Cybershelf Africa

27/09/2024

WHY DON'T WE JOIN BOKO HARAM?
The late Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, once said that the task of any society with complexes is to look back and find out where it went wrong, "where the rain began to beat us". We have many complexes in the world--like the inferiority and superiority ones, leading to Na**sm, trumpism, racism and tribalism. In Africa, we particularly have the colonial disease and poverty, leading to megalomania, the cult for anything foreign, obscene theft and accumulation of material clutter and money, which some people even think may be used to secure accommodation in heaven. The task of checking where the rain began to beat us is a simple and yet such a difficult task of reading and re-reading our experiences, our cultures, our history, etc. This is what the current ethos is against, what with high-profile utterances indicating that education doesn't matter. Reason: the big-moneyed people, like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs “didn’t go to college”--they even say “they are not educated”. See! When you don't read, you depend on rumours, lies and propaganda for information. You will rival Dr. Goebbels in believing that through some chemistry of repetition, you can turn a lie into truth. To set the records straight, these people are highly educated and went to universities, and THEY READ: both Gates and Zuckerberg went to Harvard, and Jobs attended Reed College. Some of these people may have stopped formal schooling (the ignorant use the phrase "dropped out"), but they did so because they had learned what they wanted and found their purposes. You need an educated mind even to find a purpose and redirect the course of your learning. So if in your idle mood, you wished your idol--money—grew like leaves on the tree of mental poverty, you're in for a rude shock. The richest people and nations have this in common: they are educated. And by education, I don't mean the mad rush for papers and titles that we see around, but meaningful acquisition and use of knowledge and imagination to connect our rich past to our rich future. It is actually a matter of reading and re-reading. I find it a very mean joke to hear that if you want to hide anything from an African, you should put it in a book. For your information, 2,300 years ago the first university existed in Africa and was the alma mater of the fathers of Western civilisation, like Archimedes. It is actually the loose-mouthed, thieving and idle barbarians that made us lose our civilization. So if we hate it so much, if we think education is so useless, why don't we join Boko Haram--and go back to Stone Age?

