THE POLITICAL FORMS AND CULTURAL PROCESSES OF A PARTICULAR SOUTH AFRICAN EXILE . |
Emigration is the best school of dialectics. Refugees are - Bertolt Brecht, Refugee Dialogues . The historical form and the cultural texture of exile experience are determined by many interrelated and integrated factors and processes: the structure of the national history of noe's country; the ensemble of the complex components that constitute the texture of a national culture; the nature of the political forces which contest the shaping of a political state; and the form of the struggles, especially the class struggles, which periodize the phases and moments of national history as well as being its driving force. These determinants located internally within a national geographical space are interconnected to other determinants situated externally within the territory of international boundaries: whether one's national economy is subordinated to an external and dominant capitalist economy; whether one's national culture is autonomous and moves according to internal dynamics and contestations, or merely responds to political directivesformulated outside its national boundaries; whether the national destiny is forged through the collective will and effort of the people, or just imposed on the nation by external imperial forces; whether one's national language is totally integrated and organically linked to the national cultural fabric, or merely mimics international discourses and intellectual fashions like the present vogue of postmodernism. These are some of the determinants, concrete and multivocal, which shape the qualitative nature, political and cultural, of exile experience. It is also these determinants which mediate the differential forms of this experience: the lived experience of the exile of Alexander Herzen from the Czarism and the Absolutism of the Romanov House of the nineteenth-century Russia is different from the exile of Bertolt Brecht fleeing from Nazism and monopoly capitalism of the Third Reich, and as much and different from both, is the present exile of Ngugi wa Thiong'o resisting the neo-colonialism in, and fighting against the satellite status of, Kenya. The very designation of these names tells us that exile is an intellectual phenomenon , to be sure politically motivated, which hardly touches the inner essence of the masses of the people. The peasantrey and the working class live the same historical experience as refugees , which is qualitatively different from that of the petty-bourgeoisie. The logic of the historical experience of black South African exiles follows the same dialectic, i.e., it is a component part within this universalism. The particular uniqueness of South Africa is that it has been intellectual schools, whole artistic currents and cultural movements which have been forced into exile, and not merely individuals as intellectuals or artists. In this, the experience of South Africa in the twentieth-century is similar to the Polish exile experience of the nineteenth-century, in that it was the whole great Polish Romanticism which was scattered across the skies of Europe by Prussia, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had among themselves divided the Polish national state. The poetry of Mickiewicz and Norwid and the music of Chopin were a constant call for the national independence and national unification of the Polish nation. Many Polish intellectuals and artists searched for the independence of their nation in various European revolutions of the nineteenth-century. Some Polish soldiers even fought in Napoleon's counter-revolution against the Haitian revolution in search of their lost and disappeared nation. The great tragedy of the Polish nation in that century was the result of nationalism and chauvinism. Whereas the Polish intellectual and artistic emigration was a product of external factors, in South Africa the forced emigration of a cultural movement has been the outcome of internal national conflicts and dynamics of Apartheid (arguably the last authentic ideology of fascism and Nazism). It was a whole group of outstanding black writers and intellectuals, known in our South African literary and intellectual history as the Drum writers or the Sophiatown Renaissance, which was forced to emigrate just before and after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The cultural constellation of the Sophiatown Renaissance consisted of the following writers, some of whom are still alive and others have already passed away: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Henry Nxumalo, Arthur Maimane, Can Themba, Todd Matshikiza and Nat Nakasa. It also encompassed two photographers, one of them great: Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane. The African nightingale, Miriam Makeba, was alsopart of it. The unique result of the constellation of these writers, intellectuals and artists was that they exercised hegemony on the South African intellectual and cultural landscape. No artistic movement or school of intellectuals among South African whites could challenge it in its brilliance, range and depth. In mastery of the English language, these black writers had no peers among their white compatriots. For instance, Alan Paton cannot compare to Lewis Nkosi in command of the English language. In the writings of Can Themba the adjectval prose of Joseph Conrad and the rhetorical power of Hermann Melville are echoed. Nadine Gordimer has recently spoken of the Shakespearisms shimmering in Can Themba's prose. All the Sophiatown Renaissance writers were united in opposing