Dedicated to Wọle Ṣoyinka
Ṣoyinka is one of very few Black authors of our era, including the Ghana-born novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, the African American filmmaker Julie Dash, and the South African poet Mazisi Kunene, whose conception of time departs sharply from the standard understanding of it as a progressive, forward-moving phenomenon. They view time as a continuum, with past, present and future informing one another, the world of the dead, the living and the unborn as interpenetrated. It is a conception of time found in many African cultures, and it has served as a taken-for-granted background to the way these cultures relate to death, to birth, to every sort of transition in the life of an individual or a community
THE purposes of this lecture are three, maybe more. [I say maybe more because, as in most of what I write, I proceed more from creative hunches than from anything else, a thesis least of all.] The first is to show that the abjections of our contemporary life, the losses attendant on human values and the rejection of which calls for affirmations of hope, cannot be separated from categories of identity. The two kinds of identity that are relevant to my purposes are religious and national identities, and my understanding of national identity is presented in terms of ethnicity, and implicitly so, due to the complexity of the topic and the pressures of time. The second purpose is to make a connection between such notions as hope, happiness, and love, which appeal to the positive impulses in us humans and the supposedly negative ones—say, evil, hatred, despair—as passions germinating from the same seed-bed fertilized simultaneously by violence and imagination, or, in other words, by visions of the past and the future. For the third and perhaps final purpose, I use two textual examples—the essay “This Past Must Address Its Present,” the Nobel lecture by Wọle Ṣoyinka and the documentary film, The Return of Sara Baartman, by South African director Zola Maseko—to show how imagination does or can respond to historical or potential acts of violence, without guarantees that such acts will be fully accounted for or that they will not reoccur. If there are to be any such guarantees, I suggest, it is to the realm of imagination, to art in particular, that we must not only look but also actively invest our energies.
The two texts are acts of engagement. Ṣoyinka’s Nobel lecture was dedicated to Nelson Mandela and delivered just three years before the future president of South Africa was freed from apartheid jail. Anyone who knows Ṣoyinka’s work as writer and activist also knows that he figured out pretty early in his career that the world of black peoples, or what he preferred to call the black race, was his primary sphere of engagement. He has never wavered. Giving a circumstantial account of that engagement through a call to the civilized world to embrace its common humanity with Africans was only logical, and circa 1986, apartheid was the putrid sore in the eye of that world. As a work of historical recovery, The Return of Sara Baartman forces France, the great trumpeter of human equality, liberty and brotherhood, to honor those values with respect to the ugliness of its history, in essence adding its voice, the film’s voice, that is, to the chorus of Ṣoyinka’s clamant music.
I address the lecture primarily to South Africans and Nigerians, in part because of the provenance of the two texts that I shall discuss, and in part because, to my way of looking at things, many of the challenges that Africans face, as humans, as citizens aspiring to full humanity, attain sharper relief when we pay attention to the paradox of hope and despair in the modern history of these two societies. South Africa and Nigeria are exemplary: in the apartheid system, South Africa experienced a totality of historical acts of violence that other societies experienced serially or discretely as slavery, racism, colonialism, and Nazism. Nigeria is all but unique in the contemporary world in its endowments of ethnic multiplicity and untold material resources, much of which is mismanaged through sustained visitations of violence on the same population that owns those resources. [I pause for a moment for you to reflect on what binds these two countries together in the internal management of their affairs, and across continental boundaries.]
In sharing my thoughts in this lecture, I am guided by a series of open-ended questions: Can hope be sustained without idealism, and what relation does this idealism bear to violence and imagination? When you have experienced a historical injustice, either as a victim or a witness, active or passive, what can you do ensure restitution and, if possible, prevent a re-occurrence? When something has been taken from you by force, to what extent can you negotiate (for the right) to have it back?
What do I mean by the claim that negative and positive impulses are seeded in the same bed and are fertilized by violence and imagination? In his epigrammatic essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” [my good friend] the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin famously asserted in the seventh thesis that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Benjamin’s essay was part of a series of reflections on the task of the historian faced with the rise of fascism, the threat of large-scale violence that in retrospect we understand as Nazism and of which Adolf Hitler remains the infamous embodiment. In another of those reflections, Benjamin set his sight on positivism as a literalist view of history, in which the celebration human progress often hid the violence that attended that progress. To frame this perspective as an evocative imagery: the Egyptian pyramids are beautiful and magnificent, but what of the sweat and toil of the workers that built them? Positivism is a theory dating to mid-19th century which holds that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge, and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by empirical science. The contradictions of modernity mean that all the good things—scientific progress, liberal democracy, artistic achievements—sit in the same boat as the evil ones of fascism, colonialism, Indian reservations, the gas-chambers of Auschwitz.
