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MEMBERS OF GROUP: ASTRID ØSTERGAARD, CHARIS SIEUNARINE, SHEKERA
BOYCE, JAMILA PATEL
COURSE : LITS 3303 MODERN CRITICAL THEORY
TITLE: TUTORIAL PRESENTATION NOTES
LECTURER: DR. RICHARD CLARKE
2
NGUGI WA THIONG’O:
“LITERATUE & SOCIETY: THE POLITICS OF THE CANON!” (1973)
MARXIST POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY THEORY
Background
Born 5 January 1938
Kenyan writer, playwright and literary critic
Works include: novels, plays, short stories, essays and children’s literature
Earlier he wrote in English, later in Gikuyu (Kenyan language)
Actualizes the debate on why African writer write in
English/French/Portuguese/etc. instead of their own native language
Born “James”, changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Social realist, Marxist, intellectual activist
Goal: Decolonizing the mind (anti-colonial)
Tend to nationalism
“Africaness” instead of “Blackness”
Thinks that the colonized land should be returned to the native people of Kenya
Spent years in jail in Nigeria, because his writings did not please the government
[political prisoner]
Major figure in the African Renaissance
Friend of Edward Kamau Braithwaite (Barbadian author) also changed first name to
Kamau similar to Ngugi’s first name James which he dropped.
Has taught at Yale, New York University and University of California
3
Bibliography
The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)
Weep Not, Child, 1964, Heinemann, 1987, Macmillan 2005
The River Between, Heinemann 1965, Heinemann 1989
A Grain of Wheat, 1967 (1992)
This Time Tomorrow (three plays, including the title play, "The Reels", and "The Wound
in the Heart"), c. 1970
Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics,
Heinemann, 1972
A Meeting in the Dark (1974)
Secret Lives, and Other Stories, 1976, Heinemann, 1992
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (play), 1976, African Publishing Group (with Micere Githae
Mugo and Njaka)
Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play; with
Ngugi wa Mirii), Heinemann Educational Books (1980)
Petals of Blood (1977) Penguin, 2002
Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross), 1980
Writers in Politics: Essays, 1981
Education for a National Culture, 1981
Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, 1981
Devil on the Cross (English translation of Caitaani mutharaba-Ini), Heinemann, 1982
Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, 1983
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986
4
Mother, Sing For Me, 1986
Writing against Neo-Colonialism, 1986
Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Mathagu), 1986 (children's
book)
Matigari ma Njiruungi, 1986
Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief (Njamba Nene na Chibu King'ang'i), 1988 (children's
book)
Matigari (translated into English by Wangui wa Goro), Heinemann, 1989, Africa World
Press 1994
Njamba Nene's Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene), (children's book), 1990, Africa
World Press
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, Heinemann, 1993
Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-
Colonial Africa (The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1996), Oxford University
Press, 1998
Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), 2004, East African Educational Publishers
Wizard of the Crow, 2006, Secker
Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Basic Civitas Books, 2009
Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir, Harvill Secker, 2010
In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir, Pantheon, 2012
Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening, New Press, 2016
5
“Literature & Society”
Written in 1973 after his Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (see
bibliography). Ngugi opens his article by problematizing the African literary canon because it
tends to give preferential treatment to Western authors and thus neglects the works of the non-
western, i.e. African, Asian, South-American authors (3). He claims that this tendency is ruled by
a fear of tarnishing the great Western authors and he find that this “fear of tarnishment is linked
to another tendency in the area of theory:
the almost total omission of colonial, racism and ideologies of repression and their
opposites, anti-colonialism, anti-racist struggles and ideologies of liberation, in the
debates about the constitution of modernity and post-modernity” (3)
In favor of this Ngugi presents not only a critique of the African literary canon but also a more
general critique of the modernity and post-modernity and its struggle to embrace non-western
culture.
Ngugi claims that the African literary canon is based on imperialism and the domination in the
colonial phase, since the “literature syllabus, its presentation, the machinery for determining the
choice of texts and their interpretation were all in integral part of imperialism” (3). The structures
from the colonial era are inherited in today’s neo-colonial society. However there seems to be
one major difference: In the classical colonial era the cultural imperialism only supplemented the
occupation while today cultural imperialism is “the major agency of control under neo-
colonialism” (3). Formerly culture was an important part of succeeding in the imperialistic
occupation, and today – Ngugi claims – culture have become the overriding element which
dominates in neo-colonial society.
