Soyinka, Mahfouz, Zuglool, and the hazards of critical scholarship in African Literature
The publication by Gerald Moore of his Seven African Writers, in 1962 marked the genesis of what later turned out to be the institutionalization of African literary criticism. There have since been literary assessments, evaluations, estimations, deflations, deconstructions, reconstructions, comparisons, and other forms of judgmental undertakings in connection with African literature. However, the volume and quality of critical literary scholarship in African literature today falls far below expectation especially in view of the proliferation of creative works and imaginative books on the continent. Tony Afejuku, a distinguished scholar-poet and Professor of African Literature at the University of Benin recently argued that African literary criticism is “still elementary” and further remarked that “the corpus of creative, imaginative works and books known today in the domain of established African literature far outnumbers the body of valuable criticism,...in terms of books (or handbooks) claiming originality, to the literature of contemporary African literary criticism”. Afejuku further remarks that “Today, in Africa, we seem to have far more writers than critics”.
However, the present writer ventures to state that while this assertion is obviously true of Nigeria, it may not be true of other geographical entities in Africa especially the Arabic-speaking settings. I wonder if the characterisation “African Literature” or “African Literary Criticism” has always been intended as inclusive of North Africa and the Maghrib. With the somewhat unwieldy size of the continent, it may not be easy to attain an appreciable level of accuracy in generalised literary analyses at all times, unless the continent is classified into regions or sub-regions, for easy contextualization. Yet, I shall further demonstrate that both where the claim is true and untrue on the African Continent, certain harzards are associated with literary criticism especially at literarily rural as against intellectually cosmopolitan setting. In pursuing this task, I shall rely appreciably on the experience of these two African Noble Laureates and illustrate with specific experiences from the scholarship of Mustapha Zuglool, a foremost Nigerian Arabic writer who represents the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz in Southwestern Nigeria, where Wole Soyinka belongs.
Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz are the two African writers who have won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. While Soyinka is a Nigerian, born a Christian and strongly associated with the Western Literary Tradition, Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian Muslim, and of the Arabic and Middle-Eastern Literary Tradition. It should be pointed out that the geographical location at which these two literary icons meet is African Literary Criticism. Where does Mustapha Zuglool belong in the present scheme of analysis? He shares few commonalities with each of the two African Laureates. For instance he, like Soyinka, is a Nigerian and a foremost writer, and a highly influential user of language. Similarly he, like Naquib Mahfouz, is a Muslim who cultivated the scholarly orientations of the Middle-East and therefore has Arabic as his mode of expression. At the time of his death on July 5, 2017, he was arguably the most prolific and most intellectually endowed Arabic writer in Southwestern Nigeria, the ancestral origin of Wole Soyinka.
It is not premature to state at this juncture that significant parts of the so called hazards of literary criticism are themselves among the hazards of critical performance in any genre of African Literature. This line of thinking finds support in James Baldwin’s words in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1962, p. 1) that one cannot attain eminence in creative writing or imaginative scholarship especially novel without “attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more”. David Ker has rightly interpreted this as meaning “attacking what society tends to hold sacred, in order that reality be confronted and constructively altered” It is in their attempts to alter social constructions by affecting readers’ consciousness and conscience that Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, and in their own way, Mustapha Zuglool and few of his notable disciples, earned wraths in certain quarters, as shall be demonstrated shortly.
To the two Laureates, the role of a creative writer as a freedom fighter is unmistakable. Christopher Okigbo demonstrated this so eloquently when, during the Nigerian Civil War, he stopped writing poetry and took to running guns until he died on the battlefield. Okigbo’s experience was later characterised by Achebe as a creative undertaking. Achebe sees as creative “any activity engaged in by a creative writer”, thereby dismissing as half-truth “the belief that creativity is something that must come from a kind of contemplation, quite or repose and that it is difficult to keep the artistic integrity of one’s writing while being totally involved in political situations”. As regards Soyinka, he unequivocally connects critical literary scholarship to social change where he states that the greatest handicap to development of Nigerian writing was the lack of a “really fearless but very honest and intelligent critical forum’, adding that “a critic’s job is not merely to review an existing piece of work but also to create an atmosphere of appreciation, of tolerance, to cultivate an experimental attitude not only in writers, but in the audience” Soyinka did not equivocate in berating lazy and passive critics who “manipulate” the minds of their audience or followers towards “rejecting what seems strange” Soyinka believes strongly that “if the writer feels committed or involved or he feels a compulsion within himself to write the truth, then he surely has the right to try and build the kind of society in which he can write this beautiful literature, these beautiful words”. This is an unveiled call on the writer to move a step beyond the provision of ideological vision through creative writing for social change, by engaging in direct political action as was the case with Christopher Okigbo.
The natural outcome of such an experience was later described in Soyinka’s A Shuttle in the Crypt which is a pen portrait of his twenty-five month incarceration following his open pronouncement upon the anti-people policies of the Federal Government of Nigeria under General Yakubu Gowon. At the twilight of the Nigeria-Biafra War, Soyinka travelled to the rebels’ camp for the purpose of peacemaking. However, he was jailed by the Gowon administration for daring to traverse the warring borders at such a time. Yet Soyinka condemned the human wastage occasioned by the war. In The Man Died which was a product of his prison notes, Soyinka demonstrated the need for revolution by remarking that such an experience is a test of the people themselves, “a test of those who claim to think on behalf of the people and a gauge of the potential for the only kind of political action which I foresee, with no alternative”. This line of thinking about creative writing and social change caused Soyinka persecutions in the form of irreparable losses as well as assassination attempts including that which he narrowly escaped by disguising like a hunter across the forest, during General Sani Abacha’s dictatorship. It is this area of assassination attempts that marked the meeting point between the hazards of his own activities as a critic and those of Naguib Mahfouz. The two Laureates, it should be noted were two outspoken, unrepentantly critical and highly influential writers of their time and age in their respective environment. Like Soyinka’ Ake or Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years, Mahfouz’s half-century of work, rich in detail, is characteristically a pen portrait of some aspects of life in teeming working-class neighborhoods in Cairo. The picture painted of the city involved in each of two writers’ work may be compared to Dickens’s London or Zola’s Paris.
For a very long time in Cairo, Mahfouz had been an endangered species and after his publication of Awlad Haratna (Children of the Alley), he became a target for assassination by Islamists. In the words of Muhammad Salmawy, his journalist friend who delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mahfouz was getting in a car with his friend who was a doctor to go meet some friends when a young man approached him. Salmawy said Mahfouz thought the man was coming to greet him, so opened his window before the man reached his neck with a knife, stabbing him and running away. The incident happened close to his home in Dokki and his friend rushed him to the Police Hospital, which was metres away from him, and in 10 minutes he was in the operations room, which saved his life. “After the operation, Mahfouz was in the Intensive Care Unit and visits were not allowed. But he asked to see me. The doctors said I shouldn’t be there for more than three minutes and I promised to commit to that. But when Naguib saw me he started to tell me about what happened; he described the stabbing moment as if strong claws had penetrated his neck,” Salmawy recounted. Mahfouz wondered aloud to Salmawy, “Why this guy would do this to himself? He is a strong man; he could have been a sports player, or any other thing, but now he is going to jail,” Salmawy said.