from Research in African Literatures Volume 31, Number 1Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship1
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
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I was lucky, in preparing for this lecture, to come across one of Eric Ashby's books, African Universities and Western Tradition, and a cursory reading brought a sense of recognition. I noticed the irony in the way the book had crossed my life while also embodying a number of my concerns. The book was the Godkin lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1964. It was the year I graduated from Makerere College with a University of London honors degree in English. It was also the year that William Heinemann brought out a hardcover edition of my novel, Weep Not, Child, written in English, obviously a product of my five years at Makerere. My novel and I were products of the kind of universities which Eric Ashby was talking about and whose social function was "to produce men and women with the standards of public service and capacity for leadership which self rule requires" (20), in short a governing elite in the expected new political dispensation following the end of the Second World War.The colleges were established in the fifties, the culmination of a series of committees and recommendations going back to the 1925 advisory committee that years later metamorphosed into the Asquith Committee and the Inter-University Council for Higher Education. But the vision of a modern university in Africa did not begin in the twentieth century with these official committees but rather in nineteenth century with James Africanus Beale Horton in 1868 and Edward Blyden in 1872. Both Horton and Blyden were of African descent, both from Sierra Leone, and they clearly wanted the best for Africa. Nevertheless, their two visions were different. According to Ashby, Horton wanted to introduce into Africa "undiluted Western education" and "there was no place in his scheme of higher education for the incorporation of African languages, history or culture." The way to African modernity lay by way of the Greek classics and European languages and culture. Blyden on the other hand wanted to free higher education in Africa from "despotic Europeanizing which had warped and crushed the Negro mind" (qtd. in Ashby 13). Writing in 1883 Blyden said:
All our traditions and experiences are connected with a foreign race. We have no poetry but that of our taskmasters. The songs which live in our ears and are often on our lips are the songs we heard sung by those who shouted while we groaned and lamented. They sang of their history, which was the history of our degradation. They recited their triumphs, which contained the records of our humiliation. To our great misfortune, we learned their prejudices and their passions, and thought we had their aspirations and their power. (91)
He wanted a system of education which rejected all the errors and falsehoods about the African and, while he wanted the Greek and Latin classics as part of the curricula for his visions of an African university, he also wanted African languages to be an integral part of it. J. E. Casely Hayford of Ghana, then Gold Coast, was to go further than Blyden and in his Ethiopia Unbound of 1911 he too articulated a vision of an African University in which the medium of instruction would be an African language and to meet the needs of the relevant material scholars would be employed to translate books into African languages.
When eventually Universities were set up in Africa following the recommendations of the Asquith committee—Ibadan in 1948, University of Gold Coast in 1948, Makerere University College in 1950—it was the Horton vision which triumphed, except that where Greek and Latin had been envisioned as the foundation of excellence, English took over as the foundation of that excellence. At the risk of simplification I shall call this the Horton-Asquith model to contrast it with the Blyden-Hayford model.
What divided the Horton-Asquith model and the Blyden-Casely Hayford Vision were clearly not their disagreements about the need for excellence in the pursuit of higher education but rather the way of achieving it and the question of African languages was central. In the Horton-Asquith model African languages were relegated to the periphery and in the Blyden-Hayford model they would occupy a central place in the scheme of things. Periphery or the center, that was the great divide and the implications of which model failed to make the grade and which eventually occupied the center still haunt African scholarship and politics. In short, the answer to the question as to whether African languages occupy center stage or the periphery is still relevant as Africa struggles for a more equitable place in the economic and political map of the global community of the twenty-first century.
