78th birthday of Wangari Maathai

(Born 1 April 1940, Ihithe, Kenya)

BIOLOGIST and iconic exponent of freedom and the environment

IN THE following review essay first published on 17 December 2013 and entitled “Daughter-of-the-soil”, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe reflects on Professor Maathai’s autobiography, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story (London: Arrow Books, 2008), 314pp:

It is unmistakeably evident in the early chapters of this remarkable autobiography by Wangari Maathai, especially those that cover her childhood to adolescence growing up in rural Kenya of the 1940s, how very little appears to exist on the ground to prepare her for the enormous challenges she confronts and overcomes, spectacularly, just a few years subsequently. 

Right from the outset, Maathai is indeed the daughter-of-the-soil and she retains this prestigious accolade throughout her most fulfilling life. As she works full time with her mother on the farm, having been allocated a 15-sq.ft. plot to tend herself at the age of 7 cultivating “sweet potatoes, beans maize, and millet” (Wangari Maathai, 2008: 38), there is no certitude to Maathai’s formal education in a school eventually. But the following year, aged 8, an unexpected conversation between her mother and Maathai’s older brother on one late evening after another hardworking day on the farm, would change the direction of young Wangari’s life. Maathai learns, with staggering incredulity, of her parents and brother’s decision to send her to school:

[A]lthough [my mother] had almost no formal education, she agreed with my brother. How grateful I am that she made the decision she did because I could not have made it for myself, and it changed my life… To this day I do not know where the money for my education came from, but my mother probably raised it by working for people in the village, cultivating their land. At that time you could earn up to sixty cents doing such work. (Maathai: 40)

Contours of conquest and occupation

BUT THE deal for Maathai to go to school is not done, yet! Someone else’s approval must be sought, someone who is not even a member of her family. Just as the hundreds of thousands of Gĩkũyũ people’s families whose legendary fertile lands in the central and western Kenyan highlands have been seized by the British occupation regime and handed over to 40,000 European-descent immigrant-“settlers” (predominantly from Britain, Germany, South Africa, Australia and Canada) by the beginning of the 1950s (10), Maathai’s “displaced” family now lives on one such “settler” farm owned by a recent British arrival, D.N. Neylan. Maathai’s family’s official designation in their new abode, as the rest of these nascent landless Africans, is “tenant-at-will”, as distinguished writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Maathai’s compatriot and contemporary recalls his own family’s experience (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46), or “squatter-on-the-farm” as Maathai prefers instead: “My father had no title to the land where he had established his household – he was effectively a squatter on the farm … [H]e could build housing for his family and cultivate crops on land Mr Neylan apportioned to him … [In return] the man, his wife, and children were all required to provide labor. They were really glorified slaves…” (Maathai: 14-15). 

So, given this evident use-of-labour status in the “squatters-on-the-farm” provision, Neylan pointedly asks Maathai’s father who would “pick his pyrethrum” on the farm (plant used as insecticide and picking it is a specialism reserved for African children!) if the young Wangari goes to school, to which her father replies: “Don’t worry, [Mr Neylan], there are still many children in my homestead” (Maathai: 29). Educating African children, Maathai recalls, gravely, “was not a priority for the settlers” (29).

Just as Ngũgĩ (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46-48), Maathai is a keen witness to the momentous clash of two fiercely contradictory streams of consciousness and movement in the Kenya of her childhood whose outcome would impact on her and others of her generation most profoundly subsequently. On the one hand, there is the juggernaut of an insistent, if not desperate occupation regime which wants to consolidate its stranglehold on strategic and wealthy Kenya, 50 years after the beginning of its conquest and despite the lessons of the recently concluded Second World War and the 1947 liberation of India, and the other hand is the challenge of the land and freedom-bound army of the Mau Mau resistance. 

The significance of this clash dawns on Maathai perhaps most acutely in her new school, a catholic school run by Italian nuns. She readily excels in all her lessons but is shocked to be confronted with a very important school rule, arguably the most important school rule, which bans the speaking or any other forms of communication in Gĩkũyũ as well as in other African languages throughout the school premises. The only language allowed in school is English. Any student who contravenes this law wears a button of shame known as the “monitor”:

It was sometimes inscribed with phrases in English such as ‘I am stupid. I was caught speaking my mother tongue’. At the end of the day, whoever ended up with the button received a [physical] punishment, such as cutting grass, sweeping, or doing work in the garden. But the greater punishment was the embarrassment you felt because you had talked in your mother tongue. In retrospect, I can see that this introduced us to the world of undermining our self-confidence … trivialization of anything African and lays the foundation for a deeper sense of self-doubt… (59-60)

Maathai soon realises that that much-cherished anchor of family and Gĩkũyũ national life which has sustained her for ten years, this daughter-of-the-soil, is at best tenuous… It is now evident to her that for her family, living on Neylan’s farm in the wake of being thrown out of their land by the occupation, it is not only a material loss, important as this is, but, more tragically, the loss of culture or a people’s identity. Neylan’s question of who would “pick his pyrethrum” is not just the seemingly casual remark uttered by a British head of a “settler”-farm on whether or not an 8-year-old African child in Kenya should go to school but a metaphor that captures, quite graphically, the aftermath of the subjugation of a people. The impact of this history on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance,  is that 50 years hence, he writes only in Gĩkũyũ as he makes his contribution to the literary, political and philosophical discourses of the peoples of the world (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 49-50). As for Maathai, the impact of this history is that 50 years later, she takes an unbowed stand to defend Kenya’s environmental heritage.

