the real gain. The only real gain. This was the thing for which
poor men had fought and shouted. This was what it had come to: not that
the whole thing might be overturned and ended, but that a few black men
might be pushed closer to their masters, to eat some of the fat into their
bellies too. That had been the entire end of it all. (126)

In this novel, Armah sees the common people in the dual image of victim and evil

doer. But their evil doing is attenuated by their being vulnerable and lacking in

20
social power. They are reproached for lacking the moral will to resist corruption ,

but it is also constantly pointed out that they are exposed unceasingly to the

seductions of corruption. They observe those who adopt illicit means to fame,

wealth, and power , and the hardship which is the lot of the honest and the morally

fastidious. Nothing is done to give respectability to morality. The few who hold on

to their moral integrity, like the the Teacher, become outsiders and are only saved

from destruction by an indomitable pessimism and a tough-minded reliance on their

individual integrity. They turn their back on society and seek for strength within

themselves.37( “Love and Nation…” ,98)

As it will be developed later, the impression we get in The Beautyful Ones

Are Not Yet Born is that there is no change at all, only an illusion and that the

history of African societies is a vicious circle of “of the ordinary people first by one

master then another. In this novel as in Fragments, the pull to disillusion and despair

is resisted and eventually overcome. Through a graphic language and imagery,

Armah shows us a demeaning, degraded world that seems positively to invite

despair, and which he peoples with characters, like Teacher in The Beautyful Ones

Are Not Yet Born, whose embrace of disillusion is so understandable that we

wonder not at them, but rather at the other characters. He has lived through the days

of hope, when it seemed that Africa had only to hold fast to its dreams in order to

realize them, and he has witnessed the sickening collapse of these visions. Now

hope has been drained out of him and replaced by despair.  “It is not a choice

between life and death,” he tells us, “ but what kind of death we can bear, in the end.

Have you not seen there is no salvation anywhere.”

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 Ngugi, who also sought to reaffirm his social commitment even in the darkest

moments of postcolonoial retrenchment , looks beyond the elite at the wider social

implications of its existence. To him, the “  African revolution” had not at all failed

because it had to, but rather for the very specific reason that it had been sabotaged

by its leaders. The postcolonial leaders “take a manifestly evolutionary situation

and. . . pretend that it is revolutionary.” 38 (Communication and the Evolution of

Society, 42). Contrary to their assumption, independence should only be

represented as “a staging-post” in the struggle for national liberation. The history of

postcolonialism thus began to loom, for Ngugi, as a history of betrayal. As Achebe

would put it nearly tw twenty years later, in 1984, “Nigerians are what they are only

because their leaders are not what they should be.” 39 (The Trouble with

Nigeria,p.10.) These accusatory pronouncements are also found in Armah’s

writings wherein he follows Fanon in accusing these leaders of treason for the

revolution has been undermined from within, turned back, betrayed.(Resistance, 42)

Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat dramatizes the many salient moments when

decolonization is revealed as an “ empty shell ,” and the novel is structured by an

acute opposition between the expectations raised by nationalism and the realities of

compromised decolonization. The long-awaited and hard-fought for independence

becomes hollow and meaningless for the whole conduct of political authority in

independent Kenya. The fundamental aim of revolution, which is an “expression of

emancipatory self-determination,” 40 (Frantz Fanon,79) is negated.

The breakdown of this solidarity has been vitalizing to African creative

writing. It has, for instance, infused in writers a certain radicalism as well as a

sharpening of their social instincts. This is evident in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones

22
Are Not Yet Born which is taken to be a radical book which belongs to the best

protest tradition.41(Tasks and Masks, 67). In “The Allegory of the Cave : Language,

Democracy and a New World Order !”, Ngugi also comments favourably on it:

The Beautyful Ones.. . is an outcome and an expression of . . .

disillusionment. But in its analysis of the rotten, there is an implied search for
the basis of a new and more just social system. The « beautyful ones, »
comparable to Plato’s incorruptible true philosophers, had not yet been born,
but until they were born, society would continue to be ruled badly. And they
could be born, because in the Socratic character of the Man—that is, in his
pure incorruptibility—we are shown the possibility of such a birth. 42

Toward the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the African ‘mystique’ of

independence began, for the first time, to be exploded. The attack was launched on

several fronts. Within the domain of politics, as Emmanuel Ngara has recently

argued, “ a new ideological awareness was beginning to dawn on some of the

statesmen and, in particular, on leaders of nationalist movements still fighting for

independence.”43(Art and Ideology,36) Central to this “ new ideological awareness”

was a widespread disenchantment with bourgeois progressivism. It began to seem to

radical leaders and intellectuals that it was not –indeed, never had been- sufficient

for them to place themselves on the side of the masses of their compatriots ; rather,

they needed to commit “ class suicide,” to ‘unclass’ effectively their revolutionary

commitment to national liberation.