23/03/2021

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyh1FXvDOH4&feature=share

A hilarious passage from The Epic of Gor Mahia by Adrian Onyando

08/10/2020

THE FAMISHED ROAD: FANTASY, MAGIC AND POLITICS
A discussion of Ben Okri’s novel, The Famished Road, must always begin with the title, for its central metaphor, “the road”, is found there. Also, in the opening passage, Okri’s “road” which was once a river turns into a trope branching into three pathways: first, it is a consequence of a natural phenomenon (river, water); second, it is an artificial construction (the road) supplanting its natural antecedent (the river) and linking it to the wider world; and, third, it is a “hungry” monster (unsatisfied, starved, growing), ominously set to devour its victims (Okri, 3).
It may also be added that these tropes of the “road” also link up with the literary motif of the road as a journey—a representation of discovery, of creating meanings and of ultimate identity. In such a novel as The Famished Road, which that takes place in a setting whose analogue is obviously Nigeria, a “young” African nation in postcolonial terms, the quest for definitions becomes a significant problematic. The road that “branched out to the whole world” (Okri, 3) is therefore a metaphor for Nigeria growing up with challenges, and connecting with many other cultures (hybridizing) with a view to finding her own level.
The naming of Nigeria for the Niger (a river) is symbolic of the arbitrariness of the colonial demarcation the African states. This arbitrariness was purely for the European exploitation and has led to the current problems of identity and growth on the continent. Ben Okri’s intention seems to be to write the story of Africa in a way analogous to her actual history. It is a history of colonial exploitation of her natural resources, here symbolized by the water and the river, Madame Koto’s run-away capitalism and exploitation of the protagonist’s child labor.
After colonialism comes a new “groping” and “repositioning” evidenced mostly by the career of the protagonist. He is an “abiku”, “ogbanje” or spirit child, who according to Yoruba or Igbo (Nigerian) mythology is destined to die, but can also rise up and lead the human life. The story in The Famished Road is mainly about one such spirit child, Azaro (short form for the resurrected Lazarus in the Bible), who decides to live the long life of humans in sympathy with his grieving mum.
Azaro is the connecting link between reality and the spiritual world, an occupant of “the interspace between the spirit world and the Living” (Okri, 6). In his career, he incorporates the real and the fantastic, making the novel to defy conventional expectations of form, meaning and closure and qualify as fantasy.
Azaro’s story is that of the “young” African nation, fragile and embarking on a journey into the past, present and future in order to define herself. It is a journey involving living in the marginalised urban areas, the slums, but also making sorties into the primordial forests, African villages and into nature as a whole. The road he often follows, initiated during the colonial conquest, is unstable, full of mistakes and dangerous, but must needs be trodden: “Each generation has to reconnect the origins for themselves. They tend to become a little wiser, but don’t go very far. It is possible that they now travel slower, and will make bigger, better mistakes. That is how they are as a people. They have an infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles. Nothing can destroy them except themselves and they will never finish the road that is their soul and they do not know it” (Okri, 330).
The story of Madame Koto is also analogous to the African story of colonialism through independence and a fumbling with ideologies that only divide rather than forge an African identity. She starts as a simple entrepreneur depending on cultural beliefs and superstitions to boost her trade. By and by, she builds her trade by employing prostitutes, gets involved in the warring parties, The Party of the Rich and The Party of the Poor. As a budding capitalist, she becomes a member of the Party of the Rich, a party defined by its arrogance and exploitation of the poor. It represents capitalism, its insensitivity, corruption and dehumanizing effects on the society, here seen in its offer of rotten milk that leads to massive diarrhea of the populace. But despite being a member of such a cynical society, Madame Koto is successful in the end, at least materially. She has electricity at her bar and proudly possesses a car.
The antagonist to such an aggressive Madame Koto’s approach to the economic life is none other than Azaro’s Dad. He is a metaphor for the laboring poor whose hard work is alienated and doesn’t really count in the new dispensation. He belongs to the Party of the Poor, but is no match for Madame Koto’s rich camp. He becomes a boxer who fights and wins in matches organized by the locals, but he doesn’t climb the social, or the material ladder. He is as poor at the end as he was at the beginning.

09/08/2020

The Man Who Thrived On Bad English
Amos Tutuola passed away silently on June 8, 1997 at the age of 77. But how far had he gone with his unique writing?
'I don’t write good English,' said Tutuola, 'but see how far I have got with my poor English.’

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day (Amos Tutuola, London Faber 1952).

That is the voice of the protagonist/narrator in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. The grammar is shaky, but the prose style is so refreshingly original that it is recognizably Tutuolan. These two features: unconventional language and unusual prose-style are what has put Amos Tututola in a category of his own, a successful writer in spite of his inadequate language. Tutuola himself used to apologise for his unusual English. ‘I don’t write good English’, he said to an audience, ‘But see how far I have got with my poor English’. Yes, it is the language that has attracted attention to Tutuola even though there are other elements in his work that are equally important.
Chinua Achebe, one of the admirers of Amos Tutuola has highlighted the social and ethical concerns in Tutuola’s works. One of these concerns is work. Achebe writes of The Palm-Wine Drinkard in his collection of essays Hopes and Impediments:

What happens when a man immerses himself in pleasure to the exclusion of all work; when he raises pleasure to the status of the work and occupation and says in effect: ‘pleasure be thou my work’? The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a rich and spectacular exploration of this gross perversion, its expiation through appropriate punishment and the offender’s final restoration. That’s what the story is about.

