adminLiterature Rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Black writing and the search for authentic blackness
The process of decolonisation was not only in the conventional battle front. There’s no doubt that the rough road to African self-determination was also punctuated by intellectual militancy. The arrest of Ngugi Wa Thiongo for his decolonial writing not to mention the illicit circulation and the banishment of liberation literature substantiates that one of the fundamental projects of colonial domination was to arrest African reason.
This clearly outlines that the other essential mandate for Africa’s absolute liberation transition was the production of knowledge from the epistemic location of the oppressed espousing detachments from colonial mental subjugation — as a form of dehumanisation. Therefore, it has been expected of all African writers to use the pen to ascertain the sense of ‘being’ for Africans through their craft. This is because literature serves as an important socio-political epistemic accessory for reclaiming the continent’s aspirations for self-definition and challenging the hegemony and imperialism of knowledge.
The above assertion forms the foundation of what l term the search for “authentic Blackness” through literature. This assertion is also explained by Asante Molefi; “[…] when Africans speak for themselves and about themselves, the world will hear the authentic voice, and will be forced to come to terms with it in the long-run […]”. The position of this commentary draws its motivation from the feedback I got for the last instalment from several colleagues. Tswarelo Mothobi reciprocated:
“Can we not say Marechera defined the African he was as and that it then fits to be the definition of an African? […] Ubuntu does not call upon us to discard the individual; isn’t Ubuntu already an individual relationship? Marechera wasn’t in denial of the African Struggles. He was the embodiment of them! Isn’t that the nature of our politicians or the Africans we are today?
To be schooled in Western thought to practice an African being? Marechera was honest with oneself and as such, this struggle was him and it existed within him. Point to me an African who is not caught up in the entrapments of coloniality today. Marechera did point out that he was a writer and a hero at that.”
The inquisitive submission by Mothobi who is a scribe and a disciple of revolutionary intellectualism just as I am is very crucial in attempting to demythologize Marechera.
The “Zvavanhu” principle as an expression of authentic blackness.
However, Mothobi’s analysis has a more Eurocentric proclivity which selectively and deliberately misses that “Ubuntu” as a theory cannot be alien from African condition as the theory originates from Africa. Samkange and Samkange (1980:34) defines Ubuntu as “a philosophy that is the experience of thirty five thousand years of living in Africa. It is a philosophy that sets a premium on human relations”.
In Africa — where the cradle of Ubuntu traditionally resides, individuals belong to communities. One does not belong to him/herself. That is impossible. The individual belongs to others and the template for his conduct is prescribed by maxims of the “otherness” which categorically resides in the laws of nature and ideological systems set by one’s community. This is why Ubuntu advocates for selflessness. As clearly explained in the previous article:
“He (Marechera) is said to have been an “individualist” which may loosely refer to one who places the self before the rest and cares not about others. This attribute places Marechera in the periphery of the “I am because we are” African social order.
This description denies him the fundamental attribute of being African, since we are a people whose role is to replicate values of our society and not the self. This is proverbially echoed in Ndebele philosophy: “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”. This Ndebele adage simply explains that individual’s character is shaped by maxims of their society and likewise, Shona wisdom proclaims the same “Munhu, munhu pavanhu” (Mahomva 2016: 4).”
House of Hunger — a symbol of Africa’s intellectual poverty
However, the burden of coloniality is the major reason why Marechera experiences self and external conflict which I analysed as his personal phase of double consciousness. As such Professor (Flora Veit-Wild 1987:114) observes; “It would seem that Marechera finds himself always persecuted, endlessly pursued. With his unusually thin skin, he can only survive the constant, threatening blows of the outside world through the powerful and magical exorcism of the written word”. Moreover — what Mothobi defines as Marechera’s “struggle within” himself is a burden of battling with the coloniality of power which translates to the coloniality of knowledge:
“This makes his language strikingly immediate and intense, with exceptionally vivid imaginative power. The ‘power’ of his words, always highlighted by critics, can be taken quite literally: with the power of the word and of the imagination, he seeks to counter the manifestation of power (i.e. violence) which he meets in all its forms in his own life, and which he abhors and fears more than anything else (Flora Veit-Wild 1987:114) . “
This intense and vivid language also surfaces in Yvonne Vera’s writing. The same goes out to Tsitsi Dangaremngwa’s expression of the ‘Nervous Condition’ of womanhood to a point she openly declares that ‘She No-longer Weeps’. In light of the same aspiration for ontological restitution another radical feminist literary fire brand invites Africa to put together the ‘Shards’ of coloniality in search of liberated intellectualism replicated in Marechera’s passionate meditations in the House of Hunger — a symbol of our intellectual poverty:
“I acquired the ability to simply go on reading even while my father and mother were fighting, or while someone was being mugged just outside the house. I would simply just concentrate, knowing very well about the horrifying circumstances around me. A total escapism.”
However, Marechera’s meditative effort deserves appraisal as it indirectly summons the writer to reach out to the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ who are victims of Western supremacy:
“There were no conscious farewells to adolescence for the emptiness was deep-seated in the gut. We knew that before us lay another vast emptiness whose appetite for things living was at best wolfish. Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon. One’s mind became the grimy rooms, the dusty cobwebs in which the minute skeletons of one’s childhood were forever in the spidery grip that stretched out to include not only the very stones upon which one walked but also the stars which glittered vaguely upon the stench of our lives. Gut-rot, that was what one steadily became.”
Finding authentic blackness in Marechera’s work
Therefore, the need to solicit an Afrocentric interpretation of Marechera’s work becomes a central issue. This is because much of that has been done by outsiders of Africa who view Marechera as an “outsider” of the continent. This clearly explains that there was no model of […] distinguishing between European intellectual particularism and the universal functions that it was supposed to incarnate, given that European universalism had constructed its identity precisely through the cancellation of the logic of incarnation and, as a result, through the universalisation of its own particularism.
So, European imperialist expansion had to be presented in terms of a universal civilizing function, modernisation and so forth. The resistances of other cultures were, as a result, presented not as struggles between particular identities and cultures, but as part of an all-embracing and epochal struggle between universality and particularisms — he notion of people without history expressing precisely their incapacity to represent the universal (Layla, 1996: 24).
Beyond Eurocentric constructions of Marechera’s organic scholarship we need interpretations of his work from an Afrocentric epistemic location. Long-live the fight to escape the House of Hunger.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network — LAN.
Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected]
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