In most of my publications, principally in Decolonising the Mind; Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams; and Writers in Politics, I have tried to argue that the language question is so crucial because language occupies a significant position in the entire hierarchy of the organization of wealth, power, and values in a society. Let me summarize the argument. Language is a product of a community in its economic, political, and cultural evolution in time and space. In their very negotiation with nature and with one another humans give birth to a system of communication whose highest expression and development is the signs which we come to give the name of language. But Language is also the producer of a community, for it is language after all which enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and indeed that which makes possible their multifaceted evolution. It is in that very negotiation that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others. This is because in doing similar things over a similar natural environment within similar regulations which govern what is extracted from nature, how it is extracted and how it is shared out, such a community develops knowledges which are passed from generation to generation and which becomes the basis of their future actions and the stuff of their way of life. Every community has a way of life: a way of what, how, and when it negotiates with nature, with one another, with other communities, with self and the universe. Language carries the cultural universe of the community and in that universe also resides the entire body of values held by that community. Every community of humans with a given particularity has notions of what is right and wrong, of the bad and the good, of the ugly and the beautiful, in short a system of ethics and aesthetics the entirety of which, with associated feelings, emotions and attitudes, forms the basis of their identity or their being for themselves.
In his Science of Logic and in The Phenomenology of Spirit as indeed in all his works, Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, often talks of the notions of being and becoming, making the distinction between Being in itself and Being for itself, notions which Jean Paul Sartre plays with in Being and Nothingness, further talking about Being for others. We can think of Being in itself as when an entity exists objectively undifferentiated as opposed to being for itself when it becomes aware of itself as an entity. Language is what most helps in the movement of a community from the state of being in itself to a state of being for itself and this self-awareness is what gives the community its spiritual strength to keep on reproducing its being as it continually renews itself in culture, in its power relations, and in its negotiations with its entire environment. It is its culture which enables a community to imagine and re-imagine itself in history. And that is why a culture is to a community what a flower is to a plant. A flower is very beautiful, very colorful, often very delicate. But it is the flower which often readily defines the identity of so many plants. Most important it is the flower which is the carrier of the seeds which make it possible the reproduction of the roots and trunks of that plant. Kill the tree trunk and even the roots but retain the seeds and the tree can reproduce itself. It can, if you like, re-imagine itself. Language which is the carrier of culture is the ultimate and the most primary means of imagination.
Empire builders have always known that and in trying to shape how the dominated imagined their future they clearly saw the importance of delinking the elites of the dominated communities from their languages and literally transplanting their minds in the languages of the imperial center. And where the traditional elite resisted the transplant because they were too rooted in their languages and cultures, the empire builders simply manufactured a new elite through a massive cultural surgery carried out in the theaters of the new schools and colleges. The aim, realized or not, was to turn the elite into beings for others even in their conception of themselves. Examples abound and we do not even have to go to the special case of plantation slavery where whole communities were delinked from the languages of their original homes. Colonial India will do.
India, because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, became a social laboratory with the results later exported to other colonies. And so, the words of Thomas Babington Macauley who as a member of the Supreme Council of India (1834–38) helped reform the colony's education system as well as drawing its penal code have a special significance. You remember that in the famous minute on Indian education he had visions of English language producing "a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Note that this was not for the aesthetic pleasure of disinterested cultural engineering but rather, this class of persons "maybe interpreters between us and the people we govern." Exactly eighty-seven years later, Macauley's words were to be repeated in colonial Kenya by the then British Governor, Sir Phillip Mitchell. In outlining a policy for English-language dominance in African education literally as a moral crusade to supplement the armed crusade against the Mau Mau guerrilla army, he saw this new language education as bringing about a "civilized state in which the values and standards are to be the values and standards of Britain, in which every one, whatever his origins, has an interest and a part." In both instances, Macauley's India in nineteenth-century and Mitchell's Kenya in the twentieth century, the context was colonial and the aim was clear. Just as in the military realm the colonial powers had carved out a native army simultaneously alienated from the people whence they came and collaborative with the forces of their own conquest, the same would be true in the realm of the mind: create from the governed an intellectual army both alienated and collaborative. You create a being not for itself but being for others and therefore against its own being.