Tutuola’s coinage of the word ‘drinkard’ is not without significance. He meant to create a character who habitually drinks for pleasure and does not work. So how does the palm-wine drinkard atone for the sins of drunkenness and laziness? First, he suffers the loss of his palm-wine tapster and is thus rendered useless. Like a feudal king, the drinkard cannot do anything without the help of his servant. So he rises up and sets out for the Deads’ Town with the hope of retrieving his tapster. It is in this journey that the drinkard goes through a series of trials and tribulations that forces him to work for survival. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a tale of adventure, but one in which the protagonist has to fight for survival in order to compensate for his past idleness. Achebe concludes his essay by highlighting the relevance of The Palm-Wine Drinkard in a rhetorical question: ‘For what could be more relevant than a celebration of work today for the benefit of a generation and a people whose heroes are no longer makers of things and ideas but spectacular and insatiable consumers?’ (76).
Who then is Amos Tutuola? Tutuola was born in 1920 at Abeokuta in the southern region of Nigeria, son of a cocoa farmer. At twelve, he went to the Anglican Central School, Abeokuta, where he schooled for only five years. It was during his school days that he began his story-telling career. As he says himself:

In school we used to tell folktales to our schoolmates and teachers. Each time we got our holiday, I used to go to my people in the village. There was no radio or television but our source of amusement was to tell folktales after dinner. I used to listen to old people and the folktales they told. Each time I returned to school, I told the story to other schoolmates and I became a very good storyteller. They used to give me presents for telling incredible folktales (Adeniji Olayiwola, ‘Tutuola: the Man and His Art’. Guardian 14 June, 1997, p. 25).

When Tutuola’s father died, he couldn’t go on with schooling. He went to Lagos in 1939 to learn blacksmithing, a trade he engaged in the Royal Air Force in Nigeria in the period 1942-45. He then worked as a messenger in the Department of Labour and eventually wound up as a storekeeper in the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria where he retired in 1976.
Armed with Yoruba oral literature, Tutuola wrote the tales in the form of a connected narrative. The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts, his first manuscript was sold to a publisher of photography books in London. But Tutuola’s success came with the publication of a lengthy narrative, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town by Faber and Faber in 1952. Since then, Tutuola has published eight other novels and two collections of short stories.
Tutuola passed away silently on June 8, 1997. He was 77. At the time of his death, Nigerian newspapers reported that he died a pauper, leaving a family of four wives and eleven children. But he also left a legacy of literature that refreshingly rings with orality. There is a consensus that Tutuola wrote Yoruba in English, that is, he carried the Yoruba tales into English when he writes: ‘I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wing in my life.’
The repetition or redundancies, the coinage and the vigour of the lines are all characteristic of an oral narrative. In this connection, Tutuola has been joined by other artists like his compatriot Gabriel Okara who does not bat an eyelid at violating the rules of the English language. Listen for example to the opening of Okara’s The Voice:

Some of the townsmen said Okolo’s eyes were not right, his head was not correct. This they said was the result of his knowing too much book, walking too much in the bush, and others said it was due to his staying too long alone by the river. So the town of Amatu talked and whispered, so the world talked and whispered (1).

Tutuola was aware that the English medium was no enough to explore the mythical experiences, so he became an innovator. The Palm-Wine Drinkard, was largely experimental. But did it succeed? Yes, if you look at it in its own time. As Cyprian Ekwensi says:
Tutuola wrote music with his words. Although his medium was prose, his writing appeared more musical, more lyrical and more poetic than many of those who set out to write poetry. His writing was in a class of its own, because he wrote out of a poetic mind though with grammatical limitations. Nigeria will never have another Tutuola. Were he to write today, he will never have written a book like The Palm-Wine Drinkard. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was a product of a phase in Nigerian literature that has passed. That phase can never come again and that is why The Palm-Wine Drinkard remains a classic (Weekend Concord,14 June 1997).

