University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh UNIVERSITY OF GHANA COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE COLONIALIST NOVEL: CAVING, CAGING, THEFT AND VOICING AS A STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR JOSEPH BROOKMAN AMISSAH-ARTHUR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH JULY 2017 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh UNIVERSITY OF GHANA COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE COLONIALIST NOVEL: CAVING, CAGING, THEFT AND VOICING AS A STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR BY JOSEPH BROOKMAN AMISSAH-ARTHUR (ID. NO. 10212919) THIS DISSERTATION IS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE AWARD OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ENGLISH DEGREE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH JULY 2017 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh DECLARATION I, the undersigned, hereby declare that this dissertation is the result of my own research undertaken under supervision, and that, with the exception of the cited references, this work is an original research which has not been previously presented for another degree. Candidate:………………………………………………………………… (Joseph Brookman Amissah-Arthur) Date:………………………………………………………………………. Lead Supervisor:………………………………………………………….. (Professor Augustine N. Mensah) Supervisor: ………………………………………………………………. (Professor Albert A. Sackey) Supervisor:………………………………………………………………... (Professor Helen Yitah) i University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ABSTRACT The English novel was born a colonialist literary production. From its earliest beginnings in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) through its nineteenth-century realisations in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887) to its twentieth-century forms such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), the English novel has been closely associated with the rise of the British Empire. The colonialist novel, novels written by British colonisers who came to Africa, is therefore an integral subset of the English novel. The present study seeks to interrogate the colonialist novel in order to find out how colonialism has been socially organised in the genre. We seek to discover the structural formulations that make the story of the colonialist novel possible. The thrust of the study is motivated by two key problems identified in the existing scholarship on the English novel and structural theory. First, the distinguished Terry Castle (2002) suggests that critical ideas on the early English novel have been exhausted, and that nothing new can be discovered about the novel. Second, Firdous Azim (1993) emphasises that criticism on the colonialist novel is lopsided as it stops at the social, thematic level. She bemoans the dearth of the structuralist methodology in the study of the genre. We find in Castle’s and Azim’s positions a conundrum and motivation respectively. First, Castle’s proclamation seems hasty and unjustified, especially, in the light of Azim’s observation. Second, Azim’s profound discovery of the lack of the structutalist methodology in the study of the colonialist novel exposes a gap in scholarship that must be filled. ii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh In view of the the problems identified above, the study provides a structural study of the colonialist novel with an emphasis on the story – and not on the discourse. The story of the novel represents the social matter while the discourse is the process by which the story is carried to the reader. Our study seeks to find out how the story of the colonialist novel is organised on the social level; in other words, how the structure of the story manifests in the social domain. The study is interested not merely in the politics of the story but more importantly in the structure of the story. Applying the Levi-Straussian paradigmatic strain of structural methodology, we examine a select set of seven colonialist novels, and reduce the plots of all seven texts to seven simple sentences or clauses. We then re-arrange the seven sentences to discover what formulaic relationships exist among them, keeping in mind that it is only as bundles of relations that the constituent units of a story can be combined to make a meaning (Levi-Strauss 1986). We make the following discoveries: that there is a grammar in the story of the colonialist novel; that the grammar is homological, and determines the chiasmic structure of the colonialist novel; and that there is a mirror line in the story which makes the chiasmic structure possible. In other words, the action of one part of the story is repeated in the other part, but in the inverse order, creating an object and mirror-image formulation. What this means is that the suffering experienced by the colonised African is eventually inverted against the coloniser. The significance of our study resides in its attempt to provide a new theory of the novel by examining the structural basis of the colonialist story. Our study is significant also because, by exposing the falsehood of the colonialist notion of co-victimhood, the supposed victimhood of both the colonised and coloniser, the study does not merely generate but also problematises the grammar of the colonialist story. iii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh DEDICATION Twerampon Kwame, who makes all things possible. Ewuradwoa, who shouldered the burden. iv University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am heavily indebted to my supervisors: Professor A.N. Mensah, Professor Albert A. Sackey and Professor Helen A. Yitah, all of the Department of English, for their huge support. I am thankful to Professor Kofi Anyidoho, also of the Department of English, for his interest in my work. My special thanks goes to Mr. Brandford Parker Amissah-Arthur for his unflinching support. I express gratitude, again, to Professor Helen A. Yitah and Professor Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu for their immense roles in my receipt of a PhD Research Grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York under the auspices of University of Ghana. My profound appreciation goes to University of Ghana and Carnegie Corporation for the kind support. v University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration………….…………………………………………………………….i Abstract……………………………….…….…………………………………….ii Dedication…………...…………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgement...........…………………………………………………………v Table of Contents...........................................……………………………………vi List of Schemata.......................................................................………………….xi List of Figures……………………………………………...……………………xii List of Tables.......................................................................……………………..xiii 1.0 CHAPTER ONE: CONCEPTUALISING THE STUDY……………………………..................................1 1.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 1.2 Toward a Definition of Colonialism…………………………………………….4 1.3 Statement of the Problem………………………………………………………10 1.4 Objective of the Study………………………………………………………….11 1.5 Hypotheses………………………………………………………………………12 1.6 Research Questions……………………………………………………………..14 1.7 Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………...14 1.8 Justification for the Study……………………………………………………...20 1.9 Organisation of the Study….…………………………………………………..22 2.0 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE, POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL ……………...……………..24 2.1 Literature Review I: A Critical Survey of Colonial Discourse………………24 2.1.1 The Role of Science in Inaugurating Racism and Western Colonialism...27 2.1.2 The Role of European Philosophy in Inaugurating Modern Racism and Colonialism………………………………………………………………32 2.2 Literature Review II: A Critical Survey of the English Novel and Postcolonial Studies.............................................................................................37 2.2.1 A Critical Historiography of the English Novel…………………………37 vi University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 2.2.2 The English Novel in the Colonies………………………………………44 2.2.3 The English Novel and Postcolonial Studies……………….....................51 3.0 CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY……………………………………………………...58 3.1 The Theory: Formulating the Grammar……………………………………...59 3.1.1 The Principle of Constant and Variable………………………………….61 3.1.1.1 Defining the Nominal (Actant) Category…………………....62 3.1.1.1.1 The Notion of the Cave………………………………62 3.1.1.1.2 The Notion of X and Y…………………………........63 3.1.1.2 Defining the Verbal (Functional) Category………………….65 3.1.1.2.1 The Verb: “To Enter”………………………………...65 3.1.1.2.2 The Verb: “To Cage”………………………………...67 3.1.1.2.3 The Verb: “To Steal”………………………………...69 3.1.1.2.4 The Verb: “To Speak”……………………………….71 3.1.2 Establishing the Bundles of Relations Among the Terms of the Grammar…………………………………………………………………73 3.1.2.1 Relation 1: Dioscuric Pairs and the Chiasmic Structure of the Grammar…………………………………………………74 3.1.2.2 Relation 2: Semantic Compounding, Neutralisation of Semantic Opposition and the Chiasmic Stucture of the Grammar…………………………………………………….79 3.1.3 The Mirror Line………………………………………………………....82 3.1.4 The Grammar……………………………………………………………82 4.0 CHAPTER FOUR CAVING: THE MYTHOPOETIC COLONIAL CAVE AND THE DIALECTICS OF ENTRY……………………………………………………………………………...85 4.1 [Sentence (a): X enters the cave]………………………………………………88 4.1.1 Mythopoetic (Dis)Ordering of Time: ‘Past in the Present’ and ‘Present in the Past’ Time Schemata………………………………………………89 4.1.1.1 Present in the Past Time Diffusion: Haggard’s Manipulation of Time…………………………………………………….....90 4.1.1.2 Present in the Past Time Diffusion: Conrad’s Manipulation of Time……………………………………………………...101 vii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.1.1.3 Past in the Present Time Diffusion: Cary, Greene and Monsarrat’s Manipulation of Time…………………………105 4.1.1.3.1 The Structures of Modernity and Primitivity……….105 4.1.1.3.2 The Structure of the African Mind: The Primal Horde, Group Psychology and Psychosexual Fixation……………………………………………..109 4.1.2 Mythopoetic Treatment of Space: The Gross Cosmic Membrane……...120 4.1.2.1 Mythopoetic Penetration of the Cosmic Membrane………..122 4.2 [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X]…………………………………………..141 4.2.1 The Dialogue of the Caves……...............................................................142 4.2.1.1 Haggard’s and Conrad’s Tentative Acceptance of the Notion of the European’s Inner Cave……………………………....143 4.2.1.2 The Cary-Greene-Monsarrat Environmental Case for the European’s Inner Cave……………………………………...149 5.0 CHAPTER FIVE CAGING: TAMING THE ‘CAVE PEOPLE’ AND THE REVOLT OF THE CAVE…………………………………………………………………………………..155 5.1 [Sentence (b): X cages Y]………...……………………………………………156 5.1.1 Political Caging…………………………………………………………156 5.1.1.1 The Mother-Aspect of the Mother-Queen Dyad and Cognitive Caging...…………………………………………157 5.1.1.2 The Queen-Aspect of the Mother-Queen Dyad and Political Caging……...……………………………………...161 5.1.2 Physical Caging………………………………………………………...165 5.1.2.1 Physical Caging in Haggard and Conrad…………………...166 5.1.2.2 Physical Caging in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat…………...176 5.1.3 Psychosexual Caging…………………………………………………...184 5.1.3.1 Death Eroticism: The African Woman and Colonial Phallus………………………………………………………185 5.1.3.2 Economy of the Libido: African Masculinity and Denial of the European Pudenda…………………………………...197 5.2 [Sentence (b-1): The cave cages X]…………………………………………....205 5.2.1 Physical Caging………………………………………………………...206 5.2.2 Social Caging…………………………………………………………...210 5.2.3 Marital Caging……………………………………………………….....214 viii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 6.0 CHAPTER SIX THEFT: EXPROPRIATION AND THE FAUSTIAN EXCHANGE……………...220 6.1 [Sentence (c): X steals from the cave/Y]……………………………………..224 6.1.1 Theft of Animal Resources……………………………………………..224 6.1.2 Theft of Mineral Resources…………………………………………….230 6.1.3 Theft of Forest Resources………………………………………………232 6.1.4 Theft of Marine Resources……………………………………………...232 6.1.5 Theft of Human Resources……………………………………………..234 6.2 [Sentence (c-1): Y/the cave steal from X]…………………………………......240 6.2.1 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Marriages…………………….240 6.2.2 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Sanity…………………….......245 6.2.3 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Lives…………………………249 7.0 CHAPTER SEVEN VOICING: THE MIRROR LINE OF COLONIAL INTERRELATIONS……….255 7.1 The Mechanics of the Mirror Line……………………………………………...256 7.2 [Sentence 0: Y/the cave speak against X]…………………………………….257 7.2.1 The Four ‘Voices’ of Africa………………………….…………….......259 7.2.1.1 The Discursive Voice: Hybridity, Subversion and African Nationalism…………………………………………………260 7.2.1.2 The Violent Voice: Self-Preservation and African Nationalism…………………………………………………267 7.2.1.3 The Cultural Voice: (De)hybridisation, Cultural Nationalism and African Agency……….……………………………......277 7.2.1.3.1 Hybridisation of Africans…………………………..278 7.2.1.3.2 Dehybridisation as a Source of Empowerment….....282 7.2.1.3.3 The Problematics of Dehybridisation………………290 7.2.1.4 The Cosmic Voice…………………...……………………...292 8.0 CHAPTER EIGHT SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION………………………298 8.1 Summary: Research Questions and Critical Findings…………..………….298 ix University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8.1.1 What is the constitutive grammar of the colonialist novel?.....................298 8.1.1.1 Caving…………………………………………………………..299 8.1.1.1.1 Representations of Time……………………………300 8.1.1.1.2 Representations of Space…………………………...301 8.1.1.1.3 What happens in the Cave?........................................302 8.1.1.2 Caging…………………………………………………………..303 8.1.1.2.1 Who is caged?............................................................303 8.1.1.3 Theft…………………………………………………………….307 8.1.1.4 Voicing………………………………………………………….308 8.1.2 How is the grammar formulated or structured?.......................................309 8.1.3 Does the structure of the colonialist story have a meaning?....................312 8.1.4 Does the structure of the colonialist story reflect the reality of colonisation in Africa?.............................................................................317 8.2 Conclusion………………………………………………………………..……318 8.3 Recommendation……………………………………………………………...319 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………......321 x University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh LIST OF SCHEMATA Schema 1………………………………………………………………………………………59 Schema 2………………………………………………………………………………………75 Schema 3………………………………………………………………………………………78 Schema 4………………………………………………………………………………………79 Schema 5……………………………………………………………………………………….309 xi University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1………………………………………………………………………………………….74 Figure 2………………………………………………………………………………………….74 Figure 3………………………………………………………………………………………...256 Figure 4……………………………………………………………………………………..….310 Figure 5…………………………..…………………………………………………………….310 xii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh LIST OF TABLES Table 1………………………………………………………………………………………….95 Table 2………………………………………………………………………………………….97 Table 3………………………………………………………………………………………….98 Table 4………………………………………………………………………………………….124 Table 5………………………………………………………………………………………….233 xiii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.0 CHAPTER ONE CONCEPTUALISING THE STUDY 1.1 Introduction The history of the British Empire, and by extension Western colonialism, has an umbilical relationship with the history of the English novel. The rise of English colonial and imperial ambitions coincides with the birth of the genre to the extent that it is inconceivable to think of the rise of the British Empire, for instance, and not consider the role the English novel played in the “fictional construction of Englishness and its place in the world” (Philips 2011:116). The English novel provides a convenient site for the convergence, insemination and dissemination of colonial ideologies and their Manichean social categories such as: master race/slave race, superiority/inferiority, whiteness/blackness, light/darkness, Christian/pagan, civilisation/primitivity, culture/nature, rationality/passion, humanity/bestiality and metropolis/ outpost (JanMohamed 1995). These dialectical inflections of the master race ideology, the hallmarks of the British Empire and Western colonialism, become the staple and ideological basis of some of the foundational texts of the English novel. The stories of colonial English explorers, adventurers, administrators, scientists and soldiers who came to Africa in the great age of Empire – the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries – feature numerous instances where Englishness is constructed solely on the bases of superior technology, Christianity, military might and ‘civilisation’, and on those bases, the colonisers arrogate to themselves the authority to appropriate and misappropriate the land and resources of the Africans. Thus, one of the fundamental roles played by the English colonisers, in addition to mapping the land for imperial annexation, was narrating the ‘exoticism’ of the Empire to the metropolis. 1 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Even though many of the works in the canon of the English novel are deeply implicated in Empire – Robinson Crusoe, Great Expectations, Moll Flanders, Jane Eyre, to mention a few – these great works are differentiated from what Michael Echeruo variously calls the “explorer’s novel of Africa” or “the European novel of Africa” (Echeruo 1973: 1). According to Echeruo, the latter designation describes a special segment of the English, and by extension European, novel whose setting is alien to the metropolitan readers, and which seeks to “record, evoke and interpret the life and situation of a foreign people for the education and entertainment of the author’s native readers” (Echeruo 2). In the European novel of Africa, the novelist usually takes the stance of a folk reporter, philosopher and discoverer who reports to the home audience his ‘discovery’ of strange, usually, ‘primitive’ peoples of distant lands, their exotic habits, customs, language and lore. Invariably, these presumed ‘primitive’ peoples are reported as having no civil institutions: justice system, religion and democratic government; or moral codes. They are either cannibals or presumed to be cannibals, and have unbridled libido. These texts are usually written by colonisers – Europeans or British citizens who come to Africa in some capacity: as adventurers, merchants, soldiers, settlers, priests or colonial administrators – who settle among the Africans, observe their habits and arrogate to themselves the status of an authority in African culture. What they write is therefore taken as ‘facts’. But Echeruo rightly points out that: [The European novel of Africa] rarely provides the [European] reader with any [factual] basis. More usually, it only offers him a prior evaluation of evidence. […] The argument of such novels derives its cogency almost entirely from the character and meaning which the author ascribes to the foreign lands and foreign peoples about whom he writes. But the significance the novel finds in the episodes will usually be founded on an assumed philosophical or moral bias supposedly unique to the environment of 2 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the action. Accordingly, the valuation of its episodes and of its characters is determined by an imposed moral code specifically defined for it by the novelist and his cultural assumptions. In such circumstances, the fidelity of the reportage becomes of secondary importance to the novelist’s overall conception of his foreign context. (2-3) Our focus in the present study is this specific segment of the English novel: the English novel of Africa, which, in the context of this dissertation, shall be called the colonialist novel. The designation ‘colonialist novel’ is appropriate because authorship is usually by European nationals who either believed in Empire and, therefore, came to live in Africa in that belief, such as Henry Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Nicholas Monsarrat; or people who worked for the British Imperial Service and experienced posting to Africa in the service of Empire, such as Graham Greene and Joyce Cary. In view of the above context, novels such as Haggard’s She ([1887], 1994), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ([1902], 1994), Cary’s The African Witch (1936) and Mister Johnson (1939), Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1960) and Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956) are classified as colonialist novels, and constitute the focus of our study. We might want to understand – and indeed, it behoves us to explain – the currents that compel Joyce Cary’s narrator, for instance, in The African Witch, to describe the Oxford-trained African prince, Aladai, as an “ape” who does not deserve to be invited to European circles (1939: 121); or why the powerful Emir of Rimi is reduced to a “house-tortoise” and “performing cat” (Cary 175); or why Haggard’s narrator sees Africans as “tigers [who are ready] to lap blood, and even now …hunger for your lives” (1994: 172). It is important for this study to try to explain why Marlow represents Africans as brutes and cannibals stamping their feet and rolling their eyes on an earth that seems unearthly; or why he regards Africans as monstrous men whose 3 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh humanity is doubtful (Conrad 1994: 51). In order to properly apprehend the social, historical and intellectual influences that produced the colonialist novel, we need to investigate the intellectual milieu which shaped the thinking of the writers of the colonialist novel. Thus, having defined what we mean by ‘colonialist novel’, it is important that we also define ‘colonialism’, and trace its development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it became the hugely compelling force that inaugurated Western colonialism. A detailed discussion of the intellectual climates that produced Western colonialism and the colonialist novel is provided in Chapter 2. 1.2 Towards a Definition of Colonialism Following Robert Delavignette, Olufemi Taiwo (2010) attempts a definition of the word ‘colonialism’. The meaning of the word has evolved over time, from its original, supposedly neutral, meaning to its negative contemporary connotation. In his Christianity and Colonialism, Robert Delavignette, the French colonial administrator, suggests the word comes from the Latin verb colere, meaning to cultivate a land. Delavignette reports that the etymology of the word derives from the Indo-European root, kwele, “implying the idea of men moving around in order to organize space by occupying the soil” (qtd in Taiwo 25). He reiterates colonisation has never been merely an agrarian exercise, and that there is more to its meaning than mere cultivation of land. In most cases, colonization took the form of a political expansion, with the centre of the expansion turning into a metropolis; it becomes a matter of State, and there is the tendency to found an empire based on the principle of linking to the metropolis countries often separated from it even further ethically and sociologically than they are by physical distance…. From this point of view, it becomes clear that there is no colonization without a metropolis or mother-country. (qtd in Taiwo 26) 4 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Ania Loomba’s definition of colonialism coincides with Delavignette’s. In her view, the word derives from the Roman word ‘colonia’ meaning a farm or settlement. The word in this original context refers to Roman citizens settling and setting up farms in other lands but retaining relationship with Rome (Loomba 1998: 1). Loomba points out that this meaning of the word makes no reference to the displacement that occurs to indigenous peoples when their lands are taken over (Loomba 1). Delavignette’s comprehensive explanation of colonialism however reveals that the word has always been associated with occupation and appropriation of other people’s land and resources. Other semantic extensions of the ‘colonialism’ include: the angst of displacement, exploitation, acculturation, and many other negative practices associated with conquest. Jurgen Osterhammel, in Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, defines colonialism as: a relationship between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule. (2005: 16) Other distinguished commentators such as Frantz Fanon (1967), Jean-Paul Sartre (1967) and Edward Said (1994) have attempted to define or give insights on what constitutes colonialism. For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, colonialism wrecks violence and brutality on the cultural, social, political and economic life of the colonised. He defines colonialism in totalising terms: 5 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Colonial domination … is total and tends to … disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs…, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women. (1967: 190) Edward Said sees colonialism, and its twin concept of imperialism, as Europe’s establishment of “colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths” abroad for the purposes of exploiting “overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor, …hugely profitable land,” […] and large numbers of subjugated peoples” (1994: 8). In effect, both Fanon and Said identify exploitation of material and human resources, and political domination as key elements of colonialism. Perhaps, the most articulate statements on the nature of colonialism are those provided by Jean-Paul Sarte and Olufemi Taiwo. In his “Preface” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre delivers a monumental report which we quote below. He suggests colonialism: does not only have for its aim the keeping of…enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are leveled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces. …[I]n Congo,… Negroes hands were cut off, [and]…in 6 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Angola,…until very recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to shut them with padlocks. (1967: 13-4) Olufemi Taiwo identifies three forms of colonialisation. He calls them “colonialisation1,” “colonisation2” and “colonisation3” stressing that all three forms involve conquest. Colonisation1 assumes that the land taken over is unoccupied and empty, and thus, calls for utilization. When colonisation1 occurs on sparsely populated lands, there is not much consequence. When it takes place on already settled lands with organised community life, there is a massive displacement of people, and disruption of social life. The colonisation of Canada, Australia and United States of America is an instance of colonisation1 (2010: 27). As Taiwo points out, even in earlier times when might was its own justification for conquest, “it was never enough to subdue an enemy to prevail…. Elaborate rituals were invented to aid the acceptance by the displaced of their displacement and various myths developed over time to legitimate what initially was obtained by force” (Taiwo 27). Amar Acheraiou highlights some of the methodologies of incorporation and hybridisation used to ameliorate the effects of conquest in earlier times. For instance, the Greek conquest of Egypt in 146 BC saw the incorporation of Egyptian religious practices, myths and arts into Greek lore. Similar syncretism took place when the Romans took over Greece; the conquerors assimilated “Greek strategies of expansion, arts, gods, rituals and even dress, establishing continuities between the Hellenic and Latin worlds (Acheraiou 2008: 3). In the face of the above, the European conquest of Canada, Australia and the United States represents an example of colonisation1 with a caveat: the new settlers did not seem to be interested in cultivating the aboriginal peoples as happened in earlier times. The aboriginal peoples were simply exterminated (Taiwo 2010: 28). Colonialisation2 in Taiwo’s definition reflects Delavignette’s idea of modern empire 7 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh building, which initially “takes the form of political expansion with the centre of the expansion turning into a metropolis” (Taiwo 29). The whole arrangement leads to a metropolis-periphery relations that translates into a mother-country controlling countries and territories separated from the metropolis physically in terms of distance, and “even further ethically and sociologically” (Taiwo 29). The bedrock of colonisation2 is economic exploitation. Generally designated as modern or Western colonisation, Colonisation2 represents the foundation of modern imperialism. It was practised in India, Caribbean and Africa (Taiwo 29). Colonisation3 is a combination of the first two forms of colonisation. It is a simultaneous convergence on the colonised land of huge numbers of settlers as well as economic exploiters. While the settler community appropriates lands and cultivates them, the exploiter community is interested in policy formulation, taxation, control of trade and repatriation of profit to the mother-country. It is the type of colonisation practised in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Algeria (Taiwo 2010: 34). According to Taiwo, though colonisation has been occurring throughout human history, what makes Western colonialism phenomenal is the technological support that propelled the unprecedented scale of territorial annexation. He writes: the kind of colonization that was definitive of the modern era was enhanced by new knowledge that generated technological innovations that were deployed to give birth to a different kind of empire whose colonial adventures shaped and continue to shape our contemporary landscapes and mindscapes. (Taiwo 34) As Delavignette rightly warns, any attempt to define ‘colonialism’ raises many complex issues. For example, there is no universal consensus that the career of Western colonialism has been mainly negative. Even though many scholars – for instance, all the commentators cited earlier – 8 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh condemn the career of colonialism, not everybody shares this position. In a 2015 essay, “The Truth About Western ‘Colonialism,’” the distinguished Bruce Thornton, attacks Fanon’s and Sartre’s condemnatory positions on colonialism. Thornton seeks to validate Western colonialism, and describes any uncomplimentary definition of colonialism as “crude” and “simplistic discrediting.” He writes: This leftist interpretation of words like colonialism and imperialism transforms them into ideologically loaded terms that ultimately distort the tragic truths of history. They imply that Europe’s explorations and conquests constituted a new order of evil. In reality, the movements of peoples in search of resources, as well as the destruction of those already in possession of them, is the perennial dynamic of history. In our view, Thornton’s conviction on colonialism is a reflection of the Middle Ages scenario when “might was its own justification” for conquering other peoples (Taiwo 2010: 27). Even more curious is Thornton’s alibi that: colonialism is justifiable since “human history has been stained by man’s continual use of brutal violence to acquire land and resources and [to] destroy or replace those possessing them”. Equally untenable is his view that: “scholars may find [only] subtle nuances of evil in the European version of this ubiquitous aggression….” Significantly, Acheraiou (2008) and Taiwo (2010) alert us to the antiquated nature of colonialist views such as Thornton’s. So far, we have attempted to provide an analysis of the nuances involved in trying to define colonialism. 9 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.3 Statement of the Problem It has become unfashionable to pursue scholarly investigation in the early novel, including the colonialist novel, because it is assumed that the most important critical and theoretical work in the field has already been done. It is argued that there is nothing new to be discovered or added to the saturated field. For instance, Terry Castle pronounces the death of the early novel scholarship when she declares that the astonishing store of new historical, genealogical and bibliographic information about the early English novel, accumulated over the past thirty years, has exhausted the field, and brought it to a dead-end. She cites the ‘Eighteenth- Century Novel and Empire’, for instance, as one of the oversaturated areas that need no further investigation. She is emphatic: “we can go no farther;” the field “may have reached its natural terminus point” (2002: 110). Delivering the final verdict on the subject, she declares, “the battered pigskin of [early English] fiction studies has been definitely kicked through the goal post” (Castle 110). We share Lennard Davis’ opinion that Castle’s declaration may be premature and that, in spite of the great intellectual work done, the field is still fertile for further exploration and contribution (2000: 480). Firdous Azim exposes another gap in the scholarship on the English novel. She observes that not much work has been done on the structure of the colonialist novel, a subset of the English novel that is deeply implicated in the seventeenth century birth of the English novel and the career of Empire. According to Azim, studies by Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for instance, have been hugely psychological, social/thematic and linguistic (Azim 1993: 31), but not structural. There is, therefore, the need for a study that interrogates the structural formulations of the colonialist novel, and examines how colonialism is organised in the fiction to reflect the colonialist writers’ unique vision of colonial social reality. 10 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.4 Objective of the Study Following Seymour Chatman (1978), we conceptualise narrative as constituted of two broad components: the story and its discourse. The ‘story’ (histoire) is the ‘content’ or social matter of narrative. It is composed of the chain of events (actions and happenings) and existents (characters and items of setting). The story, therefore, deals with the existential fabric of narrative with an emphasis on the representation of life experiences. ‘Discourse’ (discours), on the other hand, involves the expression of the content, that is, the means by which the action of the story is communicated (1978: 19). Discourse concerns itself chiefly with the narrative voice and its complex realisations such as point of view (Chatman 151) and speech-acts (161ff). It also involves the complex constructs of the narrative voice and their relation to the historical author and reader. In other words, discourse also deals with concepts such as: real author, implied author, narrator, narratee, implied reader, real reader (151). In a nutshell, while the story comprises the what of narrative, discourse involves the how of narrative (Chatman 19). This dissertation seeks to investigate the structure of the story of the colonialist novel. In other words, we intend to find out how the veridical matter, content, or social reality of the colonialist novel is organised. Our interest is not in the discourse of the novel or strategies of expressing the content. Following Chatman (24-26), we recognise that the story has a form and substance of its own, quite apart from its discourse. Our objective is to interrogate the substance (the social world) of the story in order to find how that world is formed or structured. We intend, therefore, to discover the grammar by which the story is formulated. By ‘grammar’ we mean the recurring functions that are used to organise the story of the colonialist novel. In other words, we shall interrogate the social world of the novel, and attempt to delineate a set of stable functions that represents the grammar or formulaic structure of colonialist story. 11 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh We shall then project the isolated structure as the “minimal [irreducible] complete” colonialist story (Todorov 2001: 2105). 1.5 Hypotheses In providing the analysis, we posit that: 1. On the level of the story, all colonialist novels are the same, and are built on the same grammar. That is, all colonialist stories are organised according to the same set of functions and in a pattern that is fixed. It is our argument that this pattern is not readily discernible on the superficial level. It is deeply embedded in the social fabric of the stories, and is realisable only at the level of abstraction. 2. The grammar is a superordinate sentence consisting of seven simple sentences or clauses. 3. The grammar is organised as a chiasmic or dioscuric structure to represent an object and mirror-image social reality. At this point, it is important to explain the key terms, ‘chiasmic’ and ‘dioscuric’. According to Henry Clay Gorton, chiasma derives from the Greek word chiasma which means a ‘cross-mark’. Chi is Greek for the alphabet, ‘X’, thus chiasma denotes a cross-over shape. The same sense of the ‘chi’ informs the rhetorical device, chiasmus. In the device, two parallel structures are inverted so that there is a reversal of form and meaning. Gorton provides two examples of a chaismus. A structure such as “ABCD…DCBA” is chiasmic or chiastic because there is a reversal of the components, which implies a medial reflective principle. He cites another example from Matthew 19:30 in The Holy Bible: The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first 12 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh In the above example, the nouns “first” and “last” swap places in the two sentence structures creating an X-shaped formation (Gorton 1993: 11). From the examples, we observe two identical structures are inverted to create a simultaneous synonymous and antonymous relations. There is also an abstract principle of a mirror line that makes the inversion of the structures possible. We shall talk more about the chiasmus in Chapter 3 where we shall expound on the grammar we are theorising. We shall now explain the term, ‘dioscuric’. The word derives from the Dioscuri: Castor and Pollux, the antithetical twins of classical mythology. Though twins, Castor’s father, Tyndareus, is human, so Castor is mortal; Pollux’s father, Zeus, on the other hand, is a god, so Pollux is immortal (Lampriere 1820: 160-61). Thus, Castor and Pollux simultaneously reflect each other as twins through their shared mother, Leda, and deflect from each other as mortal and immortal through their antithetical fathers. The dioscuric principle, therefore, implies a condition of simultaneous synthesis and antithesis. It is evident from our definition of ‘chiasmic’ and ‘dioscuric’ that the two terms reflect the same principle. In our study of the colonialist novel, we recognise that structure of the stories reflect the chiasmic or dioscuric principle, explaining why we shall use the two terms interchangeably. In other words, it is our argument that the story of the colonialist novel has a dioscuric structure: it has two parts which share a simultaneous synthetic and antithetic relationship. 4. On the level of abstraction, there is a mirror line in the colonialist novel, which makes the splitting of the story into two homological parts possible. It is our suspicion at this early stage that the mirror line of the colonialist story is not merely an artistic device, but also a specifically contrived ideological tool designed by the colonialist writer to create an illusion of co- victimhood. 13 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.6 Research Questions In order to achieve its objectives, the study will attempt to answer the following pertinent questions: 1. What is the constitutive grammar of the colonialist story? 2. How is the grammar formulated or structured? 3. Does the structure have a meaning? What are the social, political, economic and ideological implications of the structure, if any? 4. Does the structure of the colonialist novel reflect the reality of colonialism in Africa? 1.7 Theoretical Framework The analysis in this dissertation is be influenced by structuralism. As a theory, structuralism is heavily indebted to linguistics as it seeks to apply the principles of linguistics to the analyses of cultural phenomena. Structuralism essentially studies signification and assumes that at the root of each signifying phenomenon is a set of organising principles, an intrinsic operating system, in the form of an isolatable structure, which enables the phenomenon to have a meaning. In other words, structuralism studies the “semiotic conventions” that govern language or cultural phenomena, and provides the possibilities for interpretation. Essentially, structuralism studies phenomena as systems within which meaning is constructed only by virtue of the network of relations. In Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, Jonathan Culler provides a useful definition of structuralism. According to Culler: Just as the speaker of a language has assimilated a complex grammar which enables him to read a series of sounds or letters as a sentence with a meaning, so the reader 14 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of literature has acquired, through his encounters with literary works, implicit mastery of various semiotic conventions which enable him to read a series of sentences as poems or novels endowed with shape and meaning. The study of literature…would become an attempt to understand the conventions which make literature possible. (1975: viii, my emphasis) Essentially, Culler defines structuralism in terms of structural linguistics. He sees “language” rightly as a system made up of different phonemes (sounds) or graphemes (letters). The meaning of the phonemic or graphemic system is based on qualitative differentiations in the system. Similarly, he casts the entire body of “literature” or “literary works” as a system made up of genres. Meaning within literature as a system is established based on a differentiation among the genres: poetry, drama, novel. The principle which makes these differentiations, and therefore, meaning, possible is what has been called “grammar,” the set of operating rules. Culler further emphasises two important aspects of structuralism in his analogy above: “contiguity” and “shape.” First, his definition points to serialisation as a key principle of structuralism. Roland Barthes in The Rustle of Language (1989) defines the principle of serialisation as “sentential structures, syntagmatic clichés, …and clausulae of sentences” (1989: 99). Second, Culler refers to the “poems or novels [as] endowed with shape:” “shape” here represents literary ‘form’. The key objective of structuralism therefore is to discover the abstract form of the literary work, form being the conventions or the deeply-implanted structures by which meaning is constructed in the work. Concerning “contiguity,” it is important to note that in structuralist application in literature, the grammar is formulated syntagmatically: as a complete sentence. In the field of literary studies, Alan Dundes (1968) delineates two types of structuralist 15 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh application; Jonathan Culler (2002) identifies four types. We will review Dundes’s models and indicate which type will influence the present study. In the “Introduction” to the second edition of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale ([1928], 1968), Alan Dundes suggests the “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic” approaches as the two key methodological logics in structuralism. He cites Propp’s approach in Morphology of the Folktale as representing an exemplary instance of the syntagmatic approach. The Proppian logic essentially sees structure as a chronology: a linear sequential arrangement of action as already presented in the text. “Thus, if a [text] consists of elements A to Z, the structure of the [text] is delineated in terms of the same sequence” (1968: xi). Using this methodology, Propp finds that there are: Both constant and variable [elements] … in the [folktale]. The names of the dramatis personae change (as well as the attribute of each), but neither their actions nor functions change. From this [he] draws the inference that a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages. This makes possible the study of the tale according to the functions of its dramatis personae. (1968: 20, original emphasis) From his observation above, Propp reduces all actions in the Russian folktale to thirty-one functions. He defines a “function” as “an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action” (21). For our purpose, Propp’s study has three crucial insights: first, his linear sequential approach; second, his notion of “function” as a piece of transformative action; and third, his conclusion that there are only thirty-one pieces of action in the Russian folktale. Following Propp’s methodology, Tzvetan Todorov provides a structural analysis of the hundred tales in Boccaccio’s Decameron in his Grammar of the Decameron (1969). He finds that the tales have the same plot structure and that they share the same constant and variable 16 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh elements. Accordingly, he formulates his observation as a series of sentences representing his grammar. The following is the schematic representation of Todorov’s grammar: X violates a law Y must punish X X tries to avoid being punished Y violates a law Y does not punish X Y believes that X is not violating the law From the diagram above, Todorov draws eight conclusions. For our purpose, we will provide a summary of the salient points below. a. The skeletal plot structure can be represented by the clause. b. The clause elements lend themselves to grammatical analysis: there are “agents,” “X” and “Y,” which are proper nouns that serve as either subject or object of the clause; there are verbs: “violate,” “punish” and “avoid” which share the same semantic feature – transformative action. c. The clauses share a relation: of causality. d. The clauses lend themselves to a “new syntagmatic pattern.” This pattern represents the “finished story,…the minimal narrative in a completed form.” He suggests that: The minimal complete plot can be seen as the shift from one equilibrium to another….The two moments of equilibrium, similar and different, are separated by a period of imbalance, which is composed of a process of degeneration and a process of improvement. All of the stories of the Decameron can be entered into this very broad schema. (1986: 2103-5) 17 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Opposed to Propp’s and Todorov’s syntagmatic method of analysis is the “paradigmatic” approach championed by Claude Levi-Strauss in “The Structural Study of Myth.” The paradigmatic method disregards the chronological ordering of events as pre-arranged in the text and opts for a reformulation of the events in a schema of binary oppositions (Dundes 1968: xii). This method essentially disintegrates the manifest wholeness of the text and imposes on the text a new seemingly avant-garde order in order to re-configure a new structure (Phillips 2000:130- 1). Using the approach to analyse the Oedipus myth as well as myths from Indigenous American peoples, Levi-Strauss essentially sees structure as a homology of a “double set of dioscuric pairs” (1986: 818) which share a dialectical relationship. He emphasizes that the most important elements of structuralist analysis are not merely the narrative sentences or their parts but rather the bundles of relations constituted by the dioscuric pairs. He stresses: “The true constituent units of [text] are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (812, original emphasis). Given the above theory, Levi-Strauss scans, for instance, the plot of the Oedipus myth and randomly groups together what he perceives as constant functions. He then pairs these bundles and finds the common semantic feature for each pair. These two pairs are then juxtaposed against each other in a four-item homology that has dialectics as its source of cohesion. Using the Oedipus myth as an example, he constructs four columns, each containing small action units in a sentence form. The sentences of the first column have as the common semantic feature: “overrating of blood relations;” the second column, “underrating of blood relations;” the third column, “the denial of autochthonous origin of man;” and the fourth column, “the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man” (814). From the above, he points to column one and column two as constituting a bundle, a dioscuric pair; dioscuric because of the 18 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh dialectical tension between them. Columns three and four form another dioscuric bundle. These two bundles are set against each other in a relation of simultaneous equivalence and resistance. According to Levi-Strauss, his grammar works for all myths. Even though there are methodological differences between Propp’s and Todorov’s syntagmatic approach and Levi-Strauss’s paradigmatic analysis, the two methods share a lot in common. We will first examine the differences. First, the Proppian syntagmatic approach, with its linear sequential logic, has the tendency of providing the apparent, ‘visible’ and predictable structure. The paradigmatic approach, on the other hand, seeks to provide the truly underlying pattern of organisation, and this, in Levi-Strauss’s view, represents the “correct,” more important structuralist reading of a text. To Levi-Strauss, the structuralist’s business is to unravel the underlying principles not superficial patterns (Dundes 1968: xii). Second, the Proppian style is formalistic to the extent that it represents a scientific exercise isolated from the social and cultural spheres. Alan Dundes stresses that, “One of the most important differences in emphasis between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic brands of structural analysis has been the concern or lack of concern with context” (xii). He suggests: Propp’s syntagmatic approach has unfortunately dealt with the structure of text alone,... in isolation from its social and cultural contexts. In this sense, pure formalistic structural analysis is probably every bit as sterile as motif-hunting and word-counting. In contrast, Levi-Strauss has bravely attempted to relate the paradigm(s) he “finds” in myth to the world at large, that is, to other aspects of culture such as cosmology and world view. (xii-iii) Dundes is quick to add, however, that the concern with social and cultural contexts is a matter of the application of the result of structural analysis rather than a matter of a quality inherent in the 19 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh paradigmatic approach itself. In spite of the above differences, it is clear that both Todorov and Levi-Strauss are inspired by Propp. Indeed, the notion of literary grammar as realisable on the sentence level, the privileging of plot and functions over character, setting and language, and the emphasis of story over discourse are all originally Proppian ideas. Todorov’s and Levi-Strauss’s analyses can be safely said to be improvements on Propp’s pioneering methods. In this sense, Propp, Todorov and Levi-Strauss constitute a class of structuralists – ‘grammarians of the story’ – who, in spite of their methodological differences, share a lot of similarities and a common interest: the structure of the story. The present study shall be influenced by the Levi-Straussian strand of structuralist methodology. Accordingly, we shall re-formulate the plots of the select set of colonialist novels, and attempt to find the homological relationships that exist among the terms of the re-formulated structure. The new structure and its internal cohesive relaitonships and bundling properties shall be proffered as the complete colonialist story in skeletal form. We shall attempt to relate the new structure to the social fabric of the novels from which it derives, and also to the social reality of colonialism as experienced in Africa. From the foregoing, the Levi-Straussian paradigmatic methodology enables us to reveal the psychological currents and deeply underlying structures that operate in the colonialist novel, and make meaning possible. 1.8 Justification for the Study This dissertation is important for three reasons. First, as we have tried to demonstrate earlier, much of the criticism on the English novel has been essentially in the nature of “existential thematics” (Culler 2002: 32), that is, a discussion of themes as they affect colonial life in the novel (Ashcroft et al 1989: 27-8, Azim 1993: 30). Thematic studies, in themselves, do 20 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh not pursue the structural formulations inherent in the social fabric of the novel. Earlier studies such as M.M. Mahood’s Joyce Cary’s Africa (1964), Michael Echeruo’s Joyce Cary and the Novel of Africa (1973) and Chinua Achebe’s collections of essays: Morning Yet on Creation Day (1976), Hopes and Impediments (1988) and Home and Exile (2001), for instance, follow the same strain of social and political analyses without considering the structures by which the socio- political is organised. Following Azim, we recognise the dearth of the structural approach in the criticism of the colonialist novel. While the thematic study of the colonialist novel is a valid and necessary intellectual enterprise in itself, we suggest that the structural analysis of the story of the colonialist novel provides a different methodological approach that will throw a new light on the genre. Thus, our study interrogates the social matter of the colonialist novel from a different perspective: through the structural lens. Such an examination attempts to provide a critical resuscitation for a field which is no longer fashionable to study, and prematurely presumed dead. Our work is therefore a contribution towards addressing the dearth of structural analysis in the field, and also towards rejuvenating the field. Second, as Dundes rightly cautions, structuralist application could be a sterile, abstract intellectual exercise if divorced from social and cultural reality (1968: xii-iii). In our view, colonialism is too tragic a subject to be studied only in abstract terms as some structuralist approaches tend to do. We intend, therefore, to interpret the structure of the colonialist novel with reference to the social, political and economic reality of Africans under colonialism. We will, therefore, examine the structure of the colonialist novel in terms of the notions of victimhood: the victimhood of the colonised and the false ‘victimhood’ of the coloniser. Third, the perpetuation of the colonialist project under new guises has been long observed by Kwame Nkrumah in Towards Colonial Freedom (1962). Over half a century after Nkrumah 21 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh made the observation, and coined the term ‘Neo-colonialism’ to describe it, “there [has been] a continuity of preoccupations throughout historical processes initiated by European [and American] imperial aggression” (Ashcroft et al 1989: 2). Spivak equally “attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, [which is] now displaced and dispersed into modern forms” (1985: 243). From Nkrumah, Ashcroft et al and Spivak above, we can deduce that those imperial fixations and machinations that started “from the moment of colonization [continue] to the present day” (Ashcroft et al 2). Given the above, the present study seeks to re-read the colonialist novel in the light of the ‘present day’ to find what new insights will be generated. 1.9 Organisation of the Study This study has eight chapters and a list of bibliographical works. ‘Chapter 1: Conceptualising the Study’ includes introductory remarks, definition of key terms, statement of the problem, objective of the study, hypotheses, research questions, theoretical framework, justification, and organistion of the study. The chapter provides the conceptual details for the study. ‘Chapter 2: Literature Review’ provides a bipartite review of the relevant critical works. ‘Literature Review 1’ provides a critical survey of colonial discourse with an emphasis on the genesis of racism in Graeco-Roman thought. It traces how classical pseudo-scientific, scientific, historical and philosophical scholarship paved the way for the emergence of racism in modern European thought leading ultimately to the emergence of Western colonialism. ‘Literature Review 2’ provides a critical survey of the English novel with an emphasis on its historiography and complicity in Western colonialism. At the end of the chapter we would have discussed key scholarship in colonial discourse and the English novel and their umbilical 22 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh relationship with postcolonial thought. ‘Chapter 3: Research Methodology’ provides an overview of how we intend to conduct our study. Also, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of the technicalities and mechanics of the colonialist grammar we are theorising. ‘Chapter 4: The Mythopoetic Colonial ‘Cave’ and the Dialectics of Entry’ is the first substantive chapter of our study. The chapter is dedicated to analysing the notion of ‘caving’, which represents the first function in the grammar we have discovered in the colonialist novel. ‘Chapter 5: Taming the ‘Cave’ People and the Revolt of the Cage’ is the second substantive chapter of the study. It examines the notion of ‘caging’, the second function in the grammar of the colonialist novel. ‘Chapter 6: Theft: Expropriation and the Faustian Exchange’ provides an analysis of the economic career of colonialism from the perspective of mythology. The third substantive chapter of the study, this chapter provides an analysis towards the illustration of ‘theft’, the third function in the grammatical postulate for the colonialist novel. ‘Chapter 7: Voicing: The Mirror Line of Colonial Interrelations’ is the final substantive section of the study. The chapter theorises the notion of ‘voicing’, the final function in the grammar of the colonialist novel. The chapter argues that the voices of the African/African space dyad represent the chiasmic point which triggers the colonisers’ peripeteia. ‘Chapter 8: Summary, Conclusion and Recommendation’ provides the final chapter for the study. The chapter includes the report of our findings and observations. It also provides recommendations for future studies. Following the last chapter is the Bibliography, the list of reference works consulted for the study. 23 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 2.0 CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE, POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL In this section of the study, we shall review the relevant critical literature that provides insights into colonial discourse, Western colonialism and the English novel as a genre. In other words, we shall provide a bipartite literature review. The first segment shall be dedicated to examining texts that provide an insight into the genesis of colonial discourse and the antecedents of Western colonialism. The second part shall examine the postcolonial responses to colonial discourse. In this second part, we shall also examine the critical trajectory of the long-standing tradition of English novelistic writing and its relationship with Empire. At the end of the review, we shall make two discoveries: first, that the umbilical linkage between the English novel and the rise of Empire has not been adequately acknowledged; second, that contrary to what Terry Castle (2002) thinks, critical views on the early English novel have not been exhausted, and that in spite of the many influential studies on the early English novel since Ian Watt, the structure of the colonialist novel has not been adequately studied. Having identified these two critical gaps, we shall make it the objective of this dissertation to contribute towards filling them. 2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW I: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE Colonialism has had a rather long career in human history. In the words of Amar Acheraiou, “Colonialism is an immemorial phenomenon” (2008: 3). To properly understand Western or modern colonialism and its motivations, we first have to examine its classical 24 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh antecedents as reflected in Hellenic racism or ‘proto-racism’ (Isaac 2004: 1), and how Hellenic racial sensibilities influenced the type of colonialism that emerged in the nineteenth century. We shall survey the role of classical Greek culture and scholarly writings in setting up the frame that would inspire Western colonialism. Many distinguished scholars in the fields of colonial discourse, history and the history of medical science have made remarks regarding their conviction that Western colonialism takes its roots from the culture and scholarship of the classical Greek antiquity. Among these scholars are the older generation of writers such as J.B. Bury (1909). Many other contemporary scholars have also expressed a similar conviction. They include Edith Hall (1989), Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Amar Acheraiou (2008). It is widely agreed among these scholars that the struggles between Greece and Persia in the 5th century BC mark the beginning of Greek, and therefore, European racist consciousness. The general view is that “the conceptual opposition of Greeks and others did not exist in the archaic period and was engendered by the Persian Wars” (Isaac 2004: 260). By the time the Graeco-Persian wars reached their acme in the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, Greek culture had experienced a shift as regards its perception of non-Greek peoples. For instance, the hitherto Greek admiration for Persian bravery had changed to hatred. The feeling of Hellenic racial, cultural, institutional and linguistic superiority had started to emerge. According to Acheraiou, in Rethinking Postcolonialism, this cultural shift was to influence 18th century European relationship with the rest of the world (2008: 5ff). In The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Benjamin Isaac records French philosopher Condorcet’s assessment of the Battle of Salamis as one of those rare events in history in which “the struggles of a single day decide the destiny of the human race for centuries to come” (qtd in 2004: 259). J.B. Bury shares Condorcet’s view about the significance of the victory at Salamis. Reviewing Herodotus’ 25 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh History, Bury writes in The Ancient Greek Historians that “the struggle of Persia and Greece…, th[e] contrast between the slavery of the barbarian and the liberty of the Greek, between oriental autocracy and Hellenic constitutionalism, is […] the keynote of the history of Herodotus (1909: 44). In her influential Inventing the Barbarian, Edith Hall also gives insights into how the Battle of Salamis came to represent the turning point of Europe’s relationship with the non-European world, a relationship where Europe assumes a superior status over the rest of the world. In her view: The battles of the wars against Persia were assimilated to the mythical archetypes of the Amazonomachy and the Centauromachy, and began to appear alongside them in the self-confident art of the fifth-century Athens as symbols of victory of democracy, reason and Greek culture over tyranny, irrationality, and barbarism. (Hall 1989: 102) Thus ingrained in the Greek psyche, the victory at Salamis came to conflate the historical and the mythical, representing an originally historical incident in mythopoetic terms leading to their canonization in the Greek culture. Seen from the mythopoetic angle, therefore, the Greek victory over Persia came to represent victory of good over evil and light over darkness. In concrete terms, it came to symbolise European enlightenment over Asian (and foreign) backwardness. This situation inaugurates what Isaac (2008) calls “proto-racism:” the emergence of Greek, and therefore, European racial consciousness, which would prepare the ground, material and mind- set that would shape the classical Greek historical, scientific and philosophical writers to produce racist statements in their writings. These Greek scholarly ideas would spread across the rest of Europe over many centuries through the Roman inheritors of the Greek civilisation, and eventually trickle down to the 18th century European scientific and philosophical thought. Particularly, the works of Carlos Linnaeus (1758), Charles Darwin (1859) and Georg Wilhelm 26 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Friedrich Hegel ([1820], 1958; [1859], 2001) would promote the inherited classical racial biases that would form the immediate basis of Western colonialism (Acheraiou 2008: 6-7). 2.1.1 The Role of Science in Inaugurating Racism and Western Colonialism The keynote for racial differentiation and justification for European racial superiority was struck in the middle of the eighteenth century when Carlos Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, published his Systema Natura (Lassiter 2002). Linnaeus did not only develop a system for naming and classifying species, including humans, he actually created a hierarchy of four human races and ascribed to each race what he perceived as its natural characteristics. We reproduce the Linnean Hierarchy below to facilitate our discussion. Homo sapiens europaeus (“white Europeans”) White, serious, strong. Hair blond, flowing. Eyes blue. Active, very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by laws. Homo sapiens asiaticus (“yellow Asians”) Yellow, melancholy, greedy. Hair black, Eyes dark. Severe, haughty, desirous. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion. Homo sapiens americanus (“red Americans”) Red, ill-tempered, subjugated. Hair black, straight, thick; Nostrils wide; Face harsh, beard scanty. Obstinate, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Eyes dark. Ruled by opinion. Homo sapiens afer (“black Africans”) Black, impassive, lazy. Hair kinked. Skin silly. Nose flat. Lips thick. Women with genital flaps; breasts large. Crafty, slow, foolish. Anoints himself with grease. Ruled by caprice. (Lassiter 28) 27 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh From Linnaeus’ taxonomy, ‘Homo sapiens afer’ or the African occupies the bottom rung of the human chain and is in the savage stage of social evolution. That the classification is hugely biased and racist is obvious. Reinforcing Linnaeus’ study is the hugely influential Darwin who published The Origin of Species a century later. Darwin’s theory of evolution would later mutate into racist theories such as social evolution and eugenics. Given Darwin’s impact on racial relations, we shall examine in some detail how his theory mutated into racist concepts. According to Darwin: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. ([1859] 1979: 68, original emphasis) For Darwin, therefore, evolution is based on the principle of “natural selection,” which is determined by “variability” (biological diversity), and “reproductive success,” (“the ability to produce the next generations”) (Lassiter 14). According to Lassiter, however, “evolution” – the adaptation of species through biological and environmental changes – does not necessarily imply progress of the species. He emphasizes evolution does not equate to moving from a simpler form to an advanced form; evolution is non-directional; it is not going anywhere in particular, and that “while change may indeed produce complexity, evolution does not dictate” (Lassiter 16). Darwin propounded his theory with this sense of evolution as non-directional and non-progressive, however, “for most English speakers, in everyday vernacular, the word evolution often implies 28 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh progress – that is, the movement from something worse to something better, or the movement from simple forms to more complex forms” (Lassiter 16). The misapplication of Darwin’s theory stems from the fact that evolution has been taken to mean progress. Darwin himself must have contributed to the misapplication of his otherwise non-directional notion by “recast[ing] many of his original ideas through the lens of progress” as seen in The Descent of Man and later editions of The Origin of Species (Lassiter 33). The progress idea leads to racist notions such as social evolution and the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’. Spearheaded by Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor ([1871], 1958) social evolution suggests that all aspects of human life obey the principle of evolution in the progressive sense of the word. Social evolutionists, therefore, construct a Linnean type of great chain in which the presumed ‘savage’ occupies the bottom, the so-called ‘barbarian’ at the middle and those regarded as ‘civilised’ at the top. Similarly, proponents of the concept of survival of the fittest, such as Herbert Spencer, distinguish between the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ races of humankind, arguing that social progress is possible only when the fit prevail over the unfit (Baker 1989: 26ff). Such notions would claim that the presumed savage races are mentally and biologically bankrupt, and that this bankruptcy accounts for their stunted social development (Lassiter 2002: 17). In line with such racist notions, some European scholars would make unfortunate remarks about Africans and colonised peoples. For instance, A.B. Ellis in The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1890), makes one such remark: [Africans demonstrate intelligence] which, compared with that of the European child, appears precocious; and they acquire knowledge with facility till they arrive at the age of puberty, when the physical features master the intellect, and frequently deaden it. This peculiarity, which has been observed amongst others of what are termed the 29 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh lower races, has been attributed by some physiologists to the early closing of the sutures of the cranium…. They can imitate but they cannot invent or even apply. They constantly fail to grasp and to generalize a notion. (Ellis 1890: 9) By the twentieth century, the mutations of Darwinism had led to eugenics, the concept which promotes racial separation, selective breeding and anti-miscegenation laws. Founded by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, eugenics seeks to bring the argument started by Darwin to a conclusion. If there are ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ races, and the fit are ‘naturally selected’, then it follows that the unfit are inferior and must not mix with the fit; and again the unfit must be weeded out through both natural and unnatural means such as the prohibition of miscegenation and sterilisation respectively. Galton created his ideal nation, ‘Kantsaywhere’, in his eponymous uncompleted novel. In the novel, the citizens of Kantsaywhere are subjected to genetic vetting. Those who failed were deemed to have inferior genetic constitution and “were segregated in labor colonies” where “celibacy was enforced.” Those who passed the test with ‘second-class’ certificate could procreate under ‘terms and conditions.’ Those who passed the test with a high grade progressed to the Eugenics College of Kantsaywhere where they were decorated with “‘diplomas for heritable gifts physical and mental’. These elite individuals were encouraged to intermarry” (Gillham 2001: 99). Following the works of Darwin and Galton, the eugenics movement, whose chief proponents were some of the most influential and distinguished scholars in some of the biggest universities in America and Europe in the nineteenth century, would produce texts which would promote selective breeding, elimination of races thought to be unfit to breed, forced sterilisation and even genocide. The writings of two eminent scholars of the time capture the intellectual 30 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh spirit and mood of the early twentieth century in Europe and America. In his preface to the first edition of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Henry Fairfield Osborn states: These divine forces [the best spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical forces of heredity] are more or less sporadically distributed in all races, some of them are found in what we call the lowest races, some are scattered widely throughout humanity, but they are certainly more widely and uniformly distributed in some races than in others. (Osborn 1936: ix) A year later, in the preface to the second edition of the same book, he writes: Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes, as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation [the United States] must chiefly depend on….In no other human stock…is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe. (Osborn 1936: xi) For the distinguished professor, some races are genetically ‘unfit’; only the European and the American descendants of the Europeans are fully gifted with the genes to produce intellectual and professional leadership. Significantly, he brings into the equation phenotypical features: “blue-eyes” and “fair-hair” are produced by the genes that produce the master race; implicitly “dark-eyes” and “dark woolly hair” constitute what he calls the “lowest races,” which are produced by ‘unfit’, inferior genes. In the introduction to The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant himself repeats the assertion that race and bodily features are indicative of one’s mental constitution. He says “the great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of 31 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses” (Grant 1936: xix). Based on his false doctrine, Grant launches an attack on miscegenation and condemns inter-racial marriage as causing racial decay among the presumed ‘superior’ race. Following Osborn and Grant, American geneticist, G.C. Hasskarl, for instance, would suggest that the African represented “the scientist’s long sought after ‘missing link’ between animal and man” (qtd in Kubayanda 1990:19). Thus, the scientific and pseudo-scientific scholarship of the eighteenth to the twentieth century sought to inaugurate the African as savage, the indigenous American as barbaric and the Europeans as ‘civilised’. More importantly, these three traits were supposed to be immutable racial archetypes. 2.1.2 The Role of European Philosophy in Inaugurating Modern Racism and Colonialism We have seen the role of science in promoting racism. We shall now look at how European philosophy, especially the writings of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, contributed to raising global racial consciousness and fixing the African in a perpetually primitive state. Earl Count expresses the view that “Immanuel Kant produced the most profound raciological thought of the eighteenth century” (1950: 704). Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze thinks likewise in his essay, “The Color of Racism: The Idea of ‘Race in Kant’s Anthropology” (1997). Eze suggests also that Hegel inherited Kant’s racist philosophical legacy. Indeed, Kant’s philosophy sets the tone of racial discrimination that would be taken up and canonised by Hegel in works such as Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant proceeds on Linnean lines to produce a taxonomy of the human species based on phenotypical features. Based on skin 32 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh colour, he proceeds to make a value judgement on what he presumes to be each race’s moral character. He outlines the races in the order of superiority as follows:  White (Europeans)  Yellow (Asians)  Black (Africans)  Red (American Indians) He concludes that the non-white races lack ethical principles, are unreflective in their mores, are naturally inclined to evil, and are therefore capable of producing behaviour that is essentially not human. About the African, Kant writes: “They can be educated but only as servants (slaves), that is, they allow themselves to be trained. They… are afraid of blows and do much out of a sense of honor” (qtd in Eze 116). For Kant, therefore, the African can be trained but only under conditions of purely “physical coercion and corporeal punishment” (Eze 116). He even provides guidelines on how to ‘train’ an African slave: “…use a split bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the ‘negro’ will suffer a great deal of pains” because the Negro’s skin is so thick that a mere whip will not inflict sufficient agonies (qtd in Eze 116). Indeed, Kant’s alibi for prescribing this mode of training for the African is the Hippocratic environmental theory propounded in Airs, Waters and Places (400 B.C.E) which suggests that, “all inhabitants of the hottest zones are, without exceptions, idle” (qtd in Eze 116). Thus, the difference in geographical location and its presumed influence on a person’s morality and psyche accounts for what Kant suggests as the fundamental difference between Africans and Europeans. This difference, according to Kant, “appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities and as in [skin] color” (qtd in Serequeberhan 1997: 148). Hegel, in his conceptualisation of history, repeats the geographical argument that had 33 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh been initiated in classical times and canonised by Kant. In his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right, Hegel disparages Africans, reserving his vilest attack for sub-Saharan Africans. Indeed, Hegel does much to inaugurate our concept of the “cave,” which is one of the key theoretical foundations of the present study. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel suggests: “Africa must be divided into three parts: one is that which lies south of the desert of Sahara – Africa proper – the Upland almost entirely unknown to us [Europeans], with narrow coast-tracts along the sea; the second is that to the north of the desert – European Africa… – a coastland; the third is the river region of the Nile, the only valley-land of Africa, and which is in connection with Asia” (Hegel 2001: 109, my emphasis). He intimates that the northern part of Africa as well as the Nile region of Egypt are not exactly African in spirit; he labels the north of Africa, where the magnificent civilisation of Carthage once lay, as ‘European Africa’. He emphasizes, “this part [of Africa] was to be – must be attached to Europe…” (Hegel 110) since the Carthaginian civilisation was Phoenician, not African (Hegel 117). Thus, the north of Africa belongs to either Europe or Asia. Regarding the Egyptian civilisation, Hegel insists this was an “independent civilization, and therefore is isolated and singular in Africa as Africa itself appears in relation to the other parts of the world” (Hegel 110). He concludes, “Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit” (Hegel 117). Having theoretically excised all the then known mighty centres of civilisation from Africa, he focuses on “Africa proper,” sub-Saharan Africa, and produces a “malicious nine-page harangue” and “collective libel” against the region (Taiwo 1998: 7). According to Taiwo, Hegel provides the philosophic underpinning for many of the warped perceptions about Africa. Because of Hegelian texts such as The Philosophy of History, “we can see why Africa is where Nature, another very Hegelian category, rules in its blindest fury in the 34 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh form of famine, or the continual recrudescence or persistence of disease and pestilences of unknown origins and severe repercussions, or ‘intertribal’ wars that on occasion bring genocide in their wake, or in unrestricted ‘breeding’, or in______ – you may fill in the blank” (Taiwo 1998: 5). Filling in Taiwo’s blank space, we draw attention to another of Hegel’s “extremely malicious libel[s]” (Taiwo 8). Hear Hegel: Cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper. Among us [Europeans] instinct deters from it…. But with the Negro this is not the case, and the devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race; to the sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object of sense – mere flesh. At the death of a King hundreds are killed and eaten; prisoners are butchered and their flesh sold in the market…. (Hegel 113) Clearly, Hegel was ignorant about the subject he was discussing, and as Taiwo rightly points out, Hegel had no access to the metaphysics, folklore and nuances of the language of the Africans he was writing about, thus what he wrote was hugely based on unreliable sources or fantasy (Taiwo 1998: 11). In his other influential text, The Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes the explicit case for the colonisation of other peoples’ lands and expropriation of their resources in order to rejuvenate the European economy (Hegel 1958: 151). According to Hegel, by colonisation, European society “supplies to a part of its population a return to life on the family basis in a new land and so also supplies itself with a new demand and field for its industry” (1958: 151-52). Thus, having effectively ‘dismembered’ Africa, disparaged its humanity and prescribed colonisation for its peoples and their resources, Hegel “leave[s] Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it – that is in its northern part – belongs to the Asiatic or European World” (2001: 35 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 117). From the on-going analysis, it is understandable when Taiwo claims that Hegel’s libels against Africa “have continued to structure the understanding of Africa in the consciousness and institutions of Hegel's descendants [to this day]” (1998: 8). So far, this section of the literature review has attempted to provide a survey of the intellectual climate, currents and influences that prevailed at the time the colonialist novels were produced. Marlow in Heart of Darkness, for instance, makes explicit claims about Africa that reflect Hegelian thought: “We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. […] We were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories” (Conrad 1994: 51). The above passage from Conrad’s novel has striking echoes of Hegel’s image of Africa as “the land of childhood …lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, [and] enveloped in the dark mantle of Night” (Hegel 2001: 109). Popularised by Henry Rider Haggard in She (1887) and Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1902), the trope of Africa as a primeval but resourceful ‘cave’ becomes a convenient structural template for colonialist literary productions. Novelists such as Graham Greene, Joyce Cary and Nicholas Monsarrat appropriate the scientific and pseudo-scientific speculations of Linnaeus, Darwin, Galton as well as the philosophical assumptions of Kant and Hegel, to produce literary works that equivocate between validating and criticising the European racist ideologies. In sum, the fields of science and philosophy cross-fertilised each other to produce an intellectual atmosphere that looked at Africa through a dark film of ignorance and justified the annexation of Africa in the nineteenth century. The novels we shall study in this dissertation are the products of the intellectual environment outlined in this section of the review. 