Thus the Horton-Asquith model had a whole colonial tradition and theory behind it and it was the model which was inherited almost unaltered in the era of independence. It was the products of this model, a Macauleyite system of education, who spread out to fill the vacant places of white judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, lawmakers, governors, military leaders, and heads of departments of education. What an inheritance for Africa! It was an interesting twist of historical fate, that those nurtured in the colonial mold should hold the key in molding the new nations in the military educational and economic realms. It is ironic and interesting to compare the position of the elites who, before the set-up of the Asquith colleges in Africa, were educated in London, Paris, and Washington. They lit the fires of nationalism and pan-Africanism and the politics of cultural identities as in the concepts of negritude and African personality. Whether they spoke African languages or not, they still paid homage to them as in the case of Nyerere translating the works of Shakespeare into Kiswahili or Kwame Nkrumah setting up the Bureau of African Languages or Birago Diop and Cheikh Diop stressing the centrality of African languages in the self-emancipation of Africa. But the products of the Asquith colleges embraced English language with an almost religious fervor as the language of modernization and respect in the global community. In various ways they argued and sought to convince themselves that English was now an African language.
The result is really a paradox. Systems of education entrusted by the new nations to research ideas of emancipating and modernizing Africa and for which process the new nations invest a good percent of their GNP now brings up brilliant intellects in every field of modern learning and yet they cannot put even a summary of what they have acquired in any African language. There is no doubt that these colleges, particularly in their heydays, have produced a remarkable scholarship. African scholars, whose first degrees were acquired in the colleges of the Horton-Asquith model, are to be found in major universities in Africa and Abroad. But they are clearly alienated intellects, exiles at home and Abroad, or exiles in search of a place they can truly claim as their own. In the context of the collective social body, they become beings for others, at the very least beings against themselves, against the very soil that gave birth to them. African-language communities pay for intellects which cannot put a single idea, even about agriculture or health or business, or democracy, or finance, into the very languages which gave them birth. This great paradox of African scholarship in general is best mirrored in the particular case of the production of African literature.
Because English was so central to all aspects of learning in the new colleges, the English Departments were very prestigious and quite frankly it is difficult to quite express in words the tremendous prestige with which a good performance in English was held. Students of English were the elite of the elite and a first-class degree in English was simply the first among equals. The history of English Literature, described in an apt phrase originally coined by Professor Abiola Irele as ranging from Spencer to Spender, was at the center of that curriculum. Since all the new colleges were largely external affiliates of the University of London, they virtually offered the same history, the same authors whether one went to the English Department at Makerere in Uganda or Ibadan in Nigeria, and that is why in the Ashby description of the rise of these universities I could see myself so clearly. I was definitely a product of the Horton-Asquith model, as were indeed nearly all the pioneering writers of the fifties and sixties. They were products of the English Department and often their initial inspirations were triggered by the admiration or disagreements with the models they read, a practice Clark-Bedekeremo once again described as The Example of Shakespeare.
A cursory glance at some of the early titles of African fiction tells the story. Achebe's Things Fall Apart and also No Longer at Ease from Yeats's Second Coming and Eliot's Journey of the Magi. The title of my own first published novel, Weep Not, Child, was taken from Walt Whitman. And I am sure that within the narratives or poetry it is possible to hear echoes of Thomas Hardy, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. In his essay "Named for Victoria, Queen of England," Chinua Achebe tells us that his initial motivation to write came from his encounter with some appalling novels about Africa including Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, and he decided "that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anybody else no matter how gifted or well intentioned." But here I am not so much concerned with the impact of the models as the language in which we produced our reaction to those models.
