The African Novel: The Pen, the Cross and the Club

The African Novel: The Pen, the Cross and the ClubAuthor(s): Martin TuckerSource: Africa Today, Vol. 11, No. 10 (Dec., 1964), pp. 14-16Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184583 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 13:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Africa Today.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.28 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:23:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184583?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


African Novel/Three

the pen

the cross

and the club

Martin Tucker

Staniley, jouernalist ta nedl e.ploi e.

IN NOVELS ABOUT AFRICA, the journalist is a villain, the missionary a fool, and the police officer a de-

cent man caught in an inescapable tragedy. Occasion- ally, but less significantly, the police officer is cast in the familiar role of the brutal sadist. The most strik- ing conclusion suggested by a review of the literature is that two of these reputed forces of progress and enlightenment-religion and journalism-not only fail to bring understanding between individuals and groups but cause damage and despair. The police officer, on the other hand, an oath-taker to a supposed system of repression, creates the bridge on which understanding travels to a more profound level.

These roles are not confined to any one region of Africa and through their portraits over the past sixty years may be said to have assumed a tradition. The police officer is found in West Africa ("The Heart of the Matter," "The Loved Enemy," "The African Witch," "Riot"), East Africa ("The Day of the Monkey"), and South Africa ("Too Late the Phala- rope," "In a Province"). He is the man divided- within himself and outside himself. His inner conflicts are parallel to the social conflicts with which he finds himself inevitably, if reluctantly, engaged. A gentle soul, he cloaks his yearnings for tenderness in the efficient performance of his duties. Essentially he is a man of feeling who is forced to dispense with those feelings in order to continue in his social and bureau- cratic role. Often he is a man who appears to be afraid of success.

Scobie, in Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter," is perennially ignored in the matter of pro- motion. Far from feeling injustice at this situation, Scobie courts the masochistic denial of recognition. Scobie's passivity and seeming lack of ambition is manifested in all his roles of life. His marriage has evolved into a state of passionless contiguity with his wife; his extramarital affair produces a conflict which he solves by self-rejection and suicide. Yet Scobie comes closest in this book to caring about the African and to identifying with him. The other Englishmen and foreigners are too much involved in their petty affairs to think of the African as more than a servant or a nuisance. Scobie, however, has developed a friend- ship with his "native boy" Ali that wipes out the color bar by making it irrelevant in the sphere of human love. Ironically, Scobie is responsible for the murder of Ali and it is in the recognition of his guilt-personal and racial-that Scobie is able to rise out of his moral indifference.

The hero of Alan Paton's "Too Late the Phalarope" is another complex, gentle police officer who suffers a painful enlightenment as a result of yielding to his compassion. Like Scobie, Pieter is disinterested in the color question but he is forced to face it on the personal level. Pieter, an officer sworn to uphold the South African law of apartheid and to apprehend any- one who contravenes it, is dismissed from service and imprisoned for his act of miscegenation. Significantly, Paton chose a police officer to create the first small

14 AFRICA TODAY



break in the wall of human feeling between black and white.

If the police officer is often the hero of modern novels about Africa, the journalist is always the villain. Either he is a purposeful liar or a. fervent propagan- dist, but in both cases he causes great damage and mischief. English writers on Africa have exhibited this attitude toward journalists as early as John Buchan's "Prester John," in which a correspondent for the Times reported inaccurately nearly every inci- dent in the "Kaffir Rising," and where the repor-ter is described as a "picturesque historian." Even in the one novel by an Englishman, "Sea Never 'Dry,"- by Anthoniy Smith, in which African newspapers and newspapermen are treated sympathetically, the Afri- can journalist is admitted to be careless of facts. In general it may be said that the English, American, and African journalists are all tools of violence and misunderstanding in the novels about Africa in which they appear. More sympathy is extended to African journalists than to English and American reporters, but all newspapermen are treated as distorters of the fact.

