An African Cultural Modernity:
Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonization Author: Biodun Jeyifo
Socialism and Democracy, Volume 21, Issue 3 November 2007 ,
pages 125 - 141
Some recurrent themes on the challenges of an
African cultural modernity I start with the contention that if we are to derive much-needed
illumination from the literature and critical thought of Africa of
the last half a century with regard to the profound crises
engendered by arrested decolonization in the postindependence
period, three recurrent, closely related themes on the problem of
modernization and modernity in the continent ought to engage our
serious attention. I wish to frame my reflections here around a
synoptic review of these three themes.
The first theme involves a deep sense of perplexity with regard to
all available cognitive or explanatory models and paradigms,
precolonial, colonial and postcolonial. Indeed, this perplexity is
so deep, so profound that it amounts to nothing less than an
epistemic impasse. Sometimes, this theme is rendered in literary
criticism of the conventional kind in the simplistic and distortive
framework of a culture clash between Africa and the West, tradition
and modernity, the old and the new, the indigenous and the alien.
Soyinka, among others, has confronted this critical reductionism
with one of its most devastating rebuttals.1 A much more resonant
articulation of this theme of epistemic impasse is suggested by both
the title and the narrative of Achebe's classic novel, Things Fall
Apart, especially in its exploration in depth of the forcible
transition of Umuofia, standing metonymically for all of precolonial
Africa, into a historical space which seems to make invalid all pre-
existing cognitive systems, all paradigms for making confounding or
traumatic experiences comprehensible or negotiable.
This theme is often apprehended in the larger imaginative topography
of anomie, spiritual or psychological. However, what I am
emphasizing here are the specifically epistemic dimensions of the
theme. Thus the narration of the collapse of all the identity-
forming and socially cementing institutions of Umuofia in Things
Fall Apart is underscored by the simultaneous telescoping and
fragmenting of vast temporalities and synchronicities of precolonial
experience. It is this particular form of the disintegration of the
institutional matrices which organise and shape cognition which is
conveyed by the Yeatsian/Achebean image of the center which can no
longer hold. In other words, beside the collapse of ordered
practices and values of kinship, identity and community, it is the
terror of losing one's cognitive moorings and having little to shape
the fashioning of new and viable markers or paradigms to make
experience meaningful that leads to the deep historical melancholia
at the end of the novel.
Of the many texts in the corpus of modern African writing which have
given a compelling, mature exploration of this theme of epistemic
impasse or terminus, we may point to the exemplary cases of
Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests, Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not
Yet Born and Fragments, Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure,
Bessie Head's A Question of Power, and Dambudzo Marechera's House of
Hunger and Black Sunlight. In these texts we encounter protagonists,
characters and imaginative lifeworlds in which "old," hitherto
stable meanings, codes, inscriptions and significations no longer
suffice to make experience easily or reassuringly cognizable, at the
same time that "new" syntheses can only very dimly be perceived if
at all.
It is important, I believe, to draw attention to one often ignored
but crucial aspect of this theme of epistemic, cognitive crisis and
its corresponding historical melancholia: its initial articulation
literally preceded the attainment of formal independence, indeed
coincided with the inception of the movement toward decolonization.
Moreover, in many notable cases, the imaginative landscape of the
literary expression of this theme involves a retrospective
projection into both precolonial, precapitalist African social
formations and the forcibly imposed disarticulations of colonial
capitalism. I believe it is important to recall this point if only
to underscore the fact that this theme of epistemic impasse did not
emerge, as many critics seem to think, with "postcolonial
disillusionment."2
The second theme - which I designate radical alterity and hegemony -
is perhaps more overtly political; it entails two distinct but
closely interlocking ideas. On one side is the idea that in the
modern world and more specifically the global order of late
capitalism, very powerful, almost insuperable external forces and
interests are ranged against Africa and African peoples and
societies; on the other side is the idea that these mostly Western
foreign interests and forces are so alien to our cultures and
societies as to constitute, compositely, a difference that is
radically incommensurable to Africa. It is on the basis of the
convergence of these two ideas that we should look for a deeper
resonance of this theme of radical alterity and hegemony beyond its
normative inscription in our critical discourse as economic and
political imperialism against Africa. In the deeper articulations of
this theme in African literature and critical discourse, the
putative difference between the cultural and civilizational
ensembles of Africa and the West are reified in the form of
difference made so incommensurable as to be endlessly inimical and
threatening.
