The heights of Parnassus can readily
accommodate a large crowd of people

Glorious at 75, on a summer’s evening
on my veranda, to be reading Herodotus.
Why didn’t I do this 60 years back?
To have formed my mind after his fashion,
endlessly enquiring, closed to no novelty,
embracing digression as narrative norm
as fresh facts crowded his pen, meticulously
distinguishing what he saw with his own eyes
from what was credibly witnessed, what
entertainingly rumoured, and what evident
nonsense but too hilarious to leave out.
He was wrong, of course, to claim Ethiopians
eject black sperm, or that Indians copulate
like beasts (Aristotle corrected these both),
but I applaud his Persians who debate laws
twice, once when drunk, and again sober,
adopting whichever’s doubly approved
(better that, than a second chamber).
His belief, that events are pre-determined
by oracles speaking in ambiguous verse,
seems as sound a historical method as any
whether your sages are Gibbon or Althusser.
His approach to poetry is matter-of-fact
(witness those crowds haunting Parnassus),
and his ruling myth, that free men of Athens
will always defeat the slaves of autocracy
is one I buy into, though his tribes at war
seem simultaneously just down the road
and all-too-menacingly-up-to date.

(with gratitude to Tom Holland’s translation)

Read More

Review of Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: a personal narrative of the Nigerian crisis ( Oxford University Ptress, 1996); Collected Plays (2 vols., re-issued Oxford University Press, 1996); and Kole Omotoso, Achebe or Soyinka? A Study in Contrasts (Zell Publishers, 1996)

When Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian novelist, playwright and President of the Movement for the Salvation of the Ogoni People was hanged on November 10, 1995, following a rigged and rushed trial, the machinery of execution had rusted from disuse. As he was being led away from the gallows after the third or fourth botched attempt to kill him, he cried out “Why are you people doing this to me? What sort of a nation is this?” It is the question that haunts Wole Soyinka’s newest book.

Despair and anger about Africa are commonplace. Writers who address it need a rare eloquence if they are not to lag far behind what is said openly in streets and bars and market places. What can a mere author add to the raging scorn, the inventive scatology, the cackling contempt for corruption and brutality that are the substance of today’s “oral traditions”? Or when the people have been bombed or hacked into silence, or herded into refugee columns, criss-crossing borders with their pathetic possessions and their trail of corpses, what role is there for African writers agonizing in their enforced exiles?

Soyinka’s title echoes, perhaps unconsciously, an earlier despairing comment on Africa, when the dying Livingstone, himself haemorrhaging, confided to his journal the prayer that someone would abolish the slave trade, “this open sore of the world”. It was a plea that played a part in the colonizing experiment, recruiting philanthropy as well as greed and authoritarianism, to the partition of Africa. The boundaries created in that scramble have, with minor adjustments, given birth to, or been aborted as, the independent “nations” that are the object of Soyinka’s present enquiries.

I write “enquiries” advisedly, because whatever questions Soyinka puts to his readers, he puts equally urgent questions to himself. If he demands with Ken Saro-Wiwa “What sort of a nation is this?”, he asks himself what he is doing as a Nigerian writer, or as a writer from Nigeria. The latest twist in this long saga is that the Nigerian junta, having detained and exiled their Nobel laureate, have charged Soyinka (and eleven others) with the capital offence of high treason.

The Open Sore of a Continent is framed by a personal account of events in Nigeria since the annulled election of June 1993, and is valuable on that account alone. Chief Moshood K. O. Abiola, who won that election, remains in detention, and his senior wife Kudirat has been assassinated. The military junta, which has misruled Nigeria effectively since 1966, has succeeded in convincing some friendly governments that it acted to preserved Nigeria’s “unity” against the threat of Yoruba dominance – despite the fact that Chief Abiola is a Muslim and that his Social Democratic Party won a majority of the votes in northern and eastern Nigeria, as well as in the western region where most of the Yoruba people live. Meanwhile, in the defence of that same “unity”, the junta has targeted the hapless Ogoni people in their struggle against the depredations of Royal Dutch/Shell, executing Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others. It is this taboo issue of ethnic nationalism that Soyinka, a Yoruba, tackles head on.

On Nigeria, his case is simple. The military, and the world outside, should accept the results of the 1993 election. But the larger issues loom. What constitutes nationalism, and what are its territorial implications? Soyinka’s pursuit of these questions makes The Open Sore a book of significance.

To Africanists of the 1950s, the State was not a problem. Recaptured from colonialism, it could be made the means of raising African living standards to those of the developed world. Some even argued that state formation in Africa had occurred independently of European rule, that colonialism had been no more than an interlude in Africa’s long history. Faced with evidence of the widening gap between rich and poor nations, aggravated by the first oil crisis, the argument of the 1970s was that the State should be recaptured from the petit-bourgeois nationalists who were looting it for their own ends, and made to serve a revolutionary agenda. The claim of more recent studies, as diverse as Jean-Francois Bayart’s The Politics of the Belly (1989) and Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden (1993), is that the State is itself the problem. An alien imposition, owing nothing to African culture or skills, the ex-colonial African State with its constitutional, bureaucratic, educational and linguistic inheritance, is a violation of African history. Its disappearance, with the politics of “state-collapse”, need not be bad news.