36 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 2.2 LITERATURE REVIEW II: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES In the current of section of the literature review, we shall provide an analysis of the critical readings on the English novel and postcolonialism. By ‘English novel’, we imply novels written by white imperial British nationals from the early beginnings of the novel in the late seventeenth century to the formal end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century. This periodisation puts Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) at the head of the novelistic epoch. Consequently, we shall provide a review that attempts to track the trajectory of the development of the English novel from its inception, and examine how this development reflects British relations with Empire. In providing this analysis, we have kept in mind Derek Hand’s assertion in A History of the Irish Novel (2011) that “a history of the….novel is a history of power and authority, a history of questions concerning colonial and native narratives, and of questions surrounding who speaks and writes and who is spoken and written about” (Hand 2011: 5). Hand advises that the novel should not “be thought of as singularly attached to modern metropolitan life; rather, it becomes a vehicle for investigating the periphery, those neglected spaces where…contradictions abound” (Hand 2). The English novel’s relationship with the colonial spaces is the core subject of this section of the literature review. 2.2.1 A Critical Historiography of the English Novel In a new study, New Directions in the History of the Novel (2014), Parrinder et al introduce three frameworks for the analysis of the history of the novel: the literary tendency, material tendency and cultural tendency. Literary history traces the relationship of the novel with the other genres, usually how the novel derives from older genres such as the classical epic, romance and myth. Material history of the novel focuses on how the novel emerges as a response 37 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to a specific social and economic development. Consequently, material history examines the material factors that influence the rise of the novel, factors such as methods of production, the printing press, distribution channels, and the role of bookshops, libraries and newspapers. Cultural history of the novel traces the effect of the novel on the lives of the people, that is, how the novel functions in society as regards how it shapes the thinking, feeling and behaviour of people (Parrinder et al 2). The Parrinder framework shall guide our review of the development of the English novel and its relationship with Empire. In Dialogic Imagination (1982), Mikhail Bakhtin provides a hugely literary account of the development of the novel, and traces the origins of the genre to the Middle Ages and classical antiquity. He suggests that the precursors of the novel are the prosaic – and some poetic – ancient texts which break with the tradition of the epic, and install the ordinary man and woman, rather than the gods, demigods and heroes, as subjects worth writing about. To Bakthin, the subject matter – lampooning ordinary man in society – is not the only point of departure between the ancient novelistic texts and the traditional ‘high genres’ of antiquity. Equally crucial in this novelistic endeavor is the use of language. Novelistic language is contemporary, ‘ordinary’, ‘low’, ironic and mocking. The application of ordinary language to portray ordinary people, and in a style that laughs and celebrates their travails, represents for Bakhtin, the basis of the novel. In this direction, he names the ancient spoudogeloion – the ‘serio-comical’ works of antiquity – as “containing in embryo and sometimes in developed form the basic elements characteristic of the most important later prototypes of the European novel” (Bakhtin 1982: 22). Prominent among those works are: the mimes of Sophron (5th century BC), fables, early memoir literature including the Epidemiai by Ion of Chios, the Homilai of Critias (460-403BC), “Socratic dialogues,” Roman satire by Lucilius, Juvenal and others, literature of the “Symposia,” 38 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Menippean satire and Lucianic dialogues. He opines that the influence of the so-called Greek ‘novel’ is limited only to the Baroque period of Madame de Lafayette, and that the foundations of the novel is more correctly found in the ancient serio-comical texts (Bakhtin 21-22). Franco Moretti (2006) largely shares Bakhtin’s thesis of a more ancient roots of the novel. In The Novel, Moretti finds the genre all over the world prompting him to reject Ian Watt’s thesis of the English rise of the novel as seen in his book, The Rise of the Novel (1957). Parrinder et al attribute the immediate catalyst for the emergence of the novel to Elizabethan England, and point to writers such as Deloney, Gascoigne and Nashe as novelists who have not been properly recognised by contemporary critics (2014: 2). According to Parrinder et al, the historiography of the novel begins with Fanny Burney’s preface to Evelina (1778). John Colin Dunlop then dedicates his History of Fiction (1816) to tracing the history of prose fiction from the Greek romances, though Bakhtin rejects the Greek origins of the novel as stated earlier. The growing importance of the novel as a field of academic study in the late nineteenth century sees literary scholars, usually teachers and professors of English literature, writing more standardised and scholarly literary histories of the English novel. Among these scholars, David Masson, Sidney Lanier and Walter Raleigh are prominent. Masson published British Novelists and Their Style in 1859, Lanier The English Novel in 1883, and Raleigh The English Novel in 1894. Wilbur L. Cross’s The Development of the English Novel (1899) and George Saintsbury’s The English Novel (1913) followed. Of all the scholarly histories of the novel, Walter Raleigh’s contribution is regarded as perhaps the most systematic for its methodological handling of the trajectory of the development of the English novel. Raleigh sees two apexes for the novelistic enterprise: its first rise in the Elizabethan England and its second rise in the eighteenth century. In the view of Parrinder et al, “the organic model for 39 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh understanding the history of the novel (birth, infancy, development, maturity) was firmly established in Raleigh’s work…” (2014: 3). Ernest A. Baker consolidates all the pieces of earlier information and extends the material in his definitive History of the English Novel (1924-39). F. R. Leavis uses the tools of The New Criticism to produce a highly conservative list of eminent authors and their works. His Great Tradition (1948) eliminates most of the authors mentioned in previous histories of the novel (Parrinder et al 3). Susanne Howe then attempts to break the critical silence regarding Empire’s relationship with the novel in her Novels of Empire (1949). Howe’s work tries to draw a linkage between the destinies of the British Empire and the nineteenth century novel arguing that the growth of one affects the other (O’Gorman 2002: 321). Her effort is effectively drowned in an ever-increasing corpus of works which simply avoid the question of the novel and Empire. An example of such works is Walter Allen’s The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954). In discussing the beginnings of the novel, Allen mentions Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) but is conspicuously silent on the practice of slavery, slave trade and Behn’s biased representation of the African slaves. As regards Robinson Crusoe, Allen fails to mention the colonising acts of the eponymous protagonist. Indeed, Allen’s only interest in Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe is their achievement of verisimilitude; he praises the genius of the two authors for achieving a rare exactitude of representation (Allen 1954: 34-42). Nothing is said of the imperial project of the novels. Georg Lukacs’ The Historical Novel (1962) and Merryn Williams’ Women in the English Novel: 1800-1900 (1984) follow in similar vein. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) elevates the historiography of the English novel to a new height but does not alter the trend of parochialism that has engulfed the historiography of the novel. In a recent study, “Introduction: End of Empire and the English Novel,” Bill 40 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Schwarz defines ‘parochialism’ as “a psychic incapacity to register the social realities which made metropolitan lives possible,…a forgetfulness about the historical work of empire” (2011: 5). He suggests that in spite of, what he calls, historical “English parochialism and insularity,” there exist memory traces of empire whose recovery mandates that the English novel be read “at its most centred,” to “illuminate the historical question of the impact of…empire” (Schwarz 5). Watt’s arguments in The Rise of the Novel provide a multi-dimensional – literary, materialist and culturalist – account of the development of the novel (Parrinder et al 2014: 2). Among others, he discusses ‘Realism and the Novel Form’, ‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel’, and ‘Realism and the Later Tradition’ corresponding respectively to the literary, materialist and culturalist account of the evolution of the novel. For the purpose our argument in the present study, we shall focus primarily on the cultural aspects of Watt’s accounts. He discusses the capitalist orientation of Robinson Crusoe whom he designates the economists’ archetypal homo economicus – the selfish, rational, profit-fixated economic human – because all his mores are dictated by gain and financial expediency (Watt 1957: 65). Watt recognises that for Crusoe everything is subordinate to “book-keeping and the law of contract” (1957: 64). In spite of this perspective on Crusoe, Watt fails to see Crusoe as an agent of Empire. He fails to broach, for instance, pertinent questions regarding displacement of the indigenes, the original name and language of Friday, colonialism and slave trade, except to say, with an air of normalcy, that Xury was sold into slavery. As a critic, Watt fails to interrogate Empire and its hazards. For our purpose, Watt lost the opportunity to highlight one of the most crucial foundational elements associated with the birth of the novel: Empire. Having dismissed Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as unrealistic, Watt dislocates the novel from its colonial and imperial hinges and glosses over Crusoe’s colonisation of a non-European island. Edward Said is right, therefore, when he says 41 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh that Robinson Crusoe is “the prototypical modern realistic novel” whose theme is about “a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant non-European island” (Said 1994: xii). Said is again right when he says that the plot of Robinson Crusoe is not “accidentally” wrought and that the novel is a deliberate work of art designed by a conscious author to reflect and – perhaps celebrate – the triumphs of the British Empire. That Watt fails to read Empire in the text renders his assessment of the English novel not only parochial but also indicting. He takes a stance that may be construed as his endorsement of Empire and its fictional agent, Crusoe. For instance, his assertion that “profit is Crusoe’s only vocation, and the whole world is his territory” (Watt 1957: 67, my emphasis) comes across as a statement of approval of Empire and all its inequities. Watt does not also mention some of the great novelists of Empire such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Henry Rider Haggard. He mentions Joyce Cary only casually in reference to Cary’s stylistic approach in Herself Surprised (Watt 1957: 118) reinforcing our perception of Watt’s parochialism. In sum, Watt does not connect the English novel with Empire. In spite of its shortcomings, The Rise of the Novel remains the first definitive account of the history of the novel. The text has yet to be dislodged from its authoritative position (Parrinder et al 2014: 4). Regarding the influential role of Watt in plotting the trajectory of the English novel, Lennard J. Davis calls Watt “the great First Cause” (2000: 479). According to Parrinder et al, there have been a lot of histories of the novel most of them being either an expansion of Watt’s trajectory or response to Watt’s assumptions. Significant examples include Lennard J. Davis’ Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983) and Michael McKeon’s The Origin of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1988). Both works examine the material development of the novel by looking at literacy and the literature available at the time, namely: newspapers, diaries and pamphlets. Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman 42 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (1986) and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) highlight the role of women in the development of the novel. Spencer restores Aphra Behn to her pioneering role in the novelistic enterprise after being glossed over by Watt. Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988) finds a parallel between the careers of the British Empire and English novel. He suggests the rise and demise of the British Empire corresponds to the rise and what he perceives as the decline of the novel. For instance, the early seaman’s novels of Marryat, according to Brantlinger, represent a bright start to the novel’s career while the novel in the hands of Conrad, with its multifarious representations of ‘darkness’, primitivity, anthropophagi and anthropo-zoomorphic characters, represent a decline (Azim 1993: 31). Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the English Novel (2000) extends the materialist approach of Davis and McKeon, and brings into focus the various formats for presenting the novel: from its fragmentary insertions in cheap newspapers to its expensively-published and bound editions (Parrinder et al 2014: 4). According to Terry Castle, scholarship on the novel has reached a dead-end as far as the early novel is concerned. In her view all essential work on the novel has already been done citing “The soaring critical trajectory extending from Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) through the work of Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, John Richetti, Lennard Davis, Nancy Armstrong, John Bender, Margaret Doody, William Warner, Clifford Siskin, and Catherine Gallagher [and numerous others” (2002: 110). Castle is not quite right, however, since scholars continue to interrogate the early novel. For instance, Watt’s assumption of the English origin of the novel is critically challenged by two key works: Ann Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996) and Franco Moretti’s The Novel (2006). Doody’s and Moretti’s works trace the origins of the novel 43 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to about two thousand years ago, and speculate that the origins of the novel are neither English nor European. According to Moretti, for instance, the novel is “the first truly planetary form” because it is available to many civilisations in antiquity all over the world (qtd in Parrinder et al 2014: 14). 2.2.2 The English Novel in the Colonies The relationship between the English novel and British imperial territories has been simultaneously umbilical and inimical, affiliation and rejection – a tense co-existence where the English novel is adapted and subverted into novels in English. Thus, former imperial subjects dictate new styles and forms that respond to their peculiar colonial situations and reject many of the diktats of English critics such as Watt. The ‘American novel’ in English, for instance, boasts two fundamental tendencies: the white American novel, usually called the American novel, and the African-American novel. According to Parrinder et al, the American novel is defined in terms that break from the great tradition of the great English masters such as Richardson and Fielding. For instance, Richard Chase, in The American Novel (1957) argues that the American romance novel is a “freer, more daring, more brilliant kind of fiction in sharp contrast to the solid moral inclusiveness and massive equability of the English novel” (qtd in Parrinder et al 7). Leslie Fielder’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) projects a simultaneous affiliation to and break from the English novel. Though Fielder recognises the ancestral connections between the American romance novel and the English novel, he suggests that since the birth of the novel coincides with the founding of the United States, the novel in America is somehow born free and is therefore independent of the English novel. Cathy N. Davidson’s Revolution and the World: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) projects the novel as a platform for the most intense political discourse of the nation (Parrinder et al 7). 44 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay provide an account of the development of the African-American novel in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). The relationship between the African-American novel and English novel is, first, through the dominant white American novel, after which contact the African-American novel has developed a style and temperament peculiar to itself. The African-American novel is born out of the racial realities of African-American life, namely: slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow laws, rootlessness, disempowerment, loss of identity and loss of language. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and the Black Power Movement of the 1970s prompted African-Americans to assert their rights. The writings of Frantz Fanon whose The Wretched of the Earth was translated into English in 1968, Richard Wright, a pioneer African-American novelist, and the liberation movements in Africa, especially Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, are key motivations for the African-Americans to question colonialism and imperialism in the world as well as racism in America (Gates and McKay 1997: 2011). Richard Wright, for instance, creates a picture of the peculiarly difficult conditions that confront the African-American. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” the introductory essay to his novel, Native Son (1940), Wright draws attention to the difficult position of the African-American in America as a result of disenfranchisement, segregation and “a whole panoply of rules, taboos, and penalties designed not only to ensure… complete submission, but to guarantee that no real threat [from the black community] would ever arise” (Wright 1940: xi- xii). The status quo as described by Wright influences the direction of African-American literary productions, including the African-American novel. Indeed, Wright concludes his essay by providing the taxonomy of the cultural currents that dictate the temperament of the African- American novel. “[W]e do have in the Negro embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of a [Henry] James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow 45 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy brooding of a [Nathaniel] Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him” (Wright xxxiv). Wright’s Native Son and Zora Neale Hurston’s earlier work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), would inspire an entire generation of African-American novelists who would turn to the historical novel as the genre best suited to articulating the African-American angst and aspirations. Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Wright’s Black Boy (1970) extend the articulation of black suffering and rebellion against discrimination. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992); Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976); and David Bradley’s The Chaneyville Incident (1981) are all fictional contributions towards constructing an African-American identity. The key to securing an African-American identity through fiction is to attempt to subvert the English novel and to create a form that is unique to African-American experience. As Derek Hand suggests, “the real act of rebellion, then, is to be found in the power of rendering one’s own story in one’s own inimitable style” (2011: 7). Thus, the African-American novel appropriates African cosmologies and mythologies, including ancestor veneration, voodoo and other traditional African cultural forms (Gates and McKay 1997: 2014) to inscribe its difference. On the language front, the African-American novel adopts elements of African oral and linguistic resources to shape a genre that confronts and undermines the mainstream English novel and its white American version. According to Gates in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Case Book, “the quest to register a public black voice in Western letters” (Gates 2000: 60) means that the African-American novelist must fall on ancestral traditions 46 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh unique to the African diaspora. The formal end of the British Empire brings in its wake the histories of the novel in English from the former ‘outposts’ of Empire. Scholars from Africa, for instance, are interrogating the English novel and its relationship with Empire. There are studies concerned with the rise of the African novel. Most of these studies are carried out in the field of postcolonial studies. Emmanuel Obiechina’s Culture, Tradition and Society in the West Africa Novel (1975) recognises the European missionaries’ contribution to the development of the novel in West Africa as a result of the role they played in developing literacy. He also gives credit to journalism and the newspaper for promoting the development of the genre (Parrinder et al 8). In The African Novel and the Contemporary Experience in Africa, Shatto Gakwandi defines the African novel in terms of historicity, and believes that the genre’s effectiveness in subverting the English novel is inherent in its employment of oral sources (1977: 10-11). Cheinweizu et al published Toward the Decolonization of African Literature in 1980. In the work, the writers take a revolutionary stance in their definition of the African novel preferring to create different criteria and standards by which the African novel will be judged. In dismissing the critical standards of Europe as imperialistic, they propose criteria that accommodate African mythologies and cosmologies, and metaphysics that are reposed in the African oral tradition and languages (1980: 16ff). The contribution of women writers to the development of the African novel is celebrated in Lloyd Brown’s Women Writers in Black Africa (1981) and Oladele Taiwo’s Female Novelists of Modern Africa (1984). A.N. Mensah provides a Marxist reading of the African novel that reflects Gakwandi’s. Mensah prefers the African novel to be historical because, as Georg Lukacs suggests in The Historical Novel (1936), the business of the novel is to encourage social change and historical development through the portrayal of the psychology and 47 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ethics of the past (Mensah 1996: 69). Ngugi wa Thiong’o provides a materialist history of the novel in Africa in Decolonising the Mind (1986). In the study, Ngugi identifies two issues that militate against the rise of the African novel. His thesis is that since “the printing press, the publishing houses and educational context of the novel’s birth were controlled by missionaries and the colonial administration,” the story of African confrontation with Europe was held in check (1986: 69). Second, he suggests that since the African novelists were university-trained, and since the colonial universities, for instance, in Anglophone Africa, were “all overseas colleges of the University of London,” the African novelists were inclined to adopt the European frames of reference for their own writing (Ngugi 70). For Ngugi, these two factors inhibited the growth of the African novel. We cannot discuss the novel in English in the African context and not broach the question of language. Some African novelists, such as Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, suggest that the English language, as a colonial legacy, should be used for literary writing since colonialism is an inexorable part of African history (1976: 82). Other writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, insist that traditional African languages must be used instead for African literary writings. Obi Wali, a Nigerian critic, for instance, is outspoken in his advocacy for the use of indigenous African languages. For him, “until these writers [African writers who write in English] and their Western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would be merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncertainty and frustration” (qtd in Achebe 1976: 80). Wali, Ngugi and like-minded writers advocate the use of indigenous African languages on functional and ideological bases. Functionally, they argue that only African languages are competent enough to express the African worldview: the mythologies, cosmologies and metaphysics of the various African 48 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh traditions. Ideologically, they suggest that English and the African languages have a confrontational relationship, that of conqueror and vanquished, and an “oppressor language inevitably carries racist and negative images of the conquered…, particularly in its literature, and English is not an exception” (Ngugi 1993: 35). Based on this premise, Ngugi, for instance, writes his novel, Matigari, entirely in his local Kikuyu language before it is translated into English. Ngugi’s subversive stance is echoed by Lokangaka Losambe in his account of the rise of the African novel (Losambe 1996: xi). Stephanie Newell traces the development of the novel in Ghana and West Africa in her Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana (2002). Her materialist, culturalist and literary approaches provide an eclectic discussion. She accounts for the role played by the European missionaries in developing literacy, the part played by the privately-owned nationalist newspapers in promoting a reading culture, and the activities of the cultural nationalists of the Gold Coast elite. Cultural nationalism, according to Newell, led to the literary activism that would eventually lead to the evolution of the novel in Ghana and across Anglophone West Africa. She draws attention to three novels, all of which claim the accolade of being the first novel in West Africa: Marita or the Folly of Love (1886-7) by A. Native; Guanya Pau (1891) by Liberian author, Joseph J. Walters; and Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (1911) by J.E. Casely Hayford. Kofi Awoonor’s The African Predicament: Collected Essays (2006) provides the penultimate text in our review of the African novel. In the essay, “Marita or the Folly of Love: The First West African Novel: A Review,” Awoonor takes a materialist and culturalist approach in discussing the African novel. Materially, he highlights the role played by the newspapers in encouraging reading among Ghanaians. According to Awoonor, as West African nationalism developed, affluent nationalists set up printing presses to promote cultural nationalism and 49 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh literary activism eventually leading to the rise of the novel form in Africa. In Awoonor’s account, the West African scenario differs markedly from the southern African situation where the pre-independence press was controlled solely by the European missionaries and colonial authorities. In Ghana and Nigeria, private ownership of newspapers meant that stories that confront the colonial government could be published. Thus, Marita, a story that indicts the imposition of European nuptial customs on Africans, and believed to be the first novel to be published in West Africa, appeared in a nationalist newspaper. The story was first published in forty instalments in 1885 in the “Western Echo,” and later in the Gold Coast Echo (Awoonor 2006: 246). Newell puts the date of first appearance at 1886 (Newell 2002: 152). Culturally, Awoonor links the rise of the English novel with Empire and the slave trade. In his view, the emergence and thriving of the English novel, as a form of refined entertainment for the newly industrialised English bourgeoisie, is underwritten by African slave labour. According to Awoonor: What many of the [great scholars and literary critics] will forget to tell… about the English novel, particularly at the point it attained exquisite elegance in the dainty prose of Jane Austen and the marvelous Bronte sisters when it had much to do with those fine and well-appointed homes scattered across England, is that it is the product of leisure earned through capital extorted from slave labour both at home and abroad,…on the Caribbean and colonial American plantations. It is this capital which financed the Industrial Revolution of Europe [and led to the refined bourgeoisie cultural sensibilities to which the novel owes its origins]. (2006: 247) Parrinder et al’s New Directions in the History of the Novel (2014) attempts to broaden the scope of the origins of the novel. Unlike earlier histories of the novel which are parochial, Parrinder et 50 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh al provide a much enhanced and global perspective on the novel. The work recognises the contributions of not only the English writers but also the colonial relations between the English novel and its regional forms such as the Indian and African novels. Parrinder et al extend the frontier of novel scholarship by positing that the novel is no longer ‘novel’ as the form is progressively losing its innovatory character because of new technology. The novel now exists in all manner of formats, including virtual forms on electronic devices. The current debate on the novel is based on the suggestion that the genre’s English language name has become anachronistic, and may need to be changed to accommodate the form’s protean, multidimensional and multimedia realisations in the current technological milieu (2014: 1). 2.2.3 The English Novel and Postcolonial Studies We shall start this segment of our literature review by discussing the postcolonial responses to European colonialist and imperialist thought. Bill Ashcroft et al in The Empire Writes Back define ‘postcolonialism’ as “cover[ing] all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (1989: 2.) In this sense, the postcolonial captures the state of the world during and after the period of European imperialism, and the global effects of that domination (Ashcroft et al 2). Helen Tiffin provides a bi-angular definition of the term ‘postcolonialism’. To her, postcolonialism is, first, “writing … grounded in those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism – that is … writing from countries or regions which were formerly colonies of Europe. …Second […,] the postcolonial is conceived of as a set of discursive practices, prominent among which is resistance to colonialism” (qtd in Ahmad 1997: 366). Aijaz Ahmad, on the other hand, bemoans the tempo-spatial plasticity of the term ‘postcolonial’. Regarding its temporality, he argues that the term’s inexhaustible elasticity sees the concept of 51 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the postcolonial being applied to a wide range of colonial conditions making the term amorphous in its meaning and application. In his view, since “any resistance to colonialism is always, already postcolonial,…postcoloniality envelopes coloniality itself as well as all that comes after it…” thereby making the term ambiguous (Ahmad 365-6). As regards the term’s spatial application, Ahmad suggests that the term is plastic enough to cover conditions across the entire globe. According to him, the postcolonial has been used to describe extensive geographies including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific Islands, the former Soviet states, Yugoslavia, the whole of Asia, Latin America and Africa. In the view of Ahmad, therefore, postcolonialism has become a loose and “remorseless universalism” accommodating all kinds of phenomena (1997: 365). In our own view, rather than weaken the term, the elasticity of the concept of postcolonialism goes to show the pervasiveness of colonisation and its attendant exploitation and imperial domination in human history. Ahmad’s complaint about the universalism of postcolonialism is weakened by the fact that more than three-quarters of the globe’s population have had their lives shaped by colonialism (Ashcroft et al 1989: 1). Moreover, Europe held a grand total of about eighty-five percent of the earth under various colonial arrangements between 1800 and 1914. “No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis” (Said 1994: 8). Recently, scholars have begun interrogating the seemingly antithetical posturing between two schools in the fields of colonial and postcolonial discourse. Michael Chapman (2008), following the conundrum between the linguistic-literary-culturalist school of Said- Spivak-Bhabha and Marxist-materialist-political school of Ahmad-San Juan, provides a definition that attempts to merge both schools of thought. In Chapman’s view, the critical enterprises involved in postcolonial studies and theory encompass: 52 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh  “A critique of Western totalizing narratives”  “A revision of the Marxian class project”  “utilisation of both poststructural enquiry (the displaced linguistic subject) and “postmodern pursuit (scepticism of truth claims of Cartesian individuality)”  “The conditions of both nativist longing for independence from the metropolitan power and recognition of the failure of the decolonization trajectory”  “A marker for voices of pronouncement by non-resident, ‘Third-World’ intellectual cadres in ‘First-World’ universities”  “[And lastly] a focusing of the ethical and imaginative lens on expression, writing, and testimony outside of, or in tangential relation to, the metropolitan centre-space.” (Chapman 2008: 1) According to Chapman, the last point in his trajectory seeks to re-integrate literature or “literary matters” back into postcolonial studies and theory – as per the linguistic-literary-culturalist tradition – since postcolonial studies have increasingly, as seen in the trajectory above, become politics- and economics-based. By reinstating literature, the focus is chiefly on work from the erstwhile colony or new literature in English (Chapman 1). It is clear from the above attempts at a definition that ‘postcolonialism’ is an expansive term embracing periods, places and practices. The periods span the inception of colonisation to the aftermath of formal colonisation with a focus on the contemporary effects of the phenomenon. The places include all the societies which have had the experience of European imperial domination. The practices comprise discursive acts such as literary writings that deal with Empire, discourses of resistance and critical works that interrogate imperial and colonial relations. Having broadly defined ‘postcolonialism’, we shall now attempt to trace the relationship between the English novel and postcolonial thought. We provide the latter analysis to expose 53 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh further the gaps in novel scholarship. According to Peter Dempsey, the field of postcolonial studies starts with the 1978 publishing of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a text that mounts a vigorous investigation of Western Europe’s assumptions on Oriental civilisations (2005: 287). The most enduring European representation of the Orient, in the view of Said, is the image of the inferior Other against whom Europe’s ‘natural’ superiority is inscribed in spite of Europe’s significant dependence on the Orient for much of its material and cultural wealth (1978: 1). Another key foundational text in the field of postcolonial studies is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985). Bemoaning the parochialism with which critics account for the history of the English novel and its relationship with the British Empire, Spivak writes: It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. […] If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the "worlding" of what is now called "the Third World." (1985: 243) Spivak’s profound observation in the mid-nineteen-eighties, in addition to Said’s influential study, is instrumental in constructing the basis of the field of postcolonial theory. Following Spivak, Ashcroft et al published their seminal study, The Empire Writes Back (1989), as another foundational text in the field. Citing Batsleer et al, Ashcroft et al suggest that “the historical 54 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh moment which saw the emergence of ‘English’ as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism” (1989:3). In other words, “the study of English [with an emphasis on the centrality of the novel to English studies] and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other” (Ashcroft et al 3). Since Said and Spivak, the field of postcolonial studies and theory has grown seeing an increase in works that implicate the English novel in the British imperial project. Works such as Ania Loomba’s Woman, Image and Text (1986), Daniel Bivona’s Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (1990), Suvendrini Perera’s Reaches of Empire: The Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (1991), Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow’s The Africa That Never Was (1992), Firdous Azim’s The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993), Brantlinger’s “Race and the Victorian Novel” in the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) and Francis O’Gorman’s The Victorian Novel: A Guide to Criticism (2002), have all made significant contributions to the field. With the significant exception of Azim’s work, the common thread running through all above texts is their thematic treatment of colonialism. Azim laments: “histories of the novel generally treat colonialism as a theme, reflected within the narrative terrain” (1993: 30). For her, criticism of the colonialist novel should move beyond thematic analysis. Accordingly, she departs from the trend of thematic analysis, and provides a formalistic analysis of colonialism in the novel, perhaps, the first of such study since W.H. New’s Among Worlds (1975). For her, colonialism is not only a theme to be found in the text, but more importantly it is a textual construct realised in the voice of the powerful, authoritative narrator. One of her objectives in The Colonial Rise of the Novel is to “show that the translation of imperialism into novelistic genre is not limited to its thematic 55 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh concerns, but refers [also] to the formation of the subjective positions of the colonizer and the colonized within the colonial terrain” (Azim: 31). In justifying her formalist approach to analysing the novels of Charlotte Bronte, which she designates as colonial writings following Spivak, Azim cites examples from Africa to India to show the dearth of the structural approach to the study of the colonialist novel. She specifically points to Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o as critics whose approach has merely been to “show the relation between the linguistic and psychological/psychic modes of colonization” (Azim: 31). Concerning India, she points out that studies such as Woman, Image, Text (1986) and Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race and Renaissance (1989) have primarily focused on the pedagogical aspect of colonialism, especially the confrontation of the English text and language by women in the classroom. The dearth of the structural analysis of the colonialist novel leads Azim to conclude that “the novel is an imperial genre, not in theme merely, not only by virtue of the historical moment of its birth, but in its formal structure – in the construction of that narrative voice which holds that narrative structure together” (qtd in O’Gorman 2002: 322). To Azim, therefore, the critical fixation on the ‘politics’ of the novel to demonstrate “how [it] has forwarded the task of imperial domination” (1993:31) reduces the focus on how the text itself is constructed as a symbol of colonisation. Azim’s position seems to suggest that structural methodology precludes the study of the story or social content. She seems to associate structural analysis with only the discourse of narrative and not the story. In this regard, she focuses on the voice of the narrator as constituting the proper concern of the structuralist approach (Azim 1993). We find Azim’s stance problematic. We want to point out that not only the discourse but also the story of narrative can be studied structurally. In our view, there can be no study of the discourse of narrative without a simultenous study of the social domain. This is because it is the story that produces the structure, 56 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh thus structural analysis must necessarily involve consideration of the social domain. Moreover, the pioneers of structural analysis were ‘grammarians of the story’ – not of discourse. Propp, Todorov and Levi Strauss studied the stories or social matter of the Russian folktales, Boccacio’s The Decameron, and the Oedipus and Native American myths respectively. The ‘grammarians of discourse’ such as Gerard Genette, and ‘mixed narratologists’ such as Roland Barthes and Gerald Prince would come after the pioneers. Thus, though Azim impressively identifies the lack of the structural approach in the study of the colonialist novel, her failure to recognise the social strata of narrative as a complementary component of structural analysis creates a conundrum. Perhaps, what Azim wants to say is that structuralists are interested in the story of narrative, but only to the extent that it projects and support a structure, which represents their key concern. Drawing insights from the literature review, we recognise what constitute gaps in the study of the colonialist novel. First, there is a premature declaration of the death of scholarship on the novel. Second, we observe that the role of the English novel in the career of imperialism has not be adequately acknowledged; and third, there is a dearth of structural methodology in the analysis of the colonialist novel. The present dissertation intends to contribute towards filling these gaps by providing a structural study of the story of the colonialist novel. We intend to delineate the social, economic, political and psychological patterns by which the colonialist story is organised. Our analysis also intends to link the English novel with the colonising enterprise of the British Empire. 57 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.0 CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY To provide the analysis in this study, we seek to follow the structuralist tradition pioneered by Propp and followed by Todorov and Levi-Strauss. In other words, the present study adopts the methods of the ‘grammarians of story’. Our approach is more specifically Levi- Straussian in its paradigmatic methodology. Thus, we identify and isolate specific functions that recur in the select set of colonialist novels. These functions are constructed as simple sentences or clauses of one grammatical sentence which represents the complete plot of the colonialist story in its skeletal form. We shall do so by summarising the plots of all the novels in seven simple sentences. In doing so, we shall not follow the given order in which the functions appear in the stories. Rather, we shall rearrange the functions as simple sentences in a system, and attempt to identify the bundling relationships that make meaning possible within the system as a whole. We shall then discover what single grammatical structure emerges from the system. The resultant structure is a fixed pattern or formula that represents in its barest form the complete colonialist story. The structure is proffered as the grammar of the story: an irreducible template into which all colonialists stories can be fitted. The structure is the operating principle that governs all colonialist stories. We shall then investigate what the structure signifies socially, politically, economically and historically: its implications for artistic fidelity, colonial ideology and colonial history. We derive the grammar from our study of a select set of colonialist novels written by British and European nationals: Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Joyce Cary’s The African Witch (1936) and Mister Johnson (1939), Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1960) and Nicholas Monsarrat’s 58 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956). Our select set of novels conveniently covers the period from the commencement of formal British colonisation of Africa to the end of formal colonisation. This period starts with the Partition of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884 and ends with decolonisation in the 1950s. The select set of novels are set across the various African regions colonised by European powers, chiefly Great Britain: West Africa, Central Africa and Southern Africa. Our select set of novels, therefore, enable us to provide a critique of the representation of colonialism in its totality: from commencement to the end, and across the entire African territory dominated by Britain. In the few instances, where the novel is set in non- British colonies, for instance, Graham Greene’s Belgian-ruled Congo in A Burnt-Out Case, the story is still told from the British perspective creating a unified authorial and narratorial perspectives. We now proceed to provide the technical details and theoretical orientation of our methodology. The following analysis represents the step-by-step demonstration of the processes by which we shall formulate the grammar. 3.1 The Theory: Formulating the Grammar We shall now formulate the grammar of the colonialist story. In doing so, we shall be influenced chiefly by Levi-Strauss. Based on our reading of the select set of colonialist novels, we shall formulate the grammar, first, as a series of seven simple sentences or clauses as seen in Schema 1 below: Schema 1 X enters the cave (a) X cages Y (b) 59 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the Cave speak against X (mirror line sentence) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) The cave cages X (b-1) The cave enters X (a-1) As pointed out earlier, the seven simple sentences above represent the subordinate elements or “clausulae of sentences” (Barthes 1989: 99) of one single superordinate grammar. The seven sentences constitute the seven main action units of the plot of the colonialist novel. In other words, they constitute the constants and variables of the story. The seven units of action do not necessarily follow a linear sequential progression in the plot. Schematically, the diagram above is based on a re-ordering of the action in the plot. In this sense, our theoretical approach is the paradigmatic type of structuralist application used by Levi-Strauss, and not the syntagmatic type used by Propp and Todorov. According to Levi-Strauss: “The true constituent units of a myth [or literary text] are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (1986: 812). We shall accordingly define our grammatical categories, and try to establish the internal relations among the sentences to determine how they produce meaning in the colonialist novel. We cannot proceed, however, without explaining the fundamental structural principle of ‘constant’ and ‘variable’ as well as defining the categories of the grammar. 60 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.1 The Principle of Constant and Variable In Schema 1 above, there is first the nominal category which represents the domain of actants/characters in the colonialist novel. The category comprises the noun: “cave” and nominals: “X” and “Y.” They represent one set of the constant elements in the colonialist novel – the other set of constants being the actions or functions of the actants. Thus, in the colonialist novel, there are nominal constants (actants) and verbal constants (functions of the actants). Both of these constants have a set of variables. For example, each nominal constant or class of characters has various members but the function remains the same. The various members of the class represent the variables of the constant entity. For instance, the X-constant represents all colonisers whose wide range of membership becomes the variables of X. Similarly, the Y- constant represents all colonised Africans. Thus, Haggard’s Amahagger, Conrad’s Congolese, or Cary’s Nigerians represent variables of the Y-constant. Propp puts the principle in another way: “The names of the dramatis personae change (as well as the attributes of each), but neither their actions nor functions change” (1968: 20). In the structural grammar, therefore, a constant may be defined as a generic notion that is realised in a multiplicity of subsidiary forms. The “amazing multiformity” or variability of the elements of the constants give the tale/novel its colour and picturesqueness (Propp 20). So far, we have defined the principle of constant and variable with an emphasis on the nominal/actant/ category; the same principle operates in the verbal/functional category. Having defined what constitutes a constant and variable, and their interrelations, we shall now define the categories of the grammar of the colonialist novel and attempt to discover the internal cohesion or bundles of relation within the categories. 61 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.1.1 Defining the Nominal (Actant) Category: 3.1.1.1.1 The Notion of the Cave We use the term ‘cave’ to refer to the various peripheries of the British Empire, colonised territories which are represented in the colonialist novels as the primitive outposts of the imperial metropolis. For instance, Haggard sets his novel, She, “on the coast of Africa, in a hitherto unexplored region [where there are] great mountains…and caves surrounded by measureless swamps” (Haggard 1994: 34). Haggard’s narrator, Holly, describes the terrain as “caves of which no man hath ever seen” (37). The presumption, therefore, is that the Englishmen – Holly, Leo and Job – are the first people to ever walk in this “very wild stretch of country” (57). Being presumably the first people on the land, they suppose the resources of the land have no owners; they, therefore, arrogate to themselves the right to expropriate the resources of the land. Thus, on arrival in Africa, the first act of the English entourage is to pick their guns and “get some first class shooting” (51), after all, in their view, “you won’t find out anything wonderful [in Africa], but… some good shooting” (53). Haggard’s setting is a cave not merely in the literal sense, but more significantly in the metaphorical sense. The English men characterise the African people as cave people, foul-smelling cannibals, thieves and murderers. Hear Job: “I don’t like the looks …of these black gentry; they have such a wonderful thievish way about them” (55). Elsewhere Job complains about the “sight of these blackamoors and their filthy, thieving ways.” Similarly, Conrad in Heart of Darkness paints a picture of an untamed African landscape inhabited by wild people whose very humanity Marlow, the narrator, doubts. The people are represented as cannibals who behave like the wild beasts they share the jungle with. In a description that coincides with Holly’s view of the African terrain, Marlow says: “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet (Conrad 1994: 51). The 62 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh portrayal of the African terrain as an otherworldly atavistic space as done by Holly and Marlow abounds in the colonialist novel tradition. Invariably, the notion of the cave is closely linked with expropriation. The cave is always represented as a place of inexhaustible lodes of raw materials. The Europeans’ assumption that they are the ‘discoverers’ of the cave – an assumption that disregards the rights of the Africans as the rightful owners of the land and its resources – fuels the colonisers’ conclusion that the resources of the cave must be appropriated. The pretext is that the inhabitants, the ‘primitive cavemen and –women’, do not have the use of the natural resources. We can delineate two major variables of the cave: the absolute cave and cave-city. There are a few occasions where the cave-city is fully furnished as a complete city thereby adding a third dimension to the cave. An example is Port Victoria in Monsarrat (1956). Mainly, however, the cave is comprised of the absolute cave and cave-city. The absolute is the default environment of Africa: the wild, pre-existing space before the arrival of the Europeans. The second variable of the cave is the product of European transformation. The Europeans introduce a semblance of modernity to the enclaves where they settle, so that there is a simultaneous co- existence of modernity (city) and the atavistic (cave), creating the ‘cave-city’ symbiosis. By juxtaposing the ‘cave’ against the ‘cave-city’, we seek to highlight the notion of the cave as an excessively primitive space far removed from the temporal, spatial and value planes of European scientific modernity. 3.1.1.1.2 The Notions of X and Y From Schema 1, “X” and “Y” represent another set of nouns in the grammar. Like the “cave,” they are also constants, but they boast a more comprehensive range variables. For instance, members of the X-constant include all colonisers, that is, all non-African peoples who come to Africa for political and commercial reasons. They are mostly Europeans but there are 63 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh also Arabs, especially, citizens of Arabia and Syria. The X-constant is therefore a large, dynamic class whose variables may range from the lowly illiterate European and Syrian traders on the coasts of Africa to the educated colonial governors. The class includes characters such as Prince, the ill-bred, ex-Manchester-based shop assistant turned rich shop owner in Africa (Cary 1936: 196); Tallit and Yusef, the contraband-dealing Syrian merchants in Greene (1948); European adventurers such as Holly, the highly trained Cambridge scholar (Haggard 1887); Ayesha, the primeval Arabian goddess turned dictator in Africa (Haggard); and European colonial officials such as the various Governors, Resident Commissioners, District Officers, Security Attaches, “Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers, Directors of Public Works,” and other members of the colonial administration and their spouses (Greene 1948: 14). Similarly, the Y-constant embraces a comprehensive range of colonised peoples as variables. In the context of this study, the colonised peoples are the Africans. This class includes the many unlettered African men and women; semi-literate colonial African officials such as Mister Johnson (Cary 1939) and Corporal Laminah (Greene 1948: 19); chiefs such as Emir Aliu (Cary 1936) and Billali (Haggard 1887); and the educated African elite including Aladai (Cary 1936) and Dinamaula (Monsarrat 1956). So far, we have defined the three constant elements that constitute the nominal category of the grammar: the “cave,” “X” and “Y.” We shall now proceed to define the verbal/functional category. 64 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.1.2 Defining the Verbal (Functional) Category: “To Enter,” “To Cage,” “To Steal,” “To Speak” The second category of the grammar is verbal. The operational verbs in the category are the infinitives: “to enter,” “to cage,” “to steal” and “to speak.” Items in the verbal category are nominalised to represent the functions performed by the actants/characters. As Propp affirms, “Definition of a function will most often be given in the form of a noun expressing an action” (1968: 21). Thus, in our study, “to enter [the cave]” turns into the noun, “caving;” “to cage” translates to “caging;” “to steal” transforms into “theft;” and “to speak” becomes “voicing.” In the colonialist novel, therefore, “caving,” “caging,” “theft” and “voicing” represent the four constant functions. The variables of each function are the various social acts that will bring out the function. As Propp suggests, though the functions are constant, “The actual means of the realization of functions can vary, and as such, it is a variable” (Propp 20, my emphasis). By “the actual means,” Propp is referring to the actual social act that will bring about the fulfilment of the function. What this implies is that different acts can lead to the same function. For instance, the actual acts of Kurtz (Conrad 1994) may be quite different from the acts of Burwash (Cary 1936) or Scobie (Greene 1948) or Macmillan (Monsarrat 1956), yet all these pieces of divergent acts fulfil the same function of caging Africans. Thus, they are variables of the constant function: “caging.” We shall now proceed to define the items in the verbal category. 3.1.1.2.1 The Verb: “To Enter” “To enter” translates as the function ‘caving’ in the colonialist novel. The function has two antithetical variables: the colonisers entering the cave, and the cave entering the colonisers. We shall explain. When the colonisers enter the so-called primitive African space, we describe their coming as ‘entering the cave’. Upon entering, the colonisers are represented as ambassadors 65 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of enlightenment who are in the colony to inculcate civilisation in the Africans. In Marlow’s words, the English colonisers are the torchbearers, “messengers of the might within the land [England], bearers of a spark from the sacred fire [of civilization]” (Conrad 1994: 7). Paradoxically, after spending some time in Africa, the colonisers begin demonstrating behaviours that can be interpreted as primitive. They commit brutal murders and indulge in sexual escapades, blackmail, theft, segregation and racism against the Africans: acts that do not represent the much-touted European civilisation. In the colonialist novels studied, the narrators usually blame the excesses of the Europeans on the so-called psychological impacts of the atavistic African environment. To the narrators, the African wildness ‘enters’ the Europeans and causes them to demonstrate wild behaviour. We interpret the scenario just described as ‘the cave entering the European’. Thus, there is a reverse principle involved in caving. The Europeans enter the cave with the torch of civilisation, but the cave supposedly blows out the torch so that the darkness of the cave enters the Europeans in return making them behave primitively. The function we have just described emerges from the colonial novel, and demonstrates the dialectical relationship between the two forms of entry of the cave. Our own opinion regarding the function is that it is a dubious function. The narrators’ alibi that the African wilderness ‘enters’ the Europeans leading to their bad behaviour is unsupported in the novels. Our personal stance is that the supposed entry of the cave into the Europeans is the result of the Europeans’ own archetypal drives or ‘inner cave’ rather than the effects of the African ‘cave’. The ‘inner cave’, the human tendency to demonstrate animalistic behaviour, according to Carl Jung (1980), represents archetypal instincts that is available to every human, whether African or European. We contend, therefore, that the Europeans arrived in Africa carrying their own internal caves. The narrators’ case of the African cave entering the European is, therefore, 66 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh misleading. The above analysis highlights the falsity of the function in [Sentence (a-1): The cave enters X] of Schema 1. 3.1.1.2.2 The Verb: “To Cage” The verb “to cage” translates as the function: ‘caging’. To cage is to circumscribe individuals with circumstances that inhibit their ability to move freely or express their natural freedoms. There are many variables of caging in the colonialist novel: physical caging, social caging, economic caging, political caging and psychosexual caging. The ultimate effect of caging on the colonised peoples is immobility. Since stasis implies the lack of historical development, the colonised people are caught up in a situation where their physical, social, economic and political progress as well as their libidinal desires are held in check by the colonisers. Instances of physical caging suffered by the Africans include all acts which are employed by the colonisers to cow the Africans into submission. Such acts include the use of violence, militaristic intimidation, coercion and racial segregation as a means of control. The taxonomy just enumerated above is documented as a key feature of colonial practices in Africa. In She, for instance, there is an extreme form of physical caging. The caves of Kor are transformed into cells by the coloniser. Ayesha, the white Arabic ruler of the Amahagger people, imposes severe physical restrictions on the Africans. No one is allowed to stand in her presence: the physical posture one adopts when appearing before Ayesha is crawling. Thus, the Amahagger are made to crawl on all fours like animals. This arrangement represents just one of the numerous examples of physical caging in the colonialist novel. We define social caging as social immobility; restrictions that inhibit a people from interacting freely with other people. Social caging is frequently expressed in the form of racial 67 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh segregation. For instance, in She, Ayesha prevents the Amahagger from interacting with the English men. Ustane, the Amahagger girl who gets married to Leo in the traditional Amahagger custom, is considered unfit to marry him simply because she is African. She is subsequently disfigured, banished and eventually killed by Ayesha (Haggard: 200, 218). Political caging is one of the fundamental forms of caging in the colonialist novel tradition. It occurs when the colonisers, usually the representatives of the English Queen, undermine the African chieftaincy institution, and impose foreign rule on the Africans. Political caging comes with an entire administrative machinery consisting of the colonial administrators, police, military, justice system and penal code to subjugate the Africans. Political caging is seen in all the novels studied. Psychosexual caging captures sexual fixations and their allied sadomasochistic misdemeanours. It is the type of caging that inhibits Africans from exercising their sexual rights or receiving decent or dignified treatment in their sexual liaisons with Europeans. Billali, Aladai and Dinmaula are African men who experience psychosexual caging in She, The African Witch and The Tribe That Lost Its Head respectively. Matumbi in Mister Johnson and the unnamed mistress of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness represent African women who are psychosexually caged. In line with the dioscuric grammar of the colonialist novel, the function of caging undergoes a structural reversal to affect the colonisers also. In this regard, the colonisers also experience shackling in the forms of physical, psychical and social caging. For instance, the colonisers are physically caged by the African environment. The elements of the African space constitute themselves into an antagonistic physical cage that traps the invading Europeans. However, the fact that the colonisers eventually succeed in invading Africa implies their ability to ‘negotiate’ or come to terms with the physical forces of Africa. The colonisers seem unable, 68 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh however, to deal with the so-called psychic cage imposed by the African space. The supposed effect of the African environment on the colonisers’ psychic constitution is presumed by the colonialist narrators to be negative. In some cases, the colonisers also experience social caging. In spite of the professed unfriendliness of the African space, some of the colonisers adapt to conditions in African so much so that they reject their native Europe. When this happens, the colonisers feel out of place when they return home to Europe on vacation. They are unable to adapt socially to their own European environment, and want to return to Africa. Some of these colonisers decide to spend the rest of their lives in Africa. We call the phenomenon social caging. Kurtz (Conrad 1994), Andrew Macmillan (Monsarrat 1956) and Querry (Greene 1961) are among the colonisers who experience social caging. There is also the marital cage which is a form of social caging. Most European marriages and nuptial arrangements collapse in Africa as a result of either climatic or social conditions in colonial Africa. Thus, we observe in the function of caging the same trend of reversal seen in the function of caving. 3.1.1.2.3 The Verb: “To Steal” The verb “to steal” is nominalised as the function: ‘theft’. In the context of our study, ‘to steal’ implies the appropriation of other people’s property. In one sense, theft refers to the expropriation of the resources of the colonised by the coloniser. In another sense, it refers to the losses suffered by the coloniser as a result of the supposed effects of the elements of Africa. In Heart of Darkness, for instance, the Company for which Kurtz is an agent is involved in mass stealing of ivory from the Africans through Kurtz, the prime thief. There is also the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, a group of European treasure hunters whose sole aim is “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land…, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (Conrad 1994: 44). In She, Ayesha steals the psychic resource 69 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of Africa. She tricks the old African philosopher, Noot, into revealing to her the secrets of the sacred Fire. She then waits for Noot to die to steal the Fire to prolong her life (Haggard 1994: 267). She then uses her ill-gotten longevity as authority to colonise the Africans. In A Burnt-Out Case, expropriation of Congo’s agricultural resources is central to the colonial enterprise. For instance, “the long avenues of logs …[are] cut ready for fuel[ling]” the Europeans’ steam transportation (Greene 1961: 16), and the palm fruits are pressed into oil to feed the factories in Europe. In The Heart of the Matter, the British government and colonial smugglers take over the diamond resources of Sierra Leone. The Africans are denied any roles in the diamond business. In accordance with the dioscuric principle of the colonialist novel tradition, the function of theft is reversed against the colonisers. In this case, the dual forces of Africa – the African and African environment – steal from the colonisers in return. The Europeans lose their health, sanity, wives and lives in Africa. For instance, Kurtz’s losses are multiple: he becomes sick and insane; he crawls on all fours like an animal, and eventually loses his life (Conrad 1994). The African environment is presumed to have stolen his sanity, health and life as a retribution for his brutal invasion of Africa and violation of the Africans. In She, Ayesha steals the Africans’ sacred Fire which gives her longevity and psychic powers. The Fire eventually takes a brutal revenge on her as she is burnt beyond recognition (Haggard 1994). In A Burnt-Out Case, the principal representatives of Empire experience great losses. Querry is a renowned architect known for building famous Cathedrals all over the world. He typifies the cross between two of the principal pillars of Empire: capitalist industry (commerce) and the Church (Christianity) – the other pillar is civilisation. He loses his life in Congo when he is shot by another coloniser, Rycker. Rycker himself represents the European mercantile interest. He is the manager of the European-owned oil palm plantation. For his part, Rycker loses his wife, Marie. She divorces him and flees Africa 70 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to Europe. In Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the young District Commissioner of Shebiya, Tom Ronald, and his young wife, Cynthia, both representing the civilising mission, are brutally murdered. Cynthia is additionally raped by many Africans. Father Schwemmer, representing the church and the civilising mission, is also killed by the Africans. In the same novel, Andrew Macmillan, Resident Commissioner of Pharmaul, the highest colonial official after the Governor, commits suicide because of his inability to deal with the African uprising. From the numerous instances of madness, death, murder, suicide, rape and divorce suffered by the colonisers on the account of the African/African space dyad, it is obvious that Africa ‘steals’ the important resources of the colonisers in revenge. From the above analysis, we can observe that the function of theft, like the functions of caving and caging, affects both the colonised and colonisers to satisfy the dioscuric or chiasmic logic. 3.1.1.2.4 The Verb: “To Speak” The verb, “to speak,” becomes the function, ‘voicing’, which represents African agency. In the context of the present study, ‘to speak’ is to react against colonial oppression. Unlike the three functions already discussed – caving, caging and theft – voicing does not have a dual or dioscuric effect. Voicing is the sole function of the African/African space dyad. This is because, in the colonialist novel, only the African/African space dyad is under siege, so it is only the dyad that reacts or gives voice to its resentments. Voicing includes the various acts of dissent perpetrated by the African peoples against the colonisers. It also includes the antagonistic climatic effects of the African space on the colonisers. In other words, not only the African peoples speak against colonisation, the African environment also ‘speaks’ against the Europeans. We recognise four voices of Africa: the discursive voice, violent voice, cultural voice and cosmic voice. The discursive voice is the 71 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh voice of reason, which is commanded by the African elite. The violent voice is the voice of aggression and destructive action; it is the voice of the masses of colonised Africans. The cultural voice calls for the rejection of European lore and re-embracing of traditional African mores; it is the voice of cultural nationalism, and is controlled by the African masses, and to a lesser degree, by the African elite. The cosmic voice is the agency of the elements of the African space. It represents the impacts of the African environment on the colonisers. The unbearable heat, unnavigable rivers, impenetrable jungle, ruthless mosquitoes and many other vicious elements that seem to ‘attack’ only the colonisers, and make them uncomfortable. So far, we have defined all the categories that constitute the grammar of the colonialist novel. We have broken down each sentence making the grammar to its minute elements, and defined each in detail. We have examined the nominal/actant category, and defined its constants: the ‘cave’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’, and their variables. We have also discussed the verbal/functional category, and defined its components: ‘to enter’, ‘to cage’, ‘to steal’ and ‘to speak’. Following Propp, we have explained that the verbal category is nominalised to constitute the functions. In that regard, we have indicated that the verb, ‘to enter’, translates as the noun, ‘caving’; ‘to cage’as ‘caging’; ‘to steal’ as ‘theft’; and ‘to speak’ as ‘voicing’. Following Levi-Strauss’ mandatory “bundles of relations” principle (1986: 812), we shall now attempt to discover the principles of bundling that exist within each of the categories. In other words, we shall try and examine the internal cohesion that exists within the nominal/actant category and also within the verbal/functional category. 72 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.2 Establishing the Bundles of Relations Among the Terms of the Grammar We shall now attempt to delineate the pivotal relationships that exist among the terms of the grammar. According to Levi-Strauss, the meaning of a text is possible only through the “bundle of relations” of its terms, and “it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (1986: 812). In pursuit of this objective, we shall reproduce Schema 1 below to facilitate the discussion. Schema 1 X enters the cave (a) X cages Y (b) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the cave speak against X (mirror line sentence) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) The cave cages X (b-1) The cave enters X (a-1) From Schema 1, we can establish two sets of bundled relations: dioscuric pairing and semantic compounding. Both sets of bundles have implications for the superordinate grammar of colonialist novel. 73 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.2.1 Relation 1: Dioscuric Pairs and the Chiasmic Structure of the Grammar We posit that the structure of the colonialist novel is chiasmic or dioscuric. As seen from Schema 1, the structure is constituted of seven sentences. Six of these sentences go into three pairs of bundles; each bundle of sentences shares a simultaneous parallel and inverted relationship leading to the dioscuric or chiasmic logic. The inversion or homological bundling of the sentences occurs across a seventh sentence that acts as ‘Point 0’ or the ‘Mirror Line Sentence.’ The inversion of the individual sentences across the mirror line creates the chiasmic or dioscuric structure for the colonialist novel. We have already defined the term ‘dioscuric’ as referring to a homology, the principle of simultaneous synonymous and antonymous pairing analogous to the reversed ordering of two similar structures, as seen in the Greek letter chi (X) (Gorton 1993: 11). Graphically, a chi and its derivative, chiasmus, is represented as Figure 1 below: Figure 1: Chiasmus It has two sides of equal magnitude which are inverse in relations as a result of a mirror line reflection as seen in Figure 2 below. Figure 2: Chiasmus showing mirror line mirror line 74 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh According to Chris Holcomb and Jimmie Killingsworth in Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style, a “chiasmus is a more general version of antimetabole and refers not [only] to a reversal of the same words but [also] to a reversal of grammatical structures” (2010: 122). Clearly, therefore, the structures in Schema 1 represent a chiasmus: though the syntactic structures remain the same, the words are reversed. We shall therefore use the terms, ‘chiasmus’ and ‘Dioscuri’, interchangeably to represent the same phenomenon. To demonstrate the dioscuric bundling and its resultant chiasmic impact on the structure of the colonialist novel, we shall re-arrange Schema 1 in a slightly modified format in Schema 2 below: Schema 2: Y/the cave speak against X (Point 0/mirror line) X enters the cave – (a) The cave enters X – (a-1) X cages Y – (b) The cave cages X. – (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y – (c) Y/the cave steal from X – (c-1) From Schema 2, we can clearly establish the first relation: dioscuric bundling. Each sentence and its inverse across the mirror line sentence is unambiguously observed. Schematically, the dioscuric relation is simplified below: Point 0/mirror line (a) (a-1) (b) (b-1) (c) (c-1) 75 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh From the above, the dioscuric bundles are as follows: [(a), (a-1)]; [(b), (b-1)]; and [(c), (c-1)]. The above bundling represents a case of lexical inversion where the subjects of sentences (a), (b), (c) become the objects of (a-1), (b-1), (c-1) respectively, and vice-versa across the mirror line sentence. In other words, [sentence (a)] and its reflection, [sentence (a-1)] are syntactically parallel but the positions of their noun phrases are inverted in their respective structures. Similarly, [sentence (b)] and [sentence (b-1)] are syntactically parallel but their noun phrases swap positions in their respective sentence structures. One will observe our conflation of the nouns, ‘Y’ and ‘the cave’, between sentences (b) and (b-1). The conflation does not raise a problem at all. In the colonialist novel, ‘Y’ (the colonised African) and ‘the cave’ (the African space) share a synonymous relationship. The colonisers see the African and the African environment as one and the same entity. The environmental deterministic ideology of the colonisers mandates the Europeans to conceptualise a supposedly primitive African who must be native to an equally atavistic environment. Therefore, the African/African space dyad conforms to the colonial logic of synonymy between the Africans and their environment. The relationship between the African and the African space can be represented by the notation Y ≡ the cave; where Y (the African) is equivalent to the cave (the African space). Regarding [sentence (b)] and [sentence (b-1)], therefore, ‘the cave’ cages ‘X’ on behalf of ‘Y’ because ‘Y’ and ‘the cave’ are synonymous-related. Once this caveat is explained, we can see that [sentence (b)] and [sentence (b-1)] are syntactically parallel but their noun phrases swap positions in their respective sentence structures. Similarly, [sentence (c)] and [sentences (c-1)] share a parallel syntactic structure but their noun phrases are inverted in their respective structures. We have seen that each pair of sentences shares a parallel syntax and inverts the noun phrases. 76 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The principle of shared syntax and inverted noun phrases creates a relationship of simultaneous synonymy and antonymy, where antonymy means oppositeness of relations (Leech 1981). For instance, sentences (a) and (a-1) are synonymously-related on the syntactic level because they share the same syntactic structure, but they are antonymously-related on the semantic level because their meanings are opposed by virtue of their swapped noun phrases. The same principle operates in the other set of sentences. It is this principle of simultaneous synonymy and antonymy that creates the internal cohesion or dioscuric bundling that exists between each pair of sentences. It is the same principle that gives the colonialist novel its dioscuric structure. The relationship we have just described satisfies the Levi-Straussian criterion of bundles of relations as the centres of meaning. So far, in Relation 1, we have seen that the sentences go into antithetical or dioscuric pairs: [(a), (a-1)]; [(b), (b-1)]; [(c); (c-1)]. We have also observed that it is this bundling that imposes the chiasmic form on the colonialist novel. The question now is: how does the abstract form just discovered translate to the social world of the colonialist novel? In order to answer that question, we shall reproduce the dioscuric framework (Schema 2) below, and show how it maps to the veridical level in the colonialist novel in Schema 3. Schema 2 Y/the Cave speak against X (Point 0/mirror line) X enters the cave – (a) The cave enters X – (a-1) X cages Y – (b) The cave cages X – (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y – (c) Y/the cave steal from X – (c-1) 77 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Schema 3 African/African space speak against coloniser Coloniser enters Africa (a) Africa enters coloniser (a-1) Coloniser cages African (b) African space cages coloniser (b-1) Coloniser steals from Africa space/African (c) African/African space steal from coloniser (c-1) From Schemas 2 and 3 above, we can make the following observations: first, the colonialist novel has a chiasmic structure where the story turns on the mirror line into an inverse story. In other words, the first and second parts of the story are the same in structure but the roles of the characters as reversed, so that the meaning of the first part is reversed in the second part. This creates a phenomenon where sentences (a), (b), (c) represent the original stories while (a-1), (b-1), (c-1) represent the counter-stories. This formulation represents the chiasmic structure. The structure is ironic and implies that, ultimately, the coloniser and colonised suffer the same fate. We suspect, however, that such a structure is false, and that in the real, historical experience of colonialism, there are vast differences in the magnitude of pain suffered by the colonised and coloniser. Nevertheless, the observation of the chiasmic structure is profound as it reveals that victimhood is not the function of only the colonised, as contemporary criticism – Achebe (1976), Spivak (1985), Brantlinger (1988), Ashcroft et al (1989), Kubayanda (1990), Azim (1993), Taiwo (2010) – often suggests. It indicates that victimhood is a shared function of both the colonised and coloniser. While this might be true, it is so only to an extent. We suspect that the colonialist author specifically contrives the mirror line to create the impression of equal victimhood (Enns 2012) between the colonised and coloniser, a false claim which is unsupported by historical fact. In our view, therefore, the colonialist notion of co-victimhood is a dubious one. 78 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3.1.2.2 Relation 2: Semantic Compounding, Neutralisation of Semantic Opposition and the Chiasmic Structure of the Grammar We have observed from Relation 1 that the pairs of sentences constituting the grammar of the colonialist novel are antonymously-related on the semantic level. We have observed, also, that it is the antonymous relations between the pairs of sentences that give the colonialist novel its chiasmic structure. In the present segment of the study, we shall attempt to discover another kind of internal cohesion among the pairs of sentences. Proceeding from the known to the unknown, we shall re-examine Relation 1 to determine what other cohesive possibilities exist within each bundle, the bundles being: [(a), (a-1)]; [(b), (b-1)]; and [(c), (c-1)]. We shall call the new relation that emerges Relation 2. To facilitate our analysis, we shall reproduce the bundles in a more complex format in Schema 4 below: Schema 4 Dioscuric Bundle Semantic Compound Superordinate Grammar X enters the cave – (a) /+ Entry/ /+ Caving/ The cave enters X – (a-1) X cages Y – (b) /+ Caging/ /+ Caging/ The cave cages X – (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y – (c) /+ Stealing / /+ Theft/ Y/the cave steal from X – (c-1) From Schema 4, we shall isolate the bundle [(a), (a-1)] for analysis as seen in the diagram below. We may have to reiterate some earlier observations to provide the necessary perspective. 