IN THE mean time, the broader canvass of certain features of Maathai’s own family history begins to acquire some intelligibility, on further reflection by her, in the wake of her school’s encounter with the constrictive edict on African expressivity and being. A clear example is the story of uncle Thumbi, his father’s older brother who had been conscripted by the occupation regime to fight against the Italians and Germans in neighbouring Somalia and Tanganyika, respectively, during the 1914-1918 World War I. Thumbi never returns from the campaign (later confirmed dead by a fellow Gĩkũyũ comrade who survived and had seen Thumbi “fall” at the battlefield) and his name and memory never mentioned again within the family so as not to upset Maathai’s grandmother who still grieves for her son despite the passage of time. Most tellingly, though, the occupation regime never informs Maathai’s family of what happened to Thumbi. As would be the case of the 100,000 Gĩkũyũ conscripts who died during this campaign (27), the perverse, double-jeopardy fate of an already occupied African national forced by the occupier to fight in the latter’s subsequent wars of intra-imperialist rivalries and expropriations (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 56-57), Maathai describes the death of Thumbi as “still an open wound [in my family]… I want to say to the British government, ‘My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son’” (28).

Name, names, naming, presence

Yet if there is ever the singular site of a clearly discernible de-Africanisation programme that projects the searing, triumphal outcome of the pan-European conquest and occupation of Africa, the focus must be on that crucial subject of name and naming – precisely the reference to the individual an how he or she is identified by the rest of society: What is your name? In occupied Kenya, the African “loses” their surname or family name. They are “officially” identified by their forename(s). In Maathai’s example, before going to school, she is known, interchangeably, as Wangari Miriam or Mariam Wangari, both being her forenames! On arrival at school, following baptism as a catholic, Maathai becomes Mary Josephine Wangari or Mary Jo Wangari – again, all forenames and no surname. In a few years, in 1960, after wining a scholarship to study at university in the United States, she is called “Miss Wangari” by her professors and fellow students on campus because everyone assumes, of course, that “Wangari” is her second name/surname. Reacting to this development, with her infectious sense of humour, Maathai writes:

This began to seem absurd, since I knew the term ‘Miss’ meant the ‘unmarried daughter of …’ and I knew I was not the unmarried daughter of myself.  I decided to put this right and began writing my name as Mary Josephine Wangari Muta [father’s name!], so I’d be called Miss Muta. I then reversed my primary and personal names, becoming Wangari Mary Josephine Muta, and later dropped Mary Josephine because the name had become too long. When I returned to Kenya [1966], I was Wangari Muta. That was what I should always have been. (96)

Maathai is 20 when she finally reconnects with her family name – not within her country but in a foreign land. The legacy of the encompassing African World historical experience of the previous 400 years is not lost on Maathai as she sees a link between her, from east Africa, and African Americans in this country where she is studying for a bachelor’s degree: “The way surnames were forgotten in Kenya struck me as similar to how many African Americans in the times of [enslavement] and segregation were known only by their first names, yet had to address white people as Mr. or Miss, followed by their surnames” (96). On this overriding question of names and naming across the African World, Chinua Achebe, the Father of African Literature, has aptly observed and it is important to quote him at length:

[The European conquest of Africa] may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and you won’t to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold and diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the right sense of the word – that he and they had just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally if the worse comes to the worse, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. From denying the presence of a man standing there before you, you end up questioning his very humanity …[I]n the [European conquest] situation presence was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of [this conquest’s] ideology. (Chinua Achebe, 1990: 4; emphasis added)

The lift!

The scholarship on which Maathai goes to the US to study at Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Kansas (now Benedictine College) is from the Joseph Kennedy Foundation. Three hundred Kenyans benefitted from this scholarship. The then young Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts was very interested and personally involved in the programme which included covering transport costs for these students to their various colleges of admission in the US and back home after completion of studies. Following Maathai’s successful bachelor’s degree at Atchison, she studies and earns an MA in biology at the University of Pittsburgh before returning home. Besides enabling her resolve the legacy of historical identity denial, Maathai has fond memories of her six years living in the US: “… America transformed me. It made me into the person I am today. It taught me not to waste any opportunity to do what can be done – and there is a lot to do. The spirit of freedom and possibility that America nurtured in me made me want to foster the same in Kenya, and it was in this spirit that I returned home” (97).

Trees

SHE CONTINUES her study in Kenya, registering for a phd in the biological sciences at the University of Nairobi where she also teaches. She is awarded her doctorate degree in 1971 on completion of her research, making her the first woman in east and central Africa with such a qualification. Her main work subsequently is not focused on just teaching and researching in the academy but working outside – the daughter-of-the-soil returns, once again, to her roots, to protect the environment from the degradation of soil erosion and gullying, logging and unbridled deforestation, land-grab commercialisation to grow “cash-crops” tea and coffee, for instance, and ever-expanding desertification. The fate of that enduring fig tree that she had known, whilst growing up, appears to register the definitive spur for Maathai’s founding of the movement that would transform debates on the environment in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa: “I learned that someone had acquired the piece of land where the fig tree I was in awe as a child stood. The new owner perceived the tree to be a nuisance because it took up too much space and he felled it to make room to grow tea …[I]t did not surprise me that when  the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I played with tadpoles dried up. My children would never be able to play with the frogs’ eggs as I had … or … enjoy the cool, clear water of that stream. I mourned the loss of that tree” (122).

