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Question 3: With detailed reference to at least two African novels, write an informed essay on the subject: “The Tropes of Disability in African Prose Fiction”.
ABSTRACT
This essay examine some African novel’s social vision about the economic, political and material conditions of contemporary African society by centrally representing the trope of disability in some selected novels, to underscore the fact that the current African societies are impoverished and stratified amidst plenty. Emanating from the present social stratification are complications that breed the emergence of a class struggle between the aristocrats represented by the politicians, leaders and the proletariat represented by the disable, hence making disability in the fictional works a signifier of the debauchery and disillusionment in Africa.
The Trope of Disability in African Prose Fiction
Ayo Kehinde (2009) describes disability as a polysemic term that differs from one culture to
another culture. According to him, this claim is in line with that of Susan Whyte and Benedicte
Ingstad (1995) and Ato Quayson (1999) who opine that “any attempt to universalize the category
‘disabled’ runs into conceptual problems of the most fundamental sort” (5). Quayson and
Kehinde emphasize that both Susan Whyte and Benedicte Ingstad, however, categorize disability
into two: manifest physical disability and less manifest forms of disability. Manifest disability
has to do with physical and obvious disability for instance, leprosy and blindness, while less
manifest are virtually not visible and they include; insanity, deafness, and sometimes loss of
“manhood”. Erving Goffman (1963) and Quayson (1999) dwell perceptively on the cultural
dimension to disability which well in line with Whyte and Ingstad Quayson (1999) therefore sees
disability as both a cultural and physical problem, and he attempts a deconstruction of Robert
Murphy (1987) who claimed from personal experience that stereotypes on the disabled impact on
the psyches of the disabled themselves, generating problems with their self-esteem. It is this
same view that Frantz Fanon (1965) holds that the displacement of the people in Africa tends to
results to; “a mass of humanity. People of the shanty town, the horde of starving man, who are
uprooted from their tribe and class”.
By tropes of disability we mean disability used in a figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect.
It may be of interest to establish that in African fiction, according to (Quayson, 1999; Kehinde,
2011) there are three ways by which tropes of disability is presented: The first one is the
Lacanian conceptual apparatus for theorizing what happens in the encounter with the disabled;
the second one is the discursive ways in which the disabled people are figured or depicted or
characterized in Africa fiction; and the third one is the contextualization of disability
Building on the work of literary disability theorists Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Lennard
Davis, and David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder, Quayson argues that disability is unique in that it is
an "excessive sign." It demands interpretation whenever it appears but, at the same time, it often
functions to indicate meaning in other registers - those of race, class, gender, and so forth.
In the course of this book Quayson teaches us to be suspicious of the over-signification that
would ascribe metaphorical meaning to real disabilities, and one surely sees the ethical charge of
this suspicion. But something peculiar seems to happen around disability within the literary text:
the vehicle itself actually does what it is supposed to do and imputes some quality to the tenor.
Like disability (and indeed, like anything else), gender, race, and sexuality can be tropes.
Disability is such a powerful and irreducible signifier, in other words, that it winds up being
constitutive of textual elements at every conceivable turn, even in texts that are not ostensibly
about disability like Okphewo’s The Last Duty. Yet it resists easy interpretation or containment.
As Quayson writes, "we have to understand disability's resonance on a multiplicity of levels
simultaneously: disability acts as a threshold or focal point from which various vectors of the
text may be examined" (28). Fortunately, Quayson's close readings of Beckett's Molloy,
Morrison's Paradise and Sula, Soyinka's The Strong Breed and Madmen and Specialists, and
Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, clarify and confirm his conceptual arguments.
Therefore, Kehinde (2003) opine that what is often found in postcolonial writings about disabled
people is an uneasy relationship between the disabled and the able-bodied. There are also
attempts to link historical epochs with the conditions of disabled people. Ato Quayson’s
illuminative comments on the importance and status of disabled people in postcolonial literary
works are worth quoting at details at this juncture:
The presence of disabled people in post-colonial writing marks more than just the recognition of their obvious presence in the real
world of postcolonial existence and the fact that, in most cases , national economies woefully fail to take care of them. It means much more than that. It also marks the sense of a major problematic, which is nothing less than the difficult encounter with history itself…What is important to note, however, is that the encounter with the disabled in postcolonial writing is as much a struggle to transcend the nightmare of history (65-66).