79 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh X enters the cave – (a) /+ Caving/ /+ Caving/ The cave enters X – (a-1) From the diagram above, the bundle [(a), (a-1)] constitutes a set of paradigmatic sentences. Though the semantic relation between (a) and (a-1) is that of antonymy, “parallelism invests items in the same paradigm with the same value” (Yankson 2007: 7). Thus, if we grind the antithetical bundle [(a), (a-1)] in a semantic crucible, they lose their antonymous relation. What results is a semantic compound with the common semantic feature: /+ Entry of the Cave/ which further leads to the superordinate feature: /+ Caving/. Thus, through the concept of semantic compounding (Yankson 6), the internal opposition within the bundle is neutralised creating another form of cohesion. In other words, the originally opposed elements of the bundle are “contextually conditioned” to share the same semantic feature and assume the same meaning (Yankson 5). Applied to the social fabric of the colonialist novel, the framework implies that the often- cited historical opposition between the colonial experiences of the African and European is only superficial, and that on the abstract level, the colonised African and the colonising European shared the same experiences or were co-victims under colonialism. (We have already pointed out our suspicion of the falsehood of the colonialist grammar). We shall provide the same analysis for the other two bundles: [(b), (b-1)] and [(c), (c-1)]. We shall reproduce below the bundle [(b), (b-1)] from Schema 4 to facilitate our analysis: 80 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh X cages Y – (b) /+ Caging/ /+ Caging/ The cave cages X – (b-1) From the diagram above, the sentences (b), (b-1) are antonymously related on the semantic level. The subject of (b) becomes the object of (b-1), while the object of (b) is equivalent to the subject of (b-1). We have already explained the equivalence of ‘Y’ and ‘the cave’ in the notion: Y ≡ the cave. The antonymous relation between (b) and (b-1) is neutralised because parallelism conditions the two sentences to share a synonymous value. Such contextual conditioning produces a common semantic feature: /+ Caging/ which leads to the superordinate grammar /+ Caging/. We shall now examine the final bundle: [(c), (c-1)]. X steals from the cave/Y – (c) /+ Theft/ /+ Theft/ Y/the cave steal from X – (c-1) From the bundle above, the subject of sentence (c) occupies the objective position in sentence (c-1) while the object of (c) takes the subjective position in (c-1). Inversely, the subject of (c-1) becomes object of (c), while object of (c-1) becomes the subject of (c). The implication of this swapping is that there is semantic tension between (c) and (c-1). This tension is resolved by the fact that the two sentences share a paradigmatic relationship by virtue of their parallel sentence structures, and since parallelism forces the sentences into contextual conditioning, they lose their 81 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh original tension. The result is that both sentences are forced to share a common semantic feature: /+ Theft/ which leads to function: /+ Theft/. So far, we have attempted to establish the two key bundles of relations which give the story of the colonialist novel its meaning. Relation 1 provides the dioscuric logic and generates the chiasmic structure of the colonialist novel. Relation 2 makes use of the semantic oppositions established in Relation 1 to construct the functions of caving, caging and theft. 3.1.3 The Mirror Line The verb, “to speak,” translates to the function, ‘voicing’, which means to react against colonial oppression. Those who speak are the colonised Africans and African environment. We have identified and defined the four ‘voices’ of Africa: the discursive, violent, cultural and cosmic voices. In the colonialist novel, we realise that the African voice – either in its human or cosmic form – leads to the colonisers experiencing peripeteia, and therefore, it is the African voice that provides the mirror line in the colonial relations. As we shall see in Chapter 7, the various variables of the African voice expose the colonisers as barbaric or caged or suffering theft, ills originally suffered by the Africans. In other words, when the African or African environment reacts, the ills suffered by the Africans are reversed onto the Europeans. It is, therefore, the African agency that provides the false notion of ‘equity’ in the colonial interrelations. We shall discuss the mirror line in greater detail in Chapter 7. 3.1.4 The Grammar With all the bundles of relations and functions constituting the grammar explained, we shall now formulate the grammar itself. We shall generate the grammar from Schema 1 below: 82 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Schema 1: X enters the cave (a) X cages Y (b) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the Cave speak against X (mirror line sentence) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) The cave cages X (b-1) The cave enters X (a-1) From Schema 1, the grammar of the colonialist novel is as follows: [X enters the cave]a, [cages Y]b, and [steals from the cave and Y]c, but [Y and the cave also speak against X]0, and [steal from X]1/c as [the cave cages]1/b and [enters X]1/a The grammar, as we can see, is a single superordinate sentence containing the seven simple sentences put together paratactically. The grammar is chiasmic in structure and demonstrates all the cohesive relationships, reduplicative logic and dioscuric principles established in Relation 1 and Relation 2. The grammar represents the complete plot of the colonialist story in its barest form, and can be applied to all properly-written colonialist novels. It is the fixed, irreducible, universal structure of the colonialist novel. As we have attempted to demonstrate, the structure of the colonialist novel is based on a reversed symmetry where an original action is repeated in a reversed order to create an inverted parallelism. We must stress that the structure emerges from the colonialist novel and represents the unique vision of the colonialist author regarding colonialism in Africa. Even at this 83 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh preliminary stage of the study, we have our suspicion about the fidelity of the structure to colonial history. The structure comes across as a misrepresentation of the truth about colonialism. We suspect that the colonialist writers, consciously or unconsciously, formulated the structure as a stylistic device to effect co-victimhood, a false sense of equity in colonial suffering between the colonised and coloniser. Such a structure seeks to mitigate the crimes of colonialism by denying the historically-validated perpetrator-victim dichotomy, and replacing it with a fraudulent victim-victim symbiosis. In this chapter, we have attempted to provide the technical details and nuances of the grammar we are postulating. The grammar we have developed in this chapter represents the methodological and analytical framework that shall guide the discussion in this dissertation. 84 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.0 CHAPTER FOUR: CAVING: THE MYTHOPOETIC COLONIAL CAVE AND DIALECTICS OF ENTRY In this chapter, we shall attempt to analyse the first dioscuric pair of sentences of the grammar we have derived from the colonialist novels. In other words, we shall examine the following antithetical twin sentences of the grammar: [Sentence (a): X enters the cave] and [Sentence (a-1): The cave enters X] In providing the above analyses, we shall proceed on two fronts: in the first part of the chapter, we shall examine sentence (a), that is, we shall look at how the coloniser (X) enters and inaugurates the mythopoetic cave of Africa. In the second part of the chapter, we shall demonstrate how the action of sentence (a) is inverted in sentence (a-1), that is, we shall attempt to reveal how the African cave psychologically enters the coloniser (X). We shall then analyse the transformations that take place in the psyche of X as a consequence. Diagrammatically, sentence (a) and sentence (a-1) are represented in Schema 2 below as the first dioscuric pair. Y/the cave speak against X (mirror line) X enters the cave (a) The cave enters X (a-1) X cages Y (b) The cave cages X (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) From the above diagram, sentence (a) gets inverted across the mirror line to form sentence (a-1). In other words, the action of sentence (a) is repeated in sentence (a-1) but in an inverse form creating a chiasmic relation between the sentences (a) and (a-1). Such a formation provides a 85 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh dynamic case of syntactic parallelism where the two sentences are simultaneously synthetic and antithetic: the agent of sentence (a) becomes the sufferer of sentence (a-1), while the sufferer of sentence (a) becomes the agent of sentence (a-1). Our contention is that this grammar, derived from the colonialist novels, is designed by the colonialist writer, either consciously or unconsciously, to create erasure or diffusion of the crimes of colonialism as shall be seen in the following analysis. In providing an examination of the colonialist writers’ representation of Africa as a mythopoetic cave, we shall make reference to Carl Gustav Jung’s Theory of the Archetype and Collective Unconscious, and Jean O. Love’s concept of Mythopoetic Cognitive Style. Our main theoretical underpinning for this chapter shall be the psycho-linguistic and literary perspectives provided by Jean Love’s Mythopoetic Cognitive Style. Carl Jung alerts us to the umbilical relationship between the archetype and the collective unconscious. He defines the collective unconscious as the hereditary warehouse of racial impulse which is accumulated since the earliest beginning of the human race. The collective unconscious “constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us” (Jung 1980: 4); its content, which is the archetype, is the primordial human impulse lying in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. In other words, the collective unconscious and the archetype are communal properties shared by all individuals irrespective of race and geography, and they generate the same modes of behaviour everywhere in the world and in all individuals. The products of the collective unconscious, the archetypes, are archaic material, and as mythological thought-forms (Jung 3) or ritualistic modes of behaviour or mysteries, they are often best expressed as mythology. In mythopoetic form they are realised in genres such as the epic, folktales and esoteric teachings (Jung 1972: 183). Extending the work of Jung and Northrop Frye, Jean O. 86 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Love’s Mythopoetic Cognitive Style attempts to capture the primitive logic of literary writing. It interrogates the text linguistically, socially and psychologically to delineate the language and literary elements which reflect an author’s archetypal frame of mind which produces works that have mythical significance. According to Love, two mandatory elements define the mythopoetic style: diffusion of objects and dialectics. In her view, mythopoetic thought creates a world where differentiation is hardly existent; the recurrent characteristic of the mythopoetic world is diffusion of the objects or, more precisely, schematised diffusion of the elements. In the various complex renderings of the concept of diffusion, the underlying factor is that objects are systematically interrelated in such a way as to neutralise semantic opposition between them. “A corollary of object diffusion in mythopoetic thought is the failure of objects to remain within their own boundaries, to subsist within themselves. Instead,…objects and their powers flow into other objects. They also influence other objects in ways that are predicated upon the ability of a given object, whether animate or inanimate, to exceed its corporeal limits” (Love 1970: 20). In mythopoetic thought, a comprehensive range of psychic and physical phenomena, or indeed the entire world of reality, is diffused. Psychic phenomena such as dreams and meditation are diffused, so are physical elements such humans, animals, plants, time and space. In the view of Love, for a text to successfully and completely signify as mythopoetic, diffusion must be necessarily complemented with dialectics, where dialectics is “the form of change in consciousness” (Love 75). This change, often involving opposition and synthesis, is observed in the character, symbol and setting or is encountered structurally in the formal composition of the text itself, sometimes as content and form incompatibility (Love 76). Just as Jung, Love suggests that “an author’s work is even less a sampling of the universe comprised by his personality than it is a sampling of the universe of his cognitive process” (Love xiv). Thus, Love just as Jung, 87 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ascribes mythopoetic logic to all literary texts. Our interest in Jung’s and Love’s theories resides in their respective abilities to explain the psychological processes that inform literary myth- making, and to elucidate the character of the mythopoetic material. We shall begin our analyses of the mythopoetic cave of Africa and its two dialectical modes of entry by first examining the first of the two dialectical pair of sentences: sentence (a): X enters the cave. In the second part of the chapter, we shall discuss the dialectical counterpart: sentence (b): The cave enters X. 4.1 Sentence (a): X enters the Cave In the grammar, sentence (a) maps to “X enters the cave,” which means “the coloniser (X) enters the African terrain (cave).” In the colonialist novel tradition, characters belonging to the X category – European adventurers, scientists, merchants, colonial administrators and their wives, soldiers, policemen, missionaries and travelling journalists – enter Africa as representatives of Empire carrying the torch of enlightenment and civilisation. On entering Africa, their remarks, actions and attitudes towards the African geography and its peoples inaugurate the myth of Africa as a cave. Primarily, the author, the physical, historical creative consciousness, is responsible for the creation of this myth through his narrators and characters. The author selects an atavistic terrain set in the earliest dawn of creation and introduces to such a setting modern scientific man, typically European, whose incongruent presence in the crude environment leads to discomfort, and thus, the representation of the environment as a cave. In most colonialist texts, the cave is as much the reality of the fictional characters as it is of the author, who is invariably a coloniser himself, projecting his own experiences fictionally. In examining how the coloniser, (X), enters and announces the African cave, we shall discuss how the authors schematise the diffusion of time and space. In other words, we shall 88 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh provide a tempo-spatial analysis of Africa that considers the colonialist authors’ handling of the geographical elements: humans, animals, land, rivers and the vegetation. 4.1.1 Mythopoetic (Dis)Ordering of Time: ‘Past in the Present’ and ‘Present in the Past’ Time Schemata In an attempt to create a setting that is primitive and archaic enough to satisfy the demands of a mythical setting, the colonialist author manipulates the time-space schemata in order to either “transcend” time or “eliminate” time outright (Love 23). The novelist creates a fusion between present time and past time to fabricate a time warp which becomes a suitable setting for his cosmic drama. In our study of the select set of colonialist novels, we find two forms of time diffusion. Jean O. Love alerts us to one form: ‘past in the present’ (1970: 49); but we also realise another form: ‘present in the past’, which is a variation of the more common former format. The difference between the two forms lies in the degree of temporal foregrounding presented by the author where ‘temporal foregrounding’ implies the aspect of time that is made dominant in the text. The narrators of Henry Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness foreground the past time in their narration of the present, which format we have called ‘present in the past’ time diffusion. The narrators of the rest of the colonialist authors studied, that is, Cary, Greene and Monsarrat foreground the present in their narration of the present but maintain the past lurking in the background so that the past often intrudes into the present. The latter format, ‘past in the present’, is the more popular treatment of time in the colonialist novel tradition. Both formats of time manipulation involve temporal transgression or diffusion – the conflation of two antithetical time- and value-planes – and are therefore a highly mythical style (Love 49). 89 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.1.1.1 Present in the Past Time Diffusion: Haggard’s Manipulation of Time We shall focus our analysis on ‘present in the past time’ scheme, and examine how the writers employ it to create their unique vision of a mythical Africa. Haggard and Conrad’s treatment of time represents a simultaneous symbiosis and separation of two time- and value- planes: the past time and present time. In this diffusion of time, the present is projected to the background and the past foregrounded. This temporal (dis)order is a simultaneous diffusion and distancing of the two time planes, hence its mythical significance. The result is that in Haggard’s She and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the recurrent time in Africa is the absolute past time although the narrators are telling about a contemporary, lived, personal experience. The narrators choose to foreground the remotest prehistoric beginnings of time as representing the African experience and consciousness. What constitutes for the narrators the notion of present time, typified by English/European modernity, is projected far back beyond the past so that it is the past time that is foregrounded; the present time is in the background. The two time planes are separated by what we shall call gross cosmic membrane. This membrane is constituted by the composite of all the crude atavistic features of the African geography. Our concept of ‘gross cosmic membrane’ differs from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “epic distance.” In The Dialogic Imagination (1982), Bakhtin argues that the past and present time-planes are separated by “epic distance” where the older world, the “world of ‘beginnings’” or the absolute past, is completely sealed off from the contemporary reality of the author and his characters (Bakhtin 1982: 13). Our ‘gross cosmic membrane’ diverges from Bakthin’s notion in two ways. First, whereas Bakhtin’s concept projects temporal blockade – sealing off of the past from the present – our concept permits permeability. Second, while ‘epic distance’ connotes absolute separation, our ‘gross cosmic membrane’ suggests simultaneous distance and diffusion, separation and symbiosis, 90 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh projecting a dioscuric logic. Our notion is therefore more mythical than Bakthin’s concept in its re(ordering) of time and experience. We shall have the opportunity to examine the nature of the ‘gross cosmic membrane’ when we discuss the represented African landscape. The permeability of the cosmic membrane makes it possible, even if dangerous, for members of the X-category, to move in and out of the two time-planes. For instance, Holly, Leo and Job in She, and Kurtz and Marlow in Heart of Darkness are able to cross from the modern time-plane represented by English modernity into the atavistic time-plane represented by African recrudescence. They are able to escape back to modernity, though Job and Kurtz fail to make the journey back, and are trapped in the African cave. Haggard uses a variation of this time re(ordering) to provide his mythical vision of Africa in She. In the text, Kallikrates, an ancient Graeco-Egyptian priest of Isis, dies around 339 BC. Haggard ‘reincarnates’ Kallikrates as Leo Vincey, a nineteenth century English man. The fictional re-embodying of the soul of Kallikrates in Leo Vincey is a mythical exercise: that of stepping out of a much older time-plane into a modern one. Here, Haggard reverses the order so that instead of the quest from the present to the past, Kallikrates moves from the archaic antiquity to the present. The mysterious Ayesha demonstrates awareness of this time diffusion. She tells Leo: “…thou – living, and but lately born – shalt look upon thine own departed self, who breathed and died so long ago” (Haggard [1887]1994: 228). In another instance, she tells him: “thou shalt see a wondrous thing – living, thou shalt behold thyself dead” (Haggard 227). She then proceeds to show Leo the mummified corpse of himself as Kallikrates. A witness to the incident, Holly confirms the likelihood that Leo is Kallikrates reincarnated. We shall quote Holly to buttress our point: 91 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh For there, stretched upon the stone bier…was what appeared to be the body of Leo Vincey. I stared from Leo standing there alive, to Leo lying there dead, and could see no difference; …. Feature for feature they were the same, even down to the crop of little golden curls…. It even seemed to me …that the expression on the dead man’s face resembled that which I had sometimes seen upon Leo’s when he was plunged into profound sleep. I can only sum up the closeness of the resemblance by saying that I never saw twins so exactly similar as that dead and living pair.” (Haggard 228) The mythical logic of the incident related above reflects on many levels: psychological, spiritual and temporal. We shall look at the temporal. Kallikrates dies in 339 BC (1994: 18); Leo is born in the nineteenth century. A conservative reckoning puts a period of about two thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine years between Kallikrates and Leo. Haggard manipulates the time-planes so that the two selves of Kallikrates (or Leo) meet bodily across such a vast span of time. Again, Ayesha herself is an embodiment of temporal diffusion. She kills Kallikrates two thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine years earlier, yet, she lives and preserves herself over this vast gulf of time to welcome him back to life again as Leo Vincey. Haggard reinforces this diffusion of time with other kinds of diffusion to support the mythical logic of the novel. We have already seen the object diffusion where the “living Leo” is undifferentiated from the “dead Kallikrates.” This object diffusion is expressed linguistically providing an instance of linguistic diffusion. Holly’s statement below will provide an example: “I stared from the Leo standing there alive, to Leo lying there dead…” From the linguistic perspective, the infinitives ‘to stand’ and ‘to lie’ are antonymously-related in the English language code. The same principle governs the infinitives ‘to live’ and ‘to die’. In the 92 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh context of the novel, however, the lexical items: “standing” and “lying” are conditioned to relate to each other paradigmatically or as a dioscuric pair: Leo standing …alive Leo lying … dead By the principles of syntactic parallelism and neutralisation of semantic opposition (Yankson 2007: 29, 5), the two sentences above are conditioned to share the same meaning creating an instance of semantic diffusion. By diffusion the original semantic opposition between “dead” and “alive” is neutralised. In the context of the novel, “Leo standing there alive” means “Leo lying there dead.” Similarly, the semantic opposition between “standing” and “lying” is neutralised by the same principles of contextual conditioning, paradigmatic association and neutralisation of semantic opposition. In the context of the novel, “standing there” and “lying there” represent the postures assumed by the same person simultaneously, thus they are diffused. The linguistic diffusions as we have just illustrated are a re-enactment and reinforcement of the main diffusion: the mythical re(ordering) of time. As we have attempted to demonstrate, anything is possible in Haggard’s Africa simply because time is transcended or eliminated. In the primeval dispensation created by Haggard, humanity and the forces of the cosmos are shown to be in a crude relationship; a relationship that reflects the darkness and mythical nature of the world. Another example of Haggard’s protean treatment of time in Africa is indicated by his symbolic use of Vincey’s (Leo’s father’s) chest of three embedded boxes. That the innermost box contains the relics from his mysterious African journey makes it a substantial part of the African time-plane. In our view, the boxes are arranged, first, to replicate X’s (the coloniser’s) journey from the modern European time to the primordial African cave time. Second, they are 93 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh arranged to dramatise the simultaneous interrelatedness of the two opposing time planes. We shall attempt to demonstrate how the boxes are arranged temporally, and how temporal diffusion is effected in the scheme. In the novel, the three boxes are arranged so that Box 1 is the outer box; within it is Box 2, and within Box 2 is the much smaller Box 3. The following represents the taxonomic description of the boxes as provided by Holly, Haggard’s narrator:  Box 1: A massive old, rusty, iron box whose key is comparatively modern (Haggard 16, 30, 31).  Box 2: An extremely antique wooden box whose key is “an exceedingly ancient one” (Haggard 16, 30, 31).  Box 3: “A magnificent silver casket…of Egyptian workmanship…much tarnished and dinted with age” (Haggard 31), and whose key is “entirely unlike anything of the sort we had ever seen before…” (Haggard 30), it being more like “a model of an antediluvian railway key than anything else” (Haggard 31). In our view, the embedding of the boxes suggests a quest from modern time (Box 1) to primitive time (Box 2) to an even more primeval time lying beyond reach of human memory (Box 3). In spatial terms, this quest will correspond to a journey from modern England (Box 1) to Africa, the archetypal cave (Box 2). Upon entry to Africa an even more atavistic reality confronts the coloniser (Box 3). Diagrammatically, the scheme looks like Table 1 below: 94 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Table 1: SYMBOL TEMPORAL SPATIAL VALUE PSYCHIC PLANE PLANE PLANE PLANE Box 1 Modern England/Europe Science, Culture, Human Rationality (former cave) Christianity, Language Box 2 Archaic Africa (cave) Cannibalism, Animal Nature, Paganism, Emotion No Language Box 3 Most Archaic Inner Africa Total Psychic Total Psychic (cave) and Cultural Darkness Darkness The temporal trajectory illustrated in Table 1 is marked linguistically. The narrator skews his language to reflect his ideation of time. Holly casts the boxes in temporal terms: Box 1 is “modern,” Box 2 “exceedingly ancient” and Box 1 “antediluvian.” The persistence of the time-related vocabulary and diffused chronology of boxes – the boxes are embedded and, are therefore, metaphorically fused into one – suggests the narrator’s temporal and mythological consciousness. We shall cite another example to demonstrate Haggard’s temporal schematisation. To cement his vision of a mythical journey back in time to Africa, Haggard references the original cosmic chaos: the Deluge. In the novel, Box 3 has a key that looks like “a model of an antediluvian railway key” (Haggard 1994: 31). First, the symbol of an “antediluvian railway” 95 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh immediately connotes time-travel in the reverse order: a journey that goes back to the very beginning of time, even before the Deluge. Second, “antediluvian” evokes the image of the Biblical Flood itself and associated imagery such as the chaos of the cosmic drama. That chaos tallies with Haggard’s vision of quintessential Africa. Third, the idea of an “antediluvian railway key” presupposes the presence of a rail engine or “train” closely associated with the Flood. In our view, an antediluvian engine references the Ark in Christian mythology. By extension, and in the context of the novel, the Ark becomes a metaphor for the most atavistic cave, it being the largest zoo in mythology. Our argument is that Haggard’s implied Ark is a mythopoetic representation of Africa in all its uncontrolled, natural, zoomorphic and cosmic wildness. The notion of the Ark seeks reinforcement in the other marine vehicle in the novel: Holly and Leo’s “beautiful whale-boat” which they use to cross the dangerous waters of Africa (Haggard 55). As observed, both the implied Ark and Holly’s whale-boat are destined for time-travel to the past. If the key to Box 3, the “antediluvian railway key,” evokes the symbol of the Ark, let us now examine Box 3 itself to see what readings it will suggest. According to Holly, Box 3 is “a magnificent silver casket, about twelve inches square by eight high,…of Egyptian workmanship, [with] the four legs…formed of Sphinxes…and the dome-shaped cover surmounted by a Sphinx” (Haggard 31). While a “casket” is referentially associated with death, the “Sphinx,” a mythical creature, is connected with inescapable destruction, an example of which is seen in the Oedipus myth. Adorning the casket with sphinxes therefore increases its image of terror. From these associations, we can construct literal and metaphorical connections between the casket and Ark in spite of the functional tension between them. We shall provide a literal comparison between the casket and the Ark. First, both are receptacles. Next, they both contain humans and animals, that is, while Noah’s Ark carries humans and animals, a casket carries the remains of a human 96 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh which then turns into animals: worms and termites. Again, both casket and Ark are structurally similar. Indeed, the Ark described in the Bible looks like a casket, it is only bigger. From the literal perspective, therefore, the casket and Ark are diffusible in spite of their obvious differences. Metaphorically, also, the two objects are interconnected. First, they are both vessels for a mythical journey through darkness. Extra-textually, that is, outside the world of the text, the journeys they are involved in are antithetical in nature and direction: the casket moves from light into darkness of the underworld; the Ark from darkness to the light of a new world. Intra- textually, that is, within the context of the novel, this ontological difference is neutralised by object diffusion. The casket and Ark are contextually conditioned to relate synonymously by sharing the same elements: movement, light, darkness, old world, new world, within the novel. In the context of the novel, therefore, the Ark represents a journey similar to the casket’s: a quest back to the dark beginning of time. We shall attempt to illustrate the original dialectical relationship and its synthetic resolution in Table 2 and Table 3 below. Table 2: Extra-Textual Semantic Opposition CASKET ARK Earth-related Water-related Sub-terrestrial destination Terrestrial destination Death Life Damnation Salvation Pagan/Hades Biblical/Heaven 97 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Table 3: Intra-Textual Neutralisation of Semantic Opposition CASKET ARK Journey to the another world Journey to another world Enclosed cage – “dome-shaped cover” Enclosed cage – “roofed” Human and animal content Human and animal content Architectural measurements Architectural measurements Antediluvian railway key Antediluvian engine Sphinx: animal Dove: animal From the above, Table 2 outlines the original, referential antonymous relations between the casket and Ark; the opposition that exists between the two objects outside the world of the text. Table 3 establishes a synonymous relation between the two objects within the context of the text; the paradigmatic association within the novel that creates the instance of neutralisation of semantic opposition. To reinforce the synonymous relations, Haggard describes the casket in terms of the Biblical Ark. He provides an account of the specifications and dimensions of the “casket” that replicates the step-by-step architectural manual style of instruction provided by the Bible in Genesis 6:14-16. We shall quote both the Bible’s and novel’s account for comparative analysis. The Bible’s instruction for the construction of the Ark is as follows: “...an ark of cypress wood;….The ark is to be one hundred and forty metres long, twenty-three metres wide and 98 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh thirteen and half metres high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within half a metre of the top” (Genesis 6: 14-16). Holly’s description of the casket is as follows: “a magnificent silver casket, about twelve inches square by eight high,…of Egyptian workmanship, [with] the four legs…formed of Sphinxes…and the dome-shaped cover surmounted by a Sphinx” (Haggard 1994: 31). The stylistic parallelism between Haggard’s and the Biblical account is remarkable. The initial noun phrases are syntactically parallel:  …an ark of cypress wood  …a magnificent silver casket A re-ordering of the syntax of the Biblical noun phrase clarifies the syntactic parallelism:  …a cypress wood ark  …a magnificent silver casket From the above, it is evident the two noun phrases share the same grammatical structure: /article/ + /adjective/ + /adjective (of material)/ + /noun (receptacle)/ The next items in the information structures of both sentences are the architectural dimensions of the Ark and casket respectively:  “one hundred and forty metres long, twenty-three metres wide and thirteen and half metres high”  “twelve inches square by eight high” Again, re-writing “twelve inches square” in an expanded form gives us a clearer picture of the parallelism as seen below:  “one hundred and forty metres long, twenty-three metres wide and thirteen and half metres high” 99 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh  “twelve inches [long], twelve inches [wide] by eight [inches] high” From the above, the closeness of the two structures is evident. They share the same syntactic pattern: /measurement (length)/ + /measure (width)/ + /measurement (height)/. The next items concern the roof of the Ark and casket respectively:  “…a roof for… the ark… within half a metre of the top”  “…the dome-shaped cover surmounted by a Sphinx” Here, there is symbolic parallelism in the sense that the same imagery is repeated and diffused. The roof of the Ark has the same referent as the dome-shaped cover of the casket. Likewise, the “top” of the Ark and “summit” (derived from “surmount”) of the casket refer to the same thing. From our stylistic analysis of the two passages from the Bible and She respectively, the dialectical relationship and the eventual synthesis in the form of object diffusion is illustrated. There is repetition of syntax, imagery, information structure and consciousness between Haggard and the mythopoetic Biblical writer. The linguistic analysis just provided above goes to support our argument that, though he does not explicitly mention the Ark in the novel, Haggard provides enough context through the symbol of the “antediluvian railway key” to evoke the Ark. Our substantive contention though is that the casket and the Ark are interconnected as time-vessels that ferry the coloniser through the temporal planes to the older archaic world represented by Africa. Again, the “casket/Ark” homology signifies mythopoetically since the simultaneous relation of “symmetry” and “inversion” or the dioscuric principle is the “basic logical process…at the root of mythical thought” (Levi-Strauss 1986: 818). We have provided the above analysis to demonstrate Haggard’s manipulation of time according to the ‘present in the past’ 100 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh time diffusion. We shall now examine how Conrad handles the same time format in Heart of Darkness. 4.1.1.2 Present in the Past Time Diffusion: Conrad’s Manipulation of Time Conrad’s treatment of time in Africa proceeds on Haggardian ‘present in the past’ time-format but in a more radical sense. Just as the latter, Conrad foregrounds atavistic/African time while maintaining modern/European time at a safe temporal distance, protected from the irrationality and ahistoricity of Africa. Unlike Haggard whose Africa has had a glorious past, as seen in the praises Holly heaps on the ruins at Kor, Africa in Conrad’s novel is still in the infantile morning of creation day, to use Achebe’s phrase (1976). The relationship between the African terrain and primordial nature is still umbilical. Time has hardly started ticking in Marlow’s Africa. This conceptualisation of time in Africa has two implications: first, the coloniser loses the sense of time when he or she enters the African cave; second, Africans themselves do not have any sense of time. Marlow therefore constructs Africa in strictly Hegelian terms: an ahistorical space where irrationality reigns. As noted earlier, elimination or transcendence of time in fiction is a highly mythopoetic style. We shall now proceed to provide an analysis of Conrad’s mythopoetic handling of time in Africa. We shall make comparative reference to Haggard occasionally. First, Marlow describes his journey to Congo in temporal terms. It is a quest conducted in “the night of time” (Conrad [1902],1994: 7), “the earliest beginnings of the world” (Conrad 48). Lying beyond this ‘night of darkness’ time- and value-plane is the notion of civilised, English time. Marlow underlines the primitive-civilised time dichotomy when he says: the “Light [of modernity] …is like a running blaze upon a plain, like a flash of lightening in the clouds. We [English people] live in the flicker” (Conrad 8). From the above, Conrad’s foregrounding of 101 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh atavistic time coincides with Haggard’s presentation of archaic, antediluvian time, highlighting our observation that the two writers employ the same ‘present in the past’ time schematization. Similarly, both Conrad’s and Haggard’s characters experience the same sense of forlornness in their mythical time-travel. According to Holly, Haggard’s narrator, no time manipulation can produce the unique sense of desolation he feels: “Indeed, I do not think that if I live to a hundred years I shall ever forget that desolate and yet fascinating scene” (Haggard 70). Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, expresses his desolation in similar terms as Holly: “There were moments when one’s past came back to one […] but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world” (Conrad 48). As can be discerned, the quotes just cited come from two different texts, yet the tone of voice is so similar the two statements could have come from the same text. The manipulation of time in Conrad as in Haggard is evidently extreme. Closely related to the mythical presentation of time by the two writers is the presentation of the means of travel. Marlow’s temporal journey is facilitated by three marine craft: the Nellie, “a cruising yawl” (Conrad 5); a French steamer (Conrad 8); and his own “two-penny-half-penny river steamboat” (Conrad 8). These three boats have strong echoes of Haggard’s ‘boats’: the three systematically embedded boxes one of which is the metaphorical “Ark.” They also have echoes of Holly and Leo’s purpose-built whale-boat. This echoing becomes even more pronounced when Marlow replicates Holly’s railway metaphor to describe his journey to the past. Describing the river which would take him to Kurtz, Marlow says: “The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a railway cutting” (56) coinciding with Haggard’s antediluvian railway metaphor. From the critical perspective, therefore, both Holly and Marlow travel to the same mythical beginnings of the world in the same boat; hence they tell the same story. The 102 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh numerous instances of convergence between the two authors – and indeed among all the colonialist authors studied – alert us to the effect of Jung’s collective unconscious and the archetype. The sameness of the authors’ grammatical choices signals a diffusion of the authorial minds and raises the mythopoetic logic of the colonialist novel from the textual level to the authorial level. Another diffusional device Conrad uses to manipulate time is by stopping time outright. The natural periodic system of morning, afternoon and night is transgressed so that the mythical solar cycle ceases, an act which is in itself mythical. We shall demonstrate how Conrad handles this device. Marlow stops his steamer in the middle of the Congo to rest for the night. This is what he sees: the night came suddenly, and struck you blind.... […] When the sun rose there was a white fog […] more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all around you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. […] [T]hen the white shutter came down again. […] What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water… around her – and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a shadow behind. (Conrad 56-7) Evidently, the blindness that engulfs the scene pervades both night and day, so that moonlight and sunlight are undifferentiated. Darkness blinds, light blinds. Day and night are diffused. The solar cycle is eclipsed in a highly mythical variation of the time schematisation. A classic variation of this device is seen in the Old Testament myth of Joshua. According to the myth, Joshua, in his battle against the Amorites, commanded the celestial bodies – the sun and the 103 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh moon to standstill so that he could complete his victory over the Amorite kings. Joshua said: “‘O sun, stand still over Gibeon,/O moon,/over the Valley of Aijalon.’…The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since….Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel” (Joshua 10: 12-14). The closeness of the Biblical myth to Conrad’s mythical manipulation of the day-night cycle resides not merely in the solar eclipse but also in the associated incidence of war and death. In the Biblical myth, the breach of the solar cycle happens so that the raging war can be completed. In Conrad’s novel, the night-day blindness is the occasion for the battle between Conrad’s passengers and the Africans on the shore. In the battle, Conrad’s African helmsman is killed while the white passengers also shoot into the Africans. Conrad’s treatment of time in this account closely reflects the Biblical myth amplifying the mythopoetic consciousness of his text. The handling of time by the two authors helps them to project a rather gloomy and mythical perspective of Africa. Africa becomes an enchanted space where time is transcended or eliminated; and in the eternal eclipse, the uncontrollable forces of the cosmos vent their raw unbridled barbarity. We have attempted to analyse how Haggard and Conrad handle time in Africa. We have taken the position that the two authors’ schematisation of time foregrounds the past so that the present remains partially sealed off by the cosmic membrane, which regulates the inward and outward movements of the coloniser between the past time and present time. In the following section, we shall examine how the other colonialist authors inaugurate the African cave through their manipulation of time. 104 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.1.1.3 Past in the Present Time Diffusion: Cary, Greene and Monsarrat’s Manipulation of Time Unlike Haggard and Conrad, Cary, Greene and Monsarrat tend to portray a primitive African living in a relatively modern time. These writers create a milieu where both the past time and present time are mixed, but not inextricably. The present (modern) time recedes to the background as the characters move away from the coastal European enclaves, usually the capitals, to the interior of Africa. In the apocalyptic imagery of Northrop Frye, we shall say that the ‘City’ (modern time) and ‘Garden’ (past time) (1957: 141) are diffused at one point, and separated at another point. Unlike the Haggardian-Conradian imagery where the City and Garden represent a permanently disparate time-plane separated by the cosmic membrane, in Cary- Greene-Monsarrat the two time-planes are mixed as the modern-atavistic or spatialised as the ‘Garden-City’. The notion of the Garden-City corresponds to the situation where at “any moment in time, any particular day has within it all the preceding moments and days” (Love 1970: 50). To examine this form of temporal schematisation, we shall analyse how the novelists negotiate the fusion of present time and past time, and how they represent the African mind in this simultaneously modern and archaic milieu. We shall first examine the diffusion of modernity and the archaic, and then examine how the African mind is structured within the milieu. 4.1.1.3.1 The Structures of Modernity and Primitivity In Cary, Greene and Monsarrat, there is the co-existence of modern time and archaic time. The structures of modernity include: the colonial governance system, social amenities, Christianity and formal education. These structures ensure that the ‘Cave’ is furnished as the ‘City’: that is, facilities native to the metropolitan centre are installed in the cave to inaugurate 105 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the ‘city’ or ‘cave-city’, depending on the sophistication of the installed structures. The absence of these facilities denote the ‘absolute cave’. The spatial arrangements delineated above correspond temporally to the modern, modern-atavistic and atavistic respectively. In the five texts under discussion in this segment – Cary’s The African Witch (1936) and Mister Johnson (1939); Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1960); and Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956) – modernity is first projected in the form of the colonial governance system. The colonial administration is headed by a Governor who controls a comprehensive team of officials. Monsarrat’s narrator provides the clearest picture of the structure of the colonial administration: Governor and Commander-in-Chief Sir Elliot Vere-Toombs, K.B.E. Aide-de-Camp Captain H.G. Simpson, O.B.E., R.N. Secretary (Political) A. Purves-Brownrigg, C.M.G. Secretary L.M. Stevens Secretary (designate) D. Bracken, M.C. Assistant Secretary (Gamate) Miss N. Steuart Resident Commissioner (Gamate) A. Macmillan, C.M.G. District Commissioner (Gamate) G.L.T. Forsdick Agricultural/Livestock Officer (Gamate) H.J. Llewellyn District Officer (Shebiya) T.V. Ronald Security Captain K. Crump, M.C., Royal Pharamaul Police. (Monsarrat 1956: 13) In addition to the European colonial officials, there are non-official Europeans in the city: Christian priests, private merchants, plantation farmers, business people, hotel operators, journalists, spouses and adventurers. All the Europeans constitute the X-category of characters in the grammar of the colonialist novel, and are presented as agents of civilisation in Africa. For 106 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh instance, in Mister Johnson, Rudbeck, the District Commissioner, builds a new road “cutting through this primitive country, where scattered villages, lost in the bush, are not visited by a stranger in a year” (Cary 1939: 153). The road boosts trade and communication but also introduces miscreant characters who disrupt the peace of the hitherto sleepy town of Fada. In A Burnt-Out Case, the Catholic priests commission the famous French architect, Querry, to build a new leprosarium to cater to the needs of the diseased Africans in Congo. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, there is plenty of social, scientific and economic development. Monsarrat’s eloquent narrator gives a detailed report on the progress of the Principality of Pharamaul. In Gamate, the native capital, “There’s…poll tax, inspection of cattle, soil conservation, [and] inoculation…. […] Now, we teach them not to overgraze their lands, …not to doctor themselves with dried toad skin and manure….[…] There’s a school…. And a mission…. And a town band. And a hotel of sorts. And a native tax office. And a tribal management committee. And a little hospital” (Monsarrat 1956: 20, 21). In Port Victoria, the colonial capital, the Europeans have transformed the originally primitive economy to: something like a European level…. [T]here was now a modern abatattoir, to handle the cattle…, a big logging-camp up north…kept the Port Victoria sawmills busy most of the year round. A scheme for fish-canning, on the coast near Shebiya’s ‘Fish Village,’ was even now grinding through its governmental paper-work stage, towards actuality. […] [A]n oiling and bunkering station has been added to the port, and a small repair dockyard…. Now tourists came…. [M]easurable progress, had in fact reared its pretty head. Health, agriculture, water conservation, the general standard of living – all had improved under…British rule. At least three decimating tropical diseases had been eradicated. Literacy, starting at nil in 1842, had now reached thirty 107 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh per cent – …immeasurably better than the rest of Africa. Fewer children died in infancy, fewer mothers…succumbed to childbirth. Drought [is] held in check by careful water conservation…. Soil clung to the earth, instead of washing seaward…. Law ruled: thieves and murderers were often caught: fathers whose daughters had been raped now found it at least worthwhile to file a complaint. Here and there, a Maula student attained a level of education comparable with the white world outside and was sent to Britain…to be taught. (Monsarrat 26-7) A general sense of ‘progress’ and modernity, though not as elaborately reported as by Monsarrat’s narrator, prevails in all the five texts under discussion. There are images of hotels, hospitals, laboratories, cars, shops, schools, banks, Police stations, law and order, Christianity, factories and other services associated with European civilisation. The time-plane under consideration is clearly modern in contrast to Haggard and Conrad’s treatment of time. This sense of modernity is, however, tempered with the co-existence of the past. A juxtaposition between Monsarrat’s Port Victoria, the colonial capital of Pharamaul, and Gamate, the native capital, will be illustrative. “Formal government sat at Port Victoria: the Governor’s white house mansion dominated the residential quarter, the Secretariat crouched in its shade: downtown, a town council…dealt with the drains, housing, harbour pollution, street lighting, public health, and civic celebrations…” (Monsarrat 26). Thus, Port Victoria is a city. However, a few kilometres north of Port Victoria is Gamate where the Resident Commissioner is in charge of “a hundred thousand souls, concentrated in one of the biggest ‘native villages’ south of the equator” (Monsarrat 26, my emphasis). As the focus falls to the north of Gamate, precisely Shebiya, absolute past time is fully restored: “Government of any sort faded north of Gamate, where the dry ranch lands gave place to jungle, and the […] only link was a radio schedule…” (Monsarrat 26). The three tier gradation of time – the modern time (Port Victoria); modern- 108 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh atavistic time (Gamate); and absolute past time (Shebiya) – is consistent with the representation of time in the select set of Cary-Greene-Monsarrat novels. There are reflections and snippets of these time-planes throughout the works. Our analysis above portrays the co-existence of the structures of modernity and the archaic in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat. We shall now examine how the African mind is represented within these antithetical time-planes. In other words, confronted with the rationality of scientific modernity and primitive emotionality of the atavistic past, to which of these opposing currents does the African mind draw? 4.1.1.3.2 The Structure of the African Mind: The Primal Horde, Group Psychology and Psychosexual Fixation Within the ‘past in the present’ re(ordering) of time, Cary, Greene and Monsarrat represent the African mind in primal terms with specific emphasis on group psychology, psychosexual fixation and sexual misdemeanour. The primary myth evoked in the treatment of the African mind is the Oedipal myth and its Freudian theory of the Primal Horde. According to Freud, primitive society is originally organised on the basis of a father-son relationship where central authority is vested solely in the dictatorial father. Arrogating all the females in the group, the father compels the sons to abstain from sexual relations leading to libidinal tension. The result of the compulsory abstinence is father-son enmity which precipitates a violent patricide and the subsequent appropriation of all the women in the group by the sons. The guilt for eliminating the primal father provides the source of totemism, and ultimately religion. To assuage their guilt, the son deify an animal as a surrogate of the lost father. On the anniversary of the parricide, the totemic animal is worshipped as a way of reclaiming the lost father. 109 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh This theory… describes how the Oedipus complex becomes a fateful inheritance for all humanity. […] [I]t not only accounts for the two fundamental taboos of totemism – those against incest and the killing of the father-substitute, the totem animal – but, through the process of ‘psychic inheritance,’ sets in motion a chain-reaction of associated Oedipal guilts, which in turn explains the subsequent creation of all cultural phenomenon, including religion. (Palmer 1997: 64) Freud delineates the following as the psychic inheritance from the primal horde: group psychology, that is, “the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of emotions and of the unconscious mental life, [that is,] the tendency to the immediate carrying out of intentions as they emerge - all [of which] corresponds to a state of regression to a primitive mental activity” (1922: 91). As an element of the collective unconscious, the horde psyche comes into effect “in so far as men are habitually under the sway of group formation” (Freud 1922). The Oedipus complex, and its Freudian horde interpretation becomes the fundamental basis for representing the African mind in the colonialist novel. It is a mind dominated by sexual depravity, the archaic sexual instinct associated with primitive mentality. Our objective in providing the primal horde analysis is to demonstrate that temporality in Africa – even in the modern setting of the Cary-Greene-Monsarrat stories – is treated as primitive, and the African mind naturally oriented towards the archaic even in the face of the modern. In The African Witch, the narrator depicts the town of Rimi as the primal horde boasting many of the essential elements of the Oedipus myth and primitive group psychology. First, there is the dictatorial Aliu, the Emir of Rimi, who centralises all authority in himself. He is “the King 110 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of the World” (Cary 72); “King of Sudan” (92); “Lion” (180); “the greatest chief in all the Sudan” and “the greatest king that ever ruled… the world” (180). The way to treat this wise and powerful man [is] to go down on your face before him and throw dust on your head. You could cry out to him for help, but whether he gave it or not was his own mysterious affair. His gifts were like the rain; his anger like a draught [sic]. If you give thanks for rain, it is not from gratitude but to keep the god in a good temper; if you complain of draught, it is in this form: ‘We are sinful people’. (226) He is omnipresent: “None in Rimi could remember when the Emir had not dominated his life. …[H]e was present in their lives like the weather; the sky and the earth” (226). He prowls all day night and all night micromanaging trivialities and ‘discovering’ secrets. “At any time of the night he would come to wake some officer of State to know why a horse had not been cleaned, or a roof repaired. He would be heard in the darkest hour of the night shouting somewhere….” (176). If it is possible, the Emir “would… have done the whole government of Rimi by himself: seen every house built; tried the hanging of every door; advised every young husband and wife, heard every case” (178). He is omniscient: “He knew things ordinary people did not know. …He was to be feared” (226). Cary’s striking allusion to Haggard’s all-knowing Ayesha, she who must be obeyed, is inescapable. With his omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, Aliu occupies a deified significance for his people. Additionally, he boasts the quintessential Freudian father’s sexuality. He appropriates a large harem of women. His sexual appetites know no bounds as he “scarcely distinguish[es] between his wives and their children” (179). Indeed, his youngest wife is ten-year old Ibu who is groomed by the oldest wife on how to please the old king. Just as Freud’s father-king, Aliu’s 111 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh psychosexual fixation contributes to his downfall. Excited by the thought of a new, young wife, he abandons investigating the strange nocturnal meeting at which his overthrow is planned. The next day, all his guards are removed, and his harem ransacked by the townspeople, the primal horde. Significantly, his favourite wife, Fanta, is raped. Just as in Freud’s theory, the sons appropriate all the women including mothers, sisters and aunts. Thus, Fanta is abused by “men…all known to Fanta – favourites of the [harem] women, to whom Fanta herself had [often] given cigarettes and money” (224). In spite of calling them by name, the men insist on “Rip[ping] her up first [because] [t]hat’s what she deserves, the old whore” (224). As the rampage continues, the entire Rimi is ‘deserted’ as people hide in their rooms aware that the Emir is going to be killed. When the Emir, forced by hunger, goes to the town knocking on doors for food, nobody opens. The elimination of the father-king is a group action compelled by the Freudian group psychology. In an act that adds to the sexual character of the Emir, the poisoned food that kills him is presented by a female agent of Sale dressed like a bride. It is uncharacteristic for a woman to dress as a bride at 4 o’clock in the morning. That part of the plot is a contrivance by Cary’s narrator to foreground the Emir’s mind as fixated on the libido, and also to connect the Emir’s sexual jealousy to his death. With the elimination of the Emir, Sale assumes the reins of power in Rimi. Our contention is that the story remodels the myth of the Primal Horde in an attempt to demonstrate the African mind as recrudescent. In A Burnt-Out Case, Greene produces a variation of the primal horde. This novel is largely a critique of Catholic missionary activity in Congo. In the text, the word “father” assumes an ambivalent meaning, simultaneously referring to the Catholic priests and the dictionary meaning of “fatherhood” as a biological responsibility. In the novel, the narrator portrays a society of females without the primal father, leading to unrestrained sexuality. There is, for 112 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh instance, the case of Marie Akimbu, the Africa teacher, who has “a baby every year by a different man” (1961: 107). The Catholic priests claim that in the Congo “there are few people who know their own fathers. The children belong to the mother” (108) suggesting the elimination of the metaphorical primal father. Such a society, in our view, is built on the principles of the primal horde, thus the culturally-sanctioned libertine life. As a further demonstration of the horde sexuality, the narrator tells the story of a man who leaves the leprosarium only to find out that his wife has moved in with a catechist and has had a baby by him. The narrator emphasises: “The fathers were unconcerned with private lives” (154). Though “Fathers” in the present context means the Catholic priests, the narrator seems also to imply the primal fathers, and to emphasise that in the absence of the primal fathers, sexuality is uncontrolled in the African cave. In the same Greene novel, there is also the episode of the old Greek shop owner whose African wife is caught having sexual relations with one of the Greek’s African servants. The Greek breaks his servant’s pelvis with his car so that “he wouldn’t be any good for a woman ever again” (130), and then commits suicide. The suicidal death of the old Greek is a remodelling of the elimination of the primal father. In this case, the ‘primal father’ is driven to eliminate himself through sexual jealousy brought about by the ‘son’, the African servant. Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head provides the most detailed and complex version of the primal horde in the select set of colonialist novels studied. Set in Pharamaul, an imaginary African island close to South Africa, the story is about the British colonial administration’s refusal to accept the proposed interracial marriage between Dinamuala, the chief designate of the Maula, and a white woman. Dinamaula’s intention to marry a white woman is seen as an affront to white racial supremacy and is rejected outright by the Resident 113 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Commissioner, Andrew Macmillan. The issue of Dinamaula’s marriage – and also his call for political reforms – triggers a series of civil unrests. Macmillan exiles Dinamaula from Gamate, the native capital, and puts him under house arrest in Port Victoria, the colonial capital. The exiling of the chief designate creates even more confusion as the Maulas insist on the right of their chief to marry anybody he chooses, including even an English woman. The excesses of the colonial officers and the white settlers in handling the legitimate demands of the Maulas lead to fatal results. First, Macmillan commits suicide because of the failure of his administration to control the situation. Second, the Maulas go on rampage killing Oosthuizen, a violent white settler farmer and his two sons. Third, the U-Maulas, the renegade cousins of the Maulas in the northern-most part of Pharamaul, on the orders of their chief, Gotwela, kill Thomas Ronald, the District Commissioner of Shebiya, and his wife, Cynthia, and a missionary, Father Schwemmer. The killing of the Ronalds and Father Schwemmer takes the form a crude religious ritual. In reprisal, the colonial security machinery under the command of Captain Simpson kills the ringleaders of the uprising. Indeed, Captain Simpson summarily executes Gotwela and Zuva Katsaula against the tenets of the law. Dinamaula is denied his throne and further exiled to England. The story we have just summarised has all the elements of the Freudian horde. We shall attempt to delineate these elements to indicate how Monsarrat’s narrator treats the African mind. Our emphasis shall be on three elements of the primal horde myth: sexuality, religion and group psychology. Concerning sexual behaviour, the entire citizens of Pharamaul are cast as the horde. Pharamaul is presented as an excessively paternalistic society: where the women are kept in the background. Indeed, no other African woman is named in the story except “Miera Katsaula, the folorn bride who was no bride” (1956: 239) – the girl rejected by Dinamaula for a white girl. The 114 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh slighting of Miera by Dinamaula, and the unsavoury comments made about her by the narrator expose the narrator’s design to denigrate African femininity. As a horde, all Maula men are presented as being psychosexually consumed by thoughts of the white woman. White woman represents the quintessential image of woman. The narrator typifies the effect white woman, especially, the fat white woman, has on Maula psychology and sexuality. Mrs de Kok [is] a vast woman whose monumental bosom and fantastic flanks excited particular admiration in Pharamaul. Whenever she appeared in public, she was always followed by respectful Maula glances. Every Maula man knew, and admired, a bargain when he saw one. This one was certainly a bargain. […] A giant wife such as this promised endless pleasure,…Ow….” (285) Maula manhood, represented by their chief, Dinamaula, is denied access to womanhood, represented by the imaginary white girl Dinamaula intends to marry. Andrew Macmillan, the Resident Commissioner, in restraining Dinamaula from getting married to a white girl, assumes the role of the primal father-king. In accordance with the father-king role, he organises a tribal meeting at which he speaks disrespectfully to the people, and denounces Dinamaula’s marriage proposal as preposterous: “…a new chief in Gamate does not mean new things, nor any great changes. There will be no great changes in this tribe, and nothing will be done that is against the custom. That I tell you plainly, so that there may be no more doubts” (318). To forestall any more civil disturbances following the rejection of the marriage, Macmillan exiles Dinamaula from Gamate, and puts him under house arrest in Port Victoria. In response to the metaphorical stifling of Maula manhood, the father-king must be eliminated in accordance with the primal horde mentality. Hints of the elimination of the dictatorial Macmillan are given when Puero, one of the three regents, tells him: “There can be no order without the chief. He must return…. But 115 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh when Dinamaula returns, he will rule, not you….You will not be here” (456, second emphasis mine). In our view, Puero’s statement carries a much deeper implication than just political power relations. By “You will not be here,” Puero seems to imply that the father-king and all his surrogates will be eliminated. In the context of the novel, the father-king role is played by multiple people: Sir Elliot Vere-Toombs, the Governor of Pharamaul, and his surrogates, Andrew Macmillan, Resident Commissioner at Gamate, and Thomas Ronald, District Officer at Shebiya. Subsequent to Puero’s prediction, the father-king and all his surrogates are eliminated in the course of events. Macmillan commits suicide after failing to contain the uprising. Tom Roland, and Cynthia, his young wife, are brutally murdered by the U-Maulas for ritual purposes. Sir Elliot Vere-Toombs is recalled to England, and replaced with a younger Governor. The elimination of the father-king and the death of his surrogates satisfy a major mythical requirement: the Freudian horde myth. Integral to the Freudian myth is the domination of the women by the sons in the aftermath of the father-king’s elimination. In Monsarrat’s novel, the scramble for the women is typified by the rape of one white woman, Cynthia Ronald. She is ritualistically raped by thirty men in the presence of the entire U-Maula adult community, who approve of the act. In fact, the entire adult population of the U-Maula gather at the designated place and watch the murder of Thomas Ronald and rape of Cynthia. The elimination of the father-king surrogate and the forcible appropriation of his woman is therefore a communal act – a re-enactment of the Freudian myth. After the mass raping, the Golden Nail is inserted permanently in Cynthia “to set the mark of the U-Maulas upon her” (545). That the Golden Nail, a metaphorical phallus originally owned by the Maula king, is inserted in Cynthia by the U-Maula king symbolises the rape of the woman by the shared Maula and U-Maula phallus. The violent rape of the white woman is therefore the 116 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ritualistic reclamation of Maula and U-Maula manhood which had been mocked when the father- king denied Dinamaula a white wife. The episode reflects the primal group psychology. Another element of Freud’s myth that is realised in Monsarrat’s novel is totemism and its link with the beginnings of religion. The first allusion to religion is the image of the fish. Earlier in the text, the symbol of the fish is presented as an early Christian symbol introduced to Pharamaul by a first generational Christian evangelist. The fish remains an engigmatic symbol throughout Pharamaul appearing variously as a political, cultic and pseudo-Christian symbol. For instance, Cynthia Ronald becomes the live ‘fish’ in whom the oath of brotherhood is taken. The seeding of Cynthia becomes the cultic oath. The antiquity of the fish symbol links with the discovery of the pre-historic coelacanth in the seas of Pharamaul to project an archaic fish totem which is at the root of a very early and crude form of Christianity. The ‘Fish Village’ beyond Shebiya where the early Christian meetings were held reinforces the totemic underpinnings of this primitive, psychosexual and orgiastic form of Christianity. Third, the place where Tom, Cynthia and Father Schwemmer are murdered is called Calavaree by the U-Maulas. ‘Calavaree’ seems to be a transliteration of the Biblical Calvary where Jesus Christ, the totemic animal in Christian eschatology, the Lamb of God, is crucified. In many other ways, Monsarrat adapts his novel to the primal horde and Eucharist. For instance, the Biblical march to Golgotha or Calvary – the place of skulls – is replicated in the text when Captain Simpson, at the head of the colonial Police, marches Gotwela, Puero and Zuva Katsaula to Calavaree. They are followed by a large throng of U-Maulas. Just as in the Bible, Calavaree turns out to be a place of skulls: on arrival it is discovered that Father Schwemmer and two goats have been literally crucified on crude crosses, with a goat at each side of Father Schwemmer. On the ground, beside Father Schwemmer and the two goats, are the corpses of Tom and Cynthia Ronald. 117 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh There is even a more complex diffusion of the Primal Horde and the Eucharist in the text. So far, we have discussed Father Schwemmer’s role as the totemic animal, the ‘Lamb of God’ that is crucified. We have also discussed Tom Ronald as the Father-King surrogate who is eliminated. Freud’s myth says the Father-King’s body is shared and eaten by the horde. Similarly, in the Christian myth of the Eucharist, Christ’s body is shared, and his blood drunk by the Disciples. We shall attempt to illustrate these multiple allusions in Monsarrat’s novel. In the novel, Tom Ronald’s entrails are drawn out while he is still alive, and severed. The severed entrails are then “pounded into a paste, and mixed with the blood of the goats, and the gourd passed from hand to hand[.] [T]he oath-takers [drink] with the thirst of lions” (547). In the above episode, Tom and Father Schwemmer are diffused into a composite of a paganistic- Christian totemic representation. Tom becomes the ‘pagan’ Father-King surrogate whose body must be eaten in accordance with the Freudian myth; Father Schwemmer becomes the Christ whose body and blood must be consumed. The two figures are combined so that Tom’s body, that is, his entrails, is mixed with blood from the crucifixion, and shared by the community of oath-takers. It is evident that the Lamb of God is diffused into the two goats whose blood is used for the sacrifice. The complex and multi-layered diffusion that takes place represents the narrator’s struggle to express a unique vision of Africa: it is an Africa that has been transplanted from twentieth century modernity to the remotest antiquity when religious consciousness was just beginning to dawn on humanity. Another form of projecting the African mind as primitive is the notion of the Africans’ collective consciousness. According to Freud, “the psychology of the group is the oldest human psychology” (1922: 92). Much of the burden of Monsarrat’s narrator seems to be an attempt to prove that the people of Pharamaul represent that archetypal Freudian horde. All the acts of 118 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh barbarity and sexual misdemeanour are carried out by the group. The narrator seems to tell the story according to a Freudian template, which emphasises “the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, [and] the focussing of the thoughts and feelings into a common [group] direction” (Freud 91). Consequently, all the Maula and U-Maula are presented as single-minded in their depravity. All acts of violence are motivated by the group psychology. For instance, Ooosthuizen, the white farmer, is killed by a group of Maula men; the European sailors’ killing of the Maula stevedoring worker is precipitated by a group action by the Maula youth; the resultant strike action involves all Maula harbour workers; the boycott of the European club involves all Maula servants and bandsmen; the decision not to re-apply for jobs at the European club is taken by all Maula club workers, likewise the decision to ask for a raise in salaries; the boycott of the Governor’s town hall meeting involves all Maula men and women and children; the murderous nightly violence in Gamate involves the entire people; the murder of Tom Ronald and Father Schwemmer, and rape of Cynthia involve the entire Maula and U-Maula populations. Not a single Maula or U-Maula is portrayed as capable of individualistic and rational thinking. Even Dinamaula who is not involved in any of the acts of violence or planning of violence is subsumed under the group category as the cannibal chief. The burden of Monsarrat’s narrator seems to be the attempt to ‘prove’ that the group psyche that is able to produce the series of barbaric and cannibalistic orgies outlined above must belong to the archaic period of human history. So far we have attempted to demonstrate how time in Africa is projected by the colonialist writers as mythical and archaic. We have analysed how Haggard and Conrad, for instance, pursue a style we have called ‘present in the past’, and how Cary, Greene and Monsarrat employ the ‘past in the present’ temporal order. While the former pair of writers 119 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh carries the present time into the past, the latter set of writers retrieves the past and makes it part of the present. Both treatments of time are significantly mythopoetic; they show that in spite of the billions of years since creation, a segment of humanity, Africans to be precise, has not developed much, and that even their presumably few, short, tentative steps from the cradle of creation is nullified (Love 1970: 49). 4.1.2 Mythopoetic Treatment of Space: The Gross Cosmic Membrane To complement our examination of temporality in Africa is our analysis of the spatial aspect of the time-space schemata. The temporal invariably evokes the spatial, and therefore, a discussion of the one without the other provides an incomplete analysis. Indeed, “Mythopoetic cognition seems unable to make literature temporal without also making it spatial, [thus] temporal fusion” is invariably “spatialized time” (Love 23). In our study, we discovered that the colonialist writers’ treatment of the African space parallels their treatment of African time. Haggard and Conrad, in projecting the present time to the past, also create a physical environment that foregrounds the past: they present a terrain that is an absolute cave. Cary, Greene and Monsarrat, on the other hand, pursue a style that projects the past time forward to the present time. They therefore create a space that diffuses aspects of the primitive and the modern, and establish an atmosphere that is simultaneously a ‘Cave-City’ as we have discussed earlier. From our analysis, ‘the cave’ and ‘cave-city’ represent the two central spatial projections of Africa in the colonialist novel. Common to both treatments of space is our notion of Gross Cosmic Membrane. It is essential for us, at this juncture, to keep in mind that our analysis on the African space is meant to complement, and reinforce, our argument on the treatment of African time. The tempo-spatial analysis, generally, as stated at the beginning of the chapter, is our attempt to 120 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh demonstrate the first sentence of the grammar: [Sentence (a): X enters the cave]. We shall begin our spatial analysis by providing a more detailed definition of our concept of Gross Cosmic Membrane. We use the term in the geographic and psychic senses. Geographically, the term captures all the physical attributes of the primitive landscape that serve as a barrier against European penetration. These are the four classical elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire and Air. The narrators of the colonialist novel often describe the elements of Africa in gross, cosmic and Edenic terms. Africa is seen as a land that is still freshly leashed by the umbilical cord to the cosmic forces of creation. Achebe’s phrase: “morning yet on creation day” (1976) provides a useful insight to the colonialist viewpoint on the African landscape. Landforms, mountains, forests, rivers, beasts of prey, the climate, presumed cannibals, and indeed, all the elemental forces of the African space, are composited into a formidable physical barrier which we have called ‘Gross Cosmic Membrane.’ The impenetrability of the barrier is only apparent; in fact, the forests and the physical elements are all permeable allowing the coloniser entry into the African space to colonise the people. That the cosmic barrier permits penetration makes it a ‘membrane’. The Gross Cosmic Membrane is not merely physical, it has psychic relevance. The projected wildness of the land, with its rampaging monsters, archaic river bodies and the extreme heat, are presented as environmentally deterministic of cave behaviour. The psychological effects of the space are presumed to manifest in the lives of not only the Africans, but also of the Europeans. Indeed, the recrudescence of the colonisers in Africa is attributed to the psychic effects of the cosmic membrane. In the current analysis, [Sentence (a): X enters the cave], we shall restrict ourselves to only the physical properties of the membrane. We shall examine the psychic aspect in our analysis of the inverse sentence: [Sentence (a-1): The cave enters X]. 