The pitfalls of cultural consciousness

Philosophia Africana, March, 2007 by Chielozona Eze

There is no doubt that Blyden's thought influenced many of modern Africa's most successful revolutionary and nationalist thinkers, including Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah. But his most obvious and lasting influence is arguably to be found in the literary outputs of Senghor, who formulated his ideas about the African as a contrast to the European. The European, Senghor wrote, is a man of reason, while the African is a man of emotion. While the European thinks in analytic terms, the African, supposedly, is "shut up inside his black skin: he lives in primordial night." While European cultures encourage objective thought, the African ways, Senghor believed, allow the thinker not to make an objective distinction between the self and the object of perception. For Senghor, an African perceiver, by nature, "does not keep [an object] at a distance; he does not analyse it." (19) But Senghor's goal, in the long run, was not to deny the African a capacity for objective thought. Rather, as one suspected from the beginning, the goal is to prove--and seemingly do so at any cost--that the African is different. The point is that Africa is not Europe. While the European has "no respect for life" and is morally depraved, the African is, by Senghor's antagonistic reckoning with Europe, one with life: "a pure sensory field" (PP, 29). In line with Blyden, therefore, Senghor is interested in creating two worlds that, in essence, are distinct from each another. The claim that--in this forced march of difference--the African has the moral edge while the European has the scientific edge is almost beside the point.

Ten Kortenaar once said that Achebe's Things Fall Apart

   refers to the Yeatsian prophecy of the decline and fall of the
   current incarnation of the West. In using it to speak of the
   collapse of the Igbo world, Achebe plays with cultural equivalence.
   One mode of knowledge is forced to give way before another, but not
   because the other has a stronger claim to be able to know the world.
   Both are time-bound, culture-bound; either may fall apart (HCH, 126).

If this is true, should we read the fictional Igbo world represented in Things Fall Apart as an "alternative" to the West--a world that cannot be understood by an outsider yet makes perfect sense to insiders? If the answer is Yes, then, considered from within, it is a world about which it would be wrong to claim--as Hegel and other Eurocentrists would have liked--that Africans had no history except that provoked upon them by the atrocities of transatlantic capitalist slavery. Should we speculate, further, that the weight of Achebe's alternative world could lie in the suggestions that that world might have had the moral edge: the moral voice of the oppressed? But in what consists the morality of this voice? How must one draw the line between what Achille Mbembe captured as a tension between victimhood and subjecthood? (20)

The moral turning point in Things Fall Apart is captured in two scenes. The first is the one in which the Umuofia elders come together to talk about the ills of the presence of the missionaries among them. The missionary, the white man, "has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart." (21) In the second key scene, Obierika, described as the village wise person, is at the scene of Okonkwo's suicide with a white man. With Okonkwo's remains hanging on a tree, Obierika turns to the white man and says, accusatorily, "That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself" (TFA, 149). It is as tenable to see the point in the novel summed up in the last sentence as it is paradoxical that Obierika fails to feel guilt on behalf of the Umuofia community for not rallying in support of Okonkwo and against the invader. The culpability of their inactivity is played off against that of the white man who ostensibly drove Okonkwo to kill himself. Of course, we will never get to know the exact reason Okonkwo killed himself. It is, however, morally soothing to blame the white man. It is in this way that Okonkwo's death is metonymic. So is the moral world constructed around him.