In 1977, Maathai begins to organise women to plant trees and her influential Green Belt Movement is born and soon spreads across the country, urban and rural, involving family and neighbourhood organisations, schools, churches, trades’ bodies and the like. Under the slogan, “One person, one tree”, the goal is to plant a tree in the country for every person in Kenya’s population of 15 million at the time. Soon, the country’s forestry commission is running short of seedlings, such is the demand to plant trees everywhere. After a decade’s work, an assessment of progress so far is hugely impressive: “several million trees” have been planted with the projection that by the year 2000, the movement would be able to plant 30 million trees, twice the target at initiation (175); about 200 women-groups are now working full time in the project – from nurturing nurseries to tending planted trees; more than a 1000 green belts are being overseen by schools and students; the movement is now spreading to other parts of Africa especially Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda with study groups from these countries visiting Kenya  regularly for exchange of  ideas and  solidarity (177); consequently, the Pan-African Green Belt Network emerges after workshops in Kenya involving 45 representatives from 15 African countries (177).

But these successes have had huge costs on Maathai. She is subjected to a series of harassments, intimidations, arbitrary arrests and detentions by the police and other state armed agencies and even imprisonment, on a number of occasions, by the increasingly authoritarian state led by Daniel arap Moi which views her work on the environment as essentially “political”.

MAATHAI has undoubtedly expanded the parameters of her work to incorporate organised protests against unlawful detentions and gaoling of citizens, support for freedom of speech and association, students’ and workers’ rights, and anti-corruption campaigns against public officials including those in such sensitive sectors that affect people’s everyday life such as the judiciary and law enforcement bureaus. The Maathai-led October 1989-January 1990 mass opposition to the Moi regime’s attempt to build a 60-storey tower office and a shopping complex fronted by an imposing stature of the tyrant in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s equivalent of London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Central Park, is unquestionably the landmark, epic struggle of her illustrious career and her success in forcing the regime to abandon this project, utterly humiliated, marks the beginning of the end of that dictatorship.

To be

On a personal level, though, the strain of such high-profile and very busy work schedule begins to affect family life, and, in Maathai’s case, results in the breakdown of her marriage to an influential Kenyan politician and entrepreneur. The divorce proceedings are very bitter and play out in public with the husband, Mwangi Mathai, insisting that Maathai drop her married name (i.e., the man’s surname, “Mathai”!) as part of the “final settlement” of the marriage’s dissolution. Ironically, Maathai had felt even before marriage in 1969, three years after returning from the US, that she would rather retain her name, Wangari Muta, in keeping to her historic resolution of the name-question earlier on in the decade. She didn’t want to be a Mrs Wangari Mathai! Besides, the “Mrs” is a title introduced to the country by the British as women in pre-conquest Gĩkũyũ and other African nations kept their names after marriage. Maathai only relented then on taking on the “Mrs” and becoming Wangari Mathai because the subject was creating some strain early on her marriage. Now, eight years later, she is challenged in court by her estranged husband to drop the name that she had not sought for in the first place. So nearly 20 years since Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Maathai faces yet another crisis on name and naming. True to type, she responds intelligently and resolutely:   

I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m not an object the name of which can change with every new owner!’ And I had resisted adopting his name in the first place! As a way to deal with my terrible feelings of rejection, I got the idea of adding another ‘a’ to ‘Mathai’ and to write it as it is pronounced in [Gĩkũyũ]. And so I became ‘Maathai’. The extra syllable also signified that although a part of me would always be connected to Mwangi and his surname, I had a new identity. Henceforth, only I would define who I was: Wangari Muta Maathai. (147)

On 8 October 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announces that the 2004 Nobel Prize has been awarded to Wangari Muta Maathai for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.  As Maathai receives this news of her outstanding accomplishment, the daughter-of-the-soil turns and faces Mt Kenya: “the source of inspiration for me throughout my life, as well as for generations of people before me” (293).

SADLY, on 25 September 2011, the news is flashed across the world that Wangari Muta Maathai has died unexpectedly in Nairobi after a brief illness. She was 71. She receives a heroine’s funeral by both the Kenyan state and society. According to the latest, 2013 figures from the Green Belt Movement, 51 million trees have been planted in Kenya since the 1977 founding of the organisation. This is well over three times the number of trees envisaged by Maathai’s original conception.

(Alice Coltrane Sextet, “Journey in Satchidananda” [personnel: Coltrane, harp; Pharoah Sanders, soprano saxophone, bells; Cecil McBee, bass; Tulsi, tambura; Majid Shabazz, tambourine, bells; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studios, Dix Hills, New York, US, 8 November 1970])

References
Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”. Kunapipi, 1990, 12, 2, 1-10.

Alice Coltrane Sextet,  “Journey in Satchidananda”. Coltrane home studios, Dix Hills, New York, US, 8 November 1970.

