Lecture 4: African American Literature

“WITCH DOCTOR OF DARKEST AFRICA AND HIS HOUSE OF FEAR”

http://ian.macky.net/secretmuseum/page_2.91.html



        Today I am going Aristotelian on you and throw some Socratic method at you. (Joke) What is the problem with this picture? Does it seem out of place in the twenty-first century? By now you should realize that I understand the three c’s, conversion, commerce and civilization as patriarchal and state derivations. Of course these derivations are culture derivations, which are the result of our original state in paleontology; i.e., “culture is the human nature.”(Sahlins, 103-104) Security is therefore the result of social interaction and the human need to survive that drives humanity to form social groups. In the stories by Henri Lopes of the Congo and Luis Bernardo Hanwana of Mozambique, security and social interaction are explored as inversely related.  Is this inverse relationship the result of the culture that is human nature? Does this drive to survive necessarily mean human security is constituted for better or for worse within society? (Sahlins 109) Western history dates the introduction of European explorers meeting with the San, Khoikhoi, and mixed Bantu-speaking Africans in Algoa Bay in the 15^th century.  Bantu dialects are spoken all over sub-Saharan Africa; the linguistic similarity was not the focus of the first Europeans in the southern part of the continent, id. est. Mozambique. Instead they focused on racial categories that date back to the Arabic medieval epoch when they called sub-Saharan Africa bilâd as-sûdân. “The land of the blacks” offered fertile territory for the three c’s.

The Europeans observed the San, Khoikhoi, and mixed Bantu speakers who lived in kinship residential groups as inefficient because they did nothing to overcome this inefficiency for progress. They were never in a hurry. In the story of the snake, this practice is shown in five different characters’ interactions with domestic animals. Nonetheless, the European idea that the people of the sub-Sahara are primitive is a misconception based on the demotion of everyday labor for consumption that is detached from the familial group. Consumption finds its “self” in an external realm governed by commerce, conversion, and civilization. (Sahlins, 76-77) Individual production within the familial group defines western progress.  Production intensifies for the familial group with the empiricism brought to bear by commerce. Indeed, we may as well include conversion and civilization, because, all the stories outside of northern Africa in The Anchor Book are about the disarray of the culture, i.e. human nature.  



http://www.beachandbush.co.za/thingsToSee/arts_crafts/cederberg_san_rock_art

            In Swaziland, the everyday practice of putting out “medicine” to keep away snakes is reminiscent of Hanwana’s story of the black mamba. I witnessed the death of a juvenile spitting cobra in Swaziland and there was nothing magical about it. However, inclined as I am to agree with sociologists and archaeologists about social grouping for survival; I think living in abundance is a human practice, which any human should recognize as our earliest socialization. I am referring, of course, to witchcraft and medicine as we read it in “The Prophetess” by Njabula Ndebele; as it is practiced everyday; it is a cultural practice, whether or not the western reader accepts it. That being said, I want to suggest that traditional, patriarchal and legally governed states are subject to greed and hierarchical societies, even those whose practices are dismissed.

         

         Other stories in our reader, specifically,“The Last Battle’ by Enekwe and Civil War I-VII” by Maja-Pearce allows the reader to wrestle with the “body politic” and how it applied, if ever,  to western culture. I would make a joke here, but Conrad’s Heart of Darkness make the disruption of civilization as a result of commerce and conversion not humorous. The laws of consumption drive people to become “on the edge.” But so does subsistence survival; it also suggests how far one will go until conforming to patriarchal, traditional, state-identified realities are too much. Bessie Head’s “Looking for a Raingod” introduces witchcraft and ritual murder. However, this tale fashions itself in an era of droughts, in which the period of “abundance” became less possible. In contrast, Bessie Head’s A Collector of Treasures, writes that “Witchcraft” is practiced but it is impotent because Mma Mabele has to get up and go to work, even when she is sick. Perhaps civilization as it is written by Head needs to be “consumption”. Ultimately what is the body or the soul as read in the short fiction of The Anchor Books of Modern African Stories? Is it having clean water, enough to eat with others, the stories told and being told?

Study Skills

1.       Identify the italicized terms. Develop a thesis using the terms and three stories from The Anchor Anthology text.

2.       Use the pictures that accompany the lecture to discuss the italicized terms. You must be prepared to read the pictures as texts. This is a writing across the curriculum question that encompasses sociology and anthropology.

Lecture 3: African Literature

In our earlier talks, I introduced the term urban and suggested that urban is an area where people lived in abundance. Abundance is suggested by the rock paintings and other fossils that are signals about prehistoric life. What then are the great things that stimulate upheaval, instead of gradual change? Islam and Christianity have played a role in creating upheaval as well as gradual change.

Religious mysticism or conversion at times leaves behind literacy, contemplation of faith, as well as prayer. A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Sahil creates questions in the discussion between the elders who are not practicing strictly as orthodox Muslims, who celebrate their male and female sexuality. The sexuality discussed is not Islamic; Sahil’s novel was banned for its openness about sex. “A Handful of Dates” by the same author in The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories and “Her Three Days” in The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories by Sembene Ousmane is much more cryptic inviting the reader to consider the everyday practices, intimate and public in an Islamic area.