Certainly, in the African political arena, this was the position adopted by such

leaders as Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, and Robert Mugabe as

their struggles against colonial regimes in Guinea –Bissau, Mozambique, Angola

and Zimbabwe intensified. It was also the position belatedly assumed by such

figures as Nkrumah and Nyerere. In Nyerere’s case, we can see the famous Arusha

23
Declaration of 1967 as his own public statement of radical rebirth. Moreover, one

would not have found the early Nkrumah writing, as did the later, that

Intelligentsia and intellectuals, if they are to play a part in the African

Revolution, must become conscious of the class struggle in Africa, and
align themselves with the oppressed masses. This involves the difficult, but
not impossible, task of cutting themselves free from bourgeois attitudes and
ideologies imbibed as a result of colonialist education and propaganda. 44
(Class Struggle in Africa ,40)

More recently, starting in the late 1970s, analysts of African literature have

already detected the beginnings of a more “forward-looking post-disillusionment

trend”45(“A Critical Reading”, 399) that is, works that challenge political economy

and bestow energy and consciousness on the masses. The historical events of the

1970s revealed even more clearly the transition from colonialism to neocolonialism

that had begun during the 1960s. Writers began to understand that the roots of social

contradictions and conflicts lay in class differentiations not color. Some works

representative of this period include Ngugi's Petals of Bloodand Devil on The Cross.

These novels portray conflict in terms of class conflict and from the perspective of

the oppressed -- the workers and the peasants. The writers delegate the revolutionary

vanguard role to the people themselves. They were implicitly disgusted with the

educated elite who cannot initiate a struggle and bestow their faith in the peasants

themselves or suggest ways to solve Africa's contradictions. The writer saw his or

her role as that of instigating the people into a revolutionary struggle. Within this

literature, too, writers began to ask themselves new questions. Specifically, the

articulations of cynicism and despair in the face of postcolonial developments began

to seem increasingly inappropriate. For one thing, it became clear that no matter

how often or how obsessively the trajectory of independence was rehearsed as a

“great collusive swindle,” the effects of this “ swindle” had to be lived with, and if

24
possible struggled against. For one thing, it began belatedly to be appreciated that

independence had all along been mythologized, above all by intellectuals, and

credited with an emancipatory potential that it could not possibly have achieved.

Thus we find Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in a decisive turn, blaming African writers in

1967 because they have neglected their historical responsibilities toward the

population at large :

When we, the black intellectuals, the black bourgeoisie, got the power. We
never tried to bring about those policies which would be in harmony with
the needs of the peasants and workers. I think it is time that the African
writers also started to talk in the terms of these workers and peasants. 46
The significant ideological shift in in Ngugi’s stance has been well expressed by

Emmanuel Ngara :

By 1967 Ngugi felt that the African writer had failed. The failure referred
to there was in fact not that of the African writer alone. It resulted from the
failure of the African bourgeoisie to give meaningful freedom and
independence to the broad masses of the people. . . In less than a decade of
their rule, many African leaders proved that they were incapable of shaking
off the shackles of neo-colonialism. . . The essence of Ngugi’s complaint,
therefore, was, that by failing to challenge this new state of affairs, the
African writer was guilty of neglecting his duty to society in general and to
the African masses in particular. . . It was now incumbent upon [the writer]
to throw in his lot with the masses once more by confronting the ideology
of the new ruling elite. A new rift had surfaced in independent Africa, not
between Blacks and Whites, but between the haves and have-nots, what
Ngugi has called a “horizontal rift dividing the élite from the mass of the
people.”47 ( Art and Ideology, 34/5)

Following Ngugi’s lead, writers began to realize that they needed to change their

tactics if they want to combat their growing social ineffectualness. It began to seem

to them that whatever they were doing, it was not enough. Several leading writers

began to ask fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of radical

intellectualism in postcolonial societies. The questions they asked touched on every

aspect of their practice as writers : For whom were they writing ? Who was reading

their work ? Who was publishing and distributing it ? Was it possible to broaden the

25
base of their readership by establishing alternative channels of production and

distribution ? All these questions had to do with the potential democratization of

African culture. A literature written by the elite, about the elite, and for the

consumption of the elite simply could not, in the end, bear the burden of social

activism. Writers began to cast around for new forms and styles of writing that

would enable them to escape the implications of their intellectualism. Some writers

seek a regenerating myth which will counteract their own ambiguous insertion and

alienation, with blackness as an important factor to an undifferentiated and

comforting black brotherhood. The example is Armah in Two Thousand Seasons,

The Healers and Osiris Rising and even his latest novel KMT: In the House of Life-

An Epistemic Novel48. In his late novels, he has fallen back on his people’s vision

of a communal past to transcend alienation and reaffirm the need for national

independence, in the post-colonial period he would have to confront the harsh

realities of his time with a mixture of guilt and a sense of betrayal.