Among the literary works which have explored this theme at some
length and with imaginative force are Achebe's Arrow of God,
Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two
Thousad Seasons, and Yambo Ouloguem's Bound to Violence. It might be
useful to remark here that Negritude was, in its classical phase,
indeed initially an ideological, perhaps doctrinal codification of
this theme of the radically incommensurable alterity of the West to
Africa.3 Furthermore, most of the varieties of the vigorously
revisionary "nativism" of recent critical discourse, as in the
notable cases of Chinweizu and Armah, correspond to a sort of post-
Negritude consolidation of this theme.4 I would thus argue that this
theme, conceived as a set of dispersed tropes or "idiologemes" in
contemporary African critical discourse, occupies a deep structure
of the political unconscious of the modern African nationalist or
Pan-Africanist literary-cultural imagination.5
The third theme of our review of contemporary African thought
derives dialectically from the second and is indeed a refinement or
sublation of it.6 This theme I identify as that of culturalism. It
essentially entails the view that given the vastly unequal
technological, military and economic dimensions of the encounter of
colonized Africa with the colonizing West - indeed, on account of
this very factor of a massively disproportionate distribution of
power and advantage - "culture" constitutes the only real bulwark,
the last redoubt, the kernel of both effective resistance to the
West and neutralization of Africa's enormous disadvantage. In all
the varied formulations of this view, "culture" is recognized as
being the target of a massive Western onslaught; however, "culture"
is at the same time seen not only as the most resistant "front" but
as the very ground of resistance on all other "fronts," economic,
political, military, ideological. Thus, if this theme, as we have
noted, is a dialectical response to the reification of the presumed
incommensurable and inimical alterity of the West to Africa, it is a
response by way of a counter-reification: African "culture" is saved
by the very fact of its presumed absolute difference from the West.
In varying formalistic and thematic expressions, with their
divergent ideological inflections, this idea animates such diverse
literary texts as Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards, Hampate Ba's The
Fortunes of Wangrin, Ebrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile, Okot p'Bitek's
Song of Lawino, Armah's The Healers and, again, Soyinka's Death and
the King's Horseman.
A changed historical ground It is important to recall these central themes of the literary-
critical discourse on cultural modernity and African societies
because, since the 1980s at least, a changed historical ground has
given them a new pertinence, a fresh lease of discursive life. In
other words, these themes are being discursively reinscribed, albeit
in greatly altered forms. We shall engage some of these at the end
of this essay, but first, a word on the changed historical ground.
Since the terms which define this have been extensively delineated
and analysed, only its barest outline will be given here, not in any
particular order, but as a composite profile.7
Perhaps the most important feature of this altered historical
terrain is the polarization of the global economic order into two
warring camps of "creditor nations" and "debtor nations." Expressed
differently, the old polarization between colonizers and colonized,
between empire and colony, has been transmuted into the far more
rarified and finessed antagonism between, as some now put it,
nations that "restructure" and those that "adjust." Africa is
solidly and almostly completely mired among
Effective control and initiative for the present and future
direction of the continent now lie with the creditor nations, acting
through institutional proxies like the IMF and the World Bank. This
spells virtual recolonization of the continent;
As most of the African states enter a kind of collective debt
peonage in which a laissez-faire market economy is imposed on them,
there is a much-touted view that both socialism and capitalism, as
paradigms of mobilization for economic and social progress, have
failed in the continent;
Given these factors which have reduced Africa's growth rate to
virtual nullity, or even stagnation and real decline, Africa is
effectively excluded from the current explosion of knowledge by the
technologization and computerization of information data and new
knowledges and techniques;
Given the massive reduction of social expenditure on the public
sectors of the African economies, there is now a virtual collapse of
higher education and high-level manpower training, with a
corresponding demoralization of educational personnel and other
professional groups;
With the enormous shrinkage of credit and investment capital which
accompany these interlocking developments, there is a monumental
reduction of the cost of reproduction of labor power and general
productive capacities; consequently there is every possibility that
competencies and capacities of the present generation, already
almost fatally depressed, will further deteriorate in the next
generation;
The greatest human cost is imposed: the immiseration and
pauperization of virtually all urban and rural producers and
toilers, especially women and children;
There occurs a perceivable weakening, or even implosion, of the
postcolonial state, given the disappearance of the extractable
surplus on which its apparatus, as well as its legitimacy, rests;
consequently, there seems to be an intensification of more
primordial bases of community, allegiance and sociality.