Ekwe Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011.

Maathai, Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story. London: Arrow Books, 2008.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

77th birthday of Wangari Maathai

(Born 1 April 1940, Ihithe, Kenya)

Biologist and iconic exponent of freedom and the environment

IN THE following review essay first published on 17 December 2013 and entitled “Daughter-of-the-soil”, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe reflects on Professor Maathai’s autobiography, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story (London: Arrow Books, 2008), 314pp:

It is unmistakeably evident in the early chapters of this remarkable autobiography by Wangari Maathai, especially those that cover her childhood to adolescence growing up in rural Kenya of the 1940s, how very little appears to exist on the ground to prepare her for the enormous challenges she confronts and overcomes, spectacularly, just a few years subsequently. 

Right from the outset, Maathai is indeed the daughter-of-the-soil and she retains this prestigious accolade throughout her most fulfilling life. As she works full time with her mother on the farm, having been allocated a 15-sq.ft. plot to tend herself at the age of 7 cultivating “sweet potatoes, beans maize, and millet” (Wangari Maathai, 2008: 38), there is no certitude to Maathai’s formal education in a school eventually. But the following year, aged 8, an unexpected conversation between her mother and Maathai’s older brother on one late evening after another hardworking day on the farm, would change the direction of young Wangari’s life. Maathai learns, with staggering incredulity, of her parents and brother’s decision to send her to school:

[A]lthough [my mother] had almost no formal education, she agreed with my brother. How grateful I am that she made the decision she did because I could not have made it for myself, and it changed my life… To this day I do not know where the money for my education came from, but my mother probably raised it by working for people in the village, cultivating their land. At that time you could earn up to sixty cents doing such work. (Maathai: 40)

 Contours of conquest and occupation

But the deal for Maathai to go to school is not done, yet! Someone else’s approval must be sought, someone who is not even a member of her family. Just as the hundreds of thousands of Gĩkũyũ people’s families whose legendary fertile lands in the central and western Kenyan highlands have been seized by the British occupation regime and handed over to 40,000 European-descent immigrant-“settlers” (predominantly from Britain, Germany, South Africa, Australia and Canada) by the beginning of the 1950s (10), Maathai’s “displaced” family now lives on one such “settler” farm owned by a recent British arrival, D.N. Neylan. Maathai’s family’s official designation in their new abode, as the rest of these nascent landless Africans, is “tenant-at-will”, as distinguished writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Maathai’s compatriot and contemporary recalls his own family’s experience (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46), or “squatter-on-the-farm” as Maathai prefers instead: “My father had no title to the land where he had established his household – he was effectively a squatter on the farm … [H]e could build housing for his family and cultivate crops on land Mr Neylan apportioned to him … [In return] the man, his wife, and children were all required to provide labor. They were really glorified slaves…” (Maathai: 14-15). 

So, given this evident use-of-labour status in the “squatters-on-the-farm” provision, Neylan pointedly asks Maathai’s father who would “pick his pyrethrum” on the farm (plant used as insecticide and picking it is a specialism reserved for African children!) if the young Wangari goes to school, to which her father replies: “Don’t worry, [Mr Neylan], there are still many children in my homestead” (Maathai: 29). Educating African children, Maathai recalls, gravely, “was not a priority for the settlers” (29).

Just as Ngũgĩ (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46-48), Maathai is a keen witness to the momentous clash of two fiercely contradictory streams of consciousness and movement in the Kenya of her childhood whose outcome would impact on her and others of her generation most profoundly subsequently. On the one hand, there is the juggernaut of an insistent, if not desperate occupation regime which wants to consolidate its stranglehold on strategic and wealthy Kenya, 50 years after the beginning of its conquest and despite the lessons of the recently concluded Second World War and the 1947 liberation of India, and the other hand is the challenge of the land and freedom-bound army of the Mau Mau resistance. 

The significance of this clash dawns on Maathai perhaps most acutely in her new school, a catholic school run by Italian nuns. She readily excels in all her lessons but is shocked to be confronted with a very important school rule, arguably the most important school rule, which bans the speaking or any other forms of communication in Gĩkũyũ as well as in other African languages throughout the school premises. The only language allowed in school is English. Any student who contravenes this law wears a button of shame known as the “monitor”:

 It was sometimes inscribed with phrases in English such as ‘I am stupid. I was caught speaking my mother tongue’. At the end of the day, whoever ended up with the button received a [physical] punishment, such as cutting grass, sweeping, or doing work in the garden. But the greater punishment was the embarrassment you felt because you had talked in your mother tongue. In retrospect, I can see that this introduced us to the world of undermining our self-confidence … trivialization of anything African and lays the foundation for a deeper sense of self-doubt… (59-60)

Maathai soon realises that that much-cherished anchor of family and Gĩkũyũ national life which has sustained her for ten years, this daughter-of-the-soil, is at best tenuous… It is now evident to her that for her family, living on Neylan’s farm in the wake of being thrown out of their land by the occupation, it is not only a material loss, important as this is, but, more tragically, the loss of culture or a people’s identity. Neylan’s question of who would “pick his pyrethrum” is not just the seemingly casual remark uttered by a British head of a “settler”-farm on whether or not an 8-year-old African child in Kenya should go to school but a metaphor that captures, quite graphically, the aftermath of the subjugation of a people. The impact of this history on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance,  is that 50 years hence, he writes only in Gĩkũyũ as he makes his contribution to the literary, political and philosophical discourses of the peoples of the world (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 49-50). As for Maathai, the impact of this history is that 50 years later, she takes an unbowed stand to defend Kenya’s environmental heritage.