6
In accordance with this Ngugi wants to examine and discuss four themes of this article:
1. Literature and society and particularly the role of literature in cultural education
2. Literature and colonization
3. Literature and the national liberation process
4. Literature and the decolonization of the mind by posing the question: what can be done
now in the post-colonial era? (4)
1. Literature and society and particularly the role of literature in cultural education
First of all Ngugi states that literature is social since it “results from conscious acts of men and
women in society” (4). As we saw with Goldmann, Ngugi also seems to associate with the idea
of the individual and the collective being interactively connected: The individual writes
“socially”, since she writes to or for somebody who also is a part of society. “At the collective
level literature embodies in word-images the tensions, conflicts and contradictions at the heart of
a community’s being and becoming” (4), he puts it, and add that literature “shapes our attitude to
life, to the daily struggles with nature, within communities and within our individual souls and
selves.” (4) Thus Ngugi thinks that literature is both part of the individual and the collective level
in society.
Basically Ngugi is here trying to show us that literature is not just some surrealistic entity which
does not connect with society and the structures therein:
“As a process and an end, it is conditioned by these social forced and pressures
because imagination takes place within economic, political, class and race contexts.
Arising from its thoroughly social character, literature is partisan: it takes sides
more so in a class society” (4)
7
We see here how Marxist thinking sneaks into Ngugi’s essay; especially when he emphasizes
that every writer comes from a particular class, gender, race and nation (4).
Ngugi attempts to show which different levels the human being goes through when entering a
society: First of all he finds that nature is the most fundamental state of the becoming of a
society, since “man himself is of nature” (5). Secondly human is also a social being, since she in
her struggle with surviving enters into relationships with other human beings. The third level is,
Ngugi finds, like Marx, the most basic level of a community and is based on the economic
arrangements and alignments plus the power relations which follow (5). This community
develops into a political system which in the end will evolve into a constitution of cultural
relations, which then evolves into different institutions and ideologies such as education, laws,
religion, orature, literature, arts, intellectual, moral and ideological forces (6). What we see here
is basically the base-superstructure figure we know from Marx: “It is a dialectical process with
everything acting on one another to produce the everchanging complexity that goes under the
name of society” (6).
In the light of this Ngugi finds that it is the ruling class which controls and influence the
intellectual and cultural forces and therefore also the literature and dominant values of a society
(7).
Discussion questions
Based on the background knowledge of Ngugi and his life, can it seem at little peculiar
that he benefits from a capitalistic society when “preaching” Marxist values? Is there a
contradiction between Ngugi’s lived life and his ideal values?
How do you see the Marxist influence in Ngugi’s text?
8
2. Literature and colonization
Since Ngugi sees literature as a social product of conscious intellectual and imaginative
acts of men and women operating at the three levels of the individual, collective and the
aesthetic, literature is therefore seen as partisan (4). Echoing Lukacs, Ngugi uses this claim to
anticipate the effects that colonization had upon the African people. Colonialism is baptized
by Ngugi as a practice not a theory, a historical process not an abstract metaphysical notion
and a relationship of power, at the political and cultural level.
In reference to Walter Rodney who has written that Europe underdeveloped Africa,
Ngugi claims that Africa overdeveloped European capitalism through four stages. The first
stage is the mercantile phase [Africans sold as commodities], the second is Industrial
capitalism [scramble for Africa], thirdly classical colonialism [territorial occupation of
Africa] and last of all, finance capitalism [European money capital still proposes and
disposes in the era of neo-colonialism](7-8).
Drawing strength from CLR James (8) and Amilcar Cabral (9), Ngugi outlines the aims
of colonialism and its long term effects upon the cultural identity of the African people
through the Western literary tradition. Colonialism, Ngugi says aimed first at the land, what
the land produces and the people who work it (8). This took the form of direct settler
occupation as in the white settler systems of Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa where the
colonial state was run by white settlers for white settlers, or in the form of purely politico-
economic control where in the case of Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana, the colonial state was run
with the help of indigenous institutions and personnel. Both systems followed similar
patterns with similar ends: economic and political control (8).
