Debating Aid and the African Renaissance

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009). New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The Wizard of the Crow (2006). London: Harvill Secker.

Dambisa Moyo. Dead Aid : Why Aid is not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa (2009). London: Allen Lane.

Part I: Keepers of Communal Memory: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Something Torn and New”

By Gabriele Schwab

There is no region, no culture, no nation today that has not been affected by colonialism and its aftermath. Indeed, modernity can be considered a product of colonialism.  This book speaks to the decolonization of modernity. – Ngugi wa Thiong’o

 

Something Torn and New is about the systematic starving and killing of indigenous languages and the conditions for their revival. Linguifam and linguicide, the most pernicious attacks on indigenous cultures worldwide, belong to the ongoing effects of colonialism.  African languages have become, in the words Ngugi borrowed for his title from Kamau Brathwaite,  “something torn and new.”   Torn asunder, indigenous languages are “forced to whisper like hungry ghosts;”  renewed, they become the base of a Pan-African renaissance.  Centuries of colonial attacks have turned indigenous languages – even the languages of the ancient civilizations of Ghana, Mali, Sudan, and Mwenematope – into “ghosts from graveyards over which now lie European linguistic plantations.”   Postcolonial intellectuals prefer to express communal memories in foreign languages while fragments of indigenous languages languish as “exquisite corpses”  in literary zones of abandonment.   African postcolonial writers, Ngugi deplores, borrow those fragments of dismembered indigenous languages in order to rejuvenate colonial master languages with native rhythms, while remaining indifferent to the death of their mother tongues.

How may we read these tropes of haunting?  Ngugi places this “death wish” into the historical context of the pervasive dismemberment of bodies, communities, homelands, and minds that accompanied the colonization of Africa: the continent’s dismemberment into British, French, Portuguese, German, Belgian and Spanish colonies was doubled by dismembering its peoples into the continent and the Diaspora.  But what was needed to sustain this colonial enterprise was a dismemberment of psychic lives through targeted attacks on communal memory and indigenous languages.  In his influential article on the mirror-stage, Lacan argues that phantasms of the fragmented body belong to the most archaic fears that haunt the sense of an integrated self.  Ngugi’s reflections in Something Torn and New on the dismemberment of indigenous languages seem to suggest that we may imagine something akin to phantasms of the fragmented language that haunt the integrity of a language community. Like victims of violent crimes and murders, the starved and dead languages come to haunt the living.  According to Ngugi, linguicide requires the complicity, forced or voluntary, of the speakers and writers whose language is under attack.  This is why Ngugi takes postcolonial African writers to task for preferring to “express communal memories in foreign languages”  and for using “the European linguistic screen” as a divider from their own peoples.  In this vein, communal memory is filtered in the screen memory  of the colonizer’s language.

“We may borrow from psychoanalysis to explain the formerly colonized natives’ death wish for the languages of their cultures,”Ngugi writes, linking the attempt at appropriating the colonizer’s language in Anglophone or Francophone African literatures to an inability or a refusal to mourn.  “They shut the trauma in a psychic tomb, acting as if the loss never happened.  The radical denial of loss means no mourning at all, for you cannot mourn a loss you deny.”   Ngugi goes so far as to see Europhone literatures as a form of cryptonymic hiding in another’s language that facilitates a flight from the postcolonial writers’ own histories:  “The new language becomes a screen against the past.”   A screen hides, makes invisible and replaces.   According to Ngugi, this logic of substitution amounts to theft:  “Europhone African literature has stolen the identity of African literature.”