However, Kehinde noted that in postcolonial and postmodern texts, thematic foci have shifted
from the centre to the hitherto marginalized plane of discourse (the margin) – the disabled, the
poor, the disempowered, the third world, etc. Thus, disability is no longer conceived in
postmodern/postcolonial texts as a marginal case as we have in the case of Aminata’s The
Beggars’ Strike.
This paper therefore examines the representation of disability in Aminata Sow Fall’s The
Beggars’ Strike, Sembene Ousmane’s Xala and Isidore Okphewo”s The Last Duty with regard to
the dissonant relationship between the archetypal disabled, and the able-bodied people in the
society. Karl Marx’ Marxism, most especially the distinction between the upper class and the
lower class, is very germane to this discourse. The human state of in the neo-colonial Africa is
characterized by antagonism, which results from all levels of alienation (i.e. economic, political,
psychological and physical etc). Sigmund Freud’s analysis of human unconscious is also relevant
as a frame work of this study. Beneath every human skin as Freud posited is the unconscious
which resides in the nervous system of the body. This unconscious is often equated with the
animalistic principle in humans that has wrecked so much havoc in humanity through hubristic
tendencies achieved through selfishness, dehumanization, man inhumanity to man among other
actions that debases the morality of other man. This tendency is articulated in the constant
conflict between the “have” and “have not” in the novels.
Tropes of disability in Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike, Isidore Okpewho’s The Last
Duty, and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala
As earlier argued disability as employed in African literature could only be understood when it
signify and explain certain situations in which it is use. The trope of disability covers wider and
different socio-cultural context and we tend to show that in this essay. As such, the three texts we
have selected for consideration are well founded on the springboard of disability. Human
disabilities explored in this work are physical, psychological and metaphorical.
Class struggle and dis/ability
This use of disability as metaphorical vehicle for the effects of the capitalist division of labour
characterizes an ethical thread in Marxist thought. In the same thought, Quayson endorsement of
“social model of disability” makes us understand that it is not the person, but rather society
which is disabled. This is a useful dialectical reversal. If we take the social model of disability in
the broadest sense, we might be led, circuitously, to Marx, and to identify capitalism with
disabled society in a new sense. It is only when social being is equated with labour power, with
the ability to perform economically productive work that disability can be understood from the
social angle. Balogun, P O support this view; “Socio-political structure is determined by the
performances of various classes at work and the nature of their relationships in the society”
(2007, 72). Socially, the representation of the beggar in The Beggars’ Strike can be explained
base on their inability to work, i.e. not being a productive member of the society. In the text, the
upper class is represented by the top government officers such as Mour Ndaiye, Keba Dabo and
the minister while the lower class is represented by the beggars. Here, the unproductiveness and
the presume harmful presence of the beggars are met with constant threat by the upper class
which is demonstrated with the policy (to clean-up the capital from the beggars) implemented
through police tactics of harassment, physical abuse, and imprisonment of beggars so as to
promote tourism and ensure public hygiene. This is fully illustrated in the text as presented
below:
You realize, the latter went on, their presence is harmful to the prestige of our country, they are the running score which should be hidden at any rate in the capital (p 2-3)
While on the other hand, the lower class (beggars) see their profession a necessity and that
without them (beggars), the religious injunction cannot be fulfilled. They might not be as
productive as Mour Ndaiye and Keba Dabo, but they believe that begging is; “That’s what
religion says; when we beg, we just claim what is our due (61) it is interesting to note that the
people with explicit physical infirmities beyond doubt, display maverick intelligence and
demonstrate the ability to call the high profile people to order.
In Okpewho’s The Last Duty, Odibo is a cripple and messenger to the honourable Chief Toje.