Given the fact that these patterns and developments are to be found
in virtually all the African states, with perhaps only South Africa
as a historic exception, the total import lies not in particular,
differentiated expressions in each African country, but rather in
the way in which these developments combine to homogenize, objectify
and reify the continent, the "race," as a weak, stagnating,
dependent and tragic zone of humanity. Given this factor, racial or
continental awareness becomes a sort of community of consciousness
of unassuageable suffering desperately in search of, in Walter
Benjamin's famous construct, messianic time.8
This condition is a fertile ground for a special kind of
reification, a special kind of hypostasis which generates and
naturalizes "racial explanations" in place of scrupulous attention
to the historically contingent crystallization and intensification
of unequal relationships between and within nations and peoples. In
its most extreme negative expression, this reification of "race" as
the ground of all explanatory or analytical paradigms indeed
engenders what I would describe as the mythicization and annulment
of history. Thus again today we confront the increasing
racialization of thought and culture about which Fanon had given
insightful warnings. In the cloudy light of this re-racialization of
thought, historical experience and social phenomena assume the
extremely mystifying appearance of new phantasms of the "white man"
or the "Black race."9
In such conditions, a truly radical African critical discourse calls
for intellectual vigilance, for sustained, unyielding and rigorous
acts of theoretical demythologization. Our reflections on Achebe,
Fanon and Cabral and the philosophy of decolonization thus hope to
establish a line of departure from the tendency toward the
reification and obfuscation which the current historical melancholia
all too easily engenders. What links these three writers, indeed, is
their efforts to demystify reification, not by ignoring it, but by
engaging it directly in both lucid and complex ways. In this regard,
it becomes important to uncover how, on the one hand, each of the
writers engages our three central themes and, on the other, how we
might read each of these engagements - Achebe's, Fanon's and
Cabral's - against one another, and against the more generalized
philosophy of decolonization which we deem a fundamental aspect of
contemporary intellectual culture.
Achebe: telos, progressivism, and de-mythologization To read Achebe's ideas on the genealogy and evolution of an African
cultural modernity, on the one hand, in his imaginative works and,
on the other, in his non-fictional essays, is to become acutely
conscious of the need for very discriminating, hermeneutically
flexible and open reading strategies. For scattered throughout
Achebe's fictional and non-fictional prose works are ideas which, at
one level might seem inconsistent and contradictory, but at another
level reveal deep structural, dialectical regularities and unities
(if it is remembered that the "unity" of the dialectic not only
admits, but consists of contradiction and tension).10 This calls for
careful elaboration.
Even a cursory reading of many of Achebe's fictional and non-
fictional prose works shows immediately that the themes of a radical
incommensurability of "Africa" and "Europe" and of the great
disproportion in power and historic advantage between them, are
explored extensively by him, and in quite unique representational
terms. Consider the sort of inscription of these themes that we find
in Achebe's novelistic masterpiece, Arrow of God,11 in the account
given by Winterbottom (the colonial District Officer) of a
particular episode in the military "pacification" of Umuaro:
I think I can say with all modesty that this change came after I had
gathered and publicly destroyed all firearms, except of course, this
collection here. You will be going there frequently on tour. If you
hear anyone talking about Otiji-Egbe, you know that they are talking
about me. Otiji-Egbe means "Breaker of Guns." I am even told that
all children born in that year belong to a new age-grade of the
Breaking of the Guns. (36-7)
The triumphalism of this account, which savours and re-enacts the
psychic violence it narrates, is all the more interesting in that it
seems to find complicity in the way in which the colonized have
ritualized and encoded the event in collective memory. Clearly,
Winterbottom intends a ritualization of the colonizer's military
superiority or invincibility in the ceremonial, public enactment of
the event. As some scholars have noted, this reveals the European
colonizers' consumate love of spectacle - of ceremonial display of
power and majesty - that played a crucual role in the consolidation
and stabilization of colonial rule in Africa and Asia.12 Thus, if
this is a recognizable part of the culture of colonialism, what is
extraordinary in Achebe's depiction is the seeming complicity, even
acquiescence, of the colonized in the ritualization of the
colonizer's military superiority. This seems to be even more pointed
in the following account of Ezeulu's ruminations on "book" and
writing as indices of a vast chasm in cultural achievement and
advantage between the "white man" and the "black man":
The messenger pointed in his direction and the other man followed
with his eye and saw Ezeulu. But he only nodded and continued to
write in his big book. When he finished what he was writing he
opened a connecting door and disappeared into another room. He did
not stay long there; when he came out again be beckoned at Ezeulu,
and showed him into the white man's presence. He too was writing,
but with his left hand. The first thought that came to Ezeulu on
seeing him was to wonder whether any black man ould ever achieve the
same mastery over book as to write it with the left hand. (173)
Since this is Ezeulu the proud priest who refuses to be the "white
man's warrant chief," it behoves us not to read this pasage in
isolation from other kinds, or orders, of narrative and
representation in the novel. For Ezeulu is not like the benighted
fireman on the riverboat in Conrad's Heart of Darkness who, thanks
to Conrad's totalizing and totalitarian exclusion of "native"
versions of "reality" other than his own narcissistic "European"
point of view,13 cannot have any conception of the riverboat's
engine-room boiler or furnace other than as a malevolent, fiery
spirit who must be constantly and endlessly appeased. Thus, even
though Ezeulu, from the conditioned gaze of an analphabetic, non-
literate culture, mystifies "book" and writing, in many other
respects, especially on the level of ethical and spiritual
reflectiveness and acceptance of moral responsibilitity, Ezeulu
considers himself, and aspects of his culture, superior to the
culture and vlues of the "white man." This is definitely the spirit
of his testimony against his own community of Umuaro in the "white
man's" court in which he makes a deposition against what he sees as
a "war of blame" by his own people against Okperi, a neighboring
community. In making that deposition, Ezeulu stands completely
alone, distanced as much from the land-grabbing, aggressive
opportunism of his own community as from the manipulative, divide-
and-dominate politicking of the white colonial administration. But
significantly, Ezeulu invokes ethical imperatives from his culture
in maintaining his lonely unpopular stand.