Kole Omotoso’s Achebe or Soyinka? contributes to this debate with a fresh accusation. It has to be said that his book is flawed, riddled with inconsistencies and judgments that are patently untrue. He charges Achebe with refusing to write of the “middle” generation of Christian Nigerians whom, Igbo-fashion, he regards as “traitors”, preferring pre-colonial heroes or contemporaries. Can Omotoso have read Things Fall Apart, with its wholly sympathetic portrait of Mr Brown the missionary, and of Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, alienated by his father’s rigour, appalled by the abandoned twins wailing in the forest, and lured irresistibly by the music of evangelism? For all his neo-traditionalism, Achebe is far too fair-minded a writer not to recognize the social and aesthetic reasons for Christianity’s success in Africa.

The contrast addressed by the title is the claim, much touted in Nigerian criticism, that Achebe writes “simple and easy to read” narratives which “the people” can understand, while Soyinka’s sophisticated obscurity is elitist and neo-colonial and designed to impress foreigners. Omotoso describes this as “premature and superficial”, noting that some oral forms, such as divination songs, can also be “obscure”. But having rejected one type of xenophobia as a means of contrasting Nigeria’s most distinguished writers, he sets up the equivalent charge that Achebe sees the world as an Igbo and Soyinka as a Yoruba and that neither has anything to say of northerners or of minorities.

Soyinka came to prominence young, and it is true that a few poems in his first volume are cluttered and dense. But what he demonstrated very early, especially in his plays, was a mastery of metaphor, of linked images unfolding until the moment when the drama is consummated and the whole radiates as myth. He has testified generously that he learned this studying Shakespeare with G. Wilson Knight at the University of Leeds. But this is also the main characteristic of the Yoruba ijala or praises (not just divination songs) which, with their wit and wordplay, their transcendental toughness and complexity, have always been Soyinka’s most immediate inspiration. It is Nigerians educated in the stilted bureaucratic English that passes for a national language who have trouble with this, not the so-called “masses” (nor indeed foreign audiences).

Yet Achebe or Soyinka? contains one central argument of troubling importance.

The first African writers, says Omotoso, were pan-Africanists. They were concerned with the liberation of the continent rather than of the territories defined by colonial boundaries. When, like Achebe and Soyinka, they turned to themes and images more authentically and explicitly “African”, they found their materials in their own backgrounds, making the transition from the pan-African to the local and the ethnic without pausing to consider the new “states” which were coming into existence. “Few African writers”, charges Omotoso, “have attempted to understand the kind of pressure that African politicians have had to bear.” By the time poets, dramatists and novelists discovered “the State” in the first years of independence, they were already concerned with its failures, writing their satires on incompetence and corruption. At the core of the “literature of disillusionment” were the very ethnic metaphors that were tearing states like Nigeria apart.

One of Omotoso’s examples is Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (1967), included in the welcome reissue of his Collected Plays (though it is misleading of Oxford University Press to continue calling these “collected” volumes, when they contain nothing more recent than 1973). Kongi’s Harvest opens with a drum roll, coaxing the audience to rise for the national anthem, and then mocks them by raising the curtain and chanting instead the official praises of the Oba Danlola, the play’s hero, currently in detention. From this point on, two rival systems of authority are acted out. Kongi has the trappings of a national flag and anthem, an organizing secretary, Right and Left ears of state, a Five-Year Development Plan, a Carpenters’ Brigade of young thugs, a Women’s Auxiliary Corps, and a “reformed” fraternity of elders charged with the task of formulating the new philosophy of Kongism. Danlola has the religious authority of an Oba. The land’s fertility and the prospects for harvest are vested in him. He is associated with song, dance, warmth and a language rich in symbol – as well as (through his heir) with the city’s best nightclub and the new agricultural station. The marvellous thing about the play is the internal consistency of its harvest imagery, culminating in the moment when the year’s first yam is presented to Kongi who is supposed to sample it on the people’s behalf, but who passes it to an official taster in case it has been poisoned. These images are Yoruba in origin, invested with Soyinka’s favourite myth of Ogun, but the play is in English and entirely accessible.

The problem for African writers of the 1960s was not that they ignored the State – how could they when it was banning their works, or detaining them or dispatching them into exile? It was, rather, that everything to do with the colonial and ex-colonial states seemed utterly banal compared with the social and religious hierarchies they had supplanted. The argument of The Black Man’s Burden is already reflected in the literature of three decades back.

Soyinka denies that The Open Sore is a requiem for Nigeria, or that he wishes the federation to collapse into ever-diminishing components. The heart of his book is an extended survey of “national questions” in Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa and the former Soviet Union. If this sounds absurdly ambitious, the fact remains that he pulls it off. His analysis of the predicaments of Kurds and Rwandans, Bosnian Muslims and French Canadians, Basques and Kuwaitis (not forgetting the “miracle” of Mandela’s South Africa), is an intellectual tour de force, enriched by his experiences as a traveller and his unfailing gift for language. Who but Soyinka, strolling through the market at Samarkand, would record “It did not require your tragic-romantic recollection of James Elroy Flecker’s verse play Hassan to make you aware you were plunged into a different culture”? Or, noting the Republic of Ireland’s periodic doubts about incorporating Protestants, would characterize the IRA as “a national longing that has nowhere to go”?

Acknowledging, with Omotoso, that for most Nigerians, Pan-African visions have contracted to the exigencies of salvaging the “colonial endowment”, Soyinka concludes with a sober and dignified statement of where he stands:

For the moment, I am able to claim that I accept Nigeria as a duty, that is all. I accept Nigeria as a responsibility, without sentiment. I accept that entity, Nigeria, as a space into which I happen to have been born, and therefore a space within which I am bound to collaborate with fellow occupants in the pursuit of justice and ethical life . . . I accept that space as a space of opportunities and responsibilities that must extend beyond its boundaries . . . I accept that space as one that is best kept intact.