Tutuola never lacked detractors, especially at home where critics felt embarrassed by his innocence in the English language. But he remains the Nigerian man of letters who beat the path which is being followed by literary stars like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. No wonder Nigerians are debating on how best he should be feted. In a continent where only politicians (and to a little extent athletes) are honoured, the death of such people like Tutuola reminds us of how limited we are in our world-view. All the same, Tutuola will be remembered alongside Okot p’Bitek and others as the writer who bridged the gap between traditional story telling and a newly introduced Western literary tradition.

31/07/2020

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a novel set in pre-colonial Nigeria, before the arrival of the white settlers in Africa. The plot focusses on the central character, Okonkwo, through whom we can see the values and ideals of the traditional Igbo community. He wants above all to preserve the traditional way of life. The novel shows the destruction resulting from Okonkwo’s pride and inflexibility in the face of a changing community and way of life. Okonkwo’s stubbornness is his downfall, but his actions force others to question the dictates of their society.
Okonkwo’s Ibo society is already faltering due to internal flaws, so when the white missionaries arrive, the Ibo culture is easily threatened by the European one .
Although Achebe feels that Europe is largely responsible for what has happened to black African society, this novel shows a conflict in which both sides are partially to blame.
Things Fall Apart is one of the texts in which Achebe appropriately uses an African oral style as the events are set in a primary oral culture, that is, the Igbo society before and during the era of colonialism. Many aspects of the oral tradition come into play, but more pervasive is the use of proverbs. One literary critic, Berth Lindfors, has termed proverbs "the palm oil with which Achebe's words are eaten". The expression is borrowed from Achebe's Igbo people who have this saying: "Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."
Proverbs are central for the thematic and character development in Achebe's novels. They provide, as M. J. Herskovits says, the grammar of values' through which a hero's actions may be judged.
One of the central concerns in Things Fall Apart is the hero's struggle to attain and maintain his status among his people. He has risen from humble origins--from the son of a good-for-nothing flutist to a famous man whose deeds rest on solid personal achievements. His sport is wrestling; but wrestling is also a metaphor for his struggle to stay on top of the world. Okonkwo's tragic flow stems from his obsession with wrestling: he doesn't want anybody to think he is weak. For this reason he's brutal and goes overboard in challenging anybody or situation that might detract from his image as a macho man. He simply overreaches himself.
The best proverb that expresses this tragic flaw is that of wrestling one's chi. The proverb is best explained through a story inAchebe's novel, Arrow of God:

"Once there was a great wrestler whose back had never touched the ground. He wrestled from village to village until he had thrown every man in the world. Then he decided that he must go and wrestle in the land of the spirits, and become a champion there as well. He went, and beat every spirit that came forward. Some had seven heads, some ten; but he beat them all. His companion who sang his praise on the flute begged him to come away, but he would not. He pleaded with him but his ear was nailed up. Rather than go home, he gave a challenge to the spirits to bring out their best and strongest wrestler. They sent him his personal god, a little, wiry spirit who seized him with one hand and smashed him on the stony earth."
Okonkwo is likened to one who dared to wrestle with his chi. From the beginning, we get the allusion that his wrestling is that which will take him to the land of spirits, a fight which "…the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their clan engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights."

Later on Okonkwo violates the Week of Peace by beating his wife. "His enemies said his good fortune had gone to his head. They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy meal that he challenged his chi (to a wrestling duel."
But challenging his chi comes afterwards. Okonkwo's fortunes and fall are expressed in proverbs that deal with status and achievement.
“The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them”. Success comes to those who have worked and are therefore ready for it. (Compare: Chance favours the prepared mind--Louis Pasteur).
"If a child washed his hands he could eat with the elders."
"As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him."
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31/07/2020

MHUDI, by Sol(omon) T(hekiso) Plaatje, was written in 1919-20, but published in 1930. One of the earliest written novels in Africa, it easily gains the classic status. It is the first novel in English by a South African black; its author is viewed as the founding father of black literature as well as a pioneer freedom fighter against racism in South Africa. Plaatje was the first secretary of South African NATIVE National Congress, which later metamorphosed into African National Congress, now the ruling party in South Africa.
Why we rate it as an African classic:
1. It is has a very early skilful usage of the African oral narrative (example)
2. It is an elaborate defence of the positive traits of the African customs
3. A perceptive awareness of and built-in critique of his own use of language
4. A complex concentration of the novel around the idea of race relations and its major ‘pin-prick’ in South Africa—the land question
5. It has a fascinating view of history in the way it is presented almost unique in South African literature.
6. It deals extensively with one of the cataclysmic periods of African history: the Mfecane, Boer invasion and the white power consolidation in South Africa.