121 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.1.2.1 Mythopoetic Penetration of the Cosmic Membrane In the select set of novels studied, the colonialist’s journey to the African space is presented mythopoetically: there is a dramatic movement from a stable, civilised European environment to a chaotic, otherworldly African space. The mythopoetic presentation of the journey is primarily the result of the narrator’s unique vision of the confrontation between the coloniser and the formidable cosmic membrane which serves to block the coloniser’s entry. The clash between the brain of culture (European civilisation) and brawn of nature (African primordiality) produces the mythical plots that are analogous to dimensions of the classical epic. In the following analysis, we shall attempt to demonstrate how the journey to Africa is presented as a battle against the cosmic barricade, and therefore, constitutes an exercise in myth-making. We shall use two elements – water and earth – from the various novels to illustrate. First, the coloniser always has to confront hostile water bodies – the ocean, rivers, streams and lakes – in order to gain entry to the African space. The antagonistic marine encounters, usually representing the first attempt at penetrating the cosmic membrane, involves death or near-death situations. In Haggard’s She, Holly, Leo and Job’s approach to Africa involves battling a series of huge squalls that kills eighteen people on board their boat. To make the encounter look more otherworldly, Holly, the narrator, contrasts the easy calmness and the civilised outlook of the English environment with the turbulence and danger of the African space. Gone are the quiet college rooms [of Cambridge], gone the wind-swayed English elms, cawing rooks, and the familiar volumes on the shelves, and in their place … the great…ocean gleaming…beneath the beams of the full African moon. [Then suddenly, there was a frightful roar of wind, shriek of terror from the awakening 122 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh crew, and a whip-like sting of water in our faces [then] […] within a twinkling of an eye, I saw the…whale-boat cast high into the air on the crest of the breaking wave. Then – a shock of water, a wild rush of boiling foam, and I was clinging for my life to the shroud, ay, swept straight out from it like a flag in a gale. We were pooped. (Haggard 1994: 53-7) Again, the two narrators of Heart of Darkness present a picture of English maritime calmness against the African elemental hostility. The frame narrator of Conrad’s novel portrays the Thames in superlative terms. It is a picturesque river: on the Thames “the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirit” (Conrad 1994: 5). Also, the Thames has a great composure and reputation. “The old river…rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway [….] It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud” (Conrad 6-7). In contrast, Marlow constructs an image of the Congo that is antithetical to the genial representation of the Thames. Going on that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On the silvery banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, …till you thought yourself…cut off for ever from everything you had known once…. (Conrad 48, my emphases) 123 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The difference between the English Thames and the Congo is vividly presented. Marlow portrays in detail the hostility presented by the cosmic membrane. We can identify all the elements of nature – water, fire, air and earth – combining to bar the way of the coloniser. In Table 4 below, we provide an analysis of the dynamics of the opposition and their semantic implications for Africa as a space. Table 4 ELEMENT ELEMENTAL COMMON SEMANTIC OPPOSITION FEATURE Water “Archaic river” /+ unfriendly/ “Empty stream” “Deserted waterway” “Lost river” Fire “Joyless sunshine” /+unfriendly/ “Gloom” “Shadow” Air “Warmth” /+unfriendly/ “Thickness” “Heaviness” “Sluggishness” Earth “Rioting vegetation” /+unfriendly/ “Big kingly trees” “Impenetrable forest” “Hippos” “Alligators” From Table 4 above, it becomes clear that the African space is presented as highly “unfriendly” to Marlow and his crew. The elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – are diffused into an 124 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh antagonistic cosmic force that restrains the colonisers’ incursion. The hostility is aggravated by the Africans who carry out an attack on Marlow and his men (Conrad 57ff). In symbolic terms, therefore, the Africans are represented not as human but as constituting a part of the natural cosmic forces militating against the colonisers’ penetration of the land. Cary, Greene and Monsarrat treat the African space a little differently from Haggard’s and Conrad’s representations. In contrast to Haggard’s and Conrad’s absolute ‘Cave’, we have already drawn attention to the Cary-Greene-Monsarrat conceptualisation of Africa as a ‘Cave- City’ where elements of the atavistic are mixed with the modern. In spite of this difference, entrance to the Cave-City is quite Haggardian-Conradian: it is also rife with confrontation between the coloniser and the water element. Although Cary does not make much of the African water bodies, Greene and Monsarrat provide an extensive treatment of the African marine element. In The Heart of the Matter, Helen Rolt’s entry to Africa sees the capsizing of the ship, SS. 43, on which she travels. She is one of the few survivors who arrive safely at Pende after spending forty days on the open sea in a lifeboat (Greene 1948: 105ff). Major Scobie, already in Africa, is not spared the vagaries of the elemental hostility. He has a dream in which he is in a boat that is drifting down a subterranean river just as Allan Quatermain had taken “towards the lost city of Milosis.” In the dream, he is accompanied by a dead body, but the stench of death comes not from the corpse but rather from his own living body. He is the ‘living dead’ on the mythical river (Greene 214). Greene’s invocation of the mythical lost city of Milosis in the form of an epic journey on a mythical river to the Underworld, coupled with the references to the living dead increases the mythopoetic orientation of the novel. In A Burnt-Out Case, the journey on the Congo is largely uneventful, but even here a battle rages against the elements. There is a sense of battle with “the thick, rapid, khaki-coloured stream against which the small boat fought 125 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh its ways…, the engine… groaning like an exhausted animal…. A lot of effort it seemed for so small a progress” (Greene 1961: 4). There is so much discomfort from the heat, mosquitoes, and tsetseflies that Querry, the protagonist, invokes Descartes: “I feel discomfort, therefore I am” (3). In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Monsarrat’s colonisers travel across the southern African coastline in an aircraft, but even so, the narrator contrives an imaginary battle against the marine element. Looking at the sea from the air, the narrator sees the Atlantic Ocean as “gratefully cool” (Monsarrat 1956: 3) and the ship sailing on it “at peace and at ease” (6). Against this calm setting, the narrator curiously imagines a mid-air disaster midway through the journey. “From this moment, if anything went wrong they must press on regardless of danger. The pilot…must set his teeth, clench his moustache, and endure to the end. Suspended in mortal peril, five thousand feet above a hungry ocean, with three hundred miles behind them, three hundred ahead, they could only…prepare to dice with death” (10). God is invoked to no useful purpose, because “God [as] the co-pilot blink[s] at the unaccustomed dials” (10) as they prepare to crash. In the colonialist imagination, the Christian God is either absent in Africa, as seen in Heart of Darkness, or he loses control in Africa, as seen in Monsarrat’s passage just quoted above. Our contention in the present analysis is that, unlike Conrad’s Thames in Heart of Darkness, African water bodies are invested with an archaic and mythical essence as seen in the examples cited. Achebe has noted Conrad’s antithetical juxtaposition of the Thames and Congo, and has pointed out that, to Conrad, “The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus” (1988: 3). Even when approached from an aeroplane, the mystery of the hungry African ocean or river persists, and is unsolvable by God himself. We shall now look at how the elemental African earth or land is treated as part of our analysis of the mythopoetic treatment of the African space. Haggard’s and Conrad’s narrators are 126 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh unanimous in their mythopoetic cognition that the African land is the archetypal cave. In their representation of the land, the vegetation and animals are highlighted. They both express horror for the land, though in different terms. Whereas Haggard’s Holly sees an admixture of beauty and horror in the uncontrollable wildness of Africa, Conrad’s Marlow sees only gloom and horror. The following is Holly’s description of a scene on arrival in Africa: Indeed, I do not think that if I live to a hundred I shall ever forget that desolate and yet most fascinating scene: it is stamped upon my memory. To the right and left were wide stretches of lonely death-breeding swamp, unbroken and unrelieved so far as the eye could reach, except here and there by ponds of black and peaty water that, mirror- like, flashed up the red rays of the setting sun. Behind us and before stretched the vista of the sluggish river, ending in glimpses of a reed-fringed lagoon, on the surface of which the long lights of the evening played as the faint breeze stirred the shadows. To the west loomed the huge red ball of the sinking sun, now vanishing down the vapoury horizon, and filling the great heaven, high across whose arch the cranes and wildfowl streamed in line…with flashes of flying gold and the lurid stain of blood. And then ourselves – three modern Englishmen in a modern English boat – seeming to jar upon and look out of tone with the measureless desolation…. (Haggard 1994: 70) We contrast Holly’s description of the African wild with Marlow’s vision of the African scene: Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high […] We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. […] We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, 127 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and excessive toil. […] The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly…. (Conrad 1994: 50-1) Both descriptions portray the primordial but the eerie uneasiness of Marlow betrays his horror. On the other hand, if Holly’s vision of the wild is romantic, his vision of the habitation of the Africans is not. To start with, he translates the metaphorical African cave – the supposed crudity of the land – into a literal realisation by providing a setting where the Amahagger live in actual caves. These caves are filled with the mummified and semi-embalmed corpses of the earlier civilisation that had lived in the land. That the cannibalistic Amahagger co-exist comfortably with the corpses in these subterranean morbid apertures transforms the African land from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of mythical primitivity. Africa is not the conventional place for human habitation. Here, the living and dead co-exist in sepulchres creating a diffusion between the two so that Amahaggerland is the land of the living-dead. The coincidence of such as a representation with Greene’s representation of Scobie as the living-dead at the mythical Milosis is very striking (Greene 1948: 214). The representation of Africa as an archaic space takes another form: the land is presented in geological terms. Africa becomes one huge geological park: a primordial zoo. Beasts of prey prowl the forests, and the land is infested with insects. According to Holly, “[W]e saw hundreds of crocodiles basking on the muddy banks, and thousands upon thousands of waterfowl” (Haggard 1994: 69). In another instance, Holly narrates the story of a ferocious duel between two beasts of prey, a lion and crocodile, which ends with the crocodile killing the lion (73). Marlow also describes a scene where “hippos and alligators” sun themselves on the shore (Conrad 1994: 128 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 48). Monsarrat’s narrator discovers the prehistoric and extinct coelacanth in the waters of Pharamaul (1956: 194). All the instances cited above are insightful for their revelation of Africa as a cosmic zoo. The narrators of Cary, Greene and Monsarrat project a vision of the African land that is largely analogous to the vision of Haggard’s and Conrad’s narrators; the only difference between the two visions is the cave-city formulation of the latter group of writers. We shall cite two examples from Cary and Monsarrat to exemplify the dynamics of the Cave-City. Cary’s narrator in Mister Johnson provides a description of Fada, a town in colonial Nigeria, which is evidently a modest example of the Cave-City. The town enjoys some of the facilities available in Lagos, the colonial capital. For instance, the town has European-owned shops, a prison house, a Police force and justice system. The opening of the new road brings even more civilising influences, and also corrupting elements, from the bigger cities. Though Fada is not an epitome of European civilisation, evidence from the text does not support the “faecal imagery” (Yankson 2007: 71) attributed to it. Cary’s narrator thinks otherwise. The description of Fada given by the narrator strips the town of any semblance of civilisation, and thrusts it back into the Haggardian- Conradian absolute cave. We find the narrator’s assertions antithetical to the snippets of evidence provided in the text, which point to growing European influence. We therefore question why the narrator would seek to contradict his own narration. Hear the narrator: Fada is the ordinary native town of the Western Sudan. It has no beauty, convenience or health. It is a dwelling-place at one stage from the rabbit warren or badger burrow; and not cleanly kept as the latter. It is a pioneer settlement five or six hundred years old, built on its own rubbish heaps, without charm even of antiquity. Its squalor and its stinks are all new. […] All its mud walls are eaten as if by smallpox…. […] [T]he 129 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh absolute government of jealous savages, conservative as only savages can be, have kept it at the first frontier of civilisation. Its people would not know the change if time jumped back fifty thousand years. They live like mice or rats in a palace floor; all the magnificence and variety of the arts, the ideas, the learning and the battles of civilisation go on over their heads and they do not even imagine them. Fada has not been able to achieve its own native arts… An English child in Fada…would be terrified by the dirt, the stinks, the great sores on naked bodies, the twisted limbs, the babies with enormous swollen stomachs and their hernias; the whole place, flattened upon the earth like a scab of a wound. (1939: 99-100, my emphasis) If Fada’s septic representation is distasteful, Monsarrat narrator produces an even viler attack on Pharamaul in The Tribe That Lost Its Head. Pharamaul is not only a “god-forsaken part of the world” (1956: 6): [it is] a rough featureless country, cultivated haphazardly on principles as old as the plough itself, devoted for the most part to stringy scrub cattle and enormous flocks of goats. Gamate [the traditional capital] …[i]s an untidy straggle of huts, sprawling like dusty beehives…sheltering over a hundred thousand people – and many more goats – and the people themselves [are] largely backward, unenterprising folk, degenerating in the northern parts to a simple, uncontrollable savagery. They [a]re like children […] ragged, brutish, undeniably dirty. (17) In our view, the conflation of “people” and “goats” in the above quotation is a deliberate diffusion of man and animal, a remodelling of the Conradian anthropo-zoomorphic diffuse style, employed to cast insinuation and doubts on African humanity. In the above quotation, “people” and “goats” are paradigmatically related. That the two nouns are put together in the same 130 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh grammatical context so that “people” and “goats” can swap positions in the sentence structure suggests their equivalence. By such a stylistic structure, the original semantic opposition between “people” and “goats,” /+ human/ and /- human/ respectively, is neutralised. “People” acquires an additional characteristic: /- human/ while “goats” also acquires the characteristic: /+ human/. Thus, the common semantic characteristics now shared by both “people” and goats” are: /+ human; - human/ establishing a mythical cognition in which Maulas are equated to the goats which they rear. Elsewhere in the novel, Monsarrat’s narrator makes even more explicit racist statements about the people of Pharamaul. For instance, the narrator describes the people as a “lazy, dirty, shiftless, stupid collection,” (9) and their homes “the dry, dusty, straggling mud village where most of them lived” (9). According to the narrator, Pharamaul is not only a “forgotten corner of a backward continent (28)” with “a hundred back-street hovels, a hundred miserable mud huts in [a] derelict, disgraceful corner of the British Empire” (29), but, indeed, the very “smell of Maula humanity distract[s] one’s attention from higher things” (268). Having denigrated the Maula, the narrator dismisses the U-Maula as “something short of human” (128). In a uniquely Conradian style, he describes Pharamaul as a “silent land…which had awaited [human] passing for a hundred years,…a land inscrutable in its blank denial of welcome… [and boasting] an impassive air that seemed to mask the very claws of danger” (128). The vision of Monsarrat’s narrator for the African land is uniquely Haggardian-Conradian. The sense of ‘first people’, discovery of an untrodden new land, looming danger, timelessness, impenetrable vegetation, roaming animals and inferior humanity – all staples of Haggard and Conrad – permeates the fibre of Monsarrat’s novel to capture the notion of a primitive, mythical space. The coloniser’s image of Africa as an accursed land is supported and rebutted in equal 131 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh terms by critics. While some commentators uphold the atavistic representation of the African terrain and its peoples, others reject such representations, and expose them as instances of European disrespect for Africa. There is yet another group of critics which vacillates in its views between the two opposing critical positions. In the following analysis, we shall examine all three critical views mentioned above. We shall first look at the critics who support the notion of Africa as a primitive space. The position of such critics accords with the project of the the select set of colonialist novels we have studied. For instance, in Primitive Culture (1871), Edward Tylor stresses that “In our time [the nineteenth century], West Africa is still a world of fetishes…So strong is the pervading influence, that the European in Africa is apt to catch it from the Negro, and himself, as the saying is ‘becoming black’” (qtd in Raskin 129). Citing Haggard, Edward Dicey in The Nineteenth Century (1890), makes a similar argument. He declares that there is “no better evidence than that to be found in Mr. Haggard’s romances for the belief that Central Africa contains vestiges of any civilization” (qtd. in Raskin 1967: 129). Daniel Crawford provides perhaps the most scathing attack on African society in Thinking Black (1912). In his own words, “the fearful fact must be faced that all things European degenerate in Central Africa.” In his opinion, “Africa invades you…the Dark Continent flooding your insular English being at every pore” (qtd. in Raskin 94). The ramification of the distorted representations of Africa, and the attendant critical support for such representations provide the basis for the support of colonisation. In this regard, Robert F. Lee, offers an account of his experience in the Orient as a justification for the dehumanisation and colonisation of non-European peoples. His account has been rightly described by Hunt Hawkins (1979: 287) as uncharitable and “crude.” Citing the Roman conquest of England in Heart of Darkness as the basis of his argument, Lee writes: “One of the major directions of 132 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Conrad’s colonial fiction is a recognition of and an accord with the conception of Anglo-Saxon superiority in administering the lives of Oriental and other dependent peoples” (1969: 10). Opposed to the above views are Chinua Achebe, Patrick Brantlinger and Olufemi Taiwo. In his essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1988), Achebe takes an exception to Conrad’s representation of Africa. In another essay, “My Home Under Imperial Fire,” he rejects Joyce Cary’s faecal image of Nigeria. In a statement that might pass as a general critique of the English colonialist novel, Achebe condemns “[the] undertow of uncharitableness just below the surface on which [the coloniser’s] narrative moves and from where, at the slightest chance, a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery breaks through to poison his tale” (Achebe 2001: 24). Views similar to Achebe’s have been expressed by Brantlinger and Taiwo. In the monumental opening of his essay, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Brantlinger debunks Conrad’s representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that Africa is no longer the “blank space” on the map that he had once daydreamed over. “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. …It had become a place of darkness.” Marlow is right: Africa grew “dark” as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light, because the light was refracted through an imperial ideology that urged the abolition of “savage customs” in the name of civilization. As a product of that ideology, the myth of the Dark Continent developed. (1986: 185) Following Achebe and Brantlinger, Taiwo denies the charge of African primitivity, and suggests that “there is evidence of Africans who had embraced modernity with considerable enthusiasm [through association with earlier missionaries] before the advent of formal colonialism.” He insists that “Rather than build African agency in what would have been a nod to subjectivity, 133 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh colonialists stultified its growth. Instead of allowing Africans to choose from among old and new customs, institutions, and practices, they foisted sociocryonics on the colonies” (2010: 25). In other words, he argues that the European colonisers performed a social abortion on Africa by inhibiting the natural evolution of traditional African institutions, and by doing so terminated the clear progressive march towards modernity. In view of the position of Achebe, Brantliner and Taiwo above, the European colonialist representation of Africa seems prejudiced and unfair. Finally, we shall examine the position of the critics whose arguments represent a seeming equivocation between the two opposing positions already discussed above: John Tessitore, Hunt Hawkins and Jonah Raskin. In “Freud, Conrad, and Heart of Darkness,” Tessitore takes a stance that can be described as unstable and even curious. Following Freud, he admits that the archetypal primal instinct of humans co-exists with the developed instincts (1980: 32). If this position of Tessitore is neutral, his next view is quite the opposite: he seems to provide a justification for the brutalities and excesses of the colonisers, for instance, Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness. According to Tessitore, “the motive – what might even prove to be the necessity –” for Kurtz’s criminal actions is that: “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us [humans]; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures” (32, my emphases). Now, hear Tessitore’s explicit rationalisation of Kurtz’s abhorrent behaviour: If, in speaking of the average man, [Freud’s psychological] obversation [about the difficulty of life] seems valid, how much more it must be in the case of Kurtz [who is] unable to marry his Intended due to inadequate means and therefore joins the Belgian company in search of his fortune. (33) 134 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh To sooth what Tessitore calls “an extreme instance of pain and disappointment,” Kurtz requires “the strongest dose of ‘palliative measures’” (33). Those measures include Kurtz’s brutal murdering of Africans, decapitation of those who resist his aggression, placing of decapitated heads on stakes around his house, the aggressive stealing of African ivory resources, and the many other criminalities he commits in Congo. We find Tessitore’s position curious for two reasons: his language and his moral/ethical posturing. Regarding his language, we find it problematic that he sees the blatant crimes of Kurtz as “palliative measures.” We ask: must the failure of one European to marry his intended lead to the destruction of settled African communities and African lives? Must the sedation of the perceived pain of Kurtz lead to the atrocities he commits in Heart of Darkness? And here is the crux of our linguistic argument: must Kurtz’s atrocities be labelled “palliative measures?” We may want to seek relief in the knowledge that Tessitore draws heavily on Freudian psychology as espoused in Civilization and Its Discontents (1961), and that terminologies such as “palliative measures,” are borrowed freely from the distinguished psychologist. Even in the event of such borrowing, the alibi does not excuse the insensitivity of such use of language in respect of African humanity. Our second issue with Tessitore is in regard to his moral stance on the events in Heart of Darkness. Throughout his essay, Tessitore provides a hugely psychological account of the story. What he fails to do, however, is explicitly declare his position on the unethical and illegitimate methods of Kurtz. One would expect Tessitore to condemn the acts of Kurtz outright; he fails to do so. Instead, he freely imports a host of distasteful Freudian euphemisms into his work: “palliative measures,” “powerful deflections,” “substitutive satisfaction” and “intoxicating substances” (33). The terminologies project Africans as ‘scientific specimens’ in the laboratory 135 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of colonialism upon whom an insane colonial ‘scientist/anthropologist’ (Kurtz) practises his warped social experiments and methods of extermination. In sum, Tessitore’s use of Freudian scientific language, and his failure to observe the inappropriateness of such nomenclature in the context of the tragedy of colonialism, adds to his ambivalent moral stance. In “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness” (1979), Hunt Hawkins provides an analysis that is as ambivalent as Tessitore’s. First, he reviews the positions of Jonah Raskin and Eloise Knapp Hay in The Mythology of Imperialism (1971) and The Political Novels of Conrad: A Critical Study (1963) respectively. He concludes that Raskin and Hay see Conrad as an anti-imperialist (287). He then produces a reading of Avrom Fleishman’s Conrad’s Politics (1967) and Robert F. Lee’s Conrad’s Colonialism (1969), and concludes that both authors project Conrad as an imperialist (287). Caught between these two opposing critical opinions, Hawkins suggests that Conrad is not an imperialist, and that rather than being seen as such, “he...[must be seen as] making an appeal to the values of his [British] audience so that they might censure the atrocities in the Congo” (288). In the typical ambivalent style we have observed in the Tessitore-Hunt-Raskin criticism, Hunt concludes his argument as follows: “Since imperialism was not identical in all territories, Conrad’s harsh evaluation of the Congo need not imply any final judgment either favourable or unfavourable, of British imperialism” (288). Jonah Raskin provides a similarly unstable account of Conrad’s novel. In one breath, Raskin praises Conrad’s artistry and his ability to provide a vivid, simultaneously mythical and realistic, representation of European barbarism and degeneracy in Africa. In this breath, he shares Hawkins’ position that Conrad is pro-African and anti-imperialist. In fact, he shares Conrad’s own view of himself as a “white slave” in Congo (Raskin 1967: 120). He emphasises that: “Conrad’s indignation at being a white slave and exploited was channelled into an art which 136 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh indicted Belgian exploitation in the Congo, and his sense of being on the frontier between civilization and savagery was transformed into a myth about the barbarism of colonialism” (120- 1). In a curious turn around, however, Raskin seems to project Conrad as a racist. He highlights Conrad’s anti-black sentiments in novels such as The Secret Agent, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness. He projects Conrad’s supposed racism in the following terms: Conrad believed that blacks were a corrupting force, and in his earlier novels he described savage women and Negroes demoralizing white men. He knew little about Negroes and one unfortunate experience in particular framed his notion of evil blacks, for he remembered an enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti who crystallized his conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, manifested in the human animal. (127-8) According to Raskin, Conrad’s biases against black people influence his representation of blacks so that in The Secret Agent, for instance, “Conrad indicates the depravity of an anarchist by describing the negro type of his face. And in Nostromo he used the suggestion of Negro features to indicate the baseness of the revolutionaries, informimg us that their appearances argued the presence of some negro blood.” Raskin concludes: “[If] in these novels the fault is slight – in Heart of Darkness it is critical” (128). We find Raskin’s two positions antithetical and irreconcilable: he shifts from his view of Conrad as pro-African to that of him as anti-African. Finally, Raskin provides a reading of Heart of Darkness that disregards the stance of earlier criticism, and betrays what may be seen as his own biases against African cultures. Hear Raskin: 137 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Very few quarrelled with his [Conrad’s] sociology of colonialism, his notion that men’s very lives were rendered possible through high organization of civilized crowds, that society permitted men to live on conditions of being machines, but that when man was freed from society in the tropics and confronted by primitive man and primitive nature, his life was disrupted and demoralized. (128) He concludes that “Society was necessary to keep in check man’s barbarism – without it, as in the presence of Africans in the tropics, his innate savagery would be rekindled” (128). In the view of the present writer, Raskin’s statement has two implications. First, by claiming, for instance, that “very few quarrelled with Conrad’s sociology of colonialism,” he fails to account for the many convincing counter-arguments against Conrad’s depiction of African society. As we have demonstrated earlier, arguments by distinguished critics such as Achebe, Brantlinger and Taiwo reject Conrad’s representation of Africa and its peoples. Second, by claiming that without society man’s archetypal instincts assert themselves as pertains in the African tropics, Raskin provides a reading that disregards African social formation. He implies that the African communities of Congo, and, by extension, all African communities, do not constitute society. The implication is that society is possible only within the context of the mechanised and automated systems and conditions of Europe, and that since the precolonial African sphere does not boast the mechanical apparatus, industrial facilities and architectural edifices of Europe, African communities cannot be described as society. We consider Raskin’s position untenable especially in view of the many compelling pieces of evidence in many African literary and critical writings that expose the falsity and prejudice of some Eurocentric representations of Africa. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, for instance, provides a detailed portrayal of African society that highlights an extremely organised social domain, sophisticated cosmological 138 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and ontological perspectives, and impressive scientific and agricultural bodies of knowledge. The weakness of Raskin’s position is foregrounded when placed against the backdrop of, for instance, Achebe’s novel. One may want to understand why Tessitore, Hunt and Raskin seem to vacillate in their interpretation of Heart of Darkness. The answer may lie in the voice of the colonialist narrator itself. In all the colonialist novels studied, the narrators seem to demonstrate a double consciousness; they simultaneously engage in a project of condemning and endorsing colonialism. This ambivalent narratorial position seen especially in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head, and to a lesser extent in Cary’s The African Witch and Mister Johnson, and Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case confirms Bhabha’s observation of the ambivalence and doubleness of the colonial utterance (Parry 1995: 42). The double-sidedness of the colonialist story dictates the chiasmic grammar we have identified in the story. The ambivalence perhaps provides the basis for the unstable criticism we observe in Tessitore, Hunt and Raskin. In the last section of the chapter, we have tried to provide an analysis of views that support the atavistic representation of Africa, those that reject such representations, and those that speak in equal measure for both positions. While Edward Tylor, Edward Dicey, Daniel Crawford and Robert F. Lee share the view of Africa as a primitive space, Chinua Achebe, Patrick Brantlinger and Olufemi Taiwo oppose that view. The interface between the two opposing critical views is mediated by the position of John Tessitore, Hunt Hawkins and Jonah Raskin. Recapitulating, we have attempted to illustrate how, in the unique vision of the colonialist writers, the elements of nature – Water, Earth, Fire and Air – constitute themselves into an 139 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh atavistic cosmic membrane which militates against the entry of the coloniser to Africa. We have used the first two elements – Water and Earth – to illustrate the cosmic membrane. We have taken the stance that the colonialist writers furnish the African space with atavistic elemental forces in order to justify their mythicisation of the space as a primordial cave. We have also made the case that the atavistic representation of Africa yields criticism that either supports or rejects the colonialist standpoint. We have drawn attention to a third type of criticism that vacillates between the pro-and anti-atavistic arguments. So far in this chapter, we have attempted to demonstrate the first sentence of the colonialist grammar: Sentence (a): X enters the Cave. In pursuing that objective, we have taken the stance that X (the coloniser) enters the Cave (Africa) in time and space. To discuss the temporal aspect of the entry, we have discussed broader topics such as the mythopoetic (dis)ordering of time under which we noted that the writers create a diffusion of time, either as ‘past in the present’ or ‘present in the past’. We have discussed the structuring of modernity and the archaic, and also tried to demonstrate how the African mind is represented as the source of archetypal impulses such as the primal horde, group psychology and psychosexual fixation. On the spatial front, we have examined the mythopoetic treatment of the African space with an emphasis on what we have called the gross cosmic membrane. Generally, therefore, we have discussed how the coloniser enters the represented physical geography of Africa in time and in space. The recurring pronouncement upon entry is that Africa is an accursed cave. All the above discussion has been an attempt towards demonstrating the first grammar of the colonialist novel: [Sentence (a): X enters the Cave.] In the following section of the chapter, we shall examine the inverse of [Sentence (a)]. 140 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.2 Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X In the present section of the chapter, we shall attempt to establish the dioscuric logic of the colonialist novel. In other words, we shall demonstrate the chiasmic structure of the colonialist novel by showing that the action of [Sentence (a): X enters the Cave] has an inverse or dioscuric counterpart which is [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X]. This dialectical turn in the action is diagrammatically demonstrated in Schema 2 below: Schema 2: Y/cave speak against X (mirror line) X enters the cave (a) The cave enters X. (a-1) X cages Y (b) The cave cages X. (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the cave steal from X. (c-1) From the Schema 2, [Sentence (a-1)] is the reversal of the action of [Sentence (a)], so that if in [Sentence (a)], ‘X enters the Cave’, in [Sentence (a-1)], ‘the Cave enters X’. When we say ‘the Cave enters X’, we imply that after his entry into the Cave, X naturalises in the Cave, and demonstrates traits and behaviour that are usually associated with the primitive. In other words, X initially enters the Cave carrying the torch of civilisation, however, upon arrival, the torch is extinguished by the vagaries of the Cave; X, therefore, forgets his civilisation, and assumes a character that is at variance with his enlightenment and civilising mission. There are two levels of dialectics here. The first is in the formal structure of the colonialist novel where the coloniser’s entry to Africa cave is inverted so that the African cave supposedly ‘enters’ the coloniser. The second dialectic is in the social structure of the novel 141 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh where X undergoes a psychological and social transformation so that the torchbearer of civilisation turns out to be a savage worse than the ‘primitive’ African he condemns. These dimensions of the dialectics are what we have called the dialectics of entry of the cave. The dialectics of entry reinforces the elements of diffusion to project the mythical logic of the colonialist novel. 4.2.1 The Dialogue of the Caves We have stated earlier that the cosmic membrane, the formidable composite of the aggressive elements of Africa, is deemed to have both physical and psychical relevance. We have demonstrated the physical impact of the membrane in the preceding section of the chapter. In the present section, we shall examine the supposed psychical effects. As indicated by [Sentence (a-1)] above, the narrator of the colonialist novel does not blame X for his or her reprehensible behaviour in Africa; the narrator rather blames the African atmosphere for influencing such behavioural changes in an otherwise civilised European. We shall contend that the function – [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X] – is a dubious function specifically contrived by the colonialist writer to generate sympathy for the coloniser. Crucially, we shall suggest that X enters the Cave carrying his own repressed internal cave. In Africa, X’s dormant primitive psychology is exposed, further exposing his supposed cultivation and civilisation as a sham. Our contention, following Northrop Frye (1957) and Carl Jung (1980), is that the human psyche – whether of the colonised or coloniser – is essentially primitive, and under enabling conditions, such as colonisation, long-repressed archetypal impulses re-assert themselves. Therefore, the colonialist writers’ contention that the Cave or Africa is responsible for the coloniser’s crude behaviour is a falsehood. With apologies to Talleyrand, we shall suggest that, psychologically, the coloniser, like all human beings, ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’ in 142 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Africa space (Skrine 2013: 32). In other words, Africa did not introduce the psychology of violence to the coloniser. The primitivity the coloniser demonstrated in Africa was always there in his or her psyche. In Africa, the coloniser created a condition within which his archetypal primitive drives – the Jungian “racial memory” – would thrive; conditions of disrespect, dictatorship and disempowerment. Once such conditions were installed, the animalistic, and often brutal, drives that were long-repressed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche were unleashed. In our view, therefore, the coloniser simply uncovers his own animalistic nature in Africa, so that the supposed entry of the cave into the coloniser is merely self-discovery: the discovery of the European’s own inborn primitive instincts which lie concealed by the façade called ‘civilisation’. With our point of departure clarified, we shall use the rest of the chapter to demonstrate how, according the colonialist writers, ‘the Cave enters X’ or how the psychic effects of the cosmic membrane transforms the civilised European into a brute. 4.2.1.1 Haggard’s and Conrad’s Tentative Acceptance of the Notion of the European’s Inner Cave Haggard and Conrad display a rare insight that is absent in Cary and Monsarrat: that X comes to Africa embodying his own primitive psyche. While Haggard does not provide a sustained exposition of this insight, Conrad builds his novel shakily around it – shaky because his narrator is tentative in his acceptance of the notion of the inner cave. We may criticise Conrad’s Marlow for his stance towards African humanity; we may condemn his distasteful epithets for everything African; and yet we may admire him for demonstrating awareness of the primal impulse in all humans, whether European or African. Marlow’s peculiar insight, recognised also in Haggard’s Holly, is conspicuously missing in Cary and Monsarrat. Greene, to a lesser extent, also shows awareness of the aboriginal human depravity. We shall now examine 143 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh how Holly illustrates the cave in X. During the brawl between the Amahagger and Englishmen in She, Holly makes a comment that points to his awareness of the archaic composition of the human mind. A cultured Cambridge scholar, Holly finds himself in an unlikely scenario where he has to defend himself against two Amahagger cannibals. He reports: “They were strong men, but I was mad with rage, and that awful lust for slaughter which will creep into the hearts of the most civilised of us when blows are flying, and life and death tremble on the turn (Haggard 1994: 103, my emphasis). In another episode, he says: “I …hacked at the head of one man with my hunting-knife,…with such vigour, that the sharp steel…split his skull down to the eyes, and was held there so fast by it that as he suddenly fell sideways the knife was twisted right out of my hand” (104). Even Leo, touted more for his good looks than for his physical strength, is seen fighting with an “energy that was at once splendid and hideous to behold. He drove his knife through one man” (104). Our argument is that: here are Englishmen, from the very source of enlightenment, Cambridge University, exhibiting the most barbaric of human instincts in spite of their cultivation. Holly recognises that self-preservation automatically ignites the long-dormant atavistic impulses in all humans, civilised or not, making the notion of civilisation subjective and relative. In this regard, Holly, unlike Cary’s and Monsarrat’s narrators, does not attribute the Englishmen’s exhibition of primitive brawn to the African environment. It is neither the heat nor vegetation of Africa that instils barbarity in the Englishmen. They produce the brutal massacring of the Africans according to a very native instinct known to all humans. As Holly rightly concedes, “the awful lust for slaughter” is quite capable of “creep[ing] into the hearts of the most civilised of us” when confronted with the necessity for self-preservation. Holly’s observation is profound: the capacity for barbaric action is an aboriginal human instinct, a fact affirmed by Northrop Frye (1957) and 144 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Carl Jung (1980), but largely denied by the narrators of Cary and Monsarrat. Conrad’s Marlow, like Haggard’s Holly, also shows awareness of the archaic nature of the human psyche, however, he struggles with the notion. He accepts it in one breath and denies it in another. Throughout Heart of Darkness, Marlow vacillates between acceptance and denial of the idea of archetypal behaviour. For us, one of the fascinating characteristics about Conrad’s novel is Marlow’s vacillation between what constitutes human nature and what constitutes the influence of the environment. In spite of his equivocal stance, Marlow eventually undergoes a dialectical change in his perspective when he concedes to the existence of archaic internal drives in all humans. At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Marlow makes a lot of insightful submissions that deny the existence of the aboriginal cave in all humans. First, he suggests: “Darkness was here yesterday” (Conrad 1994: 8). By that he meant that England was also once a cave, and was geographically considered to be at the very end of the world. Its sea had the colour of lead, its sky the colour of smoke, its landform was made up of “sand-banks, marshes, forests [and its people] savages” (9). Second, he admits that the conquering Romans unleashed a terrible form of colonisation in England, killing and stealing: “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force” (10). Third, that the action of the Roman colonisers was environmentally determined; that is, the Roman brutalities on the English people could be attributed to the psychological changes imposed on the Romans by the effects of the atavistic English environment. According to Marlow, the crudity of the English environment, “all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forests, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men” … closed in around [them, the Romans]” (9). In Marlow’s view, therefore, the Romans “surrendered” to the influence of the English cave: they experienced “powerless disgust”, “surrender” and “hate” (9), all as effects of the primitive English environment. In a nutshell, the English cave entered the 145 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Romans and influenced their brutal excesses. It is important to note that Marlow has no qualms whatsoever with the Roman style of colonisation in England. Indeed, he admits, “They [the Romans] were men enough to face the darkness” (9). Marlow fails to realise that human nature, and not the archaic English terrain, is responsible for the brutalities the Romans perpetrated. His objectivity suffers from the effects of his admiration for the Roman culture. Indeed, he provides a lot of evidence to prove that he admires the Romans. Their navy is captained by the “commander of a fine trireme;” “the[ir] soldiers are legionaries – a wonderful lot of handy men;” their civilians are toga-wearing prefects or members of the entourage of such; generally, they are refined people with good sense and taste; they drink Falernian wine (9). Infatuated with the Roman culture, Marlow does not permit the faintest possibility of the archetypal cave in the Romans. Rather, he provides the environmental alibi to justify the clearly primitive Roman colonisation. In our view, Marlow exhibits biased judgement in failing to respond appropriately to the primitive psyche of the Romans. He would turnaround, however, and condemn the Europeans who would produce Roman-style colonisation in Africa. In our view, the Romans, just as the English, or the Africans, or any other human race, for that matter, carry within their psyches the primordial cave: the cave of the mind. The Roman savagery in England is, therefore, simply a matter of the awakening of the animalistic human instincts because the conditions are rife: the structures of disrespect and disempowerment are installed. In view of our analysis, Marlow’s alibi that the Romans were not initiated into the mysteries of archaic life is baseless. Following Jung (1980), we know that the human psychology is naturally archaic, so that one does not need initiation into a phenomenon that is aboriginal. In other words, Marlow’s argument that the English cave entered the Romans is untenable: the Romans came to England carrying their own internal caves; they discovered 146 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh their own concealed primitivity in England. When Marlow is confronted with Roman-style colonisation in Africa, he still insists that the archaic environment is to blame for the crude European behaviour. For instance, when Fresleven, “the gentlest, [and] quietest creature that ever walked on two legs” beats up an African chief over two hens, and gets murdered for it, Marlow suggests that it is the environment that induced his madness. “Oh it didn’t surprise me in the least to hear this…. [H]e had been a couple of years already out there…” (13), Marlow says. In other words, in Africa, the gentlest European can suddenly turn violent as a result of the primitive environment. Marlow’s company doctor shares the environmental deterministic point of view. Before Marlow sets off for Congo, the doctor pronounces Africa a place of madness, and insists on measuring Marlow’s head, stressing: “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of the individuals, on the spot” (17). The doctor, just as Marlow, believes that environmental factors are responsible for psychological deterioration in Africa. In another instance, when a French warship shells a poor African village, Marlow sees it as a sign of insanity (20). The objectless bombardment of the village is replicated in the purposeless blasting of rocks which has nothing to do with the rail line construction (22). When a Swede hangs himself for no apparent reason, Marlow reports that he might have killed himself because he could not bear the hot climate or the country generally (21). The crude attitude of the European in Africa is attributed to environmental factors. When it comes to the question of Kurtz’s degeneration, Marlow comes to a new, tentative realisation not previously shown in the novel. We see him shifting his ground and equivocating, unsure whether it is the African environment or human nature that influences Kurtz’s “horror” (Conrad 100). At one point he seems to concede that human nature is aboriginally barbaric and quite capable of producing despicable acts of violence; at another point, he regresses to his 147 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh environmental thesis. In this new, dialogical insight, Marlow recognises that human nature does not succumb to but rather engages with, and responds to, the call of atavistic factors. Clearly, ‘engaging with’ and ‘responding to’ the primitive presupposes the pre-existence of the primitive in the European which makes the call-and response possible. Marlow’s new insight seems a movement away from his environmental alibi, but he does not move far. For him, the culture of the Africans and the wildness of the African environment constitute the external atavistic call to which the inner cave of the European responds. He mentions, for instance, the effects of the excessive heat, impenetrable jungle, unaccustomed African ritual drumming and the supposedly weird incantations of the Africans as examples of the atavistic factors. For Marlow, therefore, the recrudescence of Kurtz is a response to the call of African cultural and environmental factors: a dialogue between the pre-existing internal cave of the European and the external cave of Africa. While it is true that humans have an aboriginal capacity to dialogue with the atavistic on a deeper psychological level, Marlow’s definition of the atavistic is flawed. In our view, the culture of the Africans – the so-called “monotonous beating of…a drum” (92) and chanting of ‘incomprehensible’ words, for instance – has nothing to do with Kurtz’s descent into crudity. The supposedly crude African environment does not constitute the actual atavistic factor either. The real atavistic factors usually consist of conditions that allow the unbridled exercising of the aboriginal human nature. When law and order are suspended, for instance, we are in the context of the atavistic. According to Freud, when stripped of conditions such as religion, the law and punitive check-and-balances, conditions that check the free exercising of the pleasure principle, the said principle has the tendency of indulging its aboriginal, animalistic nature leading to reprehensible behaviour (Phillips 2000: 176-79). The colonial context replicates Freud’s psychological perspective. In the forest of Congo, the European loses touch with his religion, law 148 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and order, and all other conditions that would have restrained him in Europe. Instead, he arrogates all power: he constitutes himself into the law and God. His position of absolute power in Congo arouses “the memory of… monstrous passions” which leads to “the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (94). The result is his brutal misdemeanours and “incredible degradation” (95). Freud’s psychological perspective explains, to a significant extent, the action of all colonisers, including Marlow’s revered Romans. Marlow’s statement that: “The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (52) is therefore instructive. It shows his vacillation between the environmental-cultural alibi, which is a falsehood, and the archetypal alibi, which is psychologically held as the truth. Profoundly, his claim that “The mind of man is capable of anything” re-echoes Holly’s statement in She that: the “awful lust for slaughter [is capable of] creep[ing] into the hearts of the most civilised of us” (Haggard 1994: 104). We can suggest, therefore, that Marlow experiences a semblance of dialectical change in his cognition. It is, however, a tentative change driven by uncertainty, bias and prejudice. In spite of his equivocation, Conrad shares with Haggard the distinction for making an insightful observation regarding the aboriginal primitivity of the human mind. 4.2.1.2 The Cary-Greene-Monsarrat Environmental Case for the European’s Inner Cave We shall now look at Cary’s, Greene’s and Monsarrat’s attitude to the colonisers’ aboriginal cave. The present set of writers employs the environmental deterministic argument championed by Marlow’s doctor. Though Greene’s narrator in The Heart of the Matter demonstrates some awareness of the aboriginal crudity of the human psychology, this awareness is buried under heavy doses of the environmental argument. For instance, Wilson’s patronising the Sierra Leonian brothel is rightly attributed to the animalistic human libido rather than the effect of the environment (1948: 166), yet the narrator’s story is full of environment-induced 149 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh misdemeanours. With Cary, Greene and Monsarrat, therefore, we have returned to Conrad’s Roman conviction. When the Rimi disturbances break out in The African Witch, Burwash drives through a crowd of women protesting against high markets taxation. He runs over a young girl injuring her. Burwash initially orders his driver, Ojo, to “Drive on. […] Go on. Push ’em out of the way” (Cary 1936: 235-6). When Ojo refuses to drive through the crowd, Burwash himself takes over the steering wheel, and ploughs through the crowd causing injury. The refusal of the supposedly uncivilised African, Ojo, to drive through the protesters exposes the primitive instincts of Burwash. Again, when the Women’s War starts, Sangster opens fire on the women armed with only kitchen pestles killing eight and injuring nineteen (296-7). If the coloniser is not hesitant to massacre the African women wielding cooking utensils, he is doubly ready to kill the African men. In the men’s version of the Rimi War, Aladai, Coker, and their followers, armed with spears, are riddled with bullets and killed. The causes of the Rimi War makes the coloniser’s cave mentality conspicuous. The Africans had merely requested for reduced market taxes, introduction of European secular education and political reforms. Though the narrator does not explicitly claim the environmental alibi in the above instances, we have kept in mind Marlow’s doctor’s ‘theory’ about the changes that supposedly occur in the European psychology in Africa. In accordance with that theory, the heinous behaviours of Burwash, Rackham and Sangster should be attributed to the disconcerting effects of the African environment. In Cary’s Mister Johnson, the Commissioner, Rudbeck, sentences the eponymous Johnson to hang. Instead of sending him to the hangman as the law demands, Rudbeck decides to kill the man himself. After “blow[ing] his out” (1939: 225), Rudbeck walks away “not feeling any violent reaction. He is not overwhelmed with horror. On the contrary, he feels a peculiar 150 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh relief and escape….[…] He is insisting with the whole force of his obstinate nature that he has done nothing unusual, that he has taken the obvious, reasonable course” (225-6). The environmental cause of Rudbeck’s heartlessness, for instance, is captured by the narrator in a pun. Rudbeck comes to kill Johnson not wearing his usual hat, thus the narrator describes him as “hatless” (221). In our view, Rudbeck’s dressing without a hat and the narrator’s use of the word “hatless” have an environmental significance. First, that Rudbeck comes to do the killing not wearing a hat implies the African sun has gone into his head; it suggests the cave has entered his senses, thus his horrible murdering of Johnson. Second, the narrator’s use of the adjective “hatless” could be a deliberate pun for “heartless” signalling Rudbeck’s mood. The two readings reinforce each other to imply that the effects of the African sun makes the coloniser heartless. Such a reading makes the environmental rather than the archetypal case for the European’s psychology. Greene also records instances of the coloniser succumbing to the effects of the cave. In The Heart of the Matter, Wilson, the newly-arrived intelligence officer disguised as U.A.C. accountant, fights with Scobie over the latter’s wife. He tells Scobie that Louise is too good for him (Scobie); he provocatively admits kissing Louise, and attacks Scobie for sending her away “because you were afraid of me” (1948: 126). Scobie explicitly ascribes Wilson’s libidinal tension to the effects of the African sun on the newcomer: “You ought to wear a hat, Wilson,” Scobie says (126). Scobie’s caution implies that Wilson, like Rudbeck before he kills Johnson, is “hatless.” In other words, Greene’s narrator agrees with Cary’s that when the European does not wear a hat in Africa, the sun distorts his mental processes. Such a claim is a repetition of Marlow and his doctor’s position in Heart of Darkness. In a series of statements, Scobie emphasises his view that Wilson is new in Africa and is reacting badly to the climate. In response to more 151 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh provocations from Wilson, Scobie repeats the environmental mantra: “This is sun, Wilson, just sun;” “It [is] just a touch of sun” (126). When Wilson bizarrely begins to cry, out of anger, Scobie is adamant: “It’s the sun. Just the sun. Go and lie down” (127). According to Scobie, for “times out of mind during fifteen years” in Africa, he has witnessed Europeans behaving insanely because of the effects of the sun (126). If Fresleven’s environmentally-motivated attack on the African chief over two hens (Conrad 1994: 13) is absurd, Wilson’s quarrel with Harris over cockroach-hunting epitomises the supposed influence of the African environment on European sanity. Wilson and Harris, another European, are resident at Bedford Hotel in Sierra Leone. The hotel is so squalid that it is infested with cockroaches. There are cockroaches everywhere: on the walls of the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the wash-basin and at every imaginable place. Wilson and Harris decide to organise a nightly cockroach-hunting competition. They embark on a chaotic cockroach-killing expedition smearing the walls with the blood of the insects. They compete to see who will kill more cockroaches. When the two of them target the same cockroach, enmity erupts between them and a quarrels ensues. Upset, Wilson leaves the room “slam[ing] the door [so] hard behind him [that] the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock” (Greene 1948: 71). The narrator attributes Wilsons’s violent reaction to the effect of the heat: “His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpit” (71). In our view, quite apart from the heat- influenced bouts of rage, the very idea of a monthly cockroach-hunting competition with a silver-cup at stake (70) reflects environmentally-influenced insanity. The narrator seems to say that in Africa, the European finds himself in a zoo that is why he puts up bizarre behaviour. For two adults to fight over a cockroach in The Heart of the Matter seems worse than Fresleven losing his life over two hens in Heart of Darkness. 152 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh In Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, Marie’s behaviour is an example of environmentally- induced insanity. She is newly married to the controlling Rycker, an oil palm plantation manager in Congo. Her husband’s Catholic idiosyncrasies and the African climate make her hate her marriage and Africa. She meets Querry, a famous architect who has sought refuge in a Catholic leprosarium. Desperate to “escape from Rycker and Africa” (1961: 238-9), she accuses Querry of responsibility for her pregnancy. The lie leads to Rycker murdering Querry. Marie demonstrates psychological imbalance. She fantasises about Querry when having sexual liaisons with her husband whom she hates: “I didn’t want him. The only way I could manage was to shut my eyes and think it was you. It was then that the baby must have started. […] So in a way it is your child,” she tells Querry (1961: 236). The “tortuous logic of her argument” (236) reflects how the African environment precipitates psychological instability in the European. She does not like Africa: “I hate this place. I want to go home” (191). The only way to escape from Africa then is to get her husband to kill Querry, so that when he is imprisoned, she can escape. It is a bizarre psychology motivated by her hatred of Africa and desire to return home to Europe. In Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Resident Commissioner, Andrew Macmillan, is unable to control the African insurrection. Feeling defeated, he goes for a walk which takes him deeper and deeper into the thick forest till he is completely surrounded and lost. In that instance, he feels doubly defeated: first, by the Africans, and second, by the African jungle. Unable to free himself from the clutches of the trees and entanglements of the undergrowth, and unable to bear the thought of the jungle caging him, he suffers a psychological breakdown and shoots himself dead. Once again, the African cave enters the European and induces him to produce a primitive behaviour. To summarise this section, we have attempted to demonstrate the function: 153 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X]. Our argument has been that the narrator of the colonialist novel presents the presumed crudity of the African environment as the influential factor in the colonisers’ primitive psychology in Africa. We have said that whereas Haggard and Conrad demonstrate a tentative acknowledgment of the archetypal crudity of the human psychology, Cary, Greene and Monsarrat do not show any such acknowledgement. Generally, therefore, the colonialist writer suggests that the European produces barbaric behaviour in Africa because the African cave enters him and extinguishes his torch of civilisation. Concluding this chapter, it is our argument that in the colonialist novel each grammatical sentence has an inverse counterpart and that the interrelations of the pairs of sentences create the dioscuric structure. In that regard, our just ended discussion on the reversal of the African cave is the inverse counterpart of the coloniser’s original entry into the African cave, which we have already discussed. The two actions are the same and opposed creating the dioscuric parity. Our argument in the entire chapter has been an attempt to demonstrate the dioscuric logic between [Sentence (a): X enters the Cave] and its counterpart: [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X]. 154 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5.0 CHAPTER FIVE CAGING: TAMING THE ‘CAVE PEOPLE’ AND THE REVOLT OF THE CAVE In this chapter, we shall attempt to illustrate the relationship between another set of functions: [Sentence (b): X cages Y] and [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X]. Following the chiasmic logic of the previous chapter, the current chapter is organised in two parts. The first part discusses the methods by which the colonisers shackle the colonised. In other words, we shall examine how the coloniser sets up the structure of disempowerment through the employment of the machinery of caging to strip the colonised of their freedoms. The analysis in the first part of the chapter shall be done towards illustrating: [Sentence (b): X cages Y] with X being the coloniser and Y the colonised. The concept of caging, as we have already defined in our theoretical chapter, represents circumstances that inhibit a character from the free expression of his or her personhood, or from the use of resources that, by the unwritten laws of nature, rightfully belong to him or her. To be caged, therefore, is to be locked up in a disempowering situation. The second part of the chapter shall discuss the inverse of [Sentence (b)], that is, [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X]. In the second part of the chapter, therefore, we shall attempt to illustrate how the coloniser is trapped in Africa, and made to suffer disempowerment by the combined agency of the African environment, the vagaries of the climate. In the second part, therefore, we shall examine how the action of [Sentence (b)] undergoes a chiasmic reversal in [Sentence (b-1)] to maintain the dioscouric logic we have observed in the structure of the colonialist novel. The key cages to be discussed in this chapter are: political, physical, 155 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh psychological and psychosexual. We shall start our analysis by discussing [Sentence (b): X cages Y]. 5.1 [Sentence (b): X cages Y] 5.1.1 Political Caging: The commonest instance of caging we have discovered in the colonialist novel is political caging, and the African institution that suffers the immediate impact of political caging is kingship or chieftaincy. In order to enforce submission of the people, the European colonisers subvert the traditional African governance system by shackling the kings, and reducing them to mere servants and stooges of the Queen or King of England. The effect is that the African kings are subdued through the cognitive process of infantilisation, and caged in the nursery, while the Queen of England, through her comprehensive list of surrogates, rules. In many cases, the African kings are physically humiliated; those who confront the colonial machinery are eliminated outright. We shall examine a number of cases in which African kings are belittled and politically shackled. Haggard chooses not to invoke the image of the English queen as the colonising authority in She, yet the overpowering mother-principle – a distorted sense of queenship – is ever-present in his novel. The title of the novel itself, She, is a tribute to an overwhelmingly powerful mother- queen “who-must-be-obeyed” (1994: 86). The mother-queen essence pervades most colonialist novels. It comes in the image of the Queen of England, or by extension, her son, the King of England, who then becomes the father-king. The mother-queen/father-king principle works on two levels: biological and political. On the biological level, the emphasis is on the machinations of the ‘mother’ aspect of the dyad. This includes her process of infantilising the African kings and their peoples, and portraying them as nursery children who need the mother’s guidance and 156 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh protection. On the political level, the focus is on the ‘queen’ aspect of the mother-queen dyad, specifically her usurpation and exercising of the African kings’ political power through her surrogates. 5.1.1.1 The Mother-Aspect of the Mother-Queen Dyad and Cognitive Caging Biologically, the benevolent ‘mother-queen/father-king’ essence implies that all colonised African kings are merely children, “backward sons [who] will never quite grow up, [and] never really leave the nursery” (Monsarat 1956: 8). This representation of African royalty is a justification for colonisation on the rational basis that children cannot rule. As Andrew Macmillan, Resident Commissioner of Pharamaul, says in The Tribe That Lost Its Head: the Maulas are “Backward. Some of them just down from the trees. But we look after them, all right” (Monsarrat 1956: 20). When asked whether the Maulas are “capable of managing their own affairs” and whether “there [is] any sort of political advancement,” he answers: “You’ve got to forget all that stuff. They’re just simple, backward children. We look after them. […] They could never run their own country. …The future is a long way ahead. It may come: […] But not now” (Monsarrat 20, original emphasis). Sir Elliot Vere-Toombs, Governor of Pharamaul, re- echoes Macmillan when he says of the Maulas: “They are a backward lot… Occasionally they throw up a first-class man…[such as Dinamaula]. But basically, they are [savages]. They are very simple people. We will have to help them for a very long while” (Monsarrat 35). Identical statements are made in Cary’s The African Witch and Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. In the former novel, the racist head of the colonial police, Rackham, believes, “The blacks out here are not fit to run their own show, and it will be a long time before they learn. Meanwhile we’ve got to keep the machine running, and the only peaceful way of doing that is to support white prestige” (Cary 1936: 97). In the latter work, Mrs Bowles tells Helen Rolt that Scobie, the head 157 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of the Colonial Police in Sierra Leone, must return to his base because, “They [Africans] [wi]ll be murdering each other without him” (Greene 1948: 124). She implies the Africans are children who need the presence of a father-figure to ensure that sanity prevails in the ‘nursery’. Such a conviction explains the recurring image of the ‘child-’ or ‘boy-chief’ in the colonialist novel tradition. We shall examine specific examples of how the mother-queen, her surrogates, and their narrative constructs, the narrators’ voices, infantilise the African king. In Cary’s The African Witch, twenty-year old Aladai, heir-presumptive to the Rimi throne, is often referred to as a “boy” by the narrator (Cary 1936: 20, 72, 106, 187). To reinforce the infantile image of Aladai, Cary’s narrator projects Aladai’s hall as a nursery rather than a chief’s room. [T]he little sitting-room [was] furnished with a drawing-room suite in pink plush, a cottage piano with pink silk front, a carpet striped like a rainbow, a brass standard lamp with pink silk shade…. […] The curtains were of white lace tied with pink ribbons; the tablecloth was pink plush. The pictures, in large gilt frames, represented the King and Queen, King Edward, Queen Victoria,… and the young Queen – apparently Queen Victoria – at Buckingham Palace. (1936: 106) The overwhelming occurrence of pink in Aladai’s room suggests infantilisation, and a subtle sense of femininisation. The colour pink is habitually used to decorate children’s room, especially that of little girls. To foreground pink in Aladai’s room indicates emasculation, therefore. To make the representation of the nursery complete, pictures of Queen Victoria and King Edward hang on the walls metaphorically keeping an eye on Aladai. This re-echoes Mrs Bowles in The Heart of Matter: the mother-queen/father-king must keep an eye on the nursery, or the ‘children’ would be murdering each other. In Cary’s novel, the image of the benevolent 158 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh mother-queen is extended to Miss Judy Coote, Aladai’s ex-tutor at Oxford. She assumes the maternal role when she visits him in his pink room. Seeing the room childishly furnished, she feels “a new and slightly different kindness for Aladai – more protective; more maternal; deeper” (Cary 1936: 106). The nursery trope is present also in Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head. Twenty-two year old Dinamaula, heir-apparent to the Maula throne, is regarded as a little boy by the colonial authorities. Andrew Macmillan, Resident Commissioner, for instance, calls him, “Master Dinamaula” (Monsarrat 315, my emphasis), and summons him arrogantly for a sharp rebuke. When Dinamaula visits his farm, Llewellyn, the Agricultural Officer, is sent to keep an eye on him, prompting Dinamaula to protest: “I am no longer a child, to be spied on… – and followed” (Monsarrat 265). In the colonialist novel tradition, even the older kings, such as Cary’s Aliu, Emir of Rimi; and Monsarrat’s Regents: Seralo, Katsaula and Puero, are portrayed in infantile terms. For instance, Aliu is described as: “[A] little creature in pure gleaming white. He was like a pillow balanced on its bottom edge and carrying on its other a smaller, rounder pillow. Between the two a little black crescent, three inches long and two wide, could be seen. This was his eyes and the bridge of his nose – all that was left uncovered of the royal face” (Cary 1936: 73). Aliu’s description reflects the image of a tiny, newly-born baby freshly draped in white clothing for presentation as done in many African traditions. Just as Judy Coote patronises Aladai, Dryas Honeywood, also a young English woman, expresses motherly affection for the old Emir, and describes him rather condescendingly as, a “poor little thing!” She insists she can “pick up the little Emir, to console the poor little mite,” and “play with him” (Cary 73). In Monsarrat’s novel, Seralo, Katsaula and Puero, the old Regents of Pharamual, are also presented as infants. They are told by Andrew Macmillan that their mother is the Queen of England (Monsarrat 317); that it is she who determines how the Regents should behave. Evidently, the 159 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh representation of Aliu, Aladai, Dinamaula, Seralo, Katsaula and Puero is childish, and demonstrates the persistent infantilisation of the African king in the colonialist novel tradition. On the other hand, the posturing of the English women, Judy Coote and Dryas Honeywood, coupled with the symbolic evocation of the image of Queen Victoria, reflect the English mother- queen essence. Our reading coincides with the explicit statements by made by Andrew Macmillan and Governor Vere-Tombs in Monsarrat: that the African is merely a child who must be looked after. Our analysis, so far, exposes the sham of the benevolence of the mother-queen. The myth of the all-loving English mother-queen is created to deceive the African kings, and manipulate their cognitive processes so that they will behave as infants. Infantilisation, caging the African in the nursery, is therefore a key device in the generic machinery of colonisation. Its aim is to lull the senses of the African kings and their peoples so that they do not react to political caging. Underpinning the notion of infantilisation is cognitive caging: the suspicion and propaganda that the African intellectual is not intelligent enough to succeed at the highest level of academic pursuit. The educated African is, therefore, presented as intellectually bankrupt. Cognitive caging is a version of the nursery trope. In The African Witch and The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the presumed intellectual deficiency of Aladai and Dinamaula is raised on several occasions. Both Aladai and Dinamaula are sent to England to be educated at Oxford University, but both are presumed to have been unimpressive in their studies. While Aladai abandons his studies after two years (Cary 1936: 72), Dinamaula barely passes his law examination. According to the Permanent-Under Secretary for Colonial Affairs, “the Oxford career [of Dinamaula] was far from brilliant, and he only just scraped a pass degree” (Monsarrat 33). He is quick to add, though, that “the same could be said of a lot of us” (33). In our view, the 160 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Permanent-Under Secretary’s alibi – that “the same could be said of a lot of us” – is quite insightful. It exposes the injustices and biases involved in colonialism. If “the same could be said of a lot of us,” that is, if a lot of the people in the colonial service leave school with weak passes, but are nevertheless entrusted with the office of Empire, what then is the justification for denying Dinamaula and Aladai their rightful inheritances as kings of their respective peoples? In our view, the assumption that Aladai and Dinamaula are intellectual bankrupt stems from the coloniser’s discomfort with the realisation that the African intellectual is equal with the European. The charge of intellectual inferiority seems, therefore, a spurious smear meant to discredit the emerging African intellectual. 5.1.1.2 The Queen-Aspect of the Mother-Queen Dyad and Political Caging We shall now examine the ‘queen’ aspect of the mother-queen dyad as it affects African kingship. The enforcement of the structures of disempowerment (Kubayanda 1990) by the British Empire inevitably leads to the usurpation of the authority of the ‘deposed’ African kings. The English queen then becomes the focal point of the Africans’ political consciousness. We shall try to examine the significance of the concept of ‘queen’ in the political life of the following African kings: Haggard’s Billali, Conrad’s Congo kings, Cary’s Aliu and Aladai, and Monsarrat’s Regents and Dinamaula. The image of the foreign queen looms large, and towers above the African king in the colonialist novel. In Haggard’s She, political authority is centralised in the person of Ayesha, the foreign queen. Billali, Father of the Amahagger tribe, is merely a servant of Ayesha. His only role is to relay information from Ayesha to the Amahagger, and to do errands for Ayesha. He is completely caged by the all-seeing, all-knowing, Ayesha. In The African Witch, Emir Aliu has to seek approval from the Resident Commissioner, Burwash, on any important decision. He cannot 161 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh even appoint a successor without Burwash’s approval. In the same novel, the presence of the pictures of Queen Victoria, King Edward and the Kaiser on the walls of Aladai suggests psychological subservience to the queen. It is significant that Queen Victoria’s picture appears beside King Edward’s. The pictorial arrangement seeks to highlight the centrality and immortality of the matriarch who persists, and continues to rule through King Edward, her son. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Seralo, Katsaula and Puero cannot take any decisions unless they are approved by Andrew Macmillan, the Resident Commissioner and the English queen’s surrogate. The overwhelming essence of the ‘queen’ aspect of the mother-queen dyad permeates the entire fibre of the colonialist novel and dictates the policy of political caging. Macmillan, for example, tells the Maula Regents and people that he will ask their “mother the Queen” to delay the enthronement of Dinamaula. The narrator makes it explicit that, “‘your mother the Queen’ meant Queen Victoria, their true mother, enshrined perpetually in love and honour” (Monsarrat 317). The narrator continues, “Even the smallest Maula child knew [the mother-queen] was the far-off queen whom the Great Maula had visited long ago,…swearing loyalty, making safe their lives forever” (317). Perhaps, the most profound claim by the narrator in connection with the mother-queen is that, “Maula the Great [the first King of the Maulas] was dead, but the old Queen still lived on (it was said), and still loved them, and still bore children who sometimes visited them, as a pledge of protection” (317). The narrator’s claim constructs a mythopoetic, almost deified, image for Queen Victoria. While the obviously mortal African King, the Great Maula, is long dead, Queen Victoria, “it [i]s said,” still lives. It is significant to note that Monsarrat’s representation of Queen Victoria as an immortal queen strikingly coincides with Haggard’s portrayal of Ayesha, the immortal Queen of the Amahagger. Just as Ayesha “[i]s 162 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh rumoured” to give birth to a female child from generation to generation to replace herself (Haggard 1994: 92), the ‘immortal’ Queen Victoria, “[i]s said” to keep procreating and sending her children to protect the Maula from time to time (Monsarrat 1956: 317). In view of their parallel representations, we shall argue for a mythopoetic diffusion of the two queens: that Queen Victoria is cast in the image of the mythical Ayesha. The mythopoetic diffusion of Ayesha and Victoria is increased by the mythical concepts applied to them. They are both immortal, perpetually fertile, unceasingly procreative and reincarnating, that is, they live on, and rule by proxy through their offspring. The mythopoetic logic of Haggard’s and Monsarrat’s representations of the queens is reinforced linguistically by the two writers’ adoption of a parallel rhetoric. Haggard’s clauses: “it [i]s reported,” “it [i]s rumoured” (that Ayesha is immortal) (Haggard 1994: 92) is grammatically and semantically parallel to Monsarrat’s clause: “it [i]s said” (that Queen Victoria still lives) (Monsarrat 317). The subjunctive clauses, “it [i]s reported,” “it is rumoured,” and “it [i]s said,” are used to a mythical effect in the context of the two novels. The clauses render the presumed inexhaustible powers of the queens neither factual nor fictional. That they are immortal, perpetually fertile, forever procreative and progressively reincarnating is a body information that simultaneously demonstrates fiction and fact, providing an instance of, what Karen Ferreira-Myers calls, ‘faction’ (Ferreira-Myers 2015: 135). The narratives about the powers of the two queens are presented as African myths – an inerasable body of information perpetually etched on the consciousness of the Africans. The coloniser then exploits the mythical image of the queens to arrogate for him- or herself the license to take arbitrary and unpopular decisions, including the political caging of Billali and Dinamaula. In spite of their mythopoetic diffusion, there is differentiation between the two monarchs. First, Queen Victoria is merely mythicized. She is not a mythical being. Ayesha, on the other 163 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh hand, is a mythical being. She defies all the laws of nature: she is undying and lives for over two thousand years. Second, while Monsarrat’s narrator presents the former as loving and benevolent, Haggard’s Holly portrays the latter as a ruthless dictator who murders her subjects. In the context of our analysis, however, there is hardly a distinction between the two queens. Both Ayesha and Queen Victoria are colonisers who cage the African kings politically and usurp their authority. For instance, Ayesha not only imposes a foreign rule on the Amahagger, she also denigrates their culture: “Arabian am I by birth, even ‘al Arab al Ariba, an Arab of Arabs” (Haggard 1994: 144). Of the Amahagger, she says: “[S]peak not to me of my people [the Amahagger], these slaves are no people of mine, they are but dogs to do my bidding…; and as for their customs, I have naught to do with them” (150). Under Ayesha’s rule, therefore, the traditional Amahagger governance system is subverted. Traditionally, the Amahagger are organised on tribal lines with each tribe or household ruled by a patriarch who bears the title, ‘Father’ (92-93). Billali is the Father of the tribe we encounter in the novel. With seven thousand individuals in his tribe (84), Billali is revered, and carried around in a palanquin. However, Ayesha imposes a superstructure over the traditional Amahagger political organisation so that Billali is reduced to a mere servant. In Ayesha’s presence, Billali and his subjects are not differentiated: they all go on their hands and knees and crawl like animals. For example, in approaching Ayesha’s cave, Billali cautions Holly: “Down, my son; …down on to thy hands and knees. We enter the presence of She, and if thou art not humble, of a surety she will blast thee where thou standest” (137-8). Our case of political caging is better illustrated in the light of the fact that, while Billali crawls before Ayesha, the English men, Holly, Leo and Job, walk upright. The African king is totally subdued. The case of Billali’s crawling before Ayesha is not an isolated one. As we have pointed 164 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh out, Ayesha and Queen Victoria are unified in their political caging of the African kings, thus the surrogates of Queen Victoria also force African kings to crawl. An occurrence is seen in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Kurtz installs himself ‘king’ over the chiefs of Congo. He grants audience to the African chiefs who come to him crawling on all fours (Conrad 1994: 83). Kurtz wields so much power that the Africans “would not stir till Mr. Kurtz gave word” (83). Psychoanalytically, the crawling of Billali and the Congo kings is a re-enactment of the nursery trope discussed earlier. In Cary’s The African Witch, the Emir of Rimi, Aliu, is politically caged by Resident Commissioner Burwash, another surrogate of the English queen. The Emir cannot choose a successor without Burwash’s approval neither can he exercise political authority – as in his attempt to exile Aladai and Sale from Rimi – without support from the Resident Commissioner. When he applies for a raise in his monthly allowance, he is refused by Paxton (Cary 1936: 78). Burwash uses monetary tokens to manipulate Aliu’s decisions. Thus, Aliu is doubly shackled: politically and financially. We have attempted to examine political caging from the perspectives of the biological and political roles of the conceptual ‘mother-queen’ dyad. We realise from our analysis that the benevolent ‘mother’-aspect of the dyad, first, imposes a cognitive cage in which the African king is treated as a child. Second, the queen-aspect of the dyad imposes a political cage stripping the African king of his political power and ruling in his stead through her surrogates. We realise, therefore, that the projection of a double personality for the English monarch, as ‘mother-queen’, is a narrative device aimed at producing double caging of the African king. 5.1.2 Physical Caging With the African kings emasculated, and political control vested in the hands of the coloniser, the African peoples are left to the physical shackling machinations of the colonial 165 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh administration. In this sub-section of our study, we shall examine how the coloniser erects physical barriers to impede the freedom of the colonised Africans. The notion of physical caging captures the impediments the coloniser puts in the way of Africans to hinder their physical and social mobility. It includes the physical harm done to African peoples as well as the measures designed to inhibit the Africans’ social development and expression of their humanity. We shall examine the cases of Haggard’s fictional Amahagger people of South Eastern Africa, Conrad’s Congo people, Cary’s Rimi folk in Nigeria, Greene’s leprosarium inmates in Congo and Monsarrat’s fictional Maula of South Western African. 