In July 1994, Tai Solarin, the septuagenarian educationalist long known as the “conscience of the nation”, joined a march for justice organized by Soyinka with the words, “Ah Wole, I thought I would come and walk a step or two with you.” He died the following morning. Today, as he confronts his would-be executioners, Soyinka has more readers and admirers walking with him than he can possibly know.

First published Times Literary Supplement, 13 Junes, 1997.

 

Read More

José Saramago, Journey to Portugal, A Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture. Translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor (Harvill, 2000). 

José Saramago, off form, is fatally easy to parody. At his best, as in O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984), he is as good as any European novelist now writing. His loose but subtle style – those long, unpunctuated sentences reading like the transference of thought itself to paper – is as receptive to ideas and impressions as a wire touched by a insect’s wing. Here, though, in what for such a late-maturing writer must count as an early book, he has yet to make it work for him. At one point he mocks Dom Joao VI for saying things like “His Majesty has the stomach ache” or “His Majesty would like pork scratchings!” But he does the same throughout, referring to himself up to eight times a page in the third person as “the traveller” (or occasionally “we”). It is a sad miscalculation, making him appear (as he is emphatically not) arch and portentous.

Journey to Portugal dates from 1979 when, at the age of fifty-seven and after various jobs and several minor works, Saramago became a full time writer. It was not published in Portugal until 1990, after the huge success of his novels of the 1980s. Presumably, his Nobel Prize- winning status has brought it into English. As a guide to Portugal, it fails. Saramago spends far too little time in far too many places, indulging far too many idiosyncratic whimsies, for anyone but a Saramago buff to want to retrace his steps. As a guide to Saramago, though, it is invaluable. For those already hooked on the major novels, Journey to Portugal is a must.

Looking back from a vantage point of twenty-two years, we can see two projects here. The first, over and above the wish to learn about his country, is to find himself as a writer. His six-month quest for material pays off handsomely, for many of the seeds of his later novels are here. In the family that lent its oxen to haul stones to build the church at Vimioso, is surely the inspiration, in Memorial do Convento (1982), for those oxen dragging marble slabs from Pero Pinheiro through the deep valley of Cheleiros to build the convent at Mafra. On his dispirited visit to the convent, he is unimpressed by an architecture speaking of only absolutism and the Inquisition. The very randomness of his journey suggests something of the picaresque wanderings of A Jangada de Pedra (1986). His fascination with ruined castles and with the tiles in the church of Sao Vincent de Fora depicting scenes from the conquest of Lisbon, looks forward to Historia do Cerco de Lisboa (1989). His admiration for an anonymous crucifix in the museum at Aveiro (“a back that must have borne heavy weights”, a face “the most human the traveller has ever set his eyes on”) anticipates the working, questioning Christ in O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (1991).

Particularly interesting is his fascination with the miracles of folklore – the child Christ of Cartolinha who led the people of Miranda into battle against the Spaniards, St George of Braga who disgraced the priests when the rats ran out of his belly, the cockerel of Barcelos that, after being oven-roasted, crowed aloud from the carving dish to proclaim the innocence of a traveller unjustly accused. He retells these legends with a relish that makes it plain the fashionable “magic realism” of his novels has nothing to do with Latin American models but has a very local source.

The second project, in the aftermath of the carnation revolution of 1974, is to seize back Portuguese culture from the monarchy and the Inquisition and the Salazar dictatorship, and restore it to the people who carved stone and terraced the valleys and trod grapes and lived out obscure existences. A Marxist design, then, but there is nothing simple about this patriotic Marxism.

Portuguese Communism is a deeply ambiguous phenomenon – antediluvian Stalinist in its official postures, but attracting the allegiance of the most cultured, inventive and artistic talents of a whole generation. Here, for instance, is Saramago, the Communist, on a pair of lovers unable to point out to him the Chapel of Our Lady of Refuge in Romarigães: “Had the traveller not been so apprehensive, he would have rebuked these two ignorant lovers with little future ahead of them if they didn’t learn more about love than its earthly manifestation.” I lost count of how many churches, convents and shrines he visits. The index lists 250, but these are only the sub-entries for his visits to towns with more than one, and the final figure must be at least double that.

Journey to Portugal is more of a book of churches even than the 1963 classic by Ann Bridge and Susan Lowndes, The Selective Traveller in Portugal.

But with important distinctions. Saramago is in ecstasy over the tiny, weathered Romanesque churches he encounters in Tras-os-Montes and Minho, and he is prepared to accommodate the Gothic. But with rare exceptions, he draws the line at the Baroque, is normally a little bored by anything Renaissance, and finds most Manueline architecture too much a matter of external decoration. He loves granite, but hasn’t a good word for marble which doesn’t respond with roughness to the hand. Even with the Romanesque, he draws a distinction between the churches and the Church, the former carved by the labour of masons, whose individual marks are still visible, the latter “a joyless thing”, its only pleasures being “celestial and contemplative or mystical and ecstatic”.