The Author
Sol Plaatje was born on 9 October 1876 in Orange Free State. He was missionary educated and therefore a child of two worlds: African and Western. He learnt the history and literature of his Sechuana people, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Romantic and Victorian poetry.
Living through the Anglo Boer War (1899 – 1902) and the voertrek, he became one of the founders of the Native National Congress in 1912, becoming its first secretary. A year later, the South African white parliament enacted a legislation which lay foundation for the segregation of 1948. The legislation practically dispossessed Africans of their land, drove them into reserves and forced them into becoming labourers on white farms. The Congress sent delegation to England to have the act repealed, but it was unsuccessful. Plaatje, who was one of the delegation, remained in England during the World War I to maintain pressure. He wrote Native Life in South Africa (1915), a scathing attack on the Land Act. A second delegation in 1919, in which Plaatje was a part, was equally futile.

Mhudi
During the period in England, Plaatje wrote, Mhudi, the first exile book—an important genre in SA. Mhudi was written almost simultaneously with Native, and so are complementary.
The Land Question
Mhudi can also be seen as a protest against the 1913 Native Land Act, which dispossessed Africans of their land rights. Plaatje also attacks the act in another book he authored almost at the same time: Native Life in South Africa.
The loss of land is one prominent theme in the novel. Land is the foundation upon which tribal life is built; to lose it is to lose that life itself. The land is given the first expose at the beginning as Eden-like. Mhudi’s people are deprived of their land by the Matabele; later by the whites.

Plaatje in Native Life in South Africa says: ‘The Voetrekkers was a gigantic plundering raid. They swept like a desolating pestilence through the land, blasting everything in their path, and pitilessly laughing at the ravages from which the native races have not yet recovered.’
The presentation of the white invasion as a ‘desolating pestilence’ is the same as the presentation of the Matabele in Mhudi, who are described as ‘continuing their march very much like a swarm of locusts’ (4).
Both the Matabele and whites levy taxes and give little in return and both have arbitrary systems of justice.
The horror visited on the Barolong (Bachauana) is expressed as the Matabele being impartial in their killing—they kill men, women and children alike; the whites on their part would enter into a war of extermination.
In Mhudi, Boers are received with hospitality and generosity and when they ask help from the Barolong and unify them with Griquas, they fight off the Matabele. But they hardly return this hospitality. They treat Ra-Thaga badly in their camp—throwing tantrums when he uses a vessel to drink water (95-6).
The Hottentot servants are treated savagely: ‘a grizzly old Boer…gave a Hottentot maid some thunder and lightning’ (95). While the Barolong have not yet been subjected to the Hottentot-kind of treatment, they are being on their way to becoming ‘Native servants’ whose backs will be lacerated with sjamboks. Mzilikasi uses a folktale about Zungu to predict the situation:
‘The Bechauana know not the story of Zungu of old…’ (147). The story of interbreeding a buffalo and a cow precedes it. Ref to exposition.