This may well be the most controversial position Ngugi advances in Something Torn and New.  While Ngugi never questions the importance of Europhone literatures (after all his own work has substantially contributed to it), he nonetheless criticizes its role at the present time in the sharpest terms.  He himself has long ago made a firm political commitment to write his work first in his native Kikuyu and then to translate it into English. Postcolonial writers, however, argue that the former colonizers’ languages – English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German – no longer belong to the colonizer, and that they have appropriated them on their own terms, making them their own by infusing them with indigenous inflections, rhythms, styles, or even syntax and grammar.  They also argue that they cannot ignore the power relations in today’s global world that determine who and what gets published where, and who is read in countries across the globe.  Familiar with these arguments, Ngugi addresses them by insisting that at this particular time in history, and especially in the context of a growing Pan-Africanist Movement not only in Africa but in the US and beyond, it is crucial that more writers return to write in their native languages.   While focusing on Africa, Ngugi’s reflections have much larger implications for and raise crucial questions regarding the global movements of indigenous language revival.  Would Ngugi make the same claims he makes about African languages about indigenous languages more generally?   What would his position be regarding indigenous writers who have never learned their indigenous languages of origin and whose first language is thus the language of the colonizer?  Would the politics of appropriation change?  Can there not be a politics of resilience and resistance from within, and what would it look like? Can there not be a mourning rather than denial of loss within the appropriated language of the colonizer?   Can there be an exhibition of collective grief and an assertion of resilience that is not a “hiding in language” or a burial of past history in the crypt of the Other’s language?  In other words, what are the conditions of making a language one’s own that was originally forced upon one’s people?   And what are the conditions of using that very language as a tool of resistance?

The greatest challenge for the African Renaissance and revival of indigenous African languages Ngugi envisions is, of course, the overwhelming multiplicity of African languages within and between states, as well as the fear that reviving them would exacerbate the fragmentation of the continent, or in the worst case feed into new wars of secession like the ones that devastated Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, and Ethiopia.  Other indigenous writers on different continents and (post)colonial conditions do not have to face the same fears.  For those who live on their own homelands in forced coexistence with the colonizers, the issue may rather be sovereignty than the fear of secession.  We may recall that the different concerns with sovereignty versus secession were at the forefront of divisions regarding the UN declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  It was the fear of secession and its fatal consequences that led many African states to resist the declaration in its initial stages.  While Ngugi acknowledges these fears, he reminds his readers that the wars of secession were not fought on language lines.  He also reminds them that the astounding multiplicity of African languages would not be worse than the multiplicity of European languages.   In answer to the question whether Africa would “become a house of Babel,”  he proposes: “the solution lies in translation.”   For Ngugi, the single most important political steps toward an African Renaissance are thus Pan-Africanism, the rival of indigenous languages and a cutting-edge politics of translation that places indigenous languages at the center.  “Translation is the language of languages, a language through which all languages can talk to one another.”   These three elements – Pan-Africanism, revival of indigenous languages and translation — must be developed together since it is translation that provides the basis for an indigenous language revival that Ngugi considers indispensable for Pan-Africanism.  The global vision on indigenous languages developed in Something Torn and New further suggests the validity of the centrality of translation for a global politics on indigenous languages, if not a Pan-indigenous movement.

Seen from within a struggle for decolonization (Ngugi speaks of “decolonizing modernity”), Something Torn and New thus proposes yet another turn to the politics of resistance and resilience that Ngugi has developed since the beginning of his career as a writer and critic.  “If history is replete with the death of languages as a result of the physical or cultural death of the peoples who spoke them, there also have been cases where languages have been resurrected,” Ngugi writes and emphasizes the unique position of Continental Africa in today’s worldwide struggle for the revival of indigenous languages because, in contrast to many other indigenous languages, African languages have not yet died. In Ngugi’s global vision, the struggle for the revival of African languages with its indispensable politics of translation may thus well become a model for the revival of indigenous languages worldwide.