and writing against the neo-fascist ideology and philosophy of Apartheid. Politically, they were struggling against internal-colonialism instituted by the Apartheid State. When the Apartheid State destroyed the Sophiatown Renaissance in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, the aim was not only to eradicate black hegemony in South African intellectual and artistic life, but also to eliminate the intellectual sustenance which the Sophiatown Renaissance had derived from the Harlem Renaissance. In destroying the Sophiatown Renaissance through its repressive state apparatuses, the Apartheid State, through its ideological state apparatuses, dialectically, brought about the fruition and the subsequent hegemony of the white Afrikaans 'Sestigers' writers. The cultural renascence of Afrikaans writers was mounted on the back and with the help of the repressive state apparatuses of Apartheid. It is this dialectic of destruction and construction that the Apartheid State instituted which informs the classical sadness of Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist . Today, in this book, Breytenbach rejects the legacy of the Sestigers writers, of which he was a member in the early 1960s with Andre Brink, Etienne Le Roux, and others. The white hegemony of the Sestigers writers was to be eliminated by the black explosion of the Soweto Rebellion of 1976. The autobiography and the short story form were the literary genres which exercised the imagination of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers while they were still living within the borders of South Africa. Two autobiographies, Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue and Modisane's Blame Me On History , are considered today to be African classics. Both of them were attempting to answer the perennial question which always arises in conditions of oppression: who am I to be visited by such terrible oppression and suffering! Mphahlele's aim in his autobiography was to deflect the racist ideology of Apartheid by meditating on the uniqueness and solidness of African traditions. On the other hand, Bloke Modisane"s quest was to counter-pull against the same racist ideology through celebrating the tremendous liveliness of African urban culture. The jazz music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, which had penetrated deeply into the black urban cultural fabric of South Africa, was used by Modisane as part of the cultural instruments of struggle against Apartheid. The predominance of the autobiographical form (including those of Alfred Hutchison, Todd Matshikiza and others) in our literary history in the 1950s was similar in importance to the hegemony exercised by this literary genre in black American or African-American cultural and literary relations of the nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century. The autobiographies Fredrick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson come to mind. To bring the names of these African-Americans is to come to the vry important historical and cultural point: that the South African Sophiatown Renaissance is simply unthinkable and inconceivable without the profound and great influence of the American Harlem Renaissance on it. In fact, we find echoed in Modisane's Blame Me On History Johnson's The Confessions of an Ex-Coloured Man, in as much as Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue is informed of Langston Hughes poetry. If in South Africa today the autobiographical form no longer has any historical legitimacy, this is because the people have taken up the instruments of warfare to storm the citadel of Apartheid. This logic, concerning the historicity of a particular literary genre in South Africa, can be drawn as a logical consequence or lesson to be derived from Houston Baker's brilliant formulations on the genealogical structure of African-American literary history from the slave narrative of Gustavus Vassa to the novel form of Ralph Ellison. The universalism of Houston Baker's theorizations make him an outstanding scholar. It is perhaps here to note the recent attack on Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates by Joyce A. Joyce In New Literary History as being misconceived and misplaced. The short story form was the other literary genre in which the Sophiatown Renaissance writers were excellent masters. The exemplary figure in this regard is Can Themba, nwhose literary production was small but a great well of brilliance. The very sucess of Themba's mastery of the English language and the command of a particular stream of its stylistics has brought about a controversy in our present literary history as to whether black South African writers should write only in the African languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho, etc.) in total disregard of the European languages, like English, which exercises hegemony in South Africa today. In another essay I have made mention of the fact that one of the great weaknesses of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers was in employing their formidable cosmopolitanism against their national literary traditions, especially those existant in the African languages. Can Themba mastered the English language to the point of losing the capacity to express himself in his mother tongue and in other African languages. It is this perhaps which has triggered the forthright condemnation of the Sophiatown Renaissance experience in our literary history as totally irrelevant and without historical basis by two colossal figures: Mazisi Kunene, the great Zulu poet, presently