It is quite ironic that while one of the biggest achievements of the Horton-Asquith model was the production of an African literature in English it was a literature often motivated by the Blydenian vision of positive affirmation of the African image:
In all English speaking countries [Blyden had written in 1883], the mind of the intelligent Negro child revolts against the descriptions given in elementary books—geographies, travels, novels, histories—of the negro, but though he experiences an instinctive revulsion from the caricatures and misrepresentations, he is obliged to continue, as he grows in years, to study such pernicious teachings. After leaving school he finds the same things in newspapers in quasi-scientific works, and after a while—sape cadendo—they begin to seem the proper things to say about his race, and he accepts what, at first, his unbiased feelings naturally and indignantly repelled. Such is the effect of repetition . . . . Having embraced, or at least assented to these errors and falsehoods abut himself, he concludes that his only hope of rising in the scale of respectable manhood is to strive after whatever is most unlike himself and most alien to his taste. [qtd. in Ngugi, Writers in Politics, 1981, 1997].
The words and the sentiments are echoed in a statement by one of the early products of the new colleges. "If I were God," Chinua Achebe wrote in 1963 in the famous essay "The Novelist as a Teacher," "I would regard as the very worst our acceptance, for whatever reason, of racial inferiority" and he went on to defined his role as a writer as that of an educator trying to help "my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-denigration."
Thus this literature had two contradictory tendencies. It was often motivated and driven by the nationalistic and racial pride inherent in assumptions of the Blyden model, and yet its models were often the English authors read in class. Written in a European language it has nevertheless become to be the nearest thing to a common pan-African heritage. When Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature, his achievement and recognition were celebrated in many parts of Africa, Kenya for instance. Names of writers like Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Kwei Armah are known and respected in the four corners of the continent. Because of the models of its inspiration, the nineteenth-century Victorian novel with its natural realism and linear narrative structure for instance, the literature, and particularly the narratives tend to be conservative, almost imitative in form and yet very pertinent in their descriptions of the concerns of the twentieth-century Africa. Even in form it feels different and innovative compared with the models of its imitation.
What gives it this innovative sense? It cannot be the models which inspired it either in anger or pleasure. And this brings us to another paradox. For what gives it that innovative difference is surely its relationship to African languages and the great heritage of orature in those languages. These languages are a reservoir of images, proverbs, riddles, and ballads, stories from which this literature in European languages draws freely and often creatively. Among the Ibo, Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart, the proverb is like the palm wine with which words are eaten.
These languages are the magic fountain from which African Literature in English or French or Portuguese draws and which give it a perpetual youthfulness. The paleness arising from its imitation and the use of European languages to represent the real-life speech of the characters is immediately refreshed in color by the stamina and blood it draws from African languages.
All this—its pan-African reach, its racial pride, its champion of human and democratic values—is the most positive side of what now I call Europhone African Literature. Its Europhonity is of course a direct product of the Horton model and so whatever is positive in it would justify Horton's hope that the great achievements of the classics and Western civilization would generate excellence in the African recipients.
But Europhonism has no language or a cultural universe of its own. The literature it generates—Europhone Literature—is given identity in the market place of all writings in European tongues by all the reservoir of images in African life and languages. It has therefore a negative, almost parasitic side to it. Like a leech it sucks blood and stamina from African languages and it never gives anything back to the people who created the languages and the orature from which it draws so freely to give it that identity in the market place of world-wide writings in European tongues.
The two tendencies inherent in Europhone African literature are actually true of all the scholarship produced by the Horton-Asquith model. There is the creative tendency. The scholarship takes away from the African heritage and produces great works on many aspects of African history and landscape most of which are now to be found in Libraries all over the world. But there is also the parasitic aspect to this scholarship which knows only how to take away but never how to give anything back to the languages and peoples on whose behalf it makes its claim in the global community of scholarship in the arts, sciences, and technology. Knowledges of Africa, the results of extensive research, invention, and discoveries about Africa, by the sons and daughters of the continent, are actually stored in European-language granaries.
We can now see the implications of the Horton-Asquith model. A people can be deprived of wealth and even power. But one of the worst deprivations is the means of perceiving all that, articulating it, and therefore developing a vision and a strategy for fighting it out. We can of course blame it on colonialism and I have done my share of blaming in many of my publications, but remember that we cannot accuse colonialism of failing to do what it was clearly not meant to do. Colonialism and colonial models were never meant to develop the colonies for the benefit of the colonized. And that is why I think it is time that African scholarship and the university begun to question the Horton-Asquith model and its legacy of language policy and practice.