This line of interpretation allows us to see that the structure of
Achebe's representations and narratives on the historic encounter of
Europe and Africa is intricately dialectical and is shaped by
ambiguity and irony. At the very least, I identify three levels of
narratological, representational or ideological matrices, all deeply
interconnected. Here, I will attempt only a brief unravelling of
these matrices.
At one level, the superb realist logic of Achebe's narrative art
shows a deep intuitive grasp of objective, impersonal mediations and
determinations on the encounter of the colonizer and the colonized.
Moreover, this is matched by a rigorous fidelity to the exploration
of these processes and determinations in their own right and at that
level at which they are not only ultimately beyond the control of
either side, but cannot even be adequately perceived, let alone
understood and mastered. The most widely discussed of these is the
case of Oduche, Ezeulu's son who, at his father's behest, goes to
the "white man's" church and school in order to be his
father's "eyes and ears"; however, Oduche disappoints his father and
culture by the way that his formation as a newly colonized subject,
an unintended "évolué," exceeds his father's plans. This is the
level of the external, objective operation of the dialectic of
history and subjectivity, and Achebe's realist art is superbly
attentive to it.
At another level, that of interiority and personal volition, Achebe
does not cede individuals, their passions, anxieties,
eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses to total control and
determination by abstract, impersonal forces and processes. This is
perhaps a product both of his version of realism and his deep strain
of humanist sympathies. Thus, it should be remarked that Achebe
extends his understanding, and his solicitude and compassion, to
both the colonizer and the colonized, both the victims and the
perpetrators of reification. One instantiation of this is the total
portrait of Winterbottom, "the Breaker of Guns": even at the very
moment of glorying in his triumph as "Otiji-Ogbe," Breaker of Guns,
the vulnerable, wasting man behind the mythic lionization is deftly
shown to be succumbing to that classic of the wages or nemesis of
colonial "sin" - tropical fever - and the relentless human vitiation
lodged within the natural cycle of aging.
The most intricate, daunting level of these matrices of Achebe's
representations of historical experience concerns his infusion into
his characteristic realist detachment and irony passionate espousals
of particular causes and somewhat more limited communal, national
and even "racial" interests. Some of these are: the human worth and
fundamental dignity of the African precolonial past, with all its
imperfections and limitations;14 the cause of women and all
marginalized groups and classes;15 the vocation of writing in
particular and art in general in an increasingly philistine,
vulgarly materialistic African postcoloniality;16 the cause of
Biafra during the Nigerian civil war and of the Igbo people in the
skewed, explosively antagonistic "peace" of post-civil war
Nigeria;17 and the Pan-Africanist internationalism of an African
humanity which embraces the continent and the diaspora.18 This is
perhaps the greatest challenge to interpretation posed by Achebe's
fictional and non-fictional works: the intersection and convergence
in these works of realist detachment and objectivity, intuitive
grasp of the inner movement of complex mediations and
determinations, a broad, catholic humanist sympathy, and the
espousal of particularist causes.
It is against this complex tapestry of Achebe's narrative art, broad
moral and philosophical temper, and passionate political and
ideological enthusiams that one must, I believe, read what comes
across in his writings as the most recurrent, the most insistent,
and the most problematic theme on modernity and modernization: a
much too linear and teleological view of historical change, a much
too schematic division between "backwardness" and "progressiveness,"
between cultural immobilism and dynamism. I would like to examine
this issue briefly by juxtaposing three passages from different
fictional and non-fictional works of the Nigerian author.