professor of African languages and literatures at UCLA; and Daniel P. Kunene brilliant scholar of African literatures in the African languages, presently a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Though both their critique is historically lrgitimate, their scornful dismissal of the Sophiatown Renaissance literary productivity is untenable in that the Drum writers were desperately in search of the possible forms of cultural unity of the black experience in the modern world: they were in search for universalism to counter-pose against the particularism of the Apartheid State. In fact, it was this belief in the historical consciousness of the possible cultural unity of the black experience all over the world that made it possible for them to survive in the foreign skies of exile after being scattered to the stormy winds by the repressive forces of Apartheid in 1960. Nevertheless, the indictments of the Kunenes against the Sophiatown Renaissance writers that they wrote in the English language against the African languages and that some of them were pandering to the superficiliaties of the mass urban culture has merit. Upon being exiled from South Africa, the Sophiatown Renaissance writers discovered a new literary genrw of literary criticism, through which they could express their search for the cultural unity of the black experience and through which they could critically evaluate their historical project. The central figures of this exile experience were Ezekiel Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi, who were to write two books of literary criticism, respectively The African Image and Home and Exile , which have become the emblems of the literary brilliance of this literary school. Invariably, for practically all the Sophiatown Renaissance writers in exile, the search for the cultural unity of the black experience meant first and foremost a celebration of the Harlem Renaissance which had fascinated them from a distance of thirty years, either through living there for short periods, as was the case with Lewis Nkosi, Nat Nakasa, Bloke Modisane and Ezekiel Mphahlele, or writing on it as in the instance of Ezekiel Mphahlele. Some of the exiled South African writers left Drum magazine to join forces with Ulli Beier's literary magazine, Black Orpheus , which unquestionably assisted in the emergence of Nigerian literary renascence with figures like Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark and Gabriel Okara. While Mphahlele moved to Nigeria, Bloke Modisane found a temporary home in an Ugandan brilliant literary review, which also assisted in the emergence of intellectual culture in East and Central Africa with figures like Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Ali Mazrui (Kenya), David Rubadiri (Malawi), Robert Serumaga (Uganda) and Christopher Okigbo (Nigeria). Rajat Neogy stewarded Transition towards finding and establishing modern African intellectual culture. Tragically, this great venture was shattered by African politics. What these different migrations show is that the Sophiatown Renaissance writers not only searched for the cultural unity of the black experience, but they actually for sometime lived and practised it . Unquestionably, this is a formidable achievement in the cultural politics of the black diaspora. Undoubtedly, the most important figure in the cultural politics of South African exile experience is Ezekiel Mphahlele. He is the central emblamatic of our (we black South Africans) tragic experience in exile. One of the first major essays by Mphahlele upon leaving South Africa in 1959 was on Langston Hughes, which was published in a 1960 issue of Black Orpheus . It was this essay which was to signal the deep-running interconnections between the Sophiatown Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance. Though the ostensible purpose of the essay was to celebrate the great uniqueness of the Harlem Renaissance as it found representation in the poetry of Langston Hughes, the real aim of the essay was an attempt to dislodge the Negritude Movement as the authentic heirs of the Harlem Renaissance. Though the ostensible purpose of the essay was to celebrate the great uniqueness of the Harlem Renaissance as it found representation in the poetry of Langston Hughes, the real aim of the essay was an attempt to dislodge the Negritude Movement as the true continuators of the Harlem Renaissance literary tradition. In undertones, Mphahlele was arguing for the position that only the Sophiatown Renaissance writers were the legitimate heirs of the Harlem Renaissance, because they (the Sophiatown Renaissance writers) were a cohesive national cultural movement like the Harlem Renaissance, also because in both of them jazz and dancing were important artistic forms incorporated into their respective movements, and thirdly because both of them were situated in the context of black struggle againsr rabid forms of racism. For Mphahlele, these three characteristic features were what united the cultural experiences of the Sophiatown Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance, supposedly in contrast and opposition to those informing the cultural fabric of the Negritude Movement. Subsequent to this essay, Mphahlele was to launch a massive attack on the Negritude school. Wole Soyinka followed likewise with the statement that a 'tiger does not need to proclaim its tigritude'. The real paradox here is why Mphahlele and Soyinka choose to ridicule the Negritude poetic movement on the one hand, while on the other hand as co-editors with Ulli Beier of Black Orpheus