9
In order to make economic and political occupation complete and effective, the colonizer
tried to control the cultural environment- education, religion, language, literature, songs and
dances, every form of expressive practices- hoping in this way to control a people’s values,
their world outlook and hence their images and definitions of self. Adopting Amilcar’s
Cabral’s argument that “to dominate a nation by force of arms is, above all, to take up arms
to destroy, or at least to neutralize and paralyze its culture” (9).
Ngugi therefore works out that genocide as an alternative would simply leave a void of
domination and labour and that it is impossible to harmonize economic and political
domination of a people with a cultural personality. So to avoid these futile alternatives,
racism and racist doctrines were formulated through the culture which became an integral
part of the ‘permanent siege’ of the indigenous population.
Crude racist formulations were seen in the works of philosophers and prominent writers
such as David Hume (1735), Thomas Jefferson, Hegel and Trevor Roper (1960) who
assumed that African people were primitive and inferior. Ngugi also quotes Anthony
Trollope, the novelist as saying that the African was “idle, unambitious to worldly position,
sensual and content with little” (10). The English language itself is testimony of the
negativity in its representation of blackness with words like black market, black sheep,
blackmail, blacklist, blackspot (10) and other visual imagery that preference white over
black. The South African Apartheid system, Christianity and the commercial cosmetic
industry [specifically lightening creams] are all described as machines, doctrines and
manufacturers of racism, promoting whiteness over blackness (10).
Apart from cultural imperialism, the colonized was assaulted by European literatures of
three kinds in three principal ways: The refined tradition [Aesychlus, Sophocles, Rabelais,
10
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Thomas
Mann, Ibsen, Yeats, Whitman, Faulkner and Brecht to mention just a few] was rooted in
European history, culture, class, white images of the world which according to Ngugi
represented bourgeois bigotry and a spiritual wasteland; The explorer narratives [Richard
Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Robery Ruark’s Something of Value, Nicholas
Monsarrat’s The Tribe that Lost its Head, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Elspeth
Huxley’s The Red Strangers and A Thing to Love] used characterisations of Africans which
were either evil because they challenged white intrusion, good because they had the sense to
understand whites as higher, nobler and cooperated with whites against their own people or
in the case of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, savage and cannibalistic; The last group of writers
were driven by the racism of sympathy [ William Blake’s poem The Little Black Boy, Joyce
Cary, Karen Blixen, Alan Paton] who portray black characters in need of saving from their
reality of skin colour, compared to animals or submissive after being converted to
Christianity (13-15). Ngugi poignantly summarizes that “Colonialism rains death; and then it
exhibits charity by providing burial grounds to the victims” (14).
The totality of these three Western traditions, given their colonial context, offered an
aesthetic of acquiescence, undermining in the process the aesthetic of resistance (16).
Do you think there is merit in Ngugi’s claim that we have been wired to revere Western
writers?
Can you remember a piece of writing from the Western writers that you felt a level of
disdain for? Why?
11
3. Literature and the national liberation process
National liberation is simply a dialectical negation of the colonial process (19). For colonized
people, the two most essential values are the land (according to Fanon) and their labor power. It
is that power acting on land that makes history. Making reference to Amilcar Cabral, we can
view the colonial process as “the negation of the historical process of the dominated people
through the violent usurpation of the freedom of the development of the national productive
forces.” National liberation is then a negation of negation. (19).
We can state that the national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given
socio economic whole rejects the negation of the historical process. In other words, the
national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality that people, its
return to history through the negation of the imperialist domination to which it was
subjected… National liberation exists only when national productive forces have been
completely freed from every kind of foreign domination. (19)
The economic and political struggle is waged under the banner of rational nationalism. It is the
black (in which Ngugi equates with Africans) and the white (British) people. This struggle takes
on the form of a race-caste structure under colonialism, and the economic and political struggle
under neo-colonialism. He goes on to state that “economic and political struggles are in complete
without cultural elements. Culture becomes the site of intense struggle. Indeed most national
liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer by repudiating his religious
and educational systems.””(20) The colonized take the oppressor songs and hymns and construct
something of an altered emphasis, interpretation and meaning. Ngugi uses the Mau Mau as an
example of national liberation. They rejected the colonizer’s interpretation of reality, by using
12
the same Christian songs and hymns and even the Bible; interpret them for themselves,
emphasizing their struggle.
