Pitfalls of ‘writing back’ crusade

Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
WRITING back is a noble project embraced by African literary giants such as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in an attempt to project Africa from the point of view of Africans after the denigration of colonial literature. In “writing back” to empire, Achebe and other African authors are informed by the fact that Europeans who first came into contact with Africa had a

condescending attitude which was used to justify colonialism and denigrate everything African.

Achebe and others felt duty bound to respond to the disgraceful fictional narratives by Europeans by reconstructing the real image of Africa’s past to the rest of world away from the “blind truths” contained in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe writes back in an attempt to discredit the “blind truths” surrounding time, language, and the indigenous societies of Africa and goes so far as to say that Western influence helped to cause the blind perspective on Africa. While Heart of Darkness portrays Africa as underdeveloped and primitive, Things Falls Apart depicts Africa as having complex societies by showing us the complex ways of life of the Igbo people in Nigeria.

Achebe depicts the complexity of the political, economic and social organisation through the Feast of the New Yam, held every year before harvest to honour the earth Goddess and ancestral spirits of the clan. Besides Achebe, Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy can also be classified as literature seeking to write back to empire in its depiction of the latent and apparent brutal and oppressive aspects of the French assimilation policy.

Houseboy’s constant use of African proverbs and idioms is indicative of his yearning to assert a sense of cultural pride, which colonialism regards as primitive and backward. Toundi, the main character in Houseboy, questions the whole essence of being called African French, and regrets having some kind of identity crisis. In other words, Toundi believes Africans must be proud of who they are as they will never be treated as equals by whites no matter how much they try to imitate the white man’s ways.

Another foremost critic of the colonial project and its negative residential effects in the post-colonial period is Kenyan author, Ngugi waThiong’o. In Weep Not Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), Ngugi exposes the sophisticated native religious culture and the consequences of the imposition of Christianity, a religion culturally alien to Kenya and Africa.
Writing back offers, therefore, not only possibilities for the former colonised but also the former colonisers, new meanings and counter discourses that come into play in our shared language.

Colonialism was presented as “the extension of civilisation,” which ideologically justified the self-ascribed superiority of the European Western world over the non-Western world.
Writing back forms the literature of anti-conquest narrative with the praxis being the “indigenous decolonisation” whereby writers explain, analyse, and transcend the personal and societal experiences of imperial subjugation of having endured the imposed identity of a colonial project. It is this kind of literature that replies to the mother country’s misrepresentation of Africa’s humanity.

While the writings of Achebe and other African authors are essential in putting the history of Africa into perspective, the literature has somewhat remained ambiguous in its ultimate goals.

In the case of Achebe, his main protagonists in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are tragic heroes consumed by their own abstinence and lack of rationale to adjust to a changing system.

In other words, one gets the impression that Achebe may have been advocating for the selective acceptance and application of certain traits of Western culture brought about by colonialism.

Attractive as Achebe and other authors’ militant exhortation, there are inherent elements of ambiguity, which could defeat the very purpose of his novels to restore the dignity of the African. In his attempt to praise African culture, Achebe glosses over the fact that African history is full of narratives of betrayal and collusion on the part of African elders and chiefs.