The first passage, the earliest of our three examples, comes from
some fragmentary, non-fictional notes titled "Tourist Sketches"
published in 1962 which bore the subtitle "being part of an
unwritten travel book":
The Wachagga who inhabit the slopes of Kilimanjaro are today a very
progressive people. They are comparatively wealthy because they grow
coffee on the most modern cooperative lines. I am told that the
Wachagga used not to be very popular with the British
administration, especially with one particular Governor who did not
fancy natives in lounge suits.
The Masai their neighbours took one look at Western civilization and
turned their back on it; the Wachagga plunged in without taking a
look. They are always trying out new things. In the fifties they
decided to unite their 300,000 people under a paramount chief, and
chose as their first ruler Tom Marealle who was educated at the
London School of Economics. In 1960 they found him too ambitious and
replaced him with an elected President, Solomon Eliufo who had been
educated at Makerere and the United States and was one of Mr.
Nyerere's brightest ministers
Personally I think New Africa belongs to those who, like the
Wachagga, are ready to take in new ideas. Like all those with open
minds they will take in a lot of rubbish. They will certainly not be
a tourist attraction. But in the end life will favour those who come
to terms with it and not those who run away.19
Our second passage takes us back to Arrow of God in Winterbottom's
speech on the "breaking of guns." The echoes of the earlier text
on "Massais" and "Wachaggas" are unmistakable:
Those guns have a long and interesting history. The people of Okperi
and their neighbours Umuaro are great enemies. Or they were before I
came into the story. A big savage war had broken out between them
over a piece of land. This feud was made worse by the fact that
Okperi welcomed missionaries and government while Umuaro, on the
other hand, has remained backward. It was only in the last four or
five years that any kind of impression has been made there. (36)
Finally, a passage from Achebe's book of trenchant social criticism,
The Trouble with Nigeria, published in 1983. The quote is from an
essay titled "The Igbo Problem":
The origin of the national resentment of the Igbo is as old as
Nigeria and quite as complicated. But it can be summarized thus: The
Igbo culture being receptive to change, individualistic and highly
competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his
compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian
colonial society. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a
wary religion and unlike the Yoruba unhampered by traditional
hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing nor God nor man, was
custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the
white man's dispensation. And the Igbo did so with both hands.
Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical head-
start the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of
energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950.20
The implicit teleological, progressivist, quasi-Darwinian view in
these quotes on the topic of modernization and modernity is, as is
now very well known, a major aspect of the hegemonist ideology of
empire-building Europe in its global reach over the course of four
hundred years.21 It achieves one of its most "scientific"
expressions in W.W. Rostow's famous key text of 1960s bourgeois
sociology of development, Stages of Economic Growth.22 And as Byran
Turner has demonstrated in his important book, Marx and the End of
Orientalism, when applied to the so-called developing world, this
teleological, progressivist view of modernity fastens almost
exclusively on "internalist" or "culturalist" obstacles to
modernization and development.23 Thus this teleological
progressivism marks a point of theoretical and ideological weakness
in Achebe's ideas on culture and development, even though, as we
have seen, his works constitute a powerful critique of reification
and abstraction of "culture" from historical processes and the
competitive struggles between social groups, nations, peoples.