The sexuality in Tayeb Sahil’s novel and Sembene’s story cause us to consider the sexuality of Nawal El Sadaawi’s protagonist Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero. The question of female circumcision finds its way among women in Muslim countries. The practice of consuming honey wine finds a parallel in its adoption around trade routes of migration and Arab commercial travel. Commerce, of course, was followed by conversion and Arabic script, which finds some parallel in the Hausa language northern Nigeria, which is predominately Muslim. Islam is regularly gaining ground all over Western Africa and has become the religion of more than 95 % of the Senegalese population. The islamization of the present territory of Senegal began during the XIth century when the Almoravides arrived. People of the Casamance in Senegal resisted Islam, therefore, we expect a strict focus by Sembene because he was from the Casamance. Similarly Nawal El Saadawi has much to say, having undergone the excision of her clitoris in childhood, as many women experience in east, west, and North Africa .

If female circumcision is a cultural practice, is it a part of gendered security, patriarchal security, traditional security? Does it have a spiritual significance? Does it register in our minds as an equation that must have the same operation in order to maintain its balance? Salwa Bakr’s “Thirty-one Beautiful Green Trees,” suggests in a more mystical fashion that her ability to speak causes consternation of such proportions that she removes her tongue in response to metynomic floods that swept away everything beautiful. The protagonist ‘s breasts and her refusal to wear a brassiere to the office is the subject of whether she is decent or indecent.  Alifa Rifaat’s “At the Time of Jasmine” suggests a value that has slipped the narrator’s mind.  This value of Jasmine is what strikes the narrator’s mind. In both the world of western business accounting and Islam one might dust his palms of mothers and daughters and sisters. Circumcision followed by years of childbirth and childrearing beg the question of human security, from a western world view.  I suppose the question needing clarity is how one adapts and how does one place a value on womanhood?

Study Skills

1.       When was the Mosque Al Azar built? Where was it built?

2.       Where is Khartoum? What is the name of its largest mosque?

3.       When was Timbuktu settled?

4.       What is the name of the earliest mosque in Timbuktu? In what country does it reside?

5.       Where is Timbuktu in relation to Egypt, northern Nigeria, and Senegal?  See map.

African Literature: Lecture 2

At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth… JosephConrad    http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ConDark.html



Imperial Boundaries 1914

www.fsmitha.com/h2/map02af.htm



As discovered in our earlier readings, not all cultural practices are founded in the ideal of human security. Male chiefs, like Mzilikazi, taxed and slaughtered Ra-Thaba and Mhudi’s people. However the texts left on the ceiling of a cave suggests a culture less nomadic in this discussion of the earlier observations from the southern cape (Nsangwini Bird Men Cave Art, Photographer: Bob Forrester). The mfecane has been historically cited for the nomadic bands that were met by the European bearers of the three c’s outside the cape settlement and dispersed by war. However war is not the only factor in settling or being unsettled.

As discovered in our earlier readings, not all cultural practices are founded in the ideal of human security. Male chiefs, like Mzilikazi, taxed and slaughtered Ra-Thaba and Mhudi’s people. However the texts left on the ceiling of a cave suggests a culture less nomadic in this discussion of the earlier observations from the southern cape (Nsangwini Bird Men Cave Art, Photographer: Bob Forrester). The mfecane has been historically cited for the nomadic bands that were met by the European bearers of the three c’s outside the cape settlement and dispersed by war. However war is not the only factor in settling or being unsettled.



South African Native National Congress

Chinua Achebe criticized Conrad for not going far enough in his description of the abundance in the Congo, Conrad wrote about.  Achebe suggests that Conrad is hegemonic in his description because of the cultures of Africans throughout the continent prior to Christianity and after Islam. Texts like Conrad’s do not go far enough in their exploration of ‘Christianity, civilization, and commerce’ or the three c’s, as I refer to them. Either the South African Native National Congress or the eighteenth century publication of Olaudah Equiano’s memoirs anticipated the cultural imperialism that followed in the division of Africa by European cultural imperialists. According to Conrad’s observations, what is present all around him is “abundance”. [1] According to Equiano, commerce and Christianity was apparent, but civilization as he had known it in southeastern Nigeria was not.          

African Rock Paintings
http://www.commonground191.com/journal/swaziland.htm

 Africans all over the continent were introduced to commerce in the form of corn and/or sheep, e.g. and slavery. Furthermore not all religious conversion was Christian, there was Islam carried along with commerce, including slaving, from the Arab peninsula southeastward to Delgoa Bay. This invasion took its tolls as Tutuola describes in The Palmwine Drinkard.  Other Africans, knowing that change is inevitable, were sending their children to Europe to learn this new language of trade, which the Europeans brought in force when the European nations divided the continent. What one wonders focuses upon cultural/spatial practices of the epoch that preceded the map that the Europeans met to divide amongst themselves. 