I have said elsewhere how I find it very contradictory in Africa today and elsewhere in the academies of the world to hear of scholars of African realities but who do not know a word of the languages of the environment of which they are experts. Do you think that Cambridge here would give me a job as Professor of French Literature if I confessed that I did not know a word of French? And yet schools in Africa and abroad are peopled by experts—whether African or not, whether sympathetic to the African cause or not, whether progressive or not— who do not have to demonstrate any acquaintance let alone expertise in any African language. They hold chairs and produce PhD's without the requirement of an African language. It is difficult to blame this on institutions abroad when they are merely taking the lead from the practice of African universities. The result is the marginalization of African languages in the academy at home. They do not control their own home turf because tongues from Europe rule their home base.
But the same holds true for African languages at the global level. The culture and thought of the twentieth-century global community is largely dominated by a handful of European languages. Even the UNO and its agencies assume the centrality of European languages in international relations. Thus Africa languages become invisible intellectually and politically at home and abroad. They are forced to assume a kind of intellectual and political death.
In this respect I find the words of Haunani Kay-Trask on the death of languages frighteningly pertinent. In her book, From a Native Daughter, she argues that indigenous languages replaced by colonial ones result in the creation of dead languages. But what is dead or lost is not the language but the people who once spoke it and transmitted their mother tongues to succeeding generations. Everywhere it is as if European languages have come shouting the often-quoted words from Bhagavad Gita:
I am become death
The shatterer of worlds
We think of death too narrowly in terms of physical disappearance. Death comes in many forms and there is the equally devastating cultural death and we Africans already provide a good example of such a possibility.
Over the last four hundred years we have seen Africans in the West lose their names completely so that our existence is in terms of Jones, James, Jones, and Janes. Now every achievement in sports, in academia, in the sciences and the arts goes to reinforce European naming systems and cultural personality. Language is of course the most basic of naming systems. With the loss of our languages will come the loss of our entire naming system and every historical intervention no matter how revolutionary will thence be within an European naming system, enhancing its capacities for ill or good. Thus in whatever she or he does, they will be performing their being for the enrichment of the cultural personality of white Europe.
For me the question of language goes to the heart of the very being and existence of the African or for that matter any community deprived of its language. That is why I now regard Europhonism as the most dangerous intellectual system for the development of Africa. Its logic is the complete wiping off of the African personality in the global cultural map. We simply become one of several branches in the European language system and the only struggle is for the recognition of equal worth of all the cultural branches of a European global whole.
Perhaps it is time that African scholars seriously took another look at the Blyden vision. The Blyden-Hayford model rejects the assumptions underlying the relationship of Africa to the world which equates knowledge, modernity, modernization, civilization, progress, development—whatever the name—to an acquisition of European tongues. There are hundreds of languages in Africa and the world, each of which is a unique store of memories and thoughts and experiences which are of benefit to human life. It is true that the current revolutions in information technologies daily shrink the globe into Macluhan's global village. But they also open possibilities of expansion of the human community. Academic and other cultural institutions should be among the first to sensitize the world community to the existence and reality of knowledge in diverse languages of the world. There are of course practical difficulties in implementing policies that realize fully plurality and diversity of languages but there should be conscious efforts by various disciplines to recognize the existence of knowledge in languages from places other than Europe and find ways of tapping into the knowledges thereby contained and in the process help in the dialogue among languages. Dialogue among languages is definitely one way of giving back to any language from which we draw sustenance. There are moves in that direction. In 1966 I attended a conference in Barcelona, Spain, organized in part by International PEN and which came with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights based on the recognition of the need for equality and dialogue among languages big and small.