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Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor’s Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine

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Part II: Of Aid and the African Renaissance: A discussion from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The Wizard of the Crow, and Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa

By Cilas Kemedjio

The encounter between the African continent and capitalistic modernity, the aggressive expression of the European Renaissance, plunged Africa “into the dark side of the European Enlightenment, a darkness that lasted from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century” (Ngugi 2009, 71) leading to the paralyzing disruption in Africa’s development. Following this damaging encounter, Africa, despite herself, has become a donor that feeds the West: “[T[he continent’s relationship to the world has thus far been that of a donor to the West. Africa has given her human beings, her resources, and even her spiritual products through Africans writing in European languages. We should strive to do it the other way around” (Ngugi 2009, 128). The author of Decolonizing the Mind challenges the prevalent humanitarian paradigm by inviting the reader to rethink “donor” relationship and to imagine how Africa has become a donor to the West, even though the idea of the West being a donor to Africa is dominant and has not (as Dambisa Moyo argues in Dead Aid) done much good. Ngugi effects a radical reversal in the ideologies that are based upon colonialist mythologies of aid to Africa.

This radical reversal goes beyond economic dispossession to encompass what Ngugi perceives as the stealing of African cultural heritage through linguistic famine and linguistic genocide. Linguistic famine “is to language what famine is to the people who speak them—linguistic deprivation and, ultimately, starvation” (Ngugi 2009, 18). It transforms age-old civilizations into cemeteries strewn with European linguistics plantings (Ngugi 2009, 19). The postcolonial intellectual who adopts the languages of the colonizers installs African literary creation–the tutelary guardian of historical memory–in a precarious, indeed untenable position. The adoption of European languages by African writers functions as a validation of linguistic famine that leads to the mutilation of their identity and the recuperation of their creativity through Europhonic linguistic plantings: “Like the Anglo-Irish literature that took the mantle of Irish literature, Europhone-African literature has stolen the identity of African literature” (Ngugi 2009, 51; my emphasis). The translation of Europhonic texts into African languages represents a means to retrieve this cultural heritage that had been expropriated through the process of the imposition of the colonizer’s language and the subsequent marginalization of African languages. Even if actual physical return has produced nations such as Liberia or Sierra Leone, or allowed personalities such as Blyden, Hollis Lynch, or even W. E. B. DuBois to rediscover the African matrix, Ngugi judges that “the farthest-reaching return would be that of the spiritual heritage created by people of African descent all over the world. This return of the spirit would be effected through translations into African languages.” The example of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, translated into IsiXhosa by South African poet J. J. Lolobe in the 1950s, is edifying. Still, in order to make an impact, it would have to be integrated into the massive translation project that Ngugi considers a manifestation of patriotism: “[T]ranslation is an act of patriotism, a central re-membering practice with the re-membering vision of Greater Pan-Africanism” (2009, 128). The African renaissance constitutes a reactivation of the positive utopias contained in the Pan-Africanist intentions that include the repudiation “of the European post-renaissance memory and seize back the right and the initiative to name the world by reconnecting to our memory” (Ngugi 2009, 130). In that sense, it organizes an awakening from the long sleep of historical fatality to engage in historical movement again, under the supervision of a recovered memory, that is, one that is also decolonized. Moving away from the traumatism of a paralyzing historical memory would re-establish Africans as decisive agents of their rebirth. The recuperation of spiritual and cultural heritage should be a prelude to a remobilization of energies to overcome the dispossession engendered by the aggressive European Renaissance.