A written literature also develops alongside people’s oral literature. This was integral to their
cultural assertion. In the case of the African the very act of putting words on a paper was itself a
testimony of his creative capacity (21). Ngugi sees this step as on towards self-definition and
acceptance of the environment from which they have been estranged by years of Eurocentric
education. The Mau-Mau intelligentsia asserted the primacy of their languages (22). They
published works in both English and in their respective African languages, using what was meant
to confine as a weapon of the struggle. They took the language of Europe to criticize colonialism
or simply to emphasize their negritude. From the slave narrative of Equiano and others to the
fictional narratives of Chinua Achebe, the literature produced celebrated the struggle against
colonialism and asserted the African presence in the world.
Literature, at its critical best, defines a people in terms of actors and not the acted up. (22) For
Ngugi, Achebe’s early novels create a realistic, authentic depiction of a pre-capitalist Africa and
show a people in constant struggle with their natural and social environment. The tragic hero of
the novel, Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is praised for his for committed suicide instead of
submitting to a world in which he was in charge of making his own history. His act of killing a
colonial messenger is as symbolic as it is prophetic. (22) The new messenger class, the new
errand boys of the international capitalism who make total liberation difficult: for on the surface
they are black like any other black. But they play the role of messenger to perfection in a neo-
colonial context (22). Similarly in the works of Sembrene Ousmane, Alex la Guma, Vierira and
Agostinho Neto, the emphasis of class is very relevant, they depict the working people as having
the power to change their history. They have the capability to shape and make history through
13
their struggles against both the colonial and the neo-colonial state. The older submissive,
cooperating and the appreciative African of the European colonial imagination are gone.
Ngugi views literature as a reflection of society; its social significance is of paramount
importance. Since capitalist or neo-capitalist society is divided between a ruling minority idle or
elite class and a dominated majority, working class, true authentic literature is produced for and
by the majority. Progressive literature, therefore, reflects the inevitable struggle between the
minority and the majority class. Ngugi is calling for the production of a peasant and working
class literature in Kenya.
4. Literature and the decolonization of the mind by posing the question: what can be
done now in the post-colonial era?
According to Ngugi the ex –colonized cannot afford to be indifferent to the roles and functions
of literature in our society. Ignoring the question of ‘What is at the centre and at the periphery to
their detriment’ has caused a sense of complacency in embracing their culture. Ngugi posits that
all schools, colleges and community centres should be at the primacy and centrality of literature.
It is through literature that African people from the continent and diaspora find it crucial in
redirecting the consciousness of shared and individual sense of self.
Ngugi also posits that by placing African literature at the centre, does not automatically mean
that it would become isolated. He uses Discourse on Colonialism(36) as an example, where he
believe that civilizations that withdraw into themselves, end up being suffocated into their own
self-enclosure. Therefore a healthy balance between what should be emitted into African culture
14
and literature is needed for the continuation of African culture. Culture contact is what Ngugi
believes is the oxygen of any civilization. The literature of other countries serves as a way for
opening a dialogue of understanding between multiplicities of cultures. However, the culture and
literature must have undergone a similar historical experience in order for it to be mutually
beneficial.
Literature shouldn’t be only a question of the primary text; it should serve as a body of criticism.
The criticism of specific novels, poems, dramas and essays can be viewed as source of liberation
from a set of narrow biases.
The practice of African orature is also a very important aspect of African and diasporic culture.
Ngugi states that orature should not be solely thought of as a form of verbal art, instead it should
be viewed as a resistance aesthetic of the entire anti- colonial struggle through the vast body of
oral songs and poems and in the accompanying performances.
Ngugi believe that African literature, particularly in the post- colonial era highlight the struggle
between western and native belief. Ngugi states that literature is about wealth, power and values
and their effect on the quality of human lives and relations. True creative power for African
culture can only take place through the people’s control and distribution of their production. It is
only then, that they will experience economic and political liberation from western ideology and
imperialism.
Discussion Questions
Can the ex-colonized ignore the functions of literature?
Does placing African literature at the centre make it isolated?
How essential is African orature as it relates to African and diasporic culture?