were praising its poetic brilliance. The intellectual failure of Ezekiel Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka was in critically evaluating the Negrutude Movement as a unifirm structure, whereas in reality it consisted of contradictory components: the historical poetics of Aime Cesaire and the anthropological biologism of Leopold Sedar Senghor. The important point is that Mphahlele lastingly signalled the importance of the Harlem Renaissance for the Sophiatown Renaissance. It is here perhaps that the awaited publication of Houston A. Baker's book, Modernisnism and the Harlem Renaissance , will make it possible for us to historically evaluate the political and cultural coordinates of the Sophiatown Renaissance in relation to the Harlem Renaissance. While Mphahlele was more interested in evaluating the cultural forms of the Harlem Renaissance in and of themselves, the younger colleagues of his who were also members of the Sophiatown Renaissance school, Lewis Nkosi in Home and Exile and Nat Nakasa in The World of Nat Nakasa , were more interested in tracing the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance in the writings of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. Lewis Nkosi is arguably the most brilliant literary critic in Africa today (presently is a professor of English at the University of Warsaw). The romantic view of Harlem he had had through the writings of the Harlem Renaissance writers destructed on his contact with the actual reality of the economic poverty of Harlem. It was this confrontation with the social and economic reality of Harlem that was to spell a future disaster of a segment of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers. Nkosi was to be leave United States for extended stays in Europe and in Africa. Nat Nakasa was not to be so fortunate. He committed suicide at the age of 27 in his beloved Harlem. The suicide of Nakasa in 1965 destroyed what could have been an interesting and illuminating cultural project indicating the solid interconnections between black American culture and black South African culture: this was the project commissioned by Life magazine for Peter Magubane, an outstanding photographer, and Nat Nakasa, to undertake a pictorial and essayistic study of the American South. That this would have been a true rendezvous with cultural destiny is indicated by the fact that the pictorial style evident in Walker Evans' photography of the black American cultural landscape and its people is continued today in Peter Magubane's great photography, capturing the disintegration of the Apartheid ideology. The interconnections between America and South Africa extend far beyond literary matters, encompassing also the fields of the performing arts, music, photography and others. The danger here has always been to guard against the cultural imperialism of white America. It may be that Ezekiel Mphahlele never fully recovered from the shock of Nat Nakasa's suicide, perhaps indicating to him the futulity of the exile experience, and thus compelling him to return to South Africa a decade later. Mphahlele has had some bitter experiences in Africa which have led him to turn his back on Africa. This is one of the colessal failures of Mphahlele. Being profoundly romantic in his cultural alignments, he has no understanding of political realism. Politics is very foreign to his constitutional being. Because of the tragedy of Apartheid politics in our troubled land, Mphahlele has been compelled, unconvincingly, to make repeated nods to politics. The fact of the matter is that he profoundly abhors and fears politics, whether the politics of liberation or the politics of reaction. For him, to be sure, such a distinction is mere sophistry. Mphahlele simply has no understanding of politics, and that should not be held against him for since his return to South Africa a decade ago has not compromised himself with the Apartheid State. In fact, he has sought to establish the cultural pathways of continuity from the Harlem Renaissance (because this intellectual event was the first and perhaps the greatest in twentieth-century black cultural history, only seriously rivaled by the Nigerian literary renaissance of the 1950s and the 1960s) throuigh the Negritude Movement and the Sophiatown Renaissance, touching on the cultural legacies of Black Orpheus , East African Journal and Transition , to the Staffrider generation of the 1970s. This is a great achievement on the part of Mphahlele and not more should be asked of him. Another colossal instance is Mazisi Kunene, our very great epic poet, who has no understanding of the cynicism sometimes prevalent in politics. Also politics is constitutionally foreign to his being. What Pertrach said of Boccaccio, can be equally said of Mazisi Kunene: 'that his poetry is a beacon of light in a completely dark age'. Ours in South Africa, politically speaking, is truly a dark one. One of the real tragedies of Apartheid has been to force outstanding literary luminaries to pretend they were professional politicians because of their opposition to this fascism, when in fact they had no sensibility whatsoever for politics. It is politically naive of some of us in exile to expect Mazisi Kunene, and bitterly expect him, to hold a high and consistent political line, when in fact he has no idea what politics is. What Kunene knows extremely well is to write great poetry; writing great poetry is also a part of the political struggle. Mazisi Kunene should not be saddled with things whose nature is beyond his comprehension. Since the editors