The difficulty with this is that it sets what went wrong with Portugal so very far in the past. It is not just rock and roll Saramago detests, or the adverts in Porto, or the disco music he has to put up with over lunch in Penamacor. It is not just that he never once mentions football stadiums or bullfighting or cycle racing, or that he is scornful about American millionaires and German tourists and the despoiling of the Algarve. He is equally uncomfortable with the university at Coimbra, where he doesn’t visit the great library. He finds no challenge to the mind in the palace at Queluz, while the magnificent double cloister at the monastery of the Jeronimos is “beautiful but overloaded”. To conclude this catalogue of epic clearances, he reverences the houses of the writers he most admires – the novelist Camilo Castello Branco, the neglected poet Afonso Duarte, and Almeida-Garret whose own Viagens na Minha Terra he quotes. But he visits Povoa de Varzim, birthplace of Portugal’s greatest novelist, without mentioning Eca de Queiroz. I was reminded of that moment in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis when Fernando Pessoa is rebuked by the statue of Camoes for not mentioning him in Mensagem (“it was jealousy, but no matter”).

Ideally, one feels, Saramago would like to start again with this landscape. Not just before the dictatorship of “the hypocrite” (his only mention of Salazar), but before the earthquake when “a cultural bond” between Lisbon “and its inhabitants was broken”, before Philip II, before the Inquisition, back in the days when stone and miracles stood against the Moors. Visiting the castle at Monsanto with its astonishing piled boulders and ruined chapel, bare to the elements, he tries to imagine the lives of those who worshipped and took refuge there. As he walks back down to the village, the old men and women are sitting at their doorsteps, in the Portuguese way:

Take a man, take a stone, man, stone, stone, man, if there were time to take them and tell all their stories, to tell them and to listen, to listen and tell, once you’ve learned their common tongue, their essential I, the essential you buried beneath all the tons of history and of culture, so that just like the boulders in the castle, the entire body of Portugal would emerge from the ground.

So Jose Saramago began, in his mature style, with Dom Joao, the fifth monarch so named in the royal list, visiting the bedchamber of the Queen, and with the maimed Baltasar Mateus, otherwise known as Sete-Sois, crossing the Tagus for his encounter with Blimunda and the flying machine of Padre Bartolomeu. The rest has become history.

 

First published Times Literary Supplement, 3 August 2001

 

Read More

Letters between Dr Banda and Dr Nkrumah

Dear Dr Nkrumah, “This is my usual periodic letter to you. It brings nothing new of importance.” So begins, evidently in mid-course, a fascinating correspondence between Dr Hastings Banda of Malawi and Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (the original files are held in the Ghana National Archive in Accra, with photocopies in the Southern African Archive, University of York). The date is February 1956. Dr Banda is in his late fifties, and is writing from Kumasi in the Ashanti district of the Gold Coast, where he has been living since 1953.

His companion is Mrs French, former receptionist at his practice in North London, at whose divorce he had been cited as co-respondent. Dr Nkrumah, at forty-six, is prime minister of a territory that within fourteen months will become the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to gain its independence.

Banda’s professional life as a general practitioner in Britain was over. His long political campaign against the creation of the Central African Federation had apparently failed. His lonely quest for acceptance in the homeland of that Presbyterian mission where he gained his first schooling and which set the standards he had lived by for thirty years had ended in scandal and flight. So he writes in some frustration from the fringe of great events, compelled to play courtier to a former protege. (“I doubt if there is any other person who takes a keener personal interest and pride in your achievement . . . . Nothing I can tell you will be new to you . . . if at all possible, let me hear from you.”) There are five letters from this early period, four of Banda’s and one of Nkrumah’s. Banda casts himself as elder statesman, congratulating “his friend” on this or that initiative and enlarging on his public speeches in a manner that flatters with judicious advice. Nkrumah is right not to be “too rigid” in negotiations over independence. But whatever concessions are necessary, and in politics concessions are often necessary, over the Volta Lake and River Project, “I would not give in if I were you”. He explains: “as you have, at least once or twice said, the economy of this country is weakened by too much dependence on one crop, namely cocoa . . . . How I wish it were possible for you to recruit labour from Nyasaland and Portuguese East Africa for your vast development schemes.”

Nkrumah’s reply, dated February 22, 1956, is so enviably ebullient it can only have been received with mixed feelings:

“I am very glad Mrs French thought I looked well. I must confess that I feel very well. Many people marvel at this, especially during the rather troublesome time we have been going through lately. I think they feel that I should, according to the book of rules, have a furrowed brow, an anxious eye and sunken cheeks though sleepless nights and loss of appetite. I have long known I am not true to type, but that I should flourish at such times is something that staggers even me! The whole answer, of course, is that I never brood once I have solved a problem to my own satisfaction. While I am busy solving it, however, I am told by my staff that I am as savage and unapproachable as a lion in his den!”

Then comes a small disaster. Nkrumah has written asking for advice on whom to invite from southern Africa to Ghana’s independence celebrations. The letter never reaches Banda, but the reproof does, conveyed through a minor trade union official. “Such a letter would never have been delayed in being answered”, he insists, commenting at length on the carelessness of postal clerks in Kumasi.

He is delighted that Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd has been invited (it might result in “the saving of faces”) together with Welensky of Southern Rhodesia and Strydom of South Africa, but does not think they will attend. He does not recommend inviting anyone from Northern Rhodesia, but he suggests three names from Nyasaland: James Chinyama of the Legislative Council, Manoa Chirwa of the Federal Parliament, and T. D. Banda of the Nyasaland African Congress. All three were later to become victims of Banda’s own rise to power.