IN THE mean time, the broader canvass of certain features of Maathai’s own family history begins to acquire some intelligibility, on further reflection by her, in the wake of her school’s encounter with the constrictive edict on African expressivity and being. A clear example is the story of uncle Thumbi, his father’s older brother who had been conscripted by the occupation regime to fight against the Italians and Germans in neighbouring Somalia and Tanganyika, respectively, during the 1914-1918 World War I. Thumbi never returns from the campaign (later confirmed dead by a fellow Gĩkũyũ comrade who survived and had seen Thumbi “fall” at the battlefield) and his name and memory never mentioned again within the family so as not to upset Maathai’s grandmother who still grieves for her son despite the passage of time. Most tellingly, though, the occupation regime never informs Maathai’s family of what happened to Thumbi. As would be the case of the 100,000 Gĩkũyũ conscripts who died during this campaign (27), the perverse, double-jeopardy fate of an already occupied African national forced by the occupier to fight in the latter’s subsequent wars of intra-imperialist rivalries and expropriations (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 56-57), Maathai describes the death of Thumbi as “still an open wound [in my family]… I want to say to the British government, ‘My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son’” (28).

Name, names, naming, presence

Yet if there is ever the singular site of a clearly discernible de-Africanisation programme that projects the searing, triumphal outcome of the pan-European conquest and occupation of Africa, the focus must be on that crucial subject of name and naming – precisely the reference to the individual an how he or she is identified by the rest of society: What is your name? In occupied Kenya, the African “loses” their surname or family name. They are “officially” identified by their forename(s). In Maathai’s example, before going to school, she is known, interchangeably, as Wangari Miriam or Mariam Wangari, both being her forenames! On arrival at school, following baptism as a catholic, Maathai becomes Mary Josephine Wangari or Mary Jo Wangari – again, all forenames and no surname. In a few years, in 1960, after wining a scholarship to study at university in the United States, she is called “Miss Wangari” by her professors and fellow students on campus because everyone assumes, of course, that “Wangari” is her second name/surname. Reacting to this development, with her infectious sense of humour, Maathai writes:

This began to seem absurd, since I knew the term ‘Miss’ meant the ‘unmarried daughter of …’ and I knew I was not the unmarried daughter of myself.  I decided to put this right and began writing my name as Mary Josephine Wangari Muta [father’s name!], so I’d be called Miss Muta. I then reversed my primary and personal names, becoming Wangari Mary Josephine Muta, and later dropped Mary Josephine because the name had become too long. When I returned to Kenya [1966], I was Wangari Muta. That was what I should always have been. (96)

Maathai is 20 when she finally reconnects with her family name – not within her country but in a foreign land. The legacy of the encompassing African World historical experience of the previous 400 years is not lost on Maathai as she sees a link between her, from east Africa, and African Americans in this country where she is studying for a bachelor’s degree: “The way surnames were forgotten in Kenya struck me as similar to how many African Americans in the times of [enslavement] and segregation were known only by their first names, yet had to address white people as Mr. or Miss, followed by their surnames” (96). On this overriding question of names and naming across the African World, Chinua Achebe, the Father of African Literature, has aptly observed and it is important to quote him at length:

[The European conquest of Africa] may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and you won’t to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold and diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the right sense of the word – that he and they had just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally if the worse comes to the worse, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. From denying the presence of a man standing there before you, you end up questioning his very humanity …[I]n the [European conquest] situation presence was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of [this conquest’s] ideology. (Chinua Achebe, 1990: 4; emphasis added)

The lift!
The scholarship on which Maathai goes to the US to study at Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Kansas (now Benedictine College) is from the Joseph Kennedy Foundation. Three hundred Kenyans benefitted from this scholarship. The then young Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts was very interested and personally involved in the programme which included covering transport costs for these students to their various colleges of admission in the US and back home after completion of studies. Following Maathai’s successful bachelor’s degree at Atchison, she studies and earns an MA in biology at the University of Pittsburgh before returning home. Besides enabling her resolve the legacy of historical identity denial, Maathai has fond memories of her six years living in the US: “… America transformed me. It made me into the person I am today. It taught me not to waste any opportunity to do what can be done – and there is a lot to do. The spirit of freedom and possibility that America nurtured in me made me want to foster the same in Kenya, and it was in this spirit that I returned home” (97).

Trees

She continues her study in Kenya, registering for a phd in the biological sciences at the University of Nairobi where she also teaches. She is awarded her doctorate degree in 1971 on completion of her research, making her the first woman in east and central Africa with such a qualification. Her main work subsequently is not focused on just teaching and researching in the academy but working outside – the daughter-of-the-soil returns, once again, to her roots, to protect the environment from the degradation of soil erosion and gullying, logging and unbridled deforestation, land-grab commercialisation to grow “cash-crops” tea and coffee, for instance, and ever-expanding desertification. The fate of that enduring fig tree that she had known, whilst growing up, appears to register the definitive spur for Maathai’s founding of the movement that would transform debates on the environment in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa: “I learned that someone had acquired the piece of land where the fig tree I was in awe as a child stood. The new owner perceived the tree to be a nuisance because it took up too much space and he felled it to make room to grow tea …[I]t did not surprise me that when  the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I played with tadpoles dried up. My children would never be able to play with the frogs’ eggs as I had … or … enjoy the cool, clear water of that stream. I mourned the loss of that tree” (122).