You will see where I am going with this when we turn to the documentary about Sara Baartman.
This discussion of positivism has much to do with the theme of hope and despair because, in another thesis, Benjamin argues that both the hatred and the spirit of sacrifice of the true agents of history—the toiling classes—are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. In other words, stories from the past, condensed as fearsome imagery of violence, serve to fire the imagination that causes the living to take their destiny into their hands. Ṣoyinka would join issues with Benjamin by arguing that the image of liberated grandchildren is no less consequential as a propeller of action!
Ṣoyinka is one of very few Black authors of our era, including the Ghana-born novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, the African American filmmaker Julie Dash, and the South African poet Mazisi Kunene, whose conception of time departs sharply from the standard understanding of it as a progressive, forward-moving phenomenon. They view time as a continuum, with past, present and future informing one another, the world of the dead, the living and the unborn as interpenetrated. It is a conception of time found in many African cultures, and it has served as a taken-for-granted background to the way these cultures relate to death, to birth, to every sort of transition in the life of an individual or a community. For them, in fact, the three dimensions of past, present, and future do not exhaust the possibilities of time. This is because there is a fourth dimension, or the Fourth Stage of Ṣoyinka’s phrasing, where ideas and images from the past enliven the present so intensely that those living in that present are alive enough with dreams and hopes of the future to plan for it.
In case all of this is beginning to sound abstract, let me use the present lecture as an example. December this year would make it thirty-eight years since Ṣoyinka gave his Nobel lecture in Stockholm. That’s the past in relation to today, and some of the ideas in the lecture no longer have the urgency that they had then. Now, presently, we’re returning to a few of those ideas to imagine possibilities about life and human dignity on the continent and the world at large—an investment in the future, in hope. Those possibilities inform my assumption of Nigeria and South Africa as my primary audience in a manner that, for Ṣoyinka, was only potential, even though his context presented him with a greater sense of occasion than this.
This conception of time informs the counterintuitive phrasing of the title of the Nobel lecture—this past, not this present, must address its present.
The world in 1986
THE past to which Ṣoyinka refers is the global history of white supremacy that culminated in the apartheid system and which, in 1986, was in its last throes, though still able to do enormous damage. The entire southern Africa region, including the so-called frontline states, was caught in the crosshairs of the Angolan civil war that pitted the ruling MPLA and its allies, principally Cuba, against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA that drew support from certain Western powers. The apartheid regime provided significant backing to UNITA and engaged in vast acts of destabilization and sabotage across the subregion, while movements like the ANC resolutely held the separatist government’s feet to the fire. Just two months before the Nobel lecture, in fact in the same week that the award was announced and the black world went into jubilation, President Samora Machel of Mozambique was assassinated when the helicopter in which he was traveling crashed in the southern part of the country. Fingers were pointed at the racist regime in Pretoria. [I might add, parenthetically, that 1986 also saw the emergence of Yoweri Museveni as president of Uganda, and that black king remains on the throne, thirty-eight years on…]
To bring home the urgency of his message regarding the backwardness of apartheid, “…a stubborn, self-destructive child, with certain destructive powers, but a child nevertheless” (766-767), Ṣoyinka links Machel’s death to that of Olof Palme, the progressive prime minister of Sweden, his present hosts. He states,
TEXT: “Whatever the facts are about Olof Palme’s death, there can be no question about his life. To the racial oppression of a large sector of humanity, Olof Palme pronounced, and acted, a decisive No! Perhaps it was those who were outraged by this act of racial “treachery” who were myopic enough to imagine that the death of an individual would arrest the march of his convictions; perhaps his murder was simply yet another instance of the terror epidemic that feeds today on shock, not reason. It does not matter; an authentic conscience of the white tribe has been stilled, and the loss is both yours and mine” (764).
Apartheid was an unprovoked, state-backed regime of aggression toward a large segment of the population of South Africa, and was entering its fourth decade of systematic cruelty. In the 1980s, the racist regime had the unqualified support of the conservative governments of the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher and the United States under Ronald Reagan. It also menaced many of its white intellectuals and activists—Ruth First, Bram Fischer, Andre Brink, Helen Suzman, Breyten Breytenbach—who had resolved neither to endorse its cruelty nor keep silent. Ṣoyinka says further,
TEXT: “The blacks, of course, are locked into an unambiguous condition: on this occasion I do not need to address us. We know, and embrace our mission. It is the other that this precedent seizes the opportunity to address, and not merely those who are trapped within the confines of that doomed camp but those who live outside, on the fringes of conscience” (765).