Yet for all the frustrations of his position and the ironies of hindsight, Banda’s early letters are often deeply moving. “My Dear Dr Nkrumah”, he writes in April 1956, “please allow me to tell you what a joy it was to me to read the proposals for the independent Ghana. A lump came up into my throat and only with difficulty did I restrain myself from shedding tears of joy.” The passions of that generation of African leaders, bruised by their long contact with colonial racism, are too easily forgotten in the turmoil and horrors that have followed. There is innocence in Banda’s joy, the perfect foil to Nkrumah’s exuberance in power. “The birth of a truly independent Ghana cannot fail to arouse deep emotions of joy among all Africans, no matter what tribes or where they live. Because it means that at last, we have one truly independent African modern state, to which we can all look with pride.” Time and again he comes back to this theme: “if you succeed, the whole of Africa is redeemed. It may not be in my time, but it is redeemed. If you fail, the whole of Africa is doomed and doomed for centuries.” He recalls their meetings in London and Manchester. “Can you still remember that big map? It seemed a wild dream then. It does not seem so wild now, does it?” His marginal gloss explains, “I mean the dream of the redemption of Africa.”

But there is also a warning, increasingly ominous in their subsequent correspondence: “it has been a constant source of worry to me that through the action of some stupid and idiot fanatic . . . your great work might be cut short, that is, by their attempts on your life by one means or another”.

No further letters are available for the next five years. Banda’s career in Ghana was not a happy one. The relationship with Mrs French collapsed in acrimony, and she left for Britain with their son. There were rumours, perhaps malicious, about schizophrenia and illegal abortions. Then in 1958 his political career is revived when he is invited home by the new leaders of the Nyasaland African Congress to head the revived struggle against the Central African Federation. He is detained by the federal authorities, released by the British, and wins an election campaign. When his corres-pondence with Dr Nkrumah resumes in 1962, he is himself about to become prime minister of a territory on course to independence.

Between February 1962 and Malawi’s Independence in July 1964, thirteen letters exist. Ten are Banda’s, eight of them written from his private address in Limbe where he maintained a small practice. It continues, in short, as a private correspondence, though the letters are now addressed to “The Osagyefo”, and later “The Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah President”. This praise name he was later to copy and elaborate.

Banda’s letters share three concerns. The first continues to speak of Ghana as the pattern for African development. The ideological implications of this need not be taken too seriously. Banda was never the man to write off his Ghana years as irrelevant, and his habit of lecturing young associates on the lessons to be drawn from his own experiences continued into his old age. Nkrumah was offering aid from Ghana’s cocoa wealth to fund political parties in Southern Africa, together with personnel for development projects. It is fair to add that no other model existed of five years’ standing of how (or how not) to govern an independent African country. So Banda misses no opportunity to send his parliamentary supporters, party members, members of the Women’s League, and personal associates such as Cecilia Kadzamira his “secretary” to study “the progress Ghana has made under and through your wise leadership”.

Linked with this is his personal admiration for Nkrumah. “To me you have long since ceased to be a person or an individual. You are the symbol or personification of Africa and all that Africa means to true nationalists . . . No single African leader has done more for Africa: no single African country has done more than Ghana.” It is the kind of flattery Nkrumah was already demanding of his own supporters, but Banda’s words are not flummery. Nkrumah is cast as the man with the vision of a united, modernized, non-aligned African continent. Banda echoes this vision and supplements it with political gossip.

He regrets that other countries are not following Ghana’s example (“Independence seems to drive us Africans apart, instead of bringing us together”), and he blames Nigeria and Tanganyika for “trying to isolate Ghana and diminish the influence of yourself in inter-African affairs”. Increasingly, at this period, Banda’s letters invoke a world in which the righteous (Nkrumah, Banda himself) are surrounded by implacable enemies -the British press, all Americans, and a host of upstart, ungrateful Africans.

The bulk of these letters, then, are horrified reactions to threats to Nkrumah’s safety, specifically to the assassination attempts of August 1962 and January 1964, separated by the actual killing of President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo in January 1963. “Make certain that you surround yourself with trusted, tried and proven friends,” he writes on September 2, 1962, “both in the Government and the top layers of the party.” Then, on January 12, 1964:

“The news of yet another attempt on your life, through (sic) me into a frightful sense of horror from which I have not yet recovered. And this sense of horror was made worse by news that the man involved was, in fact, a policeman attached to your personal entourage. This worries me greatly. It worries me because I do not know, my dear Osagyefo, to what extent the whole Police Force is infiltrated by the enemy . . . . You have great work to do in Africa. Any attempt on your life, is an attempt on Africa itself.”

He reports on policemen “like those I knew in Kumasi” who were once Nkrumah’s opponents, yet now hold high office. Everyone must be investigated “preferably secretly”, even the intelligence services. Self-evidently, the horrors expressed here touch Banda in more ways than one. The measures he proposes were very soon to become his own practice.

Only three of Nkrumah’s letters from this period are in the file. Two are brief responses to the attempts on his life, again notable for the stylishness of their sangfroid (“This was certainly a very unpleasant business, but bad as such things are, very often good comes out of them”). The third, dated April 15, 1964, less than three months before Malawi’s independence, is a carefully argued document demonstrating a new concern.