In 1977, Maathai begins to organise women to plant trees and her influential Green Belt Movement is born and soon spreads across the country, urban and rural, involving family and neighbourhood organisations, schools, churches, trades’ bodies and the like. Under the slogan, “One person, one tree”, the goal is to plant a tree in the country for every person in Kenya’s population of 15 million at the time. Soon, the country’s forestry commission is running short of seedlings, such is the demand to plant trees everywhere. After a decade’s work, an assessment of progress so far is hugely impressive: “several million trees” have been planted with the projection that by the year 2000, the movement would be able to plant 30 million trees, twice the target at initiation (175); about 200 women-groups are now working full time in the project – from nurturing nurseries to tending planted trees; more than a 1000 green belts are being overseen by schools and students; the movement is now spreading to other parts of Africa especially Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda with study groups from these countries visiting Kenya  regularly for exchange of  ideas and  solidarity (177); consequently, the Pan-African Green Belt Network emerges after workshops in Kenya involving 45 representatives from 15 African countries (177).

But these successes have had huge costs on Maathai. She is subjected to a series of harassments, intimidations, arbitrary arrests and detentions by the police and other state armed agencies and even imprisonment, on a number of occasions, by the increasingly authoritarian state led by Daniel arap Moi which views her work on the environment as essentially “political”.

MAATHAI has undoubtedly expanded the parameters of her work to incorporate organised protests against unlawful detentions and gaoling of citizens, support for freedom of speech and association, students’ and workers’ rights, and anti-corruption campaigns against public officials including those in such sensitive sectors that affect people’s everyday life such as the judiciary and law enforcement bureaus. The Maathai-led October 1989-January 1990 mass opposition to the Moi regime’s attempt to build a 60-storey tower office and a shopping complex fronted by an imposing stature of the tyrant in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s equivalent of London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Central Park, is unquestionably the landmark, epic struggle of her illustrious career and her success in forcing the regime to abandon this project, utterly humiliated, marks the beginning of the end of that dictatorship.

To be

On a personal level, though, the strain of such high-profile and very busy work schedule begins to affect family life, and, in Maathai’s case, results in the breakdown of her marriage to an influential Kenyan politician and entrepreneur. The divorce proceedings are very bitter and play out in public with the husband, Mwangi Mathai, insisting that Maathai drop her married name (i.e., the man’s surname, “Mathai”!) as part of the “final settlement” of the marriage’s dissolution. Ironically, Maathai had felt even before marriage in 1969, three years after returning from the US, that she would rather retain her name, Wangari Muta, in keeping to her historic resolution of the name-question earlier on in the decade. She didn’t want to be a Mrs Wangari Mathai! Besides, the “Mrs” is a title introduced to the country by the British as women in pre-conquest Gĩkũyũ and other African nations kept their names after marriage. Maathai only relented then on taking on the “Mrs” and becoming Wangari Mathai because the subject was creating some strain early on her marriage. Now, eight years later, she is challenged in court by her estranged husband to drop the name that she had not sought for in the first place. So nearly 20 years since Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Maathai faces yet another crisis on name and naming. True to type, she responds intelligently and resolutely:   

I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m not an object the name of which can change with every new owner!’ And I had resisted adopting his name in the first place! As a way to deal with my terrible feelings of rejection, I got the idea of adding another ‘a’ to ‘Mathai’ and to write it as it is pronounced in [Gĩkũyũ]. And so I became ‘Maathai’. The extra syllable also signified that although a part of me would always be connected to Mwangi and his surname, I had a new identity. Henceforth, only I would define who I was: Wangari Muta Maathai. (147)

On 8 October 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announces that the 2004 Nobel Prize has been awarded to Wangari Muta Maathai for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.  As Maathai receives this news of her outstanding accomplishment, the daughter-of-the-soil turns and faces Mt Kenya: “the source of inspiration for me throughout my life, as well as for generations of people before me” (293).

Sadly, on 25 September 2011, the news is flashed across the world that Wangari Muta Maathai has died unexpectedly in Nairobi after a brief illness. She was 71. She receives a heroine’s funeral by both the Kenyan state and society. According to the latest, 2013 figures from the Green Belt Movement, 51 million trees have been planted in Kenya since the 1977 founding of the organisation. This is well over three times the number of trees envisaged by Maathai’s original conception.

(Alice Coltrane Sextet, “Journey in Satchidananda” [personnel: Coltrane, harp; Pharoah Sanders, soprano saxophone, bells; Cecil McBee, bass; Tulsi, tambura; Majid Shabazz, tambourine, bells; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studios, Dix Hills, New York, US, 8 November 1970])

References

Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”. Kunapipi, 1990, 12, 2, 1-10.

Alice Coltrane Sextet,  “Journey in Satchidananda”. Coltrane home studios, Dix Hills, New York, US, 8 November 1970.