5.1.2.1 Physical Caging in Haggard and Conrad: In Haggard’s She, Ayesha cages the Amahagger physically in a labyrinth of caves so that they are cut off from the rest of the world and civilisation. According to Billali: “No man had ever known or heard of white strangers arriving in the country of the People of the Rocks [the Amahagger country]. Sometimes, though rarely, black men had come here, and from them they had heard of the existence of men much whiter than themselves, who sailed on the sea in ships” (Haggard 86). Ustane, the brave Amahagger girl, corroborates Billali’s assertion, and confirms that apart from the caves, there is also the swampland which increases the levels of elements that separate the Amahagger from civilisation. “They [the Amahagger] had no connection with any other race, indeed none lived near them, or were able to thread the vast swamps. […] The marshes…were absolutely impassable except to those who knew the paths…” (Haggard 93). Holly also admits: “it would be quite impossible for us to find our way across the network of marshes which, stretching for scores and scores of miles, formed a stronger and more impassable fortification round the various Amahagger households than any that could be built or designed by Man” (Haggard 165-66). In other words, the Amahagger are physically caged behind a cosmic 166 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh membrane formed by the elemental earth (the great caves) and water (the swamps). The caging of the Amahagger in the dark caves, and the people’s inability to access the outer world and civilisation, is reminiscent of Plato’s allegory of the Cave in The Republic (Book 7). Like Plato’s cave, the physical caging of the Amahagger has psychological implications for the people. Imprisoned in the dark tombs of a dead civilisation, the Amahagger do not see any other reality except the savagery, cannibalism and violence that happen in the cave, and what diktats Ayesha sends from time to time. Their physical caging therefore implies a limited view of the world, and therefore, psychological caging. Their point of reference for the whole universe is the extremely narrow perspective of life in the caves, a life dominated by Ayesha’s brutal rule. In a typical Platonic style, “every stranger who had ever come into the country [obviously carrying information from the outside world] … had been put to death” (Haggard 87), so that the Amahagger are perpetually kept in psychological darkness. Their caged psychology is exposed by the fact that they do not know of the existence of white people when in fact their own queen, Ayesha, is an extremely white woman. That “she [Ayesha] was very rarely seen, perhaps once in two or three years, …and when seen was muffled up in a big cloak, so that nobody could look upon her face” (Haggard 92), is symbolic of their cognitive deficiency. The mental retardation of the Amahagger is inevitable because it is persistently induced, and strictly enforced by Ayesha as a tool of control. For instance, she uproots the tongue of her servants and guards, and destroys their hearing so that nobody is able to communicate or report on her atrocities. She is deliberate in her decision to impose a total physical and psychological cage on the Amahagger. She admits, “[M]y girls… are mutes[;]…deaf are they and dumb, and therefore the safest of servants, save to those who can read their faces and their signs. I bred them so…; […] I have triumphed” (Haggard 151). Ayesha’s fixation with psychological caging is seen in other utterances, such as: 167 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh “[I rule] by terror. My empire is of the imagination” (172) which claim is well demonstrated in the elaborate forms of sensory mutilations and cognitive blockades she imposes on the Amahagger people. Ayesha’s psychological caging of the Amahagger leads Russell Forster, for instance, to suggest, in his Mapping European Empire, that “Ayesha clings to her crown not through actual power but the image of power” (2015: 17). We find Forster’s claim only partially true. In fact, Ayesha wields actual physical and military power in addition to “a representation of supreme sovereignty” (Forster 2015: 17, original emphasis). Not only does she overwhelm the national imagination of the Amahagger with her psychic powers, she also controls them militarily and physically. She has a standing army and a team of trained torturers and executioners whose job it is to kill people who are deemed to have disobeyed her. She asks: “How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding…” (Haggard 173). In addition to the army, she wields electro-psychic powers that enable her to blast her victims from a distance. We are twice given a demonstration of her psychic powers in the novel. On the first occasion, she strikes Ustane “lightly upon the head with her hand[,] …and …there upon her hair,…were three finger-marks white as snow” (200). Holly calls Ayesha’s act a “dreadful manifestation of inhuman power” (200). The second occasion is when Ayesha is confronted by Ustane over Leo. This time: “she only drew herself up, stretched out her arm,…and appeared to look fixedly at her victim. Even as she did so Ustane put her hands to her head, uttered one piercing scream, turned around twice, and then fell backwards with a thud – …she was stone dead – blasted into death by some mysterious electric agency…whereof the dread She had command” (218). Thus, contrary to Forster’s claim, we observe that physical and psychological caging buttressed by military coercion are closely intertwined in Ayesha’s logic. The two forms of caging are inseparable in a scenario that resembles the physical shackling and 168 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh cognitive caging in Plato’s atavistic cave. Conrad’s treatment of physical caging does not differ from Haggard’s. In Heart of Darkness just as in She, there is an extreme use of the military to enforce physical and psychological shackling. The first recording of physical caging in Conrad’s novel occurs when a French war ship bombards an African village. Marlow sees the attack as a senseless act of violence. He reports, “There wasn’t even a shed there, and she [the war ship] was shelling the bush” (Conrad 1994: 20). The claim that the poor African villagers are enemies is exposed by Marlow as farcical. Marlow’s view that the attack is unnecessary is supported by Adam Hochschild. In King Leopold’s Ghost, Hochschild provides a hugely historical account of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and of colonialism in Congo generally. One of Hochschild’s theses is that: “Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book [Heart of Darkness] has as literature,… what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of ‘the actual facts of the case’: King Leopold’s Congo in 1890” (1999: 143). According to Hochschild, when Henry Morton Stanley arrived in Congo in the 1890s, he recognised immediately that the people were “not a military threat:…their spears and arrows and decrepit muskets [were] no match for his new, breech-loading Snider rifles” (1999: 62). In other words, the fictional attack on the African villages as reported by Marlow is an unnecessary demonstration of European military supremacy designed to cow the Africans into submission. It is an instance of physical caging. In a similar vein, Africans are imprisoned arbitrarily, and forced to labour under a foreign penal system whose demands they hardly understand. Marlow calls the colonial justice system “an outraged law,…an insoluble mystery from the sea” (Conrad 22-23). He provides a description of the wretched physical condition of a group of six African criminals who are chained together and condemned to hard labour. 169 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. […] [E]ach had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. […] Behind this raw material one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. …[S]eeing a white man on the path, [he] hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. (22-23) The above passage exemplifies another instance of physical caging. There is the suspicion that the men are wrongfully incarcerated so that they can be used as beasts of burden to provide free labour for the colonisers’ economic activity. Marlow exposes the fraud inherent in the justice system when he says: “…these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies” (22). The label, “enemies,” which justifies the dehumanisation and use of excessive violence against the men is seen by Marlow as spurious. An important instrument in the caging of Africans is the African stooge – typically, the African policeman – who enforces the structures of disempowerment and dehumanisation. Marlow gives us an example of the African stooge: the gun-wielding African policeman who strolls behind the chain-gang (22). The role of the colonial African police in Conrad’s novel brings into focus the historical Force Publique, the notorious Belgian military-police which was the central tool of control in colonial Congo. According to Hochschild, the Force Publique was variously “counterguerilla troops, an army of occupation, and a corporate labor police force” (1999: 123). Paradoxically, the African members of the colonial police force were themselves caged. In Marlow’s story, the African policeman walks “despondently,” and on seeing a white 170 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh man hoists his rifle “with alacrity” (Conrad 1994: 23, my emphasis). The two pieces of action by the African policeman do not tally. There is a sudden and illogical shift in his posturing from the nonchalance associated with lack of motivation to a sudden alertness. He puts on a façade merely to impress his white employers. Indirectly, the African policeman seems as caged as the incarcerated Africans over whom he exercises brutal control. According Hochschild, Belgian colonialism in Congo was so horrible that even members of the Force Publique were indirectly slaves because they were severely abused by their white commanders (1999: 128-9). In another instance of physical caging, Marlow reports of a group of Africans who are contracted – or were they conscripted? – by the Belgian colonisers to build a railway across the mountain. Marlow stumbles upon their resting place, and describes it as a “gloomy circle of some Inferno” (Conrad 24). Most of the labourers come to this resting place either to recover from the physical tortures of overwork – or simply to die. Marlow provides a vivid account of the physical condition of the labourers as follows: Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth,… in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. […] The work was going on. …And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. (24) Hochschild comments on the historical railroad that might have inspired Conrad’s railway scene in Heart of Darkness. According to Hochschild, King Leopold II of Belgium’s dream of annexing all the important mineral-producing areas of Congo is the reason why he financed 171 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Henry Stanley’s 1879 expedition to Congo. The contractual terms between King Leopold and Stanley stipulates, among other things, that Stanley will construct a road: through the rugged Crystal Mountains – a precursor to a railway. Over this road porters would carry several steamboats broken down into small pieces, which Stanley would later assemble and use to travel upstream, building a chain of trading stations along the thousand-mile navigable main stretch of the Congo River. […] Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory. (1999: 63-64) Incidentally, Marlow speaks of ivory as the raw material that defines the dream of most colonisers in Congo. The trade in ivory is typified by Kurtz. The physical exploitation of the railway labourers is therefore in the service of Hegelian-type of economic exploitation. One of the most hazardous tasks of the railway-building project in Conrad’s novel is the blasting of rocks. Marlow laments the purposelessness of the exercise: “They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on” (Conrad 22). Clearly, Marlow sees the rock-blasting as a senseless exercise that achieves nothing except endanger the lives of the labourers. Hochschild’s historical report confirms Conrad’s fictional rock-blasting scene. According to Hoschschild, Stanley’s African labourers nicknamed him Bula Matadi meaning ‘Breaker of Rocks’, an apparent reference to Stanley’s ruthless overworking and abuse of the African labour force. Stanley himself attributes the nickname to the occasion when he taught the Africans how to use the sledgehammer and dynamite to crack huge boulders as he constructed a trail through the Crystal Mountains (1999: 68). Whatever the occasion for the name, ‘Bula Matadi’ points to corvée, and therefore, physical caging of the Africans. Stanley’s own writings expose his colonialist mindset: “Every cordial- 172 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh faced aborigine whom I meet…, I look upon…with much of the same regard that an agriculturist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-labourers” (Hochs- child 1999: 68). To the coloniser, therefore, the African population provides a ready source of free labour to be exploited and abused. In a recent study, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896 – 1913, Dean Pavlakis attempts to provide colonial justifications for forced labour in Congo. According to Pavlakis: The reasons given by Europeans for the necessity of forced labor ranged from the grimly practical to the socially progressive. For example, Africans’ forced labour would pay for services of European governments, such as suppression of intra- African wars and slave-raids, road-building, and port improvement. Many Europeans also felt that African culture needed to adapt to a world without warfare by adopting a new gender division of labor: forced labor for African men would reduce the slave- like burden of African women by imposing a European domestic model, where men would be wage-earners and providers supporting women whose first responsibility would be to raise children and make home while supplementing male wages by gardening or selling goods at the market. If the current inhabitants could not see this, compulsory labor would teach them. (2015: 15-16) In our view, these are not altruistic justifications. Rather, they expose the economic mindset of the coloniser. In any case, African social organisation differs from European social arrangements so the objective to forcibly adapt African culture to the European domestic model is untenable. Perhaps the most horrifying instance of physical caging in Heart of Darkness is produced by Kurtz. In recent studies, Kurtz’s recrudescence has been compared to figures in fiction and history. In Modernism and the Aesthetic of Violence, Paul Sheehan strikes a resemblance 173 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh between Kurtz and Dorian Gray. He emphasises their “lethal charisma” and “pathological magnetism” whose “kingdom of death is tied to [their] own powerful personalit[ies]” (2013: 163). Other commentators such as Germain Tshibambe and Kenneth Omeje have chosen to trace the historical origins of the fictional Kurtz. In their essay, “Rentier Politics and Low Intensity Conflict in the DRC,” Tshibambe and Omeje are explicit in their claim that “Kurtz as a fictional character is represented historically by true personages like King Leopold II of Belgium” (2008: 136). Adam Hochschild also sees Kurtz as a fictional composite of many historical colonisers, supporting Marlow’s claim that: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Conrad 71). In Hochschild’s view, the possible candidates for the character of Kurtz are: Georges Antoine Klein, Edmond Barttelot, Arthur Hodister and Captain Leon Rom of the Force Publique. The character of each of these men is believed to have contributed to Conrad’s conceptualisation of Kurtz, meaning Kurtz is not entirely fictional. To grasp the personality of Kurtz, therefore, we may have to trace his historical prototypes. George Antoine Klein was a French ivory-agent in Congo. He fell very ill and died on the steamer, Roi de Belges, when Conrad was piloting the craft downstream. Conrad was captaining the boat on behalf of the substantive captain who was ill himself. Edmond Barttelot belongs to Henry Stanley’s Emin Pasha Expedition. He was the commander of the rear column of the expedition, but lost his mind and killed lots of people before he was killed. Arthur Hodister was Belgian and famous for his huge harem of African women as well as his aggressive appropriation of huge stores of ivory. He antagonised the local people with his violent craving for ivory, and was murdered. Leon Rom was a Belgian colonial officer and commander of the Force Publique in Congo. He is reported to have carried out a punitive military action against so-called African ‘rebels’ around the Stanley Falls in 1895. A British journalist who witnessed the event filed the following report: “Many women and children 174 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house” (Hochschild 1999: 144-45). Though this incident happened five years after Conrad had left Congo, Hochschild believes, its wide circulation in the media might have influenced Conrad in his design of the character of Kurtz. The fictional Kurtz himself is as lethal as the amalgamation of all his prototypes, if not more so. According to Marlow: “there was something wanting in him – some […] deficiency….” (Conrad 83). Kurtz exploits the pre-existing enmity and tension among the neighbouring tribes to instigate tribal wars for the sole purpose of looting ivory tusks. Those who resist his machinations are labelled ‘rebels’, massacred, and their heads placed on stakes around his house in the historical Leon Rom-style. Marlow describes the horror of the heads placed round Kurtz’s house. They were “black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids – …head[s] that seemed to sleep at the top of th[ose] pole[s] and, with the[ir] shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth” (82). In our view, Kurtz’s display of the heads is a psychological ploy designed to reinforce his physical caging machinery. It is a ploy used by other vicious colonisers such as Ayesha. By putting the heads on the stakes, he inadvertently re-states Ayesha in She: “[I rule] by terror. My empire is of the imagination” (Haggard: 172). The heads are meant to send traumatic signals to the Africans to weaken their resolve to resist, an instance of psychological caging. Marlow provides hints that point to the psychological implication of the heads. In his words, “These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; […] – food for thought…” (82). Marlow could not have used a more appropriate language to present his view of the spectacle. Symbolism – conceptual representation – is a hugely psychological phenomenon, the “food for thought” metaphor is therefore indicative. Kurtz seems to make a statement with the heads: ‘any African who plans to disobey me should look at these heads’. The heads therefore provide food for 175 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh thought for the Africans, indeed. Our present analysis attempts to illustrate that in Conrad as in Haggard, the coloniser employs psychological mechanisms to reinforce his or her physical caging agenda. The close linkage between physical caging and psychological caging makes it imperative to discuss the two together. In providing the foregoing analysis, we have merely used Hochschild’s and Tshibambe and Omeje’s historical accounts to expose the severity of physical caging as might have been seen by Conrad. The validity of our approach seeks support in Conrad himself who admits that: “Heart of Darkness is experience…pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case” (qtd in Hochschild 1999: 143). 5.1.2.2 Physical Caging in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat: While physical caging in Haggard and Conrad, as we have just attempted to demonstrate, is militarily- and psychologically-enforced, the phenomenon is enforced socially through racial segregation in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat. We shall now examine physical caging in Cary’s The African Witch, Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case and Monsarrat’s The Tribe that Lost Its Head. In Cary’s novel, the tone of segregation is set in the very first few sentences: AN AWKWARD INCIDENT took place at Rimi races. Rimi races are always popular in Nigeria… Great crowds of natives attend, and many white people. Sometimes there are thirty whites. It is usual, for convenience, to reserve the paddock for invited guests, and in practice this arrangement excludes all natives except a few magnates like the Emir and his Ministers. The Emir of Rimi has never attended the races, but he is always represented. On this occasion, three of his chief officers…took up their places at one side of the enclosure…and remained there conversing among themselves for the rest of the day. They were an ornament to the occasion. (Cary 1936: 15, my emphasis) 176 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The above extract is self-evident of segregation. Social intercourse between African peoples and Europeans is aborted. The narrator is explicit on the fact that the social “arrangement excludes all natives.” The African dignitaries who are invited into the European enclosure are actually caged. They are bundled to the fringes of the paddock, and left there to interact among themselves till the end of the programme. The narrator is emphatic: “They were an ornament to the occasion.” The reference to ornamentation is indicative of the dismissive attitude of the Europeans towards the African dignitaries. The physical caging of the African chiefs and masses reflects the Europeans’ lack of respect for the African political institution and African peoples. The attempt by the two African young men, Coker and Oxford scholar, Aladai, to breach the imposed cage elicits verbal and physical responses from the Europeans. Verbally, there are raucous reactions such as: “Kick them out” (Cary 1936: 17) and “They ought to be put down and beaten. That’s the only way to teach such brutes!” (15) Physically, “Two young bankers…, and a soldier, stood planted opposite them, like dogs about to spring. Rackham [head of the colonial Police], too, wanted to do something violent – to inflict public humiliation on the pair” (17). Escalation of the confrontation is averted only when Judy Coote, Aladai’s ex-tutor at Oxford, escorts Aladai and Coker out of the European enclosure. Judy Coote’s singular act of diplomatic intervention diffuses the tension. In our view, however, her intervention is very much a part of the colonial caging machinery. She merely uses tact instead of force to push the Africans out of the European area. The objective of her intervention is no different from the proposed forcible ejection of the Africans. Both methods are designed to enforce the structures of disempowerment and physical caging. There are two instances of physical caging in Cary and Monsarrat that are closely related. We have already commented on the similarity in the academic backgrounds of Aladai and 177 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Dinamaula, protagonists in The African Witch and The Tribe That Lost Its Head respectively. The resemblance between the two characters goes beyond their royalty and Oxford education. They encounter similar caging conditions in their respective countries. The two princes become anglicised as a result of their British education. They leave Africa as little boys, and return as grown men. In effect, they become hybridised Africans demonstrating conspicuous European sensibilities and tastes. Unable to socialise with fellow Africans, Aladai and Dinamaula crave for European company. For example, Aladai invites himself to the Rimi Scotch Club, an exclusively European social club. His presence at the club is seen as an effrontery. As a result, the Europeans desert the premises. He is left sitting alone in the middle of the ring of chairs like a circus animal. According to the narrator, “The ring of chairs was in fact very like a circus,” (Cary 1936: 121), and Aladai a circus “ape” (120). As the Europeans withdraw into their homes, and peep out of their windows at Aladai’s forlorn figure sitting at the centre of the ring, Aladai represents the quintessential caged animal. He feels so caged that he is unable to rise and leave or sit comfortably. This humiliation occurs at a place appropriately named as “Oxford Circus” (115), as reference to Aladai’s education. The colonial discomfort with the emerging African intellectual is discernible in the narrative voice. The abandoning of Aladai reflects the treatment meted out to the African chiefs at the Rimi races. Dryas Honeywood, who stumbles upon the forlorn Aladai sums up the European attitude: “I nearly ran away. I simply can’t get used to black men – socially, I mean” (123). In Monsarrat’s novel, Dinamaula faces worse forms of physical caging. In the story, ordinary Africans are not sold alcohol in Pharamaul. Only the chiefs are allowed to buy alcohol, but they do so with a caveat: that they do not drink with the Europeans in the public bar. African chiefs are supposed to go into “a private room, out of sight,” (Monsarrat 1956: 171). In effect, 178 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh they are to be served only in the cage. It is against this background that Dinamaula is invited by Tulbach Browne, an English journalist, to a drink at the Gamate Hotel bar. He is refused a drink “because he’s not allowed in here” (170). He will be served only on the condition that he go into the humiliating ‘cage’ – the private room – which he refuses to do. We suggest that even though Dinamaula refuses to go into the private room, he still does not escape the cage entirely. His humiliating dismissal from the public bar is in itself an act of physical caging. Exiling is another form of physical caging both Aladai and Dinamaula experience. The former is removed from Rimi, and sent to Kifi to live with the European missionary, Dr. Schlemm, in order to avert a tribal war. Dinamaula is also exiled from Gamate, his ancestral home, and kept under house arrest in the colonial capital, Port Victoria. He is eventually removed from Pharamaul altogether, and sent away to England with little hope of returning. In both instances of exiling, the African princes are removed from their political strongholds and placed under European supervision. For instance, by sending Aladai, with an all-female European entourage – Mrs Vowls, Judy Coote and Dryas Honeywood – to stay with Dr. Schlemm, the coloniser seeks to achieve parental caging of a ‘stubborn child’. The missionary school at Kifi was Aladai’s formative school; Dr. Schlemm his childhood teacher. Sending the adult Aladai back to the school to live with Dr. Schlemm again represents sending him to be caged in the ‘nursery’ by the European father-king, a variation of the mother-queen concept already discussed. Apart from Dr. Schlemm, the all-pervading mother-queen figure is present also in the persons of the European female triad that accompanies him to Kifi. That the trip is organised as a holiday is merely a subterfuge to send Aladai into the physical cage. The caging machinery is carefully crafted. The trip is organised by Resident Commissioner Burwash, sponsored by the priest, Dr. Schlemm, and patronised by an all-female coloniser triad: Mrs 179 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Vowls, Judy Coote and Dryas Honeywood. Aladai is, therefore, circumscribed on all sides by the father-king and mother-queen surrogates. It is a cage he can hardly escape. Predictably, his refusal to stay in the Kifi cage results in fatalities. On his return to Rimi, he is killed by the colonial administration. The story seems to suggest that the African’s refusal to accept the colonial cage leads to only one outcome: violent elimination. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Dinalmaula, just as Aladai, is eliminated through exiling. He is tricked into leaving Gamate, and is put under house arrest in Port Victoria. Resident Commissioner, Macmillan, tells the protesting Regents who demand Dinamaula’s release: “Let’s get this straight! Dinamaula is not coming back! Make up your minds” (Monsarrat 1956: 339). He reiterates his intention to keep Dinamaula: “The chief will not return, and he will not be proclaimed, until I am satisfied that order has been restored in Gamate” (340). Dinamaula protests and provides his perspective on his unjustifiable incarceration: “I live in this room. I cannot talk to my people, I cannot succeed as chief. I have to report to the police once every day. If I travel, Mr. Bracken or Mr. Llewellyn or Mr. Brownrigg will accompany me. I await orders from the Governor as to what I may do next. What lead can I give?” (394) When he is removed from Gamate, Dinamaula is escorted by Llewellyn, the Agricultural and Livestock Officer. That the Resident Commissioner chooses the Agricultural and Livestock Officer to escort Dinamaula – instead of the Political Officer (Bracken), or Chief of Police (Crump), or District Commissioner (Forsdick) – has a zoological implication. It suggests an animalistic representation of Dinamaula, the implied ‘livestock’. Such a representation is consistent with the portrayal of African chiefs in the colonialist novel tradition. Emir Aliu is represented variously as a “performing cat” in a circus (Cary 1936: 175) and “house-tortoise” (175); Aladai is a swollen-headed “ape” (120) and Dinamaula “the District Commissioner’s dog” (Monsarrat 1956: 180 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 325). Also, Gotwela, the U-Maula chief, is “something out of a zoo” (159) while Billali, the Amahagger chief (Haggard 1994: 137), and Marlow’s chiefs of Congo (Conrad 1994: 83) are reduced to crawling creatures. Dinamaula’s animalistic representation therefore reinforces the zoological image of the African chief in the colonialist novel tradition. As an ‘animal’ placed in a physical cage, he is easily removed from Pharamaul, when he is sent away to England. Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case represents another novel with an elaborate layering of physical caging. In the work, an entire class of people, the lepers, experience comprehensive physical shackling. First, the geographical location of the Catholic-operated leprosarium suggests physical caging. The leprosarium is situated in a space that approximates our cave-city concept discussed in chapter four. Basically, it is an archaic environment which is fitted with a semblance of social amenities, such as a hospital, church, and in the surrounding towns, an oil palm plantation, hotel, laboratory and brewery. To access some of these facilities from the leprosarium, one has to travel for days through the thick forest, and cross huge rivers. To capture its crudity, the narrator describes the environment in terms of geological time. The space imposes physical restraint on the inhabitants – both African and European. The Africans are more restrained than the Europeans, however, by the fact of their diseases and the impossibility of penetrating the forest on foot. The Europeans enjoy mechanised mobility: they have cars and bicycles which facilitate their mobility. They are therefore able to access the port to receive imports, letters and supplies while the Africans are stuck in their little huts. The caging of the Africans is typified by the case of a dying old cured leper who believes one should not travel far from home if one is old. In his worldview, “One should die in one’s own village if it is possible” (54). Unfortunately for him, he will die in a squalid leprosarium far away from home. He is so eager to leave the leprosarium that he will walk home, if he can, but admits “[my legs] will not 181 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh carry me…” (54). He cannot even be transported by road because he is too weak to stand the rigours of the odious journey through the thick forest. In this instance, the leprosarium becomes a physical cage. All the inmates feel trapped. Another example of the caged African is Deo Gratias, the most visible African in Greene’s novel. He is the epitome of a ‘burnt-out case’ – a person on whom the disease has taken its fullest toll. He has no fingers and no toes, for instance. All the soft parts of his body have been eaten away by the disease. He walks very awkwardly on his stumps. Like the dying Old Man, Deo Gratias wants to escape from the prison-like routine of the leprosarium. In spite of the good intentions of the Catholic priests who run the leprosarium, conditions are filthy and dehumanising. We shall provide an example of the dehumanising conditions the Africans suffer at the leprosarium. When Querry, the famous European architect, travels with Deo Gratias, the former sleeps in a mosquito-net-protected camp-bed in the bucket of the truck while Deo Gratias “settl[es] himself for the night under the belly of the truck” (33). In other words, while Querry enjoys the benefit of the open space and natural ventilation, Deo Gratias sleeps ‘buried’ under the chassis of the truck. The image evoked by this sleeping arrangement has many implications. First, it is indicative of colonisation: while the European is in the open world, the African is physically caged ‘underground’ beneath the European. Second, it pits European mastery of technology against the supposed African authochtony or soil-orientedness. In other words, the scenario indicates the European as rising above primal nature to develop technology (the car, camp-bed, mosquito-net) while the African is still authochthonous, having barely emerged from the primitive soil, thus he sleeps on the bear soil. Third, ‘burying’ Deo Gratias under the chassis of the truck reinforces the physical restraint experienced by the Africans under colonisation and reflects the narrator’s “grave” and “coffin” analogy (Greene 1961: 32). Against the background 182 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh just provided, it is understandable why Deo Gratias and the lepers feel physically and socially caged. To demonstrate the social impact of physical caging, for instance, Deo Gratias, tells Querry he feels suffocated: “there [isn’t] enough air. He want[s] to dance and shout and run and sing. But, …he [can’t] run or dance and the [Catholic] fathers would have taken a poor view of the kind of songs he want[s] to sing” (68). His resolution, therefore, is to escape to Pendele, a distant place by the waterfalls where there is merrymaking. Whether Pendele is his hometown or a place of childhood fantasy, as Querry suggests, the fact is clearly stated: Deo Gratias, just as most of the cured lepers, feels caged and wants some air. Accordingly, he escapes but fails to reach Pendele because the connecting bridge has collapsed. He has no choice but to return to the leprosarium (65-66). Deo Gratias’ predicament is symbolic of the wider experience of Africans under colonisation. In this sense, Greene’s leprosarium signifies as an extended metaphor for the entire African continent. Greene’s and Conrad’s Congolese, Haggard’s Amahagger, Cary’s Rimi and Monsarrat’s Maula are all boxed into acute physical conditions where connections (bridges) to happiness (Pendele) are non-existent leaving them perpetually trapped. So far, we have discussed physical caging from two perspectives. First, we have looked at the militarily-enforced physical caging of Haggard and Conrad. Second, we have analysed the phenomenon from the angle of social ostracisation and racial segregation as represented in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat. We have realised that both forms of physical caging affect the psychology, and, therefore, the behaviour of the African characters. We shall now turn our attention to another form of caging: psychosexual caging. 183 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5.1.3 Psychosexual Caging The complicity between colonisation and sexuality is well documented in literary scholarship. Many distinguished commentators in the fields of psychology and literary criticism have theorised how colonialism appropriates sexual paradigms to enforce the structures of disempowerment in colonised lands, especially the Americas and Africa. Anne McClintock, for instance, cites the classic example of Christopher Columbus in the West Indies. Upon reaching the Caribbean, Columbus declares the layout of the land as looking like “a woman’s breast, with a protuberance upon its summit in the unmistakable shape of a nipple – towards which he… slowly sail[s]” (McClintock 1995: 21). Sondra Archimedes, also, cites Ania Loomba’s reference to John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” in which the persona sails towards his lover’s ‘India’ (2016: 112). In view of Columbus’s and Donne’s sexual metaphors, Sondra M. Archimedes agrees with Loomba that, “The two ‘Indies’ [are] repeatedly identified with female parts, both in literary accounts…and in travel narratives” (qtd in Archimedes 112). Drawing primarily on the work of Frantz Fanon (1967), we shall examine the interrelations between colonialism and sexual caging. We shall make cursory references to Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1993), Anne McClintock (1995), Robert J.C. Young (1995), Jess Nevins (2016) and Sondra Archimedes ([2005] 2016). What is psychosexual caging? According to Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, psychosexual analysis is a fundamental aspect of colonial discourse because it seeks to “explore the ways in which colonial and imperial discourse implicitly draws upon sexual paradigms to represent itself” (1993: 193). For instance, psychosexual analysis asks the question: “to what extent does the conquest of, and domination over, the land and people of the colonies model itself upon power relations of 184 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh masculinity and femininity?” (Williams and Chrisman 193). Even though Williams and Chrisman’s perspective is useful, it glosses over the primacy of psychoanalysis, and focuses on secondary considerations, such as the politics of gender. We intend to extend the definition of psychosexual discourse. In our view, psychosexual discourse tries to understand the deep-seated mental processes that dictate abhorrent sexual (mis)behaviours such as fixation, sadomasochism and necrophilic eroticism. We categorise these misdemeanours as psychosexual caging. Our analysis, therefore, makes use of a broader framework centred on psychological analysis as it affects sexuality. Our analysis is not a study of gender politics. 5.1.3.1 Death Eroticism: The African Woman and Colonial Phallus Haggard, Conrad, Cary and Monsarrat have all depicted the African woman as sexually obsessed with the European phallus. In this representation, the African woman’s sadomasochistic negotiation for the European penis is fraught with pain, emotional and psychological violence, and even death. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert J.C. Young, following Arthur de Gobineau, draws attention to the sexual attraction and repulsion that occurs between the male coloniser and colonised female leading to sadomasochistic relations in the colonial space (1995: 102). Sadomasochism is a psychosexual practice which involves the production and reception of pain as a mutual stimulator in the sexual arena. Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary defines ‘sadism’ as “the act or instance of gaining pleasure from inflicting physical or psychological pain on another; the term is usually used to denote sexual sadism” (2001: 737). It defines ‘masochism’ as “the act or instance of gaining pleasure from physical or psychological pain; [the term] usually used to denote sexual masochism” (497). Whereas the sadist enjoys inflicting pain, the masochist gets gratification from receiving pain. Sadomasochism is, therefore, a “state characterized by both sadistic and masochistic tendencies” 185 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh (497). Lynn S. Chancer, however, provides a definition of ‘sadomasochism’ which extends beyond the primary focus on sexual domination and subordination. In her view, the word refers to the much broader cultural arena where the dynamics of everyday life is seen as an enactment of power relations (1992: 1). We shall agree with both the medical and cultural definitions of the word. In providing an analysis towards illustrating the sadomasochistic tendency of colonial sexuality, we shall contend that the phallic liaison between the colonised African woman and European male coloniser represents a case of sadomasochistic caging, or in the words of Jess Nevins, “death eroticism” (2016: 193). In this form of caging, the African woman endures physical and psychological torture but still refuses to abandon the European phallus. The reason why she stays in the abusive relationship is that the European phallus represents for her a key to “subjective consecration,” that is, “the wiping out in [her]self and in [her] own mind the color prejudice from which [s]he has suffered so long” (Fanon 1967: 71b). Seen from the psychological perspective of Fanon, the African woman’s craving for European masculinity is not merely for sexual gratification. Her craving is a ploy towards “deracialization,” that is, towards stripping herself of her ‘ugly’ blackness and ‘becoming’ white (1967: 71b). Fanon’s notion of colonial sexuality contradicts Young’s idea of colonial sadomasochism. While Young’s framework is highly useful, it is not elastic enough to capture the reciprocity of colonial desire. In Young, the white male desires the black or yellow female whose repugnance of the former drives him to force her into submission. Paradoxically, the white man himself “cannot get rid of the last few traces of his feeling of repulsion towards another race” (1995: 102). Young’s framework, however, does not account for the possibility of the African or Asian woman desiring the white man in spite of her repulsion. Young does not also consider the possibility of 186 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the African or Asian man desiring the white woman. These gaps in Young’s concept emerge because Gobineau on whom Young draws genderises the races: white is masculine, black and yellow are feminine (Young 102). The dominant role arrogated to the white race in colonial sexuality and politics, makes it incongruous for Young’s framework to conceptualise a dominant role for the black and yellow races. Such a framework will be inimical to the ‘superiority’ of the white race, which is inscribed as the absolute male. Thus for Young, colonial sexuality is the domain of the white male. He is driven by a mix of desire and repulsion for the black/yellow woman. The black/yellow woman, on the other hand, is impelled by pure repulsion to resist the white male resulting in coercive coitus or rape. Young’s framework misses the fact that the black woman is not all repulsion, and that she has desire for the European phallus. It is Fanon who recognises the complicity of the colonised woman in colonial sadomasochism. In providing an analysis of the African woman’s reciprocal role in colonial desire, therefore, we shall look at the cases of the following women: Ustane in She, Kurtz’s mistress in Heart of Darkness and Matumbi in Mister Johnson. In Haggard’s She, Ustane is a beautiful but savage African girl. She belongs to the cannibalistic Amahagger tribe that dwells in the gory caves of South Eastern Africa. She gets attracted to the English traveller, Leo, when his entourage ventures into the caves. She marries him in accordance with Amahagger custom. Leo does not reject her advances, and seems to accept her marriage proposal. Meanwhile, the dreadful Ayesha, queen of the Amahagger, is also interested in Leo. She sees him as the reincarnation of her long dead lover, Kallikrates, who has returned to her. When she realises that her access to Leo is blocked by Ustane, she unleashes her sadistic temperament on the young woman, and eventually kills her. The struggle between Ustane and Ayesha over Leo involves complex sadomasochistic motivations and instances of 187 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh psychosexual caging we shall try to unravel. First, we contend that Ustane is psychosexually caged by Leo, and subjected to sadomasochistic abuse. Though Leo is not a sadist, Ayesha is; and it is on Leo’s account that Ustane is abused. This creates a sadomasochistic love triangle. Ustane only needs to give up Leo in order to enjoy her freedom, but she refuses. Her uncompromising desire to acquire the European phallus, in spite of the clear danger to her life, constitutes a sexual cage induced by Leo’s eroticised persona. We shall paint a portrait of Leo in an attempt to discover the psychosexual motivations that influence Ustane’s uncompromising stance to hold on to him. According to the fictional editor of the novel, Leo is the epitome of masculine enchantment. “He [is] very tall, very broad and ha[s] a look of power and grace that seem[s] native to him….[H]is face [is] almost without flaw – a good face as well as a beautiful one, and […] his head [is] covered with little golden curls growing close to the scalp” (Haggard 1994: 9). He “looks like a statue of Apollo come to life” explaining why people call him “the Greek god;” “he is the “handsomest young fellow I have ever seem” (Haggard 9). The above portraiture of Leo indicates not only physical allurement but also an attempt at deification: he is compared to, and actually called, Apollo, the Greek god. The reference to the Grecian deity is not accidental. Leo is a descendant of Kallikrates, the Greek priest of the Egyptian deity, Isis. The seeming ‘deification’ of Leo, therefore, has echoes of actuality. Again, that ancient Greece is the quintessential inspiration for modern European civilisation is well documented (Hall 1989, Isaac 2004, Acheraiou 2008). Sondra Archimedes is right, therefore, when she says that, “race and heritage merge in Leo to portray an image of nobility: powerful, beautiful, and seemingly born to rule. …[H]is supremacy is in the blood” (2016: 95). The eroticisation of Leo provides an insight into why he becomes the cynosure for all the Amahagger women. He is irresistibly attractive: 188 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh physically, morally and racially. When he lifts his hat, the Amahagger women give a “slight murmur of admiration,” as they marvel at his “curling yellow hair” (Haggard 83). Unable to resist Leo’s European looks, Ustane falls in love immediately, and proceeds to marry him. The reasons she proffers for falling in love indicate a sexual attraction. “Thou art very beautiful. Who hath hair like unto thee, or skin so white?/Who hath so strong an arm, who is so much a man?/…Ay, when my eyes fell upon thee I did desire thee” (Haggard 94, my emphasis). The references to “beauty,” “strength,” “manliness” and womanly “desire” indicate Ustane’s sexual motivation. Leo becomes to Ustane a symbol of male virility, an object of libidinous desire, and sexualised ‘divinity’ born to dominate her feminine sexual fantasies. That Ustane has sexual fantasies about Leo is captured in the very first line of her poetic performance: “Thou art my chosen – I have waited for thee from the beginning!” We read: ‘I have always had dreams of an erotic liaison with a white male’. Accordingly, upon seeing Leo for the very first time, she “deliberately advanc[es]…, put[s] her arm round his neck,…and kiss[es] him on the lips” (Haggard 83-84). Leo’s reciprocal embrace signifies his acceptance, and sealing of the phallic contract. Thus, Ustane’s long-held erotic fantasy, fuelled by her caged sexual psyche, sees fruition in the form of her European phallic ‘god’. There is a second level of Ustane’s psychosexual caging: her willingness to die for – or because of – Leo. Towards this direction, she endangers her life on many occasions. In the story, the Amahagger organise a massive cannibalistic attack on Leo and his companions. The attack is motivated purely by phallic reasons. Job, Leo’s European servant, spurns the marriage proposal of an Amahagger woman; the Amahagger people see Job’s refusal as a slighting of the entire Amahagger tribe, and an insult to their culture. The attack is organised in revenge for the English man’s insult to Amahagger femininity. Ustane, however, endangers of her life to protect Leo from her kinsmen. 189 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh She covers his body with hers, and shields him from the spears of his assailants. We stress two points here. First, since the Amahagger attack is a response to an insult by European masculinity, Ustane’s protection of Leo is also a defence of European masculinity. In psychosexual terms, therefore, she endangers her life to protect her acquired European phallus. Second, she wraps her body around Leo’s, and prevents him from being speared. The covering of Leo’s body with Ustane’s body is a psychological enactment of the phallic fusion. According to Holly, “[Ustane] twisted her legs round [Leo’s], and hung on like…a creeper to a tree, and they could not [drag her from him]” (105). The only way to kill Leo was to “Drive the spear through the man and the woman together so of a verity shall they be wed” (105). From the story, a pattern of sexual imagery is foregrounded. There are multiple references to fusion, including: twisting of two legs around each other; clinging on like creepers to a tree; and spearing the two bodies together. We contend that the multiple acts and images of fusion are a psychological realisation of coitus, and therefore, a projection of Ustane’s unconscious mind. Particularly, the Amahagger spear assumes a phallic significance. Ustane would not be separated from Leo unless their bodies are speared together. In fact, she expects the spear to be driven through their entangled bodies so “of a verity they be wed.” The two instances cited above demonstrate Ustane’s demand for the European phallus. The first instance – her holding and kissing Leo, and her recounting of her sexual desires for him – is a conscious sexual drive motivated by Leo’s European looks. The latter instance – her protection of Leo and performance of multiple acts of sexual fusion – is an unconscious motivation still influenced by the phallic drive. Both conscious and unconscious drives indicate Ustane’s psychosexual caging. The other occasions on which Ustane endangers her life on account of Leo involves Ayesha, the Queen of Amahagger. In one instance, Ayesha offers to heal the terminally ill Leo, 190 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and asks Ustane to leave the room so that she can apply her psychic powers. Ustane defies Ayesha, asking: “What does She want? It is surely the right of a wife to be near her husband when he dies. Nay, I will not go…” (Haggard 191). Ustane’s obstinacy is shocking since she has just witnessed Ayesha’s ruthless delivery of justice to the people who attacked the English men. In delivering justice, Ayesha reminds the Amahagger, “my lightest word [is] law” (171), and those who “breaketh it by so much as a jot or tittle shall perish” (171). In view of Ayesha’s overwhelming demonstration of power, we find in Ustane’s defiance a reflection of a caged sexual psyche. She is determined to uphold the phallic contract with Leo, even at the expense of her life. The next time Ustane confronts Ayesha over Leo, Ayesha demonstrates sadomasochistic violence. She electro-psychically strikes Ustane on the head leaving an imprint of her snow white fingers on the girl’s head. The chilling warning that accompanies the strike gives a clear indication of Ayesha’s plan to kill Ustane. “Look, I have set my seal upon thee so that I may know thee till thy hair is all as white as it. If I see thy face again, be sure, too, that thy bones shall soon be whiter than my mark upon thy hair” (200-01). A sadist, Ayesha clearly enjoys inflicting, and watching people endure pain. She mocks Ustane, “Now, wilt thou go, or must I strike a second time?” (200). Ustanes’ continual defiance, in spite of the danger to her life, is a reflection of a deeply-seated sexual motivation. She is uncompromising in her stance: “The man is my husband. […] I will not give thee my husband” (199-200). In the final confrontation between the two rivals, Ayesha strikes Ustane dead. Ustane’s address before her death provides an insight into her uncompromising position. “When first I knew my lord, I knew also that death would be the bridal gift he gave me” (218). Ustane knows that pain and death are the price to pay for her acquisition of the European phallus – a forbidden 191 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh object for an African woman in the colonial context. She is determined, however, that nothing will hinder the fulfilment of her long-awaited erotic fantasy. “I risked my life, …yet am I glad that I risked it,…because he [Leo] embraced me once, and told me that he loved me yet” (217). Her determination to pay the highest price for a brief sexual liaison with a white man underlines her psychosexual caging. We have so far attributed purely sexual motives for Ustane’s actions, but there are other, invisible drives. We are now in the purely psychological arena. Our reading of Ustane’s action will, thus, ascribe thoughts and motivations that are unconscious to Ustane herself. We shall try to get into her psyche to uncover the repressed thoughts that motivate her to sacrifice her life for the European phallus. Frantz Fanon cites Louis-T. Achille’s framework, ‘subjective consecration’, which attempts to explain the psychosexual caging of the African man and woman in relation to the European pudenda and phallus respectively. In Achille’s view, interracial marriages bestow on the coloured spouse “subjective consecration,” a sort of induction into ‘whitehood’, which leads to “wiping out in himself [or herself] and in his [or her] own mind the color prejudice from which he [or she] has suffered so long” (Fanon 1967: 71b). Achille is even more explicit: “Among certain people of color, the fact that they are marrying someone of the white race seems to have overridden every other consideration. In fact they find access to complete equality with the illustrious race, the master of the world, the ruler of the people of color” (Fanon: 71-2b). Achille’s assumption sheds light on the psychological motivations that induce the desperate search for sexual liaisons with European men as seen in the life of Ustane – and many other female African characters in the colonialist novel. Ustane’s self-abandonment and fixation on Leo becomes understandable when viewed in the light of the concept of racial consecration. Looked at from the racial angle, the overriding motivation for Ustane’s acquisition 192 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of the European phallus is not merely sexual gratification. Unconsciously, and perhaps more importantly, she is motivated by the wish to acquire European selfhood. In her particular case, European selfhood encompasses phenotypical trappings such as golden tresses and beauty, and the social benefit of power. For instance, the Europeans demonstrate their superiority to the Amahagger through their scientific technology: mirrors and guns. Also, they do not crawl before Ayesha like the Amahagger do. She realises that to be European is to be powerful and respected; to be Amahagger is to be reduced to an ‘animal’. Her desperate attempt to hold on to Leo, therefore, demonstrates her innate desire for social, economic and political power. By “denaturalizing” (Fanon 1967: 71) – purging oneself of one’s blackness – she becomes ‘white’, and, therefore, equal in status to Leo and Ayesha. Her possession of the European phallus is the only way to achieve denaturalisation. In this sense, her psychosexual caging is dictated by sexual gratification only insofar as it is European masculinity that will open the door to the white world. The primary cause of her psychosexual caging is actually the desire to escape her Africanness. Death eroticism, as dramatised by Ustane, Leo and Ayesha in She, is a recurring element in the grammar of the colonialist novel tradition. Two other African female characters experience psychosexual caging in the select set of colonialist novels studied. They are Kurtz’s mistress in Heart of Darkness and Matumbi in Mister Johnson. For illustrative purposes, we shall focus on the latter woman. Matumbi’s libidinous relationship with Gollup, an ex-English soldier, reflects a classic case of African woman’s complicity in sadomasochism. Gollup’s particularly ill-treatment of Matumbi, and the latter’s willing acceptance of the terms of the relationship underscores a depravity that can only be produced by her psychosexual caging. The implication of their abusive liaison extends beyond the sexual arena to reflect the much deeper Manichean dynamics of conqueror-conquered, 193 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh power-disempowerment, white-black, beautiful-ugly, rich-poor and coloniser-colonised. Matumbi is caught up in the same cage as Ustane and Kurtz’s mistress. Her desperate acquisition of the European phallus is not merely for sexual pleasure but, also, and perhaps unconsciously, for power: social and economic. Gollup, like Leo and Kurtz, has everything Matumbi desires. Let us provide a brief comparative analysis between Gollup and Matumbi to highlight the latter’s dependence on the Englishman. Gollup is a European, male coloniser with authority; Matumbi is an African, female and colonised. Immediately the racial, social and political disequilibrium which constitutes the basis of their relationship, becomes manifest. There is even more to be said about the Manichean categories. She is ugly, “Her face is so ugly…, ‘Some cow must have walked on it. Her nose is as wide as her enormous mouth and its nostrils are turned outwards like two oven mouths” (Cary 1939: 126). In contrast, Gollup has a white face and round blue eyes. He is very careful with his physical looks. “He parts his black hair down the middle, shaves carefully, and wears every day clean clothes. …His store and compound are kept as spotless as himself” (122). In addition, his wife, Gladys, who lives in England, is a highborn, “beautiful… good girl” (128), and his eight-year old son, Bobby so handsome “you’d think he was a prince” (129). Thus, Matumbi is presented as phenotypically and socially inferior to Gollup and his family. Financially, Gollup is rich. He sets up a successful trading business in Africa and amasses wealth. “He struts about like a little king” (122). Matumbi on the other hand is poor. She is a nonworking concubine whose only source of livelihood is her relationship with Gollup. According to Ajali, one of Gollup’s workers, Matumbi is undone if she is jilted by Gollup. In terms of physical power and temperament, Gollup is a tough ex-Sergeant in the British army. He “always seems like an old soldier on campaign in enemy territory; watchful, suspicious, enterprising, always on the alert, always in fighting trim; not too punctilious, scornful of 194 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh convention; …ferocious and ready at any moment for any kind of violence” (131-2). Matumbi, conversely, is weak. “She is a huge, lumbering woman dimpled all over in her soft fat. She is as soft and heavy as peasant-pudding in a bag” (126). In terms of influence, Gollup is very well- connected. He is a business owner. He does business in surrounding villages by bribing the chiefs and people with trifle gifts (122). He also employs Africans, such as Ajali and Mister Johnson. He therefore wields influence over the African royalty and citizenry. As a European, Gollup has powerful connections in colonial circles, also. The influence of Matumbi, on the other hand, lies with beggars and poor people who come to her for money. Indeed, her influence is a sham because her generosity is dependent on her relationship with Gollup. From the comparative analysis just provided, it is obvious that Gollup is the more powerful of the two: physically, economically, socially and politically. He has everything that Matumbi lacks and craves for. Thus, Matumbi’s liaison with Gollup becomes the transformational factor in her life. The relationship secures for her a psychological transformation from the poor, disempowered, ugly African woman to a rich, powerful, beautiful, ‘Europeanised’ girl in the image of Gladys, Gollup’s wife. In dispossessing Gollups’s beautiful wife of the phallus, and appropriating it, Matumbi psychologically denaturalises, and becomes the mirror-image of the English woman. As the Gladys-surrogate, she enjoys a psychological diffusion between herself and Gladys where Matumbi ‘becomes’ Gladys. Through this psychological transformation, Matumbi gains access to all the power, wealth, beauty and status that come with being a European woman. In the language of Louis-T. Achille, Matumbi becomes ‘racially consecrated’ into ‘whitehood’ (Fanon 1967) Denaturalisation or deracialisation, almost invariably, comes at a price. For Matumbi, the price is sadomasochistic beatings and brutalisation at the hands of Gollup. For a period of four 195 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh years she suffers grievous injuries at the hands of Gollup, including: “a broken arm, a split ear, and …deep scars” (125). Some of the weapons he uses on Matumbi, apart from his hands and feet, are bottles, jugs, clubs, and chairs, which are intended to “smash Matumbi’s skull or face. […] His only idea is to kill Matumbi” (131). In spite of Gollup’s bestiality, Matumbi does not break the relationship with him. On the contrary, Sundays are her special days as she anticipates the imminent torture. The masochistic abandonment with which Matumbi accepts, and even anticipates, her beatings reflects a complex of deep-seated psychological inadequacies. Key among these are her discomforts with her presumably ugly African looks, her colonised selfhood, and her economic shortcomings. Significantly, all these shortcomings reflect on her body. Thus, being destroyed bodily by a European man becomes, in her unconscious mind, an attempt to purge her of the unwanted inadequacies associated with Africanness. Her beatings, therefore, assume the significance of a psychological ‘cleansing’ of her ugly African body. Abusing her becomes a crude pseudo-religious and sexual exorcising of her undesirable African reality. After her bodily destruction, which we recognise as ‘racial crucifixion’, she assumes a false sense of racial consecration, which amounts to ‘racial resurrection’. Psychologically, she ‘becomes’ European by the mere fact that she has been ‘consecrated’ by a white man. In these religio-sexual rites of cleansing and consecration, the violent beatings endured by Matumbi, the breaking of her body and shedding of her blood (Cary 1939: 125) represent a passion analogous to the Eucharist of Christian eschatology. In symbolic sense, Matumbi’s ugly African blood is shed and replaced with new blood, the European phallic semen, which represents the sacramental wine. In this sense, the beating of Matumbi becomes ritualistic: breaking the body to drain out the African blood, inseminating the body with European blood and consecrating the African as a newborn European. Our reading of archaic religiosity into the sadomasochistic relationship 196 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh between Gollup and Matumbi seeks support in Lynn S. Chancer (1992). She defines sadomasochism not merely in sexual terms but also in cultural dimensions. According to Chancer, daily life “exhibits the same structured, recurring features that operate in many situations that are sadomasochistically oriented” (1992: 1). To her, sadomasochistic interrelations occur “whether that pattern appears in the…realm of sexuality, […] or in other highly charged encounters between parties caught in symbiotic enmeshments of power and powerlessness” (1992: 1). Also, Matumbi’s ugly body assumes a greater significance as it represents the social, economic and political body of Africa under European colonisation. Williams and Chrisman (1993), McClintock (1995) and Archimedes (2016) have all demonstrated how the sexualised and readily available body of the colonised woman becomes a metaphor for the colonial space upon which the coloniser projects his perverse fantasies. As we have attempted to illustrate using the cases of Ustane and Matumbi, the colonised African woman’s relationship with the European man is invariably sadomasochistic. The African women endure psychological and physical torture, and even death, in the hope of a racial transformation. They are caged into sexual slavery because of the desire of obtaining the advantages supposedly available to only Europeans: beauty, golden locks, wealth, social influence, political power and freedom. In short, Europeanness is the way out of the political, physical and economic cages imposed by colonialism. Paradoxically, in their attempt to escape from these cages, they lock themselves in the psychosexual cage. 5.1.3.2 Economy of the Libido: African Masculinity and Denial of the European Pudenda The colonised African man does not escape the psychosexual cage. Closely related to African woman’s fixation on the European phallus is African man’s fascination with European femininity. Fanon alerts us to the centrality of the acquisition of European woman to the 197 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh definition of an emancipated African masculinity. Fanon observes, for instance, that the “dominant concern among Antilleans [black men] arriving in France [is] to go to bed with a white woman” (1967: 72b). To Fanon, deeply buried in the recesses of the African man’s mind is the unacknowledged desire to be white. “I wish to be acknowledged as not a black but white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man” (Fanon 1967b: 63). To the black man, therefore, possessing the European pudenda is a “ritual of initiation into ‘authentic’ manhood” (Fanon 72). Aware of the value of European womanhood to the definition of African masculinity, the European man seeks to deny the African man access to the European woman. This sexual blockade creates an instance of the Freudian economy of the libido. In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud theorises ‘the economy of the libido’ as a psychosexual concept layered on an economic foundation. Freud’s concept concerns the pursuit of the illusive happiness which torments humanity. According to Freud, since humans are driven, primarily, by the pleasure principle, the fundamental aim of humanity is to seek satisfaction. By extension, pleasure equals libido since sexual pleasure is the most potent pleasure of all. However, since satisfaction is not completely achievable, there arises an economic/libidinal inadequacy in human affairs. In Freud’s view, since all human beings experience disjuncture between dream and reality, or between fantasy and its achievement, there is an enduring economy in human relations, particularly sexual relations, in which libido or pleasure is perpetually in short supply (Freud [1961] 2010: 43ff). In his own words, “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the individual’s libido” (2010: 54). Freud applies his concept to all human enterprises, including: politics, economics, sexuality and entertainment. In this study, we shall use it strictly in the sexual sense. Freud’s 198 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh concept effectively captures the angst of colonised African men in relation to their demand for European femininity, and the denial they experience in this direction. Following Fanon and Freud, we shall discuss the psychosexual fixation of Billali, Aladai and Dinamaula in She, The African Witch and The Tribe That Lost Its Head respectively. Billali tells of his relationship with the embalmed corpse of a white woman which was kept in the caves when he was a child. She was so beautiful in her white robes that he ended up falling in love with her. “I would creep up to her and kiss her cold face” (Haggard 1994: 110). Similarly, Aladai and Dinamaula desire white women. Their Oxford education, and resultant social status, purges their interest in African women. Both princes reject the eligible African girls, and instead pine for white women. In Aladai’s instance, there are two African girls in his life: Osi and Obishala. The former is described in superlative terms. She is a young girl of sixteen years with chocolate-milk skin, firm breasts, broad face and full, curled lips. “This girl … [i]s a well-known beauty” (Cary 1936: 31). The other girl, Obishala, is equally beautiful. “Her walk…[i]s that of a pretty girl who challenges the world to put her down” (Cary 286). She is sent to serve Aladai with the hope that he will be smitten by her beauty, and fall in love with her. Dinamaula also encounters an African girl: Miera. She is chosen as wife for him according to Maula custom. All these girls are rejected by the Oxford-educated African men. For instance, “Aladai accept[s] Osi for a guard, but not for a wife, [because] [s]he i[s] too savage” (Cary 1936: 28). He rejects Obishala, also, because she is not merely arrogant, she is “pure bred” (113), meaning she is uncouth. Dinamaula, also, finds Miera unattractive, dirty, sweaty and driven by sheer animalistic sexuality. With her “wiry hair plastered with ochre mud, her jaw heavy; [sweat running generously] between her massive breasts[,] [s]omething within Dinamaula revolted – at the girl’s animal readiness” (Monsarrat 1956: 72). She is described in ungenerous terms by the 199 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh narrator as a “dog” (240) and “squalid sort of cow” (241). The fact is, the traditionally-bred African girls do not meet the criteria of wife for the hybridised, Oxford-trained, African scholars. Significantly, all the African men discussed crave for white women. Their psychology is dominated by the desire to possess the European pudenda. For instance, Billali, even as a boy, indulges in necrophilic eroticism with a white woman’s corpse. He confesses to being “bewitched” – we read ‘psychosexually caged’ – by the corpse (Haggard 1994:111). Aladai is equally caged by the thoughts of Dryas Honeywood, who he has the chance of dancing with one night. Aladai’s over-expressive and suggestive dance moves make Dryas feel uncomfortable. When she asks for a break, Aladai’s hand still wraps round her body. In what might be an unconscious act, he is unable to break his embrace of the girl, even when the song has ended. His remarks after the dance betray his sexual motives. “I need not tell you what happiness you have given me – what great happiness […] I must not say what I feel” (Cary 1936: 169). Indeed, he needs not express his feeling: he has already betrayed his thoughts. In an encounter with another English woman, Judy Coote, he unexpectedly breaks into the “Heidenroslein,” a poetic love song by the German poet, Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Also, Judy Coote finds in his possession a book titled, Notable Sex Crimes of the Nineteenth Century. The two incidents – his singing of “Heidenroslein” and Judy’s discovery of the book – are not casual incidents in the plot. They are part of the narratorial calculation to present Aladai’s mind as saturated with sexual images of the white woman. The narrator is explicit, “Aladai [i]s sophisticated; but there [are] odd holes in the polish of his surface” (Cary 107). There is a lingering element of sexual depravity in the presentation of Aladai. Pioneer English linguist, John Bowring’s translation of ‘Heidenroslein’, or ‘Heathrose’ in English, appears in Goethe’s Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to 1860 (1919) by Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons. In the poem, a boy sees a beautiful rose and plucks it 200 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh against the flower’s will. In lines 14-19 of Bowring’s translation, the boy is portrayed as a “cruel,” crude, and depraved sexual predator who violates the beautiful girl. The forcible “picking” of the rose suggests rape. Commenting on the poem in Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middles Ages, Albrecht Classen reads not only rape but also murder in the boy’s attitude towards the rose. In Classen’s view, the violent uprooting of a flower leads to the loss of roots causing instant death (2011: 204). We suggest Cary’s narrator links the boy in the poem with Aladai and the rose with Judy Coote. The context in which the poem appears in the story makes such a reading inevitable. In addition, the appearance of the book, Notable Sex Crimes of the Nineteenth Century, in Aladai’s library, lends credence to our view. Judy Coote is quick to add that the book throws more light on Dr. Crippen. The latter was an American medical professional who was hanged for allegedly murdering his wife in a sex crime story that has become legendary. Clearly, Cary’s narrator induces sexual suspicions in the reader’s mind by foregrounding literary and historical sex crimes, and associating them with Aladai. The implication of such an association is quite obvious: Aladai is so fixated on, and desperate for, the European pudenda that he might even attempt raping a European girl – Dryas Honeywood or Judy Coote – to satisfy his craving. Dinamala, in The Tribe That Lost Its Head, is sketched in the same light as Aladai. Dinamaula rejects Miera because she is savage. He wants to marry a white girl. He fantasises about all the white girls he has had sexual liaisons with in his school days in London: girls at the Savoy and Claridges; and parties that had ended in canoes at dawn on the river bank (Monsarrat 1956: 173). Particularly, he is nostalgic about a “slim girl with a light skin and breast of small and pointed excellence” (Monsarrat 73). He fantasises about a blonde he has once danced with, who “talked coolly of politics and travel and music” (73). His idea of a white wife contrasts 201 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh sharply with Miera, an African girl who is disparaged as being “stupid and uncouth and without grace” (73). To highlight African man’s obsession with European femininity, even uneducated African men are portrayed as craving for European pudenda. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the brutal rape of the white girl, Cynthia Ronald, by the illiterate African king, Gotwela, and his henchmen, reinforces the image of the black man as obsessed with white womanhood. Cynthia Ronald is raped by thirty African men, and dies as a consequence. Indeed, the thirtieth man gets up from the body only when he realises she is dead (Monsarrat 546). A Golden Nail, symbolic of the African phallus, is then inserted in her to represent African masculinity’s claim to European womanhood. The necrophilic eroticism of Gotwela and his men in this novel, and of Billali in Haggard’s She reflects the depravity and psychosexual sickness attributed to African masculinity in the colonialist novel tradition. The African man experiences severe economy in his pursuit of libido from European woman. According to Fanon, so long as the white man has ruled the world, he has forbidden the black man from possessing the white woman (1967b: 70). In this context, the white man assumes the role of the Freudian Primal Father who denies the black sons of access to the white woman. Accordingly, all the African men discussed in this study are blocked from the white women. Billali’s unnatural rendezvous with the corpse of the white woman is discovered, and the body burnt. Although, he saves a foot of the corpse as a memento, this is confiscated years later by a European man, Holly. In seizing the foot, Holly performs a eulogy for the foot and keeps it in his Gladstone bag. He addresses the foot: “Shapely little foot! Well might it have been set upon the proud neck of a conqueror bent at last to woman’s beauty, and well might the lips of nobles and of kings have been pressed upon its jewelled whiteness” (Haggard 1994: 112). By these lines, 202 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Holly seems to suggest that Billali, a savage African, does not deserve even the foot of the dead white woman. As he claims, while she was alive, she must have been served by black slaves, and loved by kings, conquerors and nobles, like Holly himself. Billali, an African slave, is, therefore, forbidden to keep the foot. Holly seizes the foot and keeps it in his Gladstone bag. The symbolism of the Gladstone bag cannot be lost on us. According to Morton S. Freeman, the Gladstone bag is named after “the greatest British statesman of the nineteenth century,” William Ewart Gladstone, who was four times Prime Minister of Britain (1997: 109). In the colonial context of the novel, therefore, the Gladstone bag represents colonial authority. The confiscation and keeping of the white woman’s foot in the Gladstone bag is, therefore, indicative of colonial rejection of black man’s attempt to possess the white woman. The British political institution will not permit such a liaison, Holly seems to say. Billali’s necrophilic pleasure in the white foot is truncated. Likewise, Aladai’s romance with Dryas Honeywood, in The African Witch, elicits a severe response from the British men. Aladai is beaten up by Captain Rackham, head of the Colonial Police, with the support of Dick Honeywood, the girl’s brother. Dick Honeywood sees Aladai’s dancing with his sister as a dishonour to the white girl (Cary 1936: 206-07). Rackham, who is interested in Dryas, is obviously envious of Aladai’s success with the girl. The two take vengeance on Aladai for attempting to acquire European woman. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Dinamaula is also denied a white wife. Resident Commissioner, Andrew Macmillan flatly rejects the idea of an African marrying a white girl. To him, “Such as a marriage is impossible” (Monsarrat 1956: 339). As indicated, all the African men experience economy of the libido. The only African men who succeed in having a sexual liaison with a European girl – albeit, illegally – are punished with death. Gotwela and Zuva who lead the rape of Cynthia Ronald are summarily executed by Captain Simpson (Monsarrat 551-52). 