The bearer is John Tettegah, dispatched by Nkrumah on a trip that took him to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to promote the latest of his panAfrican initiatives, namely, the all-African Trade Union Federation (and, incidentally, to field complaints about the non-arrival of Ghana’s promised aid). Nkrumah was sponsoring this Ghana-based federation, of which Tettegah was first secretary, as a rival to the existing organizations (the Industrial and Commercial Federation of Trade Unions and the World Federation of Trade Unions). He had recently experienced renewed labour unrest and was inclined to put the blame on “foreign interference”:

“The ICFTU and the WFTU are only interested in promoting their respective claims for recognition in Africa, whereas our interests lie in insulating our labour groups from the hostilities that have torn foreign labour organizations apart and created labour and industrial unrest among them for so long. For us in Africa, it should be clear that we cannot indulge in expensive industrial strikes and lockouts. We must concentrate our efforts and exert all enemies towards the urgent tasks of national reconstruction. The welfare of the African worker is therefore our first concern. This is the language which the capitalist power-groups in Europe and America have yet to understand.”

“Unfortunately”, he continues, the Nyasaland TUC continued to be affiliated to the ICFTU “which has been known to incite strikes against African leaders whose policies are not acceptable to the Western bloc”. Even “more embarrassing”, Yatuta Chisisa, one of Banda’s parliamentary secretaries, had recently attended an ICFTU meeting in Addis Abba. The letter ends subtly with an appeal to Banda to give Tettegah “sound advice and guidance”.

Banda’s response (in Tettegah’s report to Nkrumah) was that the contents of the letter were “true”, but that Trade Unions were “insignificant” . . . . “Dr Banda, I must mention, tends to under-estimate the power of Trade Unions completely.” It was the first hint of doubts in Ghana about the direction of Dr Banda’s Government, and the first time a direct appeal from Banda’s mentor was to be ignored.

Ghana was lavishly represented at Malawi’s independence celebrations with a delegation of five ministers, thirty-two members of the police band, twenty-seven members of the Institute of Arts and Culture, and the Uhuru dance band.

However, reports Krobo Edusie, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who led the delegation, “It became very clear to us that Dr Banda is not well grounded ideologically. In most of his speeches, save one, he never mentioned African Unity, etc. The stress was on the Commonwealth and on the United Nations.” Part of the blame lay in Malawi’s “land-locked problem” that, in Banda’s view, necessitated co-operation and good relations with the Portuguese in Mozambique, and with the United States who already had “about 3,000 Peace Corps” in Malawi. Interestingly, in the light of what was to follow, Edusie also blamed Tanganyika’s influence on Malawi’s young Cabinet ministers, in particular Kanyama Chiume, Minister of Information, for Banda’s “change of attitude”.

Four months later, in November 1964, Edusie was back in Malawi on a secret mission from Nkrumah with personal letters to Banda and to Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika. The context was the aftermath of Malawi’s Cabinet crisis, that defining event in the new nation’s history, when the most talented members of Banda’s Cabinet resigned in protest. Though Banda’s social and foreign policies were given as the cause, the real issue was his autocratic, increasingly messianic, style of leadership. New to power, the ministers were easily outmanoeuvred, overlooking the importance of the Malawi Congress Party, and losing a confidence vote in a parliament packed with Banda’s nominees. When violence erupted, several of the exministers, including Chiume, were given asylum in Dar es Salaam. In Nkrumah’s letters, Banda was “advised to visit Ghana during his U.N. trip so that he may have the benefit of Osagyefo’s counsel . . . and advised about the dangers of friendly overseas overtures to the Portuguese”. Nyerere was warned “that Banda would not tolerate any interference in the internal affairs of Malawi”.

By 1964, Nyerere, at forty-two, wielded more influence than Nkrumah in Eastern and Southern Africa, and Dar es Salaam was the principal base of the nationalist movements later to achieve power in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. His response to Nkrumah’s assertion of seniority was cool: “He would obviously like a complete rapprochement with Osagyefo”, Edusie reported, “provided in his simple view Osagyefo would leave Africa alone and stop causing trouble”. But it was Banda’s response that caused heart-searching. His style of leadership was “unpopular because he was following Ghana . . . he used what he described as ‘his Ghana methods’ and he gave the impression that his actions had the support of the Ghana government”. This had caused, noted Edusie dryly, “some confusion in African nationalist circles”.

The file contains eight more letters and one telegram, and they bring the sad story to a swift conclusion. Two, from Banda, concern mundane matters -a visit by his security officer, a new High Commissioner in Accra. Nkrumah responds on April 24, 1965, with one of his last political statements. After promising that he has been “able to arrange some financial assistance from our limited resources for you”, he rebukes Banda for “compromising over Portugal”:

“Our only hope for survival against this deadly encroachment on our political and economic freedom is our ability to stand together against the imperialists and colonialists. As soon as we stand together in this way, the colonialists will be at bay, and we will not go to them cap in hand or be subjected to undue subservience to them. In my view we can protect ourselves best in Africa by uniting under a continental Union government which alone can help us solve our mounting problems in Africa. You should therefore proclaim this at the top of your voice on every suitable occasion.”

Banda’s next letter is stiff and formal, regretting that, with the change of date for the OAU summit conference in Accra, he will not be able to attend.

Warned by his High Commissioner that this is being interpreted as “a break”, he writes again personally with all the old warmth. “As you know, Kwame, you and I have been together for over twenty years now . . . . Whether I agree with you or not, I could never gang up with anyone against you.” He attends the conference in October, and is flown to Kumasi for a private visit.