In Smith's "Sea Never Dry" a West African newspaper is born, blooms, and dies. Although the paper is killed by a combination of libel suits, political oppo- sition, and lack of funds, it creates for its owners, employees, and readers a sense of exciting participa- tion in local and national events. This sense of par- ticipation is not achieved without exaggerating the facts: Smith's journalists see a news story as the means of a lively controversy and not as an objective reflection of the facts. This view is defended by one of the characters, who -is described by Smith: "Like many other journalists, he often stretched a good point so far-that:the facts no longer fitted it, and sev- eral of his remarks about Europeans had been over- stretched. But U-go,-who always tried to see the other side of things, knew that Daniel was right. In spite of the apparent altruism of Europeans in West Africa, in spite of the missionaries and the schools, and in spite of the desire to grant self-government to the Africans, the whites, who live along the Coast, have chalked up quite a lot against themselves in their time."

Another journalist who offers the same justification for his editorial use of the facts in a news story is Amusa Sango in "People of the City," by Cyrian Ekwensi, Nigeria's most prolific writer. Sango, in grief over the murder of a good friend by a Syrian, writes the news story of that murder as an editorial attack on the Syrian and Lebanese menace. Sango re- calls the fact that most of the wealth, especially that coming from retail trade, is in the hands of Syrians. When Sango is released from his job because of pres- sure from the Syrian groups in the city, he defends his attack on them i as truth. The significant fact, however, is not the-truth of Sango's statements, but the relevance and suitability of his remarks in a reputed newspaper story of the mulrder of a young man.

This tendency to see in every story, small or big, the means to editorialize on larger and more profound conditions is reflected throughout most novels in which African journalists enter the scene. English novelists writing on African journalists often reflect their shock at this behavior. John Wyllie in "Riot" presents a scathing portrait of Marcus Aurelius, the pseudonym of the West African journalist who spreads his lies and exaggerations in his propaganda campaign to rouse his countrymen to revolution against the "white imperialists." Mrs. Elspeth Huxley in "The Walled City" took her mission-educated Afri- can boy and showed his transition from a gentle, obedient character to a rabid nationalist urging violence. For the symbolic proof of the African's change Mrs. Huxley cast him in the role of a journalist who writes the newspaper story that results in the de- struction of the one possible equitable solution in a West African community. Carol Christian, an English resident in Nigeria, in "Into Strange Country" has her main character express these views on Nigerian newspapermen: "I saw that, with such nerve, he could only be a newspaperman" (page 27); "That's not reporting. . . . It's rabble-rousing, inciting to riot." (page 122) ; "Don't ever have a journalist for a brother-in-law, Ellen. We are so ashamed of some of the things he says." (page 112).

If English writers are shocked at the behavior of African journalists, African writers are more prone to "explain" the phenomenon as the legacy of Western imperialism. Sango in 'TPeople of the City" and Daniel in "Sea Never Dry" excuse their exaggerations as the price of decades of enslavement. The newspaper be- comes for the African the symbol of freedom-a pro- testant freedom.

That this fictional representation follows the facts of West African history and sociological fact is shown by Gustav Jahoda in his study of conditions in Ghana before its independence, "White Man" (London, 1961). On page 106 of his excellent, well-documented study, he says: "They [broadcasting and journalism] were deliberately and most effectively used to reduce the image of the European to life-size, and to enhance the African self-image correspondingly. If the African trumpet was sometimes blown in what appeared a rather loud and shrill manner, it is as well to pause before judging and to remember that the still small voice of European superiority had been heard whisper- ing for so long and so insistently, that its message had become deeply engraved in the minds of the listen- ers, and therefore a great effort was required to coun- teract it."

Like the journalist, the missionary in modern Afri- can novels is enthusiastic, but his enthusiasm poisons the environment. A large body of work by English, African, and South African writers sees the missionary as a fool wreaking damage wherever his best-in- tentions get a chance to display themselves. Curiously, the missionary comes off best in novels by Americans and about American missionaries. The missionary has

DECEMBER 1996644



also had apologists in three major English writers of the 20th century, Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, and Evelyn Waugh.

The tradition in fiction of attacking the missionary is at least sixty years old. One of the earliest modern influences was Mary Kingsley, whose books had a profound effect on the attitude of many writers. Miss Kingsley said that West African missionaries pro- duced "incalculable" evil, and that their influence led to the English policy of destroying native states. She also laid the blame for British military repression to the "exaggerated" reports of tribal cruelty and immor- ality written by missionaries in order to horrify the English public into subscribing to the government's policy of force. The English novelist, Marguerite Steen, in the introduction to her novel "Twilight on the Floods" (London, 1958), said that most readers believed Miss Kingsley's report in "West African Studies" (London, 1899) that the missionary's evan- gelical horror at the African scene was the prime cause of the full-scale Ashanti War (in what is now Ghana).