Often scoffed by his master who flays him with denigrating insults, Odibo conditions his
intellect to accept that ‘he is nothing’. He arrives at this belief about himself in spite of the fact
that he is an active worker at Chief Toje’s rubber plantation and later supplies foodstuffs on
Toje’s behalf to the soldiers during the course of the raging war between the Simbian and
Urukpe forces. He says, ‘I know I am nothing. Iknow I have nothing. But why does he keep
making me feel so bad?’ (6) According to Eustace Palmer (2008), Odibo’s statement “is the
language of the man who is totally lacking in confidence, who is so completely aware of his
inadequacy that he wishes to efface himself. It is the style of the man who feels small because he
has been made to feel small. It is an index of his own sense of "nothingness" (3). In Xala, the
condition persist as business men and politicians like El Hadji Abdou, Kader Beye and the
President of the Chamber of commerce and industry represent the upper men who oppressed the
beggars that constitute the lower class. Hence, the class as shown in the novel leads a privilege
affluent, oppressive, protected and comfortable life. The class lives off the fruits of the labour of
the masses. It derives is wealth by sadistically cheating the common man who because of the
economic disability have been relegated beyond background.
Disability and Post-independence African society
In the novels, disability is also employed to capture the disillusioned and the crippled state of
African society which is often characterized by continued ethnic distrust, religious crisis,
poverty, corruption, low literacy rate, poor infrastructural facilities, intermittent military
incursion, irresponsive and irresponsible leadership that has often been considered as the bane of
most African countries after independence. These poor socio-economic indices therefore have
contributed in no way to subjugating and emasculating the masses. Right from the beginning of
Okpewho’s The Last Duty, the readers are introduced into a world enveloped with war, a
universal as well as a natural constraint on the human rights of a people. As if this is not enough,
a dusk to dawn curfew is imposed on the supposedly free citizens of Urukpe. Hence, the
atmosphere presented in The Last Duty depicts a crippled society where every functioning
faculty of the societal systems is tamped with. Little wonder some privileged individuals like
chief Toje and the sergeant could exhibit their animalistic tendencies just because the system of
the society is malfunctioning. The case in Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike poses no difference as a
society polarized by ‘means’ is presented with each experiencing incapacitation to a desired end.
Therefore, the readers are confronted with a world incapacitated to achieve a desired goal. In The
Beggars' Strike the pressure to remove beggars from the city originates outside the internal
dynamic of the social system in the form of foreign currency and the values of those who bring
it. While the social condition of the beggars is not put into considerations, the change Mour
Ndiaye oversees and his assistant, Keba Dabo, engineers is not a structural change at all, but a
cosmetic change. Their commitment is not to eliminate the institution of begging or probably set
aside skills development and employment packages for them, which would be an alternative
means of survival, but to hide beggars from tourists. Mour Ndiaye argues that the beggars "are a
running sore which must be kept hidden, at any rate in the Capital" (Fall, 1986: 2). As this novel
progress it becomes apparent that as long as beggars are not provided with social economic
opportunities, begging will thus remain a stable feature of post-independence Africa social
system. Sembene presented an unstable economic and political that is prominent in post-
independence Senegal society where the business men and politicians symbolize the priviledge
class against the adverse conditions of the masses. Sembene comments on the socio-psychology
of the national middle class that:
They had come together from different sectors of the business community to form the ‘Business’s Group’ in order to combat the invasion of foreign interests…their anxiety to constitute a social class of their own had increased their combatively, tingeing it with xenophobia” (p.1)
These are the characteristics of the businessmen in the post-independence Senegal and by
extension in the other post-independence African nation-state. Fanon describe the lopsided; or
the rather cripple state of African nations through the gaucheness often display by the middle
class. In his The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Fanon argues that the African middle class is a
mere economic and political stooge. He also opines that it has nothing to contribute to
progressive revolutionary change. Ironically, the likes of El Hadji Beye deem it feet to use the
opportunity to “gain control of the country’s economy” (p, 1) though legitimate but done at the
expense of the lower estate. For this reason, the life of the proletariat does not change for better.
El Hadji’s secretary sales lady (Madam Diouf), Modu and Alasene, his two chauffeur(s),
represent the state of this class. The secretary we are told, has no salary for months. Modu and
Alasene, the drivers work restlessly without pay too.