203 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh So far we have attempted to discuss the first part of the second discouric pair of sentences. Specifically, we have discussed: [Sentence (b): X cages Y]. In providing the analysis, we have tried to demonstrate how the coloniser (X) becomes the agent for restraining the colonised African (Y). The types of caging we have discussed are: political, physical and psychosexual. We have examined political caging from the perspective of our conceptual mother-queen dyad. Under this, we have looked at how the ‘mother’ aspect of the dyad functions biologically while the ‘queen’ aspect functions politically to cage the African king from exercising his political authority. We have also discussed physical caging from two perspectives: militarily-enforced physical caging, and its socially-enforced form. We have realised that, when militarily enforced, physical caging leads to deaths, sometimes on a genocidal scale. Socially- enforced physically caging, on the other hand, results in acts such as segregation and ostracisation. Generally, we have tried to argue that physical caging has a huge psychological impact on the colonised Africans. We have noticed that the shackling of a people leads to the inscription of their faculties as prelogical and infantile. Lastly, we have examined psychosexual caging. Here, we have taken the stance that Africans are influenced by racial, economic, political and psychological factors to crave for European spouses. We have argued that the colonised African is compelled not merely by sexual gratification, but by powerful colonial dynamics into an obsessive craving for the European phallus or pudenda irrespective of the consequence. All the discussion so far, from the beginning of the present chapter up to now is in respect of [Sentence (b): X cages Y]. We have attempted to demonstrate the various means by which the coloniser (X) shackles the African (Y). The next major section of this chapter shall discuss the antithetical counterpart of the sentence just examined. In other words, we shall look at [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X]. Examining the two antithetical sentences consecutively shall reveal 204 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh how the action of [Sentence (b): X cages Y] is reversed in [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X] to maintain the dioscuric logic of the colonialist novel. 5.2 [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X] Under this sentence, we intend to examine how the African terrain detains the European coloniser in revenge for the coloniser’s action in [Sentence (b): X cages Y]. As we have defined earlier in our theoretical model, the Cave ≡ Y, that is, the relationship between the Cave (the African space) and Y (the African) is that of equivalence. The Cave and (Y) are synonymously related. In other words, in the colonialist novel, Africans and their environment are unified as one entity; to be African is to share the characteristics of the African environment: wildness, crudity and savagery. African cultural practices, psychology and phenotypical features are, therefore, regarded in environmental terms. Aladai, in Cary’s The African Witch, vocalises the equivalent representation of the land and its people when he says Rimi and the Rimi people are the same thing (Cary 1936: 106). Conrad’s Marlow speaks in the same tone when he suggests that the African boat men “wanted no excuse for being there [in the crude African geography]” (1994: 20); they were one with their environment. This equivalence is what we represent by the relation the Cave ≡ Y. The equivalence makes the antithetical relationship between Sentence (b) and Sentence (b-1) logical, and sustains the overall dioscuric principle of the colonialist grammar as illustrated in Schema 2 below. Schema 2: Y/the cave speak against X (mirror line) X enters the cave (a) The cave enters X (a-1) X cages Y (b) The cave cages X (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) 205 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh What [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X] means, therefore, is that in the colonialist novel, the African space reacts against the coloniser. The physical environment, harsh weather, marauding animals and insects as well as the colonial atmosphere and its social demands exact a punishment on the coloniser on behalf of the African. In other words, when it comes to shackling the European, it is the cave itself, the environment, and not the ‘cave people’, that does much of the shackling. This highlights the ineffectiveness of African resistance to colonialism in the context of the novels. What the function seems to emphasize is that the African responses to colonisation are weak, easily suppressed, and therefore, negligible. By making the environment fight on behalf of the African, the colonialist novelist mocks the African agency and recognises the African environment as a more potent adversary than the weak African peoples. In our view, this grammar is designed to re-inscribe the European’s supposed superiority over the African. The foregoing contextualisation has been provided to clarify the aspect of our theoretical framework concerned with the inverse caging. We shall now examine how Africa or the African environment cages the coloniser. We have identified three forms of caging: physical, social and marital. 5.2.1 Physical Caging: Fundamentally, all colonisers in Africa experience a form of physical caging. The cosmic membrane constituted by the elements serve not only to hinder but, sometimes, also to block the coloniser’s movement. All the writers studied portray the elemental cage. Conrad’s Marlow speaks about the cosmic wall erected by the atavistic jungle in Congo. “There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering. Come and find out.” (Conrad 1994: 19). The seeming invitation – “Come and find out” – is merely ironic. The jungle is so colossal with “Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, 206 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh immense, running up high [that]… It made you feel very small, very lost” (50). To complement the jungle’s blockade, the coast is also “bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself ha[s] tried to ward off intruders” (20). In Mister Johnson, the white man’s desire to expand trade in Fada is hindered by the impenetrable forest necessitating the construction of ‘Rudbeck’s road’ (1939: 59). In A Burnt-Out Case, Querry reaches a cul-de-sac in the rainforest of Congo: the boats and roads go no further. He reaches a dead-end not only metaphorically but also physically (1961: 30). Layered on the series of physical blockades are the punishing effects of the African climate. The African sun, for instance, is one of the prime elements that cage the European. As a result of the excessive heat, many European activities, including social interactions and nuptial relations, suffer or break down. For example, in The Heart of the Matter, Scobie is unable to make love to his wife because of the heat. He “tr[ied] to keep his body away from Louise’s: [because] wherever they touched – if it were only a finger lying against a finger – sweat started. Even when they were separated the heat trembled between them” (1948: 41). For Scobie, the African climate “isn’t a climate for emotion. It’s a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery. […] It’s damned hot” (Greene 1948: 31). According to the narrator in Greene’s other novel, A Burnt- Out Case, Africa is “a continent of misery and heat” (1961: 17). In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, Sir Elliot Vere-Toombs, Governor of Pharamaul feels caged in his luxurious office by the heat. The weather is so “torrid… [and] defeating” that in spite of the whirring fan and spacious layout of the office, it is “still a hot, humid, and airless box” (Monsarrat 1956: 30) rendering him unproductive. Thus, the colonialist writer constitutes the elements into a formidable cosmic machinery that serves to disarm and defeat the coloniser. Almost all colonisers experience physical caging in one form or another. Apart from the general sense of physical caging which affects most Europeans in Africa, 207 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh there are also very specific forms of physical caging. An example is Ayesha’s habitation in She. According to Holly, Ayesha’s house is “a great natural castle” whose “solitary grandeur” and “majesty” “I never saw, and I suppose I never shall” (Haggard 1994: 124). In spite of Holly’s superlative description, the structure in question is merely a mountain with subterranean caves filled with corpses from a long-dead civilisation. Indeed, it is a burial ground consisting of a series of sepulchral chambers. In these morbid chambers, Ayesha is physically and socially trapped. Her mobility is acutely restricted in the caves. When Holly asks, “does she come at times without the mountain?” Billali responds, “Nay, my son, where she is, there she is” (126). Ayesha’s caging becomes clearer when we consider the fact that she does not come into the caves on her own volition. She is forced into hiding in the caves as a fugitive. She seems to have been an itinerant Arabic philosopher, a sort of sophist, who travelled from place to place teaching. Her attempt to teach Arabic philosophy to the Jews in Jerusalem provoked the ire of the Rabbis and Jewish religious leaders who incited the people to stone her. She then fled to hide in the caves. In her own words, “they broke my heart, those Jews, …and drove me to this wilderness” (146). In other words, she is a heretic and fugitive from Jewish law. In the light of the above, Ayesha’s mountain is not the palatial castle Holly presents it to be. It is a prison, a physical cage, erected by the African geography to detain her. She is physically caged by the African terrain. Ayesha is not the only coloniser in the novel who experiences physical caging. Holly, Leo and Job are also caged. Job and Leo, especially, express at various times their wish to escape, but also acknowledge the impossibility of leaving. For instance, it is quite impossible for them to find their way out of the complex labyrinth of caves, or “across the network of marshes which, stretching for scores and scores of miles, formed a stronger and more impassable 208 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh fortification…than any that could be built…by man” (Haggard 165-66). Then, there is the danger of the Amahagger discovering their escape attempt. According to Billali, escape is difficult: “By Kor ye cannot pass, for ye would be seen, and as soon as those fierce ones found that ye were alone, well [they will kill you]” (296). There is also the likelihood of their attempt upsetting Ayesha, who might then decide to kill them. The English men are completely caged on all sides the most restrictive of the cages being the geography. In spite of the scholarly credentials of Holly and Leo, it is the unlettered Job who provides a clear analysis of their caging, and, rightly, attributes it to a retribution from Africa. “It’s a country of devils,…and [Ayesha]’s the master of the lot: and if ever we get out clear it will be more than I expect to do. I don’t see no way out of it” (235). He continues, “[I]t is what people must expect as is fools enough to come to such a place to look for things no man is meant to find. It’s a judgement on us,…and I, for one, is of opinion that the judgement isn’t half done yet, and when it is done we shall be done too” (165, original emphasis). The usually optimistic Holly recognises the validity of Job’s conclusion and concedes: “Taking one thing with another, it appear[s] to me to be an utter impossibility that we should escape from the place where we are” (165). Ironically, Ayesha, the queen of the cage, also wants to escape from the cage. She wants to marry Leo so that “we will go hence…and journey to this England of thine, and live as it becometh us to live” (234). Her desperation to escape echoes in her lament: “Two thousand years have I waited for the day when I should see the last of these hateful caves and this gloomy-visaged [Amahagger] folk” (243). The colonisers’ dream of escape is partially fulfilled when Leo and Holly are helped by Billali to run away. Ayesha and Job fail in their bid to escape as they both die in the cave of Noot. 209 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5.2.2 Social Caging Closely related to the colonisers’ physical caging is the notion of social caging, which involves the colonisers’ imposition of social restrictions upon themselves. In social caging, the colonisers come to Africa to ‘imprison’ themselves metaphorically. Among the colonisers who suffer self-imposed caging are: Conrad’s Kurtz and Kurtz’s Russian assistant; Greene’s Henry Scobie and Querry; and Monsarrat’s Macmillan. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz comes to Africa as an agent of an ivory-trading company, and becomes so naturalised that he refuses to leave. He sets himself up as a king over the African kings, and organises a ruthless private army which helps him to raid the communities for ivory tusks. His unsound methods of trade are well documented in the company’s headquarters, but there is no intervention from Europe as the company enjoys the economic benefits of his atrocious relationship with the Africans. His racism is captured, for instance, in his opinion that the African ‘brutes’ must be exterminated (Conrad 1994: 72). European intervention comes only when he falls terminally sick, and Marlow is despatched to rescue him. Clearly, Kurtz cages the communities that fall under his influence. The crawling African kings, the illegal raids, the fomenting of communal wars for economic reasons, the genocidal cleansing of Africans who challenge him, and many other atrocities point to him as a prototypical coloniser. Feeling he owns Africa, he simply refuses to leave. When Marlow comes to rescue him, he tells Marlow: “You are interrupting my plans.... You with your little peddling notions – you are interfering with me” (88). He promises to return, and carry out his plans. Unlike Ayesha, Holly, Leo and Job who express the desire to escape from Africa, Kurtz is explicit he wants to stay. In pursuit of his desire to stay, he runs away from Marlow’s steamer and goes back into the social circles of Africa. It is only by physical force that he is taken away from the jungle but even so, he does not 210 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh make it back to Europe. He dies on the steamer on the Congo. Kurtz’s social caging is seen in the light of the fact that he is under no compulsion to remain in Africa. He is already a corporate hero in Europe having enriched his employers with record stocks of stolen ivory from Africa. He is rich and can go back to Europe and live a comfortable life. That he refuses to leave suggests caging, an unconscious level of caging. Ironically, he seems unaware of his caged position in Africa, and promises to return. Perhaps, had Marlow succeeded in taking him to England, he would have returned to Congo. Examining Kurtz’s social situation in another light, we will suggest that his self-caging as well as psychological and physical regression into bestiality is a result of a curse placed on him by Africa or Africans. In a recent study, The Transnational in English Literature, Pramod K. Nayar recognises the correlation between the name “Kurtz” and the malediction “curse.” He finds that the two nouns echo each other in a phonological relationship which is reinforced by a half-rhyme: “Kurtz” (kərts) and “curse” (kərs) (2015: 205). We suggest that perhaps, it is a curse that leads Kurtz to: turn his back on his “Intended [wife]” (Conrad 69); deny his country; spurn the wealth he amasses; reject the assurance that “Your success in Europe is assured” (94); and abandon all the comforts of Europe. Perhaps, it is the same curse that makes him opt to stay among the so-called cannibals in an atavistic corner of the world. Perhaps, only such a strong curse can affect a man’s psychology so much as to make him take such drastic decisions. In some sense, Kurtz is as much a curse to Africa as Africa is a curse to him. Similarly caged in Africa is Kurtz’s Russian assistant, the Harlequin. Son of an arch- priest, he runs away from home in search of adventure. After dabbling in seamanship, he finds himself in Congo as a trader. His adventure in Congo is accidental. He begs a Dutch friend, Van Shuyten to set him up in trade, and after taking a few cheap merchandises, “I went a little farther, 211 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh then still farther – till I had gone too far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back” (Conrad 78). Clearly, he is lost in the African jungle. He is not successful in business as he has neither merchandise nor money to trade with. He is poor, wears rags and walks about almost bare-footed (91). According to Marlow, “He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through” (79). He has no aim in life other than “to exist, and move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation” (79). Like Kurtz, he is under no compulsion to stay in Africa. He manages to settle his indebtedness with Van Shuyten when he sends him “one small lot of ivory” (77). Van Shuyten can therefore not call him a thief when he (Russian) returns home. Evidently, the Russian has no business in Africa, yet he refuses to leave. Ironically, he urges Kurtz to return to England (81), but does not recognise his own forlornness. When he has the opportunity to ask Marlow for a favour, he does not ask for a passage back home. He asks for bullets and a new pair of shoes for “a new encounter with the wilderness” (91), which encounter, we can assume will be as fruitless as his life. His case is also an instance of self-imposed caging. Another character whose self-imprisonment is similar to Conrad’s Russian is Greene’s Querry, the famous ecclesiastical architect in A Burnt-Out Case. Unable to reconcile his Catholic sensibilities with the vanity of his celebrity, he escapes his debauched life in Europe to sojourn in Congo. He gives up on his career, children, society and life generally. Confiding in Dr. Colin, the dermatologist at the Catholic leprosarium, he says, “I have no interest in anything anymore…. I don’t want to sleep with a woman nor design a building. […] I wanted to be in an empty place, where no new building or woman would remind me that there was a time when I was alive” (Greene 1961: 52). In coming to Africa, therefore, he seeks the womb of renewal, but also the tomb of rest. When Dr. Colin asks, “So you thought you could just come and die here?” he 212 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh responds, “Yes. That was in my mind too” (52, original emphasis). He expresses the hope that the Catholic priests at the convent where he seeks refuge will “find room” for him in the cemetery (163) because “I don’t want to return to Europe….Never. I am afraid to return” (28). He is a classic example of self-imprisonment in Africa. Greene’s Henry Scobie and Monsarrat’s Andrew Macmillan also refuse to leave Africa in The Heart of the Matter and The Tribe That Lost Its Head respectively. The two men reflect each other in many ways. Both are in the colonial service; the former is the head of the Colonial Police in Sierra Leone; the latter, Resident Commissioner in Pharamaul. Both men have served for a long time in their respective colonies, and are nearing retirement, but are reluctant to return to England on their retirement. When Scobie is passed over for promotion, his wife, Louise, suggests he resign. Scobie refuses to do so on the grounds that he cannot leave Africa. “I have been fifteen years in this place. I’d be lost anywhere else, even if they gave me another job” (Greene 1948: 23). He advances a plethora of reasons to justify his inability to leave: “I have been here too long to go. […] You know I like the place. …It’s pretty in the evening” (17). Scobie is fully aware that he could have been “somewhere far better, [with a] better climate, better pay, [and] better position” (17), but he feels unable to leave Africa. Like Querry, his professional upheavals are compounded by instances of bribery, extramarital liaisons, spousal pressures and an unforgiving Catholic conscience. The amalgamation of all these crises leads to an acute sense of social paralysis in his life in Africa, but he is still resolute in his decision to stay in Africa. Andrew Macmillan in Monsarrat (1956) is similarly paralysed by professional and social failures. Professionally, his racist and arrogant responses to Maula demands leads to a violent Maula reaction which neutralises his authority as Resident Commissioner. He acknowledges his 213 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh failure when he admits that his administration has been unsuccessful in “its task of maintaining order,…and ha[s] to be reinforced [by the military]” (Monsarrat 459). He fails also on the social front as he is estranged from his native England. Alienated from England for a long time, he becomes disenchanted with English lifestyle, and is unsuccessful in his attempt to re-integrate into British society. For instance, when he goes for holidays in England, he feels like a stranger on tour. “[A] fortnight in Oxfordshire…, and a week in London” (7) is enough to make him realise that he wants to settle in Africa for good. Sacrificing the luxuries of London, he chooses to settle in the “hot, damp, ant infested, [and] ill-appointed” Residency in Gamate (7). Having spent thirty five years in Pharamaul, he decides “Pharamaul [is] home, and only there could he be happy” (7). The social and professional burdens and pressures of colonial life in Africa lead to all these Europeans entrapping themselves in Africa. Unable to extricate themselves, the only way out of the social cage is death. Kurtz dies on board Marlow’s steamer, Scobie and Macmillan commit suicide, and Querry is murdered. Paradoxically, death does not take them out of the African cage. In fact, death keeps them perpetually caged in the African cave as they are all buried in the African soil. 5.2.3 Marital Caging Lastly, we shall look at how the colonisers’ marriages break down in Africa and metamorphose into a cage. The marital cage affects mostly the female colonisers such as: Ayesha, Louise Scobie and Marie Rycker in She, The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case respectively. We have already discussed Ayesha’s physical caging by the African geography. Her physical caging is complemented by marital caging. She falls in love with Kallikrates who is already married to Amenartas. Out of jealousy, she kills Kallikrates, while Amenartas flees. She then waits for two thousand years in the caves for Kallikrates to reincarnate, and come back to 214 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh marry her. She concedes to Holly, “I wait now for one I loved to be born anew, and I tarry here till he finds me” (Haggard 147). She laments further: “Two thousand years have I waited and endured; […] with all my passion eating at my heart” (Haggard 161-62). The hope of marriage to Kallikrates becomes the paramount consideration which overrides all her other thoughts. The failed marriage negotiation with Kallikrates and her uncompromising desire to actualise the illicit liaison become for her a marital cage which keeps her shackled in the caves for two millennia. In The Heart of the Matter, Louise Scobie’s position is similar to Ayesha’s in She. Louise is the wife of Henry Scobie, the head of the Colonial Police Service in Sierra Leone. Her sense of fulfilment and pride is in her husband’s achievements, as she does not work herself. She is, thus, devastated when her husband is overlooked for promotion to the position of Commissioner. She sees Scobie’s failure as a personal defeat. When she learns of Scobie’s inability to secure the higher position, she laments, “How different the whole day would have been if you’d come home and said, ‘Darling, I’m going to be the Commissioner’” (Greene 1948: 24). The singular blemish in her husband’s career defines her position in the marriage and direction in life. Due to Scobie’s professional failure, Africa becomes, for her, an even more intolerable social cage: “I’ll never be able to show my face at the club again” (23); “Do you think they all know…[t]hat you’ve been passed over [for the position of Commissioner]?”; “[T]hey don’t like me [at the club]” (27); “They’ll be laughing about…me” (42). Her social relations with the European community break down just as her marriage to Scobie does. Inevitably, her marriage becomes a cage which must be escaped. She creates the conditions which lead to separation. She starts by accusing Scobie of narcissism: “Do you love any one…except yourself?” (24); “You don’t love anybody” (56). She then charges him with infidelity: “[you love our servant] Ali’s sister” (24). She also brands their marriage loveless: “I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me” (56), “you 215 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh won’t even say you love me” (57). She finally suggests separation: “if I go away, you’ll have your peace. […] [Y]ou wish I were dead… You want to be alone” (58). Louise’s action reflects a deeply caged psyche, the result of fifteen years of financial, physical, social and marital entrapment in Africa. In speaking out, she gives vent to thoughts and emotions which have been long repressed. Her psychological instability and neurotic depression, exemplified by her regular bouts of crying and tantrums, are an indication of her recognition of her caging, and her expression of her desire for freedom. She proposes multiple routes out of the multiple cages. First, she wants to work: “I could make a little money writing. …I ought to be a professional” (23). Her demand for work provides a fruitful arena for feminist discourse. Second, she wants to leave the stifling conditions of living with Scobie: “[P]lease let me go away and begin again” (42); “I can’t bear this place any longer. …I shall go mad…. I’m so lonely. I haven’t a friend” (56). Thus, Wilson’s recitation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “To a Lady, With a Guitar,” seems as much an expression of his own desires for Louise as it is a commentary on Louise’s marital caging. In Shelley’s lines: “the poor sprite is/Imprisoned for some fault of his/In a body like a grave” (62), Louise’s marital cage is strongly implied. In her attempt to escape, Louise leaves not for Europe but for South Africa. It is understandable why she chooses South Africa over England. In England, she cannot avoid the public censure that is likely to erupt over her deserting her marriage. In South Africa, she is certain to avoid censure. Also, in South Africa, she will enjoy the added benefit of the apartheid regime which conduces to the comfort of Europeans. The fact, however, is that, Louise is unable to escape the marital cage. While in South Africa, news of Scobie’s illicit affair with Helen Rolt drives her back to Sierra Leone where she starts an affair of her own with Wilson. Perhaps, Scobie’s suicide provides a cathartic ventilation for Scobie himself, and also for Louise. 216 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The case of the coloniser’s marital entrapment in Africa is epitomised by the life of Marie Rycker in Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. Marie is married to Rycker, an overzealous and hypocritical Catholic, who manages of an oil-palm plantation in Congo. His fanatical Catholicism turns his marriage into a suffocating cage for Marie. His puritanical attitude towards sex and worldly entertainment is comparable only to his obsessive craving for alcohol. For instance, he prohibits Marie from playing cards or bridge or socialising with the other Europeans. He says, “I will not have my wife turned into a typical colon[,] …[s]pending all their time in small talk” (Greene 1961: 79; original emphasis). He will also not consummate his marriage, telling Marie, “I am only your husband who shares your bed” (81). He is scared of starting a family, so he makes Marie sleep in a separate room. He sees her only when she is not likely to get pregnant (82, 83). To him, the act of lovemaking is like “going through the Dark Night of the Soul” (81). He suggests love and happiness are incompatible with marriage (81-82). His explanation for his religious overzealousness is that he wanted to be a priest as young man (80). The staleness of their marriage is demonstrated by the fact that he prefers saying the “Pater Noster,” “Ave Maria” or “the Act of Contrition” (82) to speaking to his wife. The social weight of his idiosyncrasies in an unfriendly African environment takes its emotional and psychological toll on the young Marie. She confides in Querry, “I wish I hadn’t met [my husband]” (191). Like Louise Scobie, she wants to escape from the marriage, and from Africa. She admits to Querry: “I hate this place, I want to go home” (191). She attempts to borrow money from Querry “for a ticket home – I mean, to Europe” (192). To demonstrate her desperation to escape, she falsely accuses Querry of responsibility for her pregnancy. She tells the lie so that “they’ll send me home” (238). According to Querry, “She’ll stick to her lies [because] [t]hey are her only way of escape from Rycker and Africa” (238-39). When her husband, believing her lies, kills Querry 217 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and gets imprisoned, Marie makes her escape from the marital cage and flees from Africa. In all the instances of physical, social and marital caging cited, we can surmise that the African environment – the configuration of the elemental forces of the geography as well as the vicissitudes – unleashes a torrent of disconcerting dynamics that work to entrap the colonisers. Summarising the chapter, we have attempted to provide two separate but linked analyses to illustrate the pair of antithetical functions involved in the notion of caging. In the first section of the chapter, we discussed [Sentence (b): X cages Y:]. Under this sentence, we examined how the colonisers use military and social means to physically cage the Africans. In the second section of the chapter, we looked at how [Sentence b] is reversed in [Sentence (b-1): The Cave cages X], where the African cave, acting on behalf of the African, cages the coloniser in turn. We can, therefore, observe the reversal of roles between [Sentence (b)] and [Sentence (b-1)]. Demonstrably, the subject of [Sentence (b)] becomes the object of [Sentence (b-1)] while the object of [Sentence (b)] becomes the subject of [Sentence (b-1), keeping in mind that the Cave is equivalent to Y, [Cave ≡ Y]. What this means is that the colonisers’ caging of the Africans in [Sentence (b)] is turned against the colonisers in [Sentence (b-1)]. Conversely, the African who is at the receiving end of the colonisers action in [Sentence (b)] is avenged by the African environment in [Sentence (b-1)]. This inverted structure maintains the chiasmic logic of the grammar. In the next chapter, we shall look at theft as a function. We shall discuss the last pair of the antithetical sentences: [Sentence (c): X steals from the Cave/Y] and Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave steal from X]. Regarding the function we shall examine how the colonisers take over the natural resources of the colonised Africans, and use them for their own benefits while the original owners languish in poverty. In the inverse sentence, we shall discuss the revenge of the 218 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Africans and the cave, that is, how the African and African environment also rob the colonisers of valuable resources. We shall provide the analysis in an attempt to consolidate our observation that a dioscuric grammar governs the structure of the colonialist novel. 219 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 6.0 CHAPTER SIX THEFT: EXPROPRIATION AND THE FAUSTIAN EXCHANGE In this chapter, we seek to provide an analysis of the economic enterprise of colonialism in Africa as portrayed in the colonialist novel. In pursuing that object, we contend that the colonial economy in Africa is governed by a principle we shall call ‘Faustian exchange’ or ‘Faustian theft’. In our view, the Faustian myth provides an archetypal economic principle that governs the type of economic exchange the colonisers practise in Africa. We shall attempt to summarise the myth in order to provide the necessary perspective. In the myth, Faust mortgages his soul to the devil for benefits such as knowledge, power, wealth and pleasure for a specific period of time. At the end of the period, the devil takes Faust’s soul in payment for lavishing him with the gifts mentioned. Our notion of ‘Faustian theft’ is influenced by this myth. In the colonialist novel, the African environment is portrayed as a Faustian cave because it is inexhaustibly resourceful, menacingly dark, malevolent and unforgiving. The Africans who are the owners of the cave’s resources are represented as agents of darkness, children of the ‘evil’ space. The African cave and its ‘evil’ children, therefore, constitute a formidable Faustian dyad, a formulation which is consistent with the notation Y≡ the cave. The colonisers are represented as the greedy Faust archetype. In their pursuit of political and economic power, the colonisers enter the African cave (the bewitched ‘heart of darkness’) and strip the ‘agents of darkness’ (Africans) of their wealth. By doing so, the colonisers metaphorically ‘pawn’ their souls to the presumed dark forces of the Faustian cave. What the colonisers steal in Africa is therefore ‘Faustian wealth’, an accursed lode of resources whose fraudulent acquisition implies an inevitable and horrible retribution. Consequently, the so-called dark forces of Africa, or more appropriately, the ‘malevolent’ dyad of the African/African cave contrives to steal the resources of the colonisers in revenge. As a result, the colonisers lose their sanity, health, wives and lives. 220 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Indeed, most of the colonisers end up awfully or die horribly to satisfy the Faustian ‘bargain’. This function of expropriation, in its dioscuric logic of theft and counter-theft, is what constitutes our notion of the ‘Faustian exchange’. Albert Memmi observes an analogous phenomenon in the colonial enterprise. In his work, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi theorises the economic career of colonialism and concludes that the enterprise ultimately leads to entrapment or death of the coloniser. Unlike our notion of Faustian exchange, though, Memmi’s theorising does not ascribe retribution or the Faustian principle to the demise of the coloniser. Given the profundity of Memmi’s observation, and its coincidence with our own view on the economic career of colonialism, we shall quote Memmi at some length below: Today, the economic motives of colonial undertakings are revealed by every historian of colonialism. The cultural and moral mission of a colonizer, even in the beginning, is no longer tenable. Today, leaving for a colony is not a choice sought because of its uncertain dangers, nor is it a desire of one tempted by adventure. It is simply a voyage towards an easier life. One need only ask a European living in the colonies what general reasons induced him to expatriate and what particular forces made him persist in exile. […] The change involved in moving to a colony…must first of all bring substantial profit. …[A] colony is a place where one earns more and spends less. You can go to a colony because jobs are guaranteed, wages high, career more rapid and business more profitable. The young [European] graduate is offered a position, the public servant a higer rank, the businessman substantially lower taxes, the industrialist raw material and labor at attractive prices. […] But if he were repelled by its climate, ill at ease in the midst of its strangely dressed crowds, lonely for his native country, the problem 221 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh would be whether or not to accept these nuisance and this discomfort in exchange for the advantages of a colony. …From then on, even though fed up, sick of the exotic, at times ill, he hangs on; he will be trapped into retirement or death. (1967: 3-5, my emphases) In providing our analysis of the economic enterprise of colonialism, we are aware of recent criticism on the Faust archetype. For instance, Paul Sheehan observes a semblance between Conrad’s Kurtz and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (2013: 163). Norbert Kohl and David Henry Wilson, in Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, also link Dorian Gray to the Faust myth. In Kohl and Wilson’s view, “Dorian’s desire to preserve his youthful beauty while his portrait bears the alteration of age, and his willingness to even sacrifice his soul to this end” is a representation of the “pactum cum diabolo” – the devil’s contract – “found in the legends of Faust and Theophilus” (1989: 162). This logic of theft and counter-theft goes to reinforce, for instance, Memmi’s view on colonial economics as well as the generic chiasmic principle we have identified in the colonialist novel. We shall provide the analysis to illustrate the last pair of the antithetical sentences of the colonialist grammar. For [Sentence (c): X steals from the Cave/Y], the emphasis shall be on the colonisers’ theft of African resources. For [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave steal from X], the focus shall be on the counter-theft by Africans and the African space. We shall first consider (Sentence c). In pursuit of that objective, we shall recapitulate Taiwo’s framework (2010: 38) on the types of colonisation to enable us to examine colonial theft. We reproduce Taiwo’s framework in Table 5 below: 222 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Table 5 Colonisation1 Settlement Canada, Australia, United States of America Colonisation2 Exploitation1 India, Caribbean Exploitation2 Africa Colonisation3 Settlement + Exploitation South Africa, Kenya, Algeria Taiwo identifies three types of colonisation. In his view, the commonest form of colonisation in Africa is Colonisation2 with its heavy emphasis on Exploitation2. According to Taiwo, though India, the Caribbean and Africa experience Colonisation2, Africa is a different case because its peculiarly primitive features provide immense obstacles for the forces of development and history. Thus, “In the hierarchy of colonies of exploitation, India was put in a category all its own and all other tropical possessions were placed opposite it. Among the latter, Africa was placed at the bottom” explaining the differentiation between Exploitation1 and Exploitation2 (Taiwo 37). The term ‘Exploitation2’ is used, therefore, to designate the expropriation that goes on specifically in Africa because of the continent’s primitive circumstances. Under Colonisation2, the prime factor of interest for the coloniser is the ready availability of the raw materials needed to feed European industrialisation. Primary produce such as spices, cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm nut, sugarcane, oil-seeds and rubber are encouraged as the coloniser promotes a shift from the traditional cultivation of subsistence crops to the production of primary export crops. Again, the Colonisation2 community provides a ready market for manufactured European goods which are mostly a conversion of raw materials taken from the colonies (2010: 36). Our interest in Taiwo’s model lies in Colonisation2 because it represents the widest form of colonisation in Africa; and to affirm the fact, all the novels studied for this dissertation are set under Colonisation2. In providing the analysis, we shall make cursory 223 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh references to Kwame Nkrumah (1962) and Tejumola Olaniyan (2005). We shall now commence our analysis by discussing [Sentence (c): X steals from the Cave]. 6.1 [Sentence (c): X steals from the Cave/Y] We observe that economic production and exchange in the colonialist novel are tilted in favour of the colonisers. In all the novels studied, we observe a systematic pattern of economic duping and robbery sponsored by the colonial state for the benefit of the colonisers and their commercial interests. The African continent and African peoples are systematically robbed of their resources or short-changed in the economic exchange. The colonisers steal a wide range of African resources, including: animal, mineral, forest, marine and human resources in what essentially constitutes a Faustian theft. 6.1.1 Theft of Animal Resources In the novels, the colonisers’ attitude to the African animal resource is that of reckless exploitation and destruction without respect to sustainability and compensation. Two motivations drive this careless expropriation of the animal resource. The first is the Europeans’ racist assumption that the African resources are not owned by anybody, and that Africa is a free and ‘empty’ land that is available for appropriation. The second motivation is the Europeans’ penchant for capitalist profiteering. In our view, the Europeans’ reckless expropriation and profiteering practices are both examples of theft. We shall attempt to illustrate. In She, Holly and Leo come to Africa for two reasons. The primary aim is to find the “the rolling Pillar of Life;” the secondary reason is to shoot big game. It seems that the latter intention eventually outweighs the former as they concede the impossibility of their original mission. The desire to hunt in Africa stems from their belief that the African jungle is an uncontested territory 224 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and its resources unclaimed. According to Holly, “[Africa] must be a very wild stretch of country, and full of big game. I have always wanted to kill a buffalo before I die” (Haggard 1994: 52). Leo also suggests, “I shall get some first-class shooting” (52). Holly sums up their resolution thus: “I don’t believe in the [original] quest, but I do believe in big game” (52). Accordingly, one of the first things they do on arrival in Africa is to load their guns, and destroy the animal population for the sake of adventure. According to Holly, “We saw hundreds of crocodiles basking on the muddy banks, and thousands upon thousands of waterfowl. Some of these we shot, and among them was a wild goose” (69). The waterfowl are destroyed for the sake of reckless adventure rather than for the existential necessity of food. The only animal they shoot for food is a waterbuck (69). We see the wanton destruction of the animals in Haggard in the same light as the destructive theft and exploitation of the African mineral resources by Conrad’s Eldorado Exploring Expedition in Heart of Darkness (1994: 43-44). The colonisers’ fixation on elephant tusks in Congo provides another example of the theft of Africa’s animal resource. In Heart of Darkness, ivory is the main material exported from Congo. Ivory is a precious material used for aesthetic, cosmetic and industrial products. There is, therefore, a keen capitalist competition among the European companies for the resource. Companies send agents such as Kurtz to Congo to procure the material, but not much legal procurement takes place. What takes place is a violent theft of the resource and massive destruction of the elephant population. Marlow’s account of the volume of the ivory trade suggests the magnitude of devastation wrecked on the elephants in Congo. According to Marlow, Kurtz’s warehouse has “Heaps of [elephant tusks]. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country” (Conrad 69). There is so much ivory that “We filled the steamboat with it, and had to 225 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh pile a lot on the deck” (70). Marlow’s account represents only Kurtz’s collection. Even a conservative reckoning of only Kurtz’s activities projects a gloomy fate for the African elephant population, not to speak of the cumulative effect of the activities of the other ivory agents. Adam Hochschild’s historical perspective provides support for our analysis. According to Hochschild, “As the 1890s began, the work whose sanctity [King] Leopold prized most highly was seizing all the ivory that could be found. Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants” (1999: 118). Though Congo people have been hunting elephants for centuries (1999: 118), the sudden massive commercial scale hunting aided by new scientific technology – the gun rather than the spear – leads to the annihilation of the elephant stock. In spite of the exploitation of their resource, Africans do not accrue the economic value from the ivory trade. In Heart of Darkness, the coloniser either forces the Africans to hand over their ivory tusks or he steals them. For instance, Kurtz organises armed bandits to raid the African communities for their ivory tusks, or he foments intertribal wars as an expedient for stealing the Africans’ tusks. He even digs up tusks hidden underground, and steals them (Conrad 69). Kurtz’s Russian friend, the Harlequin, confirms Kurtz “had no goods to trade with” (80), and yet, he manages to “send in as much ivory as all the other [agents] put together” (27). Hochschild’s historical account provides remarks that support Marlow’s story, and the theft function. Hochschild outlines the various policies introduced by the Belgian colonisers to rob the Africans of their ivory resource. [First, Africans are] forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold. [Second,] [a] draconian refinement of ivory-gathering methods,…was a commission structure the king [Leopold] imposed in 1890, whereby his agents in the field got a cut of the ivory’s market value – but on a sliding scale. For ivory 226 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh purchased in Africa at eight francs per kilo, an agent received 6 percent of the vastly higher European market price. But the commission climbed, in stages, to 10 percent for ivory bought at four francs per kilo. The European agents thus had a powerful incentive to force Africans – if necessary, at gunpoint – to accept extremely low prices. Almost none of these Belgian francs actually reached any Congolese elephant hunters. They received only small amounts of cloth, beads, and the like, or the brass rods that the state decreed as the territory’s main currency. For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. (1999: 118) The historical portrait painted above represents the reality as must have been witnessed by Conrad on his visit to Congo, and might have shaped Marlow’s story in Heart of Darkness. In view of the above, statements such as: “Kurtz was the best agent,…an exceptional man, [and] of the greatest importance to the Company” (Conrad 32), or Kurtz is a “first-class agent” (27), reads to us as follows: ‘Kurtz is a first-class thief’ and of the greatest importance to ‘a swindling company’. Indeed, Marlow’s own words put an affirmative seal on our reading: Kurtz “collects, barters, swindles, or “steals more ivory than all the other agents together” (67). The other ivory agents who do not adopt Kurtz’s violent methods, also manage to rob the Africans in other ways. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, advocates conquest of overseas territories and expropriation of overseas resources as a necessary means of solving Europe’s economic problems. He also champions the use of the conquered territories as a market for manufactured European goods (1958: 151-52). Accordingly, Africa is not only cheated out of the economic bargain, she also becomes the dumping grounds for European goods (Olaniyan 2005: 279). Nkrumah also stresses the inferiority of the goods the coloniser sends to Africa, calling them “spurious imported goods” (1962: 19). In the economy of the colonialist novel, Hegelian 227 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh capitalism, and Nkrumah’s and Olaniyan’s insightful expositions of Hegel are observed. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow observes that “a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire [are] sent into the depths of darkness, and in return [comes] a precious trickle of ivory” (Conrad 26; my emphasis). We shall have much to say about the brass-wire currency of colonial Congo. Kurtz’s Russian friend also adopts the same policy of swindling in starting his unsuccessful business. He comes to Africa with some “cheap things” given him by Van Shuyten, and manages to send back a package of ivory a year later (77). Our argument is that the African elephants are destroyed for the sole enrichment of the colonisers. Africans are not compensated for the destruction of their animal resource as the colonisers use various coercive and swindling strategies to deny them of their share of the economic value of the ivory trade. As indicated, we shall make a brief digression from our discussion of the animal resource, and comment on the brass wire introduced as currency in colonial Congo. Marlow mentions the brass wire twice in his story. First, the brass wire is sent into the interior in exchange for valuable ivory. Second, his African crewmen are paid with the brass wire as a sort of crude currency. Each of the crewmen is given “three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to buy their provisions with that currency in river-side villages. …[However], [t]here were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or the director…didn’t want to stop the steamer…. So, unless they swallowed the wire itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don’t see what good their extravagant salary could be to them” (Conrad 58-59). The worthlessness of the brass wire currency is thus revealed by Marlow, and it, again, corroborates Hochschild’s historical observation that there are two currencies in use in colonial Congo. According to Hochschild, there are the valuable Belgian francs and the worthless brass wire which is really not money. Africans are not allowed to use the Belgian 228 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh francs because “Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy” (Hochschild 118). Thus, the issuing of the double currency is a part of the multi- layered duping strategies adopted by the colonisers to cheat the Africans out of their resources. We shall now continue with our substantive discussion on the theft of Africa’s animal resources, with an emphasis on the theft of animal skin. In Cary’s novels under study, trade in animal hide is so huge in Nigeria that it leads to the establishment of Rimi Hides Company by the Europeans (Cary 1936). Though there are Africans who trade in hide, such as Makurdi in The African Witch, the colonisers control the business with European merchants such as Prince (1936: 194) and Gollup (1939) complementing the activities of the big capitalist companies. The pattern of expropriation practised by Prince and Gollup, for instance, follows the pattern seen in Heart of Darkness. Prince, for instance, deals in all kinds of hide: cattle skin, goat skin and sheep skin. He buys quality skins from the Africans at decidedly low prices, and pays for them with cheap products in an inequitable barter system. As we have already observed in Conrad, the colonisers always strive to keep money from the hands of the Africans so that they can control the Africans. As a result, Prince pays a group of Hausa people for their cow skin with the “cheapest cotton” (Cary 1936: 195) instead of money. Indeed, Prince’s entire shop is filled with inferior goods: “cheap clay-filled cotton, cheap soap” and other cheap products (194) validating Nkrumah’s suspicion that the coloniser only merchandises “spurious imported goods” (1962: 19). In Mister Johnson, Gollup sells cow skin, while the colonial administration exports hides to England (Cary 1939: 54). The cases of Prince and Gollup, and their warped barter system, demonstrates Hegelian capitalism, a practice that affords Europe’s poor, “the penurious rabble” (Hegel 1958: 151), a new lease of economic life overseas. Thus, Prince, a lowly, filthy, shop assistant in Manchester (Cary 1936: 195-6), becomes a tycoon tradesman in Africa through 229 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh swindling. Similarly, Gollup, another lowly, and uncouth ex-British soldier, becomes “a little king” in Africa through inequitable trade practices. Curiously, Cary’s narrator celebrates Gollup as a “first-class trader” (1939: 122) just as Marlow celebrates Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. In Monsarrat, also, cow hide and cattle play a major role in the colonial economy as the commodities are exported to England (1956: 24) presumably on the same colonial principle of swindling. Indeed the narrator suggests so when he says that, “Pharamaul…had been an authentic part of the African pattern” (Monsarrat 24). As we have attempted to demonstrate with Conrad, Cary and Monsarrat, and as we shall see in Haggard and Greene also, the colonial economy is defined by a pattern of deceit, corruption, aggressive dispossessions, murders and violent thefts. Indeed, in the colonialist novel tradition, commercial dishonesty and theft are cultivated as ‘virtues’ that define the colonial economy. We have so far tried to look at the expropriation of Africa’s animal resource. African animals are, however, not the only resource stolen. 6.1.2 Theft of Mineral Resources Gold and diamond theft is one of the fulcrums of the colonial economic system. Africa’s rich lode of minerals is exploited indiscriminately and profits repatriated to Europe. In Heart of Darkness, The Heart of The Matter and The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the colonisers scramble for African minerals. In Conrad’s novel, we encounter, the reckless Eldorado Exploring Expedition whose sole aim is to prospect for minerals without any regard for environmental impacts. Their singular objective is, “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” (1994: 44). Marlow compares them to “burglars breaking into a safe” without any inkling of mores. Though Marlow does not know the sponsors of the Expedition, we are aware that large scale activities such gold and diamond prospecting are sponsored by powerful financiers in Europe who seek to make 230 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh massive profits from their African expeditions. We have already drawn attention in Chapter 5, to King Leopold II of Belgium’s sponsorship of Henry Stanley to Congo as a result of which he annexed all the important diamond- and rubber-producing areas in the country. Nkrumah rightly observes, therefore, that for the colonisers, Africa is a “field for capital investment,” thus “capitalists, bankers and financiers of colonial powers” invest into activities that will accrue for them “super profits” (1962: 6). The scramble for African minerals is highlighted also in The Tribe That Lost Its Head and The Heart of the Matter. In the former novel, the rumour of a gold strike in Orange Free State in South Africa brings prospectors travelling halfway across the world to Africa in search of the mineral (1956: 216). Had they found it, we can speculate that African labour will be heavily involved in the extraction, but Africans will not benefit from the wealth. In the latter novel, the British colonial government places an embargo on the indigenous diamond trade in Sierra Leone. A special agent is despatched from the Colonial Office in London to gather intelligence on the diamond smuggling. The colonial government’s fixation with diamonds leads Yusef, one of the Syrian diamond smugglers, to lament repeatedly: “I think the Government is crazy about diamonds” (Greene 1948: 100). All diamond resources in Sierra Leone are vested in the hands of the British government. What this means is that the precolonial African control of the diamonds is broken as control now falls into British and Syrian hands. Even the smuggling of the diamonds is out of African control. Syrians provide the conduit to send the diamonds to Portugal, Germany and France (Greene 100). Whichever way we look at it, therefore, Africa loses her minerals to Europe without the Africans benefiting. Whether through official British monopoly, or through the Syrian-European smuggling cartels, Africans are side-lined in the mineral exchange. 231 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh At this point, it is important to stress another dimension of the diamond business that reflects the Hegelian capitalist principle: low prices for African diamonds. According to Yusef, “for a whole matchbox full of [industrial diamonds], you would only get two hundred pounds” (100), again reflecting the policy of swindling and theft that characterises economic exchanges in Africa. 6.1.3 Theft of Forest Resources A comprehensive range of forest products are also stolen from Africa. Among these are tobacco (Cary 1939: 55), shea-butter (59), oil palm (Greene 1960: 172) and groundnuts pressed into oil (Monsarrat 1956: 23). Africa’s wood resource is also targeted by the colonisers. In Monsarrat, for example, there is “a big logging-camp” up north that keeps sawmills in Port Victoria in the south “busy most of the year round” (1956: 26). Sending logs from the landlocked north to the sea port implies lumber exportation: African wood is prepared for immediate use in England. In Greene, the narrator complains about the capitalistic tendencies of O.T.R.A.C.O., the colonial government’s company that has monopoly over transportation on the Congo River and its tributaries. The company also sells wood as fuel for the numerous steamers that ply the river system. The narrator complains about the exorbitant prices O.T.R.A.C.O charges for its fuel wood (Greene 1961: 7). Given the centrality of marine transport to the colonial expansion, we can merely speculate the size of the Congo forest that is exploited for fuel wood. 6.1.4 Theft of Marine Resources In Monsarrat, the heavy dependence of the English economy on its overseas colonies is vividly portrayed. The resources of the colony of Pharamaul are heavily exploited for the benefit of the English people and industries. In view of the long list of resources taken out of the colony (1956: 23-4), the narrator stresses that “the only status [Pharamaul] seemed likely to enjoy” is 232 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh that of a feeder island; Pharamaul is a country to be exploited. “Its salt fish,” for instance, “had sustained the endurance (and tortured the thirst) of passing mariners” (1956: 23). There is, therefore, a policy to set up a fish-canning business (26) to regularise the colony’s fish supply to the colonisers’ plying its seas. Aside from the exploitation of Pharamaul’s fish resource for culinary purposes, there is another, rather unconventional, form of exploitation of the fish. In Monsarrat’s novel, there is a rumour that a coelacanth has been caught off the coast of Pharamaul. We shall makes a brief excursus at this point to provide the necessary historical perspective. Coelacanth is an archaic, prehistoric species of fish believed to have perished with the dinosaurs “in the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period” (Weinberg 2000: 22). The most archaic fossilised specimen of the coelacanth found dates to about four and ten million years ago. Until 1938, the most recent fossil dated to about seventy million years ago, and was found in 1839 (Weinberg 22). Marjorie Courtney-Latimer’s catch of a live coelacanth off the coast of South Africa in 1938 was therefore “a staggering announcement” that “rocked the zoological world;” it was “the impossible come true” (Smith 1979: 11). Our interest in the history of the coelacanth lies first in its likely inspiration for Monsarrat’s coelacanth. Incidentally, Monsarrat’s coelacanth is also caught in southern African seas just as the historical coelacanth. Indeed, Monsarrat’s narrator alludes to the historical catch when he says the species are “known to have reappeared off the African coast” (Monsarrat 194). Second, we are interested in the coelacanth because of the politics of naming involved with the catch. Marjorie Courtney-Latimer’s catch is named after her as ‘coelacanth Latimeria’ (Smith 1979: 13) immortalising her name. In Monsarrat’s novel, the Governor of Pharamaul, Sir Elliott Vere-Toombs, wishes the coelacanth to be named after him as ‘coelacanth Vere-Toombs’ merely because it is caught in the colony where he is governor (Monsarrat 194). 233 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The governor’s stance means that if indeed a coelacanth had been caught, the local African fisherman who caught it would have been relegated to the background, and his glory stolen by the coloniser. Instead of the fish being named after the African fisherman, the governor will usurp the fisherman’s position, and appropriate the fame that accrues to him for his discovery. This incident of naming is very insightful: it demonstrates that not only physical resources are stolen from Africa, but also intellectual property is pilfered. The incident also exposes the fact that the African stands to be swindled in whichever arena of exchange he engages the coloniser. 6.1.5 Theft of Human Resources In Chapter 5, we discussed forced labour under the notion of physical caging. In the present chapter, we shall look at African labour as a stolen resource. Nkrumah draws our attention to the fate of the African labour force under colonialism. He discusses the reduction of Africans to the servitude of “contract bondsmen” and the meagreness of the stipends paid to them by the colonisers (1962: 18-19). In the colonialist novel, Nkrumah’s assessment of colonial labour is prevalent: the entire African populace is reduced to servant status. In Congo, for instance, Hochschild (1999) alerts us to the historical conscriptions to labour gangs that are fictionally represented in Heart of Darkness. There is evidence also that slavery and forced labour is widespread not only in Congo but in all colonial economies. In She, Holly’s African boatman, Mahomed, is poorly-used by the English men. He is an all-purpose servant: a boatman (Haggard 54), watchman (73), slave (83), and sacrificial ‘animal’ (100ff). He is to be sacrificed by the Amahagger in revenge for the insulting behaviour of the Englishman, Job. Ironically, Mahomed is killed by Holly, a member of the English entourage for whose indiscretion Mahomed’s life is being sacrificed by the Amahagger (101). Mahomed becomes the archetypal African slave. He apparently renders free service for the colonisers. He 234 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh risks his life to steer the English men across stormy waters, carries their cargo, and ensures their safety by watching out for them when they sleep. For all this, the narrator does not mention any payments to Mahomed. He is eventually shot dead without any provocation by the very coloniser he serves. The shooting is explained away as an accident. In Cary’s Mister Johnson, African labour is cheaply procured and abused. The English merchant, Gollup, pays his workers poorly resulting in Ajali and Johnson pilfering from the petty cash drawer (Cary 1939: 120-21). He also assaults them at will at the least provocation or without provocation at all. For instance, when Johnson mistakenly buys a poor hide at the price of a quality one, “Gollup sets up a scream, rushes at him and gives him a punch on the nose which jerks the boy’s head backwards like a punching ball” (123). This is Johnson’s first day in Gollup’s employ. He then forces Johnson to deny that he has been assaulted. Gollup also kicks Ajali for carrying out Gollup’s own instructions. The power of the kick is so ferocious that it sends Ajali slightly into the air (123).When Matumbi, Gollup’s mistress, tells a lie about one of Gollup’s workers, he “come out with wooden hammer break his head, kick his ribs, break four teeth down his troat, trow him in de river, and every time he come up he shoot at him with a gun” (120). District Officer Rudbeck also uses poorly-paid African labourers to construct the road which will enable the colonial administration to tap the resources of the interior for export to England. As Rudbeck admits: “every penny spent on them [the road, bridge and labourers] would bring in twenty in trade” (Cary 59). Cheap African labour is ruthlessly exploited to maximise English economic theft. In Cary’s The African Witch not much mention is made of African labour, although there is a lingering notion of the practice in the novel. In Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, there is an elaborate system of servitude. Ali, for instance, is the faithful servant of Scobie. There are many other ‘small boys’ in the service of Europeans. All African male servants are called ‘small boys’ 235 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh irrespective of their actual ages. As typical of the colonial labour system, as seen in the case of Haggard’s Mahomed, the African servant’s relationship with his European employer is fraught with abuses. Ali, for instance, is betrayed by Scobie, and gets violently murdered by Yusef’s men to cover up Scobie’s illicit dealings with smugglers (Greene 1948: 238). In A Burnt-Out Case, Deo Gratias, the African servant, is ill-treated by Querry. While Querry sleeps in a mosquito-proof bed in the trunk of the car, Deo Gratias settles for the night on the bare floor beneath the car (Greene 1961: 33). The question of African labour deserves a closer examination in Monsarrat’s novel. The British practise slavery in Pharamaul. The narrator is explicit about the fact that slaves from “the dark interior” of the colony “buttress the prosperity of Bristol and Liverpool” (1956: 24). Curiously, the narrator seems to endorse the practise calling it “a little slavery” (24). In our view no form of slavery can be justified as ‘little’; the justification draws attention to the narrator’s complicity. There is also mention of unlimited supplies of servants in Pharamaul. Indeed, the colony is represented as the coloniser’s haven as regards the supply of servants as well as other provisions. According to the narrator, “Pharamaul’s position on the Cape trade route gave it obvious strategic importance: as a result,…tourists came to spend a few weeks in guaranteed sunshine: easy-life settlers enjoyed the cheap living and the unlimited servants: hard-working immigrants disembarked to carve a life from this blossoming economy: civil servants arrived to shoulder the dreary burden of administration” (26). The truth is that all the segments of colonisers mentioned – tourists, settlers, immigrants, civil servants, missionaries and soldiers – depend on free or cheap African labour, as the narrator indicates. The entire Pharamaul economy is based on slave-like labour where “the humble and degraded blacks toil inhuman hours for the 236 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh white man, and exist on a handful of mealie rice a day” (75). An example of the slave-like working conditions is Oosthuizen’s plantation. Like many farmers in Pharamaul and South Africa, Oosthuizen runs his plantation on a paternalistic basis. The African workers are not paid for their labour. They are merely housed and fed by Oosthuizen; their children’s medical needs are attended to by Oosthuizen’s wife; and they are given plots to farm as if the land was their own, but it was not. All proceeds from the farms go to Oosthuizen. “All his neighbours work the same system as [him]” (116). Such a system is simply a remodelling of the Congo conscription system. Perhaps, the domestic front is the domain where Pharamaul’s cheap labour supply is more flamboyantly demonstrated. For example, at the Governor’s dinner, a small party of ten guests, there are about fifteen African servants in view, and “a round dozen other individuals” toiling behind the scenes (40). The narrator concedes that there are more servants than guests, and suggests that in England such an arrangement would have been seen as a “waste of taxpayers’ money [and] debasement of fellow human beings” (40). Curiously, in Africa, it is none of these ills. In Africa, the excessive deployment of servants at the party is not a waste of the taxpayers’ money because labour is obtained either freely or so cheaply as not to register on the accounting ledger. The question of dehumanisation of the African servants does not also arise because in the colonial context the African is hardly recognised as human. We have earlier suspected the complicity of the narrator in his justification of African enslavement and stolen labour. In the present episode, Monsarrat’s narrator pauses the narration, and provides a comment which is conspicuously authorial. He suggests that Africans are used mostly as servants because perhaps Africans “liked being servants;” that being servants is “the thing they did best of all;” that “they did not find [being servants] in the least degrading, and would have felt insecure, unhappy, and even disgraced, if they could not serve in this glittering household [of the 237 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Governor]” (40). By his utterances and stance, Monsarrat’s narrator is too closely aligned with the colonisers to be differentiated from them. As such, the narrator’s thinking betrays the colonisers’ perverted mentality which accepts the perpetration of injustice as “an authentic part of the African pattern” (24). As seen in the above episode, the narrator’s position in this story, and by extension, in all colonialist stories studied, is quite ambivalent. For instance, by exposing the dehumanisation of the African labour force, the narrator seems to criticise colonial excesses, and yet this important critical role is undermined by the narrator himself when he makes the series of uncharitable statements regarding African servitude. The narrator is explicit in his notion that Africans like being servants, that servitude is the best vocation for Africans, that Africans do not find forced labour and servitude degrading, and that denying the Africans the servile vocation is tantamount to denying them dignity (40). Such conspicuously anti-African utterances by Monsarrat’s narrator, and indeed by the narrators of all the colonialist novels under examination, create an ambivalence for the role of the colonialist narrator and his story. We may ask: is the colonialist novel genuinely a critique of colonialism as Hay (1963), Raskin (1967), Hunt (1979) and Tessitore (1980) seem to imply? Is the colonialist narrator wholly and genuinely committed to the African course? It is the critical view of the present writer that as a discourse of colonisation, and as a discursive enactment of British authority over colonised peoples the world over, the colonialist novel cannot be said to be a whole-hearted, dispassionate critique of colonialism, even if the writers intra- and extratextually make claims to the opposite. This is because there are conspicuous instances of bias and uncharitableness against Africans in the stories as typified by the stance of Monsarrat’s narrator above. Spivak (1985), Slemon (1987), Kubayanda (1990) and Bhabha (1995) clarify for us the the proper role of colonial discourse: “to 238 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh produce and naturalise the hierarchical power structures of the imperial enterprise, and to mobilise those power structures in the management of both colonial and neo-colonial cross- cultural relationships” (original emphasis, Slemon 1987: 6). Parry (1995: 42), citing Bhabha, also alerts us to the double rhetoric inherent in colonial discourse: that it implicates both the colonised and coloniser. The double-sided rhetoric may actually represent a subterfuge to destabilise meaning and to hide biased authorial intentions. From the analysis above, we can say that though the colonialist narrator may seem to be on a mission to critique colonialism, that mission may not be genuine after all because the very narrator continually produces hints of prejudice against the African he is seemingly defending. In a final example, Resident Commissioner, Macmillan, employs four convicted prisoners to work in his residential garden. When the interviewing journalist, Tulbach Browne, asks whether the prisoners get any token for their long hours of work in the scorching sun, Macmillan says, “We don’t pay them anything extra. It’s included in their normal prison routine.” Tulbach Browne is therefore right when he suggests that Macmillan’s exploitation of the prison systems “means that you get four gardeners for free” (145). Macmillan’s action is a clever ploy to enjoy free African labour. According to Monsarrat’s narrator, all these unfair labour arrangements are a part of the African pattern. It is a pattern that sees a “debased colony” such as Pharamaul (Monsarrat), Congo (Conrad, Greene), Sierra Leone (Greene), or Nigeria (Cary) “[making] a few men rich, a few more contented in hard employment, and innumerable others doomed to permanent subjection” (24). The above representations of slavery and cheap or stolen labour reflect the pattern of theft which characterises the colonisers’ relationship with the African continent and its peoples. So far we have tried to argue for theft. We have taken the position that the colonisers 239 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh steal from the African cave and its people. We have found that the resources stolen include the following: animals, minerals, forest products, marine products, human labour and human beings (slaves). We have also taken the position that the resources stolen are metaphorically Faustian in nature, and that the Faustian principle mandates the colonisers repay with resources of their own. We have provided the above analysis towards illustrating [Sentence (c): X steals from the Cave/Y]. In the following section of the chapter, we shall provide an analysis to illustrate how the action of [Sentence (c)] is reversed in its antithetical counterpart: [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave steal from X]. In other words, if in [Sentence (c)] we examined the colonisers’ accrual of the Faustian wealth, in [Sentence (c-1), we shall examine how the African and African cave unleash their Faustian retribution by stealing the resources of the colonisers in turn. We shall, therefore, examine how the colonisers repay their Faustian debt with their own resources. 6.2 [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave steal from X] In this section, we shall examine the counter-theft, that is, the reversal of the colonisers’ theft seen in [Sentence c]. If the colonisers steal from Africa and its peoples in [Sentence c], we shall examine in [Sentence c-1] how the African peoples and the African environment take their Faustian revenge on the colonisers by stealing the latter’s important resources in turn. In discussing [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave steal from X], we shall look at how the African and African cave steal the marriages, sanity and lives of the colonisers. 6.2.1 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Marriages The first of the colonisers’ resources that is ‘stolen’ by the African space is their marriages. Some of the colonisers, usually the men, invite their wives or fiancées to join them in Africa. Others get involved with African women. Both types of relationships are attacked by the vagaries of conditions in Africa. We shall look at the following spousal relationship: Kallikrates- 240 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Amenartas, Leo-Ustane and Leo-Ayesha in She; Rackham-Judy in The African Witch; Rudbeck- Celia and Gollup-Matumbi in Mister Johnson; Scobie-Louise in The Heart of the Matter; and Rycker-Marie in A Burnt-Out Case. In Haggard’s novel, Kallikrates is a Greek priest of the Egyptian deity, Isis. He breaks his vows of celibacy to marry an Egyptian princess, Amenartas, and elopes with her to the eastern African coast where they are trapped by Ayesha. Ayesha falls in love with Kallikrates, and wants him to divorce Amenartas, but he refuses to succumb to Ayesha’s advances. Angered by his slighting, Ayesha kills him. In our view, the coercive attempt by Ayesha to dissolve the marriage between Kallikrates and Amenartas represents an attempted theft of the Greek coloniser’s marriage. It is an instance of the forces of Africa contriving to rob Kallikrates of his marriage and life. The Faustian nature of this episode lies in the fact that Kallikrates’ marriage to Amenartas is fraudulent. As a priest sworn to celibacy, his revocation of his vows, abandonment of his spiritual duties, betrayal of the African deity he serves, and elopement with the African Amenartas have in them an element of theft. He can be said to have ‘stolen’ a wife, an African resource, and run away. Ayesha’s attempt to break the marriage is therefore a Faustian retribution for a Faustian theft. When Ayesha kills Kallikrates for slighting her, the Faustian principle is carried to its mythical conclusion. Ayesha – a monstrous, archaic, subterranean ‘creature’ imprisoned deeply in the caves of Africa – killing the Greek Kallikrates is the African cave’s vengeance on the coloniser and his marriage The second couple in She whose marriage is robbed is Leo and Ustane. In Chapter 5, we indicated how Leo and Ustane got married. Ayesha’s repeated craving for other women’s husbands leads her to murder Ustane. With her rival eliminated, Ayesha makes Leo fall in love with her. Leo laments: “I let [Ustane] be killed…but within five minutes I was kissing her 241 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh murderess [Ayesha] over her body. …I cannot resist that. …I know that I am in [Ayesha’s] power for always; if I never saw her again I should never think of anybody else during all my life” (Haggard 231). Ayesha whose life is enhanced by the psychic powers of the sacred Fire, intends to fortify Leo by the Fire. The Fire makes a person “so cased and hardened against the attacks of Time that arrows shall glance from the armour of thy vigorous life as the sunbeams glance from water” (Haggard 238-39). She promises Leo: “I will give thee life – …life and youth that shall endure for thousands upon thousands of years, and with it pomp, and power, and wealth, and all things that are good and beautiful, such as have been to no man before thee, nor shall be to any man who comes after” (Haggard 229). Ayesha’s offer is conspicuously Faustian. She is prepared to give Leo wealth, longevity, beauty and power in return for nuptial consummation. Ayesha has already made the Faustian pact by stepping into the sacred Fire explaining why her beauty and life are enhanced. By drawing Leo into the pact, she intends to negotiate a marriage of the immortals. She is on course to fulfilling this nuptial dream when she suffers a violent death in the Fire. (Haggard 280). Her death represents another example of the theft of the colonisers’ nuptial relationships, a theft caused by the African cave. In Cary’s The African Witch, there is another example of a stolen marriage. Irish man Rackham, head of the Colonial Police in Rimi in Nigeria, intends to marry Judy Coote, an ex- tutor at Oxford University. He invites Judy to join him in Africa, but their relationship suffers a breakdown as a result of disagreements over Aladai, the African prince. Judy had taught Aladai at Oxford, so in Rimi they become friends. Rackham, on the other hand, is a white supremacist who hates Aladai. There is also Dryas Honeywood, an English girl who is friends with Rackham, Judy and Aladai. A combination of racist hatred and jealousy as a result of Judy’s relationship with Aladai leads to a constant friction between Rackham and Judy resulting in their split. First, 242 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Judy does not like Rackham’s racist attitude towards Aladai. For instance, when the Europeans denounce Aladai’s presence at the Scotch Club and desert him, Judy wants to provide him with company but Rackham detains her by physical force. In another instance, Rackham beats Aladai for merely dancing with Dryas Honeywood. The quarrels and disagreements over Rackham’s treatment of Aladai strains the relationship between Rackham and Judy. The consequence is that Rackham starts having an affair with Dryas Honeywood. When Judy becomes aware of the affair, she asks Rackham, “if you want the engagement broken, I’d rather you told me,” to which he responds, “I will” (127). In the end, Judy becomes suicidal (259), and the engagement is broken. Rackham leaves for England not to return, while Judy stays in Africa to teach. In a way, Aladai becomes the prime factor for the collapse of the relationship. The Rackham-Judy story reflects another instance where the combination of the African and African cave ‘steals’ the colonisers’ marriage. Rudbeck and Celia’s marriage in Cary’s Mister Johnson closely resembles the Rackham- Judy relationship just discussed. Rudbeck, a District Commissioner in Fada, also, in Nigeria, is newly wedded to Celia. She joins him in Nigeria hoping to be a good wife, and to enjoy her stay. She soon finds out that Africa is a tedious place to live. Africa becomes, to her, “simply a number of disconnected events which have no meaning…at all” (Cary 1939: 92). She hates her life in Africa, and blames Rudbeck for bringing her to this “god-forsaken hole” (93) – we read ‘god-forsaken cave’. The effect of the pressures of the African situation strains their marriage to a breaking point. The constant quarrels lead to Celia’s nervous breakdown resulting in “crying fits” (101), denial of sex (93), inability to eat, sleep or read (94). So much hatred develops between husband and wife that they both agree their marriage is a mistake (93). Indeed, Rudbeck “[t]hank[s] goodness” that “there’s no baby [yet] – so we can split up evens” (93). The colonial 243 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh administration realising the effect of the African environment on the nerves of Celia, and on the marriage, transfers Rudbeck back to England. The instruction is for Rudbeck “take [Celia] home yourself by the next boat” (101). The transfer saves their marriage from the imminent collapse. Back in the familiar environment of Europe, the couple settle down to a peaceful marriage, and even have a baby. However, when they are transferred back to Africa, the friction starts again. Boredom in Africa and Rudbeck’s racist attitude to the Africans begin to strain their relationship again. Celia simply cannot bear to live in Africa. The novel ends with them still married but their relation is reduced to “a series of mild depressions and deceits” (153). We suppose the collapse of the marriage is only a matter of time, if they continue to live in Africa. Other colonial marriages that are broken in Africa include Scobie’s marriage to Louise, Rycker’s to Marie, and Dr. Colin’s to Mme. Colin. In The Heart of the Matter Louise abandons Scobie and flees to South Africa. On her return, their marriage is destroyed by Scobie’s suicide. Rycker’s marriage to Marie in A Burnt-Out Case is broken when Marie falsely names Querry for her pregnancy. When Rycker kills Querry in a rage and gets incarcerated, Marie flees to Europe not to return. In the same novel, Dr. Colin’s marriage to Madam Colin is destroyed when she dies in Africa. In all the eight instances of colonial marriage cited, the colonisers assume the Faustian personality, albeit in various degrees. They enter the so-called ‘heart of darkness’ and take the licence to proclaim a cave, cage the people and steal their resources. In revenge, a complex of circumstances involving the African peoples and African environment contrives to ‘steal’ the colonisers’ marriages bringing the Faustian cycle to a logical close. 