Ṣoyinka’s categories of black-and-white, us-and-them, may sound rather stark from this distance. Let us bear in mind, however, that those were categories on which the apartheid regime thrived and that it continued to reinforce with physical and discursive violence. The address was thus to Europe and its principal allies across the world, particularly those sectors disingenuous enough to oppose the global call for economic and cultural boycotts of that regime. To appreciate the significance of Ṣoyinka’s standpoint about the twinned destiny of black-and-white, Europe-and-Africa in this particular challenge, let us remember that he understands Samora Machel’s tragic death as a form of triumph for the Black world:
TEXT: “Every act of racial terror, with its vastly increasing sophistication of style and escalation in human loss, is itself an acknowledgment of improved knowledge of, and respect for, the potential of what is feared, an acknowledgment of the sharpening tempo of triumph by the victimized”(764).
Ṣoyinka’s premise is that the African world, or “the black race” as he prefers to call it, knows itself, and is content with that knowledge. Secure in that knowledge, a member of that community does not seek to impose her spirituality on others. The African world, therefore, is “a world…that is so self-sufficient, so replete in all aspects of its productivity, so confident in itself and in its destiny that it experiences no fear in reaching out to others and in responding to the reach of others” (767). And he asserts further that this self-sufficiency “means that our sight need not be and has never been permanently turned inward” (767).
This is where I wish to make a central extrapolation, to depart from Ṣoyinka’s premise, but without standing against him. There are two aspects to this extrapolation. This first is that setting one’s sight inward is no sign of a lack of awareness about the global, planetary scope of the forces that deny or stand in the way of one’s highest aspirations, our most heightened senses of hope. That to address one’s concerns to Nigeria and South Africa, for example, is to speak to the entirety of the Black world, and of course, the world at large. Once we shift perspectives from looking at the world in purely rationalized, calculable idioms, even the tiniest fragment of negligible experience is a potential embodiment of infinite complexities. The significant difference between the present attention and the one that Ṣoyinka requested in 1986 is this: since the fox of apartheid need not be permanently chased away before we turn our attention to chastising the errant hen, we can stay vigilant at the ways of hens that pick at the innards of their kind. Let me suspend the metaphor and state the matter plainly: Whether or not apartheid, as a racialized system of economic exploitation remains, or returns, in a different guise, we should not hesitate to hold Nigeria and South Africa responsible for treating their populations as expendable entities. Both countries, at the present time, have mostly hardened as socioeconomic immiseration what apartheid once gamed the world into seeing in racial terms.
This point dovetails with the second aspect of my extrapolation. Can we be certain that the self-knowledge which Ṣoyinka confidently spoke of in Stockholm is still accessible to us? That it has not been buried under the debris of decades of external and internal afflictions, of the little-understood genealogy of our identities? If the basis of one’s self-apprehension is solely as a Muslim, or Yoruba, or socialist, or South African, how can one recognize and defend the sanctity of the existence of a neighbor who isn’t any or one of these? Note that I do not dispute the existence of such self-knowledge: what I say in a moment about the recovery of the remains of Sara Baartman will affirm the essence of what is possible, based on self-knowledge, despite centuries of seeming silence in the face of strenuous denial and cultural denigration. Nor am I calling for the abandonment of whatever identities we, as self-conscious individuals, choose to profess in private or in public. Rather, my contention is that the essential identities that we have accepted or are constructing stand in the way of a fruitful understanding of that self-knowledge if we do not at the same time see those identities in relation to others, and to those of others. This detail underscores the relevance of The Return of Sara Baartman to issues of identity, but I think that it is clarifying to place that second story in the larger context of the theory of positivism, the context within which my opening remarks about the coexistence of negative and positive impulses, and of violence and imagination as well, comes into relief.
As a theory of human progress, positivism invested more in scientific knowledge, certain that ideas of biology, geology and, of course, technology must inform the appreciation of social phenomena, and in an irreversibly progressive manner. But the 19th century, the long era of scientific discovery, of Darwin’s theory of evolution, of the invention of the cinematograph, also brought about the Scramble for and Partition of Africa, and the regime of global imperialism that remained in place until the carnage of the Second World War and the relentless agitations from the colonized world persuaded the imperial powers to abandon, or at least change, the rules of the game. Think of our present obsession with technology—Artificial Intelligence, genome sequencing, advanced communication—as inextricably linked to its questionable sides such as genetically modified organisms, disinformation through social media and other unpredictable or unforeseen outcomes. Besides tainting scientific progress with reactionary politics, positivism also characterized human values like spirituality as imperfect knowledge. Whether one practices or invests in religious faith matters less than that spirituality is part of the human heritage and comes from the same place as what we often think of as imagination.