If Africa has become a donor to the West, the African Renaissance presupposes a recapturing of that which was stolen, that is, a negation of the extractive relationship dictated by the European Renaissance: “The success of Africa’s renaissance depends on its commitment and ability to re-member itself, guided by the great re-membering vision of Pan-Africanism” (Ngugi 2009, 88). Pan-Africanism appears as the concrete political expression of the idea of Africa forged in the diaspora before making its return trip to the continent. Pan-Africanism finds its primary expression in the triumph of the Haitian Revolution of 1804. Pan-African consciousness, in its return to Africa, fertilizes the idea of an African identity that transcends ethnic partitions. In 1912, the founding of the African National Congress, a movement that supersedes ethnic nationalities for a political vision, crystallizes “the African idea as an active agency in the constitution of the Afro-modern” (Ngugi 2009, 74). The African renaissance is nevertheless hindered by the consuming bourgeoisie that, bogged down in neocolonialism, Cold War schemings and globalization, “uses the ship of state to loot the nation” (Ngugi 2009, 82). The defeat of the Pan-Africanist utopia is translated as famished bodies that proliferate failed States: “as a result of famines, massacres, denials of rights, insecurity, and intolerance—replicas of colonial times—virtually every African State is hosting refugees from its neighbors and citizens continue to flee from the continent altogether—a brain drain that is much talked about. In this sense African renaissance means, first and foremost, the economic and political recovery of the continent’s power, as enshrined in the vision of Pan-Africanism” (Ngugi 2009, 89). States depending on humanitarian manna for their survival reproduce the pathetic destiny of populations that, by being forced to beg, end up as veritable attractions for tourists who lack inspiration: “Pictures of beggars or wild animals were what many tourists sent back home as proof of having been in Africa. In (fictional) Aburiria, wild animals were becoming rare because of dwindling forests and poaching, and tourist pictures of beggars and children with kwashiorkor and flies massing around their runny noses and sore eyes were prized for their authenticity. If there were no beggars in the streets, tourists might start doubting whether Aburiria was an authentic African country” (Ngugi 2004, 35). The proliferation of refugee camps swarming across the continent creates non-governed enclaves that call for humanitarian intervention.

It becomes therefore important, in light of the reversal suggested by Ngugi about the aid paradigm, to question the role of humanitarianism in the memory of exploitative and unequal power schemes that are, at least in part, responsible for scuttling the project of postcolonial State construction. In other words, is the Western humanitarian organization a challenge or a continuation of the very process that plunged the African continent into darkness?  Ngugi suspects aid, in its humanitarian incarnation, to be the tree that hides the forest of ravages brought on by the adventures of capitalism: “The Global Bank [ i.e. the World Bank] and the Global Ministry of Finance [i.e. The International Monetary Fund] are clearly looking to privatize countries, nations and states. […] Corporate capital was aided by missionary societies. What private capital did then it can again: own and reshape the Third World in the image of the west without the slightest blot, blemish, or blotch. NGOs will do what the missionary charities did in the past” (Ngugi 2006, 746). Ngugi wa Thiong’o approaches the criticism of humanitarian aid through its role in the deployment of the logistics of the subjugation of African peoples. Indeed, as noted earlier, the missionaries of aid, from the beginnings of colonization, have had as their mission to place compresses on the wounds of a disaster brought about in part by the logics of capitalist exploitation.

In The Wizard of the Crow, the protests of the nationalist fringes against the mirage of aid dramatize the mythology of begging that Dambisa Moyo denounces in Dead Aid: “Your Loans Are the Cause of Begging. We Beggars Beg the End of Begging” (Ngugi 2006, 74). Moyo casts blame on aid as the source of the stagnation of the African continent: “Millions in Africa are poorer because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased” (Moyo xix). Moyo defines aid as the combination of gifts (whether or not for emergencies) and loans at preferential rates of interest that are transferred from rich countries to poor countries. Moyo’s definition raises questions. For example, the accounting for aid given is suspect: it presents figures of aid transferred to Africa, but it never offers information on whether or not the loans have been repaid. As a solution, Moyo offers a return to the classicism of economic liberalism through privatization and normalization of the economies of poor countries. Moyo’s solution is a return to the dream of those who envisage “a free and stable world where our money can move across borders without barriers erected by the misguided nationalism of the outmoded nation-state” (Ngugi 2006, 580). Africa’s redemption is to be achieved by adopting the gospel of the market economy that Naomi Klein deconstructs with such perspicacity and passion in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. And it is here that Ngugi and Moyo seem to diverge.