The next item is a telegram from Nkrumah to Banda, sent in cipher through T. K. Owusu, Ghana’s High Commissioner in Malawi, and appealing for clemency in the case of Silombela, sentenced to be publicly hanged “for subversion against your person and government”. In the aftermath of the Malawian Cabinet crisis of 1964, Henry Chipembere, one of the dissident ministers, launched an abortive raid on the government capital Zomba from his base at Fort Johnson. It was an ill-considered revolt, ending for Chipembere in permanent exile. Silombela, one of his lieutenants, remained in the Fort Johnson area, organizing low-scale guerrilla activity until his capture in 1965.

Nkrumah continues, “I would like to make this special appeal to you to commute the public hanging to a sentence of imprisonment . . . on purely humanitarian grounds.”

Owusu’s return telegram describes Banda’s and his own reactions, not omitting to note the young pioneer connection. “He read through, held his chin up and replied he could not reconsider his original decision. Silombela should be hanged . . . . The inhabitants in Fort Johnson district are predominantly Muslim, and their belief in absurdities is profound . . . . I want to give them a practical demonstration that Chipembere and his henchmen are not superhuman beings.” Owusu’s telegram concludes, “It will be a horrible execution.”

On February 16, Banda wrote to Nkrumah requesting the closure of Ghana’s mission in Malawi. With deliberate cruelty, he chose March 6, Ghana’s Independence Day, for the break in relations to become effective. Nkrumah is unlikely to have seen this letter. He was on a state visit to China and on February 29 was overthrown by a military coup. In July 1966, Hastings Banda became President (later Life-President) of the Republic of Malawi with the praise name His Excellency the President, the Ngwazi, Dr H. Kamuzu Banda.

First published Times Literary Supplement, 17 August, 2001.

Read More

Review of Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Hurst & Co., 1995)

Can Mozambique at last become a nation- state? Now that the war is over, the elections accepted as free and fair, the peace process and refugee-resettlement process still on course, can this war-torn Y-shape on the map of south-east Africa set about “forging” national unity? The question is pertinent whether you believe with the established commentator on Mozambique, Joe Hanlon, that the forces of disruption have all been external – Portuguese colonialism, South African destabilization, the neo-imperialism of the aid industry – or like Malyn Newitt, that some level of “intervention” will continue to be necessary to overcome the disruptive pressures within.

It is a long time since Mozambique was left alone. When the Portuguese arrived in the late fifteenth century, they found that Swahili traders had already occupied the tiny island which eventually gave its name to the whole colony. As the poet Luis de Camoes reconstructed the encounter: “We”, one of the islanders responded, “Are not of this place or superstition /Those who belong here are suckled by Nature / Without religion or understanding.”

The comment indicates the first of Newitt’s difficulties in writing the 500-year history of this territory, namely bridging the gap between the words of the “history-makers” and the realities they were caught up in. These Swahili traders of Mozambique Island, Arab by extraction and Muslim by religion, were thoroughly “Africanized”. They were linked by marriage and descent to the lineages of the territorial chiefs along the trading routes of the interior, spoke a creole already more “Bantu” than Arabic, and appeared to the Portuguese virtually indistinguishable from the African peoples of the coast.

Initially, the Portuguese were interested in Mozambique only as a stepping-stone to India and the spice trade. Faced with the difficulties of financing that trade, they tried to locate and capture the gold mines of Manica in the interior. When the gold supply failed to come up to expectations, they dealt in ivory and, eventually and inevitably, in slaves. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, “two competing trading systems began to emerge”.

Captains, appointed triennially in Lisbon to administer royal monopolies in gold and ivory, were, in effect, given three years to make their personal fortunes by “what can best be described as asset-stripping activities”. As they enforced and extended their monopolies, all other trade the normal commercial activity of an African coast became technically contraband, opening a conflict which turned to warfare in the nineteenth century, as Portuguese armies had to reconquer territory from people who called themselves “Portuguese”.

But there are difficulties in talking of “Africanization”. The word was first applied to Mozambique by Allen Isaacman in his Mozambique: The Africanization of a European institution: the Zambezi Prazos: 1750-1902 (1972). The title suggested African initiative in the making of history, successful cultural resistance to political and economic domination, with the colonizers compelled to acknowledge the superiority of African institutions. The actual text, however, indicated that being “African” involved warlordism, witchcraft, polygamy on a massive scale and slave-trading. Something of this problem, though acknowledged and articulated, attends Newitt’s description of the process of Africanization. He emphasizes the African origins and social structure of towns like Sofala, Sena, Tete and Quelimane, together with the principal feiras or trading centres. He has fascinating things to say about the distinction between the gold trade which, such as it was, could be appropriated through simple conquest, and the ivory trade which demanded mutual co-operation. He insists on the pivotal rote of the Afro-Portuguese community, known locally as muzungos.

Yet throughout this book, these figures are also described as bandits, warlords, conquistadores, bandidos, stockade-holders, and even pirates. From Diogo Simoes Madeira, who seized the chieftaincy of Inhabanzo from Monomotapa in 1607, to Manuel Antonio de Sousa, who in the 1860s created the polity which was eventually to become the Companhia de Mocambique, Newitt insists on a pattern to Mozambique’s history, a “predatory culture of raiding”, in which even the prazo system of the Zambesi valley, for all its apparent stability and longevity, was no more than “institutionalized banditry”. It is an argument which enables him to convert Renamo’s brutalities of the 1980s to the country’s “traditions of banditry”, and to comment in respect of Moraes Pereira’s classic account of the rise of the bandit Macambe in 1752 that “it might almost be a description of a Renamo warband of the 1980s”.

