LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Gregory Johnson
09 June 2003

Expectations & Realizations,

and

The Motivations of Chinua Achebe

Initial thoughts and expectations about a course entitled “Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature” can be quite smaller than the subject’s largeness.  Being guilty of having harbored diminutive expectations, I am proof of how efficiently a chosen set of words can mislead the audience.  My conjured images were limited to those that addressed the early American experience, or, more specifically, the period following the break up with—and the subsequent ambivalent longing for—Europe and all things European; i.e., its comforts, refinements, and embodiments.  So this is yet another period of America’s literary history being granted a course-length worth of study?  Interesting, yes, but annoying nonetheless.  The idea of Early American angst expressed in literature, which certainly is a valid discourse worthy of infinite study, seemed tiring and, for me, redundant, having already had much study in this period of American Literature.  While I appreciate the category in its totality, my interest in American Literature does not usually regress beyond the early twentieth century.  So imagine my relief upon scanning the course description and learning that this course encompassed a far larger scope than my imagination had forecasted.  The course description draped a new life over the ponderous title; its name then conjured images of the human condition as affected by acts committed in the world beyond our shores.  To study literature developed by capable authors directly exposed to the colonized world—where people have been suppressed by every meaning of the word—is a grander, nobler endeavor than studying the travails of those who voluntarily displaced themselves in the new world. 

And to further that thought, studying literature developed by the colonizer and the colonized gives valuable insight into the hearts and minds of both parties.  What the reader gets by studying texts from the conquerors and the conquered is then not only history (what happened) but also literature—what could (or should) have happened.   And it is literature that provides us, through discourse, the medium to formulate, address and ponder pertinent questions and hypotheses concerning colonization, since the answer as to whether or not colonization was natural or inevitable will never be successfully supplied.  What we know for sure is that colonization did occur and, as a result, the imprint of the colonizer has undoubtedly affected the lives of the colonized. 

In bringing their idea of civilization to Africa, the Europeans closed every gate that the Africans could have possibly used to thwart suppression.  Christianity replaced every degree of indigenous religion that had inhabited the land.  Governments, too, were obliterated, and the Africans quickly found themselves herded into a system of rule that penalized them beyond their reasonable comprehensions.  Rituals they had practiced for ages now landed them in prison.  Imagine the surprise of the tribesmen when the law-enforcing commissioners rolled into Ibo-land on the heels of the seemingly benevolent missionaries.  It must have hit like a second shock wave.  In comes the white man, with talk of there being a God, one bigger than all of those in their foolish African beliefs combined.  Then they, the white men, display no interest in understanding tribal language customs or culture.  And not only are these white men not going to get along with you, they are going to imprison you for living your life, for continuing your tribal ways, the only life you know, the ways of your father and forefathers.   Surely this effort required great orchestration, for human do not naturally yield to domination.  It must have happened much like Achebe describes in chapter 23 of Things Fall Apart.  The narrator says that the men of Umuofia are summoned to courthouse and are received politely by the District Commissioner.  But instead of an honest dialogue, the men were ambushed and handcuffed.   “It all happened so quickly that the .. men did not see it coming.  There was only a brief scuffle, too brief even to allow the drawing of a sheathed matchet” (137).  After three days of starvation and depravation, the men of Umuofia give in to their captors.  Figuratively speaking, the tribes of Africa were overtaken just as quickly.  This scenario expanded—one ambush at a time, over and over—until the umbrella of colonization was fully deployed.  And, summarily, the Africans’ culture, value system and traditions were systematically eroded away.  European education installed the white man’s value systems and beliefs into the Africans.  And every British lesson carried an underlying message: everything you Africans are, and everything that you have ever practiced and believed, qualifies you as heathen.  Whether or not the Europeans believed this argument wholeheartedly or blindly practiced it for expediency is open to endless discourse.  The end result remains and stands: they committed unnecessary acts of tyranny while forcing colonization upon the Africans. 

Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, attempts to expose the hidden motivations of the so-called “colonists.”   When Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, says, “They were no colonists; they were conquerors…” the author allows both colonizers and the colonized to see inside what must have existed in the hearts of some Europeans during the turbulent years.  Therefore, by way of writing the book, Conrad does in fact initiate a dialogue.  And even though the hearts of Europe were not yet inclined to respond to this most essential layer of Conrad’s story, the seed was planted.  The flame of dialogue had been lit.  And as it swelled, so did the level of response to the novel.

Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart responds directly to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  But Achebe’s response came late, years after his first contact with Heart of Darkness.  Achebe was born in Nigeria, and while being indoctrinated into a British educational system, he had loved Conrad’s adventurous tale.  Imagine Achebe’s delight: a fine story told by a venerable writer, who made the gracious effort to use Nigeria as a setting.  But as Achebe furthered his education at the university in Nigeria, and then in London, his attitude towards Conrad’s novel became reversed.  Achebe’s awakening came when he realized that he had erroneously identified himself with the narrator, Marlow.  It occurred to Achebe that, as a black Nigerian, he could never be Marlow.  And if he was not the adventurous mariner who manned the deck of the boat, then he was indeed one of the grotesque masked savages standing on the riverbanks.  The fact that Achebe could have ever been so taken with Conrad’s tale that he aligned himself with Marlow is remarkable.  Obviously, the post-colonial educational system that nurtured Achebe gave him no sense of identity.  Furthermore, impressions made by his British education overshadowed whatever sense of history that his forefathers and community supplied.  The root of Achebe’s native African-identity got lost in his British books; he did not even own enough of his heritage to align or recognize the image of himself.  Instead, his love and familiarity with the English word had attuned his mental perspectives towards British values and sensibilities, not African.  The irony in this is that Achebe no longer possessed, or “owned,” the most prevalent and fundamental quality that defined him most—his African heritage.  Post-colonial education had totally annihilated his history and true identity.  And to ensure their success in doing so, the colonizers allowed no alternative educational system to coexist.  So even in gaining an education Achebe found the Africans delivered, again, into an inescapable trap. 

And, like Achebe, those born into colonization suffered all the more. Only remnants of the pre-colonial Ibo way of life remained, and most of what lived did so only by way of oral storytelling.  Certainly, no Ibo government or politics or religion was allowed to exist to any meaningful degree.   It is important to exclaim and remember that Achebe was born in 1930, in Nigeria.  His fore parents were mission-school teachers and among the earliest to convert to Christianity in his community.  In a web article www.northern.edu/hastingw/achebe.htm, we learn that Achebe’s forefathers, as far back as his father’s grandfather, had expressed tolerance towards the Christian missionaries (1).   These occurrences are reminiscent of Nwoye, who, as Dale Marie Taylor’s dialogue on the course website reminds us, was “lured by the poetics of English” and “wanted to learn to read and write.”  Perhaps in presenting this aspect of Nwoye’s character Achebe was giving a nod to his own attitude, and to that of his forefathers.  And if not, it remains reasonable to deduce that the acceptance enacted by his forefathers is a personal point of conflict and contention ambivalence for Achebe.  The road he followed was first chosen by his fore parents, so perhaps Achebe fell onto his path by default alone.  While growing up, he had no reason to question the British methods and theories put before him.  And after four generations of colonization, there was little or no African rock remaining for young Chinua to wash or break his European theories against.  But still, Achebe arrives.  And when he does the one major vantage point he has is that of colonial hindsight.  When his seminal novel was published in 1958, Nigeria was still under colonial rule.  By this period, the after shocks of colonization were had come to fruition.   And while Conrad could only guess about colonization’s shock wave, Achebe lived in its wake directly. 

Still, Conrad maintains a certain advantage of his own.  Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, which places him much closer to the crux of the colonial wheel as it rolled through Africa.  Achebe himself states in the article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” of Conrad’s birth in 1857, that he arrived “the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my people in Nigeria” (260).  In this same article Achebe states, with rebellious conviction, that Conrad “condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth” (260).  Achebe then leaves no hint of ambiguity in his opinion of Conrad.  In the body of the same article, Achebe states “Conrad had a problem with niggers.” (260). 

Still, in light of Achebe’s convictions and assessments, does not the text Heart of Darkness force one to surmise that Conrad was indeed exercising a higher realm of conscious thought, one greater than that period’s idealized white thought, which was to mindlessly conquer and enslave everything non-white while fulfilling a ravenous, unquenchable appetite for everything new and promising under the heavens?  The question leads one to add ammunition to Conrad’s defense.  But Achebe makes a point when arguing that if Conrad were not racist then why was he vague in staking his claim?  But the argument concerning Conrad’s heart distracts from the larger issue at hand.  And why should we necessarily care whether or not Conrad, or any other singular human being, is a racist?  It is analogous to a murderer going on record and admitting that it takes a dim-hearted soul to perform a killing.  The murderer himself is not of worldwide importance.  But his words provide key insight into what society should be on the alert for in every heart.        

In my opinion, it is the pain of rejection and betrayal that causes Achebe to dismiss Conrad as racist.  But even this opinion is not my final answer.  Achebe does not state his position on Conrad foolishly or naively.  And the thought of Achebe willfully entangling himself in a dishonest diatribe, expressly to debunk one man—Joseph Conrad—is indeed preposterous.  So from where then does Achebe’s hypotheses spring?  In a 1989 article entitled “Hopes and Impediments,” Achebe describes how he became a writer, saying that “at the university I read some appalling novels about Africa … and decided that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well intentioned” (38).  Also, in a web article listed at www.northern.edu/hastingw/achebe.htm Achebe further addresses the source of his inspiration:

     When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp. . . fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories.

This excerpt suggests that Achebe’s rejection of Conrad and Heart and Darkness is closely akin to his own internal conflict.  And his conflict is a continuous wrestling match between two questions.  In one corner stands the question: How else could I (Achebe) have arrived at my present station without the influence of his British education?  In opposition to this is: What voice would I have if I had remained untouched on the riverbank? 

Ultimately, Achebe’s argument, and likely Conrad’s too, is that, in civilizing Africans, the most efficient exercise did not take place, nor was efficiency ever intended or given a chance.  The Europeans did not have to practice ruthless nihilism while introducing their idea of civilization to the Africans, but they did.  And the subject of whether their unsympathetic manner was due to greed, self-aggrandizement or human wickedness is a subject of discourse for the ages.