of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women, especially Dr. Beverly Guy-Mitchell, have asked this author to 'write a personal essay about being a black South African living in exile', I sincerely hope the readers of this short sketch will excuse the intrusion of the personal factor in the rest of the essay. If the literary generation of Ezekiel Mphahlele's era embraced the culturalism of the Harlem Renaissance, then our literary generation has been in search of the political forms of Pan-Africanism. The emblamatic political figure of our generation was the great Steve Biko; not necessarily that some of us agreed with his political philosophy, though its momentary historical necessity was apparent to all of us. Our generation has had and continues to have divergent streams feeding its powerful historical movement. The Sophiatown Renaissance generation had or displayed a remarkably uniform voice, whatever the clashing of discordant tones within it. Our generation, that of the Staffrider literary starship (whose members include Njabulo S. Ndebele, Mbulelo Mzamane, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Essop Patel, Ahmed Patel, and many others), was fractured in the middle between those who were already in exile at the shreshold ushered in by the Soweto Rebellion of 1976, like this author, and those who were still at home. By and large, and only with slight modifications, it could be said that my generation which was still at home in 1976 was more concerned with the black nationalism of Pan-Africanism, whereas we outside the country were examining the Marxist strains of or within Pan-Africanism. For the people inside the country, that is the younger generation, they equated Pan-Africanism with George Padmode and Kwame Nkrumah, whereas we living under foreign skies (most in Britain and United States) Pan-Africanism was equated with C.L.R. James and W.E.B. DuBois. Whereas some of us already under the American sky were throwing our gazes toward the the East European political skies for cencrete forms of 'actually existing socialism', our generational compatriots at home were focussing their gazes on the legacy of the black power politics of Stokely Carmichael, the inspirational example of Malcolm X and the political strategy of George Jackson. It is clear from these distinctions and differentiations that, whereas we abroad were searching for a true philosophy of life and history through which we could defeat the ideological philosophy of Apartheid, those at home were seeking the political instruments of strategy through which to achieve the same aim. Most of us abroad, like the present author, were/are members of the African National Congress, whereas those at home were affiliated to the Black Consciousness Movement. After the great earthquake of 1976, there was a gravitational pull of many members of the Black Consciousness Movement to drift onto the landscape of the African National Congress. Many did drift toward that direction, but many equally resisted that pull. There was one great intellectual figure who was important to both to the internal and 'external' segments of the Staffrider literary and political generation ( Staffrider is a literary and cultural review which facilitated the emergence of black literary renascence in the 1970s, following the literary catastrophe consequent on the destruction of the Sophiatown Renaissance in the Sharpeville flames of 1960): that figure was Frantz Fanon. The central text for both segments was The Wretched of the Earth . What was fascinatingly different, was the poetical and sociological reading of this 'bible' of the African revolution. Whereas we under under the American sky read the book facing Africa, our compatiots, under the Apartheid skylines, read it facing black America. Invariably, we abroad read the chapter on 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' seeking answers to the tragedies then befalling Africa, which today seem to be at the point of overwhelming it, ranging from neo-colonialism, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation to military dictatorships, and last but not least, the failure of Pan-Africanism in its last great political figure of Kwame Nkrumah. To our compatriots at home, it was the chapter 'On Violence' which was crucial to them by indicating the historical necessity and the psychological cleansing effect of violence. It was this which made them throw their gazes at the American Black Panther Party, whose members were also reading the same chapter in the same sociological and poetical strain. The conjunctural meeting point between the then powerful political movements, the South African Black Consciousness Movement and the African-American Black Panther Party, still awaits a historically and encyclopeadically informed theoretical analysis. In support of our theses and formulations, which were then in the process of development, we abroad supplemented our political reading of 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' with Fanon's Studies in A Dying Colonialism. This sociological study of the Algerian Revolution helped us to understand the political mechanism of the African Revolution. The intellectual soldiers of the Black Consciousness Movement supplemented their reading 'On Violence' with Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, a book which examines the psycho-dynamics of black-white relations. (In an Introduction to the recent 1985 Polish translation of The Wretched of the Earth a poetical and sociological reading of Fanon is presented emphasising the possible diverse paths