NGUGI IN THE FREE STATE, SOUTH AFRICA

By DINEO MOKGOSI No matter how we look at it, Africa has come a long way from the days of near continental bondage to Europe, said Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o as he delivered the Africa Day Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) on Friday, May 28. “We celebrate Africa Day today in the context of over 60 years of Africa’s independence going to that of Morocco, Libya, Sudan and Ghana, all in the fifties to the present. “If the independence of Ghana is the more memorable in terms of its impact, it was because on the continent, it was first identifiably, unmistakably and unambiguously black nation to wrest independence from Europe,” Thiong’o said. He said Ghana was unique in that Kwame Nkrumah linked the independence of Ghana to that of the rest of the continent and had said Ghana’s uhuru was incomplete as long as the rest of the continent was not free. “In Nkrumah’s eyes the continent could not live with one part free and the other enslaved, a stance reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln, in a statement in the American civil war, that the nation could not endure half free and half enslaved. No leader of the already independent nation including nation building Liberia or the never colonized Ethiopia had ever linked the destiny of their country to that of the continent,” he said. He went on to say that Nkrumah and Nyerere assumed the integrity of the continent and took responsibility for Africa as a whole, a vision already assumed in the anthem Nkosi Sikelele Africa, whose lyrics and melody became the nearest thing to an African anthem. Thiong’o said despite Africa having the only two countries –South Africa and Libya- that have voluntarily given up a nuclear programme, Africa is still not accorded respect in terms of its position in the world as a major power play. “When NATO powers recently attacked and bombed Libya to submission, they were completely oblivious to the feeling and opinions of the African Union. It’s not a question of what one thinks of Kadafi; it’s the blatant almost arrogant disregard of the opinion of the AU, that stood out, in the unfolding drama enacted under the fig leaf cover of a United 4 nations resolutions, a situation not too dissimilar to the killing of Lumumba in the 1960’s. “Would this have happened if Africa had a united muscle to flex? Coincidence or not, the loudest drum beat for war came from France and Britain, both with a colonial and slave past, which means that their attitude to Africa is coloured by their experience of the past master-servant relationship to the continent,” Thiong’o said. He added that if ‘we’ want to know the standing of Africa in the world today, one does not need to question Africa’s seat in the security council or dramatic acts of military intervention but just to look at the attitudes towards blackness in Africa and the world today. “While others may bear the blame for this, Africa is also culpable in the negative standing of blackness in the world” Prof Thiong’o related his own experiences as a black writer having attended a conference for black writers at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda where many writers were often afraid to classify themselves as ‘black writers’. “When I came to see how African writing was often critiqued as lesser than or ‘good enough considering’,or that it was anthropology not literature, I begun to understand why some people would want to disclaim the label black or African, their way of clamoring to be judged by the same aesthetic criteria as any other writers. “I am aware that no writer sits down to see whether every word, sentence or image they put down is black enough; or to consciously erase the memory of experience that shaped the writer so that he or she can write like a writer. But there are moments when I want to stand on roof tops, tear off my clothes, and proclaim I am black writer, holding a banner with the words: I write primarily in an African language, Gikuyu; what of my fiction you now read in English is largely translation from the Gikuyu original. There are other moments when, even if I wanted to be just a writer, no drama of tearing off clothes and holding banner aloft, I am reminded of the fact of blackness: my blackness as a black writer,” the aging professor said. Prof Thiong’o related another story of racial intolerance directed towards him in America. One as a guest at a hotel wherein he was told to his face that the facility he was using was for “guests only” and the other incident occurred whilst in a queue at an ATM to withdraw money. Here, he was approached by a white man who demanded to go before him as he (Ngugi) was collecting a “welfare cheque”. Prof Thiong’o said it was the “absolute certainty” of these gentlemen that made him feel uneasy. “That self-certainty can condemn any one to early death. In that sense race would seem to trump class. The certainty is based on a negative profile of blackness taken so much for granted as normal that it no longer creates a doubt,” the Prof said He avowed that the perception and self-perception of blackness as negative is spread and intensified in the images of everyday; in the West, TV clips to illustrate famine, violent crimes and ethnic warfare, tend to draw from dark faces. “In commercials, TV dramas, in the cinema, one hardly ever sees a really dark person portraying beauty and positivity. A concession to blackness stops at various shades of light skin. No wonder this result in a knee jerk rejection of the African body,” he said. The professor said the negativity around blackness manifests itself in other ways such as where an African leader addresses a nation and for the sake of the ‘British and American’ ambassadors on the dais; they make the speech in English or French. This he said was because African leaders often associated European Languages with formality, dignity, serious discourse on the state of the nation, and African Languages with coarse speech, abuse and ridicule. “This negative perception and self-perception has roots in the history of enslavement and colonization. “The biggest sin, then, is not that certain groups of white people, and even the West as a whole, may have a negative view of blackness embedded in their psyche, the real sin is that the black bourgeoisie in Africa and the world should contribute to that negativity and even embrace it by becoming participants or shareholders in a multibillion industry built on black negativity. If it was a case of a few social foibles here and there, it would not matter, but in a post-colonial situation, the internalized negative view of the black body can have fatal consequences. “The images we have of each other, the images of self, the images we have of the world and history can often blind us not into seeing that reality,” he said. He said for Africa to heal, the African middleclass must give up the looting mentality inherited from the colonial era and political mercenary must give way to political visionary. He continued to say that Africa must rediscover and reconnect with Nkrumah’s dreams of a politically and economically united Africa, rooted in the working of people of Africa. “If we brought together the might of our African and global presence, there’s nothing that could stop Africa being an equal player in the globe. The world begins at home and home begins inside the castle of one’s skin,” said the Professor.