244 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 6.2.2 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Sanity Another of the colonisers’ personal resources stolen by Africa are their mental faculties. The colonisers often experience mental breakdown in Africa; a phenomenon that seems to confirm the ‘scientific theory’ of Marlow’s company doctor. We shall examine the cases of Conrad’s Fresleven, the unnamed Swede, Kurtz and Marlow; Cary’s Rudbeck; Greene’s Rycker; and Monsarrat’s Captain Simpson. According to Marlow’s doctor, the primitivity of the African space impacts negatively on the colonisers’ psychology driving them to lunacy. For the doctor, therefore, it is “interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals” who go to Africa (Conrad 1994: 17). Marlow’s account of widespread lunatic behaviour by the colonisers seems to uphold the doctor’s environmental deterministic ‘theory’. We shall attempt to delineate examples of generic and specific of acts of the colonisers’ insanity. Generally, the colonisers as a class can be said to have lost its sanity in Africa. The coloniser-class continually perpetrates acts that reflect questionable psychology. For instance, the bombardment of the humble African villages by the French war ship in Heart of Darkness is seen by Marlow as an act of insanity (Conrad 20). Marlow’s own passengers behave insanely when they fire heavy gunshots into the bush in response to an African arrow attack. Marlow sees the inequitable use of force as insane because the African arrows “looked as though they wouldn’t kill a cat” (Conrad 64, 74). The random abandonment and aimlessness with which the Europeans shoot into the bush adds to Marlow’s sense of the insane. There is a second attack on the Africans by Marlow’s men. This attack is totally unprovoked and unnecessary and reflects the madness the Europeans are presumed to experience in the African jungle. Indeed, Marlow calls his crew an “imbecile crowd” because their action defies sanity (Conrad 97). There is also the insane instance where Marlow’s company manager refuses to stop the steamer for Marlow’s 245 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh African crewmen to buy food supplies. Marlow himself finds the manager’s decision absurd. (Conrad 58, 59). The reckless and aimless blasting of rocks in Heart of Darkness provides another instance of insanity. The rocks, as Marlow reports, are not in the way of the railway, so the blasting is sheer recklessness, a product of an insane judgment (Conrad 22). The destructive aggrandisement of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition represents another example of the colonisers’ insanity (Conrad 43). Generally, the senseless aggression and destruction of everything African points to the colonisers’ questionable mental state. Nineteenth century scientific opinion, as proffered by Marlow’s doctor, blames the recklessness of the colonisers on the psychological impact of the African environment. In the unique vision of the colonialist writers, therefore, Africa steals the sanity of the colonisers. As we have tried to argue out earlier, such a notion is untenable. The colonisers’ wives as a class also experience mental depression. From our analysis of colonial marriages, we have observed that most of the colonial wives feel uncomfortable in Africa. Their inability to escape from Africa often leads to psychological instability. We have observed how Cary’s Judy Coote and Celia Rudbeck, and Greene’s Louise Scobie and Marie Rycker develop depression as a result of which they produce erratic and nervous reactions to their caged situations. That all the women mentioned negotiate some kind of escape from Africa, or from their immediate, stifling environments, indicates their attempt to arrest the melancholic situation Africa imposes on the colonisers. For example, Celia and Marie return to Europe, Judy leaves her bleak Rimi environment for Dr. Schlemm’s peaceful Kifi convent; Louise runs away to apartheid South Africa which is ruled by Europeans. All these various forages are an attempt by the colonisers’ wives to restore themselves to mental balance and sanity. Aside from the group acts of insanity, there are also specific acts of madness committed 246 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh by individual colonisers. Marlow records three of such cases. There is, first, the case of Fresleven, a boat captain who loses his mind, and beats up a village chief over two hens. Consequently, he is killed by the chief’s son. Marlow attributes Fresleven’s uncharacteristic violence to mental breakdown. The real cause of his lunatic behaviour, according to Marlow, is that “he had been a couple of years already out there [in Africa]” ‘confirming’ the company doctor’s theory (Conrad 17). Second, there is the case of the unnamed Swede who hangs himself apparently for no reason. It is believed the African sun or environment must have driven him crazy (Conrad 21). Third, there is the case of Kurtz’s mental breakdown. Although Marlow attempts to defend Kurtz’s sanity by claiming his “intelligence was perfectly clear” (Conrad 95), Kurtz’s actions expose Marlow’s defence. Kurtz’s excessive violence, narcissism, necrophilia, and incoherent thought-patterns reflect a sick mind. Indeed, Marlow himself suffers a mild form of lunacy in the Congo jungle. While on board the steamer, Marlow behaves normally, and demonstrates control over his faculties. In contrast, his mental processes begin to suffer when he steps foot in the jungle to retrieve Kurtz. Marlow, suddenly, develops aggressive traits and lunatic thoughts, all of which are ‘foreign’ to him. For instance, he threatens to smash Kurtz’s head with a stick or stone, or throttle him in the bush (Conrad 94). Also, he imagines himself not returning to his boat, or becoming a hermit in the African jungle till old age (Conrad 94). He has another brainwave which projects into his mind incoherent images. For example, he sees the company receptionist with her cat, and his own passengers shooting at Africans. He admits of his changed mental patterns: “I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting” (Conrad 29), “I had some imbecile thoughts” (Conrad 93). Evidently, Marlow believes in the company doctor’s environmentally-deterministic theory. He ascribes his changing psychology to the effects of the African jungle. To him, it is the jungle that is “awakening…forgotten and brutal instincts” 247 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh (Conrad 94). He realises that he is rapidly losing hold of his senses, and attempts to confront the unseen forces of the jungle: “I tried to break the spell” (Conrad 94). In Freudian opinion, though, what Marlow experiences is not determined by the African jungle per se. It is a hysterical reaction that comes as a result of the conflict between the id (the primitive, pleasure principle) and super-ego (the civilising, reality principle). According to Freud, when repressed thoughts return to the surface of consciousness, a psychological battle ensues between the id and the super-ego. This battle expresses itself in hysterical behaviour which may lead, in extreme cases, to neurosis: nervous disorders, or even psychosis: mental disorders (Phillips 2000: 176-9). In the jungle, therefore, Marlow’s own internally repressed drives, his primitive instinct, shifts from his subconscious to his conscious mind, and tries to impose itself. His super-ego, on the other hand, attempts to keep the id under control. The resultant battle produces in Marlow hysterical responses: aggressive behaviour and “imbecile thoughts” (Conrad 93). The phenomenon just described is archetypal, and therefore, common to all humanity. Its triggers may vary; it can happen in the African jungle or a luxurious bedroom in cosmopolitan Europe. Looked at in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis, therefore, the doctor and Marlow’s theory is quite questionable. Rudbeck’s inexplicable murdering of the eponymous Mr. Johnson in Cary’s novel adds to the recurring evidence of insanity among the colonisers. Johnson is condemned to hang for murdering Gollup. He prays that his friend and ex-employer Rudbeck hang or shoot him himself. Rudbeck is the very judge who sentences Johnson to hang. Instead of allowing the law to take its course, Rudbeck shoots Johnson dead, and thus commits a reckless murder (Cary 1939: 225). Rudbeck’s act defies rational explanation and the law. As a judge, he implicates himself by undermining his own judgement and the very law of which he is the enforcer. In murdering 248 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Johnson, he becomes Johnson’s equal: they are both murderers. One struggles to find the justification and motivation for Rudbeck’s callousness, except to attribute it to a questionable mental state. Another example of coloniser madness is Rycker’s murdering of Querry in A Burnt-Out Case. Rycker impregnates his own wife, and accuses Querry of responsibility. He kills Querry based on lies, suspicion and self-inadequacy. As Querry says before he dies, “this is absurd” (Greene 1961: 252). Again, Captain Simpson’s summary execution of U-Maula chief, Gotwela, and Zuva in A Tribe That Lost Its Head (Monsarrat 1956: 552) closely resembles Rudbeck’s execution of Johnson. In the long list of cases cited, the dynamics of Africa are perceived to militate against the mental faculties of the colonisers leading to their reckless judgments. In Faustian terms, we shall say that the forces of Africa place a curse on the colonisers turning all of them into various versions of Conrad’s Kurtz-prototypical. Their mental breakdown is Africa’s revenge for a brutal colonisation. 6.2.3 Counter-Theft: Stealing the Colonisers’ Lives The most Faustian and brutal of the counter-thefts is the stealing of the colonisers’ lives. Of the long list of colonisers who suffer this fate, Haggard’s Ayesha is, perhaps, the closest representation of Faust. Paul Sheehan (2013) is right, therefore, when he compares Ayesha to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Wilde’s protagonist sells his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth so that while his [Gray’s] picture bears the signs of ageing, his real self enjoys the benefits and licence of youth. Before he dies, there is a reversal of the process: the utterly aged features of the picture are transferred to Gray, while the picture assumes Gray’s youthful looks. He dies looking disfigured and ugly as all the ills of his debauched life take their effect on his real self. 249 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The chiasmic process involved in the Dorian Gray episode occurs in the life of Ayesha. She goes into the forbidden Fire of Life and enhances her life with superior beauty, knowledge, longevity and power. She lives for over two thousand years, and yet maintains her youthful glamour. When she goes into the Fire for the second time, she experiences a fatal reversal. Her form shrivels; the “perfect whiteness” of her skin losses its lustre, and turns “dirty brown and yellow, like an old piece of withered parchment;” her “delicate hand” withers into “a claw…, a human talon like that of a badly-preserved Egyptian mummy;” her skin is “puckered into a million wrinkles;” and her “shapeless face” assumes the “stamp of unutterable age” (Haggard 280). The “loveliest, noblest, most splendid woman the world has ever seen” transforms into something “no larger than a big monkey, and hideous – …too hideous for words!” (Haggard 280). The African cave effectively takes its revenge on Ayesha claiming her life. Conrad’s Kurtz is also a Faust archetype: Sheehan sees him also in the light of Dorian Gray (2013). According to Marlow, Kurtz sells his soul to the supposed evil forces of Africa for ivory, wealth and influence. Throughout the novel, Marlow recounts Kurtz’s so-called recrudescent ‘soul-selling’. Supposedly, Kurtz surrenders his soul to the forces of the jungle by “tak[ing] a high seat amongst the devils of the land … literally” (Conrad 70). As a result, the wilderness pats him on the head, caresses him, takes him, loves him, embraces him, gets into his veins, consumes his flesh, and seals his souls to its own by “the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation” (Conrad 69). Having thus relinquished his soul to Africa, in the view of Marlow, Kurtz becomes king of ivory and ‘king of kings’ (Conrad 83). In time, and in accordance with the Faustian principle, the forces of Africa exact payment by taking Kurtz’s humanity, sanity and life. Though his death is not bloody, it is still very violent, in the eschatological sense. He endures psychic torture as his soul wrestles with the so-called unseen 250 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh forces. According to Marlow, “the mysteries [his soul] had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul” (Conrad 98). His remarks: “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad 100) reflects his final wrestling with the unknown. Like Ayesha, he dies an awful death in Africa. We suggest Africa visits retribution on him for the murders, thefts, wars and dehumanisation of Africans. Other key Faustian characters are Cary’s Gollup, Monsarrat’s Oosthuizen, and Tom Ronald, and his wife, Cynthia. Gollup is an ex-British soldier who becomes a successful entrepreneur in Nigeria. He wields a lot of power and influence because of his wealth and connections in official circles. He is physically strong and very abusive. We have discussed his sadomasochistic relationship with Matumbi in the preceding chapter. We have also indicated his assault of his employees, Ajali and Johnson. The “gentlemanly Ajali,” for instance, is “kick[ed] in the backside for failing to understand that ‘Over there on the right, you silly bawstard’ [sic] really means ‘On the left, four shelves from the bottom’” (Cary 1939: 123). He then silences the witnesses to the abuse with threats: “You didn’t see anything happen, did you? …Because if you did, you better not. …Unless you want something to [h]appen to your trousers, only more so” (Cary 123). When he punches Johnson on the nose (Cary 123), he warns him, “I didn’t touch you, did I?” (Cary 124). Gollup is also racist. He calls Johnson “silly baboon,” “Mr. Monkeybrand” (123), “nigger” and “Wog” (125). He believes, “A chap may be a nigger – that’s the way Gawd [sic] made ’em – same as ’e made warthogs and blue-faced baboons – ’e can’t help being a nigger” (125). Gollup sees himself as a “little king” (Cary 122) with his businesses as his kingdom. He is an example of the lowly-bred European become rich and powerful in Africa. We see his ill-gotten power and riches in Faustian terms, so that when Johnson stabs him to death (197), we read it as his Faustian fate. Oosthuizen is a white farmer in Pharamaul in The Tribe That Lost Its Head. Like Ayesha, 251 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Kurtz and Gollup, he is a violent racist who has become rich in Africa. He employs about five hundred African labourers and their families on his huge plantation (Monsarrat 1956: 161). He is a third generational settler who sees Africa as home. “He and his father and his grandfather had farmed Morgenzon for nearly a hundred and fifty years” (Monsarrat 468). In Faustian terms, therefore, we shall say, his soul is committed to the African soil, and as a result, he reaps huge financial rewards. In time, colonial circumstances in Africa contrive to exact a gruesome payback in accordance with the Faustian principle. This happens when, during the Maula uprising, his labourers beat him to pulp, and tear his body into pieces with their “bloody claws.” His two young sons are also killed (Monsarrat 474). Tom and Cynthia Ronald die in a similar circumstance in the same novel. Tom is District Officer of Shebiya in Pharamaul, and lives with his wife, Cynthia. In accordance with the Faustian principle, they live a privileged life as Europeans and rulers of the disempowered Africans. The power and comforts they enjoy – their Faustian privileges – are wrested from the suffering African masses. Eventually, the forces of Africa exact a bloody retribution through Gotwela, the local chief. Gotwela and his people murder Tom and Cynthia, and their guest, Father Schwemmer. Their bodies are gruesomely mutilated and dumped in a field (Monsarrat 544ff). Andrew Macmillan is another Faustian figure in Monsarrat’s novel. Resident Commissioner of Pharamaul, Macmillan is the second highest political officer after the Governor. He is a powerful figure. Like Kurtz and Oosthuizen, he commits his soul to Africa by staying in Pharamaul for thirty-five years. After retirement, he intends to spend the rest of his life in Africa (Monsarrat 7). He intends to take full advantage of the inexhaustible privileges the coloniser exacts from Africa: cheap, abundant, or free supply of servants, food, farmlands, labour, sunshine, authority and financial reward. In time, however, the Faustian principle catches 252 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh up with him so that he commits a bloody suicide. Frustrated by his inability to control the anticolonial Maula uprising, and unable to live with the shame of the failure of his administration, he loses his nerve, and shoots himself dead (Monsarrat 464). There are even more suicides and violent deaths of powerful European figures in the colonialist novel tradition, affirming our observation that the coloniser is a Faustian character. In The Heart of the Matter, there are two suicides: Pemberton’s and Scobie’s. Both are driven by the same forces of Africa to take their own lives. In A Burnt-Out Case, Rycker’s murder of Querry represents another violent death of a coloniser (Greene 1961: 251-52). All these deaths – murders and suicides – suffered by the colonisers are a result of circumstances arranged by the vicissitudes of life in Africa. Losing their lives, therefore, reflects the counter-theft or Faustian retribution for the original colonial thefts. In discussing [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave Steal from X], we have attempted to demonstrate that the African and African cave steal the colonisers’ critical resources – marriages, sanity and lives – in revenge for the colonisers’ (mis)appropriation of African resources during colonisation. We have observed that circumstances in Africa set up situations that lead to the loss of the Europeans’ suffering losses. We have also attempted to illustrate the Faustian logic that operates in the function of theft and counter-theft. In this chapter, we have tried to examine the antithetical relationship that exists between [Sentence (c): X Steals from the Cave/Y] and [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave Steal from X]. From the analyses, we have tried to prove that the function of theft, like the functions of caving and caging, operates in a chiasmic format in conformity with the structural principles we have identified in the colonialist novel. Particularly, in this chapter, we have tried to prove that the colonisers amass ‘Faustian wealth’ by robbing the Africans of numerous resources including, 253 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh animal, forest, mineral and human resources. We discussed the notion of the colonisers’ theft under [Sentence (c): X Steals from the Cave/Y]. We have also tried to show that the colonial licence to steal, and its concomitant enrichment and empowerment of the colonisers, elicit a Faustian retribution or counter-theft through the agency of the African/African cave dyad. We have noted that the Faustian retribution demands that the colonisers also lose valuable resources such as their marriages, sanity and lives. We discussed the notion of counter-theft under [Sentence (c-1): Y/the Cave Steal from X]. This principle of theft and counter-theft, what we have called the Faustian exchange, contributes towards reinforcing the dioscuric structure of the colonialist novel tradition. 254 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 7.0 CHAPTER SEVEN VOICING: THE MIRROR LINE OF COLONIAL INTERRELATIONS In this chapter, we shall examine what constitutes the Mirror Line in the interrelations between the colonisers and colonised. From Chapters 4, 5 and 6, we have attempted to demonstrate that the colonialist novel has two parts which are simultaneously synonymous and antonymous, therefore, constituting a dioscuric or chiasmic pair. We have tried to show that the action of one part of the story is repeated in the other part but in the inverse order resulting in a symbiotic relation. In schematic terms, we have tried to show that the colonialist novel is organised as in Schema 2 below: Schema 2: Y/the cave speak against X (Point 0/mirror line) X enters the cave (a) The cave enters X (a-1) X cages Y (b) The cave cages X (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y (c) Y/the cave steal from X (c-1) From Chapters 4, 5 and 6, we have discussed the interrelations within each sentential bundle, the bundles being: [(a), (a-1)]; [(b), (b-1)]; and [(c), (c-1)]. From Scheme 2 above, there is one sentence we are yet to account for: [Sentence 0: Y/the Cave speak against X]. The indicated sentence constitutes the subject of the present chapter. We call this function [Sentence 0] because, in the photographic logic of the colonialist grammar, the function represents the mirror line. 255 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 7.1 The Mechanics of the Mirror Line The Mirror Line is the chiasmic point, (Point 0), where most of the transformations in the colonialist novel occur. In theoretical terms, when the action of [Sentence (a)], for instance, crosses Point 0, it becomes an inverse action, and is denoted by [Sentence (a-1). In veridical terms, [Sentence (a)] translates as follows: the supposedly civilised colonisers enter Africa, and declare the space a cave. To civilise the Africans the colonisers subject them to brutal domination. The action we have just described represents [Sentence (a): X enters the Cave]. The European domination pushes the Africans to Point 0, the point where they must resist colonisation. The Africans, therefore, use various means including physical violence to counteract European domination. The resistance of the Africans in turn elicits even more brutal responses from the Europeans highlighting the fact that the supposed darkness of the African cave has entered the Europeans. This supposed reversal of the cave is represented by [Sentence (a-1): The Cave enters X]. From the synopsis above, we can observe two antithetical actions mirroring each other as a result of the mirror line. The mirror line represents the moment when object transforms into image, or when the brutal actions of the colonisers are inverted to affect the colonisers themselves. Mathematically, the number-line exemplifies our notion of Point 0 or mirror line as seen in Figure 3 below. Figure 3 c-1 b-1 a-1 a b c -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 256 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh From Figure 3 we can see, for instance, that when 1 crosses Point 0, it transforms to the inverse of 1, that is, -1; similarly, when (a), for example, crosses Point 0, it becomes the inverse of (a) which is (a-1). This transformative mechanism of the mirror line governs the grammar of the colonialist novel. The mirror line is, therefore, an abstract logic that mediates between the action of the coloniser and the consequence of that action creating a cause-and-effect principle. In accordance with the paradigmatic principle of Levi-Straussian structuralist methodology, the position of the mirror line in the actual stories is arbitrary: that is, in the world of the colonialist stories, the actions that represent the mirror line may occur in the initial, medial or final positions without affecting their function as the mirror line in the grammar. This is so because the grammar is based on a re-formulation of the story components into a new structure. 7.2 [Sentence 0: Y/the cave speak against X] The objective of the present chapter then is to examine the function of the mirror line or [Sentence 0: Y/the cave speak against X]. In other words, we shall discuss the resistance of the African/African cave dyad to the colonisers’ domination. In providing the analysis, we disagree with Spivak’s view that the subaltern cannot speak. The subaltern is properly understood as “the whole of the colonised world [,]…all natives, male or female” (Ashcroft et al 1989: 178), or “those who have no part” (Enns 2012: 11). According to Spivak, “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak 1995: 28). Benita Parry observes rightly that “Spivak…gives no speaking part to the colonized, effectively writing out the evidence of native agency” in the anticolonial struggle (1995: 37). Homi Bhabha also rejects Spivak’s stance, and suggests that the colonised voice is recoverable through the subaltern’s mimicry, and wrongful imitation of the 257 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh coloniser’s discourse (Ashcroft et al 178). In Bhabha’s view, the English book represents the authority of the coloniser; it is “an insignia of colonial authority and a signifier of colonial desire and discipline” (1995: 29). The syncretic responses of the colonised to the English book – their processes of displacing, distorting, dislocating and repeating the English book – therefore question and undermine the authority of the coloniser’s discourse (1995: 32). In Bhabha’s opinion, the strategies of hybridity inherent in the native’s attempt to mimick the coloniser represent the native’s assumption of an anticolonial voice. Parry puts Bhabha’s theory in another perspective: Bhabha’s theorizing succeeds in making visible those moments when colonial discourse[,] already disturbed at its source by a doubleness of enunciation, is further subverted by the object of its address; when the scenario written by colonialism is given a performance by the native that estranges and undermines the colonialist script. The argument is not that the colonized possesses colonial power, but that its fracturing of the colonialist text by re-articulating it in broken English, perverts the meaning and message of the English book…, and therefore makes an absolute exercise of power impossible. (1995: 42) Bhabha himself is emphatic, “What is articulated in the doubleness of colonial discourse is not the violence of one powerful nation writing out another [but] a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently re-inscribes both coloniser and colonised” (qtd in Parry 1995: 42). Our own position on the African voice is closer to Bhabha’s position but with a caveat. Our opinion is that though Spivak and Bhabha grapple with an important aspect of the coloniser - colonised interrelations, they both seem to miss the clear, unequivocal, incendiary voice of the colonised: the voice that calls for the violent overthrow of colonialism. 258 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 7.2.1 The Four ‘Voices’ of Africa A critical reading of the colonialist novels reveals that colonial Africa wields four conceptual ‘voices’: discursive voice, violent voice, cultural voice and cosmic voice. The first three voices are attributed to the colonised African. He or she selects the appropriate voice for strategic effect in relation to the European’s responses. The fourth voice, the cosmic voice, however, is not controlled by the African at all. The fourth voice is the agency of the sum of the elements that constitute the African cave, and therefore, belongs to the domain of metaphysics. We use ‘metaphysics’ to mean being and its interrelations with the totality of reality as constituted by the world that being inhabits (Harold 1981: 1-2). The discursive voice represents the rational voice of the colonised. In this voice the Africans engage the colonisers in rational debates proffering reasons why the Africans need better conditions. Hugely an intellectual voice, the discursive logic is the mainstay of the African leadership: mainly the educated elite and the nationalist chiefs. The violent voice is the voice of the masses. It is insistent, unambiguous and demands freedom through the use of physical force and unbridled violence. The cultural voice is used mainly by the African masses with the tacit approval of the African leadership. It calls for a return to precolonial African cultural essentialism. Critics have reacted variously to the four voices delineated above. While Spivak does not seem to hear ‘voices’ at all, Bhabha hears only the discursive and cultural ‘voices’ leading to the charge that Spivak’s and Bhabha’s theorising “is concerned to place incendiary devices within the dominant structures of representation” (Parry 1995: 43). Cole Harris (1991) and Andrew Sluyter (2002), on the other hand, hear the environmental, cosmic voice. For a concept that properly addresses the key issue of the redemptive counter-violence of the colonised, we need to go beyond the influential but inadequate theorising of Spivak and Bhabha. We need to examine 259 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the postulates of the older tradition of nationalist-critics such as J.E. Casely Hayford, and their second generational successors, such as Ndabaningi Sithole, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the general scheme of this chapter, therefore, we shall discuss the four voices of colonial Africa. In examining the discursive and cultural voices, we shall draw on Blyden-Hayford- Bhabha all of whom advocate the employment of the white man’s discursive principle to subvert colonialism. Though anticipated by Blyden and Hayford, Bhabha’s notions of ‘liminality’ and ‘hybridity’, in their expansiveness, effectively subsume the views of Blyden and Hayford. We shall discuss the violent voice guided by Casely-Hayford’s notion of ‘self-preservation’ (1969: 108) and Fanon’s advocacy of reciprocal violence in The Wretched of the Earth (1967). We shall make cursory references to Ndabaningi Sithole, Attoh Ahuma and Jean-Paul Sartre in discussion African violence. Finally, we shall attempt to discuss the cosmic voice by following the work of Cole Harris and Andrew Sluyter. 7.2.1.1 The Discursive Voice: Hybridity, Subversion and African Nationalism In the colonialist novel, African reaction against colonisation usually starts with an attempt to engage the coloniser in a rational negotiation. In this attempt, the anticolonial nationalist assumes the discursive voice. For example, Aladai and Dinamaula, in The African Witch and The Tribe That Lost Its Head respectively, try to meet the colonisers to discuss issues affecting their respective peoples under colonisation. Aladai, for instance, wants two things from the colonial administration. First, he demands the introduction of secular European education for the people of Rimi; second, he wants to be chosen emir over Sale, his illiterate rival. These two demands are interrelated: only an educated emir will be interested in providing secular European education for his people. Rimi is a town of about one million people but has no secular European schools. The wealthy people of the town such as the chiefs send their children to European 260 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh schools at distant places such as Bauchi. Pagan children are sent to mission schools to learn hymns and catechism. Altogether, there are merely five hundred people out of the population of one million who have any kind of education. This represents a staggering illiteracy rate which Oxford-educated Aladai finds unacceptable. Indeed, not a single child attends school in Rimi town itself, a fact that surprises English woman, Judy Coote (Cary 1936: 25). Aladai demands not merely European education for his people, but the secular strain of European education that is provided only by the government school system. He rejects mission school education because of its emphasis on character development and compliance to the detriment of intellectual education. In pursuit of his educational objective, Aladai writes to Resident Commissioner Burwash appealing for the establishment of secular government schools in the town (Cary 69). He even meets the Resident Commissioner to argue his case for secular education, but Burwash proves elusive and dismissive. Predictably, Burwash stresses “the great importance of inculcating character; or ‘guts’” (Cary 69) over cognitive abilities. He prefers the mission school education to its secular strain, which is rejected by Aladai. Eventually, Burwash disavows the idea of educating the children of Rimi altogether pointing out the “difficulty and danger of educating a primitive community in a hurry” (Cary 69). Aladai’s second demand – to succeed to the emirship of Rimi – is also rejected. Aladai’s unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with Burwash precipitates the Rimi War that claims many lives including Aladai’s. Before we discuss the Rimi War, we shall examine the influences that drive the respective stances of Burwash and Aladai. Burwash’s refusal to provide secular education for the so-called primitive people of Rimi stems from his Lugardian belief that secular education, especially the literary strain, equips Africans with the facility to question the legitimacy of colonialism – we read Bhabha’s theory of hybridity here. Historically, Lord Frederick Lugard, the “arch-philosopher of empire” and long- 261 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh serving Governor-General of Nigeria in the early twentieth century, was uncompromisingly averse to providing secular education for Africans (Taiwo 2010: 94). In his book, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (1922), Lugard protests against training Africans in intellectual activity citing what he perceives as the ‘error’ of the Indian example. According to him, in India, “‘A purely literary type of education was the only one provided by Government,’…and the intellectual classes eagerly grasped at the prospect of Government, professional, and clerical employment, with the result that a disproportionate number of persons with a purely literary education were created, and industrial development arrested” (1965: 427). Taiwo suggests that Lugard’s real quarrel with the educational system was not its creation of an imbalance in the labour sector. “The real culprit was that literary education was making uppity lads of Indian children and ingrates of the educated classes in their relations with British and other constituted authorities. Here then is the real reason for the suspicious attitude toward ‘education of the intellect’” (Taiwo 2010: 95). Lugard is even more explicit about his aversion to the secular training of the African in his other book, Political Manifesto. The primary function of education should in my judgment be to fit the ordinary individual to fill a useful part in his environment with happiness to himself, and to ensure that the exceptional individual shall use his abilities for the advancement of the community, and not to its detriment, or to the subversion of constituted authority. We are to-day beginning to realise our failure in this respect both in India and in West Africa. If the local Press may be taken as a criterion of the feelings of the educated communities in all the West African Colonies we must admit that education has not brought them happiness and contentment. It should be the ideal of a sound educational policy to exchange this hostility for an attitude of friendly co-operation, and to train a generation which shall be able to achieve ideals of its own without a 262 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh slavish imitation of Europeans, and be proud of a nationality with its own definite sphere of public work and its own future. (qtd in Taiwo 146-7, my emphasis) For Lugard, therefore, education should make the African happy with himself under the shackles of colonialism. He insists, “The examples of India and China, as well as Africa, appear to demonstrate that purely secular education… infallibly produces a class of young men and women who lack reverence alike for their parents, their social superiors, their employers, or Government” (qtd in Taiwo 148). Lugard’s educational policy in Nigeria is therefore designed to promote moralistic Christian education with an emphasis on obedience to political authority. Following Taiwo, we contend that Burwash’s educational policy in The African Witch reflects the Lugardian perspective. We suspect also that Burwash’s stance stems from the author’s closeness to the story material. Cary, the author, was himself involved in the Nigerian colonial service for a long period of time: as a soldier from 1914 to 1916, and an administrator from 1916 to 1919. During Cary’s time in Nigeria, Lugard was the supreme ruler of the country: the Governor-General of both the northern and southern Nigeria. Cary’s position as Assistant District Officer in Nigeria required him to perform multiple roles including being: policeman, tax collector, judge, administrator, census taker, map-maker, road-builder, and arbiter in cases of juju and witchcraft (Henderson 1991: 574). As a result, it would have been Cary’s brief to execute Lugard’s educational policies as enshrined in Political Manifesto and The Dual Mandate. Given the background just provided, the story of The African Witch might very well be a fictional representation of a historical event, in which case we detect a reflexive stance in Cary’s characterisation of Burwash. The colonisers’ suspicions about literary/secular education is seen not only in colonial Nigeria but elsewhere in colonial Africa. Greene records a similar suspicion in The Heart of the 263 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Matter which is set in British-ruled Sierra Leone. In the latter novel, Scobie is asked to read to a sick child who is bedridden. To Scobie’s surprise, he finds no book at the mission library that will be interesting for a child. All the available books have heavy missionary themes. The titles include: Twenty Years in the Mission Field, Lost and Found, The Narrow Way, The Poems of John Oxenham and Fishers of Men. Mrs. Bowles, the nurse at the colonial infirmary, is quick to remind Scobie, “You are safe with any of those books….We are not teaching the children here to read in order that they shall read…novels” (Greene 1948: 121, my emphasis). In Greene’s other novel under examination, A Burnt-Out Case, the Catholic priests in Congo are emphatic that in their mission school, catechism is more important than the alphabet (1960: 106). In all the cited cases, from Cary to Greene, from Nigeria and Sierra Leone to Congo, from British rule to Belgian colonialism, the same policy holds: the coloniser – whether government official or missionary – insists on religious education for the African child. The Lugardian preference for ‘character training’ over intellectual education permeates the fibre of the colonialist novel. The only Africans who are lucky to enjoy intellectual training at Oxford – Aladai and Dinamaula – are projected by the narrators as failures: Aladai abandons his programme midway; and Dinamaula is supposed to have graduated with a very low law degree. Having taken a digression to examine the possibility of Lugard’s influence on Cary’s and Greene’s stories, we shall now re-focus on the Burwash-Aladai confrontation in The African Witch. In discussing that conflict, we shall try to find the locus of Aladai’s hybridity and later shifts in his worldview within the postulates of the early West Africa nationalists. Aladai’s rebuttal of Burwash’s educational policy with reasoned arguments reflects the position of some of the early West African nationalists such as S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma of Gold Coast (Ghana). In his Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness (1911), Attoh Ahuma asks: 264 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Have we exhibited, do we care to exhibit, that broad sympathetic interest in things which make for national progress and advancement? Are the people – our own kith and kin – cultivating a national consciousness, a national conscience, national affection, national passion, and national vigilance? […] It does not comport with the dignity of a nation to be forever absorbent and receptive without being in turn responsive and reproductive. (qtd in Langley 1979: 163) It is quite obvious from the above quotation that early West African nationalism predates, by many decades, contemporary postulations such as ‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’. In pushing for the growth of national consciousness among African peoples, Attoh Ahuma advocates what Bhabha, in contemporary times, terms variously as “displacing , distorting, dislocating, [or] repeating” the coloniser’s knowledge (1995: 32). In placing a high premium on the absorption and reproduction of European ideas as a means for confronting colonisation, Attoh Ahuma significantly preempts Bhabha. Attoh Ahuma questions the capacity and readiness of Africans to assume modern political leadership. Importantly, he places emphasis on European education as the instrument for leveraging the African intellectually. He asks: What are our credentials and passports? What are our assets as a nation? Can we, do we, stand before other races and peoples with heads erect and with a free and independent spirit? What is our mental, moral, and social equipment worth? […] The blood of our nation requires enrichment, and the freest possible circulation; it calls for invigoration; it needs recuperation, that Body Politic may be quickened, strengthened, and purified. (qtd in Langley 164) We contend that Attoh Ahuma’s references to “credentials and passports,” “erect heads” and “mental equipment” and “enrichment of the nation[al] blood and its freest circulation” situate his 265 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh project firmly in the intellectual, discursive context. Though a Christian priest, he recognises that the development of national consciousness is possible only through secular, intellectual education and not Christian dogmatisation and character training. Aladai’s argument in The African Witch largely coincides with Attoh Ahuma’s views. Thus, when Aladai questions Rimi civilisation, and calls it a “joke,” “juju,” “crude and stupid” (Cary 1936: 24), he re-echoes Attoh Ahuma, who questions the worth of the African’s mental equipment? When Aladai suggests that reading English books makes him feel “grow[n] up thousands of years in a few months” (Cary 24), he reflects Attoh Ahuma’s demand that the African national blood needs enrichments and the widest circulation in order to generate political consciousness. Casely Hayford, through an authorial comment in Ethiopia Unbound, also re-echoes Attoh Ahuma: “The African’s way to proper recognition lies not at present so much in the exhibition of material force and power, as in the gentler art of persuasion by logic of facts and of achievements before which all reasonable men must bow” (1969: 167). From the above analysis, Aladai’s initial attempt to use reasoned argumentation to convince Burwash of the necessity of secular education for Nigerians belongs to the framework provided by the early West African nationalists. Cary, author of the novel, must have been privy to the African position through the prolific writings of the early West African nationalists who operated a dynamic newspaper business across Anglophone West Africa. We conceptualise Dinamaula’s and Aladai’s negotiations with the colonisers as the discursive voice of Africa, an African intellectual engagement with the colonisers to seek better conditions for the colonised. The discursive voice functions as one of the variables of the Mirror Line. Its mediatory role lies in its ability to expose the distinction between, for instance, the two antithetical images of the coloniser as projected by [Sentence (a): X enters the cave] and 266 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh [Sentence (a-1): The cave enters X]. In [Sentence (a)] the coloniser embarks on a civilising mission in Africa. It is a mission characterised by dehumanisation of Africans, but even so the coloniser touts his position as torchbearer of civilisation. In reaction, the Africans confront the coloniser with the discursive voice. The discursive approach marks the turning point (the mirror line) in the colonial interrelations. This is because the coloniser’s response to the discursive voice exposes an image of the coloniser that is quite contradictory to the original image of the torchbearer of civilisation. By refusing to listen to the reasoned arguments of the Africans, and by inaugurating an even more brutal colonial regime instead, the colonisers demonstrate that they are not, after all, as reasonable or civilised as previously assumed by the narrators. In this regard, the Africans’ discursive voice mediates between the two antithetical images of the same coloniser. In sum, the discursive voice as a variable of the mirror line exposes the presumed civilisation of the European as a sham as it reverses European civilisation into European recrudescence. 7.2.1.2 The Violent Voice: Self-Preservation and African Nationalism In Ethiopia Unbound, Casely Hayford provides an alternative direction for West African politics: violence. Here, he preempts the politics of later black nationalists such as Fanon and Sithole. Casely Hayford’s mouthpiece in his work, Kwamankra, propounds a concept he calls “the law of self-preservation,” by which he advises the use of reciprocal force to overthrow colonisation, if necessary. Justifying his advocacy for reciprocal violence, Kwamankra charges: there are certain nations in the world who call themselves Christian, and who claim a monopoly of culture, knowledge and civilisation, and who, ergo, think that they have a heaven-born right to survive and thrive while all others go under. They are mostly whites, and when … the black man resists and shows he does not mean to go under, 267 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh these self-same white Christian people hysterically cry out: … the ‘Black Peril’. (1969: 108) He cautions, “if you relax the practice of this principle [of self-preservation] in the course of life, you go under, and men then talk of survivors as the fittest because they have resisted best” (Casely Hayford 108, original emphasis). Evidently, Kwamankra rejects the philosophical and pseudo-scientific basis for colonisation: the Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’. Kwamankra makes an allusion to the anticolonial situation in Gold Coast: “Here on the Gold Coast the people have … shown that they do not mean to go under, but in a different way. […] [W]e can’t always bring to play our pop guns when we may morally be justified in doing so” (112-3). Casely Hayford seems to vacillate between two antithetical directions: engaging the colonisers in rational argumentation (discursive voice) or warfare (violent voice). Resolving the tension in Casely Hayford’s thought leads to an understanding of his philosophy and politics. He seems to suggest that the colonised Africans must, first, use reasoned arguments (discursive voice) to make their case against colonialisation; if that fails, they are morally justified to pop their guns to liberate themselves (violent voice) (112-3). Kwamankra’s advice to his son in Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel seems to be heeded by Aladai in Cary’s 1936 novel. The trajectory of Aladai’s politics follows the frameworks propounded by both Attoh Ahuma and Casely Hayford. First, Aladai, through the discursive voice, pursues the rational engagement with the Europeans and pleads for schools to be built, exorbitant taxation to be reduced and himself to be installed emir. When Burwash refuses to be persuaded “by the logic of facts” (Casely Hayford 168), and when the already tense situation is exacerbated by Rackham’s unprovoked assault on Aladai, the latter feels that he has exhausted all reasonable options. Self-preservation and reclamation of his humanity through armed insurrection, the violent voice, is perhaps the only 268 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh option left. Fanon, Sartre and Sithole have all written extensively about the need for armed resistance in the colonial situation. Fanon, for example, suggests that colonial freedom “will always come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists [the coloniser and colonised]” (1967a: 28). Sartre is more explicit: “The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. …[T]o shoot down a European is to kill two birds with a stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man, and free man (“Preface,” 1967: 19). Sithole’s verdict is crisp: “only power [or violent voice] decides the question of power” (qtd in Langley 289). The results of Burwash and his administration’s intransigence in Aladai’s case are civil disturbances leading to the Rimi War. For example, the women of Rimi picket a bridge in a peaceful protest against high taxation. The protest exposes the veneered recrudescence of the supposedly civilised Burwash. He orders his driver, Ojo, to drive through the women. When Ojo refuses to obey the order, Burwash takes over the car and runs over the human bodies. He breaks the limb of a fifteen year old girl in the process. His reckless behaviour surprises Ojo (Cary 235- 6). Needless to say, this act of savagery must have cast doubts in the minds of the Africans regarding the acclaimed civilisation of the Europeans. This is especially so when the African women have expressed belief that “white men do not shoot [or harm] women” (Cary 211). If a peaceful women’s demonstration elicits such a savage response from Burwash, the women decide to attack the next time they confront him. Following the incident, another mob of women attack him with pestles, and smash his car. The violence succeeds in producing an immediate review of the colonial economic policy in Nigeria. Burwash makes an “immediate proclamation, through the native administration, that the market dues would be revised, as from that date” 269 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh (Cary 297). The change of policy comes too late though as the war has already started. In Kifi, two Europeans – Dryas Honeywood and Father Schlemm – are killed. In Rimi, the war is fought on two fronts: the Women’s War and Men’s War. On the women’s front, the police open fire on the three thousand pestle-wielding women wounding nineteen and killing eight (Cary 297). So much for European civilisation and for the conviction that “white men do not shoot women” (Cary 211). On the men’s front, Aladai’s spearing-wielding men are fired upon by the police wounding sixteen and killing six, including Coker and Aladai. Only three policemen are wounded. The trend that emerges from the Rimi violence has precedents in the historical accounts of colonial violence. Sithole draws our attention to the cases of Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea and Algeria where Africans embarked on a violent revolt against colonisation. In all the instances, more Africans than Europeans were killed. In Kenya, for example, about twelve thousand Kikuyu were killed whereas only about thirty Europeans lost their lives in the violence (cited in Langley 289). In Cary’s novel, Aladai’s violence achieves very marginal returns: taxation is reduced, but his substantive demand for secular education is denied outright; so is his demand for the emirship. Tentative attempts by liberal Europeans such as Judy Coote to teach English to the Nigerians is ridiculed: “What would they [Africans] do with it?” “Shakespeare for a lot of apes;” “Give me the real old bush pagan” (Cary 304). The war in effect makes very little impact. Burwash maintains his position as Resident Commissioner. He is not punished for his own savagery in driving over a demonstrating mob of women, nor are his policemen punished for massacring women wielding only cooking utensils. According to the narrator, “[T]he whole affair [the war] had probably done Burwash a great deal of good, in the right places [the colonial headquarters in London]” (Cary 301). Aladai’s sacrificial death does not achieve much in terms 270 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of bettering the conditions for Africans. Rather, it emboldens an already arrogant colonial regime to institute more stringent rules to forestall further agitation. It also exposes the much-touted civilisation of the colonisers as a sham as the Europeans demonstrate their own primitive drives in exterminating the protesters. Perhaps, the only positive impact of the African revolt is that it implants the seed of national political awakening in the people of Rimi. In sum, the violent voice of Africa is quite ineffective against the formidable military machinery of the colonisers. In The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the confrontation between Dinamaula and Macmillan is very similar to the feud between Aladai and Burwash. The colonial administration in Pharamaul encourages racial segregation, eugenistic practices and dehumanisation of the Africans. For instance, Africans are not sold alcoholic beverages; they cannot drink with white people at public bars; and they cannot marry Europeans. Thus, when Dinamaula tries to drink with his white friend, Tulbach Browne, at the hotel bar, he is thrown out (Monsarrat 1956: 170ff). When he proposes to marry a white girl, the colonial administration deems his proposal untenable (325); “Such a marriage is impossible” (339). When he proposes to work with the colonial administration to reform colonial policies upon his assumption of office as chief, Macmillan tells him “it’s out of the question. This country has never been run like that” (325). Consequently, he is exiled from Gamate to Port Victoria, and put under house arrest (330, 394). He is later sent into further exile in London (553). In the confusion that ensues, Macmillan approaches the Regents to help him defuse the tension, but they refuse to help unless he frees Dinamaula and installs him as chief. Puero, one of the Regents, sums up the feeling of the Regency: “My first strong thought is: where is our chief [Dinamaula]?” (336). He continues, “Our own chief can put an end to [the unrest], when he returns to Gamate [the traditional capital]” (337). Unrepentant, Macmillan describes the Regents’ demand as “foolish thought,” and threatens them with physical 271 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh force. “If you will not rule for me, then I shall rule for myself. If you do not like the way I rule, if it means the bringing of policemen, perhaps even of soldiers, then you have only yourselves to blame. But I will rule” (340). The negotiation ends in a stalemate as the coloniser refuses to listen to the discursive voice. The failure of the British to listen to the rational arguments of Dinamaula and the Regents leads to the application of Casely Hayford’s concept of self-preservation, where the Maula go on a violent rampage. Oosthuizen, the racist and violent farmer is the first white person to be killed in Gamate during the confrontation. He is the man who leads the move to throw Dinamaula out of the public bar. He, his two children and his African informer are violently mauled by his own workers. According to the narrator, he is literally torn into pieces (475). In Shebiya, in the north of Pharamaul, District Officer, Thomas Ronald, his wife Cynthia, and their guest, Father Schwemmer are brutally murdered. The murder of the white people represents the mirror line of colonial interrelations in the novel. As we have already observed, the mirror line always induces a more brutal response from the coloniser and betrays the sham of European civilisation. Predictably, Captain Simpson and his troops who are sent to investigate the Shebiya murders turn out to be even more savage than the ‘animalistic’ African murderers. Captain Simpson’s summary execution of the criminals closely reflects Rudbeck’s coldblooded execution of Cary’s eponymous Mister Johnson. In spite of Zuva’s claim to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention (551), Captain Simpson decides that the legal system takes too long to prosecute. He constitutes himself as the law, and executes the Africans without trial. As in Burwash’s massacring of the African men and women in The African Witch, and as in Rudbeck’s murder of Mister Johnson, Captain Simpson’s unlawful execution of Gotwela, Zuva and the others is concealed by colonial officials. According 272 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to the narrator, “Perhaps, the true story would all come out one day, perhaps it would simply pass into tribal legend, and be lost to the censorious world” (557). Just as the Rimi War, the Maula violence does not achieve much. Except for the changing of the colonial administrators, nothing else changes for the Africans highlighting the ineffectiveness of the violent voice of Africa In the novels of Greene, not much emphasis is placed on the Africans. Greene is mainly concerned with the Europeans, especially the European Catholic. He seeks to portray the internal turmoil and personal inadequacies that confront the European Catholic in the colonising enterprise. As such, he uses Africans merely as silent props and objects in his narration of the European angst in the African cave. However, in spite of his gagging of the Africans, the African voice still filters through in his novels, usually as sporadic acts of violence. In The Heart of the Matter, for instance, a group of rebellious boys constitute themselves into a gang the narrator calls the ‘Wharf Rats’. Their objective is not only to steal but also to attack the agents of colonial authority and colonisers, especially policemen and drunken European sailors. They also plant “incendiary bombs” (1948: 36-7) to intimidate the colonial administration. In A Burnt-Out Case, a similar group of Africans protests against colonisation, Christianisation and the collusion between the African chiefs and colonial administration. Seen as “trouble-makers,” the protesters express their grievances in song: “E ku Kinshasa ka bazeyi ko:/E ku Luozi ka bazeyi ko…,” which translates as “In Kinshasa they know nothing/In Luozi they know nothing.” The song continues: In the Upper Congo they know nothing: In heaven they know nothing: Those who revile the Spirit know nothing: 273 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Those chiefs know nothing: The whites know nothing. (Greene 1960: 224) We can decipher the following meanings from the song: “Upper Congo” represents the area where the Catholic-run leprosarium is situated; “Heavens” represents Christianity; the “Spirit” refers to the local deity, Nzambe, who is disrespected by the Catholic priests; “chiefs” refers to the local African chiefs who collude with the colonisers; “whites” represent the colonial administration and all colonisers. From the song, therefore, the group expresses resentment against colonisation and its negative effect on traditional African religion and the chieftaincy institution. The group is clearly bent on a physical confrontation with the colonisers. Querry acknowledges the protest as a national awakening among the people of Congo. He asks Dr. Colin: “Is that the future?” The question could as well have been a statement; it dawns on both Querry and Dr. Colin that the time for the anticolonial revolt has dawned in Congo. From the pattern of brutal colonial responses to African agitations as seen in the colonialist novel tradition, we can surmise that if the Congo protests descend into violence, the colonisers’ military machinery will not hesitate to annihilate the protesters as seen in the cases of Cary’s Aladai and the Rimi women, or Monsarrat’s Gotwela, Zuva and Puero. The violent voice of Africa is always silenced by the colonisers whose brutal repression of African dissent projects an uncivilised image of the Europeans . In Mister Johnson, the jocular eponymous protagonist assumes a violent voice in the face of the coloniser’s incessant abusing. When Gollup punches him on the nose for throwing a party in the shop compound, he stuns not only Gollup but also the on-looking Africans with counterpunches. He beats Gollup till he collapses to the floor and loses consciousness. He then tells Gollup, “I no ‘fraid for [sic] you, Sargy Gollup” (Cary 1939: 139). He later murders Gollup 274 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh in a robbery attempt. Given Gollup’s rampant abusing of the Africans – he beats Matumbi, Ajali and Johnson – Johnson’s murder of Gollup may be read in purely psychological terms: it is an unconscious reaction against European racism and dehumanisation of the Africans. In that sense, Johnson’s murder of Gollup assumes a political significance: it represents a violent attack on colonialism. Johnson is tried and condemned to hanging. That he is not hanged but summarily shot by the colonial judge himself, Rudbeck, points to the trend of brutal and illegal colonial silencing of the violent voice of Africa. The murder, like Captain Simpson’s annihilation of Gotwela, Zuva and Puero, also exposes the inner primitivity of the supposedly civilised coloniser. The most silent groups of Africans we observe in our study are Haggard’s Amahagger and Conrad’s Congolese. Both groups of Africans live under an extreme form of colonisation where silence is vigorously enforced. For instance, in She, Ayesha severs the tongues of her servants and destroys their hearing in order to keep them mute. She manages to build a nation of silence where dissent leads to a miserable and instant death. In spite of the imposed silence, the Africans manage to exercise the violent voice: they rebel against Ayesha. There are two clear instances of Amahagger revolt: one on the group level, the other on the personal level. In the first instance, the Amahagger attempt to kill the three English men who are Ayesha’s guests; in the second, Ustane confronts Ayesha over the latter’s attempt to snatch the former’s husband. In the case of the English men, Ayesha sends a message to the Amahagger not to harm her guests, Holly, Leo and Job. The message is delivered by the Father of the tribe, Billali, who serves as Ayesha’s emissary. The Amahagger ignore Ayesha’s instruction and attack the white men (Haggard 101ff). The attack is precipitated by Job’s slighting of an Amahagger woman who makes advances at him (90). When put on trial, the Amahagger justify their attack that it was 275 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh motivated by a “sudden fury” (170). We ask: ‘fury’ against what? Is it fury against the white man (Job) for insulting Amahagger femininity? Is it fury against the white man’s attempt to stop the killing of sacrificial Mahomed to compensate for Job’s ‘transgression’? Or is it fury against the unwanted and dangerous presence of white people in their country? A psychological perspective will illuminate our discussion. The Amahagger fury may have been triggered by the English men’s refusal to allow the sacrificing of Mahomed, their African servant, but we suspect that the real cause of the attack is hatred for the white people. Generations of the Amahagger have been colonised, tortured, killed and dehumanised by Ayesha’s two thousand year reign. Ayesha is a white woman. Naturally, therefore, the Amahagger have developed an aversion to white people, especially when Ayesha seems to be bringing more of her ‘kind’ – white people – to bolster her hegemony over them. In our view, therefore, the Amahagger attack on the English men is an unconscious and spontaneous reaction against the intrusion of white people on the land. It is a psychological reaction dictated by the long-repressed anger and resentment against Ayesha’s dictatorship. The psychological nature of the attack explains its ‘suddenness’, what the Amahagger themselves describe as a “sudden fury.” Fanon captures the Amahagger mood thus: “The native knows [that the coloniser regards him as an animal], and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he begins to sharpen his weapons with which he will secure its victory” (1967a: 33). As typical of the colonialist novel tradition, the Amahagger act of protest is denied its redemptive significance by both Ayesha and the narrator. The culprits are arrested and put to a brutal death on the orders of Ayesha. The narrator, also, attributes the attack to anthropophagi, a charge that strips the attack of any political agency, and subsumes it under the anthropological category of primitive pleasure. 276 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh In all the instances of violence cited, the Africans fail to achieve any substantial gains. There is a trend of brutal reprisals from the colonisers that denies the violent voice of Africa any meaningful impact. In veridical terms, the violence fails; in theoretical terms, it draws a mirror line between the two antithetical images of the coloniser: the coloniser as supposedly civilised and coloniser as primitive. 7.2.1.3 The Cultural Voice: (De)hybridisation, Cultural Nationalism and African Agency African resistance against colonialism sometimes takes cultural forms. The Africans, especially the educated elite, hybridised by their assimilation of European culture, reject the adopted culture, and attempt to re-embrace their own traditions as a source of empowerment. Blyden, Casely Hayford and Bhabha have written extensively about the politics of culture and strategies for negotiating cultural identity. Blyden, for instance, advocates what Homi Bhabha theorises variously as ‘hybridity’ and ‘liminality’. In African Life and Customs (1908), Blyden advises: “If…Europe wishes to help Africa…[,] she can do so effectively…only by assisting her in the maintenance and development of her own social system” (qtd in Langley 1979: 83). Here, Blyden suggests a relationship where European intervention in Africa will not seek to overhaul the entire African cosmogonies and cultural forms. Rather, he envisions a relationship of mutual exchange leading to cultural adaption and translation. Casely Hayford shares Blyden’s syncretic view of culture. Speaking through Kwamankra, the authorial mouthpiece in Ethiopia Unbound, Casely Hayford cautions: “no people could despise its own language, customs, and institutions and hope to avoid national death” (1967: 17). For this reason, he recommends the African school uniform to be a distinctive national garb “with an adaptability suggestive of the advanced state of society” (Ethiopia 17). He also champions the use of local languages in teaching and translation of authoritative textbooks into African languages. Blyden’s and Casely Hayford’s flexible strain 277 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of cultural nationalism anticipates Bhabha’s notion of the ‘limen’ which recognises empowerment and agency as residing in the threshold of cultural exchange. To Bhabha, as to the earlier nationalists, the interfacing that occurs between European and African cultures necessarily creates a diffused situation, “mimicry, hybridity, sly civility,…[a] liminal moment of identification…[that] produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency,” an agency “that negotiates its own authority” (1994: 185). Thus, hybridity and liminality – the site of cultural exchange – represent the locus of the empowerment of the colonised in Bhabha’s thinking just as we observe in the frameworks of the earlier African thinkers. Fanon provides another view of cultural exchange that opposes the Blyden-Hayford-Bhabha liberal postulate discussed above. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates a cultural essentialism that seeks to abrogate all relationships with European culture, and to reinstate precolonial African values (Fanon 1967: 36). In the light of the two antithetical postulates, Blyden-Hayford-Bhabha’s and Fanon’s, we shall examine how Africans in the colonialist novel tradition negotiate the complex cultural relations with Europe in their attempt to assert African culture. In other words, we shall analyse how the cultural voice of Africa speaks and reacts against European domination. Our emphasis shall be on two sets of Africans: the educated elite such as Aladai and Dinamaula; and the illiterate or semi-literate class featuring Mister Johnson, Akande Tom, Elizabeth Aladai and Deo Gratias. 7.2.1.3.1 Hybridisation of Africans Aladai and Dinamaula are trained at Oxford University, Europeanised and alienated from their peoples. While their sensibilities and perspectives are European, those of their respective peoples are African, creating a conflict of identity. For instance, in The African Witch, Aladai refuses to marry any of the beautiful eligible African girls available. He rejects Osi (Cary 1936: 278 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 31) and Obishala (286) because they are illiterate and pagan. His Oxford, Christian tastes do not permit conjugal relations with ‘savage’ girls. He is obsessed rather with the white girl, Dryas Honey, with whom he dances erotically, and gets beaten for it. Dinamaula in The Tribe That Lost Its Head also refuses to marry Miera, his designated tribal bride, because she is illiterate and dirty (Monsarrat 1956: 72). He, like Aladai, prefers a white girl (173). Both men reminisce about their social lives in England: a life involving parties, boat clubs and European women. The case of Aladai and Dinamaula represents the effect of colonisation on the African elite: hybridisation, which engenders a split-identity and self-denial. Colonialism and its splitting of cultural identity affects not only the educated elite. As Bhabha demonstrates in “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1995), the unlettered and semi-educated are also caught up in the liminal space of mimicry. Thus, the half-educated Mister Johnson (Cary 1939) and the unlettered duo, Akande Tom (Cary 1936) and Deo Gratias (Greene 1961), also adopt the white man’s culture in various ways. The eponymous Johnson, for example, prides himself on being a clerk in the colonial administration. He feels himself an English man and calls England home (Cary 1939: 36). He desires his illiterate wife, Bamu, to behave like an English lady, to “wear white women’s dress, sit in a chair at table with him and eat off a plate” (11). A Christian, Johnson wants to convert pagan Bamu into Christianity. For him, respectability, class and acceptance in civilised circles are the indispensable accruals from clerical work and Christian marriage. He therefore intends to transform the village girl Bamu into Missus Bamu Johnson, a respectable woman, who dresses in “a blouse and skirt, shoes and silk stocking, with a little felt hat full of feathers” (13). He, therefore, marries the pagan girl in a Christian ceremony which she does not understand (38-9). In her “Introduction” to Marita: or the Folly of Love (1886), Stephanie Newell draws attention to the importance of a Christian marriage for the 279 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh colonial African. In relation to that, she highlights the pervasive phenomenon of the semi-clad, illiterate African woman who sheds her “African cloth and becom[es] what [is] known in the Gold Coast as a ‘frock lady’” (2002: 4). Johnson is desperate that Bamu ‘become’ English. In his newly-found ‘Englishness’, Johnson rejects African values as “savage” (11), “foolish” (12), “bush” (38) and worthless. Akande Tom, in The African Witch, is cast in the mould of Johnson, the difference being that Tom is stark illiterate. Being African, pagan, unlettered and in the employ of Elizabeth, the powerful African priestess, Akande Tom’s natural orientation is towards the African tradition. However, influenced by the attractiveness of European clothing and mannerisms, Tom rejects his African culture and embraces European values. He proudly announces his conversion to Christianity: “Yaas, I am Cristin [sic] man now…. I no savage man” (Cary 1936: 110). As a Christian, he swaps his native banty or kilt for the European suit. According to the narrator, when Tom wore the white man’s clothes “he felt…the quality not merely of a white man, but all that belongs to him – the power of his engines and guns, the magic of his telegraphs, gramophones, radio, motors, ships, and his mysterious being. By wearing the white man’s clothes, it seemed to Tom’s body and natural logic, that he became one with the white ju-ju” (149). Deo Gratias in A Burnt-Out Case is an illiterate cured leper who works at the Catholic- run leprosarium in Congo. Having lived all his life with the European priests in the mission, he is hybridised. A Christian, he bears a Latin name with a reference to the Christian God: ‘Deo Gratias’ – meaning ‘Thanks be to God’. He smokes, and speaks some French. He is hybridised, though on a much lower scale. So far we have seen the hybridisation of Aladai and Dinamaula on the elite scale, and 280 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Mister Johnson, Akande Tom and Deo Gratias, on the lower end of the scale. We observe that irrespective of their level of hybridisation, the same motivation accounts for their embrace of European norms: civilisation. Being seen as civilised comes with prestige in African circles and acceptance in the European circles. Particularly for the educated elite, acceptance into European social and political circles is crucial since it provides access to the relevant ears that will listen to their pleas for reforms and redress. The Africans are surprised, however, that in spite of adopting the European culture, they are still rejected and dehumanised by the Europeans. Aladai, for instance, is repeatedly described in zoological and cannibalistic terms: a “trousered ape” (Cary 1936: 56), “swollen-headed ape” (120), “performing ape,” “[in]decent ape” “a bloody swollen- headed monkeyfied –” (192), “a dirty swine” (198), “the cannibal chief” (19, 263). He is beaten up for dancing with a white girl, and snubbed when he goes to the European club. Dinamaula is also denied by the Europeans. For instance, he is thrown out when he goes to the European drinking bar with his European friend. His intended marriage to a white girl is also rejected by the colonial administration. The educated Africans are rejected because the Europeans are uncomfortable about their equal status. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha constructs the equality between the coloniser and educated colonised as follows: “You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re different, you’re one of us” (1994: 44). In the context of Cary’s and Monsarrat’s novels, we shall construct the parity as follows: ‘we wear the same clothes, we attend the same school, we speak the same language, we share the same tastes, we love the same girl (Aladai and Rackham are rivals over Dryas Honeywood; Dinamaula and all white men want to marry a white girl), [therefore] we are equal.’ Education is the equalising factor that intermixes the two worlds in a complex negotiation of cultures. Aladai realises the diffusive property of hybridisation, and observes: “it looks as if I wanted to put myself on a level with them” (Cary 23). The colonisers 281 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh refuse to accept the parity and question the presence of the African in the European’s world. In The African Witch, Rackham verbalises his resentment of the hybridisation process: “I’m not against the nigger in his proper place” (Cary 46, our emphasis). For the coloniser, the African’s proper place is not European circles, wearing suit, tie and shoes, speaking English with an Oxford accent, and articulating rational arguments, “Bloody Oxford double talk,” (Monsarrat 324) to justify decolonisation. Indeed, for the coloniser, the place of the African is not at the ‘threshold’ exchanging ideas with the coloniser in a discursive exercise: as Aladai does with Burwash (Cary 1936: 69), as Dinamaula with Macmillan (Monsarrat 322-26), and as Seralo, Katsaula and Puero with Macmillan (Monsarrat 334-40). The place of the African, in the view of the coloniser, is the place Marlow consigns them: the deep atavistic jungle because, “They wanted no excuse for being there” (Conrad 1994: 20). In the jungle, there is no danger of “making him [the black man] think he’s equal to a white man when he isn’t?” (Cary 1936: 46). We have tried to discuss the hybridisation of the African. We have seen the complex processes involved in the African’s attempt to gain acceptance by the European through the adoption of European cultural values. We have seen also that hybridisation as a cultural strategy fails just as the other African strategies such as the discursive voice and violent voice. In the face of the Europeans’ disavowal of the African cultural hybrid, the latter seeks empowerment in another cultural strategy: dehybridisation. 