The beggars and the other destitute also represent the proletariat in the novel. Ousmane’s
juxtaposition of El Hadji Beye’s affluence and the mystic life of the destitute life portray the
post-independence Senegal as a replica of the colonial setting. Though, this is a pun on the
traditional society, there is much to it. The beggar, even with his handicap nature, still suffers
humiliation from the oppressors. El Hadji Beye denies the beggar the right to his heritage. His
hatred for the beggar is overtly and covertly expressed. Even to the point that; “the monotonous
scrape of a beggar’s chanting on the other side of the road got on his nerves” (p.29)
Yay Bineta conventionally known as Badyen also exposes the betrayal of trust that is dominant
in the disabled African society after independence. Her inspiration to become a national
bourgeois is rooted in her clientele role to the upper class. As a matter of fact, she is a pimp in
the novel. She proposes N’Gone to El Hadji for marriage for a price since El Hadji gives “them a
thousand Francs to pay for a taxi home on one thier visits to him.” (p.7) This is the real class
attitude of the privileged post-independence Africans. They sell their fellow blacks for their
selfish ends.
“Manhood” in tropes of dis/ability
Disability has also been used to examine the meaning of manhood in The Last Duty. For most of
the characters manhood is closely associated with male pride or male sexual power and one’s
inability to perform such sexual power is deemed incapacitated: "Otherwise, how can a man
reconcile himself to that title when it seems very clear to him that he no longer possesses, has
completely lost—strange as it may sound to a normal mind—that power which gives the title its
very definition" (24). In Toje's eyes, therefore, Odibo the cripple is doubly deficient in the
quality of manhood; he is physically maimed since he has only one arm, but because of this
deficiency he couldn't possibly be attractive to a woman and so he is apparently automatically
bereft of sexual potency; he is a small and insignificant man. Toje therefore scoffs at Odibo's
manhood. (Palmer, 51) The irony is that in spite of his position and power, essential ingredients
for manhood as far as he is concerned, Toje, by his own definition, is not really a man, since he
has lost his sexual potency. But far from realizing it he continues to insult other men he considers
small and to insist on his former prerogatives as a "big" man. Thus, in spite of Odibo's lowly
status and his loss of an arm, Aku realizes quite early that he is a real man: "As he came nearer
and nearer, I noticed that he was bare to the waist, with his cloth wrapped round his loin. He
came closer and closer to my bed. I could now see him in full view. The stump of what should
have been his left arm. His imposing build. The swell of his shoulders and of the biceps of his
right arm. The taper of his trunk He was every inch a man—his manhood scarcely faulted by the
unfortunate loss of an arm" (162). However, his disability is adequately compensated for by his
ability to mate successfully with Aku. Disability as perceived here there means that the loss of
certain physical parts and powers does not necessarily mean the total erosion of one's manhood.
By surrendering herself to the lowly Odibo, Aku has taught the latter that real manliness has
nothing to do with social status, nor does it have anything to do with physical deformity. This
discovery is liberating for Odibo who now sees the world anew, therefore signals the beginning
of Odibo’s gradual move away from Toje and the discovery is truly liberating:
"How much does it take to be a man, knowing that someone takes good healthy notice of your manhood, and you come out and receive the fresh, beautiful morning air full in your face without fearing that some other man would take you to task for it? . . . After that woman let me into her body, and I experienced a release of my long pent-up passion, I felt my whole body—my whole personality—loosen, and my entire being change. Now when Toje calls me a useless mass I am simply going to swallow his words without a care" (179-180)
But though he has moved significantly away from the effects of Toje's brainwashing and has
shed much of the latter's conception of "manhood," he still shares Toje's notion that manhood has
a lot to do with sexual potency and therefore masculine pride. Similarly, the magnetic correlation
between manhood and the human power through the ability to arouse the appetite for sex and
further expand its elasticity is reflected in the character of Mour Ndiaye, a civil servant The
Beggars’ Strike with a soaring profile who decides to have another wife, Sine (a teenager) due to
his sudden inflated financial and social status. This view is also related to Toje’s conventional
view about “manhood”. For him real manhood has something to do with social importance. The
real man is the big man. When Toje says, "It's a curse to be a small man" (119), he really means
that a man without any social standing cannot really talk of his manhood because no matter what
is his integrity and honesty, he couldn't really earn the respect of the community.