In the 1980s, the staleness and hollowness of African sloganeering leftist

ideology which concurs the gradual withdrawal and late collapse of the Eastern

bloc deepened Ngugi’s feeling of disillusionment . His exile status exacerbated that

feeling as he turns in into himself. He gradually relinquishes his realistic

representation of his previous novels for a world of fairy tale and day-dream

bringing him close to magic realism. Though set in Kenya Ngugi’s Matigari49 is the

story of a Mau Mau freedom fighter. On his return from the forest, Matigari, buries

his sword and his AK-47 under a mugumo-tree-alas too soon as it turns out- in order

to don “a belt of peace”(5). His principal aim to which the novel devotes most of its

rather insubstantial plot is to take possession of his « house » from which he had

26
fought to dislodge Settler Williams. This struggle for possession is obviously meant

to symbolize the people’s bid to claim their heritage at the end of the freedom

struggle; in Matigari’s own words he now wishes to “ blow the horn of patriotic

service and trumpet of patriotic victory”(Matigari, 6) but is astonished to find on his

return that nothing has changed very much; if anything conditions have become

worse. The Anglo-American Leather and Plastic Works Company runs a factory

behind a wall of metal sheeting, and the workers’ quarters are fenced in a barbed

wire, children scuffle “ with dogs, vultures, rats, all sorts of scavengers and vermin,

for pieces of string, patches of cloth, odds bit of leather, shoe soles, rubber bands,

threads, rotten tomatoes, sugarcane chaff, banana peels, bones. . .

anything.”( Matigari, 11) Through a thinly veiled allegory about post-colonial

Africa, Matigari provides us with yet another sign of the crisis afflicting the post-

colonial novel in Africa generally in its attempts over these past three decades to

plot the story of corruption and exploitation under the leadership of civilian-military

dictatorships. Economic decline, violence, coup and counter-coup have produced a

profound disillusionment among Africa’s populations which have in turn inevitably

left their marks on the novel.

Therefore, the “ Novels of Disillusion” still bear directly on social, cultural

and political issues relevant to Africa of the 1980’s and even today’s. Particularly

in the light of the intensifying disenchantment with nationhood, these narratives

continue to sustain the clarity of thought and the critical agenda which motivated

their writing in the years immediately following decolonization and independence.

It is within this general context that Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

continues to function till now as a critical intellectual endeavour at grappling with

27
the contradictions of national liberation and the postcolonial politics of the “ nation”

in Ghana. As for Armah, in the mid-nineties , his disillusionment with post-colonial

Africa still constitutes his central thematic concern. His novel Osiris Rising (1995)

is dealing with the past and present betrayal of African and Diaspora peoples by

political leaders, who are only interested in amassing wealth through corrupt means.

The South African liberation struggle against the apartheid regime is mentioned

together with the disenchantment which followed the attainment of freedom in

Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola. The main thrust of the novel suggests that

Africa’s revolutionary fight for transformation and genuine freedom from tyrannical

foreign and indigenous rulers is an ongoing liberation struggle, to which Blacks

from the African Diaspora must contribute. This is conveyed in Asar’s account to

Ast of his experiences as a freedom fighter in Mozambique, Angola, and apartheid

South Africa :

Eventually, though, some of us concluded that what we were fighting to

create was not a socially just society, only a racially reformed society.
What we were creating was in each case just a neocolonial society with the
barriers slightly lowered. At first it was confusing, the fact that some
countries had to take up arms merely to achieve neocolonial status. But
revolutionary rhetoric was in the end insufficient to forestall the
realization : the societies we were fighting to make would remain
structured in hierarchical, unjust ways. . . It was worthwhile. A racially
open neocolonial society is an improvement on a straightforward colonial
apartheid system. But over the last few years, several of us were acutely
aware that a social revolution in Africa would take a lot of preparatory
work. . . Now we’ve got to do it unless we resign ourselves to this new
form of slavery, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
beating out the rhythm for the dance of death.( Osiris Rising, 116-17)

It is against this backdrop that we will examine in the next chapter the themes of

identity and alienation as best exemplified by Armah’s and Ngugi’s novels.

28