in the construction of socialism and the possible forms of freedom within socialism: see, Elzbieta Reklajtis, 'Przedmowa do Wydania Polskiego', w Frantz Fanon, Wyklety Lud Ziemi , Waszawa. An East German anthology of Fanon's writings excerpted from his four books and essays carries an Afterword which emphasises the supposed uniformity and similarity of socialism in all 'true' socialist states: see, Rainer Arnold, 'Nachword', Frantz Fanon, Das kolonisierte Ding wird Mensch: Ausgewahlte Schriften , Leipzig, 1985). After the Soweto Rebellion of 1976, both the internal and the external segnents of the Staffrider literary and political generation combined their perspectives in search of the authentic forms of socialism realizable under the guidance of Pan-Africanism. What all this makes clear is that political exile is a tragic intellectual phenomenon of an unending search for solutions and answers. The victory of the Mozambiquan and Angolan revolutions in 1975-76 compelled many of us South Africans to search for the possible synthesis between Marxism and Pan-Africanism. Fanon's classic text was used as a possible indtrument of mediation between these two historical processes: one a philosophy of history, the only authentic philosophy of history in the world today, and the other a political philosophy of the possible political unity of the African (black) world. The importance of Fanon lay in the fact that he had continuously insisted that in order to develop their nations, Third World countries should embrace the socialist system in opposition to the capitalist system. But Fanon appendixed a very important proviso that this choice of the socialisy system should not be according to the principles of socialism defined in other ages by other men. The Third World countries themselves would have ro re-discover these principles in accordance with the dialectic of their own particular national histories. This formulation made understable the synthesis of Castroism and Marxism in the Cuban Revolution, the synthesis between Marxism and Sandinismo being attempted in the Nicaraquan Revolution, and the synthesis between Maoism and Marxism realized in the Chinese Revolution. The historical relevance of Fanon's great book, The Wretched of the Earth , fell into disuse when it could not possibly facilitate an epistemological unity of Marxism and Pan-Africanism. The 'failure' of Fanon was related to Jean-Paul Sartre's failure to achieve a synthesis of Marxism and Existentialism (a philosophy of individual freedom) in the Critique of Dialectical Reason . Fanon's great political writings were put into serious doubt by the subsequent development of the Algerian Revolution after his death. The Revolution took a right-ward turn into disastrous political reaction, especially in its treatment of Algerian women, the very women, as Fanon makes clear in Studies of A Dying Colonialism , who practically carried the Revolution on their back. When the project of using Frantz Fanon as a mediation instrument collapsed, we encountered in our searches of the reasons for the collapse, two outstanding intellectual figures from the West Indies: George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both from Trinidad). Both were engaged in the epic struggle to disloge colonialism from Africa and bring about the emancipation of this great continent. Though neither of them was able to provide a conrete answer as to the difficulties involved in attempting a synthesis between Marxism and Pan-Africanism, their deep involvement in the great sicialist experiment of the twentieth-century, the construction of socialism in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, provided some few pointers. Initially, in contrast and in opposition to each other, Padmore by joining forces with Stalinism and James by aligning himself with Trotskyism, they both sought to deepen the reciprocity between historical materialism and the philosophy of African unity. When this proved unattainable at that particular historical moment, they responded differently: Padmore renounced Marxism in favour of Pan-Africanism, and James held the median ground between the two. Their intellectual integrity lay in the fact that they both were able to take other directions when they perceived that the fundamental interests of black people were at stake. The principle involved in both their actions was classically formulated by Aime Cesaire when he resigned from the French Communist Party in 1956: Cesaire stated that he joined the French Communist Party in order for the party to continue serving the interests of oppressed people, especially black people, and not in support of the demand of the Cimmunist Party that black people should serve it. It was on this fundamental principle that Richard Wright too felt complelled in the 1940s to disengage himself from the American Communist Party. George Padmore did not live long enough to see the consequences of pure unadulterated Pan-Africanism on the Ghanian state under the stewardship of the great Nkrumah. When Nkrumah recognized, too late for him to do anything practical about it, the tragic consequences into which he had put Ghana in the interests of Pan-Africanism, he abondened this philosophy for Marxism-Leninism. This reaction on his part was due to political despair rather than calm critical appraisal. It is perhaps in the voluminous writings of C.L.R. James that we may be able to fathom the mutual incomprehension between Marxism and Pan-Africanism. Upon completing our studies in America, a very few of us South Africans in exile returned to Africa