But for Africa the question of languages goes beyond that of simply sensitizing the world to the plurality of languages and it goes to the very heart of our being and existence. And that is why I have always taken it that the main challenge is to African scholars and writers and Universities to act as pathfinders. It is this consciousness that made me turn to Gikuyu language for my creative endeavor and now I cannot go back. I work at New York University and I have just finished the fourth draft of a one thousand one hundred and forty-two page novel in Gikuyu language tentatively titled Murogi wa Kagoogo, in English, The Wizard of the Crow. I have also founded a journal with the help of New York University in Gikuyu language and in which I publish papers on every aspect of development, hoping that the journal will act as an inspiration for more journals in African languages. Then I see a very exciting possibility for mutual exchange among such journals making it possible through translations a genuine dialogue among African languages. There is also the conference on Literature and African Languages due in Asmara, Eritrea, in January at the beginning of the new millennium. The conference which brings together writers from every country in Africa who write in African languages and scholars who want to confront the question of African languages and knowledge and scholarship should be the first of many in the first century of the new millennium to raise the visibility of African languages and to celebrate the fact that all the odds stark against them African languages have re fused to go away.
I started by quoting from the Godwin lectures which Eric Ashby gave in Harvard. The book he published in 1964 opens with two quotations. One of these is taken from a dispatch from the Governor General of India in 1934 in which he declares that the education they intend to impose on India is that of the sciences, arts, philosophy, and literature of Europe, in short, European knowledge, a kind of Horton model. The other is from the 1959 charter of the University of Ghana. By then Ghana was independent and the charter saw the University as taking its place among the foremost universities in the world. As a great seat of African learning it would give leadership to African thought, scholarship, and development. That lofty ideal is still shared by many African institutions and scholars. But the question of African languages is primary to that leadership in thought, scholarship, and development, and I hope that all the African scholars and writers will heed the call. Let us go back to the magic fountain and draw that which gives power and knowledge to the real agents of social change in the continent—the ordinary man and woman who probably only speaks his or her language. When African writers reject Europhonism as the only way of performing their being, they will bring about genuine revolution in their literature in both content and form. Then we can draw from whatever sources elsewhere to add to that fountain instead of always drawing from it and taking away. We shall link with the globe without delinking from our worlds. It is then that Africa will say with Martin Carter of Guyana:
I come from the nigger yard of yesterday
Leaping from the oppressor's hate
And the scorn of myself.
I come to the world with scars upon my soul
Wounds on my body fury in my hands.
I turn to the histories of men and the lives of the peoples.
I examine the shower of sparks the wealth of the dreams.
I am pleased with the glories and sad with the sorrows rich with the riches, poor with the loss
From the nigger yard of yesterday I come with my burden.
To the world of tomorrow I turn with my strength. (39)I believe now more than ever that Africa must use its languages and peoples as a strength with which it can leap into tomorrow. African scholars and writers must lead the way as we enter the twenty-first century.
NOTE
1. Ashby Lecture given at Clare Hall, Cambridge, May 1999. I would like to thank Miss Toral Gajarawala for her research into this paper.
WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958.
_____. No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann, 1960.
_____. "The Novelist as Teacher." Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture. Ed. John Press. London: Heinemann, 1965. 201-05.
Ashby, Eric. African Universities and Western Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.
Blyden, Edward Wilmot. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. 1887. Chesapeake, NY: ECA,1990.
Carter, Martin. Poems of Succession. London: New Beacon, 1977.
Cary, Joyce. Mister Johnson. New York: Harper, c1951.
Hayford, J. E. Casely. Ethiopia Unbound. London: Cass, 1969.
Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Humanities P, 1969.
_____. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Kay-Trask, Haunani. From a Native Daughter. c1993. Honolulu: U of Hawai'i P, 1999.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Weep Not, Child. London: Heinemann Educational, 1964.
_____. Writers in Politics. London: Heinemann, 1981. Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997.
_____. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986.
_____. Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams. Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. c1956. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Citadel, 1966.
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