Despite a front of wealth and stability, El Hadji's economic status in Xala crumbles to dust
before his eyes. His close friends and business partners desert him when he poses a threat to their
economic positions, and his wives exhibit similar faithlessness. In the novel, El Hadji's status as
a member of the economic elite, as well as his manhood, is therefore put into question. El Hadji's
affliction, Xala (or impotence) not only present a form of disability that is rooted from his
inability to successfully mate with his new wife, but it also symbolizes his lack of power in both
the economic and social world.
Power and Role Reversal in the tropes of dis/ability
Power is presented in the novels as a tool which everybody possesses irrespective of their
physical challenges. In most cases, the power possessed by the disabled turns out to be the
beginning of their liberation. However, their eventual liberation led to role reversal in the society
thereby heightening their symbolic impotence. The changing relations between Odibo and Toje
are a very interesting feature of Okphewo’s The Last Duty. At the start we see that the abusive
and arrogant Toje is utterly contemptuous of and insensitive toward the suffering Odibo largely
because he considers him to be something less than a man, a mere creature. He because of this
scorns his “manhood” and calls him names in front of Aku. As far as he is concerned Odibo is
little better than a eunuch. Odibo, for his part, almost accepts Toje's judgment about his
manhood, convinces himself that he must be useless, and resigns himself to total subservience to
Toje. This started to change; “Toje, however, continues to speak brusquely to Odibo, not
realizing the full implications of the deflation that is taking place in his personality consequent
on his failure to achieve consummation with Aku, and failing to see that Odibo's perception of
him is gradually changing (Palmer, p.8). The major turning point in relations between the two
men comes after Odibo's successful mating with Aku, something that Toje, the "complete" man,
had failed to achieve. Their positions are now, in a sense, completely reversed due to the sudden
sexual power of Odibo. Thus, Odibo has superlatively demonstrated his manhood where Toje
clearly has not. This epoch of Odibo signifies the reclamation of his self-esteem as he is able to
confidently stand neck-to-neck with Chief Toje. The language in which Odibo narrates his
confrontation with Toje is now a far cry from that of the early Odibo. It is now almost like the
language of the early Toje without the bluster and the pompous self-importance. It is the tough,
hard-hitting, no-nonsense language of a man who is strong and knows it; ‘Toje!’I call threatenly,
drawing him back with a vehement jerk. He whirls around at me with bloodshot eyes and a
frothing mouth. But he can see that I am staring back at him with equal menace. (212).
In The Beggars’ Strike, the unbearable situation prompts the beggars to organize a strike in
which they refuse to return to the city streets to receive donations from the selfish Mour Ndaiye.
Mour who stands as the instrument used by the government to eradicate the beggars from the
city, now opts out due to selfish interest to give sacrifice to the power so as to become the vice
president. The beggars are able to demand their pound of flesh by frustrating the selfish ploys of
Ndiaye to get them back to the streets after he has initially dislodged from their usual location:
“What! It’s out of question. It is completely out of question! Just because he threw his money at
us, we have to give in to his whims! No! if he threw his money about. It’s because he’d got his
pocket full…” (p.97). Their refusal to take heed to Ndiaye’s warning crashes his lofty ambition
and aspiration of becoming the vice-president. Hence, the beggars, in spite of their disabilities
fight back in protest against the draconian policy of the government given forceful
implementation by the top civil servant Mour Ndiaye who coincidentally has to suffer the brunt
of the indignation. The novel portrays the beggars as an integral part of the society's social
structure, and how their removal creates profound disruptions in people's everyday lives.