in order to apply our acquired knowledge. As we were arriving in Africa, two senoir South African intellectuals, Makhosizwe Bernard Magubane, a Marxist sociologist-anthropologist, and Ezekiel Mphahlele, were leaving Africa on account of national chauvinism on the part of certain African countriesn to return to America. They both found Zambia no longer intellectually hospitable and left in bitter diasppointment. The present author returned back to Kenya where he had completed Secondary School (High School). In Kenya the present author confronted one of the central questions facing African intellectuals, artists and scholars: what are the authentic components of a natinal culture in Africa today. How can a national culture locate and find its true forms within a context of neo-colonialism? How can a popular national culture defeat the vulture settler culture, a settler culture which had exercised hegemony on African cultural landscape under the auspices of colonialism and imperial domination? These questions had been critically posed by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, before he was detained by the neo-colonial regime of the late Jomo Kenyatta. These enquiries led Ngugi to argue that an authentic popular national culture could only be articulated or conveted in an African language, which is not only organically located within the multifarious coordinates of a national culture, but also was understable to a majority of the population. This belated arrival at this position by Ngugi joins him to the positions of Mazisi Kunene and Daniel P. Kunene (no relation), sketched earlier in this essay. Whereas the two South Africans were naively oblivious of the question of cultural imperialism, Ngugi undertook to expose its mechanism of cultural domination. All these three intellectuals were supporting a position which had been argued for earlier by Obi Wali in 1962 at the historic Kampala English Conference convened by Mphahlele under the auspices of African Cultural Society. In opposition to Wali's contention that African literature should be written in the African languages were Mphahlele, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Modisane and many others. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who was one of those 'European-African' writers who poured scorn on Obi Wali, today writes novels in the Gikuyu language of Kenya. At the same time that Ngugi was shifting to his new philosophical and political position, his historical importance within African cultural and intellectual history was shifting: since the publication of The Petals of Blood in 1977, the importance of Ngugi as a novelist has diminished, if not totally disapperared, only to re-emerge in the early 1980s as a major cultural critic. Perhaps it is this that Fredric Jameson was trying to convey, in his recent essay theorizing the concept of Third World literature, when he said that whereas Sembene Ousmane is a great writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o is profoundly problematical. In many ways Ngugi has posed the most central problems concerning the nature of African (national) cultures. That he has not been able adequately to find solutions to the questions he himself has posed, does not in any way diminish his importance to Africa. The present writer was forced to leave Kenya (a neo-colonial regime) in late 1980 and take refuge in Poland (a socialist country), when it was discovered that he identified himself with the position being articulated by Ngugi. While in Poland the writer thought that he would never see Africa nor practically encounter black cultural forms again. The qualitative feel of the experience of exile had been different in Poland, as much as that in Kenya had been different from that in America, and the present exile life in West Berlin is different from that experienced in Poland. What combined them into a unity, other than the fact that they were experienced by a single person, was a search for the political and cultural solution to the enigma known as South Africa. It was in the midst of the profound crisis of socialist Poland in 1981, within hours after the declaration of the State of Emergency on December 13th, that the present author historical discovered the colossal figure of Amilcar Cabral, 'historically' because the present author had always been reading Cabral metaphysically rather than sociologically and poetically. (The writer also re-discovered Nadine Gordimer 'historically' at this moment of tremendous crisis: reading The Late Bourgeois World at the British Council Library and the essay "Living in the Interregnum" in the New York Review of Books at the American Library. The matter of Gordimer will be considered on another occasion). As will be remembered, the present writer had partly left for Poland in search for the authentic forms of 'actually existing socialism' (The other wish was to study at the Polish Academy of Film Art in Lodz, a great film school that had produced all Polish great directors from Andrzej Wajda through Krzysztof Zanussi to Krzysztof Kieslowski. Studying at this institution was truly momentous.) It cannot be doubted that the present writer traumatically encountered what he was searching for: he encounted in Poland in 1980 a nation that was in a state of anarchy, in 1981 it was in a state of nihilism, in 1982 it was in a state of atrophy, and in 1983 a socialist state practicising political repression. This experience traumatised our author: it did not disillusion him,though it did make him shed many illusions. The result was that he developed a