Miss Kingsley's attitude is paralleled by that ex- pressed by one of her contemporaries, Mary Gaunt, who in "Alone in West Africa," said, "Frankly my sympathies are not as a rule with the missionary, certainly not with the African missionary. I have not learned to understand spiritual misery, and of material misery there is none in Africa to be compared with the unutterable woe one meets at every turn in an English city." Missionaries,, were also attacked in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" in his ironic use of the word "pilgrims" to describe those bringing not enlightenment, but exploitation, to Africa, and in his description of Brussels as a "white-domed sepulchral city" where traders and missionaries began their trek to the heart of Africa. Even Olive Schreiner implied an attack on the missionary system for allowing her kindly German preacher in "The Story of an African Farm" to be destroyed so easily by his companions.

These are all early attacks on the missionary, and they concentrate mainly on the missionary as a dupe of the British government or of his own blind dogma. Richard Wright summed up the African's point of view toward this kind of missionary in "Black Power," a record of his tour through Ghana in the early 1950's: "The more I reflected upon the work of the missionary, the more stunned I became. They had, prodded by their own neurotic drives, waded in and wrecked an entire philosophy of existence of a people without replacing it, without even knowing what they had been doing. Racial pretensions had kept them from sharing intimately the lives of the people they had wanted to lift up. . . . What would happen when the native began to realize all of this clearly?"

The attack on missionaries in later novels centers on the unfinished state in which missionaries leave their African "charges." The mission-boy African in most of these novels idealizes his minister, and de- sires fervently to ftollow the peaceful, humble ways of

Christian teaching. But education brings to the Afri- can a sense of the wrongs he has suffered, including the hypocritical repressions of the Church. The Afri- can in a state of anger and rebellion turns on the missionary both personally and socially. Out of such materials the drama is made. Most novelists see the tragedy-that is, the inescapable rupture between teacher and student, older man and boy, the idealized figure and the adolescent-in terms of pity for the minister, but their sympathy is reserved for the Afri- can who must burn his bridges behind him before he can build stronger foundations underneath him.

Corresponding to this personal drama between white and black is the social drama. The mission-boy and the missionary are attacked by their neighbors for their attempts at coexistence. The strongest attack is found in novels by South Africans, who see the missionary as a mischievous sentimentalist, but the attack is not limited to that region of apartheid.

Missionaries have been defended, of course. The most famous example is Alan Paton's "Cry the Be- loved Country," but significantly the major figure of this novel has- been criticized as being too good, too Christian, too forgiving, and too soft to be true to the complexities of human behavior. Another example is Harry Bloom's Zulu Christian minister in "Episode" who tries to drown the black tide of hate in the native Location in a sea of Christian philosophy. Both these missionaries are African, however, rather than Euro- pean or white. The few white missionaries presented with any degree of heroism, minor though it be, are those depicted by American authors or in American characters; the Catholic emissary is also treated sympathetically by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. To sum up, then, although there are exceptions, the general portrait of the missionary in English novels about Africa is that of a confused, idealistic man often forced by circumstances into acting the fool. The missionary, through his sympathetic, Christian instruc- tion, provides the key to enlightened Western ideas of progress, but he himself has not yet crossed the threshhold of African allegiance. This is the unavoid- able conflict from which the tragedy of ruptured love springs, and in its depiction most novelists reveal their complex of reactions of sympathy, pity, and understanding.

(Cartographic Swindle, continued from p. 20) various and, geographically separated Bantu, peoples together in a united state can only bring the principle of separate freedom into discredit with the pioneers and only possible consummators of it in South Africa: the Nationalist Government and its supporters." This verbal fog can be paraphrased to read: "We are going to hold on to our 86.3 percent."

Mr. Hill's monograph is a concise and accurate introduction to the Bantustan policy. His tone is more good-humored than the present reviewer's, and his impartiality is worthy of an Assistant Director of the Institute of Race Relations.

16 ALFRICA TODAY



The African Novel: The Pen, the Cross and the Club

Documents

Transcript of The African Novel: The Pen, the Cross and the Club