Alongside Achebe's teleological formulations, there has thus always
been something of an internal critique of them in his writings, and
some of his recent essays and fictional works have indeed deepened
and expanded on the more muted articulation of this critique in his
earlier writings.24 This is particularly true of the novel Anthills
of the Savannah25 and the collection of essays, Hopes and
Impediments. In these works we encounter a much more complex view
of "culture" as the kernel of resistance to both local and foreign
domination and as a germ of renewal and transformation. In other
words, we find a transcendence of the schematic, binary division of
history and experience in the teleological, progressivist
formulation of a radical separation and antagonism
between "stronger" and "weaker" peoples and social groups,
more "dynamic" and "static" cultures, the precolonial, precapitalist
past and the varied capitalisms of the present. In Anthills of the
Savannah, this exemplary transcendence of cultural or experiential
binarisms is symbolized by the novel's extraordinary closing
narrative and representational tropes: Elewa's new baby girl is
given a boy's name and during this emblematic enactment the men, as
traditional embodiments of "strength," initiative and decisiveness,
are noticeably in the background. And consider the radical critique
of, even the break with, teleological thought in the following
passage from the eloquent essay on culture and development, "What
Has Literature Got to Do with It":
In one sense [there is] a travelling away from [an] old self towards
a cosmopolitan, modern identity, while in another sense [there is a]
journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To
comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from it
such unparalleled inventiveness requires not mere technical flair
but the archaic energy, the perspective, the temperament of creation
myths and symbolism. It is in the very nature of creativity, in its
prodigious complexity and richness, that it will accommodate
paradoxes and ambiguities. But this, it seems, will always elude and
pose a problem for the uncreative, literal mind. The literal mind is
the one-track mind, the simplistic mind, the mind that cannot
comprehend that where one thing stands, another will stand beside
it - the mind (finally and alas!) which appears to dominate our
current thinking on Nigeria's need for technology.26
Fanon and Cabral: materialist hermeneutics and cultural theory In approaching the immensely crucial works of Fanon and Cabral, it
is perhaps useful to recall the extraordinary idea that we
extrapolated above from Achebe's essay, "What Has Literature Got to
Do With It?," which states that the problematic of modernization and
modernity for non-Western societies involves a Janus-faced embrace
of the past and the future: a moving outward and forward toward
technological mastery and cosmopolitan identity as well as a moving
inward and backward in time to repossess an archaic cultural energy
and creativity lodged in residual sediments derived from the
preindustrial, precapitalist and precolonial cultures. This notion
flies in the face of the dominant discourses on development and
modernity in African and Third World societies, which are all mostly
based on teleologically progressivist and evolutionist theories.
Sometimes, as in the case of a W.W. Rostow, these theories are quite
explicit in affirming that there are definite, sequential stages to
necessarily and progressively pass through in the forward march to
modernization, affirming in effect that one cannot skip intermediate
stages with impunity in order to arrive at real modernity. Mostly,
however, these theoretical suppositions on stagist evolutionism are
muted, implicit; nonetheless they run deep.
Most theorists and popularizing pundits of this school, Africans and
non-Africans alike, locate Africa at the earlier phases of this
teleological-evolutionist schema, thereby implying that the problems
and challenges of modernization and modernity in Africa are almost
insuperable on account of the presumed cultural provenance of
backwardness. If Achebe's formulation of the engine of modernity
facing forward and looking back at the same time is a powerful
metaphoric rebuttal of this telos, the writings of Fanon and Cabral
constitute important theoretical validation of this rebuttal.
Since most of Fanon's mature writings on cultural theory are in his
last three books, The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism and
Toward The African Revolution, it may be useful to raise the
question of how his first book, Black Skins, White Masks, a more
youthful, passionate, tortured self-analysis, relates to the later
works. The title is pertinent here: masks and phantoms of a black
subjectivity overdetermined by deep complexes of alienation and self-
hatred. In other words, the book was a courageous, unflinching,
brilliant look at the sources which generate, and the forms/shades
which express the "black man" as the absolute Other, the incarnation
of negativity and inferiority. Beyond this, the book also explored
how this phantasm became internalized, lived and acted out in
elaborate forms of schizophrenia (e.g. linguistic and psychosexual)
and how it could and should be terminated. What Fanon was thus later
able to do in his mature works came by way of deepening and
generalizing these insights of Black Skins, White Masks to wider
historical, political and ideological contexts implied, for
instance, in the title The Wretched of the Earth.
Indeed one can, I believe, plot a sort of movement in Fanon's
thought in general, and on cultural theory in particular, in the
ideas and achievements of these four titles: from the most concrete,
personal and confessional descent into subjetivity in Black Skins,
White Masks, through a more muted form of the searing, poetic prose
of the earlier book as he articulates a sort of manifesto and primer
of revolt (in the context of historic decolonization) in A Dying
Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth, to the essays of Toward
the African Revolution which, in a visionary, proleptic register,
look ahead beyond formal decolonization to the consolidation of the
momentum of emancipation. Thus, in Fanon's work we find an internal
dynamic which is rare not only in intellectual history in general
but also among revolutionary intellectuals: a trajectory which
progresses from the most intimate, personal, concrete and particular
expression of suffering and thwarted desire, to its generalization
and universalisation to encompass the truths of collective class,
national and racial oppressions of the most marginalized of a world
order under colonial and imperial domination. This is perhaps what
has, in the decades since his death, turned Fanon into the leading
theorist of national liberation as vehicle of revolutionary
transcendence of many forms of oppression in the developing world:
psycho-social and psyco-sexual alienation; economic and political
domination and marginalization; the usurpation of the right to self-
representation.