What hope does Plaatje offer?
The thrust of the novel is that when, like the Matabele and the whites, you oppress people long enough, the oppressed will eventually unite and overthrow their oppressors, in open conflict. Oppressors as Plaatje says, in Native Life, are always courting retribution.
Mhudi argues implicitly for unity against oppressive rulers. There is also hope symbolized in the women folk in the character of Mhudi. After being evicted from her home, she develops a resilience and independence which enables her to face lions and other dangers. She becomes ‘the cradle of her race’; her family is the new beginning of a people. She is friends with other virtuous women, like Queen Umnandi, wife of Mzilikazi, who will also start a new race of the Ndebele after their defeat by the Boers and allies; and Annetje, the Boer girl who is to be married by Phil Jay, the only good Boer in the hoek.
By bringing these characters and families together, Plaatje seems to suggest to a future in which the resilience of spirit will always triumph over human tragedies.

Language in Mhudi
Language in Mhudi is often Biblical and epical. Sol Plaaje was looking for equivalent English register for the dignity of events and characters in his book—indicating that a despised colonized people were comparable to any people (especially the pastoral Jews). The result is sometimes archaisms like: ‘native gallantry’, ‘bucolic girl’, ‘serried ranks’, and ‘an even set of ivories’.
However he also succeeds in adding local colour through images like, ‘lion’s hair looked just like the tops of the autumn grass,’ ‘as obstinate as gnu’; use of proverbs of a pastoral or hunting nature. His writing style, like the speech of Chief Maroka abounds in allegories and proverbial sayings, some traditional and others original.
There is also the use of A Sechauna folktale in Chapter 5 where Ra-Thaga holds a lion by the tail while Mhudi spears it. In the original, the one hunter flees leaving his companion to hold onto the tail overnight. But the twist is to bring out the bravery of Mhudi and contrast it with the cowardice of the hunter.
The novel itself can be seen as a South African folktale with the moral of unity, starting from the family and extending to all tribes, black and white.
Descriptions have some epic horror (17). The novel is sub-titled, An Epic of Native Life a Hundred Years Ago’. (Which Epic?)
The opening is Eden-like in quality and reminds us of Genesis; and the subsequent loss and search for it in Exodus. Mhudi echoes the Aenid in plot of a sack and wandering of its heroes, culminating in the founding of a new nation; it is therefore the first South African national epic. It has, like in God’s Bits of Wood and Two Thousand Seasons, an alliance of the people of S. Africa as seen in the communion of Mhudi, Umnandi and Annetje.
The novel is also a love story, in the manner of romances between Ra-Thaga and Mhudi, Umnandi and Mzilikazi and the white couple.


History
Plaatje’s view of history is that it begins before the coming of the Boers, when the Africans were busy creating their own history of conquest and invasions. The Great Trek of the 1820s is therefore the only the introduction of a third force to that of the Barolong and the Matabele.
The great historical canvas is that of the Mfecane—a period of widespread chaos in Southern Africa between 1815 and 1840. It far exceeds other movements and migrations and definitely dwarfs the Boer Great Trek.
It begins with Shaka’s creation of a militarized state in the Zulu kingdom. In 1821, a Zulu general, Mzilikazi of the Khumalo clan, after rebelling from Shaka, set up his kingdom and then moved northwards to modern-day Zimbabwe. In 1837, he passed across Tswana territory, pillaging and killing the people there.
The Boer claim that the land in the Orange area was empty of population and therefore liable for claim by them is contradicted by Plaatje. The European settlement therefore took place in a land settled by relatively large native population.
White South African writers have extolled the courage of the Voortrekkers. Plaatje deals with events from the African side, with people who were braver for they didn’t have the comforts of horse and gun. The Barolong (Bechauna) and Griqua help the Boers to drive off the Matabele to Rhodesia.
The wars are caused not by the inborn quarrelsomeness of savage and warlike tribes, but by the keen competition of two agricultural groups for the most fertile and best-watered stretches of land. The Boers come out as savages when they attack the African hunters and flog the Hottentot servants.
But Plaatje also does justice to the Boers by making Phil Jay a sympathetic character. He is a friend of Ra-Thaga, the protagonist, and his wife, Mhudi who describes him as ‘the one humane Boer she had ever found at the Hoek.’
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22/05/2019

I'll not miss this!