According to Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism, it took millennia for monotheism, the form that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have taken in the common era, to find wide acceptance. Monotheism gained favor with the world, it triumphed, as it were, recovering its loss thousands of years after the first attempt by pharaoh Akhenaten was quashed definitively during the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt. That eventual triumph occurred through the figure of St. Paul who, as we know, never met Jesus Christ and, in fact, began his career as a persecutor of the remaining apostles, only to suffer a similar fate in the latter part of his career. Millennia may lapse, but the silent and steady work of memory, fragmented memory no less—for there is hardly any memory that ever remains whole—ensures that reckoning does come. The violence through which monotheism, which Ayi Kwei Armah characterizes as “totalitarian ownership” in his book The Way of Companions, has consolidated that triumph is linked to the power it exerts on the imagination of its adherents. Punishing “apostates” and “heretics” by burning them alive at the stake—arguably the most painful kind of death—converting people by force of arms, these are acts of violence certain to achieve immediate results. Monotheism, or even religion as such, does not, however, fully apprehend, much less exhaust, what we mean by spirituality.
Reckoning in Paris
For the story of Sara Baartman, to which I now turn, reckoning took just two centuries. Through the agency of an engaged spirit, alias poetic faith, what was considered dead and buried was exhumed and restored to an equilibrium that would be impossible to contemplate on the basis of empirical knowledge.
VIDEO [Narrator]: PLAY: the first 4.10mins; 7.43-9.25 of the documentary.
Note, please: the worldview which informed Georges Cuvier’s experiment was a rigorously scientific one; comparative anatomy predated and later informed such original ideas as Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Historical knowledge afforded, whatever the prejudices of his age, Cuvier’s point in comparing Baartman’s anatomy and physiological dispositions to those of an orangutan is hardly disputable today. What is in contention is the radical difference in thinking of the Khoikhoi as unrelated to the human species in France, circa 1815, when Darwin was an infant. Yes, Baartman was a member of the Khoikhoi ethnicity that already faced near-extinction from the onslaught of Dutch settlers in South Africa. But as one of the interviewees says, we no longer dispute the fact that the brains of Frenchman René Descartes, so-called father of modern philosophy, and Baartman were the same size. The empirical worlds of science and cultural relativism were content to leave things at that.
Then comes a South African poet, Diana Ferrus who, living abroad, feels something as ineffable as homesickness, and begins to call to the spirit of home. The transportation of Sara from England to France was anything but fortuitous, being understood as a disposition toward avoiding the kind of scandal that could damage commerce in the entertainment industry. To understand how Ferrus’s poem sets in motion the long process that culminated in the repatriation of Sara’s body requires us to embrace the less predictable ways of historical reckoning, even in the midst of deep-seated despair. Imagination confronts the violence of historical injustice on its own terms—as an uncompromising statement of idealism—and on the turf of that violence. But that imaginative leap—notice that Ferrus calls Sara her sister—needs company, and finds it in the all-but-forgotten memory of Nicolas About who went to Musée de L’homme a lot as a boy and who, now a Senator, responds to the same call that has moved Ferrus:
VIDEO [Nicolas About]: “Saartjie Baartman is an encounter going back to my childhood. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. My leisure activity on Thursday afternoons, when I was four years old, consisted of going to the Mankind Museum. I often saw Saartjie Baartman there, her skeleton and the cast of her body. That was our first meeting, which was very impressive for a child. I never forgot this image” [12.04-12,30].
It is an unexpected companionship of poetry and politics, in retrospect, never mind that the act of passing the law authorizing the repatriation is another day at the office for French parliamentarians. Between Ferrus and About, between poetic faith and political passion if you will, sits the ordinary figure of Anne-Sophie Parisot, the parliamentarian assistant who brings the poem to About’s attention. Without explicitly stating it, Ms. Parisot already embraces the ideal of her identity as French, female, and bureaucrat in kinship with the impulses the poem projects, and which Ṣoyinka would demand in his lecture. The series of chance encounters in this story offers a lesson in the possibilities of hope, but we can do more than leave things to chance in a world of sustained states of emergency. The certainties of scientific knowledge play a decisive role in the attitude toward Baartman 19th century France. Two centuries later, those certainties meet a combination of historical memory, cultural identity based on ethnicity, and uncompromising artistic integrity, to force a reckoning. Perhaps a triumph not on the scale of that of monotheism, but it is a singular example of the restoration to an abused past of its essence. It is also a precursor of the current turn in the restitution of artefacts from European museums.