From the perspective of our own present reflections, perhaps the
most important lesson of Fanon's life and work is that, starting
from the most personal experience of racial negation, he made so
thorough a theoretical investigation of it as to link it with
virtually every other form and site of negation and oppression. And
he turned his searing demystification both on the oppressor and the
oppressed, both on arrogant, triumphalist Europe in its imperial
project and on Africa beaten down, exploited, inferiorized,
condemned to backwardness. By totally absorbing the insights of the
major Western intellectual currents of his day - structuralism,
phenomenology, psychoanalysis, linguistics and revolutionary
socialist theory - and by engaging thinkers like Hegel, Marx,
Sorrel, Adler and Lacan, he was extraordinarily penetrating on the
contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of Europe's finest ideas
and institutions - humanism, democracy, the secular, rationalist
legacy of the Enlightenment. Conversely, while he was deeply
sympathetic to the racialized, nationalist or culturalist turning
way from Europe, he was penetrating in his account of its dangers,
pitfalls, delusions and, ultimately, self-reification. In this
particular respect, the penetrating reach of his critique of
Negritude is perhaps still to be matched.
Above all else, Fanon demonstrated that successful, emancipatory
resistance is possible for oppressed "races," peoples, nations and
classes at whatever level of economic, psychological and historic
disadvantage and devastation by cultural imperialism; but he
insisted that this was possible only on the basis of avoiding the
reification both of the "racial" or "nationalist" self as
incarnation of virtue, and of the colonizing Other as the embodiment
of evil. This was the crux of Fanon's exposé on the dangers of
freezing the initial manicheanism of the culture of colonialism into
a permanent binarism; regrettably, this insight has been widely
ignored or misunderstood. Finally, Fanon cautioned the middle-class
African intellectual or writer to be aware of seductions and
inducements to moral vaccilations and ideological compromises which
are inherent in his or her being part of the colonized elite, part
of the pseudo-bourgeoisie whose role, according to Fanon, would in
all probability, be to betray the promise of independence, to arrest
or set back the forward motion of historical decolonization.
With the possible exception of the descent into a personal,
intensely subjective experience of racial alienation and its
theoretical generalization into a collective psychohistory of racial
disalienation, most of these themes of Fanon's mature writings are
present in Cabral's work. The important differences between the two
revolutionary thinkers pertain to points of emphasis and contexts of
theoretical reflections. Thus, in general, Cabral's writings are
less personal, less "confessional" than Fanon's; they are more
grounded in close, extensive and exacting analyses of African
societies and cultures in the context of what was perhaps the best
organized, most ideologically developed anti-colonial, anti-
imperialist national liberation struggle in Africa, namely that of
the former Portuguese colonies. And since Cabral was arguably the
greatest theoretician of that extraordinary anti-colonial, anti-
imperialist movement, what we have in his work by way of the
philosophy of decolonization, especially in the domain of cultural
theory, marks perhaps the highest point of theoretical elaboration
prior to the consolidation of recolonization in its present stage.
Given the many points of convergence between Fanon and Cabral, we
can only in the present context indicate, in summary fashion, the
main ideas of Cabral. Three closely connected ideas seem to be of
exceptional significance.
First, there is the notion that whatever the level of economic
development, whatever the material conditions of a particular
society, it is a bearer and creator of culture and thus capable of
self-regeneration and self-renewal, capable of mastery of techniques
and processes necessary for survival and social reproduction
relative to that society's level of development. We can see that
this point directly addresses the themes of the radical
incommensurability between Africa and the West and the great
disproportion in initiative, power and advantage between them.
Secondly, there is Cabral's thesis that, "without underestimating
the importance of positive contributions from the oppressor's
culture and other cultures," emancipation, progress, transformation
will come to Africa and other Third World societies only if they
return to the upward paths of the liberation of their productive
capacities, distorted or paralysed by colonialism's devaluation of
the culture of the colonized. Without the liberation of these
productive capacities, Cabral insists that no progress is possible.
