The African novelist as a cultural spy

The work of spies and informers has not always been commonly regarded as a decent profession or a noble vocation. Spies and informers are associated with theft of information, espionage and political surveillance.

It is for that reason that when Nigerian intellectual Okello Oculi argued in the year 2000 that African novelists should spy for Africa his message was received, in some circles with suspicion and in others with pure contempt and anger, very little sober attention was paid to the spirit of his message.

Oculi was simplistically understood to be persuading African novelists to prostitute their otherwise honoured vocation for the slippery business of peeping and spying toms. A closer and much more charitable reading of Oculi’s lecture which he later published as a much watered down essay shows that he said nothing radically new from what such African novelists as Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe and Sembene Ousmane had already said about the work and vocation of the novelist in African communities and society.

For a continent burdened with a history of colonialism, political and cultural imperialism, the work of the novelists and other imaginists cannot be simply that of entertainers and myth makers. In full appreciation of that important burden before the African novelist in the troubled continent, Oculi’s gesture was that African writers should write back to Empire, deploy their stories and imaginative narratives to counter the myths and fictions that colonialists and imperialists writers had concocted and spread about the continent and its peoples.

What provoked the controversial but important wish that African writers should survey world cultures, understand humanity and present a fair and informed view of Africa and Africans in the world was the dehumanisation of blacks and Africans that Oculi witnessed as a university student travelling in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Caribbean where he observed blacks and Africans to be perpetual objects and suspects in a humiliating and much unfriendly world. Oculi felt that African writers, particularly the novelists as story tellers had the potential to throw into world circulation better and much more empowering images and imaginations of Africa and the Africans.

After the Spies of Empire The call to arms that Okello Oculi gives to African novelists is against European and American novelists, travel writers and journalists who came to Africa as tourists and produced literature that misrepresented Africa and Africans in western audiences.

Not only the western novelists, travel writers and journalists practised this misrepresentation of Africa and the African but also intellectual tourists, historians and anthropologists came to briefly survey Africa and in no time produced lengthy narratives about the continent and its people, narratives that westerners relied on as authoritative knowledge of Africa and the Africans.

Part of the colonisation and domination of Africa was in how it became a site and a place that was easily knowable, simple and open for explorers, experts and Empire builders from the West. In a sad but strong way, what western publics and audiences came to know about Africa and the Africans was a mere racist and colonial representation of the continent and its people.

Up to this day students of representation itself still note how Bayard Taylor’s 1853 portrait of China and the Chinese people as primitive and strange still guides popular western views and sentiments on China and its many people, even as China is proving to be a formidable economic, political and cultural world civilisation.

A special correspondent of The Los Angeles Times, for instance, American journalist David Lamb in the 1970s spent only four years in Africa interviewing political leaders, observing guerrilla movements, interacting with academics, witnessing coups and talking to witchdoctors, in his claim, and after that brief sojourn, he had enough authority to write

The Africans, a cruelly hateful, prejudiced and racist narrative about Africa and the Africans that enjoys bestselling status and occupies top drawers in western libraries as an important resource material for any researcher on Africa and the Africans. One of the telling wisdoms of this conceited book is that because of war, poverty and disease, “in Africa one does not really need to grow old, the secret is to be ten years old,” and one would have lived a full life.

Misrepresentation does not only remain at the level of cultural imperialism, racism and orientalism but it has serious historical, economic and political consequences. American author, Robert Kaplan’s influential but dangerous essay that appeared in The Atlantic in 1994 represented the Global South as the starting point of “how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.” Typical of colonialist, racist and imperialist misrepresentations, Kaplan did not bother to investigate the colonial and imperial origins of the decay in Africa and the Global South at large.

Victims of the crimes of slavery and colonialism are intelligently misrepresented as the criminals and the culprits who endanger life and progress in the planet by supposedly learned and sophisticated spies of Empire that enjoy the epistemic privilege of front page coverage in elite publications.

Writings such as those of David Lamb and Robert Kaplan are relied upon, not only by tourists and cultural explorers in the West, but economic and political policy makers in governments know Africa and Africans as represented by literary and academic tourists. Colonial and racist policies that were implemented by colonial administrators were in a strong way informed and shaped by the representations of Africa and Africans that such novelists as the British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad produced about Africans as objects and animals. Empire has for centuries relied on mythical and fictional representations of the conquered for its justification of their conquest and dehumanisation.

Mahmood Mamdani has rendered this effectively in his 2013 publication by the same title that Empire’s biggest weapon was really not to divide and rule but to “Define and Rule”, a representation and a definition of the native is constructed that makes his colonisation and domination make perfect sense.

In gathering and fabricating toxic representations of Africans, European and American novelists, journalists, anthropologists and other spies of Empire did and still do the cultural homework that permits imperialism and all its poisonous accompaniments. Where the image of the conquered is constructed to justify conquest, the power, culture and the image of the conqueror is mystified and presented in superior terms.

The culture of the coloniser in the description of Homi Bhabha became a collection of artefacts and “signs” that were “taken for wonders” and their seduction and powerful persuasion overwhelmed the colonised who took to the life world of the conqueror the way the proverbial duck takes to water.

The Battle of Images and Imaginations There is no doubt that in persuading African novelists to do cultural spy work Okello Oculi meant to cause controversy. He understood his audience to be that of image makers and imaginists for whom such provocative and controversial metaphors are the stock in trade. The meaning of Oculi’s message however, is much heavier and more important than the controversy that it caused.

The world that we live in is not only engulfed is the “clash” of political and economic “civilisations” but also a cultural and even spiritual battle of images and imaginations. Oculi might have been addressing African novelists, their cousins the poets and the dramatists but his message expands to African intellectuals and other cultural and information workers, scholars, journalists and movie makers.

The need to write back to Empire, to explode the myths and fictions that have been constructed about Africa and Africans is a serious intellectual, cultural and spiritual vocation for all those in the Global South that trade in the production and circulation of information and ideas. It is no exaggeration that peoples and communities of the Global South are in reality who they have been imagined to be.

The need for re-imaging and re-imagination of the societies and peoples of the Global South cannot be a luxury but a grave responsibility. In a world where being defined means being ruled, the battle for self-definition is an important liberation struggle, one that cannot be left to politicians and cultural activists alone.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe writes from South Africa: Decoloniality2016@gmail.com