Bringing this discussion to an end, I want to hone in on the questions of religious and ethnic identity that I hinted at in the beginning, doing so in a manner that, it seems to me, invites reflections for sentient Africans of the present time. About religion I have said a bit; regarding ethnicity, more needs to be said. Its significance lies in the fact that thoughtful Black authors like Ṣoyinka (in the Nobel lecture, for instance) speak for and as Africans, reducing or sublimating the ethnic fragment to that inclusive, continental vision. But see what thinking and imagining as Khoikhoi enable Ferrus and her allies to achieve! This is a win for ethnic identity.
VIDEO [Dr. Yvette Abrahams]: “You fight for something for almost a decade, and you don’t actually believe you’re going to succeed. And I think you do that because you need to…how do you get the courage to continue fighting? You get the courage to continue fighting thinking, This is probably going to take the rest of my life. It hasn’t. I am overjoyed, I am very happy. I want to bury her, have a beautiful funeral, cry my eyes out. And now, I have got the rest of my life for other struggles…[Laughs.] Which undoubtedly I shall also win! You know this is really giving me confidence in our capacity to be able to change the world in the way we wanted. It’s a beautiful millennium to be alive. Beautiful.” [35.46-36.39]
It is a double-edged weapon, surely. A people, victims of centuries of historical oppression finally throw off the yoke, and what do they do? They take to oppressing others, doing to others mostly what had been done to themselves. Oftentimes more. Around 1966, according to a documentary film titled Concerning Violence, which was on YouTube the last time I checked, an attempted strike by laborers in the rubber plantations in Liberia is met with violence of a most ruthless kind. An entire family is plucked out of company housing and dropped in the middle of nowhere. After seeing that film, you can decide what role the maltreatment of the workers played in the quest for revenge that, fourteen years later, spurred the bloody coup that brought Master-Seargent Samuel Doe to power in Monrovia. On the face of it, such latter resorts to violence are seen as the ripening of the hopes of recovery of lost dignity, the cleansing of the memory of the enslaved ancestors of Benjamin’s formulation. On closer scrutiny, they are an attempt at protecting current privileges, now retroactively affirmed as rights.
At any rate, there is another chastening lesson in that episode for seeing abstract ideas like hope, love, evil, or right as the poisoned chalice that the past offers to the future. Abstract ideas must be worked, cultivated; they require labor as constant attention and vigilance and, even then, with so much dedication, there are no guarantees. This is where, that is why, art goes to work, quarrying in the realm of imagination, the moral immersion of figurative language in the task of striving to perfect, or correct, nature, including human nature, where it is failing. Diana Ferrus’s imaginative leap as a poet comes from the same space of spirituality as religious faith, as twins or triplets do from the same organ. An Abrahamic religion, or religion as such, does not exhaust spiritual possibilities, so there is nothing to be afraid, ashamed, or proud of in the act of professing a religious faith, or refusing to profess one. The same ought to go for national or ethnic identity. Ethnic rivalry or suspicion in and of itself does not constitute danger or safety, without vested interests. When African ethnicities, say the Temnes and Kamajoors of Sierra Leone during the civil war of the late 1990s, were at each other’s neck, the animus was impotent, or the scale of violence comparatively low, without outside interference, the big money investments of the world’s ammunitions industry and the conglomerates in the global business of diamond mining.
In counterpoint to the perspective about the destructiveness of ethnic identity, perhaps we can respect the integrity of those fragments (Akan, Malinke, Kalenji, Urhobo, or Zulu), keeping in mind that they are continuously reconstituted and reinvented through contacts, while pointing to the whole that is precariously African, itself a fragment of our common humanity in the uneven oneness of the known world. Through neighborliness and incorporation that stir to life in this unceasing process, histories take shape, move away, resettle, picking up or leaving residues here and there. Leaf becomes soap.
Thank you for your attention.
- Akin Adesokan, novelist and scholar, is professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, exerts influence on Nigerian cultural environment through commentary, advocacy, and writing. His research interests are in the 12th and 21st century African and African American/African Diaspora literature and cultures. His first novel, Roots in the Sky (2004), won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Fiction in manuscript form back in 1996. He has won the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award (1998), and the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Human Rights Award (1999).