7.2.1.3.2 Dehybridisation as a Source of Empowerment The rejection of the hybridised Africans by the Europeans has an effect on the former’s attitude toward the adopted European culture. Denied entry into European circles, and their arguments for freedom rejected, the Africans begin to question the effectiveness of the discursive principle and the agency inherent in liminality and hybridity. In other words, they question the 282 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh effectiveness of the Blyden-Hayford-Bhabha model. Indeed, Fanon warns of the dangers of using hybridity as a source of empowerment. For him, “The natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute” (1967a: 31). Fanon’s proposal – the ‘absolute idea’ – is a call to physical violence. Thus, we observe that after the rational arguments of Aladai, Dinamaula and the Regents have been rejected, the Africans turn to the use of physical force in their relations with the colonisers. Our interest in physical violence lies in its cultural expression: the nationalists’ spurning of the European culture and their return to the indigenous African traditions. We realise that when the strategies of hybridisation fail to deliver the expected results, the African nationalists try to “dehybridize” (Katsuei 2005: 23). By dehybridisation, Katsuei means a calculated effort aimed at unlearning and reversing the influence of hybridisation. It is a process of “monoculturalization” (Katsuei 23) that, theoretically aims at reversing hybridity. We highlight the word ‘theoretically’ because, as we shall soon discover, dehybridisation is as ambivalent as the process it seeks to disavow. The adoption of dehybridisation as a cultural strategy seeks reinforcement in Fanon. The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Graeco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean 283 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh values – the triumph of the human individual, of clarity and of beauty – become lifeless, colourless knick-knacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged. (Fanon 1967a: 36) In the spirit of Fanon, therefore, the African intellectuals, Aladai and Dinamaula, and their uneducated compatriots, Elizabeth, Akande Tom and Deo Gratias, see cultural dehybridisation as the necessary counterpart to and reinforcement for physical violence. To dehybridise, Aladai, for example, rejects his adopted European values, re-immerses himself in the African community and re-imbibes the indigenous traditions. Such an action is prescribed by Fanon as redemptive and empowering. In Fanon’s view, the moment of dehybridistion occurs when the African intellectual recognises the falsity of the coloniser’s theory of individualism, and reintegrates back into the local community which constitutes the source of power and traditional wisdom. “Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will…discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people’s committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments” (Fanon 1967a: 36-7). Thus, when Aladai is beaten up by the Europeans – Rackham, Honeywood and Prince – for dancing with Dryas Honeywood, he returns to the group of agitated young men gathered in his forbidden town house. He is infected with their chants of war, and declares: “I have come home to Rimi […] Yes, it is war now. […] War has come to us. It can’t be avoided, except by cowards” (Cary 1936: 210). He rejects the European medicine when his sister Elizabeth suggests sarcastically, “Perhaps you want a white doctor [to attend to your bloodied face]!” (210). He also rejects the European clothing: “I am a Rimi man. Takes these [white men’s] clothes away and burn them” (210). He then accepts the 284 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh traditional dress of the Rimi people: the banty or kilt, and a skull cap. He rejects the white singlet also as a dress for servants (213). He also refuses to wear shoes, preferring to walk to the warfront barefooted holding a spear (263). His dehybridisation seems complete. In Monsarrat’s novel, Dinamaula’s moment of dehybridisation occurs when he moves away from Gamate and re-immerses into the traditional, earthy, surroundings of his tribesmen at his ranch at Baraula. Here, he meets with the old man, Paulus, his chief herdboy, to discuss the state of his cattle. When the colonial officer, Llewellyn intrudes upon his private meeting with Paulus, Dinamaula’s new dehybridised identity is revealed. He declares: “This is my country. These are my herds, these [men here] are my subjects. If you had been here when I arrived at… Baraula, you would have seen how a chief is greeted in Pharamaul. That old man fell on his knees and touched my feet with his forehead. That is how an old man greets his chief” (Monsarrat 265). Dinamaula’s attitude here, his pride in the traditional method of greeting, is a marked departure from his embarrassed and condescending posturing when he first arrived in Pharamaul from England. Then, he had seen the tribal appellations and formulaic greetings as a primitive ritual which will embarrass him before his Oxford friends. Now, at Baraula, he wants Llewellyn, a European, to witness an even more dramatic demonstration of deference. The shift in Dinamaula’s cultural choices in favour of his African tradition is an obvious rejection of European culture. Also, Dinamaula rejects European scientific opinion for African agricultural expertise. Kofi Anyidoho draws attention to the umbilical linkage between culture and agriculture, and suggests that the failure of many European agricultural interventions in Africa comes about because such projects “violate ‘cultural protocol’ by alienating the land from the people without due regard to custom” (2000: 28). It is assumed that the European experts are the only people 285 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh with technical knowledge about agriculture and the land; the indigenous African farmers are supposed to be ignorant of such knowledge. “But it would seem,” Anyidoho opines, “that a people who have cultivated a stretch of land for several centuries, must have developed a body of knowledge about local conditions, even climatic conditions, that should serve as a useful complement to the potential efficiency of imported technology” (“Culture” 28). The scenario described by Anyidoho is demonstrated in the confrontation involving Dinamaula, Paulus and Llewellyn. The Welshman, Llewellyn, is the agriculture officer of the colony of Pharamaul. He is touted for his excellent knowledge in the field: “What he knew about crops, cattle, water, and disease was phenomenal” (Monsarrat 51). He is an authority on European scientific technology. Paulus, on the other hand, is an elderly illiterate Maula, the chief herdboy of the royal herd. He comes from a long line of royal chief herdboys: his grandfather, his father and himself over several decades. He demonstrates expert knowledge of the climatic conditions, land, cattle- rearing and state of the cattle in all six of the royal herds. It is claimed that he can look at the heads of six cattle randomly chosen from the herd, and “name the sire and grandsire of each” (Monsarrat 263). Paulus represents the authority on the body of indigenous agricultural knowledge. The encounter between Llewellyn and Paulus, therefore, has a significance that is much deeper and overrides politics. In reality, it is a contest of European scientific technology and its cultural values against African indigenous technology and its cultural protocols. Thus, when Llewellyn intrudes on Dinamaula’s meeting with Paulus, Dinamaula is confronted with two different bodies of agricultural knowledge: Llewellyn’s European scientific opinion and Paulus’s indigenous African expertise. In his dehybridisation mood, Dinamaula rejects Llewellyn’s interventions; indeed, he does not even invite Llewellyn’s opinion on the subject of the cattle, or on any other subject for that matter. He makes Llewellyn’s position as agricultural 286 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh advisor conspicuously redundant when he chooses Paulus expertise over Llewellyn’s. By telling Paulus, “I will sleep now. Tomorrow we will talk of the herds, and the care of them” (Monsarrat 267), Dinamaula emphatically spurns European expertise in favour of the culturally-oriented tribal knowledge. Anyidoho would support Dinamaula’s choice. Every authentic agriculture is or should be based on culture. It is within this context that we can fully appreciate the fact that within our cultural heritage, the calendar of events that may begin with the propitiatory rites in honor of the Earth Goddess and move into successive periods of clearing the soil, planting, making sacrifices to the rain god, observing the ‘Weak of Peace, gathering the harvest home, and finally celebrating the rice or yam festival’ (Achebe 1958) all these constitute an organic approach to development planning. (2000 19-20) Our argument here is that Dinamaula’s choice of indigenous expertise over European opinion is an expression of the anticolonial cultural voice. It is an exercise in dehybridisation. In The African Witch, Akande Tom’s Europeanisation is violently interrupted and reversed by Elizabeth whose extreme form of cultural nationalism militates against both Aladai’s and Tom’s hybridisation. Thus, when Tom visits wearing a suit, mimicking European mannerisms and announcing his pursuit of English scholarship and conversion to Christianity, Elizabeth sees his posturing as an insult to the African tradition. She rips the suit from his body, tramples on it, and throws him out into the street naked. She then advises him to “Come in now and put on a banty, like a Rimi woman’s husband” (Cary 151). Tom refuses to wear the banty or return to African traditional worship proclaiming, “That’s for savage men. […] I’m a Christin man” [sic] (151). Under what the narrator calls ‘Elizabeth’s evil spell’, Tom eventually abandons his English studies, Christianity, European clothing and mannerisms, and returns to the 287 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh traditional African way of life. “[H]e no longer tries to be a white man, or to learn book” (309). Deo Gratias also attempts to dehybridise when he is confronted with the cultural voice of his tribesmen from the Lower Congo. At the consecration of the new Catholic Church at the leprosarium, a group of young men from the Lower Congo mounts a protest against colonisation, Christianisation and the complicity of the African chiefs in colonisation. Deo Gratias’ reaction represents an awakening of his nationalistic and cultural consciousness. While the Europeans are perplexed by the protesters, “Only Deo Gratias moved some distance towards them; he squatted on the ground between them and the hospital, and the doctor remembered that as a child he had come from the Lower Congo too” (Greene 1961: 224-5). Deo Gratias identifies with his people and the song they sing: “E ku Kinshasa ka bazeyi ko/ E ku Luozi ka bazeyi ko…” (224). His alignment with his tribesmen can be explained in cultural terms: they speak his mother-tongue. Nobody at the leprosarium understands the language the protesters speak except Deo Gratias and Dr. Colin who had worked in the Lower Congo before. At the leprosarium, Deo Gratias is linguistically caged: he is forced to speak European languages: French and other Flemish languages, possibly Belgian. Thus, when he hears his mother-tongue for the first time since he left home as a child, he naturally abandons the Europeans and moves towards his own people. His action is very significant: it is a rejection of the European language and value system which have been forced upon him. Going to his people suggests re-embracing his African tradition, an act of dehybridisation. Apart from the politics of language, there is another cultural motivation for Deo Gratias’ dehybridisation: religion. In the protest song, the people uphold the local deity, ‘Nzambe’, and denounce the Christian God and notion of heaven: “In heaven they know nothing/Those who revile the Spirit [Nzambe] know nothing” (Greene 1961: 224). Deo Gratias is therefore caught 288 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh between two gods: the Christian God and local god, Nzambe. Thoroughly indoctrinated by Catholicism, he is expected to affirm his Christian beliefs in the face of a rival god, but he refuses to do so. By moving closer to his people, he signals his choice of Nzambe and the African tradition over the Christian God and European values. He reaffirms his choice when he performs a sacred traditional African funeral ritual at the Christian cemetery at the burial of Querry. Father Joseph, a Catholic priest, says a Christian prayer at the grave, but Deo Gratias offers a very different kind of prayer: not to Christ, but to Nzambe. He puts “an old jam-pot beside the mound [Querry’s grave] filled with twigs and plants curiously intertwined. It looked more like an offering to Nzambe than a funeral wreath” (Greene 252). Upset by the apparently pagan ritual, Father Thomas threatens to throw away Deo Gratias’ offering because “It’s a very ambiguous offering for a Christian cemetery” (252). In the episode cited, we see Deo Gratias reject the European language for his local Lingala, and the Christian God for the local Nzambe. Indeed, he even subverts Christianity by performing a pagan ritual at a Christian cemetery. All these acts of Deo Gratias are cultural decisions taken apparently in support of nationalist activism buttressing our argument that the colonised Africans rely on cultural voicing to push their anticolonial political agenda. Before we proceed to discussing the difficulties involved in the processes of dehybridisation, we want to make a comment on Greene’s characterisation of, and opinion on Nzambe. In the novel, Greene represents Nzambe as a local god, an idol of pagan reverence. Such as a representation is misleading and erroneous. In the Lingala language widely spoken in Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Angola and Central African Republic, ‘Nzambe’ is the Supreme God (Ngondji 2011: 21-3). He is not a pagan deity as Greene’s colonialist narrator suggests. Indeed, Ngondji questions the colonisers’ representation of the 289 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh image of God in colonial Congo. It is quite obvious to us that Greene, and many of his fellow colonialist writers, did not understand the African culture they were writing about leading to misconceptions, misrepresentations, and in some cases, outright untruths. 7.2.1.3.3 The Problematics of Dehybridisation From the above analysis, we observe that the African nationalists seek empowerment and agency in the African culture. They do so by rejecting or ‘unlearning’ the adopted European cultural values. However, negotiating the break with European civilisation is always fraught with challenges and inconsistencies that weaken the project of dehybridisation. None of the characters who attempts to dehybridise manages to return to an essentially precolonial African culture untouched by European influence. For instance, Aladai, in spite of his rejection of European medicine and clothing, and in spite of his public announcement that “I am not a Christian” (Cary 1936: 140), is unable to make a clean break from the European culture. Though he wears a traditional Rimi banty and skull- cap, he also wears a European coat into which a Christian prayer-book has been sewn. Elizabeth sews the prayer-book into the coat as a form of primitive ‘Christian juju’ to protect Aladai (213). In spite of spurning everything European, Aladai accepts the European coat and ‘Christian juju’: “He was not afraid to make them useful if they served him” (213). We observe in this episode the syncretic re-rendering of religion and culture. The paradoxical notions of ‘Christian juju’ and the act of wearing a European coat over a Rimi banty and skull-cap reflect a process of selective dehybridisation which is still very much a liminal act. Thus, Aladai’s dehybridisation is not a complete de-coupling of the African and European cultures but rather a creative re-negotiation of cultural relations and identity. We encounter this type of dehybridisation throughout our study. To cite another example, Elizabeth and her assistant, Obishala, are seen smoking cigarette that is 290 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh obviously imported from Europe (Cary 1936: 242, 308). This is in spite of her violent attack on Akande Tom, and her mockery of Aladai, for their English pretensions. To cite another example, Dinamaula’s attempt to seek political empowerment in the traditional practices of his tribesmen also encounters a disruption. His process of dehybridisation is abruptly truncated when he is arrested and exiled to England. In England, he is thrust back into the very heart of the European culture from which he tries to negotiate a break. Deo Gratias epitomises the problematics of dehybridisation. Caught between the forces of Europe (Catholic Church, hospital, French language, European priests, Querry, Dr. Colin) and those of Africa (Congolese protesters, Lingala language, Nzambe), Deo Gratias “move[s] some way towards [the Africans]; [and] he squat[s] on the ground between them and the hospital” (Greene 1961: 224, my emphasis). We emphasise “ground between” because it represents the thrust of our argument with regard to dehybridisation. It is significant that Deo Gratias, like Aladai, Dinamaula and Elizabeth, is unable to break away from the forces of Europe completely or to align himself with the forces of Africa completely, but rather chooses the “ground between.” From the choices of the aforementioned African characters, we contend that the death of hybridity occurs at the very locus where the hybrid is born: the liminal space. Bhabha’s notion of the limen, in-between, middle ground, threshold or “ground between,” where Deo Gratias squats, represents the womb and tomb of hybridity. From the complexities involved in the attempts of Aladai, Dinamaula, Elizabeth and Deo Gratias to return to their African traditions, we observe that dehybridisation is not an abrupt, sharp severance of cultural relations with Europe. It is a difficult, almost painful project fraught with inconsistencies and tentative decisions as the Africans grope their way back into their indigenous traditions. In other words, just as hybridity is negotiated and constructed, the reverse process also involves negotiation and 291 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh construction. Curiously, the two antithetical processes take place at the same location: the “ground between.” This calls into question the nature of African identity. Is there an authentic African identity? We suspect in Fanon’s desire to eliminate the “artificial sentinel” that defends “the Graeco-Latin pedestal,” and in his desire to expunge “All the Mediterranean values” (1967a: 36), an essentialist yearning for a return to the monoculturalism that prevailed in precolonial Africa. By denying the African an essentialist status, however, the colonialist novelists inscribe the supremacy and unassailability of colonialism and its effect on African identity. They also suggest the weakness of African agency to assail the overpowering influence of European culture. But as Blyden-Hayford-Bhabha suggest, the African does not need to dehybridise in order to fight colonisation. Rather, understanding culture as a dialectic, or dialogue between the African and European traditions helps the African to subvert the European culture and colonialism. As Bhabha stresses in The Location of Culture, hybridity “negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable insurgent rethinking” (1994: 185). Bhabha, here, is talking about the double standards involved in the strategy of dehybridisation. If “mimicry” and “hybridity” operate on the principles of “iterative unpicking and incommensurable insurgent rethinking” – principles that are even more relevant to dehybridisation – then the two supposedly antithetical processes represent the same strategy of subversion. 7.2.1.4 The Cosmic Voice Cole Harris and Andrew Sluyter have both grappled with the issue of landscape and colonisation. Harris, in The Resettlement of British Columbia (1991), provides an extensive geographical history of the colonisation of the Indigenous American land by the Europeans. In Colonialism and Landscape, Andrew Sluyter follows Harris’ work and conceptualises a colonial 292 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh triangle of native, landscape and European, which to him constitutes a transformative triad perpetually involved in a process of change. The agency of the indigenes and the ‘agency’ of the land are affirmed by both Harris and Sluyter (Sluyter 2002: 17). However, Harris’ and Sluyter’s meaning of ‘agency of the land’ is in regard to the biophysical adaptability of the land; that is, the ability of the colonised people and land to cooperate in a transformative relationship that yields agricultural and other productive rewards. We shall use the term ‘agency of the land’ quite differently in our analysis in the present section. We shall use the term to denote the ability of the land to repel European incursion into Africa. We conceptualise the antagonistic function of the African cave as the land’s contribution towards the anticolonial drive of its peoples - the African peoples. By ‘agency of the land’, therefore, we imply the ability of the landscape to ‘speak’ and act on behalf of the Africans against the Europeans. We designate the agency of the land as a ‘cosmic voice’ because it is a composite of the elemental forces of Africa. In Chapter 3, we postulated that the elements of Africa constitute, in the context of the colonialist novel, a gross cosmic membrane. Our argument in that chapter was that the colonialist writer uses the elements: Fire (sun), Water (marine bodies), Earth (vegetation and landscape) and Air (humidity) to constitute a formidable but permeable elemental wall (our notion of cosmic membrane) which tries to hinder the incursion of the coloniser into Africa. Our argument in the present section is that the cosmic membrane just described assumes a voice: a metaphysical voice that repels the colonisers. We shall look at how the cosmic voice fend off the following colonisers: Ayesha, Holly, Leo, Job, Marlow, Kurtz, Scobie, Macmillan, Pemberton and Fresleven. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow conceptualises the cosmic voice of Africa as silence. The forests and rivers are all monstrous and silent. He calls it the “heavy mute spell of the wilderness” (Conrad 94). But this silence also ‘speaks’. For instance, Marlow expects “the 293 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh wilderness [to] burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places” (70). The paradox of ‘silence that speaks’ reflects the problematic of the cosmic voice. In one breath, it is inviting and drawing the coloniser in; in another breath, it is repelling the coloniser. For instance, the wilderness of Congo seems to invite Kurtz. “[H]ow can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into…by the way of silence – utter silence” (70), Marlow asks. This invitation turns out to be merely a subterfuge contrived by the African space to harass the coloniser. Once Kurtz is settled in Africa, he is “assaulted by the powers of darkness” (70). Marlow’s keen insight recognises the paradox of the ‘speaking’ silence, and captures its problematic thus: “the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it whispered to him” (83, my emphasis). Marlow’s observation efficiently illuminates our postulation about the cosmic voice of Africa. The seeming silence of the African wilderness is actually a voice that speaks, but equivocally. For instance, it seemingly invites Kurtz only to brutally spurn him. Unable to accept his rejection, Kurtz refuses to leave Africa, and spends his final moments negotiating with the cosmic voice: “The horror! The horror!” (100). In She, Ayesha is also assaulted by the cosmic voice. To begin with, she does not want to live in Africa anymore. She wants to leave the depressing sepulchral caves and go to England. She awaits the return of Kallikrates so that she can flee from Africa. She says, “I await now for one I loved to be born anew, and I tarry here till he finds me…. […] [W]hy…dost thou think that I herd here with barbarians lower than beasts?” (Haggard 147). “Two thousand years have I waited for the day when I should see the last of these hateful caves and this gloomy-visaged folk” (243). Thus, when Kallikrates comes back as the English man Leo, she does not hesitate to propose “journey[ing] to this England of thine, and live as it becometh us to live” (243). The 294 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh elemental earth (the caves) serves as the aspect of the cosmic voice that stifles Ayesha and necessitates her wish to flee the cage. Holly, Leo and Job are equally invited and repelled by the African landscape. The joy and prospect of killing big game which surround their adventure to Africa turn sour when they are confronted by the cosmic forces of Africa. According to Holly, their lives on the plains of Africa became “one monotonous record of heavy labour, heat, misery and mosquitoes. […] I can only attribute our escape from fever and death to the constant doses of quinine and purgatives which we took” (76). In contrast, the mosquitoes, for instance, do not bite Mahomed, their African servant, at all (74). Holly’s claim of Mahomed’s so-called insulation against mosquito bites is not merely racist, it also suggests that, in the unique vision of the coloniser, the African landscape is nuanced in its acts of agency: it does not attack its own people; it assaults only the invaders. Significantly, the invaders are unable to leave till death strikes. Ayesha and Job die as a result of the cosmic force of Africa: the sacred Fire of Noot. Holly and Leo then flee to England. In all the examples cited above, the equivocation and agency of the African landscape is revealed. The seeming silence or ‘emptiness’ of the African space becomes an incentive for colonisation, but the coloniser soon discovers that the silence of Africa is dubious. The presumed silence is paradoxically full of ‘voice’ and agency. The voice unleashes torrents of physical and psychological discomforts that either have the European escaping from Africa like Marlow, Holly, Leo, or succumbing to death like Ayesha and Job, Greene’s Scobie and Pemberton, Monsarrat’s Macmillan and Conrad’s Kurtz, unnamed Swede and Fresleven. The cosmic voice complements the effects of the three other voices of Africa already discussed: discursive, violent and cultural. 295 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh As we have tried to show, the cosmic voice, in its function as the mirror line, also delineates two antithetical images of the colonisers. First, there are the happy colonisers amassing wealth and gloating over the ease of their success in Africa. This success is quite abruptly truncated when the cosmic voice ‘speaks’. The ‘speech’ of the cosmic voice signals the reversal of fortune for the colonisers as they experience various forms of peripeteia. The cosmic voice, therefore, separates the two opposing images of the same coloniser – the succeeding coloniser against the suffering coloniser – thereby creating a mirror line effect. All the ‘voices’ of Africa have the effect of exposing the dialectical circumstances of the coloniser. In this chapter, we have tried to demonstrate that in spite of Spivak’s views about the supposed silence of the subaltern, the latter has a voice and speaks. We have tried to show that the colonised Africans and their elemental ally, the African space, speak with four voices. First, the Africans speaks in the discursive voice. Here, they confront the colonisers in a debate employing rational arguments to justify their demands. Second, the Africans speak in the violent voice by applying reciprocal force and physical violence. This happens when the rational voice fails. Third, the Africans speak in the cultural voice. Here, cultural nationalism becomes the strategy of subversion. We have recognised in cultural nationalism an attempt to return to the precolonial cultural values of Africa, but we have also detected that such an exercise is fraught with inconsistencies leading to our suspicion that dehybridisation is merely a modification of hybridity. In our view, both hybridity and dehybridisation thrive on ambivalence, thus, the two strategies are analogous. We have also noted that cultural nationalism does not act alone, and that the cultural voice usually reinforces the violent voice. Fourth, the African landscape itself assumes a ‘voice’ through its elemental acts of agency. We have called this the cosmic voice. In sum, we have tried to demonstrate that the four voices of Africa or the reaction of Africans 296 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh against colonisation invariably succeeds in projecting an image of the coloniser that is quite antithetical to the original image of a successful, happy and civilised coloniser. In its mediatory role, the function of voicing represents the mirror line of colonial interrelations. We have provided the analysis in this chapter towards illustrating the last sentence in the grammar: [Sentence 0: Y/the cave speak against X]. 297 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8.0 CHAPTER EIGHT SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION In this final chapter, we shall provide a summary of the major findings and concluding statements for this dissertation. We shall also provide recommendations for further study. In pursuit of the above, we shall briefly reiterate the objectives, hypothesis and research questions. At the beginning of the study, we set an objective to find the grammar of the colonialist novel, and how the grammar may project a meaningful structure for the story of the colonialist novel. The objective, therefore, was to find out if there was an inherent grammatical structure in the story of the colonialist novel, and whether the structure was meaningful. Before we embarked on the study, our preliminary investigation of the select set of colonialist novels had given us an inkling that a grammar was inherent in the colonialist story. That earlier observation yielded our hypothesis that the colonialist story has a chiasmic or dioscuric structure and that the categories of caving, caging, theft and voicing represented the permanent features of the story. In order to thoroughly examine these preliminary observations, and confirm or deny our assumptions, we set out to rigorously study the colonialist novel tradition. Our study pursued answers to five pertinent research questions. The responses to the research questions will constitute the basis of the findings of this dissertation. We shall proceed by posing each research question and providing a summary of the findings. 8.1 Summary: Research Questions and Critical Findings 8.1.1 What is the constitutive grammar of the colonialist story? From our examination of the select set of colonialist novels, we deciphered seven functions in the form of simple sentences of clauses that constitute the grammar. Six of the sentences are as follows: 298 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Dioscuric Bundle Semantic Compound Function X enters the cave – (a) /+ Entry/ /+ Caving/ The cave enters X – (a-1) X cages Y – (b) /+ Caging/ /+ Caging/ The cave cages X – (b-1) X steals from the cave/Y – (c) /+ Stealing / /+ Theft/ Y/the cave steal from X – (c-1) As can be seen from the scheme above, six of the seven sentences go through transformative processes to produce three of the functions of the colonialist story: caving, caging and theft. The fourth sentence [Y/the Cave speak against X] provides the last function: voicing. Thus, transformationally the functions, caving, caging, theft and voicing constitute the grammar of the colonialist story. 8.1.1.1 Caving Caving as a function in the colonialist story represents the colonisers’ view of Africa and what happens in the continent. The world of Africa is represented as one big cave that is tempo- spatially projected to an atavistic age. It is a space ruled by monstrous beasts that roam the jungle. Africa is presumed to be inhabited by primitive peoples who have no language, laws, knowledge of time or conception of God. With slight variations, all the colonialist novelists studied represent the African world in terms of a primeval cave. There are two broad variations of the cave based on tempo-spatial (dis)ordering. Temporally, there are the ‘present in the past’ 299 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and ‘past in the present’ time manipulations. Respectively, these temporal formations correspond spatially to the notions of the absolute cave and cave-city. 8.1.1.1.1 Representations of Time: ‘Present in the Past’ and ‘Past in the Present’ Time Diffusions We observed two time formats in the novels: ‘Present in the Past’ and ‘Past in the Present’ time renderings. The difference between the two lies in the degree of temporal foregrounding contrived by the narrator. By ‘temporal foregrounding’ we mean the aspect of time that is made dominant in the text. The narrators of all the novels studied set, or profess to set, their stories in the present time; that is, a time as recent as colonial Africa, but the aspects of time they actually project in the stories do not always reflect recent time. In Haggard’s She and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Holly and Marlow respectively project the extreme past time in their narration of the present; that is, in their representation of the fairly recent phenomenon of colonialism, they choose to portray the atavistic time. Such a time disordering represents what we have called ‘Present in the Past’ time diffusion. The narrators of Cary, Greene and Monsarrat, on the other hand, foreground the present time in their narration of the present, but even so, the past always lurks in the background and intrudes upon the present regularly. Jean O. Love has termed the latter format ‘Past in the Present’ (1970: 49). Both treatments of time involve temporal diffusion, an ambivalent synthesis of antithetical time- and value-planes, and therefore, constitute a highly mythical representation of time. According to Love, diffusion is one of the key logics of mythopoetic thought (Consciousness, 49). Thus, we observe that, temporally, the colonialist novel is mythical in its outlook. 300 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8.1.1.1.2 Representation of Space The Cosmic Membrane, Absolute Cave and Cave-City Corresponding to the dual representation of time is the dual treatment of space. We discovered that all the colonialist writers created what we have called the ‘Gross Cosmic Membrane’, which mediates their representations of space. We have defined the Gross Cosmic Membrane as an atavistic ‘wall’ constituted by the elements; it is a wall that separates the African ‘cave’ from the European metropolis. The elements of Fire (sun), Water (river bodies), Earth (land and vegetation) and Air (humidity) are constituted into the composite physical barrier, simultaneously formidable and permeable, that regulates the colonisers’ entry to and departure from Africa. The ‘savage’ physical and psychical properties of the cosmic membrane define African primitivity from European modernity. Thus, in terms of space, Africa is projected as either an Absolute Cave or Cave-City. As ‘absolute cave’, the African space is presumed to be engulfed by the cosmic membrane with its full complement of roaming beasts, haunting vegetation and primal humanity with malevolent and cannibalistic tendencies. With apologies to Achebe (1976), it is ‘morning yet on creation day’ in Africa, the first ages of humankind. In the absolute cave, the Africans are yet to take their first tentative steps towards cognitive maturity, so they are depicted as animals living in utter darkness, physically and psychically. Africa in Haggard’s She and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is set in the absolute cave, literally and metaphorically. The second representation of the African space is what we have termed Cave-City. In this spatial arrangement, there is a simultaneous co-existence of both the modern and atavistic. For instance, the coastal areas and colonial capitals where the Europeans live boast modern amenities such as hotels, hospitals, banks and road transport but just a little distance away from 301 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the European enclaves the cave is fully restored. We observe the cave-city in Cary, Greene and Monsarrat. Like the temporal manipulations, both treatments of the African space are mythical in their diffusion of the antithetical spatial planes. Thus, temporally and spatially, the colonialist novel projects a consistent mythical logic. 8.1.1.1.3 What happens in the cave? In the African cave, the Africans are, at best, depicted as ‘cavemen’ and ‘-women’ who are childlike and stupid, and boast no language except mere grunting. At worst, they are represented as animals or sub-humans. Accordingly, they roll their eyes and stamp their feet like horses; they kill, rape and eat human flesh; they have little or no capacity for rational thinking, and are consumed by evil thought; they are conflated with the beasts of the jungle. The Europeans, on the other hand, come into the cave bearing the torch of civilisation. They are the antithesis of the Africans: Christian, educated, scientifically advanced, occupants of the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. However, after staying in the cave for a while, the Europeans undergo dialectical changes in psyche and attitude: the cave is presumed to have ‘entered’ the Europeans so that they become naturalised in the cave and start behaving primitively just as the Africans. In other words, just as the Europeans enter the cave with the torch of civilisation, the cave also enters the Europeans with darkness and extinguishes their torch of civilisation; the cave, thus, transforms the Europeans into cave people just as the Africans. In their newly- acquired ‘cavepeople’ status, the Europeans demonstrate psychology that is more primitive and savage than that of the original ‘cavepeople’, the Africans. The above represents the unique vision of the colonialist novelist as regards events in the African cave. We have said, however, that the dialectical entry of the cave into the European is a false notion contrived by the colonialist novelist. Following Jung (1980), it is our view that, just as any humans, the 302 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Europeans come to Africa carrying their own primitive drives in the deepest recesses of their psyches. The conditions of superiority and inferiority they create in Africa foster the atmosphere that indulges their primitive or cave instincts. As Jung makes us aware, the cave is native to every human being; it is neither the preserve of Africans nor the function of the African environment. Thus, the colonialist grammar that attributes the European barbarity to the influence of the African space is misleading. Regarding caving, therefore, we made two observations: first, there is the schematised diffusions of the tempo-spatial planes; second, there is the dialectical change in the psyche of the colonisers. Diffusion and dialectics represent the two mandatory elements in mythopoetic thought (Love 1970). From the complex and consistent schematisations of diffusion and dialectics that occur in the colonialist novel, we can safely say that the genre is mythopoetic. Its world is based on a re-created and mythicised Africa, which provides the appropriate setting, licence and moral justification to characterise Africans as savages in order project the civilised the Europeans. 8.1.1.2 Caging Caging is the second function we observed in the colonialist novel. We defined ‘caging’ generally as the imposition of circumstances that inhibit the natural freedoms of a people. In the colonialist novel, the African space is represented not only as a cave, but also as a cage. We recognised four types of cages: political, physical, psychosexual and social. 8.1.1.2.1 Who is caged? Both the colonisers and colonised are caged. Originally, the European colonisers shackle the Africans into a variety of cages but eventually the dialectical or chiasmic principle occurs, and the Europeans are caged in turn. First, the Europeans use brutal violence to fetter the 303 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Africans politically, physically and psychosexually. In its turn, the African space (the cosmic voice of Africa), acting on behalf of the colonised Africans, cages the Europeans physically and socially. Thus, both the coloniser and colonised experience the cage, though in different forms and degrees. Politically, the colonialist writer constitutes European authority in the form a conceptual Mother-Queen dyad whose function is to pretend to care for the Africans only to exploit their trust and dominate them. The Mother-arm of the Mother-Queen dyad provides only a parody of care. Its real function is to infantilise the African political personages: the chiefs, regents and princes. The ‘mother’ persona, which can be realised in the various representations of Queen Victoria, treats the African kings as children whose only role is in the nursery. As infants, the African kings are represented as unfit to exercise governance. They can only serve as messengers for the Mother-Queen. The Queen-arm of the Mother-Queen dyad, on the other hand, represents the ruthless political agent. It strips the African kings of political authority and rules in their stead. Haggard’s Billali, Conrad’s Congo kings, Cary’s Emir Aliu and Aladai, and Monsarrat’s Seralo, Katsaula, Puero and Dinamaula are all African royalty who are infantilised and dominated. Thus, there is a dual strategy in political caging: while the Mother-arm of the dyad questions the rational capacity of the African kings to exercise governance, and tries to get them to trust in a benevolent mother overseas, the Queen-arm of the dyad actually strips the kings of power by enacting crippling laws and posting soldiers and administrators to colonise the people. The Mother-Queen construct is therefore a paradox, a simultaneous diffusion of mother and murderer, and is therefore a mythical abstraction. In other words, Queen Victoria is mythicised in the colonialist novel as simultaneously benevolent and brutal, an aberration with a mythical personality. The longevity of the Mother-Queen contributes to its mythical nature: Queen 304 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Victoria is always present in the colonialist novel in one form or another. Even when the reigning English monarch is King Edward as in The African Witch or the sons of the great queen as in The Tribe That Lost Its Head, the presence of Queen Victoria looms large in the background. For instance, in The African Witch, her picture hangs on the wall beside King Edward’s. Her ‘immortality’ and metaphorically ceaseless procreative capacity – as seen in her long line of descendants who ascend to the English throne – reinforces the mythical outlook of the Mother-Queen dyad. Again, the Europeans cage the Africans physically. By enforcing segregation and punitive laws, by applying the principles of eugenics, and by unleashing the brutal colonial police and military, the colonisers physically circumscribe the Africans with forces that inhibit their physical mobility and socialisation with Europeans. For instance, Haggard’s Amahagger are kept in caves while Ayesha makes plans to leave for England; Greene’s people of Congo are kept in a squalid leprosarium while the Europeans enjoy the occasional drive or ride to the port; Conrad’s Congolese are bombarded, imprisoned, kept in chains and forced into hard labour; Cary’s Rimi and Monsarrat’s Maula are segregated from the Europeans. In all these instances, the European retain their liberties. Physical contact between the African male and European female is also prohibited: thus, Aladai is beaten for dancing with Dryas Honeywood; Dinamaula’s proposal to marry a white girl is also rejected. All these are instances of physical caging. Thus, in the supposedly ‘dark’ cave of Africa, the Africans are physically shackled in a manner that resonates mythically with Plato’s allegory of the cave. As we can see, the function of caging, just as the function of caving, establishes a mythical principle for the colonialist novel. The Europeans also cage the Africans psychosexually. Both the African woman and man suffer psychosexual caging at the hands of the colonisers. The African woman is shackled into a 305 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh sadomasochistic relationship we have called “death eroticism” (Nevins 2016). She desires the European phallus for economic and racial reasons. Economically, the European man bestows financial gifts. Racially, he erases the African woman’s supposedly ugly blackness. In the liaison, she suffers physical and emotional abuses. Kurtz’s mistress in Conrad and Cary’s Matumbi are examples of African women who are abused in their relationships. The African man also suffers psychosexually. He fixates on the white woman because only she can erase his ‘unwanted’ blackness and bestow the benefits of whiteness. He suffers psychosexual caging because the white man denies him access to European femininity. His libido is thus severely economised or truncated. We have summarised the caging of the Africans. Following the principle of the chiasmus, the function of caging is reversed to affect the Europeans. The Europeans’ physical caging is brought about by the physical effects of the African space. The cosmic voice of Africa unleashes the properties of the cosmic membrane to physically trap the colonisers. Thus, the colonisers experience, for instance, the unfriendly effect of the climate and its social impacts: boredom, neurosis, unproductivity and insomnia. There is also social caging of the coloniser. There are two forms of social caging: self-imposed caging and marital caging. With self-imposed social caging, the Europeans refuse to leave Africa in spite of the wretchedness of their existence in Africa. Conrad’s Kurtz and the Russian harlequin; Greene’s Scobie and Querry; and Monsarrat’s Macmillan are examples of colonisers who face difficult conditions in Africa but are socially conditioned by the African terrain to reject Europe. In other words, they are stuck in Africa. The second type of social caging is marital. The effects of the African space renders many European marriages a cage. The European women are mostly disillusioned about Africa. The metropolitan image of an exotic Africa does not coincide with the reality of living in the hot, insect-and disease-infested Africa. The disillusion develops into 306 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh marital friction so that the European women develop neuroses – examples are Cary’s Judy Coote and Celia Rudbeck; and Greene’s Louise Scobie and Marie Rycker. The marriages of all the women cited suffer in Africa. The women eventually flee the marriages or the marriages collapse. In respect of caging we observe also the conspicuous representation of the African space as an agent for the colonised. The African environment is portrayed as a more potent force in its anticolonial agency than the human African. In other words, the cosmic voice of Africa is seen as providing more potent enmity to the colonisers than the human-operated rational, violent and cultural voices of Africa. By this, the colonialist writer seems to suggest that the human African is powerless against colonialism, and that the African environment is a more efficient enemy. We suspect an ideological motive behind the elevation of the agency of the African environment over the agency of the human African. From the above, we observe that both the coloniser and colonised suffer caging. We find also that the dialectical logic inherent in the colonialist novel applies not only to the function of caving but also to caging. We notice that in transforming the European cagers into the caged, and the caged African/African space into cagers, the colonialist novel establishes a diffusion between the European and African. By meeting the conditions of diffusion and dialectics – mandatory conditions for mythopoetic thought in literature – the colonialist novel once again demonstrates its mythical logic. 8.1.1.3 Theft Theft is another function we discovered in the colonialist novel. The economic enterprise of colonialism is fraught with theft and counter-theft which are organised along mythical principles. The colonisers ‘sell’ their souls to a supposedly evil African terrain and obtain the 307 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh licence to steal African resource: animals, minerals, forest produce, marine products, human labour and human beings. In addition, the colonisers usurp political power. The foregoing constitutes the function of theft. The function is then reversed against the colonisers by the agency of the Africans and African space. In the counter-theft, therefore, the Europeans lose the following resources: marriages, sanity and lives. Sometimes the counter-theft is as brutal as the original theft. We recognise in the logic of theft and counter-theft, again, the principles of diffusion and dialectics reinforcing the mythical outlook we have observed in the colonialist novel. The mythical logic is increased further by our observation of the Faustian principle in colonisers’ ‘soul-selling’ and its brutal retribution. 8.1.1.4 Voicing Voicing is the last function of the colonialist novel. By ‘voicing’ we mean the Africans’ and African terrain’s ability to ‘speak’ and react against the colonisers. Voicing, therefore, implies the anticolonial agency of the Africans’ world. Voicing represents the medial line of action in the plot of the colonialist novel. It is the point around which the dialectics in the colonialist novel occurs. When the African or African space speaks, the coloniser experiences peripeteia. We identified four voices of Africa: the discursive voice, violent voice, cultural voice and cosmic voice. The cosmic voice belongs properly to the African terrain, and represents the agency of the cosmic elements. The discursive, violent and cultural voices belong to the human African. We notice, however, that all the voices under the control of the African fail or are ineffective against colonialism. Only the cosmic voice succeeds in its agency. We have ascribed an ideological interpretation for why the colonialist writers raise the effectiveness of the environmental agency over that of the Africans. In sum, caging, caving, theft and voicing are the functions that constitute the grammar of the colonialist novel. 308 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8.1.2 How is the grammar formulated or structured? Following our response to the preceeding research question, we are able to formulate the seven clauses or simple sentences into one single superordinate sentence that represents the single grammar of the colonialist story. The grammar is as follows: [X enters the cave]a, [cages Y]b and [steals from the cave and Y]c, but [Y and the cave also speak against]0, and [ steal from X]1/c as [the cave cages]1/b and [enters X]1/a. The grammar represents the structure of the colonialist story. It is an abstract structure and remains unnoticeable until it is discovered. It is neither obvious in the texts nor do its constitutive sentences appear in any particular order. Indeed, its constitutive sentences are hidden formulas embedded deeply in the social fabric of the novels, and are not discernible to the unconscious reader. We are able to discover and formulate them into one complete grammatical structure because we apply to the reading of the texts a high level of abstraction. The grammar, a linguistic pattern, lends itself to mathematical formulation in three steps as seen in Schema 5 below: Schema 5: The Mathematical Formulation of the Grammar • [X enters the cave]a, [cages Y]b and [steals from the cave and Y]c, but [Y and the cave also speak against]0 and [steal from X]1/c as [the cave cages]1/b and [enters X]1/a. • (Caving)(a) + (1/a) + (Caging)(b) + (1/b) + (Theft)(c) + (1/c) + Voicing = Colonialist Story • (C )(a) + (1/a) + (C )(b) + (1/b) + (T)(c) + (1/c)1 2 + V = CS The formula above does not merely simplify the grammar by putting like items together, it also provides a useful mnemonic for its easier recollection and application. 309 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The formula can also be rendered graphically as Figure 4 below: Figure 4: Chiasmus: The Abstract Structure of the Colonialist Story Mirror Line Evidently, Schema 5 and Figure 4 above represent the formulaic and graphic abstractions based on the grammar. These abstract structures, representations of the grammar, are, however, based on the very dynamic veridical substance of the narratives: the social domain of the stories. Thus, the grammar of the colonialist story emerges from the following dynamic social pattern: [The coloniser enters the African space]a, [cages the African]b, and [steals from the African space and African]c, but [the African and African space also speak against]0, and [steal from the coloniser]1/c as [the African space cages]1/b and [enters the coloniser]1/a. The social pattern above can itself be vivified as a graphic structure as seen in Figure 5 below: Figure 5: Chiasmus: The Social Structure of the Colonialist Story Voicing Caving – Caging – Theft Theft – Caging – Caving 310 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh From the structural representations of the grammar above, we can make some observations. First, the grammar of the colonialist story has a chiasmic or dioscuric structure; it has two parts that are simultaneously antithetical and synthetical; it operates on a reversed symmetry. Second, there is a mediatory mechanism (Sentence 0) that makes the symmetrical logic possible. Third, the grammar has both abstract and social significance. In its purely formulaic, abstract form, the grammar provides a mental picture of the very dynamic and chaotic social structure of the stories. In its vivified form, the grammar dramatises the social realities of caving, caging, theft and voicing in their dioscuric logic. We observe also that the abstract and social realisations of the structure are co-existent; they represent the same phenomenon, and are therefore inextricable from each other. Whereas the abstract realisation represents an intangible formulaic image – a methodological principle – that exists in the mind of the writer, the social realisation represents the writer’s literary representation, the veridical objectification, of the abstract formula. Thus, the writing of the colonianist novel can proceed from any of these two realisations of the structure. While the colonialist writers’ traditional approach to the story has been that of eye-witnesses reporting on personal experiences and observations in Africa, one should presume that the path to creating the story is from the social strata to the abstract strata. One should think that the human story determines the formulaic structure of the story, so that what is abstracted as the grammar is based on social truth artistically rendered. But we suspect the contrary pertains in the colonialist novel tradition. We suspect that the pre-determined, ideologically-inflected, abstract formula, as seen in Figure 4 above, determines how the human story should be wrought, thus defeating artistic fidelity. Our suspicion is based on the numerous instances of inaccuracy, racist bias and outright lies we have attempted to expose in the novels studied. In the author’s prefatory essay in the 311 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1951 edition of The African Witch, for instance, Cary makes a point that buttresses our assumption of a pre-existing abstract formula which falsifies the human story. According to Cary, “the African setting, …because it is dramatic, demands a certain kind of story, a certain violence and coarseness of detail, almost a fabulous treatment (we read, dubious treatment) to keep it in its place” (1936: 11). The statement is self-evident of the bias that apparently produces the preconceived structural formulation: Africa must be kept in its place, a statement that bears an echo of Conrad’s Marlow. With the formulaic structure of the colonialist story eternalised and internalised, writers who have not even stepped foot in Africa can produce a colonialist novel and claim it to be a representation of the colonial truth. An example of such a writer is the renowned British anthropologist, James George Frazer. He writes thirteen volumes on the presumed savage mind, but when asked whether he has seen or interviewed any of these so- called primitive peoples, he replies emphatically: “God forbid!” (Lassiter 71). Thus, the structure of the colonialist story raises several issues which we shall deal with in the next research question. 8.1.3 Does the structure of the colonialist story have a meaning? What are the social, political, economic and ideological implications of the structure, if any? The structure of the colonialist novel may be interpreted from five perspectives. First, we might say that the structure is an unconscious act of self-erasure brought about by the complexities of the colonisers’ own language. If the primary career of colonialism is to inscribe “the structures of subordination and domination” (Kubayanda 1990: 40), and if that career forecloses the idea of equality between the colonised and coloniser – and it does – then, from that perspective, it seems implausible that the colonialist writer will deliberately shackle himself next to the colonised as co-equals, as the structure suggests. In our view, the equalising function of 312 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the structure of the colonialist story – the erasure of the coloniser as the dominator and reinscription as co-dominated in the colonial situation – might be an unconscious, involuntary, narrative act engendered by the difficulties involved in the use of the English language. In this sense, we see the writers as caged by their own language. This viewpoint exposes the meta- dimension inherent in the structure of the colonialist novel: the writers use language to tell a story about trapping, but in the process of the telling, they trap themselves linguistically. The above represents our linguistic interpretation of the structure. Applying the logic of antithesis that has been repeatedly observed in the present study, we may interpret the structure of the colonialist story from another perspective that opposes the preceding point of view. If [Sentence (a)] is equivalent to [Sentence (a-1)], [Sentence (b)] to [Sentence (b-1)] and [Sentence (c)] to [Sentence (c-1)], then it follows that there is a state of equilibrium between the colonisers and colonised; and if there is equilibrium, then it follows that the crimes of caving, caging and theft are effectively erased. This structural balance is mediated and maintained by the Mirror Line. The logic just described establishes a movement from one state of equilibrium to another state of equilibrium (Todorov 2001: 2105) leading to the two states nullifying each other in the process. In other words, the structure of the colonialist story creates a notion of social equilibrium or co-victimhood that implies that both the coloniser and colonised are equal victims of colonisation. Our present view represents the logical interpretation of the structure of the colonialist story. Our logical interpretation with its notion of co-victimhood is a significant departure from the customary reading of colonial discourse. This is because it unsettles the debate as regards who the real victim of colonisation is. Is it the colonised or coloniser or both? Many distinguished scholars such as Fanon (1967), Achebe (1976), Spivak (1985), Brantlinger (1988), 313 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Ashcroft et al (1989), Kubayanda (1990), Azim (1993), Said (1994), Bhabha (1995), Sluyter (2002), Acheraiou (2008) and Taiwo (2010) have often, and rightly, taken the victimhood of the colonised as a settled fact. However, the chiasmic structure of the colonialist story problematises the traditional reading and questions the stance of postcolonial scholarship. The chiasmic grammar suggests that the questions of colonialism and the fictional representations of colonial victimhood are far from settled. Even though we are convinced that the notion of co-victimhood is a spurious claim contrived by the colonialist writer, it nevertheless suggests that one of the major impacts of our study is the unsettling of a supposedly long-settled debate in colonial representation. In this regard, our study attempts to revitalise the colonial/postcolonial critical traditions. We may also interpret the structure of the colonialist story from the historical angle, which undermines the logical perspective. Judging the chiasmic structure against the historical career of colonialism in Africa, we suspect that the balanced structure of the colonialist story is a stylistic technique deliberately designed by the colonialist writers to erase the crimes of colonialism. This interpretation is based on our observation that the structure does not tally with historical reality. We shall revisit this point. Our fourth interpretation of the structure is that it is an exercise in rhetoric. A cursory glance at the grammar of the colonialist story (below) indicates that the structure consists of three pairs of subordinate sentences or clauses that are parallel in structure. Following Yankson’s rhetorical categories, the parallelisms are observed on the syntactic, semantic, phonological and graphological levels (Literary Stylistics, 2007). [X enters the cave]a, [cages Y]b and [steals from the cave and Y]c, but [Y and the cave also speak against]0 and [steal from X]1/c as [the cave cages]1/b and [enters X]1/a. 314 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Syntactically, [Sentence (a)] and [Sentence (a-1)] are parallel because they share the same grammatical structure, keeping in mind that the subject of [Sentence (a-1)] has been elided. Even their noun phrases are the same except that they swap positions in each other’s clausal structure. Thus, the subject of (a) becomes the object of (a-1) and vice-versa. Semantically, also, the two clauses are parallel: they denote the same action: entry of the cave, leading to the function, caving. Phonologically, the two clauses share a similar sound pattern since the same words are used in similar positions in the clausal structures. Graphologically, that is, considering the orthography, the clauses again share the same lexical items in almost the same positions except the swapped noun phrases. This schematisation of parallel structures applies to the other two pairs of homological clauses: [(b), (b-1)] and [(c), (c-1)]. The effect of these reduplicative formations is a deliberate reiteration of the unique vision of the colonialist writers: co-victimhood, which we have labelled a misrepresentation. By continually repeating the same structures across a set of three pairs of clauses and across the syntactic, semantic, phonological and graphological levels, the colonialist writers indulge in a rhetorical performance which seeks to persuade the readers to believe in the writers’ vision. Looked at as a rhetorical performance, the structure of the colonialist story uses parallelism, an emotional automatism, to induce the readers’ emotions, and to forestall the engagement of the readers’ rational faculties. The intoxicating effect of a rhetorical style such as the one under discussion deters the readers from pursuing a rational evaluation of the text (Frye 1957: 328). This is because, the clauses, repeated systematically, assume a rhythmic and incantatory form, which produces a hypnotic effect on the readers’ rational faculties. Under the effect of the rhythmic grammar, the readers are swayed by the emotions projected by the writers, and are therefore dissuaded from questioning the validity of the account of the story and its structure. Northrop Fry rightly calls the style emotional 315 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh rhetoric or “tantrum prose,” and declares it well suited for propaganda (1957: 328-9). As we have tried to show, the structure of the colonialist novel is a misrepresentation of the facts of colonialism: the structure is a formal and social propaganda. Our rhetorical interpretation of the structure of the colonialist novel ties in with our historical interpretation. Finally, the structure of the colonialist story signifies mythopoetically. There are many instances of mythical thought within the grammar of the story. For instance, the (dis)ordering of the tempo-spatial plane in [(a), (a-1)]; the formulation of the mythical Mother-Queen dyad in [(b), (b-1)]; and the multiple instances of the Faustian theft in [(c), (c-1)] are all indicative of the mythical logic of the story. In addition, the operating principles of diffusion and dialectics make the structure of the story itself mythical as we shall soon see. Let us examine Figure 4 below. Figure 4: Chiasmus: The Abstract Structure of the Colonialist Story Mirror line In Figure 4, the triangle on the left side of the mirror line is equal to the one on the right side. In the veridical world of the novels, this equality establishes the basis for the false notion of co- victimhood. The supposed undifferentiatedness of the colonised and coloniser establishes the principle of diffusion, which is a mandatory requirement for mythopoetic thought. Still in the diagram, we can observe that in spite of their sameness, the two triangles are opposed across the mirror line. In the social world of the novels, this opposition implies that, in spite of the forced fusion of the two adversaries, the African and European are still antagonistic towards each other. There are oppositional movements in the structure: the coloniser becomes the ‘colonised’, while 316 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the colonised assumes the role of the ‘coloniser’, so that the entire structure is dioscuric. The dioscuric establishes the principle of dialectics, which is the second obligatory factor for mythopoetic thought in literary work (Love 1970). Indeed, the dioscuric, in its original, classical context of Castor and Pollux, is a highly mythical formation. From the above, we can surmise that the colonialist writers indulge in myth-making. There is a simultaneous convergence and divergence between the coloniser and colonised representing a deliberate mediation of the stories; a mediation that mythicises the truth about colonialism. The fact is that colonialism is not a myth but a tragic historical phenomenon. To be represented mythically, therefore, signifies a motive: erasure of the truth. We have interpreted the structure of the colonialist story from five different perspectives: linguistic, logical, historical, rhetorical and mythical. We find that there is agreement among the historical, rhetorical and mythical views. The consolidation of the three views weakens the linguistic and logical interpretations of the structure of the colonialist story. Again, the agreement among the three views points to the deliberate nature of the grammar of the colonialist story, a grammar that seems decidedly devised to erase the crimes of colonialism, and to create a false sense of co-victimhood. In view of the above findings, we regard the grammar of the colonialist story as a falsehood. 8.1.4 Does the structure of the colonialist story reflect the reality of colonialism in Africa? Under the current research question, we shall re-visit our historical interpretation of the chiasmic structure as indicated earlier. The structure of the colonialist story signals the dissonance between the colonialist novel and the historical truth about colonialism in Africa. In our view, the structure of the colonialist novel is clearly flawed: the chiasmus is a distortion of the truth because in the history of colonialism the suffering of the African masses significantly 317 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh outweighs the suffering of the Europeans. In history, the experiences of the colonised and coloniser do not mirror each other as the structure suggests. Adam Hochschild (1999) reveals the imbalance in colonial suffering between the colonised and coloniser. Moreover, the Africans are not conflated with the Europeans in the history of colonialism: the two peoples are differentiated and segregated by physical, social and economic barriers. The Africans are slaves, the Europeans masters. Thus, to produce a narrative which seeks to bundle master and slave together as one entity is a misrepresentation of the truth. A story that consciously distorts a historical phenomenon crosses the line from the historical to mythical. As we have seen, the colonialist novel is highly mythopoetic in its logic; this explains our suspicion that the grammar or structure of the colonialist story is consciously designed to mislead. 8.2 Conclusion We shall conclude the study by providing our final remarks. We have discovered that the story of the colonialist novel is governed by a chiasmic grammar. The grammar can be applied to any properly written colonialist story. The grammar, a superordinate sentence, consists of seven simple sentences or clauses arranged in three dioscuric bundles, and mediated by a mirror line sentence. There is internal cohesion between each dioscuric pair of sentences leading to the isolation of caving, caging, theft and voicing as the grammar of the colonialist story. In other words, the structure of the colonialist story is governed by the four distinct functions: caving, caging, theft and voicing. There is another level of internal cohesion within the structure made possible by the mirror line. This structural cohesion is governed by diffusion and dialectics. The structure of the story, therefore, suggests a mythical mindset for the colonialist writer. The colonialist novelist turns to myth-making in order to distort the historical truths about colonialism so that the coloniser can escape censure. 318 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Again, the singularity of the grammar or structural formula across the select set of novels indicates that all colonialist novels tell the same tale, one great myth, a totalising and insincere account of the coming of European civilisation and modernisation to Africa. Furthermore, our discovery of the chiasmic structure and its concomitant destabilisation of the customary reading of colonial and postcolonial discourses, even if we contest the authenticity of the structure, provide a critical basis for resuscitating and re-interrogating those discourses in order to provide new insights. Finally, our major findings – the grammar, chiasmic structure, one great myth, mythopoetic logic of the colonialist story and concept of co-victimhood – have implications for the theory of the novel. These findings imply that, in spite of what some critics think, questions regarding the theory of the novel have not been fully answered. Our findings attempt to provide not merely a new theoretical postulation of the novel; it also seeks to expose the prematurity of the critical view that regards scholarship on the novel as a dead exercise unworthy of fresh academic pursuit. By our findings, we have tried to demonstrate that neither the novel nor its criticism is dead. We have sought to show that the novel, as a genre, is very much alive, and provokes new interests, new critical and theoretical questions, and new answers. 8.3 Recommendation The current study limited its scope to examining the structure of the story of the colonialist novel. Findings of the study provoke future research. For instance, future researchers might want to use other structuralist approaches to study the colonialist story. In that direction, future researchers might want to pursue the Proppian/Todorovian syntagmatic approach to find out if that approach and our paradigmatic analysis will yield similar or divergent results. Other researchers might want to apply our chiasmic grammar to the study of colonialist novels set 319 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh outside Africa. Others may also want to pursue the discourse of the colonialist novel. For instance, they might want to use Gerard Genette’s narrative categories in Narrative Discourse (1972) to study the narrative situation or linguistic and stylistic organisation by which the narration is carried out. Studies such as proposed will complement our study, and contribute to a critical resuscitation of a field that has been declared dead. 320 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Texts Cary, Joyce. Mister Johnson. London: Michael Joseph Limited, 1939. ___. The African Witch. London: Michael Joseph Limited, 1936. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Greene, Graham. A Burnt-Out Case. London: 1960. Heinemann, 1961. ___. The Heart of the Matter. London: Penguin Books, 1948. Haggard, Rider. She. London: 1887. Penguin Books, 1994. Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Tribe that Lost Its Head. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1956. Secondary Texts Achebe, Chinua. “My Home Under Imperial Fire.” Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. 1-35. ___. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays: 1965-87. London: Heinemann, 1988. 1-13. ___. Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor Books, 1976. Acheraiou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern in Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Post-’ Condition.” The Socialist Register. Vol 33 (1997): 353-381. 12 December 2015 ˂socialregister.com˃. Anyidoho, Kofi. “Culture: The Human Factor in African Development.” Ghana Changing Value/Changing Technologies: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, II. Ed. Helen Lauer. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2000. 19-30. Archimedes, Sondra, M. Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: Routledge, 2016. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. London: Routledge, 1989. 321 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Awoonor, Kofi. “Marita or the Folly of Love: The First West African Novel: A Review.” The African Predicament: Collected Essays. Accra: Sub-Saharan, 2006. 246-53. Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London: Routledge, 1993. Baker, Lee D. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896 – 1954. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essay. (Tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist). (Ed.) Michael Holquist. Texas: U of Texas P, 1982. ___. The Rustle of Language. Tr. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Bhabha, Homi. “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The Post-Colonial Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 29-35. ___. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 185-222 Bury, J.B. The Ancient Greek Historians. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Casely Hayford, J.E. Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation. London: Frank Cass, 1969. Castle, Terry. Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex and Writing. New York: Routledge, 2002. Chancer, Lynn, S. Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. Chapman, Michael. “Postcolonialism: A Literary Turn.” Ed. Michael Chapman. Postcolonialism: South/African Perspectives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 1-15. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980. Classen, Albrecht. Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middle Ages: A Critical Discourse in Premodern German and European Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 322 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Count, Earl W. This is Race: Anthology Selected from the International Literature on Races of Man. New York: Schuman, 1950. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Darwin, C. The Origin of Species. 1859. New York: Avenel Books, 1979. Davis, L.J. “Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 12.2 (2000): 479-99. 20 Jan. 2014 ˂http://muse.jhu.edu/article/412310/summary˃. Dempsey, Peter. “Postcolonialism.” Ed. Stuart Sim. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. 286-7. Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary. 26th ed. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co., 2001. Dundes, Alan. “Introduction to the 2nd Edition.” Morphology of the Folktale. Ed. Louis Wagner. 2nd ed. Austin: Texas UP, 1968. Echeruo, M.J.C. Joyce Cary and the Novel of Africa. London: Longman, 1973. Ellis, A.B. The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. London: Chapman and Hall, 1890. Enns, Diane. The Violence of Victimhood. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2012. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology.” Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Ed. E. C. Eze. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. 104-40. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967b. ___. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967a. Ferreira-Myer, Karen. “In Between the Collective and the Individual.” Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature. Ed. Benaouda Lebdai. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. Forster, Russell. Mapping European Empire: Tabulae Imperii Europaei. London: Routledge, 2015. Freeman, Morton S. A New Dictionary of Eponymy. Oxford UP: New York, 1997. 323 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. 1961. Ed and Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. –. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth P, 1922. Fry, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. ___. The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963. Ed. Germain Warkentin. Vol. 21. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Gakwandi, Shatto A. The African Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa. London: Heinemann, 1977. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Nellie McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ___. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text.” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 59-116. Gillham, Nicholas W. “Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics.” Annual Review of Genetics. 35 (2001): 83-10. 27 Jan. 2016 ˂http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_ PSY3801H/readings/Readings%20-%2001Gillham%202001.pdf˃. Gorton, Henry C. Language of the Lord. Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1993. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race. 1916. Rev. 4th Ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1936. Hall, Edith. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989. Hand, Derek. A History of the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Harold, Oliver H. A Relational Metaphysics. London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Hawkins, Hunt. “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness. PMLA 94.2 (1979). 286-299. 17 February, 2018. . Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago: U of Chicago P., 1963. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. 1837. Trans. J. Sibree. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001. 324 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ___. The Philosophy of Right. 1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. Henderson, Greig E. “Joyce Cary.” Ed. Frank N. Magill. Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Pasadena: Salem P, 1991. 571-84. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Holcombe, C and M.J. Killingsworth. Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition. Carbondale: South Illinois U, 2010. Holy Bible. New International Version. Colorado Springs: International Bible Soc., 1973. Isaac, Benjamin. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory.” The Post-Colonial Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 18-22. Jung, C.G. The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Katsuei, Yuasa. Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Kohl, Norbert and David Henry Wilson. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Kubayanda, J.B. The Poet’s Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Lampriere, John. “Castor and Pollux.” A Classical Dictionary; Containing a Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors: with the Values of Coins, Weights, and Measures, and a Chronological Table. 11th ed. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1820. 160-61. Langley, J. A. Ideologies of Black Liberation in Black Africa, 1856-1970. London: Rex Collings, 1979. Lassiter, E. L. Invitation to Anthropology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira P, 2002. Lee, Robert, F. Conrad’s Colonialism. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. Leech, Geoffrey. Semantics. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1986. 809-22. 325 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Losambe, Lokangaka. “Introduction.” An Introduction to the African Prose Narrative. Ed. Lokangaka Losambe. Pretoria: Kagiso Tertiary, 1996. xi-xv. Love, Jean, O. Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. Lugard, Frederick D. The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa. London: Frank Cass, 1965. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Mensah, Augustine N. “The Uses of History: Three Historical Novels from West Africa.” An Introduction to the African Prose Narrative. Ed. Lokangaka Losambe, Pretoria: Kagiso Tertiary, 1996. 69-83. Nayar, Pramod K. The Transnational in English Literature: Shakespeare to the Modern. London: Routledge, 2015. Nevins, Jess. The Victorian Bookshelf: An Introduction to 61 Essential Novels. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Newell, Stephanie. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. ___. “Introduction.” Marita: or the Folly of Love. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Ngondji, Fungula Fumu. The Kongo of My Ancestors. Mustang, Oklahoma: Tate Publishing, 2011. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986. ___. Moving the Centre: Struggles for Cultural Freedom. London: James Currey, 1993. Nkrumah, Kwame. Towards Colonial Freedom. London: Panaf, 1962. O’ Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel: A Guide to Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Olaniyan, Tejumola. “Africa: Varied Colonial Legacies.” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 269-81. Osborn, Henry Fairfield. “Preface to First Edition.” The Passing of the Great Race. 1916. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1936. pp: vii-ix. 326 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ___. “Preface to Second Edition” of The Passing of the Great Race. 1916. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1936. pp: xi-xiii. Osterhammel, Jurgen. A Theoretical Overview. Trans. Shelley L. Frisch. 2nd ed. Prince, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. Palmer, Michael. Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge, 1997. Parrinder, Patrick, Andrew Nash, Nichola Wilson. “Introduction.” New Dimensions in the History of the Novel. Ed. Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nichola Wilson. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1-14. Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” The Post-Colonial Reader. Ed. Bill Aschcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 36-44. Pavlakis, Dean. British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896 – 1913. London: Routledge, 2015. Philips, Deborah. “The Empire of Romance: Love in a Postcolonial Climate.” End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945. Ed. Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. pp: 114-151. Phillips, John. Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory. London: Zed Book, 2000. Plato. The Republic. Ed. G.R.F. Ferrari. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Propp, V. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Ed. Louis A. Wagner. 2nd ed. Austin: Texas UP,1968. Raskin, Jonah. “Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Journal of Contemporary History. 2.2. Literature and Society (1967). 113-131. 17 February, 2018. . Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. ___. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Preface.” The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Schwarz, Bill. “Introduction: End of Empire and the English Novel.” End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945. Ed. Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. 1-37. Serequeberhan, Tsenay. “The Critique of Eurocentrism and the Practice of African Philosophy.” Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. 141-61 327 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Sheehan, Paul. Modernism and the Aesthetic of Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Simmons, Lucretia Van Tuyl. Goethe’s Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to 1860. U of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 6. Madison: U of Wisconsin at Madison, 1919. Skrine, Francis, Henry. The Expansion of Russia. 1915. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Slemon, Stephen. “Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing.” Kunapipi. IX.3 (1987): 1-16. Sluyter, Andrew. Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Smith, Margaret M. “The Influence of the Coelacanth on African Ichthyology.” Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences. 134 (1979): 11-16. Spivak, G.C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 24-28 ___. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Enquiry 12.1 (1985): 243 - 61. Taiwo, Olufemi. “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy.” 4 April 2014. African Studies Quarterly 1.4 (1998): 3-16. 20 December 2015 ˂http//:www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/2.pdf˃. ___. How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Tessitore, John. “Freud, Conrad and Heart of Darkness.” College Literature. 7.1 (1980). 30-40. 17 February, 2018. . Thornton, Bruce. “The Truth About Western ‘Colonialism’.” 21 July 2015. Defining Ideas 7 March, 2016 ˂http://www.hoover.org/research/truth-about-western-colonialism˃. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 2097–2106. Tshibambe, Germain, and Kenneth Omeje. “Rentier Politics and Low Intensity Conflict in the DRC: The Case of Kasai and Katanga Provinces.” Extractive Economies and Conflict in the Global South: Multi-Regional Perspectives on Rentier Politics. Ed. Kenneth Omeje. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008: 135-48. Tylor, E.B. Primitive Culture. Vol. 1. 1871. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. 328 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh United Nations. Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoner of War. 75 U.N.T.S. 135. 10 June 2015. U of Minnesota Human Rights Library. 3 May 2017 ˂hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/y3gctpw.htm˃. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Weinberg, Samantha. A Fish Caught in Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Williams. P., and Laura Chrisman. “Introduction to Theorising Gender.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1993. 193-95. Wright, Richard. “Introduction: How ‘Bigger’ was Born.” Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940. Yankson, Kofi E. An Introduction to Literary Stylistic. Enugu: Pacific Publishers, 2007. Young, Robert, J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. 329