At the end of Xala, the religious and economic structures upon which El Hadji has built his life
are shown to be flawed. El Hadji's manipulations of the Muslim faith and the tenet of polygamy
eventually result in his undoing. Ousmane reveals the true nature of gender relations in Senegal,
a world in which it is widely assumed (especially by westerners) that women are powerless
(psychologically disabled) under the domination of men. In fact, the female characters in Xala,
most notably El Hadji's wives and the domineering figure of Yay Bineta, exhibit the power that
many women in fact yield over their male counterparts. El Hadji's marriage to a third wife,
N'Gone, occurs not as a result of his own volition, but rather due to the scheming of the Bayden
(Yay Bineta). A headstrong and eloquent woman, Yay Bineta is able to manipulate El Hadji into
accepting a third bride. Playing a game in which she was "well-versed," In her exchanges with El
Hadji, the Bayden alternates from sweet and subtle hints to outrageous accusations in order to
pressure the man. During one encounter she baits him, "You're afraid of women! Your wives
make the decisions; wear the trousers in your house, don't they? Why don't you come and see
us?"(7). N'Gone's mother provides yet another example of the powerful woman. Her husband,
Old Babacar, admits that "his wife's authority was limitless," and Friends of his own age-group
all said that it was Babacar's wife who wore the trousers in the home..."(6) In this way, these men
(Old Babacar and El Hadji) faces a new dimension of feministic archetype, confrontationally
unconventional and eccentric to thier previous orientation to woman submissiveness. Their wives
are embodiment of the new generation of women with disdain for male chauvinism. Thus the
threat of being perceived as feminine and disabled becomes a strong factor in the weakness of
these men and becomes a tool in the hands of others.
A strong delineation of the strength of power and role reversal is also present through the
beggars, who are the blind, the lame, and the generally disabled. Sembene slips them into the
story and tries not to draw attention to them too early, but when he uses the song of the beggars
to further the narration of the story, their presence is amplified. Also, we take solace in their
potential as revolutionary. They now exercise even power as it the beggar’s ritual that purifies El
Hadji. Just like the beggars and Odibo had done in Beggars’ Strike and The Last Duty
respectively, the beggars in Xala insult and tell El Hadji “to be naked before them all. And each
of us will spit three times on you. You have the key to your cure. Make up your mind…” (p.60).
Thus, the beggars who were once relegated became El Hadji’s source of revitalization and
Ousmane’s positive alternative in revolutionary struggles. As their presence is increasingly felt,
we no longer perceive the beggars in asymmetry to the opulence of wealth and power because
they were able to shed their ineptitude and acquire an equality that prepares them for the
impending confrontation with the police.
Conclusion
From the foregoing discussion, it is unequivocal through the reading of The Last Duty, The
Beggars’ Strike and Xala that the dis/ability of a disabled if undermined, tends to trigger
perplexing manifestation. This manifestation is born out of the inordinate ambition of the
bourgeois class to maintain status quo. Though it is a commonplace phenomenon that the
masses are relegated in the post-independence African social stratification, there is hope for their
emancipation. This is contained in thier ability as revealed in their efforts to denounce
oppression as represented in the three novels. Hence, the three narratives relates equation of
power between the mighty and the weak, the master and the servant, man and woman, the
seemingly able and the outrightly disabled among others. Okpewho’s narrative in The Last Duty
is an ingenious task to portray impossibility to arrive at objectivity by everyone—a universal
disease that plague every human. In The Beggars’ Strike and Xala, the undaunted and relentless
collective resistance of the beggars, is exhibited to frustrate the ambition of the powerful ones in
the society.
References
Balogun, Jide. 2007. Class Stratification in Post-Independence African Novels: an example of
Xala. Zaria: ABU Press Limited.
Fanon, F. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Macgibban.
Goffman, Erving.1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hal.
Kehinde, Ayo (2003). Ability in disability: the empowerment of the disabled in J.M.Coetzee’s
life and times of Michael K. University of Mumbai: Center for African Studies.
Ousmane, Sembene. 1976. Xala. London: Heinemann
Okpewho, Isidore. 1976. The Last Duty. Essex: Longman.
Quayson, Ato, 1999 “Looking Awry: Tropes of Disability in Post-colonial Writing” In: An
Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in England Since 1970, ed.
Rod Mengham. Cambridge: Polity Press
Sow Fall, A.1979. The Beggars’ Strike. Darkar-Abidjan-Lome: NEA
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