Ekwe Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011.

Maathai, Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story. London: Arrow Books, 2008.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Professor Kalu Ogbaa, who attended the April 1980 Gainesville (Florida) conference of the African Literature Association that featured the conversation between Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin (posted on rethinkingafrica, Sunday 13 November 2016), reflects on the historic occasion…

(Kalu Ogbaa: ... fond memories of the great literary Africana Renaissance in me...)

Kalu Ogbaa, professor of English, Southern Connecticut State University, writes:

Thank you so much for publishing this 
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/james-baldwin-and-chinua-achebe-african.html). It conjures up fond memories of the great literary Africana Renaissance in me. I took active part in that conference and presented a provocative paper titled “The Critics of Chinua Achebe”. The late Professor John Povey of UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] took issues with me for describing African unwritten literature (oral performance or orature) as legitimate literature; whereupon I challenged him for daring to call Homer’s and (to an extent) Milton’s works literature for they chanted their poems orally but were later on transcribed and published by their daughters as written literature. From the reactions of the audience, I thought I won the debate.

Also, during that conference, I had the opportunity to interview Achebe. The content of that interview was so seminal that Bernth Lindfors published it as a lead article in the special volume of Research in African Literature, Vol. 12, #1 (1981), 1-13, devoted entirely to the criticism of Achebe’s works, and thereafter reissued as a chapter in Conversations with Chinua Achebe, edited by Bernth Lindfors (Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 64-75). “The Critics of Chinua Achebe” article was also published in Commonwealth Quarterly, Vol. 14, #39, 1989, 19-31). I think both works laid the foundation upon which I built my reputation as an Achebephile.

I read all the things you have been publishing in your notable rethinkingafrica. They are music to my ears and a balm to my sometimes troubled soul. Remain ever blessed!

Kalu Ogbaa

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

3rd anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country

(Published 27 September 2012, Penguin, London, Britain)

Father of African Literature’s incomparable memoirs on the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, when the Nigeria state and its allies, principally Britain under the primeministership of Harold Wilson, murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

FWD – Conference on “Forty Years After: Chinua Achebe and Africa in the Global Imagination” – University of Massachusetts Amherst, 14-15 October 2015

“In 1899 Joseph Conrad published a short work of fiction called Heart of Darkness.  This novella is often read, discussed, criticized in literature programs throughout the world.  It is a work that allow us to tackle a variety of topics, and is therefore responded to in a variety of ways. The work itself as one critic puts it “might most usefully be considered hyper-canonized” (Padmini “Why” 104).  The work is taught beyond the realm of a normal work in the literature program.  Many forms of criticism have taken on the subject matter within the book feminism, psycho-analytic, Marxism have all had things to say about the novella.  They’ve discussed things such as imperialism, the psychology of Marlow and Kurtz, the role of women in the novella (both literally and symbolically), all these issues are important topics in the novella.  For a long time, however one crucial issue in the work was not addressed, that of race.

It was not until 1975 when Chinua Achebe gave his famous lecture, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that the issue of race was tackled head on in Conrad’s work.  It is this lecture that has become the cornerstone of writing and criticism of Heart of Darkness.  It would be hard to find an essay since then that doesn’t in some way discuss or acknowledge Achebe’s essay.   Even critics who do not use take into account historical or auto-biographical details of a work, such as Miller, have written responses to Achebe.  In Miller’s essay “Should we read Heart of Darkness?” he discusses, in his own way, the essence of Achebe’s argument that the novella should not be read because of its racist undertones.  On critic has even gone on to say that Achebe’s essay has become a work included in the literature canon.

The lecture given at the University of Massachusetts in early 1975 was published as an essay in The Massachusetts Review, and later republished in The Norton Critical Edition Heart of Darkness.  Achebe’s main theme within the essay is “the need—in Western psychology to set up Africa as a foil to Europe” (“Image” 252).  Within the context of this theme he goes on to criticize what he considers a work of “permanent literature”, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.   He discusses how within the context of the work we can see that Conrad was nothing more than a racist.   The entire argument of the essay, both the ignorance of Western literature and Conrad’s racism, can be summed up in the following passage:

Africa as a setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as a human factor … Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind?  But that is not even the point.  The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world.  And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization… can be called a great work of art.  My answer is:  “No it cannot (“Image” 257). It is interesting how most critics focus on the first two sentences of the beginning of this passage, the idea of Africa as the setting.  Few it seems what to take on the charge that Heart of Darkness is not a great work of art.”1

“Achebe's criticism has become a mainstream perspective on Conrad’s work. The essay was included in the 1988 Norton critical edition of Conrad’s novel. Editor Robert Kimbrough called it one of “the three most important events in Heart of Darkness criticism since the second edition of his book ...”. ^[121] Critic Nicolas Tredell divides Conrad criticism “into two epochal phases: before and after Achebe”. ^[122] Asked frequently about his essay, Achebe once explained that he never meant for the work to be abandoned: “It's not in my nature to talk about banning books. I am saying, read it – with the kind of understanding and with the knowledge I talk about. And read it beside African works”. ^[121] Interviewed on National Public Radio with Robert Siegel, in October 2009, Achebe remains consistent, although tempering this criticism in a discussion entitled “‘Heart of Darkness’ is inappropriate’: “Conrad was a seductive writer. He could pull his reader into the fray. And if it were not for what he said about me and my people, I would probably be thinking only of that seduction”. ^[123]2