Finally, there is Cabral's thesis on the multiform, complex,
asymetrical and contradictory nature of culture, especially in
Africa with regard to the historical heterogeneity of its peoples
and societies, and their violent disaggregation by colonial
capitalism. Indeed, it is perhaps best to bring our observations and
reflections in this essay to a close by quoting directly from Cabral
on this point:
In the specific conditions of our country - and we should say of
Africa - the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of
culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from the villages to the
towns, from one ethnic group to another, from the peasant to the
artisan or to the more or less assimilated indigenous intellectual,
from one social class to another, and even as we have said from
individual to individual within the same social category, there are
significant variations in the quantitative and qualitative levels of
culture For culture to play the important role which falls to it in
the framework of development of the liberation movement, the
movement must be able to conserve the positive cultural values of
every well-defined social group, of every category, and to achieve
the confluence of these values into the stream of struggle, giving
them a new dimension - the national dimension.27
Notes 1. This is contained in Soyinka's prefatory note to his play, Death
and the King's Horseman, London: Methuen, 1975. I should add that in
the context of this essay I will be using the terms "modernization"
and "modernity" interchangeably, even though they mean quite
different things and historical, cultural processes; "modernity,"
for instance, indicates a more complex, contradictory and elusive
concept than "modernization."
2. See Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, London:
Macmillan, 1989.
3. I define as "classical" Negritude most of Senghor's definitions
and elaborations on the subject up to the end of the 1950s. In this
phase, Negritude is defined primarily in its particularity, in its
difference and opposition to Europe. In the 1960s, and after formal
independence and the institutionalization of Negritude as a sort of
official ideology or cultural doctrine, we have what I call
a "revisionist" Negritude, which underplays particularism as Senghor
increasingly talks of the contribution of Negritude to
the "civilisation of the universal." See my "Negritude and Its
Discontents," forthcoming.
4. There are important differences between the "nativisms" of these
two writers. Armah tends to be far more erudite, more
philosophically grounded, while Chinweizu is more the polemicist and
gadfly to Eurocentrism. See Armah, "Masks and Marx: The Marxist
Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis," Présence
Africaine, 3rd Quarter, 1984, and Chinweizu, the introduction
titled "Redrawing the Map of African Literature" to his Voices from
20th Century Africa, London: Faber & Faber, 1988.
5. See, for the full-scale theoretical exposition of "idiologeme,"
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
6. Sublation is the act of canceling but also preserving in an
elevated and transformed manner as a moment in a dialectical process.
7. See, among other numerous titles on this subject, Ben Turok,
Africa: What Can Be Done? London: Zed Press, 1987; Kofi Buenor
Hadjor, Africa in an Era of Crisis, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
1990; and Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World,
London: Zed Press, 1985.
8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York:
Schocken Books, 1968, especially the chapter, "Theses on the
Philosophy of History."
9. The phrase "racialization of thought" was initially coined by
Frantz Fanon, in the chapter "The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness," in The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press,
1963.
10. On the concept of "contradiction" see, among others, Roy
Bhaskar, Dialectic, Materialism and Human Emancipation, London: New
Left Books, 1983, and Lucio Colletti, "Marxism and the Dialectic,"
New Left Review, No. 93, 1975.
11. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, New York: Doubleday, 1969. All page
references are to this edition and are indicated in parentheses in
the text of the essay.
12. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of
Tradition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
13. For a brilliant discussion of this point, see Edward
Said, "Intellectuals in the Postcolonial World," Salmagundi, No. 70-
71, Spring-Summer 1986.
14. See Chinua Achebe, "The Novelist as Teacher," in Morning Yet on
Creation Day, London: Heinemann, 1975.
15. I have explored this theme in Achebe's writings in two different
essays: "For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience and the Predicament of
Obierika," in Kunapipi, Special Issue in Celebration of Chinua
Achebe, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, and "Okonkwo and his Mother: Things
Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African
Postcolonial Discourse," in Callaloo, A Journal of Afro-American and
African Arts and Letters, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1993.
16. See Chinua Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction" in Hopes and
Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987, London: Heinemann, 1987.
17. See, among other statements and writings of Achebe on this
subject, "The African Writer and the Biafran Cause," in Morning Yet
on Creation Day (note 14), and "The Igbo Problem," in The Trouble
with Nigeria, Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1983.
18. On this subject, perhaps the most eloquent illustrations are
Achebe's famous encounters with James Baldwin, and his founding of
the journal African Commentary whose coverage encompassed both the
continent and the African diaspora.
19. Chinua Achebe, "Tourist Sketches," in Frances Ademola, ed.,
Reflections: Nigerian Prose and Verse, Lagos: African Universities
Press, 1962.
20. The Trouble with Nigeria (note 17), 46.
21. See Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, New York: Monthly Review Press,
1989.
22. W.W. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto, London: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
23. Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1978.
24. I have explored this in an essay, "Things Fall Apart: One
Marxist Exegesis," in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Approaches to Teaching
Things Fall Apart, MLA [Modern Languages Association], 1991.
25. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, London: Heinemann, 1988.
26. Hopes and Impediments (note 16), 110.
27. Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, London: Heinemann, 1980, 144-
5
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