While Moyo undertakes a very technical critique of aid, Ngugi situates the problem of aid in the genealogy of the historic fatality that, in his view, constitutes the basis for problems in Africa. The articulation of incestuous relations between the architects of imperialist capitalism and charitable organizations sheds light on the paradox that haunts Moyo’s work, namely, the continuity of aid despite the fact it does not seem to have much impact in improving the destiny of poor countries. The absence of an historical perspective leads Moyo, for example, to regret the absence of African voices in the debate over aid. But in her book, very little is done to remedy the exclusion of African expertise, thus giving credence to Ngugi’s contention according to which postcolonial intellectuals are busy repressing the memory of colonial violence: “In the continent as a whole, the postcolonial slumber would not be disturbed by memories of the African holocaust. Slavery and colonialism become events of shame, of guilt. Their memory is shut up in a crypt, a collective psychic tomb” (Ngugi 2009, 61).  The passive representation of Africa that comes out of her narrative contrasts with Ngugi’s essay, which, by means of a Panafricanist approach, restores the intellectual richness of the African intellectual heritage. Would it be possible to read Moyo’s technical approach as a reproduction of the masochistic hatred that the colonized develops against his race and culture were thoroughly analyzed by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks? If we provisionally answer with the affirmative to the previous question, Moyo’s failure to locate the aid misunderstanding would parallel the “trials and tribulations” of the postcolonial intellectual who “has screened himself from the trauma, the shame of defeat, the shame of a language or a culture of defeat; and yet at the same time, he freely borrows from the language of shame to claim a separate identity in the language of victory.” (Ngugi 2009, 62-63). Moyo’s undertaking may therefore be read as a consequence of the continuous historical fatality that “can cause a person who has lost her land, who feels the pangs of hunger, who carries flagellated flesh, to look at those experiences differently. It can lead to a pessimism that fails to see in her history any positive lessons in dealing with the present.” (Ngugi 2009 109). Moyo borrows from the « language of shame », that is, the language of the conquering capitalist drive that force Africa into a reluctant donor to the West, to dismantle the « dead aid » that, according to her, is impoverishing the African continent. I would resist the attempt to dismiss her contribution to this debate as nothing more than a self-inflicted whipping, the masochism I alluded to earlier. But reading her book from the ethical demand posited by Ngugi leads to the conclusion that her approach is unlikely to contribute to the African Renaissance.

In sum, the African renaissance ought to put an end to the nightmare that was made possible by what Fanon so rightly calls “trials and tribulations of the national consciousness,” a betrayal of the spirit of independence. These misadventures of the postcolonial bourgeoisies are in part responsible for the proliferation of refugee camps, starving bodies, and failed States that form the background of the pathological representations of Africa in the Western imaginary. At the fulfillment of the African renaissance we would find an eradication of the continent as the embodiment of the non-governed that gives rise to humanitarian vocations. And here again,  I suspect that Ngugi’s and Moyo’s paths cross once more. I salute, in fact, the original intention of Moyo’s work, minus the belief in the myth of the market, which is to deconstruct the mirage of aid. Even the most adamant defenders of aid ought to recognize, as Moyo rightly observes, that it leads to a neutralization of African initiative. In Fanonian terms, aid helps delay the resumption of historical initiative by Africans and, consciously or unconsciously, becomes the Trojan Horse of the perpetuation of Western hegemony. Ngugi does not explicitly define this beyond a restored Africa, but the book of essays foresees it, and if restoration is above all a cultural matter, there can be no doubt that the author of Decolonizing the Mind remains focused, as his novel The Wizard of the Crow, shows, on the materiality of a suffering Africa, the economic and social dynamics that challenge the postcolonial. Ngugi and Moyo, in their own unique voices succeed in calling our attention to how the debates about aid, pan-Africanism, and Africa’s renaissance are symbiotically linked to Africa’s historical fatality.

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Cilas Kemedjio is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Rochester. He can be reached at cilas.kemedjio@rochester.edu

Translated by Ruthmarie H. Mitsch

I would like to express my gratitude to Cecelia Lynch for her invaluable suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.