(University of Massachusetts Amherst [chapel and library])

*****Forty years after that influential lecture was delivered, the University of Massachusetts will gather scholars, students, intellectuals, and writers from around the world to the beautiful campus at Amherst to examine the impact of Achebe’s essay on the global imagination. The opening day will recreate the intellectual ambiance and reception of the speech of the distinguished professor here in Amherst fifty years ago. The effect of Professor Achebe’s delivery in and upon the context of the state of the literary and political vocabulary dominant in Western intellectual circles at the time will be clearly outlined. The second day will invite contemporary discussion by writers of another generation on the state of the literary/cultural discourse between Africa and the West as it exists today. The purpose of the second day will be to try to evaluate any progress or evolution in the quality of cultural discourse between the West and the rest of us and the long term effects of the speech therein.

1) http://loki.stockton.edu/~kinsellt/projects/hod/achebe.html

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe

For more details, please contact:

                            

Professor Stephen Clingman, director, The Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, clingman@english.umass.edu

Michael Thelwell, writer, author and professor emeritus of African American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, emthelwell@gmail.com

*********************************************************************************************** 

Chinua Achebe: The lecture heard around the world

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261

---

In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain Community College not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.” A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who – bless their teacher – had just read Things Fall Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe.

I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them. But only, I hope, at first sight. The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things.

The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I believe that something more willful than a mere lack of information was at work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist?

If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.

This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class – permanent literature – read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it “among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise.

Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks.” But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.

These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.” That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well – one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to quote almost a whole page from about the middle of the stop/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa.

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, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.  

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 and the men were… No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend.

Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours… Ugly.” Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity – and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance.

“Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place,” he tells us pointedly. Tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe stronghold between the policeman and the baker to like a peep into the heart of darkness.

Before the story takes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice little vignette as an example of things in their place:

Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks – these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and hue as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.

Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent... She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.

This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons. First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story:

She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning… She took both my hands in hers and murmured, “I had heard you were coming.” ... She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.

The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subfile ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the “rudimentary souls” of Africa. In place of speech they made “a violent babble of uncouth sounds.” They “exchanged short grunting phrases” even among themselves. But most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them: “Catch ‘im,” he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth – “catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.” “To you, eh?” I asked; “what would you do with them?” “Eat ‘im!” he said curtly… The other occasion was the famous announcement: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”

At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults. In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad's purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz’s death by the “insolent black head in the doorway” what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and “taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land” than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?

It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete confidence – a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers.

Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever.

Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these:

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. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.

The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says: “The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother.” And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being. Naturally he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious miracle in Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest.

Conrad’s liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer’s, though. He would not use the word brother however qualified; the farthest he would go was kinship. When Marlow’s African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives his white master one final disquieting look:

And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory – like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.

It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad: “... the thought of their humanity – like yours … Ugly.”

The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad’s great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments:

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile water to bar the way for our return.

Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last fifty years. His obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was!

Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing:

A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.

Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description:

A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms…

as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad’s obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He calls him “my unforgettable Englishman” and describes him in the following manner:

(his) calves exposed to the public gaze … dazzled the beholder by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory … The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men … illumined his face … and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth … his white calves twinkled sturdily.

Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer’s mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.

Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as “among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.

There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.

Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, did sail down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms. How could I stand up more than fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any traveler’s tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evidence even off man’s very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s. And we also happen to know that Conrad was, in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, “notoriously inaccurate in the rendering of his own history.”

But more important by far is the abundant testimony about Conrad’s savages which we could gather if we were so inclined from other sources and which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations besides merging into the evil forest or materializing out of it simply to plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad had written his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art historian, describes it:

Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act of turning to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was “speechless” and “stunned” when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze … The revolution of twentieth century art was under way!

The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of Conrad’s River Congo. They have a name too: the Fang people, and are without a doubt among the world’s greatest masters of the sculptured form. The event Frank Willett is referring to marks the beginning of cubism and the infusion of new life into European art, which had run completely out of strength.

The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad’s picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopold’s lnternational Association for the Civilization of Central Africa.

Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. But even those not blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing blind. Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid travelers of all time, Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled Description of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. But there were at least two extraordinary omissions in his account. He said nothing about the art of printing, unknown as yet in Europe but in full flower in China. He either did not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it. Whatever the reason, Europe had to wait another hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polo's omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles long and already more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the moon! Indeed travelers can be blind.

As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray – a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.

In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people – not angels, but not rudimentary souls either – just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart; when I thought of the West's television and cinema and newspapers, about books read in its schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible. And there was, in any case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in return for its good opinion of Africa. Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward. Although I have used the word willful a few times here to characterize the West's view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this stage is more akin to reflex action than calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more but less hopeful.

The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than most, once carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:

In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language.

I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically erroneous in the context is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad’s withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects!

In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only to the image of despised peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress. Look at the phrase native language in the Science Monitor excerpt. Surely the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our writer means something else – something appropriate to the sounds Indians and Africans make!

Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad.

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