African Rock Paintings

http://www.sntc.org.sz/photo.asp?pid=111

Study Skills:

1. Identify the italicized terms. Identify all the italicized words.  Write a paragraph on each. Some are names, some are not. 
2.  You can see how the continent was divided. Can you identify the players? When did they meet and where? 
3.  What spatial practices are discussed in the rock paintings? Why did these Africans prefer not to become agronomists?  Why was animal husbandry preferable to agronomy?
4.  I included a footnote from the reserved reading in the Lakeland library. Can you explain why one would use a footnote?

---

[1]    Thompson, Leonard. A history of South Africa. 3rd edition. New Haven,CT: Yale Univ Pr, 2001. 1-29. Print. This text discusses South African history from many perspectives in the first chapter in order to put today’s South Africa into perspective.







Lecture 1:African Literature

 

Map of Africa 1729 

http://www.waado.org/NigerDelta/Nigeria_Facts/NigerianMaps/Africa-HistoricMaps/WestAfrica-1729.html

When I was a child, Tarzan movies represented Africa. Of course, when I got to college, I met Africans from the east and west of that continent and they told me that’s how they imagined African Americans. As my education continued, the massacres in Sharpesville, RSA and Soweto, RSA represented African life. I found myself caught in shifting sands with regard to Ethiopia, because I knew Haile Selassie as a king, in much the same way Elizabeth II is a queen, because he resisted the Axis in World War II. When I think of Ethiopia today I think of a fallen dynasty, and wonder about the monarchies in today’s Africa and all over the world. When I finally got to the continent, I found myself in Senegal; then later, I found myself on Lobombo Mountain considering the Shakespearean tenor of the history of the Lobombo district in Swazi history.  Indeed there is something epic about the history and literature of Africa. The Stone Age of Africa, I think, is a place to begin; however, there are other world views than suggested here, but the possibility of ‘a slippery slope’ is imminent, if one is not careful. When one begins to think in epic terms, one begins to think about remote history of which we have only signal posts about everyday life at the time this epoch was happening.  

While the Greeks were smearing their crops in the blood of young men to insure successful harvests in Medea, we are barely given time to breathe to consider the practice of ritual murder, when we must contemplate Rome.  Again the western canon comes to mind because I am trained to think in terms of the western world view first; and when dissatisfied, search for other answers. Both Plaatje and Tutuola cause us as readers to demand more information, although my job is to hector you off the easy path of just waiting for me to show you everything. (joke)             

Batswana author, Bessie Head repeated a tale of human sacrifice to rain gods to intervene in droughts that lasted seven or ten years. She also told of ritual murder by the ruling class? I ponder these things because of Shakespeare and my belief that my African ancestors were early agronomists. They were much like those who lived outside the cities in townships like today’s designed or ill-designed cities on the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe.  Readers fail to imagine life before imperialism because Americans do not have an urban world view, or even think in terms of someone unlike themselves. Some perceive urbanity as code language for ‘black’.  The concept of an urban/black world view was rejected in the eighteenth century; many of the founding fathers, like Jefferson and Madison e.g., defined urban as a place where the people did not share the same customs and cultural referents. However the aforementioned should have us all nattering over our commonalities. How can we not know these commonalities in this age of information? It is world view and all that these two simple words encompass as it is put on paper.   A world view that presents a continent as seen in the maps that accompany this lecture should be suspect. If the reader searches maps made during the period of the mfecane that opens Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, one will find the maps may as well have been written on sand (Mackaness, 2006, 1). When one opens Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, it takes the reader away from mapping on paper onto a topography that anticipates GPS, et alia.  The lost boy, who finds himself lost after a slave raid, presents us with the need to follow the child to see to his safety, as well as the safety of Plaatje’s victims of the mfecane. The anticipation of discovery of new information opens another path unexplored in this the quest to know more about Africa. Nonetheless, remember social/spatial practices constitute cultural production developed from its everyday actions, which may be written on stone or passed in novels, stories, dramas, and poetry. Your western world view may not be enough.

                            

17^th century Southern Africa, 1747

          http://hdl.library.northwestern.edu/2166.DL/inu-afrmap-4004497-recto-ah

Study Skills Questions:

1.       Identify all the italicized words.  Write a paragraph on each question. They are important, right? Try to trace the flight pattern in Mhudi. Is it possible using the map included in the lecture titled A new & accurate map of the southern parts of Africa: containing Lower Guinea, Monoemugi, Zanguebar, and the Empire of Monomatapa, county of the Cafres &c. and the Island of Madagascar.

 http://hdl.library.northwestern.edu/2166.DL/inu-afrmap-4004497-recto-ah

2.        Can you plot the adventures in Tutuola on the map identified in the lecture, as Map of Africa 1729, in following Tutuola’s narrative? Why? Explain in three to five paragraphs and include a minimum of two citations (MLA, unless you have spoken with me concerning writing across the curriculum.)