passion for Poland while deepening his political convictions which he had learned from C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah. It was in this state of profound personal crisis that the present writer began reading Amilcar Cabral historically. The one fundamental lesson he drew from Cabral was the following: that the solution to Africa's dilemmas, logically too that for South Africa, was to be searched for in African history and not on the political landscapes and histories of different European countries (a direct confirmation of Fanon). This was a radical discovery of revolutionary truth. It was from this point that the present author seriously began to read the historical works of Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the late Cheikh Anta Diop, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. DuBois and many others. (In West Berlin the present author discovered the brilliant literary criticism of Houston A. Baker and Henry Louis Gates, especially the former's, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory .) But the experience of exile in Poland had other significances other than the conformation of Fanon's historical prescience. Besides the discovery of beautiful Polish women, there was also the task of discovering the treasures of Polish culture. These great Polish treasures extend wide and deep: ranging from the tremendous literary power of Bruno Schulz's novellas and stories to the early great cinema of Wojciech Has to the incomparable literary criticism of Artur Sandauer. These three names designate the persistently high contribution of the Jewish element to the solidness and resiliency of Polish culture even after the catastrophy which totally destroyed Yiddish culture in Poland. Other great names could be presented here which equally indicate the high summits of Polish culture: the consistently high quality of Andrzej Wajda's cinema; the haunting music of Penderecki; the anarchistic but great theater of Tadeusz Kantor. The formation of Polish culture, its complex pathways of development and evolution, and its present structural forms today: these were some of the issues which preoccupied the mind of the present author as he was actually imbibing and experiencing the textural feel and form of actually existing Polish socialism. From these experiences the present author posed to himself several questions which were not easily answerable: What are the components of a national culture in a context of multi-cultural communities? How are they synthesised and constituted to form a unified national culture? What is the effect of socialist experience on the texture of a national culture? How does a national culture in its encounter in a real sense with Marxism transform the latter or modify it, to be able to say that the qualitative nature of Marxism within Polish culture is different from the qualitative nature of Marxism within Cuban culture? Why does nationalism constantly defeat Marxism within the real fibres of a national culture, even if that state parrots that it is Marxist-Leninist, as it seems to have been the case in Poland? Why is the emotive power of nationalism much stronger than the intellectual power of Marxism? How does the experience of socialism affect the quality of linguistic grammar? What is the relationship between socialism and Marxism, when it is evident that in practically all actually existing socialist states the intellectual quality of Marxism is total mediocrity,except for the parroting of dead and irrelevant dogmas? If these were the questions posed to the author by Polish political landscape, he himself referred them to African and South African history. It is here that the totally superlative theorizations on African history present in Amilcar Cabral's writings took on their historical significance. It was and still is the intellectual belief of the present author that all the above questions could be adequately answered by forging a dialectical process or discursive unity between the writings of Cabral and the complex structure of African history. From this point on, the beckoning of Africa was becoming stronger and stronger until the present author re-entered 'Africanism', disembarking from 'Europeanism'. The House of Africanism in which this writer has found a home, hopefully a permanent home, is constructed on foundations laid by the Marxism of Cabral, DuBois, Fanon, James and Nkrumah. Presently, one of the most fascinating rooms to enter into painted in post-modernist colours, is that belonging to Houston A. Baker. Inside, Houston Baker is having a long discussion with his special guest, Fredric Jameson, on the question of the relation between modernism and postmodernism. The center of the discussion is on the postmodernist literary motifs, features and forms in the novels of Ishmael Reed and J. M. Coetzee. At the same time, Jameson is pointing in the direction of Italy: presumably, to the writings of Manfredo Tafuri, the historian of architecture, to the writings of Alberto Asa Rosa, the historian of literature, Guilio Carlo Argan, the historian of art. The contention of the argument between them is how to write a Marxist history of literature in postmodernist conditions. What all this indicates is that although in late 1987 the intellectual discussion is centered on other matters, the dialectic between Africanism and Marxism is still the central problematic of African history, as it has been throughout the whole African intellectual history of the twentieth-century. Hoe does one go deeper into Africanism by going deeper into Marxism? |