The logic of this is centred in Mozambique’s “frail agricultural base”, always prone to drought with its concomitants of famine, smallpox and locusts, coupled with inherently unstable patterns of African settlement patrilineal in the south, but unable to maintain large chieftaincies because of the unsuitability of the land for cattle-rearing, and matrilineal in the north, with tiny scattered villages and tensions between female control of resources and male political power. The bandits, in short, appear to be invaders, but their banditry is best understood as an accommodation to local conditions.

This is the story told in the first two-thirds of this book, which focus on Mozambique before its modern boundaries were established in 1890. The themes are “integration” and “disintegration”, and Newitt relishes to the full Mozambique’s capacity to make fools of anyone trying to impose the simpler paradigms of African historiography (resistance, state-formation, underdevelopment, class). There is no single “story”, rather the separate, sometimes interlocking, sometimes mutually destructive relationships of the raiders and the raided Muslim, Portuguese, Afro-Portuguese and a dozen different African polities. The forces of integration are Catholicism and Islam, international trade, the colonial structures of the Estado da India and, periodically, the rise of African kingdoms under Karanga, Tonga, Maravi and Nguni chiefs. The forces of disintegration are drought and famine, small-scale settlement patterns with low levels of technology and, of course, banditry with its accompanying trade in slaves. This does not necessarily all happen within Mozambique’s modern boundaries; Newitt includes the tiny Colonia de Sao Luis, founded by the trader Joao Albasini, today part of the Transvaal, while one of the greatest African “successes” was the resistance of the Karonga to Portuguese penetration, which makes them today part of Zimbabwe’s, not Mozambique’s history. Yet Livingstone’s observations of the region in 1858 were not markedly dissimilar from those of a certain Father Monclaro in 1570.

The Mozambique which came into being in 1890 was in no sense “a state”. It had no administrative or legal system, no public revenues or communications, no services and was largely unmapped. The boundaries to the north and south-east had some historical validity, but the rest were the arbitrary outcome of the Ultimatum and the Scramble, with Portugal for the most part denied what she had a better claim to than any other colonial power. But Portugal was in no condition to create an administration or invest in the economy. Well over half of the territory was sub-leased to companies, financed by British and Belgian capital, who administered, policed, taxed, monopolized trade and extracted labour by force from the territories chartered to them, subject to decisions made at head offices in London, Paris, Monaco, Durban and (nominally) Lisbon.

Until 1930, travelling round Mozambique involved negotiating a crazy patchwork of mini-states, each with its own administration, currency and customs barriers. Not until 1941, when the last of the company charters lapsed, was Mozambique for the first time governed as a single entity.

The new Mozambican government of 1975, Frelimo, inherited an almost equally fragile state. Military roads had been built linking north and south, the Zambesi was bridged by road for the first time and the economy had expanded rapidly in the 1960s under the impact of the huge investment in Cabora Bassa.

But it remained largely hostage to white-ruled South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, while “government”, in the guise of administration, law and taxation, was regarded almost universally with suspicion. Meanwhile, Frelimo’s definition of its task aggravated a delicate situation. It was Eduardo Mondlane, Frelimo’s founder, who first attempted to define a prototype independent Mozambique.

Unable to deploy myths of pre-colonial empires (as in Ghana or Malawi), or of ethnic unity (as in Lesotho or Swaziland) or of an indigenous socialism (as in Tanganyika and Zambia), Mondlane emphasized that what Mozambicans had in common was the exploitation of their labour in a regional capitalist system. It was a theme that resonated with his first constituency of labour migrants. But the Marxist-Leninist paradigm implicit in this analysis led Frelimo, on assuming power, to declare a new war against “the internal enemy” whites who owned or were the comprador face of capitalist interests, Catholic intellectuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, traditional rulers and the country’s cash-cropping peasantry, and (in effect) the black and mestico working class tens of thousands of whom left for Portugal. Though such follies were soon abandoned, South Africa’s war of destabilization against Mozambique, which created the guerrilla group Renamo, had by then been launched.

Newitt has taken many years to write his long book, as he has wrestled with his own problem of making “sense” of Mozambique in a language few of its inhabitants speak. His solution, which works admirably, is to blend conventional chronologies of conquest and trade with leisurely descriptive essays on towns, the prazos and labour migration, which move from region to region and are illuminated throughout with a rich haul of detailed incident. It is skilfully done, both ironic and melancholic, with surprisingly little repetition, and with some memorable turns of phrase. My single major reservation is the paucity of African voices, particularly for the past 150 years, for which an abundance of testimony is available.

Perhaps, too, the conclusion is unnecessarily pessimistic. This may seem an ungracious thing to say of a book written in the shadow of unremitting atrocities, while the rise of a new guerrilla movement, the Chimwenjes, targeting Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU, may appear to confirm the worst. But this history appears at a time when Mozambique has, for the first time ever, an elected, experienced government, friendly neighbours and a well-disposed international community. In a country riddled with land-mines, there is talk of hope. Arguably, it was Mozambique’s most recent drought of 1992 which led to the peace process. The power vacuum, created by Frelimo’s weakness and by Renamo’s loss of its agricultural base, was occupied by ordinary peasants demanding an end to the fighting (the so-called “people’s peace”). Most of the refugee- and land-resettlement programmes have been carried out spontaneously without the intervention of the NGOs officially responsible. There is not a great deal in A History of Mozambique about the capacity of African cultural practices to settle rather than to dislocate; however, an elegant, sober, comprehensive “history” has been written which will surely stand for a generation.

First published Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 1996.

Read More